August 20th, 2019

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The goal of an oligarch is to rival the power of the state

(written by lawrence krubner, however indented passages are often quotes). You can contact lawrence at: lawrence@krubner.com, or follow me on Twitter.

I saw this on Tumblr:

If you have $10 million then you can buy everything in life that you might find pleasant. You can own 3 houses and a bunch of cool cars and you can send all of your children to good private schools. If you want more than $10 million, then you are no longer seeking money, you are seeking power. $20 million, $100 million, $1 billion — the extra money doesn’t let you get nicer things for you or your loved ones. It does put you on the path that can lead to oligarchy, that is, a society where a few wealthy families can combine their power to form an alliance that holds more power than the apparatus of the state. And that leads automatically to corruption.

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"I wish I could go back," said Anna. "I guess I thought it would always be there, and I could go back and learn more when I was older. But now I'm older and it's gone."

"All the great art scenes are like that," said Mariah. "Renoir's career was half over before the term Impressionism caught on. And Fitzgerald and Hemingway had given up on the Left Bank long before the place was overrun by talentless hacks who wanted to imitate the Lost Generation lifestyle. And the Beats had mostly left San Francisco before busloads of visitors started to do tours of the Haight-Ashbury. When Johnny Rotten couldn't work with the Sex Pistols anymore, he left and the London punk scene began to die. Later on, he said he regretted his decision to leave. Everyone thinks they can go away and come back later, but they never can. When Joan Didion and her husband left New York, she quipped that some other couples were staying too late at the party, but that gets it all backward. The party ends whether you want it to or not, and it takes an unusual arrogance to celebrate the end of an era that some people will remember as the best years of their life. Hemingway lived in Paris during his twenties, but he didn't write about his experience in Paris until he was in his sixties. No one ever knows they're part of an art movement; it's something you only see afterward."

"But if we only see it in retrospect, then how can we find the next great art scene?" asked Anna. "What do I look for?"

Also read this true story about a startup I worked at in 2015:

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The goal of an oligarch is to rival the power of the state

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