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this post was submitted on 27 Jan 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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“Absolute power corrupts absolutely”
Financial obesity is an existential threat to any society that tolerates it, and needs to cease being celebrated, rewarded, and positioned as an aspirational goal.
Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.
Class conflict is a problem for much of human existence.
don't underestimate the misery caused by idiopathic disease.
“The Earth is not dying, it is being killed, and those who are killing it have names and addresses.”
Utah Phillips
The deaths from climate change related Ice storms, floods, fires, heat waves and droughts are not due to "catastrophes", or "disasters" they are calculated, premeditated murders for profit.
BINGO, SUMMED-UP The World on Capitalism!
Hunting billionaires for sport would make the world immeasurably better in every way
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They are the symptoms, not the disease. Capitalism will always create them on a long enough timeline. It is streamlined feudalism.
If you have any type of head start under capitalism, for any reason, regardless if everyone profits, those who initially profited a little more will profit exponentially more at an exponential rate as time goes by.
The claim is that under capitalism, everybody is better off. But if they earn 1.1 times as much as you do, as the years turn into decades into centuries, you will have earned a fraction of what they did. That difference matters a lot, especially at scale.
If I get $1 and you get $100, that's a big difference between us, but not life changing for either.
If I get $1000 and you get $100000, that is a massive difference between us, trivial for me, definitely significant for you.
If I have $100000 and you have $10000000, we might as well live on different planets.
Capitalism doesn't take this into consideration. Sorry for the somewhat juvenile example, I'm very tired, and am going to have another drink now.
Why would a wealth tax not fix this?
Because if wealth is power, then wealth will not want to pay taxes, so it would wield its wealth as a weapon so as to assure that it wouldn't. See? Taxes are laws. Capital is above the law. Can the law be enforced? If so, then yes, it would fix this. Unfortunately, a legal and democratic system cannot withstand the force of capital- which, incidentally, is also an agreement. It's only as long as we play the game and let us be duped by it that this goes on, that's why the power remains with the people. If we withdraw, it all collapses.
True human unity and cooperation transcends all arbitrary systems of government, democratic or other.
I think we are on the same page, to be honest.
My point is: the power should be with the people, as you said. Capital creates power. So let’s use a wealth tax to distribute it back to the people (and improve their living standards, drastically, while we are at it).
Your example isn’t bad. You could go further. 1,000,000 vs 1,000,000,000. Massive difference.
The problem is when we live in a world when we have millions of people with less than $1,000, and others have more than $300,000,000,000.
Here's another problematic aspect of the same-
In 1913 there were 435 representatives in Congress. The population of the United States was ~97 million.
In 2026 there are still 435 representatives. The population is about ~335 million.
In 1913 each representative spoke for roughly 223,000 people.
In 2026 each representative speaks for roughly 770,000 people.
In 1789 there were 65 representatives, and about 4 million people, speaking for ~60,500 people each.
Scale matters, a lot.
I think of giant monsters. Kaiju.
A normal ant is no problem. An ant the size of a skyscraper is a problem.
Money is the size here. A human with a billion dollars is a giant monster kaiju.
It ain't the species it's the size.
And even more importantly, you have to figure out what is causing the ants to grow that big in the first place. There are billions of ants on the planet. Killing the couple giant ones does nothing if other ants can just grow to the same size.
That's a really good analogy. Thank you very much for that.
Power, not just money, power in too few hands. Getting there also tends to require extreme selfishness, which only makes it worse for everyone else when the most selfish acquire said power. Democracy was supposed to disperse power across the community to explicitly prevent concentrations of power.
Money results in having power, wether you use it or not/Privilege (SP?) given people with more money over people with less money .
Power is owned by Capital. Capital is owned by Violence.
Power is owned by Capital. Capital is owned by Violence.
Yes, power is owned Capital/wealth, But no has power in Capitalist system without wealth/money, just a fact. So no way is Wealth/money owned by violence. Perfect example is the political history of The 1st World, especially USA & even happening with ‘The Crazy Don’s ‘Mob Enforcers’. Violence is owned by all, but Privileged, like government forces with authorities, get away with violence.
Yes. We're well aware.
They that will be rich fall into temptation and a snare, and into many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown men in destruction and perdition.
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On climate change, I gotta disagree. We have two major drivers of climate change: Greenhouse gas emissions, and land-use changes. The land-use changes go way back. We're in the geological epoch called the Anthropocene, one in which humanity is the dominant force in shaping the biosphere. There's some debate about it, but some scientists place the beginning of the Anthropocene as much as 15,000 years ago, driven by habitat destruction and resource extraction to support growing human populations. It takes a lot of natural resources to support each human to the standard to which we've become accustomed, and even the poor people in Western countries live a lifestyle that the Earth cannot sustain. It's not just billionaires, it's all of us.
Similarly with fossil fuels. We know that a handful of mega-corporations produce the fossil fuels responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas releases, but they're not the ones releasing the gases. We can't just abolish them and expect nothing to change about our daily lives. We've reached a point at which even working class people in the United States can order up a taxi for their beef burrito.
Instead, we can say that this wanton shredding of our natural inheritance enables flows of wealth that allow unscrupulous hands to skim criminal quantities off the top for their hoards. Even if we depose them, though, we'd still have the climate change problem to tackle.
If we depose them, we'd have access to their wealth to tackle climate change. And it wouldn't be for building the doomsday bunkers they are now.
Zuckerberg spent nearly $400 million for a bunker to be built in Hawaii. This was after Hawaii had fires that cost them nearly a billion in damages.
Zucks $400 million purchase could have repaired half the nation-state. It would have immediately improved ecological recovery, and restore the canopy biome that helps pull C02 from the air as a natural deterent to Climate change. He'd then have most of the population worshipping him for doing so. Likely welcoming him anywhere in the state he'd want to visit.
Instead he can now visit his bunker, needs it because the island hates him, and helped contribute to ecological collapse in building it.
The problem is that billionaires are the worst humans imaginable to have such wealth. It will always go towards cthe acceleration of climate collapse for their benefit instead of preventing it. Whether you feel they're a contributor or not, they're still in charge of the resources that could easily stop climate change faster than any other mechanism on the planet.
Instead they're building bunkers with that money to run from the problems they've actively contributed to more than any other human on the planet.
One of the most carbon intensive things someone can do, especially in the developed world, is to have a kid.
If money was more equally distributed more people would have more kids.
So really the billionaires are helping with climate change.
/s
Or more to the point; money is the problem. Currencies are useful tokens that make trade more convenient. But systems have been built around the simple concept of a trade token that a person can have power over others by just having a bigger number.
But it's just a number. Most of the time a number that doesn't even represent anything real or physical. Just a number of a hypothetical thing(s) that has a certain hypothetical value because someone said so.
Money is not the problem. Money is being used to translate the value of the real resources that the Uber rich hold.
They don’t hoard money. They hoard companies, houses, stocks, bonds, debt.
When you work to create a surplus? It goes to them. When you pay your landlord? It goes to them. When you pay taxes? Believe it or not, it also goes to them through the form of interest debt.
You gotta weed that shit out at the root. Tax wealth not work.
Debt is not a real resource, it's a complete fabrication, and all the richest people have a value that doesn't exist in real world resources, rather a perceived agreed upon value of what their assets might cost, based on the vague idea that it will appreciate in value in the future, and the debt cycle that may continue printing money for banks.
So most money isn't based on anything. And the value of currency these days is entirely fiat.
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