Were neon in this cyberpunk dystopia

Says while paying money to the person they’re telling about for a blue marker
- You have to be in a position to be heard. You could literally be the most popular account on lemmy, but you'd still be yelling down or laterally at people who already support you.
  To punch up, you have to be on their stage.
  
  No, paying Elon for a check mark wont make him read your stupid tweets.
- How many Lemmy instances are hosted on AWS?
  
  Curious! I am very intelligent.
  
  All these people shitting on you acting like there aren’t a bunch of easy-to-use alternatives. This is one of those cases where a boycott is actually feasible. So many people here with more opinion than knowledge.
  
  My biggest annoyance with Lemmy is the complete lack of self awareness.

As long as a single human being is homeless or hungry, billionaires should not exist.
- Billionaires shouldn't exist. Period.
  
  Technicaly That is very dependent on the value of currency current or future one

Americans be like

- Go get em Spidey.
  
  My vote is for the punisher tbh

So we're going to support a democratic system to tax people and service the underprivileged, right?
We're going to do that, right?
- Sounds good to me
- No objections here

We got all the dystopia and none of the cool futuretech.
- Low latency cell phone coverage anywhere on the planet using LEO satellites is undeniably cool future tech.
  
  I would like this but also have those phones have a no logs policy so they cannot be used to track you or figure out where you were previously, at least without your consent.
- Exactly. I would like cybernetic arms and legs and eyes that let me scan everything. But instead we get the most boring dystopia.

No, see, I made all my money by inheriting it, and because I'm rich and wealthy that means that god must love me, and therefore I must be a good person inherently. People are poor because god doesn't love them, therefore they must be bad people. Duh. /s
- [Moe throwing Barney out meme with label "divine right of kings" on first panel and "oligarchy" on second panel]

The real question is how do you define best system. I bet those billionaires think this is in fact a pretty good system. Though they are probably never satisfied, so they wouldn't say best until they could snap thier fingers and a million people would start working to make whatever idea popped into thier head happen.
- Gatcha addicts.
  All of them. Gambling addicts addicted to watching numbers grow.
  
  Pretty much. Though from things I have read they are more likely to be competition addicts. Gambling would be one way to compete with others. But yeah, honestly, I wouldn't want to be them. I consider most of them mentally ill.

The plan is going well. Now all we gotta do is convince all those sonobabiches to get on a Tesla rocket to Mars. As soon as that shit is outta here, we cut off communication and problem solved.

I do somewhat disagree with this. Don't get me wrong, I'm very much on the eat the rich train. But, while not due to elons personal "brilliance" space x has cut the cost of going to space by a huge amount. And so many amazing things have come out of the space program
- Sure, if by "Elon's brilliance" you mean decades of Congress forcing NASA to outsource plus a whole lot of engineers none of whom are also CEO
  
  while not due to elons personal “brilliance”
- Why can't we do both? How many billionaires are there? How many of them have their own space company? I'm no mathologist but something doesn't add up.
- The fact is, one thing has pretty much nothing to do with the other. The wealth gap between the wealthiest individuals on Earth and the rest of us is not the cause of poverty; in fact, as you go back in time long term, the wealth gap shrinks, while overall poverty goes up.
  And what you mention about Space X is one example of the 'rising ride lifts all ships' phenomena that makes things better for all of us overall long term.
  The fact that fulfilling three extremely-doable conditions: graduating high school, not getting married before the age of 21, and not having children before getting married, make your chances of being impoverished as an adult next to nothing, makes it even more obvious that billionaires are not the cause of poverty.
  Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of increases in net worth of billionaires is created wealth (as in, if it didn't happen, that wealth wouldn't belong to someone else, it just wouldn't exist at all).
  The real issue is the eradication of poverty. It's impossible to prevent someone from being at the top, and that top being exponentially higher than the average, in a society where wealth is so 'create-able' (and the fact that it is is a good thing, imo!), that position is always going to exist. But as we've seen over the past 50-100 years, it is very possible for that wealth gap to not only exist, and grow, and have the percentage of human beings who are impoverished shrinking, at the same time.
  
  Add be born in a rich country and don't be mentally ill to your list.

Well if it isn't the best system why is it the system we have? Survival of the fittest, duh!

It's Neo, also I kinda agree. Though how to fix it is the tricky part.
- It’s neon.
  Some old book has a monologue where a character says “I am neon” and the context is that they see themselves as beautiful and transient.
  The subtext is that the neon gas in a neon light is just a medium power is passed through to produce some useful outcome through its interaction with the coating in the lamp (light). The neon itself is thrown away when it outlived its usefulness and no one who receives the light of it cares where it went or what happened to it or why.

Be the change you want to see! Load up on cold cathode tubes and shove them in your PC or wherever else you can think of!

Nine out of ten people with enough money and power to steer the system to massively favour them think that things are perfectly fine as they are. Now carry on, peon.

Sharing twitter posts in a meme sub isn't the best system either. Don't expect anything to change with the current quality of discussion.

I hate to burst any utopian bubbles out there, but the problem with society ultimately isn't capitalism, or communism, or socialism, or fascism, or any other system of government or economics. The problem with society is people. We are the problem. While some systems of government are certainly better than others at protecting us from our ourselves, eventually they all crumble and succumb to our depravity.
"We have met the enemy, and they are us" -Pogo

The fact that progressives have decided to hate the space industry, probably because Elon is a prominent figure in it, really rubs me the wrong way. It's regressive bullshit under the guise of a moral assertion.
Honestly I've noticed a lot of anti intellectualism from progressives over the past few years. You guys hate STEM, hate emerging tech, and hate people who work in emerging tech. While they stress "being informed", all that really means is watching some 15 minute YouTube clip from a comedian pretending to be a journalist or reading an article from an obviously biased website, then adopting all the assertions as their own viewpoints.
If anyone disagrees with that worldview, they are ridiculed for being either morally or intellectually inferior. Usually there's some literal schoolyard level insult thrown in. I don't like the cyber truck, but calling anyone who drives it a "cybercuck" is the kind of shit I would expect from middle schoolers.
It's absolutely exhausting.
- There's a way to do things, and then there's a way to do things well. It may be that many progressives are no longer interested in progressing for the sake of progression. Rather that they're trying to create not just a more "advanced" world but a better, more beautiful one.

Yeah it’s a shitty system. But it is objectively the best system. All the other systems lead to massive death. Like, lots and lots of death.
- Implying capitalism… hasnt?
- You're right, taxing the rich to pay for common-sense social programs is going to lead us straight to the gulags.
- Capitalism has led to more death than any other system we've come up with. It is a useful intermediary step between feudalism and socialism and instead of progressing we've stalled here and slowly but steadily turned it back into feudalism.

Billionaires and starving people tend to live in different countries though. What ever makes someone a billionaire in the US isn't probably the same thing that makes someone else starve in Africa. One could even say that thanks to the wealthy westerners there's less and less starving people in those places. There's been a huge decrease in world wide poverty over the last few decades.
- Go back to Xitter and say that to Elon, he likes people blowing smoke up his ass
  
  He did say "one could say". And I imagine an argument could be made. I would love to see either side of it with some data. It would be interesting. Like one could talk about how bill gates has poured money into Africa that might not have gone there otherwise. And then the response could outline how the money was taken out of Africa to make the billionaires, though I am not sure if Microsoft makes a lot of money in Africa our not. And I would love to have an informed rebuttal for my own use.
  
  Ironically I came to Lemmy with the hope of meeting less people like you who act like a complete jerk towards strangers for no reason.
- Username checks out.

I know it’s hard to hear, but nobody is starving in the USA.
I know it really sucks because it would be so satisfying to say people are starving, but I’m sorry to inform you that it is not happening.
- Honestly, I think we've surpassed the point where obvious trolling and alt-right propaganda are indistinguishable, and this comment proves it.
- 12% of the population of the US would like to have a word with you.
  https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/food-security-and-nutrition-assistance/#:~:text=In%202022%2C%2012.8%20percent%20of,of%20a%20lack%20of%20resources.
  
  They are suspiciously silent on the issue. Wonder why that could be?
  
  “Starvation” is a very specific thing which is not referred to by “food insecurity”.
- Well, death by malnutrition is what they call it. But it does still happen in the US. https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2023-04-13/deaths-from-malnutrition-have-more-than-doubled-in-the-u-s
  That said... the USA is just a small part of society.
  
  From that article:
  Malnutrition is particularly common among older people, especially those who are ill, low-income, homebound, or without reliable access to healthy food or medical services
  Notice how they keep referencing “healthy food”.
  Starvation is not a lack of access to “healthy food”. Starvation is a lack of access to “any food”. Insufficient calories.
  Starvation looks like this: https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:460/1*CdO7eSjb3Qsn-MN16cbZ3w.jpeg

One might say it's better than a system where everyone starve...
- Is that system in the room with us right now? 🙄
- Which system are you speaking of?
  
  Systems without exploitation