Even if rich people were no more likely to believe stupid shit than you or me, it'd still be a problem.
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This is a tautology: the argument goes that only good people are made rich, and therefore all the rich people are good. If rich people had as many cherished stupidities as I claim, The Economy (TM) would relieve them of their wealth, and thus their power to allocate capital, and thus their potential to hurt people by being wrong, which means that they must be right.
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This is the stupidest (and most destructive) of all of billionaireism's cherished stupidities: that we live in a meritocracy, which means that whatever the richest people want must be right. It's a modern update to the doctrine of divine providence, which held that we can discern god's favor through wealth. The more god loves you, the richer he makes you.
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This is the stupidest (and most destructive) of all of billionaireism's cherished stupidities: that we live in a meritocracy, which means that whatever the richest people want must be right. It's a modern update to the doctrine of divine providence, which held that we can discern god's favor through wealth. The more god loves you, the richer he makes you.
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This *can't* be true, because *every single economic cataclysm in the history of the world was the fault of rich people*. Rich people gave us the 19th century's bank panics. They gave us the South Seas bubble. They gave us the Great Depression, and the S&L Crisis, and the Great Financial Crisis. They invented greedflation and created the cost of living crisis. Today they are teeing up an AI crash that will make 2008 look like the best day of your life:
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This *can't* be true, because *every single economic cataclysm in the history of the world was the fault of rich people*. Rich people gave us the 19th century's bank panics. They gave us the South Seas bubble. They gave us the Great Depression, and the S&L Crisis, and the Great Financial Crisis. They invented greedflation and created the cost of living crisis. Today they are teeing up an AI crash that will make 2008 look like the best day of your life:
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The old left aphorism has it that "every billionaire is a policy failure." That's true, but it's incomplete. Every billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale.
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The old left aphorism has it that "every billionaire is a policy failure." That's true, but it's incomplete. Every billionaire is a machine for producing policy failures at scale.
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Image:
Aude (modified)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:80th_floor_of_3_World_Trade_Center_-_OHNY.jpgCC BY 4.0
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.eneof/
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@pluralistic I mean, it's arguably what killed the Roman empire. Rich Romans got fancy indoor plumbing, made of lead for easy maintenance. The lead leeches onto the water, giving them a strange line on their gums and a tendency to believe idiotic nonsense.
@madengineering @pluralistic actually it is probably not the lead plumbing as limescale buildup limits the lead concentration in the water.
The bigger problem in terms of exposure were pewter plates and pots, especially in combination with fruits or acidic drinks.
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@madengineering @pluralistic actually it is probably not the lead plumbing as limescale buildup limits the lead concentration in the water.
The bigger problem in terms of exposure were pewter plates and pots, especially in combination with fruits or acidic drinks.
@madengineering @pluralistic or the fact they intentionally used lead acetate as a wine sweetener (which continued in europe until mid 18 century)
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@madengineering @pluralistic actually it is probably not the lead plumbing as limescale buildup limits the lead concentration in the water.
The bigger problem in terms of exposure were pewter plates and pots, especially in combination with fruits or acidic drinks.
@missqarnstein @pluralistic Looking further into this, I see articles about how "sapa," better known as lead acetate, was used as a sweetener.
Thank you for your assistance in understanding the chemistry involved, miss Qarnstein. Chemistry is my weakest science.
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@pluralistic I mean, it's arguably what killed the Roman empire. Rich Romans got fancy indoor plumbing, made of lead for easy maintenance. The lead leeches onto the water, giving them a strange line on their gums and a tendency to believe idiotic nonsense.
@madengineering @pluralistic Until Trump I assumed all the discussions of Nero were hyperbole
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Even if Peter Singer were no more prone to ethical missteps than you or me, the fact that he is morbidly wealthy means that his ethical blind spots leave behind a trail of wreckage that rivals a *comet*. And of course, being as rich as Peter Singer inflicts a lasting neurological injury that makes you incapable of understanding how wrong you are, which means that Peter Singer is *doubly* dangerous.
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@pluralistic *Paul Singer
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Even if rich people were no more likely to believe stupid shit than you or me, it'd still be a problem. After all, I believe my share of stupid shit (and if you think that none of the shit you believe in is stupid, then I'm afraid we've just identified at least one kind of stupid shit you believe in).
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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@pluralistic If I only knew what shit that I believed was stupid.
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@pluralistic *Paul Singer
@gneilyo Fixed!
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R relay@relay.publicsquare.global shared this topicR relay@relay.an.exchange shared this topic
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@madengineering @pluralistic Until Trump I assumed all the discussions of Nero were hyperbole
@etchedpixels@mastodon.social @madengineering@mastodon.cloud @pluralistic@mamot.fr
As I posted elsewhere, "if there are future historians, I wonder if they will wonder if Trump literally golfed while the world burned." -
@pluralistic If I only knew what shit that I believed was stupid.
@Enema_Cowboy@dotnet.social @pluralistic@mamot.fr
A significant chunk tends to fall into areas where you lack enough knowleged to "know what you don't know". Sadly, there's a lot of people where such "areas" effectively comprise "everything". -
@etchedpixels@mastodon.social @madengineering@mastodon.cloud @pluralistic@mamot.fr
As I posted elsewhere, "if there are future historians, I wonder if they will wonder if Trump literally golfed while the world burned."@ferricoxide @pluralistic @etchedpixels @madengineering The world would be in a much much better place if all he had done was played golf for 4 years.
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Ford was a vicious antisemite, a bigot, a union-buster and an all-round piece of shit, but also, he believed that his opinions trumped the axial tilt of the planet Earth.
In other words, Henry Ford wasn't merely evil - he was also periodically as thick as pigshit. Ford's cherished stupidities didn't just affect him, they also meant that a whole city full of people in the Amazon had windows facing the wrong direction.
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@pluralistic I don't understand why the factory would even have to do anything differently. You could simply turn the entire building - or the entire town - around 180 degrees.
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@pluralistic If I only knew what shit that I believed was stupid.
@Enema_Cowboy @pluralistic One good filter: ask who told you something. Then, go to someone who actually works in that field and ask them if whoever told you that is a reliable expert in that field. Their answer will tell you whether or not to believe that something.
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@gneilyo Fixed!
@pluralistic No worries! Great thread/essay, thanks for writing it
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@pluralistic I mean, it's arguably what killed the Roman empire. Rich Romans got fancy indoor plumbing, made of lead for easy maintenance. The lead leeches onto the water, giving them a strange line on their gums and a tendency to believe idiotic nonsense.
@madengineering @pluralistic
The Roman empire ended when the Ottomans conquered it in the 15th century, long after their plumbers did the initial work..... -
Even if rich people were no more likely to believe stupid shit than you or me, it'd still be a problem. After all, I believe my share of stupid shit (and if you think that none of the shit you believe in is stupid, then I'm afraid we've just identified at least one kind of stupid shit you believe in).
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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@pluralistic Rich "people" believe the STUPIDEST shit. For example: They believe they deseeve to be rich.
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The airline went from being the *least* enshittified airline in America to the *most*. Southwest is now worse than Spirit airlines - no, really. Southwest doesn't just merely charge for seat selection, but if you refuse to pay for seat selection, *they preferentially place you in a middle seat even on a half-empty flight*, as a way of pressuring you to pay the sky-high junk fee for seat selection:
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My favorite anecdote about comeuppance for airline execs is that on New Year's Eve 1999, at the witching hour for the Y2K scare, the Chinese govt made the top execs of its state airlines be on one of their aircraft and in the air from 11.00 pm to 1.00 am. It was an incentive to make sure they had sorted out any Y2K bugs.
If only something similar could be sorted out for scores of top American airline execs. Their policies might not be so rapacious.
