I think we all know the answer to that question, but I’ll tell you anyway: no. None of them are.
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
I think we all know the answer to that question, but I’ll tell you anyway: no. None of them are.
Is he dead? If not, then no.
Holy crap PZ posted ThoughtSlime! Yay! To anyone who hasn’t, I highly recommend subscribing. They’re good. Very good.
The Giving Pledge has always reminded me of folks prior to the Civil War who promised to free their slaves when they died. Sometimes they did free their slaves, sometimes they didn’t, but it always seemed odd that they wouldn’t do it sooner if they thought it was a good idea.
This unease led me to look into Warren Buffet’s plan to give away his fortune and surprise-surprise there are obviously shady elements to it. Buffet has created three foundations. Why three one may ask? How does three foundations address the core needs of the world? Well those appear to be the wrong questions. The correct question is how many children does Warren have? The answer is three. And it just so happens that the best way to help the world is to have each of these foundations run by one of his children…
My gut tells me this is a generational transfer of funds set up to avoid paying taxes, but that can’t be. Can it?
Warren Buffet is also not a good billionaire. Neither is George Soros. It’s the “billionaire” part that makes them bad.
The only good billionaire is a … redistributed … billionaire.
“Indy? Why is the floor moving? Very dangerous. You go first.”
To be fair, that picture of Bill Gates with the drawn on goatee and devil horns is unflattering.
That’s a pointless question. A good system wouldn’t have any billionaires, neither “good” ones nor “bad” ones.
According to the Economic Policy Institute, the average income for the top 1% in the US in 2015 was $1,316,985. You don’t even want to know what it’s like for the bottom 1%.
It would take an awfully long time to make a billion fucking dollars, even with an income like that. And how many are in the 1%? It sure as fuck isn’t a handful of famous billionaires. We’ve got to deal with a much bigger group of people who are interested in destroying this country.
Personally I found the video a bit disingenuous.
I would start with how many people has Bill Gates saved/helped through his charity/Foundation work, versus how many people have been seriously harmed or killed from his work?
Every invention has been used for military purposes. If the military uses non-Apple computers, then they are probably using Microsoft software. That doesn’t make Microsoft complicit in the military’s actions, otherwise you could make the same argument about the manufacturers of tires, toilet paper, radio, cellphones, or cooking utensils as the military uses those as well.
Many companies don’t provide benefits, particularly in the U.S. Meanwhile the average salary of Microsoft employees is over $100 000/year, so it isn’t exactly a sweatshop.
“It’s the “billionaire” part that makes them bad.” Really? J.K. Rowling was a billionaire. What about whoever won that billion dollar Powerball lottery.
@8 Michael:
As a trans person I can tell you using J.K. Rowling as an example of a non-problematic billionaire will not help your case.
@Michael: that average salary is in large part due to the fact that some time ago Microsoft fired all their lower-paid staff and brought them back in as “contractors” who don’t count towards the average.
Also the gates foundation’s investment wing is explicitly “apolitical” so ends up funding companies whose agenda is entirely contrary to the aims of the charity.
I don’t agree that Gates is a good billiionaire at all.
But Thought Slime is making a mistake if he thinks “experts in education” know what they are doing. They don’t. The whole pedagogy of education does not run on an actual double-blind scientific model and is based on random guesses followed by authoritarian jumping upon the latest bandwagon. Gates did in fact make a random guess of his own.
It isn’t that Gates wasted money, it’s that the whole enterprise of the pedagogy of education by the way that it works now wastes money and schools have done and will continue to waste money without his influence. Thought Slime supposes that their foundation doesn’t have their own experts. In this case though, their own experts may have bought an exciting line of bullpuckey by yet-another this is the best new thing to jump on the bandwagon for by some other education …’experts’.
#11
Couple points:
1. There is more to science than a double-blind scientific model. A lot of science can be performed and often has no choice but to use other methods including clinical trials.
2. If they are simply chasing fads, then how do they know if they work or not? How did they determine if the Gates funded effort worked? There must be testing and analysis at some point. Please explain how this is completely absent, yet they know Gates’ efforts failed.
I know very little about the effort to improve education. What I do know is that it is often politicized and often controlled by folks with a lot of money and no knowledge of teaching and learning (think Betsy DeVos).
@8
Every single dollar he makes as a consequence of his business is pilfered from the work of the underlying workers. Extracting excess labor value is literally how he got that wealth. If I steal 3/4 of your bank account, and then donate a bit of it to charity, is it therefore morally correct that I stole 3/4 of your bank account?
It actually does make them complicit if they don’t disavow the usage and attempt to prevent said usage. Also, I very much do make the same argument about said manufacturers. Providing materiel support to the imperialist war machine is condemnable, irrespective of whether it’s drone computers or toilet paper.
Cool, so if someone makes over 100k a year, it is morally allowable for me to steal from them? Being a better slumlord than the one down the block doesn’t make someone a good person.
Yes, and Rowling is just as much of a bourgeois worm as gates, albeit with the bonus baggage of being a transphobe.
RE: J.K. Rowling
I’d be surprised if you can find me any celebrity, or person for that matter, that you can’t find fault with – nobody is perfect. I’m not familiar with the transphobe issue, and I don’t see that it has much relevance with her being/becoming a billionaire. No downtrodden or exploited workers were involved. She is also no longer a billionaire because of how much she gave to charity.
@13 reminded me of Atlas Shrugged.
@ Michael, #14
We’re not talking about some harmless foible, like pronouncing nuclear as “nuke-you-ler.” Bigotry kills.
Oh yeah? No exploited workers were involved in her wealth? Cranked out all those millions of copies of books sold from a basement printing press, did she? Made all the paper and inks and dyes all by her lonesome?
@14
Then you might actually be too stupid to be worth responding to. Atlas Shrugged embodies the exact opposite political philosophy I am espousing, and was in fact written literally to defend the morality of business owners against the accusations I am making.
I doubt you have actually even read a summary of the plot if you’re going to say something that monumentally ignorant.
How much of the merch she profits off of is made either directly or in its constituent parts by sweatshops and underpaid, veritable slave labor? Did all the workers that printed, transported, and sold her books receive even a fraction of the value they generated for her?
Great. That’s a step in the right direction. Now if she can stop being a bourgeois slimeball and pay everyone that generates her wealth an amount commensurate with their added value, she might just barely count as a decent person.
Michael —
Of course billionaires have many imperfections. Just like all of us. The problem is that billionaires get to impose their imperfections on millions of other people. That’s what makes it a problem that billionaires exist.
whywhywhy@12–
This cannot be stated enough. Double-blind control studies are the gold standard of research, but there are many situations where they are unfeasible, impossible or horrifically unethical to perform. In those situations, you have to draw on the best available evidence, not the best evidence that would be available in a fantasy world.
The “best” evidence is that programs like the ones I ended up in (due to idiots at the school misdiagnosing me with possible mental issues for 2 years, and dragging me out of classes I needed to keep up with other students, even if those classes did bore the hell out of me, which was the real “problem”) actually help kids catch up, figure out where they are failing, and/or find better ways to teach ones that are having issues. All the evidence said it was a good program. The cash box, on the other hand, told the school district, “We need to find a cheaper way to do this, which doesn’t involve an extra group of teachers, and extra supplies, and extra school rooms.”
So.. Yeah, don’t tell me they base how schools run on, “evidence”, no matter what kind of science is involved. Also.. Just look at how math keeps changing. I understand why it has, in some respects, and it may even be based, in principle, on “science and evidence”, but there is a far cry from, “We need to get this principle across, so kids understand math better.”, and the seemingly insane, random, incomprehensible, because its never explained to the adults, never mind the kids, rearrangement of how the F its taught, which seem to have no effect other than to leave everyone freaking confused (because its not actually delivering what the science says needs to be taught, or understood, its just thrown together by someone who barely understands what, never mind why, someone else thinks teaching it that way is necessary). So, the end result is something that, too often, false to teach either math, or the way of thinking that was previously “missing”, and this new, failing, experimental, solution was supposed to provide, but doesn’t, because, again – no one, not even the teachers, have a damn clue why its being taught, what the lesson is really supposed to be, or what the end goal is. Its just assumed that the “thought process we are trying to teach will magically arrive in their heads, even when the people teaching it have no clue what the F they are actually teaching, other than ‘just math’.”
And, that is without getting into the times that I have no clue why the F they did something myself, and it just seems to be some crazy idea that X school decided to try, because its staff, or administrators, or just one teacher, with an “idea” decides to implement some bit of crazy, because they can, and there are no universal standards on how to actually do the teaching, only on what knowledge or skills a student is “tested on”. Which, really isn’t very useful if there are things they need to be learning, from all that “scientific” stuff, that isn’t being tested for at all.
@16 You have confused my Atlas Shrugged comment with regards to Ayn Rand’s philsophy, rather than the contents of the book, which is why I used the title rather than the author. The “villains” of the book were always making statements along the lines of employers stealing from their workers or using the term values.
@15 & 16 “How much of the merch she profits off of is made either directly or in its constituent parts by sweatshops and underpaid, veritable slave labor? Did all the workers that printed, transported, and sold her books receive even a fraction of the value they generated for her?”
Well, what is it? Raincoat Books in Canada published the Canadian titles within Canada, and I assume employees were paid a decent wage for doing so. I can’t speak to other countries. She earned royalties from the books that were sold, including ebooks, and in addition for the rights to the movies, which also pay their employees quite well. I can’t speak for merchandise, but your comment sounds more like jealousy (someone must have been exploited!).
“she can stop being a bourgeois slimeball” Citation needed. You realize you are picking on a single mother, who was living on welfare, wrote a best-selling series of books and became rich, paid back welfare money she received, and has donated literally millions to charity. Your virtue-signalling is showing.
@17 “The problem is that billionaires get to impose their imperfections on millions of other people.” Elaborate, and provide a citation for J.K. Rowling please. Her opinions on a given topic are not imposing anything on anyone, except perhaps opening a few minds – see her Trump twitter responses.
I don’t think the problem is billionaires, but rather what rich people do/don’t do with their money. I’m sure that $500 million wasted on a Presidential run could have been used for much more productive things. However I’m quite happy with what Bill Gates’ Foundation tries to do with its money, and that Warren Buffett will do some good with his fortune as well.
I guarantee you that they were not paid commensurate with the value that their labor provided her. “Decent” doesn’t come into it. Further, who produced the wood pulp for the paper and the ink? Were they paid according to the value that their labor produced? Were the people who transported those materials and the finished books? The people in the stores that sold them?
(The answer is no, by the by)
No shit I’ve been exploited, as has literally every other worker under capitalism. Hence why I’m a socialist.
The capitalist system is founded on exploiting the labor of workers and appropriating the value that they create. Even if the workers in the printing house were paid 100$ an hour, that would be a tiny fraction of the amount of value they’ve generated for her. Meanwhile, she makes millions off of a few months of work that she did over a decade ago.
Yes, and when she was a single mother living on welfare, she wasn’t a bourgeois slimeball. She is literally bourgeois, by the by. Definitionally. The wealth that she receives is primarily created by the labor of others, who are not paid in accordance with that value. I couldn’t give less of a shit what she did with the money she appropriated from all the workers she profited from. If I steal money and then donate it, I’m still a thief.
This is, of course, also ignoring her open transphobia in public venues and the racism contained in her works.
No, you’re just clearly unfamiliar with how capitalist economics function. The things I am describing to you are literally entry-level positions that can be explained in high school level courses.
That you think this is necessarily virtue signalling rather than a description of an economic theory that has existed for literally over a century only shows that, once again, you are much less smart than I gave you credit for.
@ Michael, #20
Telling that you ignore the fact that she’s supporting transphobic bigotry.
Based on all available evidence, capitalism is completely unworkable without exploitation. So if somebody got very rich, then someone, somewhere, got very screwed. A lot of someones, generally. I wouldn’t care if a few people got very rich in a world where the people who do all the actual labor (that allows the rich to get rich) had everything they need, but that’s not the way the world works.
The people at the bottom make far less than a living wage and don’t have access to healthcare or education. They often have no real choice but to work long hours at dangerous and debilitating jobs that permanently damage their bodies and shorten their lifespans. Slavery is not only still a thing, it’s more widespread and sophisticated than ever.
If you can show me that all the people involved in every aspect of producing millions of copies of her books, all the merchandise, and the movies were paid a living wage, worked in decent conditions, etc. then I’ll stop saying she made her money on the backs of exploited people (same as every billionaire). But I’m not going to hold my breath.
And she’s still a transphobe, so… yeah, still an asshole. That’s not unique to rich people, but being a superrich public persona gives her a massive platform from which to spread bigotry.
@21 Please define what a “decent wage” is. Forestry workers are paid quite well in Canada, and Raincoast Books warehouse workers earn about $50 000/year. I’m still waiting for citations or evidence from those who have responded to me, rather than just opinions and insults.
Rowling wrote a book. A publisher paid her for doing so. The book sold really well. She received lots of royalties for those books selling. The publisher made money. The publisher’s employees made money. Where is the exploitation? Again, what is a decent wage for their work?
@22 I think you are confusing sex and gender. You are talking about gender, applying it to sex, and concluding that Rowling is transphobic because of that. Rowling was talking about sex, not gender. PZ once linked to a nice article explaining the difference between the two, and the context for each.
I also suggest you check out today’s Jesus and Mo cartoon. https://www.jesusandmo.net/comic/high/
@23
“Decent” was your phrasing, not mine. All workers should be paid an amount commensurate with the amount of value that the worker adds to the product.
So they have their excess value extracted by their bosses. Got it. Was pointing to that number supposed to prove something? What’s their Boss’s salary? What’s the CEO’s?
I doubt you actually have sufficient mental capability to understand entry level economics but here: every single worker in this chain, such as the people making the paper and ink, assembling them into a book, transporting said book, and selling said book is not paid an amount of money commensurate to the value they added to the product. If Rowling was self-publishing her book on handmade paper with handmade ink, she’d still be poor. However good her writing is, it does not justify her making millions while they make ~50k~.
Oh, you’re a transphobic dipshit too. Neat. Hey, PZ, cleanup on aisle five.
For the record, using your incredibly large platform to whine about a well-known and particularly virulent transphobe being fired does, in fact, make you transphobic.
Don’t dragoon me into supporting your transphobia. Sex & gender are different concepts, but both are subject to distortion and dishonesty by transphobes.
@20 “The “villains” of the book were always making statements along the lines of employers stealing from their workers or using the term values.”
And, proceeded to “fix this” by claiming that everyone else was stealing from them (a refrain the rich use all the time, even today. Its practically the GOP motto at this point, “We deserve the help we get, but everyone else is just ‘taking it’ under false pretenses!”), they know better than everyone else (also, oddly, a claim always made by the rich throughout history), and basically using their own personal wealth, and riches, which they, of course, unlike everyone else, never once took wrongly from their workers, to burn the world down, and create a fancy new dystopia.
I, for one, don’t give a F what their “propaganda” was, their solutions where criminal, their utopia a delusion, and their claims to be better, somehow, than all the other thieves (since, apparently, derailing trains, and killing “takers” was totally morally justified and not itself “taking” anything), is, at its core, utter hypocrisy. Which is why you won’t find anyone sympathetic here to spouting nonsense about how, “pure their ideals where in the books!” There ideals are that of every two bit, rich, con artist, who wants to convince the gullible people they cheated that, “All the troubles we caused you are someone elses fault.” Funny how its not the “cheaters”, and the “takers”, etc., ending the world to remake it, or derailing trains full of people, or… yeah..
This is the problem with “real world villains”. Unlike the fantasy ones from comic books, real world villains don’t know they are evil, they almost always are convinced, absolutely, that they are the good guys. Atlas Shrugged’s core “values” are, “Your not a villain if you think you are right, and people believe in you.” Well, unless you are literally anyone else, other than a brain washed follower, or one of the elite leaders, then.. you are just a freaking villain PERIOD.
It’s not even just that, at least not for me. I have no problem saying that the words on the page were worth more than, say, the paper itself. But once a person’s income goes beyond a certain amount, that income should be taxed at a very high rate. Or you can do a wealth tax, where income tax never goes above a certain amount to protect those people that have one great idea/ book/ album/ whatever, but once wealth goes above a certain level then it is taxed at a rate where it becomes very difficult to grow further and very likely to decline. Of course, once it declines to close to the limit above which wealth is taxed, a smaller percentage of the person’s overall wealth is subject to the tax and more of the person’s investments are profitable. Wealth stability would then be something higher than the minimum level for the tax, but lower than 10x that level, probably (but not certainly) a lot lower – maybe1.5-2x the minimum level for the tax.
Why? Because investors use a huge amount of a society’s resources to earn their money. For the person who owns a shipping company, the profit extracted from the public highway system is far higher than the economic benefit to the person who uses a car or takes a bus on that highway system in order to work a median-wage job.
Billionaires don’t merely exploit employees, and in theory you could have a billionaire that got their wealth by creating a product so valuable that they were able to fairly compensate literally all of their employees. But they would still be getting vastly disproportionate benefit from tax dollars and should therefore pay a vastly disproportionate share of tax receipts. To do otherwise is exploiting everyone who contributes to tax receipts.
But we don’t pay anything to paper itself. It’s just paper, and it won’t accept your money, no matter how much you may wish to give it to the paper. You have to talk about people who produce the paper, those who distribute the raw materials to the places those materials need to go, those who build and run the machines which print the paper and bind the book, etc.
That labor is what adds to the value. Coming into the factory, there are various costs for assorted things, which are invariably paid to somebody (not to an inanimate object). Coming out of the factory is an item which is sold at a profit to somebody (not to an inanimate object). The people who make it profitable should be the ones who get that profit.
I don’t know how to imagine this. By hypothesis, the billionaire hired those employees to do useful work which creates some part of the value of the product. The billionaire may (or may not) have also done some work which adds to the value. (Maybe not, because they may be able to get away with doing nothing.)
It’s not as if the billionaire first made a valuable thing with the value that it has, and then their moral obligation is to “compensate” their employees who had no real role to play in making it have that value. The reason they should be compensated is because the billionaire didn’t do all of that work which made it valuable. If they had done created the value themselves, then they didn’t need their employees.
Or okay, a trivial case that I can imagine: The whole company makes $3 billion. There is “the employer” who makes $1 billion and two “employees” who also make $1 billion each, because all three did an equal share of the work.
You could say the same of a company that makes $30, with the same three characters who also divided the money equally among themselves. But I’m pretty sure that’s not what you were suggesting there.
And then … there are other companies in the world, not just a single company. If not everybody makes this $1 billion figure, there is still the same capitalist exploitation, which was just pushed onto some other group of people outside the company. It’s not an issue of how much anyone is taxed. It’s simply that those people are doing work which makes it possible for this company to make $3 billion (whatever it amounts to in macro terms that makes this meaningfully different from $30).
@ Michael, #23
From the webcomic (which is also regularly transphobic) you linked:
Okay… I’m going to try to put this in terms that even you should be able to understand:
Side one: Says and believes that trans people are human beings who should be accorded all the rights and dignity that (should) go along with being human.
Side two: Disagrees. Some on side two do so violently and directly. Others on side two use weaselly innuendo, often in the form of JAQing off, and transparently disingenuous word games; they think they’re being clever and subtle, but they’re not. Still others don’t directly say hateful things, but instead vigorously defend the right of haters to impose said hate on trans people.
Everyone on side two is a transphobic assboil. Everyone. Even if they’re superrich and wrote some really popular books. Even if you like their webcomic. Everyone on side two. It’s that simple.
I think a lot of people don’t understand how fucking big a “billion” is.
It’s simply too much money for a single individual to own, and I’m of the opinion a single individual can’t amass that sum of money without doing something immoral, illegal, or both.
A billion is a thousand-thousand-thousand. A thousand cubed. That’s fucking immense.
Working full time for a year is approximately ~2,000 hours. So, if you were paid $500 per hour, worked full time, for a fucking millennium, and never spent any of that money, and just stuffed it under your mattress or whatever, at the end of that millennium, you would have amassed approximately a billion dollars.
Jesus fucking christ, consciousness razor, are you determined to be an asshole?
No. I’m “suggesting” that we don’t even have to talk about the morality of specific wages to specific employees, because EVEN IF each employee was compensated according to some definition of “fair” a billionaire still has to extract unfair amounts of wealth from the community at large.
Talking about whether or not the employees at Raincoast Books were fairly paid is futile to someone like Michael. I was quite clear that I do not grant the premise that everyone was fairly paid, that’s why I stated “in theory”. And yet, even a hyper-skeptical someone like Michael, whom we cannot reach because we cannot trace every wage dollar paid to every single person in the production/ transportation/ sale/ delivery chain might actually understand that someone like Rowling extracts more from common projects than others do. And so in attempting to get through Michael’s thick head, it’s useful to at least try this other argument.
I’m also not the fuckign bad guy. I’m the one who’s five steps a fucking head of you, to wit:
Exactly. And how do you fix this issue where the billionaire has exploited people outside the company so much? You fucking tax their wealth and send it back to the people as a whole by continuing to educate people and build infrastructure and do all the other good things that governments can do.
It absolutely IS a matter of how much you’re taxed. I’ve already identified the problem before you, and I’ve already identified the solution before you, and you’re still pissing around trying to say that I think that workers aren’t exploited. That’s not what I said. I was making the argument that even if the workers were not exploited (again, a premise I do not grant) the community as a whole has to have been exploited for anyone to end up with a billion dollars, ergo ipso ex machina, Billionaires are exploiters, even if you’re a hyper-skeptical asshat who needs to see every single wage-stub from every single employee before you believe that Billionaires use insufficient wages to accomplish that exploitation.
Now, since you can’t seem to read me with any accuracy at all, ever, on any fucking subject, kindly do me the pleasure of FUCKING THE FUCK OFF.
Imagine thinking the solution to billionaires is taxes. Incredibly small thinking, that.
I must have missed something. I don’t think I was being impolite.
I was just disputing the premise of “a billionaire that got their wealth by creating a product so valuable that they were able to fairly compensate literally all of their employees.” It’s hard for me to make any sense of that.
There is nothing realistic about a person who single-handedly created anything that has a $1 billion value, which is then dispersed to other people for whatever reason. It’s pointless to suggest anything like that, although it may not have been your intention.
It is not the large value of a product which enables an employer to fairly compensate literally all of their employees. It is just a matter of rights that workers should be fairly compensated, whatever the value may be. This should not be up to the discretion of their employer, based upon what they think they are “able” to do (which almost always represents what they are “willing” to do).
It sounds as if it were their wealth derived from their product, which has a value created solely by them. It may not be what you had in mind, but that is not how billionaires actually obtain their wealth.
Maybe you don’t generally think of in these terms, but this was in the context of a billionaire author, where you had (rather quickly and without argument) concluded that the words written on the paper had more value than the paper itself.
As someone working in the arts, I sort of get it. You see, it’s the really nifty ideas about Harry Potter and friends, which were written down after coming straight from the author’s mind. Those things are what explain how billions of dollars in monetary value ended up in J.K Rowling’s bank accounts and her other assets.
But that’s not right. Those nifty ideas were not worth billions of dollars, until an enormous number of people worked (for less than $1 billion) to print and publish each of the books, translate them into other languages, produce each of the movies, distribute them globally, write glowing reviews which attract tons of attention, produce absurd amounts of merchandise, advertise all sorts of other goods and services which become associated with the ideas, etc.
All of this economic activity also sucked the air out of the room (globally) for numerous other writers, filmmakers, etc., many of whom had more culturally valuable ideas (different from monetary value) but didn’t get the celebrity treatment like Rowling.
I didn’t have to mention “taxes” once to make any of these points clear. And taxes are definitely not the only way that these issues could or should be addressed. The government can intervene for instance to support unionization and otherwise enforce various forms of workplace democracy. When all of the workers have a real voice in the giant corporations they typically work for, they will have some amount of control (which they do not currently have) over how they are compensated for their own work. They will naturally see to it that there are no billionaires (or anyone making anything close to that amount), just as it should be.