So you want to be a trillionaire
ingenuism.substack.com
ingenuism.substack.com
In a world where I am a trillionaire, those gains necessarily have come from exploitation and deep unequality rather than just getting my share of recognition. I don't want history books to remember my name as a robber-baron-slash-Marie-Antoinette, blindly extracting wealth while society collapses.
Most of the time it will. Humans will generally profit and succeed by: Mining, Burning stuff and polluting into waterways. If you limit human progress to "art or technology or marketing" you're ignoring all of the things that make a burger available to you impossible. Let alone any quantity of vegetarian food.
Now a world like that IS possible, but not one with nearly 8 billion people.
Why?
Exploitation is when everybody is allocated a fixed wage and incremental raises, and only a tiny subset of the people involved in the company get to reap the rewards of everybody's hard work.
There is no objective measure for what ratio people should be paid at, because different roles often cannot be compared; I think it's best decided democratically based on assessment contribution.
Assuming you're in a capitalistic society: I'll rephrase. If 7 billion people can do your job at the drop of a hat, you're going to make the lowest wage. If 100 million people can, you'll make a little more. If 100 people can, you'll make the most.
I was responding to a statement made upthread:
>...> “Working hard” is meaningless, it’s about your output.
While I don't need your elementary explanation of how capitalism operates, it does appear that you agree with me. We aren't paid by how much value we provide to the company. We aren't paid by how much effort we provide to the company. We're paid according to the amount of leverage that a company has to exploit us.
Unfortunately top level managers have far more control over the output of the business than low level laborers.
> In a true meritocracy, a fair system, people are rewarded for their contributions.
Assuming that after some time, the new hire has the potential, although not guaranteed, to make substantial business impact.
As I said in another comment, I would suggest allocating wages democratically - that way people can negotiate between themselves to find an agreeable rate.
To have that much wealth also implies that there is a broader need/demand for said wealth. 1 trillion dollars does not, in and of itself, imply a determined set of material goods. If one were to argue that your possession of said imposes nothing upon anyone else, as everyone in this hypothetical world already has everything they want/need, then that wealth would not be nominally valued at $1 trillion. Value implies demand and scarcity relative to said demand.
I'm paraphrasing here, but I've always enjoyed the phrases:
Rich people still have problems. They just have rich people problems.
Money doesn't buy happiness, but I'd rather cry in my Ferrari.
By Mark Manson: Choose your shit sandwich. Choose the pain you want to live with, and choose it wisely.Also, if you are rich in a different country than the U.S., you may possibly be a good target for blackmail from your own government. A lot of the Russian oligarchs moved out of Putin's reach just to prevent being taken de facto hostage (or their families). Little man is usually invisible to the top hawks that rule empires.
Trying to decide between Fiji or Tahiti for the Summer vacay, because we did the Swiss Alps last winter and now we want something warm and wet. What charity do I support, have I given enough back to the community, what is the best use of my time since I'm not stuck behind a desk 40+ hours a week, that kind of stuff.
Throwing brain cancer and tyrants into the mix isn't quite what I meant, those aren't really rich people problems after all. Anyone can be kidnapped or blackmailed somehow, and disease is no respecter of persons.
True, but doing some things as a high-profile person is more dangerous. I think that the tyranny aspect is not banal. A lot of people live in countries where your highest safety risk wears the crown.
KGB won't waste polonium on Ivan Q. Random, but it may be willing to poison an unrepentant's oligarch daughter just to teach everyone a lesson.
No one said anything about becoming a russian oligarch or befouling the KGB by virtue of their existence.
Just take it as another perspective from a different point of the globe.
Or from crippling inflation. See this banknote.
If you want to be a trillionaire, the first question you should ask is why: to what end?
That kind of money is power, and power is just a means to an end. What do you believe in? What needs doing in the world? Follow that, and if you get it right you'll find the means will follow.
If you need to feel better about yourself, build a secure life and learn to be content.
In Detroit, cars made a lot of money in the mid 20th century. Cars would roll through an assembly line, the parts of which might be $1500 or so in 1960, and be sold for more at a dealer.
Nowadays you have teams building the iOS and Android app and web interface for Facebook and Google, which also have backends, SREs, UX etc. The Facebook Android app is written by a team, and once a version hits production, it is distributed around the world almost instantly, and almost for free (from Facebook's perspective). The costs are in building the first one, the costs of the next billion are much lower ( The Facebook Android app has been installed over 5 billion times https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.facebook.k... , according to Google Play)
Same with Avengers movies. Final cut costs over $100 million, next to that, worldwide distribution to millions of people costs next to nothing. It goes into Netflix and onto my screen.
This is what is changing. A lot of money goes into perfecting a piece of digital property, and then worldwide distribution to billions of people has negligible cost. Different than an automobile going through an assembly line decades ago, where each car made cost Ford over $1000 to produce.
With this more modern phenomena for digital products, almost all the costs go into creating the very first product, and then with the production of the copy and subsequent copies the cost of subsequent products falls to near-nothing or nothing. It could be called marginal cost if so desired, but this phenomenon is new in terms of its weight within the economy.
How do actual people from the real world come to these conclusions? After 10-15 years of experiencing the nightmare that all of these network goods have created worldwide, how can you possibly say that it's actually good that these businesses are impossible to compete with, and that their competitors needing to vastly outperform them in ways that are not only currently inconceivable but have been inconceivable for a decade despite hundreds of billions of dollars worth of effort being placed into the matter is a feature rather than a bug? How many of those 10% improvements currently in the dustbin of some VC fund could compound to create something that's 100, 500, or 1000% better had they had any chance at adoption?
It seems intuitively obvious that these products stifle any reasonable innovation in the space they occupy by their continued remaining in private hands, and that waiting around for the mythical solutions that by sheer virtue of their goodness can depose the corporate titans whose business model is to corrode whatever social cohesion still remains is playing right into their hands.
Fusion sounds cool, but the fusion part of the reactor produces heat, not electricity. The steam turbines we use to convert heat into electricity are more expensive than wind turbines and solar panels per kWh.
That's right, even if coal/fission/fusion is free, they're still uncompetitive. And steam turbines don't work great as dispatchable power, which is really what's needed to complement solar & wind.
Natgas runs a turbine directly, which is why it is so much cheaper than coal.
With exceptions. Isn't that weird?