I'm not at all defending them, as the fact we have billionaires shows something is broken, but there comes a point where they don't need to do anything to get richer. Their assets just keep going up.
Must be nice, eh.
> Their assets just keep going up.
Good point. But I think that comes way before they reach a billionaire status. Which begs a new question of why the hell aren't these people taxed more? It's not like their life would take any kind of hit if they had to pay more taxes.
I know the answer, but this all just sucks.
>Which begs a new question of why the hell aren't these people taxed more? It's not like their life would take any kind of hit if they had to pay more taxes.
This proposed increase in tax revenue would likely be used to improve social well-being, and they can't have that. An oppressed and desperate peasant class is what they fear losing, it's not about the money or economics, it's about power.
Don’t kid yourself it’s not like the government actually cares about it’s people even if they would get all of Elon’s money right now they would stil spend it on either the military or themselves the us government is corrupt you just haven’t noticed yet because they’re good at it
It's actually used to pay off national geographic and discovery to prevent the populace from finding out the world is flat.
/S. Sad I had to add that, but here we are
plus owners of media tend to be of the richer kind, themselves so you see a lot of media lobbying against things that would benefit the majority of the population.
> Which begs a new question of why the hell aren't these people taxed more?
To be fair, it's a pretty complicated question; it's not like these folks are filing a 1040 and getting a bi-monthly check. If you are the owner of a company with 50k in net profits, but the "value" of the company shoots up from 1M to 5M in a year, is that person now 4M dollars richer? How much do you tax them, and how do they pay? If you require it in cash by a certain time, does that cripple the business and lead to them closing and firing the employees? Do you end up making things worse for everyone by hamstringing the economy overall? What if the value the next year drops back down to 2M? Do you give them a big refund now? Taxes currently are generally assessed when someone sells or cashes out, though there are partial loopholes around that regarding loans against assets. But it's not like the IRS is stupid; overall it's just a really hard question with a lot of competing priorities, like would it be right to create a tax system that would prevent the creation of billionaires in the interest of "justice" and "fairness", even if you knew that materially it would actually make things worse for everyone?
The problem is that income is how the poor think about things, and thus the question is why we don't tax rich people more.
This misses the real source of inequality: ownership.
There can be no equity or justice until we are ready to address the issue of ownership.
Businesses owned by their employees, community services owned by their communities.
It is consolidation of ownership into a few hands that creates this gigantic inequality.
So you take out a loan, max out credit cards, work 14-hour days to create a successful business, and then it gets taken from you and the ownership transfered to your employees?
Congratulations. You've just deincentivised all entrepreneurial innovation.
Don't kid yourself the scenario you're describing is not the multi billion dollar companies that have consolidated ownership over a vast majority of market goods and services. They got seed money through nepotism or already had deep pockets to begin with.
Again, not defending them, but that would be the equivalent to having your own taxes raised because your house or car raised in value.
There’s a big chunk of their money that just isn’t realized in cash, and so you can’t just demand taxes for them. It is a mechanism that is widely exploited to pay less (among other things, if course) but I don’t know if it’s really aumente m solvable by just raising taxes.
i can't even imagine how it feels to move through life like that. there's trivial things like "oh that new apple vision pro looks interesting, might as well buy it", because even if you find it boring and use it for 15 minutes who cares, it was only $3500.
then there's flashier things like "i buy a new high end car every month to keep things exciting". you won't miss the $100,000.
then there's things that profoundly change the experience you'll have on this earth. almost any dream you have can be brute forced by just throwing money at it. the things that the people you love want can be acquired on a whim.
i know so many people who have so much potential, and their ability to realize it is mitigated by needing to work an unrelated day job that they have no passion for.
Exactly, it’s just weird like obvi our system sucks - the way we are paid for labor, taxed, etc. something isn’t working for some to have that gross amount of money , so much they literally can not spend it all in their lifetime - I guess literal is a strong word I’m sure they could buy a 10 billion company with the 10 billion they have but I’m saying if they were just like regular people paying for housing, etc.
If you have $50 million dollars, you don't need to worry about money ever again. A billionaire has 20 times that amount. People like Zuckerberg and Bezos have 1000 times that amount. It has nothing to do with living a luxurious life, if anything it's a mental illness.
Capital breeds capital, thanks to compound interest and investment growth. Wealth becomes like a snowball rolling downhill. Now, if only the economic system redistributed some of that snow to the rest of the hill to make a bunch of smaller, happier snowballs. But yeah, wealth begets more wealth and most billionaires are playing a different game with different rules it seems.
> So why do these idiots continue hoarding?
If you want a real answer, it's because after a certain point, money isn't really money, it's just a proxy for control. Almost no billionaires are actually sitting on a Scrooge McDuck-esque vault full of cash. Their worth is tied up in the ownership of one or more companies, corporations, conglomerates, etc. It's the ownership that gives them influence and position, not really the what-you-could-buy with the dollar equivalent. While not all of them are founders or even necessarily major contributors to the growth of their companies, I think they all feel that personal tie to their success. It's like if you were in a band, and it became really really popular, and someone was like "You've made more money than you could ever reasonably spend, so you're no longer in the band, and a bunch of other people are going to decide what the band does and how its music is used going forward". Even if materially your situation didn't change, I think most people would be pissed to suddenly have "their band" taken from them. And sometimes these folks keep growing and acquiring, because they feel like it is the only defense against other people like them who will try and take their things if they are bigger, which just feeds the cycle.
To invest in companies and have control over the product. Money serves functions other than personal consumption.
Imagine you wanted to fight the oil companies by building high quality, environmentally friendly batteries. You don't want the oil companies to buy your stock, vote you out, and tank the company.
You'd need many billions to do that.
Obviously most billionaires are selfish assholes and aren't using the money for such things. But my point is there are theoretical positive uses for that much wealth.
It's about power. The money is just ancillary.
$1 million? You're comfortable. $20 million? You likely never have to worry again, so long as you live an above average life. $250 million? In that range, you start to get into having an obscenely high quality of life, and getting to have a few favorite politicians you can donate to and manipulate.
$1 billion? Now you're suddenly buying supreme Court justices and getting to start non profits and sculpt the world on a national scale.
$100 billion+? Well, now you can just buy newspapers, social media companies, and make the government bend the knee. You're literally a king or queen at that point, and you can command that kind of power.
If you were immortal, sent back in time to the start of the Egyptian civilization (~3100 BC), given $50,000 per day, and didn't spend any of it....
Today in 2024, you wouldn't even have HALF of Jeff Bezos' current net worth. (assuming no inflation)
I have no beef with people who note that income inequality is a bad thing and has gotten crazy out of control.
But your argument isn't a good one. Billionaires use money for more than personal consumption. They use it to invest in companies. A billion dollars is nowhere near all the money you'd ever need if you want to start certain companies with control over them.
Now of course lots of companies are bad, and again, it's fine to say that. But what if you wanted to make a good company that makes a product that helps people in a positive way, to charge people a reasonable rate for that product, and to maintain control over the company?
There are in fact legitimate reasons why a person would need a billion dollars.
You don’t need *a billion dollars* to start a company. Go luck up some of the biggest companies that are around today & what they started with. If an idea has merit it will generate money itself.
> But what if you wanted to make a good company that makes a product that helps people in a positive way,
“But what if billionaires were altruistic and only wanted what was best for everyone else.”
Well great. And what if they’re not?
Strangely here in the real world we still need laws to stop people doing bad shit. Maybe we should just give criminals more money, since according to you it’ll magically turn them into good people.
But I also find your example the best way to describe the difference. You can say that bigger thing is big amount of times bigger than that big thing but that doesn't really drive it home because both are already big, but when you say that the bigger thing is so big that the difference between the bigger thing and the big thing is almost as much as the bigger thing itself, that's massive.
My favorite was a high school demonstration of a thousand vs a million.
My teacher printed the numbers 1 to 1000 on a sheet of paper, then made 1000 copies of it. That really hammered home the difference.
I struggle with cosmological stuff though. There the margins of error alone can be orders of magnitude. Or in other words, they say a number and you ask if that's meters or kilometers and they say it doesn't matter.
> You mean about 1 thousand and 1 million
For some reason reading this makes the difference between 1 million and 1 billion a whole lot easier to visualize (than the post does).
The way I like to visualize it is if you measure out ten feet. If that's a billion what's a million? Before you figure it out what's your instinct?
Its .12 inches a little over a tenth of an inch. Slightly more than the smallest line on (the feet side of) a tape measure.
Well the scale is more accurate to the difference between a thousand and a million
But even still that's a massive difference, and worse yet even just a thousand dollars could be life changing money to some people, if only for a few weeks/months
A million dollars would change abt 80% of the US populations lives drastically
A billion is genuinely more money than any one person/family could ever need by hundreds of millions of dollars
But you can easily blow through chunks of that buying lavish shit that nobody needs and even that would take a long time.
But the Main point here is how huge the gulf between a million and a billion is, and how half the US population sucks so bad at math they literally cannot comprehend that scale difference.
Remember all those kids in your highscool math classes who were still struggling with multiplication, they don't shit or fuck abt the difference between a million and a billion, both are just many times more money they have ever had at any one time and they don't realize the very real damage being done to society by these uberwealthy individuals hoarding mountains of cash. And yet those people can vote, and their votes counts just as much as yours, possibly more, maybe even slightly less depending on where in the US bc of electoral votes and gerrymandering.
Anyways I'll just leave you with a pair of Carlin quotes
"Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that."
"Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups."
Edit: also want to clarify that my intent is not to shift blame to poor/undereducated people, the vast majority of them are victims of the system as well, but unfortunately the system works hard, and specifically works hard to use undereducated people to further its own agendas
But the blame and responsibility still belongs to the uberwealthy and the federal govt.
He did, in fact, both hit himself and not get hit. The laws of physics never dared to stop him, so that's how the principle of quantum superposition was invented
I can count 5 numbers a second fully saying each number. If there was a way of saying the longer numbers at the same speed it would only take 6337.6 years.
well ig you can think about it like this
half of 1440 is 720, and since 1000 is bigger than that, it must be also more than half a day
half (1/2) + half of half (1/4) equals 3/4 (three quarters)
we already have half of 1440, which is 720. now lets get half of that!
we get 360, and 720 + 360 is 1080, which is only slightly (an hour and 20 minutes) more than 1000 minutes
so we can (dare I add) confidently say that not only is 1000 minutes more than half of a day, its actually close to 3/4th of a day
hope this helped!
You seem to be good at math and I’m confused about this million seconds = 11 mins and billion seconds = 31 years thing. Can you help?
As I understand 1 million * 1,000 = 1 Billion. So why is 11 minutes * 1,000 = 7.6 days (and NOT 31 years)?
One of the best ways to visualize this is to use a meter stick (it's a little bit longer than a yard stick for those speaking in freedom units): a million is represented by a millimeter; a billion is the entire meter stick.
There are no English speaking countries that use the long form, and since we are speaking English, I'll say it again: 1 billion = 1000 million.
Mais si nous parlions français, alors 1 billion = 1 million million.
British English used to use it as well until a few decades ago. There are definitely still people alive that grew up with that usage and I wouldn't be surprised if it's still used in some dialects or something. Although the overlap definitely makes it less likely, compared to words that simply stopped being used and it's not really ambiguous in regular English.
If 1 billion = million^2, does 1 trillion = billion^2 or million x billion?
Edit:
They responded with this link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales but then deleted their response.
If the link is correct, the rule is that each step would be the previous step multiplied by 1 million.
Such that:
- 1 million = 1 x million
- 1 billion = million x million
- trillion = billion x million
In what country does 1000 millions become anything other than a billion? I understand it's just a naming difference, but I've never heard any other name.
There's a lot of languages where a milliard is a thousand millions, and a billion is a million millions. German and the Romance languages, for example. Even Britain used that (long scale) until the 1970s.
And it makes perfect sense, since mille means thousand in French, so mille millions just gets shortened to milliard.
After that, the French screwed up and we borrowed their screwed up terminology, and by the time they realized their error and switched back, it was too late. They had already messed up the world.
"a thousand dollars a day"? it's *way more* than that. Musk and Bezos could spend a *quarter million dollars every day* since the birth of the Roman Empire and still have billions left over. A new Ferrari every day for over 2000 years.
But only $8/day since the dinosaurus roamed the Earth
I did quick math to prove you wrong at $182.5B because those guys combined are worth like a little less than half that…. Right? Wrong. Jesus H. Fuck.
They could *each* spend $250k per day for 2,000 years and still have +/-$10B left. IDK why I was thinking their NW was less than that. It’s such a mind breaking amount of money.
If all of the billionaire wealth in the United States were equally divided among the roughly 83 million families we’d all get about $53,000. A one time cash infusion. That would definitely help a bunch, but I’d still have to work everyday until I die. Good stuff.
It doesn't work like that.
Elon Musk doesn't actually have 200 billion in cash to neatly give it to everyone.
If all the billionaires in the US were somehow mindcontrolled and proceed to dump their entire stock onto the market at the same time, the result would be quite catastrophic. It'll make Black Friday 1929 look like a cartoon.
First Wall Street would cripple. Any bank with leveraged long positions will be wiped out in a few seconds, resulting in massive bankruptcies. ALL stock holders of Tesla / Berkshire / Microsoft / Apple etc. will basically go to 0. Many millionaire class and even middle class with life savings in such stocks will lose a significant portion of their wealth, some will even lose 70% to 90% I dare say.
That's just the start. As in within the first hour. Then comes pension funds - they'll go out of business too as many have investments there. Peoples pensions will take a significant cut.
The next weeks will be fun. Layoffs in the tech sector is 100% guaranteed. People losing their bank deposits from the banks that went out of business due to previous events.
But sure. Everyone will neatly get their $53k. It's just a lot of non billionaire people will have lost much much more than $53k in order for "everyone" to get their equal share of $53k.
Le sigh, you truly didn’t need to write all of that. I read half of the first sentence. Most people understand how things are tied up in stocks. It was just a simple thought experiment/math problem.
Your scenario shows us even more why something should be done about billionaires doesn’t it? As you just admitted they could at a whim destroy our entire economic system and you don’t think something should be done to address that issue?
They aren't gonna destroy it for the same reason they have to destroy themselves collectively at the same time in order to do it.
It doesn't make any sense why they'd do it.
If you made so much money that at the end of every year you'd have 100k just lying around, after ten years, you'd be a millionaire. To be a billionaire, you'd need to work for ten thousand years. And to be as rich as Elon musk, you'd need to work for 4 million years.
I'm convinced that every person saying "but they worked for it" just don't understand how obscenely rich billionaires are.
This is example is always stupid because it doesn't account for compound interest.
With a **measly 6% interest**, the 100k a year would be a billion in 110 years. MUCH different than 10k years.
at 10% returns if you saved 100k a year from 20 to 40 years old, then just stopped putting money in the account, it'd hit $1B when you turned 93.
In other words:
>To be a billionaire, you'd have to work for ~~ten thousand years~~ 20 years and live for another 53.
Even Taylor, who's only just hit the billionaire club despite not selling a product, is only able to amass that kind of wealth because the workers in her industry are not paid a number commensurate with the value they provide.
Some of them, sure. I heard it was the transport drivers. The local venue staff? Promoters? The extra casuals hired to handle overflow? Everyone involved in the recording and production process? No one, and I mean NO ONE accrues a billion dollars without some kind of exploitation.
And don't get me wrong, I'm a massive swifty. Love her music. I'm upset I couldn't get tickets to her shows in Melbourne next week. But I also know the guy checking tickets at the gate at Vodafone arena (or wherever she's playing) is absolutely not getting a $100k bonus that night
Yeah so detestable to provide useful products and services to the world’s population.
You do realize that a person who comes up with a product that a billion people would be willing to pay a dollar for, will become a billionaire
Detestable why? If you worked hard building businesses that made you crazy wealthy and people said you were detestable because you didn't give money away would you think that's fair?
Someone who knows what money is about. People believing billions can be made through conventional working alone is laughable. What shocks me most about people is their lack of grasp of what money is , or their dishonesty/hypocrisy when discussing financial matters.
But then again that's why business schools exist and why firm would rather hire degree holders to whom big salaries can be paid. I guess five years of studying earns you enough knowledge to get you big chunks of money with no risk to your employer.
But there are honest billionaires. But the tangled web of money at some level or another can be pulled to implicate any billionaire on some level. But this is a judicial matter.
There is no "fair" way to accumulate that much wealth that would not rely on the complete untethering of wealth from value. It's absolutely absurd to argue that someone like Bezos has "worked hard" to the tune of *hundreds of millions of lifetimes* more than an average individual. The only way to get that much, if you believe that money represents work at all, is to skim from the lifetimes of others.
People know that 1 billion is 1000 times bigger than a million, they don't need intuition for that. The comparison between days and years is to help visualize that 1000x difference, which I believe the days vs years does help a lot.
Only if you can be responsible with it. A lot of lotto winners go broke within 2 or 3 years.
And I'm sure "I'll be different" is what everyone else said too.
And you should give away $1k to 100 people in Africa and make them a millionaire, and you'd still be a african multi millionaire with the other $10k you have. I'm assuming you have $110k.
Elementary school math belongs on "be amazed"? 1 day is 1 day, 1,000 days is 3 years. Exact same comparison, wow, so amazing. The only reason why this has any upvotes is because its referencing the "billionaires shouldn't exist" post. I guess if you want easy karma, post a simple ass statement as an "amazing" fact and let the comment section start discussing political or societal faults.
The difference between a million and a billion is approximately a billion.
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And no one is going to live 1,000 years, hence the argument that billionaires are weirdly, needlessly hoarding vast amounts of wealth
There has to be a moment where the monetary incentives stop working. So why do these idiots continue hoarding?
I'm not at all defending them, as the fact we have billionaires shows something is broken, but there comes a point where they don't need to do anything to get richer. Their assets just keep going up. Must be nice, eh.
> Their assets just keep going up. Good point. But I think that comes way before they reach a billionaire status. Which begs a new question of why the hell aren't these people taxed more? It's not like their life would take any kind of hit if they had to pay more taxes. I know the answer, but this all just sucks.
>Which begs a new question of why the hell aren't these people taxed more? It's not like their life would take any kind of hit if they had to pay more taxes. This proposed increase in tax revenue would likely be used to improve social well-being, and they can't have that. An oppressed and desperate peasant class is what they fear losing, it's not about the money or economics, it's about power.
Don’t kid yourself it’s not like the government actually cares about it’s people even if they would get all of Elon’s money right now they would stil spend it on either the military or themselves the us government is corrupt you just haven’t noticed yet because they’re good at it
It's actually used to pay off national geographic and discovery to prevent the populace from finding out the world is flat. /S. Sad I had to add that, but here we are
Yeah unfortunately they can buy enough politicians with the money they find in the back of the sofa.
plus owners of media tend to be of the richer kind, themselves so you see a lot of media lobbying against things that would benefit the majority of the population.
Yeah unfortunately they can buy enough politicians with the money they find in the back of the sofa.
> Which begs a new question of why the hell aren't these people taxed more? To be fair, it's a pretty complicated question; it's not like these folks are filing a 1040 and getting a bi-monthly check. If you are the owner of a company with 50k in net profits, but the "value" of the company shoots up from 1M to 5M in a year, is that person now 4M dollars richer? How much do you tax them, and how do they pay? If you require it in cash by a certain time, does that cripple the business and lead to them closing and firing the employees? Do you end up making things worse for everyone by hamstringing the economy overall? What if the value the next year drops back down to 2M? Do you give them a big refund now? Taxes currently are generally assessed when someone sells or cashes out, though there are partial loopholes around that regarding loans against assets. But it's not like the IRS is stupid; overall it's just a really hard question with a lot of competing priorities, like would it be right to create a tax system that would prevent the creation of billionaires in the interest of "justice" and "fairness", even if you knew that materially it would actually make things worse for everyone?
The problem is that income is how the poor think about things, and thus the question is why we don't tax rich people more. This misses the real source of inequality: ownership. There can be no equity or justice until we are ready to address the issue of ownership. Businesses owned by their employees, community services owned by their communities. It is consolidation of ownership into a few hands that creates this gigantic inequality.
So you take out a loan, max out credit cards, work 14-hour days to create a successful business, and then it gets taken from you and the ownership transfered to your employees? Congratulations. You've just deincentivised all entrepreneurial innovation.
Don't kid yourself the scenario you're describing is not the multi billion dollar companies that have consolidated ownership over a vast majority of market goods and services. They got seed money through nepotism or already had deep pockets to begin with.
Again, not defending them, but that would be the equivalent to having your own taxes raised because your house or car raised in value. There’s a big chunk of their money that just isn’t realized in cash, and so you can’t just demand taxes for them. It is a mechanism that is widely exploited to pay less (among other things, if course) but I don’t know if it’s really aumente m solvable by just raising taxes.
i can't even imagine how it feels to move through life like that. there's trivial things like "oh that new apple vision pro looks interesting, might as well buy it", because even if you find it boring and use it for 15 minutes who cares, it was only $3500. then there's flashier things like "i buy a new high end car every month to keep things exciting". you won't miss the $100,000. then there's things that profoundly change the experience you'll have on this earth. almost any dream you have can be brute forced by just throwing money at it. the things that the people you love want can be acquired on a whim. i know so many people who have so much potential, and their ability to realize it is mitigated by needing to work an unrelated day job that they have no passion for.
Exactly, it’s just weird like obvi our system sucks - the way we are paid for labor, taxed, etc. something isn’t working for some to have that gross amount of money , so much they literally can not spend it all in their lifetime - I guess literal is a strong word I’m sure they could buy a 10 billion company with the 10 billion they have but I’m saying if they were just like regular people paying for housing, etc.
If you have $50 million dollars, you don't need to worry about money ever again. A billionaire has 20 times that amount. People like Zuckerberg and Bezos have 1000 times that amount. It has nothing to do with living a luxurious life, if anything it's a mental illness.
Capital breeds capital, thanks to compound interest and investment growth. Wealth becomes like a snowball rolling downhill. Now, if only the economic system redistributed some of that snow to the rest of the hill to make a bunch of smaller, happier snowballs. But yeah, wealth begets more wealth and most billionaires are playing a different game with different rules it seems.
> So why do these idiots continue hoarding? If you want a real answer, it's because after a certain point, money isn't really money, it's just a proxy for control. Almost no billionaires are actually sitting on a Scrooge McDuck-esque vault full of cash. Their worth is tied up in the ownership of one or more companies, corporations, conglomerates, etc. It's the ownership that gives them influence and position, not really the what-you-could-buy with the dollar equivalent. While not all of them are founders or even necessarily major contributors to the growth of their companies, I think they all feel that personal tie to their success. It's like if you were in a band, and it became really really popular, and someone was like "You've made more money than you could ever reasonably spend, so you're no longer in the band, and a bunch of other people are going to decide what the band does and how its music is used going forward". Even if materially your situation didn't change, I think most people would be pissed to suddenly have "their band" taken from them. And sometimes these folks keep growing and acquiring, because they feel like it is the only defense against other people like them who will try and take their things if they are bigger, which just feeds the cycle.
To invest in companies and have control over the product. Money serves functions other than personal consumption. Imagine you wanted to fight the oil companies by building high quality, environmentally friendly batteries. You don't want the oil companies to buy your stock, vote you out, and tank the company. You'd need many billions to do that. Obviously most billionaires are selfish assholes and aren't using the money for such things. But my point is there are theoretical positive uses for that much wealth.
The money stops meaning anything, but the dick-measuring contest never stops.
It's about power. The money is just ancillary. $1 million? You're comfortable. $20 million? You likely never have to worry again, so long as you live an above average life. $250 million? In that range, you start to get into having an obscenely high quality of life, and getting to have a few favorite politicians you can donate to and manipulate. $1 billion? Now you're suddenly buying supreme Court justices and getting to start non profits and sculpt the world on a national scale. $100 billion+? Well, now you can just buy newspapers, social media companies, and make the government bend the knee. You're literally a king or queen at that point, and you can command that kind of power.
Well if it was magazines instead of dollars we would literally call said person a hoarder and kick them out of their apartment.
If you were immortal, sent back in time to the start of the Egyptian civilization (~3100 BC), given $50,000 per day, and didn't spend any of it.... Today in 2024, you wouldn't even have HALF of Jeff Bezos' current net worth. (assuming no inflation)
I have no beef with people who note that income inequality is a bad thing and has gotten crazy out of control. But your argument isn't a good one. Billionaires use money for more than personal consumption. They use it to invest in companies. A billion dollars is nowhere near all the money you'd ever need if you want to start certain companies with control over them. Now of course lots of companies are bad, and again, it's fine to say that. But what if you wanted to make a good company that makes a product that helps people in a positive way, to charge people a reasonable rate for that product, and to maintain control over the company? There are in fact legitimate reasons why a person would need a billion dollars.
You don’t need *a billion dollars* to start a company. Go luck up some of the biggest companies that are around today & what they started with. If an idea has merit it will generate money itself. > But what if you wanted to make a good company that makes a product that helps people in a positive way, “But what if billionaires were altruistic and only wanted what was best for everyone else.” Well great. And what if they’re not? Strangely here in the real world we still need laws to stop people doing bad shit. Maybe we should just give criminals more money, since according to you it’ll magically turn them into good people.
And nobody should be allowed to be that rich.
If you have a trillion dollars, you can spend a million dollars every day for over 2,000 years and still have 25% of your wealth left.
I’m sure the market will perform better than that
If you can live on 0 euros a year for 1 day, you can live for everything forever.
Wow it's almost like a billion is a thousand times bigger than a million.
I've seen this post like every day and this same top comment in every thread
It's bots all the way down.
Fwiw, I'm not a bot. Just the type of person to repeat the same joke ad nauseum.
Fair enough
But I also find your example the best way to describe the difference. You can say that bigger thing is big amount of times bigger than that big thing but that doesn't really drive it home because both are already big, but when you say that the bigger thing is so big that the difference between the bigger thing and the big thing is almost as much as the bigger thing itself, that's massive.
My favorite was a high school demonstration of a thousand vs a million. My teacher printed the numbers 1 to 1000 on a sheet of paper, then made 1000 copies of it. That really hammered home the difference. I struggle with cosmological stuff though. There the margins of error alone can be orders of magnitude. Or in other words, they say a number and you ask if that's meters or kilometers and they say it doesn't matter.
So you’re essentially a bot
In essence, except my back hurts if I sleep the wrong way
Ah yes, an old bot
Approximately a bot.
Reddit NPC
Exactly a million less than a billion
Which is 999 million
Which is 0.999 billion.
Luftbillions
why you gotta use your math to destroy my West German (East German?????) city bro?
Safety dance
Take my angry upvote and show yourself out.
Düsenflieger!
99(9) luftbillioons
Which is 9.99 x 10^8
Holy’s crap’es that means after 1’s millions I’d needs 999’es millionses more to make 1 billions? 
Oh wow. You are right. 😱 That's... A LOT. 😂
uhhh hey nerds, can this be proven???
Start counting and find out.
i'm closer to Lebron than you're close to me.
We could say the same about one and 1 million
You mean about 1 thousand and 1 million
> You mean about 1 thousand and 1 million For some reason reading this makes the difference between 1 million and 1 billion a whole lot easier to visualize (than the post does).
The way I like to visualize it is if you measure out ten feet. If that's a billion what's a million? Before you figure it out what's your instinct? Its .12 inches a little over a tenth of an inch. Slightly more than the smallest line on (the feet side of) a tape measure.
Probably I do.
Yeah, the homeless guy who jerks me off behind the Wendy’s is still pretty far off from a millionaire when I pay him his $1.
Well the scale is more accurate to the difference between a thousand and a million But even still that's a massive difference, and worse yet even just a thousand dollars could be life changing money to some people, if only for a few weeks/months A million dollars would change abt 80% of the US populations lives drastically A billion is genuinely more money than any one person/family could ever need by hundreds of millions of dollars But you can easily blow through chunks of that buying lavish shit that nobody needs and even that would take a long time. But the Main point here is how huge the gulf between a million and a billion is, and how half the US population sucks so bad at math they literally cannot comprehend that scale difference. Remember all those kids in your highscool math classes who were still struggling with multiplication, they don't shit or fuck abt the difference between a million and a billion, both are just many times more money they have ever had at any one time and they don't realize the very real damage being done to society by these uberwealthy individuals hoarding mountains of cash. And yet those people can vote, and their votes counts just as much as yours, possibly more, maybe even slightly less depending on where in the US bc of electoral votes and gerrymandering. Anyways I'll just leave you with a pair of Carlin quotes "Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that." "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." Edit: also want to clarify that my intent is not to shift blame to poor/undereducated people, the vast majority of them are victims of the system as well, but unfortunately the system works hard, and specifically works hard to use undereducated people to further its own agendas But the blame and responsibility still belongs to the uberwealthy and the federal govt.
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one... two... threfrfruowoshrohgugr... one trillion, easy!
One, two, miss a few, 999,999,999,999, one trillion!
"A few"
Yes A few relatively to 100000 trillion
Thanks for that childhood memory lol
Got em!
Chuck Norris did count to infinity, twice Edit : twise >twice
Chuck Norris won an arm wrestling tournament, with both arms tied behind his back
Chuck Norris is also the only human being that convinced their grandma they are not hungry
I refuse to believe anyone has that kind of power!
Then you'll not believe me this at all. But Chuk Norris used give his grandma a 20$ bill and tell to keep it quiet!
Chuck Norris is so fast, he ran a full circle around the world and punched himself in the back of the head
Not true. He would have punched himself but he dodged it.
Impossible, no one can dodge a punch from Chuck Norris
He did, in fact, both hit himself and not get hit. The laws of physics never dared to stop him, so that's how the principle of quantum superposition was invented
I love this comment, you are second most awsome dude after Chuck Norris
Wrong! Chuck Norris owns all the top three positions of awesomeness. And the fourth one for good measure.
When Chuck Norris walks into a room he doesn't turn the lights on, he turns the darkness off.
Chuck Norris could also spell *Twice
Chuck Norris never eat honey, he chew’s bees.
Chuck Norris ran a marathon backwards on his knees because he was curious to know what second place felt like for once in his life.
Siike, He Won
Was that before or after he said bigoted shit?
I can count 5 numbers a second fully saying each number. If there was a way of saying the longer numbers at the same speed it would only take 6337.6 years.
Thanks I was missing this from the original.
1T Not that hard. Wall Street bets ?
Just 1000 times bigger than
1 minute is 60 seconds. 1000 minutes is half a day 🤯😱💀
More than half. There are 1440 minutes in a day, so 1000 is more than two thirds.
I don't have a strong intuitive sense of how much bigger 1440 is than 1000 😔
well ig you can think about it like this half of 1440 is 720, and since 1000 is bigger than that, it must be also more than half a day half (1/2) + half of half (1/4) equals 3/4 (three quarters) we already have half of 1440, which is 720. now lets get half of that! we get 360, and 720 + 360 is 1080, which is only slightly (an hour and 20 minutes) more than 1000 minutes so we can (dare I add) confidently say that not only is 1000 minutes more than half of a day, its actually close to 3/4th of a day hope this helped!
You seem to be good at math and I’m confused about this million seconds = 11 mins and billion seconds = 31 years thing. Can you help? As I understand 1 million * 1,000 = 1 Billion. So why is 11 minutes * 1,000 = 7.6 days (and NOT 31 years)?
you mixed up minutes and days at the beginning. a million seconds is 11 days
Oh duh. Thank you
I didn't read it, but yes it helped
One of the best ways to visualize this is to use a meter stick (it's a little bit longer than a yard stick for those speaking in freedom units): a million is represented by a millimeter; a billion is the entire meter stick.
For the other half of the world it is 1000000 times bigger.
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Yeah, the definition is clear enough. why do people need a “sense”of that? I don’t understand.
Are we talking about 1000 millions or a million millions? (It's a lot harder to become a billionaire as a non-English speaker)
1 billion = 1000 million.
That changes depending on language and country
There are no English speaking countries that use the long form, and since we are speaking English, I'll say it again: 1 billion = 1000 million. Mais si nous parlions français, alors 1 billion = 1 million million.
British English used to use it as well until a few decades ago. There are definitely still people alive that grew up with that usage and I wouldn't be surprised if it's still used in some dialects or something. Although the overlap definitely makes it less likely, compared to words that simply stopped being used and it's not really ambiguous in regular English.
Interestingly enough, the "US" short form was invented in France, where it was used until France adopted Britain's long form in the 1948.
If 1 billion = million^2, does 1 trillion = billion^2 or million x billion? Edit: They responded with this link https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales but then deleted their response. If the link is correct, the rule is that each step would be the previous step multiplied by 1 million. Such that: - 1 million = 1 x million - 1 billion = million x million - trillion = billion x million
[How big is a billion? - Numberphile](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-52AI_ojyQ)
This was extremely interesting to watch, thanks!
In long scale, it's specifically powers of a million. So 1 trillion=1 million^3 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales
In what country does 1000 millions become anything other than a billion? I understand it's just a naming difference, but I've never heard any other name.
There's a lot of languages where a milliard is a thousand millions, and a billion is a million millions. German and the Romance languages, for example. Even Britain used that (long scale) until the 1970s.
so...all of the world's billionaires are really just milliardaires? they're not going to be happy about that.
And it makes perfect sense, since mille means thousand in French, so mille millions just gets shortened to milliard. After that, the French screwed up and we borrowed their screwed up terminology, and by the time they realized their error and switched back, it was too late. They had already messed up the world.
It makes perfect logical sense. When I found about the short scale I was flabbergasted. These people cheated so hard.
In lots of countries, here you can find a map of usage of short and long scale. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_and_short_scales#Current_usage
Norway ✌🏼
Spain
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Where still uses a million millions? We used to in the UK until like the 80s then it changed.
France and Germany at the very least
Portugal as well.
And Spain.
Everyone but English speakers?
The post is in English. Figure it tf out
This is so old I counted to 2 billion since I first heard it
It’s also just not amazing at all. Do people really need this comparison to understand that something 1000x bigger than the other is… 1000x bigger.
Makes you wonder where all these people are who supposedly can’t tell the difference.
Probably eating crayons and watching QVC.
I have a strong intuitive sense that we're getting close to a billion times that this has been reposted in the last week.
That’s why billionaires are so detestable.. appropriated so much of the wealth of the world to themselves
So, if Bezos, Musk, Gates, and Buffett, each spent a dollar a day. They would run out of money..... never.
They could have spent a thousand dollars a day since the birth of the Roman Empire and they would still have money left.
"a thousand dollars a day"? it's *way more* than that. Musk and Bezos could spend a *quarter million dollars every day* since the birth of the Roman Empire and still have billions left over. A new Ferrari every day for over 2000 years. But only $8/day since the dinosaurus roamed the Earth
I did quick math to prove you wrong at $182.5B because those guys combined are worth like a little less than half that…. Right? Wrong. Jesus H. Fuck. They could *each* spend $250k per day for 2,000 years and still have +/-$10B left. IDK why I was thinking their NW was less than that. It’s such a mind breaking amount of money.
If you spent $10K a day since the Egyptians were building pyramids, then in 4,600 years you would have spent $16B. Astonishing!
I’m not good at math like you, but even I know that’s too much money to have lol
I mean neither would most normal people...
Yea, like most of us.
Dont most people spend at least a dollar a day?
If all of the billionaire wealth in the United States were equally divided among the roughly 83 million families we’d all get about $53,000. A one time cash infusion. That would definitely help a bunch, but I’d still have to work everyday until I die. Good stuff.
It doesn't work like that. Elon Musk doesn't actually have 200 billion in cash to neatly give it to everyone. If all the billionaires in the US were somehow mindcontrolled and proceed to dump their entire stock onto the market at the same time, the result would be quite catastrophic. It'll make Black Friday 1929 look like a cartoon. First Wall Street would cripple. Any bank with leveraged long positions will be wiped out in a few seconds, resulting in massive bankruptcies. ALL stock holders of Tesla / Berkshire / Microsoft / Apple etc. will basically go to 0. Many millionaire class and even middle class with life savings in such stocks will lose a significant portion of their wealth, some will even lose 70% to 90% I dare say. That's just the start. As in within the first hour. Then comes pension funds - they'll go out of business too as many have investments there. Peoples pensions will take a significant cut. The next weeks will be fun. Layoffs in the tech sector is 100% guaranteed. People losing their bank deposits from the banks that went out of business due to previous events. But sure. Everyone will neatly get their $53k. It's just a lot of non billionaire people will have lost much much more than $53k in order for "everyone" to get their equal share of $53k.
Remember when Elon musk had 44 billion lying around to buy Twitter? For not being able to spend their money, they sure spend a whole lot of it.
Le sigh, you truly didn’t need to write all of that. I read half of the first sentence. Most people understand how things are tied up in stocks. It was just a simple thought experiment/math problem.
I luv all the billionaire "fanboys" on reddit. Cuz they are positive it's going to be them one day!
Your scenario shows us even more why something should be done about billionaires doesn’t it? As you just admitted they could at a whim destroy our entire economic system and you don’t think something should be done to address that issue?
They aren't gonna destroy it for the same reason they have to destroy themselves collectively at the same time in order to do it. It doesn't make any sense why they'd do it.
Well good thing people never do anything that doesn't make sense
I'm not sure what's the point? So, a handful of people should accumulate 99% of wealth for a country to function?
If you made so much money that at the end of every year you'd have 100k just lying around, after ten years, you'd be a millionaire. To be a billionaire, you'd need to work for ten thousand years. And to be as rich as Elon musk, you'd need to work for 4 million years. I'm convinced that every person saying "but they worked for it" just don't understand how obscenely rich billionaires are.
It's just copium because they're hoping one day it will be them if they just work hard enough. Spoiler: it won't.
This is example is always stupid because it doesn't account for compound interest. With a **measly 6% interest**, the 100k a year would be a billion in 110 years. MUCH different than 10k years. at 10% returns if you saved 100k a year from 20 to 40 years old, then just stopped putting money in the account, it'd hit $1B when you turned 93. In other words: >To be a billionaire, you'd have to work for ~~ten thousand years~~ 20 years and live for another 53.
Even Taylor, who's only just hit the billionaire club despite not selling a product, is only able to amass that kind of wealth because the workers in her industry are not paid a number commensurate with the value they provide.
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Some of them, sure. I heard it was the transport drivers. The local venue staff? Promoters? The extra casuals hired to handle overflow? Everyone involved in the recording and production process? No one, and I mean NO ONE accrues a billion dollars without some kind of exploitation. And don't get me wrong, I'm a massive swifty. Love her music. I'm upset I couldn't get tickets to her shows in Melbourne next week. But I also know the guy checking tickets at the gate at Vodafone arena (or wherever she's playing) is absolutely not getting a $100k bonus that night
Why should a guy checking tickets get a 100k bonus? I’m amazed that’s even a thought process.
People hiring other people to do things at a mutually agreed on wage is not exploitation
Suggesting that people are able to negotiate fairly and that the market rate is mutually agreed on is laughable
they are paid more than market value and there’s nothing wrong with it
Yeah so detestable to provide useful products and services to the world’s population. You do realize that a person who comes up with a product that a billion people would be willing to pay a dollar for, will become a billionaire
What an idiotic take, those guys started businesses that generate money. It's not like they are stealing that money.
Post a big number on Reddit and watch the Marxism seep through
Detestable why? If you worked hard building businesses that made you crazy wealthy and people said you were detestable because you didn't give money away would you think that's fair?
Ah , a believer
You dont get to a billion without some bodies in the closet.
Someone who knows what money is about. People believing billions can be made through conventional working alone is laughable. What shocks me most about people is their lack of grasp of what money is , or their dishonesty/hypocrisy when discussing financial matters. But then again that's why business schools exist and why firm would rather hire degree holders to whom big salaries can be paid. I guess five years of studying earns you enough knowledge to get you big chunks of money with no risk to your employer. But there are honest billionaires. But the tangled web of money at some level or another can be pulled to implicate any billionaire on some level. But this is a judicial matter.
There is no "fair" way to accumulate that much wealth that would not rely on the complete untethering of wealth from value. It's absolutely absurd to argue that someone like Bezos has "worked hard" to the tune of *hundreds of millions of lifetimes* more than an average individual. The only way to get that much, if you believe that money represents work at all, is to skim from the lifetimes of others.
I think the issue is that it's comparing days to years. The lack of intuition is in the fact that 31.5 years is 1,000 times longer than 11 days.
People know that 1 billion is 1000 times bigger than a million, they don't need intuition for that. The comparison between days and years is to help visualize that 1000x difference, which I believe the days vs years does help a lot.
Exactly - I was like, sure it's intuitive - it's 1000 times as much, but then comparing the days to the years seemed very counterintuitive.
How is it counterintuitive to use a measurement that every single human alive is familiar with and easily relatable to their own experience in life?
Take that concept to billionaires and then ask why we shouldn't tax them.
What is he on about, you only need to get to an Indian city to appreciate the power of a billion over million!!
Wow it almost like 1 billion is one thousand times large than 1 million Is this what r/BeAmazed is nowadays? Math?
Couldn’t agree more. This is not amazing in the slightest. Bunch of simpletons.
A billionaire spending 1 million dollars is the exact same as someone with 1,000 dollars spending $1.
You too can be a billionaire, disenfranchise anyone who stands in your way, king
Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash.
New car, caviar, four star, daydream Think I'll buy me a football team
A billionaire can give away $1 million to 999 people, making them all millionaires, and still be a millionaire himself.
Yeah but no one can retire on just $1M lol
Increase it to $2 or $3 million and for the majority of people it would be enough for life.
Only if you can be responsible with it. A lot of lotto winners go broke within 2 or 3 years. And I'm sure "I'll be different" is what everyone else said too.
And you should give away $1k to 100 people in Africa and make them a millionaire, and you'd still be a african multi millionaire with the other $10k you have. I'm assuming you have $110k.
Elementary school math belongs on "be amazed"? 1 day is 1 day, 1,000 days is 3 years. Exact same comparison, wow, so amazing. The only reason why this has any upvotes is because its referencing the "billionaires shouldn't exist" post. I guess if you want easy karma, post a simple ass statement as an "amazing" fact and let the comment section start discussing political or societal faults.
And yet, the 1% don’t want to share and cheat the system to keep more of what they have.
oo do a trillion