It’s a terrible situation. How can anyone justify this when children and pensioners have been freezing this winter?
This isn’t capitalism, it’s kleptocracy.
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Any of us are welcome to setup our own petro chemical company and drill, refine and ship oil. Access to cheap fuel isn’t a human right.
I’m in the industry, and can confirm they are disgustingly greedy organisations, driven by keeping the returns to their shareholders as high as possible.
I have been offered, and turned down multiple job offers in the last year, where they, in cahoots with vermin recruiters looking for their cut, are offering salaries which are about 30% less than 8 years ago.
What threshold of crime should be a death sentence? Ultimately people from the “higher castes” steal more in taxes and (even) illegal parking on a daily basis… I advocating guns for tax officers and parking wardens!
https://us.yahoo.com/news/just-washed-blood-off-then-130000280.htm
Nothing to see, move along.
Misleading headline, with no mention of the obscene amount of tax they pay.
I agree.
Yes, it is probably (though likely only slightly) misleading and yes, they probably pay a lot of tax and finally, yes, to them either be paying more tax or earning a lot less.
I think the headline works for me - whether it is 3, 13 or 30 days - when all is totted up.
You think they should pay even more tax?
You don’t? 
3 years later so you maybe done remember, but can you expand on that? Im not really tracking what your saying happened. Are we saying we didnt really respond to how much richer the rich became? Like we claimed we recognized it but didnt really internalize it in terms of our expectations for our lives?
My memory is terrible 
I think it may have been from Morgan Housel’s book (i’ll have to revisit it again).
If i am remembering correctly, i think the point was that once incomes began to diverge, those on the lower end failed to readjust their expectations and kept on spending in line with those whose incomes were improving faster - keeping up with the Jones as it were.
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On a similar theme:
I have mentioned in the past that the vilification of tax is part of the neoliberal agenda.
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Increased equality equals greater security, stability, health and well-being for the whole society.
Increased inequality, the opposite…
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I agree inequality must be combated but this sort of article (headline) puts up bogie men (usually) for people to focus on rather than the governments that ultimately facilitate their rise. In my opinion I t perversely and ironically glamorises inequality.
I think a big part of the problem with billionaires, is that very few people grasp how much a billion actually is. We struggle to grasp the exponential nature of numbers - we just instinctively think a billion is the next one up from a million. We’re not very good at conceptualising the mind numbing vastness of that number. We’re not brilliant at anything over a couple of hundred, actually.
For reference,
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If you have a thousand pounds, to count that out, steadily, at one pound a second, it would take 16 minutes and 40 seconds.
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To do the same with a million pounds, it would take non stop counting for twelve days.
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But if someone counted a billion pounds, it would take 32 years. It would take Jeff Bezo’s 5,664 years to count his money.
And now we’re talking about the world’s first trillionaire? 31,700 years, in case you were wondering.
I honestly think if people understood this intuitively, Jeff Bezo’s head would be on a spike.
(By the way, it’s a very similar issue with people who don’t believe in Evolution. What? You can’t accept the diversity of the natural world could arise without a creator? Do you understand how long half a billion years actually is?)
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I mentioned it on another thread as a concern…
AI is a real fork in the road point for humanity. It’s a huge concern, but it’s also a massive opportunity as well. AI is going to take somewhere between 30-40% of jobs. But another way of looking at that is that AI is going to free 30-40% of human capacity for other stuff.
There is one pathway where we just let people lose their jobs on a scale never seen before, and fuck em, they should get on their bike etc.
There is another pathway where we embrace a new model of work, where people work less hours, have more time for innovation, creativity, charity, entrepreneurialism (in other words, all the things that computers can’t do) while society meets everyone’s basic needs, and shorter working weeks top up the rest.
I’m cautiously optimistic about that second path, for no other reason that AI is really a middle class issue - AI isn’t going to take all the manual work - so there will be a drive to make sure everyone is OK. I’m doubtful that would be the case if we were talking about an army of robot labours about to take over working class jobs.
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It is not a topic on any political party agenda as far as it is commonly advertised. Moreover it is about the world as a unit. Saying that our 40% will be ok is a very poor argument for me as ultimately we have a global economy. What goes around will come around in one way or another. It is in everyone’s interest to have a global strategy - everything else is exploitation.
p.s. make no mistake, every company and country, is looking to make a buck…