Up to a point, yes. But I'd also factor this in: If I'm a startup founder and am ever in a position to hold $50 million, I could take that, invest it relatively sanely in the stock market, and be living extremely comfortably for the rest of my life. There's such a thing as "enough", and there's no particular reason to press your luck when you already have it.
At what point is Ubuntu going to transition into a community driven OS?
I'd say it already is transitioning to a community-driven setup, called "Mint". One of the key things that makes the open-source world different from the commercial world is that when an organization starts getting stupid and greedy, someone forks the project, and if they do a better job the user-base just switches to the new project and loses nothing of any great value.
That guy is a rich retired lawyer, not an archeologist or historian.
That doesn't mean he won't find what it is he's looking for. For example, amateur retired businessman Heinrich Schliemann successfully found the city of Troy buried in Turkey: On the one hand, he didn't do a very good job of digging it up once he found it, but on the other hand nobody else was making a serious effort to look where he was looking because they mostly thought the Trojan War was just a cool story with no basis in actual events.
So best of luck to him, so long as he gets advice from actual archeologists once he finds a site worth digging.
The reason government contracts are broken is because they exist.
For some reason, in the US it is more politically acceptable to pay a private firm $200K per worker for a government contract than it is to pay $150K per worker to hire people to do the job. And this is not a partisan thing, since the biggest area where this kind of silliness happens is obscenely high military budget, and that gets reapproved without much serious question. It creates a lot of opportunity for graft among anybody controlling a government purchase, costing even more public money unnecessarily.
By contrast, the UK government has an IT department that is in charge of all government websites. If they need more people to do the job, they hire them. If they need fewer, they lay people off. And overall, they get better results for less money because that one department can coordinate efforts in a way the multiple US contractors simply can't do.
As far as TSA information to the general public goes, the answer is exactly "never". As in, they haven't really caught anybody seriously trying to engage in terrorism, ever, over the entire 12 years the TSA has existed. They apparently have managed to nab some other criminals (smugglers, traffickers, etc), but not terrorists. They also apparently catch people with guns and other "prohibited items" about once or twice a day, but it's unclear if those people actually presented any kind of threat to anyone.
Just because the house has windows viewable by the public doesn't mean the public has the right to peer into your house to watch you prance around naked.
If you're prancing around naked, with the shades / curtains open, in a window visible from the street, it's not illegal to look at you from the street. If anything, you may be committing indecent exposure, if someone who sees you decides to complain about it and the police decide to do something about the complaint.
It's the same rules as being naked in your own backyard: If the neighbors see you, that's not their problem.
Does the same apply if there is a crack in your curtains through which the papers in your home can be seen?
If a policeman or citizen is walking down a street, looks through the crack in your curtains, and sees evidence of criminal activity, that is most definitely legitimately gathered evidence.
I'm not blaming all crime on racist issues, I'm saying that racism is behind a lot of the fear of crime, and that fear imposes real costs on those who are afraid.
A calculation that I think would be worth making: What is the true cost to middle class suburban America pays for its fear of impoverished urban America? Some of the costs that would be worth factoring in: - Home security systems and private security guards. - Longer commuting time, distance, gasoline, etc caused by white flight. - Insurance premium changes due to the longer commute. - Much of the cost of the prison system. - Much of the cost of police forces and court systems. - For many, guns and gun training. - The costs of the murders and suicides committed on impulse by those guns that were bought for protection. - The time spent driving the kids everywhere because you're too scared to let them walk anywhere, and there's nowhere nearby that they would want to walk to. - The cost of refusing to use public transportation systems because "those people" also use it.
And you can't really discuss that issue without at least mentioning the racial component: For a lot of white American suburbanites, what they fear most is black people that appear to be from the city. This despite the fact that the person most likely to murder a white woman in America is her current or former boyfriend / husband.
Capitalism does not reward hard work. It rewards marketability and cunning investment.
Actually, what it rewards most is having capital. And what it punishes most is not having capital.
If I have capital, I can invest it, not particularly cunningly, in S&P 500 ETFs and get a not-terrible return for doing no work at all. At worst, I'll be pulling in 0.5% from my bank with it. If I collect enough capital, then I don't need to do any work whatsoever and I'll be able to live comfortably by demanding other people's work in the form of purchases.
If I don't have capital, then anything that I buy will be done on credit, making it more expensive than if I had bought it outright. For example, if I use a credit card to buy food and don't pay it off right away, than the cost of my groceries is at least 25% higher due to the payments to the credit card company. So that means that because I started with less capital (for whatever reason), I actually have to work harder to pay for the same things that the person with $150K lying around can just buy.
An example from my day-to-day: I was lucky enough to be born into a family that could afford to pay for my bachelor's degree. That gave me an income of $2400 or so higher than classmates who started out earning about as much as I did. 2 years later, that translated into the just under $5000 I needed to buy a car to get to a better-paying job, saving me about $3000 a year in car loan payments. So now I'm basically earning $5K more than an equally-hardworking and responsible colleagues and classmates, and that allows me to save up for all sorts of things more easily than they can. The uneven playing field happens to be tilted somewhat in my favor, solely because I started with assets rather than debts.
#4 is largely incorrect. There was a big burst of inflation in the 1970's that basically halved the value of money in 9 years, and that's the kind of thing you fear. But since then, it's been closer to a rate that halves the value of money in over 20 years, which is neither unusual nor particularly harmful. And all you need to do to beat inflation is to hold assets that aren't cash, such as stocks, bonds, a home, land, or commodities.
The Military-Industrial Complex, at least, produces something. The Welfare-Industrial Complex is completely parasitic.
Oh really?
For example, when House Speaker John Boehner inserts a provision into an unrelated bill to require the army to buy overpriced M1 tanks that they don't even want, that just happen to be built in his district, why exactly is that in any way beneficial to society? And why are we not willing to see welfare as the cost of preventing riots of starving desperate people in the streets?
Your position, in a nutshell, has 3 major problems:
First objection: People who lack the basic necessities of life do whatever it takes to acquire those necessities. They will try to find work, but given that there are currently 3 unemployed people per open position that only solves, at most, 1/3 of the problem. If they can't find work to pay for those necessities, they may try borrowing the money, but that will ruin their credit pretty quickly (which, incidentally, makes it even harder to find work). If they can't work, and can't borrow the money because they've ruined their credit, they will steal those necessities. That gives your "productive Peter" of the world 3 options for dealing with at least 2/3 of the "idle Pauls": - Lock them up in a prison. But because prison (~$45,000 per year) is more expensive than welfare (~$20,000 per year), this is neither in the interests of Paul (who gets locked up) or Peter (who has higher taxes to pay for the prisons). - Let them go, which means they'll steal again, which means that whoever is getting stolen from is paying the costs that welfare would have paid. This is at best no better than welfare. - Kill them, which violates the fundamental moral teachings of just about every human society.
Second objection: There is no clear dividing line between who's a "productive Peter" and who's an "idle Paul". Most welfare recipients receive benefits for less than 2 years, which means that they were productive, hit a bad spell, and eventually became productive again. If you condemn "idle Paul" to death (which, as we've seen above, is the only method of dealing with him that doesn't involve taking some resources from "productive Peter") for his lack of productivity, you lose his many years of potential productivity that he could have after his bad spell. That wastes the resources that were used in raising and educating Paul.
Third objection: Productivity and income or wealth are plainly not directly related. For example, Christy Walton has produced over her career, approximately nothing, and has a fortune of about $15 billion and an annual investment income of well over $150 million. By contrast,my former barber, currently surviving on government benefits, with no wealth to his name, worked full time his adult life until the nerve damage he sustained in Vietnam made him unable to do his job. The Vietnam vet didn't produce anything fantastic, but his thousands of haircuts were probably of more benefit to society than the absolutely nothing that Christy Walton managed. So why is it that you seem to think it's morally bad to keep Mr Vietnam Vet alive with tax money from Ms Walton? What makes her worthy of adulation, and him so heinous that you're willing to condemn him to death?
But today you are actually rewarded for being a socialist.
This is only true if you think the statement "The government should promote the general welfare" immediately makes you a socialist.
The number of people able to make a living because they are socialists is (being generous) around 1000, and most of them not a particularly good living. There are some people that hold good jobs and also are socialists, but typically they hold those jobs because of their skills unrelated to their politics. What absolutely doesn't exist is a well-established and well-funded set of organizations with media outlets, think tanks, etc hiring bunches of people making well over $250,000 a year promoting socialism, whereas such organizations do exist for movement conservatism (some talk radio, Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Chamber of Commerce, etc), libertarians (some talk radio, Cato Institute, some Tea Party organizations), and to a lesser degree for the Democratic Party (MSNBC, Brookings Institution, AFL-CIO). But there's a giant gap between the Democratic Party and actual socialists: The Democrats want to keep getting their nice big donations from big corporations, so they shy away from doing anything that smacks of bona-fide socialism.
If you're thinking that the people receiving welfare are being rewarded for being a socialist, that doesn't make any sense, because welfare recipients receive their benefits regardless of whether they're a socialist or not. They are arguably benefiting from the majority of voters believing that a bit of socialism in the name of preventing people from starving or freezing to death is a good idea, but that's different from they themselves being socialists.
What is true is that being a socialist no longer destroys your career like it did in the 1950's.
I can't tell if you're serious, so I'm going to act like you are in case you or some other reader doesn't understand the problem: In the URL that you'd be using to hit that page, change the "id=42" or whatever you have there to "id=0 OR 1=1". Poof, your page is now reading the entire catalog in rather than the single record you wanted to. Hit that fast enough, and if that catalog is large enough, and the bad guy may have just brought your nice database server to a screaming halt as it loads up 300 million records multiple times every second.
Or, if you're really not careful, a black-hat can use that to start pulling out whatever they want out of your database: usernames, passwords (hashed, but bad guy can crack 1-way hashes relatively quickly if it's useful to do so)
Watch out when you're giving me instructions, I might just start writing something like this:
Can't land this! Can't land this! Can't land this!
My, my, my spaceship don't brake so hard Makes me say "Oh, my Lord!" Thank you for launching me With no extra fuel at 300 feet. It'd feel good, if we got on down A super dope pilot from a Midwest town And I'm blessed with cool hands But this is a place, uh, you can't land!
I told you, Control I can't land this! Yeah, so much for living, now you know I can't land this!
Take a look at some of the tests from a hundred years ago and try your luck at passing them, or read reports written by sixth graders in 1900. Impressive, huh?
Part of the reason for that apparent phenomenon is that the kids who weren't actually near the top of their class in 1900 didn't go to school. Most 12-year-olds were working, either in factories or on family farms. Illiteracy and innumeracy was much much higher than it is today: Many many people not only couldn't have passed those tests, many people couldn't even read the numbers or hope to add them together. The fact of the matter is that according to even cursory study of the issue demonstrates that on average Americans are better educated now than at any time previously in the entire history of the country. The idea that there was some kind of idyllic America with great educational systems some time in the distant past is just nonsense.
They didn't get that way by paying more tax than they had to.
Warren Buffett is Warren Buffett because of a ridiculously good track record of stock picks. Either he's very very good at it, or very very lucky.
He's also at the same point as his buddy Bill Gates: Sure, he could pay fewer taxes and save millions, but when you already have enough to make somewhere around $300 million a year easily without any kind of chicanery, what's the point? These guys have realized that there's such a thing as "enough", and they already have way more than that, so they're trying to build a different kind of legacy with their charity work. Also, unlike a lot of Wall Street types, Warren Buffett lives relatively modestly: I think again he got to the point where he and his family were very comfortable, and didn't feel a strong need to buy expensive stuff just to prove how rich he was or show he was good enough to hobnob with other rich people.
The assumption is that the rich got rich from the work of the poor. Which is probably not so true today as it was when we had a more industrial economy.
It's just as true today as it was back in the day. There are 2 reasons why it's still true: - The poor are still being horrifically exploited for industrial labor, but in China, Nicaragua, Columbia, Bangladesh, and other dirt-poor countries rather than in the US. People are being killed and maimed and given horrible diseases so your plastic doohickeys from Walmart are nice and cheap. It used to be those people were living not too far from you, now they're halfway around the world, so it's easier to pretend that they don't exist. - Without the (relatively) poor in the US and Europe spending more money on consumer purchases than they're earning in wages, the entire system of Wall Street collapses. That difference between consumer purchases and wages is most of corporate earnings, which drives the stock and bond prices, which is the rich's primary source of income.
Another way of looking at it: 1. An average person produces, at most, $50 worth of a product per hour. A really smart and hardworking person might make double that, or $100 per hour. 2. There are 5840 hours per year where a person could reasonably be awake. To be generous, I'll round it up to 6000. Such a person would be ridiculously diligent, doing nothing but working any moment they were awake and pushing themselves beyond their physiological limits. 3. That means that any annual gross salary higher than $600,000 has an earnings source other than the stuff somebody produced. 4. Ergo, if you're earning more than $600K a year, you're a thief of some kind or another. The numbers might not be exactly right, but the point remains: There is some point at which what you make is higher than what you actually earned.
Also very relevant to this is the direct democracy in much of the state at the local level, and one of the lowest constituent-to-representative ratios in the world in the state government. That makes it one of the most responsive governments you'll find anywhere, where you can in fact convince the powers that be to change policy if you're right.
Other interesting fact: New Hampshire has the longest-serving Secretary of State in the country, who took office in 1976 and has stayed there ever since. The reason? He's demonstrably good at his job, and in the NH government that counts more than party affiliation.
Slashdot Mirror
They might not arrest him. They might just shoot him.
Up to a point, yes. But I'd also factor this in: If I'm a startup founder and am ever in a position to hold $50 million, I could take that, invest it relatively sanely in the stock market, and be living extremely comfortably for the rest of my life. There's such a thing as "enough", and there's no particular reason to press your luck when you already have it.
This is an outrage - I was going to eat that mummy!
At what point is Ubuntu going to transition into a community driven OS?
I'd say it already is transitioning to a community-driven setup, called "Mint". One of the key things that makes the open-source world different from the commercial world is that when an organization starts getting stupid and greedy, someone forks the project, and if they do a better job the user-base just switches to the new project and loses nothing of any great value.
That guy is a rich retired lawyer, not an archeologist or historian.
That doesn't mean he won't find what it is he's looking for. For example, amateur retired businessman Heinrich Schliemann successfully found the city of Troy buried in Turkey: On the one hand, he didn't do a very good job of digging it up once he found it, but on the other hand nobody else was making a serious effort to look where he was looking because they mostly thought the Trojan War was just a cool story with no basis in actual events.
So best of luck to him, so long as he gets advice from actual archeologists once he finds a site worth digging.
The reason government contracts are broken is because they exist.
For some reason, in the US it is more politically acceptable to pay a private firm $200K per worker for a government contract than it is to pay $150K per worker to hire people to do the job. And this is not a partisan thing, since the biggest area where this kind of silliness happens is obscenely high military budget, and that gets reapproved without much serious question. It creates a lot of opportunity for graft among anybody controlling a government purchase, costing even more public money unnecessarily.
By contrast, the UK government has an IT department that is in charge of all government websites. If they need more people to do the job, they hire them. If they need fewer, they lay people off. And overall, they get better results for less money because that one department can coordinate efforts in a way the multiple US contractors simply can't do.
Why yes, where had I read about that?
how often do the TSA actually catch a terrorist?
As far as TSA information to the general public goes, the answer is exactly "never". As in, they haven't really caught anybody seriously trying to engage in terrorism, ever, over the entire 12 years the TSA has existed. They apparently have managed to nab some other criminals (smugglers, traffickers, etc), but not terrorists. They also apparently catch people with guns and other "prohibited items" about once or twice a day, but it's unclear if those people actually presented any kind of threat to anyone.
Just because the house has windows viewable by the public doesn't mean the public has the right to peer into your house to watch you prance around naked.
If you're prancing around naked, with the shades / curtains open, in a window visible from the street, it's not illegal to look at you from the street. If anything, you may be committing indecent exposure, if someone who sees you decides to complain about it and the police decide to do something about the complaint.
It's the same rules as being naked in your own backyard: If the neighbors see you, that's not their problem.
Does the same apply if there is a crack in your curtains through which the papers in your home can be seen?
If a policeman or citizen is walking down a street, looks through the crack in your curtains, and sees evidence of criminal activity, that is most definitely legitimately gathered evidence.
I'm not blaming all crime on racist issues, I'm saying that racism is behind a lot of the fear of crime, and that fear imposes real costs on those who are afraid.
A calculation that I think would be worth making: What is the true cost to middle class suburban America pays for its fear of impoverished urban America? Some of the costs that would be worth factoring in:
- Home security systems and private security guards.
- Longer commuting time, distance, gasoline, etc caused by white flight.
- Insurance premium changes due to the longer commute.
- Much of the cost of the prison system.
- Much of the cost of police forces and court systems.
- For many, guns and gun training.
- The costs of the murders and suicides committed on impulse by those guns that were bought for protection.
- The time spent driving the kids everywhere because you're too scared to let them walk anywhere, and there's nowhere nearby that they would want to walk to.
- The cost of refusing to use public transportation systems because "those people" also use it.
And you can't really discuss that issue without at least mentioning the racial component: For a lot of white American suburbanites, what they fear most is black people that appear to be from the city. This despite the fact that the person most likely to murder a white woman in America is her current or former boyfriend / husband.
Capitalism does not reward hard work. It rewards marketability and cunning investment.
Actually, what it rewards most is having capital. And what it punishes most is not having capital.
If I have capital, I can invest it, not particularly cunningly, in S&P 500 ETFs and get a not-terrible return for doing no work at all. At worst, I'll be pulling in 0.5% from my bank with it. If I collect enough capital, then I don't need to do any work whatsoever and I'll be able to live comfortably by demanding other people's work in the form of purchases.
If I don't have capital, then anything that I buy will be done on credit, making it more expensive than if I had bought it outright. For example, if I use a credit card to buy food and don't pay it off right away, than the cost of my groceries is at least 25% higher due to the payments to the credit card company. So that means that because I started with less capital (for whatever reason), I actually have to work harder to pay for the same things that the person with $150K lying around can just buy.
An example from my day-to-day: I was lucky enough to be born into a family that could afford to pay for my bachelor's degree. That gave me an income of $2400 or so higher than classmates who started out earning about as much as I did. 2 years later, that translated into the just under $5000 I needed to buy a car to get to a better-paying job, saving me about $3000 a year in car loan payments. So now I'm basically earning $5K more than an equally-hardworking and responsible colleagues and classmates, and that allows me to save up for all sorts of things more easily than they can. The uneven playing field happens to be tilted somewhat in my favor, solely because I started with assets rather than debts.
#4 is largely incorrect. There was a big burst of inflation in the 1970's that basically halved the value of money in 9 years, and that's the kind of thing you fear. But since then, it's been closer to a rate that halves the value of money in over 20 years, which is neither unusual nor particularly harmful. And all you need to do to beat inflation is to hold assets that aren't cash, such as stocks, bonds, a home, land, or commodities.
The Military-Industrial Complex, at least, produces something. The Welfare-Industrial Complex is completely parasitic.
Oh really?
For example, when House Speaker John Boehner inserts a provision into an unrelated bill to require the army to buy overpriced M1 tanks that they don't even want, that just happen to be built in his district, why exactly is that in any way beneficial to society? And why are we not willing to see welfare as the cost of preventing riots of starving desperate people in the streets?
Your position, in a nutshell, has 3 major problems:
First objection: People who lack the basic necessities of life do whatever it takes to acquire those necessities. They will try to find work, but given that there are currently 3 unemployed people per open position that only solves, at most, 1/3 of the problem. If they can't find work to pay for those necessities, they may try borrowing the money, but that will ruin their credit pretty quickly (which, incidentally, makes it even harder to find work). If they can't work, and can't borrow the money because they've ruined their credit, they will steal those necessities. That gives your "productive Peter" of the world 3 options for dealing with at least 2/3 of the "idle Pauls":
- Lock them up in a prison. But because prison (~$45,000 per year) is more expensive than welfare (~$20,000 per year), this is neither in the interests of Paul (who gets locked up) or Peter (who has higher taxes to pay for the prisons).
- Let them go, which means they'll steal again, which means that whoever is getting stolen from is paying the costs that welfare would have paid. This is at best no better than welfare.
- Kill them, which violates the fundamental moral teachings of just about every human society.
Second objection: There is no clear dividing line between who's a "productive Peter" and who's an "idle Paul". Most welfare recipients receive benefits for less than 2 years, which means that they were productive, hit a bad spell, and eventually became productive again. If you condemn "idle Paul" to death (which, as we've seen above, is the only method of dealing with him that doesn't involve taking some resources from "productive Peter") for his lack of productivity, you lose his many years of potential productivity that he could have after his bad spell. That wastes the resources that were used in raising and educating Paul.
Third objection: Productivity and income or wealth are plainly not directly related. For example, Christy Walton has produced over her career, approximately nothing, and has a fortune of about $15 billion and an annual investment income of well over $150 million. By contrast,my former barber, currently surviving on government benefits, with no wealth to his name, worked full time his adult life until the nerve damage he sustained in Vietnam made him unable to do his job. The Vietnam vet didn't produce anything fantastic, but his thousands of haircuts were probably of more benefit to society than the absolutely nothing that Christy Walton managed. So why is it that you seem to think it's morally bad to keep Mr Vietnam Vet alive with tax money from Ms Walton? What makes her worthy of adulation, and him so heinous that you're willing to condemn him to death?
But today you are actually rewarded for being a socialist.
This is only true if you think the statement "The government should promote the general welfare" immediately makes you a socialist.
The number of people able to make a living because they are socialists is (being generous) around 1000, and most of them not a particularly good living. There are some people that hold good jobs and also are socialists, but typically they hold those jobs because of their skills unrelated to their politics. What absolutely doesn't exist is a well-established and well-funded set of organizations with media outlets, think tanks, etc hiring bunches of people making well over $250,000 a year promoting socialism, whereas such organizations do exist for movement conservatism (some talk radio, Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Chamber of Commerce, etc), libertarians (some talk radio, Cato Institute, some Tea Party organizations), and to a lesser degree for the Democratic Party (MSNBC, Brookings Institution, AFL-CIO). But there's a giant gap between the Democratic Party and actual socialists: The Democrats want to keep getting their nice big donations from big corporations, so they shy away from doing anything that smacks of bona-fide socialism.
If you're thinking that the people receiving welfare are being rewarded for being a socialist, that doesn't make any sense, because welfare recipients receive their benefits regardless of whether they're a socialist or not. They are arguably benefiting from the majority of voters believing that a bit of socialism in the name of preventing people from starving or freezing to death is a good idea, but that's different from they themselves being socialists.
What is true is that being a socialist no longer destroys your career like it did in the 1950's.
Maybe we could give them clamps instead?
I can't tell if you're serious, so I'm going to act like you are in case you or some other reader doesn't understand the problem:
In the URL that you'd be using to hit that page, change the "id=42" or whatever you have there to "id=0 OR 1=1". Poof, your page is now reading the entire catalog in rather than the single record you wanted to. Hit that fast enough, and if that catalog is large enough, and the bad guy may have just brought your nice database server to a screaming halt as it loads up 300 million records multiple times every second.
Or, if you're really not careful, a black-hat can use that to start pulling out whatever they want out of your database: usernames, passwords (hashed, but bad guy can crack 1-way hashes relatively quickly if it's useful to do so)
Watch out when you're giving me instructions, I might just start writing something like this:
Can't land this!
Can't land this!
Can't land this!
My, my, my spaceship don't brake so hard
Makes me say "Oh, my Lord!"
Thank you for launching me
With no extra fuel at 300 feet.
It'd feel good, if we got on down
A super dope pilot from a Midwest town
And I'm blessed with cool hands
But this is a place, uh, you can't land!
I told you, Control
I can't land this!
Yeah, so much for living, now you know
I can't land this!
Take a look at some of the tests from a hundred years ago and try your luck at passing them, or read reports written by sixth graders in 1900. Impressive, huh?
Part of the reason for that apparent phenomenon is that the kids who weren't actually near the top of their class in 1900 didn't go to school. Most 12-year-olds were working, either in factories or on family farms. Illiteracy and innumeracy was much much higher than it is today: Many many people not only couldn't have passed those tests, many people couldn't even read the numbers or hope to add them together. The fact of the matter is that according to even cursory study of the issue demonstrates that on average Americans are better educated now than at any time previously in the entire history of the country. The idea that there was some kind of idyllic America with great educational systems some time in the distant past is just nonsense.
They didn't get that way by paying more tax than they had to.
Warren Buffett is Warren Buffett because of a ridiculously good track record of stock picks. Either he's very very good at it, or very very lucky.
He's also at the same point as his buddy Bill Gates: Sure, he could pay fewer taxes and save millions, but when you already have enough to make somewhere around $300 million a year easily without any kind of chicanery, what's the point? These guys have realized that there's such a thing as "enough", and they already have way more than that, so they're trying to build a different kind of legacy with their charity work. Also, unlike a lot of Wall Street types, Warren Buffett lives relatively modestly: I think again he got to the point where he and his family were very comfortable, and didn't feel a strong need to buy expensive stuff just to prove how rich he was or show he was good enough to hobnob with other rich people.
The assumption is that the rich got rich from the work of the poor. Which is probably not so true today as it was when we had a more industrial economy.
It's just as true today as it was back in the day. There are 2 reasons why it's still true:
- The poor are still being horrifically exploited for industrial labor, but in China, Nicaragua, Columbia, Bangladesh, and other dirt-poor countries rather than in the US. People are being killed and maimed and given horrible diseases so your plastic doohickeys from Walmart are nice and cheap. It used to be those people were living not too far from you, now they're halfway around the world, so it's easier to pretend that they don't exist.
- Without the (relatively) poor in the US and Europe spending more money on consumer purchases than they're earning in wages, the entire system of Wall Street collapses. That difference between consumer purchases and wages is most of corporate earnings, which drives the stock and bond prices, which is the rich's primary source of income.
Another way of looking at it:
1. An average person produces, at most, $50 worth of a product per hour. A really smart and hardworking person might make double that, or $100 per hour.
2. There are 5840 hours per year where a person could reasonably be awake. To be generous, I'll round it up to 6000. Such a person would be ridiculously diligent, doing nothing but working any moment they were awake and pushing themselves beyond their physiological limits.
3. That means that any annual gross salary higher than $600,000 has an earnings source other than the stuff somebody produced.
4. Ergo, if you're earning more than $600K a year, you're a thief of some kind or another.
The numbers might not be exactly right, but the point remains: There is some point at which what you make is higher than what you actually earned.
Also very relevant to this is the direct democracy in much of the state at the local level, and one of the lowest constituent-to-representative ratios in the world in the state government. That makes it one of the most responsive governments you'll find anywhere, where you can in fact convince the powers that be to change policy if you're right.
Other interesting fact: New Hampshire has the longest-serving Secretary of State in the country, who took office in 1976 and has stayed there ever since. The reason? He's demonstrably good at his job, and in the NH government that counts more than party affiliation.
What part of "Attempt no landing there" don't you people understand?
It turns out these *are* the EditDroids we're looking for!