Being rich means that you have mastered how to turn time into money. Great. So you've got the hang of half of the game - which is no time to sit back and rest on your laurels.
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.
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.
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?
As important as this is, I know people whose lives are so consumed by their quest for immortality that they go without much of what makes life worth living.
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.
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.
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. :-)
As important as this is, I know people whose lives are so consumed by their quest for immortality that they go without much of what makes life worth living.
This is a synopsis of a short story by Larry Niven.
Yes, it's a synopsis of a lot of stories. But I feel obliged to point out that, in real life, I know a number of people in quest of immortality who lead quite awesome lives on a day-to-day basis, because the same style of rationality and nonconformity that leads you to seek world optimization and indefinite life extension also leads you to, say, polyamory.
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.
In general, I think that seeking immortality has surprisingly little effect on your prior personality.
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.
If I could guess, 100% of the people are male. Polyamory is usually one guy and more women and is usually quite the sexist thing. Seeking life extension is at the current point of science not really rational.
I know a polyamourous married woman. She's also one of the most intelligent women I know.
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.
I have a hard time understanding that argument. Cheeseburgers don't make my life worth living. Healthier food can be quite tasty. Exercise can be fun. Supplements are a very minor inconvenience taking up maybe a minute per day.
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 wouldn't need billions, really. Not even millions. Just some income, I wouldn't mind if it was capital income, if some benevolent gazillionaire would pay me a modest lifetime allowance, or if I inherited some poor but filthy rich relative as long as nobody told me what to work on.
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.
This article pisses me off. This is certainly a giant windfall, but Reid is already wealthy and has shown that he doesn't fall into the ridiculous sensationalist stereotypes proffered by this moronic journalist. And he's been building this company for 8 fricking years! Hoffman one of the most visionary and prolific angel investors and (never met but hear he is) a fantastic person.
He had a substantial exit when one of the largest internet acquisitions happened with PayPal (anyone know his total take?). And with his stake in Facebook he's had "paper X00 millionaire" status for quite a while. And Zynga? And about a hundred other angel investments? Not to mention that with the liquidity now afforded by the secondary markets, the term "paper millionaire" is ringing a bit hollow when talking about the elite consumer Internet companies who have active demand in SecondMarket and the like.
So to characterize him as this rags to riches story illustrative of the flash-in-the-pan excess of some new dot-com "bubble.0" is frankly disgusting.
Oh, and to answer the journalist's question of what to do with all that money? Do what Reid has done, and usher in the next generation of successful startups (with surely some casualties along the way, but hey, that's investing).
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.
Paying more money for a better therapist is somewhat like paying more money for better wine and scotch. You don't want to pay too little, but there's a point where you reach diminishing returns, and it's more about a tradeoff between time and money, or the ability to say you spent money prestigiously.
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.
I remember reading (and cannot find the source) that therapy has a very high happiness vs spend ratio.
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.
NetJets. Warren Buffett was a customer for 3 years before buying the company, though. The Marquis card is interesting, but I think the traditional fractional ownership plan is a lot more popular.
It's quite possible to be high profile because of what made you rich, not because of how you spend money. Bill Gates would still be known even if he lived in a $1500/month appartment, drove a car worth $500 and left all his money unused in a bank account.
He is, in general, extremely frugal. However, he also owns a chalet and Porsche that he drives when at the private chalet (although, I'd argue that for someone worth more than 20 billion dollars, that's fairly frugal.)
I seem to recall that IKEA offers their more frequent flying employees business class tickets but if they choose to take the standard (slave) class tickets they get 50% of the difference.
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.
A lot of the philantropic efforts are dealing with manifestations of the problems instead of root causes. They're giving the man a ration of fish instead of fish rods.
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.
Sometimes the effects are even directly counterproductive: if you dump loads of free grain into a poor society, guess what happens to local farmers who are trying to grow and sell grain for a living?
So your point is what? Giving to charities is universally bad? One should should just throw out the whole concept of charity, because some are less effective than others?
Original poster suggested "just giving" instead of "sitting on the money". Implied rushed decision can be counter-productive.
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.
I wanted to get absurdly (>$25b) rich to be the guy who financed the first mission to Mars, as a private venture. I think Elon is going to beat me to it. Somehow, this doesn't really upset me at all.
Tons of political problems have been solved in the past†. If politics were incapable of solving problems society wouldn’t exist.
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.
all of those resulted in awful outcomes to go with the good.
political problems don't get "solved". differing groups get pushed around around over time. the overall amount of pushiness monotonically increases.
That’s an awfully cynical view. Problems remain, politics is tedious and sometimes mindbogglingly irrational but, looking back, humanity has made progress and there are countries in the world that are better at this stuff and some that are worse.
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.
I think it is wise to be cynical about zero sum games such as status and government and optimistic about positive sum games.
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.
The most interesting thing about the article was that the advice was not just for the rich, but general investment advice for anyone.
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.
I once read a great article on asktog, called "How I made a Small Fortune (out of a much larger one)". It dealt with advice, from someone who got a lot of shares of Apple when they IPOed.
For some reason I can't seem to find it anywhere. Can anyone provide a link?
The only thing that happens when you're rich is that you can help more people. If you were not helping people before (whatever that means to you), you probably won't do it after.
What you said intuitively appears true, but it's actually not the case in real life. Helping others is not limited by time or money - you can help others in large or small ways. And the OP is absolutely correct, if you are not already helping others in some way, having more money won't change your behaviour.
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.
Agree with parent, disagree with grandparent. If there's one thing you learn when you're doing philanthropy, it's that people who give to charity this year will probably give to charity next year; and people who are planning to give to charity "next year" will, next year, be planning to give to charity "next year". Donors donate, nondonors don't.
Not really. If you are rich you may have some investments you would like to make and, in doing so, you are helping other people: you create jobs, you generate wealth for everyone, you might even make the world a better place depending on what your investment is.
When I read: "Give your money away" as an item in the list, I clicked "x" on the window. I was expecting advice on how to keep the money, not on how to blow it all like an idiot.
If I were American, and I was suddenly rich, the first priority would be to get out of the land of God and guns and sexual repression known as the USA. Yes, it's a great place to spend time, but not all of the time. It has many advantages for the entrepreneur. I love it. But the ignorance and attitudes put me right off.
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.
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.