I went to the DNC in 2004 and 2008. Both times I heard from friends later that TV had been focused on riots, which confused the hell out of me, because I didn't see anything. There was some obnoxious stuff at the 2008 convention in Denver, we had to walk a gauntlet of ugly pictures of dead fetuses going in and out of the convention center. But in neither case were there any disturbances. I see the same sort of thing happening in LA now. #
Suppose you're an average middle-class person who works for a tech company when the company is bought out for a huge amount of money and your stock is now worth $10 million. It's liquid today. You just received a check for $10 million. What do you do? #
Answer: You buy things to see if there was a reason to make the money, and it turns out there really wasn't. You would have been just as happy in the big house in the rich neighborhood or the smaller house in a more modest place. #
Then what if you reach another level, now you have a check in your hand for $100 million, then $1 billion, then $25 billion and keep going. It doesn't stop there. At each level you are compelled to find something fantastic that you can use that money for. Some power that the new level of wealth gets you. #
We saw in Succession, they played out the lunacy, the people use a lot of space, but they're still just people. #
Having such large useless amounts of money is a not only a problem for the rich folk, we've found out, it's a problem for everyone, because eventually they get around to buying political power and they start using the money to change other people lives, always for the worse, it seems. #
We need a new game that only super rich people can play that doesn't hurt the rest of us. I'm not advising anyone to do anything. But I think this is what I've been writing about on my blog since the beginning. #
I didn't understand why, for example, Evan Williams didn't just make technology and give it away, after having made billions from Twitter. #
Why did Bill Gates have to accumulate so much money and threaten the independence of the open web, a miracle, to get it? Why not use your power to make miracles before you retire? What good, in hindsight, did the extra billions do for anyone, including Gates? When his power was at his peak, in the 90s, he could have done a much bigger thing for the world, give it a free new level of communication that would be available equally to everyone. #
Elon Musk, having done some incredible things in computers, finance, cars and space, had to invent new challenges that only his wealth can buy, and invented things that only the US treasury could buy, and some things like relocating the human species on Mars, that no amount of money can buy (or so scientists say).#
PS: I haven't read Evan Osnos' new book about billionaires, but I plan to. #
You know those obnoxious sites that pop up dialogs when they think you're about to leave, asking you to subscribe to their email newsletter? Well that won't do for Scripting News readers who are a discerning lot, very loyal, but that wouldn't last long if I did rude stuff like that. So here I am at the bottom of the page quietly encouraging you to sign up for the nightly email. It's got everything from the previous day on Scripting, plus the contents of the linkblog and who knows what else we'll get in there. People really love it. I wish I had done it sooner. And every email has an unsub link so if you want to get out, you can, easily -- no questions asked, and no follow-ups. Go ahead and do it, you won't be sorry! :-)