Banned
Sure. They have the right to live a life in accordance whith what they've earned throughout their life.
What they don't have is a right to spend billions on a home while ignoring the rest of humanity (and the countless deaths that have, and will continue to result as a consequence of their decision.
FEMMEM. I won't translate, as it's not particularly nice.
Order of Kilopi
You got any examples you want to share? You know, so we have a clue why you're upset.
Order of Kilopi
We can't boycott the rich. They own nearly everything and employ nearly everyone. Even small businesses buy their products from the rich.
Order of Kilopi
Two things keep the world going round. Money, and Love. Love keeps making new customers, so that Money can flow around, Trade is the foundation of all civilizations, even something as simple as the trade between farm and city. Without it, the best we could do was subsistence farming, making just enough to feed, clothe and house, ourselves. Not a way for technology to grow. It is a surplus of materials that allows the growth of specialist industry. This also means there will be inequalities of wealth, some people will have much more resources then other.Yes, it sucks to see someone who makes more then you do in your life time in a year, but it is the creation of wealth is the driving force of a vibrant community. It wasn't communism that invented the PC, or the telegraph then telephones then fiber optic cables and satellites, that created the world wide network of computers we call the internet, that allows you to moan about it to us. The irony is killing me here.
Newbie
mugaliens, why don't you tell us what kind of lifestyle you live?
The reason I ask is, the world is full of people who live in houses and apartments much bigger than they need, who drive vehicles on leisure trips, who have homes filled with fancy electronics, with all kinds of nice stuff. These people live their lives at a level so much beyond their survival needs, and are completely indifferent to the people who die every day because they don't have clean water, and for whom electricity is a distant dream.
So I need to know if I should be boycotting you.
Order of Kilopi
Considering they are posting on the internet, the answer is likely yes. As an example, I shall boycott myself. I shall never buy anything from myself again!Originally Posted by Coral
On a more serious note, I don't see, how boycotting rich people would ease suffering in third world nations. If anything, if it was effective, it would add suffering at home. Gee, thats a good idea.
Member
mugaliens,
In a way you are right. Of course it's shameful that there are people that rather spend their money on a mansion for their dog, then to send it to places in need. However...
I find freedom even more important. If we as a society would force the rich to give up their wealth or tell them how they should spend their money, then we are heading towards a society that I don't want to be part of.
Second I believe in the 'self made man'. If we would enrich poor countries immediately, they will never have been through the process that we have been through. It's good to help out and find new ways to solve the hunger problem, however I am very much against sending cash blindly to places that need it. It will only feed corruption and they would be completely dependent on other nations to help them. If for some reason the richer countries fall apart, then they will have no money or skills to feed themselves.
It's like raising a kid, if you give your kid everything he wants, then (s)he will become a spoiled brat that doesn't know how to work and how to get things done...
Why are you this upset? What has Paris Hilton done this time?
Established Member
Ahem...
The Terrible People
by Ogden Nash
People who have what they want are very fond of telling people who haven't what they want that they really don't want it,
And I wish I could afford to gather all such people into a gloomy castle on the Danube and hire half a dozen capable Draculas to haunt it.
I dont' mind their having a lot of money, and I don't care how they employ it,
But I do think that they damn well ought to admit they enjoy it.
But no, they insist on being stealthy
About the pleasures of being wealthy,
And the possession of a handsome annuity
Makes them think that to say how hard it is to make both ends meet is their bounden duity.
You cannot conceive of an occasion
Which will find them without some suitable evasion.
Yes indeed, with arguments they are very fecund;
Their first point is that money isn't everything, and that they have no money anyhow is their second.
Some people's money is merited,
And other people's is inherited,
But wherever it comes from,
They talk about it as if it were something you got pink gums from.
Perhaps indeed the possession of wealth is constantly distressing,
But I should be quite willing to assume every curse of wealth if I could at the same time assume every blessing.
The only incurable troubles of the rich are the troubles that money can't cure,
Which is a kind of trouble that is even more troublesome if you are poor.
Certainly there are lots of things in life that money won't buy, but it's very funny --
Have you ever tried to buy them without money?
Order of Kilopi
Our busy bee's reading list seems to include Drudge:
Now it's doubled in price:January 29, 2008
Man Builds Himself a Billion Dollar Home
...its future resident, Mukesh Ambani, is India's richest man...
- ABC
Last edited by sarongsong; 2008-May-04 at 03:46 PM.
Order of Kilopi
I'd rather we boycott criminals or terrorists---how many gripe about Bill Gates and his money, while typing the gripe using software and/or operating system from Microsoft? The "evil" for being rich (as opposed to the truly evil rich) have improved the lives of all of us. Gee--if not for the promise of getting rich, would Henry Ford have developed the mass-produced automobile? How about Thomas Edison--was he really just being a philanthropist or did he actually intend to make money with his inventions? Certainly, the promise of wealth has driven most of the innovation out there. The promise has to be viable for it to be effective, too.
Order of Kilopi
I guess this means you wont be posting anymore as you go live in a cave?
Order of Kilopi
I have an idea, lets boycott jealous people! Moaning about how much money some people make is not going to get people clean water.
Bad Post-Doc
Heck, a lot of 'em weren't even his inventions; he'd hired a whole stable of inventors to work for him. (Literally, as I recall--I believe they worked in a converted barn.) Then again, without Edison and his money and his employees, how different our lives would be!
Mugaliens, I'm kind of getting tired of you telling us all how to behave. You want to boycott rich people? Fine. Go ahead, if you can figure out how. But I'm going to go see Iron Man tomorrow, and I'm watching a Disney movie right now, and I don't intend to stop watching movies or buying, you know, food.
_____________________________________________
Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
Established Member
Life is a trade off. The richer one is the more responsibility is attached to that wealth and can take up an enormous amount of time in the day. The number of phone calls Bill Gates receives each day is far more than the two I get each week. It is nice and quiet in this home and I aim to keep it that way! Therefore, I have a freedom that Gates may ponder about from time to time but that does not necessarily make him miserable. All those phone calls might be really neat to him. All the different deals and ways of twisting around his finances to make something work may bring pleasure. And so what about his big house? Would you like to clean it and maintain it or have the threat of a guest suing you for one slight misplaced item by hired help that may have brought injury?
I am not sure that I buy all the arguments listed above as to why capitalism has provided the class distinctions and results that it gets. There are many welfare states that have produced great scientists and so did the former Soviet Union. I had one former Soviet citizen tell me that the intentions of that society was very good but that the mechanics of the system is what breeds its problems. She stated that life as a worker, as long as one was at work, did have much less pressure than it does in the United States. But once she would leave work, as a consumer things are the other way around and it is more mechanical in reasoning than laziness or any other attutude one might attribute. The promise of having the right to democratically elect one's own supervisors was a promise of greater freedom than U.S. workers have. However, the planned economy associated with it has some problems other than corruption.
The planned economy still has a need for surplus in order to invest in newer technologies. So when 5 year plans were announced, the prices on some items would be be going up to draw in that surplus. The trouble with that is that the people as consumers would then stock up on those items about to be raised in price. 5 years of toothepaste, 5 years of soap, 5 years of (you name it minus fresh food) gets stockpiled in the cellar or under their mobile homes. That means that no surplus can be realized and that newer and better mouse traps cannot get to the market as quickly as it can in the United States. So corruption has nothing to do with it. We have plenty right here. It is not perfect here or anywhere. Capitalism can just get products into the market and a larger number of them in a shorter amount of time.
Further, there are many rich people who had no intention of getting rich but wealth just plucked down in their lap due to methodologies that govern their lives. Many of them just dig the world of making deals and trading, like some kid hung up on the board game Monopoly.
Mugaliens, do you really think that Michael Jordon loved basketball just to satisfy his wallet? Then why did he play at casinos so much? He didn't do it to get rich. He must have done it for enjoyment and the surroundings and the people he rubbed shoulders with in those places. He played minor league baseball for a short while but stunk. Yet, here in Chicago, we were able to witness him on television buying hot dogs for children after a game in Birmingham and sitting under a tree and eating with them. A beautiful quiet setting that MLB has lost.
Yet, other rich people needed some privacy and felt trapped into needing their mansions to put space between themselves and others. Still others wanted to share their mansions with many friends whose lives did need help.
The rich can appear to be greedy. But be careful. Not all workers envy their lives at all and are quite content with their smaller lot in life. I have also seen greed right here in my mobile home park. Kids steal lunch money from each other. So it works both ways.
As for the Third World, it is not as easy as it seems. The Third World is very complex as a whole. There are an extreme number of social stuctures that differ from each other so much that as soon as you give to one of them, it destroys another. Most Africans cannot digest wheat and gluten because it is not in many of their diets while it does exist in communities spread out from one another. As a result, celiac disease has plagued many African countries and the recipients of the western world's donations think they are being poisoned. A cyber pal of mine in Kenya complains that western medicine is pushed on a populace that cannot afford it while African drug makers like himself (he is a chemist in Eldoret) are making equal quality products that can be sold way cheaper. He feels that African private entrepeneurs are being suffocated by western aid and local dictators who keep making deals to keep them around. Yet, I am sure that others in Africa have benefited and got themselves a head start to realize a business due to foreign aid.
To shorten things up, it aint as simple as "haves and have nots".
Order of Kilopi
Hee-hee, as this sentence unfolded I thought it would end with:which, in a way, we are....as we at BAUT are all rich!
Established Member
(my bold) I really don´t understand this. Could you explain what you mean by this? What´s the meaning of "countless deaths that .... result as a consequence of their decision"? Which decision? I would recommend to spend trillions and trillions and trillions on a home. Have you ever thought about how many families could live for how many years from this investment?
If I understand your post correctly I would say: They are obliged to spend billions on a home (and other things).
Am I misunderstanding you completely?
Established Member
Wait a second, first you tell us to mug aliens, now you are telling us to boycott the rich! :P
Order of Kilopi
how many poor people got jobs in the design and construction of this billion dollar home, and how many are going to have jobs maintaining it?
the money that was used to build it wasn't just thrown in a barrel and burnt into nothingness any more than the money that the USA spends on what some people consider "wasteful" things like shooting rockets into space.
the money goes somewhere, and when something big gets built, it goes right into the pockets of the people that build it.
Banned
OK I don't get it.
No one seems to mind when several members tell us how to act here (No mystery links, describe your YouTubes etc) but if Mugaliens says something that has nothing to do with how we act on BAUT, he is told to stop telling us what to do? That makes no sense.
Secondly, I can see why seeing a billion dollars dumped into your house (Which for some people is an air conditioned oversized storage unit) would seem very appalling and wasteful.
But I agree with Novaderrik, not Mugaliens. I'd rather see the economy get fed- with people working for the money. That seems more sensible to me than if the billionaire (trillionaire?) built a less expensive house and gave the rest away to lazy butts.
Either way- it's his money and his freedom to build a billion dollar house. Or a gajillion dollar house if he's that stupid.
Can you imagine the taxes and maintenance on that thing?
Come to think of it... You know those European mansions that are absolutely humongous that were built a couple hundred years ago? I wonder how much it would cost in todays money to have built one now.
Order of Kilopi
This comes after a string of posts telling us how to behave on BAUT. The two or three ideas he posted were counter to the basic idea of the board, and the tens of posts on those two or three topics became terribly annoying. This continues the trend. As you can see, Gillian isn't the only one annoyed by this.
As for this post, it's kind of impossible to do. Buying anything anywhere supports rich people. Working anywhere supports at least one rich person somehow. I'm not about to start subsistence farming, and it's really hard to be an independent physics professor.
Banned
This is true, and I also disagree with the point of "Boycotting Rich People" but in the end, I read the OP more as a statement of being appalled by this particular wealthy persons actions.
Which I can understand.
I just had to point out the other side is all
Order of Kilopi
Still, 2x109 dollars for a house is, well, just obscene.
Bill "If I had a nickel for every time Windows crashes--oh wait a minute, I do" Gates only spent about 4x107 on his computer-driven multi-media mansion. I'm afraid to ask what is going into the Indian billionaire's house that will make it cost 50 times what Bill Gates spent on his. Guess I'll have to follow the links and see.
Order of Kilopi
About 31% of the U.S. corn crop will be turned into ethanol in the 2008/2009 season. Funny thing is, this ethanol is produced so inefficiently it would be cheaper to buy ethanol from more efficient producers such as Brazil and sell the corn on the open market. This would lower food costs world wide and allow people in the U.S. to fuel their cars.
Bad Post-Doc
If it were all he were saying, I wouldn't've said what I did. But it does rather follow hard on an out-of-the-blue tirade about how we shouldn't be doing what the board's mandate pretty much requires we do, so you see my weariness.
I can also assure you that there are a lot of things that people do around here that annoy the bejeezus out of me without my ever saying a word.
_____________________________________________
Gillian
"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"
"You can't erase icing."
"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"
Established Member
Don't boycott them, just make it illegal for their children to inherit the wealth. Gets rid of the bludgers, ensures re-distribution of the wealth AND ensures we actually do have 'self-made (wo)men' at the top of the pile.
I've met a few rich people & mostly (there's always an exception) the self-made types are genuine people - the problems seem to come from those who inherit & thus assume they are in some way better than those who need to work for a living.
Order of Kilopi
...and that would help how? If the wealthy wanted their children to have it, they would just distribute it before they died!...make it illegal for their children to inherit the wealth.
BTW, Warren Buffet has already told his children that they aren't getting any! It's all going to charity.
Order of Kilopi
Except that:April 30, 2008
... the rest of the world doesn't seem to want what the Brazilians have. In the United States, a 54 cent-per-gallon tax blocks most Brazilian ethanol from reaching U.S. consumers...Brazil churned out nearly 6 billion gallons...last year, about 85 percent of it used domestically...
McClatchy
Order of Kilopi
Is there some line you want to draw on how much can be passed down, and if you do, how do you draw that line? Can parents pass down a home, a family business or a farm, or does it get taken away?
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?
The Leif Ericson Cruiser
Established Member
Best of luck to you in your quest, mugs.
I don't expect to ever see you post on this board again if you succeed, since you won't be giving the rich guys at your ISP any money. And remember, libraries have to pay ISPs for their internet access too, so don't go thinking that by posting from a public library (or borrowing a friends computer or internet connection) that you're dodging your standard of ethics that you've formulated with your "boycott the rich" plan.
And when the hard drive on your computer fails, I'd be interested in seeing if you can build your own.
Let me know how that works out for you.
If this guy didn't steal the money from anyone, and as long as he's paying people a fair wage to do the work, why should anyone care what he spends on his own house?
I spent over $150,000 on my house. I guess that means that every person that lives in a mud hut in some filthy corner of the world should be resentful of the sheer opulence that is my house, huh?
I just simply don't understand the entire mentality of "that guy has more than me, and he's spending a lot on his house, therefore he's evil*"
*Unless we can get the government to force him to give me some of that money that I didn't earn through the tax system. Then it's okay.
Established Member
Well, I think that it is good.... you know, I wish that I could ignore the rest of humanity....
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