This is how I feel reading Oppenheimer’s biography. He came from an affluent family and apparently never had to worry about paying the bills, being free to fully dedicate himself to the things that interested him. The guy was a genius, no doubt about that… I just feel that we would have a lot more geniuses out there if we didn’t have to work so much in order to enjoy so little.
There are definitely people out there capable of major contributions to human culture and knowledge toiling in a sweat shop or picking fruit.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
- Stephen Jay Gould
That’s some Girl Next Door shit. He just want to get Samnang to the US so he can cure cancer
Well Einstein had to work in a patent office.
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I’m not jealous of rich people’s possessions or lifestyle. I’m worried about the power they wield over other people’s lives. Their power to affect the laws that get passed, their power to close down stores and factories and lay off all the workers, their power to kick people out of their homes.
The closer I get to my retirement the more I realize how much of my life has been wasted at my job. It’s sad really.
I hear you there. Time is all we really have and it’s an extremely limited quantity.
I’m not jealous of anyone, good on you. What I do have a problem with is when the rich refuse to pay their fair share of taxes. Not only do they don’t want to pay a fair share, while using our society, they use that money they saved cheesing the system to subvert politicans and our system to pay even less and squeeze people even more.
All that said I also think billionaires shouldn’t be a a thing. Past 1000 million dollars you should be taxed at 99%.
Not just that but I don’t think massive amounts of wealth concentrated into a small number of hands is good for a democracy.
While I agree with your message on taxation, I don’t think any billionaires actually earn a billion dollars that could be taxed like that.
Our media fawns over their wealth which is assets, their business value and the like, not actual income that could be taxed. I definitely agree with a wealth tax though, but I don’t know if that operates in the same way as a progressive income tax works, as in “after x amount you owe y% and then z% after another total dollar amount.”
Wealth tax. No one needs more money. You’ve won capitalism. Now you can compete in a high score of who gives back most to society, and pretend it’s actually you that is doing the good deed.
I kinda like the general idea, but I think you’d just end up with corporate fat-cats that personally hold close the limit, and then have a couple of hundred ‘friends’ who hold the rest and live in fear of themselves and their families getting disappeared if they touch the wealth without directions from said fat-cats.
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What does that fix though? Government is a little more funded, so what? If thieves were rampant, the solution isn’t taxing the thieves.
Billionaires leech off of the working class and we should just tax them? No, we need to address the underlying mechanisms that allow them to do that. If someone actually did $1 billion worth of labor, they deserve the billion, and probably a prize for being the first
It would not fix our problems, but it may help discredit the austerity narrative promulgated by the ruling class, and also erode some of its power to repress more meaningful change.
I’m envious of the rich because they’ll never know the struggle of having to choose between gas in the car to get to work, or paying your bills so the heat stays on.
It’s the security that I want. If I could quit my job tomorrow and all my bills would be convered and all my debts (and their related payments) suspended, and I was given enough to put food on the table… Then I’d be a lot happier. I’d know that I’ll never have to submit to some dickhead boss trying to push me around so I can be underpaid and go home late to my cold house because I don’t make enough to keep it warm.
The future is stupid.
I went from homeless to 6 figures and security is exactly what drove me so hard. It’s such a relief to just keep my bills and mortgage on autopay and never even think about it. I still feel like an imposter when I go to the grocery store and don’t have to keep track of how much every item costs to ensure I have enough to cover it.
I’m not rich by most definitions but getting to a point of real stability makes life so much easier. Granted I still worry all the time that I’ll be fired and I have backup plans upon backup plans in case shit hits the fan.
Some well off people work way more than 40 hours per week to be wealthy. Not all of them are living the dream (so to speak) - they also can be stuck.
What the super rich people get is time. They have people to take care of all the crap the rest of us deal with - shopping, fixing the car, booking holidays, cooking, cleaning…
Yeah… I’d rather be wealthy than not.
what if their passion is working and it’s more than 40 hours
is workaholism a passion or an addiction, a way to distract yourself from having to experience the painful realities of looking at yourself in the mirror with vulnerability and honesty?
This is it. Although the selfmade millionaires are few and not many they are complete workaholics. The ones who inherited wealth are the ones screwing around and spending their money.
Nobody’s “selfmade”. That’s a myth perpetuated by Forbes, WSJ and the like to decrease resentment towards the people whose boots they lick for a living.
In reality, no matter how hard you work, you need the help of others to be successful and to be downright RICH, you need a whole lot of luck too.
it’s less about working harder, and more about seeing opportunities and being able to take the risk to go after them.
Nope. If someone with a net worth of $100m or more takes a gamble and loses, the company goes under and people lose their jobs while the rich guy gets a loan or a tax write-off.
“Seeing opportunities” for huge possible gains for yourself with all significant risks being to people much less fortunate than you and taking it isn’t a virtue, it’s self-centered greed.
the key to my statement is “being able to take the risk”. poor folks can’t take the same risks that the wealthy folks can take.
And what my statement was meant to convey is the fact that the ventures you so laud are all reward and no risk for the rich and all risk and no reward for the poor.
If it had been a game of crabs, the rich would be rolling 4 loaded dice, picking which two count after throwing. The poor would have one dice at most, the most beneficial numbers missing at all times.
You don’t understand what selfmade means. It means they did not inherited a fortune500 company at the age of 25. Selfmade means they started from a situation where they had a degree and a simple common job and made into a billionaire. Obvioisly no single person can create and manage a 20000 person company on its own, no one ever said it is like that.
I understand just fine. What I’m saying is that using that word implies that they have earned all their wealth and are more deserving than others who didn’t have the same help and luck. More deserving than others with the same background who have worked just as hard with less help and/or luck along the way.
Whether or not that’s the intention, that’s the implication and thus why using the word at all skews the conversation.
Literally semantics and who gives a shit. Erm ackshually, type beat. Obviously money flows, no one just generates money on their own without the creation of value by the governing body, or can provide goods/services without the goods/services needed to even start their own trade. No one legitimately believes selfmade means you did literally everything yourself, everywhere. It’s just people who earned a wealthy life without inheritance.
At a certain point these individuals aren’t really contributing much. They’re keeping themselves busy with unnecessary meetings, networking activities, etc.
If upper management takes a month off work at a steady company, not a lot of things slow down.
In Dutch there’s this joke: “netwerken is net werken.” Roughly translates to “networking is almost like work.”
I don’t have to work 40h a week to get by…
I work a lot more, but for my own leisure…
I live in France.
They spawned in GodMode
“If you aren’t rich (right now), its because your parents did not worked enough.”
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I feel that
Rich people works too. Source: know rich people.
I guess it depends. A doctor can be considered rich and certainly works long hours, whereas a trust fund kid can just travel the world on mommy and daddy’s dime.
they’re just like us!
And one day I will be rich like them! Then people like me better watch their step…
Quote mining.
Where do the people who worked 40+ hours a week jobs and worked up to being rich go?
You know that’s only 10 people right?
I understand the sentiment, but depending on what you consider “rich” that, IMO, is very, very wrong.
You’re moving the goalpost.
I just see two classes. The working class and the owner class. People who own entire large businesses without having to work at them or manage them? That’s rich. The owners.
Anybody who has to work to live is by definition working class, though some working class people get paid very well and can lead decadent lives. I might be caught saying they are well-off, doing well, are rewarded generously for their work, can afford more freedoms than most. They aren’t rich though. Their continued labor makes their life possible.
Meanwhile me in Europe both working lightly for decent money (ironically for the US company), pursuing my hobbies and chilling out reading American antiworkers complaining about literally everything related to work. I suspect most of the complaints are from NEETs or similar individuals that worked 0 to 3 days of their life which makes it even funnier to me.
Just curious, how many hours does the average European person work in a week? I see a lot of talk about vacation days but I’ve never seen someone mention how long the workweeks are.
For comparison, the average work week in the US is 40 hours.
40 hours work week and 26 paid vacation days in my country. Everything above 40h is paid 150 or 200% depending on circumstances but it’s usually not obligatory to work like that as employers both don’t want to pay more and they don’t want to screw with people due to lack of workforce willing to do that shit.
It’s so nice that you well-off Europeans let Americans live rent free in your heads
Hard to not think about that when you read Americans whining everywhere.
Your views are bad, and you should feel bad.
And it’s easy to tell when Americans are whining, because someone from Europe will always show up to let everyone know
U jelly?
No
