#wealth exploitation

[cyber-soul-smartz]

Influence of Power, Wealth, and Social Status on Morality: Unveiling Biases

Discover how power, wealth, and social status shape our moral judgments. Challenge your assumptions and join the journey toward ethical clarity. Don't miss out—subscribe now for more insightful content from Hafsa Reasoner!

[anna-scribbles]

if the agrestes weren't rich i think that gabriel would be the normal one. like gabe's problem is that he stopped running into natural limits due to absurd wealth and his obsessive nature led him to develop some kind of god complex where he won't accept that anything is out of his control. I think that if gabe was broke again and just simply couldn't afford to go on an international goose chase for ancient magic artifacts of untold power, if he had to work a 9-5 to live and couldn't just disappear into his basement lair to commit domestic terrorism and say evil monologues to himself, then he would be way more normal. he'd just be some guy. he might even let himself have a mowhawk again. but I think that emilie would be way LESS normal if they weren't rich. like emilie needs so many people to be obsessed with her so much all the time in order for her to function. and gabe would still have his toxic codependent obsession with her, sure, but that wouldn't be nearly enough. emilie has to be at the center of the world's spotlight at all times because she doesn't know how to exist if she's not performing. anyway all this to say I am so certain that if the agrestes were not disgustingly wealthy, emilie agreste would one million percent be running a massive family vlogger youtube channel

[alwaysbewoke]

[bet-on-me-13]

The one where Bruce is the asshole (again)

So! We have a typical story where the JLA finds out about the Situation in Amity.

Whichever way they find out doesn't matter, but either way they end up sending Batman to do a threat analysis and review of whether this requires their attention.

And while there, he runs into a Kid who obviously needs to be saved from his Abusive Home. Look at him, he's far too thin, his grades are horrible, he has many unexcused absences, and he has bruises hidden under his clothes.

Even after figuring out that Danny is Phantom the local Hero, he thinks Danny needs to be saved from his Parents.

I mean, it's plain to see! They Hates Ghosts with a Passion, negelct their son very often, shoot at him nearly every day, and are probably the ones who killed him in the first place!

So, with no input from Danny himself, Bruce calls CPS on the Fentons and uses his Wealth to expedite the process and avoid the actual Investigation. (I mean, why would you even need one? It's so obviously a bad home!)

The Fenton's are arrested, and Bruce reveals that Danny is Phantom to convince the Courts that they are horrible people for shooting at their own son, and that they should be locked up (ignoring the horrified looks on their faces, probably cause they were living with a Ghost for so long, thats probably why).

He immediately offers to adopt Danny, even when Danny vehemently refuses his offer. He knows that Danny will come around to it, he's doing this for his own good. He still thinks his Parents were good people, and not thr Villains they really were.

Meanwhile Danny's life has been completely uprooted thanks to the self-righteous machinations of an Adoption Crazed Fruitloop! And not even the usual one!

Sure his parents were often busy with their work, but they Always set aside time to hang out with their kids and make sure they were okay. They never abused him, the neglect was only for like a month or two when the portal before they got their act together and apologized for it, and (most importantly) THEY DIDN'T KNOW he was a Halfa when they shot at him! They only found out when the ASSHOLE revealed his Identity in Court!

And Danny is Extra enraged by that part. The Adoption Crazed Fruitloop had revealed his secret identity for the ENTIRE WORLD TO HEAR!

He would never be able to live a normal life anymore, even if he managed to get away from the Moron who caused all this!

Bruce Wayne was a Villain in his eyes.

He ripped him from his home and from his family (basically kidnapped), revealed his identity to the world so he was forced to stay with him for fear of the GIW, and spun the whole story so that it looked like he was the Good Guy in this!?

It was official. Danny Hates Bruce Wayne, possibly more than anyone else in the World.

And that's a High Bar.

[tilbageidanmark]

Person of the year

[fluentisonus]

sorry this is just a running thought process so very unedited but one of the big failures I feel like with the whole situation in montreuil sur mer -- and this is not really jean valjean's fault bc like. he's just some guy who has been outside of society for nearly twenty years and was making this up as he went along & learning & making mistakes as he went -- is that it was all based around charity rather than much actual systematic or solid structural change. which like again I don't really think as a small town mayor in the early 19th century he was really in a position to wholesale restructure anything, so he really was just working with what he had to hand, but I do keep thinking that part of his whole dilemma in 'a tempest in skull' -- i.e. if he turns himself in then the whole system of schools & hospitals & pensions for old people & support for the poor he's set up will essentially collapse -- really shows the failure of charity on its own to accomplish any lasting change. like even if champmathieu hadn't turned up what would have happened to the town if/when he died? the same thing quite probably I'd imagine. tbh I think you could potentially make an argument in fact that the book's position on charity in many ways is that it really does help in the moment individually or in communities but it does nothing really to get at or change the root causes of poverty, & m sur m is to me an example of that -- although I'm not entirely sure how much hugo himself saw the situation in m-sur-m as a flaw (well. he obviously saw valjean's situation re champmathieu itself as a genuinely sticky moral problem, but whether he saw the fundamental basis for the system valjean set up in m sur m as a problem I can't really tell). but anyways I've just been thinking this one over as I reread the champmathieu bit

[nando161mando]

Report: Since 2020, almost two-thirds of all new wealth went to the top 1%

[the-hopeful-squid]

Millionaires vs. Billionaires: Let's Talk Money!

A few numbers to start off:

Squid game winnings in Korean Won: ₩45.6 billion

Winnings in US dollars (USD), using the 2020 exchange rate: ~$37.5 million

Number of Squid game winnings needed to reach $1 billion USD: 27

In-ho won the 28th games in 2015: implies the games started in 1987.

Take a minute, now, and read back over those numbers. Winners recieve ₩45.6 billion, which translated to roughly $37.5 million in prize money in 2020.

Got it?

Yes?

Great!

5. Gi-hun would have had to win 27 games, at the same prize level and the same Korean Won->USD exchange rate, before he would be a billionaire in US dollars.

That's nearly as many games as had been played in total by the time In-ho won his games in 2015.

Crazy, right?

Yeah.

Let's do some more thought experiments with these numbers!

--

(I use USD in the following thought experiments mainly for the following reasons: i) many tumblr users are more familiar with USD than Korean Won ii) many current political and economic conversations about 'billionaires' are talking about billions in US dollars iii) I'm from the US, so this was the easiest for me - if you want to redo these thought experiments in another currency, please do!)

--

Now, with no further ado: Thought Experiments with Money!

--

Imagine you are given $37.5 million every year: -> If you put the entire $37.5 million in, say, a savings account (ignoring interest), every year, it would take 27 years for your accumulated savings to reach $1 billion.

How long is 27 years? -> If you started this process in 1987, you would not reach $1 billion until 2014. -> If you started this process in 2000? You would not reach $1 billion until 2027.

In other words:

If you started putting $37.5 million in the bank every year starting in 2000, you would still not be a billionaire yet in 2025.

A few additional examples: -> Say you graduate college, and you are able to save this much right away, starting at 22. You would not have saved $1 billion until you were 49 years old. -> Say your parents started saving that yearly amount for you the year you were born. To have saved $1 billion by 2025, you would have had to be born in or before 1998.

--

And that is what it means to be a billionaire compared to a millionaire.

[tauindi]

tbh i don't think you can put an end to single-use plastics without also reckoning with capitalist + imperialist worker exploitation.

[biggestdickinohio]

Milo and Friends 2

Wonder where one of the best jewelers in the city gets her pearls? Our fishy friend might just be the answer.

Original ref for the jeweler blue footed booby below

Valerie “Val” Zales, a big time jeweler in the upper city who sells rare and priceless jewelry.

I’d assume that most jewelry that anyone would be able to get would be pearls (they live out in the ocean after all). Though I’d have ideas for other rare minerals that could be cut into proper polished jewelry (#geology).

Anyways, she hires dock workers to gather pearls from any oysters they find. The more perfect pearls they bring her, the more she pays them.

Milo is usually called up by her to hunt down pearls, but perhaps she hires others too…

[stuck-in-jelly]

I will say a petty criticism i have of the hunger games movie vs the book is that they weren’t weird or fun enough with the outfits and make up

Thats just a man with blue hair and pronouns come on now

[owlrageousjones]

Is Blanche Devereaux a Landlord?

Random thought of the day: Is Blanche Devereaux of the Golden Girls a Landlord? And if she is, does she deserve the guillotine?

Obviously, in the strictest sense, she is a landlord. She owns accomodation, and she derives income from renting that accomodation out. That's a landlord.

But in saying that, Blanche lives in that same house - she rents it out to the other women because she has space and she's a widow with no dependents anymore. She had a large house to raise children and live with her husband, but her children have moved out and her husband's moved on (to the afterlife).

The absolutely moral thing to do would be to either let her roommates stay with her for free (because housing is a human right) OR to downsize.

And it's easy to say that's what she should do, but the absolutely moral thing for most of us to do is to sell most of our belongings and give the proceeds to charity but that's the kind of behaviour you'd expect from a saint, not some random person. I think we generally agree that there's a gradient between the extreme ends here.

And although it's kind of a meme, landlords do provide a service - as someone who has owned their own home with a mortgage, owning a home can be annoying and stressful. Owning your own home makes you feel like you put down an anchor, and when you want to move, you end up asking yourself if it's worth raising that anchor. For some people, it's better to have the freedom and flexibility that renting can provide.

(Also technically you don't have the stress of wondering how you're going to pay for repairs because that's the landlord's responsibility, but you know, that also puts you at the mercy of the landlord.)

In some ways, I think there wouldn't necessarily be anything wrong with having landlords if those landlords weren't private investors whose desire is profit - if the government owned my house, and I just 'rented' it from them by paying taxes, and then I would be able to move at some point if I chose, that'd be a neat solution.

(But then it also raises all sorts of questions such as: should I, a single bachelor with no dependents, be allowed to have a house with more than one bedroom? Under the capitalist system, I could have as big a house as my pockets could afford, even if that is a terrible allocation of space and housing.)

Looping back to Blanche, neither Rose nor Dorothy seem like they might've been in a position to buy a house - Rose sold her previous home, so maybe she would have the funds, but she was also moving from a small town to Miami, so the houses would probably cost a lot more (but she could probably afford a condo or small apartment). There's also the fact that living in a shared accomodation with each other was almost definitely good for them, socially wise.

I know living on my own was kind of sad in some ways, even if it did mean I didn't have to wear clothes in the summer.

So is Blanche bourgeouise? I mean... probably, but if the Revolution came, would she be up against the wall?

[that-punk-adam]

Maybe it’s because I’m job hunting again, maybe it’s because I just got offered an unlivable/poverty wage, or maybe because it’s 2025 and I’ve watched the price of every single item a consumer could ever purchase absolutely sky rocket over my short life, but I am just so livid.

Rent is high. Trying to find housing that’s not insanely priced is impossible. Having the bare basic bills are expensive bc they’re high. The US basically requiring you to have a license and invest in a vehicle (+gas +insurance +maintenance) because “public servants” refuse to invest into the public by giving them dirt cheap (or free) wide spread, on time, clean and safe public transit that pays people real living wages is horrific. Credit is stupid as fuck and so are background checks.

Life in the USA is set up so that you have to spend money on every single resource that would probably otherwise be available to you if we lived in human and community centric designed cities. Everything from the public to the private has to be bought out and sold back to you in one way or another- and you’ll most likely fall for it bc others around you are falling for it too. It’s not even their fault.

I think people are just now ready for a change. I don’t think that they’re ready for such foreign and exotic concepts like living without money and continuing (or starting) education and projects in things that will help yourself/humanity live better and healthier lives along with nature, but they are ready for a change. What I think Americans are ready for is a change to happen in the system that wouldn’t/won’t move them from the comfort of what position they have in current day society. The only issue is that demanding and seeing change demands that you do, act, and say things that you wouldn’t normally. That, or that they don’t know how to start because there is no pre installed system existing for them to jump into. I don’t blame them, jumping into something when you weren’t raised to do so is intimidating.

We have to make a new way. We have to break rules, because we know that they’re unfair and in the favors of the people with all the resources. We have to come together and say “XYZ is bs and we’re not going to do this anymore”. It has to start local. It has to start small. It has to come from the materials and minds of the community members that actually give a shit. It has to be shared and expressed to others that haven’t even thought about getting together to end the madness in some way.

The only way that we’re ever going to see change at this rate is from ourselves. No more sitting on our asses and begging to higher ups for things we all know we aren’t going to get. Abusers cannot be rehabilitated. Take control of your life and see that these people have no control over yours. See the damage they are doing to the people and world around you and take action now.

[iwonderwh0]

I don't fucking understand the sentiment of "if computer becomes smarter than humans it'd be the end of humanity" like WHY? Is this a projection "what if someone treated humans like humans treat other animals"? Is something smarter means it's gonna destroy everything "inferior" to it? Fucking how does it work, what is advantage of that

Like I fail to understand the motivation of why would artificial intelligence want to kill all humans or life or concur everything, why are we imagining superior intelligence as a raging hateful brute with a mentality of an incel fascist, I'm not fucking buying it

"Oh, so you know there's this movie where there's SKYNET or that one short story where AI tortures humans or the Matrix or..."

I'm more afraid of natural stupidity and casual animalistic cruelty than autonomic artificial intelligence more advanced than humans. I'd rather sentient machine got in charge than a bunch of narcissistic billionaires with god complex who want nothing more than more money and power. I'm more scared of those fucking people than some chat gpt infecting every single computer it can reach, I'm more afraid of religious fundamentalists than a godless algorithm trained on humanity's knowledge because I don't believe it'd be as hateful as humans can be, I fail to see why the fuck would it be

[scumtrout]

Sometimes I find myself thinking, 'no one is coming to save me, it must be because I'm stupid and ugly, a bloo bloo bloo' but then I usually refute it with, 'BITCH, NO ONE CAME TO SAVE AMY WINEHOUSE, AND SHE WAS AMY FUCKING WINEHOUSE.'

[nammythings]

Why the West Is Obsessed with Africa

…and why Burkina Faso is at the center of it all If Africa reclaims what’s rightfully hers, the global balance of power shifts. Permanently. The West knows this. That’s why it’s obsessed, not with Africa’s people, but with its resources. From gold and cobalt to solar real estate and shipping corridors, Africa holds the raw materials of the 21st-century economy. And the more African nations like…