Work Reform

Polymarket and crypto have some people believing they're only three days from being a millionaire

Millionaires are working class. $1B - $1M is ~$1B.

Well, I'M okay. I'm at least four bad months away from homeless so no sense planning to change the system any.

Well a million dollars isn't that much anymore.

And no matter how good the facade, I will always reflect my white trash roots.

And now I cant really remember what the point is I was going to make. Damnit. I hate it when that happens.

Oh well, never mind.

Being "a millionaire" is outdated. There are plenty of people who are both millionaires and working class. Because the US doesn't do pensions anymore, people have to invest in 401(k)s and the like. It's pretty likely that someone can hit $1m through a combination of a retirement fund and a house, but still be working class. In fact, you can be a millionaire on paper but still be vulnerable to homelessness, especially if you're at an age where you can no longer work.

It's certainly possible to retire on $1m, but it's not going to be a lavish lifestyle if you're playing it safe with your retirement fund. If you want to live near family, or if you have any medical issues, or if you might need to support someone else, it might really be impossible to retire with only $1m.

A good concept to pass around is contrived desperation or manufactured desperation. The notion that desperation circumstances like the affordability crisis are intentionally developed by the ownership class so that workers will accept low wages, poor benefits, harsh conditions and abuse by their management and colleagues.

An extreme fictional example is in the TV series Squid Game. The players quit in the opening episode after they learn that the stakes of the game are their own lives, and only one final player would survive. But then (in the second ep) they return to their prior lives in which their financial situation is so dire, it compels them to return to the game.

The Epstein child sex ring is a strong non-fictional example of contrived desperation. The girls under Epstein's employ quickly learned they were being groomed to be sexually exploited. But they were drawn from communities that offered few opportunities.¹ Girls quickly learned that they could escape their dire circumstances at home so long as they agreed to play ball, and be complicit in their own sexual exploitation.

We're seeing another example in the US armed forces. All branches are achieving their recruitment quotas. Despite the news of the dire circumstances of the Abraham Lincoln. Despite that the military is deployed in an active theater. Despite that rates of abuse of enlisteds, especially of women, has only escalated since Hegseth's tenure as SoD and his warrior ethos. Despite that the US is considering putting boots on the ground in Iran and Cuba.

And that's because a growing number of people are finding they have no other opportunities to stay above water. People are going into credit-card debt and skipping meals, and working 40+ hours a week. They are three very bad months away from being homeless already, and their numbers are growing.

When the ownership class is sufficiently removed from the working class, it loses touch, and stops empathizing, and then starts contriving desperation to get workers to stay in their place. Unions can be an effective countermeasure, though they are often busted by the political class and the police.

¹ Epstein's early victims were girls from post-Soviet Russia. During the collapse, the most popular career for young women was wage prostitute and children in the streets offering sexual favors for money were commonplace. It was an entire failing nation of desperate teenage girls.

Nuh-uh. I have an uncle who lives two doors down from a lady whose nail stylist's daughter's teacher just won 10 million dollars from a scratch off lottery ticket.

I honestly think the poor understanding of math is to blame for a lot of our problems. People don't understand exactly how massive a billion dollars are, they don't understand probability so they play the lottery. Most people get visibily angry when I've explained exactly how much money the Epstein class is hoarding.

There are almost 24M millionaires in the US alone. A millionaire in 2026 honestly isn't all that impressive anymore, thanks to inflation. I'm not saying we should feel sorry for them, just that it's not the instant easy classification that it used to be.

As for billionaires, those should not exist, IMHO. A billionaire is a symptom of a broken economy, not a worthy goal.

Edit: fixed a typo.

Generally speaking, it doesn't matter how many good months you have. You're still 3 months out.

I don't love how we as a capitalist society have financialized everything into economic terms.

I'm rich now, but I grew up lower middle class (had food security and shelter security, but many aspects of middle class lifestyle were out of my family's reach, like being able to dine at restaurants or go out of town for vacation or afford most of the things or experiences advertised on tv). I was also fairly financially insecure in college and the few years after (playing games with back dated checks to make rent or pay bills, lots of late fees and overdraft fees).

Even in those relatively insecure times, though, I was never anywhere close to 3 (or 6 or 12) months away from homelessness. I had a strong network of friends, family, neighbors, etc., who could keep me on my feet. Some of it was money (where people could chip in to help with an uninsured medical expense or loss to a car or a house), but a lot of it was social, like being able to get a ride from a friend when your car is in the shop, a meal train while someone is sick/hospitalized or bereaving the loss of a family member, etc.

By steering the discussion into purely what can be bought and sold with money in an economy between strangers, I feel like this misses out on what actually makes us secure, and what keeps us from homelessness and food insecurity. Those parts of society should also be protected and bolstered, even if they don't fit cleanly into financial, economic, political, or policy categories.

It also misses who among us are actually the most vulnerable or the most secure. There may be people who have solid net worths on paper but aren't actually resilient against bad months, and other people who might not look like they have much property/wealth/income but actually can manage a crisis just fine.

Because of that whole exponential thing, millionaires and ten-millionaires are actually closer to the rest of us working class folk than they are their billionaire owner-class brethren.

And this is going to be important when the ultra-wealthy decide to reveal their less-rich near-peers aren't actually in the oligarchs club, and don't get to live in Thiel's Rapture-style hypercities with the real people.

Sure, but many people who aren't really grappling with where they are in class struggle will still see that and believe it makes intuitive sense because of some aggrieved entitlement. Lemmy is a great platform to find people who know some element of socialist or Marxist politics, but then think the problem is "oligarchs" who are just exceptionally naughty and greedy and not like, a system that produces food and fabrics for insanely cheap and specifically to their benefit.