---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <noozguru@...> wrote :
On 03/30/2015 09:14 AM, salyavin808 wrote: ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com mailto:FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <LEnglish5@...> mailto:LEnglish5@... wrote : Actually, people DO pay attention to what billlionaires say and do. You have completely departed from reality with this statement. Nobody gives a toss what millionaires do, their lives are so far removed from ours that they might as well be alien. Actually a lot of dummies think of billionaires as some kind "gods" or "special people" as if making lots of money is the key to life. Thinking about it a bit more, Lawson's statement might be more true of America than over here. We have a funny attitude to money, everyone wants to be rich but people can really dislike the wealthy just being rich. The weird politics of envy. Thing is, a lot of our modern day billionaires are "accidental". They just had the right idea at the right time in the right place. And anyone else with that right idea but the wrong time or wrong place might not have faired so well. IOW, it's about luck (there was a Harvard study about this). A lot of the recent immigrants to London are conmen like Roman Abromovich and his Russian oilgarch friends who made a fortune in Russia during the capitalist free-for-all and park their money in London forcing up house prices way beyond the reach of locals. Even worse are playboy Arab billionaires racing their stupid fast cars round Knightsbridge. Everyone hates them and rightly so. The only thing the English like (except me) is class, we let the "uppers" shit on the rest of us whether they've got money or not. It's all bearing and accent. The only billionaire everyone seems to like is Richard Branson. He has a good and carefully managed image but what's he like really? Damn shrewd, hardworking or just lucky? They really DO set the trends and fashions of society. Bullshit. Would you hang out with someone who dressed like Bill Gates? I think Melinda dresses him nowadays. Part of my job in my PR company was monitoring what the press said about Gates. All articles about him or his life were cut out and sent to me and I'd enter the details into a database and send a monthly report to MS's own press department. To say that I knew everything there is to know about him is an understatement. I felt like some hideous nerd stalker, but highly paid and probably shouldn't be telling you this! I knew how every room in his house was decorated and how much money he'd have top drop to make it worth his while bending over to pick it up (he made $150 a second apparently). Why they wanted to know all this stuff is a mystery to me, maybe they used it to monitor how obsessed people were with myths about his lifestyle? Weird job anyway... I also had to monitor the whole IE anti-trust thing and the battle with Netscape (remember that?) and all the while I was using a crappy Windows 95 PC. We didn't even have the internet in those days and had to actually work while looking at our screens! And of course, when Ray Dalio appears on the stage with Bob Roth, it makes all sorts of headlines in business journals. Cultmania. I love it. Lawson makes being a TM'er like being a Jehovah's Witness. We have those downtown standing around looking for a mark. They are dressed (including their kids) like they are living in the 1950s. That sorta fits in with the town which clings to the 1950s Mayberry scene. Kick myself though as I didn't go downtown last week at all and there was a film crew there filming a PSA. It was a New York company and 30 people involved and even doing crane shots. Maybe you'll see it because it was a London agency that had them filming. The theme is "American small town." I like the JW's we used to get plagued by them at the TM centre because they considered us possessed by the devil for our pagan ways and would do everything in their power to convert us. One of the girls that came round was lovely and I used to chat her up for ages in the hope she was flirty fishing but she was married and you wouldn't believe the rules they have about that sort of thing. Funny thing was her husband wasn't a JW which is odd because they believe there are only 7000 places in heaven and every one is reserved by people from the JW's, but not even all of them. I asked her if it was depressing being married to someone she was actually guaranteed to never see in the afterlife of eternal peace and she didn't want to discuss it. I like to get their mag "The Watchtower" and read it on the train, they often have some TB articles about creationism V's evolution and it's fun to pit my wits against the clever nonsense they publish. PS I was an extra in a BBC production called "Dr Foster" they were filming at our local medical centre at the weekend. I made a good passerby I think. If I make the final cut I'll post a link to iplayer.
