It reminds me of how Sam Altman recently said: "I'd rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires." But the hyper-wealthy don't just have _stuff_, they also have power to make decisions affecting society -- to buy elections, to buy social networks, to influence which countries we do AI chip deals with, to start new cities, and so forth. A world in which everyone has the same amount of this decision-making power is probably not a world in which billionaires exist.
Yes, "don't look at wealth inequality" boils down to an argument for shifting political power to the wealthy — which I'm sure its proponents genuinely believe is for the best.
Of course Sam Altman doesn’t want to hear about eliminating billionaires, because he’s a fucking billionaire.
Not everyone can be a billionaire, when it’s based fundamentally upon having exploited the have-nots. You’re always going to need a wage-slave class, if not a class of slaves proper. That money doesn’t come from nowhere - it’s drawn from those least able to afford it, and therefore least able to resist exploitation.
If anything, that should be all the more reason to do it.
Give the poorest more money. It’s the complete opposite of our current approach.
Capitalism ties decision power to how good you are at accumulating wealth. Other systems give decision power through birth, status, or bureaucracy. But so far none have matched capitalism at growing total wealth over time- just look at “communist” China adopting capitalist tools to get rich, and now struggling with the inequality that comes with it.
The "↑11" bucket -- which Saul labeled as "Megacorps ($300b-$3t)" -- now contains at least one individual human. How far we've come (or fallen?) in just a year.
What does that matter for, though? The people in that wealth bracket tend to borrow against their assets (or use more convoluted schemes) rather than use those assets directly, and someone with $300B is still bound to have a lot more borrowing power than someone with $3B. Just because they can't put these hundreds of billions in a pocket right now doesn't mean that the power those assets grant is any less significant. And if someone that rich wanted to sell those assets, it's not like it's impossible to do. Is there anything besides having to stretch out the selling over a longer period of time that would be an inconvenience?
As dumb as People magazine is/was, it is not algorithmically optimized to hook its readers through constant notifications and rewards. I'd say social media has the edge in terms of its ability to cause sleep deprivation, cognitive fragmentation, and addiction, especially in kids.
Great project! It's visually dazzling and it really drives home the sheer size of the universe(s) of named colors.
I've long been interested in the names of colors and their associations. If I may plug my own site a bit, check out the "color thesaurus" feature on OneLook that organizes color names more linearly. Start with mauve, as an example: https://onelook.com/?w=mauve&colors=1
(It also lets you see the words evoked by the color and vice versa, which was a fun LLM-driven analysis.)
I am the creator of the 3d thing that was shared. I am very interested in collaborating on something. Is the data you used for it accessible somewhere?
X11 color names are atrociously bad. Inconsistent prefixes and suffixes, flatly wrong names for many handfuls of RGB triplets, and it’s what got hard wired into CSS and HTML.
Agreed. Techno-solutionists now use the verb "solve" in every imaginable context -- often where there's not a coherent question, let alone a workable answer ("AI will solve physics!"). It's comfortable to see everything as a system of equations.
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