If you had a business that made 10 million dollars every single year, and every single cent went to you without taxes or overhead. It would still take you 100 years to make a billion dollars. You would pass away before you "earned" it.
I keep talking about how we are connected. One person can only make a billion dollars if millions of other people are not. You can only make that kind of money by siphoning it off the backs of 100s of millions of people. The number of possible billionaires is extremely finite.
You can't actually spend 10 million dollars a year on yourself. I promise you. You can ball out for a couple of years. Make a few really big extravagant purchases. Then you pretty much have everything you need.
After a certain amount of money, you have to *invent* things to spend it on. That's what my wife and I were talking about. I said "what could you possibly still want that you don't have?"

She said "Mars".
Let me come back to my critique here. Because people need me to keep spelling it out. I'm not saying Riri is a "bad person" for being a billionaire. I'm saying that Riri the human cannot actually fathom how much money that is.
She sits at the center of a machine that prints money regardless of what she does. All she has to do is stay popular and it will keep working. That doesn't mean she doesn't do work herself. I'm sure she does. It's just not what makes the machine produce that much cash.
And to the point about why people congratulate her. It's not because they're inspired. They might be inspired, but that's not the feeling. The feeling people have is this.

"You can stop now. You have enough money where you get to rest and breathe. That sounds amazing."
That's fantastic. We should all aspire to reach that place where we can stop scrambling. But I'm saying two things that are critical here.
1. You can do that with *far* less than a billion dollars.
2. Billionaires make it so *far* fewer people will actually be able to reach that.

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More from @polotek

25 Sep
This IS how twitter works folks. There is a feature that allows you to remove individuals before you reply. It allows you to respond to reasonable requests to be left alone rather than being a giant asshole and trying to blame it on technology.
This is what the feature looks like. First you hit reply. Then you click on the list of @ mentions. You'll get a list of people. Uncheck them and they will not be included in your reply. Is this clear @BryanFinster? Image of previous tweet. Fi...Image of empty Twitter repl...Image of screen to edit Twi...
Right. We already knew this guy being an asshole had nothing to do with twitter. That's just the first excuse shitheads like this try to use.
Read 10 tweets
23 Sep
I know it's dangerous to criticize Rhianna on here. But this is a good example of how rich people rationalize to themselves how people feel about their wealth. This is exactly the wrong conclusion to draw.
Ooh man. Spelled her name wrong too. The stans about to come get me. 😂
Me and @operaqueenie were talking again last night. Trying to fathom how much a billion dollars is. I still say that humans can't actually wrap their heads around that much money. You can't even approach it. It's little more than a safety blanket. A status symbol.
Read 4 tweets
23 Sep
This is a good message. It makes sense. It’s even relatively persuasive. Unless you have a different mental model. One that says the hospital’s job is to magically serve every individual whenever they need care, and you don’t actually have to know the details of how that happens.
If you have a different mental model that doesn’t include at least some understanding of hospital capacity, then this message may not mean anything to you. It’s not persuasive. It could go by and have no impact on your thinking at all.
Some people won’t update their mental model until they actually go the hospital and can’t get treated. That’s the only way it will become real to them. So there needs to be a different message that might also reach those people. We need lots of messages to reach lots of people.
Read 5 tweets
22 Sep
I feel like I need to try again to make an important distinction here. Humans are terrible at "remembering" things. That's not how it works. When we "learn", what we do is incorporate new information into how we understand the world. After we do that, we don't have to "remember".
Education is not about remembering facts. It's about building stronger and stronger mental models about why the world works the way it does. And we take those mental models into everything we do so that we can make better decisions about the world around us.
I'm thinking about this right now because I had an important epiphany earlier. I think the right-wing culture war is absolutely about reducing "education" back down to "facts". They want to control people's mental models. Because that's how you manipulate people.
Read 12 tweets
18 Sep
Here's the thing. Any white man who actually understands the problems with diversity in tech would also understand the problem with making themselves the face of it.

It's actually not that hard to see the signals of why people aren't ready for this work.
What's harder to see us why those white men can also raise $50MM when those who aren't white men cannot. More people need to understand that there are people who will put real money behind *sabotaging* diversity efforts.
Read 5 tweets
17 Sep
The idea of inheritance has been on my mind a lot lately. It’s pretty obvious that having a child reconfigures your priorities. It’s difficult to convey what it feels like to know if you died tomorrow she would be okay for at least a while.
I have a vivid memory of talking to my father in law on his 50th Birthday. We threw him a party, and everybody was asking him how it feels. He was pensive about it. Then he said “I’m not sure. To be honest I never thought I’d make it to 50.”

As a Black man, I felt that deeply.
Ever since then, I have been on a journey to stretch myself into being able to think longer term. I’ve learned a lot about the difference between people who grow up with money and safety vs people who don’t. It has so many effects. This is one of more subtle ones.
Read 5 tweets

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