• AllNewTypeFace@leminal.space
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    6 days ago

    You can have more yachts, jets and homes than you know what to do with with well less than a billion, to the point where acquiring new ones becomes a cognitive burden (“which yacht did I leave that on?”), so you hire people to manage your status symbols, and they become more of a token than a source of joy.

    Beyond a certain point (perhaps in the tens of millions, perhaps in the low hundreds), it becomes impossible to spend your wealth on your own desires and joys, and the only uses of it are to jockey for status by wasting it on impractical things (“the other guy just bought a 1km-long yacht, I’d better buy a 1.5km one. Can’t let him outdo me”) or, by buying up labour and political decision-making, diverting society’s efforts from objectives thrashed out by its members (however imperfectly) to your own fantasy projects.

  • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    7 days ago

    I doubt people care about the difference

    Most people see it as: Owns yacht = bad

    50 yachts or 1, its the same.

    The top 0.1% definitely are gonna toss the rest of the 1% to the wolves.

  • ceenote@lemmy.world
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    7 days ago

    But then they’ll have to deal with no longer being in the top category of person. Simple peasants like us can’t even imagine the magnitude of that suffering.

  • WhatSay@slrpnk.net
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    7 days ago

    … There aren’t middle class billionaires, there’s barely a middle class because of billionaires.