I’m pretty sure they would. It’s not like they’d like to see their seaside properties go underwater within their lifetimes.

  • @[email protected]
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    393 months ago

    You wish.

    If I were a sociopathic billionaire I would love some degree of global warming. The more you make part of the world unliveable, the more I can charge people for living conditions.

    I can create bio domes that have clean cool air and charge people to live in there. I’ve now successfully monetized clean air.

  • @[email protected]
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    283 months ago

    Why?
    They’d just need to get property in the safer places.

    I think they’d improve research in automation and AI. So that they can have their stuff, without having to rely on regular people who’d be wiped out or affected by climate change in the long run.

  • kenkenken
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    263 months ago

    I don’t think so. Climate change is not a big threat for the rich. Actually they can even gain benefits from it, as it will push inequality to new heights.

    • @[email protected]
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      43 months ago

      I don’t think the billionaires’ investments are going to be worth billions if the global economy collapses.

      • kenkenken
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        103 months ago

        I think relative values mean more than absolute for them. They just need to keep their position as the richest people in the world even in absolute sense they will lose. Money itself expresses relative values. So billionaires will continue be billionaires.

      • @[email protected]
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        93 months ago

        We hoi polloi think in money numbers and what we can afford to purchase. For the Capital Class, it’s all about power. Money is just how they keep score.

      • @[email protected]
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        23 months ago

        Billionaires don’t care about the economy. What matters is whom owns the means of production. And in today’s age, whom owns the means of ideology production.

        Being g a saint to a group of bullies is worth everything.

  • @[email protected]
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    213 months ago

    At the current rate governments would spend the world’s remaining time making a cozy place for them to spend eternity alone.

  • Shadow
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    183 months ago

    I’m pretty sure they would just become the goa’oul from Stargate and enslave the mere mortals.

  • @[email protected]
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    183 months ago

    Not at all. Those billionaires will still have massively huge egos that will prevent them from recognizing their own futures will be incredibly shitty.

    They’ll use their wealth in the short term to build bunkers, etc. where they think they’ll be able to continue to live in luxury while the rest of the world burns around them. But no matter how good the bunker and how many supplies they squirrel away, they’ll eventually be forced to return to the real world, and won’t be prepared for the fact that their piles of money will be worthless if the planet is largely uninhabitable.

  • impresario
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    123 months ago

    Then those billionaires would continue to keep hoarding wealth across the globe and let everyone else live in/near poverty. Even if they manage to curb climate change, the whole outlook would still look incredibly grim.

  • @[email protected]
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    83 months ago

    I don’t know. I kindof suspect that:

    • The billionaires may somewhat believe their own propaganda and maybe the climate chang denying billionaires may outnumber the ones who are more in touch with reality.
    • The machines that capitalism has built to maintain and intensify wealth concentration may well have escaped the control of their creators. Corporations have wills of their own distinct from that of the people nominally “in charge” like the C-level leaders and board and shareholders.
    • Climate change itself may have already passed a point of no return or if it hasn’t, it likely will before even the most powerful manage to redirect the momentum of the system in a different direction.
  • @[email protected]
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    3 months ago

    Well, it’s becoming a genuine concern because of the advances of medicine and the growing understanding of the aging process. Imagine a guy like Musk living for a 100 or 200 years, imagine the accumulation of wealth.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      That kind of understanding is centuries away from now. There is a lot of hype about medical junk, but it is just that. In the real world, the medical field is a commercial enterprise. It has a 3 sigma standard when all real science requires 5 sigma results to publish or make a claim. The vast majority of medical research is cherry picked which is absolutely unscientific. Go through a major traumatic injury like I have with my spine and you’ll learn just how little humans actually know how to diagnosis and work on.

      Most of the hype is to get and justify grant proposals and to promote dubious commercial endeavors. We still can not even explain or synthesize life, and we’ve barely started to document a sizable chunk of our DNA. Like all the claims about fully mapping the human genome are crap. It is because they call a MASSIVE chunk of it junk DNA even when there is plenty of evidence otherwise.

      Biology is actually the ultimate technology. Once fully understood and mastered it will displace nearly every piece of industrially produced technology of our stone age of silicon. Such a future is inevitable, if we survive, because it is the only way to be long term sustainable and in balance with the environment. When that happens, it will be a time when people live the longest lives possible for a human.

      • @[email protected]
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        23 months ago

        Of course it’s not a 10 years from now thing, but it’s probably going to happen someday, and a dude like Musk or Trump with an artificially extended lifespan could be absolutely devastating.

  • @[email protected]
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    73 months ago

    I’m surprised that no one has mentioned this is essentially the plot of fallout. The billionaires will solve climate change by culling the poor “destroying the world”.

  • @[email protected]
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    53 months ago

    You think Jimmy Carter would be 100years if he was a homeless person. The age-gap between rich and poor will only get bigger. Don’t know if immortality is possible, but extending life is definitely possible. Extending life to 150 or even 200 is within our grasp, even today.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      In older mice the best telomere therapies are increasing lifespan by ~15%. Max human lifespan is currently ~120. So, if those same therapies work on old billionaires they still wouldn’t live past 150.

      Models for extending life in young mice and mice zygotes hit around ~25%.

      200 isn’t within our grasp currently. 150 is if the animal models work on humans. But the treatments work better the younger the animal. Working best on embryos.

      Tldr: It’s unlikely today’s billionaires will live past 150 without a breakthrough in telomere research.

      • @[email protected]
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        13 months ago

        Telomere therapies is but one path. There are many different paths that each contribute to a longer life in better shape. I’ve seen at least four different therapies, all very promising. I don’t have article links at hand. Point being, that these therapies are so close that they might already be available, for the exploitation-class.

  • Bear
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    53 months ago

    No, worse. These monsters destroy everything to make the numbers go up.