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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023

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Most people become rich through mutually positive sum trade with others, at least these days.

Bezos didn't become a billionaire by "taking resources" from others, he sold a product that people were willing to buy, in the form of something as incredibly useful as Amazon. I reject the "and opportunities" part because it means nothing of significance, sure, someone else might have come up with the idea later or perhaps executed it well enough to capture the value, but they didn't, and I fail to see how it's Bezos's fault for that.

This is broadly true for anyone who isn't wealthy via being a corrupt politician or oligarch.

Currently the elites are all in on the latter plan, not even secretly, pods/bugs/own nothing is a tired meme.

I certainly disagree, at least with an attempt to clump such an amorphous group under the same banner as Soros and Co. Most of them aren't ideologically motivated to make us bugmen.

Besides, that's driven by (grossly wrong) opinions on the sustainability of modern capitalist growth, and I see no reason to assume they fetishize that for its own sake.

They might be too busy with the former plan for the initial stages of the gold rush (Dyson rush?), but they will inevitably return to the current one after the lightcone is divided between them.

Barring the invention of FTL, dividing the light cone is a process of billions of years. I remind you that merely making everyone else supremely wealthy by modern standards is nothing next to that, even if they're not made true equals.

If they even tolerate our existence and subsidize our lives, then the additional expense of keeping us that way is nothing at all. I'm not claiming the former is a given, just that going to the latter when you're already there is no big deal, in much the same way that almost anyone who cares enough to tip a beggar isn't also going to the trouble of finding the smallest denomination of currency in the world to give them.

All it takes is one entity holding a non-negligible portion of the cosmic endowment having charitable urges, and they can take care of us for geological timescales. My opinion of the elite is nowhere low enough to think that low bar can't be met.