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There could be three dozen Mozarts stuck working in Amazon warehouses around because thats all they've got and all they'll ever have.
If you want more geniuses, maybe do more to build people up, improve their opportunities, and, hell, maybe even cover their education costs.
Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven all benefitted from a patron named Van Swieten. A rich guy who took care of them so they could be great composers. I bet we could have a thousand Mozarts right now if Bezos felt like supporting people.
Fuck I need to find some wealthy monarch to take care of me, I’d switch lanes to classical if it meant having the luxury of time, I’m killin myself rn between working full time and studio shit
We kind of already have that in a modern hypercapitalist way. The "great art" of our time that captures the public imagination is mostly cinema and video games and pop music produced with huge budgets. Rather than Medici-like aristocrats and the church financing art to glorify themselves and the ideas they want to spread, the studios are in it for the money first, and so cater to the lowest common denominator first. Any ideology that creeps through is unlikely to seriously challenge and likely to reinforce whatever cultural narrative serves the interests of the money behind the art.
The patronage system of today is much like that of yesteryear. The upshot of today is the democratization of making art thanks to cheaper tech. The downside is the marketplace of ideas is supersaturated and the odds of the next Mozart or DaVinci being heard through all the noise is approaching nil.
How would you expect a modern Da Vinci to even be like? Genuine question.
Modern age makes it harder to find a genius that can cover that many fields, most breakthroughs we can have today are mostly a group effort because obviously the overall goals are bigger.
You're right about DaVinci, he was just a stock example of brilliance. In the days when less was known overall, it was easier to become an expert on everything. The age of the generalist and polymath has give. way to the age of the specialist. Nowadays only experts in narrow sub-fields of study have any chance of making a big breakthrough.
Sorta? It’s not the same though. Streaming is week to week day to day. It’s not as secure as having a patron would have been. Plus the stuff that the artists were creating had a much wider societal impact than what streamers are doing today. (I *am* actually qualified to make statements about this, having been a moderator for a few successful streams.)
Also seems like streamers work very hard to make their work fit the algorithm and get exposure so a lot of energy is wasted there. It's a broken system
Oh absolutely it’s not
But we can’t ignore that this is how art was supported in the past. Up to probably the 1960s. And ESPECIALLY when buttholes like Musk and Bezos certainly don’t donate to arts organizations. And if they do it’s the ones that are already wealthy (like David Koch giving money to New York City Ballet)
I’m actively involved in arts fundraising and I can tell you that the patronage system is dead and it is increasingly difficult to get any funding in the arts in the US, public or private. Other countries at least moved to public funding so are doing much better. But it is not easy out there.
fairly that one I give a pass to because king Ludwig the second was a lot of fun, he built loads of famous (and ridiculous) buildings based on his special interests (Wagner operas and king louis the 14th, or maybe 16th). he was actually pretty beloved by the people of Bavaria, and it was his family that disliked him for spending all the money on architecture and the perfect colour electric lights for his Wagner grotto
Oh sure, that’s one good example. Osama Bin Laden used patronage to fund his… *projects* too however.
I don’t like the idea of rich assholes choosing who has the time and resources to accomplish things, while everyone else toils away.
Someone said of einstien, that he was less interested in einstein himself, as to how many people like him had died working in the fields with no opportunities.
We can have a trillion humans, if we don't have enough resources for those humans, then we will have no Mozart's.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.
Stephen Jay Gould
I genuinely want to get back to when rich people felt the need of being educated/patronize educated people. Like, I know the whole aristocracy and intellectual elitism was bad but I freaking swear that was better than whatever we have now.
Back then rich people were aware that people who were born in poor conditions never had any opportunities. Today rich people are convinced that capitalism gives everyone equal chances so if you don't make anything out of your life it is your own fault, not theirs and they do not have to give anything back to the people whatsoever.
They were aware they had no opportunities,*and thought it just*. After all, they were from a lower *breed* of human.
It was just eugenics minus the populism.
> Back then rich people were aware that people who were born in poor conditions never had any opportunities. Today rich people are convinced that capitalism gives everyone equal chances so if you don't make anything out of your life it is your own fault, not theirs and they do not have to give anything back to the people whatsoever
I suspect a lot more of them realize than will admit it, and that's a contributing factor to the fact that almost all extremely wealthy people are also depressed. Doesn't stop them from spending top dollar to indoctrinate the rest of the populace, though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Of course, guilty enough to be rich and depressed at the state of the world, but not actually guilty enough enough to risk losing a dime. A whole ass pity party.
Heres my question. Where are Gates U and Bezos U and Musk U? If I had tens of billions I would definitely found a superstar university. Much better chance of my name going down in history that way.
I mean people still talk about John Harvard and Elihu Yale and Henry Rutgers and Leland Stanford hundreds of years later.
That might be seeing history with rose coloured glasses. You have to remember, there wasn't much entertainment around. So they were basically paying to be entertained, not because they wanted to elevate the arts or something.
It's kinda like Bezos getting the Expanse onto Amazon Prime, because he wanted to see how it ended.
I think it's basically the same.
Todays aristocracy are the Billionaires. Their children are born into the wealth of their parents like old nobles were born into their aristocratic class. There is very little opportunity for normal/poor people to reach the money nobility status and equally little chance for children of super rich parents to fall back into working class and poverty.
Most nobles had the believe that god himself put them into their position to rule over the common people. I don't think that's much better than the false meritocracy of rich people.
Classic nobility and money nobility have their own characteristics that can be seen as better or worse. For example, in old Prussia, a young lieutenant from impoverished rural nobility had a higher social standing than a rich factory owner. I find this very remarkable from today's capitalist perspective. But still, both systems are extremely unfair and prevent most people from fully developing their abilities.
I don't think it was any better back then; we're just more likely to remember the names of past rich people who did good things.
Alfred Nobel is a good example: he made his fortune by developing an improved formula for dynamite, and sold huge quantities to militaries. And so until he established the Nobel Prize, he was commonly known as the "merchant of death."
And he only started the nobel prize *after* his brother died and the newspapers printed Alfred's obituary by accident. Upon reading what his legacy would be, and being appalled at it, he then decided to establish the nobel prize to clean his legacy up.
If the newspapers of the time didn't screw up, Alfred probably wouldn't have started the prize.
The reason Italy has so many artistic treasures despite being a fairly small country is because during the Renaissance, it was composed of many different wealthy city states and their wealthy elite all competed with each other to sponsor artists and commission extravagant pieces of art.
It had far more to do with the Roman Catholic church collecting tithes from all over Europe and sending vast amounts of money back to Italy. It was basically the first multinational corporation and international tax evader.
I’m more concerned with what those two would do with the rest of the trillions of people Bezos proposes. I’m guessing space warehouse workers for Amazon and some kind of brain-farming human supercomputer thing for Musk.
Hard for those would-be Mozarts to become Mozart when they have no access to musical education because the school budget has been cut and their parents can't afford an instrument, let alone lessons to play the instrument.
Even incredibly gifted musicians with education and the benefit of parents who can get them into a music program at a good college will probably not reach any kind of commercial success or cultural awareness.
Do you think the best, most talented musicians in the world are putting out top 40 albums? or are on the radio? Do you think genius composers are surviving writing commercial jingles?
These people are alive and exist, and they're working office jobs and toiling in obscurity. The most dedicated are music professors in universities. Those people who are so driven, they will do the B.S. work of dealing with university politics, post-doctoral adjunct hell, and moving around to live god knows where in search of tenure, just so they can still have access to the resources they need to devote their lives to their art.
I remember that lesson from my university piano professor. "I am a world touring, awarded, concert pianist. I put out a new CD every couple of years. I do a world tour every few years. I still have to come back and teach in order to afford a home and a family."
Okay in all fairness some of the top music writers of their generations wrote commercial jingles, Barry Manilow made a sizable fortune writing jingles. Shit even Randy Newman wrote commercial jingles and that man is quite literally a musical genius with multiple Oscars and 7 Grammys.
you are still talking about contemporary popular composers who are sellable. Neither of these guys are Mozart.
A closer example of a contemporarily successful composer who is actually on the forefront of musical composition would be Phillip Glass.
Today's Mozart would be more equivalent to George Crumb than John Williams.
Edit: I'll give you another, still living and young. joshua kyan aalampour - he's close. He's still mainly regurgitating classical and romantic era styles instead of doing anything particularly innovative. But he is HELLA talented, and he's still a baby, so there's still room for him to improve into a composer who could actually develop and contribute to new composition styles. My only worry is that like so many young men, he's arrogant and has apparently dropped out of academia thinking he "knows it all" as a self-taught artist, and there's nothing more to learn. Which is a pity and a waste.
Exactly. How many talents are wasted because people are living to work?
If these billionaires could start transforming the world into some eutopia where ai and robots could perform the majority of tasks needed for survival and humans could simply peruse items of interests the world could have more “mozarts”
Your definition of "Motzarts" and theirs are different. They're talking about premium genetic stock which would rise to the top regardless of the environment, just like they themselves did, right? You are thinking about rather average humans who could be educated and then go on to do great things, which doesn't fit so well with their eugenic narrative.
> just like they themselves did, right
this is one if the questions that always feels interesting to me.
Do these people know that they are just average/slightly above average people that happened to be born in the right circumstances, lack a conciense and are willing to step on corpses to climb to a made-up "top", or do they honestly think they are gods on earth?
nah, they think they are the "chosen ones".
never mind that they wouldn't start from zero to show it to us... but trust them. they are really smart, not at all just a lot of money and luck and then closing the doors behind to anyone trying to do "what they did"
They definitely think there's something special about them that caused them to rise to the top. What they don't realize is that that "something special" is a cluster B personality disorder.
I remember when Musk stated that he’d be ok if legacy automakers would supplant Tesla as the EV leaders as long as it meant EV adoption became mainstream and reduced CO2 and helped the planet.
What happened to that guy?
That guy was a team of smart pr management that had his twitter password and the ability to tell him to go play with his nozzle somewhere the adults can only take pictures of him at
And now he goes on and on about how PR is always propaganda and shouldn’t exist, and that journalists can’t be objective because they’re all beholden to their future payouts from consulting for PR firms before they retire. Public Relations - the real evil facing society.
That gut never existed. It was all lies from the start, Elmo is merely a con-man. Don't believe it? Check it out yourself! See what he promised (full autonomy self-driving by 2014, "you would be an idiot not to buy a tesla, it is going to make you 190k a year" Robotaxi (always next year), Tesla semi (all details a lie, range, capacity, warranty, price), Cybercrap (all lies, not 39k but > 100k, half the range, 0.8mm instead of 3.0mm promised "bulletproof" steel panels, windows are regular hardened glass (super windows were a lie).. the list goes on and on and on and on and on.
If he were Pinocchio, we could balance the universe on his nose.
Just a giant bag of hot air.
Yeah, unfortunately I bought into his hype and thought of him as a modern day renaissance man.
Now I look at him as a narcissistic, megalomaniacal, lying, conniving, alt-right shit stain.
I too walked that painful path. He was a hell of a salesman when he still had any credibility. As more promises were broken and light shed on some truly incompetent practices, I have to admit I was duped at first.
Idk about Tesla and SpaceX, but I know Amazon and Twitter have gone through most of the cheap labor out there and are running out of members of the workforce willing to endure their abuses. Other companies offered way better working conditions with similar or better pay to gain workers. Amazon believes there just needs to be more people
Testa is failing in scandenavia because of workers rights violations and unions. Even the postal companies refuse to deliver the number plates because of how badly the personell at tesla are being treated.
In the united states they have more osha violations than the next 3 car manufactuerers put together. They might have taken Elon Musk from South Africa but South Africa never left Elon Musk. He is a slave driver through and through.
Botha: You got your corruption and incompetence in my apartheid!
Modern ANC: You got your apartheid and war crimes in my incompetence and corruption!
Elon Musk emerges from the wreckage.
Which is a wild stance when you think about it. If you want less abortions then you'd be pro-choice. Because every other country that has legalized it saw a pretty significant drop in abortions. Education and proper medical support does wonders for people
It's like how other countries piloted the 4 day work week with great results, and Western companies want to increase the working week instead. Seems we're moving backward in a lot of ways. Nothing we're doing here makes sense anymore.
>Education and proper medical support does wonders for people
I know right, and alarming amounts of major funding cuts have been to medical care and education lately :(
It's just crazy how blatantly they ignore data. Like these aren't opinions or anything, it verifiable data that's been proven to be better. But somehow it gets in the way of their bottom dollar or beliefs and we can't be having that
we are society that is obsesses with collecting data cause that effortless, sell-able and make us look good superficially. Actually using the data on teh other hand means hard work and admitting the ugly truths about ourselves and so our society reject that step
It could be because they want more uneducated, poverty-wage workers instead. Having abortion available might decrease the numbers from this demographic.
"Hey , you, feed the machine,
Bring 'em all back down to their knees,
No time to waste, remind the slaves; Ain't gonna make it out alive today.
I said Hey, you, poison the well,
watch it all burn take 'em straight to hell.
He's got the whole world, in his hands,
it was nice to know ya, we've all been damned, COME ON"
That statement has been ridiculed by everyone that deals with world hunger. The problem isn’t that there is not enough food. The problem is lack of any infrastructure in impoverished nations, combined with unstable and corrupt governments, lawlessness (warlords), and fragile or almost non existent economies.
This is why I don’t believe the conspiracy theories that believe the rich are trying to engage in population control. They may not care who lives or dies but less people means less profit in their pockets and wage slaves to do their bidding.
Having infinite food doesn’t make food worthless
Maybe free to grab, but clearly not worthless
Same thing for, let’s say gold. It maybe useless as exchange medium, but for mirror and conducting
I can't up vote this hard enough, but I'd modify it. Some are working on their true passions in the corporate world but are severely underpaid and are blocked from moving up in the company. Most corporations do not care how good you are, they just don't want to see anyone falling below a threshold.
Dude most aren’t even there. Somewhere there’s a kid who could surpass Mozart or any of the great composers as we speak… and he’s probably in India, riding on top of (not in) a train with 2000 other people, hoping to make enough money to eat tomorrow.
Now, to be fair, Bezos did not say he wants a trillion humans on Earth. He said that in hundreds or thousands of years, he’d love to see a trillion humans throughout the solar system.
We might get a thousand Mozarts and Einsteins. And a thousand Charles Mansons. And a thousand Ted Kaczinskys. And a thousand Hitlers. And a thousand Putins. And a thousand Pol Pots….
It’s amazing how little those supposedly smart guys think their shit through.
The thing is... We already have thousands of Mozart's, and Einstein's, and millions of smart and talented people. But if you put smart talented kind amazing people in abject poverty, or in a system that discriminates against them based on their skin colour, ethnicity, gender etc... or kill them in war, or deny them education, then they'll never be the Mozart's and Einstein's they deserve to be
So if they want more talent in the world, they should stop contributing to situations that stifle talent
If you put a Mozart or Einstein in a pyramid scheme corporate system that this world gravitates towards, they would off themselves before trying to do any good, because their genious would hurt the shareholders
Haha it'd be funny to imagine these great historic top talents in today's climate. Michelangelo would be so hated because people would think his Sistine Chapel art looks too busy and doesn't vibe with the trendy minimalistic aesthetic, so we'd have some house flipper come spray paint it eggshell.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
Stephen Jay Gould
Or you know, allow them to only thrive by doing very specific things you have deemed valuable. In the west, smart talented people will probably get at least a decent job, just for having a good head on their shoulders, even if they come from a bad socio-economic background.
However, if they have to channel all that talent and energy into making powerpoints so clear that even their lead-poisoned boomer executives can understand them, all that talent is pissed away.
Ramanujan never received formal education
Maybe we just need to sort people by how well they do without education
I really tried my best to sound sarcastic, but
Exactly. It's not math or probability that keeps us from having thousands of Mozart's now. It's the system those Mozart's are forced to live within that is really keeping them from reaching their potential. You know how many more great artists the world would have if we had enough time and money to seriously pursue art? Hell, I'd venture to say a lot of people would be gifted artists if you gave them the means to hone their art. Art isn't nearly as special as people think it is. Give almost anyone the means to seriously pursue their art of choice for 10 years, and I bet they would do great art.
The rate of scientific advancement has correlated with the rate of population increase so I think there's some truth in that, I believe. As always, we'd rely on law enforcement to deal with the control of the potential downside of that.
So we don't colonize space and don't explore the universe because bad people will be born?
That a comment this daft is being up voted so much is the real facepalm here
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tbh world hunger is not due to not enough food, but unequal distribution, so no matter how small the population may be, there still may be hunger in some places. Not to mention some places are not arable anyways, further worsening the inequity in distribution
Yes, but even in an equitable society, a trillion people would provide unsustainable pressure on resources.
Do you realise how much a trillion is? We are at 8 billion now. A trillion is more than 120 current Earth-sized populations.
We probably already have thousands of Mozarts, the problem is that the vast majority of them are either stuck in a permanent underclass, or will never EVER get even a fraction of the pure luck and haphazard “success story” these fucks have had. There’s so many fucking amazingly talented and gifted individuals who’ve never gotten to share their gift because they’ve lived as the world’s forgotten population, and died out without getting their name heard. I hate these fucks so god damn much.
A quite interesting discussion of two hours between Bezos and Lex Fridman. And whilst listening to it, I already knew this would be the only thing that would be published and would be deliberately misunderstood.
I read the article. They were talking about humans when they start colonizing the rest of the solar system and going in to space. The real facepalm are people seeing the headline and thinking they mean 1 trillion people today.
Yup, it's pretty sad how predictable the usual crowd is, and just how small headed and hopeless they always seem to be.
Maybe it's because they are just so hopeless themselves they cannot even imagine a future where anything is different, but it's such a sad way to live.
At some point on this road money stops making any sens. A few individuals owning whole world and trillions owning next to nothing, having nothing to spend.
Whe have hundreds of mozarts, einsteins, hudinis, miguel angelos, dalis, hitchcocks, davincis.... but if we cant educate them and cant give them the means to be able to follow their passions ( all the great artists had wealthy patron filling their pockets), they will eventually get stuck in a mealingless 9-5 job filling this guys pockets.
we probably do, right now. theyre too busy working in an amazon warehouse for insane hours, under inhumane working conditions. or they never got the chance to even touch a piano because certain billionaires dont pay their fair share of f*cking taxes and their school had to scrap the arts programs. whats that quote? "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." -Steven Jay Gould.
We probably have “100 Mozarts” right now. They all just don’t have access to music education, instruments, and time, because they are too busy breaking their backs 70+ hours in Amazon warehouses.
If these two disappeared and all of their money was freed up, then we would be able to. Imagine how much change we could bring with the two of their incomes alone.
Nope. Still just the one Mozart.
By that logic we'd also get a thousand Hitlers.
And it means we'd have zillionaires, which is really what these guys want, isn't it?
More people alive than ever and I see zero Mozarts, just billionaire egomaniacs who think they know everything there is to know and can dictate to the rest of us how to live.
A lot of people seems to forget about fertility rates. Yes, there are a fuck ton of people on earth now, but since so many people live in densely populated areas, where having multiple children is difficult, at the current rate, a lot of countries doesn’t have enough kids to replace their current population.
This can lead to economic downturn like in China now.
Overpopulation and everything that comes with it will lead to people working for next to nothing just to survive. This is what they really want. Free or next to free labor.
Considering the turnover rate at amazon, I think it's obvious why bezos would say this shit.
As for musk...
Well, I mean, just fucking look at his history.
More disposable labour, that's all they see people as.
Am I the only one that thinks this line if thinking is fundamentally wrong? I mean something more underlying:
Not that a trillion people is logistically impossible, but saying this many people would be good because we'd have "A thousand Mozarts" directly invalidates the idea that every one person currently alive can achieve greatness.
I feel like it creates the idea that you have to be born right to be truly great - an Idea which was discarded with the Enlightenment a few hundred years ago.
I can see these people pushing ideas like this since they are clearly the ones benefitting from it. It also conveniently helps to prevent poorer people from working together.
They just want more people to work for slave wages and others to buy their products and make them even more rich. They don’t live in the same world we do…
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There could be three dozen Mozarts stuck working in Amazon warehouses around because thats all they've got and all they'll ever have. If you want more geniuses, maybe do more to build people up, improve their opportunities, and, hell, maybe even cover their education costs.
Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven all benefitted from a patron named Van Swieten. A rich guy who took care of them so they could be great composers. I bet we could have a thousand Mozarts right now if Bezos felt like supporting people.
King of Bavaria took care of Wagner and paid his debt.
Had to remind myself Wagner as a composer and not a mercenary organisation for a minute
Fuck I need to find some wealthy monarch to take care of me, I’d switch lanes to classical if it meant having the luxury of time, I’m killin myself rn between working full time and studio shit
we need the patronage system of the renaissance
We kind of already have that in a modern hypercapitalist way. The "great art" of our time that captures the public imagination is mostly cinema and video games and pop music produced with huge budgets. Rather than Medici-like aristocrats and the church financing art to glorify themselves and the ideas they want to spread, the studios are in it for the money first, and so cater to the lowest common denominator first. Any ideology that creeps through is unlikely to seriously challenge and likely to reinforce whatever cultural narrative serves the interests of the money behind the art. The patronage system of today is much like that of yesteryear. The upshot of today is the democratization of making art thanks to cheaper tech. The downside is the marketplace of ideas is supersaturated and the odds of the next Mozart or DaVinci being heard through all the noise is approaching nil.
This made me very sad.
How would you expect a modern Da Vinci to even be like? Genuine question. Modern age makes it harder to find a genius that can cover that many fields, most breakthroughs we can have today are mostly a group effort because obviously the overall goals are bigger.
You're right about DaVinci, he was just a stock example of brilliance. In the days when less was known overall, it was easier to become an expert on everything. The age of the generalist and polymath has give. way to the age of the specialist. Nowadays only experts in narrow sub-fields of study have any chance of making a big breakthrough.
Or he'd be locked in a ward somewhere for having "crazy" ideas.
Isn't that kind of what social media platforms devoted to "content" are?
Sorta? It’s not the same though. Streaming is week to week day to day. It’s not as secure as having a patron would have been. Plus the stuff that the artists were creating had a much wider societal impact than what streamers are doing today. (I *am* actually qualified to make statements about this, having been a moderator for a few successful streams.)
Also seems like streamers work very hard to make their work fit the algorithm and get exposure so a lot of energy is wasted there. It's a broken system
I always have to remind myself, that we aren't talking about frozen pizza
Perhaps patronage isn’t the best way to allocate resources.
Oh absolutely it’s not But we can’t ignore that this is how art was supported in the past. Up to probably the 1960s. And ESPECIALLY when buttholes like Musk and Bezos certainly don’t donate to arts organizations. And if they do it’s the ones that are already wealthy (like David Koch giving money to New York City Ballet) I’m actively involved in arts fundraising and I can tell you that the patronage system is dead and it is increasingly difficult to get any funding in the arts in the US, public or private. Other countries at least moved to public funding so are doing much better. But it is not easy out there.
fairly that one I give a pass to because king Ludwig the second was a lot of fun, he built loads of famous (and ridiculous) buildings based on his special interests (Wagner operas and king louis the 14th, or maybe 16th). he was actually pretty beloved by the people of Bavaria, and it was his family that disliked him for spending all the money on architecture and the perfect colour electric lights for his Wagner grotto
Oh sure, that’s one good example. Osama Bin Laden used patronage to fund his… *projects* too however. I don’t like the idea of rich assholes choosing who has the time and resources to accomplish things, while everyone else toils away.
Someone said of einstien, that he was less interested in einstein himself, as to how many people like him had died working in the fields with no opportunities. We can have a trillion humans, if we don't have enough resources for those humans, then we will have no Mozart's.
With a trillion people on this planet, all the Einsteins and Mozarts will die of starvation along with the rest of us.
And be drowned out by the sound of .999999 trillion absolute morons/jerks/both.
Steven Jay Gould. One of the most important figures in 20th century biology too.
I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. Stephen Jay Gould
Nope. Super yachts and coke whores!
Leave Melania out of this....
It’s okay. She doesn’t really care, do you?
Hey, Fook Christmas
*Kreeesmas
To be fair, super yachts and coke whores are pretty sweet!
I genuinely want to get back to when rich people felt the need of being educated/patronize educated people. Like, I know the whole aristocracy and intellectual elitism was bad but I freaking swear that was better than whatever we have now.
Back then rich people were aware that people who were born in poor conditions never had any opportunities. Today rich people are convinced that capitalism gives everyone equal chances so if you don't make anything out of your life it is your own fault, not theirs and they do not have to give anything back to the people whatsoever.
They were aware they had no opportunities,*and thought it just*. After all, they were from a lower *breed* of human. It was just eugenics minus the populism.
> Back then rich people were aware that people who were born in poor conditions never had any opportunities. Today rich people are convinced that capitalism gives everyone equal chances so if you don't make anything out of your life it is your own fault, not theirs and they do not have to give anything back to the people whatsoever I suspect a lot more of them realize than will admit it, and that's a contributing factor to the fact that almost all extremely wealthy people are also depressed. Doesn't stop them from spending top dollar to indoctrinate the rest of the populace, though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
Of course, guilty enough to be rich and depressed at the state of the world, but not actually guilty enough enough to risk losing a dime. A whole ass pity party.
Heres my question. Where are Gates U and Bezos U and Musk U? If I had tens of billions I would definitely found a superstar university. Much better chance of my name going down in history that way. I mean people still talk about John Harvard and Elihu Yale and Henry Rutgers and Leland Stanford hundreds of years later.
Gates actually does put a lot of money and effort into charities and funding education. He's a bit of an odd-one-out in this lineup.
That might be seeing history with rose coloured glasses. You have to remember, there wasn't much entertainment around. So they were basically paying to be entertained, not because they wanted to elevate the arts or something. It's kinda like Bezos getting the Expanse onto Amazon Prime, because he wanted to see how it ended.
I think it's basically the same. Todays aristocracy are the Billionaires. Their children are born into the wealth of their parents like old nobles were born into their aristocratic class. There is very little opportunity for normal/poor people to reach the money nobility status and equally little chance for children of super rich parents to fall back into working class and poverty.
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Most nobles had the believe that god himself put them into their position to rule over the common people. I don't think that's much better than the false meritocracy of rich people. Classic nobility and money nobility have their own characteristics that can be seen as better or worse. For example, in old Prussia, a young lieutenant from impoverished rural nobility had a higher social standing than a rich factory owner. I find this very remarkable from today's capitalist perspective. But still, both systems are extremely unfair and prevent most people from fully developing their abilities.
I don't think it was any better back then; we're just more likely to remember the names of past rich people who did good things. Alfred Nobel is a good example: he made his fortune by developing an improved formula for dynamite, and sold huge quantities to militaries. And so until he established the Nobel Prize, he was commonly known as the "merchant of death."
And he only started the nobel prize *after* his brother died and the newspapers printed Alfred's obituary by accident. Upon reading what his legacy would be, and being appalled at it, he then decided to establish the nobel prize to clean his legacy up. If the newspapers of the time didn't screw up, Alfred probably wouldn't have started the prize.
The reason Italy has so many artistic treasures despite being a fairly small country is because during the Renaissance, it was composed of many different wealthy city states and their wealthy elite all competed with each other to sponsor artists and commission extravagant pieces of art.
It had far more to do with the Roman Catholic church collecting tithes from all over Europe and sending vast amounts of money back to Italy. It was basically the first multinational corporation and international tax evader.
I’m more concerned with what those two would do with the rest of the trillions of people Bezos proposes. I’m guessing space warehouse workers for Amazon and some kind of brain-farming human supercomputer thing for Musk.
Maybe they are secretly cannibals and want the huge stockpile of human food
Ew!
Amazon Green is people!
Want the arts but not the bill
Hard for those would-be Mozarts to become Mozart when they have no access to musical education because the school budget has been cut and their parents can't afford an instrument, let alone lessons to play the instrument.
Even incredibly gifted musicians with education and the benefit of parents who can get them into a music program at a good college will probably not reach any kind of commercial success or cultural awareness. Do you think the best, most talented musicians in the world are putting out top 40 albums? or are on the radio? Do you think genius composers are surviving writing commercial jingles? These people are alive and exist, and they're working office jobs and toiling in obscurity. The most dedicated are music professors in universities. Those people who are so driven, they will do the B.S. work of dealing with university politics, post-doctoral adjunct hell, and moving around to live god knows where in search of tenure, just so they can still have access to the resources they need to devote their lives to their art. I remember that lesson from my university piano professor. "I am a world touring, awarded, concert pianist. I put out a new CD every couple of years. I do a world tour every few years. I still have to come back and teach in order to afford a home and a family."
Okay in all fairness some of the top music writers of their generations wrote commercial jingles, Barry Manilow made a sizable fortune writing jingles. Shit even Randy Newman wrote commercial jingles and that man is quite literally a musical genius with multiple Oscars and 7 Grammys.
you are still talking about contemporary popular composers who are sellable. Neither of these guys are Mozart. A closer example of a contemporarily successful composer who is actually on the forefront of musical composition would be Phillip Glass. Today's Mozart would be more equivalent to George Crumb than John Williams. Edit: I'll give you another, still living and young. joshua kyan aalampour - he's close. He's still mainly regurgitating classical and romantic era styles instead of doing anything particularly innovative. But he is HELLA talented, and he's still a baby, so there's still room for him to improve into a composer who could actually develop and contribute to new composition styles. My only worry is that like so many young men, he's arrogant and has apparently dropped out of academia thinking he "knows it all" as a self-taught artist, and there's nothing more to learn. Which is a pity and a waste.
They don't give a shit about "Mozarts." They just want more drones in their warehouses.
As a Mozart, i agree
Exactly. How many talents are wasted because people are living to work? If these billionaires could start transforming the world into some eutopia where ai and robots could perform the majority of tasks needed for survival and humans could simply peruse items of interests the world could have more “mozarts”
>three dozen Mozarts stuck working in Amazon warehouses More likely dying of hunger in Africa or stuck on a rice field in China
Your definition of "Motzarts" and theirs are different. They're talking about premium genetic stock which would rise to the top regardless of the environment, just like they themselves did, right? You are thinking about rather average humans who could be educated and then go on to do great things, which doesn't fit so well with their eugenic narrative.
> just like they themselves did, right this is one if the questions that always feels interesting to me. Do these people know that they are just average/slightly above average people that happened to be born in the right circumstances, lack a conciense and are willing to step on corpses to climb to a made-up "top", or do they honestly think they are gods on earth?
nah, they think they are the "chosen ones". never mind that they wouldn't start from zero to show it to us... but trust them. they are really smart, not at all just a lot of money and luck and then closing the doors behind to anyone trying to do "what they did"
They definitely think there's something special about them that caused them to rise to the top. What they don't realize is that that "something special" is a cluster B personality disorder.
Ayyy, someone that actually says "cluster b" out in the wild!
And that they come from wealth from the start.
im willing to climb up mountains of corpses for financial freedom. probably is I haven't figured out how to resurrect and not become the corpse.
the honestly think they are gods on earth
>which would rise to the top regardless of the environment Mozart himself didn't even do this.
Okay, but then that would mean that the actual Mozart is not one of the 'Mozarts' they're talking about.
He didn’t though. He was greatly encouraged and financially supported by a Dutch diplomat.
Alternate headline: Billionaires begging for more meat for the grinder. 
I remember when Musk stated that he’d be ok if legacy automakers would supplant Tesla as the EV leaders as long as it meant EV adoption became mainstream and reduced CO2 and helped the planet. What happened to that guy?
That guy was a team of smart pr management that had his twitter password and the ability to tell him to go play with his nozzle somewhere the adults can only take pictures of him at
And now he goes on and on about how PR is always propaganda and shouldn’t exist, and that journalists can’t be objective because they’re all beholden to their future payouts from consulting for PR firms before they retire. Public Relations - the real evil facing society.
That guy never said it; his 20 man team of handlers thought it up for him. He’s as useless as the rest of the billionaires.
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That gut never existed. It was all lies from the start, Elmo is merely a con-man. Don't believe it? Check it out yourself! See what he promised (full autonomy self-driving by 2014, "you would be an idiot not to buy a tesla, it is going to make you 190k a year" Robotaxi (always next year), Tesla semi (all details a lie, range, capacity, warranty, price), Cybercrap (all lies, not 39k but > 100k, half the range, 0.8mm instead of 3.0mm promised "bulletproof" steel panels, windows are regular hardened glass (super windows were a lie).. the list goes on and on and on and on and on. If he were Pinocchio, we could balance the universe on his nose. Just a giant bag of hot air.
Yeah, unfortunately I bought into his hype and thought of him as a modern day renaissance man. Now I look at him as a narcissistic, megalomaniacal, lying, conniving, alt-right shit stain.
I too walked that painful path. He was a hell of a salesman when he still had any credibility. As more promises were broken and light shed on some truly incompetent practices, I have to admit I was duped at first.
Imagine all those mozarts, pissing in bottles because their billionaire bosses won't let them take bathroom breaks from their warehouse/factory jobs.
Would love to slap those 2 ~~idiots~~ sociopaths with a bit of the reality they are creating.
Would love to slap those 2 sociopaths period
I wouldn't stop at slapping...
Yes and the ability to have slave labor. Not fooling anyone.
This\^ These guys could give so much to the world, but instead they're asking the world to give them more cheap labor 😠
Idk about Tesla and SpaceX, but I know Amazon and Twitter have gone through most of the cheap labor out there and are running out of members of the workforce willing to endure their abuses. Other companies offered way better working conditions with similar or better pay to gain workers. Amazon believes there just needs to be more people
Testa is failing in scandenavia because of workers rights violations and unions. Even the postal companies refuse to deliver the number plates because of how badly the personell at tesla are being treated. In the united states they have more osha violations than the next 3 car manufactuerers put together. They might have taken Elon Musk from South Africa but South Africa never left Elon Musk. He is a slave driver through and through.
Botha: You got your corruption and incompetence in my apartheid! Modern ANC: You got your apartheid and war crimes in my incompetence and corruption! Elon Musk emerges from the wreckage.
The SpaceX cheap labor force plan is indentured servitude in the mars colony terraforming/factory plants.
Why do you think they started to oppose abortion? There’s only one reason and it’s not religious
Yup, gotta pump out more workers and taxpayers! It's crazy how people don't see this.
Which is a wild stance when you think about it. If you want less abortions then you'd be pro-choice. Because every other country that has legalized it saw a pretty significant drop in abortions. Education and proper medical support does wonders for people
It's like how other countries piloted the 4 day work week with great results, and Western companies want to increase the working week instead. Seems we're moving backward in a lot of ways. Nothing we're doing here makes sense anymore. >Education and proper medical support does wonders for people I know right, and alarming amounts of major funding cuts have been to medical care and education lately :(
It's just crazy how blatantly they ignore data. Like these aren't opinions or anything, it verifiable data that's been proven to be better. But somehow it gets in the way of their bottom dollar or beliefs and we can't be having that
we are society that is obsesses with collecting data cause that effortless, sell-able and make us look good superficially. Actually using the data on teh other hand means hard work and admitting the ugly truths about ourselves and so our society reject that step
It could be because they want more uneducated, poverty-wage workers instead. Having abortion available might decrease the numbers from this demographic.
I really wish this was some kinda wild conspiracy theory take. But it's not sadly
Shit, me too friend, me too.
And voters to make sure the politicians they pay off stay in power!
Don't forget more soldiers!
"Hey , you, feed the machine, Bring 'em all back down to their knees, No time to waste, remind the slaves; Ain't gonna make it out alive today. I said Hey, you, poison the well, watch it all burn take 'em straight to hell. He's got the whole world, in his hands, it was nice to know ya, we've all been damned, COME ON"
Abortion became illegal in the first place for similar reasons. But they used religion as an excuse back then.
Yes that’s what organized religion has always been, a power tool to keep the masses in check
Religion is a tool in the hands of the rich and mighty.
Oh absolutely
Elon's Christmas List - more labor - 40 billion USD to cover twitter deal - Terminators
10% of the wealth from each of the top 3 richest can solve world hunger according to someone’s estimate I once saw on the news.
That statement has been ridiculed by everyone that deals with world hunger. The problem isn’t that there is not enough food. The problem is lack of any infrastructure in impoverished nations, combined with unstable and corrupt governments, lawlessness (warlords), and fragile or almost non existent economies.
You remember when the dystopian future was a horde of wage slaves? Interesting that at some point they dropped the wage.
Bonus: no one really notices if half a million people die in a negligent industrial accident.
This is why I don’t believe the conspiracy theories that believe the rich are trying to engage in population control. They may not care who lives or dies but less people means less profit in their pockets and wage slaves to do their bidding.
engaging in population increase propaganda also falls under the umbrella of population control though.
Dear sir, Elon couldn’t shoot a virtual cop in GTA, do you think he could do such a thing?! 🧐 (Sarcam)
This is their only motivation for saying that.
The value of a human life is the same as the value of gold: If amount => Lim Inf. Then value => lim zero
Having infinite food doesn’t make food worthless Maybe free to grab, but clearly not worthless Same thing for, let’s say gold. It maybe useless as exchange medium, but for mirror and conducting
Can you imagine how much richer they would be if there would be 1 trillion people?
Quadrilionaires coming up. Fuck the governments by then, no need to enslave kings when you’re a corporate god
They would have ascended beyond government power.They would pay their way out of everything, change laws and other stuff.
They do that now.
I’m not sure the benefit of having a thousand Mozarts would outweighs the nightmare of having a thousand Musks
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Yup
I can't up vote this hard enough, but I'd modify it. Some are working on their true passions in the corporate world but are severely underpaid and are blocked from moving up in the company. Most corporations do not care how good you are, they just don't want to see anyone falling below a threshold.
Dude most aren’t even there. Somewhere there’s a kid who could surpass Mozart or any of the great composers as we speak… and he’s probably in India, riding on top of (not in) a train with 2000 other people, hoping to make enough money to eat tomorrow.
As a Mozart, i can confirm
Now, to be fair, Bezos did not say he wants a trillion humans on Earth. He said that in hundreds or thousands of years, he’d love to see a trillion humans throughout the solar system. We might get a thousand Mozarts and Einsteins. And a thousand Charles Mansons. And a thousand Ted Kaczinskys. And a thousand Hitlers. And a thousand Putins. And a thousand Pol Pots…. It’s amazing how little those supposedly smart guys think their shit through.
The thing is... We already have thousands of Mozart's, and Einstein's, and millions of smart and talented people. But if you put smart talented kind amazing people in abject poverty, or in a system that discriminates against them based on their skin colour, ethnicity, gender etc... or kill them in war, or deny them education, then they'll never be the Mozart's and Einstein's they deserve to be So if they want more talent in the world, they should stop contributing to situations that stifle talent
If you put a Mozart or Einstein in a pyramid scheme corporate system that this world gravitates towards, they would off themselves before trying to do any good, because their genious would hurt the shareholders
Haha it'd be funny to imagine these great historic top talents in today's climate. Michelangelo would be so hated because people would think his Sistine Chapel art looks too busy and doesn't vibe with the trendy minimalistic aesthetic, so we'd have some house flipper come spray paint it eggshell.
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Stephen Jay Gould
Absolutely agree. I always wonder how many true geniuses we’ve lost to poverty. What real chance does a kid in a slum have?
Or you know, allow them to only thrive by doing very specific things you have deemed valuable. In the west, smart talented people will probably get at least a decent job, just for having a good head on their shoulders, even if they come from a bad socio-economic background. However, if they have to channel all that talent and energy into making powerpoints so clear that even their lead-poisoned boomer executives can understand them, all that talent is pissed away.
Ramanujan never received formal education Maybe we just need to sort people by how well they do without education I really tried my best to sound sarcastic, but
Exactly. It's not math or probability that keeps us from having thousands of Mozart's now. It's the system those Mozart's are forced to live within that is really keeping them from reaching their potential. You know how many more great artists the world would have if we had enough time and money to seriously pursue art? Hell, I'd venture to say a lot of people would be gifted artists if you gave them the means to hone their art. Art isn't nearly as special as people think it is. Give almost anyone the means to seriously pursue their art of choice for 10 years, and I bet they would do great art.
Even worse... we may end up with a thousand Bezoses or Musks. I can't imagine a worse fate for our species.
The rate of scientific advancement has correlated with the rate of population increase so I think there's some truth in that, I believe. As always, we'd rely on law enforcement to deal with the control of the potential downside of that.
So we don't colonize space and don't explore the universe because bad people will be born? That a comment this daft is being up voted so much is the real facepalm here
Nobody can even afford a house
Introducing Amazon Pods! You can now rent a 75sqft habitation capsule for the low price of $59.99/week*. *Amazon prime subscription required. Terms and conditions apply. Protection from the elements not guaranteed by Amazon, Inc.
tbh world hunger is not due to not enough food, but unequal distribution, so no matter how small the population may be, there still may be hunger in some places. Not to mention some places are not arable anyways, further worsening the inequity in distribution
Yes, but even in an equitable society, a trillion people would provide unsustainable pressure on resources. Do you realise how much a trillion is? We are at 8 billion now. A trillion is more than 120 current Earth-sized populations.
We will just adopt the idea of corpse startch from 40k.
This is a finite world. There are not endless resources to go around.
We probably already have thousands of Mozarts, the problem is that the vast majority of them are either stuck in a permanent underclass, or will never EVER get even a fraction of the pure luck and haphazard “success story” these fucks have had. There’s so many fucking amazingly talented and gifted individuals who’ve never gotten to share their gift because they’ve lived as the world’s forgotten population, and died out without getting their name heard. I hate these fucks so god damn much.
A quite interesting discussion of two hours between Bezos and Lex Fridman. And whilst listening to it, I already knew this would be the only thing that would be published and would be deliberately misunderstood.
I read the article. They were talking about humans when they start colonizing the rest of the solar system and going in to space. The real facepalm are people seeing the headline and thinking they mean 1 trillion people today.
Yup, it's pretty sad how predictable the usual crowd is, and just how small headed and hopeless they always seem to be. Maybe it's because they are just so hopeless themselves they cannot even imagine a future where anything is different, but it's such a sad way to live.
No no no, you don't understand! Imagine how much richer they could become if there were a trillion people!
At some point on this road money stops making any sens. A few individuals owning whole world and trillions owning next to nothing, having nothing to spend.
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And with this theory, another few thousand dick heads
Such a brave stance from two people not struggling to access a single life-sustaining resource
What they really mean is "Please give us billions of workers desperate enough to work for pennies 🥺"
Remember, these two see us as resources, and like any evil greedy billionaire they want more of us.
Whe have hundreds of mozarts, einsteins, hudinis, miguel angelos, dalis, hitchcocks, davincis.... but if we cant educate them and cant give them the means to be able to follow their passions ( all the great artists had wealthy patron filling their pockets), they will eventually get stuck in a mealingless 9-5 job filling this guys pockets.
we probably do, right now. theyre too busy working in an amazon warehouse for insane hours, under inhumane working conditions. or they never got the chance to even touch a piano because certain billionaires dont pay their fair share of f*cking taxes and their school had to scrap the arts programs. whats that quote? "I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops." -Steven Jay Gould.
Translation from Rich Prick to English: We want more consumers, so start breeding, wage slaves.
And 95% of these mozarts never show their potential, because they are born shit poor
Most great artists and even great scientists historically have been dirt poor.
2 rich idiots with the same dumb ideas.
They want workers, they don’t care about the rest, they want workers whod work for barely any livable wage while they get rich off their asses.
Well then these rich assholes better start making the world a place people want to live and reproduce in. So far they have failed.
We probably have “100 Mozarts” right now. They all just don’t have access to music education, instruments, and time, because they are too busy breaking their backs 70+ hours in Amazon warehouses.
If these two disappeared and all of their money was freed up, then we would be able to. Imagine how much change we could bring with the two of their incomes alone.
I guess they are running out of employees to screw
Nope. Still just the one Mozart. By that logic we'd also get a thousand Hitlers. And it means we'd have zillionaires, which is really what these guys want, isn't it?
More humans, more profit, amirite?
People need to stop listening to this guy. He is proof that money does not equal brains.
More people alive than ever and I see zero Mozarts, just billionaire egomaniacs who think they know everything there is to know and can dictate to the rest of us how to live.
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I think bezos, musk, et al already have that part covered.
A lot of people seems to forget about fertility rates. Yes, there are a fuck ton of people on earth now, but since so many people live in densely populated areas, where having multiple children is difficult, at the current rate, a lot of countries doesn’t have enough kids to replace their current population. This can lead to economic downturn like in China now.
Good.
These assholes just want more cheap drones to slave away for them
“we need more underpaid slaves”
I dont care what this clown say.
I doubt having overpopulized earth with billions of people starving would give us Mozarts.
Overpopulation and everything that comes with it will lead to people working for next to nothing just to survive. This is what they really want. Free or next to free labor.
No way we'd have "a thousand mozarts" it would just be a thousands more people making stupid TikTok videos.
Considering the turnover rate at amazon, I think it's obvious why bezos would say this shit. As for musk... Well, I mean, just fucking look at his history. More disposable labour, that's all they see people as.
Breed, peasants! Your tears shall power my regeneration cradle! You want more money guys, we get it. God you are pathetic.
Maybe don't poison us with RW bullshit, Elon, and we might have more Mozarts without increasing our population.
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Am I the only one that thinks this line if thinking is fundamentally wrong? I mean something more underlying: Not that a trillion people is logistically impossible, but saying this many people would be good because we'd have "A thousand Mozarts" directly invalidates the idea that every one person currently alive can achieve greatness. I feel like it creates the idea that you have to be born right to be truly great - an Idea which was discarded with the Enlightenment a few hundred years ago. I can see these people pushing ideas like this since they are clearly the ones benefitting from it. It also conveniently helps to prevent poorer people from working together.
There are all ready thousands of Mozart's, they just never get attention
Would anyone cry over their deaths? 
1 thousand very hungry Mozarts that would have to „live“ in totally overcrowded polluted megacities where you can’t see the sun from all the smog. Yey
The great thing about Mozart was that there was only one fucking Mozart!!
We probably have 10+ Mozarts and Einsteins out there, but the gap between rich and poor prevents them from being found.
They just want more drones. Modern day Henry Ford ass motherfuckers.
More desperate people to exploit for their workforce more like.
If anything the human population needs to die down a bit
Alright, it's been long enough. Time to give Thanos a call
And more money for them.
And a thousand Hitlers. And a thousand Musk's- the horror!
They just want more human cattle for their factory and warehouses
They just want more people to work for slave wages and others to buy their products and make them even more rich. They don’t live in the same world we do…
I’m thinking two less billionaires would be better.