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Author Topic: Extreme wealth  (Read 7403 times)

Rob C

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Re: Extreme wealth
« Reply #40 on: October 29, 2018, 04:53:34 am »

Too bad they were all fake.

Glad you're posting again; was wondering where you were.

Rob

Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Extreme wealth
« Reply #41 on: October 29, 2018, 09:16:07 am »

Glad you're posting again; was wondering where you were.

Ha! Nice. I’ve been traveling. Belgrade, Serbia, currently in Nicosia, Cyprus. Might post some pics soon.

Alan Klein

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Re: Extreme wealth
« Reply #42 on: October 29, 2018, 10:24:57 am »

Too bad they were all fake.
Why do you say that?

Slobodan Blagojevic

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Re: Extreme wealth
« Reply #43 on: October 29, 2018, 10:58:12 am »

Why do you say that?

Because there is no such thing as “Sunrise over Hernandez,” just “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.” 😊

Peter McLennan

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Re: Extreme wealth
« Reply #44 on: October 29, 2018, 11:08:36 am »

Sweet revenge on the rich is illustrated by the meme “Buy experiences, not things.”

My best value in that meme was stopping dead in my tracks and pulling off the road in amazement in New Mexico one day back in the 70s.  There it was, right outside my windshield, the little white crosses, the whole nine yards.  Yes, I was in Hernandez, New Mexico.  I have a Kodachrome of it, somewhere.

The scene is gone now, Hernandez is no more.  But the memory, the experience, is intact.
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Alan Klein

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Re: Extreme wealth
« Reply #45 on: October 29, 2018, 12:07:17 pm »

Because there is no such thing as “Sunrise over Hernandez,” just “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico.”
Well, that's why they were so expensive. The Sunrise over Hernandez are rarer.😏

James Clark

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Re: Extreme wealth
« Reply #46 on: October 29, 2018, 02:27:40 pm »

Ha! Nice. I’ve been traveling. Belgrade, Serbia, currently in Nicosia, Cyprus. Might post some pics soon.

Please do!
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Telecaster

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Re: Extreme wealth
« Reply #47 on: October 30, 2018, 11:36:25 pm »

Of course…you can have a decent pile o' dough socked away and still value experiences more than it. You can even use it to expand your reach of places to experience. The danger, beyond fixating on bank and investment account balances, is in using money to isolate yourself from the rest of humanity and of the world. You can visit a place in a certain detached way and never really be there.

-Dave-
« Last Edit: October 31, 2018, 09:57:52 pm by Telecaster »
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John Camp

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Re: Extreme wealth
« Reply #48 on: November 02, 2018, 05:05:56 pm »

That whole thing about **taste** usually refers to objects and styles, but taste isn't innate. It's something you acquire after quite a bit of searching and contemplation. A lot of rich people don't have time for that, because they're doing whatever they do to get rich. And what they do to get rich is often intensely interesting, IMHO. Compelling, even. A lot of it doesn't even have to do with gathering money, but with competition, learning about how the world works, negotiating with a wide variety of people from other cultures, etc. The money is often a by-product. I'm not denying that there are people who are no more than unethical money-grubbers, but as a former longtime newspaper reporter, I met a lot of super-rich people and found that many of them have extraordinary insights into the way the world works, in the sphere they're dealing with.

Of all the art forms, I think photography (which I love and collect) tends to have the largest number of people with poor taste. There's a reason for that -- a very large number of people who may become good technical photographers are in it for essentially wannabe reasons. To a very talented engineer, photography seems to be an art form that is accessible. You can be a screamingly good coder or engineer, but still feel that something is missing in life (art.) That's why we see, on so many forums, the emphasis on autofocus speed, sensor size, IBIS, and so on. They are *engineering* concerns. There are Sony fixed-zoom consumer cameras out there that can take better technical pictures than anything Ansel Adams ever used, but in engineering terms, they just can't hold a candle to the latest D850 or Canon equivalent. So, we wind up with a lot of really inane photography. Especially landscapes. And the reason for that is the same reason that rich people often have poor taste in objects and styles -- many engineers really don't have time to develop it.

I do think that disparities in wealth can be terribly corrosive, both personally and culturally, and especially when the wealth in a small segment of society becomes extreme. But it doesn't have to become extreme to see it. There's an old Russian story about the peasant whose ox dies. He doesn't pray for a new ox; he prays that his neighbor's ox dies.
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Alan Klein

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Re: Extreme wealth
« Reply #49 on: November 02, 2018, 10:04:45 pm »

I think that's a rather limited view of photography as art for the average person.  We're not all Ansels or HCB or whoever.  There are loads of amateur musicians who will never make a recording, amateur cooks who will never become restaurant chefs, and painters who will never become Van Gogh.  Even Van Gogh almost didn't become Van Gogh. He starved while alive and most living engineers would prefer to eat.  In the end, there's nothing wrong with experiencing art to the best of a person's capability even though God made us all different in our skills.  There appears to be a creative instinct in all of us.  Certainly we should be free to create.
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