We learned just how small Valve really is this year, but also how good it is at raking in the cash: It's making more money per employee than Apple
We learned just how small Valve really is this year, but also how good it is at raking in the cash: It's making more money per employee than Apple
Valve is actually smaller than Larian, but in terms of pure money-making efficiency there's nobody bigger.
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So we’re at a point that,
We are at a point where if we don't reduce emissions humanity is doomed. A fleet of private mega yachts is a smack in the face to everyone trying to change for good and so is a smack spending billions on "toys" when the average person is struggling to pay rent.
You seem to have lost track of the plot and of reality, look around yourself there's a disaster or a tragedy happening every single day.
Mega yachts aren't causing our issues. 3rd world countries with no regulations for environmental impact and consumerism is. Most of these yachts just sit in a port doing nothing but collecting dust 99% of the time. Thinking that getting rid of yachts is going to even scratch the surface of our environmental problems is a joke.
Exactly, it's just virtue signaling.
If you look at sources for pollution, it's largely:
- energy production (esp. in industrializing countries)
- personal transportation (esp in US, we're the second top polluter, and transportation is #1 or #2, depending on how you count it)
- heating and cooling houses and offices - in the US (from previous EPA link), household use is #1 or #2 depending on how you count it, and heating and cooling uses the lion's share of that
From this data, the most effective thing to focus on in combating climate change is improving efficiency of energy production (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, etc instead of coal, gas, etc). The next most effective thing is improving efficiency of transportation, followed by improving efficiency of heating and cooling (e.g. getting people to use heat exchanges instead of separate gas and AC). Yachts, cruise ships, and other related luxury items don't even register on the list of priorities and are merely a blip. They're very visible wastes of energy, but they're lately harmless.
Mega yachts fall into the personal transportation problem. If everyone would go around in a mega yacht we would be long time extinct.
Sure, but the number of people actually using mega yachts is vanishingly small. It's so small that completely eradicating them would do exactly nothing to combat climate change because the amount they contribute is within a rounding error for any meaningful measure of climate change.
it’s so small that completely eradicating them would do exactly nothing to combat climate change
That's not true, did you read any of the link posted?
We live in a society made of billions of individuals, we are not ants or robots, everyone is supposed to do is part. Billionare part count as much as millions of people, that's how big their footprint it.
There are very few billionaires, so while their footprint is larger on an individual basis, their total footprint is absolutely dwarfed by the rest of the population. Going after billionaires may feel good because you're "sticking to the rich" or whatever, but even if we eradicate all billionaire carbon output, it wouldn't put a dent in global carbon emissions.
It's the same issue as the popular notion of taxing the rich. If we took all of Elon Musk's wealth ($486 billion from a quick check), we could fund the US government for less than a month. If we took the entire wealth of the top 400 people in the US ($5.7T combined), we still couldn't fund the US government for a year. Here's an article about it from the tax foundation (they have a right-center bias with high factual accuracy):
A common refrain from many progressive lawmakers is that the rich don’t pay their fair share of taxes. “Fair share” is, of course, subjective. But a new Treasury study provides data showing that the rich not only pay more than the middle class, they pay more than one-third of their annual income in federal taxes and more than 45 percent when state and local taxes are included.
Indeed, the total tax burden on the super-wealthy, especially those with large stakes in global businesses, is upwards of 60 percent of their annual income because of the taxes they pay abroad.
Financially they're a blip, and ecologically they're a blip as well. Punching up may be cathartic, but it's not going to solve the climate crisis.
Why are you wasting your time defending billionares who are screwing the planet and everyone over? Are you getting paid or are you playing the devil advocate?
There are 800 billionares in USA alone and more than 3000 around the globe. My country italy has about 60 million people and spend 130B on public health each year. The 5.7T you mentioned would be enough to cover the healthcare spending that covers 60M people for 40 years.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/dec/11/megayachts-environment-carbon-emissions-ban
This article breaks global emissions down by sector, and I'm assuming that private jets and private yachts (both the top contributors to billionaire emissions from your link) are included in the aviation and shipping sections, which are 1.9% and 1.7% respectively. Both areas are likely dominated by non-billionaire sources (e.g. freight and passenger travel), so we're probably looking at <1% of global emissions (probably far less) coming from billionaire jets and yachts.
I'm not saying it's okay for billionaires to be that wasteful, I'm saying it's not what's causing our problem, and even if we eliminate 100% of pollution from billionaires, we'll still have a massive problem.
Are you getting paid or are you playing the devil advocate?
More the second, but mostly because I see people blaming the wrong problem. Billionaires aren't the problem, though they are symptoms of problems we have, like high medical care costs (and again, insurance company behavior is a symptom), CO2 emissions, erosion of privacy, data breaches, etc. Yes, billionaires had a hand in each of these, but the real problem is the lack of accountability.
As the saying goes, don't hate the player, hate the game.
Do you realize how much even 1% in the scale of billions is? It more than entire small countries. If the billionare you are talking about would give you 1% of his money to defend him online you would get 50 millions.
Okay? I don't care how much money he has, I only care what kind of person he is and what he does with he resources he has.
He chooses to use his position to make a quality service that respects its users, which is sadly uncommon these days. That's honestly all I expect from a CEO, and for that he gets more respect than most CEOs, meaning I'm pretty "meh" about him. He's not a villain, but he's also not a saint, he's just a reasonable human.
If he offered me 1% of his wealth to shill for him online, I'd probably take it, because I could do so much more good with that money than the minor "evil" of being annoying shilling for a kind of okay dude. $50M means I could fund a charity I believe in and dedicate my time to it.
I honestly don't care if some people get disgusting amounts of money, I only care how get got it and what they do with it. Gabe Newell seems to care more about the service than the money, and is doing what I expect the average person would do if they had that much money. So he's a pretty okay dude.
If a single person throw the garbage out of the window it isn't going to cause much of pollution so why don't you just throw trash out?
As the ceo of a company with millions of clients many of which are kids you are entitled more than everyone else to show the good example.
What you are saying is simply wrong anyway, mega yachts and billionares are indeed a big cause of pollution.
All of those studies are flawed as fuck. They assume the products the rich sell as polution. Do you sit there and include farmers in it as well because they sell/grow the food you eat which is a huge contributor to climate change. The yachts they buy, sit in dry dock 99% of their lives. You bitching about it is pure ignorance.
The yachts they buy, sit in dry dock 99% of their lives. You bitching about it is pure ignorance.
In the articles is it explained how they don't spend 99% of their live there and how they are polluting even when they are docked, they also get to show you how much of a problem that "1%" cause
You bitching about it is pure ignorance.
I really hope you are rich yourself and own a bunch of boats because otherwise you defending a billionare is as miserable as one can get.
One such owner is Amazon owner Jeff Bezos, whose $500 million superyacht Koru incorporates sails to help power its voyage. It is the largest sailing yacht in the world, according to Oceanco, the Dutch company that built it. When not under wind power, however, Koru does rely on sports diesel-powered motors. Oxfam estimates that the 127 meter vessel has emitted 7,000 tons of carbon dioxide over the past year, an amount equal to the annual emissions of 445 average US residents.
Estimates and 445 US residents...there is no way yachts are causing even a blip of climate change compared to everything. It's the stupidest shit ever to point a fucking boats and be like "that's why we have climate change" on any level. You could snap your fingers and make every single on of them vanish and it wouldn't do shit to turn the climate change ship around.
Yachts spend 10% to 20% of the year sailing and relying on engine power.
So yea...they basically sit in dock like I said, doing nothing.
The report shows the stark gap between the carbon footprints of the super-rich—whose carbon-hungry lifestyles and investments in polluting industries like fossil fuels
Ah so investments are now pollution....got it.
This is why studies like these are bullshit. That right there was prefaced with "tax the rich, and it'll magically make climate change less"...which makes no fucking sense at all.
As for your "I better be rich bullshit"... that's such a copout. I'm not naive enough to think some boats are causing our climate change, I'm also not fool enough to think that rich people investing in industries is the reason we're in this predicament. Trying to blame others actions while we all contribute to it is a joke. Everything you do contributes to it, you bought anything recently that has plastic? Contributor. You have a 401k? Contributor(apparently). Drive somewhere? Yep you guessed it... contributing. Eat something not grown by you? Contributing.
So let's stop the non-sense virtue signaling. It detracts from the actual issues.
Trying to blame others actions while we all contribute to it is a joke.
You are defending the biggest polluting individuals in the world and probably in history.
I really hope reincarnation is a thing and you get to be reborn as a seaturtle and choke in diesel fuel left by a mega yacht
You know who's the biggest polluters? Companies and governments... mainly the militaries. I'm not defending anyone, I'm telling you that you're worried about the dumbest shit ever to think that some mega yachts are the problem. Container ships and cruise liners make all those yachts look like green floating sailboats in comparison. You know who uses those cruise ships and the shit on those contrainer ships the most? Normal every day people.
Companies and governments
You know who own companies and control the government? Have fun figure it out
Yea because the people totally have control over that...yea I forgot how fair and honest indias elections have been, same with china...tell you what, you keep harping on about how the rich are destroying the planet and nothing the rest of us do is causing it.