OwenEverbinde

Dragged, kicking and screaming, to unprecedented wealth.

What a strange world we live in.

Well that's an awful trend.

I would have expected the reported sexual abuse cases to be lower in conservative states. You know, because victims would feel more shame and danger so fewer of them would come forward and fewer would file police reports? Is the first graph measuring estimated abuse or reported abuse?

I feel like if I ran a company, I would have folded my hand after Kellogg's and the Big Three automakers lost their respective labor disputes.

"Oh, these are your demands? Done. Better than selling my customers the media equivalent to glue-frosted pop tarts for the next two months because I can't admit I need my own workers."

I know there wouldn't be any billionaires if people thought that way. It just seems so much more sane and well adjusted.

You're welcome. I'm glad I was able to help.

A lot of people are offering explanations, but I think I'm going to give one too.

Think of recoil in a gun. If you don't have a mental image of it, watch a few youtube videos of people firing handguns. Look for videos of big, high-recoil handguns, like the Desert Eagle or the Magnum (or the Super Ruger Redhawk according to chat-GPT).

You need to get a good look at handguns pushed backwards as they are fired.

Now think about this: those bullets aren't pushing against an atmosphere. They are pushing only against the inside of a gun.

But when this tiny, tiny bullet pushes super-fast against the gun, using the gun to accelerate to incredibly high speeds very quickly... it pushes the gun really hard in the other direction.

Get that mental image into your head. Small object can push large object with a lot of force by kicking off of large object with insane speed.

Now: Take away the person holding the gun. Take away the planet. Take away the atmosphere. Put that gun in space and pull the trigger again. (Just make sure to use a gun that has modern ammunition that doesn't require oxygen to fire).

What happens to all that recoil? What does the recoil do to the gun now? The bullet still goes flying out of the chamber. Still does this by pushing against the gun.

Hopefully it should now be easy to imagine that the gun will start moving.

Rocket fuel is basically a tank full of bullets.

The main function of rocket fuel is "heavy stuff that is shoved out of the spaceship to make it move."

The reason we use highly explosive fuel is because "shoving heavy stuff away from you at the speed of a bullet" is going to move you more than "shoving heavy stuff away from you at normal speed."

Does this make any sense?

I think the idea that billionaires are created by any kind of motive is the wrong lens.

Their wealth doubles faster if they lack egalitarian values. So the millionaires who end up becoming billionaires are the ones who lack egalitarian values.

The values they do hold could be anything from, "everyone wants to win; I'm just winning harder" to "God told me to" and it won't matter as long as they keep reinvesting and growing their wealth faster than the economy or ecosystem can sustain.

What we're witnessing right now is not a set of ideas or beliefs, but an exponential growth equation -- with all of the overwhelming speed and transformative power such an equation carries.

Exponential growth is the reason for everything from the mammoths' extinction to rotten food and the lethality of cancer. It transforms entire systems, outgrowing (and often destroying) its own host.

If your society has currency but lacks any chemotherapy / surgery to remove concentrations of the aforementioned currency that start growing at a cancerous rate...

Then it won't matter what values are common or uncommon: your society is eventually doomed.

It could take a hundred years or a thousand, but eventually, a pile of wealth will emerge that multiplies until it consumes everything.

"children are not born with Daily Wire subscriptions" is one of the most eloquent ways I've ever seen someone express the idea that children don't hate until they are taught to.

Yikes. My condolences. That sounds stressful, to say the least.

Yeah, I ended up looking up the actual Flynn effect numbers AFTER leaving my comment, and had to edit because I was way off.

Oh yeah, they normalize IQ every year, and 100 is always used as the median.

But thanks to the Flynn Effect, getting a 100 (the number they always choose for the middle) in 2024 means you're significantly smarter than someone who got a 100 in 1990.

So when Carlin said, "think of a person with average intelligence" he was calling to mind (to his 1990 audience) a person who was average in 1990 but would score [EDIT: I originally said 70s to 80s, but I was off by a lot. Such a person would actually score right around 90 points] today.

This is what happens when you take the lead out of gasoline.

Now I wish our legal system could let the winner designate a beneficiary, like,

"if you lose, you have to donate $600,000 to this child literacy program" or something.

And just have the money go directly from the loser to the charity.

Maybe that's already a thing. I don't know how our legal system works.