May I call triple bollocks?

Gas prices are going down, down, down.

These warm banks and small sacrifices in personal comfort are basically winning the economic war against the poo tin.

Yeah, at 17 C it's chillier in my house than the toasty 20 C I would normally have, but my gas consumption is down 40%.

Who is winning now, poo tin? 🤣🤣🥳

No disrespect, but your comment reads more like something written in the year 2000.

This is the best take.

No, the main type of exemption is: Dutch company made a contract for the delivery of oil or gas in the past, when prices were low.

Now they get an exemption on the sanctions to take delivery of that oil and gas.

And this is good, since it helps alleviate the energy crisis without giving Russia current high prices.

I know. That's what I said. Read it again.

But more efficient than spending it on vacations to Hawaii or imperial/genocidal wars like Russia does.

As I said, I think markets can be more efficient than billionaires. But they are more efficient than some other alternatives.

They only exist as a side effect of our tax code.

FDR basically culled them all (with help of WW1 and the Great Depression) and they only started to come back around the 1980s.

It really is up to the G7 countries, which happen to all be democracies, to decide how we allocate capital across the globe.

We can't cull the desire though. Some people are just wealth maximizers and empire builders and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I actually think it is a good thing, because they help society build capital, which is better than spending everything on short term living.

But just as we decided that it's no longer acceptable to build physical empires by conquering land, at some point we will have to limit how much of the capital stock can be conquered by these empire builders.

Honestly, the more simple solution is that we don't really need billionaires, contrary to the propaganda.

Suppose you implement a compression function, so that the people with wealth in the range of 100 million to 500 billion all fall into the range of 100 million to 500 million, preserving their relative ranking.

No incentives change, but billionaires have ceased to exist.

One thing billionaires do provide is an efficient allocation of capital.

So put each of these persons excess wealth in a fund that copies the rest of their investment decisions. So the person with 200 million might allocate 20 million to an investment, then his fund might allocate an additional 20 billion.

Society would preserve their investment wisdom.

This is just a thought experiment to get rid of billionaires without changing anything else.

Of course, I believe we can allocate capital more efficiently than billionaires by utilizing markets, but many people don't believe that - hence this thought experiment.