Let’s start with those that profit directly from human suffering.
Yeah for sure, but we can still plan for tomorrow.
Edit: I’m using him as an example of an other billionaire who is constantly defended even though he owns 6 mega yatchs and a few submarines costing him an estimated 75 to 100 million a year just in maintenance. Sorry for the misunderstanding.
Look I love Gabe as much as anyone but nobody earns a billion dollars
He owns 6 yachts! What a waste of money, resources, and imagination!
You can only be on and enjoy a yacht one at a time so the other 5 are just there while other human beings in the world suffer.
And the perfect counterpart is another rotund fuzzy tech guy, Steve Wozniak. The Woz, who isn’t a billionaire in part because when Steve Jobs decided to fuck over a bunch of Apple employees before the IPO Woz gave them some of his shares. Woz, who spends his time in part video chatting with elementary school classes and talking to them about technology.
Are you presenting him as an example of a good billionaire? Cause still, nah.
It was not my intention, I edited my comment to make it clearer.
Guarantee we’re going to find out he’s a real dirt bag after everything is said and done he just keeps a tight circle.
To be a billionaire you need to be a dirt bag, it’s that simple.
I doubt it. It’s obvious from looking at Gabe that he hasn’t really changed who is he from before he made his money.
And his ethics at work with a flat hierarchy don’t scream over involved shitty boss.
Mind you by virtue of having all that money, he isn’t good, but I don’t think he is bad either.
Oh fuck off dude, the guy is a billionaire that means anyone who makes a purchase on Steam is paying more than the games are worth because there’s a fucking leech at the top who wants to buy a seventh yacht.
paying more than the games are worth because there’s a fucking leech at the top
Where we at now…30% and probably climbing? Ugh.
They take their 30% cut, then the publisher takes another cut with another billionaire’s salary taken into consideration and then…
He’s greedy as fuck leech no argument.
But the dirt bag billionaires are the ones who it comes out allowed for a culture of fear, have sexual assault charges against them, power hungry manipulative fucks, etc. and I don’t see that coming out about Gabe.
They’re all dirtbags, the reason why people like you and me can barely afford to live comfortably is because of all the billionaires and multimillionaires. Just because they propose a nice product doesn’t mean they’re not responsible for much more harm than good.
It’s obvious from looking at Gabe
imo nothing is obvious about gabe. very little is known about him. we see what he wants us to see, nothing more.
We see how he runs Valve and how he interacts with customers. Both are pretty different to every other company. How many billionaires can you email to get help with low level account issues?
As a swiftie, I can say you’re right. However, there’s also no such thing as a purely good or purely bad person, and liking a billionaire does not make someone good or bad. People, it turns out, are complex.
I can love Taylor’s music while also criticizing her for her excessive personal jet use and massive pollution problem.
I think if we stop making it a binary decision that more people will start opening up about changes need to make. In Taylor’s case, most Swifties would never dare say anything negative about her for fear of others in the fandom thinking they aren’t true fans, and vis versa, I’m sure people here will read this as I must support billionaires because I like her music. No, complex multifaceted opinions are valid.
I think we should abolish ICE vehicles. It doesn’t mean I think I need to yell at family members who pull up in their 02 Camry because they can’t afford to upgrade.
You need to be evil to accumulate billionaire levels of wealth, no one forces her to be that wealthy, she could give hundreds of millions to MSF and other reliable charities and still be richer than 99.999999% of people on earth.
Completely agree. Went to her show, loved it. She’s donated to every food bank in each city she’s stopped at, but I don’t think it’s nearly what she could be doing. She has “put an actual dent in climate change” money bur instead gives a few thousand to food banks. Like I said, people can hold 2 opinions.
Disagree here. I’d argue being good and being a billionaire are mutually exclusive. You can be good before you are a billionaire (rare) but it’s not possible once you enter that class.
100% agree.
For anyone who may disagree, consider thinking of excess wealth as excess food.
If you were in a stadium full of people that represent all of humanity, and you have more food than you could ever even eat in multiple lifetimes are you not an evil person for not sharing with those who are literally starving to death?
These are people with the amount of wealth who could easily subsidize paying a team of people to plan out how to appropriate give away most of their wealth so they don’t have “excess food” by the time they die - and not have it impact their day to day lifestyle. Instead they let others starve.
These are people with the amount of wealth who could easily subsidize paying a team of people to plan out how to appropriate give away most of their wealth so they don’t have “excess food” by the time they die - and not have it impact their day to day lifestyle. Instead they let others starve.
Exactly. If we only had one or two billionaires do what they do in the Maya Rudolph show “Loot,” we could probably provide housing for every homeless person in America.
someone of her unique status cannot fly scheduled commercial flights without causing significant disruptions everywhere she travels to and from.
Pfff, yeah, sure. In my country the ex-president was stupidly popular, like 80% approval popular and 99% of the people knew him. He still traveled, always, in commercial flights, economic class, basically each weekend. Taylor Swift just doesn’t wanna deal with normies.
Shits a cult aye
Hi fellow Swiftie! Thanks for sharing your thoughts 💃
Hello! If you aren’t aware we do have a community over at !taylorswift@poptalk.scrubbles.tech if you’d like to join! Always happy to have more!
Hi, Swiftie here 🙋♀️
There are no good billionaires. Taylor Swift is not a good person due to her business practices. I have no defense of her and I would never say “she is one of the good ones.” I and most of the Swiftie circles I run in wish that she would practice equitable compensation in her tours (where she gets the vast majority of her profit), among other areas.
Taylor Swift is a capitalist, and that’s bad. There are thousands of artists and laborers being exploited by her every performance. All those laborers, stage hands, designers, arena staff, etc should have a say in how the massive revenue generated is distributed, and they do not get that say. That is bad.
As a majority male space, Lemmy has a tendency to slide a bit toward dunking on women and majority women’s spaces because you may not be aware that many leftist Swifties are just as critical of Swift as other billionaires. This post is a good example of that. (If you feel bad or called out by this, don’t stress it. I just want to gently course correct the conversation a tad 🙂)
I appreciate you posting this, it was actually unexpected to see to me and was nice to know.
i appreciate you leaving the feedback! sometimes i feel like what i say lands on deaf ears so it’s reassuring that my experience can actually get out there :) cheers
I’m not a swiftie, and I’m male, so take my words as you will in that context.
Simply: IMO, it is possible to appreciate someones artistry while disliking their personal value system and actions.
Just because someone is a good artist, does not and should not imply that they are good.
Both liking someone’s music and disliking their decisions as a person, can both be true. I hate the plethora of false dichotomy arguments that you can’t appreciate music made by a person if that person is considered a bad person. One does not mean the other cannot be true.
based
Brava!
Thanks for this
Wow, I could never listen to her, but thanks for a Swiftie with a reasonable take on this.
to reiterate: i’m not alone :) my positions mirror a ton of other swifties’ (obviously not all, but you do what you can)—they just have limited representation on lemmy due to gender and vibes
It’s not a matter of “nobody should be allowed to be ultra wealthy,” it’s a matter of “nobody should be allowed to be unacceptably poor.”
If our civilization can generate wealth at an astronomical rate, then there is no morally defensible reason for anyone to be homeless, hungry, poorly educated, lacking medical care, drinking unsafe water, worked to death, or any of a number of other baseline metrics of civilization. All of those ills exist because wealth is funneled upwards at an unbelievable rate, leading to the existence of billionaires. All of that wealth should be used to raise everyone’s standard of living, rather than give a handful of people more power and luxury than ever appeared in Caligula’s wet dreams.
Of course the way that you accomplish that is by an exponentially progressive taxation system, and that will… probably make it impractical to be a billionaire, but frankly I think that focusing on helping the bottom end of the economic ladder is more productive than just talking about how it should be illegal to have more than a given amount of wealth.
I’m still surprised that taxing the rich is such a difficult bill to pass. Assuming we live in a democracy, the 1% shouldn’t be able to have such sway over the population.
Might have something to do with almost all relevant politicians being in the 1%. Maybe. Possibly.
Those billionaires are being propped by stupid people buying exorbitant ticket prices to see their idols dancing from a mile a way. I blame the populace for this. you can make them irrelevant without even spending a penny.
As someone in the entertainment business, those performers don’t like ticket master either. Or at least on the level I am at.
Basically the only way for a professional touring musician except those like her at the top to make money is to sell merchandise at this point. Either that or play small clubs which don’t use Ticketmaster and get a small take of the door. It’s ludicrous that so many very talented people can’t make a living as musicians anymore.
I guess that’s the difference between me and Taylor Swift.
TM decimates every show i am involved in
In the face of exploitative capital, blaming the consumer is on the same tier of nonsensical rhetoric as victim blaming.
It’s not the fault of people buying bottled water for Nestle’s human rights violations, nor is it the fans’ fault that Swift’s business model is exploitative and nonethical.
You are telling me you can’t live without going to a Taylor Swift concert. Capitalism is the origin of many pains, but this one isn’t one of them.
I am not telling you that. Blocked :)
As an INTJ I also don’t like most people, because as you said people are stupid
If the entire human population was just 100 people stranded on an island in the Pacific, would we allow
1% (which in this case would just be 1 person ) to own 95% of all the resources? Hell No!I just think that at $1BN net worth or whatever, you start getting taxed on 99.99% of everything you earn or gain in worth after that.
This way people still get stupid rich, and if someone ever has $10bn you can easily just sound the alarm then and there and say nope, fuck this guy.
The tax curve just just be exponential and it should be basically vertical at $1bn.
Along with some restriction to their wealth relating to where the money was earned, so they can’t just leave the country with it all.
You could also argue there are no good millionaires by the same logic.
The existence of billionaires is a systemic problem, largely not a personal failing.
I’m not a swiftie, but the message here should be “We need better redistributive institutions” or “We need a new economic system”, not “Artist being an unexceptional artist (in terms of industry behavior) is BAD because she is one of the more successful ones”
You could also argue there are no good millionaires by the same logic.
Heyyyy, you’re starting to get it!
Heyyyy, you’re starting to get it!
Careful, the middle-class socialists on Lemmy who dream of owning a nice house will get mad.
But more pertinently, the argument can be applied to anyone as long as there is suffering in the world and unnecessary luxuries. And while I think most of us here agree that there is a structural issue with that, I’m far less fond of the idea that Joe Schmoe working a soul-crushing minimum-wage job should never do anything other than work, sleep, and donate every spare penny to charity because keeping or using wealth while others are suffering would make him a bad person.
I know you’re being a little facetious but you raise a good point. As you start talking about a net worth more like 5-10 million, there’s a lot more people in that class. I think then it’s more about things like, do you have one fairly nice house, or one nice house and a half dozen shitholes you rent out, or a couple nice houses that you move between? Are you a business owner who pays well in a field that is profitable or are you the proud owner of a handful of subway or McDonald’s locations?
It’s something that always hits me acutely. I grew up in a poor area, with a family from a different but equally poor area. The total net worth of the past three generations of my family, combined, at their peak and adjusted for inflation just for fun, from grandparents and great-uncles down to me, wouldn’t break a mil. Yet I also recognize that people can own a house worth a million or even two without being absurdly wealthy, or even more than just middle-class.
On one hand, when people start wringing hands and crying about their taxes going up on their million-dollar house, I get the emotional urge to sneer and spit at their feet. Poor babies! On the other hand, I do try to recognize also that all wealth is relative, and that we, as human beings, should not and cannot be judged solely on how we try to make our own way in this miserable world, but rather on how we interact with others. Even I am extraordinarily wealthy, as a disabled man who ekes out a below-poverty line existence in the US doing clerical work, compared to someone doing back-breaking labor to provide for their family in Mali.
The condemnation should not be when we buy a nice meal for ourselves, but when we refuse a loaf of bread to a beggar, sort of thinking. And above all, most non-ultra-wealthy people are not making decisions that explicitly hurt others for their own gain, nor even that deny help to others for their own convenience, but simply buying themselves little luxuries to forget the misery of existence. That’s… just how human beings work. And the solution is in structural reform, not condemnation of people for trying not to go crazy in a universe whose laws were not constructed to suit thinking beings.
Should billionaires exist? No, fuck no. But of the people who are billionaires, “I lucked out in a field I’m legitimately talented in, and it scaled to the tune of billions instead of the normal artist existence of ‘barely surviving’” is probably one of the least objectionable. In Swift’s place, most of us probably wouldn’t be much different. One can argue, and not incorrectly, that the activities of billionaires is disproportionately more damaging than us lowly thousandaires with a PC and a bicycle, but the fundamental principle of selfishness behind taking an uber for non-essential round-town travel and taking a private plane when a few well-planned train tickets would’ve done just fine is the same. We differ from THOSE billionaires not in nature, but in scale. It’s a scale that MUST be reduced for the survival of both the planet and the polity, but it doesn’t spring from some essential evil in the individual - unlike, say, some cunt jacking up the price of life-saving medication so they can buy a third yacht.
Ultimately, a billionaire like Swift is the rare creature who DOES perform legitimate labor, whose actions do not fundamentally come at an increased cost to people just trying to survive, and largely no more exploitative than any other musician or participant in the industry or wider economy (which is a condemnation of the industry and our economy, arguably, but neither here nor there), just one who has managed success on a more massive scale than her peers. She SHOULD be brought down to a reasonable level of wealth - but she’s not some demon who deserves the guillotine. Just massive asset seizure. She’s probably a pretty ordinary human being, as far as human beings go.
There’s also no good 100thousandaires because wealth accumulation is bad
Heyyyy, you’re starting to get it!
All right kulac time to surrender your phone / PC. It’s a clear sign of your wealth hording.
If you don’t see the difference between me who owns a gaming PC and lives in an apartment and a multimillionaire that could have a gaming PC in every room of their house that’s way too big for their needs then you’re not worth engaging with.
My apologies comrade druge. I can see that the only moral abortion is your abortion. I did not realize I was addressing Stalin himself comrade.
If you follow your own line of logic, the mere fact that you have electricity puts you well above many people in developing countries, let alone the fact that you have a personal dwelling in which resides a personal electronic device to utilize that electricity. If you haven’t figured it out by me calling you a kulak yet you may want to look up what would qualify a peasant farmer as a kulak. Hint it would be anybody that is middle class. Sounds like you would be a passive kulak.
I think you missed the last part of my message so I’ll be blocking you now
Ta ta 👋
Your failure to reply to an official party summons for comment during the last 3 hours has been noted. As such, we have determined that the proper procedure will be re-education.
I think it is 100% realistic for Swift (and similar wealthy artists) to one day realize that her business model handed down to her is unethical and exploitative and take steps towards making amends. It’s mostly a matter of getting her exposed to the right conversations, either through public pressure or interpersonal relationships. Like how she started buying carbon offsets for her jets.
I also (naively?) hope/feel that there will be a domino effect. Once one massive touring artist starts making equitability moves for their staff, other artists might follow. Doesn’t even have to be Swift tbh, Coldplay or Bruno Mars or someone could set it off.
CTRL + F thread for Rihanna = Phrase not found
No one has anything to say about Rihanna, or Jay-Z, or Paul McCartney?
Rihanna’s worth more than Taylor Swift
Everyone’s hyper-focused on Taylor Swift and Rihanna is in the same pic.
Looks like your stats are a bit out of date, Swift is in first place again: https://www.forbes.com/sites/conormurray/2024/10/08/taylor-swift-becomes-worlds-richest-female-musician-heres-who-is-right-behind-her/
But you bring up a poignant point. Maybe some of it is because of the whole jet thing from some months ago, those discussions were really raging on here and so it’s probably echoing forward.
People have been hating Swift for decades now. They were hating her for writing too many relationship-related songs even before the American left revived.
She’s an easy target because her target demographic is teenage girls, and anything / anyone beloved by teenage girls MUST necessarily be gay and worthless.
See also: Justin Bieber, the Backstreet Boys, and the Jonas Brothers.
I highly suspect people joined the left and transferred their hatred from, “Taylor Swift the musician for stupid, hysterical girls, who I hate” to, “Taylor Swift, the billionaire,” without once examining the lens through which they first started hating her. And now she gets more “anti-billionaire” hate than Jeff Bezos?
It bothers me.
Misogyny is a tool of capitalism, and to quote Lorde: the tools of the master will never dismantle the master’s house. No one is destroying capitalism by weirdly fixating on Taylor Swift and her fans “because she’s a billionaire” while criticizing her more than basically all other billionaires.
I look forward to the day I see a leftist meme reminding me “you can’t love Bruce Springsteen (1.1b) or Jay-Z (2.5b) and still be a leftist.”
Until then, I’m not taking lectures on leftism from people who haven’t deconstructed their own feelings of hatred and superiority towards teenage girls.
Edit: I hope I didn’t come across as angry at you in particular. You don’t seem to be joining in the hypocritical, unnuanced hate.
I made a post about this a while ago! (edit: okay it’s not about this per se but relevant, inspired by Contrapoints’ video about JK Rowling.)
https://lemmy.cafe/post/3014506
remember who your memes give ammo to
PREACH
I’m glad you got a good upvote:downvote ratio for that post. It’s encouraging to know that people are at least willing to listen to a reasonable take on Taylor Swift.
thanks! i actually forgot how successful it was! to be fair, that was back when blahaj zone didn’t federate downvotes so the ratio must be taken with a grain of salt :)
They both got rich and famous with pop music, but Rihanna started making BANK when she made makeup for women of color. Crazy idea right? She noticed a hole in the market and filled it. That’s not talked about as much as entertaining us musically, so Swift is normally brought up before Rihanna. Swift has been touring more recently as well.
Paul McCartney catching strays out here… If anyone should be allowed to live a life of luxury, it’s the surviving members of the fucking Beatles…
Jokes aside, I do see a difference between people who became wealthy through art, than through straight capitalism. It’s still gross, it still shouldn’t exist, it is still a form of capitalism and exploitation, etc. etc., but there are levels to this.
I wouldn’t call her a good billionaire, but I think she’s as benign as billionaires get. At least she does things like pay her employees a good wage and gets people involved in the political process.
And, as far as I know, she isn’t responsible for anyone’s deaths.
I’m sure she still stepped on a lot of necks up the pyramid, but compared to a shit ton of other billionaires out there…
I’d settle for “less bad”. If Musk is a 10/10, she’s an easy 4/10, with the ranking based entirely on arbitrary numbers and few actual facts.
deleted by creator
Posting women as the targets is such easy pickings and it’s so fuckin lazy. Where’s the white guys? Why aren’t they the face of this, since they’re the hand choking the poor?
When your bank balance is higher than the GDP of a small country, gender is irrelevant.
One could also argue that posting a man as a homeless is ignoring countless homeless woman and countless homeless trans people.
One of them just got shot, remember?
Ask yourself how that billionaire was made first
The way every billionaire is made: ruthlessly exploiting the working class.
Not all of them. i wouldn’t call buying a concert ticket exploitation. Pricing them to astronomical heights, yeah. The only person responsible for parting with their moneys is the Self.
This comes up a lot. While Swift might not be able to control concert ticket prices as a whole, she certainly has the influence to make it better. She’s a literal billionaire with a very devout following.
If anyone could hold a concert at a non-ticketmaster venue, it’s her.
If anyone could pay her staff quintuple the going rate, it’s her.
If anyone could lobby cities that hold her concerts accountable for how they treat homeless people, it’s her.
I love Taylor Swift as much as the next person, but she has blood on her hands just like every billionaire. She may be one of the “good” ones but if anyone could afford to do better, it’s her.
And yet, you pay for her priviledge. Is your arm ever sore for the twisting of it?
Ruthless espolitation of the working class and then portected from said working class by armed guards (ploice) and their apparatchik (judical system) , paid for mostly by the working classes.
Ok, so Taylor Swift seems to get the billionaire hate here. I’m wondering, when it comes to successful artists, what’s the opinion on Dolly. She’s not a billlionaire, but she is worth several hundred millions, so it’s close enough. She seems to be beloved by almost everyone.
You leave Dolly the fuck alone.
You hear.
My best friend is her cousin. He still hasn’t introduced me, and if she does before he does I’ll never forgive him.
That said, accumulation of wealth is bad, et cetera. But dolly is the absolute best of what that class can offer.
I like how part of the reason she got super successful is appealing heavily to the working class instead of pretending to be some monolithic impossible “you wish” standard of fame, money, and power, to self-destructively aspire to.
Dolly is based.
The statement about billionaires is true, but also the reasons that people end up living on the streets are extremely complex and I’m not sure this sort of thing helps us actually talk about the real problems.
For instance, a lot of homeless people in the US are foster children who aged out of the care system:
Nationwide, the data show that an estimated 50 percent of the homeless population spent time in foster care.
Money could maybe provide more resources to care for people, but the core issue here is that adults who were foster children lack the support of a family - which no amount of money can fix.
A more useful question to address homelessness would be “why do so many foster children struggle to become self-supporting adults, and what can we do to prevent that?”
if the world weren’t so hostile to normal humans then not having the support of a family would not be as devastating
I’m not sure that I agree… a family is a lot more than a source of economic support. No amount of less hostile world can substitute for the social, cultural, educational or psychological functions of a family, and becoming a self-supporting adult has a lot to do with mental well-being (in addition to the economic aspects).
Maybe if there were less economic pressure overall there would be more functional families and ultimately fewer children in the foster care system… but that’s really just conjecture and I’m not sure how you’d go about trying to support such an argument with research.
I’m also curious how you define “hostile” and “normal humans” in this context.
Money could maybe provide more resources to care for people, but the core issue here is that adults who were foster children lack the support of a family - which no amount of money can fix.
billions in dollars taken from billionaires to help them for a few more years would absolutely help. maybe not all of them, but any that it does help would be well worth it. billionaires don’t need more than one yacht.
That’s so brutal. The foster system is also really strange, from my broad thousand-foot view of it.
Maybe I’m way off base but it feels like some weird dispassionate state shuffle system where kids don’t get a stable family situation, they just get passed around a series of “halfway homes”, develop psychological problems from these constant disruptions in their development because duh, and then suddenly are “of age” and booted out to go work or something. (And likely end up on the street? Shocker!)
(This constant attempt to reinstitute child labor scares me even more in this context)
My wife and I were consulting various sources about adoption. We basically found out adoption is like some weird underground “baby market” that obviously favors the rich, and prices different genetics traits differently. (YEP!)
Directed to the foster system, it sounds like you just end up as a revolving door extension of a failed, undercut, under funded social program that “processes” kids through your house like inmate transfers.
No wonder statistics are so grim! My research suggests to me it was a replacement for the antiquated orphanage system of old but… Sheesh was it really an improvement? (Of the best examples, for the sake of argument, not the worst ones).
All this rabble rabble about abortion being legal or not, but it could be legal again universally, tomorrow, and conservatives wouldn’t have to worry about it actually happening so often if they fixed their freaking obtuse child-as-market-product system. If they actually cared about children, that is. Fat chance they’ll even think of that though.
Sorry I didn’t know this was such a button with me but I hope I added to the conversation LOL. Thanks for your post. <3 So many people are just…invisible. And it’s heartbreaking.
