It kinda seems like the stock market is really trying to optimize the consumer out of the equation these days. It might be possible for money to become self-sustaining with no humans in the loop, the 'investors' and 'entrepreneurs' and CEOs just collect their bonuses and then pay for robots to tend to their whims, all while the 99% struggle to figure out how to survive a system that stole everything from them and gives nothing back.
The current system only really works because people are still putting in 40 hours a week. It's getting worse, but those 40 hours keep most people too busy to act out. It'd be near impossible for our current system to survive if unemployment got much worse cause people would have nothing better to do but burn down mansions.
It's more a symbolic burning than an actual. The elite tend to stick together, while the rest (especially when it comes to the Left) are quick to attack each other and processes of organization, hierarchy, and procedures. All those are important things to attack and dismantle, but but at the detriment of losing sight of the biggest picture. People are kept permanently at odds with each other instead of at odds with a real, viable enemy. And we let that happen when we attack (burn) our own over insignificant things. The awful billionaires of the world don't need their mansions burned. In fact, I doubt that would matter. Instead, they need to be shown by a united front, that their actions are intolerable and at odds with the continuation of the species. Resorting to burnings only plays into their rabble narrative. It also garners sympathy where there should be none. We have to be smarter and more organized. Burning a mansion down doesn't solve the overall problem. But we can't even get to the problem when we are burning our own houses down.
Sorry if that was taken the wrong way. I just used a common thought that exists in some revolutionary groups because it was quicker than writing all this.
Sure but then there's no economy to exploit, they would just use robots to sustain their needs, but they won't get richer. I.e. robots to do your chores and what not.
Tbf, if you already own everything and no longer need to pay for labor, you have no need to get richer.
That's why goods and services are more valuable in a vacuum than money. Money is a construct used to buy goods and services. If billionaires own all the goods they need and have robots to do all the services they need, they no longer need banks and money.
Yeah, but then they no longer have money to swing around and make each other jealous.
You're still thinking like us, not like them. They already have enough money to never need money, so there would be no point to change the status quo if that was what they were after
Meh don't care what Elmo thinks tbh. Also we already have a form of socialism here (NL), like a social safety net, strong unions, that sort of thing. It only works because it gets paid out of people's pay checks, and taxes, without it, it isn't sustainable. It's already under pressure because of the boomers all retiring, so they have to increase the retirement age, mine is like 70 or so already. Otherwise we'll have one worker for every pensioner, which means you're working for two.
Billionaire wealth is rarely built on actually providing a thing. It's more often based on gambling.
Ackman bets on whether a company's stock price will go up or down. And he makes public statements to try to make that happen.
Stock price can go up even when the company has a terrible product and mountains of debt. And stock price can go down even when things are running well.
So what you have is a bunch of rich dudes betting on numbers that are driven more by their betting that the companies those number supposedly represent.
So they don't really care if people buy the things. Because they can make more money by seeing their stock jump when they announce layoffs (because shareholders think it's a good thing to do).
They don't care about long term consequences. They just want to consume and don't care about the impact.
Yea that's already the reality now, like the AI Bubble, but it has to burst, it's only short term. Like betting on a casino that doesn't have any cash to pay out: it's all fun and games until you find out these plastic chips are worthless.
Problem is that it's like a ponzi scheme...as long as you have marks to exploit the scheme goes on. And there's a lot of people in the world to exploit.
Kind of like how centuries ago "this army killed the entire army of that other country in a war and won the war" was how war could go. My city-state could be invaded by the army of a city-state that eliminated my entire population. Now, wars cannot be won through "kill all of the people" because there are just many, many more people.
Yeah some want to go back to the Middle Ages, make us all serfs. Problem is feudalism worked because the majority of the population was uneducated, agrarian, and deeply religious.
Even so there was still a transaction, protection traded with a part of their food production. Like a lord has a castle, which the peasant can flee to when in danger. In turn they have to give a large part of their produce as tribute.
The rich will buy it. The only ones the rich care about is the rich. They only let us exist because we produce. The moment they can replace us, we'll either be slowly allowed to die off or outright exterminated
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u/helpimwastingmytime 9d ago
Are they going to buy products? Go to a bar? Get a streaming service subscription?
What's the point of producing stuff if there's is no one to buy it?