News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
I'll take a thin skinned billionaire that donates some of those billions to feel warm and fuzzy over a thick skinned one that laughs from a balcony as people lose their homes.
I'll take neither. Billionaires can all go under the guillotine.
Well sure, in optimism land, why not go for them all. In the real world, that wouldn't be possible given the amount of insulation they have and protection they can afford.
My meaning here is that if the choice were presented between guillotining one of them that donates money occasionally, and another that doesn't so much as pretend to give a damn, I'm going to point at the latter.
They won’t have insulation and protection if we do a socialist revolution…
From a quick search, there are around 3,000 billionaires with over ten trillion US dollars combined. Even if we assume the poorest of them only have a handful of security personnel, a socialist revolution in terms of pitchforks and guillotines wouldn't get far up the ladder.
These individuals have politicians strung up as marionettes, so the world's militaries aren't going to help. Surely if more than two of these billionaires end up Thompson'd, the military would probably be used to protect them.
The revolution that could work is pretty straightforward, but it has a barrier to entry. People need to vote. Not just for the top either, but all the way down to city councillors. We'd need to see landslide elections to overcome gerrymandering, but if we managed to elect a significant number of incorruptible politicians all at once, mountains could be moved in one cycle.
Oh to dream.
I've checked the numbers once. Gates donated to his foundation $20B and today the foundation has over $70B. Bill, through his foundation, controls 3x more money they he donated. He's using foundation's grants to influence policy and research at a global scale. This is not about helping anyone, it's about excreting power over governments while improving his public image.
What he should be doing instead? Paying taxes.
Forgive me but while I could agree the primary purpose for his actions may not be philanthropic intent, it certainly has some positive butterfly effects - like the research you mention. Maybe it's not about helping anyone, but that's not to say that it doesn't help anyone.
Regardless this isn't the place to get into the minutiae. My point was that if we put the ten digit club in a cage and told them only one is allowed back out, I'd prefer Gates find victory than someone like Musk.