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Comment by swozey | Hacker News Reader

I worked for a guy a decade ago who spent 8-10 years building a company to sell it for $300-400 million and he hasn't worked a day since. Owns a 30k acre ranch that a bunch of friends/family live on. Learjets. Villas in the islands, things like that. I can't think of one thing he hasn't done or is limited financially in doing. Last time I saw him he had a $120k watch on, some type of Hublot big bang.

And Pichai gets that yearly...

Here, check out the type of trash he spends his money on now. https://www.drivetanks.com/ Absolute waste to society.

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Why is that trash? I would love to drive and shoot a real tank as a civilian.

can we argue carbon footprint?

A tank is 1 mpg. I am guessing they are not driving more than 1 or 2 miles on an excursion. This is hardly harmful to the environment compared to other entertainment options.

A quick Google shows 0.6 mpg....

Imma call for a citation from ya

At least they are not launching space rockets.

His ranch is on the MX/TX border and he owns domains (to resell) such as roaches.com, illegal.com, molest.com, etc. Take with those what you will of the sort of person he is. That's just the few I remember otoh. He has hundreds.

One of those is not like the others (it's roaches.com).

Either I'm missing a joke or you need to travel more. Calling mexican immigrants roaches is a thing.

My assumption was that it referred to this [1], but then I’m not a racist POS so maybe I’m out of the loop.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roach_(smoking)

Yeah that's definitely not the situation here unfortunately.

Never heard that before either, but personally, I would prefer not to travel to wherever immigrants are called roaches.

I haven't heard that word being used in years living around there and also being hispanic.

To me it just looks like parent is cherry-picking some domains to try and put words in their mouth.

If the person owns roaches.com out of hundreds of domains then you're going to try to make it racist so the owner looks racist?

I never understood why trying to make innocent things racist isn't considered racist itself.

I’ve only heard of hispanic comedians using it in recent years:

https://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/john-leguizamo-latinos...

I first heard that joke in a 1990’s standup routine, fwiw. It could have been the same person telling the joke, I guess.

Anyway, it used to actually be used by white american racists; it’s been weakened to just self deprecating humor, kind of like jewish comedians like to tell jew jokes.

Not unheard of to squat on domains to prevent them from being used for nefarious purposes. Not saying that is what he is doing, but unless he starts using them for racist purposes, I am not going to hold this against him.

Literally nobody asked your opinion of how he uses his domains. But thanks for your sage response. Please continue playing devils advocate in situations you're completely ignorant toward. It really benefits everyone.

Redditization of HN is impressive. Kcplate comment is totally fair and relevant, but it seems Swozey does not care about fair and relevant...

[flagged]

LOL "reddization of HN." I've been on HN for years before you. Maybe commenters should listen to the OPs better and stop playings devils advocate so much. Because especially in this specific scenario it is absolutely stupid.

Yeah, we've got a guy with essentially a right wing militia fortress on the border of TX who owns blatantly illegal-immigrant racist trope domains and it's not related at all. Some engineer who commonly talks infrastructure is just making all of this up because he's bored on HN this weekend. Who wouldn't squat on such gems as "molest.com" to keep them from being used?

> Some engineer who commonly talks infrastructure is just making all of this up because he's bored on HN this weekend.

Well, it is the internet after all.

Apparently you are unaware of how these sort of commenting forums work. Bless your heart.

- Ecological impact

- finances that could feed/house/treat people

- reinforces militant/gun culture

- wear on roads

While we're on it, can we get some negative energy for holidays in general? It bugs me that most people have no savings and then we have people just swanning around burning resources for fun. The waste of drawing hard-working people into the tourism sector when they could be working on improving their own communities directly is just appalling. Let alone the environmental damage caused by the travel and the lost productivity from people literally just having fun.

Am I being sarcastic? Not even I am sure. The arguments are truthful. But the fairest way to organise things is that people who made a big economic contribution (represented by money) should be allowed to waste a similar-magnitude-but-smaller amount of resources. That is, ironically, the path to prosperity.

Did you see the backlash the Kardashians got over COVID and flying all their friends to private islands? It was pretty entertaining.

that tank thing isn't a great example, even blue collar folk could pretty easily afford some of them. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than a Disneyland hotel!

It's on a $50million dollar ranch, dude. Where are you shooting your new blue collar tank? Your backyard?

There really needs to be an upper limit on how much wealth a person is allowed to amass.

Half a billion seems fair. After that the tax bracket needs to be taxed at 100%

No, we need to fix the mechanisms that have allowed so much wealth to accrued by individuals.

Companies need to be taxed correctly. They need to give back to the societies that built the social structures that allowed them to be created and thrive.

I would somehow tax inactive capital. Capital that is not directly invested in a company or pays for employees. Everything laying around or on the stock market should be heavily taxed.

That doesn't change the ownership problem. This solution could still allow for a a handful of people to own everything because they would be invested in, and therefore have ownership of, all of the companies.

The stock market is for directly investing in companies...

Islam bans stock markets and interest (though not all current so-called muslim countries) and every person who is rich (who have more than 87 grams of gold worth of things) is obliged to donate %2.5 of their total wealth to the poor every year. In Muslim countries, the state collects and distributes this, so it's effectively a tax. Necessities of life (shelter etc.) are excluded from total value calculation. Muslim countries traditionally took away land of people who didn't utilize it for 3 consecutive years, though idk whether this is rooted in the religion itself.

That's probably state land and regular people are not allowed to own land. If they don't work it, it gets transferred to someone else.

Yeah, right iirc.

It's also better for society, because it incentivizes people who produce more than average to keep producing. There's an optimum somewhere.

i guess the ammount of contribution to scociety by ppl that got access to fuck you money is vastly overstated due to market economics

Why do half a billion?

Let's make it $500,000. Nobody needs more than that.

Right? I'm being serious. You can live a luxurious life on $500,000 per year.

Oh wait, well compensated tech people make more than that, so let's pick a higher number!

"A rich person is someone who makes more than me"

But they were talking about total wealth amassed, net worth, while you say “per year” as in income. Completely different metrics.

Ok, then make the maximum wealth you can accrue $3M. You can live a very nice life on that.

That barely gets you into a normal house in the bay area.

Just like nobody needs more than $5M, nobody needs to live in the Bay Area.

That's impossible because that amount of money is not to buy material things but influence. It's a circular problem with no solution.

Throwing them down a well would solve it, no?

If throwing them down a well would solve it, then can you think of a less extreme solution, like for example, sitting them down to let them know that they have to give up their political power?

I think $100000 wealth is fair. Most of people in the world doesn’t have that amount. Why to go upper?

Wow, the address of that Tank website is Uvalde Texas where that horrendous shooting happened

Yeah it's Uvalde. Uvalde is a very weird place compared to most USA town/cities. The people who live IN Uvalde proper are mostly hispanic and bracing the poverty level and work on the ranches or schools of people with tens/hundreds of millions who own 10-50k acre ranches out there and are just generally worth mega millions.

Drive a tank?

That's absolutely awesome

can you divulge any info on the company in question?

I mean what info are you looking for? I don't want to be associated with this company at all. I don't even have it on my resume, it's embarassing. I'm also not going to put myself into a situation where I've potentially got a guy worth $300+ million after me.

what was this company he sold for so much?

A webhost that was encroaching on godaddy popularity back then (nowhere near that now)

Thanks

HostGator

That's incredibly impolite but I don't really care. In the future there might be reasons people don't directly name call something that should be a huge hint for you to not do it yourself to them. You aren't swooping in like a white knight answering some searing question, you're potentially throwing someone under the bus, CTO guy. You should know better.

You literally added it after I posted my own response. I hope you're proud answering the $10mil question when I clearly wasn't going to.

Why are you afraid to name companies?

You literally just read my previous comment and went "hmm, lets ask him to expound?" My god, some people.

But you didn’t really say anything besides it being ‘impolite’.. which is rarely the best reason to not do something

I don't know where your sense of entitlement is coming from, but first off, I don't owe you any information whatsoever. Not to mention the name of the company is absolutely irrelevant to the conversation we were having before you involved yourself literally only asking this question. I hoped, apparently wrongly, that someone could infer from me not bringing the name up myself that maybe I don't want to be associated with said place. I owe you nothing, welcome to hn.

People have their reasons for disclosing or not disclosing things. You aren't entitled to know why, by any means. You're a 32point 2 month old HN account who has literally nothing personal listed about yourself, whilst people like me do have personal things listed. Move off, bud. I owe you absolutely nothing and I have my reasons for whatever I say. And you are not entitled to a how, why or anything else about my reasoning.

Yes looking at someone's profile before replying is sure to get them on your side, keep it up!

This is a weird response, it's not like it's not public information, there's nothing "impolite" about it.

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