this post was submitted on 03 Aug 2025
846 points (99.0% liked)

A Boring Dystopia

13285 readers
2044 users here now

Pictures, Videos, Articles showing just how boring it is to live in a dystopic society, or with signs of a dystopic society.

Rules (Subject to Change)

--Be a Decent Human Being

--Posting news articles: include the source name and exact title from article in your post title

--If a picture is just a screenshot of an article, link the article

--If a video's content isn't clear from title, write a short summary so people know what it's about.

--Posts must have something to do with the topic

--Zero tolerance for Racism/Sexism/Ableism/etc.

--No NSFW content

--Abide by the rules of lemmy.world

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Now I need to do the math on space karen/ henery ford 2.0 aka Mr my autism makes me prone to outbursts of fascist apologia.

I did the math recently and if you took the assets of the wealthiest 1% and divided only half of it amongst the remaining 336.3 million Americans it would be a check of approximately 68,000 for every man woman and child and those bloated blood sucking leaches would still have an average remainder of just under 6 million dollars each.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] humanspiral@lemmy.ca 3 points 9 hours ago

cooperatively owned

This usually means employee, or sometimes, customer owned. You described fair taxation and UBI/freedom dividends instead.

What needs to be nationalized with 99% shareholder dillution and zero compensation in the US is oil, weapons companies on the basis of their warmongering lobbying, and other zionist first rule over America media and political funding terrorists.

UBI is first and foremost power redistribution. The wealthy stay wealthy, and through economic growth and faster money multiplier, get even richer even at higher tax rates.

[–] splonglo@lemmy.world 6 points 16 hours ago

Some people who don't know any better would say that poor Jeff innovated the world into a better place by inventing Amazon, that he's being justly rewarded by the free market.

But Amazon became so successful because it killed off all of it's competitors - not through a better service, but using investor capital to artifically lower it's prices, systematically targeting it's rivals and taking them over.

Amazon is so profitable because it has killed the market and replaced it with itself, and the tech giants and uber and so on are doing exactly the same thing.

So turn it into a co-op, let it's workers decide if they can piss on the clock or not. Give it's sellers a say in whether they want to pay 40% markup and hidden fees to get pushed to the top of front page. Amazon abuses workers, businesses and the market - this is a great solution to a problem that everyone ought to have, regardless of politics.

[–] boaratio@lemmy.world 16 points 23 hours ago

The Behind the Bastards episode about him is really mind blowing. Like, he sucks way more than you could ever imagine. When I was in college, Amazon was the company that you could get used textbooks from. Now they're the default web shopping platform.

[–] LordWiggle@lemmy.world 2 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago)

That's impossible. Because a bonus that much would mean there would be a lot of taxes paid, and that goes against Bezos his principles.

[–] elucubra@sopuli.xyz 21 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Anybody saying that co-ops don't work or whatever should check Mondragon which thrives in thoroughly capitalist Spain.

[–] cute_noker@feddit.dk 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (1 children)

The consumers have to use their brain when they use their money. Cooperatives are very big in Denmark.

[–] ExploitedAmerican@lemmy.world 1 points 10 hours ago

Unfortunately Americans using their brain when they purchase something means they are looking to maximize their quality to cost ratio. I do this all the time when shopping for automotive tools. Lots of companies sell what is more or less the same exact quality product made by the same exact manufacturer. And if you peruse amazon(so hard not to even send traffic their way) you will find the same item sold by say matco, cornwell, mac or bluepoint rebranded in different packaging for 15-25% the price asked by those other high end brands. And in some instances i have seem people open up the product and find it is packaged with the more expensive brand name logo on it. So when 50% of Americans earn $42,200/year($20.29/hr) or less and when you remove the highest earning 10% from the data set then the average wage in the USA is $58,000 ($28/hr) American’s known only one way to shop smart and that is look for the best deal and ignore the ethical implications because most of us can not afford to figure this into our shopping habits.

And this is compounded even more so by the reality that us yankees are being lied to by the financial institutions at the helm of our societal machinery. Inflation statistics are wildly skewed to reduce the possibility of the working class rioting and fomenting a revolution so the passive income stream for the ultra wealthy will continue to flow.

The world bank and international monetary fund who’s inflation calculations are regurgitated to us hu the FED and all of Wall Street- they use consumer price index to figure inflation statistics and CPI is flawed in multiple ways but the most important of them being that CPI does not account for the devaluation of a currency due to the increase in circulating currency supply as well as leveraged national debt/ deficit, and these 2 factors are the primary driving force of inflation. And if you even mention the fact that the price of gold foes account for those two factors then youre called ridiculous and a few will try to spew out a ton of nonsensical economics information at you but all you need to know is that in the 172 years of the US dollar as a standardized currency the price of gold only fluctuated ≈95% from $18 to $35 (and the bulk of that was when FDR had to take drastic measures to save the economy after wall street malfeasance that caused the Great Depression which was mild in comparison to the last 40 years of fraud by wall street so FDR made it illegal to hoard gold and bought up the majority of the supply at $20.67/ounce to store in the newly built fort knox and when his administration was certain they had the majority of the supply they revalued gold wt $35/ounce where it remained until nixon ended the gold standard permanently in 1971 by withdrawing from the bretton woods agreement) but since nixon ended the gold standard permanently 54 years ago the value of gold has increased in direct proportion to the national debt going from $35 to $3400/ounce or ≈9600% compared to the national debt increasing from $400 billion to 37.3 trillion ≈9400% in the same exact time frame.

So this is why the silent generation l, boomers and most of Gen x had it so well. Why my grandfather was able to buy a house in 1955 just 5 years after coming to the usa at the age of 18 on a minimum wage salary in an Ivy League college town for less than $3000 but today federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised in going on 17 years and average rent for a 2 bedroom apartment in the same city is now $3000/ month if you go outside the city its $2200-2500 depending on your standards but the reality is that it cost more to purchase and maintain enslaved people during chattel slavery some 170+ years ago than minimum wage workers anywhere in the Usa are currently paid today. We are slaves convinced of an illusory freedom. Mainly through the eradication of high education standards that were the norm after the Great Depression up until the end of the civil rights movement Fascism has creeped into sociopolitical system and taken a strong foot hold while using digital medial to effectively disburse propaganda and condition many to support ideas against their own self interest and simultaneously believe what is in the better interest of the working class is evil and foolish. Things couldn’t be more upside down than they are now.

[–] skisnow@lemmy.ca 55 points 1 day ago

I got into an argument years ago with someone who appeared to start on the conclusion that co-operatives must be bad and tried to work backwards from there.

There was this notion that it was somehow unfair for one delivery driver to earn $1,000,000 and another to earn $10,000 just because they worked for different companies, since it was mostly the efforts of other people in the company that gave it its value. He wasn't able to then take the tiny extra step required to apply the same logic to CEOs and shareholders.

I realized there's a kind of proximity bias; billionaires are so far removed from our lives that we just accept their existence as part of how the world works, whereas if a regular employee like us is getting something we're not then the jealousy becomes palpable. It's the same thing that drives hatred towards minorities and immigrants.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 66 points 1 day ago (3 children)

He’d have to give them this as equity in the company, he’s not liquid for that amount. None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have.

This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho

[–] ImplyingImplications@lemmy.ca 55 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Musk paid $44 billion in cash for Twitter. Billionaires only have wealth on paper until they want to buy a company, then magically they have the cash.

[–] phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 points 18 hours ago

Yeah and a lot of that came from other investors

Other investors that will be coming to look for their investment money

[–] DogWater@lemmy.world 3 points 19 hours ago

https://youtube.com/shorts/J3UVMlDUFkc

https://youtu.be/J3UVMlDUFkc

https://youtu.be/LpgNHaCuu44

You need this guy on YouTube. He's excellent at shedding light on this stuff. He has stuff for lobbying, aipac, billionaires, rfk, private equity, and more

[–] dohpaz42@lemmy.world 25 points 1 day ago (1 children)

It’s my understanding that Musk borrowed heavily from investors for that cash.

[–] David_Eight@lemmy.world 16 points 1 day ago

Buy, Borrow, Die strategy.

  1. Buy something that potentially increases in value (real estate, companies, stock etc)

  2. Borrow money against the appreciated value of step 1, this borrowing in not taxable.

  3. Die and leave assets to whoever and never pay tax on the assets.

[–] oppy1984@lemdro.id 11 points 1 day ago

It's called leveraged borrowing, it's how the billionaire class pays for things. The banks typically give them super low rates and generous terms on these types of loans.

So what Elon did was took a loan against his assets, Tesla stock, at a low APR with very loose repayment terms, then paired that with money pledged by a few other minority investors and that's how he was able to quickly come up with 44 billion to buy Twitter.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] Viking_Hippie@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 points 1 day ago (5 children)

he’s not liquid

Who gives a fuck? Wealth is wealth and his equity is his security for the low to zero interest loans from where all his spending money comes.

None of the “richest Americans” have near the amount of wealth they appear to have

Again, yes they do. Illiquid wealth is still wealth and is the basis of rich people getting to spend as much as they want with little to no risk compared to people who DON'T have a dragon's hoard in stock for the above infinite money exploit to work.

This is what people mean when they say workers should own the means of production tho

Nah, when people say that workers should own the means of production, they're talking about ACTUAL ownership, not bonuses from the owner.

load more comments (5 replies)
[–] Cethin@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's not really how that works. Sure, it isn't liquid, but you can still borrow against it, and you don't pay tax in this like you would if you sell. That's how the wealthy can still buy things without having to pay any reasonable amount of tax.

[–] ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.com 8 points 1 day ago

And if amazon gave their employees stock options (like they did at one point) the employees could also borrow against it. But amazon stopped doing that once they reached a point where their employees were impacting their bottom line. They now rob their employees of that option to entrench wealth amongst the elite

[–] Rhaedas@fedia.io 24 points 1 day ago

You could just use the top .1% and not drop that figure much. The differences as you go up are huge.

Going by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis the 1% are valued at ~49 Trillion works out to be ~$145k per person. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WFRBLT01026

[–] fubarx@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago
[–] Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca 15 points 1 day ago

So that was 5 years ago. Which means he could give them all a $20,000 annual raise and still be making money.

[–] unrealizedrealities@kbin.melroy.org 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

What was that thing about the band in 'Restaurant at the End of the Universe' being so so unbelievably wealthy that the accountants prove that space/time is not just curved, it is warped, please internet tell me i'm not insane?

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] Proprietary_Blend@lemmy.world 13 points 1 day ago

Will that keep them from parking like assholes?

[–] Trainguyrom@reddthat.com -1 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago) (2 children)

I did the math recently and if you took the assets of the wealthiest 1% and divided only half of it amongst the remaining 336.3 million Americans it would be a check of approximately 68,000 for every man woman and child and those bloated blood sucking leaches would still have an average remainder of just under 6 million dollars each.

I think you're math lost an order of magnitude somewhere in there. Quite a few billionaires increased their wealth by 10s of billions of dollars in 2024 alone. 336 million is a bit less than 1/3 of a billion. If you just took 1 billion dollars from Bezos for example, and distributed that to all Americans you'd have an economic disaster from the sudden shock of every single American becoming a multi-millionaire overnight and Bezos would still be wealthy as fuck and making more money in a day than anyone could dream of

Tax. the. rich. When billionaires can increase their wealth by hundreds of billions of dollars per year, there is no reason for anyone to be poor. Hell, lets imagine a conservative 30% tax on wealth gains over a billion dollars. That's hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into the government every single year. Universal healthcare, free university tuition, and UBI all paid for with plenty leftover for ambitious megaprojects like reconnecting the entire country to passenger rail services. Anyone who says the government can't pay for shit that will help the 99% is ignoring the amount of wealth that exists.

[–] Bubs12@lemmy.cafe 8 points 16 hours ago

I don’t follow. $1B/336M people is about $3/each.

[–] ExploitedAmerican@lemmy.world 6 points 16 hours ago

I think you have misread what I said.

The richest 1% (3.4 million people) own 44.6 trillion. Half of that is 22.3 trillion so 22,300,000,000,000 divided by 336.6 million (336,600,000) and you're left with $66,646.74 now take the other half and divide it up amongst the 3.4 million richest 1% of Americans and they are left with $6,558,823.53 each

load more comments
view more: next ›