If you have a lot of money

• you contributed a lot to society
• you took a lot from society

If you’re a successful businessman and you want to contribute, perhaps you could lower the prices of your products, perhaps you could give shares to your employees who do all the work. Not only is it efficient for them to have a stake in the company, it’s also only fair. Not doing so is unfair. We won’t celebrate your ‘success’, a successful thief is a thief nonetheless. You doing so-called ‘philanthropy’ won’t do any good either. Money is power, you exerting your power over us isn’t the moral thing to do. It’s still wrong to the core. Sure, people voluntarily giving money to all sorts of causes is a beautiful thing, but only if money is reasonably distributed among people in the first place. If you take money from society on a large scale and then exert this power, than undoubtedly your views and interests are disproportionately represented. Your intentions are dubious, because if you intended well, why did you keep all the money and power for yourself in the first place? It’s likely that you’re a power hungry maniac. But even if you’re somehow naively unaware of this and truly have the noblest of intentions with your philanthropy, then it’s still a ludicrous idea that this would be an efficient way to distribute money. It’s quite obvious that if everyone got a say in where the money goes, that the distribution of assets would better represent what society deems important. It’s only logical that if you get to distribute the money, it will go to things you deem important. If you think that makes sense, it can only mean that you deem yourself wiser, more moral, than all of humanity combined. It means you are a narcissist. It’s not unlikely that you are, people who are successful money-wise, often think that life it a money-game and they’re the winning players. And they have won because they work hard and are clever. The thing is, life isn’t a money-game, people have moral compasses and strive towards others goals than making money. And even if it was a money-game, you’ve not won because you’re so smart and hard-working, it is in a very large part due to your luck. That’s not an allegation, it’s a logical fact. People don’t have the same starting positions. Being a billionaire is morally wrong, even if you give all of it away later in life.

That’s a lot of words for saying: focus on buying houses, and keep them so no one else can buy these houses.

Also it’s not at all obvious that you’ll accomplish it before others get houses/hotels.

Where ever you listen to your music, in most cases you can hook it up with ListenBrainz, to save your listening data on a FOSS alternative for Last.fm. And to get all sorts of beneficial features, like for instance recommendations that are truly independent, and getting updates on new releases.

good luck finding one with a decent resolution AND price.

That raises the question: is there one that has decent resolution and privacy, but is expensive? Those of us who can afford it should surely go for the privacy friendly option regardless of price. Boycotting the surveillance society that’s in full development is worth a lot.

Interesting, care to explain?

I can only see ‘being a billionaire’ as ‘stealing from the population at large’. So you’re saying the biggest thief of society is still popular among 6% of democrats.

Youtube isn’t just a thing people use to waste time

I fully agree, didn’t mean to imply it’s just that. But it’s also that.

Direct payment to creators seems like the most simple and efficient method.

That’s a fair point. There’s a million things you could do, and watching videos on YT is just one of them. Watching videos online has become a large part of peoples lives. Surely it has a lot to offer, but we should probably not forget it also replaces a lot of things, things we would spent are time on otherwise, if we didn’t have YT as an easy time-drain, and those other things are presumably equally rewarding or more so.

Same here though I use Busuu. Used Duolingo in the past, to be fair there’s not that much difference between the two.

Been dreaming of a FOSS alternative, where people work together to make the best possible ever-improving courses, and all is free and customizable to your every need. That would be so awesome ! Surely some day some one will make this happen, right?

Been there in the past, but I actually have been doing all of the above past couple of years.

I recently read Peter Kropotkin’s The Conquest of Bread on anarcho-communism, and am currently reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson. I’ve been drawing geometric patterns, mostly based on the Islamic tradition of geometry, and after drawing the patterns I start painting to add some color. I throw them away after a while, but I just like the flow-experience of painting/drawing, don’t really care about the end-result. I’m studying French on a daily basis, mostly on Busuu, but also by watching French movies (most recently Le Proces Goldman) and reading French books (most recently Le Petit Prince). I watch on average 2 movies per week at my local cinema, got a subscription there, sometimes go with friends but I also often go alone. I enjoy going to museums and studying art history, so when I have the time I cross the country by train and make visits. I also take psychedelics (LSD and/or psilocybin) every 2 or 3 weeks. Psychedlics are a lot of fun, but I also actually believe they helped me grow as a person, from what the OP describes, to where I am now. Psychedelics aren’t for everyone, but still I’d highly recommend most people to try them out some time (responsibly of course).

Been playing some Xonotic recently. Good times with FOSS.

Maybe billionaires should be filmed and streamed continuously, since their behavior has such a big impact on the world. If they don’t like it maybe we shouldn’t allow them to control such incredible assets. I’m sure billionaires have nothing sketchy to hide, right? What we will see is probably how they are hard working people who are not at all detached from normal folks. Right?

That’s not limited to modern technologies. I have a lot of books laying around that are judging me by looking at me like ‘why the f are you still not reading me??’. Projection is my middle name

Ah, yeah that does make a big difference, and it also makes a lot more sense.

And here’s another beauty

“That’s what I mean. There— it’s— you know, one of the hardest parts of my job is to connect Iraq to the war on terror.” – George W. Bush

“The decision of one man, to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean, of Ukraine. Iraq too. Anyway…[I’m] 75.” – George W. Bush

Source: Wikipedia page on “Bushism”

I learned that just now.

Elon Musk

it’s a misconception that a decentralized service cannot be banned. In fact it’s not hard at all

Could someone expand upon this? I’m don’t know much about tech, but the idea that FOSS decentralized platforms can’t be banned does seem to make sense right? Ban one, another one will pop up, etc. What am I not getting here?