Billionaires are evil

[Nylock]

Thanks for posting that. I had looked for it and you've saved me the trouble.

For context, this is the guy who suggested that the reason Gen X can't afford to buy homes is because they waste their money on avocado toast.

I'm with you. Long drop, short rope.

Alternatively; long drop, deep ocean...

 

[danski]

The best form of defence is...

A human shield, made of billionaires.

 

[Pickman's model]

A human shield, made of billionaires.

You've not spelt attack right

 

[hash tag]

This is nothing new. JCB/bamfird have been done for tax fraud before, not to mention human rights abuses etc.

HMRC investigating tax affairs of one of Tory party’s largest donors

Exclusive: Inquiry into tax affairs of JCB boss Anthony Bamford calls into question whether Tories should accept funds from peer

www.theguardian.com

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

Alternatively; long drop, deep ocean...

I think I've figured out what to do with this guy. Take him out to the middle of the ocean and leave him there. Assure him that if he works hard and pulls himself up by the bootstraps, he'll eventually reach land.

 

[hash tag]

Bernie Ecclestone pleads guilty to fraud

The ex-F1 boss is given a suspended sentence and will pay back £653m to HMRC over a tax case.

www.bbc.co.uk

Ecclestone has agreed in a civil settlement to repay almost £653m to HM Revenues and Customs, a court heard.

 

[editor]

Get caught fiddling your housing benefit and you could get thrown in jail.
Get caught withholding hundreds of millions from the government and it's a suspended sentence.
The cunt should be in jail.

 

[hash tag]

Are titled people entitled?
In the course of work I have been called out to help titled people, one two nights ago. One was certainly not rich but very entitled.

 

[Spymaster]

I don’t think sticking a 92 year old in jail for tax shit is in anyone’s interests.

Making him repay it certainly is.

 

[Pickman's model]

I don’t think sticking a 92 year old in jail for tax shit is in anyone’s interests.

Making him repay it certainly is.

depends on the 92 year auld

 

[a_chap]

I agree with Spymaster

However, I think having Ecclestone serve a token jail sentence (not suspended) should happen. Say, ten years.

 

[Pickman's model]

I agree with Spymaster

However, I think having Ecclestone serve a token jail sentence (not suspended) should happen. Say, ten years.

No one ever agrees with spy

 

[Zapp Brannigan]

Bernie Ecclestone pleads guilty to fraud

The ex-F1 boss is given a suspended sentence and will pay back £653m to HMRC over a tax case.

www.bbc.co.uk

Ecclestone has agreed in a civil settlement to repay almost £653m to HM Revenues and Customs, a court heard.

This is the scale of the harm that billionaires do. Every time a policy statement is announced by government or opposition, the finances get picked apart - "we can't afford x, y and z, it would cost £1.1b per year. Where's the funding?". Doctors, teachers strike over pay (amongst other things), we're told that their demands are unreasonable and unachievable.

The tax fraud - money illegally withheld from the public purse - from just a single man equates to almost £1700 for every single nurse in the NHS.

 

[yield]

Twelve billionaires’ climate emissions outpollute 2.1m homes, analysis finds

Research shows impact from lifestyles and investments of likes of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Elon Musk

www.theguardian.com

Analysis by Oxfam and US researchers of their luxury purchases, which include superyachts, private jets, cars, helicopters and palatial mansions, combined with the impact of their financial investments and shareholdings reveals that they account for almost 17m tonnes of CO2 and equivalent greenhouse gas emissions annually.

This is the same as the CO2 and equivalent emissions from powering 2.1m homes or the emissions from 4.6 coal-fired power plants over a year, according to conversion data from the US Environmental Protection Agency.

 

[yield]

The 25 Richest Families in the World — 2023
bloomberg. 08/12/2023

Move over, Waltons. Another family has emerged as the richest dynasty in the world.

For the first time, the House of Nahyan has joined Bloomberg’s annual ranking of family fortunes, and done so at the very top.

With a $305 billion fortune, the Al Nahyans of Abu Dhabi topped the Waltons of Walmart Inc. by a cool $45 billion. Another new entrant: the Al Thanis, the royal family of Qatar, at No. 5.

The petro-fortunes are reshaping global business as never before. Their flexing of personal — as well as sovereign — financial firepower adds multibillion-dollar exclamation points to the region’s growing influence. All three Gulf families on the ranking are likely far richer than these conservative estimates.

As a group, the world’s richest families have gotten $1.5 trillion wealthier since the last ranking, and the new tallies from the Middle East weren’t the only noteworthy shifts. Among the biggest gainers was a different kind of royal house: the sixth-generation dynasty behind luxury brand Hermès, who added $56 billion to become the world’s third-richest by eschewing fads and cultivating loyalty.

In a world in which faddish fortunes are regularly made and lost in cryptofied seconds, the world’s richest clans have prospered largely by sticking together, united by a shared sense of duty and the belief that they’ll be richer for it.

That’s helped dynasties endure despite wars, downturns, taxes, blood feuds and errant in-laws. Buoyant markets help too, but the most successful families are fixated on generational, not quarterly, milestones, said Bob Gould, a partner at Creaghan McConnell Group, which advises business families. “They play a much longer game.”

 

[Dogsauce]

That’ll be where all the money is going then. All those higher fuel and food prices have to go in someone’s pocket.

 

[teqniq]

No you fools.

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk say human population not nearly big enough: ‘If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts’

“I think in a lot of these endeavors we're very like-minded,” Bezos said of himself and Musk regarding getting humans into space.

finance.yahoo.com

 

[Orang Utan]

No you fools.

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk say human population not nearly big enough: ‘If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts’

“I think in a lot of these endeavors we're very like-minded,” Bezos said of himself and Musk regarding getting humans into space.

finance.yahoo.com

Was hoping the ‘po… in that headline was leading to another word. For shame.

 

[DotCommunist]

No you fools.

Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk say human population not nearly big enough: ‘If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts’

“I think in a lot of these endeavors we're very like-minded,” Bezos said of himself and Musk regarding getting humans into space.

finance.yahoo.com

' am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein's brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops'

-SJ Gould

 

[yield]

Facebook Made This 29-Year-Old Rich; War Made Him A Billionaire
Jun 3, 2022

After being drummed out of Silicon Valley as a Trump-supporting hawk, the onetime VR wunderkind Palmer Luckey is feeling vindicated. His $8 billion defense tech startup, Anduril, is arming Ukraine and building the weapons of the future—before the Pentagon even knows it wants them.

This post by Crispy from 2016

Billionaire Palmer Luckey Unveils A New Jet-Powered Drone — And It Looks Bonkers
Dec 1, 2023

The high-speed autonomous drone, called Roadrunner, is designed by Luckey’s Anduril Industries to intercept and blow up enemy aircraft.

 

[Crispy]

Yeah, the war in Ukraine is heading towards this kind of "aerial superiority, at a tiny scale" sort of thing. It's become impossible to move around without being spotted by a drone and getting an artillery shell on your head. He'll probably sell thousands of them.

 

[yield]

How the Rich Keep Their Riches Out of Reach
Mother Jones. Jan 2024
Eight ways to hide an asset

When the US targeted Russia’s oligarchs after the invasion of Ukraine, the trail of assets kept leading to our own backyard. Not only had our nation become a haven for shady foreign money, but we were also incubating a familiar class of yacht-owning, industry-dominating, resource-extracting billionaires. In the January + February 2024 issue of our magazine, we investigate the rise of American Oligarchy—and what it means for the rest of us. You can read all the pieces here.

 

[teqniq]

This x 1,000:

Time to tax billionaires

 

[yield]

This x 1,000:

Time to tax billionaires

And taxing so few people is administratively simple. The EU Tax Observatory estimates that a 2 per cent, EU-wide wealth tax would raise $42bn a year from the bloc’s 499 billionaires. A more ambitious tax would extend to the billionaire-adjacent.

A wealth tax in the US might be ruled unconstitutional, but the government probably could adjust people’s income taxes depending on their wealth. Otherwise, the US could raise estate taxes, tax vast unrealised capital gains and close tax loopholes designed for rich people. It’s doable. States haven’t done it partly because billionaires have captured many political systems. That’s another reason to reduce their wealth.

"States haven’t done it partly because billionaires have captured many political systems."

 

[likesfish]

Get caught fiddling your housing benefit and you could get thrown in jail.
Get caught withholding hundreds of millions from the government and it's a suspended sentence.
The cunt should be in jail.

they got £632million off the old bastard. He had the ability with lawyers and accountants etc to cause problems for ages about it.

 

[Bahnhof Strasse]

they got £632million off the old bastard. He had the ability with lawyers and accountants etc to cause problems for ages about it.

No he didn't, he has a couple of years of life left, he chose to pay that so as not to spend what little time he has left in court.

 

[yield]

Tech Millionaires Take On Politicians in a Fight to Fix San Francisco
Executives are trying to combat crime, drug abuse and homelessness. ‘Enough is enough, we’re getting involved in the muck.’
WSJ. Feb. 8, 2024

Silicon Valley leaders say they want to make the city a safer and more hospitable place to raise families and run businesses. They also want to halt the exodus of some of tech’s most talented workers and reverse the doom loop narrative that has haunted downtown since Covid-19.

The industry says San Francisco’s problems stem from its current establishment having swung too far left on the political spectrum. They believe progressive Democrats are too soft on drugs and street crime, and too woke on issues like public education.

The fight in San Francisco pits Democrats against Democrats. Progressive Democrats say that the policies the tech executives are pushing would disproportionately impact minorities and the poor.

Tech’s big goal is to elect a less liberal slate of candidates to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, over half of whom are up for re-election in November. The board controls the city’s budget and can block policy proposals by Mayor London Breed, who has the backing of the industry.

"Taking the risk out of democracy." Just in case the rich are asked to pay their way.

 

[Rob Ray]

For a bunch of supposedly bright sorts they seem very poorly informed about what factors are actually driving tech workers out of the city (avg house prices of $1.3m and associated rent gouging, for example, as opposed to it's crime rate, which is among the lowest of any major US city, or "wokeness" levels which are completely irrelevant).

 

[klang]

Too woke on public education?

So what, they want less education to tackle drug problems and homelessness?

 

[Yuwipi Woman]

For a bunch of supposedly bright sorts they seem very poorly informed about what factors are actually driving tech workers out of the city (avg house prices of $1.3m and associated rent gouging, for example, as opposed to it's crime rate, which is among the lowest of any major US city, or "wokeness" levels which are completely irrelevant).

Yep. There's a reason that so many people are choosing not to have children. No one sees a future of anything but working and working to afford a few minutes a day with your family. I know people who have kids where one parent works a day and the other works the night shift so they can save on childcare costs. They meet up for a couple of minutes between shifts. It's no wonder that marriages fall apart, and people feel hopeless when that's their entire life.