Footnote: the outcome of the Epstein/Gates email itself is immaterial—what's interesting is the mind set underlying it, which seems to have strong explanatory power for our current mess: there are too many poor people, and Epstein and his mates would like to get rid of us.

@cstross It seems the solution to the question the billionaires ask is to take their ill-gotten gains and redistribute the money so everyone has a decent standard of living.

@feorag I still think we should invest in guillotine futures!

@cstross While I am in France, I still fall short of that. There again, there’s a joke in there about guillotines and falling short.

@feorag @cstross

Regrettably, their view on this senible and simple option is ‘over my cold dead body.’

History tells us that this can be arranged if no other solutions can be found.

@cstross@wandering.shop I don't actually know the context of the emails, but from the quote it does seem that the exact wording is both second hand and ambiguous; is it the poorness that is suppose to go away, or the people?

Not that I'm feeling generous enough to the people involved to assume the nicer option, but I'd feel dirty to not at least acknowledge both exist.​

@cstross Glad that more and more people realize that the oligarchy wants to kill us. I thought I was going crazy. But billion of deaths is consistent with their vision of a livable planet destabilized by an out-of-control climate.

@cstross
I dream of new Nuremburg style trials and 'detention' for the Super Rich.
Take their stuff, their names and their freedom. Redistribute.

@feorag @cstross Sure, but if you want to get ahead, get a guillotine

@feorag I suspect that when it eventually comes to that, you'd be lucky to get 5% from the liquidation.

At least the $1bn ballroom could be used as a warehouse, but even then it's probably got terrible transport links.

An awful lot of the "money" is either in the form of objects which are expensive to make but of limited utility to non-billionaires, or largely illusory -- how much is Tesla actually worth as a company, if there's no billionaires to buy it? Probably not the current market cap.

@cstross I wouldn't put anything past Epstein, but Gates has given enough evidence of somewhat-benevolent intentions that I'd at least _consider_ the possibility that he just picked a very bad way of saying "how do we get rid of _poverty_?".

I too would like a world in which there are no poor people, provided we can get there by making the currently-poor people not-poor and stopping new people becoming poor, rather than killing existing poor people and preventing anyone being born who might turn out poor.

(Of course there might be elements of both. It could be that Gates genuinely wants to eliminate poverty but some bit of his brain wants to do it because poor people are an untidy nuisance rather than to benefit those people, and sometimes that leaks out into his words, and all that could be true even if he wouldn't ever actually go for mass murder as the, er, final solution to the problem of poverty.)

Obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_4J4uor3JE

@cstross and that’s why I’m an anarchist. System needs a reboot with a degaussing for good measure.

@Alternatecelt @cstross make them outlaw: confiscate their assets and rescind their human rights, make it an offence to associate with them and restrict their movements. I'd give them a monthly dole of food, clothes and secure accommodation, and ban access to communications. It's more than they'd give us.

@cstross So, Mitchell & Webb were prescient? https://youtu.be/s_4J4uor3JE

@cstross The problem is not the billionaires, in a democracy it's the most numerous who win, not the richest. The reason the left almost always loses is purely self-harm and splittism for instance: https://bsky.app/profile/georgemonbiot.bsky.social/post/3mfcdb62pp22r the left has been doing this to itself since the 1917 March revolution. Fix the left instead of going "booho billionaires rule both parties". Hitler himself won in large part because of "nach Hitler kommt wir" ideas of the communists.

@David @cstross also: a colony of people slaving away on Mars before they can convert the complete solar system into energy to fuel exponential growth.
Still most people will think you are a raving, mouth-foaming conspiracy theorist when you inform them of the published intentions of those morons.

@cstross why not study the countries where the moderate left actually won? E.g. Scandinavia, the moderates were very brutal in excluding the nutcases. Lots of bad blood on the left to this day.

@cstross

The fact that Gates wanted to give his wife STD medication without her knowledge tells you everything you need to know about Microsoft's and the tech industry's approach to consent.

@cstross And the thing to understand about being "poor", is that that includes everything up to the very tippy top of upper middle class!!

@trademark Democracy does not run on victory to the most numerous these days, it runs on victory to the most indoctrinated. Which goes with the money.