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My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

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Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#131

Post by xori »

wowzap wrote: post #83
dumbfoundded wrote: post #72

Relevant John Adams quote: I could fill volumes with descriptions of temples and palaces, paintings, sculptures, tapestry, porcelain, etc., etc., etc.—if I could have time. But I could not do this without neglecting my duty. The science of government it is my duty to study, more than all other sciences: the art of legislation and administration and negotiation, ought to take place, indeed to exclude in a manner all o…

It's a beautiful quote and sentiment. But seriously, how unrealistic is that? The bad guys are still going to be here three generations from now and the world is still going to need people with hard skills.

You need to be able to protect your village before you can grow it.

You need to be able to feed your village, before you can have artisans.

You need to establish the basic needs before you can have a renaissance, and having everyone be a soldier when the borders haven't changed in 150 years doesn't make economic sense. "Kill them with kindness" and 2 trillion in exported goods instead.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#132

Post by rtkwe »

kazen44 wrote: post #119
rtkwe wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree heavily with this. There's been a lot of improvement in the quality and variety of entertainment too over the years not just the technology used to deliver them. If restricted to media from say mid century America post TV most people would be bored stiff by the material available. It's REALLY easy to wind up with a dismissive attitude towards the arts growing up and working in tech but never forget how muc…

Also, art does not only have a function in terms of entertainment. Art is vital to human expression, and a very powerful tool to propose an idea or "mood". cities would be terrible without public art for example, they would be dull, gray concrete silos of empty existance.

Oh yeah there was a lot more I'd love to say about how arts quietly improve everyone's millieu even without active conscious consumption. But I figured I'd better edit myself and not go off on a long rambling rant about the pervasive dismissal of art and the siloing of society into useful and non useful work based principally on what value can be captured, commoditized and quantified in the US in particular.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#133

Post by Inconel »

crooked-v wrote: post #45
mobileexpert wrote: post #27

A refrain that is very true in NYC. It is a bit off-putting (and just wrong) to read the author talk about white male privilege being a comparable head start to her half a million dollars of family money she’s received. (And 28,000/yr still coming!) For an essay centered on owning up to personal privilege it still has some serious short comings in recognizing how extreme her wealth privilege is versus almost all intr…

Consider that even well-known black movie stars occasionally get the "shopping while black" treatment. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/02/19/forest-whitaker-fa... Having even absurd amounts of money doesn't make bias just go away.

Having absurd amounts of money certainly doesn't make bias go away, but it definitely makes such bias more bearable. I've been subject to numerous indignities due to "shopping while black", I've also gone hungry and had to resort to sleeping under overpasses, the two are incomparable.

$28k a year in free money was an almost unimaginable sum to myself and many of my friends, most black but some white, when growing up. It's my general experience that people at this level of privilege don't have the ability to truly understand how privilege, or the lack thereof, impacts the entirety of your existence, and should refrain from castigating others for their perceived privileges, it's splitting hairs at this point.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#135

Post by opwieurposiu »

soared wrote: post #71

Does anyone have recommendations on how to overcome the resentment I feel against people like the author? I am jealous and frustrated by their advantage, but that opinion is purely negative and doesn't help me at all.

A stoic would say "If you don't have control over something then don't worry about it."

The trick is to recognize what you do and do not have control over. In relativity you do not control as much as you think.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#136

Post by slimshady94 »

soared wrote: post #71

Does anyone have recommendations on how to overcome the resentment I feel against people like the author? I am jealous and frustrated by their advantage, but that opinion is purely negative and doesn't help me at all.

Imagine alien algae start evolving on a barren rock in a remote planet. Some algae start out closer to water (better geographical location than others). These are the children of those lucky algae. That's basically it.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#137

Post by jessaustin »

noonespecial wrote: post #73
intopieces wrote: post #11

My guess is this is of interest to us because it sounds an awful lot like UBI. But, I think the key difference is that the money is connected to parents, who presumably have a standard for how it's spent. If E.J. ended up spending it on drugs or other perceived vices, there's a chance the money might be cut off. The point of UBI is that it is 100% no-strings-attached, which has a different dynamic. That dynamic is on…

We already provide a UBI to an entire demographic of people who are hopelessly dependant on drugs and mostly just sit around watching TV. It actually works out just fine. We call them seniors and their UBI social security.

You're not kidding. Old folks watch so much TV. While they were still able to start conversations, my grandparents were always starting off with "did you see that thing on TV?"

Now I'm wishing I could have that conversation one more time...

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#139

Post by mmcconnell1618 »

breakpointalpha wrote: post #130
mmcconnell1618 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't believe the economy is zero-sum either but handing $10B in capital to your child gives them a significantly unfair advantage compared to most others. Image that the economy is a field of wheat. It grows bigger every year as workers become more productive and learn how to fertilize and water more efficiently. At the end of the season, everyone gets a chance to head into the field and collect some wheat. Some p…

I'm sorry if someone mislead you into thinking wealth was, or could be, fair. Your analogy is so far off the mark on how wealth is created, it's laughable. $10 billion in family wealth is almost never held in cash, it's invested in companies, land, and other ventures. Wherever an investment is made, people are put to work collecting salaries and benefits, generally speaking. You've made a gross oversimplification, an…

I never said everything had to be fair. If a worker with a scythe hands it down to their child, that child has an unfair advantage compared to the child of a worker with no tools. It's the degree of the unfairness that matters.

No, not misleading at all. I never said the $10b kid had cash. Obviously, wheat expires (cash) and would be converted into another form of wealth. In this instance, he buys combines which have to be built by someone. You might even say he's a job creator.

But.... and this is a big but.... all investments are not job creating investments. Financial services, speculative investments, automation and robotics that increase worker efficiency but reduce the number of workers. I would argue that the efficiency of $10b in capital in the hands of a single person is far, far less efficient than $10b distributed across many people who use it to consume goods directly. The control of wealth by a small group produces a system where the rules favor the wealthy minority at the expense of the less wealthy. You can only go so far before the guillotines come out and the people take matters into their own hands.

Re: My Parents Give Me $28k a Year

#140

Post by maerF0x0 »

astrodust wrote: post #26
ntumlin wrote: post #21

Maybe this isn't the right place to ask, but could someone explain the rationale for taxing gifts within a family? Ignoring the possibility of using it to circumvent an income tax, etc., my initial thought is that if my dad wants to give me $30,001 this year, or even $300,000 this year, that he's already paid taxes on it and it's not the government's business. I feel the same way about inheritance taxes, although tho…

At low levels, which aren't taxed, it's not going to affect anything. At high levels, like giving your kid ten billion dollars, you're making it impractical or impossible for others to advance economically. You're creating a class of people with indestructible inherited wealth that never have to work, that only have to collect interest and rent on the backs of everyone else. That's what inheritance tax and gift taxes…

>You're creating a class of people with indestructible inherited wealth that never have to work, that only have to collect interest and rent on the backs of everyone else.

That wealth is invested in profitable ventures that either create benefits in the system (assuming rational actors) or 2) lose value due to poor choices.

Capital is rewarded because the investors are taking opportunity cost risks that advance the sum value of humanity's wealth.

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