https://thisecommercelife.com/blogs/comics/the-day-all-billionaires-died
I’m sure it’s annoying for some to click offsite, but it’s 20 panels long. IMO worth the read, though!
The wild thing is you could probably live off only 1 million invested at say 3 percent, a whole life.
Billions? That should be just unlawful.
Well that would mean a return of 30k annually, which is a pretty low quality of life in the US. If you lived in a low COL place it may be enough to get by, but you can’t live in any US city with that.
You can also use the $M up slowly.
Sure, no golden toilets, but food on the table and more for life is kinda a lot IMO. But that was not what the example was for ofc.
What’s $M up slowly mean?
You can use the 1.000.000 dollars during your lifespan too.
There is a particular sort of pessimism that liberals always surprise me with. Something actually magical happens in this scenario, and the best they can imagine is what we currently have, just with some incentive to not get famously rich. No wonder so many of them resort to doomerism, they think it’d take two actual miracles for people to even question a system that produces millionaires.
For anyone who sees this and gets upset because they liked the comic, is this really what you think humans are capable of? Just this?
ah, I see you survived the latest strike.
XD
You are far closer to being a bot. You’re like a human bot.
Not sure what that’s meant to refer to tbh. People are supposed to get banned for this?
Edit: Oh, I’m supposed to be a Russian bot for criticizing liberalism (the system that smashes babies to create billionaires), and then saying that humanity is capable of more than this. Yeah dude, totally, of the two of us, I’m the most bot-like.
Ah no, that was more about a recent, infamous bot-strike plantation.
You know… your colleagues. 😀
Right, obnoxious as always. Have fun waiting for the miracle that you don’t even want to fix things.
Please don’t be an idiot?
Not unlike Alice in Wonderland, it was always just a pipe-dream, mah dude…
“It was always just a pipe dream.”
Well, at least they’re honest that they have zero plan for anything to ever get better.
I wouldnt tell anyone i got superpowers but there woild be signs
https://www.viruscomix.com/page433.html
Additional/further reading from Winston Rowntree
Oh, HIGH-FIVE on that! Subnormality is in a brilliant, unique class of its own, and I need to figure out how to post more of them on our comics subs. Which, actually… oh! Oh, oh, oh.
Okay, there’s a technique I’ve been using for some time now at my own community that I think will work nicely. Oh my…
Always good to see another fan of their work
Recently re-read Shirley Estar Goes To Heaven (In both forms, even if the original comic was VERY early 00’s edgy, it was still a DAMN good comic, and the novel rewrite is 10/10 scifi)
Recently re-read Shirley Estar Goes To Heaven (In both forms, even if the original comic was VERY early 00’s edgy, it was still a DAMN good comic, and the novel rewrite is 10/10 scifi)
Hang on, hang on, that’s also by Rowntree?
TBH, I only check in with Subnormality every couple months, altho I’ve been reading for… shoot, it must ~20yrs now. oO
What liberals imagine instead of helping anyone.
Eliminating extreme wealth helps everyone.
Capping wealth at a billion dollars wouldn’t hurt anyone, including the billionaires. 999 million is plenty to get by.
We should eliminate the private property owning class entirely instead of stopping individuals from having more than one billion dollars.
The problem is with the infinite accumulation of capital, not individuals with obscene wealth. In reality billionaires have actually very little control over their capital, they basically must re-invest the vast majority of it into accumulating more capital, the private jets are just what they skim off the top.
Billion dollar companies aren’t own by single people anymore and never were. The CEO is beholden to their board of directors and, even more so, the investors, if they stop making more and more money then the investments go elsewhere.
Everyone I don’t like is a “liberal”.
The OP is a liberal, though.
I love that even in this made up fantasy world (which is awesome btw), we’re still only able to pay teachers “Close” to what they’re worth.
Like, lol. Teachers are so fucked from a livable wage standpoint, that it would take 2 made up billionaire apocalypses to give them enough money to be paid what they’re actually worth.
The problem with teachers is that they are part of the job market. And as a market, its subject to supply and demand. The supply of teachers is higher than the demand. (Society has also screwed this up artificially with class size etc). Teaching also has non monetary benefits. Summers off, often shorter daily work schedule. The fun of watching children grow (for some people).
But the real problem is that children almost always grow up to choose a profession they are familliar with. And nearly all children are familiar with teachers. This leads many people to think its a profession they could do, and thus a goal to achieve. This increases the number of teachers, deiving the demand down.
I also found that growing up 20 years ago, the bad teachers are impossible to get rid of. Also increasing supply. Not sure how true this is today or if any changes there have been made.
“Teachers were finally paid closer to their worth.”
I dunno, I just think the phrasing “closer to their worth” is really funny when the picture being painted is a hopeful one. We can’t actually hope that teachers will get a decent pay, even in a better world.
Kinda the point I think. It’s not a completely Utopian fantasy, and plenty of the capitalistic (etc) problems that already existed would still be here.
Yeah, was not expecting to be bricked up so much today. You can’t just post stuff like that anywhere.
Now I’m going to be thinking about this all day.
bricked up
Come again?
Will do!
(cmon, I’m exaggerating, but well it is REALLY good news)
I think it means they need to eat more fiber
Love the shoutout to Sam Sweetmilk (Starship Goldfish).
Isn’t this the plot of a Kingsman movie?
too fucking bad
“one day, like a miracle…” No, you need to make change happen the hard way.
One of the purposes of science fiction and fantasy is to allow us to imagine a different world, without necessarily knowing how get there from here. In this case, we’re imagining a post-billionaire world without worrying about how to get there from here.
If that world seems better than the one we have now, we could decide to put a long, difficult plan in place to get to that world.
There are no silver bullets, only lead bullets.
Idk what messed up religion y’all are trying to come up with now but we need to lock in and strike these mfers out of the country.
That’s a good start
My friends always say “You can’t just kill them. There will be someone to take their place.” The obvious response is kill them too. Eventually, people will stop being so eager to take their place!
Though as the comic says, there’s always going to be assholes. Limiting how much power they have would be great.
I am currently running a game of Vampire predicated on “what if you all just… took out the ultra rich?”. It has been satisfying.
Take power and abolish them.
It’s your duty as a human to kill billionaires on sight. With whole groups of people killing them no one can be guilty.
The world prospers.
The solution is an income and wealth tax tied to minimum wage. I also like a maximum wage (100% tax beyond) and a maximum wealth (ditto) including unrealized gains both tied also to minimum wage.
That can be part of a solution. You also need to plug up holes like “it’s not a wage - i just got a personal loan using my company stock as collateral”.
There’s what, roughly 4000 billionaires? Them going all at once, and anyone who crosses the line going too, would put quite the damper on the pursuit of wealth, methinks.
On the pursuit of absurd amounts of wealth. Sure. But, $200m is still an absurd amount of wealth, and wouldn’t be affected in this scenario.
Also, if there were no billionaires, someone worth $990m would be the most powerful person around. Right now if someone’s worth say $800m they’re motivated to get to $1b or more. But, they know that if they get there they’ll still have nowhere near the power of Bezos or Musk.
With a hard limit of $1b, centi-millionaires might be even more motivated to hit $990m because there would be nobody more powerful or wealthy than them.
That’s like not even 2 9/11s
Its not even a day of COVID-19
If you systematically kill billionaires then it is a systemic solution.
They’re right, though. It’s easy to say “make people not want to be billionaires” but outside this comic, it’s impossible. We need to address the issues that allow billionaires to exist and pass on their fortunes tax-free.
If I received a million dollars, everyone I care about would live a long, happy and healthy life. Elon Musk spent almost $300 million dollars just on the current US midterms to elect Republicans and enact legislation that will give him control over you and keep you poor and desperate…
It’s not impossible. There’s wealth taxes, there’s guillotines.
That’s… addressing the issues that allow billionaires to exist.
That would be nice but the pessimist in me know people would cap themselves at $900,000,000 and then gift millions of the interest they’d make to political mercenaries who will do their bidding as long as they’re on payroll.
Also, people are underestimating how much damage is being done by people who are merely centi-millionares and deci-millionaires. Yes, they have a lot less money. But, there are a lot more of them.
Yeah, but they’d have SO much less power an influence than if they had dozens or hundreds of billions.
IDK, it opens the world up to some fucked up mechanics. Like, I assume the measure of $1B isn’t cash, or else a lot of billionaires wouldn’t explode since it’s all stocks. So in that case it’s just the worth of your assets.
So what stops two $500M people from assassinating good people just by offering to make a joint purchase of that person’s right shoe for $1B? That would mean the right shoe of the good person is now worth $1B and they explode. It’s basically Death Note on steroids at this point.
I don’t think the intention is to take the mechanics of how and why exactly they explode at face value. It’s interesting to theorize, but the comic points out that “no one knows why”. If it’s some supernatural power, it could be argued that they’d be able to discern between normal value and malicious intent.
Would still make an intersting thought experiment to come up with some set of rules of explosion that is actually air tight.
the mechanics is exactly the concern that large parts of the middle class andpeople interested in crypto have with wealth taxes, how will the system handle cases where there is no market for an asset but it would typically have value (think memecoins that can be produced by the billions over an hour) or items that the owner has no knowledge of the value but have a high value non the less.
