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Ok Billionaire: Why Do the Opinions of 600 Americans Get So Much Airtime? (2019)

https://lithub.com/ok-billionaire-rebecca-solnit-on-the-self-pity-of-the-very-rich/
28•robtherobber•3h ago

Comments

camillomiller•1h ago
Because America values money above everything else. Ask anyone outside America, and that is immediately clear to them. Yet Americans are so imbued with the normalization of transactionality in all aspects of life that they can't really understand why it's not ok that the pursuit of happiness has become simply the pursuit of riches. Want another example? Look at how y'all consider poverty as basically a personal bad choice.
api•1h ago
Isn’t that obvious? Money buys things including attention.
blenderob•1h ago
It's not that all obvious to me. Where I live the richest don't get this kind of attention very much. People know they're the richest and all that but you don't see their opinions rehashed on every social media and news outlet. On the contrary, they're mostly out of sight, out of mind!
beeflet•1h ago
Seems like overly long copium about nothing in particular. The author makes some assertions, like that elizabeth warren is a viable candidate or that the republican party will weaken in coming years due to demographic changes, or that shale gas is a bubble. But the way in which it is written reveals an insecurity that this may not be the case.

The author expresses frustration that the new york times has a variety of perspectives.

>It often seems as though the Democratic and Republican parties are unconsciously perceived as the wife and husband in a very, very traditional marriage, since the former is supposed to defer to and please the latter, and the latter is free to run roughshod over the former

I think the author may be a bit trapped by their habit of seeing everything along gender lines

keiferski•1h ago
I think there has actually been something of a cultural shift on this topic in the last ±decade or so. The word billionaire used to have more baked-in positive cultural energy, something laudable in-itself.

Nowadays though it feels like the label has a negative tinge; not quite a bad thing, but not something that feels like a universal benefit either. This change probably tracks with the rise of populism.

Tarsul•29m ago
It's weird to me as a German because growing up in the 90s exorbitant wealth was not seen as inherently good, if i had to guesstimate the general feeling - it was generally seen as inherently a-little-bit-worse-than-neutral (the saying "Reichtum stinkt" - meaning rich people stink, was quite common). However, and probably due to way too much cultural influence of US media (and tech) this general feeling changed a little bit more to the positive side (00s/2010s). But now that everything goes to shit, the feeling shifts again to more negative.

At least that's my nonscientific interpretation of the historical feeling in Germany since the 90s. But would love studies about it, in general.

bko•40m ago
> Think of being a billionaire as a rare disease, though far less rare than it was a few decades ago—except that it’s a disease that’s self-inflicted, deserves no sympathy, and is easily cured by dispersal of the huge bolus of money choking their empathic awareness.

I don't think people are a disease. I think of billionaires as people who mostly started businesses that were very successful. The fact that they started a successful business suggests they know something about the world that others don't (some insight). Millionaires can be lucky (happen to invest in Manhattan real estate or crypto) but to accumulate a billion is a different thing all together and a high signal that the person is extraordinary in some regard.

surgical_fire•32m ago
To me it only suggests they are sociopaths. The common folk should generally just understand that billionaires are inherently evil, and everything they say and want will cause harm to society as a whole.

It also suggests, typically, that they just inherited generatinal wealth from their sociopath ancestors.

conception•28m ago
Note that it’s quite possible that the extraordinary thing is acute psychopathy and/or sociopathy to gather wealth at any cost.
rpdillon•22m ago
It's strange to me that you conclude that accumulating six zeros indicates luck, but accumulating nine zeros indicates skill. Why doesn't it indicate just more extraordinary luck?
kamranjon•18m ago
This line of thinking is why I think the tech industry has become so morally bankrupt.

I don’t mean to judge because I think many people come to similar conclusions but I believe there has been a concerted effort to equate accumulation of wealth with genius, and to portray this anti-social behavior of endlessly accumulating wealth in a positive light.

I really think this phenomenon should be studied because it will likely lead to some catastrophic outcomes for the country.

bko•39s ago
> accumulation of wealth with genius

Where did I say genius? They did something impressive so a useful model is to say "they know something about this world" or "they're built different". Not sure what you're referring to as anti-social behavior, but yeah I imagine extreme wealth generation means the person is likely to have some personal characteristic that could manifest as anti social. The smartest people I know are all ADHD or some other abnormality.

How exhausting must it be to think that anyone with success got so through illicit means or luck. It's much healthier to come in with the assumption that there's something to learn from that person.

lapcat•7m ago
Imagine looking at the fattest people in the world and thinking, they must know something about food that others don't. Extraordinary.

Everyone else knows that gluttony is bad, not good.

Checkout.com hacked, refuses ransom payment, donates to security labs

https://www.checkout.com/blog/protecting-our-merchants-standing-up-to-extortion
212•StrangeSound•4h ago•127 comments

Google will allow users to sideload Android apps without verification

https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-developer-verification-early.html
1134•erohead•13h ago•486 comments

Steam Machine

https://store.steampowered.com/sale/steammachine
2256•davikr•19h ago•1044 comments

Steam Frame

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1631•Philpax•19h ago•594 comments

Seed. LINE's Custom Typeface

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39•totetsu•4h ago•16 comments

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166•uneven9434•9h ago•72 comments

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700•andrewl•21h ago•856 comments

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269•AbuAssar•12h ago•67 comments

Continuous Autoregressive Language Models

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.27688
56•Anon84•1w ago•5 comments

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https://github.com/Homebrew/brew/issues/20755
254•firexcy•15h ago•195 comments

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https://openai.com/index/gpt-5-1/
415•tedsanders•18h ago•496 comments

Project Euler

https://projecteuler.net
485•swatson741•20h ago•123 comments

Telli (Voice AI – YC F24) is hiring engineers in Berlin

https://hi.telli.com/eng
1•sebselassie•4h ago

Reverse Engineering Yaesu FT-70D Firmware Encryption

https://landaire.net/reversing-yaesu-firmware-encryption/
54•austinallegro•6h ago•6 comments

Randomness Testing Guide

https://random.tastemaker.design/
11•user070223•1w ago•2 comments

Shader Glass

https://github.com/mausimus/ShaderGlass
22•erickhill•4d ago•2 comments

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https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1042355/434ad706cc594276/
118•Velocifyer•1w ago•28 comments

Valve is about to win the console generation

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405•moonleay•14h ago•326 comments

Fighting the New York Times' invasion of user privacy

https://openai.com/index/fighting-nyt-user-privacy-invasion
367•meetpateltech•23h ago•321 comments

GLP-1 drugs linked to lower death rates in colon cancer patients

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174•gmays•17h ago•149 comments

Marble: A Multimodal World Model

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231•meetpateltech•15h ago•56 comments

Learn Prolog Now (2006)

https://lpn.swi-prolog.org/lpnpage.php?pageid=top
304•rramadass•22h ago•201 comments

Helm 4.0

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113•todsacerdoti•20h ago•120 comments

Yt-dlp: External JavaScript runtime now required for full YouTube support

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/15012
1003•bertman•1d ago•588 comments

Strap Rail

https://www.construction-physics.com/p/strap-rail
26•surprisetalk•3d ago•2 comments

Digital ID, a new way to create and present an ID in Apple Wallet

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2025/11/apple-introduces-digital-id-a-new-way-to-create-and-presen...
126•meetpateltech•20h ago•169 comments

LED types by color, brightness, and chemistry (2021)

https://donklipstein.com/ledc.html
17•Lammy•1w ago•3 comments

A Commentary on the Sixth Edition Unix Operating System (1977)

https://warsus.github.io/lions-/
49•o4c•10h ago•11 comments

Launch HN: JSX Tool (YC F25) – A Browser Dev-Panel IDE for React

103•jsunderland323•19h ago•75 comments