this post was submitted on 05 Nov 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
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If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
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That's an interesting observation.
Given the 3,028 billionaires among the 8 billion people on Earth, that's the definition of extreme.
Those 3,028 people, or 0.000036% of the global population, hold more than 99% of all wealth.
The actual number is closer to 9% than 99%. This is probably some kind of mutation from "the combined wealth of billionaires is larger than the GDP of 99% of countries" where notably yearly income and wealth are not directly comparable.
Better (and true) things to say are "The global top 1% have more wealth than the bottom 95% combined" or "The richest 0.01% in the US have tripled their wealth in the last 30 years, while 90% of people have been treading water"
https://www.thecanary.co/global/world-analysis/2025/04/07/billionaires-wealth-2025/
~~Holy shit dude, being in a minority group does not.make you an extremist. Would you call people with Field's disease extremists too? No, of course not. But you would call them extremists if they believed that everyone who doesn't have Field's disease should be enslaved or to donate all the Earth's resources for their well-being. Likewise with billionaires.~~
(Ignore me - I'm apparently not very good at reading.)
Using Field's disease there is a huge false equivalence, for two main reasons.
A: you can't just choose not to have Field's, but a billionaire is capable of donating their wealth to charity or something, and no longer being a billionaire.
B: the existence of people with Field's has little to no impact on the average person outside that group, but the existence of billionaires massively changes how much money everyone else has
You don't think that 3,028 people holding 99% of global wealth is extreme?
I do, my comment was in response to the first sentence of the comment. It sounded like he was saying a minority group is the definition of extreme, but perhaps I misinterpreted it, as indeed the word billionaire was included and I could have been more charitable in my interpretation.
This is why online discourse is so hard! Beyond the anonymity, which causes its own problems, the absence of nonverbal cues and lack of immediacy in feedback leaves a lot open to interpretation, so anything can be taken in any way.
Opinions become accusations and idle musings become absolute certainty in the vacuum of supporting information that is text-only communication. I worry that the only real solution is for people to--like you--embrace the uncertainty and gracefully admit that their interpretation could be wrong. And it seems likely that the only way to collectively get to that point is to fuck it up a lot for a long time.