🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

@wjmaggos

And "do both" is hardly a solution, why do one self-destructive thing and one good thing and call that good?

You keep trying to eliminate something that isnt a bad thing, something that is actually a good thing, especially when you consider that more billionaires directly relates to fewer people in poverty. Having bigger and better wealth generators is **good** for economy, not bad, so no reason to eliminate it, full stop.

@volkris

@dinogami

I think all sides are about control in that respect.. no shortage of those on the left who want control at all costs and are willing to even be violent to get it, must like the right is and has been willing to do.

Thankfully while the right seems obsessed about judging you based on your genitals the left judges you on very different criteria outside of the scope here.

@LexiGirl @georgetakei

@wjmaggos @volkris

> I'm not for stealing all their money. I'm for a much higher progressive income tax top rate at least. like we had in the US during the 50s. worldwide.

Yes I am aware that you want a grossly unfair and abusive rate that will take the overwhelming majority of their resources/wealth but not all of it... and again, taking the overwhelming majority of money from people on the criteria that they have proven themselves the most effective wealth generators in society (several orders of magnitude above millionairs) is again probably the most self destructive thing you could do.

Thing is, you are also not well studied on this. The effective tax rate paid by the rich in 1950s was more or less the same as it is today.

Here is an explanation along with a chart of actual tax rates for you:

https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/taxes-on-the-rich-1950s-not-high/

@wjmaggos @volkris

> why are you talking about poor people?

Because the poor people are the ones suffering, not the millionairs. I dont care about wealth disparity, I care about the quality of life of the poorest people and what percentage are below the poverty line, I work from the bottom up.

More billionairs mean fewer people in extreme poverty. That is the win, not how well off the millionairs are, who are welcome to exist, but their quality of life is not my top concern.

> I'm comparing the billionaire vs the multi millionaire

You shouldnt be, the millionaires arent suffering, improving their quality of life should not be the focus.

> I'm saying what separates them is luck.

Which is wrong, while there is an element of luck it is quite obvious if you knows these sorts of people that a millionaire has a very different approach to money than a billionaire. A billionaire isnt lucky, statistically that doesnt make much sense as most are not billionairs from single ventures, they become rich over many many short term successes and failures. Over long periods of time luck averages out and its mostly skill... Unless you became a billionaire over night or inhereited it (which is a minority among the rich) then its skill mostly with an element of luck that is fairly minor.

> they both did great and deserve to live well etc. I'm not eliminating that by reducing the billionaire to a multi millionaire thru progressive taxes.

They both did well but the fact that the difference is mostly luck is just pure nonsense... the billionaire consistently made better choices. They are usually far more skilled at generating wealth than millionaires, this should be apparent given that these are long term gains over hundreds of thousands of decisions, not a roll of the dice.

@wjmaggos @volkris

> we do not have the perfect society where massive wealth cannot influence lots of people in lots of different ways. I'd be for ancapistan or communism if I thought people were interested or able to thrive in those situations too etc.

No we dont... which is why you shouldnt try to fix it by doing one of the most harmful things we can do: destroy wealth generators and push everyone to extreme poverty and starvation.

Its not like taking all their resources would be easy, there is a reason communist countries had uprisings by the people demanding capitalism. So you have two difficult tasks ahead, you can steal everyones money and cause massive harm to society, or take the equally hard route and try to fix our governments and people so they have values and integrity. While neither is easy at least the latter actually results in a healthier better society, rather than actively trying to make things worse by identifying the root of a problem and then addressing a symptom instead.

> you should care whether it's a billionaire or 100k middle class dudes. because wanting to do evil is rarely the problem. it's not understanding other perspectives and not having to compromise. that's the danger of billionaires in a democracy.

I see you have never gotten to know a billionaire. Many understand others perspectives rather well, in fact, its kinda a prerequisite to see success in most business (cant sell shit to people if you dont understand their points of view). As for not needing to compromise, tell that to must, he took a no-compromise approach as of late and his fortune has crashed directly as a result (and if he keeps it up he will loose it all eventually).

@skobkin 2nd cousin, twice removed

Man when Pho is done right it is soooo good. I had given up on it cause the noodles were always over cooked and its disgusting like that. But todays Pho came perfect, with some Jicama rolls and pocky it was amazing!

@wjmaggos @volkris

> I'm saying there was equal work involved. The difference between the multi millionaire and the billionaire was luck.

I was responding to this part of the message just to be clear.

But also in addition the difference isnt luck or amount of work, its investment. The poor person likely took bad risks and/or focused on short term easy gains rather than harder long term gains. The billionaire on the other hand spent their time learning, studying, aquiring skills, building networks, saving and sacraficing, all while not making a penny, often over very long periods of time. They start companies that fail and eventually all that time they invested will pay off.

The poor person usually works a 9-5 and may even work more 60 hours, but they do little in investing in themselves to get out of it (usually). Those that do try are irresponsible, usually being cocky without the skills to back it up.

One common pattern is the poor usually despise the rich, so they never both to learn from them (most rich people are eager to take on mentees I find). The people who succeed usually work under someone who has been successful and cares a great deal about learning from them and will often take councel in many business experts in their journey.

@wjmaggos @volkris https://liberal.city/@wjmaggos/111467997330095470

@wjmaggos

> do you think a gazillionaire would be something to avoid?

No it isnt a good thing, because someone owning a fictional amount of money would make no sense and I dont like things not making sense.

in all seriousness though, in and of itself, no. But not all super-wealthy are good just as not all are bad. People who have wealth may generate it (provide services we want) or may get it through exploitation (literally stealing or inciting wars). So long as the wealthy person is one who largely made their money generating that wealth then yes its a good thing no matter how much they have (because it didnt reduce the amount anyone else had). However if they got that wealth through the destruction of wealth (for example literally robbing a bank) then no it isnt a good thing.

> do you think they might be able to use that money to garner power in a way that even the smart democracies might have a problem dealing with if his interests went against those of the public?

That depends largely on the society. While I am opposed to just taking a persons money simply for having money I am all for making sure money can not buy influence in a society when it comes to our policies and governance. A persons money only has as much power as we let it as a society. If we all had integrity then that money couldnt buy anyone or anything that wasnt something we as a society are ok with. So if you find things are being bought with money that money shouldnt be able to buy (such as votes for politicians) then that is a problem.

Remember people can pool their resources into a common organization. So I dont care any more or less about 1 super rich evil dude than I care about 100,000 evil middle class dudes.

> maybe buying all our telecommunications infrastructure and politicians and military industries?

They would be unable to do this if those non-billionairs simply refused to sell to them. Or if the government prevented it through anti-trust laws (I am against monopolies but all for the rich).

@volkris

@wjmaggos @volkris Why would we want someone to be paid for doing work regardless of the value it provides, if we do that people will not provide value to society as they have no motivation to do hard work with large reward.

Bob got high and spun around in his chair in circles for 10 hours, it was a lot of work. Why should I pay him the same amount of money as the guy who built 10 cars on the construction line that actually enables other people to do their work more effectively?

I am not paying you for wasting energy doing "anything", I pay you (give you something I worked hard for) because you did something for me I **needed**.

Why on earth would you think out of fairness people who do work we need should be the same as people who do work we dont need. Wasting energy is not something we should reward.

@volkris

@jgg

> Well, it doesn’t seem fair to put the litmus test on english. Why not on spanish? It would be easier for me 😆 And a chinese could put it really hard for both of us. And an alien could make all of us like a chimpanzee

may not be easy but if you were stuck in china youd be able to learn it, a cat couldnt.

> We can’t use human rules to measure other animals, it has to be something more neutral.

We arent using human rules, we are using objective general rules. We can understand the vocalizations of most animals well enough to know their not symbolic in nature, and we know they cant understand us. The rules are bidirectional.

A super advanced alien could understand our language, we may be incapable of understanding theirs. but the point is one of us (the more advanced one) can understand the other.

@wjmaggos

The point your missing is the existance of billionairs is in no way something to avoid... why would you want to, their existance takes from no one, and contributes **hugely** to the economy, in such a way that if they didnt exist we would all be worse off.

No billionairs dont "prove" the economy is good, but a good economy will have few poor people and many rich people, the more so the better.

@volkris

@DenisCOVIDinfoguy

Yea its not gone, and never will be. We have to accept its here to stay and just put it in the same category as the flu at the point, just one of those diseases among many we might get. Doesnt mean you take it any less seriously, but we need to accept that diseases dont usually go away and this is in no way unusual in the sense that this too is here to stay and that could have never changed.

@auscovid19

@jgg

> Well, it seems really hard to design an experiment to know if animals have abstraction capabilities.

Its actually quite easy... you try to teach them to understand english. If they can, they have the ability, if they cant, they dont. Even humans can understand languages without being taught translations through exposure.

The key is either animals are more advanced than us at symbolic manipulation in which case they would understand english and we wouldnt under stand them, or vice versa, we are the smarter of the two and we would understand their language (and see the symbolic manipulations within it).

The fact that they cant hold a conversation and do math is in and cant be taught, is in and of itself proof.

That said some chimps may be just barely capable (like koko who clearly could perform simple speech)... but beyond chimps it would seem easy to disprove by demonstration.

> I think they must have some; knowing if a random animal belongs to your species or not is in itself a form of abstraction.

Seeing an animal and feeling a kinship towards it or wanting to engage with it differently certainly shows some awareness as to their similarity, but doesnt show a **symbolic** understanding, they do not create symbols that represent those concepts, they just know the concepts.

> Since animals have very limited language abilities, it is not surprising their math abilities are (nearly?) undetectable.

I would only loosely call what most animals do language.. They are more like vocal signaling than language.. unless we talk about koko or something.

@admitsWrongIfProven

Language **is** a math, not a prerequisite. I can say anything I can say with language in math and vice versa.

MAth is just a clearly less ambiguous manifestation of language, nothing else. Using prepositional logic and set theory notation I can turn any sentance into a mathematical expression that says the same thing, and vice versa.

@admitsWrongIfProven Noit everything is under math no.

Math is the ability to represent the world symbolically an manipulate it using objective provable abstract logic.

Adding two numbers isnt math, writing "1+1=2" and understanding the meaning of those symbols and how they relate to the act of addition is math.

Everything falls under math because math is just another language. As with any language it is expressive enough to describe anything, so everything falls under math in much the same way everything falls under language, not that everything **is** language but that everything can be expressed in language.

@jgg i disagree, they arent doing math, being able to add and subtract something isnt "doing math", thats doing calculations, not math. Math is the ability to represent the world symbolicly and manipulate those symbols.

At least within this context.