all [he] ever did was smash up things and creatures and then retreat back into their money or their vast carelessness.
—Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I think I recently drove by a sign on the road that said this too. It was right next to another sign that read "Make Money Fast", and another sign that said "Get Rich Working from Home." However, a much wiser man than I once said: TANSTAAFL.
Now I know this is gonna get nuked, but I don't care because I can prove my point if you can understand me. Money is all you guys ever talk about here. Can we get more up votes on articles about oh say, extravagant assembly code or hardware hacks, instead of the daily echo chamber of TC driven $pablum?
IMHO everyone here, or at least the most vocal minority, is far, far too obsessed with making money. And the kind of money amount always being talked about is literally winning the lottery. Fools! You want to know why the American Empire has hollwed out and is about to fall? Everybody is a fucking true-blue believer that they deserve to be rich,at the expense of everything and everyone else! Why can't people just be happy with enough to get by? Spend time with your friends and family, stop chasing the bullshit ideology of conspicuous consumption which much richer and much more powerful individuals want you to believe in order to trap you into their completely distorted mentality, a simulacrum of un-reality! And those biggest fish only benefit themselves by getting everyone else to chase their white rabbit btw.
Here's my one "TED" wish: instead of the pursuit of money and winning the lottery, I want more of you super-smart, elite, "WEIRD", technophiles to spend the same amount of time & effort doing something intrinsically meaningful, creative, in the pursuit of knowledge for yourself or others, or sacrificing & helping those people in your communities who are disadvantaged, oppressed and less fortunate, or the noble purpose of doing something(anything!) because it is Right and nobody else seems to be doing that thing.
What kind of ignorant fuck truly wants to live the hollow lifestyle of a wealthy young aristocrat? You might think you're making sacrifices now for freedom from money later, but I, and every single philosopher going all the way back to Thales would warn the pursuit of wealth, for it's own sake, or for the sole sake of being "freed" from money, ends up becoming a tragic, inescapable anchor you will be permanently chained to in your life, and it will fully consume and ruin whatever goodness and potential you might have started with.
There is another way. Take only what you need, don't need much, give generously without regard, and redirect all your newly found free time & energy into efforts that truly matter.
Ouch. Strawman attack. I want to get rich for several reasons.
* I don't want to think about money
* I want to be able to chose stuff to work on
* I want some expensive things, like learning to fly and moving out of my country
To get rich, I'm trying to create value by writing useful/entertaining software.
Is there something wrong with me? It's not that HN is full of lazy wishful thinkers who just want to get rich so that they can go insane with a new Maserati every week. We just want to get some more freedom and a safety net, and are willing to work hard and create value.
This particular article is more of a thought experiment than a pratical investment advice. Very few if any startup-culture people will spend their money this way. Most will spend it to pay off debts, start new companies, maybe invest in others' startups, buy a new car.
I don't want a new car. It's 25 years old, and I wouldn't mind replacing the ratty, decaying upholstery. My house is great, but could use some repairs.
I've got a wife and four kids, and if I didn't have to work I wouldn't have this ten hour hole in my day where I can't spend time with them. And, you know, time for learning a new language. Or, maybe, a hobby. I could play catch with my kids instead of fixing the washing machine.
I'll add that for each rich person there must be an army of people working to feed this rich, clean his toilets, repair his cars, tend his gardens, so there is a definitive limit to the number of rich lazy bastards the society can support.
Then you may realize that you don't really want to be even more exploitative towards other people by being living a more wasteful way-of-life than you already do.
I've read that at the height of the French monarchy right before the revolution, a disproportionate number of labor was being employed in textiles to create the extravagant, lavish and enormously expensive dresses for the royal court. We're talking like 25+% of what we would call their GDP. (If you really want to understand capital, wealth & labor in terms of the bigger picture, I highly recommend skipping the baseless, mostly fictional "modern" econ textbooks, and go read some political economy history books. The more thing changes, etc, etc)
Your point hits right to the heart of the matter. And it's why I utterly despise the rich so much. When I look out on the world, I don't see what is actual, rather I see all the lost potential(opportunity cost). It's heartbreaking. And it's not just how much wealth they take—it's also how much resources they divert from the natural ebb & flow of capital to support their meaningless, empty, wasteful lifestyles. And all for no practical reason other than keeping up with the Joneses. Meanwhile people are starving and killing each other in ghettos not 10 miles away.
It's funny how such a stat like the French textiles leaps right out in historical hindsight, yet every era of human history has it's own economic sinkhole into which the rich and the powerful throw societies collective wealth. I suppose for the present day US, instead of lavish dresses for the royals, it's lavish military spending for the gravy-train DoD fucktards. (We'll hit a $1 trillion defense budget in less than 5 years! If that doesn't make you want to take to the streets with a molotov, then nothing will). They don't realize it yet, because they are all narrow minded pigs blinded towards their own trough, but their economic parasitism will inevitable trigger another revolution in America. Malcom X's proverbial chickens will indeed come home to roost, and it's going to be simple, unsustainable economics that triggers it. Archaeologists will dig us up in 1,000 years and wonder why we couldn't see the pattern.
Wealth = Exploitation.
QED, bitches. If this belief makes me a radical socialist, so fucking be it! I know I'm right from a high level perspective.
—Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
I think I recently drove by a sign on the road that said this too. It was right next to another sign that read "Make Money Fast", and another sign that said "Get Rich Working from Home." However, a much wiser man than I once said: TANSTAAFL.
Now I know this is gonna get nuked, but I don't care because I can prove my point if you can understand me. Money is all you guys ever talk about here. Can we get more up votes on articles about oh say, extravagant assembly code or hardware hacks, instead of the daily echo chamber of TC driven $pablum?
IMHO everyone here, or at least the most vocal minority, is far, far too obsessed with making money. And the kind of money amount always being talked about is literally winning the lottery. Fools! You want to know why the American Empire has hollwed out and is about to fall? Everybody is a fucking true-blue believer that they deserve to be rich,at the expense of everything and everyone else! Why can't people just be happy with enough to get by? Spend time with your friends and family, stop chasing the bullshit ideology of conspicuous consumption which much richer and much more powerful individuals want you to believe in order to trap you into their completely distorted mentality, a simulacrum of un-reality! And those biggest fish only benefit themselves by getting everyone else to chase their white rabbit btw.
Here's my one "TED" wish: instead of the pursuit of money and winning the lottery, I want more of you super-smart, elite, "WEIRD", technophiles to spend the same amount of time & effort doing something intrinsically meaningful, creative, in the pursuit of knowledge for yourself or others, or sacrificing & helping those people in your communities who are disadvantaged, oppressed and less fortunate, or the noble purpose of doing something(anything!) because it is Right and nobody else seems to be doing that thing.
What kind of ignorant fuck truly wants to live the hollow lifestyle of a wealthy young aristocrat? You might think you're making sacrifices now for freedom from money later, but I, and every single philosopher going all the way back to Thales would warn the pursuit of wealth, for it's own sake, or for the sole sake of being "freed" from money, ends up becoming a tragic, inescapable anchor you will be permanently chained to in your life, and it will fully consume and ruin whatever goodness and potential you might have started with.
There is another way. Take only what you need, don't need much, give generously without regard, and redirect all your newly found free time & energy into efforts that truly matter.
Fuck you, Money!