It doesn’t require “vast hordes” of the idle rich out there.
Technically, it only requires 10.
It’s odd how upset people get about this idea. I wonder if there’s some vestige of the peasant’s mindset lurking in the zeitgheist, that doesn’t like my casting disrepsect on our just, kind, and fair overlords, the rich.
It makes people uncomfortable when you suggest that even a few of the real masters of the world might be foolish morons.
It is just a silly idea. It’s like arguing tooth and nail that men should be called “flagadoons” and women should be called “meep-morps.” These are solutions to problems that don’t exist, are just generally silly, and to take the question seriously would mean… well, that we’re taking the question seriously.
I don’t see anybody getting upset, though I’m starting to wonder about you. Your idea is unworkable. Get over it.
Heck, I could buy that some are. I expect, though, that their handlers or relatives will intercede if they were dumb enough to sell off valuable assets for a meaningless title. You’d be better off encouraging the wealthy to make large charitable donations so their names can be put on plaques and such.
Yeah, I’m sure that’s it. It’s not that we don’t want you encouraging such a “peasant’s mindset”, we’re obviously just horrified that you are disparaging our betters.
Who’s getting upset here?
You have ignored the rational refutations of various points of your plan (and your subsequent supporting arguments) that have been made by various posters here. You have made a ludicrous emotional appeal by accusing those who disagree with you of being crypto-peasant tools of the imaginary overlords.
To respond to your points: I cast more vitriol and mockery at the foolish wealthy before 9AM than most people do all day. Also, your plan relies on strengthing and promoting the ‘peasant mindset’ that is (thankfully) largely absent in the developed world.
This has degenerated into pig wrestling. I give up, you win.
I’m sorry for my last posting to this thread that accused people of a peasant mindset. It was completely out of line, and unworthy of this forum, and I have no excuse. I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.
I suppose it depends on what your goals are. If your goals are simply to make a few dollars for dubious reasons then sure…it would only require a few.
Ok. Let’s go with that. Assuming there are 10 people out there stupid enough to fall for this, how much do you expect them to give for these things? $10,000? $100,000? Let’s say you get that $100,000 (I doubt it but there is a sucker born every minute according to ole PT)…that would be $1 million. Now…myself, I wouldn’t turn up my nose at a million. However, that kind of money wouldn’t be a drop in a bucket…in fact, I doubt it would even cover the marketing costs, let alone the costs you would incur to make it work. Somehow you’d have to bring all the various vendors and venues on board (to allow people to jump to the head of the various lines, have tables reserved, buy stuff from exclusive shops, etc etc)…and that ain’t gona be free. After all, what’s in it for THEM? Even if we were to ramp up the guess to a million dollars each I don’t think you would come close to breaking even on your costs.
You are laboring under the misconception that there are a lot of idle rich and that they have a lot more money than they do…and that they would be willing to give away large portions of it for such a scheme. IIRC the average ‘rich’ person in the US has something like $10 million…in wealth and assets. That translates into very little actually operating cash…most of it is in investments and assets. No one in their right mind is going to spend even 10% of their total assets on something silly like this…even if THEY are that stupid the folks managing their money probably aren’t.
No one is getting upset by the idea. Frankly I find it more funny than disturbing. You can cast all the disrespect at the rich that you like for all of me. It’s fairly clear that you have no idea of what you are talking about and have simply built up a cartoon strawman of the ‘rich’ and are simply using that to make up your little scenario here.
See, this is what I mean. The REAL ‘masters of the world’ are the NON-idle rich…and they wouldn’t exactly fall for this stupid scheme of yours. You see, they ALREADY have the power…and it’s the real deal. The one’s you are now targeting are the very small subset of rich who are idle or wastrels (who are the one’s that, no matter how much they inherit become non-rich in a generation or less).
I have no problem acknowledging that there are a hell of a lot of people who are foolish morons. It would take something a bit more than that though to get someone to part with a significant portion of their wealth for something this silly though.
-XT
Despite MichaelJohnBertrand’s assertion that he’d probably be able to retrieve his own (sic) idea about a new aristocracy somewhere in his dusty archives, I can’t help thinking that he got his inspiration from my last post in his previous thread on the presumable endowment of above-average IQ individuals to society, namely from my therein posted motto: After the disastrous new rich, the salutary new nobles.
So why did he not stick to my definition of the nobles as the tenants of exemplary authority versus the mere tenants of ruthless power?
I guess that, knowing from another thread I’m an inventor, he felt challenged and tried to make an invention just out of his ass (sorry for the rough language, I learned it from another thread where it has been thrown at me…).
Now, an inventor will indeed come to know the famous “eurêka” at a given state of his research, but this is mostly after years of survey, investigation and auto-brainstorming (because the inventor doesn’t want the flash to occur in the presence of third parties).
The word invent means literally ‘to draw up an inventory’ (of the state-of-the-art technical solutions), hence the word inventor is designating the person who is drawing up the inventory. While this is the survey and investigation issue, the auto-brainstorming issue means confronting promising existing solutions in order to combine them into an unprecedented new and better than ever solution.
As a conclusion to my said post, I challenged any experts out there to come up with purposeful ideas about the said motto.
Yet not only did MJD replace the term ‘nobility’ by its flawed synonym ‘aristocracy’ (since he puts it into reach of the tenants of sheer financial power), but he also created a new thread for the only sake of flouting the traceability of his inspiration. Or would anybody pretend that the concept of aristocracy was so way off the above-average IQ topic as to justify a new thread?
It’s human after all, but it takes away a lot of the momentum that could have been gained from my motto in the way of defining a new entity to be elected among the very rich of the planet, in order to have some of them endorsed with the official and intangible status of a noble whose probity would be deemed above any doubt.
The fact that many tenants of huge financial power are very much into charity and supporting culture and the artists, only witnesses their bad conscience of not putting to work their surplus wealth for the promotion of purposeful projects, with priority given to the advance of technology because it has become the vital substrate of civilization.
And within technology, priority would have to be given to individual mobility because it is the most fundamental quality of organic life versus the inorganic – and within individual mobility priority would indeed have to be given to aeromobility because several species having achieved this ultimate freedom of movement are definitely witnessing the decisive advantage it confers to them over the rampant species all over the planet.
May I give an example of how the fear of massively popularized individual aeromobility, and the consequent hypocritical preference of collective, albeit most exclusive luxury-based mobility has been fatal to some of the super rich?
The Titanic sank, the Hindenburg went up in flames, the Concorde crashed.
Notice the evolution from the sea to the airspace, which is irreversible – hence the next airships for the super rich who feel above the mere jet-setters, will be Richard Branson’s Starship 2 and the 5-star hotel version of the Airbus A380. But be certain that the first fatal crash of any of these two will end their career as abruptly as the Hindenburg’s and the Condorde’s ended.
By now, you should begin to get a clue of at least one kind of super rich (the most important one, at that) who would be eligible for genuine nobility, i.e. those who would be willing to fund the democratization of the airspace so as to grant the human masses free access to their common biotope surrounding their lonely spaceship called the planet Earth.
With their floating or flying paradises the super rich are in actual fact on the way to the concept of the global paradise for all humans, but most of them are blind to the vision of the global village inhabited by billions of individuals as free to move around individually as are about a hundred billions of birds and trillions of insects since eons.
But there is some hope. I’d like to conclude with the example of at least one super- rich I consider eligible for nobility, i.e. the Swiss industrialist Adolphe Merkle (not to be confused with the German billionaire Adolf Merkle who recently killed himself after having lost most of his fortune).
Adolphe Merkle has recently donated SF100 million (approx. 90 million dollars) to the University of the Swiss canton of Fribourg to found an R&D institute for nanomaterials.
Notice that this is at the opposite of charity since it is meant to promote the ideas of above-average IQ individuals. But there will be problems of intellectual property in case of technological break-through results.
These problems have long been solved by the mere deontology and ethics of publication of all findings issued from officially sponsored research, although this was also a bit of a booby-trap set up under the influence of industrial tycoons fearing that if protected by patents major inventions resulting from official academic research might render their monopolies obsolete. In more recent times the more successful scientists have come up with the solution of the so-called spin-off companies. Yet history tells us that a number of the most important inventions have been made by private outsiders, and this is certainly so because necessity is the mother of invention…
In his example of racing horses, painters and athletes as a choice of potential avatars to be offered for sale to the super rich to boost their super-ego with the sole aim to WIN, as MJB stressed it, he hopelessly failed to recognize the potential purposefulness of the example of the patron of an artist painter.
Why should a new noble acting as patron of the arts not support an artist engineer alias inventor, by buying-up and collecting this inventor’s production, i.e. the very first proof-of-concept prototypes of his protegees’ major inventions? This would enable the inventor to secure the financing of the worldwide patent extension procedure even before filing a patent application, which is a real advantage as it has been for American inventors until recently, when the rule of the inventor who first built a working prototype being granted the patent was abolished to adapt US law to international patent law stipulating that intellectual property is granted to the inventor who first files a patent application.
But what the world needs is not only new nobility, it is also that some of these new noble dedicate a fair share of their wealth to promote inventions that face the threat of obstruction opposed by the tenants of sheer power to protect their privileges and eventually to prevent large numbers of citizens from becoming challengers of their higher status.
Sorry, to prevent confusion, I should have stressed right away that the quote on top of my long comment above is not from xtism’s reply to one of my comments, but from his comment on MichaelJohnBernard’s writing.
I don’t undersatand - are you claiming ownership of the OP’s idea?
I wouldn’t.
He does seem to be doing that, yes.
Odd, given its unpopularity. 