Our ungrateful rich

'Singapore Merlion BCT' by Bjørn Christian Tørrissen [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia CommonsAmerica has quite a few brilliant but lucky entrepreneurs who work within the American system to make a lot of money, then whine about having to pay to help sustain that system.

Eduardo Saverin came to the U.S. from Brazil because his parents didn’t want him to be kidnapped:

Saverin, who stands to make billions from his 4 percent share in Facebook, hastily moved here at the age of 13 when his name turned up on a list of potential kidnap victims targeted by criminal gangs in Brazil. His father was a wealthy businessman, with a high profile in their home country, and so his family relocated to Miami to protect the youngster. Eduardo thrived in his new country, eventually attending Harvard University, where he had a stroke of life-changing luck when he was assigned future Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg as a roommate.

After years of reaping the benefits of a society that does reasonably well at preventing kidnapping, he became a billionaire. Then he moved to Singapore. Then, standing to make billions on Facebook’s IPO, he renounced his U.S. citizenship. Continue reading

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Something is turning me all progressive and stuff

About five years ago I took the World’s Smallest Political Quiz and the results indicated that I was a left-leaning libertarian:

I took the test again, to see what five years have done, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m all liberal and crap:

Here’s how it describes me:

Liberals usually embrace freedom of choice in personal matters, but tend to support significant government control of the economy. They generally support a government-funded “safety net” to help the disadvantaged, and advocate strict regulation of business. Liberals tend to favor environmental regulations, defend civil liberties and free expression, support government action to promote equality, and tolerate diverse lifestyles.

How did a kid from Alamo Heights grow up to be such a stinking hippie? I’m sure there are lots of reasons, but for now I just thought the shift in test results was interesting.

Of course, the test presumes to categorize you based on ten questions (five political and five economic), so its reliability is dubious. Meh.

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