Idk:)
::shrug:: He could be some sort of events liaison and be in the presence of CEOs, oil shieks, or what have you “regularly”. He might not know them personally but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. What is outside the realm is that he’s chummy enough with them to know that the’re heartless money grubbing douchebags.
I would almost certainly think that billionaires would not be. Most of them I would imagine came from rather humble beginnings and amassed Billions (with a b) through investments coupled with business. Not a lot of trust fund billionaires out there.
I'm not exactly getting where the animosity comes from, Lemur. I don't question that you're acquainted with Bill Gates. Why wouldn't you be? Here's something about these super rich folks ... d'ya know who knows them? Pilots, lawyers, massage therapists, chauffeurs, personal trainers, maids, butlers, mechanics, exotic animal trainers, gurus, priests, rabbis. The list is a lot longer than that. None of these folks are uber-wealthy, but you can bet that the rich guy still talks to his doctor, his nurse, his hooker, his bartender, his chef. It's not that big of a deal.
There's a character in this thread who appears to be so intimidated by the prospect of being familiar with the super-rich that he can't believe a mere mortal who occasionally posts here on SD works in a capacity to hang out with them regularly.
Couple things, American billionaires own homes and apartments all over the world, yes even in Laguna, and oh yes, Newport ... Vegas, too. And foreign billionaires LOVE southern California and love gambling in Vegas ... they own homes in SoCal and visit Vegas regularly. They regularly interact with bodyguards, baccarat dealers, magicians, strippers, actors, singers. They don't stay in subterranean lairs with mute henchmen and white cats.
In my experience, most of them have been A-holes with just a few exceptions. That said, all these folks that I judge to be dickish have hosts of friends that think they’re the salt of the earth. It’s all a matter of opinion.
I agree. Those accounts (or that of the Bangladeshi garment workers burned to death by the fire a while back) are plain horrific and demands reform. 
Getting rich isn’t a zero-sum game-one can create wealth, not just take wealth at the expense of others.
I’m sure that’s why Karzai is never criticizes the US and Iraq still allows a 100,000 American troops. :rolleyes:
If that’s the case, then it has been the case since the beginning of history. While wealth inequality has increased in the last generation in the United States and other First World countries, a large part of it is a product of structural change, while much of the rest can be corrected with strong policies of social reform.
I notice when I debate politics online the capitalists reveal their true, bigoted colors after long enough. I wish they would just be forthright and admit they want slavery back! :smack:
That just means the rich got richer, but not that the poor got poorer. “Unskilled labor” in developed countries represents a small fraction of the populace, not the majority, as was the original claim.
So, yeah, more cites are needed to back up that claim. If you want to make a different claim, that’s fine. But you agreed with DT, and he’s simply wrong.
Just to be clear, this is the post we’re talking about:
Now, “a better life” is certainly subjective, but I don’t think the rest of that is.
I think “better entertainment” is not only debatable, but downright wrong. Justin Bieber is a product of capitalism, remember that. 
There are numerous ways to challenge an unsupported claim. The simplest and most common is to simply note that data is not the plural of anecdote.
However, accusing another poster of lying is not permitted in this forum regardless whether it is a simple denial or a claim that the poster has “fabricated” his claim.
Do not do this again.
[ /Moderating ]
Yeah, but he’s Canadian. If they didn’t have socialized medicine, maybe he would have been an infant mortality statistic.
Well, since you appear to be set on your ideas and I in mine – in fact, living in a Third World nation I see the poor getting poorer quite literally, all around me – I’ll leave it at that. Not much in the mood to do homework for you.
And yes, I wasn’t just agreeing over the US, bur rather on a Global scale.
Enjoy your evening.
PS – Do the rich get richer and the poor get poorer? Literally thousands of sites like that one, explaining and citing their arguments as to why that’s happening. You may, or not, take it from there.
Hahahahaha no, OP. We are going in the other direction.
As scarcity increases pressure on the population, even the level of civil rights enjoyed by the previous generation will come to seem utopian. In the face of massive privation, elites will push the excess population into ruin and into war in the faint hope of holding onto their own comfort.
You can’t repeal the laws of political nature.
…OK, I’d like to be wrong. But with the RCC pushing high birthrates, I’m afraid it’s only getting worse right now.
This was what I was going to say - this is the only way Communisim could actually work in any fashion remotely close to what the hippy-dippy Hipsters would want to experience.
But…
The only way that we can reach that level of advancement is for at least SOME of the rich to “win” - factory workers and dirt farmers don’t invent replicatiors. You want to just roll over and say “tea, Earl Grey, hot” and have it appear? Then somewhere in the belly of that machine are parts invented, made, and sold by some corporations, somewhere.
And let’s not get into the whole “well once you have ONE replicator, you can make as many more as you want” argument. Even then, someone will have control over the power that runs them, and so at the very least you’ll still have someone at the top of the pyramid selling you the power for you to enjoy your miraculously produced morning spliff.
So in the far future of near-Communistic bliss, those who have the power will have the Power.
No, no, no - we don’t want slavery back - we just want all of you to die.
Red Fury, while yes the world is getting poorer, I was asking for cites/explanation that the US in general is worse off today than 20 years ago. As a quick and dirty, here’s median household income, with inflation adjusted:
In the spirit of this thread, to throw a claim that we’re worse off today than 20 years ago, it has to be pertinent. A global trend makes it hard to say what the cause is, and that just because we’re on a downward spiral, it doesn’t mean that a worldwide communism is going to bring it to an uptick.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, do you have convincing arguments that for most Americans, life today is worse than it was 20 years ago (note, most. not some). Or if you had convincing arguments that for citizen X of country X, the benefit of widespread communism makes it a better system.
I don’t think this just a matter of differing opinions, but of looking at actual data vs anecdotes. Look at Infant Mortality over the last 50 or so years:
Assume that is a typo and “in” should be “by”. IMR correlates well with all sorts of other quality of life indicators, and it is simply unarguable that it has been on a steep decline. Sure, you can find areas that are worse off today than they were in the past, but the overall global trend is improving, not getting worse.
Further, if you look at life expectancy, you can see that it is highly correlated with per capita GDP and world-wide GDP has been on a positive growth trend for decades
All you need to do is look at the per capita GDP of China and India, and you’ve got a good chunk of the world covered right there. Are you thinking that their per capita GDP is less now than it was 50 years ago?
I think you are confusing the idea that life is still crappy for a lot of people in the world with the fact that it used to be a LOT crappier.
And the fact that the gap between the very rich and the rest of us is getting bigger doesn;t actually make other worse off.
I think capitalists give capitalism the credit that development deserves. Also keep in mind that prior to the Age of Neoliberalism (1991ish to the present) the lot of the world’s poor was improving faster than it is now.
Not only that but some regions, most notably Africa and the former USSR are actually worse off today than they were in the 1970s and 1980s. The improvement in Asia is very real, but also highly qualified. It wasn’t brought to them by a lassiez-faire market policy either, the “capitalism” of China still has a very large state involvement.
Please. You want to compare the Chinese economy of the Mao era vs modern China in terms of state involvement? It’s day and night. The presence of state involvement does not mean that they get to share the credit of capitalistic gains. In fact, the deregulation under Deng is widely acknowledged as the sole reason of the current economic boom.
Even Leninists acknowledged the role of capitalism in economic development as the better policy and that a requisite amount of industrialization through capitalism is required before socialism can slide in and take the reins.
You get rich by luck, ruthlessness and by having the right connections, not by being nice. And it’s unlikely that a rich person will come from humble beginnings; the rich get richer, the poor get poorer. Being born into the “right” family is important.
Except that under capitalism the people who create wealth don’t profit from it; the people with capital do.
We gave up after the Iraqis demonstrated that they weren’t going to roll over in submission like we wanted.
Capitalism is anti-social reform. The ultimate goal of any good capitalist is a society of masters, slaves, and forced consumers. They want goods produced at a minimal cost for themselves, to be sold to people who have to buy them at the price the capitalists demands. Company towns and slave plantations and the like. And the “structural change” in question is the rich diverting more and more wealth to themselves and making themselves more and more above the law.
Or, in such a society the government can simply provide the energy and basic feedstock for the replicators. It’s not like classic communism where the sheer complexity of running an economy was too much for a government to handle well; rationing out energy and a few feedstocks is far simpler.