It grows until it consumes so many nutrients that the other living cells don't get enough. The host literally starves even if he eats plentifully.
The same applies for the US: The billionaires are not only hoarding wealth, but by doing so they're crippling the economy for workers and everybody besides themselves.
Luigi knew how to cure this type of cancer. It's not rocket science but nobody with the means and opportunity is willing to do the right thing for humanity.
Each billionaire is an individual problem AND allowing billionaires to grab and monopolize so many resources and even looking up to them is a systemic problem.
Without the systemic problem which is Capitalism and the shallow, greedy present day society, billionaires would be treated the same as other hoarders - seen mentally derranged and stopped from going too far for their own good and the good of others.
There will always be nutters, but if the social system we have wasn't broken, this very specific kind of nutter would never be allowed to cause the damage they do with their mental disease.
The (original) Nazis are rightfully considered monsters for killing millions of people in the 20th century. What will any survivors of the incineration of earth consider the billionaires that are killing BILLIONS of us for greed?
People think they understand numbers like billion because they understand thousand and billion is just thousand times thousand (million) times thousand. Multiplication is fairly intuitive, but exponentiation is not. Without explicitly thinking it through people feel like 1000^3 is not very different from 1000 * 3.
There are roughly just under 3000 people on earth with more than a billion dollars.
They have a combined net worth of over $16 Trillion
Say the almighty Cthulu/Allah/Zeus decided "yo fuck those assholes" and instantly redistributed that $16 trillion among all 8 billion+ people on earth equally
Everyone: Every man, woman and child would get just a bit shy of $2000.
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Not a fan fat shaming that gets bundled in with that but basically. It's the vice of greed, plain and simple.
Like imagine rolling up to a potluck and just buying the table, leaving naught but a bag of chips for the rest of the party. Even if you can afford it, it's still a crime against your fellows.
What are you talking about? Billionaires are what's saving this country! Everyone just needs to stop eating and be homeless. But also fuxk homeless people and you turn to drugs for comfort? Jail obviously. They're totally fixing everything! /S
I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species. I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment, but you humans do not. You move to an area, and you multiply, and multiply, until every natural resource is consumed. The only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet, you are a plague, and we are the cure.
Do you think I'm promoting voluntary extinction? I don't think anyone has to do that - not only would it not make a dent in the race to doomsday, but it's unnecessary since we've probably already passed the point at which we're capable of halting the runaway ecological collapse we've engineered - even if there was any indication of willingness on the part of the biggest polluters to draw down, which there isn't.
What I find funny is those people who are still making more people, as if they're not dooming them to live through a true apocalypse: global societal and ecological collapse, technological regression, famine, and the resurgence of self-perpetuating oligarchies. A dark ages, but one we'll never come out of.
Let’s take the original comment at face value and in earnest for a moment.
Wouldn’t the human race be more like a parasite?
In all honesty, I don’t think the earth needs us, nor would we qualify for a symbiotic relationship. Earth really doesn’t need most of its inhabitants.
That would move to a more existential question of what it means for earth to survive or be “alive”? Support any life?
If we take "Earth" as the biosphere, because honestly the naked rock isn't that interesting, then the cancer analogy is fitting. After all, we grew as part of that Earth and have developed to a size and growth that now threatens to kill our host/the rest of the body
I am incensed by the use of the word “literally” here almost as much as I am incensed by the hyper rich denying the vast fraction of the human race basics rights and freedoms. Almost.
I think OP used literally correctly here. They are saying that one possible definition of the word cancer can include billionaires as an instance. That's not the definition you'll find in any dictionary, but those lag behind the true language as it evolves.
Most people aren't frivilously spending most of their money on things... Except maybe the rich, but most people don't have that much disposable income now do they?
You know in hungarian we would flip this a bit on its head as we have a curse, "a rák vigye el", which means may cancer "bring them away"(kill them). I support this idea in this specific case.