OK, You're Rich. Now What?
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Now you have to master turning money into time.
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2008/02/what-is-wealth.ph...
We all go through engineering our cycles of property and time; how can we best optimize time to generate property that can be used to make our time more effective? We do this in small ways and large, but everyone does it. Some people do it so effectively they launch themselves into property escape velocity, exponentially increasing the effectiveness of their time and exploring the outer limits of what it means to maintain ownership of a great deal of property.
Interestingly, despite the grand importance of time as the absolute foundation of wealth, very little progress has been made in the most obvious optimization of all: creating property that can create more time. More heartbeats, more health, more time spent alive and active. Rejuvenation medicine, capable of repairing the damage of aging. Tissue engineering to generate replacements for worn organs. The cure for cancer. If you could do all that, then the much more productive form of escape velocity becomes possible - longevity escape velocity. Why strive to maintain an empire of property that will crumble to dust when the degenerations of age catch up with you when you could be that fit-looking guy having a blast swimming in the breakers every other Sunday for as long as you like?
Wealth is exactly time, and here we are, bordering the era of biotechnology for the repair of aging. Planning ahead for the best possible personal future starts with investment now. Think about it.
Very little process ... since when? Doesn't all the progress from the belief in disease as unbalanced humours to MRI machines and lab grown bladders count? Universal cure for cancer, organ regrowth and regeneration, these aren't going to be single inventions by a single small team in one project, all changes in the world which make them more likely are progress.
when you could be that fit-looking guy having a blast swimming in the breakers every other Sunday for as long as you like?
If you could implant a realistic memory of you swimming in the breakers every other Sunday for a thousand years, such that you felt like you had had a long life, would you?
Pursuing the life of an ascetic and munching on supplements in the hope that you'll still be around when the singularity hits - it's not too far from giving yourself to religion.
Name three. And please note that Voldemort doesn't count because he's not a real person.
I would reverse your question and name people who, even though they could have lived more, they chose not to do so: I will name a heavyweight: Albert Einstein
If they're not signed up for cryonics, at their income level, I don't buy that they're actually consumed by anything remotely resembling a quest for technological immortality, as opposed to merely trying to grab onto their fading youth using conventional and uninteresting methods.
http://www.amazon.com/Tuck-Everlasting-Sunburst-Natalie-Babb...
Yes, it's aimed toward 10 year olds, but it's pretty relevant here. It'd probably take less than an hour for an adult to read, which should be just a blip on your quest for immortality. :-)
This is a synopsis of a short story by Larry Niven.
I also know some sad people in quest of immortality, but they were generally sad before they found out about that stuff. In general, I think that seeking immortality has surprisingly little effect on your prior personality. It's just something you do if you have enough of a logical frame of mind to think "Life is good, death is bad, and Voldemort isn't a real person", but the logical mind is the cause, not the effect.
The phenomenon of people getting too involved in X to enjoy life is a common theme for stories. When X has to do with the extension of life, there's a pleasingly ironic self-reference. So really, the moral lesson of such stories has to do with life balance generally, and the ironic twist is more akin to a rhyme in a poem.
Thank you for making a testable prediction. Your hypothesis is thereby falsified.
"Polyamory is usually one guy and more women and is usually quite the sexist thing. "
Good heavens, what sort of culture-free hole were you raised in? Do you know anyone polyamorous in real life?
"Seeking life extension is at the current point of science not really rational."
And there you have it. If you're anti-fun, you're probably also anti-life.
Not seeking life extension at all is definitely not rational. Perhaps it's rational not to seek it personally, but that's a personal choice. I think our society should seek life extension as an ethical choice.
Even without the singularity argument, a healthy lifestyle can help avoid some really miserable life experiences. Heart disease, for example, can make it difficult to enjoy taking a nice walk.
I'd just sit down for probably four hours every day and write code for whatever open source project I'd feel like contributing to the most each time of the year. Sometimes possibly writing my own software, sometimes fixing stuff in other software, or sometimes just redesigning stuff. Minus all effort to convince people to accept my patches. But open source anyway. I think that open source is my best bet of making a difference in the world; I mean such a difference that scales.
I have four hours to spare these days. But those would be the code-writing hours only. I would need the ten other hours, while doing all kinds of everyday stuff, to think about what to write the following day. I can't do that now that I'm working: I merely spend the four hours to unwind from what I did for work, to get back to normal.
On the other hand, if I had lots of money then I'd feel being obliged to put that money into good use. Not just investing it into the most convenient index fund I happened to find: it would be my money and I'd be pretty picky about it. And managing money would take time; I'm afraid it'd take enough time to once again prevent me from just coding whatever I want.
I spend the other 37 weeks working on open source projects. If you have more in-demand skills you can probably charge more.
- Dalton (school) for the kids, and a nice donation to the alma matter to assure legacy status
- Museum board memberships for the wife
- A vanity career in writing, photography or abstract art
- The best therapist money can buy
I think I got caught by a corollary of Poe's Law to the effect that without a smiley, there's no parody of terrible ways to spend money that somebody won't mistake for reality.
It seems like the best therapist money can buy would almost by definition be reasonably priced.
The best therapist I ever saw charged the typical amount. It had to do with who we both were as people.
If you want to drink better wine and scotch, then educate yourself, associate with knowledgeable people, and devote time and money to finding what you like. The same probably goes for therapists.
It makes some sense : If a couple of hours talking things over with a sensible person can make you happy with your current state, maybe there's no need to try an 'blow your mind' with some pointless extravagance (fast, expensive car, for example). Many of the best things in life are free - if only you can appreciate them.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/05/05/mark-zuckerberg-hou...
I don't know if this is the case any more but I am reasonably certain it was some time ago, alas I have no source.
Craig Newmark
Give the money away!
Someone else can do so much more with it.
It really annoys me when people do the "I'm a billionaire who drives a pinto" thing.
Either splurge or give but don't just sit on it.
Charities that give out food to the hungry take the money away from research that could result in genetically modified foods that are extremely cheap and easy to grow.
Charities that provide college scholarships for gifted/athletic/underachieving/overachieving students contribute to overall inflation of the cost of education for everybody else.
Splurging doesn't achieve a net effect of life improvement for society in general, and neither does blind charity.
Bill Gates is a good example of efficient philantropist, instead of donating to charities who spread awareness about malaria or global warming, he invests in lasers that kill malaria mosquitos and deep-ocean technologies that prevent global warming.
Just that it frustrates me that someone who could happily live with $70,000 a year sits on millions or more.
Make use of the money in some way for someone even if its not yourself
Or a round trip to Peru, where a good shaman can sort you out with a carefully planned ayahuasca experience.
potable water is solved as a side effect of thorium reactors.
food was solved by the Bosch-Haber process, it's a matter of distribution now.
It’s just that you can’t go about solving political problems like you would go about solving engineering problems. That’s all.
†A few examples of relatively targeted efforts to achieve set political goals:
- Women’s suffrage in the UK and other countries
- Abolishment of the death penalty in France and other countries
- The civil rights movement in the US
Those are all high-profile examples but solving problems in a way that doesn’t cause chaos or disasters is one of the core tasks of any political system.
No one serious – and certainly no large portion of the population anywhere in Europe or North America – demands women’s suffrage to be taken back. I’m not sure how to interpret that in any other way as seeing clear progress (if my goal was to enable women equal participation in politics).
But that’s not really all that important to the point I was trying to make. Politics requires a different sort of mindset compared to engineering (as does, for example, PR or marketing), you don’t solve problems (or better: achieve goals – “problem” is such an awfully loaded word) the same way.
as for achieving goals, many of the "conflicts" fall away when you directly consider the goal of increases in standards of living for all sectors of society rather than an endlessly manipulated parade of sub goals.
If aliens came to earth and you told them about our problems, they'd probably first ask why everyone isn't studying the regions with the highest standards of living.
It likely needs anotehr $B or two in R&D before it's completely viable.
It seemed as though this sample suggested passive investment with an emphasis on diversification of speculative tech stocks. This would be especially important to paper millionaires who "have the money" who now need to safely and wisely get it to cash.
Not a problem for most of us yet, but I'd imagine I'd hit the books if I legally obtained access to millions like some of these founders have.
I'd also imagine experienced founders who have seen checks for millions before would already know what to do.
For some reason I can't seem to find it anywhere. Can anyone provide a link?
On a related note, I was talking to an university alumni director in Australia (where philanthropy is not culturally ingrained like in the US) and she was telling me the statistics on donations. If a student did not make a donation to the university within 5 years of leaving, 96% of them would never make a donation. However, if they made a donation within 5 years, a very large percentage of them would continue to make donations (regular or irregular) over their lifetime. How much they initially donated was irrelevant - it was the initial act of donating that determined the probability of them continuing to donate.
Similarly, if you are not prepared to donate a few dollars when on a 'low' income, you are unlikely to change your behaviour when you are on a 'high' income.
You can help people now, and as a bonus you generally get your money back too.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visa_requirements_for_Austrian_...
You can "invest" your way into an Austrian passport, then live anywhere in Europe you like. Favourite tax havens include Monaco, Switzerland, Britain (non-dom).
Europe is not more civilised because it is older, but because we are prepared to pay for public education, because we do not have world's strongest streak of anti-intellectualism and minarchism. We are socially liberal in what we demand but conservative in behaviour. Equality, nationalism, feminism and statism are not dirty words. Flame away.