this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2024
525 points (99.8% liked)

World News

32509 readers
719 users here now

News from around the world!

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

I guess even as a billionaire, the difference between your first 50 billion and your second 50 billion is that with your second you can make frivolous purchases of social media companies without going back to being poor.

It's still bullshit in the big picture of history.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Yeah, it's a continuous scale, which is something people miss sometimes. When you talk to people with millions of dollars they have a tendency to say they're not that rich, and point to some guy they know with tens of millions. They're not wrong per se even if they're dangerously out of touch; that extra digit changes a lot.

The bullshit is just that that scale goes way, way too high, as well as way too low. Human ability is normally distributed, and human worth is often held to be inalienably equal. Wealth follows a completely different distribution, for reasons.