Wealth Therapy Tackles Woes of the Rich 444
HughPickens.com writes: Jana Kasperkevic writes in The Guardian that it can be very stressful to be rich. "It's really isolating to have a lot of money. It can be scary – people's reaction to you," says Barbara Nusbaum, an expert in money psychology. "There is a fair amount of isolation if you are wealthy." According to Clay Cockrell, who provides therapy for rich, this means the rich tend to hang out with other rich Americans, not out of snobbery, but in order to be around those who understand them and their problems. One big problem is not knowing if your friends are friends with you or your money. "Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don't want anything from you! Never being able to trust your friendships with people of different means, I think that is difficult," says Cockrell. "As the gap has widened, they [the rich] have become more and more isolated."
Sci-fi author John Scalzi has published an entertaining take-down of the cluelessness in this article.
Why the fuss? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wouldn't it be easier for them to just buy a bunch of friends. Then they wouldn't need to wonder if their friends are friends with them or their money.
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Wouldn't it be easier for them to just buy a bunch of friends. Then they wouldn't need to wonder if their friends are friends with them or their money.
Worked out well for Thomas Jefferson.
Don't flaunt it, dumbasses! (Score:5, Interesting)
If you go around driving a high end luxury car, Armani suits, gold Rolex watches, etc ... you're going to get attention.
Now, if you live your life like old school humble Protestants/Jews - live in a small house, wear Timex watches, at best a Brooks Brother's suit only when you need to, drive a Toyota, etc ... you don't have to worry.
And if you're really wealthy, biz causal and and a beat up anything. I actually met a very wealthy person and he was so low key I didn't know until I went to his place of business and one of his executives told me who he was - a guy who owned a $200 million concrete business.
Geeze!
the shoe's on the other foot now, bitches! (Score:3)
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No. Because he isn't wealthy and doesn't have that problem. So the questions remains: why not donate all their wealth? Problem solved. This Clay guy is just another guy making money off the rich, along with "executive coaches", etc.
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What if you donate all your wealth, make poor friends, and then you have to go ask those friends for help?
I think they'd be pretty pissed off with you (assuming you even CAN give all your wealth away and end up in a situation where you'd need to turn to others to get out of a money jam. I'm not sure it even works that way, you'd have resources still)
To some extent it is a legit problem. There might be people who'd sue your ass for attempting to give away your wealth. If they depend on that wealth and they a
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Probably not since they don't have the luxury to be whining about how "stressed" they are about not having to worry about having more money than most people could earn in multiple lifetimes.
Re:Why the fuss? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not really. Most people don't have the luxury to whine about how hard it is to be a billionaire
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If my wealth is in non-liquid form then I'm not going to be too worried about not fitting in. I won't have the money for the big expensive house, flash car, expensive clothes, and fancy toys. People won't think I'm rich.
As to your example, you are forgetting to account for the actions of my donations. They are going to have impacts on the economy too. Say I give most of my money to Habit for Humanity. They will take that and build a lot of houses. Some materials and work is donated but there is still
Awww diddums (Score:5, Funny)
Let me find the world's smallest violin for you guys.
Re:Awww diddums (Score:5, Funny)
You couldn't afford it.
Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don't want anything from you!
Anyone who claims that has no understanding of the psychology of the majority of billionaires. See Carly Fiorina and her 'good friend' Steve Jobs for an example. If you're a billionaire, then other billionaires are the ones that have the most of what you value and therefore the best targets. Stealing from the poor is far more effort - you need to steal from loads of them.
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Funny)
Stealing from the poor is far more effort - you need to steal from loads of them.
Hey, it worked for the Waltons!
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Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don't want anything from you!
Anyone who claims that has no understanding of the psychology of the majority of billionaires. See Carly Fiorina and her 'good friend' Steve Jobs for an example. If you're a billionaire, then other billionaires are the ones that have the most of what you value and therefore the best targets. Stealing from the poor is far more effort - you need to steal from loads of them.
Not if you get tapped into government money. Then the government (also made up of poor people) does the footwork for you.
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Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don't want anything from you!
Anyone who claims that has no understanding of the psychology of the majority of billionaires. See Carly Fiorina and her 'good friend' Steve Jobs for an example. If you're a billionaire, then other billionaires are the ones that have the most of what you value and therefore the best targets. Stealing from the poor is far more effort - you need to steal from loads of them.
And that's the governments job :)
Re:Nonsense (Score:5, Insightful)
I think you need to partake in a bit more of that 'education' thing, because you are sounding like a repligoon who built a business using government business loans that requires use of the government created infrastructure to function and yet claims you did everything yourself without any help from the government.
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Someone else who is also a billionaire – they don't want anything from you!
Anyone who claims that has no understanding of the psychology of the majority of billionaires. See Carly Fiorina and her 'good friend' Steve Jobs for an example. If you're a billionaire, then other billionaires are the ones that have the most of what you value and therefore the best targets. Stealing from the poor is far more effort - you need to steal from loads of them.
Not just billionaires, problems can happen between people with any wealth gap. I'm nearing the point where interacting with people on the lower end of the income ladder than me is just irritating. Frequently they want something from me and give me basically nothing in return. They come to my apartment, want to use the pool, eat my food, drink my beer, and bring nothing. No food, no beer, nada. I know their situation- they're poor. I don't expect much. Just give me a gesture of appreciation. When you
Easy, make them less rich (Score:5, Insightful)
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You are right, wealth did not start trickling downwards, just as Obama predicted.
Rather than salivating about raising taxes on rich, there is much easier solution. Much much easier to understand and execute. Stop collecting taxes from the poor and middle class. I would say middle class family is the one which earns less than $300K.
Reduction of the tax burden for the little man and middle class would be felt and would appreciated much more than increase of taxes for super-rich.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Higher taxes on the superrich also discourage absurdly high salaries
Why would we want to do that? Pulling money out of businesses is one way wealth gets redistributed naturally.
hoarding all the new wealth.
Forcing rich people to keep their wealth in their business m
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You seem to be clinging to the same trickle-down economic theories that have created this mess. How is more of the same supposed to lead to a different result?
The GP was recommending policies that seem to have worked in the New Deal era. Forcing rich people to keep their wealth in their business led to business expansion instead of high scores racked up in Swiss bank accounts.
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Forcing rich people to keep their wealth in their business makes this worse.
So put a cap on the amount of cash a business is allowed to have in the bank, forcing them to spend it on investments, return it as dividends, buy back stock, etc etc. When the money moves it can be taxed.
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When they leave, their economic niche will be open for someone else to occupy. Lather, rinse, repeat, until you have the economic niches filled by people who understand that they're part of a society, not parasites.
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I would say middle class family is the one which earns less than $300K.
The government disagrees with you. They think anybody that actually has a job is rich. Anybody that has never had a job is poor (but not somebody that had a job and then lost it, they are still rich and not entitled to long term benefits). And with the governments current policies, it won't be long before there IS only poor and rich, and there will probably be a lot more poor when people figure out they can live a more fulfilling lifestyle by being poor than working their but off being "rich".
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I would say middle class family is the one which earns less than $300K.
The government disagrees with you. They think anybody that actually has a job is rich. Anybody that has never had a job is poor (but not somebody that had a job and then lost it, they are still rich and not entitled to long term benefits). And with the governments current policies, it won't be long before there IS only poor and rich, and there will probably be a lot more poor when people figure out they can live a more fulfilling lifestyle by being poor than working their but off being "rich".
Wow, you make being poor sound like a great deal. So why are you still working? Is it just personal pride? Or are things maybe not quite as extreme as you make them seem?
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Earning more than 200k a year puts you in the 90th percentile. More then 400k is the top 1%.
The problem is the people who earn more than a million a year pay less in total tax dollars than someone earning 400k a year.
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I don't think "earn" means the same thing to you and the previous AC. Of course, 1M of "earned income" on a W2 form gets taxed more than 400K on a W2. But, those 1M and more incomes are often structured in other tax-advantaged ways that end up taxed as long-term capital gains.
Even more, the rich often can defer taxes indefinitely with unrealized gains on the assets they hold. These assets are essentially the same form as what they would use to store value anyway (you don't park millions in a regular FDIC d
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Most societies would be more than willing to help ease the terrible burden of an abundance of assets. Raising the taxes on high incomes and capital gains would help reverse the Reagan-era onwards trend of wealth redistribution towards the higher income and wealth segments of society. We now know that wealth did not start trickling downwards, and grownups need to step in to correct the mistakes.
Raising taxes on high incomes and capital gains does nothing but take money from the rich and the middle class and give it to the government. Why would we want to do that? Isn't letting people keep the money they earned, regardless of their income level ALWAYS going to be better than taking it away and giving it to the government?
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Only if you think that the government makes the money it receives disappear through a black hole rather than doing any good with it. Many would disagree.
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,p>Isn't letting people keep the money they earned, regardless of their income level ALWAYS going to be better than taking it away and giving it to the government?
No, why would you think such a thing?
Re:Easy, make them less rich (Score:5, Insightful)
No, because this way I don't have to spend time shopping for a private army to protect me, and know I won't starve to death even if I were to lose my job.
stop the handouts to the rich (Score:5, Interesting)
Many dogs, if given unlimited food, will eat themselves to death. Yes, really. These dogs have no restraint and will consume food until their stomachs cannot physically hold any more. The stomach may rupture, and if not treated quickly, that is fatal.
I think of most of the super rich as suffering from the same sort of problem, only with money instead of food. They will earn, steal, and horde wealth beyond all sense. Even if it causes great harm to many others, damages society, they can't stop themselves. An example is wage theft. We have many people working in the restaurant business, for extremely low pay. But it seems the low pay isn't low enough to suit some owners, who bully their workers into working a few extra hours off the clock, delay paychecks, miscalculate the pay in their favor, and other tricks. It might be somewhat understandable if the franchises were struggling, but often they are doing very well indeed, don't really need more money. Nor is the owner hurting for money. Why then do they do it? They don't have good reason. Reasons of the "trickle down" variety are wrong. It simply is not possible for one person to use vast wealth efficiently. They can blow thousands on luxury conveniences that save a few minutes here and there, but it is not good value.
Meanwhile, the cheated workers must spend even more time struggling to get by on extremely limited means. The old expression "time is money" is so true for the poor. A lot of expense can be eliminated by burning more time. Dishwasher broken? Wash dishes by hand! Water cut off? Lug your laundry to a laundromat, use paper plates and plastic spoons, and as for showers, well, can rent a cheap motel room or visit the Y, but not every day. Instead, keep the deodorants and perfumes handy, and wear a cap to hide your hair. Toilets can be flushed with buckets of rainwater. Car repossessed? Take public transport, or bike or walk. The poor are forced to work around all kinds of things that the middle class take for granted, and ingenious and actually better and healthier though some of the workarounds are, it all takes time. What might they be able to accomplish if they didn't have to spend so much time scrapping and scrounging for every penny?
We should keep constant watch on the rich, and rein them in. Instead, we practically worship them. That's not good for anyone. People think the rich are really special, leaders and doers who've been rewarded with great wealth for their hard work, think it's all merited. Think they're John Galt. Some are, no doubt. However, when such status is given to someone who doesn't merit it, the result is almost always bad. That's where we as a society have fallen down. We let these undeserving rich get away with murder. In all the fraud and cheating that resulted in the Great Recession, only Madoff ended up in prison. This Angelo Mozilo should have gone to jail, instead he was only banned from ever running a company again, and allowed to keep much of the wealth he had stolen, and live on in freedom. Sure, he was fined a record amount, a fact they like to play up to try to show how tough they are on rich criminals, but it didn't reduce him to poverty, far from it. Since then, a few more perps have been put away, but it took years to do it. Meanwhile, little people are routinely dragged through the mud over petty debts. Some consequences would be okay if the big people faced the same consequences, but they don't.
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All they need to do... (Score:5, Interesting)
... is hire someone to manage their wealth and disguise themselves and go live among normal people to "cure" themselves of their own self imposed exile. AKA go live like a normal person instead. Wealth is something you can leave behind at any moment, there's no law of nature saying you need to be around your own wealth. AKA think of it like going on vacation.
People on this planet are so stupid.
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On the flip side (Score:2)
alas, they can't afford pay attention... let alone for therapy.
Try being poor (Score:4, Insightful)
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This attitude is precisely why rich people don't want to be around poor. The human mind is pretty strange, because even when everything seems good by pretty much any conceivable metric, you still typically have stuff you worry and need to talk about. It won't help if someone just dismisses all of it as non-issues.
Re:Try being poor (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Try being poor (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the rich don't want to be around the poor because of their preconceived notions about the poor.
I think that's total bullshit.
I'm not rich (to that level) and I'm aware that my relative wealth makes my unemployed friends uncomfortable. They don't resent it, they don't think I flaunt it, they're just painfully aware that I can (and am happy to) take them to a sodding good restaurant and pay for everyone's meal.
They don't want or like charity. They can't reciprocate. So do they refuse to dine out with me, take on an expense they can't afford, feel shit about themselves by letting me treat them or force me to compromise my own lifestyle to fit in their budget?
These are friends so we find ways to compromise in which everybody stays happy, but even the gap between 'well paid' and 'unemployed' causes social frictions.
Is it so hard to imagine that someone with 'never work again' levels of wealth has the same challenges even with their own friends?
Now add in the people that have no integrity, no self-esteem, high levels of greed and no compunction about pretending to be a friend purely to enjoy a lifestyle they can't personally afford. Sure, you know your existing friends aren't like that, but what about new people you meet.
It's easy (ish) to build positive relationships with your socio-economic peers, but there's a ton of material - fictional and otherwise - out there that explores the challenges around bridging those tiers.
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It is a non-issue. Thousands of people die every day due to not having enough money for food, medical care, etc. To go around pity trolling because you're wealthy is the worst sort of first-world problem imaginable. All the aforementioned people would have loved to hve the "stress" of being financially secure for life.
Even rich friends are often not your friends... (Score:5, Insightful)
Another problem is that if you ever lose your wealth, you tend to lose your rich friends too. Other rich people might not be your friends because of the money, but because they're essentially just networking in order to get business opportunities. When you lose your wealth you become useless to them. I've personally noticed that the only real friends you have tend to be the ones you found in college. You might find a few from high school too.
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I have observed that to be true going to a gathering held by a wealthy friend of mine. He is wealthy, but most people attending were not. Also, most people there are people he had known since high school, prior to him getting wealthy.
Of course, if you are born into wealth, your upbringing may not afford you that option, since everyone new and old may know you as 'wealthy' and have the potential for ulterior motives that go with it.
However, it's not wealth that is really isolating, it's the lifestyle choic
Just look at your own lives. (Score:2)
So how many of the people here regularly deal with people in the bottom 70% on a regular basis. Unless traveling to remote parts of the world not that often.
So why would you expect America's or Europe's 1% from doing the same thing?
$22,000 / year is the 1% (Score:2)
Specifically, 99% of people live on less than $22,000 per year. So if your incom is higher than $22,000, you are the 1%. Whatever you say of "the 1%" you are saying of yourself.
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Maybe if you're talking about "in the entire world", but the reference of "the 1%" usually refers to just in the US. It can refer to just in another country as well, usually modified with the country name like "the 1% of Canada", but I've never heard of it referring to the entire world's population without specifically mentioning th
Wah not 1% of Orange County. No true scotsman (Score:3)
I could give you the number for people in the United States and you'd exclude yourself because you're not the top 1% of Orange County. If you are richer than 99% of people, then yeah, you're rich. Deal with it. Somebody else is even richer? Cry me a river.
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"Specifically, 99% of people live on less than $22,000 per year."
I guess that must be a worldwide figure or something.
I saw one Money site that said you have to have household income of around $400,000 to be in the top 1% (at least in the USA)
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I earn about 80k and I used to dedicate 20% of my income and most of my weekends to running a soup kitchen in a shanty-town along with a couple other volunteers. The local narco-lord eventually moved in with assistance from political point-men, our lives were threatened both on the "legally ruin your life" and "shoot your head off" sense, and now it's a front for drug dealing. This, in the words of one of the point-men, was backed from all the way up by a ridiculously powerful and wealthy Cabinet minister w
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No, you're probably in the top .5% actually. But, you know, fuck those people who are really impoverished or aren't in your line of sight, right? Irony, I see it.
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Problems are problems (Score:5, Insightful)
Giving away money isn't the solution, any more than chopping your foot off solves the foot issue. You can't buy yourself out of the feeling people are judging you.
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Mod parent up!
This is completely true. Everyone had problems. Thing is there's always someone else in the world with worse problems. If that invalidates problems then the only person with valid problems is some North Korean with no arms and legs currently on fire and living in a barrel of radioactive waste in a prison camp.
It is of course very hard to feel sympathy for a billionaire who's problem is that he's a billionaire. Thing is your brain one's brain doesn't care and provided one generally had enough t
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If you read the thread - it's not that it's a feeling that people are judging you. It's fact that many are. Some, in a "good" way like, "They must be smart, good, and wise because they have money. I want to be like and near them." The others, well, read this thread. I sold my business and acquired some wealth. No, not billions or anything like that - not even a half billion - not even a quarter of a billion.
While I don't mind taxes (and even think my tax rate is too low) the initial taxes due were a real ey
Hanauer (Score:5, Interesting)
If they're not this guy: http://www.politico.com/magazi... [politico.com]
If they're not that guy, fuck 'em. If the system is making them hyper-privileged and it's wrecking their relationships and making it impossible to live as a human being, it's on THEM to change the system because the system is there to serve them.
They're guilty for a reason. They don't need therapy, they need reform and rehab, and they are the ones in a position to change things.
It's morally wrong to give 'em therapy and soothe their little feelings without addressing the larger problem. They're unhappy because they are BAD PEOPLE.
What a pile of absolute tosh (Score:2)
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Re:What a pile of absolute tosh (Score:5, Interesting)
My brother does this. He pays for meals but I find it awkward because he'll use his tip as a bludgeon. If service is bad, he'll not only refuse to tip but will sometimes refuse to ever set foot in the place again. If you're good, you might get a fifty dollar tip on a ten dollar pizza.
I don't think he's trying to impress me, or not primarily. I think it's a Darwinian thing where he's trying to improve the breed by punishing and rewarding.
Too bad this only underscores a sense that he is the puppetmaster managing and directing all his servants, passing judgement upon them because that's his duty. Put like that it sounds like the most extreme entitled assholery.
I'm poor, and I'm capable of getting bad service and thinking 'oh well, guess I'd better do some kind of tip, not like I'm special and there to throw my weight around. Maybe they were just having a crap day'. I guess if I was rich I would be more likely to assume I was there to pass out punishments and rewards.
"Rubbing it in your face" might be preferable because it implies someone posturing and doing a dominance behavior thing. This 'improving the breed' stuff, it's like dominance is already so completely assumed that the only remaining question is how you manage your slaves. And it seems to sneak into the behavior of relatively rational, non-evil people.
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Your brother is an asshole. By the way, unless he's also an idiot, he's probably loaning money all the time - that's what investing and, even, just leaving it in a bank is doing.
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Oops - wait - your brother wasn't the 'won't lend money' person - my bad. Still true though, only an idiot wouldn't loan money. It's a rather lucrative process.
Out of the box idea (Score:5, Insightful)
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Don't drive around in Bentleys, Lambos, or those ugly as sin Mercedes SUVs. You don't need a 10,000 sq ft, 6 bedroom house when you have no kids. Live comfortably but not showy and don't advertise the fact that you are loaded and you won't have the problem of wondering whether people are only interested in your for your money because no one will realize you have money. But therein lies the problem: most of these people WANT others to know they have money.
Most of the people buying those things are NOT rich. They are TEMPORARILY rich due to lottery, rap album, sports career, pop album, inheritance, but within decades if not years, they will be broke again. Living beyond your means is the new American pastime.
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This. A trillion times this.
The whining of the rich about how difficult it is to be them is nothing more than a weak post hoc rationalization of their hypocrisy. They WANT people to know they are wealthy, because it is not merely the exercise of wealth, but its ostentatious display, that translates to power. The rich would justify that display as simply the consequence of wanting to live well with their "hard-earned" gains. But this is overwhelmingly not the case.
I once dated a trust-fund baby. He was
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Most of the rich actually don't show off. Sure, they like luxury and comfort : why stay cramped in economy class when you can go first class, or even book a private jet?
Did you ever meet some rich people without knowing it at first? It is often quite an unsettling experience. You start talking with him like you talk with "normal" people, he is nice and interesting, nothing special about his appearance : maybe he has a watch you've never seen before, or well fit clothes, but nothing that catches the eyes. It
Not too surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
This is true all over. How often do posters on this site kick back and have a beer after their friends come home from their job on the lawn service crew, or as an auto mechanic? Are most of your friends in technical positions? Do most of your friends have interests that align with your own? Same sort of thing.
People responding to this article act like they are fonts of egalitarianism when if you look at it they are probably just as judgmental (up and down, the responses being a case in point) as the purported billionaires in TFA.
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In all too many cases, I totally agree. Here in Portland, the whole brogrammer/hipster thing is in full-force... most of the tech types I have worked with in the past (and now) only hang out with other, similarly-successful professionals with similar tastes.
However, this is not always the case. As evidence I present, well, my situation. I commute into the city from a small town in the foothills of the Coastal Range... I rent the place. My neighbor across the street is a single mother who works at the grocer
Less Money, Mo' Problems (Score:2)
Slashdot, what have we become? (Score:5, Interesting)
Coming into money, especially quickly (e.g. winning the lottery) has been shown time and time again to leave people in a MUCH WORSE situation than they started from because they don't know the first thing about handling that much money responsibly. As far as the issue of finding people with similar problems, isn't that just part of life? My wife and I don't have kids, and that makes it really difficult to find other people/couples we can connect with. It's the same thing.
So quit bitching about how clueless rich people are. You're just as clueless about them as they are about you.
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> This is like the class warfare version of race-baiting.
Class warfare *is* taking place, mind you.
The rich are winning.
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Noblesse Oblige (Score:5, Insightful)
Sci-fi author John Scalzi has published an entertaining take-down of the cluelessness in this article.
One thing Scalzi has missed in his screed is this:
Noblesse oblige is a French phrase literally meaning "nobility obliges". It is the concept that nobility extends beyond mere entitlements and requires the person with such status to fulfill social responsibilities, particularly in leadership roles.
And it's one of the things that's missing from a lot of the 1%ers. This society made it possible for them to be 1%ers. They have a debt to society. And like the Lanisters – who always pay their debts – so should they.
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And it's one of the things that's missing from a lot of the 1%ers. This society made it possible for them to be 1%ers. They have a debt to society. And like the Lanisters – who always pay their debts – so should they.
Didn't society also give us that same opportunity, so don't we also owe that debt? Or do we pay that debt back by paying taxes, just like they do?
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Re:Noblesse Oblige (Score:5, Insightful)
A person born in a ghetto with one parent making 15k a year does not have the same opportunities as someone born in the Hamptons with a trust fund in the six-digits from birth. Similarly two middle-class people that just so happen to have skill sets with differing levels of economic demand do not get the same opportunities either.
So the answer to this:
Didn't society also give us that same opportunity
is no.
"Whatever", indeed. (Score:5, Insightful)
Sorry, John, but if you don't "like" the implications of replacing group X with group Y in a sentence, the problem exists in your own wetware, not with the underlying premise. You don't get to discriminate against "the right" groups with impunity just because it happens to better fit your world-view. Nor does the whiteness of that cohort have any relevance to the analogy (and in fact, your mentioning it actually commits the offense you accuse Kasperkevic of) - If you describe someone as "hung like a bull", their lack of actual bull-ness simply doesn't matter in the least; not even if that person makes their living as a professional butcher.
Kasperkevic didn't intend to literally equate the struggles of the rich with those of blacks (something you, as a professional author, should have grasped); rather, she used it as a literary device to highlight the fact that calling for lynching any group, whether black or Jewish or rich, should offend us as a violation of basic human dignity.
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This post is only interesting if you have a turtle's grasp of logic.
On a side note, nobody mentioned lynching in either article that I could find. Here's the context in which the author introduced the rich/black analogy.
"“You can come up with lot of words and sayings about inheritors, not one of them is positive: spoiled brat, born with a silver spoon in their mouth, trust fund babies, all these things,” she said, adding that it’s “easy to scapegoat the rich”."
Yeah, the poor s
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Remember that little thing called "Occupy Wall Street"? You seriously want to defend that hill, to claim that no one has called for lynching the rich?
This post is only interesting if you have a turtle's grasp of logic.
First, WTF does that even mean? But phrasing aside, I get your point, and largely agree - What I wrote should have gone without saying: If we consider discrimination bad, it doesn't matter which group you fill-in-the-blan
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Re:"Whatever", indeed. (Score:5, Insightful)
"she directly makes a comparison by encouraging people to replace the word "rich" with "black" to see the problem with how she says people speak of the rich."
Sorry, John, but if you don't "like" the implications of replacing group X with group Y in a sentence, the problem exists in your own wetware, not with the underlying premise. You don't get to discriminate against "the right" groups with impunity just because it happens to better fit your world-view. Nor does the whiteness of that cohort have any relevance to the analogy (and in fact, your mentioning it actually commits the offense you accuse Kasperkevic of)
Kasperkevic didn't intend to literally equate the struggles of the rich with those of blacks (something you, as a professional author, should have grasped); rather, she used it as a literary device to highlight the fact that calling for lynching any group, whether black or Jewish or rich, should offend us as a violation of basic human dignity.
What are you talking about? discriminating against black people is NOTHING like the discrimination against the rich. First of all the rich as a group can do a whole lot more against discrimination against them then black people as a community. The rich have gotten away with MUCH MUCH more grievous harm and the black community has been punished for much less reason than the rich.
Which isn't to say that every rich person deserves to get their hands cut off or anything but their "struggle" is nothing like a racial struggle and bringing up the struggle of a racial minority like the black community only serves to make the black struggle seem disingenuous. The point of the comparison was not about literal lynching. No one thinks it's ok to literally lynch the rich. Which is the only way such a comparison might not be wildly offensive. The comparison was about how the rich are perceived and treated which is NOTHING like how a racial minority is treated or perceived.
Re: (Score:3)
Nonsense. Her point is a stupid example. By her reasoning, I shouldn't say "sex offenders should all be jailed" because if I replaced "sex offenders" with "black people" in that sentence it would sound really bad. Talking about groups of people isn't a bad thing, it is difficult to have any kind of meaningful conversation about society without doing it.
This is just a weak attempt to use political correctness to defend the rich from any kind of moral culpability. Being rich isn't an affliction. It is a state
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Right - And just as not all black people place the race card at every opportunity - Not all rich people use their wealth to the detriment of others.
I in no way mean to imply that we should feel sorry for the rich - But Scalzi's rebuttal reads like the worst kind of hypocritical "You may only hate who I hate" rant.
Being mega-rich is a sickness in itself (Score:2, Interesting)
While I understand "you can't tell if people are friends with you or just with your money," at the same time I also feel that if you are extraordinarily wealthy and you're not gladly dumping excess money to your friends, you're not a very good friend. After buying a nice house in a nice part of a city I love and putting enough away that I could have ~$100k/year in spending money, there is literally nothing else I would rather spend money on than bringing the people I love up to the same level. I know a lo
Re: (Score:3)
You can't do this dumping, your friends become your whores. Their basic survival becomes dependent on servicing you as soon as you 'bring them up to your level' which means they have the same budget, otherwise what are you even talking about?
You can only throw money around like that among people who have roughly the same amount of money, otherwise the power dynamic changes radically and alarmingly. You've literally explained how you'd set people up to be completely dependent on you giving them money to be a
Re: (Score:2)
I don't think they intended handing their friends paychecks. The way I took it, and I would do it, would be to actually give my friends/relatives an equal share of the wealth, such that all are equals. I have a number of siblings but very few friends, any kind of significant lottery win could be split equally among them and result in a huge change in quality of life for all.
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He's straight up full of shit.
Simple solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Dr. Nitehawk's reccomendation. (Score:2)
Get bent and get over it.
That will be $10,000.
Painting with the same brush (Score:2)
fff (Score:4, Insightful)
Stated problem: People don't like me because I'm rich
Actual problem: I choose to be a complete asshole and fuck people over to become disgustingly rich.
Rich people therapist: Will say absolutely anything to make disgustingly rich person feel better about themselves so long as they get paid
Solutions:
- take away the tax dodges that let the super-rich get or stay super-rich
- raise taxes on those same super-rich and lower the tax burden on the middle class
I had a friend I knew before he was wealthy.... (Score:2)
You just don't understand money. (Score:2)
Billionaires think BIG. They hang out with other billionaires because that's where the money is. If you're a billionaire, everyone you know, especially the other billionaires, are trying to figure out ways to get your billions. And you hang out with them because you're trying to get their billions. Billions isn't enough any more than millions was. The one who dies with the most wins!
Rich Implies Greed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Yeah, its called the Republican party. Where the super rich are at the top and those at the bottom worship the rich.