To them, actually learning a "normal" topic is a distraction. Their game is finding and exploiting weaknesses.

(Also not saying I believe this at all, just relating an anecdote).

A failing math teacher at a New York prep school leading to a job at Bear Stearns and then as a wealth manager for billionaires... let's say it doesn't add up unless there were other reasons than his own ambitions and organization skills.

Mossad or the Russians engineered his life.

So he is no longer a billionaire? And donating to what charity, The Gates Foundation? The one that he controls? The one that he uses to push his ideological stances and repeatedly fails to help anyone? Just look how successful his work on improving education system in America was. What a sacrifice it was for him...

https://www.forbes.com/billionaires/ ranks him at #13 wealthiest in the world with $108B net worth.

He's donated about half his fortune, and 60% of that to his own org.

  1. Donate 5-10% of their fortune to random unobjectionable charities.
  2. Don't abuse children.
  3. Stay off Twitter.

There is nothing at all you can do that could ever overcome the harm of helping that man, participating in his business, and calling him a friend.

I don't care if Jesus Christ himself comes down and says Bill Gates is solely responsible for the ending of all suffering.

Raping kids is Bad. Enslaving kids to rape is Bad. This is as clear as you can get in real human society to being The Bad Guy, and Bill Gates spent his precious, limited time on this earth helping him, legitimizing him, and participating in his influence peddling and child rape and slavery

Bill Gates is a piece of shit.

He took more from the society than he gave back. And when you take from society, you're not supposed to decide alone how to redistribute. That's the issue

Bill and Melinda Gates foundation are also behind Common Core and basically ruined public education in the US.

The foundation is a way for Bill to keep doing what he likes without having to pay taxes on it, he's just done a better job of repairing his image than Larry.

  > basically his entire fortune

If I give away 50% of my fortune my entire life falls apart and I am struggling. If I give away 10% it is going to hurt.

But Gates? He gives away 99% of his money and he's still a billionaire. His life isn't really going to change in any meaningful way. His money still generates tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a year without him lifting a finger. He gives away 99.9% of his money and he's still worth $100m and again, his life effectively does not change, making now only millions of dollars a year doing nothing.

Don't get me wrong, I am glad he's giving his money away and this is far better than Ellison or plenty of others, but that doesn't absolve their crimes/behavior. There's definitely a hierarchy of wrongness, being a cheater is definitely better than being a pedo cheater but neither is good or an excuse. The dude was associating with a known sex trafficker. Definitely not an "ops, I didn't know", his wife definitely knew and told him...

For example, the typical tax structure is to put assets into a foundation. That allows the assets to grow and earn income without being taxed. The only requirement is that 5% of the asset pool has to be used on the stated goal of the foundation. That might sound good but it also includes costs like "administration" so, say, having your family as employees. There are limits to this but it's still somewhat of a slush fund.

That charity can be used for political influence. A foundation can't donate to candidates or PACs but can instead, for example, fund a think tank from which policy is created or influenced. That think tank will employ people while their party is out of the White House and otherwise nurture people who will go into the administration when their party returns to power.

Also, a large foundation such as this wields influence just by its size, by choosing what to fund and where. It can exact generous conditions from governments. Those conditions can extend to companies the foundation's benefactors have an interest in.

All of this is about influence. Governments are accountable to their people. Outsized private foundations are accountable to no one.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Scully

Gates has always been a piece of shit. For example, when Paul Allen got diagnosed with cancer, Gates and Ballmer tried to screw him out of Microsoft stock that he owned (this was roughly 1982-ish?).

You're a shit person if you try to screw over your "friend" like this. You're a shit person squared if you do it when they just got diagnosed with cancer.

Put a dollar figure on your daughter, sister, mother.

Now you get it.

At some point it stops being a philanthropy when it makes lives of people he tries to "help" worse. Like his actions have a ulterior motives...

Yeah everyone forgets, he killed Hitler. That was a huge win for Germany. But no one ever gives him the credit.

Except for the parts involving criminal coverups. That seems to plague close-nit groups at any level of society, e.g. world religions, police, finance, families, etc.

Back to your main point, mafia operates similarly. In fact, there is not much difference between the two. What is Larry Summers not saying there is that being part of this circle is making this circle more powerful. Them not talking about what they know is itself "influencing powerful people and outcomes".

https://www.lewissociety.org/innerring/

“Secular liberal morality” here plays the same role as “cultural Marxism” elsewhere: neither exists concretely as an actual entity, but if you abstract away enough of the details you can still point to it like a bogeyman or a cryptid.

(I repeat for emphasis, since I know people will bring it up if I don't, that the ages of the people Epstein solicited and the circumstances under which he solicited them were not as widely known at the time.)

These are not the same, even if the government of Israel deliberately conflates them.

I think we need to start calling out this deliberate attempt from the Israeli government to correlate the two.

If the choice for Mossad was either risk Epstein exposing that Israel was essentially running a state-sponsored underage sex trafficking ring, or kill him before he can do that, you know what they'd choose.

If you don't give that entirely separate branch any executive power, it cannot enforce its rulings. If you do give it separate executive power, there is nothing to rein it in when it becomes corrupt.

(Granted, in e.g. the Ottoman Empire and Imperial China, it was frequently the case that there were dozens of princelings who were, de facto, pitted against each other in contests for the throne. That definitely selected for ambition, brutality, and a willingness to get one's hands dirty.)

They think we just need more LKYs, or really, AI systems controlling everything. A benevolent dictatorial AI running society is exactly what all the futurists think is coming. Go read Orions Arm.

The operation of the revolving door would seem to imply otherwise. You set up a situation where politicians are not just expected but required to leave office and then need a job in the private sector. Are they then inclined to do things while in office that make it more or less likely that they get a lucrative gig as soon as their term is up?

> A malicious ruler with infinite time to complete their destructive plan.

The assumption is that the ruler is the elected official. What do you do if the malicious ruler is a corporation and the elected official is just a fungible subordinate?

  >> power attracts the corrupt
  >  hence why limited terms are a prerequisite for functioning democracies.

But if you want to take Vienna, take Vienna! Embrace limited power

Limited government power is often rightfully challenged as being unbalanced to the tremendous power of non-government entities such as corporations. However, this claim elides that the power and charter of any particular entity is downstream of what is granted and enabled by government functions. Less government power makes for less powerful corporations.

However, once everything is cut down a few notches, will the remaining power still attract the "corrupt?" Yes, power, status and other social markers will still exist and act like a bug lamp for sociopaths. But on the plus side they won't be as able, as you say, "to do that much damage."

0. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...

The closest we can get is striving to elevate our cultural and spiritual level as individuals, family, friends, neighbours and strangers.

The entire power of the psychopaths in charge all stem from corrupting normal people, and the more that can be avoided, the less power they have.

But it is difficult, because they corrupt our strongest feelings: fear, greed, pride, laziness, desire, community.

Millions of young men have died in senseless wars because they didn't want to be seen as "cowards", they thought of their "honour". Who remembers them now?

Who even thinks about the thousands of young soldiers dying in the battlefields in Ukraine? Why is Trump the only leader who talks about their deaths?

Billions of people are paying taxes to support their psychopath rulers, because of simple fear. If everybody stopped tomorrow, the world would be liberated. But people are held in fear.

Because democracy at least pretends to give power to the people. Except letting a few individuals wield enough wealth and power to buy media, politicians and judges is completely antagonistic to the basic ideals of democracy, and not many realize this (yet).

> I’m not aware of any system that [...]

Liberal democracy is better than feudalism, I see no reason why our systems of governance can't be improved further. And, at least to me, the obvious path forward is to keep any of those "deranged dark triad personalities" from gaining too much power, maybe by limiting the amount of wealth any single individual can hold unto.

Everyone wants taxes to go up on everyone making more than them, and for their own taxes to go down. The problem is this is a collective negotiation, not a discussion about what to ask the genie for when we rub the lamp. If the middle class wants to decrease their own taxes (which is the political issue that objectively affects them the most, and how they lose their power), then they are going to have to meet the wealthy half way. Idealism is the enemy of the the common sense, rational, self-interested move.

> And needless to say, a non-functioning democracy is not a proof that the concept of democracy doesn't work.

Yes, democracy is a good idea precisely because imperfect implementations of it work well. If it worked in theory and not in practice, then it wouldn't be a good idea. Contrast it to communism, which is literally an info-hazard. If you try to bring it in to existence, you won't achieve your goal, and the system you do create will be much worse for you. Even if it works in theory, it's a bad idea because it doesn't work in practice.

The U.S. are a republic not a democracy. The people vote for the government but are not expected to be directly involved with it after the fact.

If 100 people were about to embark on a journey on a ship, what makes you think 51 of them know who should run the ship if none of them have ever even been on a ship?

I'd also feel a lot better about "Elon gets $200B payout", because he gets $2B and $198B goes to tax payers -- seems pretty fair. $2B is still more than anyone ever needs to live a lavish life of luxury and/or start any reasonable self-business, or buy off any politicians.

Making the government resistant to manipulation is a distinct problem. It's a game theory/mechanism design problem, and its solution doesn't require taking in lots of money. Giving the government more power/money causes people to spend more effort to manipulate it, so any weaknesses are exploited to the fullest extent.

> and second because it is not in the interest of society for wealth to be accumulated rather than moving.

This reveals a significant misunderstanding of how capital works in an economy. None of the billionaires that come up when you type in "billionaires" into Google have access to liquid cash anywhere near the number that shows up next to their face. Their money is invested in productive projects, it's paying salaries and invested in equipment. Concentrating capital is what allows a civilization to take on big projects. As a society we want big projects to be paid for by individuals bearing the risk (skin in the game). In a free-market, capital concentrates in individuals who, empirically, know how to use it well. Spending other people's money is a great way to make sure that money is spent frivolously. You can criticize luxury spending all you want, and taxing that is something most people consider "fair", but you aren't speaking for anyone economically literate when you say that you don't want capital to concentrate. I want it to concentrate as much as it does naturally.

No need to literally burn the money, either: just use the entirety of that increased tax revenue on paying down the national debt, and lower the debt ceiling by the exact same amount so it can't go back up. This is an even better deal if you think "interest rates are too high, the Fed should cut a lot more". It all fits. And we managed this throughout the 1990s.

This is so wrong, its not expensive to bribe politicians so higher taxes wouldn't stop this at all. The problem is that its possible to bribe politicians, meaning government has too much power, taxes would make that worse not better. And even more important most bribes doesn't come from individuals, it comes from super PACs and corporations, and those would exist regardless how much you tax rich people.

What you need is a less centralized government so its harder to bribe a few key people to get what you want, and a more direct democracy that can eliminate politicians that takes bribes.

When voters can't punish bad politicians since the incumbents has so much power to draw voting lines and decide who is on the ballots then corruption will always escalate out of control.

Is this a widespread view where you live? As an outsider watching the fall of Britain in slow motion, this explains so much.

Here's what I say: how about both? Or neither? I think the scope of the problem is defined too narrowly so far in this particular thread.

*Or say, 10 dollars, since a donor's dollar is leveraged

Lol. No wonder your country is such a fucking shit show, people believe this.

The one part of your comment with which I certainly agree is:

> Note: I believe this would be the case even if the money was literally burnt/disappeated rather than being given to the government (not that I suggest that's what we do).

...except, I am perhaps prepared to suggest actually implementing such a system, at least as an experiment.

Removing spending power from places where it's concentrated seems to have obvious benefits, but giving it to the state (the entity in which political power is maximally concentrated, at least with respect to the legitimate initiation of violence) seems like it's moving the power dynamic in the wrong direction.

If taxes go up on everyone, the rich are still the ones that manipulate the government, but now they have control over more tax revenue. If taxes go down for everyone, the rich are still the ones that can manipulate the government, but now the government has less revenue and can't cause as much damage.

Even the famous/infamous billionaires never come out against income tax for normal people. At most they're against taxation of themselves.

When did you hear the owner of a bank or a large hedge fund or a major industry talk against income taxes which the poor pay?

The rich are 100% pro taxes. It funnels money to themselves from the population, and keeps competition down.

In any case, you might be interested in Georgism, which is an anti-monopoly ideology most famously associated with very Strong Opinions on taxation of land and natural resources and untaxing production, along with taxation on pollution and negative externalities.

My impression is that sortition is very much in vogue within Georgist circles.

The current system of oligarch patronage is bad, but at least it keeps the train mostly on the rails.

What a bizarre turn of events that would be if THIS was the thing that got investigated.

"black ops or bullshit?"

I suspect there is no way to establish, if one has an Epstein number >2, what it is.