this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2024
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Removing one billionaire will do more good for the planet than anything a regular individual can do
That should not stop you from trying. You, and everyone else in this thread for that matter, just drop excuses. Either you guys finally start removing some billionaires, I'm all for that, or you start doing the little things. Ideally, just do both.
Yeah it shouldn't be an excuse. Sure the billionaires are terrible per person compared to a regular person. But they are still a minority. Most of the air traffic is regular folk traveling for work or fun. And freight being hauled by plane or trucks because of all the useless stuff people buy. Most of the cars driving every day are regular folk. By far the worst thing are cruise ships, dumping out huge amounts of pollution just for people to go on holiday.
Billionaires are terrible and should not be allowed to exist as they do today. But it isn't a reason not to do something yourself. If enough people do it, it will make an impact.
I mean, I still try to do all these things.
But I still don't really believe anything I do makes any real difference, because my individual impact is pretty much zero when compared to billionaires and corpos.
Can the students asking this remove billionaires? (Without going to prison)
No, so whats your point? They want to do something. Telling them to not do things because those things are less significant than other things that could theoretically be done is nihilistic.
If a building is burning, and all you have is a thimble of water, whats the point?
someone else might also have a thimble! then you two can feel smug together.
smug? where in my comment am I being smug
i didn't think you were, I'm lampooning people who think their thimble is meaningful.
Not really. You have to remove the companies that made them a billionaire or they'll just be replaced.
Drug trade has shown: even if you remove the company, as long as demand is there, another supplier/company will pop up.
I think this is why the OP mentioned buy less stuff and travel less, these two directly reduce the demand for environmentally harmful goods and services, reducing the ecological impact of the companies which issue the shares that make the billionaires in question billionaires.
It's kinda disappointing to see a post about good actionable advice to do the best you can to reduce climate change and the first reply on Lemmy is non actionable (and more controversially; to my mind irrelevant) advice to assassinate billionaires.
What's non actionable about it? Its just a different perspective is all.
Sort of. There have been major shortages before and sometimes you can't do anything about a lack of supply. Buying drugs is still a localized thing apart from the darknet.
I dont think that you can reduce something like that to simple supply and demand though since it creates mental and physical dependencies in a lot of cases.
So remove the demand by instituting a properly managed state industry that provides the service in a sustainable way
At a minimum (and something achievable in the very short term), regulations and the enforcement to go with it.
prove it
Prove that wealth doesn't just poof out of existence when the owner dies?
prove that another billionaire would take their place. this is a serious hypothesis that we can test, but the conclusion is not foregone.
Someone inherits their wealth. You realize this, right?
please run the experiment with a sufficient sample size and let me know the results.
No.
ok well if you don't have any evidence I'm going to dismiss your conclusion.
I'm not providing anything because the fact that inheritances exist isn't something that requires a peer reviewed study.
But you know this since you're being intentionally obtuse.
your assertion isn't that inheritances exist, but that removing billionaires will result in more billionaires continuing the destruction of the planet. there is no evidence for this, since billionaire removal has not been tested.
The people who inherit the billions will be the billionaires who take their place. I'm not sure why this is such a hard concept to grasp.
but we don't know that they would continue the actions that led to their predecessors removal. it's an interesting theory and we can test it!!
I'm sure there have been billionaires who have died since billionaires have been a thing, and a company suddenly not being capitalistic would make headlines.
It's the mega corporations and capitalism that allow billionaires to exist in the first place. Until the world has a major economical rewrite, billionaires and the companies who make them are going to keep doing whatever possible to profit, and that is rarely good for the earth or the people on it.
Sure, there are going to be exceptions to the rule, but outliers will always exist.
a lack of evidence to the contrary is not evidence in the positive.
That's the one for removing billionaires.