I hope the parallel of SWEs working for Mega-Billionaires is not lost on the HN crowd.
"Anyone can learn to code bruh"
170k base + 300k RSU "man I can't afford anything in [high COL area]"
"Therapy is really useful y'all"
- average SWE
The very rich having astronomical amounts of money has zero negative effect on the day to day of the middle class - we don’t have a limited money supply.
You may say it buys them outsized influence, but media companies will always have owners, whether they be hectomillionaires or billionaires or whatever.
I think this almost completely false. Elon Musk just bought Twitter and could drastically change a major point of interaction for hundreds of millions of people. The Koch Brothers spend billions to influence, to great effect, the laws that are passed in the US. These examples are not rare. The economy is almost zero sum, certainly since the 70s the top percentiles have been taking a larger portion of the pie even considering the growth of the pie.
But anyway I think the general point is that is that even by working yourself to death you only increase your income or net worth by small numbers while someone like Elon Musk can 10x it over the same time period.
Almost every consumer item is vastly better and cheaper. Middle class lives are luxurious in the extreme compared to then.
Who cares if 100 people at the top are getting more rewards faster, does it actually make your life worse? No. Only if you are jealous and mean-spirited does Musk’s quarter trillion dollars bother you.
In fact, these people tend to invest in things that lead to further improvement.
Furthermore, if Twitter bothers you that much, go on Parler.
"The economy is almost zero sum, certainly since the 70s the top percentiles have been taking a larger portion of the pie even considering the growth of the pie."
Pretty clearly stated its obviously growing.
>Almost every consumer item is vastly better and cheaper. Middle class lives are luxurious in the extreme compared to then.
"I can buy an Iphone so therefore it's irrelevant that the Koch brothers own significant portions of the US Congress?" Non sequitur imo.
>Who cares if 100 people at the top are getting more rewards faster, does it actually make your life worse? No. Only if you are jealous and mean-spirited does Musk’s quarter trillion dollars bother you.
Because there is literally less to go around.
https://www.epi.org/blog/growing-inequalities-reflecting-gro....
A huge portion of the productivity gains in the past 50 years have gone straight to those 100 people at the top so yes people should be upset that they are taking more.
>In fact, these people tend to invest in things that lead to further improvement.
I fail to see how Spacex or Blue Origin will improve life on Earth in this century.
>Furthermore, if Twitter bothers you that much, go on Parler.
Pot calling kettle black? You seem to be parroting near word for word arguments from Ayn Rand/Alt Right etc. so Parler seems like a natural fit for you.
0 -> 1M -> 10B
Not sure how far away from 10B 1M is. Maybe you can help
By your logic Sergey Brin is closer to the homeless man you step over on the street than he is to Elon Musk. Which would be a silly thing to say.
Sure, there are plenty of nice big houses that cost more than 1M, but you’re not off by much, and the first million makes a massive difference, including being able to talk to the bank rather than being escorted out by security.
But: anything over about 100M, the only difference the number makes is which company you get to own because that’s the only[0] thing people sell at that price… and at that level you get the money as a way to keep track of the score of how well you’re running them.
[0] OK, sure, private islands, and I don’t know how yachts work in law, but you get my drift
Wouldn't be surprised if one dude in Texas working 60+hrs/week is singly responsible for every Tesla in the country continuing to get remote updates.
I want to get off this wild ride.
Probably not long before we start having megamillionaires, aka kilobillionaires, aka trillionaires though. Elon Musk's around a quarter of the way there.
£1M (happens to have the same shorthand, but) is never called 'a megapound'.
I also prefer to see $1mm to $1M, and i'm not even French!
HN discussion (2009): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=921524
> Tarsnap uses a prepaid model based on actual usage:
> Storage: 250 picodollars / byte-month of encoded data ($0.25 / GB-month)
> Bandwidth: 250 picodollars / byte of encoded data ($0.25 / GB)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_total_wea...
Imagine if his assets outside Russia could be identified. Trump's fascination with Putin is not idle; he has a nose for money.
The corruption needed to enable that level of loss would imply other people having the opportunity, and I expect competition between different corrupt officials would limit any one person.
Perhaps I’m wrong — I’m not knowledgeable, this is just based on what feels like a plausible upper level to me.
Nobody can be sure of the numbers. Most of us can't count that high in one lifetime.
Naturally, but the other estimates I’ve seen — even recently — put him between 70 and 274 billion. A quarter to a 14th of what you’re suggesting. While anything over about 2 billion is uncountable in a human lifetime, the lower number does not feel entirely unbelievable, in the way a trillion does.