Meta is set to pay its top AI executives almost a billion each in bonuses

Aye, I very clearly picked the wrong career path by developing my small team engineering management and software construction skills over 20 years.

Actual quote from a Silicon Valley executive: "You can't even buy a decent house in the Bay Area for less than 50 million."

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.

> Many shy back from thinking too hard about the riduculous wealth some accumulate

I disagree - the current levels of income disparity, then Meta and Zuckerberg’s general conduct along with the general sentiment make it extremely hard to say “attaboy” when reading a news like this. I might be saying this for most readers here.

I don’t think that’s a fair expectation given the tremendous success they had with their Metaverse attempts, to the point they changed the company name for it.

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.

Zuckerberg has FOMO. Maybe it's justified.

It’s because they’re playing with monopoly money. If you leverage all the money on itself repeatedly, you can make the numbers look insane. Then, you hand pieces of the leveraged money (stock options) to a bunch of executives who will be watched very closely. You don’t sell stock that’s going to go up in value, so they have to be very careful about when and how much they sell. If they sell too much, then the facade can break, and the leverage evaporates.

To be clear, there is real, underlying value & revenue. But there’s a lot of froth right now

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 billionaires than fair progressive taxation.

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 billionaires to poverty. Any given US billionaire is likely providing over 1,000,000 direct and indirect jobs for starters.

Look at evil Jeff Bezos, who created a platform in which basic necessities are sold for margins that are frequently 0%. Previously 'local business' middlemen would charge 50% margins to impoverished locals. Undoubtedly Amazon has lowered the prices of goods. That's merely one example.