• usernametbd@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    I think that concentrating too much wealth / power into a person’s hands affects their mental health. The stuff billionaires focus on behind closed doors would be considered psychosis in a homeless person, but they articulate it on fancy stages and suddenly it’s normalized. Power and money control needs to be as decentralized as possible. Even if it means things move slower, it’s better than unilateral power in the hands of a small group of malignant narcissists surrounded by sycophants.

    • A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip
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      6 days ago

      I think that concentrating too much wealth / power into a person’s hands affects their mental health.

      I think cause and effect are exactly opposite here: you have to be exceptionally, sociopathically greedy to want to become that rich, and then work towards it. Imagine all the actively harmful and antisocial decisions each billionaire has to make to increase their wealth. I believe most people just aren’t cut out for it.

      But of course wealth/power then serves as an amplifier.

      • halcyoncmdr@piefed.social
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        6 days ago

        It’s definitely this. The Venn diagram between psychopaths and billionaires is a circle. Hell it’s almost a circle just with CEOs in general.

        The lack of empathy is a massive advantage to operating in the corporate world.

      • turtlesareneat@piefed.ca
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        5 days ago

        I’m not sure, I think money does corrupt all but the steeliest of hearts. Right now I wish I made a little more so we could accomplish several goals we want. Once those are done, there are loftier long-term goals! Like many, I doubt I’ll ever be satisfied with my income, because I’m ambitious in the rest of my life. If I won a million dollars, I like to think I’d be satisfied because I could get those things done, although I’d still have to work. But… at that point I’d want more, so I could retire early and have more time to spend on the rest of my life. Now if somehow I got that much money - I like to think I’d be satisfied. But we can see time and again how that doesn’t happen. There’d be something else just out of reach. Our capability to want is near endless, and it’s a hunger that gets worse the more you feed it.

        So really I don’t fool myself into thinking I’m immune to it, and I’m not a sociopath.

    • gravitas_deficiency@sh.itjust.works
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      6 days ago

      To be clear, Thiel was A Bad Dude from the get-go, but his impact and influence has expanded immensely since he made his nut in the PayPal era (he’s one of the OG PayPal mafia, along with phony stark)

  • Substance_P@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    Notable people on the Thiel List pulled from maia arson crimew’s Bluesky post:

    Chamath Palihapitiya

    Neal Mohan, CEO of YouTube

    Charlie Songhurst, board director at Meta

    Peter Brown, CEO, Renaissance Technologies

    Sarah Bond, President of XBOX, Microsoft

    Manuel Bronstein, chief product officer of Roblox

    Greg Brockman, Co-founder of OpenAI, fmr CTO of Stripe

    Mike Cannon-Brooks, Co-founder of Atlassian

    Scott Cook, co-founder & chairman at Intuit

    NJ Senator Cory Booker

    TX Senator Ted Cruz

    CO Governor Jared Polis

    CT Rep. Jim Himes

    MD Gov. Wes Moore

    Tom Tugendhat, Member of Parliament, United Kingdom.

    Tulsi Gabbard

    Julian Castro

    Jared Kushner

    Elon Musk

    LEONARD LEO

    Grover Norquist

    Bret Stephens (Associate Editor of the New York Times)

    Larry Summers

    Ezra Klein

    Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent

    Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic

    Jon Levin, President, Stanford University.

    Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, Fmr. Prime Minister, Pakistan. Founder, Airblue.

    Stan McChrystal, Founder & CEO, McChrystal Group. Fmr. General, U.S. Army.

    Rachel Brand, Chief Legal Officer & Corporate Secretary, Walmart. Fmr. Associate Attorney General, U.S Department of Justice.

    Link to the list shared on Bluesky.

  • treadful@lemmy.zip
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    6 days ago

    The retreat is scheduled for August 12-16 at a venue near Dublin, Ireland.

    The Irish’ll know what to do.

  • jballs@sh.itjust.works
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    5 days ago

    Other talks include “Build-a-Cult,” moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site Pray.com, and “Build-a-Party,” run by a former White House national security official.

    Well… I don’t like that.

  • LostWon@lemmy.ca
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    5 days ago

    I found this rather amusing:

    The form also gathers sensitive answers, including each registrant’s "political leaning,” which Dialog promises “WILL NOT be shared in the app or with other participants, ever.” That data, and the matchmaking responses, were exposed in the leak.