• 15 Posts
  • 316 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
Cake day: July 5th, 2025
  • Coopr8@kbin.earthtoAsk Science@lemmy.world•Besides taxing wealth, which other options exist for reducing the wealth gap?
    21·
    1 month ago

    Direct government support for and Incentivization of worker Co-ops across the supply chain, and specifically for digital infrastructure.

    Worker owned and run businesses distribute wealth to the working class directly, and digital infrastructure like datacenters and fiber optic networks which yield strong ongoing revenue in exchange for intensive uo-front work on planning and cinstruction followed by ongoing preventative maintenance are an ideal target for co-oping if a lender would specifically support it. The lender of choice could easily be a government agency, with ag loans, innovation loans, and the SBA in the US all as examples of how this can work.

    Similarly alternative energy supply chain can and should be co-op, not just as consumer co-ops like there are in rural power utilities, but worker co-ops as construction and maintenance contractors for the solar and wind fields and power grids, as well as the hardware manufacturing facilities.

    Direct revenue-driven worker ownership is the surest way to increase economic equality, as direct share of revenue and worker-member units are resistant to the speculative value manipulation that drives most wealth accumulation at the top in the “public/private” corporation model of neoliberal capitalism.

  • Coopr8@kbin.earthtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Could rising sea levels caused by climate change be thwarted by digging a big hole at the bottom of the sea?
    29·
    2 months ago

    Possible yes, practical no. Effectively you would need to build a new sub-continant to have an appreciable impact on sea level. That said, you don’t need to dredge from the low point in the ocean, all that matters is displacing solid material from below sea level to above sea level, so the best option would be to find a shallow sea with an existing archipelago of islands and build up from there making it a deep sea with the islands connected as a continent. Alternately you could go after reefs, despite the collateral damage, with the great barrier reef being the obvious choice, essentially pump up dredged sand from the surrounding ocean bed onto the reef to make new land, the reef has the advantage of being very shallow and stabilized with lots of surface area, so good for making lots of land if you don’t mind being the architect of an ecological apocalypse of unprecedented proportions.

  • Coopr8@kbin.earthtoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Richest American to FAFO?
    22·
    2 months ago

    Bernie Madoff had the largest fall from $65 billion estimated at peak to $17 billion at time of arrest then dying in prison.

    Changpeng Zhao of Binance will be the richest person in the US, and probably ever, to do time in prison after conviction, but his wealth won’t be impacted and it is only a few months, so hardly much Finding Out involved.

    Sam Bankman-Fried is potentially an even bigger Find Out than Madoff, because unlike Madoff who maintained a large estate even after going to jail, SBF has gone from around $24 billion to $15.5 Billion at time of arrest, to now close to zero on paper as almost all his wealth was tied up in FTX and crypto and it was “all” siezed as part of his conviction and the FTX winddown. Now that said, he probably has a lot of crypto stashed in cold wallets somewhere that have appreciated substantially since his arrest, so it is hard to know how much he would be worth if he ever got access to them, but as I understand it he is basically banned from using computers and facing over 100 years on his sentence, so he better be putting in a lot of good behavior of he ever hopes to see any of that secret stash again.