So they agree the universe has abundant resources and the ultra wealthy on earth are just resource hoarders who don’t want to share those resources which directly causes poverty.
We should take all of the world’s billionaires, load them into Bezos’ dick rocket and send them in the general direction of this asteroid.
I have to think of ‘don’t look up’ now.
Which is the exact reason why a free base income just increases the prices, devaluates the currency, increasing the inflation rate, making every other currency more expensive. So you only lose.
If standard of living was only about hard assets, sure. But human work is a big part of modern economies, and a free base income lets more people pay others for services. It takes time for entrepreneurial-minded people to spin up businesses and grow the economy to absorb the increased income, but done in a thoughtful ramped manner, cash payments have net positive effects.
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There is probably some irony in the artist rendered likeness resembling a double siloed Death star.
Not iron, it’s gold.
Just because the asteroid is quite goldy doesn’t mean it cant be irony too.
That’s no moon.
US quintillions or European quintillion?
And it’s all yours 😊
I hope palladium and other PGM become worthless so catalyst converters are ok to own
You just want to keep your stolen converters ;)
Convert Deez nuts
Making everyone on earth richer is how it’s supposed to work. Not like millionaires, more in the sense that gold is a resource that requires us to ration it in a sense, and we would be able to use the cheaper gold to make all lives better.
That an influx of gold wouldn’t do this is an indictment on our economic system.
It would make gold cheaper and more abundant for sure. But that doesn’t really mean too much. Slightly cheaper electronics, much cheaper gold jewelry, and Trump can build an entire tower out of gold if he wants I guess. Gold is important, but suddenly having an order of magnitude more wouldn’t mean we’re all an order of magnitude better off.
But really someone pointed out that only part of that asteroid is gold and the total value was calculated using the value of all the different metals in there. Iron (boring, it’s not THAT expensive as is), iridium (quite important for electronics), etc. If we managed to bring that whole asteroid into orbit and actually share the spoils equally between nations, a lot of different things would be slightly cheaper to manufacture. Not sure the effect would be too noticeable in the end though. We have a tendency to manufacture more shit than we need so cheaper materials would just facilitate that.
Everyone being a billionaire is the same as no one being a billionaire.
Like I told the VP who marked every single email as High Importance…when everything is important, nothing is important
Gold actually is worthless but humanity has decided it has value. Whats actually valuable is food, water, housing, mental peace, low stress, moral standards etc.
Gold is an extremely useful metal, WTF are you talking about? Despite its artificially high cost, it still gets regularly used in industrial applications. If it had a more reasonable price, it would be used a ton
It’s a good conductor, doesn’t corrode easily.
It was also used in medical implants, since it’s a pretty inert material ( was, because nowadays there are better biocompatible materials).
Gold is a actually extremely useful, and has a ton of practical applications where it’s not used because of cost.
Yeah it’s super useful for semiconductors
Plot twist asteroid density so low you try and throw a net around it and the whole thing dissipates into trace minerals
Gold price would lower until it’s the same price as it costs to mine and bring it to earth, if that’s at all lower than whatever it’s currently.
Not if I get to it first
And that’s exactly what every billionaire is thinking.
godspeed brownsugga
On all that is Holy. That would be a helluvah strong astronaut name. I’d be like, “That’s my astronaut.”
Blessings to you
Everyone “being a billionaire” and having a huge pile of worthless metal won’t increase anyone’s standard of living to the same degree as nobody being a billionaire and nobody hoarding resources.
Yep, we’d just end up like Zimbabwe was. Where a loaf of bread costed trillions or whatever
will there be advantages for daily life if gold is trivially affordable? probably, it’s a good material for many applications. and is extremely rust resistant.
Coating all exposed metals with gold would be trivial.
[Skip a few paragraphs of technical world building. ]
it’ll be an increments tech step without any changes in inequality and a minor change in the public quality of life.
I think it’d be more than incremental. Any place used use copper could likely have the gold upgrade. That’s all your wiring in your house and the EV market, maybe plumbing, heat pumps, and electronics too.
The headache would be all the power grabs (durrr it landed near my country so it’s mine) and the capitalist machine taking forever for the means of manufacturing to lower the cost of finished goods via genuine competition.
I miss being naive and thinking “technology will save us”. But technology advancement without social progress only leads to the entrenchment of unjust systems.
All those tech and infrastructure sectors will improve, but whatever possible quality of life improvement will be compensated by worse socioeconomic divide.
I’m tempted to tell about a science fiction book where that happens (not with gold asteroids but other tech) I’m currently writing that chapter, although the metaphor in my version is more obvious: Its a generation oNeil cylinder in a multicentury journey, originally set as a solarpunk utopia, it has degraded after a century and now they have heavy industries sapping energy that was meant for lighting and heating. That results in regular frosts and the poor struggling while those who can afford it can get electric heating (sapping more energy). The individualistic solution works for an individual but makes things worse for all and only benefits those wealthy who live in another part of the cylinder that’s unaffected by the energy drain.
I take your point that tech advancement without social progress can go awry. Automation replacing jobs at too rapid a pace feels like a very real threat to me right now. Maybe I’m biased by the last century where tech either lessened inequality or at least raised the standard of living for everyone, even if disproportionately applied across the population.
But yeah since tech advancement is accelerating, it seems more likely society will be unable to keep up.
it’s insane, how automation is a threat. under and sane society it’ll be seen as a good thing. why do those things if we don’t have to… wait, we set up our entire civilization so individual productivity is tied to your inherent right to life? WHY TF DID WE DO THAT??? just so the most unproductive people can cheat the system and live like gods.
I haven’t decided yet where I am on the spectrum between “zero obligation to work = utopia” and “humans need to have something to do”. But you made me chuckle sardonically at the realization that people living off dividends and interest are functionally the same as a welfare queen.
that’s what the “economy” means in politics.
whenever they say who’s good for the economy, or what they’ll do for the economy.
they are saying to the dividend elite that they’ll sacrifice the public welfare for the rich people’s welfare.
that’s why they want “number go up” and don’t care about the public
If you coat steel with gold and there is even the tiniest scratch/void/… it will extremely accelerate the rusting. Galvanic corrosion is no joke. That’s why you use zinc for the job.
True… There are lots of billionaires in Venezuela, Zimbabwe, and Argentina
It’s funny that people can understand every person having a lump of gold won’t improve their standard of living, but at the same time refuse to understand that owning a piece of a factory or a company they work at also does not directly change the standard of living. Reducing the fraction of the factory output that goes to the owners instead of the workers could. This can be done directly with raising the minimum wage or indirectly via taxes. But in the end, even the most pessimistic calculation I was able to make on how much the owners take was only about 50% of the output. Probably more like 30%.
So the billionaires owning too much is IMO a distraction. Pushing politicians to implement policies that would improve quality of life would have much bigger impact on peoples lives. Consumer protections, walkable cities, good public healthcare, social safety nets, better education, reforming how stock market works, … And it does not involve the massive risks of trying to switch to a differwnt economic model that always collapsed before.
Perhaps it’s the modern obsession with fairness. People don’t want to even consider that in reality they may have better quality of life in an unfair system (where billionaire kids get everything on silver platter) than in a fair system. Because in reality, system change, fending off corruption, laziness, authoritarianism, etc. have large costs.
owning a piece of a factory or a company they work at also does not directly change the standard of living. Reducing the fraction of the factory output that goes to the owners instead of the workers could.
Would workers owning the company not reduce this fraction to zero?
It would. Eliminating the HR would reduce the overhead from HR to zero. Eliminating the tax office would reduce money spent on that to zero. But these things fulfill a function. Could it be done better? Maybe. But why risk on maybes when that’s not the biggest problem we have with society at all. Not even in the top 10 if you ask me.
The people just getting paid just for owning something don’t seem to be contributing anything useful, and they’re using that wealth to make bad long-term decisions on our behalf. We can’t fix all the other stuff without the power to do so.
You know, there is nothing wrong with not knowing how investments and markets (stock, commodity, …) help direct the economy. It’s a complex topic that most people really don’t need to understand for their lives. But confidently claiming they do nothing just because you don’t know is ridiculous…
That’s the bad long-term decisions I’m talking about. They are currently directing the economy to end the world.
I am pretty sure what you are trying to talk about is called negative externalities. A negative externality is simply put a cost (harm) that a company inflicts on others and does not have to “pay for” itself. E.g. destroying the environment. The issue is that negative externalities don’t just apply to companies and capitalism. They are also what turns communist revolutions into authoritarian regimes. Dealing with them (or realistically minimizing their impact) is an incredibly complex subject. Trying to say we should solve it by getting rid of billionaires is like saying we should solve global warming by dropping ice cubes into the ocean.
Lmfao the billionaires are why we can’t have nice things, they put their finger on the scale all the time for their own benefit.
Why do we even need owners in the first place? We don’t need to be beholden to the borgeousie and have a class that owns the means of production and gets rich off the labor of others while all they have to do is spend their money and not do any work.
Like employee owned businesses can be a thing.
It’s not like we’d have to upend our whole society, just change how employees are compensated, give them some equity in the company they work for and bring up individual incomes. Also tax the ever loving fuck out of profits (or revenue it’s arguable which is better) after a certain threshold so the only way to get more money is to reinvest and grow the business. Same with individual wealth taxes.
Nobody needs to be a billionaire. Companies don’t need to constantly push their profit up quarter after quarter. We don’t need to be beholden to the shareholders just because they have a bunch of money and own stock, we should be the shareholders ourselves.
We need solutions to issues like capital allocation, keeping money circulation speed relatively constant and many many more. Capitalism is one solution to these problems. Perhaps not the best one, but the only one we know can work.
You say that like we’re not trying to push politicians for walkable cities and healthcare and still market reforms. Guess who hates all that stuff?
Because they are not gonna hate losing their ownership of the companies even more? Like it’s still significantly easier to push for reforms than completely toppling the economic system.
I don’t think we need to topple the system to make progress. But they can’t keep that wealth and power if we intend to live in a better world. Letting rich people write policy is a bit like letting the fox guard the henhouse. I’m not saying off with their heads, but we should set a practical cap on how much one person can own and at a minimum overturn Citizens United.
I am skeptical about a cap, but the rest is definitely true. Letting them have too much influence on policy is the issue.
