theparadox

Lol, I fixed the auto capitalization but didn't notice the spelling change.

Social psychologists have long understood that merely identifying with a group in competitive contexts can lead people to view those outside the group less favorably.

Ah yes. It's because they are on the other team that proud Trump supporters are being ostracized. The fact Trump and his allies have blatantly advertised goals that are dangerous, damaging, bigoted, hateful, and generally horrific... and their poorly hidden goals are even more so... has nothing to do with it. It's just competition bringing out the worst in the rest of us.

Hopefully it helps the troops make the right call when the orange VP and President Musk declare marshall law.

My TCL did this like 4 years ago. I went to sell it so I updated it, factory reset it... and it literally wouldn't get past the setup until it had connectivity. I didn't fight with it though. I just powered it off and handed it too a buyer who probably didn't think twice about it.

Kathleen technically fills the specified criteria if you remove the context of the conversation, which is whether or not Lucas shared a morally acceptable portion of the billions of dollars of wealth generated by LucasFilm that he took for himself, including the $4 billion he made personally from it's sale to Disney.

Your other two of your allegedly obvious examples are absolutely not from LucasFilm and one of them has a net worth of $20m, which is definitively not "hundreds of millions".

I presume, therefore, that you either argue in bad faith or don't try very hard. In either case, you aren't worth my time anymore.

Enthusiastically in agreement that funding of school districts and regional equity is a major problem. Funding is likely problem #1, but I think the problems with funding are more complex than just property taxes.

Concentrating poverty also creates poor areas and exacerbates the problem. It's so frustrating that there are so many NIMBY assholes that don't want affordable housing near them.

I could throw a dart on a list of names and get such a person.

Fascinating. You respond with the president of LucasFilm who started, more or less, months before LucasFilm was sold to Disney in 2012, an actor who has had an amazing career well beyond anything related to LucasFilm, and an actor with a career is admittedly most associated with the Star Wars Franchise (though he's done a lot of voice work in unrelated franchises) but who's net worth is only about 20 million.

So 1/3 are actually part of LucasFilm, and that one didn't really work under Lucas. Ford did star in a two franchises under LucasFilm, but he is not part of LucasFilm.

Thanks for wasting a few minutes of my time.

If you can name another person from LucasFilm that also had, at some point, several hundred million dollars, I'll make an effort to look into that claim.

Bill Gates fucked the public school systems pretty hard.

Something I think is extremely fucked up in general is that if you have millions to throw at a pet cause, you will disproportionately benefit your cause over other causes in a non-democratic manner. That means that every individual and organization involved in fields related to your pet projects are incentivized to focus on your pet projects over others. Because you have so much money, you basically individually shape public policy.

Look at the WHO (source):

...over 80 per cent of WHO’s funding relies on “voluntary contributions,” meaning any amount of money given freely by donors, whether member states, NGOs, philanthropic organisations or other private entities.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation alone is responsible for over 88 per cent of the total amount donated by philanthropic foundations to the WHO. Other contributors include the Bloomberg Family Foundation (3.5 per cent), the Wellcome Trust (1.1 per cent) and the Rockefeller Foundation (0.8 per cent).

So yeah, it's great that they donate so much... but that also means they can stop donating... so they have control.

Adam Conover makes some good points on this topic.

If the people who worked on making money from the Star Wars franchise generated literally billions of dollars in value for George Lucas's company and George still has billions of dollars then no, he did not distribute those billions to those people. How do you not understand? I'll simplify this for you.

If I have 1000 employees and my company rakes in $4 billion in revenue, I'm not a good guy even if I give them $1,000,000 each and keep the remaining... $3,000,000,000. That would imply that I think my work was 3,000x more important and valuable then their work. I guarantee that some people that helped Lucas make billions of dollars were paid as little as possible, with many likely in foreign countries with much lower minimum wages.

Society likes to pretend that rich people earn their money. What actually happens is that rich people create a situation in which they are disproportionately rewarded for work done by many other people. Yes, it's likely they did some work too (occasionally even good work), but not work proportional to their compensation. The fact that they insisted that they be the ones retaining a disproportionately large percentage of the surplus value is very telling.

Or he could have distributed the billions he made, as he was making them, to more equitably pay everyone who's work generated that wealth.

That's my point.