There’s the old joke about two economists walking down the street. One of them looks down and says, “Look, there’s a fifty dollar bill lying on the sidewalk a few feet ahead.”
The other one keeps walking without even glancing down. “That’s impossible. If there had been a fifty dollar bill there, somebody else would have already picked it up.”
I’d never heard that economist joke in my life, and in the last two days I’ve seen it twice in threads started by Diamonds02.
Ways to become fabulously wealthy all have a roadblock; otherwise, everyone would do it, and it would make no one fabulously wealth anymore. Dealing drugs is very lucrative, but you stand a non-trivial chance of going to jail (or being killed) for doing it. Being a CEO is very lucrative, but there’s a lot of competition. Striking it rich as a gold prospector is very lucrative, but you have to get extremely lucky. Being a prostitute can be very lucrative, but it’s illegal and you’d better be extremely attractive if you want to make a good wage.
Short version: there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.
We were at Ellis Island last month, and in the museum there was an actual quote from in immigrant, years after he’d been processed. It went something like: “They told us the streets were paved with gold. But when I arrived, I found: 1) There was no gold; 2) there were no streets; and 3) I was expected to make the streets.”
Luck, connections and ruthlessness are more important than either talent or hard work. Plenty of talented people work extremely hard and die no richer than they started. The hard working, talented people mostly make other people rich.
It’s largely an infrastructure problem, really. There’s lots of resources in space to be tapped - if there was an infrastructure to get them to market. But until people start tapping them, no one wants to spend the huge sums which it would take to build the infrastructure.
You could always go the Dr. Evil route. Life is a pretty valuable commodity, one for which people have been known to pay millions of dollars for. Find some rich family, kidnap one of them, and demand a million dollar ransom.
Or put a giant laser on the moon and threaten to blow up the world if you don’t get 100 hundred billion trillion gajibijibijilion dollars.
In my defense, the subject of getting something for nothing is the topic of several of Diamonds’ threads and that leads to the joke.
I highly disagree, I know people who don’t work that hard go through school get into a nice university get an easy job that pays well.
Well, maybe. The trick is finding something that somebody else hasn’t already beaten you to. The most likely avenues are 1)find some new way to gather a known valuable resource that is too difficult to gather using existing techniques (e.g. there’s gold in seawater… if you can figure out how to extract it without spending more than it’s worth) or 2)find a valuable use for something that currently seems useless.
Good luck.
[QUOTE=mac9891]
I highly disagree, I know people who don’t work that hard go through school get into a nice university get an easy job that pays well.
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Even if I accept the premise that you ‘know people’, etc etc, I am highly skeptical you know a lot of WEALTHY people who follow this trajectory and acquired their wealth in this fashion (I’m pretty skeptical that you know a lot of folks who have even gotten to the ‘well off’ point following that plan), which was the point being made in the quoted section. The OP seems to be looking for a get rich quick scheme, not some dubious plan to get to a solid middle class range by going to school and getting an ‘easy job that pays well’.
[QUOTE=Der Trihs]
It’s largely an infrastructure problem, really. There’s lots of resources in space to be tapped - if there was an infrastructure to get them to market. But until people start tapping them, no one wants to spend the huge sums which it would take to build the infrastructure.
[/QUOTE]
Agree completely. I think a good analogy would be the early rail road system. A lot of folks could see the potential, but it was difficult to get anyone to pony up the huge amounts of capital needed to set the stage, especially in the early days. The folks who were able to acquire that capital (or get the government to fork some of it over) became, by and large, the early rail road barons and became ridiculously wealthy. My guess is that some of the folks who eventually figure out how to set up the infrastructure to enable them to exploit resources in our solar system will become proportionately as ridiculously wealthy as those early rail road barons.
-XT
Hmmm…I think there is more to it than that. Luck is also dependent on having the brains to know the difference of being the tool for someone else and their success, and going out and doing it yourself and doing it better than your former boss. This positive mindset runs counter on how you view luck.
Actually, most people have idly wished that they could get rich easily, but very few people actually attempt it. Mostly they just make bad investments. Nigerian princes and casinos harvest them regularly. It takes a lot of thinking, planning and work to get rich easily. That said, if you actually apply yourself and work hard at it, you can get rich easily, though it’s by no means a sure thing. Most people simply do not do it.