@j3diknightdave: Ouch. What I was trying to point to was the irony of talking about what people 'deserve' when talking about the kind of wealth that Jeff Bezos has.

So yes if I was as wealthy as Bezos I wouldn't necessarily think I deserve it. I wouldn't give it away, nor am I advocating for Bezos to just donate it all, but I genuinely would not believe I somehow 'deserved' that much wealth. (Aside from Bezos) most billionaires are not self-made. Wealth is generationally inherited, and for the most part, wealthy people start of with a lot of wealth, and uses that wealth to generate more wealth that outpaces what the vast majority of us can ever achieve.

Most wealthy people or families have the economic mobility to hide their wealth to avoid many taxes that ordinary people pay. I do not need to know anything about your circumstances to know almost for a fact that you (yes, YOU) are paying a higher percentage in taxes on your wealth (and I'm deliberately saying wealth, not income; meaning all of your assets) than Bezos is in his. Obviously Bezos contributes to tax revenue more than you do in 'absolute' value, but you pay more in a % of your own wealth than Bezos does in his....for....a....fact. Billionaires have more lobbying power in our economic system that can continue to mold laws and policies in to their favor. So in a economic system where the game is rigged in the favor of the wealthy - no - the kinds of accumulated wealth that over time that make it easier for wealth to beget more wealth, is only possible because people like you are sold on the idea that our economic system is fair and people earn what they deserve. In a perfect meritocracy that is true, but we do not live in a perfect meritocracy.

@liquiddaylight: Well, marriages are contractual agreements in essence and per our long standing tradition (and legal precedent) she probably 'deserved' even more.

What's stupid about the world isn't that a divorce led to a split in assets, which is something that's been around forever. If we're talking about what people 'deserve', no individual ever deserves this unfathomable level of wealth. No one gets this wealthy without inherent and fundamental issues with our economic system.

I'm sure she deserved every single penny of that $36 billion. What a stupid world.

@j3diknightdave: Not everyone risks their mult-thousand dollar rig with viruses from pirated games. Us normal people buy our games off steam and whatnot.

@j3diknightdave:

First off, nowadays I’m not buying any PC games, so forgive me for thinking that they would be as expensive as new console titles tend to be. I also have never used Steam or GoG, so their prices aren’t factoring into my argument.

Secondly, if your point is that PC games are way cheaper than console games, then isn’t it even more asinine to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars on hardware to play them? My first PC couldn’t run the original Worms or even the first Diablo until I installed $120 worth of RAM (which took me a while to earn - it was the mid-nineties and I was fifteen). At the time, it was justified; once it turned into having to buy a new graphics card every time a new game came out, it just got to be too much. Unreal: Tournament was the last graphics intensive game I bothered with (and I was running the low end specs on that one; it played okay, not great.)

Cool. Don't buy them, then they'll drop the price.

@kstaggs87:

Agreed. Back in the day I was into being a PC Gamer, but when it turned into needing to upgrade all of my hardware (sometimes in the neighborhood of $800, which as a high school kid I most certainly didn’t have) just to play demos off the PC Gamer magazine discs, I went console and never looked back. My PlayStation cost me $160 and I got almost a decade of use out of it, no hardware upgrades required.

Of course, the consoles have wised up to this be releasing newer more expensive consoles every few years. But I’ll still go console over PC. Performance is great, but spending thousands of dollars to play a sixty dollar game is ludicrous.