IMHO, this is proof that an aggressive wealth tax on the top 1% would be well deserved, assuming that the tax is structured in a way that fully pays off the national debt faster than the debt can grow.
This mainly comes from people who wish to post their business or other commercial page on Facebook and have, for a reason that isn't particularly clear, been prevented from doing so, and no one at Meta can give them an explanation.
I don't have it in front of me right now but there's a Python podcast episode I listened to recently where a person involved with the Pandas project was banned from having some sort of presence on a Meta property. The theory was that the content moderation algorithms had marked his account as being related to the exotic animal trade because of the words "python" and "pandas" being in so many posts. This person had extreme difficulty in getting any sort of answers from Meta.
This really opened my eyes to some historical context I never thought of before.
My initial gut reaction was judgmental about the way billionaires spend their money; thinking it might involve some amount of hubris.
Then I realized I have no idea of how sculpture that are now show in museums as treasured historical art pieces were judge in the time they were created. Today we treasure them. But what did the general population think of them? I have no idea.
I imagine that at the time of their commissioning they were also paid by affluent people that could afford such luxuries. People that probably mirror today’s billionaires in influence and access. So what’s different about these?
The difference is that Roman sculpture is revered for it's ingenuity and craftmanship at a time where that style of sculpture was being developed with the more limited resources they had back then, and it often depicted important motifs from religion, society, etc. Whereas this is just a copy of that with limited cultural relevance (no one is going to be talking about Priscilla Chan in 20 years, let alone a couple thousand).
Decadent nobility wasted fortunes in basically gardens and lawn ornaments. It's reprehensible, but I think most of us are already decadent and wasteful in out own scale, at least compared to poorer societies.
Say what you will about the robber barrons. We still have rockefeller, carnegie, and vanderbilt buildings, institutions, and colleges today. Being a patron for general public welfare was at least socially popular for the ultra wealthy capitalists in this country 100 years ago. A shame how that has changed.
We don't call them robber barons anymore, they've succeeded enough at spinning their entrepreneurship in the public eye that they don't need to build those institutions these days
Instead they now buy enough land to keep common folk far enough away from them on what used to be areas free to roam, eg what they're doing in Hawaii
> We still have rockefeller, carnegie, and vanderbilt buildings, institutions, and colleges today
A very narrow slice of American geography has those things, primarily within the Mid-Atlantic and New England states.
Regardless, they did that kind of thing back then because there was a real risk of a lower-class uprising if they didn't at least pretend to care about the little people.
They did that where they lived. Chances are if some town in texas or wherever had a local magnate in the 1920s they made similar investments in the local community.
