this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2024
970 points (95.6% liked)
Technology
59358 readers
5091 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Imagine if you will that there are 5 items to be had, everyone wants them. Everyone except for the evil rich man has 10 tokens. The evil rich man has a billion tokens. Right now people are willing to sell an item for 4 tokens. One day the people kill the evil rich man and spread out all his money evenly. There's still 5 items! They just go up in price! The rich man's blood doesn't create more items! It isn't complicated. It's very simple.
Ok but the way I see it there are 100 people and 1000 tokens. Instead of every person getting 10 tokens, one guy has 998 tokens and everyone else argues over the remaining 2. Would killing the one rich guy not free up some tokens for the rest of us?
Yes, it frees up tokens, but it doesn't make there be more items. As a result, people pay more for the items that do exist. It is the same as people saying the government should print a bunch of money to end poverty. They have the machines. They just don't want us to have money, they could just print us all into being billionaires, and we could all live happily ever after!
I see what you're saying, the tokens represent access to a finite amount of resources and creating more tokens won't create more resources. I get that.
But if the problem isn't with the amount of resources but with their distribution, then redistributing the existing tokens out of the hands of the greedy hoarders must help the rest, mustn't it?
Edit: I can't believe I'm sitting here arguing with someone on the goddamn Internet. Must be out of my damn mind
BTW, Internet arguments can be useful, imo. My whole reason for doing it is so I can say what I think and hope someone else says something thay makes more sense than what I'm saying so that I then have something new to say in real life(and the internet) that makes more sense to me. This makes me able to then argue against my previously strongest argument.
Yeah, so if bezos is actually eating 50,000 peoples worth of food every day, then splitting up his money/food would make a whole lot more people be fed. He doesn't seem very fat to me, though. I do realise that he has a personal jet and uses lots of fuel and energy, much more that the average person. Guess who uses more energy/resources than him, though? The number of people born in a single hour. Those people far exceed his resource usage. So we could kill him and spread out all his money, but if there is really such an extreme shortage of resources, then this would be like throwing out a handful of water instead of plugging massive gushing leaks in the boat.