https://thisecommercelife.com/blogs/comics/the-day-all-billionaires-died
I’m sure it’s annoying for some to click offsite, but it’s 20 panels long. IMO worth the read, though!
too fucking bad
I wouldnt tell anyone i got superpowers but there woild be signs
This is an attainable future, they say where there’s a will there’s a way
All of those people have an address. It’s just a matter of circulating them.
Several addresses, even. And I believe you can track their private jets.
One of the last bright spots over on Reddit is that they are still tracking his jet every day.
And in the grand scheme of things, there actually aren’t that many of them.
I believe in wytchcraft!
Prosciption for anyone with a net worth over a billion dollars. It becomes an affirmative defense in a murder trial that the victim had wealth beyond the legal maximum. This avoids the issue of government enforcement. You don’t have to try and track down every criminal billionaire squirreling their wealth away in hidden accounts. It just becomes legal to kill anyone with a net worth over a certain amount. The government doesn’t have to track down and arrest billionaires. They have to worry about their own children killing them, inheriting their money, and just donating anything over the legal threshold.
“Teachers were finally paid closer to their worth.”
I dunno, I just think the phrasing “closer to their worth” is really funny when the picture being painted is a hopeful one. We can’t actually hope that teachers will get a decent pay, even in a better world.
Kinda the point I think. It’s not a completely Utopian fantasy, and plenty of the capitalistic (etc) problems that already existed would still be here.
The wild thing is you could probably live off only 1 million invested at say 3 percent, a whole life.
Billions? That should be just unlawful.
Well that would mean a return of 30k annually, which is a pretty low quality of life in the US. If you lived in a low COL place it may be enough to get by, but you can’t live in any US city with that.
Sure but assuming you’re healthy and relatively young you could just not touch any of it and roll the interest back into it. In 23-24 years it’d be 2 million and your 3% return would be 60k. More if you added excess earnings to it during that period, of course
Of course depending on risk tolerance you could speed this up considerably. Bonds are more like 4-5% and stocks are closer to 10%. But then of course risk raises, sometimes considerably but a 7% return more than halves the timeline to around a decade (though keep in mind sometimes bubbles burst, 2008 returns were -38% and that AI bubble is getting shakier and shakier)
The bigger issue is lifestyle creep and consumerism. The majority of people who get to this level of wealth get attracted to relentless consumerism. Then 60k, which can easily cover cost of living in most areas (especially with the assumption that your housing is paid for and otherwise debt free), is suddenly no longer adequate
And of course the biggest issue is that 99% of people will never have the financial resources to even consider the above
The scenario I was replying to was that you could just live off a million dollars, as in no work your whole life. I completely agree with everything you’re saying though. I lived very comfortably on $60k in one of the highest col areas in the US.
You can also use the $M up slowly.
Sure, no golden toilets, but food on the table and more for life is kinda a lot IMO. But that was not what the example was for ofc.
What’s $M up slowly mean?
You can use the 1.000.000 dollars during your lifespan too.
that might be a fine strategy if you’re retirement age, but for younger people that isn’t a good idea
Of course you can’t use 5.000 a month at 20. I thought people wouldn’t think, so I wrote using it “slowly”.
You’d run out much faster than you’d think. Life is expensive, especially if you have a home you need to maintain. Have a spouse or kids and you’ll run through that million in a decade.
Tell me you don’t understand compound interest without saying you don’t understand compound interest.
Edit: you wouldn’t run out if you do your math.
I understand compound interest very well, and your interest can’t compound if you’re constantly drawing on the principal. You’d need a job to offset expenses until your investments had time to mature, especially if your returns were at 3%.
Your premise was that $1m at 3% return was enough to live your whole life on and that’s just a fantasy unless you intend to die very young or live very poorly; and alone.
“one day, like a miracle…” No, you need to make change happen the hard way.
There are no silver bullets, only lead bullets.
One of the purposes of science fiction and fantasy is to allow us to imagine a different world, without necessarily knowing how get there from here. In this case, we’re imagining a post-billionaire world without worrying about how to get there from here.
If that world seems better than the one we have now, we could decide to put a long, difficult plan in place to get to that world.
I love that even in this made up fantasy world (which is awesome btw), we’re still only able to pay teachers “Close” to what they’re worth.
Like, lol. Teachers are so fucked from a livable wage standpoint, that it would take 2 made up billionaire apocalypses to give them enough money to be paid what they’re actually worth.
The problem with teachers is that they are part of the job market. And as a market, its subject to supply and demand. The supply of teachers is higher than the demand. (Society has also screwed this up artificially with class size etc). Teaching also has non monetary benefits. Summers off, often shorter daily work schedule. The fun of watching children grow (for some people).
But the real problem is that children almost always grow up to choose a profession they are familliar with. And nearly all children are familiar with teachers. This leads many people to think its a profession they could do, and thus a goal to achieve. This increases the number of teachers, deiving the demand down.
I also found that growing up 20 years ago, the bad teachers are impossible to get rid of. Also increasing supply. Not sure how true this is today or if any changes there have been made.
Is this still the case? It seems like I’m constantly hearing about there being a teacher shortage. I tried Google, but the Internet is basically broken right now.
I’m a bit existentially confused by the anticapitalist webcomic being hosted on Shopify.
You do not have to exist outside of a system to critique it.
Getting an anti capitalist deep inside a capitalist system is how you fuck it the best.
Capitalist systems naturally convert the majority of people into anti-capitalists given enough time. The speed at which a system becomes more humanist, and the degree of pain required to reach those improvements, are just a matter of time and effort.
This comic hints at what an ultra fast correction would look like. If only we were so fortunate.
Agree, it’s not a criticism of the comic or author, I just found it ironic.
Idk what messed up religion y’all are trying to come up with now but we need to lock in and strike these mfers out of the country.
That’s a good start
I need a “+” after billionaires. Can’t let Elon escape on a technicality.
If it follows set theory, then all trillionaires are billionaires. Math got your back!
Was worth verifying tho. Don’t want no monkeys paw shit coming back at us
That would be nice but the pessimist in me know people would cap themselves at $900,000,000 and then gift millions of the interest they’d make to political mercenaries who will do their bidding as long as they’re on payroll.
Yeah, but they’d have SO much less power an influence than if they had dozens or hundreds of billions.
IDK, it opens the world up to some fucked up mechanics. Like, I assume the measure of $1B isn’t cash, or else a lot of billionaires wouldn’t explode since it’s all stocks. So in that case it’s just the worth of your assets.
So what stops two $500M people from assassinating good people just by offering to make a joint purchase of that person’s right shoe for $1B? That would mean the right shoe of the good person is now worth $1B and they explode. It’s basically Death Note on steroids at this point.
I don’t think the intention is to take the mechanics of how and why exactly they explode at face value. It’s interesting to theorize, but the comic points out that “no one knows why”. If it’s some supernatural power, it could be argued that they’d be able to discern between normal value and malicious intent.
Would still make an intersting thought experiment to come up with some set of rules of explosion that is actually air tight.
the mechanics is exactly the concern that large parts of the middle class andpeople interested in crypto have with wealth taxes, how will the system handle cases where there is no market for an asset but it would typically have value (think memecoins that can be produced by the billions over an hour) or items that the owner has no knowledge of the value but have a high value non the less.
Also, people are underestimating how much damage is being done by people who are merely centi-millionares and deci-millionaires. Yes, they have a lot less money. But, there are a lot more of them.
Mmmm, cathartic.
That would certainly encourage the parasite class to actually DO beneficial things instead of hoarding, if they can’t spend it on themselves.
You get to 1.9 million and you better start building housing and parks and shit.
But if not, you explode. And that’s fine too.
Do… do you think a billion is 2 million?
This made me laugh so hard thank you. It reminds me of when I was a kid, I thought 200 came right after 100. Then 300, 400, and so on.
We’re too poor to understand astonomical wealth figures :(
sure, bicycle, bisect, bivalve, bi means two.
right?
Shoot, I would watch a whole sci-fi movie based on this premise.
https://www.viruscomix.com/page433.html
Additional/further reading from Winston Rowntree
Oh, HIGH-FIVE on that! Subnormality is in a brilliant, unique class of its own, and I need to figure out how to post more of them on our comics subs. Which, actually… oh! Oh, oh, oh.
Okay, there’s a technique I’ve been using for some time now at my own community that I think will work nicely. Oh my…
Always good to see another fan of their work
Recently re-read Shirley Estar Goes To Heaven (In both forms, even if the original comic was VERY early 00’s edgy, it was still a DAMN good comic, and the novel rewrite is 10/10 scifi)
Recently re-read Shirley Estar Goes To Heaven (In both forms, even if the original comic was VERY early 00’s edgy, it was still a DAMN good comic, and the novel rewrite is 10/10 scifi)
Hang on, hang on, that’s also by Rowntree?
TBH, I only check in with Subnormality every couple months, altho I’ve been reading for… shoot, it must ~20yrs now. oO
Both the original graphic novel and the actual novel are :D
Same here, absolutely wild to think how different the webcomc scene was back then
