• rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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    9 hours ago

    It’s different people. Those in US still own real things and do something with them to get such incomes.

    Those in Russia steal.

    In other words, in USA connections are means to help actual power and tools to actual power. In Russia it’s the other way around, actual power is all dependent on connections, which ultimately all go to one ruling group.

    It’s nowhere as bad. But it will get as bad as Russia, of course, if Americans don’t learn something.

    • Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works
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      8 hours ago

      Hahaha. Just because it’s “legal” here doesn’t mean it’s not stealing. Taking billions in insurance premiums and then spending it to lobby to make it harder and harder to qualify to receive money for a claim is “legal” but so unethical and morally bankrupt that a guy just killed a CEO because of it and the entire country just shrugged and said “Yeah that’s about right.”

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        7 hours ago

        It’s legal in Russia too at this point. That’s not what I mean. Wealthy people in Russia own nothing really - they are just pockets of Putin. Less wealthy people are just elements of various mechanisms, legal and not, able to steal according to their status. Less wealthy than them - those who do honest business, but pretend the competition is not stifled by various invisible limitations by connections. The lower it gets, the more it is like normal stuff, but one can feel that something is wrong even arriving from Yerevan to Moscow, and Armenia is quite oligarch-owned too.

        In Russia there are no CEOs to kill. People in such positions are kinda normal and everyone knows where real power lies, and those holding it can’t be so easily caught.

    • Saleh@feddit.org
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      8 hours ago

      Dude, you have a self selecting Elite in the US and most other countries. It is the same shit. How many “rags to riches” stories still happen? And these ultimately also involve the right connections at the right time.

      Look at the lauded “started in a Garage” tech billionaires.

      Bill Gates?

      His father was a prominent lawyer, and his mother served on the board of directors of First Interstate BancSystem and United Way of America. Gates’s maternal grandfather J. W. Maxwell was a national bank president.

      At age 13, he enrolled in the private Lakeside prep school.[14][15] When he was in eighth grade, the Mothers’ Club at the school used proceeds from Lakeside School’s rummage sale to buy a Teletype Model 33 ASR terminal and a block of computer time on a General Electric (GE) computer for the students.[16] Gates took an interest in programming the GE system in BASIC, and he was excused from math classes to pursue his interest.

      Zuckerberg? Haward student

      Bezos? Princeton and then various banks, albeit his family background actually was lower/middle class.

      Musk? Fucking apartheid mine owners.