ObjectivityIncarnate

Yes. Those people consider things like this part of the “cost of living”, not the luxury that it is.

On average, people have more of an issue overspending than they do underearning. That’s why even among people making six figures, 1 in 4 of them live “paycheck to paycheck”, which people assume to mean ‘barely make enough to make ends meet’, but what more commonly means ‘deliberately chooses not to save/spends every dollar earned’.

Okay, now it’s $74. Now what?

This seems reasonable, honestly.

He’s not the president.

Doesn’t make sense to compare a rate of an outcome (without even knowing how often that outcome was sought) with an individual attempt whose outcome is not even known yet.

When Mangione IS actually given the death penalty, this ‘argument’ will actually amount to something. Dumb until then.

for every new layer of problem you uncover you can ask “so what are the causes for that” until you reach something that can be fixed wit money.

This is just a naive assumption.

The statement that a single billionaire’s wealth can not only solve world hunger, but do it so easily as to compare it to a snap of the fingers, is frankly, comically absurd, and exposes not only a massive ignorance of the root causes of the starvation that is still occurring in the modern day, but even for those issues which CAN be solved with an injection of funds, a massive ignorance of just how MUCH funding it would take.

As one tiny example, the US, a single country, spends over 1 TRILLION on welfare, not once or in total, but annually. And a mere FOUR percent of Earth’s population lives there.

Even the wealthiest human being on the planet’s net worth is nothing compared to what it would take to solve even the small minority of issues cold hard cash can solve. You have no sense of perspective and scale on this.

Businesses that were too successful are also called monopolies

No. There is no inherent relationship between the two things. A business can absolutely be very successful while there is competition, simply by being the best ‘competitor’ in the eyes of the customers.

the ratio matters a lot. It’s the difference between “we’re all in this together” and “some of you won’t make it but it’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make”.

The vast majority of people don’t know or care how much the person at the top is making, at all. They care only about if they’re in good shape themselves. Someone who’s making $100/hour and is living comfortably is, in 99% of cases not going to really give a shit if the CEO is making 50x what they are, or 500x.

That’s the reality.

When people say it would cost x to solve world hunger, they are talking about those “underlying societal and infrastructure issues”.

And those issues cannot be fixed simply by throwing money at them, making “the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could end world hunger with a snap of their bony fingers” a deeply ignorant statement.

So, yes. Everything can be solved with money. You can hire people to “fundamentally understand local political dynamics”, invest in research, pay to fund the programs that will enable impoverished regions to develop the means to build the infrastructure to feed themselves.

And then the warlords steal the food and redistribute it as they see fit.

You’re deeply naive about the reality of the circumstances in places where hunger is still a major problem.

The bottom line is, you can’t truly solve world hunger until you solve world peace, and you can’t solve world peace with money.

There are still places in the world where slavery is legal, for fuck’s sake. Do you really, truly think things like this could still be true in 2024 if money and what/who you can buy/hire were actually the solution?

No, arbitrarily punishing a business for being too successful is both nonsensical, and has a chilling effect on new entrepreneurship. Also, it makes literally zero difference to someone earning $10/hour if one CEO is earning over $4000/hour, or if ten CEOs are each earning $400/hour.

Ultimately, the ratio itself doesn’t matter at all. The actual number is what actually matters. Who do you think is more likely to be more resentful, someone making $10/hour under a CEO making 50x that, or someone making $100/hour under a CEO making 50x that? Obviously the first person…if they can’t make ends meet, it’s not going to make any difference to them if the CEO gets a pay cut, the fuck do they care?

Social media is used by a tiny minority of the population.

Thinking you can extrapolate what you see on social media into “the public” at large is the chief reason people on Reddit and Lemmy were so baffled when Harris got her ass kicked in the election.

Be more mindful of what’s true of “the public”, and what’s true only in the echo chamber.

But it’s inevitable as a successful business grows, and the population grows. A CEO of a company of 100 people does not have the same level of responsibility as the CEO of one employing hundreds of thousands (Google says UHC employs 440,000, for example).

Working conditions were inarguably much worse a century ago, but the gap wasn’t anywhere close to 700x back then, was it? The gap was smaller not because the CEOs were more generous, it was just because the largest businesses were much smaller.

I mean, the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos could end world hunger with a snap of their bony fingers

Bullshit.

World hunger, which has in fact decreased drastically over the past century, is not a problem that money can solve, because cost is not the reason it persists where it does.

One major issue: food donations to poor areas tend to be hoarded and distributed unequally by the most powerful people in those poor areas.

So we’re one sentence in, and already we need to fundamentally understand local political dynamics and either use force to ensure equal distribution, or to change local leadership structures. This is already out of control.

You can’t just throw money at the problem and expect it to just be solved. There are real underlying societal and infrastructure issues in a lot of impoverished countries that need to be solved in order for hunger to be solved. You could ship a billion tons of food to a single starving region and there would still be millions of starving people.

Additionally, simply handing out food would kill the domestic food industry (because who would buy food when billionaires are giving it away for free) and would make the country even more problematic.

You should know what you’re taking about when you make ridiculous claims like this.