Interesting Global News

How many poor people do you think it would take to relieve the top 1% of their wealth? Surely it's just a numbers game.

A lot of the world was jobless, rent became debt and lost a lot of family members. For me all of those along with getting depressed and still unable to recover to my normal appetite.

Before it.

Agriculture actually made people's lives much worse in many regards. Worse diet, women turned into commodities, shorter life spans due to increased infectious diseases, much less free time due to having to put more effort into getting food (somewhat surprisingly hunter-gatherers have way more free time) etc. It's been great for rulers and population growth though. If anything, poor people were invented in the Neolithic Revolution

edit: see eg https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7253633/, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/06/110615094514.htm

For sure. WW2 really shows the system for what it is now.

An utterly insane number of men were fighting or part of the logistics in WW2. It really was a crazy percentage of them. China was in full civil war and India sent huge numbers to fight also.

The rest, including vast numbers of women, were producing the tank, ships, ammunition etc. Needed for the war. Its estimated that around 4 tonnes of ammunition was expensed for every soldier killed. It really can't be understated just how much production, from so many people, went into maintaining that global war.

Yet, despite this, there was more than enough food for everyone. The only outliers were due to incompetence and callousness by the UK in India and Germany trying to starve the UK. However, of course, these were preventable one way or another.

The only thing we lost was the ultra wealthy.

The period just after WW2 saw a historic level of equality that we will likely never see again. This, to me, clearly shows that we don't all work as much as we do for the benefit of our community or anything like that. Its solely for the enrichment of the ultra wealthy, who then use their wealth to extract yet more wealth at ever greater rates.

The answer has and always will be the strategic refusal of work, outside of what is needed to maintain society. Its why we live in an employment based, market fundamentalist society. Its so the idea of doing anything like that seems like dangerous fundamentalism. But we have to ask ourselves, in what kind of a world is not spending 80% of your adult awake time working, mostly for other peoples benefit, producing the very power used to force this on us, thats killing our planets ability to sustain life, that works us all into an early grave, viewed as extremism?

It can't be a very good or rational one and certainly not one worth defending.

There was a reason I picked that number. I see we have a 🤑 emoji but not one for guillotines.

🇫🇷 will have to do.

There's no ethical way to become or stay a billionaire. Swift is among the best of the worst, and typically uses her spotlight to spread a positive message, but that doesn't undue the unfathomably selfish lifestyle she lives.

So, while significantly less evil than other billionaires, she's still a billionaire, and thus evil.

Surely that is not ALL she does to get that amount of money. I'd assume she has it invested like any other rich person, stock market, real estate, tax evasion, all the trimmings. Just because she maybe does "less" of it, does not make her a good person.

I really don’t understand what this focus on Taylor Swift is about.

I'm pretty sure I know what it's about.

Female, powerful, encourages folks to vote.

All this ramped up after the "Taylor Swift tells her fans to vote" brouhaha a couple months back.

I can't swing a stick without hearing another story about how generous she is with her $$ and her fans, so while she may not be perfect, and maybe could be doing more, she seems like a decent person, and I'm gonna bet she's doing a lot more for everyday folks she helps than most of the other folks on that list.