You can’t buy people anymore but you can buy most of their awake hours. It’s called a job.
People sell those hours because they have to. It’s called a salary.
You misspelled “wage slavery”
No no, they work for each other in exchange for money, which they use to buy goods…
Depends on if you can’t live comfortably or not still.
The official poverty rate in the USA was 11.4% in 2020 with 37.2 million people under the poverty line. I’d wager many of them might not hold a job due to having young children as well.
https://www.yonkerstribune.com/2021/11/slave-wages-what-are-slave-wages
Out of the homes, 38 could be considered low income, 44 middle income and 18 high income.
So nearly 1/3 of Americans would be wage slaves by the latter. Even worse for those under the poverty line.
Wait so could I hire some suckers to do my hours so I could keep my salary and hours?
this guy has figured out capitalism
Keep it down what if they start organizing?
Great workaround rec, thanks
I think since then it’s happened a few more times. Don’t forget those that have 2-3 full time jobs.
Ugh! I’ll have to hire kids on drugs to compete with those fat cats pulling down three salaries!
I love this.
Wealthy people don’t buy things, they buy time - other people’s time.
On behalf of landfills and floating trash islands, they buy plenty of thing things, too.
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Where can I buy a ticket?
I will allow someone to buy me, but like software you won’t “own” me. You will just be liscencing me and, at any time, I may revoke your access to myself.
I, too, have a job
Is abduction piracy in this case?
If licensing people isn’t slavery,
then abduction isn’t kidnappingCloning is more like piracy in this case, unless you are referring to seafaring piracy.
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Sounds like dating!
And they can just use you on the terms which are described in your EULA
Well no, she can’t buy Kanye. He’s not a Supreme Court Justice.
Not yet.
Since we’re already destroying institutions we might as well have some fun with it. I don’t think there’s any reason he couldn’t be a supreme court justice.
Expand the Supreme Court and add Kanye, King Charles, and Elmo. At least that shit will be entertaining.
“But Elmo wants to know why policemen don’t have an obligation to intervene to protect the public.”
“Elmo is a bit confused. Why did Elmo learn to share, when Elon clearly doesn’t?”
“some of Elmos best friends are black people” lol
“Hmmm, Elmo wants to know why people pay most of their piggy banks for in case they get sick, but still have to pay their entire piggy bank when they do get sick.”
It’s treason, then.
What’s really important is that it’s impossible not to be a bad person and a billionaire. I like her music but being a billionaire means that she is an enemy of society. Period
“One cannot reign innocently… Every king is a rebel and a usurper.”
what makes you think it’s impossible? it seems unlikely but I wouldn’t say impossible
Because you can’t get that much without exploitation and refusing to share.
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If they keep it for themselves, yes.
Ya because their bloodline is already corrupted. They were raised by shit heads. They will be shit heads. It runs in the family.
Yeah, no. Billionaires suck, including if they inherited the money (e: and then kept it to themselves; thanks kofe!). But being raised by shit heads does not mean you’re destined to become a shit head.
You’re contradicting yourself. If billionaires are shit heads, why does inheriting it inherently make you one? I agree with the other poster that keeping it all is the part that makes it shitty
Keeping it does.
Oh yeah, I agree with you! I should’ve specified, but I did only mean the ones who keep the inherited money. My bad :p
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Wouldn’t know because I wasn’t raised by selfish assholes
Wouldn’t know because I wasn’t raised by
genealogists? :)
If we went back to our common ancestor I assume we’d all find a great … grandmother stealing a club or something.
There’s no moral reason to have that much money. If you earned $2500 a day (about a million dollars a year) it would take you just under 1200 years to earn a billion dollars. I personally believe you should earn more if you work harder than others but there’s simply no way anyone could work hard enough to deserve more than anyone should make in 15 lifetimes. If you are lucky enough to get that amount of money there’s no moral reason to keep it all.
Now think about how Bezos is worth 192.4 billion dollars. Hopefully that helps folks understand the problem. And by problem, I mean the largest threat we are facing to human existence. Every other issue we’re having stems from the fact that billionaires exist.
Say you work on a team with, say 50 people. Everyone works hard to generate money, but you’re the star of the show, so naturally you get to keep a little more of that money than everyone else. The question is, how much? Is it morally questionable to make double what everyone else does? What about 10x? What if you keep half for yourself, meaning those 49 other people combined make the same as you? Not enough? What about 100x as much as everyone else? 1000x?
Taylor Swift’s salary is about 1,700x the average in the music industry. People on her team are likely struggling to make ends meet or pay for hospital bills or support a family. Meanwhile, Taylor Swift is hoarding money like a fucking dragon.
It’s not really a problem that can be solved though. Should Taylor Swift’s team earn 2x more than Kanye’s? They possibly already earn above average what one usually would by supporting someone else.
She is obviously not going to refuse what people are willing to pay for her. Earnings for world famous musicians and actors always has and will be ridiculous.
The problem can be solved through progressive tax reform. Check it out:
The tax rate on the ultra-wealthy has decreased tremendously since the 70s. By making billionaires pay their fair share and closing tax loopholes, we can make huge improvements to wealth inequality and fund social programs that help people who need it most.
A good person would never make it to a net worth of a billion dollars though. A good person would give away 999,999,000 to charity, for example.
most bilionares are good people. Some are not though.
They’ve spent more money than you’ll ever make convincing you of that.
Nobody that has exploited and hoarded billions of dollars from society for their personal benefit are good people.
Some can be. You dont know all billionares
Don’t have to, it’s not possible to hoard that much wealth while people starve and be considered ‘good’.
It is possible. You dont know enough to make that judgement.
Self awareness isn’t your strong suite, is it?
its stronger than yours, clearly
Looking at your comments I can see you’re just a troll but if actual humans are reading this: there are exactly zero moral billionaires. It is not possible to be a billionaire and be a good person at the same time. You do not have to know what’s in their heart or whatever the fuck this idiot is trying to say. You can’t earn that kind of money without hurting and exploiting people and if you keep that amount of money you are actively harming society. End of story.
Not really true at all. Judgemental people like you are the reason we cant progress as a species.
Lmao and the people hoarding incalculable wealth that they’ll never ever be able to spend in multiple lifetimes are for sure helping us progress as a species.
Get real.
You don’t know that. It’s possible that it’s the billionaires
I’m assuming Elon is a “good” billionaire?
Lol no
Actually slavery is still legal in the United States as a form of legal punishment when legally convicted so she just needs to wait for a jury of his peers to convict him and a judge to Sentence him then she would probably need to pay the state
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She can’t “own” people, don’t be ridiculous now. She can only compel them with violence into servitude and extract the fruits of their labor. But ownership? That’s messed up.
Pretty much
@TSwiftFTC? Is this a two-topic account about Taylor Swift and the Federal Trade Commission? 🤔
Her impact on the economy now has its own government agency.
She COULD purchase Jay-Z, though.
He said “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man”
Tbf, Texas was notoriously slow on this
I couldn’t name nor recognize a single song from either of them. Shit, I need to improve my mainstream media knowledge.
Me too :) You are not alone
No you don’t. That’s something to be proud about
Too late.l, I used the last 5 minutes to do it already. :)
I knew several Taylor Swift songs from the radio, but didn’t think more of them but “the usual generic pop music” that normally leads to me changing the station immediatly (I expected this). I don’t think I will recognize her the next time I hear her.
I also knew some Kanye West songs and I even liked some of them (I honestly didn’t expect this). I somehow don’t want to like his music though, saw too much about him on Twitter and here).
Kanye had an absolutely killer music career before he went off the rails
He may have always been a little crazy but the man can write a song, I gotta hand him that, no matter what I think of his personal or political life
The College Dropout is one of the few albums where you just push play & listen to the whole thing.
Yeah it’d be a real shame if that came out twenty years ago.
Inb4 “well Pablo was good”
No it wasn’t, this is scientific FACT
I wish I couldn’t, I needa stop listening to the radio, haha for the occasional song I enjoy on there, theres so many that are like torture
I know the one Quentin sings!
Quentin?
Quentin Coldwater from Magicians!
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The need coming from the swifties here real.
She should put him on the wall in the downstairs toilet.
If dictaster tRump gets elected, it won’t be long before she’ll be able to buy him
Wow, now Taylor Swift fans are going mask-off racist. Not only are they simping for a billionaire like a Musk fan, but they’re alluding to going back to the good old days of slavery like Musk’s dad.
lmao no. It’s wealth comparison idiom. You’d have to intentionally miss the point.
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The only surprising thing here really is that Swift isn’t worth substantially more. She’s been the top pop music act for a decade now and has been uncommonly business savvy so I was really expecting that figure to be at least the double.
You do understand how large of a number a billion is? To work only for a decade and have that kind of networth is insane.
Relevant Tom Scott video https://youtu.be/8YUWDrLazCg?si=EawoESj6ftACGnHN
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/8YUWDrLazCg?si=EawoESj6ftACGnHN
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Sure, if we’re talking work as in compensation per hour. But we aren’t here. She’s a product (as in Taylor Swift the artist is, not Taylor Swift the person naturally) and thus can be sold in quantities only limited by the amount of people on our planet that can afford to buy her music/merch/tickets etc. For me as a consultant to make a billion just isn’t possible, but if I start a company selling something which isn’t limited like the amount of hours in a day then… Yeah no, I don’t have it in me to become a billionaire. But you get the picture I hope.
To hammer it home, she’s globally recognizeable as I’d say the most famous active musician right now. And she has been in the top 10 for a long while. That kind of fame begets net worth faster than just about any CEO gig ever will.
Yes, I understand how it seems like I refered to the person and not the artist.
I still don’t understand how you come to the conclusion that the net worth should be at least double? Based on what? My point is that it is extremely impressive to have a billion dollar company as is, in only a decade
Her net worth could be considered or much more if you think of her like a company because her billion now is already earned cash and assets. But her brand and intellectual property will last decades automatically generating revenue basically forever.
Taylor Swift is a business.Yes, in the future it could be higher. It depends on where the company is going. Artists get less popular over time and alot of assets would then necessitate scaling down, and be offloaded. If the person Taylor Swift decides she does not want to be associated with the business anymore it could lose alot, if she died probably the opposite would be true for a while. Yes a considerable amount of revenue would probably be coming in for the foreseeable future.
Tldr: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. A billion dollar company is already an amazing feat and it is impressive if Taylor can keep the ball rolling at that scale.
You can’t buy Taylor Swift stock on the exchange. Those publicly known double digit billionaires are that wealthy because they put their company public on the exchange. That company stock is sold at a premium because of high demand. Which means that it’s listed for more than the book value of that company often for 20x more. This is how even founders of companies that have never made a profit become billionaires.
Taylor Swift’s net worth is probably from real dollar profits. If she puts her company trough an IPO she will probably be worth way more than $1.1 billion.
Valid point. Unlike other billionaires with public companies connected to them Taylor Swift’s net worth is her value up until this point, what she has generated. There is no pricing in of future potential like what made the Tesla and Nvidia stock absolutely explode (and by that their respective stakeholders net worth). I hadn’t thought of that.
Pollution the planet on that scale isn’t cheap
She gives away a lot. Food banks everywhere she goes, Tennessee tornado relief, a wide variety of gofundmes, etc.
That has probably only ever helped her gain more. There is a good reason why rich people like to start charities and give money. It’s for publicity and as a tax write-off.
USA is the perfect country for getting rich and staying rich and getting richer. She could never have that kind of networth in any other country in the world as a pop act.
as a tax write-off.
People DO understand that the top marginal rate is 37%, right? So when she donates to charity she pays 63% of that charity and gets $0 back directly. It’s still spending money.
Unless she’s getting a ~70% kickback of the money from the charity. But that’s highly illegal. You have to be president to get away with something like that.
It’s probably not for tax reasons, but is 100% publicity. That’s all Taylor Swift™️ is.
She is essentially just a business that makes some decent commercial music, uses PR to develop a strong following and then monetizes the product.
I think her whole thing is fake and she just likes being the center of attention, not far off the Kardashians.
Thanks, that’s a better way to put it. It is all in the interest of business. It obviously works great, because here we are discussing it, and some of us praising it… !
The top marginal tax rate in 1947 was 91%. That was for incomes over $200,000. We have been led down the garden path.
She might even be doing it to genuinely help, but… Even if I believe she does set the direction with a lot of what she does, there’s more to it
Billionaires aren’t people, they’re basically a company themselves. They all have teams to manage what is too much to keep track of as an individual, including publicists and accountants - and Taylor Swift has a great publicist(s). Her accountant might also encourage it for tax writeoffs
For example, Bill Gates - he likes coming off as a tech guy who retired into philanthropy, but his charities are often used to accomplish political goals and move money around. Even the amounts he’s very publicly decided to give away upon his death are still going to stay in the control of his family. Same with the REI guy.
Jeff bezos likes to come off like a socially awkward sorta cowboy who fell into an obscene amount of money. Mark Zuckerberg likes to come off like a tech bro. The founder of Walmart drove around in a work truck and wore jeans
Even Elon musk, who likes to go off script, goes through great lengths to come off like a futurist. He “officially” lives in a tiny home that he bought and slapped “Tesla” onto. He’s been living in a mansion owned by someone else
Hilariously, Trump used to pose as a member of his own team, and called up newspapers and magazines to brag about himself and to get Forbes to just himself as a billionaire.
So how much is real? Who knows. But whether there’s any truth to it or not, it’s carefully cultivated. I’m inclined to think Swift is closer to genuine than most of them, but her publicist is amazing, so who knows. She’s also a performer, so it’s probably much more important to keep her image pristine than it is for most billionaires
