It strikes me that most of life’s most exquisite comforts can be had with ~$10M or so.
- Apartment in the center of a world class city (luxury condo if in the Second World).
- Holiday home.
- Nice vacations and gourmet restaurants.
- Model-tier gf.
The virgin financial docs sleuthing to suggest Bad Orange Man isn’t a billionaire vs. the Chad PHYSIOGNOMY proof of the same.
Conversely, though, it seems to me that you can’t do very much at all extra between about $10M and $10B.
Only significant exception that comes to mind is space tourism, for which you currently need ~$20M (so need to be at least $10Ms range). But that sort of proves the general point. And Papa Musk should lower that number a couple orders of magnitude anyway over the next decade, to something commensurate with taking a cruise on a Russian nuclear-powered icebreaker in the Arctic (~$40k).
I suppose another example is that owning and operating a private jet becomes realistic at $100M, whereas at $10M it would be highly profligate. But, again, that’s small peas in the grand scheme of things.
To radically transform the world – to start influencing major areas of research, funding insurrectionist and irredentist movements, etc. – you really need to be in the $10B+ range.
Bloomberg gives Soros wealth at $8B, but other sources peg it at closer to $25B. Musk of course is at ~$200B. He also has singularly big ambitions, such as Mars colonization, which will really require trillions.
Sean McMeekin estimates that the Germans gave the Bolsheviks 50 million gold marks (=$1B today) which would confirm the point.
Yes, you can strike lucky with more targeted spending (NRx/rationalist-sphere people make a big deal of “leverage”). But as with making money itself, you need both brains and luck to find that moonshot. German attempts to foment instability in Britain by way of Ireland failed.
The LDNR exists in significant part thanks to the semi-private efforts of Konstantin Malofeev. Another example of money “well leveraged” (= producing real world results).
But for every such effort, you have ten that involve throwing money into a hole. Bill Gates’ efforts to find the next African Einstein? Press X for doubt.
Scattershot policy in which you fund many different groups and people in the expectation that some of them strike gold. This describes Jacob Schiff and Soros. But you do need a lot of money for that.
You could have probably bumped up research in radical life extension forwards by at least a couple of years if you had invested hundreds of millions in it a decade ago. (Now the commercial private sector is taking it up, making it increasingly moot). But most billionaires didn’t get to be billionaires by throwing their money around on moonshots. They are spiritual normies. Musk and Soros, in their own ways, are not. But they’re the exception, not the rule.
Anyhow, what I’m really getting at here is that there’s a big filter between the mere millionaires and the billionaires.
Seems to me that most normies who do “make it” leave it that and enjoy life poolside. It takes true autism after reaching that point to trundle on into the billions.
But that, plus vision beyond those billions, seems to be a very rare thing.
PS. Bezos is also a normie. His main distinction from the normie normie is that he at least recognizes his normieness, but tries to disguise it by emulating Musk.
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There is a touch of misogyny in that framework and it doesn’t work. Many people facing the predicament of living in 2021 don’t understand that a biologically natural way of living is the only way. Call it “normies” or whatever, it works. All else is nonsense that doesn’t work. You can wish otherwise, but it won’t make it work.
Our biology is not over and it can never be. Departing from it is stupidity, no matter what PISSA scores, IQ, or gurus say. A simple human biology: boy and girl, they have children, raise them, life moves on. That’s it, no monetary figures or space travel are required.
Don’t try to redefine life. Scoring it with money or anything else is a distraction. It will always be that way. For those who depart from a normal life, a few separate chutes are available to slide to hell. Some are even entertaining, the resulting hell is not.
The cryonicist Thomas Donaldson published this back in the late 1970’s, and it deserves a look as a speculation about future trends in personal wealth:
https://www.scribd.com/document/59655111/History-to-3400-AD
Bezos is taking his time. He still hasn’t put anything in orbit.
Rocketlab beat him on a shoestring budget. Most likely, even Astra and ABL will beat him.
THINK BIGGER
THE AERION AS2 – THE WORLD’S FIRST SUPERSONIC PRIVATE JET
https://magellanjets.com/travel/aerion-as2-taking-flight-2/
Just how much did the US and the West spend in total on democracy promotion in Ukraine between 1991 and 2014? However much it was, this seems like money that was EXTREMELY well-spent given that it permanently and irrevocably pulled 90+% of Ukraine outside of Russia’s orbit.
Also, this might be an argument in favor of greater wealth redistribution, no? If one doesn’t really need all that much money beyond $10 million in order to live comfortably, one could raise the question of whether incentives to innovate and whatnot are seriously going to be hurt if billionaires are simply going to be forced to become multimillionaires (net worth of $10 million to $100 million) instead.
$5B. Well-leveraged. But still, even $5B isn’t trivial. Reinforces my point.
https://twitter.com/Alexey_Pushkov/status/468318595613982720
Ngmi
One needn’t have money. As the she-witch said in Lord of the Rings–“Even the smallest-minded person can change the future, Fro-Joe Bidens.”
Bronze Age Pervert also insists a lot on the necessity to clearly distinguish between rich people and gazillionaires, but for other reasons. A lot of blanket attacks on “the rich” are, upon closer inspection, only justified with regard to real fat cat oligarchs. Those are the ones who corrupt the system, instigate wars, break national banks, etc. A few hundred families worldwide, one thousand at most. Round them all up in one night!
Ukraine meansured in B
Iraq and Afghanistan measured in T
White privilege indeed
Perhaps in Moscow. In the US it’s chump change. In the current rates environment it will provide you with $100-200K annual income. It’s a nice middle class lifestyle but nothing special (or poverty in SF.) Apartment in the center of a world class city, holiday homes, etc.? Not if you have a family.
Congratulations, you finally managed to convince me that the talk about Lenin’s German gold is a bunch of baloney. A starving, exhausted Germany gave a random nobody in Russia ONE. BILLION. DOLLARS. Yeah, I find this totally credible.
I’m inclined to dislike anyone who has illegals mowing their lawn. Of course, that includes a lot of middle class people.
Well, it was the same Germany that sent the Zimmerman Telegram, and when exposed didn’t deny it.
That would be if you’re in passive investments like Treasuries. Ten million dollars can provide an average of roughly half a million in annual income (averaged over the years), but it requires active management with a professional who knows what they are doing and, shifting the assets through preferred stocks, corporate bonds, ETF’s and so forth. It helps that the percentage of your portfolio that goes into management fees is usually scaled and shrinks as the portfolio grows.
This does require that you and your manager keep an eye on things and make changes when investments are going south. Unfortunately a lot of people won’t even look at their 401 because they are afraid to see it has dropped.
It also means you have to take the long view and not panic when there are down periods. That’s one of the advantages people with a lot money have, swallowing a hit of say 30% is a lot easier when you still have 70% of a whole bunch left. Middle class people don’t have the same comfort margin.
“Seems to me that most normies who do “make it” leave it that and enjoy life poolside. It takes true autism after reaching that point to trundle on into the billions.”
This would explain the plain multi billionaire wife phenomenon.
Sometimes it’s not “trundling” on but rather taking massive risk. A normie in Zuckerberg’s situation, for instance, would have cashed in on Facebook early on but he held out and that catapulted him to the multi billionaire level.
To steal one dollar, you have to spend ten.
Bezos dreamed about space since he was a kid, no? As him being behind, I think it has to do with New Shepard/BE-3 being hydrogen powered. It’s more difficult to work with liquid hydrogen vs kerosene or methane. But he will get 460 seconds ISP vs 380 seconds for Musks’ Raptors and 350 seconds for Merlins in vacuum. That’s like 20% payload increase for equivalent rocket mass.
I’ve always liked the way Chinatown (1974) handled that concept:
It depends on age. Ten million wouldn’t be nearly enough to last a lifetime for someone in their twenties with respect to having an apartment in a world-class city plus country home, enjoying theater or opera at whim, travel in comfort, etc. for life. Over 50 years it would be 200k a year, minus taxes. But achieving this when one is in one’s fifties would be another story.
Ten million also won’t make that someone a plural entity.
Bullshit. They can’t even afford a properly designed web site that loads its images as required and the content is full of dirt ignorant misspelling. If that’s the mentality that produced the 120-million US private jet, expect another Edsel.
Note that it, however, was other people’s money. Another advantage of being a well-connected billionaire.
If you can only generate 1-2% returns on an investment portfolio, one wonders how you were smart enough to get $10 mil. in the first place.
From the article above
1 gold mark = $20 bidenbux then? Seems a bit low.
Perfect personal wealth should be low enough to be able to live in anonymity. Living the life of the upper middle class in rich countries, only without any financial problems. You can’t have it better.
People tend to undervalue peace of mind.
Screwing over the Winklevoss twins already meant that he was not a normie in terms risk aversion. Also the Winklevosses were awarded $80M, but then they went to court again despite knowing that they could lose it all. (In the event, they were awarded the same amount again.) Also instead of just enjoying it, they went on to another risky business venture, investing in crypto and building a crypto exchange.
I think it’s simply that most people cannot make it to $10M, and only a fraction of those will make it to $100M, fewer still to $1B, etc.
Regarding the wives, is it not just a question of whether the person is famous? I know a few fairly unknown small scale millionaires (like UHNWI category or below, so like $5-100M), and few of them have a hot wife. Even in such cases the wife is aging together with the guy.
But if you are famous despite only having $10M, then you have a much better chance of having a hot wife, mostly because you are famous, too.
Didn’t understand the logic of the multi billionaire’s wife being ugly.
Beware the shaman in the shadows! I know a moderately rich person. He invests much of his fortune into that seedy network of governments, intelligence agencies, billionaires’ foundations and NGOs that constitutes the humanitarian and regime changing arm of the Western global power. He has a few pet causes that he passionately follows. Nowadays it is Myanmar and some countries in Africa I can’t remember, and last time I saw him he also went on about the plight of the Uighurs. Anyway, what is funny is that he runs every major investment or decision past his acupuncturist. I’m not in on the fine details, but I think astrological charts are inspected, and then various outcomes are divined by tossing yarrow sticks and looking up corresponding hexagrams. The acupuncturist is some random guy operating in a shack between a Thai massage parlor and a fast food joint. He went to see him years back with a chronic throat infection or something.
Empirical observation, exaggerated for humorous effect. In reality, Bezos, Brin, Gates, Musk, and Zuckerberg each has a middle class man’s wife. Page’s is perhaps the prettiest of the tech billionaire wives, and even she has a somewhat crooked smile. In fact, I know a number of upper middle class men with drop-dead beautiful wives, so it is a mystery why the tech billionaires can’t do better. Prediction: our kind host can do better, even before he “makes it”.
Apparently natural manly charisma is at least as important as millions, billions, or even fame, since there are upper middle class men with wives more beautiful than those of typical movie stars or tech billionaires. And perhaps rich and famous men are selecting for something besides beauty and charm. Movie stars tend to marry other movie stars, for example. But I can’t figure out what tech billionaires are trying to marry.
Women at sperm banks will often turn down a rich professional donor if they find out that they do work with computers. Being an unattractive autist is a bad reproductive strategy. Even money often doesn’t fix the problem.
On questions of heredity and physiognomy, women are more based than men are.
Lol, I was trying to avoid the transification of language and failed. My wife, a foreigner, noticed this change in the English language (use of they rather than he or she when applied to an unidentified person) since she came over in the nineties.
If I had 10 Billion plus cash, honestly i’d just start a small state. Buy up a million acres of land in Siberia and Central Asia and then settle people there. Not just any people though.
I’d take the sperm and eggs of the most beautiful, noble and brilliant europeans, breed them through surrogacy and create an ideal population.
Then i’d settle them and give them an amish-jewish like faith. Super patriarchy, eugenics and nationalism. Over time they’d grow from a few hundred or thousand to millions. The Afrikaaners for example today number nearly 4 million, yet they arose from just 200-400 people about 300 years ago.
Through generations of eugenic breeding conducted by similarly minded foundations left by my will, they’d eventually develop into a master race of high IQ, high testosterone and beautiful ubermensch.
Once they reach a critical mass, they’ll be firmly on the path to taking over the world. Because while they are intelligent, high T, beautiful and ethnocentric, the rest of world is and continues to grow ever more dim, low T, ugly and liberal.
Just 11 million ugly, cowardly Ashkenazi Jews with an IQ of 107 dominate the world today. There’s no reason why 5-6 million beautiful, daring German-Slavic hybrids with 120 average IQ can’t dominate the world similarly. Russian ruthlessness and courage combined with German intelligence and work ethic. 120 IQ should probably be the average IQ as a population with more IQ than that might be excessively prone to mental illness like depression, bipolar, aspergers and autism.
They’ll be a god race to the rest of mankind, and I would be their founder. A charlemagne of sorts.
Based. I recommend the formation of a secret society of the Elders of Siberia, which can decide upon the optimal time at which to acquire nukes.
Just find a nice European-ancestry girl and have a bunch of kids. There really isn’t much more you can do unless you’re one of the super-rich guys from the meme.
Seriously, though, there’s no guarantee they’d follow your will after you’re gone. People do their own thing (more formally: people follow their own inclinations rather than those we wish to impose on them), and your bunch of 120-IQ white people might decide to emigrate to other countries in search of better opportunities, hire a bunch of less-bright people to do their dirty work, or stray from your faith as wealth makes them hedonistic. Jewish-Amish faiths are hard to build from scratch, and culture is always affected by the people around it. Besides, who’s to say they wouldn’t pick up the bad qualities of the Russian and German cultures? (I’ll refrain from listing them out of deference to our host, but every culture has its pluses and minuses.) With a mean of 120 you’re going to have a much larger portion of autistics and neurotics and the like (look at Ashkenazi Jews-there’s probably a reason nobody’s bred a group with an IQ of 120 yet), and they’ll be smart enough to make trouble.
There’s quite a few layers to the meme, as is often the case.
First of all there’s the joke that spergy tech billionaires don’t get cute wives. (Though, as said above, they tend to resemble the middle class wife more than the poor man’s wife.) TBH I think those guys got where they are by being very bright in addition to the usual ruthlessness and maniacal drive that get you rich in every era, and with the dynast’s eye they want a clever heir. Also of course there’s the late-20th-century feminist idea that you should be attracted to intelligent women, which probably significantly affected these guys, and the fact that people like to overvalue traits they have so they feel good, so they think IQ is the most important thing in the world. Why wouldn’t they–they’ve got lots of it, so having lots of it makes them the pinnacle of humanity, right? OK, but they’re rich–they could get beauty and brains, right? Yeah, but these guys suck at romance, so it’s whoever’s around.
Back to the meme: Also note the nasty expression on the mildly-rich guy’s wife; he’s gone for beauty at the expense of personality, and she’s making his life a living hell. Note also that we see her revealing clothing: she’s making the most of her physical assets to grab a rich guy.
Multimillionaire to billionaire’s got his pick, of course, so he can go for beauty and personality. (Though that often backfires too IRL).
And then there’s the grumpiness of the poor man’s wife and the multibillionaire’s wife: the poor woman, of course, is poor and thus unhappy, but the multibillionaire’s wife, well, she’s married to a schlub.
There’s actually no substantial proof of German financial support of that magnitude before the October Revolution. (The Bolsheviks’ “German Gold” Revisited: An Inquiry into the 1917 Accusations – Semion Lyandres)
There is only ample documentation of significant German subsidies and bribes after the Bolsheviks had already come to power. In that arena, it competed with Entente millions that went to Anti-Bolshevik forces. Likewise, in that phase the Germans themselves also spent millions on various White factions in an attempt to establish some ties with them as precaution for a possible White victory in the civil war or as a preparation for an eventual removal of the uncomfortable Bolsheviks by the Germans themselves.
That’s why the need for religion and brainwashing.
The Jewish faith has sustained the Jewish people for 2000 years through extreme tribulations. Sure, the more liberal oriented will wash away, but that’s part of the process. Look at the Amish, the overwhelming number of young Amish choose to stay amish.
Those that had liberal tendencies left long ago, now they’re only left with ultra-religious and ethnocentric ones, just like the Jews.
That’s part of the eugenic project. And people like religions and faiths that are flattering to them. For example: you are god’s chosen people and master race(Judaism).
Though yes, it would be necessary to ensure I have successors who follow my plans for this population. I’d need to find out people with alt-right tendencies and brainwash them into a cult like fervor.
Shouldn’t be too hard to find such people. There are millions of angry young white men in need of purpose and genetically disposed to religious fanaticism. Particularly in the autistic Scandinavians and Germans. If you dedicate a bit of money, its no issue for private agents to find hundreds of such people.
Rediculous take.
Billionaires might be taking on plain Jane wives like Bezos or Musk, but do you really think they aren’t banging 10/10 models daily?
A billionaire can watch TV and decide he wants to bang the actress and fund a TV show just so he can bang her.
But space is all you can think of for chump change $10 million dollar guys are missing out on?
Elon Musk is an enigma. I’m not sure if he actually wants to go to mars or he’s just a front for DARPA.
Mars is a complete fool’s errand. Why would you want a colony in the first place? A colony must:
Must be a self sufficient land that can absorb your extra population and serve as an outpost for your civilization. (The US, Argentina, Australia)
Provide some tangible benefit (The cape colony)
Mars provides none of them. By any object criteria its a resource sink and a waste of money. Mars is a freezing, barren desert with an average surface temperature of -81 degrees. It lacks a magnetic field and its surface bombarded with deadly cosmic radiation. It has no water on its surface and its soil is filled with perchlorates. Oh, and it barely has an atmosphere. What little atmoshpere it has is 95% CO2. All its water is also huddled at the poles in a giant frozen ocean.
Thus, it is impossible for it to ever be a self sustaining colony that can absorb earth’s extra population or be a new earth as America became a new Europe and trade partner.
Any martian colony would be permanently dependent on aid from Earth to survive. Aid that is extremely costly and resource intensive considering the immense distances and logistical huddles that come with space travel.
Even if you were to sink tens of trillions of dollars over decades, no colony on mars could ever be self sufficient.
It lacks surface water, so no industry. It lacks fossil fuels so no cheap energy. Its soil is filled with perchlorates so no agriculture. The only population it can ever have is a few thousand colonists huddled in underground bunkers, surviving on bare bones food grown on soil imported from Earth.
Plus, no one would even want to go there. A handful of ”I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE” neckbeards from reddit might want to, but normal people wont’. I can’t imagine a young couple wanting to move there, on a planet where you can never walk outside without a protection suit, where you have eat potatoes for ever and where your bones would decay over time.
The only way to ever make it a real earth 2.0 is through terraforming. Yes, you could in theory bombard Mars with methane and ammonia rich asteroids to allow global warming, you could melt its ice with a space based magnifying glass, perhaps you could introduce genetically altered algae or nanomachines to give it an earth like atmosphere but…
There are two insurmountable barriers to terraforming mars: low gravity and lack of a magnetic field. Mars is much smaller than earth and thus its gravity is too weak. Even if you were to give it an atmosphere, it would just dissipate away over a few centuries.
Even more, its lack of a magnetic field means that people on its surface will always be subject to deadly cosmic radiation.
To date, no solution has been proposed for these two issues, not even theoretical ones.
At the end of the day, mars is just a dead end, a mirage.
It would be a far wiser venture to forgo mars, and instead, sue the billions to terraform parts of earth. Make deserts of Australia, China and central Asia green. That technology is already within out grasp and would actually provide a new habitat for people.
Come on, that’s three orders of magnitude. There’s a huge difference between the two. Private planes, venture capitalism, multiple vacation homes, funding of charitable/social causes are all available to $10B and not $10M. $10M can be squandered or wiped out pretty easily, $10B is dynastic level wealth that will propagate itself forever.
Ee gad! I knew Donaldson, marginally, in the ANU. He had two pictures of Nixon in his room, one for US citizens, smiling, paternalistic, and one for foreigners, stern and ‘no nonsense’. I seem to remember Donaldson, who was very fond of retsina, declaring that Watergate would blow over, or words to that effect. What a sad end, unless he gets revivified, I suppose.
You and your IQ obsession. What’s yours, by the way. I bet it’s massive.
I remember that we used to talk like this in high school, but we were backward for our age.
Advert of Mordor and why you should move there to spend your imperialist currency, city boy.
The monthly sum needed for a “carefree life”, according to the average Russian, turns out to be $1300 due to the magic of purchase parity/lower prices (100K rubles).
https://www.banki.ru/news/lenta/?id=10943930
And outside of Moscow and St Petersburg this is mostly true, in the sense of not tormenting yourself with “what is more affordable” in the supermarket or where to eat out or stuff like dentists, clothes, holidays, university.
For around $600 a month you’ll be generic middle class that has to save on stuff.
But what does the purchase parity translate into, quality-wise? In the big cities especially the quality of life is actually good enough, if you’re in the right member state of the federation.
Here are two of the federation’s regional megapolises, in the Orthodox Slavic member states, and in the softer non-permafrost climate range.
Voronezh
https://content.foto.my.mail.ru/mail/axey/133/h-1477.jpg
https://content.foto.my.mail.ru/mail/axey/133/h-1490.jpg
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/el_magico/17218424/1564612/1564612_original.jpg
https://varlamov.me/2017/voronezh_hor/36.jpg
Krasnodar
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/chronograph/16022037/2809099/2809099_original.jpg
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/chronograph/16022037/2813994/2813994_original.jpg
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/chronograph/16022037/2816235/2816235_original.jpg
https://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/48448/39978190.e6/0_99cce_160d157a_XXL.jpg
Getting a root canal at the dentist costs $30-40 on average
Dinner in a moderately fancy place costs the same
The average university yearly fee is around $1300
A three-room apartment in the city comes out around $50K – $65K
https://voronezh.cian.ru/kupit-3-komnatnuyu-kvartiru-vtorichka/
A summer house built especially for you will cost around $12 000
https://sk-domostroi.ru/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Smolensk.jpg
None of this however matters. The only real reason to start over in Russia is graduation age school girls in school uniforms. This is all that matters. Some degenerates prefer Japanese school girl uniforms, but they are full of crap.
https://mgorod.kz/projects/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1496141518_banana.by-vypu-21.jpg
https://ribalych.ru/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/vypusknicy-proshlogo-goda_023-768×829.jpg
https://avatars.mds.yandex.net/get-zen_doc/96748/pub_5b0ee9c4256d5c490fc0c8ed_5b0eeb6620ea2bd294a05639/scale_1200
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/fire_81/1286491/363236/363236_original.jpg
You didn’t take into account one important resource: distance. Mars is very far from most people. A paradise.
Russia is doing same mistake with Belarussia. If Russia have invested fraction of money to Russian nationalistic movement in Belorussia last quarter of century, Luka would be already dead or in exile and Russian paratroopers would be near Brest. Well, Russia would rather criple own economy – not support potash fertilizer production, no euro rafineries, no technology transfer for microelectronics and support Luka with low priced oil.
Luka, will be out next year. There would be multi vector president which will just pave way for real Western puppet in 4-5 years. West will invest maximum 5 bln usd and Belorussia will be firmly in Western camp. And what is most important. Belorussians will love it.
Help your self, God will help you.
Distance makes it a paradise?
Gates married partly for smarts, as annoying as his wife might be – I think he asked what her SAT score was when dating her. Zuck’s wife went to Harvard. Don’t know about the others.
I believe the primary reason Mars doesn’t gave a reasonably dense atmosphere is a lack of a strong enough magnetic field allowing the solar wind to strip it over millenia.Which is in fact what many think happened after its magnetic field stopped functioning billions of years ago.
I don’t think insufficient gravity is one of the factors.If so how can Titan have a denser atmosphere than Earth ?
I doubt this is true. The ships kept arriving. There were at least a few thousand European settlers, before the British took control and they didn’t all come from Holland.
I think the market for space tourism might be overestimated. See reason below, if you are not disgusted easily:
It is customary for astronauts to get enemas before they go into space. Not my idea of a vacation.
Also, when there is a blow-up, I think regulations will really come down hard, possibly bankrupting any purely tourist operation.
You might find 10 billion dollars insufficient for your task.
I was scrolling through and thought it had to be a melanf post. Anyway, I understand that those uniforms are only worn for special circumstances, so there is much disappointment to be had.
Didn’t know that Unz allowed multiple images in one post.
L’enfer, c’est les autres.
I still haven’t quite figured out when which photos load and which don’t, but that aside, the posting options here at Unz, combined with the overall quality of people doing the commenting and the classical liberal levels of freedom that went extinct in the mainstream, is light years ahead of any other corner of the Internet, bloody social media very much included.
Eh, even if they only doll up as kawaii french maids just a couple of times a year, that’s still excellent.
https://goneva.net.ua/uploads/posts/2018-12/1544252113_1452502633_9199205s91.jpg
https://rabotatam.ru/uploads/monthly_2018_07/large.1852252407_20181611.jpg.5037109bbcedf7447ae454e05bf4a4e5.jpg
Very well put. We are here to make choices. The vast majority of the things we concern ourselves with are going to be moot and pointless within our lifetimes and after we pass. But the choices we make along the way on a few key things are what determines where we end up. The rest is noise.
https://aviationweek.com/business-aviation/aerion-unveils-major-updates-as2-supersonic-business-jet-design
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerion_AS2
Was there something wrong with the Edsel besides the market not wanting to pay for it?
The market paid for Hummer 2’s for awhile and even now they are paying for Teslas. : )
Anyhow, almost chump change in the context of a total war.
Good points. Russian soft power really sucked up until recently. Yes, it has gotten a bit better but even now, there is an opening for Russia to create true alternatives to western social media tech giants and to promote them to Europeans, Americans, and others looking to spread the truth about their horrible governments – yet nothing. Instead Russia allows western social media to operate in Russia and help Navalny and company to foment social/political unrest within Russia.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cd/Draka48.png
It will be near impossible to govern Mars from Earth. Two year launch period and any rocket needing to be like 99% fuel means no police or warship fleet from Earth will threaten you there.
You will be living in domes underground, but you will not be required to wash black people feet or do whatever else woke religion will demand in the decades ahead.
For a lot of people, personal dignity and psychological coherence will be worth trying to make a living as a mole. You will have to become mostly self sufficient first of course, but the type of people who go to Mars will be different from those who stay behind and likely easier to cooperate with.
Think of Mars as a gated community with “really good schools”. As in, genetic engineering will not just be welcomed on Mars, it will be a requirement for survival. Over time, Mars with genetically engineered Martians will become vastly more powerful than Earth. Just like American colonies become more powerful than European motherland.
The spread of Japanese loan-words into common speech is pretty interesting. I just was considering a local company in the US which is running a promotion with anime characters and it really shows the impressive extent of Japanese soft power in the world.
The people most likely to go to Mars will be libertarians, who as a rule do not do social cooperation too well.
They are good at geeky tech jobs though. Combine them with Trump voting trades people such as plumbers and electricians who by then will be hunted from helicopters in Diverse America, and you got yourself a decent human capital base for a colony.
But the flaw is that suggestibility of “normies” sees an increasing number of them converging with elite planning away from the “normie” (non-normies would call it Lindy) life. The plurality of “normies” view Bruce Jenner as a woman and sodomical “unions” as normal whereas having >3 kids is weird.
What’s this?
Its nice concept, the idea of another planet free from liberal lunatics is alluring. The problem is that its not feasible.
You can’t industrialize without readily available surface water or fossil fuels. Without a martian industrial base, you can’t build settlements underground or mine minerals on a sufficient scale.
Plus, there’s the question of agriculture. You can’t grow anything on Martian soil, so you’d need to make synthetic soil under ground with artificial lighting systems, and you’d need to import an initial amount of water from outer space and recycle it.
All of this is very energy intensive and would need a strong industrial base to even set up. Even then its debatable if you could acutually feed thousands or tens of thousand of people, much less support an expanding population.
The reason white colonies were able to grow richer than core Europe was because they had more land, resources and room for expansion. Mars has none. It wouldn’t be a new united states, it would just be a detroit multiplied by 10, a permanent resource sink
A very enjoyable piece of alternate history by S.M. Sterling.
“The Domination of the Draka.”
Yes, they do and they find hell. Ending up in hell is a choice. The elites have their reasons to suggest the tempting Faustian bargain, people don’t have to take it. It is a simple evolutionary selection – if some are tired of playing the game, they can quit like Bruce and cease to exist. The noise they make on their way out is irrelevant.
20 years ago, I did a study of owner managed businesses in a particular industry ranging from 0.5m GBP to 30m GBP a year in turnover seeking potential acquisitions. It was noticeable that the owners of the smallest businesses drew out no less than the owners of the largest. The range of salaries for the owner managers was 90k to 0k GBP a year. Only the very largest paid dividends. Most cash was reinvested. The law has changed a little since then, forcing some payouts.
Thus I conclude that “enough” at the turn of the century was about 100k GBP. This bought a 5-6 bedroom mansion with a paddock for the daughters’ (wife’s) ponies at the the edge of a village. Two big cars and a smaller one to pop into town. School fees and foreign holidays (sun/ski) and 2nd home somewhere in Bulgaria, definitely not Spain. Around London add 20k for higher property costs. That probably isn’t more than 150k now. 200k at the outside.
Going beyond this and buying a Ferrari instead of a Jag and a country estate rather than the former squire’s mansion would seen to be a demonstration of insecurity, certainly in the UK. Even at the level described your children are in danger of losing touch with the rest of society. In Russia, the dekamillionaires I know show off more – a church on their island, houses in London, several expensive german cars with more than one chaffeur. Rich Russians send their children away to school for fear of kidnap so they send them abroad.
That said, near me, is Atlantic College. A school for the children of the world’s elite. Their father’s names are on or behind brand names everywhere. It is of course, a secure clifftop location (a castle, previously occupied by Randolph Hearst). There, they have a course in charitable giving. I assume that the local children there on scholarships to introduce some social diversity are trained on how to run the charities for the paying pupils. 🙂
Asking about SAT score is gauche. One should be sneakier. I was attracted to my wife for a pretty smile and a certain G-loaded talent.
For the 2004 Orange Revolution, about $90k USD on an exit poll. The Cablegate telegrams tell you everything.
The joke about an American millionaire being a divorced billionaire is ancient but might explain some 😛
(by this hypothesis the wives of old money should look different)
I think the more lifeless and artificial Western pop culture becomes–and the process has been accelerating very visibly over the last decade, with an additional boost over the last 2-3 years–the more people will turn to alternatives.
The leftie wing of GloboHomo would no doubt like to promote Angolan, Nicaraguan, and Bangladeshi pop culture, or rather sanitized versions of it, but for now many people prefer the Jap and Korean ones. Because, IMO, they tend to have the vibe, in their own weird way, of the last decades of Western normality (1980s, 1990s).
The faggy K-pop of today is basically the early 1990s Western boyband reimagined gook-style.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/nintchdbpict0003062970771.jpg
And also Jap and Korean pop culture still pass for “politically neutral”. Whereas if one starts publicly promoting Russian or mainland Chinese pop culture, that’s not gonna fly. Nor vintage Western culture, for that matter.
Along the “politically safe spectrum”, retards go for Black gangsta culture, the NPCs go for the current lifeless mainstream, and some people drift toward East Asian pop culture. Which includes leftist transvestites, anti-leftist anti-transvestites, little girls who can’t work up enthusiasm for today’s Western ferally sleazed-up alleged pop alleged music, and middle aged women for whom modern soaps stopped making sense.
K-dramas show the world they way it was supposed to be today everywhere, if the promise of the 1990s had really played out, as opposed to be a fleeting peak phase before the spiral down.
https://www.hellokpop.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/My-Holo-Love_-Unit_01-190304-1387.2.jpg
https://10mag.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Fight-My-Way-2.jpg
But it’s “exotic” so still not politically incorrect. And better made than Hallmark, anyway.
…If anything, Korea’s soft power with the K-Pop and K-Dramas is even more astounding than the Jap one… And the rise overlaps splendidly with the decrease in quality and sanity of Western pop, so there’s that.
nah, its above average. One showed 125, another showed 131
Elon Musk apparently got to know Talulah Riley by asking her if she wanted to go up to his room and see his rocket ship.
Then he proceeded to literally expound about rockets to her for about two hours.
Of course, we all know how he got to know Grimes with the Basilisk and all.
East Asian girls are really pretty, they have a childish yet graceful femininity to them. You want romance them more than you want to fuck them like Latino women
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afrikaners#Genealogy
Correction, they from a few thousand people at around 1800 to 3.5 million today
Not quite as dominant here as anime. K-drama is still exotic. Anime and anime-style has gotten normalized, which all of its upsides(generalized popularity, etc) and downsides(its now being actively subject to wokism).
https://www.inverse.com/gaming/boycott-genshin-impact-explained-mihoyo
Yes, Genshin is Chinese, but its pretty rooted in the anime aesthetic.
Yes. Distance or walls. But if I can’t have walls I will take distance. And space jammers to block Terran pop culture.
Opening credits from the movie ” Major Thunder. Plague Doctor”, with a cover of Choi’s song “Change”
https://youtu.be/RSwtAdKKekw
The first full-fledged Russian film based on a comic book, and I liked it
The odds are very good that Mars has subsurface ocean. But even if not water from ice caps should be sufficient for a city.
You will need lots of nuclear power and large mining equipment (drills etc). You can grow algae or something in vats for food. 3D printing and automation should take care of large bulk parts.
You won’t be able to 3D print some complex electronics for a while, but those are light by mass, so a few shipments from Earth should take care of it for a while.
I don’t see this happening for a few decades, but by 2100 we should have delivered enough automated hardware to make human colony possible. Also, by 2100 we will be living on planet Nigeria, so motivation should be there as well.
Didn’t your grandma tell you that you shouldn’t count your chickens before they hatch?
Well, as was implied in AK´s opening post, the few people who go onto to strive at becoming billionaires (as opposed to being simply born into it) after attaining millionaire status aren’t going to be simply hedonistic pleasure seekers. And hard as it may be to believe for some, not every man craves sex simply for the sake of sex. Can anyone imagine our mysterious benefactor, Unz himself, gallivanting about LA with expensive hookers/models everynight?
Also, when you reach a point of having access to almost any physically attractive woman you want, other factors become more important, things like trust, past history etc. Although Bezos’ extremely expensive divorce doesn’t say much for that either.
Outside of influencing politics or scientific funding I honestly can’t think of a single thing.
Correct. Anyone who can’t imagine blowing $10M in a span of a year isn’t creative enough. But more realistically, $10M in net worth means living comfortably, possibly not even having to work for the remainder of your life depending on the family size and level of spending (Lambo vs Toyota, private family chef vs takeout, etc.).
However, $10B lets you hire a staff of caretakers for any need. This includes managing your wealth. With that amount of money + management, you can get away with a Wolf of Wall Street lifestyle (sinking a $12M yacht is no biggie and you can do it a few more times).
Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.
What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose.
The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.
All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again.
All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing.
Low IQ post.. Luka is far more of a Russian patriot than most of various grifters and careerists in United Russia, and God knows the political situation in 4-5 years time. This sort of hyper-centralising mentality is the bane of Russian political history, look at the devolved albeit nonetheless extremely close cooperation of the Anglophone countries, or even the Scandinavian block.
We are talking about million tons of materials and heavy equipment to get mining (of iron, nickel, copper, manganium, various salts etc.) transportation and processing started. Heavy equipment that has to work in -80C, near vacuum, tolerate Martian duststorms, work on electricity – and be easily repairable with simple tools.
Then there is a problem of refining and smelting. Industrial technologies are developed for oxygen-rich atmosphere, cheap ubiquitous water and easily available fossil fuels. Without these you need exotic processes, available only in lab-scale. Nobody has even tired to upscale these to produce thousands of tons of products in a year.
In any case these processes will require tens of megawatts of energy. As the only available source in Mars is solar, one has to import tens of square kilometers of solar cells. Producing these on Mars means setting up silicon semiconductor processing – add million tons of equipment or so.
You cannot have partially self-sustaining colony in Mars, like it was possible in New World. No resource on Mars is usable without heavy industry so even the simplest things like building a new (green)house or adding a room to settlement need either everything hauled from Earth or the full manufacturing cycle to be set up.
Exactly. For the last few years the noise has become overwhelming, I have seen it referred to as “the late Obama years collapse“. But it is still just noise.
If Soros can break the bank of England with a fortune of 10 billion or less in the 90s, this is imminently doable
WTF is wrong with you, Anatoly. Why are you assuming monogamy? Hood rats do better than that. With a few million a man can diversify his female holdings just like he does his portfolio.
That only makes sense if you’re spending someone else’s money.
You don’t need solar on Mars, nuclear power is much better for polar ice caps where you will get large quantities of water. You won’t need too much of large machinery imports either – those drills can be 3D printed locally.
Not saying it will be easy but it won’t take millions of tons or solar panels either.
I believe Soros then was breaking through an open door: pound was overvalued, he just pushed it. If the stars are not aligned, $10 billion – or even $50 billion – is not enough.
I wonder what Soros is investing in now. Just about everything looks overvalued.
District Attorneys on the West Coast.
https://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-prosecutor-campaign-20180523-story.html
Those were relatively cheap.
Gravity or the lack of terrestrial gravity will kill any and all prospects of space/Moon/Mars long travel/colonization.
Human body can’t survive low gravity for prolonged periods of time.
Sorry to disappoint you, but there will be no Mars colony by 2100, for a host of engineering and physiology reasons.
It’s simple:
#1: fund gene-therapy, which turns any 5s to 8s and 2s to 6s – men & women alike.
#2: this results in world-peace, because no more gang-wars/world-wars due to sexual frustations, envy and take down 9s’ arrogrance and market-prices alot.
#3: The resulting peace will accelerate all field of human existence.
#4: The resulting savings due to world-peace, can be leveraged to fund a Martian colony for a long time until it’s self-substaining.
#5: Galatic Empire: Humans as the apex species in the Milky Way.
#6: Invade Andromeda Galaxy
TRUST THE PLAN!
Looks like Gyorgy Soros is buying protection. That suggests that everything is overvalued and oligarchs are protecting politically what they have amassed.
When everything is overvalued maybe the measuring unit is no longer connected to the real world. Too bad we don’t have another one.
Take away #1 and it is the EU.
“Perhaps in Moscow. In the US it’s chump change. In the current rates environment it will provide you with $100-200K annual income. It’s a nice middle class lifestyle but nothing special (or poverty in SF.) Apartment in the center of a world class city, holiday homes, etc.? Not if you have a family.”
The term “world class city” always makes me laugh, mostly because the people who say it are really serious. The only thing that’s world class about these so called cities is most garbage produced, biggest rats (two and four legged), most overpriced land, worst people, most overpriced food in stores and restaurants and worst congestion.
Why are all the wives chinese?
Gravity in space very easy to simulate – just spin a decently sized object. This is why orbital colonies are much more preferred relative to planetary ones – you can have any gravity you want, and it will vary depending where you are in an object.
But Mars will have its uses. I’m betting that it contains massive amounts of subsurface water which means rocket fuel with a single stage to orbit delivery capability.
It’s true about health effects of low gravity but thats where genetic engineering will come in handy. And those not into that can sleep in centrifuges at 3g or whatever.
So none of those physiology or engineering challenges look impossible. It all boils down to the amount of water we can extract. If it’s a lot, there will be a colony by 2100, pretty sure of that.
Agree. There’s also a fractal aspect to this at the low end. Taking a medium-cost US metro area, going from $50k to $80k or $150k in income is a revolution. It changes life. Much above $200k though, and most likely you’ll be saving a great deal of additional income, until your are deep into FU money territory. Having a personal net worth of $300k or $1M, even $2M probably isn’t all that different, incrementally more peace of mind but at the end of the day you fall into one of 4 camps: Broke, Middle Class, Set, Oligarch.
MDR, correct. No need to look at the metrics. Just look at all the magic negro athletes that blow through 40, 50 million or in the case of Mike Tyson who blew through north of over $400 million and are broke at the end of their careers. I believe in the sports realm, you don’t wanna be like THAT Mike, he’s the champion of destroying wealth. Tyson that is. Jordan is ok I guess.
No criminal blacks. What a utopia. If not for them, worldwide, we’d all have it made.
LOL that wife guideline. too true.
agree with the general sentiment that there are levels of wealth. disagree with some of the details. guys with 100 million are definitely rolling much harder than guys with only 10 million.
10 million guy never has to work and can mostly do what he wants, but he’s not rich and can’t ball out totally. he actually has to pay attention to taxes and he definitely has to check the price of the expensive stuff. he can’t just get the 1 million dollar supercar at the drop of a hat, and he if he has 3 or 4 kids that are going to college, he actually has to plan the finances for that. he can’t fly all over the place any time he wants. a divorce can ruin him. a downturn in the market can screw things up for him. a bankruptcy of his business can screw things up for him.
100 million guy (lots of athletes here) has multiple houses in different states or countries, private jets, yachts, doesn’t worry about the cost of anything. blasts the top escorts and strippers on the regular, a divorce is an annoyance, not a life ruining event. serial marriages and multiple kids with multiple women is not a big problem. a business bankruptcy may or may not screw him, a stock market downturn doesn’t affect him much. he has to worry more about his business associates screwing him, identity and security fraud, getting kidnapped, and stuff like that.
i think this might show the limitations of AK’s personal life experience. people who don’t have a lot of money assume it’s all the same above a couple million – Obama used to blather about this all the time, because he’s not that smart, and doesn’t understand how money works either.
100 million guy can definitely run technical projects and change the world, if that’s what he’s into. how much money did Bitcoin take to create? way, way less than 100 million. there must be hundreds of technical projects you could work on with a few million in funding every year, depending on the scale.
100 million guy could personally finance the equivalent of one STEM department at a university, or one small engineering firm, for years, in pursuit of some technical goal. big ticket technical projects are out of reach of his personal funding, but not with loans and VC funding.
of course once you get into the 1 billion dollar range, technical projects become even more feasible. other projects, like political influence at the national level, become more possible, but not easy or automatic. at that point it starts to become a matter of scale. who do you want to influence, and what do you want from them.
it is also at the 1 billion dollar level that you can start to buy sports teams, newspapers, radio stations, stadiums, skyscrapers – something Obama has no idea about, despite being a lifetime sports fan. because that stuff is beyond his small thoughts and ideas. the Obamas of the world are looking for a nice house and Mercedes – why would you need anymore than that? these guys are simple petty bureaucrats, and never created anything or had an actual big thought in their life.
Even niggers and jews are going to need electricians which can only be White folks. Sorry for noticing. I’m bad that way.
Most men who get to billionaire status do so after they already married. And when they married, I suspect they selected for the most important quality of all: a woman who won’t torpedo their life with drama.
Well…sure… but for example the Japs also have perhaps the most developed BDSM and Fetish scene in the world, and the combination between an Eastern Asian beauty with intricate rope bondage and say wax play, or super filthy stuff to do with puke and beyond, this contrast and their ability to just let go and submerge into sensations to live out their personal catharsis (and then go back to being sane and proper), that’s something indeed.
So I would modify in the following manner your initial formula: East Asian girls are really pretty, they have a childish yet graceful femininity to them. You want to either romance them in a pure and traditionally moral way, or you want to go for total intimacy through sophisticated and complex acts of sexual power games and depravity.
https://i.site.pictures/ge8u.jpg
Whereas with the more “coarse and feral” type of races, and the considerable coarse and feral segment of white women (especially as they age out of their initial fleeting freshness), you have the impulse neither for pure romance, nor for intricate zen decadence, but just for for generic lowbrow animalistic fucking.
And even if you do try to “keep the flame burning” (if in a long term relationship with a member of the coarser races), and try to spice things up, after the initial animalistic impulse wears off, via BDSM and fetish stuff, it kind of feels more like a dude without breasts dominating a dude with breasts. Whereas with East Asians the girl is an actual girl.
https://www.kinbakutoday.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/2013_0144.jpg
In this sense, when people criticize a member of the Gookwaffen along the lines of “you guys with yellow fever are all secretly gay because Asian girls have small breasts and fine features” or “you guys with yellow fever are all secretly pedophiles because Asian girls have small breasts and fine features”, the proper retort is “no, it’s you who are banging women who start looking like worn out transvestites after 25, who’s the faggot now?”
And, of course, “being attracted to women who look young, fresh, and fertile all the way up to middle age, is not perversion. Everything else is perversion. If you prefer to bang people who look like worn out transvestites, that’s up to you. But a standard for normality and morality it ain’t”.
And anyway, the “small body and small breasts” cliché is just that, a cliché. There are more than enough curvy and bussomy Asian women as well.
https://i03.fotocdn.net/s116/cba181d3391c7311/public_pin_m/2644806123.jpg
Especially after a few generations of living in a normal modern free market society where everyone gets enough protein. They all grew a head higher than their grandparents and the boys have white sized dicks and the girls have white sized tits.
https://xyya.net/uploads/posts/2017-09/1505370371_2613_22.jpg
But the proportions and the aesthetics and the overall vibe are very specific. Very very specific.
If you don’t need innovation, or stellar performance, and only generic mid-level maintenance, then average IQ 80+ is enough for electricians. That’s how places like Iran and India function.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country
Maybe the parasites just plan to be a quasi-Hindu “upper caste”, and everyone else is either a feral underclass, or a more or less competent but not too smart servant class.
O_o! It’s nice to see that the discussions about the structure of the body of schoolgirls are attended by real experts and connoisseurs
Ahem, discussion about the structure of the body of “a schoolgirl-like race of high-IQ adults”, cough.
I think the most reliable way of ensuring all images load is to save them to your computer and then upload them to an image hosting service like Imgur and use their URLs.
But real people don’t look like the bodies in your pictures. A small percentage of people are beautiful like the lovers in Hollywood movies, a small percentage are ugly. The vast majority of people in any country simply have a mediocre appearance. If you take a random sample – there will be no anime-like personages
https://www.gov.spb.ru/static/writable/mediact/photo/2019/06/25/IMG_3458.JPG
People with high IQs look a little better (as intelligence ennobles their faces), but this is a weak correlation.
https://www.imenno.ru/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/sthh.jpg
https://www.gtrkpskov.ru/images/2021/April/umniki_result.jpg
But the bodies in nude photos from the Internet are almost guaranteed to have a low IQ
You’re right about everything. I have just two additions:
1) The inherited traits of East Asians. Half of them age like everyone else, and half of them age with a ten year lag or more. As in they look like lolitas up to 20, like young adults up to 40, and like youngish milfs up to menopause. A woman with these genes will indeed look great until grannyhood suddenly descends. And maybe even then.
2) Sex culture in modern Japan. A huge chunk of the female population plays around with sugar daddies starting from high-school, and then, with the decline of marriages, simply have networks of “sex-friends” with no strings attached. Porn, local style, is everywhere, as are brothels. So, should a Japanese woman decide she’s not going the trad marriage route, it’s not a big step toward an AV career, at least a period.
Back around 2010 it was estimated that 1 in 200 Jap women have participated in AV vids, but I suppose that if a) fast forward to 2021, b) factor in age and c) narrow the population pool down to the big cities with this industry, it’ll shrink to 1 in 50 women.
Which in turns means that while in western porn you do mainly get low IQ skunks with bad tatts being banged by drooling apes, with Japanese porn it’s not going to be only people who could barely handle school, but to the contrary, an average IQ if not equivalent to Japan as such, then at least equivalent to the average smart woman in Serbia, Croatia, Argentina, that lot, and probably slightly above the average smart woman in the Philippines, Brazil and so on.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/average-iq-by-country
So again, in general, you are very right. Most ordinary people in any demographic do look like crap, and most people showing up in porn are either low IQ or deeply damaged or both. That’s in worldwide terms.
But when you focus only on the Jap genetics + their average national IQ + the national techno-paganist approach to sex and porn + the changing marriage dynamics + the high levels of participation in the AV industry, you end up with a pool of women who really do reflect the body types of a large chunk of the population, and may not be Nobel winners, but would likely be in the elite cognitive strata in the Balkans or South-East Asia, or South America.
Most of those girls could come to a small town in Egypt or Nicaragua or Pakistan, and quickly become the dominant local personality and business lady. And of course be soon raped and killed unless she organizes herself the protection of some local ‘Man of Honor’, but that’s neither here nor there.
Do you really think Musk is blowing up his own money in each of those SN fireballs. In any case, my engineering internships back in the ‘70s included non-destructive and destructive testing of rocket motors … if I wasn’t an old man, I’d be knocking on the door of SpaceX for the fun of it, though I’d hate the thought of trading down on my wife to reflect the pay cut 😉
I dunno … a skimpy schoolgirl outfit and thigh-highs would put more than a few of those high-IQ girls into earning serious money on OnlyFans.
I don’t know much about Japan, but in Russia, Western Europe, and America, girls who earn money with their naked bodies strongly correlate with low intelligence. There are vague suspicions that in Japan, the same thing-the willingness to fulfilling wishes rich old people for money correlates with low intelligence.
It’s not unknown, even in the classic Terman studies, but it usually was with immense emotional and mental consequences for the women who participated in anything like porn.
Enjo kōsai is pretty common in Japan, though that’s more of a private vice. At any rate, it’s not a culture that particularly values intelligence in women.
Solzhenitsyn in Lenin In Zürich depicts Lenin as quite an admirer of German efficiency and regretting that Russians were not inclined that way. Solzhenitsyn was doing his best to make Lenin as “un-Russian” as possible, it seems to me, but Lenin certainly admired the German work ethic.
Are there any cultures in the world that value the talents of women in mathematics, chemistry, etc.? But the ideal girl from the time of the Tokugawa Shoguns, had to keep up a conversation, compose poetry, play Go-that is, do things that require intelligence. Actually, it’s about the same in the rest of the world. The girl-genius-physicist is some kind of the latest ideal (generated solely by ideology), but the ideal girl in any culture must be smart
You can’t eat money
Certainly, some intelligence, but only at an amateur level. A girl that spends too much time with shogi, for example, is said to be “stolen away by the God of Shogi” and is supposed to inevitable be defeated by a male player and consequently resume the more important focus of being a mother and helpmate.
The basic idea is ultimately not very far from what Sylvia Plath accused the American society of making women at her time: “Women are to be the tree from where the arrow is fired, and men to be the arrow.” In Japanese society, women are the “glue of society,” seen as the central holding principle that can reassure and support men who are to participate in more extreme measures. The yamato nadeshiko is valorized for being gentle, caring, and gracious., sometimes with the literal notions of “a woman’s strength is endurance” and “attaining happiness as a woman” defined as being married(or more historically, even having become the permanent mistress of a noble).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamato_nadeshiko
Also:
We have the best conversations here in Karlin’s gentle blog.
Begone devil, this is a Christian blog!
Genuine Russian nationalists are supporters of Christian morality, let’s see if Karlin is a fake nationalist like Bashibuzuk.
Traditional/Apostolic/True Christianity is permissive towards prostitution, even St. Augustine said that visiting prostitute is preferable to the sin of self defilement. Some one of the Church Fathers said, that if prostitution would be illegal, world would go mad with lust, now I remember, it was St. Thomas de Aquinas, he was not a Father of Church, but a doctor, eh close enough. Still we can see how feminism is strongest in the countries where prostitution is harshly criminalised, like Sweden and USA.
Buddhism shares the opinion of the Fathers and doctors of the Church, or goes little bit further, in Apostolic Christianity visiting prostitute is a minor sin for a layperson, in Buddhism it’s not a sin at all, as long as it’s vaginal sex, and one will take care, at least monetarily, of one’s potential offspring that is produced from the intercourse.
Both Buddhism and Christianity believe that one should use one’s organ in a natural way, but in Buddhism contraception is not a such problem, like it’s in Catholic Church.
However Rahan, you are publicly promoting lust, which is always a sin, therefore you are a servant of the Dark One(namuci).
Oh dear, terribly sorry, I thought this was the “springtime midlife crisis” room, I must have gone through the wrong door.
Peace be with you, buddy.
https://pravzhizn.ru/upload/resize_cache/iblock/c7e/336_336_1/7c2c31991c783619b93a7f7eba6b8638_1604690475.jpg
Roskomnadzor has a lot of work to do, it seems. Time to end #нюдесочетверг once and for all!
Some one can’t take a joke. I’m not interested of being a moderator of Karlin’s blog. I just noticed a chance to explain to folks here that traditional religiosity is more permissive of human vices than modernist heresies like protestant Christianity or contemporary Islam. One of the reasons why modern America is such a source of evil and confused philosophies is that they never have had a proper form of spirituality in hegemonic position in their society, and now Americans have gone from one extreme to another, and in the process they are infecting the rest of the world.
An entire discussion on schoolgirl outfits and the value of plaid skirts and zettai ryouiki hasn’t been mentioned once.
Terrible.
Iran and India and the Saudis call in White men to do their electrical work. Are you high?
A quick duckduck/google of “white electricians in India” shows no promising results, nor does the top video here.
This has reduced your credibility on all subsequent posts by -25.
In Updike’s “Rabbit at Rest” (the greatest postwar novel), Rabbit muses that his wife failed to give him the thing that men need the most: To be told I am terrific — even though I suspect that I am not actually so terrific. Assuming there is truth to this, does a billionaire need this even more, or, need it less? I don’t know. All I know is that my dogs think I am the most terrific person in the world.
It is time to update the dogpill for males.
https://incels.wiki/w/Dogpill
I am on record as saying that the dogpill should be defined thusly:
n. The salutary process of exposing blank-slatists to aggressive breeds of dogs – preferably through the use of pits.
Gates tried. Not with Thorium though, sadly. Jamaica is an interesting location. It has bauxite mines. With electricity that become processed aluminium and a lot more added value. Would a nuke scare the tourists. It would be transformational for everyone else.
If you are the boss, you are surrounded by people telling you that you are terrific and your decisions are great, as well as the complainers. You need someone who tells you how things really are, without being too confrontational.
Here in “get it basically okay” S. California, the same guy who was the plumber for our bathroom remodel one day was the electrician the next day. A quantitative general contractor friend places the California proficiency/conscientiousness level at 85%.
Well, this thread certainly escalated quickly.
In most countries, porn actresses and prostitutes seem to be drawn from the same social strata (the lumpen) as organized crime, in Japan it’s not a secret that most of these are either low caste burakumin or Koreans, I would be surprised if the same was not true for the former.
It must not be too long since you spent time in that raging teenage testosterone period that we all go through. Might be hard to imagine now, but eventually sex even with the hottest women, don’t become that high of a life priority. I speak as someone who very much held the same narrow-minded bias as you did, even say 5 years ago.
I don’t understand.
How much money does one man really need?
Scandinavia seems to get on quite well with a heavily socialized tax structure, agitprop about “socialism kills innovation” aside.
We would do well to dispel some of the Randroid “Atlas” narrative and take a hard objective look at what our modern “titans” are like. Jeff Bezos is not John Galt and Bill Gates is not Hank Rearden.
The is a lot of self-interested myth-making around the question of whether a collective approach to grand multi-billion dollar projects is inferior to projects led by one gajillionaire “visionary” like Musk – who seems equally visionary and clueless depending on what day it is and how far his halo effect is stretching that day.
I’m inclined to believe that mega-billion scale projects are more likely to be pro-social where they are collaborative rather than the province of one multibillionaire. Likewise I think the damage caused by permitting this class of people to exist unfettered greatly outweighs the benefits we see from them as a class.
Potential Mars colonists will probably be filtered thru a self-selecting mechanism, in addition to official requirements, to choose colonists with a pro-natalist long term view of building a society on Mars.
Looks like Kent Nationalist was right. You are demon a worshipper.
That is assuming that there are tangible benefits. Most of it is a lottery with (usually) some very heavy help from the political system. The Randian devotees are basically nerdy misanthropes. They look at the world they don’t like, and as a palliative try to identify with the “winners“. There are few sadder things than these morons turning over their lives to make-believe heroes. But they persist.
The Fed is issuing money like the Second Coming is about to happen. Once you trace the $2 billion or so that Fed dumped into US economy about 50% of it ends up in the oligarchs’ accounts. That’s the way it works. Whether it is done consciously or not makes no difference: the modern capitalism is ending up in a bizarre financial circus where a society is literally giving money to the oligarchs. (They throw a few crumbs to everyone else as a distraction.)
I suspect that latter-day Rome worked the same way: increasingly devalued currency given to the few deserving, and a loaf of bread to everyone else. Then the guys with the sharper swords showed up and it was over.
Apart from item #1 the list describes the aims and achievements of the EU.
Which is why I came close to considering Orthodoxy but my inner Calvinist won.
I do not approve of the explicit discussion of women’s bodies in an objectifying manner.
However, it appears there may be a link between faces and brain shape. A paper was published in Nature this week describing associations between brain shaping and face shaping genes. (No link handy).
Are you really sure that according to Christianity visiting prostitutes (perhaps casual sex as well?) is a lesser sin than masturbation (that’s what you presumably mean by self-defilement?)?
Isn’t masturbation safer?
Although perhaps masturbation also involves the sin of idleness?
-Philip Owen
The places in China where prostitution is legal are the woker places.
I believe the same is true for Germany.
Pro-social collaborative projects have a tendency to degenerate into endless pointless meetings where lowest common denominator consensus rules. A singular powerful vision is much better when it comes to execution. Of course a singular vision runs a higher risk of being wrong, but there’s nothing wrong with that. As long as you are capable of learning from your mistakes and iteration, you will achieve more faster.
Well, the problem with that is the likes of Musk and Bezos etc don’t really have any money. They have assets such as Tesla or Amazon stock. They sell it (or borrow against it) to fund other ventures. So if you want them to not exist, you will need to force that stock sale in large amounts and it will likely wreck the stock market and retirements and pensions of a lot of people. It will also give a lot of cash to the oligarchs that they won’t know how to deploy and this will probably end badly as well.
Unfortunately, we have made stock and bond markets the heart of national economy. It was unwise, but its done. The heart must keep on beating no matter the cost, and so oligarchs are here to stay.
Good points, Alfa.
I’m not a financial sophisticate, but my fairly small investments in real estate investment trusts consistently generate 5-8% annual dividends. Also own Russian and American stocks that pay 6-10% dividends annually.
Anyone with $10 million liquid investable cash can pretty easily earn $750,000 per year without complex or very risky schemes and without much advice.
As for not panicking and selling during big downturns in the stock market, this shouldn’t be much harder for someone with a $200,000 or ‘$1 million retirement investment account than someone with a lot more — unless they are on the cusp of retirement.
Yep, I’m quite sure. St. Augustine of Hippo and Thomas de Aquinas both thought that emitting one’s seed outside of vagina is improper way to use one’s organ, though nocturnal emissions were an exception for some reason that I do not remember. To them most important was to use one’s organs as God(nature) intended. That’s one of the reasons why brothels and prostitution were legal in Medieval Europe dominated by the Catholic Church, they were seen as a necessary evil.
I tried to be little edgy, but the topic of prostitution is not so simple in traditional Buddhism, though there is no prohibition of it, it’s still an unwholesome karmic act, that lessens one’s chances to have a good rebirth. Also it’s important that a prostitute is not “a female convict,” or so it’s said in the old scriptures, I think that it means that she is not a slave or forced to be a prostitute, e. g. human trafficking.
However, according to Buddhism sex is based on lust and delusion and is therefore an obstacle on the road to the true peace which is Nirvana.
But both ancient Buddhist and Christian authorities understood that human societies are never perfect, therefore they were very pragmatic in regards of the human nature, unlike our modern enlightened liberal, socialist and feminist overlords.
Take that back you… you worshipper of King of the Jews!
Sorry I couldn’t resist, still Christ is Great!
As you are a Welshman it’s quite understandable, but do you really believe that a loving God has predestined who will be saved and who will eternally burn in hell?
Prostitution is present everywhere in China. In practice it’s decriminalised.
I have a conspiracy theory why prostitution is so legal and open in Germany in comparison with culturally similar Scandinavian countries. Allies probably thought that it’s better that Germans don’t have pent up sexual frustration, that if they have whores, there is lesser chance that a new Führer arises. After all “authoritarian personality” arises from suppressed sexuality, or something, isn’t that what Adorno or Fromm wrote?
Soros is investing in the overthrow of European civilisation.
Gold is the best yardstick, good investment in the short, medium and long term right now.
“though nocturnal emissions were an exception for some reason that I do not remember.”
Because it is involuntary. For traditional Christianity morality, sin is always a voluntary act of distancing oneself away from God.
I’m White, but darker than Kamala, an Indian. I’m White, but darker than most blacks with my Florida tan. The jews are Whiter than me. Most. And very privileged, except for the dead SuperWhite Jewish doctor, murdered by, naturally, a black. Don’t lecture me about color and race, dickhead.
You have lost another 28 points of Credibility by using Emotional Reaction in response to the event of being shown to be Factually Incorrect. Now you are at -53.
Its interesting, though – you seem familiar with technology, and open source projects seem to manage to run the gamut of both: they do generally seem to have a single “dictator”(Linus was once the so-called Benevolent Dictator for Life) as well as a kind of freeform contribution that allowed for values both libertarian and communistic to exist. And we can see it obviously works, by the triumph of Linux and the ever rising acceptability of FOSS software everywhere.
But yes, at the time, then, they begin to be increasingly crippled – and weirdly so, really – by the increasing religion of wokism. You see this all of the time when a few trans take over, then demand increasingly expansive and restrictive “codes of conducts”, even though the vast majority of contributors really will probably always be white and East Asian males(weirdly enough, South Asians do not seem to participate in FOSS that I’ve seen).
Afraid that I have never read either of them.
I wonder how much the distinctions between Germany and Sweden might be that between war (plus hyperinflation) and peace.
Also, if it may have anything to due with having a mix of Protestants and Catholics. There were all these weird laws about where you could build one kind of church and how it could be built, where I could perhaps see something like that leading to designated sex districts. I have a very vague recall that St. Pauli’s in Hamburg is by the Reeperbahn, and they did it to insult Catholics or something.
A troy ounce of gold sells for $1745, and costs $1200 to produce at higher cost mines (some mines can produce it for much less). By produce I mean standardized bars, not raw ore.
It doesn’t look undervalued when the markup is so large.
It makes one wonder if there is a significant scarring for so-called cam-girls, showing a bit of skin, versus those doing full sex acts. Patreon and OnlyFans have no shortage of girls showing the goods, but even YouTube is chock full of girls trying on various dresses and, at most, showing the lingerie.
I know of several blonde ladies on YouTube who show nothing at all other than their daily lives, but still get scads of money via Patreon. Go figure.
Being an attention whore is basically normal; being a whore whore, not so much.
Before we talk about millions or billions, perhaps we should understand where it comes from…
For those who are interested in understanding what money really is (and how money is essentially a ledger of who owes who and how much), this might be the most important youtube video you will ever watch. Thank me later…
Soro’s foundation was about 20B when I managed a bit of it some time ago…no idea how much is it now.
The obsession that drives “normie” billionaires (or millionaires) is keeping their billionaires and not having it inflated away or confiscated by the government. So most of them spend their time investing it in various things.
Papa musk does not have 200B…that is an imputed figure and a number that he can never turn to cash or spend because him doing it would reduce that number dramatically. He probably have locked in some of that money via some derivatives but i would say it is less than 10B.
Tax payers money is someone elses money.
But it was not Germany who gave the money but Jacob Schiff, the German-American banker, the father in law of the German-American banker Felix Warburg, brother of the German-American banker Paul Warburg (chief architect of the Federal Reserve Board of the United States), brother of the German banker Max Warburg, advisor to Kaiser Wilhelm and ”one of the leading figures to advise German politicians, diplomats, and the military in financial matters”.
And the money has been given to Trotsky and Alexander Parvus. Their destination was to take Russia out of the war.
Yeah, but I’m just hearing you, and your points scanner is worthless. Your scale comes from a head as foul as a ripe melon. Now why don’t you just pedal on outta here and go fuck herself? Such idiocy could only, as I said, come only from overly ripe fruit.
Coming from someone who’s posted in Karlin’s blog maybe three times, this is very convincing.
I could never understand this fascination with (ultra)rich people.
JP Morgan, Rockefeller, Gates, Jobs, Bezos, Slim,…. are, in my view, extremely dull & uninteresting people, boredom incarnated. I’d rather be dead than super-rich. Of course, I am not looking down upon their gifts & capabilities of making money, creating new work places, but…they’re boring as hell.
And they didn’t change the world that much. Pasteur, Dirac and Watson did it.
Virtually the only rich man I have a strong respect for is the late James Goldsmith. What he said about transfer of the capital, ruination of nations & working class, parasitic corporations and quick profits… is still worth listening (if you can tolerate constant nagging of that bitch I’d very dearly strangle with my own hands):
Yeah but science is kinda worthless on its own. What you really want is the ability to purchase the products of science on Amazon for under $20. And thats where Bezos and JP Morgan etc come in.
It’s like that guy who discovered penicillin by observing mold growing in his dish. So what? Who cares? It was useless until US government awarded large wartime contracts to Big Pharma to research and build large bioreactors to save soldiers’ lives in WW2. Only then antibiotics became meaningful and saved millions of lives. That your Charlie Rose talk is sponsored by Dupont further underscores the point. So I would disagree that oligarchs didn’t change the world, or change it for the worse.
In my view, both left wing and right wing are only partially correct. Historical experience proves beyond reasonable doubt that Socialism is absolutely terrible at managing supply and Capitalism is absolutely terrible at managing demand.
Hatred of corporations is misplaced – corporations are the most powerful social tool we have for solving problems, but they are not your mommy or your daddy. Relying on them to provide demand (via wages etc) is foolish because capitalists would rather compete and eat each other until only one most powerful capitalist is left standing. This is not good for social stability or aggregate demand. Capitalists end up eating their own customers.
But likewise, having fashion pants designed by Commissar Committee is also foolish. You don’t want supply side socialism, and you don’t want excessive business regulations. Government should go easy on the supply side.
So you need ‘free market’ on the supply side and State aggregate demand management on the demand side. In my view, universal basic income is the most efficient, but other schemes work as well. And this is the future we are going to anyway.
And of course people will scream ‘Corporatism!’, ‘Fascism!’. But call it whatever you want, the reality is, what vast majority of people want is that delivery drones run on time. And thats the only way to accomplish that goal.
Truly big changes (Pasteur, Watson,..) came almost completely without big business. In most cases there were universities, and then governments- and nothing from entrepreneurs. The latter have had a lions’ share in information technology, especially in entertainment – and virtually nothing more.
Did i-Pad change the world? Yes, by making people dumber than ever.
So- quantum mechanics, penicillin, lasers, A bomb, satellites, DNA structure, TV, computer original design (von Neumann architecture), ….. are the product of people who worked at universities & science institutes, plus government funding (frequently military).
Jobs, Musk, Bezos…. forget it. They are just famous, but did not change the world except in a superficial way.
Nobody cares about any of that without large milk farms pasteurizing their milk or whatever or Eli Lilly producing insulin via genetic engineering. Those discoveries where worthless on their own. It was only when they became widespread via corporate mass production that they started improving peoples’ lives.
Nobody cares about any of this unless it’s available on Amazon for under $20. You end up like USSR which was a scientific and military leader but it was useless as it was unable to bring the science to mass market. Societies like that fail, and deservedly so.
The sketchbook of Leonardo Da Vinci is an excellent example. However elegant his sketchbook of the helicopter, it is really of minimal value until someone builds it, and for it to be of civilization importance, until someone builds it en masse.
This isn’t even considering the practical value that until a model is actually built or widely tested, the many bugs and problems associated with it wouldn’t be ruled out.
Corporations, as products of entrepreneurs, did not, in most cases, have anything to do with them. For instance, with A bomb, it was: a) scientists working at institutes & government projects, b) government simply employing various corporations to do what they told them to do. Pure state capitalism. When it comes to the pinch, no entrepreneurs need apply.
There was not a single businessman or entrepreneur involved in the Manhattan Project, deciding about any issue whatsoever. The same goes for all other fields of life & culture. As I said, the only exception is the dumbification through Facebook, Twitter etc. For the rest, both in the US, Europe & Asia- progress is a combination of scientific institutions plus government decrees.
What use do you, or anybody else for that matter, derive from A bomb? Unless you are a military planner, not much.
Atomic electricity is a different matter and it is both useful and is provided by corporations. Be it Rosatom or Westinghouse or Duke Energy utility. There is a very good reason even state controlled Rosatom is organized as a corporation. It business that solves the problem of generating and delivering electricity by and large, and or course it does that with state support. Nothing wrong with that.
Entrepreneurs are useful for consumer market and while their role is overstated in the West, they still have a role to play in an economy. Without them building out logistics and production networks, you scientific discoveries and government decrees will go nowhere. And of course, entrepreneurs rely on government built infrastructure and consumer base, its a symbiotic relationship, nothing wrong with that.
If you’re running an owner managed company, why wouldn’t you pay yourself 8k as a salary and the rest in dividends to avoid employer’s national insurance (the stupid name the uk gives to payroll tax)?
The USSR managed to build out an air transport infrastructure as widespread as the US had, over more inhospitable terrain, without private help. Although toilet paper supply is a hit and miss. But still not really Upper Volt with rockets. And France is 80 percent ran by nuclear power a few years ago, with a state run company build and maintaining the nuclear power plants. In fact considering the political situation in the West, only governments can really assume the task and building and maintaining new nuclear plants.
The USSR managed to build out an air transport infrastructure as widespread as the US had, over more inhospitable terrain, without private help. Although toilet paper supply is a hit and miss (but then that is what scratch papers are for). But still not really Upper Volta with rockets. And France is 80 percent ran by nuclear power a few years ago, with a state run company build and maintaining the nuclear power plants. In fact considering the political situation in the West, only governments can really assume the task and building and maintaining new nuclear plants.
I donno. The downside to all of this is the cold winters. I’d rather pass on that. Also, for whatever reason I can’t articulate, I’m not attracted to Russian or other Eastern European women.
This is a problem will all discussions, because some interlocutors too freely associate (they are not wrong, but they stray from the topic). So, I’ll just sum my position.
I am not talking about the 19th C (when there was still a “wild capitalism” of sorts), nor about (failed) Communism. I am talking mostly about post WW1 democratic capitalism & not about 3rd world mess (which is a topic by itself).
all I am saying that American popularization of entrepreneurs, especially in past 30-40 years is over the top & unnecessary. Gates, Jobs, Musk, Bezos, Brin, Zuckerberg, Waltons, … simply did not “expand” the world as media want us to believe. I am not saying they are useless & without influence. That would be stupid beyond belief. Just look at the Facebook. They very strongly contributed to enstupidation. But to compare them with the real captains of industry like Henry Ford is ludicrous. Henry Ford fundamentally changed a means of production & life. Those mentioned above could not even shine his shoes.
the point is that all production in developed countries is through some conglomerates, corporations etc. Whether this model will last-we’ll see. During Hitler’s regime corporations, of course, existed- but were no more than functionaries of the state. Whether this is the real future or not- we don’t know yet. But, a naive belief in liberal capitalism & deregulation has shown to be a spent sprinter. True, it creates a creative chaos & short-term progress in some fields. But, because big tech think only in terms of short-time profit & not about well being of a country- people are replaceable- it ultimately leads to the destruction of a country & the entire civilization it claims to cherish. Only nation-states who control companies have a future.
Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Jobs… are as malign as Southern slave traders, who imported masses of black slaves, thinking only of their quick profits. Liberal capitalism is deeply unpatriotic. So, if Western nations mean to survive, they should strongly subdue these rich fucks & make them work for a country- or face nationalization.
To make “heroes” of these punks is beyond mental sanity. Not denying their talents in making money, or in some aspects of innovation- these people, from Buffet to Musk, are almost comically absurd when compared with John Bardeen or Ernst Ruska. But, the comedy is not the one with certain happy ending. If one allows Bezos or Zuckerberg to lead US first to Brazil, and then to South Africa- all because their fast profits- at the end no one in liberal multicultural capitalism will laugh.
Everybody will just scream in terror.
It’s done this way for a reason. That’s what makes them developed countries. If you don’t have conglomerates and corporations, you are not a developed country.
While state certainly has national interest in certain areas and should take up equity stakes in corporations involved in those areas (mostly energy, high tech, and military), do we really want to nationalize iPhone designs? I mean, really. Venezuela here we come. Why would you want government involved in that stuff?
Straw man. I never said that all companies should be nationalized. But, all the most important that guarantee the sovereignty of a country should (food, energy, infrastructure building, crucial communications, …).
Otherwise, you end up with a banana republic of the US, where Twitter, Facebook & YouTube “elect” your presidents & eventually will turn a country into a 3rd world pile of dung.
I agree. There is a massive difference in terms of possibilities and resilience between 10 million net worth and 100 million or more. Here a lot of commenters mix between income and wealth. Even 100 million fantastically invested yield around 7-8 million per year gross, and net should be around 5-6 million. You might be able to avoid income tax and other taxation that mortals must pay, but setting those legal constructs is not cheap at all between administrative and legal fees. And also, you must reinvest part of that yield to cover for inflation.
So, once we have clarified that with 100 million, you can dispose of about around 5 million, which is by all means more money than most humans will ever see in their life, it is still not enough to own a Gulfstream, one must charter it. One can own a boat or a small yatch, but definitely not a super yatch. One can afford spacious property at one of the centers of the universe (London and New York) and a country house, but one cannot be a large owner with multiple properties and hectares of real state. Let us not forget that a spacious house in a place such as Belgravia or Mayfair goes for 10-20 million. It is not an out of pocket expense. Our hypothetical multimillionaire must plan for it. Also one is not fully resilient against life events such as a divorce, addictions or bad business decisions.
Now that we see that one person worth 100m cannot live fully careless and there are some things that he cannot afford, we see that the person with 10 million is in a more complicated situation. The person with 10 million cannot even guarantee that his offspring will get into a top university. He cannot afford to make a 3-5 million donation. The person also will be upper middle class in a place such as London and can only afford property through mortgages and using his wealth as collateral. A divorce or a bankruptcy will definitely destroy his lifestyle.
I would say that Anatoly missed the mark by two orders of magnitude. It is from one billion onwards when marginal gains stop making a difference. There is almost nothing that an Abramovitch or a Vekselberg cannot do that a Musk or a Bezos can. Even though they have 15-20% the wealth of those two.
There are degrees of Calvinism. 40,000 chosen is not for me. It is more about being cautious about a loving God forgiving us all. Better to err on the cautious side.
Reality simply doesn’t work by the ideal principles that you seem to want to espouse. If you want widespread mass production of guns, Eli Whitney will deliver it to you faster than the government. When it comes to iterative deployment of technology, commercial sectors are regularly the progenitors.
More exotic “basic research” does tend to come from non-commercial sectors; the internet was originally a defense and later an academic project, but its development was largely commercial. There are some companies that have straddled the line, which is what Thiel argued in his Zero to One; companies that establish monopolistic profits begin to behave more like governments and can create paradigm changing technologies such as Ma Bell’s creation of C, pretty much one of the fundamental programming languages.
The military and the government came sometimes come up with interesting ideas and concepts, but ultimately making it “fit to purpose” for the population is pretty consistently commercial. GPS didn’t make much of a difference in the lives people as an exotic air force project; it was only after it was commercialized did it become a major force for change.
Another regular libertardian commenter and probable Breitbart reader, great.
You just confirmed what I said: so called entrepreneurs are not, basically, inventors, creators. They’re disseminators, popularizers.
They have their function. But they don’t create, lead.
Yea, but thats a critical role in the economy. Average person needs goods and services delivered to them and disseminators do exactly that. You can nationalize their logistics network to make them less rich but odds are you will end up wrecking your supply chain and thats how you end up as Venezuela.
I’m not a Christian.
That actually sounds like something a leftist intellectual of the time would come up with. However, given the state of Weimar Germany, it is an odd perspective to say the least.
May I ask what you are then?
Just went thru all 200+ comments in one go.
None of them is as valuable or succinct as Beckow’s first comment. Everything else is up in the sky like the clouds.
A post-Christian (atheist) Anglo nationalist, I suspect.
This is essentially an appropriate summation of what happens when a non-consumer guided organization gets to make a lot of decisions on what gets delivered to the user. Classic AGILE joke, but appropriate:
https://twitter.com/bill_easterly/status/1148992125670813698
Well, on the map, that tiny slice colored orange in the south-west, over there you get normal winters.
That’s exactly where the two cities in my post are.
https://sublimemaps.micro.blog/uploads/2019/1417844738.jpg
In the region colored yellow you get the harsh North European winters, and beyond that you start entering different shades of permafrost.
As to Eastern European women–perhaps that’s a sense of self-preservation. The reason Slavic men drink themselves to death is Slavic women. It takes a Donald Trump to keep one of those from sucking the life out of him.
But again, the more you go from Muscovy into any direction, the more different genes start creeping in. First Finno-Ugric peoples and Bashkirs and Tatars around the Volga, then the slant-eyed genetics start for real.
Whereas down south, bordering the orange region of normal climate, are the various Caucasus mountain federal republics. So they beef up the orange region population with Turkic blood. And they’re not all insane. You’ve got places like the Karachay-Cherkess Republic or the Kabardino-Balkar Republic, which are normal.
https://infogalactic.com/w/images/thumb/1/11/North_Caucasian_Federal_District_%28numbered%29.svg/600px-North_Caucasian_Federal_District_%28numbered%29.svg.png
For science, this is what Turkic Russians look like. You mix this with Slavic genes you get…the Balkans and South Russia in parts of the orange belt.
https://sun9-65.userapi.com/c840428/v840428216/8674e/uRVvzMaAGqc.jpg
https://riadagestan.ru/upload/iblock/1f6/1f60733201a5dadac84a18d086aa3db0.jpg
https://ic.pics.livejournal.com/aliozdoev/61021482/263709/263709_1000.jpg
You make the same mistake as the AP – you confuse the language group and the genes.
Here are the Chuvash
https://chgiki.ru/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/4.-%D0%9E%D0%B1%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B6%D0%BA%D0%B0-%D1%81%D0%B0%D0%B9%D1%82%D0%B0-1440-500.jpg
http://richfizh.chuvsu.ru/images/news_img/17-04-29/IMG_0379.JPG
And these are the Yakuts
https://ysia.ru/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/1-44.jpg
https://yakkii.ru/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/7720bea8-a979-47c6-9a38-cc3b1060289d-768×512.jpg
Both Yakuts and Chuvash speak the languages of the Turkic group, although they represent different large races
in addition, in Kabardino-Balkaria (where the photos come from), the main population group is Circassians, whose language has nothing in common with Turkic
But are they sane or will they drive a man into alcoholism?
THINK BIGGER
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-10/atomic-superyacht-to-offer-3-million-eco-tours-with-scientists
I think this is also a case of a generational lag in our world filters and describes more the Japan of 1995 or 2005 than the Japan of today.
But anyway, even if so. The average IQ situation stands.
Korea – 106
Japan – 105
Ireland – 92
Serbia – 89
Philippines – 86
Egypt – 81
Sri Lanka – 79
Jamaica – 71
Even if today’s Japanese porn idols are “below average IQ”, they are so by Eastern Asian terms.
If they are 15 points below the local average, they would still be completely normal in places like Ireland or Serbia, and above average in the Philippines.
Even if they are a whooping 30 points below the Japanese and Korean average, they would still be members of the cognitive elite in South Asia, Central America, and much of Africa.
Gookwaffen coomers assemble! Waifu material in sight!
This is not nuclear tourism done right, IMO. For 3 million, I’d want to shoot one of those nuclear bazookas at a ghost town. Or go on an Project Orion trip to Mars.
Seems kind of crazy too? Will molten salt reactors make progs lose their fear of nuclear energy and allow the ship to come into port or go through canals? I doubt it. Nuclear isn’t something that gains status among the environmental tourism crowd. They are the ones that picket and litigate new construction of power plants.
https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/36b/cd5/3707895e93bdadc36e85d04db76eaeaa41-wojak-07.w710.jpg
If they do lead, it is often in socially harmful directions, e.g., Facebook, Instagram, Perdue Pharm. Lives can be lost quickly through opioid addiction or slowly, wasted moment by wasted moment, through social media addiction. Entrepreneurs whose impacts are of mega-scale should be on a leash held by a National Socialist style of governance.
Well it’s fantasy time for a normal people, in any case.
Median salary in the Russian Federation before tax is currently around $450 per month ($5400 per year). There is also a shadow economy, so the real number for median salary can be higher than an official one.
So for an official median salary person in Russia to earn $10 million, you will need to continue to work in your job for 1850 years before you can retire.
If you begin your “Makropulos career” at the median Russian salary in time of Marcus Aurelius, then you can look forward to have earned $10 million in 2030.
So, “chump change”.
If Zuckerberg has exited Facebook at such a young age and early stage, then he likely would have continued to found other companies as a serial entrepreneur, until he was self-confident enough to not accept early exits.
He already has bypassed an opportunity to sell his MP3 player idea when he was teenager, and he avoided selling it for a million dollars (and distributed it for free if I recall).
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/10/23/not-so-artificial-intelligence-for-his-high-school/
These people like Zuckerberg, Musk, et al, are crazy workaholics, not playboys. It’s not that surprising that they are marrying their girlfriends as soon as they found somehow whose personality seemed to match their own – it is a type of people who spend 99% of their day obsessed with working and projects.
It’s not necessarily desirable for you, unless you had developed a particular taste for those things.
For example, upper class daughters of Bloomberg and Abramovich, are obsessed with horses, and that seems to be main passion of such aristocratic childrens’ lives.
On the other hand, if you gave me a horse, I would not know what to do, except probably like to have it as a pet if I had a garden.
If I could afford to buy a horse, I would only know how to use it as a pet, which walks around the garden eating grass, and probably it will escape after a few days.
I haven’t been habituated in my childhood for an upper class life, and the upper class life is more strange than desirable, from the perspective of my modest socioeconomic background, and I wouldn’t know what to do with horses and superyacht, as I don’t have any skills projected into those aristocratic objects of desire.
However, my parents has cursed me in some sense by becoming middle class during my childhood, and then paying for things like music and tennis lessons when I was a teenager, and which most other kids my age were not having.
So, I am in a sense, cursed by dreams to have a higher income level, than normal people who doesn’t need to buy a Yamaha CFX, and whose desires didn’t extend beyond buying the latest playstation or large screen televisions.
Commodity fetishism is necessary condition for the incentive structure that organizes capitalist societies, and I can see in myself that it is certainly a large part of the motive for my own labour discipline.
But you couldn’t give me labour discipline, with the reward of superyachts and horses, etc. Once I would have enough millions to buy a vineyard, and claim that a new career as a winegrower, or something like that – then my incentives for labour discipline would be exhausted. That is to say, I would retire.
Different people have different personalities. From the blog, Karlin seems like a example of a monastic, anti-materialist personality, and could perhaps be happier without hundreds of millions of dollars.
He even seemed more happy to talk about free (in my opinion, a very unentertaining) services like Twitter, than with things like a PlayStation 5.
So probably even an average teenager, needs more money than he does, let alone dreams about private jets and yatchts.
Karlin is an avid gamer, but no, not in the open-mouthed soyboy crowd.
https://akarlin.com/reviews/games/
You really seem to me to be an intellectual of sorts, your brain churning at a very high clip. I’ve enjoyed watching your evolution as a serious film buff. Books, videos and music CD’s will probably take up a lot of your non work time. Not to say that you don’t seem to have a well developed social life. In the past, you would have made an excellent college professor type, tweed jacket and briar pipe included, naturally. Today? 🙂
What type of profession or work do you see yourself evolving into? With your high IQ and ability to manipulate data, I could possibly see you as some sort of a marketing guy. It’s nice to see that you don’t seem to let mercurial interests dominate your lifestyle.
Do you know whether Karlin spends any time playing chess, in the old fashioned Russian tradition? Has he ever had a rating?
He mentioned playing before and I think his estimated rating, he was pretty good. He hasn’t played in awhile afaik. Now he plays CHAINLINK.
Visually, the game looks quite interesting and I plan to look into it more when I find some time. My gaming experience can be characterized as a few years of racing on the “Need for Speed” circuit and also some more relaxed gaming with a couple of the electronic golf franchises. Both were a lot of fun an a great way to socialize, although 4 hours of gaming could go by very quickly. 🙂
I notice that Karlin also seems to like some of the auto games, including Grand Theft Auto. However, nobody has been able to tell me whether Karlin has ever held a rating as a chess player? I suspect that he’s quite good at it.
Karlin’s favorite game is likely a game with transhumanist themes.
I am a bit surprised that AK never mentioned playing X-com.
Though, to be fair, I did find it kind of woke. I wish there had been a patch that would eliminate the blacks and Arabs, etc. that constantly show up when you want to select a team member from Europe. If I had to form an elite team to fight aggressive aliens, I don’t think I’d want to bring along David Lammy and Ash Sarkar. Ditto for America and AOC, Rashida Tlaib, or Kamala.
X-Com isn’t in the list of games reviewed or played. He has to write GB for us, after all.
How many people here would choose to go up in New Shepard or Virgin Galactic, if offered free tickets?
Not me. It seems pretty lame. Why risk mach speeds to view for ten minutes or so what you could view on the internet, or partly experience riding a rollercoaster?
It is hard to see it being successfully commercialized on a low level like that. Full orbits, maybe.
I was one of the top players in my age group in Lancashire but happily I didn’t waste time on chess after the age of 15 or so.
I like the lore (much of it was really a satire on Thatcherite Britain, at least back then) but I only ever played a few games borrowing other people’s pieces.
I didn’t play X Com.
I made a commitment not to do Cyberpunk 2077 until GB is written.
Why do you consider playing chess a “waste of time” whereas according to some of your close commenters here, you seem to spend a lot of time playing various video games? Chess, I think, is a great way to perform a “brain realignment”, helping to sharpen things like planning, memory, tactical reasoning, execution, monte carlo simulation, baiting tactics, extreme creativity etc. etc. All in all, it’s great fun too! 🙂
I don’t spend a lot of time on video games and the games I do play tend to be low mental load (somewhere between watching a movie and reading a novel).
Chess occupies mind power that could be used for getting actually useful skills, for making money, and/or creating original intellectual work. Nobody plays chess for the “community” it has. To make money from it, you have to be in the world’s top 100 – to make serious money, top dozen.
Makes sense! Still, like borshch is the “king of soups”, chess is the “king of games”. IMHO. 🙂
Well I have been one of the most “strict” people in relation to the coronavirus lockdown, and I haven’t been to pub, restaurant or resort vacation, for more than a year.
So the fact I burned my extra time, by turning my television into something like a 1950s Italian cinema for a few months, was a pretty modest luxury.
By the way, how was your film watching “career” of last months? I was burned off films, probably by watching too many old Polish films, and now I’m just watching only around one film a week, although mostly good ones I could recommend.
My profession is “boring office worker”, and this will be my fate probably until I retire.
But lot of my family are and was working as farmers – especially as dairy farmers.
I hate all that farming industry, because of the animal cruelty*, but if I could do an organic type of farming that doesn’t involve animals, that would be my preference as a career change.
*
*For example, one of my cousins has helped with working with cows since childhood, and the cows knew him like he is their friend.
So the cows especially like that he strokes them. Whereas if I would touch one of their cows when I visited, they have a panic attack (they hate unknown people).
But the psychological situation of the daily job of this kind of farmer is an unpleasant one, as these conscious animals think the farmer is their friend, and the farmer is pretending he cares about them every day. Then there is the overall reality of the situation, where the farmer is just exploiting their lives for economic self-interest.
That’s not to mention, all their use of chemicals, and even cruelty against dogs (some of my relatives is tying dogs to different buildings for security)
So, if I was rich, I would probably try to change my profession from office life, to become of organic vegetable farmer. I would love to be a farmer, but farming is only pleasant when it which has as minimal relation to animals as possible.
As an apprentice in a giant electrical engineering factory (7500 people at the time, already down from 14,000) in the Midlands in the 1970’s, I definitely played chess for the community. I started by playing chess at lunchtime with the mechanical fitter for whom I worked, another Welshman. He was the Midlands regional champion in the British Chess Federation and one of the best players in the UK. He always beat me but insisted I was the best player in the factory to be his opponent.
The place was full of Eastern Europeans (Poles and Ukrainians mostly) who came to watch us. Eventually, the Ukrainians asked me to play for the Ukrainian Social Club against the much larger Polish Social Clubs. One of the Polish Social Clubs objected as I wasn’t Polish so the Ukrainian chairman set me up with his daughter as my girlfriend (This required physical demonstration. Neither of us objected) to qualify. The Poles accepted. This was an introduction to quite a wide circle. So chess, certainly in a club environment can be social. Of course, in those days even Aspies (me?) had to make the effort to leave the house in order to play. This was my introduction to Eastern European people and culture. At weddings everybodies Aunties turned up in national dress.
I was brought up in a rural community. At weekends I helped on a small(ish) mixed farm. In my experience, farmers genuinely care for the animals. They want them killed quickly and humanely. It is their fate to become beef or bacon. The farmer must set out to be a good steward of his herds and flocks. That is enough to be moral.
Coming back to the orginal topic, a huge number of wealthy people in Britain buy farms for retirement or even a hobby. i think this dates back to the 19th C when Rothschild, despite many donations to charity, was initially refused a Peerage by Victoria herself. Queens could do that then. Victoria felt that he needed to show his committment to the UK by owning a large piece of immovable wealth. Financial capital was not enough. In the end, 4,000 acres of farmland (about 28m GBP now) and a similar value of property let out for rent in London did the trick. Boris Johnson made Baron Lebedev of Siberia a Lord for a lot less.
Is getting into the House of Lords “making it”? No actual work required. About 100k GBP a year for turning up diligently each working day (350/day) if you want to as a sort of social security for the notable.
Yes, chess did serve a social function in Britain. As well as Warhammer 40k for richer/duller people. 🙂
It doesn’t really do that these days, so far as I’m aware. 😐
I thought that you worked in an office somewhere, that’s why I could see you morphing into a marketing guy. You seem quite good with facts and figures and are quite a friendly and sociable sort of guy, all good traits for a marketing guy. Working in the film industry would be a good fit too – don’t set your sights to low, you’re young and obviously quite intelligent.
Running an organic, green sort of business sounds good too. However, most Jewish people aren’t really known for being farmer types, although I know that stereotyping people can be quite a fruitless endeavor. My first rate auto-mechanic is Jewish. he left the old country as an engineer, and obviously loves cars. He has at least 30k invested in some very high tech computerized equipment in his small garage. He’s not afraid to get his hands dirty and is very, very honest – an important trait when looking for an auto mechanic.
I need to finish watching a film starring Robert Mitchum that I started last night “Rampage”. Big game hunting and trapping, a gorgeous femme fatal, shot in technicolor, what’s there not to like? Substantively, it’s probably not the very best Robert Mitchum film, but it’ll do…Oh, I did re-watch “Lawrence of Arabia” about a month ago. Very highly recommended (on so many levels). If you’ve never watched this film, do so, you should really enjoy it.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8a/Peter_O%27Toole_–_LOA_trailer.jpg/220px-Peter_O%27Toole_–_LOA_trailer.jpg
Peter O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia *****
The chess club in Saratov meets physically and not all the players are male. There are probably such places in Moscow, Khamovniki at least. No longer in the UK as you say.
If you’re interested in seeing a really good film noir film starring Robert Mitchum, you’d be hard pressed to find a better one than “Out of the Past”. It also stars Kirk Douglas in the only film I think that those two were in together. The film is interesting because it showcases and contrasts the different acting styles of both Mitchum and Douglas, the former being more of a self taught actor, whereas Douglas was the beneficiary of a more classical actor upbringing. Both do a great job in this one. The femme fatale Jane Greer holds up quite well in her role too. As the professional critics put it:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f9/Out_of_the_Past_%281947_poster_-_retouched%29.jpg/220px-Out_of_the_Past_%281947_poster_-_retouched%29.jpg
Kiss the pretty Ukrainian girl and you win the prize. I like that! It sounds even better than going to a county fair. 🙂
Did the kiss lead to anything more than just being able to play against some snooty Poles?
Ecxeptions happen more frequently than it should be, but yeah in general, homo sapiens tend to kill animals humanely. All those cows and many other domesticated species would have way worse fate in the wild as humans for all their flaws still do not shred them to pieces alive while heavy pregnant, which is usual deal in nature.
The need for killing may end though if that lab grown meat thing will take off sometime in the future.
I was off to university two months later. So not much.
I wouldn’t enjoy marketing. To be honest, I only enjoy “technical” work for which I was trained, and am professionally competent, although in my life I will have to do more management responsibilities if I am going to climb in the future.
I mean only if I had somehow got very rich, which is unlikely, then I would want to use my hypothetical millions of dollars to something become like an organic vegetable farmer.
And I would have to do something that not use any unnatural, unorganic farming methods, that would subtract from the pleasure of the work.
I have it on my bookshelves, but I never had 4 hours to watch it yet.
Sony did an amazing work with the restoration. Just from testing it looks beautiful on my television.
Lol good recommendations, but I already had this on my bookshelves. I’ll take a picture as the box is so cool.
Philosophically interesting film, with a lot of strange unconscious and ideological/American symbols.
https://i.imgur.com/DWcd7d2.jpg
Yes I know from time with my relatives farms, that they are basically friends with the cows, which actually has made it seem an even worse and less pleasant industry to me.
Because the cows are de facto your friends, as you spend a lot of the hours of your life with them. So the overall situation feels worse, than if you didn’t have rapport with the animals that you exploit.
People also don’t seem to understand that these farm animals are just like spending time with mentally disabled people. The cows develop a friendship with the farmer, and view him with a lot of trust.
Probably slaveowners of previous centuries would have felt more conflict to be kind to their slaves, for that kind of reason.
I know that people who do vegetable and fruit farming and not necessarily better for the environment, as they are still probably often damaging the ecosystem and using pesticides. But that type of farming we could do without any moral sense of being a slave owner.
I know someone whose parents have bought a vineyard in the UK and produce commercial wine with it, that is sold in expensive wine shops.
But they are very rich people before they became vineyard owners. I guess it seems to be a situation where they have delegated all complicated aspect of the job and have some team of experts to manage everything and produce wine for them.
Lol because people from KGB origins nowadays have the best professional skills to navigate into the British upper classes. https://www.unz.com/akarlin/open-thread-128/#comment-4303653
Yes a lot of venture capital is going into there in the last few years.
I listened recently to a podcast of a Israeli startup talking about the topic, and their marketing speech sounds very persuasive to my unexpert ears.
If I was working in venture capitalism, I would be pretty excited about a possible new agriculture revolution, that could also have some moral compulsion for the future consumers to need to buy it.*
As consumers in the future, we will (justifiably) start to feel immoral to buy real meat, after such an option to eat lab meat is created.
There is also such a market distortion with electric cars. That is, in the future, there won’t be decision for the consumers based on cost – as the moral dimension of the product, means that it will be official and unofficial compulsory to buy it.
Going full Elon Musk is one of the only ways for Multi-Billionaires to live. SPACE! and all other awesome stuff.