this post was submitted on 19 May 2026
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me_irl
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How much is the rich exactly? I'm in the top 10% earners of my country and still:
Rich is more like top 0.1%
"Rich" really depends on location
Exactly, nobody thinks they are rich.
because they want more than they have, and they are angry they don't have more.
even when they have more than 90% of everyone else in their country.
A household income of $250k is not rich, but that's essentially top 10% in the US. Why are you intent on lumping the person you're responding to in with people shopping for a third yacht? Your thinking is a problem, because it's poor fighting less poor, while rich folk fly around on private jets.
My household income is 50k. You’re most certainly rich at 250k, but if you can’t live on that it’s cause you’re living way above what you should be
because they behave the same way.
people making 250K try to minimize costs, maximize gains, and ruthlessly pursue their own self interests at the expense of other people around them and they want to avoid/shut out other people from attaining what they have.
and yes, it is rich. they just don't feel rich because they are socially isolated from the people who make 25K a year, and they look with envy at the person making 500K, just like that person envies those who make 1mil a year. so on and so on.
for a person making 25K a year, making 250K is unfathomably rich.
Have you spent any time in different classes of society, let alone looking at their behavioral patterns? probably not, sadly very few people do, hence why they are convinced people of different wealth levels are a different species. They aren't.
your grandma voting against new development in her town to 'preserve its character' is the same thing as zuckerberg buying up properties around him to prevent it. it's a different scale, yes, but the idea is the same, it's about controlling what is around you and prevent others from altering it because of your preferences.
Maybe the argument is that everyone should have the things this relatively rich person cannot afford. Not just in a SciFi utopia way, but in the sense of it being reasonable.
define reasonable. are you the decider of what a 'reasonable' life is?
what if some people in your utopian society decide they want more than someone else has?
'Reasonable' like 'do we think we could probably actually do this'. So like not everyone can live in a twenty acre footprint palace in downtown. Wouldn't work, don't have enough materials and the logistics don't check out.
We can probably do like a solid one or two bedroom apartment in a city or a pretty recently sized house in the country with some personally administered land attached for everybody who wants them in at least the kind of place they want it, with maybe multiple studios or tricked out RV's for people who split their time between multiple places. We can do that. Its not a huge ask, the resources mostly exist or could be converted without an implausible or society disrupting amount of effort.
That's what an economy is meant to do, you see. It's supposed to see that non-depleting resources like indoor space and railroad lines are built and put to use as efficiently as possible, and depletable resources are developed expended when its smart and conserved when that's smart, with labor being skilled up and put to use for some compromise between any number of optimization criteria such as human happiness space marine miniatures or FLOPS.
The maintenance of stratified classes is more of an ideological project for which the economy is hijacked by a bunch of parasitic not-even-metaphorical vampires and their deranged cultists. Economies aren't actually for that, and not in like a 'Hitachi says it doesn't make sex toys' way, but more of a 'Raytheon says they don't make sex toys why do I smell meat' way. They're genuinely for other stuff, and you can absolutely run them without the insane ideology.
For example by putting all those cultists in chains to live lives of public abuse and optimize human happiness!
In simpler terms: who the fuck would work 40 hours a week for the goals of a society that won't even give them a reliable comfy place to sleep? What kind of owned little object would do that?