What is your threshold for rich and influential? You don't have to have Musk money to have sufficient pull to escape the consequences most people would face for action X. I don't think this is a difficult or controversial observation.
If you're net worth is above $15 million or so in the US, your in the 99th percentile. There are many orders of magnitude between you and Bezos, but you're rich. And if you have a media empire that is watched by millions, you're influential.
After a few hundred years historical injustices move down the priority list. France isn't seeking reparations from Italy for the conquest of Gaul, for example.
> After a few hundred years historical injustices move down the priority list
I'm actually curious for you to expand on this.
It's broadly, I think, my view. And it's been a reason I've come to disregard pretty much all historical claims to land in the Middle East, focussing on the quality of life of the people alive today where they are over where they or their ancestors were at some arbitrary point in the past.
But that largely erupts from me drawing my line between the living and the dead. (International lawyers would draw it at the end of WWII.) How do you draw yours?
If a business is destroyed by ransomware, all its employees lose their jobs. The business's customers lose the services the business was providing. The families supported by these jobs are now all at risk.
All that money goes somewhere. Much of it goes towards clothing, feeding, and housing people. Also, in most places it's a crime to rob anyone, even selfish assholes.
That seems beside the point. The ransomware extortionists aren't doing a utilitarian calculation and transferring funds from Exxon to Oxfam. They're taking money where they can and using it to fund a lavish lifestyle and more extortion. In particular, they aren't channeling it towards transforming any society into one in which basic needs are met by something other than jobs and businesses of the familiar sort. The extortionists cause suffering. They parasitize other people's labor. Their acts have actual, identifiable victims. The escorts serving them Moët at their birthday parties funded by other people's suffering aren't doing it for fun, love, or charity. For the escorts, it's a job.
I agree that our economic system is cold, transactional, and cruel. The problem kinder systems always face is that the people indifferent to the cruelty of capitalism, exemplified by these extortionists, are still there in the alternative system. The alternative must develop countermeasures or fail. The countermeasures replicate the cold transactional cruelty of capitalism.
This isn't to say all countries are doing equally well or poorly, just that countries that came closest to eliminating what we call businesses were not generally regarded as kind, compassionate paradises by the people who lived there.
You sound depressed. I wish you well. I wish the world were kinder to idealists. May you find a supportive community within the indifferent wider world.
So Indivisible, which planned the protest, knew the US was going to attack Iran months in advance and plotted this protest to distract from it? What strategic masterminds! What opsec! The left always seemed so fractious and disorganized, but they were just wily, biding their time. But, why?
Seriously, I'm sure you're smart enough to know this is absurd. Just sit down and think about it a bit.
Carbohydrates are oxidized hydrocarbons and hydrocarbons are reduced carbohydrates.
They can be and they are interconverted, both in living beings and in the industry.
In paper, most of the wood components except cellulose have been removed, so paper usually consists mostly of carbohydrates.
In general any adhesive is neither a hydrocarbon nor a carbohydrate, but a derivative of them. Natural adhesives are usually derived either from proteins, e.g. various kinds of animal glues, or from starch or from various kinds of gums or of resins or of latex.
Bitumen has been used as an adhesive that consists mostly of hydrocarbons, but it also includes some oxidized components that provide most of the adhesion, as pure hydrocarbons have lubricating properties, not adhesive properties.
It's not quite like that, though. 90% of their funding supported candidates that lost or opposed candidates that won -- they opposed the winning outcome. They supported the winning outcome with the remaining 10% of their funds, but here they pushed on the side of the contest which was already a lock anyway. So it isn't clear that any of the money they spent achieved anything.
Special mentions to Paul Ehrlich (the "population bomb" guy). Got all his predictions wrong, never changed his mind, got a lot of money for it eg from the Ford and the Rockefeller Foundation. His ideas led to millions of forced sterilizations and abortions in China and India, with his full support, by far surpassing anything the Nazis did in that regard.
If you're net worth is above $15 million or so in the US, your in the 99th percentile. There are many orders of magnitude between you and Bezos, but you're rich. And if you have a media empire that is watched by millions, you're influential.
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