r/EatTheRich

I say it's the modern version of the Marie Antoinette "Let them eat cake" wedding. There are people suffering and dying in wars, on the streets, and in hospitals, and yet rich people get to live a way better lifestyle rather than those who are in most need of them.

Drawing on interviews with over 100 activists across five continents, the book outlines how ordinary people can build the bravery to resist authoritarianism and protect democratic freedoms.

The core tenets for building dissident courage include:

Embracing Small, Incremental Risks: Courage is a muscle built over time. Begin with small acts of defiance to build resilience before taking larger, life-altering risks.

Prioritizing Conscience over Heroism:

Most dissidents do not set out to be famous martyrs; rather, they act because they simply cannot live with themselves if they remain silent.

Building a Community of Support:

Dissidents rarely act entirely alone. Finding or forming a small, trusted coalition provides the essential psychological and physical support needed to sustain long-term resistance.

Navigating Fear:

Authoritarianism uses fear as a primary weapon. Acknowledging that fear is rational, and learning how to calculate risks rather than acting blindly, is vital to surviving and continuing the fight.

So Trump’s latest ethics filings show a massive amount of trading activity in the first quarter of 2026, including big positions tied to tech names like Nvidia, Apple, Microsoft, Meta, Oracle and Broadcom.

And sure, the official explanation is that these are managed accounts, handled by third parties, and that Trump and his family supposedly have no role in choosing the trades. Fine. Legally, maybe that checks the box.

But politically?

This is the president of the United States. His administration makes decisions on tariffs, AI, chips, China, federal contracts, antitrust pressure, export controls and market moving policy every other week. If the sitting president’s portfolio is moving hundreds of millions through the same sectors his government directly influences, that is not just “normal investing.” That is a walking conflict of interest with a flag pin.

The wildest part is how numb everyone seems to be. If this were happening in another country, Americans would call it corruption before finishing the headline.

Apparently in the U.S., it is only corruption if the other party does it.

But I had a really good one about a lifetime Musk ban ):

https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXBets/s/wUPZWVlb4Y

The fossil fuel giant BP has been one of the big winners of the Iran War, reporting first-quarter profits of more than $3.2 billion, doubling from the same time last year. Unsurprisingly, that wealth has not been trickling down. For more than three months, they’ve locked out more than 800 workers at the largest refinery in the Midwest for refusing to sign a contract that would lay off more than 100 union members and weaken safety protections. That’s a lot of folks in and around Whiting, Indiana going without a paycheck, but the folks at United Steelworkers Local 7-1 are holding strong.

🤜🏻 We can sign the United Steelworkers’ demand to BP that they return to the table and bargain in good faith here. We can find details on how to donate goods and funds for strike support to the local here or to the Food Bank of Northwest Indiana, who have been supporting hundreds of local families while their breadwinners are on the picket line, here. 🤛🏿

While suggesting cutting your social security 25%

I'm not talking about criticism, I'm talking about fury.

I see comments playing down the sinister aspects of AI as if governments and tech corporations aren't trying to exploit us in any way - what?!?

I see "they have it so they must deserve it" style attitudes toward people who are literally building bunkers to survive the scorching of the earth that they're ushering in.

They aren't two separate problems either: data centre production has ramped up to a frankly incomprehensible level recently, the emissions of which are a major contributor to climate change. Weren't we trying to fight that tide just a couple of years ago? But there's money in it so sure, let it roll.

There have been some absolutely horrific actions and events in human history that we look back on in disgust. There have been uprisings and revolutions because people believed that the systems they lived under were tyrannical and corrupt. Arguably, what's happening now will have the most devastating and long-lasting effects of anything humans have ever done, and we're just kind of... Watching it happen.

Is it just the bystander effect? Are we all hoping someone else has it covered? Are we so blinded by beaurocracy that we think the people in suits must know what they're doing? Or have we just collectively decided not to bum everyone out by gesturing toward the impending horrors?

When the money supply grows, the new money does not arrive evenly. It reaches people who already hold assets first, because that is where credit and markets push it, and they book the gain before it ever shows up in wages and prices. The bottom half of the country owns about 2 to 3 percent of all stock, so this whole channel routes around them. It is upward redistribution that happens every year, invisibly. Inflation can also be called the "hidden tax".

So I asked one question. What if a share of that money-creation gain went into an account every citizen owns instead? A floor that compounds for each citizen.

I modeled it on real US data from 1960 to 2025:

Every citizen reaches retirement with a locked floor of roughly 210k to 245k, plus a cash dividend that brings it to about 237k to 278k. That is roughly what the median household holds today, at about 0.4 times the average. Read that twice, because it is the point. It does not mint millionaires. It universalizes the middle. For the bottom half, who own close to nothing now, going from nothing to the median is the whole fight.

I stress tested it. I resampled the ugliest stretches of US history, the Depression and the Great Inflation, ten thousand times. The floor still holds. In the worst draws it lands around the median, not above it. The point was never a lottery ticket. It is a floor nobody falls through.

Quick note on Gini, since it gets thrown around a lot. It is a single inequality score from 0 to 1, where 0 means everyone is equal and 1 means one person owns everything. US wealth sits near 0.83. In the microsim, this mechanism pulls it to 0.743. That is a real move for one lever.

Now the comment I know is coming: just tax the rich. I am not against it. But a tax is a fight you have to win again every year, against the people with the most money to fight back, and they have won it for forty years running. This changes who the new money goes to in the first place, so there is nothing to claw back later.

It is not magic and I am not selling anything. It is a rule about where the gains from money creation land. It is part of a framework I have been building called the Citizens Standard. The plain-language walkthrough, with the diagnosis and an interactive version of the fix, is here: https://neo-solon.github.io/Citizens-Standard/front\_door.html

The model, the code, and the data are all open source. Feel free to ask me anything.

Palantir, the US spytech firm accused of abetting Israel's genocide in Gaza, enjoys lavish tax breaks on UK profits that are already derived from taxpayers' money, an analysis by openDemocracy has found.

The company has been awarded at least £670m in UK public contracts in recent years.

That includes a £330m deal to manage sensitive NHS data, signed despite the fact Palantir's co-founder Peter Thiel has expressed disdain for publicly funded healthcare.

Those contracts have helped make the UK Palantir's second-largest market by revenue, with 2024 pre-tax profits of £25.3m.

But its effective UK tax rate that year was only £2m, or 8%, far lower than the norm of 25% paid by firms with profits above £250,000. In 2023 it was even less, at 4.7%, and in 2022 it was 4.2%.

For 2025, Companies House filings suggest Palantir paid less than £820,000 in cash tax in the UK, less than it paid in Korea, Japan, France and Germany.

The low rate was due a structured arrangement that limits the amount of profits recognised in the UK, as well as a rule that awards large tax breaks to firms that compensate their employees with stock instead of cash, openDemocracy reported.

The report said the nature of filings made it difficult to assess the total amount of tax breaks Palantir has received, but by 2022 alone it had accumulated £230m in tax relief from what it called "employee share acquisition relief".

"When profitable companies are paying very little tax, especially when much of their revenues derive from taxpayers' money itself, then it's important to ask why," Mike Lewis, director of TaxWatch, told openDemocracy.

"Is it because tax incentives and tax breaks are poorly targeted? Or is it because companies are shifting profits in ways that our tax system is supposed to counteract?"

virginiaconnects.com

Virginia’s data centers are the heartbeat of our modern lives, connecting people, enabling essential services like healthcare, education, and public safety, and driving innovations in all sectors of our economy. They also bring substantial benefits to the communities where they operate.

Keep seeing commercials on this.

"96% of the time, data centers use 0 gallons of water". How the fuck much do they use the other 4% and how do we benefit if they don't pay taxes?