Money

The word money is mentioned 142 times in the King James bible.  The first occurrence comes in Genesis.

And he that is eight days old shall be circumcised among you, everyman child in your generations, he that is born in the house, or bought with money of any stranger, which is not of thy seed.

If I were king of the world and I was also the President and Chief Financial Officer of The School of Opportunity for Underprivileged Kids, I would make the curriculum focused on money.  But only after a bible study class in hour one and and American History class in hour 2.  The rest of the day would be focused on money and physical education.

And I would live the exact same lifestyle that I am living right now.  I would be driving my same old car and wearing my same old shoes.  Sitting at a small desk with a little computer just the same as every student in the school.  

I think the trick to understanding money is to first take personal greed out of the equation.  Kids grow up today and the only thing that the subject of money conjures up in their heads is new cars, flashy clothes, big mansions, loose women and parties.

When in reality what should be thought about money is that it is the very reason that we are able to be bullied in to a terrible system of government where a bunch of crooks and sleezebags steal all of the common Joe's wealth and use it to line their pockets in luxury all the while passing more and more restrictive laws that take away more of the common Joe's money and might eventually find him having to wear a face covering to hide all expression of disdain from his masters and being required to have aborted baby embryos injected into his arm to show that he will do anything for his master.

Thank God we are not living in the total nightmare that is imaginable and we still have some freedom and some wealth.  I am basically living in luxury and watching everything go down on my computer screen via my internet connection the same as just about everybody I know.  My job is probably easier than anybody I know and really I can't imagine anybody having things better than I do.

But I sit here and I think about money.  Not so I can go buy a new pair of shoes or get a new car or get a gold chain or buy a vacation home on south beach in Miami.  But just out of curiosity.  What is money and why does it cause so much trouble in people's lives.

An the interesting thing to me is this emerging de-fi thing.  Decentralized finance.  Got some young folks out there building computer systems that they say will disrupt the financial industry and perhaps someday even make money a different thing than it is today.  Look at Cardano for example.  Old boy living in Colorado, Charles Hoskinson, has some pretty interesting ideas on what money is and what money could be.

I find this concept to be interesting.  To live a life of minimalism while totally focused on money.  To completely reject money in your personal life, wearing old shoes, driving an old car, eating beans and rice, never going out or traveling.  While at the same time working every waking minute on the study of money, what it is, and how to make more of it.

So what would you do with all of this money that you are making.  Well for starters I doubt that I would ever make a penny beyond my paycheck and then eventually social security if I am lucky enough to get any of that.  The study would be to figure out why it is impossible to make any money beyond my paycheck which is trading my time for money.  And I am not allowed to put in any more time above 40 hours per week so my income is capped hard.

It doesn't take a genius to see what he has left over to live on after the bills are paid, and then what he has left to put into the bank after he has purchased his groceries and gasoline, and then to multiply that by the number of weeks that he has left to live and come up with the amount of money that he will have in the bank at the age of 89.  And it doesn't take a genius to see that that amount will be nowhere near any amount that would allow him to do anything that he would like to do so in essence he is working for nothing anyway.

All of the money he puts in the bank does not just sit there.  It is being used by people who know how to invest and the guy who thinks that it is his money sitting in the bank there gets nothing for it.  Other than to watch it eaten up by inflation slowly becoming worth about half of what it was worth when he put it in there.

For the first time in human history, man has created a way to make money purely out of mathematics and computer programming on top of this thing called the internet.  That is why we see a mathematician on a farm in Colorado talking with Elon Musk and Mark Cuban.  And I hear that Mark Cuban tried to ban the National Anthem at his basketball games.  That is where we stand today folks.