From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Tue Aug 15 2000 - 12:30:26 PDT
> Some completely /wrong/ thoughts about money.
Hey, just opinions. Opinions can't be wrong.
> Take it from someone who
> knows-
So, Brian? What's it like being a billionaire? I didn't realize SIAI paid so well. You
guys hiring? ;-)
> wasting your time, hard-won money, and possibly life- remember Elvis
> died young and what are the survival percentages of making a trip to Mir?
I would assert that only a person *with* that kind of disposable cash can make decisions
about whether all the sacrifice, compromise, etc. was worth it. And it's a personal
answer. My only real point in my message was that folks who say "there's more to life
than money" are (a) most probably speaking from a position of ignorance, and (b)
expressing an opinion which may differ from the opinion held by somebody else, rather
than a fact.
>
> on pointless experiences like you describe is LAME (and I don't mean the
> MP3 encoder).
Those experiences might be very important to some people. What's LAME is asserting that
there is some kind of global, generalized, objective means of determining whether some
experience is valuable or not.
> The fact that there are so many rich people out there wasting their power
> disgusts me.
Waste is another one of those slippery, subjective things. Hey, I say if somebody enjoys
what their resources afford them, then that's great!
> If you are going to go to the trouble of making the money, I
> hope you consider along the way what you are going to do with it. Take 5%
> of it, and fulfill your bodily desires, but please take the rest and do
> something more important.
"Important..." Yet another very slippery, subjective thing.
>
>
> P.S. Money will not give you freedom from death. At least not yet. Think
> about it, and consider donating big wads of cash to organizations that might
> fix that little problem.
Yeah, yeah. There's already a direct correlation in a statistical sense between standard
of living --- a reasonable proxy for "wealth" --- and both longevity and length of vital
years.
>
> --
> Brian Atkins
> Director, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
> http://www.singinst.org/home.html (temp site)
jb
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