Miscellaneous

A BETTER NAME FOR AI: Rapid stupidity, because it does things no intelligent human would ever do, but much faster.

Around 1980, in a book which I had checked out of a public library, which had been written by Caroline Coon and published in 1977, entitled 1988: The New Wave Punk Rock Explosion, I read, apparently from the author's personal impressions of John Lydon, that at age 20, his favorite insult of anyone over age 16 was, "You're too old," and -- from memory! and probably, therefore, inaccurate! -- that although married, he said, "Love is something that you feel for a kitten. If you feel it for another human being, it just shows that your brain isn't working properly." And I said to myself, "AAAAAAAAGGGHHHH!!! I knew it! I knew Johnny Rotten was alright!  HE LOVES KITTIES!!!! squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" *thud*

 

I've already said it more than once on this blog, but it bears repeating: I'm not going along with this blanket condemnation of billionaires. Maybe most of them are poisonous reptiles, but we won't know unless we examine each of them as individuals, just the same as we do with any other group, unless we're prejudiced, because that is the definition of prejudice. Furthermore, more and more I have the impression that most of these yahoos spouting blanket condemnations of all billionaires -- are millionaires. They tend not to have the look of the vagabond, as that hair stylist in Down and Out in Beverly Hills said of the homeless. I don't see thrift-store clothes or homemade haircuts on these denouncers of billionaires, and I get a definite sense of private colleges and homes in stylish neighborhoods and $10 coffees and so forth. In short, they profess to be critical of capitalism while having themselves greatly benefited from it, but they focus on the size of a person's stack -- while possessing large stacks. ENORMOUS stacks from the perspective of the great majority of people on Earth.

It's NOT the size of your stack, it's what you're DOING with it! And if you're dissing all billionaires instead of focusing on specific acts by specific billionaires -- you're not doing much with your stack! I'm unimpressed! Also, if you succeed in stirring up enmity based on the size of a person's stack, and your own stack looks huge to most people on Earth -- that could really come back and bite you on the ass, you tedious and yet also horrible moron!

A month ago I got a shot of cortisone in my right shoulder, which had been very painful, and from that time until now, my right shoulder has been COMPLETELY pain-free! I'm 62 years old! This is the first time in years ANY of my joints has been pain-free! Steroids are amazing (cortisone is a steroid. I had one dose of it a month ago, administered by an MD. I favor the medically-responsible use of steroids, not the daily massive abuse which kills and maims for the sake of more frequent wight training)!

Dream Log: Climate Activism in a Billionaire's Mansion

I dreamed that a billionaire had donated his mansion to be used as offices by an organization fighting climate change. I was one of the many volunteers working there. All around me people were bustling, appearing to be working very efficiently and effectively, but I was distracted by the house. It was very fancy. I kept staring at the floors, which had a very great variety of surfaces. I was especially fascinated by some granite squares bordered by strips of matte-finished metal which appeared to be a nickel-copper alloy.

 

Eventually I shook myself into somewhat greater alertness to the task at hand. Someone pointed out an impressive-looking white-haired gentleman in a very handsome suit, and suggested I offer to join his team. I walked up to the white-haired man and said I wanted to work with him. Right away he asked me whether I had been in the military. I said no, and he waved me off, dismissively, clearly considered the question settled.

I walked away, but then a moment later I approached him again, and told him that the reason I had not served in the military was that I had been raised in a very strictly pacifist Pietist Protestant denomination, and that although I was no longer strictly pacifist, the Pietists among whom I had been raised had for centuries bravely faced various forms of persecution for sticking to their beliefs, and that it was a heritage I could be proud of. I said that it his business who he wanted in his crew, but that he shouldn't get the idea that I was some sort of coward.

The old guy thought for a minute, then smiled, nodded, shook my hand and welcomed me aboard.

I followed the boss around the mansion as he busily networked with others. He and I and most of the other volunteers were wearing suits. I could see that the boss' suit and his shoes and watch were all much more expensive than mine. Likewise, the others in this particular crew, and most of the people we were meeting with, were very expensively dressed. I felt self-conscious. I wondered what the others thought about my appearance.

The boss got handed many pieces of paper. He handed some of them to me. Soon the stack of papers I was carrying was so big that I needed a backpack to carry them. Getting that backpack was as simple as calling out, "Hey, anybody got a backpack I can use? Big and roomy would be perfect." And just like that, a big and roomy backpack was tossed my way. 

Was the entire organization, everyone in the mansion, wired that tight? I wondered. Or just this boss' crew of a half dozen men and women quite a bit younger than he and I?

Most of the pieces of paper I was carrying contained color photos of people. "Hey Boss," I asked, waving some of the paper at him, "who are all these people?"

The boss laughed and replied, "Few people would recognize them. Few people have heard their names."

I took a guess: "So these are the 'fools' names and fools' faces' crowd?"

"That's right. They pull strings behind the scenes. And the ones in those pictures are profiteering from pollution. They're death merchants, no two ways about it. And we're going to take them public in a big way."

Billionaires

I'm going to go way out on a limb here and claim that billionaires aren't all exactly the same.

At least, I'd be going out on a limb if I said that in some of the places I hang out. I like those places, it's nice to have found places where nearly everyone hates Elon Musk, but all the same, the frequent, unchallenged assertion that all billionaires are the same is getting to be a pain in the ass. 

 

It's possible that I might dislike every single billionaire, if I examined each one closely. But I haven't examined each and every single billionaire closely. Which is why I'm unable to say that they're all the same.

But there's more than that. Yes, even more. There are differences which anyone can see. Some billionaires are Republicans, some are Democrats. The they're-all-the-same yahoos will respond that they're just pretending to be different, while they pull the strings behind the scenes in our one-party system. Have we gotten to the 100 mark yet, 100 times of me mentioning, in this blog, that brilliant remark of Kurt Vonnegut's, that we are what we pretend to be?

Gotta be at least close to 100 by now. 

There are differences, though. When Warren Buffett says publicly that he should pay more taxes, that's different from Elon Musk publicly saying that he shouldn't have to pay ANY taxes, because he's already publicly benefited mankind so much. And whether Musk really means that, or can barely keep a straight face while he says it and is as amazed as, for instance, I am, that anyone believes he's a public benefactor (we are what we pretend to be!), both Buffett and Musk are decidedly different than most billionaires inasmuch as they've talked about taxes at all in any way except privately.

Musk and Trump and Cuban, and very few other billionaires, seem to live for the spotlight, for public attention. They can't get enough of it, it seems. Many other billionaires seem to live very strictly by the code: "Fools' names and fools' faces often appear in public places." So that we've very rarely, or perhaps never, even heard their names.

Which would make it even harder to tell if they really are all the same, and also exactly the same as the publicity-hungry type of billionaire. 

As with taxes, so also with philanthropy: some billionaires practice it openly, some by stealth, some hardly at all. Instead of "hardly at all," I was going to say "not at all," but it seems even Trump and Musk may have engaged in some charitable giving. Not as much as they would like people to believe, but a little, milked for as much publicity as possible, timed to divert from scandal.

Now, even in the cases of billionaires who give the great majority of their wealth to good causes, it could be argued that they are not making up for all of the damage they caused while accumulating that money. The Andrew Carnegie Syndrome. I'd be more than glad to debate that. On a case-by-case, billionaire-by-billionaire basis. I'm still not going to even debate the nature of all billionaires at once. 

Because, as Denzel Washington said in Philadelphia: "This is the essence of discrimination: formulating opinions about others not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in a group with assumed characteristics." Simple as that. I'm not having it.

But wait, there's EVEN MORE: I have come to believe that a great many of these people claiming that all billionaires are evil and all the same, are themselves millionaires who would much rather debate something else than whether and to what extent their own existence benefits society as a whole. The B-word gives them a very convenient way to change the subject. Might even work if the people they're talking to are also millionaires. Yeah, I bet in would work real well in those circumstances.

Perhaps it was just a coincidence that the first two people I heard spreading the billionaires-are-all trope were millionaires. Gore Vidal, and then Bernie Sanders. 

In fact, in retrospect, I've got to wonder whether Gore Vidal himself was a billionaire when he warned the public to keep both hands planted firmly over one's wallet whenever in the vicinity of a billionaire. Vidal was not merely a bestselling author when he said, he had written a great many very big bestsellers, besides some screenwriting and having been born the grandson of a US Senator and being the first cousin of Al Gore and a cousin by marriage of Jacqueline Kennedy, and living half the year in a villa in Ravello and the other half in the Beverly Hills Hotel. If he wasn't worth at least $100 million in the late 1980's, when he issued his dire warning about billionaires, then he must have given most of his wealth away, or followed terrible investment advice, or been a really amazingly big tipper, or something.

You know what, maybe Gore was a billionaire and knew it, and was ironically warning his more perceptive readers, those capable of reading between the lines just as he spoke between them, to watch out for him, and maybe go into business with less treacherous types. If so -- good one, Gore! and ain't I a dope.

My point was that when I read that article in Vanity Fair where Gore talked about the billionaires and the hands clamped on wallets just for safety's sake, it struck me as very odd that someone that rich was warning the public about the rich. 

And then in 2016, Bernie Sanders went on and on at such length about billionaires that he got a billionaire elected President. And I noticed that during 2016 he and his wife sold their second house for half a million. 

Their SECOND house. Making me very suspicious that the rest of their holdings might tally up to another half, making them the dreaded M-word, as are no doubt many if not most of Bernie's colleagues in the Senate and House. 

That was before 2019, when it became widely-known that Sanders' income in 2017 had been over $1 million, leading to his famous public gaff about how you, too, can become a millionaire if you write a bestselling book. 

Who knew it was so easy, right?

Seemed disingenuous to me, because Sanders seemed to be saying that only in 2017 had he become a millionaire. 

But again my point is: a rich person warning me about those evil, evil rich people like movie stars and the Clintons!

Also, I suspect that very many of the people around me these days repeating the all-billionaires-are-the-same trope, may have learned it directly from Bernie Sanders, thus adding to the reasons I dislike him.

Economics: Beyond Quantity

As I've mentioned several times already on this blog, there appear to me to be (at least) two different kinds of socialists: those whose primary enemy are wealthy people, who want to eradicate great personal fortunes; and then those like me, who would much rather eliminate poverty, and do not believe that eliminating wealth and eliminating poverty are one and the same thing.

It also occurs to me that there are (at least) two different kinds of entrepreneurs: those who feel that the way to become rich is to squeeze whatever money is left in the possession of poor people out of them; and those who do not. It could well be that the first kind of socialist is only able, for some reason, to perceive the first kind of entrepreneur. Michael Brooks, for example,

a left-wing American radio news-talk guy who often and flatly states his belief that billionaires are evil, and that the quantitative category of billionaire must be eradicated, may, for some reason, only be able to perceive billionaires to the extent that they resemble Donald Trump. Brooks lives in New York City, so if he wanted to, he could look around himself and see rich people doing all sorts of un-Trump-like things, from leaving decent tips to giving to charity to raising money for the Democratic Party... Maybe Brooks sees all of this every day, and he doesn't consider those people to be actually rich unless they're actually billionaires. I don't know, I don't know how Brooks thinks, except that I suspect he doesn't think very deeply or in great detail, at least not when it might contradict certain flatly-held beliefs. (You gotta hold those flatly-held beliefs way down low, out of the wind, they might get knocked over and you'd actually notice something for once.)

Conversely, some people, some of whom have studied Adam Smith and then ceased to think about economics (although in many cases continuing to write about it and win Nobel Prizes in economics), believe that rich people are morally better than poor people, and that everything entrepreneurs do is a blessing for mankind in general. It's hard for me to imagine how anyone can read Smith and not perceive that the world has changed beyond all recognition since he published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, but, quite obviously, for many businesspeople, Smith is still quite literally the last word. Just as, for many Medieval people, beyond a few miles from the coasts the oceans were full of dragons and death, so, for many economists right up to the present day, beyond Smith lies Marx, who is pure evil and has nothing to give to mankind except agony.

Although I believe it is possible for someone to become wealthy and to benefit mankind at the same time, ironically, the economics of Smith, who believed that to become wealthy was to benefit mankind and vice versa, have given ideological cover to entrepreneurs who thrive while behaving in ways which are utterly predatory, and much worse than useless for the common good.

Also, and this is very important in any meaningful discussion of economics: there are (at least) two different ways of measuring someone's well-being: the first simply adds up the monetary value of everything that person owns; and the second one, the one I use, recognizes that life is not nearly that simple: well-being is a matter of your health, where you live, the air you breathe, what you eat, what opportunities you have, and so forth. And these things are not always strictly measurable in monetary terms. Comparable good things can cost much more for one person than for another; or they can be free in some cases; or, in other cases, they may not be available for any amount of money. (I just mentioned the common good: quick now, what is the common good worth in dollars and cents?)

Economic discussions often focus much too narrowly on quantities of currency, and not nearly enough on qualities of existence. The latter, the quality, is really the only thing that matters. The only reason that the quantities of currency matter is that they can sometimes affect those qualities.

Quantities of currency can affect people's lives very much. You can improve people's lives very much by giving them cash, and, there's no doubt at all, you can kill a lot of people by depriving them of cash. But it isn't the actual cash or lack of it which helps or hurts someone, it's the things which cash can buy. And cash can't buy everything. It can buy exactly what a buyer and seller agree that it can buy. That's exactly how much it has always been able to buy. If someone owns a house and is calculating how much they might save buy installing solar panels, and they're really not thinking about saving human life on Earth, then their economic calculations are appallingly primitive. So, how much would you pay to save human life? Hopefully you can see how absurd the question is. We can't buy a clean atmosphere. We're going to have to actually clean it up, and cleaning it up may well involve putting much less emphasis and worth on quantities of cash, and much more on things like qualities of substances and of behaviors. It may be environmentalism which will finally force many people to confront the fact that money isn't really reality, it's just a tool we've been using for a while, which we can set down whenever we choose, and pick up a new one.

So, to Michael Brooks, I say (ha ha, just kidding, I know damn well Michael Brooks isn't listening to anyone saying anything resembling any of this), focus on the effect people have, and not on the size of their stack. No doubt, in many cases, billionaires actually are complete bastards, just like you say they are. So, in those cases, tell us, news-talk guy, tell us specifically, what bad things they are doing. If you happen to know what those bad things are. If not, maybe you should do some research before the next time you open your mouth. Be careful, though! Research, when diligently and earnestly done, has been known to upset long-cherished beliefs!

I Just did Some Math

In my previous post, I mentioned how Zac and Jesse, big fans of Elon Musk and Tesla, said that what Musk has done to help restore Puerto Rico's hurricane-ravaged grid could be great PR for Tesla. Something I didn't mention is that Zac and Jesse also made a big deal about how Musk personally donated $250,000 to charities working in Puerto Rico. I'm not sure, but I think the phrase "right out of his own pocket" may have been bandied about.

I think it's good that Musk donated that money. I think that money helped a lot of people. Assuming it wasn't stolen by corrupt officials, and I have no knowledge of that sort of thing happening in Puerto Rico.

The math referred to in the title of this post has to do with just exactly how deep Musk's own pocket is. The math has to do with to what extent a quarter of a million dollars, for Musk, constitutes giving until it hurts.

If the reports are true that Musk got bonuses from Tesla in 2018 totaling $2.6 billion, then $250,000 would be less than 1/10,000th of his annual pay. If we stipulate that Musk works twice as long as a mere mortal, 80 hours a week, that means that he works 4000 hours a year, and THAT means that $250,000 is less than what he makes in a half hour.

Look at it another way: if Musk somehow came face-to-face with 685 panhandlers a day, every single day, 7 days every single week, and he gave a $100 bill to each one of them every time they met, in a year, it would add up to -- $250,000, less than Musk makes in a half-hour, assuming he works 80 hours a week. If he works 40 hours a week, then $250,000 is less than he makes in 15 minutes. [PS, 2 November 2019: Oops! And I'm always bragging on this blog about my superhero-level autistic arithmetic skills. Let's try that again: $100 each to 685 panhandlers a day is $68,500 a day, times 365 is $25 million a year. And it takes Musk a whole half of a week to earn $25 million.]

I have a feeling that Musk very rarely sees any panhandlers or homeless people. I could be wrong. Maybe he volunteers 20 hours a week in homeless shelters. It's just a feeling.

I'm not saying that billionaires are horrible people. Plenty of people will tell you that, but not me. I think billionaires can be horrible or wonderful, and I'm not sure what to think of Elon Musk. If I had to guess right now, I would guess that there is a mix of horrible and wonderful in him, and that his reality is so different than mine that I can't imagine all of the implications of being him. I'm just saying this: $250,000, for someone who makes $2.6 billion a year, is half an hour's pay if he works 80 hours a week, and 15 minutes' pay if he works 40 hours a week. I'm saying: if you think Elon Musk is just a down-to-Earth, folksy, regular guy, maybe you should keep on thinking.

Billionaires

Just now it happened one too many times: Bernie Sanders talking about billionaires as if they were all the same.

If you think that the Koch Brothers, Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, Mark Cuban, the Bass family, George Soros, Donald Trump (assuming he actually is a billionaire), Warren Buffet, the Waltons and Jeff Zuckerberg are all the same politically because they're all billionaires, you haven't been paying attention. If you think their daily lives are similar, you're wrong again.

In Philadelphia, Joe Miller, the character played by Denzel Washington, reads from a court decision related to the Federal Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1973:

"This is the essence of discrimination: formulating opinions about others not based on their individual merits, but rather on their membership in a group."

I don't know whether that's an exact quote from such a court case, but it's either exactly or very close to what Denzel says in the movie.

And it's not hard to understand: every time you say "they're all the same," you're discriminating and you're wrong, whether "they" are black people or white people or gay people or straight people or Democrats or Republicans or poor people or rich people.

Billionaires aren't all the same. Some were born poor, some inherited a "mere" few million dollars, some inherited billions. Some work extremely long hours, some about 40 hours a week, some have never worked in their lives and don't intend to. Some have given away almost all of their money, some have given away none and scrap and fight for every penny.

Some support any politicians who will lower the amount of taxes they have to pay (aka Republicans), some support politicians who raise minimum wages and support unions and protect the environment, aka Democrats.

They're not remotely close to being all the same in any way except for their net worths.

And Bernie Sanders is an idiot. (And quite possibly a millionaire.)