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ryandrake 7 hours ago

We need to Make Billionaires Millionaires Again, as far as I'm concerned.

EDIT: Oh, no, you said HIS name. The Elon Justice League has been activated and downvoting this whole tree....

jacquesm 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Yes, absolutely. But the billionaires will spend a fraction of their billions to stop that from happening so that's a lopsided fight already. The problem is the ratchet effect. Money is like gravity: have a little bit of it and you are attracted to the larger piles and become part of them. Have a lot of it and you start attracting more of it, even if you're not working. So once the balance is disturbed that ratchet effect makes it hard to lose money faster than you are making it.

Breaking that cycle will take some extraordinary effort and I suspect that the article gets at least that portion of it correctly. This isn't going to go away without a fight of some sort, whether a physical or a legal one is not all that important but since the billionaires have stacked the deck against the rest of us using their money in all ways except for the physical one that seems to be one of the few avenues still open.

And for how long it remains open is a question, there is a fair chance that AI will not only enable stable dictatorships but will also enable wealth extraction at a level that we have not seen before.

For instance: we are allowed to have this conversation by some billionaires. If they should decide you and I can no longer converse then that will be that and it is going to take a lot of effort to circumvent any blocks.

There are some 10 or so billionaires that can ruin my existence overnight, take away my means of living and that of those around me. And there wouldn't be much that I could do about it.

People have been radicalized over much less than this.