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Minecraft Creator Notch's $70 Million Mansion Recreated In Minecraft
theodp writes In case you've fallen behind on your TMZ reading, Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson used his Microsoft money to outbid Beyonce and Jay Z for the most expensive mansion in Beverly Hills. Now, the Minecraft mogul's new $70 million mega-mansion has been recreated inside the game that made him rich.
Bart: I'm rapidly becoming a big underground success in this town.
Jim: See? In another twenty-five years, you'll be able to shake their hands in broad daylight.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
23,000 square feet, with 15 bathrooms and eight bedrooms
It's his money to spend and I wouldn't stand in his way, but what a waste. Makes you wonder what kind of good could have been done or how many lives could have been saved with that $70 million.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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I heard you liked Minecraft and Mansions...
After 8 years of onsite computer repairs, I have a deep insight into this sort of thing. At my company we have a nickname for people who make $10,000 a month and have $5,000 of it go to their 5000 sq ft mansion. They're "poor people living in a big house." Why the hell do people spend that much money on a house? If I won $200,000,000 in the powerball, I'd buy a 3000 sq ft house. Then I'd spend the rest on awesome stuff. Who the hell wants a giant house like that? Plus, that's how NFL players keep going broke. You know if you make it to the NFL or make Minecraft that you're making a ton of money ONCE. Like one and done, surprise you're poor. I'd hoard that money like crazy and budget it out over 100 years. What and idiot.
To anyone about to say real estate is an investment, go look at his electric bill, cleaning bill, and property taxes.
why?
The 3% of his fortune that he spent on a house does seem like terrible money management.
Wait, what?!?
You might be a troll, and that's fine...
But he is not an idiot, he spent about 3% of his wealth to buy a house. Most people spend FAR more than that to buy a FAR smaller house.
Who is the idiot?
Looks like he was mostly paying for location.
I guess I'm old. I'd prefer a counterstrike map of the building at work. :-)
Sweden has some pretty hardcore taxes for the rich. Don't get me wrong, he's still a very monied guy (he made plenty before the sale as well) but it isn't like he got to keep all the cash. Sweden doubtless took their cut.
Can someone tell me if I'm smoking crack or are there three separate fire extinguishers in this picture [1]? Why are there fire extinguishers in a bathroom?
The whole "open space car garage" seems way outlandish, and the use of glass is pretty atrocious, but the views and decor seem pretty awesome. I wonder if the cost to upkeep and maintain such a home might exceed my mortgage costs.
[1] http://images.prd.mris.com/ima...
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23,000 square feet, with 15 bathrooms and eight bedrooms
It's his money to spend and I wouldn't stand in his way, but what a waste.
Sometimes such a purchase is mostly an investment, albeit a comfy investment that you can live in. Its highly likely he is expecting a "greater fool" to come around and pay much more even after adjusting for inflation and the safe alternative of buying US treasury bills instead.
And on that day, yes, we will learn that the world is a simulation running on Linux. So the year of the Linux desktop will be the year that we're all running Linux in a universe running on Linux.
The source is open, but you may need more advanced theory to understand how compilation works...
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In-laws on my brother's side of the family bought a five-bedroom home for $1M because they had hoarded five bedrooms full of old furniture and other crap from 50+ years of marriage. The place was obscene. Kitchen was bigger than my 475 SQF studio apartment, wet bar was bigger than my kitchen. The 25-foot-tall electric fence with the mountain lion watching from the other side was interesting.
No it doesn't. People with that much money store it at the bank and the money just lies there. It doesn't make the economy work it just inflates somebody else' bank account.
It inflates the bank accounts of Apple, Google, Facebook, etc, and probably your state and local government too. Wealthy people generally don't put their money in a bank account and collect interest, they generally put it into some sort of investment portfolio where the money goes into stocks and bonds. Bonds would include both corporate and municipal bonds. Municipal bonds fund a lot of state and local infrastructure, and sadly boondoggle projects.
Wealthy people may also invest in real estate. Which is probably what the $70M mansion is all about. The vast majority of that $70M probably represents the land not the blingy mansion that sits on it. The tax bill might be public record, that would define land value vs structure value.
An office tower would have been a better investment. Hire a company to manage the property, fix the toilets and collect the rents.
You're not the only one. If I was spending $70 million on a home, it'd look nothing like that. It'd probably be a good deal smaller, or if it was the same number of overall square feet, it'd probably be more subdivided. To me, a room for a given purpose has an optimal size. If the room is too small for that purpose, it's not going to work great, but also if the room is too big for that purpose, it will also not work great.
I'd probably focus less on strange decorations (some ornamental motorcycle? A wall of candy?) and more on practical stuff, like going whole hog on expensive home automation. To me, luxury involves making something easier to use or more functional (like electronically tinting windows or a Washlet toilet), or more comfortable (like a nice mattress or a good carpet), or making it look nicer (like a nice wood finish)... not stuff whose sole purpose is to look expensive. I want something to look luxurious and pleasing, not expensive.
What's astonishing with these rich people is that all this is insanely tasteles. Personally I'd have to invest roughly another 10 million to get all the crap removed. For instance: WTF are these fountains noisily piddling into the pool constantly and blocking the view?? Which architect had that brilliant idea? ... I'd fire the guy instantly. ...
Rich people: Lot's of money, no taste.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I'll get modded into the ground, but whatever.
To teach my early teen kids about money, I offered them $20 apiece for each example they could list of how our "rich" neighbor could do something with his money that doesn't benefit me ( besides piling up his cash and burning it to death )
My son went first... "he could buy a million dollar car". (note: he actually drives a 2+ million dollar Veyron, but whatever)
Reply: "Nice try... But I'm a car salesman / builder / mechanic / own stock in GEICO insurance / sell gasoline & car parts / etc... He helped me even if he didn't intend to."
Daughter: "He could put it all in a bank account."
Reply : "Smart girl, but I'm a banker, that guy was super helpful opening up that account, since we need reserve deposits... if he had picked a stock market account that would also be great, my company sells stock to investors so we can expand and build more widgets, and we issue bonds for the same reason..."
In fact, I made it "easier" for the kids... assume that guy is a hateful jerk... now just list what he could do with his money to prevent anyone else from benefitting. What move can he make with his earnings that would benefit no one but himself ?
Anybody here want to guess how much I paid out? right... and thankfully my kids have not learned jealousy of other people's legal gains.
The end of the lesson was this:
The origin of "greed" is rooted in the concept of lusting for what you haven't earned. In context, it's similar to 'coveting'.
It's not evil to want to earn more by serving as many people as you can honestly.
And while we reserve the right to snicker at people who buy solid gold cell phone cases, we don't fall into the trap of greedily wanting to decide if they deserve it (after all, someone willingly traded it for their services) or if they are using their own money as we would. If they're bad stewards, they won't have it long, and in the meantime they can't help but serve others with that money, no matter what they do with it.
(That Veyron driving neighbor sells rap music, a lot of rap music I suppose... but it's a legal living)
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
But I prefer to deal with people that don't waste money of flashy displays of financial mis-management.
So all you've taught your children is the religion of the Invisible Hand, where somehow magically the market benefits people, even though in practice life has been getting worse for the average American over the past 30 years. You are no better than a Bible-thumper, or the Party fanatic who pushed his kids into Komsomol.
Of course money spent will benefit someone - it will at least benefit the person you pay it directly to (usually) - but overall, a particular flow of wealth has no inherent reason to help more people than it harms. My having a problem with ultra-wealthy people has nothing to do with "jealousy", and everything to do with the issues I have with i) the huge amount of power certain few people have over so many others; ii) the fact that some people have access to more resources than they'll ever need to survive, while others do not have access to resources required for basic survival. I certainly won't be personally affected much by such ultra-wealthy people, since I come from a family in the millionaire category and am intelligent and healthy myself (not so great an income as my parents because I spend much of my time doing voluntary work), but I've hung around with them for long enough to know what self-serving, destructive, cruel cunts they can be, all for the sake of a few dollars more.
1.8.1 Minecraft still lags pitifully, especially when you're near water.
But, hey, it's a nice house. A bit too big for me and my needs, but I don't see any problem if he likes it.
I can only afford a lambo. :( sad face
Mod me down, my New Earth Global Warmingist friends!
The water fountains could be done with the new particle effects.
It's a nice creative build.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Whether it's a waste depends on what he wants to do with it. What if he wants to do a lot of code jams? Hmmmm, "Where should we get a half-dozen programmers together for a weekend?" "How about Notch's place?"
fencepost
just a little off
If I won a 9-figure lottery (the only kind I could win, I generally throw a dollar or two in if I notice it's gone over 200 million), the first thing to do after dealing with taxes, etc. is to set up at least one pretty iron-clad trust designed to pay me a nice solid upper-middle-class "salary" every year, with a lot of restrictions on how I could break any principal out of it. I suspect this would also impact taxes if done properly.
Once you have your perpetual senior developer-level salary set up, **then** you figure out what you want to do with the rest, be it toys, long-term investments, completing your dream to visit every strip club in the country (note: if going the "hookers and blow" route, make sure that trust is *really* airtight).
fencepost
just a little off
The fault is that your argument builds a straw man that the wealthy do *no* good by holding/using wealth, but that isn't the argument. The argument is that they do relatively little with that wealth. One two million dollar car churns the economy, as in, provides jobs, taxes through fees, etc, much less than one hundred 20 thousand dollar cars. A similar thing could be said of a house. A 70 million dollar house doesn't generate 100x the economic activity of 100x 700k dollar houses. Partly this is because many "premium" materials don't generate more economic activity than less premium materials at a fraction of the cost...but the increase in cost is due to rarity and desirability only. Another part is that high priced items tend to require a one team work longer rather than more teams work, concentrating the transfer of wealth rather than spreading it out over broad actors who can trickle wealth down much faster and efficiently than a few who have a large share of it. The idea of "trickle down" is valid, it does happen, but it is more like accidentally watering some plants from a leak in water tank rather than watering a field with irrigation. And when your goal is to grow a crop like an economy, relying on minimal rainfall and tank leaks just isn't a productive way to go about it, as our Norse neighbors have shown.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
We are a small part of the reason he got the cash to burn doesn't mean we get to say how he stacks the cash before he lights them. Hell, give me 70 million and I'll show you what's a real waste of money.
I can just see them asking the seller "who the f--- is this Persson guy anyway?" OTOH, if they have kids of a certain age, they know.
We are the 198 proof..
On the original case Lian Li a new series of Open Air we mentioned repeatedly. Their main advantage is the small size if possible, the use of standard components, including motherboards micro ATX format and even ATX. In November, the company has worked to improve the design of a new line of buildings, and then, finally, today officially announced the launch of new products in the series. http://www.devbattles.com/en/s...
Speaking of "location", Beverley Hills 90210?! The guy's obviously a sell-out that betrayed his geek roots.
I'd have expected him to move to Lebanon, Missouri. Or- at a push- Plymouth, Florida.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I think I made the points that
- we leave them alone to enjoy their earnings in peace, and.
- earning is a good thing, even if you are really, really good at earning.
The risk of arbitrarily deciding that you don't approve of my spending, or you want to take charge of my spending because you've established an arbitrary measure of how 'fast' you perceive my money is 'churning' is an affront to liberty. And you've condemned my choices of investment to non-existence.
You know it's not some finite pie, a slice of which I've hidden away selfishly.
Housing in the U.S has gained trillions in value this year, the pie just grew bigger.
Economic liberty trumps meddling, and any system that depends on violating liberty in order to exist is a false economy.
By the way, it gets worse...
I asked my son's self-described leftist high school teacher if he would be confiscating points from the lucky students with ability (whose averages were over 75) and redistributing those points to the unfortunates who needed those points to pass. Fairness would be everyone getting a 70. He seemed genuinely upset..
Pretending this is my office full of bitter coworkers..
I would think he should be upset, your analogy is terrible at describing reality is is really only beating home your worldview that wealth is earned and everyone deserves their lot in life. But this is way different than an economy. Classes don't have students that are guaranteed to get 100s because their parents had 100s, and neither do we want to teach in such a narrow way that only students who are doing well *will* do well so we try different approaches to teaching and offer outside help, as opposed to what your worldview suggests.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
*cont.. writing on a phone is hard. ...which is that we should pander to a minority and everyone else in the classroom will magically do better just by being around that minority.
I make a very good living (my family income is about 4x the average) because I work hard and am an engineer, but I hardly believe I am completely entitled to it.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);