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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 12th, 2023

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  • We have places like San Fransisco and New York, with some of the richest people in the whole world regularly walking past homeless encampments. I don’t think the structure is the problem. I think it has much more to do with the culture and family they are raised in.

    We live in a society that rewards narcissism. Our society tells these rich people that homeless people are only homeless because of bad personal choices.

    There is no reward for empathy, besides the positive feeling a healthy person would get from being kind. In fact, being empathetic can be a detriment to being successful, so many upper class families skip that lesson plan on purpose.



  • I think you missed my point, entirely. I wasn’t saying that governments committing atrocities in other countries versus their own people were any different, morally speaking.

    I was simply pointing out that the quality of life for the working class, and low amount of wealth disparity, etc in this country is largely due to Socialist policies keeping Capitalism in check, and also pointing out that Capitalist policies cause atrocities, in general.

    This was in response to the comment saying that countries were hiding atrocities behind the banner of Socialism.

    Atrocities of any kind are abhorrent and I agree that they need to be denounced. I also agree with pretty much everything else that you said. Socialism is near dead and dying in Europe. I just think that the sprinkle of Social policies that is left in the EU still holds back Capitalism from being quite as horrible as it could be.









  • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.workstoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldLeeches
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    26 days ago

    Unless you are a billionaire, or close to one, you aren’t doing what I was referring to.

    Billionaires commonly use their stock as collateral to get low interest loans. Then they use these loans to buy investments with better returns than the low interests loans that they took out. They leverage this additional capital from the investment to take out an another lower interest loan to pay off the original loan.

    They get to rinse and repeat this, unless the economy takes a huge nosedive. In that case, the amount of loans they have exceed the gains they are making and they actually have to liquidate assets and actually have to pay a lot of tax. The thing is, this doesn’t really happen often.

    Unless they get real unlucky, most of them eventually die and pass down these investments to an heir before the economy ever nosedives. The heir can cash out without paying capital gains tax, because they get a fresh starting point at whatever the accumulated wealth was.

    Basically, the capitalist class gets to avoid ever paying capital gains tax, and that sucks. This is just one of the ways they avoid paying anything back to the working class, there are plenty of others. They also use lots of legal loopholes to avoid estate tax, but that is another topic.


  • TopRamenBinLaden@sh.itjust.workstoMicroblog Memes@lemmy.worldLeeches
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    26 days ago

    But also, billionaires don’t have billions of dollars sitting in the bank.

    No, but some have billions of dollars in the stock market which they can use as a ‘bank’ anytime they want to buy something. Conveniently for them, all of that stock is unable to be taxed until it’s cashed out. Though, why would they ever cash out when they have the free money glitch using it as collateral? If they had it in the bank, then at least the interest could be taxed, I guess.


  • It was. If you go through the OP thread, one of the responses is a picture of the dialog window that this user clicked through saying, “these changes will be IRREVERSIBLE”.

    The OP was just playing with a new kind of fire (VSCodes Git/source control panel) that they didn’t understand, and they got burned.

    We all gotta get burnt at least once, but it normally turns us into better devs in the end. I would bet money that this person uses source control now, as long as they are still coding.