They borrow themselves as a way of dodging US taxes, which might be what you’re thinking of.

Holding bonds is the obvious way all of these people would probably be doing the sin of riba. It’s not necessarily public information, though. (And you can invest in bonds too; there’s no secret money glitch, just a societal lottery that someone will inevitably win)

That’s a good point. Charlie III is so hereditary it’s his whole brand. It looks like he might not actually have a billion, though, just most of one.

I’m not sure if any other European Royal families might have managed to retain more.

Which parts do you really like?

Yeah, it’s a continuous scale, which is something people miss sometimes. When you talk to people with millions of dollars they have a tendency to say they’re not that rich, and point to some guy they know with tens of millions. They’re not wrong per se even if they’re dangerously out of touch; that extra digit changes a lot.

The bullshit is just that that scale goes way, way too high, as well as way too low. Human ability is normally distributed, and human worth is often held to be inalienably equal. Wealth follows a completely different distribution, for reasons.

A good guess. I’m not sure how Evangelical he is, but he sounds like a fellow traveler having worked with Reagan and inflicted abuse on people from other faith groups.

I said a Christian author just because most people are over the Protestant vs. Catholic thing, and Chinese communists are a particular favourite bugbear of theirs.

My bad. Uuuuh… Indianapolis infrastructure, according to a quick search. Speaking of cities that get bomb reviews…

LA is aggressively overrated from everything I’ve heard. NYC prices, Kansas City Indianapolis infrastructure, Manilla tidyness. The weather is nice, I guess.

There’s a history of it meaning some kind of magical personality replacement thing, though. IIRC it was a Cold War excuse for why US soldiers defected sometimes. Cults exist, but the techniques they use to pressure people are a lot more mundane and take time to really take root.

Two options, if you’re shilling for billionaires:

They’re intrinsically 10,000x better than you and me and deserve to be 10,000x richer.

It’s just theirs. It says so somewhere, no backsies.

Pure trickle-down had it’s day too, but it’s it’s a joke again in modern times, for the most part. You may object that these are all weak arguments, but basically, you and what army?

Edit: “We need a remote chance of becoming a billionaire for anyone to go to work” is kind of a blend of trickle-down and argument number one, but I suppose I should mention it, just for the sake of completeness

Some of them literally have their money in Euros and European companies, which the US does not control. I’m not going to whine if you wanna revolution, that’s understandable, but be factual on the way.

What book is that? Brainwashing basically is not a real thing, so I advise you to check who the author is. (By the sound of it, I have my money on a prominant Christian)

Never was. (End humblebrag)

What’s the issue here? The more normal candidate is writing a letter saying she had nothing to do with the election funny business, and heading off potential demonisation by the one person everyone in the Western world is afraid of.

I mean, to be fair, it’s not the local language.

I wonder how these change as the climate changes. The Sahara wasn’t always desert, and might not be for long going into the future. Probably somebody’s modeled it, I should look it up.

I lean no, but it’s close. On the one hand, life is meaningless and hurts. On the other I’ve gotten to see some cool things.

Yup.

And honestly direct regulation is hard here. Those are the two expenses that grow out of control, because it’s really hard to measure how much marketing or managing you need exactly. No empirical proof of overspending means no legal case against the directors.

Ideally, they’d have to provide something like the MER (management expense ratio) you see on investment funds. Charity kind of is like an investment on the behalf of the greater good, if you think about it.

Reddit bad.

I got on Reddit because it’s pseudonymous, and the nesting of threads is good. I didn’t appreciate it for a while, but upvote/downvote also provides a useful proxy for what body language does in real life.

Usury is for-profit moneylending, basically. The Fidelity lady would count, the others are harder to say, either because it’s a different sector or something I’ve never heard of it.

There’s Muslim definitely-hereditary gotta-be-billionares, like all the petrostate royal families, but they hide their assets enough to stay off of the official lists.

(Halal lending exists, and it’s basically our-interest-isn’t-interest because we found a random Imam who we convinced to say so. Funny how there’s always a loophole, when the rules get really inconvenient for enough believers)

Not Oprah. Probably all 1999 other known billionaires to a greater or lesser degree, though. Social mobility is rung-by-rung; you can do multiples in theory but you have to get really lucky that many times in a row.