7 ms·

>They then realized that their two dogs weren’t allowed in the apartment, so they purchased a £10 million property opposite the apartment called the dog house,

• Geeek 3y ago
  I am not sure why someone would downvote this. It is 100% revolting and indicative of a really rotten system that allows this to happen.
  • gv83 3y ago
    yeah, it was way better when you worked the fields for a duke who had dibs over your underage wife for the first night of marriage. and don't forget the round robin slave labour in the castle! and don't forget to set aside some grain for the taxes, who cares if this year has been bad and it all goes to the duke... capitalism has its faults, but these platitudes about rotten systems really miss the mark.
    • scarecrowbob 3y ago
      I mean, I suppose we're not chattel slaves or sending our kids into mines. I mean, someone is, because that is the only way to get billionaires. But it's not us or our kids, at least. HN is great for getting a little window into how the rich sociopaths in this culture live. When folks write ahistorical fantasy, as you've done here, it's a very useful picture to help understand what kinds of really bad things folks are capable of thinking about the world.
    • marnett 3y ago
      I could get behind your general sentiment perhaps in the context of 19th century industrialism, or maybe even 20th century robber barons, but what paradise for the masses does the 21st century of “billionaires with no nation-state allegiance” bring exactly? Also, concentration of wealth doesn’t reverse without action - so your initial remarks on fiefdoms and feudalism may not be too far from where we find ourselves in this century, which king do you bend the knee to: House of the dragon, Zuckerberg, or House of the camel, Musk?
      • gv83 3y ago
        I agree with your sentiment - I simply don't have a specific answer or I would be a very important person as I would have "solved" one of this century hardest problem. I just believe that technology and innovation and creative destruction (in the schumpeterian sense) can (as they did) bring better resource usage which in turn drive better lifestyle for everyone. I'm not sure where I would go from here; my brain is wired to my country problems (which is not usa, I hail from europe) which are completely 0 opportunities to actually get rich + complete domination of old money due to compound interest unstoppable force. Heavily taxing inheritance in every form could be a start, but I'm not an expert in policy.
• jjtheblunt 3y ago
  They DID spend that money right back into the economy. Do you mean to compare spending it versus giving it away? Or would it be less revolting if they had listed the house on Airbnb or something? Please explain. That quote from Chouinard is awesome!
  • interstice 3y ago
    Buying property is a pretty bad way to put money into the economy, though partly dependent on your locations approach to capital gains (where I am it’s untaxed).
    • zdragnar 3y ago
      Since this is probably London, they probably had to pay stamp duty tax and property taxes. On a 10 million pound property, that'd be around 1.2 million pounds. On top of that, there's annual property taxes for London. I don't know if there's any discount for primary residences, but they wouldn't be getting it for a property just for their dogs.
• snapplebobapple 3y ago
  Your needs and wants are not a claim on my life. My life is my own. If you want to feed your money into whatever you define good as, go ahead. Dont expect anyone to cater to your whims with the fruits of their labors though. this is the fundamental problem with society today. Everyone thinks they have a claim to goods and services they did not earn and hate people that earned them, rather than pushing for antitrust enforcement to break up market power that allows incompetent offspring to stay rich rather than lose their wealth and return to average wealth where their capability says they belong.
  • chpatrick 3y ago
    This attitude leads to the state of society today in the US.
  • _factor 3y ago
    It’s not the fruit of their labor. It’s a combined effort they’re disproportionately benefiting from due to the aforementioned policy failures/corruption.
  • dwb 3y ago
    A lot of us would dispute that anyone that rich "earned" their money. $1bn is an absurdly disproportionate compensation for any one person's work, whatever they do. It may be legal, but it isn't right.
    • missedthecue 3y ago
      Did JK Rowling sell too many books? Should they have banned the purchase of Harry Potter books after her net worth hit $999mm? What exactly is your policy prescription here.
      • Epa095 3y ago
        Taxes
        • 3y ago
• seanhunter 3y ago
  Reminds me of John Lennon. At the time he was singing "Imagine no possessions" he had an entire floor of the Dakota building[1] just for his and Yoko Ono's fur coats. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dakota https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dakota
• ajross 3y ago
  > Imagine how much good you could do with that money. With £10M? I mean, some good, surely. But not really a lot. Is there something you have in mind, specifically? This kind of logic is just jealousy. "They have money I don't and spend it on things I don't value" is true of every entity wealthier than you. It's true of your consumption too: how many $7 lattes have you purchased that could have fed a whole family, as it were? It's true of corporations and bureaucracies and governments too, which is why libertarianism is so tempting. But there's no world where everyone agrees on what stuff we should value, just like there's no world (or at least no feasible world) where people aren't able to spend wastefully, because both of those are at their core subjective decisions.
  • rhaps0dy 3y ago
    > With £10M? I mean, some good, surely. But not really a lot You could outright transfer it to some of the poorest people in the world (via https://www.givedirectly.org/ https://www.givedirectly.org/, you'd add ~5% to their total cash transfer amount). They could then invest it in whatever they need.
    • ajross 3y ago
      Surely the billionaire in question does a ton of charity and philanthropy already, though, right? They all do. Is your point that they don't do enough, or that they shouldn't be allowed to spend 10M of what they don't give on a ridiculous dog house? Those are numerical arguments, so shouldn't you have to come to them with numbers to present? Again, my point is that this is all subjective. You're simply saying that you don't value the ridiculous dog house and that they should spend that on something else, but they probably do spend on the thing you want already, or something very similar. You don't get to tell people how to spend their money for the same reason they don't get to direct your own wasteful spending (which surely exists, right?). That's just standard western liberalism, you don't seriously disagree?
  • hermitcrab 3y ago
    You can build a small school in a third world country, such as Nepal, for £10k. So you could build somewhere around 1000 small schools (or a lesser number of bigger ones).
• passion__desire 3y ago
  If you were to flatten a Mt. Everest and spread the material over the earth's surface, it would raise the height by 1mm. But having such resource concentrated could spur individual risk taking and effort and thus innovation. e.g. Elon Musk
  • voisin 3y ago
    Diminishing returns. What extra risk do you take at $1b versus 100m? Now 10b vs 1b? Now 100b vs 1b? Now, 1m vs 100k. We should focus our systems on increasing more people from 100k to 1m rather than 10b to infinity.
    • passion__desire 3y ago
      Giving money as charity doesn't help either. ask Bono. Capital expensive projects like SpaceX require lot of money and wouldn't be possible by a group of 1000 individuals putting 1m into the bucket. Too many cooks.
      • voisin 3y ago
        Ok, but aside from Elon, how many examples are there of billionaires doing things like SpaceX (which had a very good business plan too don’t forget. It isn’t purely out of goodwill that he created that enterprise)? My point is that the vast majority of billionaires seem to spend their money not taking massive risks for the betterment of humanity but rather they buy islands and jets and art and blah blah blah.
        • passion__desire 3y ago
          Whether a private individual puts in the risk or a nation state it doesn't matter. Ultimately your point is we should enrich everybody which is a fair point. But underlying that sentiment is the fact there should be products and services worth buying for that much money otherwise you would just be increasing inflation.
    • creer 3y ago
• bruce511 3y ago
  >> I find that utterly revolting. Imagine how much good you could do with that money. I don't begrudge rich folk spending their money. I begrudge those who don't spend it. When a billionaire spends money, it ultimately goes to people. Staff obviously, but also the entire supply chain for that staff. If they drop a million on flowers, we'll that goes yo flower sellers, who pay the flower growers, and do on. In other words it -is- doing good, its the economy. Now I'm not advocating for trickle down economics. Thats not my point. But is it better to die with a billion dollars, or is it better to be an ex billionaire who dies broke?
  • Epa095 3y ago
    If the money stays in the bank it can at least belendt out and used for productive stuff. If the billionaire instead decided 'I will use 50 million to make all these people do something which is a complete waste of time' then he had used his money-given power to waste a bunch of people's limited time on earth. In the end it's the money actually used in their life which is the actual manifestation of their power. Some of them might use it to do good, but if it's just decadence then those money do more good in the bank.
    • bruce511 3y ago
      That's not how money works. Firstly billionaires don't have "cash" in some bank account. (They are more likely to borrow from banks than to have deposits in banks.) Their assets are likely to be in property or stocks etc. Secondly there isn't a "limited" amount of money for people to borrow. Its not physical. As a first approximation you can treat the lending ability of banks to be unlimited (at least for Joe's like me.)
      • Epa095 3y ago
        For your first point, I agree thats how their assets often are. And it's better that they stay there than being used for dog-chef's. For the latter I must admit that I don't really know how it works in the US. In my country banks have rules about the ratio between debt and capital, and if someone put in 100 million it would absolutely mean that the bank would be allowed to lend out more. But in any case the point is pretty much the same! That the billionaires money do more good where they are, not when spent on frivolous shit.
• creer 3y ago
  That money replaced the other owner's wealth in that house. What changed? What changed for you? What changed for us? What did change is the previous owner was taxed a boatload (yacht load?) on their capital gains on the house. And the new owner was taxed another yachtload on the capital gains they had to realize (selling shares) in order to buy the house. A lot of that capital gains tax was most likely postponed until someone's death - but still correct. Depending on the country, it's likely more than half the purchase price of the house went into taxes because of that transaction. Which is one of the reasons such purchases don't happen all that often (does that make you happier?) But you can find solace in Victor Haghani's remark that most inherited wealth disappears in shockingly few years. Because most people are terrible at judging and managing investments (when they care at all). When with even with no-brainer investments it would keep modestly growing from generation to generation. See The missing billionaires - A guide to better financial decisions, Victor Haghani and James White, 2023.