this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2025
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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There should be laws against predatory and fascist forms of Capitalism. CEOs going to jail should be a regular occurrence for a few years at least.
There should be set ratios between worker pay, CEO pay and profits. It's the only way a just society can be returned.
The problem is that wealth = power and influence in society and this has led to essentially all modern neoliberal ‘democracies’ having their governments captured and controlled by the wealthy elite. So the only way you would be able to implement something like this would be via a revolution replacing capitalism with some form of socialism that would make private wealth a thing of the past and provide a decent standard of living for all.
And if that in itself wasn't hard enough, the other evil empires of the world would never allow this to happen anywhere. No gaining traction permitted. It would take the complete collapse or civilization world-wide, and even then we would just return to medieval fuedalism and Gun Diplomacy.
A few dozen more Luigis would also make it easier.
luigis are all nice but they only treat the symptom. the system can produce replacements faster than we can individually remove them.
i think we can go further by grouping up and also going for the root causes (eg capitalism).
Imho a hard cap on personal wealth would be sufficient.
I used to think this would be sufficient as well but as you’ve probably noticed it’s damned near impossible to get our “democratic” governments to even consider something like this since they have been so thoroughly captured by the wealthy elite. You don’t have to call it revolution or socialism if those are scary words or just don’t seem possible but somehow we have to overcome that reality and I don’t see how it can be done without dispossessing these elites of their power so we can dispossess them of their wealth.
I feel like perhaps a slightly easier first step would be to push for a cap that is higher than anybody's wealth (say £100B) — so that the debate is initially only about the principle — and only then demand it be lowered. 1) salami slicing works, and 2) even just the fact of there being one (albeit unreachable) would imo do a lot psychologically.
And while we're at it, another pet policy of mine is a tax that starts at 0 and approaches 100% as your income approaches infinity. Then you'd just play with the steepness of the curve. You'd still have the problem of pre-existing hoardrd wealth though.
Also the astronomical additions to the govt budget from all this would prob lead to equally astronomical embezzlement, rendering the whole limit ineffective. So another, prob more decentralized, mechanism of redistribution would need to be devised first.
We need a corporate death penalty. If corporations are people, we should be be able to charge them like people. Well-Fargo scammed over a hundred million dollars from their customers. I see no reason why they can't be in a corporate jail, where damaged parties are paid out first, then the customers, then the employees, then the executives, and if there is anything left, let the investors have it.
Same for Equifax, they lost literally everyone's personal data after collecting and selling it without their consent. If I did something like that, I would get multiple life sentences. The company and its assets should be liquidated, and the money generated should be used to setup a Identify Theft taskforce proactively checks for identity theft on affected individuals and pays out 100% if they are damaged by Equifax's actions.
There is no other form, the difference is only in what state of fascism it is.
Not a bad idea. Except generalize it to max ratio between highest pay and lowest pay within a company.
Wouldn't that just lead to splitting off of cheap companies, with pro-bono ceos that get paid more by the parent company through side channels? I don't think there's any fixing it with these kinds of laws, as they'll just find loop holes to circumvent it.
maybe if companies were forced to be democratic so figurehead ceos could be ousted by the underpaid workers, but at that point it's not capitalism, but socialism. and that's how it usually goes imo, the workable solution to capitalism turns out to be not-capitalism