Even if you took all the money from the "rich" the goverment would shut down as usual the next year because the debt they create is way more than the private money available out there.
Insane take. Even if you confiscated ALL the money from all the billionaires (instant 100% wealth tax) and spread it to everyone worldwide, it would be a one time sum of under $2000. And what then?
You can shear a sheep many times but skin him only once.
It seems like billionaires have a knack for making lots of money every year. Why don’t we just take a bit more of it than we do now and invest it into useful projects?
Billionaires generally do not have a knaxj for value creation. What they do generally have is an egregious amount of greed and a total lack of empathy which enables an incredible amount of exploitation.
Then the former billionaires won't have the ability to influence society to pass laws that favours them. We'll finally be able to build a society for everyone.
> We'll finally be able to build a society for everyone.
I assure you this isn't the only blocker and its naive to think that [other_set_of_humans] will not try to consolidate power for themselves after you remove the current set.
Most people are not in it for their fellow man and whoever sold you this idea that billionaires are the only impediment to, or even blocking now, a better society -- lied to you.
By all means get rid of the billionaires, I don't particularly care; just don't be so surprised when it turns out that was just a side quest.
I think there are other avenues here that are probably better spent to make society better.
Everyone in the US misses the 50s, marginal tax rates were crazy high. "Oh, but people had lots of deductions and not many people actually paid the top rates" - yeah, that's exactly the point, it encouraged money to be spread around more. And a whole lot of people prospered, while government revenue was less lopsidedly concentrated too.
Get people away from paycheck-to-paycheck debt loads and you've improved a lot of lives regardless of if those people are egalitarians who will then vote for utopian policies. We know that allowing more and more consolidation ain't the move.
We have 4-5x the normalized GDP per capita compared to the 1950s.
The amount of taxes we collect isn’t the problem. Excessive government spending and inflationary pressures on things like housing is (Which, btw seems to always go up regardless of what political side you want to point fingers at)
While the economic output per person has indeed increased 4-5x, the inflation adjusted median household income has only increased by 50% (1.5x). Government spending is not the issue here.
The things you mentioned are always a problem because even the far left in America is incredibly right-wing.
Because while you can give as much time as you like as a single person, the charity can't clone you an infinite amount of times and get infinite value out of you for free.
I've been getting by for years with tinkercad. It's not sophisticated but you can make some surprisingly complex and accurate parts with it very easily.
I wish they didn't take out the "off the screen" outputs from the previous voice mode. I miss being able to ask it to output an image or codeblock when I wanted to come back to something later.
Can we be a little annoyed if a big company that can leverage publisher deals, massive amounts of analytics and loss leader tactics actively try to cut off business from smaller companies?
When a sizable chunk of the people on this site are trying to grow their idea into a big company that can leverage deals, massive amount of analytics and various tactics to cut-off business from the competitors?
Oh man, so many questions! Would a PBH passing close enough to Earth to hit a human end up being drawn to the Earth's core or the Sun? Or would the mass/inertia of a rogue PBH be enough to keep it from falling into a local gravity wall and gobbling up the solar system?
Any object that approaches the Solar System from interstellar space is necessarily moving at least (solar) escape velocity. It's "falling down" into the Solar System's gravity by a distance equal to how far it has to "climb up" to get away in a system with little appreciable friction.
The paper assumes 100 km/s, which is more than double the solar escape velocity at Earth's orbit. The mass doesn't make a difference in the absence of friction and assuming it is much less than the primary body; escape velocity depends only on the mass of the primary.
There would be some "friction" (since the hole would be eating up small amounts of mass on its journey and that mass would be moving at less than solar escape velocity), but without doing any calculations I'm almost certain it's nowhere close to enough to slow it down.
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