> The idea that rich people have something to say

What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity.

But what is evident is that the wealthy are rotting intellectually like much of the rest of society. And their brainrot has more impact because they are among the wealthiest people who have ever lived.

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simianwords 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> What is (or used to be?) implicit is that a person who has the means to be free of subsistence activities will/should take the time to *acquire a quality education and make an even better contribution to society and humanity.

The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity. This is exactly what I mean by "rich people bad" local optima trap that you also seem to have fallen into.

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heresie-dabord 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> The rich got rich exactly by contributing to society and humanity.

Pardon me, but this seems to be a local optima trap too.

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simianwords 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The difference is, I know the extent to which this is true and where it fails. I don't think you even acknowledge this is largely true.

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rhines 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Is it true? Even on a small scale, when I taught kids how to swim for $20k/year I believe I did more for society than when I built systems to help a large streaming service deliver ads for $100k/year. There are certainly exceptions, but in general money comes from extracting value from others, while jobs that provide to society are not extractive and this pay less.

	▲	simianwords an hour ago \| parent [-]
		This is fundamentally wrong. If Elon created Tesla and made ~$100B of wealth from it, he also made all the other shareholders richer by way more. Not only that - the world now has Teslas it otherwise wouldn't. Everyone wins and there is no extraction of values (old Marxist jargon that needs to go away).