The French Revolution ate the nobles, sure, but then it ate itself, then went on to try to eat the rest of Europe. It was a loooong time before it had positive results.
For the most part, the French revolution really only took down the royal family. A large portion of land owners and business people made it out perfectly fine with both their assets and heads.
Is it weird that I’m ok with people in the $50 mill range? Like yeah, they’re stupid rich. But they’re still closer to us than to people with $100 billion. And also, a lot of them just inherited it. Which is also bullshit, but they may not have done any evil to become that rich, necessarily. The question is whether or not they keep up with the evil. Bezos ex wife is a great example as she has spent tons of money on charitable organizations that opposed her ex husbands bullshit. There’s a handful of good, rich people out there, but they’re few, and far between.
We can put a number on the difference between “rich” and “filthy rich”. It’s about $10M.
I say this with regard to the Trinity Study, which backtested a retirement portfolio to see how long it would take for a given withdrawal rate (and adjusting for inflation each year) to fail. It went all the way back to 1925, which means it would have seen boom and bust, high inflation and low. What it comes out saying is that if you withdrawal 2.5% per year of a balanced portfolio, you can live on that indefinitely.
2.5% of $10M is $250k. That’s enough to live very comfortably anywhere you want. Yes, even Manhattan and San Fransisco–lookup median household income for those areas and you’ll see that $250k is far above it. Also, you can live basically anywhere if you do this, so maybe don’t live in a high cost of living area. There’s plenty of nice places to live that are cheaper. That said, if something is keeping you there, you can do it and still live pretty well.
So that’s the limit. Anything above that is just hoarding wealth.
I agree is justified in many situations, the French revolution ain’t a good example for that, namely that it didn’t work in the long run with all the Napoleon-ing.
The people most adept at violence, who will be most empowered by violence as normalized political tactic mostly don’t promote the interests of most people if they get into power. Napoleon and such
also every time there’s been prominent “propaganda of the deed” it’s backfired by inciting a HUGE state crackdown, Tsar Alexander II and William Mckinley come to mind though both were relative reformers, which would make this about target selection and not alienating potential allies rather than the use of the tactic in general
Violence towards the evil power can be good. See the French Revolution.
The French Revolution ate the nobles, sure, but then it ate itself, then went on to try to eat the rest of Europe. It was a loooong time before it had positive results.
For the most part, the French revolution really only took down the royal family. A large portion of land owners and business people made it out perfectly fine with both their assets and heads.
Is it weird that I’m ok with people in the $50 mill range? Like yeah, they’re stupid rich. But they’re still closer to us than to people with $100 billion. And also, a lot of them just inherited it. Which is also bullshit, but they may not have done any evil to become that rich, necessarily. The question is whether or not they keep up with the evil. Bezos ex wife is a great example as she has spent tons of money on charitable organizations that opposed her ex husbands bullshit. There’s a handful of good, rich people out there, but they’re few, and far between.
We can put a number on the difference between “rich” and “filthy rich”. It’s about $10M.
I say this with regard to the Trinity Study, which backtested a retirement portfolio to see how long it would take for a given withdrawal rate (and adjusting for inflation each year) to fail. It went all the way back to 1925, which means it would have seen boom and bust, high inflation and low. What it comes out saying is that if you withdrawal 2.5% per year of a balanced portfolio, you can live on that indefinitely.
2.5% of $10M is $250k. That’s enough to live very comfortably anywhere you want. Yes, even Manhattan and San Fransisco–lookup median household income for those areas and you’ll see that $250k is far above it. Also, you can live basically anywhere if you do this, so maybe don’t live in a high cost of living area. There’s plenty of nice places to live that are cheaper. That said, if something is keeping you there, you can do it and still live pretty well.
So that’s the limit. Anything above that is just hoarding wealth.
Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
But dead nobles were positive results
I agree is justified in many situations, the French revolution ain’t a good example for that, namely that it didn’t work in the long run with all the Napoleon-ing. The people most adept at violence, who will be most empowered by violence as normalized political tactic mostly don’t promote the interests of most people if they get into power. Napoleon and such
also every time there’s been prominent “propaganda of the deed” it’s backfired by inciting a HUGE state crackdown, Tsar Alexander II and William Mckinley come to mind
though both were relative reformers, which would make this about target selection and not alienating potential allies rather than the use of the tactic in general