Earthly pleasures have no meaning, all that does is line go up
If I were a billionaire, (and for the sake of fantasy, ignoring the moral repercussions of such) Id buy out every super bowl ad slot and fill it with Youtube poops from 2008
It's weird because were I billionaire, I'd do the maximum acceptable amount of socdem politics and international charity work you can do before the CIA starts trying to kill you, then spend the rest of the time funding movies and videogames around my interests.
Wealth is straight up a non-physical neurotoxin that dissolves the empathy and creative centers of the brain
Psychological studies have demonstrated for over a century that there's a predictably consistent tendency for decreased empathy and compassion the richer the studied subject tends to be.
Or it is possible that people with empathy deficiency have much better odds of becoming wealthy. Or both ways.
The studies didn't conclude whether wealth made them assholes or if assholes become wealthy, but considering how much wealth is inherited and maintained by inheritance, I think it leans toward the latter.
Imagine having unlimited money and spending your time in meetings with PowerPoints
You could have a system of locks like the Panama Canal to create a perpetual lazy river that forms a knot for $3 billion.
At least we got a university, a concert hall and some libraries out of Carnegie
oh they're doing things, we mostly just never see them or know about them
a lot of them are undergound ever since private islands got too visible
They can't even be assed to make the masses gawk at their fortune. They lock it in an overpriced vault and wear all grey every day.
I mean there wss that one guy that had the gamer yacht but even that seemed horrible to actually play on
i went to hearst castle this summer. it's pretty whatever, tbh. the bus ride up the mountain is pretty crazy. then at the top, one of the employees had their miata parked in the lot, and I was instantly envious of whoever they are, because they have the best commute in the world
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Previous elites had taste, and so their legacies live on in quasi-immortality through their posessions. The current elite are so subsumed within Capital all of their legacy will evaporate once they are gone.
Contemporary billionaires are still chasing the Steve Jobs mystique so they present themselves in incredibly boring and bleak ways with pretentious yet empty glass and steel temples to their own narcissism.
Political economy, this science of wealth, is therefore simultaneously the science of renunciation, of want, of saving and it actually reaches the point where it spares man the need of either fresh air or physical exercise. This science of marvellous industry is simultaneously the science of asceticism, and its true ideal is the ascetic but extortionate miser and the ascetic but productive slave. Its moral ideal is the worker who takes part of his wages to the savings-bank, and it has even found ready-made a servile art which embodies this pet idea: it has been presented, bathed in sentimentality, on the stage. Thus political economy – despite its worldly and voluptuous appearance – is a true moral science, the most moral of all the sciences. Self-renunciation, the renunciation of life and of all human needs, is its principal thesis. The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being. Everything which the political economist takes from you in life and in humanity, he replaces for you in money and in wealth; and all the things which you cannot do, your money can do. It can eat and, drink, go to the dance hall and the theatre; it can travel, it can appropriate art, learning, the treasures of the past, political power – all this it can appropriate for you – it can buy all this: it is true endowment. Yet being all this, it wants to do nothing but create itself, buy itself; for everything else is after all its servant, and when I have the master I have the servant and do not need his servant. All passions and all activity must therefore be submerged in avarice.
from https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/needs.htm
Hearst Castle is very pretty. It's cool to visit if you get a chance. That whole Central Coast area is quite gorgeous.
I would definitely build a floating fortress and have wackadoo parties on it
Name it Castle Thundercastle and use it to stage raids along the East Coast
