Archive for the ‘money’ Tag
It seems that almost everyone wants to be richer. We’ve heard it as children that if you become rich you will be successful, happy, and content with your life. After reaching adulthood reality sets in when you discover just how difficult obtaining and keeping riches can be. Here is a collection of quotes from some of those rich and famous folks who will explain their thoughts on being wealthy.
- “Money is a prolific generating nature. Money can beget money, and its offspring can beget more.” Ben Franklin
- “Money is a terrible master but an excellent servant.” PT Barnum
- “If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.” Aristotle Onassis
- “Money brings some happiness. But, after a certain point, it just brings more money.” Neil Simon
- “When I was young I thought money was the most important thing in life; now that I am old I know that it is.” Oscar Wilde
- “Money is better than poverty, if only for financial reasons.” Woody Allen
- “Golden shackles are far worse than iron ones.” Gandhi
- “If I hadn’t been rich, I might’ve been a really great man.” Orson Welles
- “A woman needs four animals in her life: A mink in the closet. A jaguar in the garage. A tiger in bed. And then an ass to pay for it all.” Anne Slater
- “Rich men without convictions are more dangerous in modern society then poor women without chastity.” George Bernard Shaw
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And there’s no better way to end this post then to have a quote from a celebrity that speaks the absolute truth.
“No rich man is ugly.” Zsa Zsa Gabor.
RICH MAN, POOR MAN, BAKER MAN, THIEF
Yesterday was a less than a spectacular day. My better-half was diagnosed with Covid after returning from her safari to the northern wilds of Maine. It effectively required that the cat and I sleep alone for a few days until she recovers. Today started off when the Maine Medical System decided to charge me an out-of-pocket charge of $117.30 to appear at their office to have my blood pressure checked. I said, “Hell No!” and immediately cancelled the appointment. I hate it when people in any organization think of me as just another revenue stream rather than a real patient. Well, I think that’s enough of my bitching and complaining for today. This post is trivia related but contains much more obscure information than my normal facts. Enjoy!
- Shaquille O’Neal wears a size 52XXXXL (extra-extra-extra-extra-long) jersey.
- 20.41 pounds is the weight of $1,000,000 worth of U.S. $100.00 dollar bills.
- It is 14 miles distance from the Batcave to Gotham City.
- There is an average of 512 plain M&M’s per pound.
- Jimy Olsen’s middle name was Bartholomew.
- The movie Roots was originally titled “Before This Anger”.
- The original family surname of John Cleese was Cheese.
- “Et one, Brute?” was the advertising slogan for Lay’s Potatoe Chips in the 60’s.
- “JoJo” is Bart Simpson’s middle name.
- Kelcy’s Bar was Archie Bunkers favorite hangout.
ONE OF MY FAVS
Manfred was the oldest of the Marx Brothers who died before his first birthday.
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ARREST THE LAWBREAKERS
Most Americans are raised get an education, get a job, make money, and then make more money. There’s nothing like starting your work life in your early twenties with a huge student loan debt that will take you years to pay off. Money seems to be the driving force in this country and the pursuit of it is all consuming. In reality, it’s the same almost everywhere else as well. I think a lot of that make-money mindset was passed down through the Great Depression generation like my parents who were concerned with little else. It’s not a bad thing to chase money but how you go about is even more important. Make as much money as you can but try just as hard not to harm or destroy others in the process.
Today’s post involves a short history of money.
- At the age of 12, Andrew Carnegie worked as a millhand for $1.20 a week. A half-century later, he sold his steel company for nearly $500 million.
- Not a single bank existed anywhere in the 13 colonies before the American Revolution. Anyone needing money had to borrow from an individual.
- Although he is famous for inventing the cotton gin, in 1793, Eli Whitney made no money from his invention because he did not have a valid patent on it.
- Henry Ford shocked his fellow capitalists by more than doubling the daily wage of most of his workers in 1914, 11 years after he had established his first automobile factory. He knew what he was doing. The buying power of his workers was increased, and their raised consumption stimulated buying elsewhere. Ford called it the “wage motive.”
- Paul Revere, the American silversmith and patriot, designed paper money for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which issued the money in defiance of English law even before independence was declared. The notes were handsome but soon depreciated. Some of them subsequently were used as wallpaper in barbershops.
- When Jacob A. Riis published his classic book How the Other Half Lives, in 1890, the fortunes of about 1% of the US population totaled more than the possessions of the remaining 99%. The pattern hasn’t changed all that much. Today, the fortunes of about 8% of the US population total more than the possessions of the remaining 92%.
- We hear all of the economy experts constantly raising fears about rising inflation. Here is why! At the height of inflation in Germany in the early 1920s, one American dollar was the equal of 4.2 trillion German marks.
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WORK-EARN-SPEND-OWE
These days when I talk about “rich” people it is considerably different than when I was in my twenties. Back then it was unbelievable that someone could become a millionaire. It was difficult to believe that amount of money could be earned by anyone except for the mega-rich. Today it’s almost unbelievable. If you own a large home in a nice neighborhood, have two cars, and good paying job, your net worth is probably more than a million. I couldn’t even imagine trying to guess how many millionaires are playing pro sports. It boggles the mind. As outrageous as that is, the uber rich remain in a separate class all their own. To them a millionaire is seen as a low rent bum. Let me show you what I mean.
- William Randolph Hearst once purchased a pair of Cellini saltshakers for the low, low price of $500,000.
- Henry Ford once stated to Hearst after he had been complaining about never seeming to have any money: “That’s a mistake,” replied Ford. “A man ought to have $500 million or so in cash for a rainy day.”
- Once when a reporter asked John Paul Getty if he was really worth over $1 billion, “Yes, I suppose it’s true, but $1 billion doesn’t go as far as it used to.”
- A young Nelson Rockefeller was sailing his toy boat in a pond when another boy asked, “Where’s your yacht? “Whaddaya think I am, “he replied,” a Vanderbilt?”
- When an elderly John D Rockefeller, Sr, learned that members of his family intended to give him an electric cart to ride around his estate, he told them in no uncertain terms, “I rather have the money.”
- Howard Hughs started out as a very presentable young playboy with the world at his feet. He ended up as a starving, paranoid recluse trapped in a room watching old movies.
- The oil billionaire H. L. Hunt wrote and published a book in which he proposed that citizens voting power be proportionate to the amount of taxes they paid.
- H. Ross Perot had a coral reef dynamited at his oceanfront home in Bermuda because it interfered with his boat slip.
- Armand Hammer once bought an important manuscript written by Leonardo da Vinci and renamed it the Codex Hammer.
- William K Vanderbilt once stated, “I am the richest man in the world. I am worth $194 million. I would not walk across the street to make $1 million.”
They live in a different world in a galaxy far, far away. They barely have the ability or the desire to stoop so low as to talk to someone considered a “blue collar” worker.
MONEY BREEDS ARROGANCE
Unfortunately, the word “Greed” is used to describe our country by many foreigners and also from many of our own citizens. I can’t say that I disagree because in too many cases it’s absolutely true. “Money is the root of all evil” immediately comes to mind when I hear that word. It’s not something we should be proud of but “It is what it is.” I thought today I would examine the statements made by an assortment of well-off persons who are well enough known to be quoted in publications. For those of you out there who are not rich let me inform you.
- “People will swim through shit if you put a few bob in it.” Peter Sellers
- “Time is money.” Ben Franklin
- “Money isn’t everything as long as you have enough.” Malcolm Forbes
- “It isn’t enough for you to love money – it’s also necessary that money should love you”. Baron James D Rothschild
- “If I had my life to live over again, I’d be a $30 a week librarian.” Andrew Carnegie
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- “In some ways, a millionaire just can’t win. If he spends too freely, he is criticized for being extravagant and ostentatious. If, on the other hand, he lives quietly and thriftily, the same people who would have criticized him for being profligate will call him a miser.” J. Paul Getty
- “There is always the question. You wonder if people like you for you or the inevitable disturbing question: Are they after something?” Mary Leah Johnson (heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune)
- “The best reason to read about the very rich, of course, is to be reassured that money cannot buy happiness and indeed, often seems to buy trouble.” Maureen Dowd
- “As a cousin of mine once said about money, money is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money.” Gertrude Stein
- “Money talks. The more money, the louder it talks.” Arnold Rothstein
One final thought, a quote from my late down-to-earth father concerning money. It’s as true today as it was fifty years ago when I first heard him say it:
“MONEY TALKS AND BULLSHIT WALKS!”
I thought for this post I would reintroduce Number Freaking. If you like statistics and far out and freaky explanations of numbers, this is it. I posted about it a number of months ago and the response was excellent. It just goes to show how many freaky people are hanging around out there reading this blog. Enjoy!
WEATHER
- On average there are 40-60 flashes of lightning somewhere in the world every second. 1.58 billion lightning flashes are estimated to occur each year on this planet.
- At any given moment there are an estimated 2000 thunderstorms occurring worldwide.
- There are an estimated 5,844,000 thunderstorms that occur each year.
- It is estimated that 695,000,000,000,000 (trillion) gallons of water are unleashed by thunderstorms annually. To put that into a better perspective, Lake Michigan contains 1300 trillion gallons, Lake Huron 935 trillion, and Lake Ontario 433 trillion.
TELEVISION
- One of the most expensive pilot shows on American TV was Lost, costing $12 million and the plane that provided the wreckage on the beach cost the production company $200,000.
- The total running time of the TV series Friends was 99 hours and 10 minutes (238 episodes). The final episode recorded 52.5 million viewers which is somewhere between the populations of South Korea and Italy.
- And for those of you who love The Simpsons their total running time amounted to 139 hours and 35 minutes.
ANT INVASION
- The total number of ants on earth is estimated to be in the area of 826.8 billion tons.
- It is estimated that there are 300 million trillion ants on the earth (that is 300 quintillion – followed by 20 zeros).
- The highest estimate of the total number of insects on earth is at six septillions. That’s 6 trillion trillion – followed by 24 zeros).
MISCELLANEOUS
- Money depreciates in value over time. Allowing for inflation a dollar from 1867 was worth about $12.50 in 2005, and a dollar from 1624 at least $20.41.
- In 1867 Alaska cost the United States, $7.2 million. In modern dollars this would amount to $90 million.
- In 1624 the island of Manhattan was purchased from the Indians for $24. In modern dollars that would convert to $489.84.
Isn’t “Number Freaking” just the best. Its definition explains everything simply and it’s easy to understand. “Number Freaking is something we do because we have a brain, it’s jazz math, the accountancy of the absurd, forensic speculation, surreal calculation, the art of playing with numbers just because we can.”
THANK YOU, GARY RIMMER
everyuselessthing.com 