I totally agree, but also the pop star billionaires are the least offensive type. If you're targeting them before the other billionaires, you got played and are doing it wrong. The richest most politically powerful billionaires are the biggest threat to freedom.
^ This right here.
I'm so tired of "leftists" focusing on inoffensive targets in the middle of the spectrum when the real problem is far to the right of it.
Pop stars are just the pretty faces in front of the behemoths that are the music labels. These labels are absolutely very politically powerful. Do you think Taylor Swift for rich by paying her staff fair salaries? The cleaning people from the concert venues, the bartenders, the people taking your tickets, etc, they all earned little crumbs while Swift, the venue, and the label made the big bucks.
No one becomes a billionaire by paying fair wages.
strat is to target all billionaires equally
To me this is the silliest possible counter propaganda. They want to get people fired up about a super popular billionaire that actually works really hard and over pays her people. So then they can paint a picture of radicals who'd have everyone living in the slums no matter what they were able to do with their talents. They won't even wait to see the real responses. They'll put their own in, grab the screen cap and deride us all as anarchists.
Idk, when you move from normal wealth to exorbitant wealth AND you’re a international pop star who very clearly has THOUSANDS of workers supporting each show it seems kinda hard to ignore the people who’s work is providing your stage to excess.
They all are a symptom of the same disease, some of them are the disease as well.
See that picture of the homeless man on top? Bill Gates has literally saved hundreds of thousands of men like him through his charitable foundations. It depends on the person not the size of the bank account.
Right. Bill Gates is horribly evil and rich, and like many people in his shoes, he decided to be a philanthropist to fix his image. What if millions of other people had gotten that money instead of him? What if Windows hadn't been monopolistic? What kind of world would we be in today? A better one, most likely.
Agreed. Any downvotes you got/get are simple shills of the mindsets "rich people bad" and "Windows bad", both of which are very prevalent here. Multiple people here (not all) throwing those downvotes around would be doing the same shit if they were billionaires, or worse.
Wish we could all be like Pepe.
Let's start with those that profit directly from human suffering.
Bread and circuses without bread and prohibitively expensive circuses brought to you by Ticketmaster.
So the entire Healthcare, agriculture, and processed food industries.
And obviously Ticketmaster.
Yeah for sure, but we can still plan for tomorrow.
It's not a matter of "nobody should be allowed to be ultra wealthy," it's a matter of "nobody should be allowed to be unacceptably poor."
If our civilization can generate wealth at an astronomical rate, then there is no morally defensible reason for anyone to be homeless, hungry, poorly educated, lacking medical care, drinking unsafe water, worked to death, or any of a number of other baseline metrics of civilization. All of those ills exist because wealth is funneled upwards at an unbelievable rate, leading to the existence of billionaires. All of that wealth should be used to raise everyone's standard of living, rather than give a handful of people more power and luxury than ever appeared in Caligula's wet dreams.
Of course the way that you accomplish that is by an exponentially progressive taxation system, and that will... probably make it impractical to be a billionaire, but frankly I think that focusing on helping the bottom end of the economic ladder is more productive than just talking about how it should be illegal to have more than a given amount of wealth.
I'm still surprised that taxing the rich is such a difficult bill to pass. Assuming we live in a democracy, the 1% shouldn't be able to have such sway over the population.
Might have something to do with almost all relevant politicians being in the 1%. Maybe. Possibly.
Lots of people don't understand taxes and lots of others think they'll end up rich someday and then it will affect them.
The rich have special access to the legislative machinery that the rest of us don't. The end of real democracy in this country began with the Supreme Court's "corporations are people / money is speech" rulings. Ordinary people can't compete with the influence that billions of dollars of bribes brings.
Citizens United and Regulatory Capture.
It’s not a matter of “nobody should be allowed to be ultra wealthy,”
It kind of is. the more wealth someone has, the more power they have over other people's life. They can buy laws and regulations, or have them removed. This is never a good thing. Billionaires simply must not exist. In fact, billionaires only exist because we have so many poor people. They profit from other people's hard labour and misery. If it was not such a historically charged term, I would call them parasites.
frankly I think that focusing on helping the bottom end of the economic ladder is more productive than just talking about how it should be illegal to have more than a given amount of wealth.
Agreed. Generally easier to sell to the public, too.
That said, there's also a bunch of stuff that wealth hoarding and extreme capitalism will still cause problems with, which isn't directly tied to people living in extreme poverty. Climate change is just one example. Infrastructure is another. There are collective challenges that we can't meet because of wealth disparity.
Maybe we just need to assign billionaires goals to achieve. "Hey, Elno, reduce world hunger sustainably over the next four years by 15% or we take all your money. Jeffy boy, you're on housing; get us to zero homelessness before 2030, or we're nationalizing Amazon. Oil execs, you get to tackle greenhouse gas emissions (I mean, you made the problem, you get to solve it). We're replacing half of the gas stations in the US with fast charging stations, and we'll sell off 1,000 a year to private owners; get us to net zero emissions and you get to have whichever of them the Federal Government still owns by that point. Whichever one of you chuckleheads gets done first gets all the other guys' beach houses. And go!"
Hi, Swiftie here 🙋♀️
There are no good billionaires. Taylor Swift is not a good person due to her business practices. I have no defense of her and I would never say “she is one of the good ones.” I and most of the Swiftie circles I run in wish that she would practice equitable compensation in her tours (where she gets the vast majority of her profit), among other areas.
Taylor Swift is a capitalist, and that’s bad. There are thousands of artists and laborers being exploited by her every performance. All those laborers, stage hands, designers, arena staff, etc should have a say in how the massive revenue generated is distributed, and they do not get that say. That is bad.
As a majority male space, Lemmy has a tendency to slide a bit toward dunking on women and majority women’s spaces because you may not be aware that many leftist Swifties are just as critical of Swift as other billionaires. This post is a good example of that. (If you feel bad or called out by this, don’t stress it. I just want to gently course correct the conversation a tad 🙂)
I appreciate you posting this, it was actually unexpected to see to me and was nice to know.
i appreciate you leaving the feedback! sometimes i feel like what i say lands on deaf ears so it’s reassuring that my experience can actually get out there :) cheers
I'm not a swiftie, and I'm male, so take my words as you will in that context.
Simply: IMO, it is possible to appreciate someones artistry while disliking their personal value system and actions.
Just because someone is a good artist, does not and should not imply that they are good.
Both liking someone's music and disliking their decisions as a person, can both be true. I hate the plethora of false dichotomy arguments that you can't appreciate music made by a person if that person is considered a bad person. One does not mean the other cannot be true.
based
I do agree with separating the artist from the art, but I also understand choosing to not support people whose values you disagree with. Because your money will end up being used to support those values.
So yes, I won't say that I don't like certain songs/books/paintings/etc. because of the artist, but I can refuse to pay for them or other related merchandise.
false dichotomy arguments that you can't appreciate music made by a person if that person is considered a bad person
For me this is more about making someone more popular and making them profits by listening to their music. And then there's also a possibility that someone is considered a bad person for their views that are also displayed in their music, then I consider that I might start viewing their opinion as the norm, and also prefer not to listen to them.
All in all, I agree that the dichotomy is false, but I think it has some sense in some cases.
Yep, of all the billionaires, there are so many more men to choose from. So. Many.
and how many of them have such a large cult of personality? it must be nice, to be able to use gender as a shield from any sort of criticism.
How do you reconcile the understanding of her not being a good person and doing harm to the world with being a Swiftie? That's a genuine question, I find identifying with the group supporting or admiring the person or idea I myself am opposed to on the ideological level hard to imagine. I can understand it being the case if one is defending the lesser evil, as they are coerced to do so by implied existence of the greater evil, but while I'm not well versed in the Swift lore I believe there isn't any evil twin running around that she needs to stop. Unless.
That's not an attack, I believe that being a Swiftie might mean something else than what I understand by this term and I am making a fool out of myself. Still, it does seem to mean supporting what you're opposed to. How do you resolve that contradiction?
Thanks for your question! It’s a good one.
Short answer: I don’t
Long answer: @[email protected] explains it super well so I won’t rewrite their excellent comment: https://lemmy.cafe/post/10463918/8811775
Parallel example but chronically fandom answer: Swift has also made a lot of really shitty decisions regarding relationships that I strongly dislike, including dating freak weirdo misogynist Matty Healy. 🫤 I don’t think we could ever be friends, or whatever, because of these flaws to her character. I don’t try to reconcile her flaws at all. I just like most of her music a lot and keep myself honest about the rest of it. 🤷♀️
Brava!
Edit: I'm using him as an example of an other billionaire who is constantly defended even though he owns 6 mega yatchs and a few submarines costing him an estimated 75 to 100 million a year just in maintenance. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Look I love Gabe as much as anyone but nobody earns a billion dollars
Especially when steam could have a sliding scale for fees where developers with fewer sales could earn more profit from the sale which would greatly benefit the indie developers.
Instead it has the opposite structure where fees decrease as you sell many millions in revenue which has the opposite effect.
And the perfect counterpart is another rotund fuzzy tech guy, Steve Wozniak. The Woz, who isn’t a billionaire in part because when Steve Jobs decided to fuck over a bunch of Apple employees before the IPO Woz gave them some of his shares. Woz, who spends his time in part video chatting with elementary school classes and talking to them about technology.
To be fair
He did get the steam deck made, so that was kinda cool.
But maybe owning 6 yachts is a little less cool.
Unless the sub and boats were like research vessels he funds, that would be cool
But they aren't.
Why can't billionaires dump their money into funding scientific research? It's not like there aren't scientists out there with plenty of research to be done.
Or even maybe wherever he lives, he could like, fund the entire county school districts for the rest of existence and no one would have to worry about taxes.
Or maybe regularly cancel the medical debt of Valve employees and their families.
Like how fucking hard is it to redistribute your own wealth?
Like fucking Christ, that's the part I don't understand. They complain about taxes and shit at the top, but they do absolutely fuck all to make things better for large swaths of people. Or if they do, it's after they die and $200m gets donated to a university and it prevents next year's tuition from increasing.
Yeah it's like a sickness. They're hoarders, but they hoard wealth. If I had over a billion dollars, I would literally not be able to give it away fast enough (I would leave myself with a cool $10 mil).
Which is one reason why I'll never be one.
I think part of it is the form that that wealth exists in. Not defending billionaires in any way, but they don't have stacks of cash lying around. The way that they live is that their money is in various forms of equity that passively increase in value, like stocks and houses, which they take loans against in order to pay for things. Then, they take out more loans to pay off the previous and repeat until they die and the debt disappears due to legal loopholes.
Stuff like the yachts and all the other crazy expensive stuff is one thing, but to redistribute the wealth, it's not as simple as handing out cash to everybody (and I think turning all their mansions into subsidized housing instead of selling them would be more beneficial anyway).
I think incentivizing them to do more useful things with that cash and disincentivize them from simply hoarding it in various forms would be a decent short-term solution to the issue without having to put in much effort on the government's part, but I never expect to see that happen.
It is really hard to comprehend, seriously.
A guess I'll venture is that the vast swaths of money are essential to retain influence, perhaps. The game stops being about money and starts being about power, and you lose your seat at the table unless you're just hoarding stupid ridiculous amounts of money like the rest of the players.
I dunno, I used to think they do it because they're terrified of slipping into having to actually work for a living instead of just making other people execute their maybe-good ideas. But that feels too simplistic for the uber rich, maybe it's like that for the "petit-bourgoise" but not the mega-corp titans.
But yeah, they just couldn't possibly spend themselves to a lower social class at this point, so there's gotta be some weird motive at play. It boggles the rational mind. Like are Gaben's 6 yahts "necessary" to wield influence at convenient locations and woo other industry titans? Dunno.
In any case, it's stupid and wrong, I just wanna understand it.
who the fuck is he and why does everyone know him by face?
i feel morally superior to all of yall who are star gazing all the time, fuck, why do you all know who he is
He is Gaben from steam. The picture is used a lot in article headers.
Getting some Pol Pot vibes from this. Ideology can lead to some really weird conclusions.
Somone like Taylor Swift isn't destroying people's lives and she's not overworking other people to make that money.
Sure she has too much money, but that can be solved by having more sensible tax policies. Show me where she's bribing congress and donating to the GOP to keep her taxes low.
These kinds of memes only exist to prove how edgy people are but they don't accomplish anything. Saying "I'm so hardcore I even hate the billionaires people like" doesn't do anything other than push people away from whatever movement you claim to support.
But congratulations, you're the edgiest socialist edge lord on the internet. That sound you hear is the Swifties (who might otherwise care about the issues you care about) heading towards the door.
People like Elon Musk and Donald Trump divide people so they don't think about what they're doing. You're helping them.
bvbv
and don’t stop to help and the person would have lived if you stopped but instead that person dies then yes, you are evil
Also that's actually a crime in many places. Well here in Finland at least. You have a duty to render aid if no-one else is there. Obviously you can just drive by an accident if someone is already helping but if there's no-one else around, you're required to stop to help, by law.
The point isn't "Taylor Swift is immoral". The point is "the system is immoral and the evidence for it can be seen by looking at, for instance, Taylor Swift."
Being against billionaires doesn't mean one is genocidal ffs.
People like Elon Musk and Donald Trump divide people so they don’t think about what they’re doing. You’re helping them.
No U, bootlicker.
"Kill all billionaires" isn't a genocidal statement, since it's not based on genetics, language, or culture.
I think it's a bad plan, but we shouldn't conflate genocide with mere mass murderous intent. (Also, "all billionaires" is only like 10k people at most, so it would be a very small mass murder compared to most genocides.)
If people criticizing your favorite celebrity makes you stop caring about social issues, then you never really cared about those issues in the first place to begin with.
The only smart guy in this thread⏫
These kinds of memes only exist to prove how edgy people are but they don’t accomplish anything. Saying “I’m so hardcore I even hate the billionaires people like” doesn’t do anything other than push people away from whatever movement you claim to support.
So true. Learn from the edgy George Floyd protests and the Palestine protests, which at best accomplished nothing and more likely played a key role in cutting off formerly-rising popular support for the causes they were advocating. Being edgy feels good to the person doing it, but it makes everyone else say "fuck that guy and whatever they're in favor of." Be smart not angry.
These meme would be far more effective if it didn't have the bottom picture at all.
I'll share it again...
That time Oprah and Ellen cosplayed as poor people by going to the bank...
No but see these psychopaths aren't physically that dangerous and are smiling in a not-unpleasant way, so it's okay. /s
As a swiftie, I can say you're right. However, there's also no such thing as a purely good or purely bad person, and liking a billionaire does not make someone good or bad. People, it turns out, are complex.
I can love Taylor's music while also criticizing her for her excessive personal jet use and massive pollution problem.
I think if we stop making it a binary decision that more people will start opening up about changes need to make. In Taylor's case, most Swifties would never dare say anything negative about her for fear of others in the fandom thinking they aren't true fans, and vis versa, I'm sure people here will read this as I must support billionaires because I like her music. No, complex multifaceted opinions are valid.
I think we should abolish ICE vehicles. It doesn't mean I think I need to yell at family members who pull up in their 02 Camry because they can't afford to upgrade.
You need to be evil to accumulate billionaire levels of wealth, no one forces her to be that wealthy, she could give hundreds of millions to MSF and other reliable charities and still be richer than 99.999999% of people on earth.
Completely agree. Went to her show, loved it. She's donated to every food bank in each city she's stopped at, but I don't think it's nearly what she could be doing. She has "put an actual dent in climate change" money bur instead gives a few thousand to food banks. Like I said, people can hold 2 opinions.
I recently had this conversation with my sister who's been a huge swiftie for years. Her reaction:
u and ur sister hella based 🙌
Disagree here. I'd argue being good and being a billionaire are mutually exclusive. You can be good before you are a billionaire (rare) but it's not possible once you enter that class.
100% agree.
For anyone who may disagree, consider thinking of excess wealth as excess food.
If you were in a stadium full of people that represent all of humanity, and you have more food than you could ever even eat in multiple lifetimes are you not an evil person for not sharing with those who are literally starving to death?
These are people with the amount of wealth who could easily subsidize paying a team of people to plan out how to appropriate give away most of their wealth so they don't have "excess food" by the time they die - and not have it impact their day to day lifestyle. Instead they let others starve.
and liking a billionaire does not make someone good or bad.
Buddy we all make mistakes. Liking a billionaire is simply not good don't try to hide yourself behind an excuse. The world has much better artists and music to offer.
someone of her unique status cannot fly scheduled commercial flights without causing significant disruptions everywhere she travels to and from.
Pfff, yeah, sure. In my country the ex-president was stupidly popular, like 80% approval popular and 99% of the people knew him. He still traveled, always, in commercial flights, economic class, basically each weekend. Taylor Swift just doesn't wanna deal with normies.
Hi fellow Swiftie! Thanks for sharing your thoughts 💃
Hello! If you aren't aware we do have a community over at [email protected] if you'd like to join! Always happy to have more!
Shits a cult aye
There may not be good ones, but like everything there are different grades.
Someone who became a billionaire selling weapons to conflict zones after pushing them into conflict is a lot worse than an artist that is popular and actually works for their riches.
If you have billions there are no excuses, dont defend this shit.
That person was already evil before they became a billionaire.
The amount of evilness from being a billionaire, separate from how they got there, is approximately the same for both of them.
Nobody "works for" a billion dollars.
Yeah, and every day they don’t give back and horde more than they could ever spend, the more evil they are.
It's interesting to me that Swifties look over the fact that she entertains company with Patrick Mahomes' brother, someone that is in the midst of settling his sexual assault case and only received probation (likely b/c his connections). Or that she continues to attend events of an organization that routinely tries to stifle legitimate protests and would treat their players like garbage if the NFLPA didn't exist.
In the end, she's like everyone else. You look over the sins of those that are somehow tied to your group but make a huge stink about when it's others.
I understand why Queen B or T Swift aren't doing it, but the only moral activity (beyond survival tasks) that a "good billionaire" can be engaged in is redistributing their wealth to marginalized workers.
You can figure out your next album / tour or how to benefit your friends and family once you get to 999M USD.
Why do you understand why Swift and Queen B arent doing it?
I don't know about other people, but I tend to drift toward doing things that are fun, comfortable, and familiar, unless I do some "internal parenting". Even if they found a way to make redistributing their wealth fun, they are shaped by capitalism even more than myself, so I doubt they'd find it comfortable or familiar.
That's how I understand it.
I'm going to get comfortable and familiar with community investment of my own resources well before I reach 1B, by intention.
Swifties triggered.
Those billionaires are being propped by stupid people buying exorbitant ticket prices to see their idols dancing from a mile a way. I blame the populace for this. you can make them irrelevant without even spending a penny.
As someone in the entertainment business, those performers don't like ticket master either. Or at least on the level I am at.
Basically the only way for a professional touring musician except those like her at the top to make money is to sell merchandise at this point. Either that or play small clubs which don't use Ticketmaster and get a small take of the door. It's ludicrous that so many very talented people can't make a living as musicians anymore.
This being said on the same platform that basically every third person believes voters aren't responsible for their votes.
We can always assume people will be stupid, so I don't think they're gonna all stop wasting their money. Even if half of them did TS would still be a billionaire
If every single one of Taylor Swift's concerts were free, past, present, and future, she'd still probably be a billionaire. Artists don't really make that much on ticket sales, the ticket vendors and venues are the ones making all the money. Swift's net worth mostly comes from the value of the rights to her songs, not ticket sales.
In the face of exploitative capital, blaming the consumer is on the same tier of nonsensical rhetoric as victim blaming.
It’s not the fault of people buying bottled water for Nestle’s human rights violations, nor is it the fans’ fault that Swift’s business model is exploitative and nonethical.
As an INTJ I also don't like most people, because as you said people are stupid
I just think that at $1BN net worth or whatever, you start getting taxed on 99.99% of everything you earn or gain in worth after that.
This way people still get stupid rich, and if someone ever has $10bn you can easily just sound the alarm then and there and say nope, fuck this guy.
The tax curve just just be exponential and it should be basically vertical at $1bn.
Up until the 70s or 80s I think, in the United States, the top tax bracket was 90%.
And lo and behold, the greatest period of prosperity in American history. In the 80s, Ronald Reagan cranks it all the way down to 25%. One two skip a few, now we live in a corpo hellstate where no one can afford anything except the nobility who live in a state of extravagant grandeur many exponents removed from the common man. The correlations are obvious.
High percentage high tax brackets are not the single cure-all silver bullet for all of America's woes, but it gets us pretty damn close.
10 million is fuck off money. We don't need to go another 990 million dollars. Just set it to 10 million dollars.
I mean yes and no.
Yes, no one needs more than $10 million. But there are legitimate use cases for wealth far beyond that. Let’s imagine someone develops an immutable cryptocurrency tool that is used globally to track political spending and keep governments honest. Hypothetically, this tool revolutionizes transparency and unravels corruption on a massive scale. Shouldn’t the creator of something so transformative be allowed to enjoy significant wealth—enough to provide for their family, loved ones, and even those who helped them along the way?
That kind of lasting wealth—the kind that lets someone own $10 million estates worldwide, fully staffed, with taxes paid indefinitely—is realistically covered at $1 billion. It’s feasible at $100 million, but it’s not at $10 million. A $10 million cap is "personal freedom money," but it’s not "dynasty money." And while dynasty wealth can be problematic, it’s also worth acknowledging the good that such wealth has sometimes enabled.
I love it when athletes, for example, use their success to buy their parents a million-dollar home or fund life-changing initiatives. If we cap wealth at $10 million, it prevents figures like LeBron James, Cristiano Ronaldo (love or hate him), Serena Williams, David Beckham, or even Rob Dyrdek from reaching the level of wealth where they can fund truly transformative projects.
Allowing higher wealth ceilings enables people who do reinvest in society to make a broader impact. Sure, some of these incentives are tax-driven, but the outcome still benefits society.
I get that not everyone uses their wealth for good. But there’s a meaningful gap between a $10 million cap and a $1 billion cap where good things can and do happen.
Can we negotiate to $500 million as a compromise?
Along with some restriction to their wealth relating to where the money was earned, so they can't just leave the country with it all.
I know how to fix the economy!
After 1 million, you win at life so you can stop working and get a basic income with food included, housing, etc. You won, you don't get to play anymore. No w2 forms or banking or anything. If you buy something, the government just makes the funny money to pay for that which then means more jobs for those still playing the games. Big projects and big companies all public owned and only players get to work there and decide. Anyone who reaches the 1 Million mark gets kicked out into permanent retirement. Once you reach this level you get a party and you can invite anyone you want.
One benefit of winning is that you can be completely naked the entire time. Because why not. At your party you can request everyone to be naked too.
You can be married to a winner but you must keep working until you reach the 1million mark.
That's it!
What if I want to build a rocket or iPhone or supercomputer or cancer therapy and I need more than $1 million for parts and labor?
I wouldn't call her a good billionaire, but I think she's as benign as billionaires get. At least she does things like pay her employees a good wage and gets people involved in the political process.
And, as far as I know, she isn't responsible for anyone's deaths.
I'm sure she still stepped on a lot of necks up the pyramid, but compared to a shit ton of other billionaires out there...
Billionaires can't be benign. It's impossible to make a billion dollars in a lifetime without taking more than you deserve. Someone overpaid for the product or someone was underpaid for the work (probably both). Billionaires prey on that loss, and it's not as if they are Robin Hood giving back to the poor. If that's not malignant, I don't know what is.
I'd settle for "less bad". If Musk is a 10/10, she's an easy 4/10, with the ranking based entirely on arbitrary numbers and few actual facts.
The thing with TS is that she is not supposed to be like other billionaires. Other billionaires, most of them, have a different motivation, this is, to make more money. They are supposed to be entrepreneurs but at that level they are more like gamblers. TS is supposed to be an artist and her motivation is supposed to provoke a reaction in people's emotions through her craft, which is making songs. Hell, at this point she could be singing and composing for free and giving away money. She could just license her next album to some cause, like fighting against cancer, and just let them use the gainings to fight cancer. That's why I don't even give her words my attention. She demonstrated that her motivation seems to become richer and richer. As any other billionaire she has all the attention she wants and more, because in the end she is like any other billionaire, a hoarder forgetting about the importance of other people's lives.
I would go so far as to say: they will never be a good billionaire, unless that means a median income in a poor country
Is Dolly Parton a billionaire? She has numerous assistance programs. I figure she wouldn’t be.
People don't understand just how much money a billion dollars is. Once you are that rich it's really REALLY hard not to get richer. Just putting your money in basic savings accounts would just keep piling on money. Invest it even conservatively and you'll grow like crazy. Invest aggressively and you'll have another billion soon.
Billionaires simply shouldn't exist.
I'm more charitable than most, I say you get to have up to 100 million, after that you've won life. Any extra money money you make goes back into your community.
Turns out she isn’t. I guess the constant donation of huge amounts of money prevented her from getting there.
With 3 million in an account you're already making over 100k/year out of interest. With 100 million you never have to care about money even if you live in lavish luxury. 1bil is absolutely ridiculous.
You could also argue there are no good millionaires by the same logic.
The existence of billionaires is a systemic problem, largely not a personal failing.
I'm not a swiftie, but the message here should be "We need better redistributive institutions" or "We need a new economic system", not "Artist being an unexceptional artist (in terms of industry behavior) is BAD because she is one of the more successful ones"
You could also argue there are no good millionaires by the same logic.
Heyyyy, you're starting to get it!
Heyyyy, you’re starting to get it!
Careful, the middle-class socialists on Lemmy who dream of owning a nice house will get mad.
But more pertinently, the argument can be applied to anyone as long as there is suffering in the world and unnecessary luxuries. And while I think most of us here agree that there is a structural issue with that, I'm far less fond of the idea that Joe Schmoe working a soul-crushing minimum-wage job should never do anything other than work, sleep, and donate every spare penny to charity because keeping or using wealth while others are suffering would make him a bad person.
I think it is 100% realistic for Swift (and similar wealthy artists) to one day realize that her business model handed down to her is unethical and exploitative and take steps towards making amends. It’s mostly a matter of getting her exposed to the right conversations, either through public pressure or interpersonal relationships. Like how she started buying carbon offsets for her jets.
I also (naively?) hope/feel that there will be a domino effect. Once one massive touring artist starts making equitability moves for their staff, other artists might follow. Doesn’t even have to be Swift tbh, Coldplay or Bruno Mars or someone could set it off.
I mean, if memory serves the staff she actually employs herself is pretty well-compensated. The issue is that the industry as a whole is borked, and paying the staff of other fuckwads in the industry just means that those fuckwads start planning to stiff their employees by planning around the gratuity of successful artists.
Nothing less than structural reform will even dent the injustice of it.
Empire is devaluing its currency so fast that we'll all be billionaires soon.
Zimbabwe style
I think it's kind of stupid that we're defaulting to the idea that a billion dollars as sort of the default "well, that's too much money, nobody could ever possibly deserve THAT much money!" metric we're using. Not particularly because there are really any good billionaires, I mostly think that's not really the case and agree that any claim to the contrary would probably strain credibility.
About the most you could point to is somebody like taylor swift, or any musical performer, or athlete, someone who specifically gains money based almost exclusively on their command of cultural capital and ability as a performer rather than necessarily on extracting the surplus labor value of others, though to a certain extent, you have to have some sort of corporate backing or management company to reach that level, and even if those performers don't control it, there's probably some level of loaded complicity going on there. These types would maybe be just above the sorts of people who just run good or more ethical companies, as far as companies can be, on the billionaire morality totem poll.
No, my criticism isn't so much that billionaires aren't necessarily evil, because I think it's mostly true enough that billionaires are all evil for it to be as true a heuristic as a heuristic can be true. I think my ire draws less from that, and more from how this sort of like, meaningless agreement over this particular example doesn't really necessarily lend itself towards any more in depth analysis. We've put the marker too high, the standard too high. A billion dollars is obviously very extreme, you can see that with the comparisons from a million to a billion. What about a million, though? Is that bad, is that a bad standard of evil, if you have a million dollars, does that make you evil? Where's the cutoff, here? I'm sure plenty of people know someone with a million bucks, you could probably just point at anyone who owns a home in LA.
My point is that instead of some arbitrary cutoff we should probably just be looking at what's actually going on here in terms of the relationships at work and the constructed hierarchies. If that's the case then we can probably draw the line less at a billion dollars and more at anyone propping up this stupid bullshit type hierarchy, and specifically those more critical lynchpins which hold it together. Perhaps, like a "not necessarily a billionaire" healthcare CEO. Now that, that would be a good start.
There's vastly worse billionaires than Taylor Swift. Idk what Swifties on Lemmy you're trying to trigger. Thompson wasn't even billionaire but I'd say he was worse than Swift.
if you get that bar any lower, you're gonna need a shovel.
Posts like this meme are just angry 19 year olds who hate their little sister's music and think this makes them "political".
Its because they get pushback from swifties. Its the conflict they are seeking not advancing any political goal.
Oh jeeze, you mentioned Swift in a meme. I feel sorry for your inbox.
Ok, so Taylor Swift seems to get the billionaire hate here. I'm wondering, when it comes to successful artists, what's the opinion on Dolly. She's not a billlionaire, but she is worth several hundred millions, so it's close enough. She seems to be beloved by almost everyone.
Dolly gives free books to every kid, helped rebuild Gatlinburg after the fires, and is now helping rebuild East TN after the hurricane. Also, water is free at Dollywood.
She gets a pass, but she'll still have to give up most of her wealth when the revolution comes.
You leave Dolly the fuck alone.
You hear.
My best friend is her cousin. He still hasn't introduced me, and if she does before he does I'll never forgive him.
That said, accumulation of wealth is bad, et cetera. But dolly is the absolute best of what that class can offer.
Taylor Swift is known very well for donating. She donates millions to food banks in every city she’s toured. She also donates on a lot of those gofundme fundraisers, one in which particular really moved her and she penned the song “Ronan”. An incredibly sad and tragic song that will make parents cry, knowing she’s singing about a baby that died despite medical complications, brought Ronan’s mom at some of her concerts, and of course donated to the cause. She regularly funds gofundme campaigns, so overall she seems like a pretty decent person.
I hate the use of her private jet and constant flights, but if you’re that big and hated by some people, then she can’t take regular airplanes because she can be assaulted and murdered. I wish there was some mega jumbo jet that was shared by the rich and did stops in certain cities, like as if it was “public transit” for the rich. That would be great because at least the uber wealthy would be a bit safer from being murdered that way while also certainly cutting down on significant emissions. I’d still hate it and want them to cut back more, but it would be no contest how beneficial sharing one jet versus 100 of them constantly flying everywhere would be. Some of these rich assholes fly insupplies from other countries, exotic food, etc. That pisses me off.
Taylor shouldn’t be a billionaire and I’d love for her to donate and help people out more than she’s already doing. Maybe one day people will see Swift is a bit better than other billionaires, having worked her ass off during the Eras Tour while also gifting millions of dollars to all the dancers and her staff that supported the concert. I went to her Eras tour concert with my spouse, and holy hell that was a phenomenal concert. She basically danced and sang constantly for the entire 3.5 hours or whatever. And she did that back to back for two years? Absolutely insane how much work that would take. I don’t think she gets enough credit, as I do love her music but she’s very hated for some reason.
Taylor should not have that much wealth. It’s insane. I hope she continues to give it away and donate even more than she’s already doing. Would love if she funded progressive parties and stuff like that, to give us more of a choice than the Democrats or the Pure Evil party. Maybe one day she’d be held in high regard like Dolly Parton, but let’s see. For now, I think she’s “one of the better billionaires”, but she shouldn’t be one. They shouldn’t have all the wealth.
Edit, made some slight corrections as I whipped this up on mobile.
Yeah I will agree I don't think she's spending all her time scheming on how to extract more and more wealth (her "stakeholders" likely are though)...there will be a natural point in "success" where it just keeps coming in by virtue of mass recognition, fandom, popularity, I don't think that makes someone evil.
I'm not even a fan, she could probably be doing much better, but I think we need to make sure we direct our ire where it's due, rather than being middle school kids who hate people just because they "got popular."
There's an entire class of folks who make their wealth directly off the backs of our misery, but I'm hesitant to demonize people just because they got popular or won the zipcode lottery.
Like I'd much rather depose our bosses than some random YouTuber that the algorithm blew up lol.
But that's what scares me, the people are quickly reaching a point of becoming an indiscriminate mob. A direct consequence of the actions of the evil rich, surely, but mobs seem to direct their fury in a way where rhyme overrides reason.
The "elite" can stop this turn of events by changing course and humbling themselves, but that seems unlikely...
I like how part of the reason she got super successful is appealing heavily to the working class instead of pretending to be some monolithic impossible "you wish" standard of fame, money, and power, to self-destructively aspire to.
Dolly is based.
I'm so so on this example specifically.
Most of Taylor's wealth is in the value of the rights to her songs. The liquid value she gets from those rights she is generally pretty generous with, she pays her employees very well and donated quite a bit of it.
That said, the bar is on the floor, and even a good billionaire is still pretty bad. She has much to improve
Billionaire: "So if they don't exist anymore, I'm good? How many do I have to kill?"
The statement about billionaires is true, but also the reasons that people end up living on the streets are extremely complex and I'm not sure this sort of thing helps us actually talk about the real problems.
For instance, a lot of homeless people in the US are foster children who aged out of the care system:
Nationwide, the data show that an estimated 50 percent of the homeless population spent time in foster care.
Money could maybe provide more resources to care for people, but the core issue here is that adults who were foster children lack the support of a family - which no amount of money can fix.
A more useful question to address homelessness would be "why do so many foster children struggle to become self-supporting adults, and what can we do to prevent that?"
if the world weren't so hostile to normal humans then not having the support of a family would not be as devastating
I'm not sure that I agree... a family is a lot more than a source of economic support. No amount of less hostile world can substitute for the social, cultural, educational or psychological functions of a family, and becoming a self-supporting adult has a lot to do with mental well-being (in addition to the economic aspects).
Maybe if there were less economic pressure overall there would be more functional families and ultimately fewer children in the foster care system... but that's really just conjecture and I'm not sure how you'd go about trying to support such an argument with research.
I'm also curious how you define "hostile" and "normal humans" in this context.
Money could maybe provide more resources to care for people, but the core issue here is that adults who were foster children lack the support of a family - which no amount of money can fix.
billions in dollars taken from billionaires to help them for a few more years would absolutely help. maybe not all of them, but any that it does help would be well worth it. billionaires don't need more than one yacht.
That's so brutal. The foster system is also really strange, from my broad thousand-foot view of it.
Maybe I'm way off base but it feels like some weird dispassionate state shuffle system where kids don't get a stable family situation, they just get passed around a series of "halfway homes", develop psychological problems from these constant disruptions in their development because duh, and then suddenly are "of age" and booted out to go work or something. (And likely end up on the street? Shocker!)
(This constant attempt to reinstitute child labor scares me even more in this context)
My wife and I were consulting various sources about adoption. We basically found out adoption is like some weird underground "baby market" that obviously favors the rich, and prices different genetics traits differently. (YEP!)
Directed to the foster system, it sounds like you just end up as a revolving door extension of a failed, undercut, under funded social program that "processes" kids through your house like inmate transfers.
No wonder statistics are so grim! My research suggests to me it was a replacement for the antiquated orphanage system of old but... Sheesh was it really an improvement? (Of the best examples, for the sake of argument, not the worst ones).
All this rabble rabble about abortion being legal or not, but it could be legal again universally, tomorrow, and conservatives wouldn't have to worry about it actually happening so often if they fixed their freaking obtuse child-as-market-product system. If they actually cared about children, that is. Fat chance they'll even think of that though.
Sorry I didn't know this was such a button with me but I hope I added to the conversation LOL. Thanks for your post. <3 So many people are just...invisible. And it's heartbreaking.
Ask yourself how that billionaire was made first
Ruthless espolitation of the working class and then portected from said working class by armed guards (ploice) and their apparatchik (judical system) , paid for mostly by the working classes.
What does Taylor spend money on? Since she's still a billionaire I'm guessing she doesn't give it all to charity.
Private jet rides for her friends.
You can buy an airline with that sort of money, not just a few fights.
A picture can express a thousand words, and leave out a billion others.
$500/ticket at the show in Vancouver.
How much does she need to feel like that she won ?
To be completely fair, ticketmaster takes 90% of that in fees 🙃
Posting women as the targets is such easy pickings and it’s so fuckin lazy. Where’s the white guys? Why aren’t they the face of this, since they’re the hand choking the poor?
You're missing the point. The point is that people always defend TS because they like her but she is still a billionaire. You can't just snap your fingers and turn this into a conversation about sexism because that's not related to the point in the least.
As someone else pointed out a while ago, Dolly Parton isn’t a billionaire because she tirelessly gives away her wealth to the poor.
It’s not the same level, but there are other musicians who have fought to keep ticket price affordable for their fans, Minor Threat/Fugazi being the most notable but far from the only ones.
You also can't snap your fingers and take everyone off the street. Sure, you can pay for places and help, but people aren't obliged to take it. Unless you're arguing for forcing that situation?
I understand the argument is simply "billionaires shouldn't exist", but that's a job for the government by way of taxation. There's no reason to point fingers at TS, she sells something people want really bad for some reason. Instead, point your finger at any of your asshole friends who don't vote or show up to help the cause.
Otherwise what? TS sucks because she's disgustingly rich, and the only way out is to give it all away? And then of course all other billionaires will follow suit?
These posts really seem like nothing more than "it's cathartic to yell at the sky, and it's even better if some people like the sky".
When your bank balance is higher than the GDP of a small country, gender is irrelevant.
One could also argue that posting a man as a homeless is ignoring countless homeless woman and countless homeless trans people.
One of them just got shot, remember?
True now use another example to illustrate that big wealth divides exist everywhere.
Are we really putting Taylor Swift on the same level as some of these other fuckers? Obviously she's not good, but if you compare her with Trump, musk, bezos, anyone from Walmart etc she's way better
You could point fingers to almost anyone, this is not specific to extra wealthy. All of us here probably have it better than 70% of humanity, yet we choose to watch a movie instead of go help others. Dedicating a large part of your life in helping others is very admirable, but it's not something you can expect everyone to do.
Not the same.
Imagine you had an income of 100K a year (as far as I understand this is considered nice but not rich) You pay tax, rent, food, car (maybe a beater, maybe a nice one, not a luxurious one), anything else that most would consider basic expenses. Now you are left with maybe 30K extra? Sure, that is a lot of money, but you do need to save some for you retirement, health complications, and plenty of unexpected things, not to mention if you have kids.
Let's say that you could save only 15K a year and donate the other 15K to charity, this means that you are donating 15% of your income, or more importantly, 50% of your savings. All of this while living a pretty average life style.
Now take someone who earns just 1M a year, not even a billionaire. Sure they might be living some crazy lifestyle that probably costs them a lot, but that is a choice that is wildly different then the choice of living bare bones compared to an average lifestyle. Meaning, that if they were to live an average lifestyle, maybe a bit extra, let's say that they pay all the same things but with an added 10%, they will now be left wit about 920K a year, even if they donate only 10% of their savings, they would still donate 613% of what you donated. And if they went with saving like you, heck, even 6 times what you save, so 90K a year, they would be able to donate 830K, so 55 times what you can donate.
And this is a millionaire, not a billionaire...
So yes, if you have expendable income I think it is your moral obligation to figure out how much you can donate and do that, but you will never share the same responsibility as a millionaire, let alone a billionaire.
Fuck em.
Sure they have more money to donate, but most of population is not donating even a single cent even if they could. I do have savings which I am keeping to buy a decent flat. In theory I don't necessarily must have it and I could settle with worse option and instead help someone who is worse than me, yet I am chosing to not do it.
We can also help by donating our time instead of money, go volunteer in soup kitchen or something like that. I don't ever see myself doing that.
I donate maybe 15 eur per year through some store options (I either get 1 cent per each 1 eur I spend or I can transfer it to charity. Or with deposit system I can donate 10 cents per each can, bottle of beverage I buy instead of getting that deposit back). I don't think I have explicitly transferred money otherwise. Relatively speaking I am just as bad as any billionaire when it comes to charity.
No
No.
Yeah, Lemmy was super against Swift during the election.
Just stop all of the hypocritical bullshit already.
Ok so what, posts like this are to shame billionaires into giving their money away because if they don't you will call them pieces of shit?
I'm sure that will definitely work.
Maybe instead of that we can work on being involved and elect people from the ground up who will prioritize people, and consider a tax code with some teeth. It's not nearly as glamorous as meming though. Pointing your finger at billionaires for existing even though they will never see it is a bold strategy. Probably better to be pointing your finger at your lazy ass friends for not participating in even one day a year of contributing to society by voting.
But she’s a self made hard worker!
Sure the lowly paid worker cleaning the stadium she performs at is exploited and yes sure the factory worker sewing her next shirt is exploited, but Taylor earned her billions through her own hard work and she deserves it.
Naw her music is over produced and follows the same formula the Beetles had. She had the money up front when creating the albums to have it tuned and mixed to sound better than it is. Also her songs all sound the same, bad.
She would be the first to say she couldn't do it alone. She massively over pays her staff. But she absolutely worked hard for it too.
