A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
Would we though? Actual intelligent people tend to consider the greater good.
If they considered the greater good, they wouldn't be billionaires, catch 22.
There is a probematic split, probably due to capitalism favoring stem education, between what we consider intelligent and wisdom. The latter is cultivated from engaging with "idle" topics such as philosophy, art, history and cultures, all that stuff that doesnt make any money and takes time spent not working.
So naturally these arent things the oligarchy engages with in any way that is conducive to the development of actual ethical beliefs, morals, or feelings of social responsibility. This is reinforced by the fact that those ethics would conflict with their entire existence and role in society, and self interest wins out.
Actually wise people*, you can be intelligent and remain a selfish, sociopathic waste of skin.
Exactly.
If they were half as smart as they think they are, they would enjoy their lives in luxury and leave the rest of us alone.
The smart ones are the ones we have never heard of.
That's been the Jeff Bezos gambit for nearly a decade. He's still an absolute POS and we all know it.
The smart ones are the ones we have never heard of.
Behind every great fortune is a great crime.
This is actually so true lmao literally South Park even mentioned this recently tbh.
Problem is they pay people to be smart for them. Most of them are just selfish dumbasses.
I'm confused. They think they are smart, let's say an IQ of 150. If they were half as smart, they would have an IQ of 75, but it's the IQ they already have, there would be no difference.
The implication is their IQ is currently well below 75.
They think they are smart, let’s say an IQ of 150
I think the point is that they are a bunch of narcissists that think they are way smarter than that.
Billionaires think they have an IQ of 1000.
Thank God they're mostly just broken, weak, hedonistic and distracted men with daddy issues without remarkable intellects and not a group of Henry Kissingers. 🥲
Life continues despite their best efforts.
billionaires arnt actually smart, they had a silver spoon since thier birth, so they have expensive education. even soros merely took advantage of favorable conditions at his disposal.
plus they come out of school enititled and elitist from private schools, which is not indicative intelligence.
Inheritance is only one way the ultra-wealthy gained their status. There's also exploitation, luck, predatory business practices, corruption, ....
Some gained wealth legitimately, but they usually fall under the luck category and should have been taxed at a higher rate for decades.
Some gained wealth legitimately
Nobody gets truly rich by playing within the rules. Show me a billionaire and I'll show you a list of crimes.
Gonna throw a ball and just see where it lands… Azim Premji.
So a lottery winner is guilty of crimes? There are ways to "win the lottery" inside capitalism without breaking any rules. Sure, the amassing of wealth is in itself unethical in a country where many kids can't eat nutritious meals, but you don't necessarily have to be a backstabbing thief to become rich. You can just luck out and have an idea like online banking take off at the same time the technology becomes mature enough for something like online banking to be feasible.
So a lottery winner is guilty of crimes?
They're routinely the victims of them. Lottery winners are a scam target rich environment. North of 5% of lottery winners go bankrupt within five years, far above the national average.
You can just luck out and have an idea like online banking take off
Utterly clueless if you believe the advent of online banking was Peter Thiel's idea. I seriously doubt you understand how banks form or function.
I wasn't using Thiel as an example--at least not on purpose. Take any obvious idea and marry it to a technological revolution, and you'll have a bunch of rich people who got rich mostly by pure luck. Musk is a piece of shit, but the case for Tesla taking off was actually proven by GM's EV1 ~3 years prior. The main reason it didn't take off? Well it was twofold: first, GM was reluctant to commit to EVs because marketing them would make their conventional fuel vehicles look environmentally destructive, and second, the battery technology the EV1 used was nickle metal hydride. Tesla succeeded because it coincided with the proliferation of lithium ion batteries, and in that particular case, I don't think anything unethical happened. If Musk had stopped here we probably wouldn't think of him as an evil piece of shit.
I think it's ironic that since buying power dropped by, what? 50%? Then does that mean a person with a billion is just a millionaire?
The old billionaires must be fuming because so many new billionaires keep popping up. Theirs wealth just doesn't matter anymore
eh, not really how it works. at certain point your wealth is just distributed across the market enough that it goes up with inflation.
But inflation doesn't make money worth more.
...sure, but if your money pile (in the form of various core-sector investments/broad market ETF's, which always eventually track inflation), automatically goes up with inflation your not losing anything either.
when your rich, you have to actively go out of your way to lose money. because your $ can make more $ for you than you could ever make actually working.
Those robots look like they would be a lot of fun to drag out into a field and smash with bats and pipes like a printer.
Usually there's something wrong in their brains. Most people don't like to screw over other people, but they do, and they think they're so smart for finding a "loophole".
That something is that money = power, and power corrupts.
They start out with perhaps a little less empathy than normal, maybe due to being raised by rich, entitled parents, but as their wealth and power grows, the lose it all.
I think virtually everyone, save the Mr. Rogers and Dolly Partons of the world, would soon fall into the same trap, if handed a billion dollars. It's human nature. We're not poor because we're better, we're better because we're poor.
Yeah, power damages your brain. I suspect by breaking the feedback loop between actions and consequences
Billionaires are aggressive, their drive to dominate is what makes them rich, not their intelligence. When you're not concerned about consequences or how you're perceived, it's very easy to step over people without losing sleep.
