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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 17, 2023

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Due to cancel culture and maybe even social media in general would you say its worth shooting for fame?

Back when I was a kid (when tv was the main screen) I guess I wanted to be famous. But I wanted to be famous because when I saw these muscians, actors and comedians I just thought wow their lives are easy and fun and obviously they're rich.

Now it seems like celebrities still have much more fun than the average person but it seems like to keep your position has gotten harder, especially the newer you are.

Is it still worth it?

For any given level of income/wealth, fame seems like a significant, net negative. That is, I would rather make $20 million from secretly winning the lottery than to get $20 million from having a runaway number one hit music album that made me famous. You have the downsides of stalkers, harassers, gold-diggers, cheats, etc. For every person with newfound respect for you, there are others trying to take you down a peg. And there isn't really any benefit. A person can reach peak happiness from being high status within his own family and social group. If you get so famous that you are awkward with your original social groups, and are in new higher status groups, then you haven't made yourself any better off.

Now, fame can be translated into money. So is it better to broke and waiting tables in Hollywood, or to get a huge break and become a famous actor? That is harder to say, but generally it seems to me that most modern social circles of the famous are very toxic and should be avoided.

I've always felt that if I won the lottery, I'd find someone (ideally already rich) to claim the prize for me in exchange for a significant cut (probably up to 50%). Even having your name public as a lottery winner gets you a lot of attention you don't want.

You could probably get more than the prize value by selling your lottery ticket for cash, since that would allow someone who has a lot of illegitimate cash to turn that into legitimate taxable income.

I didn't think of that, and it's an interesting idea. But I don't know many folks who have millions of dollars that need to be laundered, and it's probably too risky to trust them to hold up their end of the deal. (Also, at that point I'd be left with millions of dollars of unaccounted for cash, which seems substantially less valuable than cash that doesn't need to be laundered.)

Though I guess the biggest issue with my original scheme is that it might expose the winnings to double taxation.