Its not out of control now, but that doesn’t cancel out previous high inflation rates on things. If people wages haven’t kept up then they may not be able.to still afford the standard of living they had a few years ago.

Like one of the other replies mentioned, when you get closer to retirement, more of the money should get shifted from stocks to more stable but lower return investments like bonds and such that are not affected by a stock market crash. Usually you can set a retirement age in the management portal of your 401k and the management company in charge of your 401k uses it as a guide to move the money into the more stable investments.

Absolutely, but for now the best thing we can do is show up and vote and call out these misleading polls for what they are. The larger the margins are, the harder it gets to try to cheat through the courts. Of course if there is a big blue wave, we’ll hear that it itself is evidence that voter fraud happened, in which they will justify with these slanted polls.

I think the other silver lining is that when it comes down too it, Trump doesn’t have a large enough base that is willing to stick thier own necks out in a misguided attempt to “save” democracy. Trump.didn’t get the numbers he wanted on January 6th and he won’t get them this time either.

You literally just described American healthcare. I don’t know where people get this idea that you don’t have to wait to see a doctor here. I’ve had to book doctors appointments months out. And specialists can be 6+ months of waiting.

I think the Americans that say otherwise actually don’t try to go to the doctor on a regular basis. And if you press them on why, they’ll admit it is a fucking hassle and worried about the bill if they need to actually get something done.

Just because you don’t know the rules doesn’t mean they are unwritten.

https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/2024-Delegate-Selection-Rules.pdf

They did hold a primary. You might have not liked how they ran it. I had my own issues with it as well, but they did and once those votes are in the pledged delegates have to honor the winner from it, which Biden was. Tell me how they could have just taken it away from him without him stepping down again?

Do you know how Democrat canidates are picked? Biden already had enough pledged delegates to win the nomination.

Aren’t all of the misogynists already voting for Trump? I think just being a younger woman candidate could energize the younger voting base.

So they say, but they also just said the president had immunity for official acts. If Biden did this while at the same time urging Congress to pass judicial ethics laws, who could stop him? Hell, expand it to the federal court system and tell the committee to move fast and prioritize the most unethical judges in key positions and either the Republicans have to play ball with Democrats on passing judicial reform through law or the remaining sane judges reverse a few key decisions to unfuck our current judicial quandary.

I’m no legal expert, but could he possibly form a judicial ethics committee to investigate supreme court justices. On any evidence of violating ethics, he could sign an arrest warrent to remove them from the court.

The only reason I make the bed every morning is because we have dogs that like to lay on it when we aren’t home and there is nothing worse when you are crawling in bed at night and finding dirt or sand all in it.

I’ve wondered the same thing. Maybe a the Enquirer did a catch and kill payoff to the neighbors when it happened?

I don’t have V-Rising, and I’m sure a lot of this stuff is hardware dependent, but according to a couple of reports on ProtonDB, there might be a kernel bug causing issues with it.

https://www.protondb.com/app/1604030

I just installed bazzite on my LCD Steam Deck this week and it has been pretty solid so far, but obviously the hardware support for it is top notch thanks to Valve. I didn’t have really any issues with regular SteamOS either and just wanted to try something a bit more customizable.

And really Linux gaming on the Steam Deck feels like cheating, especially compared to trying to run games via wine before the proton days.

The claim was that billionaires shouldn’t exist and that to get that amount of money requires exploitation. You are the one taking that to mean that they are automatically morally bankrupt. I have broken down my more nuanced take that you seem to mostly agree on, so I guess I’m not sure why you are continuing to push on this one point. No one has called for actually punishing billionaires for this in this specific comment chain; I know that opinion is all over elsewhere, but that’s not relevant to what we have been discussing.

Personally speaking, I’m doing okay under the current system, I recognize where my labor is and has been exploited and am lucky enough myself to get by with what leverage I have. But I recognize that I’m just one bad accident from losing my livelihood and not being able to provide for me and my family. And if the wealth gap continues growing, then billionaires, or the owning capital class in general, should be worried about violence against them. And if that day comes, I for sure ain’t sticking my neck out for some fucking billionaire.

At the end of the day, we can disagree on messaging, but I’ll leave that to proper organizations to get the message right and try to support them when I see them to hopefully turn things around before it turns to violence. But we’re not going to convince anyone here by just getting the perfect message for the masses.

You are right that we seem to be talking in circles, so I’m done here. Going to GI back to enjoying the rest of my weekend and I hope you have a good one.

I’m not calling to break out the guillotine. Just the acknowledgment that the system is flawed and support initiatives to minimize exploitation and pay their labor fairly where they can. At the very least stop using their capital to support initiatives that only support growing their own capital at the expense of others.

Because a billionaire isn’t “just as guilty” in an exploitative system. They are more guilty because they benefit more and they have more power due to their capital. If you can’t see that, then I guess we won’t ever agree.

Do you have a job? If so, you should know how hard it is to earn money. The level of effort required to even get minimum wage is usually astounding. And maybe you went to school and learned to do more skilled jobs, so you don’t have to work as hard as a minimum wage laborer. Maybe you can justify it as being smarter or more skilled and that’s fine. But do you think someone that “earned” a billion dollars actually worked ten thousand times harder than someone who earns 100k. Or a thousand times harder than someone that earned a million dollars. Or are that much smarter or more skilled?

In your original example, you talk about how and individual could make a game that could get 300 million in sales while ignoring that vast amount of effort it realistically takes to do so. Way more effort than a single individual person can do. Getting to those kinds of sales would take the effort of many people, so if a single person benefits more than the others involved in that effort, then they did so by exploitation of their labor.

I think what we are getting to is the semantics of it. Theoretically, it should be possible to be a billionaire without stealing and exploitation. I think that in reality though, a billion dollars is so much money that’s its hard to see how a single person can amass that much wealth without being exploitative, intentionally or not. Even if you were given that much money, holding onto it would require investing into a system that is rife with exploitation.

I’ll admit that I’m by no means an expert on billionaires and there might exist some that made their fortune without exploitation. And I’m including indirect exploitation here. Maybe that’s another point of semantics, but its one that I feel very much matters in this context.

Every billionaire are where they are at by being at least somewhat lucky. In a lot of cases they are simply lucky enough to be born to the right family. Some have worked to get where they are, but its not just hard work or effort that got them there.

And I would argue that there is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and I would also argue that that is the case for just about any other societal system as well. After all, none of us can live without being a burden or hurting others at some point. That’s life. Its also more or less the concept of “original sin” that Christians go on about. Its fine to acknowledge that and only by doing so can society at large takes steps to reduce systematic harm where we can.

That being said, billionaires, by having more capital, have more power and influence under capitalism, so it can be argued that they get a larger part of the blame for systematic issues, especially as many of them do utilize their power to maintain the status quo or push for more harmful systematic policies. And the ones that aren’t actively pushing such policies are still benefiting from such policies. And they could donate their fortunes to charitable causes, but in my opinion that’s not something that we should have to rely on them doing and does nothing to solve the systematic issues at play.

At the end of the day, it’s its not as if its a black and white issue, but the statement that no one “earned” a billion dollars is largely true in the sense that if you work hard or put in the effort, you can make it. Even in Notch’s case, if he didn’t decide to sale to Microsoft, maybe he might still be a billionaire today, but would he have earned it himself? Its not like he was the only one working on the game even when he sold the company. I’m not sure what the compensation the others working at Mojang got, but if he continued to independently develop Minecraft, getting to 300 million sales requires significant development effort between porting the game to various platforms and ongoing content updates. If he ended up getting the majority of the payout, then he would have very likely did it at the disproportionately at the expense of other’s effort.

A billion dollars is a lot of money. Like a lot of money. I don’t necessary think its wrong to have the opinion that billionaires shouldn’t exist. At least in the system we have today. Now, I’d say that its the system that’s the problem, not necessary any individual billionaire, but if they get to wieild the power that comes with their fortune, then its fair to have more blame for it as well.

So really he made his money from selling his company, not just from the game sales itself. And I would argue that he more or less got lucky more than he “earned” it, which I think he has said as much in interviews before.

I can’t really speak to if he directly exploited labor, but I think we can pretty safely state that Microsoft has in fact done so repeatedly, and so indirectly at least, Notch benefited from that as well.

Now does that make him morally corrupt for taking that offer? Maybe. But I think any one of us would take the same offer if given the chance. But the reality of the situation is that getting rich from this kind of success is very slim, and even then the labor and effort involved is very much disproportionate to what others are earning for much more effort. And if he was taxed at a rate where is was no longer a billionaire, but just a millionaire, then his quality of life very likely won’t change too much while many other people would benefit, assuming that tax money is actually going to public services, that is.

You are talking about Minecraft level success and even that took many years of success and being bought by one of the largest companies in the world to reach that many sells.