But my favorite single digit billionaire pop star is one of the "good billionaires"!

Let's start with those that profit directly from human suffering.

So the entire Healthcare, agriculture, and processed food industries.
And obviously Ticketmaster.
Yeah for sure, but we can still plan for tomorrow.
Bread and circuses without bread and prohibitively expensive circuses brought to you by Ticketmaster.

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.
- Pure greed
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.
- 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.
- 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.
Are you presenting him as an example of a good billionaire? Cause still, nah.
- It was not my intention, I edited my comment to make it clearer.

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.
- I feel the reason she is being used as an example isn't because she's a female billionaire, but because she is a billionaire who receives adoration. The meme points out that even the "good ones" shouldn't be billionaires.
- 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.
Wow, I could never listen to her, but thanks for a Swiftie with a reasonable take on this.
- to reiterate: i’m not alone :) my positions mirror a ton of other swifties’ (obviously not all, but you do what you can)—they just have limited representation on lemmy due to gender and vibes
Brava!
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: @MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca 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. 🤷‍♀️

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!"
- Ideally you would set the oil companies against the car companies. Electric cars are a bandaid on a bleeding stump. We need mass transportation and efficient cities rather than suburbs. Busses, trains, and efficient last mile solvers like bikes are the goal.

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.

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.
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.
Shits a cult aye
Hi fellow Swiftie! Thanks for sharing your thoughts 💃
- Hello! If you aren't aware we do have a community over at !taylorswift@poptalk.scrubbles.tech if you'd like to join! Always happy to have more!
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.
- So what as soon as a musician or artist hits a big enough line in the sand we all have to stop liking their music?

You throw out large amounts of table scraps and leftovers daily.
But of course you make sure to poison them so the dog can't eat it
You decide not to feed it because it’s not your dog - it’s not your problem. But your whole house is completely stocked with food. You throw out large amounts of table scraps and leftovers daily.
How many people would consider that to be evil?
Internally the person can justify his actions "You feed a stray dog one time, it will nag you forever, maybe call up his buddies because there is free food, and now suddenly you have a pack of stray dogs on your farm that are causing all sorts of trouble". Such nuances are always present(I will stop with the dog analogy, because your original example and my addendum, dehumanizes people in need to dogs). but such is the harsh reality, that often arises with a direct personal transfer of wealth, people tend to form a dependency on the table scraps and those that provide them(even though they are losing literally nothing) resent it.
The solution you may ask to greedy billionaires and hungry homeless people, SOCIETAL or GOVERNMENTAL INTERVENTION, think about it, its the failure of whoever the fuck is in charge that a select few of their citizens have exploited the system so well that their wastage is equivalent to the GDP of a small country, and similarly there are many people that only dream of a roof over their heads!!

It's nice to say no, but across history there have been so so many societies that have allowed exactly that at similar scales.

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.
- https://youtube.com/shorts/Qkdszk5j1sU
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.
As an INTJ I also don't like most people, because as you said people are stupid
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.
- You are telling me you can't live without going to a Taylor Swift concert. Capitalism is the origin of many pains, but this one isn't one of them.

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.
When your bank balance is higher than the GDP of a small country, gender is irrelevant.
One of them just got shot, remember?

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.

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.
^ 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.

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.
- "As benign as billionaires get" and "benign" are not the same thing. See also the "I'm sure she still stepped on a lot of necks up the pyramid" part.
  Why do you think I said benign and not what I actually said?
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.
- You are not talking to someone who thinks there is such a thing as a good billionaire.

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"

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.

I'll share it again...

That time Oprah and Ellen cosplayed as poor people by going to the bank...

https://youtu.be/HbwARJNjI3M

No but see these psychopaths aren't physically that dangerous and are smiling in a not-unpleasant way, so it's okay. /s

Looks like your stats are a bit out of date, Swift is in first place again: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2024/10/08/taylor-swift-becomes-worlds-richest-female-musician-heres-who-is-right-behind-her/
But you bring up a poignant point. Maybe some of it is because of the whole jet thing from some months ago, those discussions were really raging on here and so it’s probably echoing forward.
- People have been hating Swift for decades now. They were hating her for writing too many relationship-related songs even before the American left revived.
  She's an easy target because her target demographic is teenage girls, and anything / anyone beloved by teenage girls MUST necessarily be gay and worthless.
  See also: Justin Bieber, the Backstreet Boys, and the Jonas Brothers.
  I highly suspect people joined the left and transferred their hatred from, "Taylor Swift the musician for stupid, hysterical girls, who I hate" to, "Taylor Swift, the billionaire," without once examining the lens through which they first started hating her. And now she gets more "anti-billionaire" hate than Jeff Bezos?
  It bothers me.
  Misogyny is a tool of capitalism, and to quote Lorde: the tools of the master will never dismantle the master's house. No one is destroying capitalism by weirdly fixating on Taylor Swift and her fans "because she's a billionaire" while criticizing her more than basically all other billionaires.
  I look forward to the day I see a leftist meme reminding me "you can't love Bruce Springsteen (1.1b) or Jay-Z (2.5b) and still be a leftist."
  Until then, I'm not taking lectures on leftism from people who haven't deconstructed their own feelings of hatred and superiority towards teenage girls.
  Edit: I hope I didn't come across as angry at you in particular. You don't seem to be joining in the hypocritical, unnuanced hate.
They both got rich and famous with pop music, but Rihanna started making BANK when she made makeup for women of color. Crazy idea right? She noticed a hole in the market and filled it. That's not talked about as much as entertaining us musically, so Swift is normally brought up before Rihanna. Swift has been touring more recently as well.
Paul McCartney catching strays out here... If anyone should be allowed to live a life of luxury, it's the surviving members of the fucking Beatles...
Jokes aside, I do see a difference between people who became wealthy through art, than through straight capitalism. It's still gross, it still shouldn't exist, it is still a form of capitalism and exploitation, etc. etc., but there are levels to this.

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.
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.
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.

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?
- They aren't doing it? Everyone's 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.

Is Dolly Parton a billionaire? She has numerous assistance programs. I figure she wouldn’t be.

Swifties triggered.

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.

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?

Oh jeeze, you mentioned Swift in a meme. I feel sorry for your inbox.

Empire is devaluing its currency so fast that we'll all be billionaires soon.

Zimbabwe style

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.

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

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.

$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 🙃

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.

reference

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.

Billionaire: "So if they don't exist anymore, I'm good? How many do I have to kill?"

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

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

True now use another example to illustrate that big wealth divides exist everywhere.