• Kvoth@lemmy.world
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    8 days ago

    I do somewhat disagree with this. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very much on the eat the rich train. But, while not due to elons personal “brilliance” space x has cut the cost of going to space by a huge amount. And so many amazing things have come out of the space program

    • SkybreakerEngineer@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Sure, if by “Elon’s brilliance” you mean decades of Congress forcing NASA to outsource plus a whole lot of engineers none of whom are also CEO

    • Chekhovs_Gun@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      Why can’t we do both? How many billionaires are there? How many of them have their own space company? I’m no mathologist but something doesn’t add up.

    • ObjectivityIncarnate@lemmy.world
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      8 days ago

      The fact is, one thing has pretty much nothing to do with the other. The wealth gap between the wealthiest individuals on Earth and the rest of us is not the cause of poverty; in fact, as you go back in time long term, the wealth gap shrinks, while overall poverty goes up.

      And what you mention about Space X is one example of the ‘rising ride lifts all ships’ phenomena that makes things better for all of us overall long term.

      The fact that fulfilling three extremely-doable conditions: graduating high school, not getting married before the age of 21, and not having children before getting married, make your chances of being impoverished as an adult next to nothing, makes it even more obvious that billionaires are not the cause of poverty.

      Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of increases in net worth of billionaires is created wealth (as in, if it didn’t happen, that wealth wouldn’t belong to someone else, it just wouldn’t exist at all).

      The real issue is the eradication of poverty. It’s impossible to prevent someone from being at the top, and that top being exponentially higher than the average, in a society where wealth is so ‘create-able’ (and the fact that it is is a good thing, imo!), that position is always going to exist. But as we’ve seen over the past 50-100 years, it is very possible for that wealth gap to not only exist, and grow, and have the percentage of human beings who are impoverished shrinking, at the same time.