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Comment by noduerme | Hacker News Reader

Because if there's one thing billionaires should be scared of, it's billions of people suddenly becoming estranged from the economy. Having governments pump money into the consumer demand side becomes a no-brainer once you're faced with deflationary depression and mass unemployment. Your investors then get taxed to give UBI to workers to spend money to keep your sales up. It's probably the one form of wealth redistribution that on balance would actually benefit billionaires.

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Billionaires don’t worry. Not in the main.

We’re going through a series of ever record breaking heat waves where the only thing you can be sure of is that it will be worse next year.

They’re still pushing fossil fuels and blocking attempts to replace them with cheaper alternatives.

They’re too focused on who got the biggest yacht to care.

When you have a surplus of poor people that might insinuate insurgency it's always possible (and cheap) to hire one half to kill the other half. Problem solved.

That assumes a degree of forethought and worry about consequences that the current set of billionaires seems to be studiously avoiding - along with half of everyone else, near as I can tell.

Why worry if you can have an army of AI controlled combat robo dogs and drones? /s

Now, times are becoming "interesting" again, unfortunately.

I’m quite sure Peter Thiel, Larry Ellison, Jared Kushner, Sam Altman et al are unironically thinking that.

Remove the /s. This is the main purpose of robot dogs and drones.

You know, they could also be used to keep invaders out of Ukraine. But for sure, that is not what billionaires have in mind for them.

Sooooo...

Circular financing???

What else had capital been doing for the last 200 years?! It works when the financing loop is not zero-sum. It only leads to catastrophe when you get too successful and start to blow bubbles or invade other countries.

Why would they worry when we're all content to lay back and die? When was the last time someone murdered a billionaire? It almost never happens. They have no need to worry.

They dont give a shit about angry masses. Nor is the angry mass a risk to them. They have money for arms.

The moat around billionaires isn't money, it's the political apathy of the American working class, which somehow believes itself to not exist.

Well, it's also money, because it influences politics to maintain that apathy, but it feels like you guys could just not.

Idk. If I were a billionaire I'd be terrified, and not about simply finding a way to save my own skin. It would seem glaringly obvious that things can't go on in a way where 99.99% of people hate you.... I mean, not that you have to give away all your money, but a self-preservation instinct would demand you at least look like you're doing something more than raping the universe.

I don't hate billionaires. They basically never cross my mind. All credit to those guys for doing what they did. I'm not personally jealous and I find the anger and jealousy at them to be petty and kind of stupid in a way that reflects badly on the person expressing it. Most of the billionaires in the tech sector didn't inherit that kind of wealth, and I respect the ones who earned what they earned. I wouldn't trade my life for theirs and I don't feel left out because I don't have private jets or islands. Whining you don't have a jet or an island is childish... grow a garden and get a dog, don't be jealous. Comparing what you have to someone else's possessions is a basic fault that makes a lot of people miserable for no reason, unable to appreciate what they have. Appreciate what you have. Billionaires can have everything you ever dreamed of and still be much more miserable than you. Good for them if they're happy, I say.

I'm just also saying that if I were in their shoes I wouldn't think the current situation was tenable.

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