Quote from bone:
That list of 'great places' is dominated by money. Hoarded gold from exterminated Jews, vice proceeds, old inherited VAT-free wealth, blood diamonds, you name it.
Unfuckingbelievably naive post.
Bone, what the hell? Usually you talk sense. What is this xenophobia against the Austrian/Swiss/Germanic peoples?
Hoarded gold from exterminated Jews? In twenty years there will be nobody alive on the European continent (or anywhere else in the world) who had anything to do with either exterminating Jews or stealing their possessions. By what right do you hold a nation collectively responsible for the deeds of their ancestors?
Is it time to get annoyed with you Yanks for waging biological warfare against the Native Americans and committing other atrocities in the ethnic cleansing of those peoples? Or for waging nuclear warfare against the Japanese? What about your enslavement of the peoples of the African continent? Holding contemporary Germans responsible for the Holocaust is morally equivalent to condemning all Jews as Christ Killers, or all caucasian Americans as slave traders.
Vice proceeds? This comes from an American whose government has created profitable and ruthlessly violent cartels through its illogical drug and foreign policies? To which nation does "big tobacco" belong? And in which country may one find the "Oasis in the Desert" paid for by gamblers? People trafficking? Where else can a billionaire pedophile obtain some imported early teen girls for his private amusement? Only in America of course, where the corrupt political system allows him to serve his sentence under house arrest.
Old inherited VAT free wealth? Are we socialist? Do we not believe in private property, here on a site for traders? Or perhaps since you have the lucky accident of being born in the New World you have the right to condemn the owners of fortunes which existed before you. If you, like Buffet, are opposed to inherited wealth I'm quite sure you will set an example by leaving the residue of your estate to the Government with nothing for your progeny. And that you also will not give any financial support to your adult children as you do not believe in unmerited intergenerational transfers of wealth.
Blood diamonds? Well, we did what we could for the nig nogs - but they insisted on hacking each other to death anyway. Build them a school, the adjacent tribe comes and burns it down. They prefer to be hacking each other with machetes and quarrelling over their natural resources. Then when they expel our farmers they have the temerity to ask for aid for their starving populations which they cannot feed as they do not know how to work our modern farm equipment. So what is a few blood diamonds? Any worse than waging wars of aggression in order to secure mineral, oil, and natural gas access? Which nation is most culpable for this?
Honestly what a thoughtless and hostile commentary. I expected better than this from you.
Then again perhaps it is not the deeds of the wealthy Europeans or their ancestors which so irritates you, but their wealth in itself. While you have no doubt done reasonably okay for yourself in your business/career and have made a little money, you have not struck it truly rich. Therefore you still undertake consulting work for a rate, which would not interest you if you had devised and implemented a methodology for creating your own fortune from the markets.
Yes, you have a good knowledge base and some edges, but the fact is that there is much that you do not know, hence your outlook and resentment against achievement. I note that you exist in a world where it is unknown to be able to create huge returns in directional trading. The institutions and individuals you know do not trade directionally. So we know your place in the ecosystem. Someone who knows a bit and gets along but not able to accumulate the vast fortune which would enable you to mix as an equal amongst the old money Europeans whom you despise.
