@realcaseyrollins @11112011 you can’t have ambitious, opinionated people with $400B hordes whose sustainability and growth depend on political choices and not end up with oligarchy. obviously people in that situation will deploy their resources as political influence.
@realcaseyrollins some of the do some worthwhile things coming up. but if they achieve billionairehood it’s usually by attaining market power and often net destructive. if the achievable spread were between 0 and 100 million (with only a very small fraction achieving 100M) rather than 0 and 1T, ambitious people would work just as hard for that status and do the same good things with less likelihood of becoming destructive monopolists.
@realcaseyrollins nope. billionaires claims to their hordes do nothing for the economy, and people strove just as hard when the economy’s big winners got tens of millions rather than billions.
@realcaseyrollins millionaires are rich. billionaires are something else. i don’t want anyone to hate anyone, and certainly not kill anyone. we don’t need a guillotine when we have a tax system. we do need to use our tax system aggressively.
@realcaseyrollins (i don’t think anyone’s better than anyone else. the dose is the poison. we’d all become whack if we had that much money and decided we had to protect and grow it. we’d become understandably paranoid and lose touch with reality as sycophants surround us.)
@realcaseyrollins people do all kinds of things. billionaires disproportionately compete and conform. billionairehood selects for people like that.
@realcaseyrollins lots of millionaires quietly take their fuck you money and live their best lives. billionaires compete for status and guard their unmistakable hordes, kissing whatever ass is necessary for advantage and to reduce the risk they might be targeted and disadvantaged in their pathetic little game to the very biggest pretend little gods.
billionaires are pathetic.
@John @ryanlcooper if we can get then to write, not ephemeral throwaways but things durably attached to their names, they will read again. life of the mind is neither consuming content nor drive-by commenting, but conversation.
and fascism!
from @ryanlcooper https://prospect.org/power/2025-01-06-bluesky-proves-stagnant-monopolies-strangling-internet/
Text: The old internet wasn’t perfect, but it used to feel like a place of almost magical potential, where you might stumble over a fascinating new site at any moment, instead of watching in horror as your aunt is driven mad by flat-earth conspiracies. This internet did not die of its own accord; it was murdered by a handful of mega-billionaires so they could sell ads for chukka boots and washing machines.
“A sensible politics needs to ask: how can we create constituencies of countervailing power to the regressive rich?” #ChrisDillow https://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2025/01/against-if-i-were-king-politics.html
“prioritize dense, mixed-use, and car-light ecodistricts. There are a number of wonderful examples in planning throughout the world, but I will note that the most visionary are so far removed from our status quo in the US – we lack the ability to even comprehend how much higher quality of life in these neighborhoods could be.” #MikeEliason https://ronpdavis.substack.com/p/mike-eliason-on-corridor-zoning ht @drvolts
peaceful transfer of power vs peaceful surrender of power
you get angry at a group of people, then you get incurious about what they say and write, then you have a blind spot.
@louis good point! i am definitely a correctist.
why is “leftist” used as a term of derision more than “rightist”?
[tech notebook] Supporting all-item RSS https://tech.interfluidity.com/2025/01/06/supporting-all-item-rss/index.html
@mpanhans it's probably true that the public broadly is madder at the things Lina Khan has targeted and still mostly just perplexed by crypto.
i think Putin persuaded himself that territorial expansion is what marks a leader as durably "great", then persuaded his admirers and imitators of this. Trump doesn't actually want to invade anybody, to his credit he's squeamish about that kind of thing, but he figures he might work some kind of deal.
Why did Lina Khan succeed so much more than Gary Gensler?
he's resigned to resigning.