Because they couldn't find anyone decent who would do it for $500 million.
Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses
21–30 of 33 posts
Re: Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses
#22I can’t imagine receiving that amount of money and not turning around and giving almost all of it to my local community. Hell I could keep 50 or 60 million and live extremely wealthy for the rest of my life and never work again.
Actual quote from a Silicon Valley executive: "You can't even buy a decent house in the Bay Area for less than 50 million."
Re: Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses
#23[flagged]
Just undo the damage of Reaganomics and reimplement real progressive taxation with some policy changes so it isn't so easy to sidestep taxation completely. Of course, the billionaires are likely to fight any changes in this area so hard and so long that they will eventually cause a situation in which whatever solution naturally arises as the masses get increasingly desperate ends up being much worse for the billionai…
We tried to vote for normal 21st century healthcare and the billionaires spammed race-baiting nonsense and backed an unconstitutional fascist to shut it down.
They gutted peaceful democracy, so FAFO
Re: Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses
#24Re: Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses
#25This is the answer to whether AI executives actually take their own rhetoric seriously. If they actually believed in things like UBI as a solution they’d be doing something besides this.
Re: Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses
#26[flagged]
This point would be more believable if rates of poverty and numbers of ultra wealthy weren't inversely correlated, but they are. It's almost impossible to be in poverty in the United States unless you're willfully trying to do so. It's certainly impossible to starve. There are free food programs in every city. Comments like these are usually driven from ideological places or jealousy, rather than a factual linking of…
> impossible to starve
this is a very low bar for determining a decent quality of life for a human being.
> ideological places or jealousy
but presumably you are a "temporarily embarrassed billionaire"?
> billionaire is likely providing over 1,000,000 direct and indirect jobs
No, they don't 'provide jobs', they suck up [human] resources that could otherwise have gone to schools and hospitals.
> Undoubtedly Amazon has lowered the prices of goods.
but at what cost to the social fabric (Walmart is probably the greater transgressor there though).
Developed societies tolerate the ultra-wealthy because a) they are an artifact of a free market for capital allocation (vs state control), and b) sometimes having large wealth concentrations has proved a useful 'short-circuit' to normal capital allocation for otherwise unfundable but ultimately beneficial projects.
The key word here is 'tolerate'. If society feels the ultra-wealthy are no longer worth the problems they cause (e.g. hoarding certain finite resources), then society should get rid of them.
I would add that beyond a certain point (a place to live, personal possessions, retirement fund, etc), there is no moral case - in the sense of the natural right of ownership - for their wealth, and we can simply confiscate it. For example in the UK we used 'death duties' to break the aristocracy.
Re: Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses
#27Why is AI so much worth to Meta?
Re: Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses
#28Why is AI so much worth to Meta?
Zuckerberg has FOMO. Maybe it's justified.
Re: Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses
#29This is the answer to whether AI executives actually take their own rhetoric seriously. If they actually believed in things like UBI as a solution they’d be doing something besides this.
One of the perks of being at the top of the food chain is that you get to define what things mean. Just like the meaning of AGI has been redefined by the masters of the universe to resemble whatever the current state of AI is, so too will concepts like UBI if it ever approaches a state where it could one day impact their wallets.
Where proven anti-poverty initiatives have been kicked to the curb (legislation-wise) in favor of horseshit like "effective altruism", so too will UBI be one day bastardized into a system that requires people to live in company towns (with sub-residential tenant protections of course), be paid in company scrip, and be spent at company food stores - a final solution for the EBT/SNAP food assistance system.
Re: Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses
#30I feel like we need a society where the amount of capital you get to keep is inversely proportional to how much you give back to society, on a percentage level. Have $100 billion dollars? Great. The more you give back in charity and community, the more you get to keep. Care more about "number go brrr" and less about your fellow man? We tax all kinds of personally harmful behavior like drinking and smoking. We should…
Giving back to society means a very different thing to billionaires than it does to ordinary folk. They’d rather spend it on politicians to tear down the society they think is wrong rather than shore up the parts that are failing. I have always blamed the idea that seems to stem from liberal economics (not liberal in the American sense) that equates money with virtue, something that conservatives have taken on as a mantra.
So be careful what you wish for. Ordinary morality or virtue loses all meaning when the world becomes abstract due to your wealth.