If the code is written by an LLM, then it can't be copyrighted, and a license can't be applied.
The US Copyright Office has stated such: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
The Council of the EU has also stated such AFAIK.
Additionally we also have to recall that the quintile's populations are not necessarily static. to illustrate the idea: members of a quintile may join an adjacent quintile in the next time period. That is, bottom members may move up, top members may move down, mid members may move either way. To the extent their movements are justified by their actions/choices is to the extent we have a fair society.
That is, if people are getting rich from sources not related to taking right actions, or people are taking good actions and getting poorer -- then we have an unjust society.
This can both apply to Rich people abusing their power to get rich, but also with poor people abusing their democratic powers to unjustly take from others that which they have not earned.
The issue is that income/wealth compounds over time. If people in the bottom 40% have very little to invest, they have nothing that compounds. They dont even have an opportunity to risk anything, or make a better decision.
The prices of the essentials are largely out of any individual's control. So any lack of ability to save / invest beyond spending on those is also out of their control. It's a vicious cycle, where excess wealth compounds, and income needed to exist dries up.
Also the rich often see a larger return to their investments than poor people, so having wealth seems to aide in your ability to make more money. Exactly the sort of thing that you implied was unjust.
And your other points about mobility I agree with and are addressed in notes on the site.
The prices of true essentials are exceedingly small. Essential is something like sharing a room with someone, eating rice beans frozen veg mix (ie very inexpensively), wearing clothes from thrift stores, exercising outside and using a library card, medicaid. Everything beyond that is, technically, optional.
Having wealth aiding the overall return doesn't negate my point. Using wealth to get an unjust return does. An example of a better return would be hiring a financial advisor that (somehow) creates better returns using smarter allocations. An example of an unjust return would be creating a monopoly, buying a politician, or extracting profits from unpriced externalities (pollution and bailouts to name a couple). (These do happen in the USA, and I'm all for ending them!)
There's nothing unjust about someone getting more returns on more invested, this will naturally lead to a widening wealth gap over time. It's an inherent property of existence that more invested yields more return yields yet more invested (accelerating).
I do, however, like Scott Galloway's point that we need to find new ways to get the rich to spend their money, we need the poor to start 10000 businesses that gratify the rich and extract their money. Right now they're mostly accumulating it and bidding up investible assets (eg look athe P/E multiple of the S&P 500) .
I just thought it was a better illustration, easier for the average person to comprehend without those.
I didnt mean to do any advocating. Just provided the info because I wanted to see how it'd affect things.
Of course the other problem with the projection is that BLS average expenses aren’t super accurate to project what people are spending on at those income percentiles :)
The other way round is much much worse - imagine if rich people don't invest but rather just consume. It _takes_ away money from poor instead of building more wealth for everyone.
So the overall point being made here is not that true
If they truly are poor, they’re surely living YOLO.
In other words, yes, they may pay 5x the price for a meal in an amusement park that they visit once a year. That does not mean they are willing to pay anything close to that for a meal every week or every day.
If a base rate that the society agrees on is e.g. n %, then, in my opinion, everyone should pay that n %. But in reality the poor people pay n % because they have no time to even think about optimizing it. As they often work around the clock to make ends meet. While the richer people hire professionals to take care of their taxes and optimize them to the extent that they pay significantly less than n %. And then there are super rich, some of whom, such as Donald Trump, pay almost no taxes at all.
This is, in my opinion, wrong and significantly contributes to wealth inequality. And therefore I believe that it needs fixing.
The median household income is $83,730: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
The average for the bottom 50% of households is $30,000-something. Would take too much effort to figure out the exact figure for a comment, but still way higher what this site says, and I still feel like this is more effort than went into this misinformation site.
Its own linked source says that for 2022 the bottom quintile makes $26.2k before taxes and transfers and $44.8k after, while this site says $17.2k after. No wonder it's coming up with such wacky conclusions like saying a majority of America is going into debt while only buying the bare essentials and nothing else. If you use the correct income numbers, even the bottom quintile averages out to having $16k extra after essentials.
"There's nothing unjust about someone getting more returns on more invested, this will naturally lead to a widening wealth gap over time. It's an inherent property of existence that more invested yields more return yields yet more invested (accelerating)."
It's not the wealth that is evil/wrong/unjust/immoral. It's the use of it to corrupt power.
Please spend even 1-2 minutes on the https://livingwage.mit.edu/ for example this calculation for Philadelphia: https://livingwage.mit.edu/metros/37980
> sharing a room with someone
> medicaid
in the top 10 CoL metros one can share a room with another person for about $600 a month.
I note that on your links the poverty wage is pretty close to the minimum wage. I'd contend that since contraceptives are widely available, including abortion in many places (or charities helping people get them in other states), we should expect the bottom quintile to not be adding to their expenses.
Most new businesses fail. Then the poor are even deeper in the debt hole. Some people can/should start businesses, but a lot of people are just not entrepreneurs - I include myself in that group. I realize that there must be ways to extract money from this economy - lots of people are doing it - but I don't think any of my ideas would end up doing that (they're generally too niche), more likely I'd end up losing a bunch of money trying to do that.
The page says that at least 50% of all people are not, so this seems like a very moot question until such a time as that changes.
And if it ever does change, we can then move on to the issue that "fairness" only exists to the extent that one is willing to acknowledge that having money fundamentally and inherently leads to having more money due to the nature of compounding growth, and the more money you have the more money you get by no real action at all.
You talk about "earned", but how exactly have I "earned" the compounding growth on my holdings? I certainly don't work for it. It just flows in for free as the world population continues to grow and produce. I can do literally nothing at all but drink margaritas on the beach and my assets will grow more per year than an average person ever makes by labor. Would you say that I "earn" it? I call it "getting" not "earning". There's nothing fair about it.
If I have enough money, I can buy a lot of businesses (or be in a controlling position) and run them poorly (read: efficently) and as wealth concentrates the capital for a new entrant to compete becomes scarcer and regulation on new competition mysteriously materializes, and without any new competition I can raise prices and no one can really do anything.
And now I have more money to do this more times in more places, and wealth is more concentrated, and legislation just seems to go my way more and so on.
That vague playbook is being applied to just about everything today.
Spirit Airlines went through two bankruptcies, and the people who lead the first one were liquidating it while it was still running to pay themselves back for the first one, and turning debt they had forfeited for equity back into debt to increase how much they'd take out of the remains.
I mean you can't even escape that playbook in childrens sports! That playbook is being run into making children sports league a profit squeezing cartel as we speak.
It's just such a simple playbook that if we really go all in on the idea that anything that's technically legal to make money will be allowed, then having more money and basic "high agency" mindset will lead to making money in increasingly perverse ways.
To me the end game seems to be a race between authoritarianism (will these high-agency wealthy types just be able to keep the poorer class under lock and key with TikTok feeds to placate) and collapse (maybe they don't get the poor under deep enough control before the poor realize they've been given a deal that justifies trying to raze it all and start again)(edit: or maybe better framing, they realize they collectively have no meaningful part in the wealth and raze it)
If the kids sports is a profit seeking cartel that you do not agree with, then do not give them your money. If enough customers do that they will not be profitable and will cease to exist once they can no longer extract investor capital from the very class this post seems to dislike.
Really roughly speaking the American consumer needs to stop being so complacent and naive, the American voter needs to get a good bit more politically active, and people need to stop choosing comfort over action. the average 2.5 hrs a day on social media could easily be spent to make their lives much better.
I assume you mean "do not justify" and the bottom line is that this type of thinking is fundamentally erroneous.
We agree to live in a society of this construction not so everyone can pull themselves up by their bootstraps (asinine conception that misunderstands structural vs individual agency) but because it is of collective benefit.
If it it not of collective benefit, the social agreement needs to be renegotiated.
There's no chance everyone will agree to live in an arrangement where a minority of the population accrues all of the benefit because they go out of their way to execute financial scams, but I'm willing to litigate that publicly, which we're doing here.
My whole point is that to the extent accumulated wealth is happening by playing by the rules, there is no injustice in accumulating wealth, nor in accumulating more than those who did not do the actions which relate to wealth building. (And there's a randomness factor involved so it mostly has to be taken on average, on average starting a business is profitable, but also lots of them fail)
Society isn't some abstract collection of rules that must be followed. Those rules are actively negotiated for majority benefit, and we agree that each person has an equal voice in the west.
If that collection of rules is failing, it's considered unjust and something to amend.
"That's just smart" because someone found a loophole or did a scam to accrue wealth isn't an acceptable negotiated state of affairs to most people.
This is a presumed goal/value. A more conservative take is that the rules are actively enforced based on values or justice.
A value could be that we do not support ill gotten gains, to the extent that the majority votes for free things paid for by the minority it could "benefit the majority" and still violate the value
I've actually gone through the rolodex of all known moral systems and none of them endorse the conception that a minority, who just earned it rightfully, is allowed to accrue outsize resources while other groups do not.
So, again; as I said earlier, I open the floor for discussion. This is the moral certainty that the process by which we adjudicate the social order will not be favorable to an unjust conception. The simple light of day ends most of these discussions.
> but also with poor people abusing their democratic powers to unjustly take from others that which they have not earned
How would they abuse their democratic powers? It's their decision to vote either way. So who says that's unjust? Certainly it's not abusing their democratic powers.
Abusing of power happens on the other end of the spectrum, especially in the US thanks to citizens united.... Surely all those super PAC dollars don't buy any influence... As a result, the voice of a single rich person might be stronger than a whole quintile of the population. So chances are that they are unjustly given things that aren't theirs (i.e. advantageous contracts, laws that help them etcetera).
Fully agree Citizen's united has resulted in legalized corruption. But 2 wrongs do not make a right, ethically.
There's nothing unjust about a rich person getting superior results through access to better resources though. Eg hiring a better tax accountant or financial advisor.
That's about twice as much as the lower 50% of the population (2% of the world's wealth)... a class consisting of 4 billion people.
Why do people pretend "right actions" has anything to do with it. "Right actions" aren't even possible at that scale of difference. How does "earning" even make sense at these proportions? you think 3500 people are doing that much more than 4 billion others?
The P/E Ratio of the S&P 500 is at a historic high level. Interpreted another way, there rarely is a better time to create a profitable business -- You can get paid $30ish dollars per annual dollar of profit you create.
On the flip side, it's never been so expensive to be an investor of capital. In order to get a return you have to wait 30 years (or 10 if you take growth rates into account), just to see your initial investment. An expensive stock market makes current consumption more rational for investors.
but let's not pretend that "right" has anything to do with it
If you start a perfectly fair society where everyone has exactly the same amount of money and you play a game were people interact and with equal random chance (i.e. each exchange you get a 50/50 chance of earning 1 buck or losing one), after a few exchanges you get a Boltzmann-Gibbs (exponential) distribution.
If each agent wealth chance of increasing depends on what they already have, you get a pareto distribution.
It's extremely hard to avoid at large scale.
Founderarcstone•3h ago