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Just got back from month long vacation # 3 this year, perspective fully changed: Working for money is fucking stupid. Wow, is it stupid.
I've met dozens of people who travel full time from property and investment income from their grandparents; and I am probably a couple years from fully supporting myself purely from passive income (though I'll probably keep working just to get the number higher; maybe pile up some burnable cash to buy more investment property during the next crash).
The switch was sudden and totally unrelated to anything specific I had done; it is just a result of two generations of skin flint behavior and interest rates. If your family line can get together mid six figures of money in investments and assets and sit on it for 1.5 generations without anyone buying penis compensation trucks or boats or developing a gambling addiction or fentanyl addition; you can just be fucking set. (Said in the tone of a joke, but actually a big ask according to the facts.)
The people talking about class war are 100% right; I can say that for a fact now that I've experienced it from both ends. It's really nice to be on the winning side for once. I just watch the money I float in my checking accounts go up 70k every couple months and most of it goes into investments that will only be dinged if the government of the USA collapses; recission proof and inflation proof and 98% risk free. It is so fucking easy to live solely off the sweat of other peoples brows; no wonder these dudes who were born into it start thinking they can't possibly fail.
All this to say: What the fuck do we do about the fact that owning shit and renting shit is just flat out better in every way than doing shit or making shit?
It's easier, it's safer, it's more sustainable over the course of your life, and you can pass it down to your kids locked away in trust so even the frailest son can't fuck it up.
I know that my solution (radical wealth redistribution, red-black shit at large, etc and so forth) isn't popular here; but even conservatives have got to recognize there is a problem.
How do you solve it without the revolution? Is that question even coherent?
The best-yielding thing that's close to inflation proof, recession proof, and risk free right now is a 6-month T-bill at 5.578 percent. To make 70k every couple of months from that, you need $7.2 million, which you're not going to get by sitting on mid-6 figures of investments for 1.5 generations.
For some reason such solutions always seek to redistribute wealth away even from those who didn't inherit the bulk of their money. My own gain from inheritance currently stands at zero; I'm not keen on solutions which would strip me of my retirement -- the one I saved and invested for myself -- based on some sort of class envy of trust-fund kids and Hunter Biden-type failsons.
I think it's tall poppy syndrome.
People can accept that someone has money because they were born into an advantageous position. People can't accept that someone has money because they are smart, better, or worked harder.
Witness the insane amount of cope trying to paint Elon Musk's slightly wealthy father as some sort of plutocrat.
or that they dislike elon musk so that is the most effective attack . the right does it for Mark Zuckerberg too "he stole facebook"
This doesn't feel accurate to me. I don't think the right sees Zuck as untalented, merely evil. Zuckerberg isn't even really left coded either. No matter how much money he gives to far left causes, he's not really one of them. "Zuck stole Facebook" isn't right coded or left coded. It's low-IQ coded.
But I take your point that tall poppy syndrome is not confined to the left.
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