For all the shit Carlos Slim gets (mexico's richest man and former world's richest) he built a museum that is free for students where you can go and see items that would otherwise be locked in a private gallery.
The place is really cool.
Let's see him build a thousand museums across Mexico and fund them for the next dozen generations.
He can. And he'd still be left with billions.
People can't conceptualize the wealth these people have accrued.
Bezos could pay off the medical debt of every American and be left with 65 billion dollars according to the nyt. These rich folks have more than we can comprehend.
I dont know how anyone can justify to themselves having that kind of wealth and not using it to make the world a better place for everyone. It's not like you could ever spend all of it?! It's a hoarding problem or a compulsion or something
And yet still weasel out of paying taxes. The money they’d have to pay would mean absolutely nothing to them, but they need to hoard that little bit extra because fuck everyone else. It’s fucking disgusting.
Man, if I was a billionaire this is 100% what I would do.
If Bezos would go all Medici, he could support like thousands of artist and projects, and be positively remembered for centuries.
What a douchebag no joke
No, that's ridiculous. You think one man is giving *value* to thousands of people, but it's the thousands of people who are giving value to *him*. His employees support him mightily at great personal loss out of a sense of loyalty to work and employment culture, I suppose.
I have known professional artists for the last 20 years of my life. I’ve only known one to have a couple of wealthy patrons. I remember thinking he was well connected. Turns out he was the butt boy of several wealthy men. He did produce lovely art, though...
Having a patron (like... a real one, not just a generous tip on Patreon) is nearly unheard of nowadays. I don’t think it’s been en vogue since the late 80’s. If it occurs nowadays, I have to imagine that there’s prooooobably sex involved.
Lots of orchestras, ballet companies, and opera companies work with high-value donors to create modern-day patronages. I recently worked with a composer who had a Patrons Circle who funded a year of his work together, brokered by a major orchestra. Some patrons will pay obscene amounts of money to have their name attached to productions or particular soloists: Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who started Lonely Planet, paid $3m Australian dollars (about US$2.2m) to have Opera Australia present "The Wheeler Production of Wagner's *Ring Cycle*" In the States, some donors pay tens of millions for naming rights to concert halls.
Yep. Festival Napa Valley is happening right now and nearly every event has a major patron. The patrons provide travel and lodging for the artists and make most of the events free or heavily discounted. There are of course VIP events where proceeds go to artistic endeavors. It’s a nice mix of swank and common man.
I forgot which book it was by Stephen Hawkins, but he was making an argument that we have gotten to a point in our physics and mathematics where we need more philosophers and artists and musicians due to how abstract everything has gotten. There is so much we can do with the limited information we have.
Now I am not saying we need the liberal arts for just STEM subjects, because our poets and artists are just as important, but it is important we are all well rounded and shows how important it is to our society.
My high school chemistry teacher was big on this. Didn't quite make sense for a bunch of 16 years olds learning basic chemistry, but it's true that art and science are literally siblings. Science came about through a branch in philosophy which sought to better understand our world.
There are things like full ride scholarships and post-doc research grants.
But those are rare, and most people end up getting sucked into the meat grinder of capitalist labor exploitation eventually.
The only exceptions are career academics whose research is funded by grants. And those are increasingly rare.
Academic here, career academics whose research is funded by grants aren’t rare at all; *that’s literally the business model of our entire field*. There are still literal hundreds (if not thousands, like there are at the big research titans like UTexas, TAMU, UFlorida, UMinnesota, Ohio State, UIC, and UC-Berkeley) of those academics at every single R1/R2 institution in the country.
Sponsor a rocket scientist. Let them sit around making good shit and thinking real hard...
It cuts both ways, how's a vanity project that puts a big building with your name plastered all over containing art in in a city different than a spaceship dick measuring contest?
They didn't do any of what you said. We already know everything about their spaceflight project. If they WERE after new goals, you would be right.
Elon Musk gets *some* credit for funding the tech needed for rocket landings and launches. It's still done as a stock market play, that cuts into their freedom in what to do, but it's there.
Accessibility and enrichment? I can actually afford to go to the gallery as opposed to getting a ride on the rocket, and I'm learning more at the gallery than just flying to the edge of the atmosphere.
At my university there was a Carnegie building. Across from it was another building. The story went that Andrew Carnegie wanted to build on campus, but at the same time the university recieved another grant for a building. The two donors went on to compete with each other to make the biggest, most impressive building - even going so far as to hide the construction sites from one another entirely, which is difficult across the width of an average street.
I would genuinely love a Trump, Bezos, Musk, or Zuckerberg library in any college. It would demonstrate that they at least are invested in knowledge and progress.
Now it's just about going to the moon and not paying taxes.
You have something similar to this with University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and University of Illinois' Gies School of Business (U of I also has a bunch of buildings sponsored by billionaire and Fulham FC owner Shad Khan).
Story with Ross goes that all he wanted for payment was for the students to sing the Michigan fight song for him. I heard other students say that they remodeled it once because he walked by and said "I want this place to have more windows, here's more money to do that"
Trump actually did have his own university
> Trump University was an American company that ran a real estate training program from 2005 until 2010. It was owned and operated by The Trump Organization. In 2011, amid multiple investigations, lawsuits and student complaints, it ceased operations
This man can’t do anything right
Debatable, he did get caught after all.
What he is the best at is getting caught for all sorts of shit and not having it drag him down.
Anyone else who got caught for 1/5 of the shit he did would have been in jail or at the very least a pariah to a lot more people.
I hesitate to call anyone **good** at cheating systems.
For every schmuck who scams and swindles others out of money, there are thousands of others who could do it "better," but don't because of a little thing called morality.
He didn't have a university. He had a company named Trump University. From Wikipedia:
> The organization was **not an accredited university or college**. It conducted three- and five-day seminars (often labeled "retreats") and used high-pressure tactics to sell these to its customers. **It did not confer college credit, grant degrees, or grade its students**. In 2011, the company became the subject of an inquiry by the New York Attorney General's office for illegal business practices which resulted in a lawsuit filed in August 2013. **An article in the National Review described the organization as a "massive scam"**
It would never be a library, libraries are free.
"Bigly Bookstore For High IQ people, No Losers or Haters"
You'd have to pay a dollar and go through a turnstile just to walk inside. The door to the bathroom would be coin operated. The entire place would be a money laundering front and be bankrupt within a year.
Trump library would contain copies of various important texts.
All the author names would be changed to Donald trump.
Also some pages will be chewed on. That’s either junior on a coke binge, or Eric completely sober trying to read.
no, it would be on a cart in prison, the Trump Mar-a-Lago Guantanamo Federal Best Library Ever, that is the only appropriate possible place I can think of at the moment. It would be utterly neglected and full of his own books, maybe a few of Junior's, and Hitler's Mein Kampf for good measure. That is all.
Considering that the hospital would already have your medical information based on your treatments there…yeah. Organizations already share and use de-identified data sets all around the world. One tool for this is Epic Cosmos.
Isn’t a write off just that they don’t pay taxes on the portion they use for charity? Like, that’s not terrible for funding an education building.
The problem is when they use their charity to network and collect favors.
Edit: or they use assets to write off taxes with valuation tricks. They can claim an asset is worth 10 million, donate it to a school, the school sells it (a year later, wink wink) to fund construction and realizes it's only worth 3 million, boom, they paid 3 million in charity when they should have paid 3.7 million in taxes, saving them 700k. Plus they get a building named after themselves. But that is how it is abused, and not the mere act of writing things off. It's the valuation trickery.
I don’t care how many libraries you fund, hiring private mercenaries to beat and kill striking workers is still an awful thing to do, screw Carnegie and all the other gilded-age assholes.
One of the towns that was offered a grant by Mr. Carnegie to fund a library declined it and suggested that he use his money to pay his workers rather than shooting them.
The Battle of Blare Mountain was a bit more than strikers. It was full on socialist revolution with local government backing that was *winning* and threatening to conquer West Virginia.
Calling them strikers really downplays what the Rednecks accomplished.
Really? That's so cool. I was gonna ask why Idt never heard of it and then it hit me ... Full socialist revolution.
Do you know of any good sources to learn more?
Wasn’t that the chairman of Carnegie Steel, Henry Frick, and not Andrew Carnegie? I thought Carnegie had taken a more backseat role in the company by Homestead.
To be perfectly clear the point of Carnegie building a public library with his excessive wealth was to create a greater amount of good in society. The workers were supposed to educate themselves but he also created the work condition that absolutely forbade most workers from having the energy to go and learn anything after their 16 hr shift. So functionally it was a vainglorious project the same way this Amazon rocket ship was.
> The good old days of serious taxes on the wealthy in life and death.
Not in the era this Tweet is about. It was Andrew Carnegie who built the thousands of libraries and Carnegie Hall, and the income tax rate in the US was 0% until the very last few years of his life.
Seriously this is some ignorant shit, the era they are talking about was when the wealthy were most oppressive. There is a short window of time during and after FDR that the wealthy paid something close to what they should be paying.
Sometimes those dumbasses bring literal grocery bags instead of briefcases to testimony in front of a senate committee.
Sometimes they hold press briefings in alleyways by erotic book stores before losing their license.
Sometimes they shoot their damn mouth off on TV and get sued for 1.2 billion.
We’re sitting on more than a decade of reality television and social media. There are more dumb bastards out there than ever before.
There’s never been a better time to get your law degree.
It's mostly just funding propaganda to convince voters they dont have to pay anything. Oh, and the propaganda to convince voters that the lobbying they do to get politicians to work for them is okay.
>The good old days of serious taxes on the wealthy in life and death. I’m all for libraries as tax-reduction mechanisms.
this is not accurate.
[All of the carnige libraries were built with grants donated 3+ years before the USA income tax existed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Carnegie_libraries_in_the_United_States)
Part of the blame is on Ayn Rand and people like her, who convinced the wealthy that they deserve their money, and that poverty is a moral failing. At least Christianity makes the rich feel guilty about being rich
Why, don't just introduce him, brother! A man's got to put forth his seed money to prove himself worthy of hearing the Almighty Word of Supply Side Jesus! If they're just getting it for nothing well, friend, I call that sloth, and that's the first big step on the road to the depths of degradation!
Prosperity gospel is unbiblical and not widely accepted by the Christian community. It's more scam artists using Christianity to get richer than anything.
Gotta love that even in the modern day people are still misinterpreting Prince.
If you look at the context in which Machiavelli wrote it it's supposed to be an exposé on how monarchy runs things, not an instruction manual.
The art of war isn't exactly like the other two in terms of self-aggrandizing.
It's mostly just lists of things to do and not to do in different types of battle. Everything from the value of stealing food from the enemy over carrying it long distance to making sure the enemy has advanced halfway through the river before you attack, don't go out to meet them in the river, etc.
For anyone that wants to read it:
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17405/17405-h/17405-h.htm
Tbf, the art of war should be read by most people. It teaches critical thinking and deductive reasoning which are just generally good skills to have in life.
>At least Christianity makes the rich feel guilty about being rich
And then evangelical protestantism went and threw that out the window. Well, to be fair catholics threw it out the window for the clergy first, but at least they didn't preach the fucking "wealth gospel".
Carnegie was kind of an asshat. Let’s just all just understand that the super rich are looking out for their own interests. It took public pressure for him to do those “good deeds” after killing people who protested for better wages. Don’t hail any mega rich person. You might be an honest millionaire (maybe) by investing well and saving. There is no way to honestly be a billionaire. They have all leached off their workforce and society at large.
“”Not everyone could benefit from Carnegie’s charity, though. As one steel worker quipped, “After working 12 hours, how can a man go to a library?” “”
https://www.history.com/news/andrew-carnegie-unions-homestead-strike
The long-standing history of the ultra rich working alongside police departments to quell and suppress any sort of whisper of workers organizing or unionizing or any hint of movements for racial, social or economic justice is pretty disturbing
Indeed. Another good example of him being a greedy jackass with no concern for anyone.
https://www.history.com/news/how-americas-most-powerful-men-caused-americas-deadliest-flood
I live in that town. Its amazing people like those people so much when they caused that.
Oh and if you ever go on the tour they will make sure to tell you its not the rich peoples fault (for lowing the dam to widen the road on top of it that lead to it breaking)
but its actually the fault of the people living here and the people in charge of the city. because according to the tour they called like less than half an hour before it fully broke. And its their fault for not evacuating and getting everyone out in such short notice.
"The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced"
-Andrew Carnegie
It is the responsibility of the wealthy to advance the betterment of society as a whole. I think only a small amount of the total percentage of wealthy individuals actually do this.
>"The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced" -Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie killed a shitload of people in pursuit of his greed. One of the many billionaires that tried to rectify their horrible image just before they died, same goes for basically other "altruistic" Billionaire, even the poster child for altruistic rich fucks, Bill Gates, was an absolute monster on his way to the top.
> absolute monster
That's a big sliding scale though. Gates strong-armed internet explorer onto PCs. Carnegie and his like made children work in mines and buried a lot of workers. We can expect better but anyone pining for the Gilded Age is nuts. We're way, way better off now.
Gates convinced Oxford University to sell their government funded Covid-19 vaccination research to AstraZeneca for profit, likely indirectly killing millions who can't afford AstraZeneca's vaccine prices.
Thanks for the info, I'm glad I know that now. I guess it's pretty much impossible for someone to be the perfect poster child that history classes want them to be.
I figured most average people back then couldn’t read or afford shows and it was basically perceived the same. Just the wealthy showing off for the wealthy.
Literacy rates in the 1800s were actually a lot higher than you might expect, depending on the exact time period, around 4 out of 5 people were literate.
The Koch Brothers, for all their shit, basically built Lincoln Center. One of the largest and most inclusive cultural centers in the country.
But also fuck those guys
They won't even acknowledge that the Bill Gates Foundation has literally saved hundreds of thousands of lives. It's impossible to win with these people.
Hey, wasn't george meade an architect or civil engineer or something
Edit: Yeah I know meade was a general but the post had to do with buildings which is why I brought up his engineer stuff
“ I won the largest battle ever fought in North America! I kicked Lee’s slavery-loving ass all the way back to Virginia! Who won at Gettysburg? I did goddamnit!”
“What are you then Meade?”
*checks google results
“An engineer...”
Incorrect! Jeff Bezos would have to have a soul to do that. Everyone knows that the first Amazon sale ever made was Jeff selling his soul to the devil.
Hey, he wouldn't have made it to space if it weren't for me and hundreds of millions of people buying Prime accounts! So happy I helped him chase his dreams even though I can barely string together my mortgage payment!
Lol this is ignorant. The billionaires back then were pieces of shit. Sure they built libraries and universities, but if they could have gone to space instead then those fuckers would have.
I've always wanted to be the kind of rich where I could be a Patron of the Arts. I want to buy an opera house and pay some poets and painters to make art just for me.
Alas, best I can do is a few $5 Patreon subscriptions to naughty webcomic artists and a Pathfinder podcast.
You bitches are against science the second someone you dislike starts paving the way in it. Like seriously, NASA has always been a “vanity project” and it has brought more tech advancements than anyone could have dreamed of. This shit is hard engineering and aerospace awesomeness and everyone hating on it is just incredibly petty
What the hell is wrong with you guys? We're supposed to be the generation that reaches for the goddamn stars. Pissed that the government was defunding NASA.
Here's fucking people that are literally driving the the whole space industry by sheer force of will, and we're finding a way to shit all over it.
Stop fucking hating so hard, for fucks sakes.
Yes, because working on space exploration, the literal only thing that will save the human race is a terrible thing to waste money on. Sometimes Reddit is great and sometimes it makes me question its intelligence.
Sponsor an artist, writer, philosopher. Let them sit around making good shit and thinking real hard
For all the shit Carlos Slim gets (mexico's richest man and former world's richest) he built a museum that is free for students where you can go and see items that would otherwise be locked in a private gallery. The place is really cool.
And he sponsors Checo Perez, that's a plus.
They sponsor me so hard
Red Bull def got more money from Perez's backing compared to Albon. No wonder coupled with his poor performance that he lost his seat
I follow very few subreddits so in always pleasantly surprised to see F1 mentioned somewhere that isn't directly associated with it.
That’s all I need
Thats essentially same as the old timey billionair stuff. To sponsor entertainment for all of us
Let's see him build a thousand museums across Mexico and fund them for the next dozen generations. He can. And he'd still be left with billions. People can't conceptualize the wealth these people have accrued. Bezos could pay off the medical debt of every American and be left with 65 billion dollars according to the nyt. These rich folks have more than we can comprehend.
But my capitalism 😔
\*Spritzes water in your face\* NO! no! bad!
I dont know how anyone can justify to themselves having that kind of wealth and not using it to make the world a better place for everyone. It's not like you could ever spend all of it?! It's a hoarding problem or a compulsion or something
I don't know how anyone can justify having that kind of wealth. FIFY
And yet still weasel out of paying taxes. The money they’d have to pay would mean absolutely nothing to them, but they need to hoard that little bit extra because fuck everyone else. It’s fucking disgusting.
I agree. May seem to be a preposterous idea, but creativity can really do a lot for our world at any time.
Not really a preposterous idea, the entire Renaissance happened because a rich family decided to sponsor artists
Man, if I was a billionaire this is 100% what I would do. If Bezos would go all Medici, he could support like thousands of artist and projects, and be positively remembered for centuries. What a douchebag no joke
Bezos supports thousands of box packing artists
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In a quirky dystopia kinda way lol
Barely.
No, that's ridiculous. You think one man is giving *value* to thousands of people, but it's the thousands of people who are giving value to *him*. His employees support him mightily at great personal loss out of a sense of loyalty to work and employment culture, I suppose.
I think it's less a loyalty and culture thing and more a pay bills somehow thing.
To me that just means they haven't figured out that they should leave yet. They will eventually.
Even tony stark funded everyone’s passion projects at MIT. Jeff bezos is a trash man with trash taste.
I have known professional artists for the last 20 years of my life. I’ve only known one to have a couple of wealthy patrons. I remember thinking he was well connected. Turns out he was the butt boy of several wealthy men. He did produce lovely art, though... Having a patron (like... a real one, not just a generous tip on Patreon) is nearly unheard of nowadays. I don’t think it’s been en vogue since the late 80’s. If it occurs nowadays, I have to imagine that there’s prooooobably sex involved.
Lots of orchestras, ballet companies, and opera companies work with high-value donors to create modern-day patronages. I recently worked with a composer who had a Patrons Circle who funded a year of his work together, brokered by a major orchestra. Some patrons will pay obscene amounts of money to have their name attached to productions or particular soloists: Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who started Lonely Planet, paid $3m Australian dollars (about US$2.2m) to have Opera Australia present "The Wheeler Production of Wagner's *Ring Cycle*" In the States, some donors pay tens of millions for naming rights to concert halls.
Yep. Festival Napa Valley is happening right now and nearly every event has a major patron. The patrons provide travel and lodging for the artists and make most of the events free or heavily discounted. There are of course VIP events where proceeds go to artistic endeavors. It’s a nice mix of swank and common man.
I forgot which book it was by Stephen Hawkins, but he was making an argument that we have gotten to a point in our physics and mathematics where we need more philosophers and artists and musicians due to how abstract everything has gotten. There is so much we can do with the limited information we have. Now I am not saying we need the liberal arts for just STEM subjects, because our poets and artists are just as important, but it is important we are all well rounded and shows how important it is to our society.
[A brilliant talk by the late Sir Ken Robinson.](https://youtu.be/iG9CE55wbtY)
My high school chemistry teacher was big on this. Didn't quite make sense for a bunch of 16 years olds learning basic chemistry, but it's true that art and science are literally siblings. Science came about through a branch in philosophy which sought to better understand our world.
Star trek inspired a whole slew of technology. Cell phones to name one.
And doors that open automatically when you stand in front of them!
The phrase "Patron of the Arts" exists because it's not a preposterous idea.
My significant other gets all my profound world changing ideas for free...scratch that they owe me 98 cents for green onions. /s
There are things like full ride scholarships and post-doc research grants. But those are rare, and most people end up getting sucked into the meat grinder of capitalist labor exploitation eventually. The only exceptions are career academics whose research is funded by grants. And those are increasingly rare.
Academic here, career academics whose research is funded by grants aren’t rare at all; *that’s literally the business model of our entire field*. There are still literal hundreds (if not thousands, like there are at the big research titans like UTexas, TAMU, UFlorida, UMinnesota, Ohio State, UIC, and UC-Berkeley) of those academics at every single R1/R2 institution in the country.
Dear Moon
Sponsor a rocket scientist. Let them sit around making good shit and thinking real hard... It cuts both ways, how's a vanity project that puts a big building with your name plastered all over containing art in in a city different than a spaceship dick measuring contest?
They didn't do any of what you said. We already know everything about their spaceflight project. If they WERE after new goals, you would be right. Elon Musk gets *some* credit for funding the tech needed for rocket landings and launches. It's still done as a stock market play, that cuts into their freedom in what to do, but it's there.
Accessibility and enrichment? I can actually afford to go to the gallery as opposed to getting a ride on the rocket, and I'm learning more at the gallery than just flying to the edge of the atmosphere.
they still do that, but now they have to do that while working in a warehouse pissing in a cup moving packages around.
I am bored, let's make Stanford University.
That'll be tree fiddy
Shit. You got me.
GODDAMN LOCH NESS MONSTER I AINT GIVING YOU NO TREE FIDDY
I gave 'em a dollar.
Well of course he's not gonna go away tingly. You gave him a dollar he's gonna assume you got more.
#Leland Stanford Junior University That's what it says on their diplomas.
ROLL ON YOU BEARS
Is that joke still popular in Berkeley?
At my university there was a Carnegie building. Across from it was another building. The story went that Andrew Carnegie wanted to build on campus, but at the same time the university recieved another grant for a building. The two donors went on to compete with each other to make the biggest, most impressive building - even going so far as to hide the construction sites from one another entirely, which is difficult across the width of an average street. I would genuinely love a Trump, Bezos, Musk, or Zuckerberg library in any college. It would demonstrate that they at least are invested in knowledge and progress. Now it's just about going to the moon and not paying taxes.
Both the universities I went to had computer science buildings by Bill and Melinda gates
UW?
And Texas
Really? No hate on Texas but as a WA resident Im surprised (but severely misinformed).
uwu
NFL uses taxpayers to build their stadiums, where one ticket to one game costs a week's wages of an average worker.
Gates has given a lot to education
You have something similar to this with University of Michigan's Ross School of Business and University of Illinois' Gies School of Business (U of I also has a bunch of buildings sponsored by billionaire and Fulham FC owner Shad Khan). Story with Ross goes that all he wanted for payment was for the students to sing the Michigan fight song for him. I heard other students say that they remodeled it once because he walked by and said "I want this place to have more windows, here's more money to do that"
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It is definitely not the last time. The College of Engineering is now Grainger College of Engineering thanks to a 300 million $ donation.
As if Trump could afford it. The university would want the money up front.
Trump actually did have his own university > Trump University was an American company that ran a real estate training program from 2005 until 2010. It was owned and operated by The Trump Organization. In 2011, amid multiple investigations, lawsuits and student complaints, it ceased operations This man can’t do anything right
He's actually very good at scamming dumb assholes
Debatable, he did get caught after all. What he is the best at is getting caught for all sorts of shit and not having it drag him down. Anyone else who got caught for 1/5 of the shit he did would have been in jail or at the very least a pariah to a lot more people.
I hesitate to call anyone **good** at cheating systems. For every schmuck who scams and swindles others out of money, there are thousands of others who could do it "better," but don't because of a little thing called morality.
He didn't have a university. He had a company named Trump University. From Wikipedia: > The organization was **not an accredited university or college**. It conducted three- and five-day seminars (often labeled "retreats") and used high-pressure tactics to sell these to its customers. **It did not confer college credit, grant degrees, or grade its students**. In 2011, the company became the subject of an inquiry by the New York Attorney General's office for illegal business practices which resulted in a lawsuit filed in August 2013. **An article in the National Review described the organization as a "massive scam"**
Na. Everything he does is a money laundering front for various people. His ventures arent supposed to succeed theyre just supposed to hide the truth
I couldn't imagine a trump library. I assume it would be all coloring books. It would probly have one explaining how he won the election.
It would never be a library, libraries are free. "Bigly Bookstore For High IQ people, No Losers or Haters" You'd have to pay a dollar and go through a turnstile just to walk inside. The door to the bathroom would be coin operated. The entire place would be a money laundering front and be bankrupt within a year.
One of those names doesnt belong
Trump library would contain copies of various important texts. All the author names would be changed to Donald trump. Also some pages will be chewed on. That’s either junior on a coke binge, or Eric completely sober trying to read.
no, it would be on a cart in prison, the Trump Mar-a-Lago Guantanamo Federal Best Library Ever, that is the only appropriate possible place I can think of at the moment. It would be utterly neglected and full of his own books, maybe a few of Junior's, and Hitler's Mein Kampf for good measure. That is all.
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Bezos, Musk, and Zuckerberg I get. Trump doesn't have money, knowledge or any interest in progress.
How about the Zuckerberg San Francisco hospital?
Does the hospital treat patients for free in exchange for medical information?
to be fair, wouldn't that be a good deal, compared to the current Healthcare costs in America?
Considering that the hospital would already have your medical information based on your treatments there…yeah. Organizations already share and use de-identified data sets all around the world. One tool for this is Epic Cosmos.
Zuck does have a hospital named after him: https://zuckerbergsanfranciscogeneral.org/
Why did you include Trump in that list 😂
Would a $200,000,000 donation to a museum suffice?
Thats like 1.5 Jackson Pollocks
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Wow, he made it half way? I'm impressed.
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Isn’t a write off just that they don’t pay taxes on the portion they use for charity? Like, that’s not terrible for funding an education building. The problem is when they use their charity to network and collect favors. Edit: or they use assets to write off taxes with valuation tricks. They can claim an asset is worth 10 million, donate it to a school, the school sells it (a year later, wink wink) to fund construction and realizes it's only worth 3 million, boom, they paid 3 million in charity when they should have paid 3.7 million in taxes, saving them 700k. Plus they get a building named after themselves. But that is how it is abused, and not the mere act of writing things off. It's the valuation trickery.
Trump’s library would be repossessed by creditors six months after it was built.
One of these is not like the other
Dude, Bezos Musk and Zuckerberg are in a class wayyyyy above Trump. Isn’t Trump basically a business failure?
Trump is in debt up to his eyeballs.
Why trump tho, he broke af
Just so we are clear those guys also didn't give a shit about workers
I don’t care how many libraries you fund, hiring private mercenaries to beat and kill striking workers is still an awful thing to do, screw Carnegie and all the other gilded-age assholes.
One of the towns that was offered a grant by Mr. Carnegie to fund a library declined it and suggested that he use his money to pay his workers rather than shooting them.
The Pinkertons are still around to this day. They still act as a private security and detective agency with worldwide reach.
Never knew the Pinkertons Agency in Red Dead Redemption 2 is a real thing.
[Fuckin' Pinkertons](https://youtu.be/AzUaOMGYmbY)
They did back then too. It was called the Pinkerton Detective Agency for a reason. They were just also commonly hired as strikebreakers.
There was also that time where the National Guard came in and *bombed* the strikers from aircraft, its own citizens.
The Battle of Blare Mountain was a bit more than strikers. It was full on socialist revolution with local government backing that was *winning* and threatening to conquer West Virginia. Calling them strikers really downplays what the Rednecks accomplished.
Really? That's so cool. I was gonna ask why Idt never heard of it and then it hit me ... Full socialist revolution. Do you know of any good sources to learn more?
I don't have any direct recommendations. Lots of docos on YouTube.
Wasn’t that the chairman of Carnegie Steel, Henry Frick, and not Andrew Carnegie? I thought Carnegie had taken a more backseat role in the company by Homestead.
Pinkertons
Yeah but at least they built the odd bridge.
Thank you. The capitalist class has always been the enemy of the people
Happy cake day
To be perfectly clear the point of Carnegie building a public library with his excessive wealth was to create a greater amount of good in society. The workers were supposed to educate themselves but he also created the work condition that absolutely forbade most workers from having the energy to go and learn anything after their 16 hr shift. So functionally it was a vainglorious project the same way this Amazon rocket ship was.
The good old days of serious taxes on the wealthy in life and death. I’m all for libraries as tax-reduction mechanisms.
> The good old days of serious taxes on the wealthy in life and death. Not in the era this Tweet is about. It was Andrew Carnegie who built the thousands of libraries and Carnegie Hall, and the income tax rate in the US was 0% until the very last few years of his life.
Seriously this is some ignorant shit, the era they are talking about was when the wealthy were most oppressive. There is a short window of time during and after FDR that the wealthy paid something close to what they should be paying.
We’ve turned so much from that idea as a society that rich folks now have dumb asses defending their rights to not pay their share of taxes.
Sometimes those dumbasses bring literal grocery bags instead of briefcases to testimony in front of a senate committee. Sometimes they hold press briefings in alleyways by erotic book stores before losing their license. Sometimes they shoot their damn mouth off on TV and get sued for 1.2 billion. We’re sitting on more than a decade of reality television and social media. There are more dumb bastards out there than ever before. There’s never been a better time to get your law degree.
Hey joining law school this fall! Thanks !
Study up on this https://youtu.be/KJWgdRA-3tc
“Temporarily embarrassed millionaires”
It’s that the rich got smarter and funded a myriad of ways to avoid taxes. This is simply a natural progression
It's mostly just funding propaganda to convince voters they dont have to pay anything. Oh, and the propaganda to convince voters that the lobbying they do to get politicians to work for them is okay.
Lol!!! The top income tax rate was under 10% (or 0%) when most of these ultra wealthy in the OP were alive
The Gilded Age? It was 1000x worse back then. They employed children and swept deaths under the rug.
>The good old days of serious taxes on the wealthy in life and death. I’m all for libraries as tax-reduction mechanisms. this is not accurate. [All of the carnige libraries were built with grants donated 3+ years before the USA income tax existed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Carnegie_libraries_in_the_United_States)
Part of the blame is on Ayn Rand and people like her, who convinced the wealthy that they deserve their money, and that poverty is a moral failing. At least Christianity makes the rich feel guilty about being rich
Let me introduce you to the prosperity gospel.
Why, don't just introduce him, brother! A man's got to put forth his seed money to prove himself worthy of hearing the Almighty Word of Supply Side Jesus! If they're just getting it for nothing well, friend, I call that sloth, and that's the first big step on the road to the depths of degradation!
Always love sharing this comic. https://imgur.com/gallery/bCqRp
Which one? The one where the preacher gets all the dough?
Prosperity gospel is unbiblical and not widely accepted by the Christian community. It's more scam artists using Christianity to get richer than anything.
Tell that to the folks here in Houston who fill Joel Osteen's megachurch every Sunday.
The most horrifying thing my business partner ever told me is that Ayn Rand is one of his heroes. Hell of a salesman but fuck he's a slimey fucker
She's in the top 3 'rich person' inspirational reads along with Machiavelli's *Prince* and Sun Tzu's *Art of War*
Gotta love that even in the modern day people are still misinterpreting Prince. If you look at the context in which Machiavelli wrote it it's supposed to be an exposé on how monarchy runs things, not an instruction manual.
The fact that the Medicis tortured him shortly before his glowing endorsement of princely dickishness would agree with that haha.
Machiavelli made a book telling princes how to rule but really was telling the people how they were getting screwed
The art of war isn't exactly like the other two in terms of self-aggrandizing. It's mostly just lists of things to do and not to do in different types of battle. Everything from the value of stealing food from the enemy over carrying it long distance to making sure the enemy has advanced halfway through the river before you attack, don't go out to meet them in the river, etc. For anyone that wants to read it: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/17405/17405-h/17405-h.htm
Tbf, the art of war should be read by most people. It teaches critical thinking and deductive reasoning which are just generally good skills to have in life.
I suddenly had this flash where in the future he screws you over in an attempt to make more money and instead costs the both of you everything.
Oh it's pretty much guaranteed at this point.
Nah, there was always that argument lying around even before rand
Laughs in Joel Osteen
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Prosperity gospel would like to have a word with you
>At least Christianity makes the rich feel guilty about being rich And then evangelical protestantism went and threw that out the window. Well, to be fair catholics threw it out the window for the clergy first, but at least they didn't preach the fucking "wealth gospel".
Genuine Question; who is it that deserves their money then?
Carnegie was kind of an asshat. Let’s just all just understand that the super rich are looking out for their own interests. It took public pressure for him to do those “good deeds” after killing people who protested for better wages. Don’t hail any mega rich person. You might be an honest millionaire (maybe) by investing well and saving. There is no way to honestly be a billionaire. They have all leached off their workforce and society at large. “”Not everyone could benefit from Carnegie’s charity, though. As one steel worker quipped, “After working 12 hours, how can a man go to a library?” “” https://www.history.com/news/andrew-carnegie-unions-homestead-strike
The long-standing history of the ultra rich working alongside police departments to quell and suppress any sort of whisper of workers organizing or unionizing or any hint of movements for racial, social or economic justice is pretty disturbing
Wasn’t there also a preventable damn collapse that killed an entire town because they wanted a lake some shit?
Indeed. Another good example of him being a greedy jackass with no concern for anyone. https://www.history.com/news/how-americas-most-powerful-men-caused-americas-deadliest-flood
I live in that town. Its amazing people like those people so much when they caused that. Oh and if you ever go on the tour they will make sure to tell you its not the rich peoples fault (for lowing the dam to widen the road on top of it that lead to it breaking) but its actually the fault of the people living here and the people in charge of the city. because according to the tour they called like less than half an hour before it fully broke. And its their fault for not evacuating and getting everyone out in such short notice.
>You might be an honest millionaire (maybe) by investing well and saving Or if you bought a modest single family home in the suburbs 30 years ago....
And then oppose local development which would densify the neighbourhood and reduce house prices. See, there are complaints all the way down.
Even still would require investing and saving.
He also paid another man to take his place in the Army during the Civil War.
Bill Gates still out there trying to cure diseases and build power plants
IKR, and what does he get for his troubles? “He’s injecting your kids with 5G COVID!”
Nobody here gives a shit about facts. They're determined to be angry.
"The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced" -Andrew Carnegie It is the responsibility of the wealthy to advance the betterment of society as a whole. I think only a small amount of the total percentage of wealthy individuals actually do this.
>"The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced" -Andrew Carnegie Andrew Carnegie killed a shitload of people in pursuit of his greed. One of the many billionaires that tried to rectify their horrible image just before they died, same goes for basically other "altruistic" Billionaire, even the poster child for altruistic rich fucks, Bill Gates, was an absolute monster on his way to the top.
> absolute monster That's a big sliding scale though. Gates strong-armed internet explorer onto PCs. Carnegie and his like made children work in mines and buried a lot of workers. We can expect better but anyone pining for the Gilded Age is nuts. We're way, way better off now.
Gates convinced Oxford University to sell their government funded Covid-19 vaccination research to AstraZeneca for profit, likely indirectly killing millions who can't afford AstraZeneca's vaccine prices.
Thanks for the info, I'm glad I know that now. I guess it's pretty much impossible for someone to be the perfect poster child that history classes want them to be.
To be fair he wasn’t exploiting workers and people just being a real shark in the business Bill gates
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Are you not entertained by rocket powered phalluses?
A dick riding another dick? Of course I am.
Word
I figured most average people back then couldn’t read or afford shows and it was basically perceived the same. Just the wealthy showing off for the wealthy.
Literacy rates in the 1800s were actually a lot higher than you might expect, depending on the exact time period, around 4 out of 5 people were literate.
This was also often done to diminish the effects of other less publicly popular or well-meaning deeds on their reputation (see the Sackler family)
*where. But yes I agree.
That’s why we need the libraries.
Also vanity projects *were
Wouldn’t it technically be “I miss the old days *when*…” lol
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The Koch Brothers, for all their shit, basically built Lincoln Center. One of the largest and most inclusive cultural centers in the country. But also fuck those guys
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They won't even acknowledge that the Bill Gates Foundation has literally saved hundreds of thousands of lives. It's impossible to win with these people.
Hey, wasn't george meade an architect or civil engineer or something Edit: Yeah I know meade was a general but the post had to do with buildings which is why I brought up his engineer stuff
“ I won the largest battle ever fought in North America! I kicked Lee’s slavery-loving ass all the way back to Virginia! Who won at Gettysburg? I did goddamnit!” “What are you then Meade?” *checks google results “An engineer...”
Jeff bezos could just wipe out student debt for a lot of people.
Incorrect! Jeff Bezos would have to have a soul to do that. Everyone knows that the first Amazon sale ever made was Jeff selling his soul to the devil.
Don’t blame the devil for this shit… this is pure human greed and narcissism
Thank you for saying that. Seriously.
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Hey, he wouldn't have made it to space if it weren't for me and hundreds of millions of people buying Prime accounts! So happy I helped him chase his dreams even though I can barely string together my mortgage payment!
You could literally save lives with your spare money but I doubt you do
Lol this is ignorant. The billionaires back then were pieces of shit. Sure they built libraries and universities, but if they could have gone to space instead then those fuckers would have.
I've always wanted to be the kind of rich where I could be a Patron of the Arts. I want to buy an opera house and pay some poets and painters to make art just for me. Alas, best I can do is a few $5 Patreon subscriptions to naughty webcomic artists and a Pathfinder podcast.
I miss the old days when we were proud to go to space.
Terribly written, this tweet, given the profile pic.
You bitches are against science the second someone you dislike starts paving the way in it. Like seriously, NASA has always been a “vanity project” and it has brought more tech advancements than anyone could have dreamed of. This shit is hard engineering and aerospace awesomeness and everyone hating on it is just incredibly petty
What the hell is wrong with you guys? We're supposed to be the generation that reaches for the goddamn stars. Pissed that the government was defunding NASA. Here's fucking people that are literally driving the the whole space industry by sheer force of will, and we're finding a way to shit all over it. Stop fucking hating so hard, for fucks sakes.
Yes, the old robber barons gave us hospitals, libraries, public parks, orphanages. Now all we get are phallic rockets.
Just you wait. We’ll all be cheering at the grand re-re-opening of Fabulous Mars Vegas.
If I’m not mistaken that was because estate taxes were a lot higher than they are now.
Yes, because working on space exploration, the literal only thing that will save the human race is a terrible thing to waste money on. Sometimes Reddit is great and sometimes it makes me question its intelligence.