In what manner would you live more extravagantly if you could?

I would get a bigger house and more land and all of the animals I wanted.

More expensive clothes.
Travel - more of it.
Freedom to engage in hobbies/activities full time.

Travel. Material things are not high on my list. I'd give to my children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and some to charity.

Not that much change. I'd be able to retire and take more vacations, I guess with first-class airplane tickets. But I like my current apartment and wouldn't want a fancier place, and I don't care about designer clothes or gold Rolexes or wide-screen TVs.

Buy a house with a yard and a bunch of new plants.

I would definitely have a nicer home (own, not rent), and probably some clothes and jewelry of greater value. I would also buy art: paintings, sculpture, handcrafted furniture. I would probably take up some new activities or hobbies, but I'm not sure what they would be. Maybe I'd own a horse and go riding a lot; I've ridden regularly before, so it's not new exactly, but it's been a long time and I've never owned a horse.

Travel, entertainment, and a better hoover.

> Travel, entertainment, and a better hoover.


Why, does your hoover suck? mwaa

Buy some young girls

More hobbies, nicer toys, a home, travel, shows, and spontaneous living. Making a show of or having economic value is not an interest of mine, though my aesthetic tastes happen to be expensive, and I do go for exquisite looks.

I'd fix what's broken.

Whey-O!

would travel more if we could but wouldn't flaunt our money.

I really don't know. I've come to realize that possessions can weigh you down. So, lets say I bought an expensive sports car. Well, I'd then need to get it serviced. OK, but if I had a lot of money, I could hire someone to do that for me. Ah, but then I have to be manager to that person. The side-effects are unappealing to me. I like my life simple. So, I think I'd put the money in the bank for the most part and just keep it as a just in case sort of thing. But, I also think that over time, I would tend to buy nice stuff anyway.

My laptop has been having this problem where it doesn't always boot up. So, I go through this ritual where I shake it and open the cover while pressing the power button and it eventually does boot. So, I guess it would make sense for me to just buy a new one instead. Oh, and my boots had come a little unraveled, but I used shoo glue on them and they are OK now. But, I could just get new boots. I would eventually anyway, but with more money, I guess I would be less likely to delay.

I might buy more organic food. Currently, I tend to skip that section because it costs too much. "flaunting" and "showy" are unappealing terms to me. I really like my home now. I might be tempted to improve it, but having contractors do work really sucks too. We'd likely travel more and probably stay in nicer places. But, we're not really into fancy hotels and restaurants and long distance travel even in first class still sucks. I'm not even sure about charity. Charities tend to annoy me with the way they are always asking for money. I suspect if I had a lot, they would find me and really annoy me all the time.

Ok, having read Bill's comment, I feel I should put thought into this.

Extravagance: the quality of exceeding the appropriate limits of decorum or probability or truth; "we were surprised by the extravagance of his description"
the trait of spending extravagantly
excessive spending
wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Extravagance is not a thing I consider I can relate to. So extravagance means 'too much.' And too much of anything is bad, that's why we say 'too much'. If I had more money, I would improve my life and the lives of my father, Amy, David, and our pets. But why be extravagant? There are some things you can't spend 'too much' on. Say I went backpacking in Thailand; the whole point of backpacking is that it's cheap... but if that's what I wanted to do, then how could I be extravagant about it? Of course there are material things I would improve, and that's when I would measure the depth of my pocket against the price of the new PC to figure out for myself the 'appropriate' amount to spend. But extravagance is illogical; why would you pursue it if you had an ounce of sensibility?

That's why you don't have goals. You want things simple. The two are barely compatable. Goals do nothing but weigh a person down even more so than having extravagances might. I'm driven, and driven to complexity. Having the results of my goals doesn't too much matter to me except for a general sense of accomplishment, I'm just compelled to work on them. I think that's something else which seperates me from Gates. I'm guessing he desired the ends more than he was compelled to just work on such stuff. That's probably more practical, since having an end goal in sight means you can cut corners (simplify) if necessary and weed out distractions. By the time I'm ever ready to roll on a project I've revised my standards to something again just unattainable.

Somehow I imagine you in a room full of people. Someone instructs everyone to 'draw a box on a sheet of paper.' You contemplate what kind of box... a plain square or a cardboard box? You decide on a cardboard box. How much detail will it have? Will there be labels or designs on it? Maybe you will be a smart aleck and draw it sitting on a sheet of paper... will the paper have anything written on it? No, maybe it won't be on a piece of paper...

Everyone turns their drawings in. Yours is still blank.

When I used the term extravagance, where I was coming from that most all of us really have all we 'need' and more already. We don't need a car, a cell phone, to own a home, etc., and whatever we are doing now apparently works well enough that we have spare time to yak on the internet.

Extravagance exists in context. Clothes one would consider appropriate at a royal wedding might be a bit extravagant to mow the lawn in. Those contexts include social contexts and one's personal contexts.

One traditional form of extravagance is to do things out of show, typically due to low esteem. One might impress others or even themself by going beyond what is considered sufficient. Then again they might not even realize they are going over the top, much like the thin bulemic people who starve themselves, unable to see that they are already too thin. You could argue that if they have to go ovor the top to feel sufficient, that it's not extravagance for them, but that's just symantics.

It's true that buying more carpet than you needed would lack an ounce of sensibility, but most things are open ended. You may not need a faster computer, but it may be more pleasurable to work with anyhow. Fashion and art are unquestionalbly open ended. Shelving units trimmed in yawah koroit opals would definitely be more cool to own than wood ones, which again beat plastic. This is really what I meant by extravagant, more than you need but something you would find pleasurable. I get by on a cabinet of vintage 80's guitar syntesizer effects, but I could easily ring up a $40k bill on new equipment that sounds way cooler with way more creative control. No one on the planet actually needs that stuff. We could get by on mic recordings of basic acoustic guitars just fine. Back to symantics, I suppose that if one defines 'appropriate' as what the music recording competiton is up to, then it's not extravagant.

I suppose one could even define extravagant in the context of their budget. Buying a $16k microtonal keyboard may be an extravagant hobby expense if you make $16k/yr but not if you make $400k/yr. This last example best captures the gist of the survey intent.

Gates was one in a million, we can't all be like that. He might have just been the one who had some good luck at the right time. Well, he's clearly ambitious and he also followed-through on things and stuck with them year after year. The first versions of Window truly sucked. Also, he got good people to help him, I'm sure. And, he was a cut-throat competitor. etc. But, really, who cares about Bill Gates? *shrug*

My page isn't blank. It contains a list of 400 alternative ways to draws boxes based on the kaballistic tree of life and fourth dimensional time loops, along with applications to video game renderers, environmental packaging, mega-watt wind generation box-kites and such, and a breakdown of features and processes involved in these conceptions, but yeah, no actual box. That's usually how it does go in fact, which is why I end up dropping half the classes I enroll in, and possibly why I'm on disability, now that I think of it. That, and all the more neurotic indecision, like how heavy I should draw the lines and such. That, and if I ever do get into box drawing mode, I don't get out of it and spend 10 hours getting into drawing boxes in the same way I might get lost in folding my trash or something as if time and other objectives don't exist.

Many people have things they feel are substandard. Those are the first things I think of when I think 'extra' money. Getting the car or house worked on, seeing a doctor or dentist, etc. Doing things non-frill that you've been putting off because of money. Stuff that "needed" to be done anyway.

I don't really care about Gates at all except that he makes an excellent reference of comparison for how I always thought my own life would go when I was younger, before anyone ever heard of him. When I was younger I somehow imagined that having a wealth of brilliant ideas alone would be enough, and came to discover that that is very far from the truth. When I was a kid I figured I'd either be the next Disney, Da Vinci, Edison, or Captain Nemo. It wasn't even an aspiration so much as what I presumed to be my obvious likely course. Things like marriage, kids, homelessness, changing my gender, becoming a yogi, are the things which didn't occur to me back then. The other thing is that it wasn't until a few years ago that it really kicked in that my time was limited. I spent five years flipping burgers, and another decade restoring exotic cars without that sense that taking my time might jeopardize my eventual plans. My mind was busy that whole time, and the range of experiences which came with restoring cars figured in much in what I know know of engineering, so it wasn't a total waste and still made me what I am.

In a similar Gates opportunity vein, I've found that there's a deserving guitar virtuoso every metropolitan mile or so, but they obviously don't all get recording contracts. Awareness of this sort of thing has much to do with my communist-socialist leanings.

As much as I always down on Gates and MS, now that he's gone (and MS is falling apart from lack of vision), I have to admit that his contribution is far more significant than what we would have had left to scattered Linux tinkerers without him as a template.

So what's your philosphical view. Would it have mattered to the world if he took up sand castle sculpting instead, or was he in a sense obligated to do what he did?

..and those aren't the things I meant by extravagant, which I why I said after the health care, retirement, and such are taken care of. In spite of our TVs, cell phones, toys, and such, I know most of here are struggling with such things anyhow.

For most of us though, our context ends up being what we feel we are stuck maintaining. I had a HS teacher impart this when she realized that her neighbors woes about having to sell the second Porche were as real to her as getting the lawn mower fixed or something was to my teacher. Very few of us actually have to worry about staying alive, yet rich and poor alike stress out with their circumstances.

I don't know. I just bought another guitar while my teeth are long overdue for crowns and root canals. I'm playing life as if such things will take care of themselves somehow on an as needed basis.

If every 'need' were out of the way, my extra would be in the bank. I like the idea of saving so as to spend less time working. I'd rather have more free time than more stuff. Living on savings would be nice.

I thought about this a little more and I actually get a lot of ideas too. But, one difference seems to be that I judge my own ideas more harshly than you seem to judge your ideas. Most of my ideas I dismiss quickly as impractical or too much work for little gain. But, I think my ideas are smaller too. Most often, I have some idea for a video game. I love games, so that's sort of natural. But, I also know it's too much work for me to actually make a game of any sort of quality. That's something that only a team of people with a lot resources/money/talent can pull of and still most fail. But, I still get the ideas and I like to think of them. Part of me still thinks it might be possible to do a game on a small scale and have some success at it. But, mostly I know that's a pipe dream.

I would not change a thing for myself. I would give give give whenever those opportunities present themselves. I would spoil my family members by making sure their needs are met and help strangers more than I can right now.

If I had so much money that I did not need to work, I would be much more spontaneous...travel, get a penthouse condo in NYC and one (here) in Boston....something out in LA, as well. I would also want a personal chef.

I'm wishing I had money to invest in the grid as I knew a couple of years ago would be smart.

Do you cook yourself? Why don't you become one? ..or do you only enjoy eating the stuff?

"The things you own end up owning you." -- Tyler Durden

I am going to go with "other". I have this fantasy about how my life would change if I won the lottery. It goes something like this:

I would buy a huge parcel of land somewhere in the Northwest. Preferably something with large wooded areas and a body of water on it or a stream running through it. Build a house, using one those "green" contractors I've seen on the Discovery channel, a house designed to use as little electricity/gas as possible. I would farm part of it, grow as much as my own food as possible, keep some animals like cows, goats a few pigs, etc and grow as much of their feed as possible on the land. Possibly build a small greenhouse for growing exotic plants such as Banistereopsis Caapi (the Vine of the Soul), Psychotria Viridis and a couple other "herbs" I might not want in plain view of black helicopters.

I would also be more generous in supporting NPR, Arts Museums and MAPS. Possibly start a trust fund for making grants to private companies looking to explore space, stuff like that.

My most recent project has been a video game renderer with a few content projects in mind for it. I could probably write the renderer and game engine single handed in less than a year. It's the content which could take another two hundred years.

You never even mention your ideas. I'm always enthralled about mine. I'm not worried about them being good ideas because they usually come true in a month or fifteen years.

Perhaps my ideas are larger (how would I know?). I alternate between letting my mind run wild and reeling in the common denominators which form an effective versatile potent infrastructure. I can't tell you my renderer concepts here, but I'd be glad to email them to you. Perhaps we could collaborate. It would put LOTRO style game creation in the hands of teenagers with a fraction of the development complexity, and still allow for things like lighting and shadowing objects with lamps through stained glass windows. I've nearly got the procedures specced. It's down to js code now.

I'm also always thinking a generation ahead. I was telling people two years ago to invest in superconductor transmission lines (so we can squeeze power for freeways through existing underground conduits). Now that Obama has announced plans to revamp the grid, tonights research will be in laser power transmission. I'm thinking line-of-sight through vaccuum tubes, perhaps even particle accellerators. At the target end would be a plate of thermal tranfer fluid running a conventional steam power-plant via a boiler-plate heat exchanger. The nice thing about solar is that it happens during the day, so we don't have to bend collimated beams between us and russia or china. Making use of african and mid-east solar may entail that though.

I do also have a few ingenuitive games in mind for my game system requiring little content creation (small scale, as you say) but I really doubt they are the sort of content you had in mind, an optimistic frustrated inventor abstract comic-style pink frog playing instruments and undergoing harrowing chores like baking a pie or washing grandmas car, where much solving ingenuity is required, and Murphy's Law is the norm, lest one not see over the dash, leave the convertible top down, have the cat come down the chimney to get baked in your pie, get kidnapped by giant yellow telepathic Martian snails, that sort of thing.

Let me know if you're interested, in the renderer/content-creation-tools part at least. I've been working towards this system since '93. Ovor the years I've watched several apps like Photoshop release my '93 ideas, but I still have plenty more. These days the thinking is to simplify while still being able to do most anything. - a lot of multipurpose reductionism.

I suppose I could talk myself out of anything as impractical. Our audience is several billion people these days, but so is the competiton. Anything not immense scale is now worth doing, but the risk of competition is also huge. My main issue is prioritization. How do I compare the value of a new video game platform to new types of musical instruments or new types of electrical bike motors.

I've realized that prioritization is easier for other people because they use a single rating criteria. Life would be considerably easier if my criteria was profit. I could estimate and compare the profit of anything. If the criteria were world benefit, well then I should probably doing the bike motors instead of video games. If my goal were private entertainment, that might be the music instruments.

No, KR...I do not cook anything...either other people do, or (as I am in the middle of the city) there is a wide array of places to pick up anything. With a personal chef, though, I would eat a lot healthier.

Have you had any artful hobbies to keep your mind passionately expanding? That would be a practical one. ..at least once a week doing crab crepes, tempura, curry, banana bread, or something.

No, I write (usually non-fiction). I have had several articles published on line (Ezine), several may be picked up independently. Writing is a vocation and my passion is philanthropic work. I find no greater joy! Cooking, although I admire those who master it, does not hold my interest.

Ah, then being a patron of great chefs seems to be the ticket.

I would have called that home, hobby, toys (exotic plants), and charity, not other. If all that depends on the lottery, you don't seem set on making it happen.

> Ah, then being a patron of great chefs seems to be the ticket.

Yes, in this, I find pleasure. (though great chefs are usually always featured at major fundraising events and are known for donating their time & talent)

Well there you go, two patronages for the price of one. Doesn't seem like much of a 'though'. Oh wait, they're still volunteering. I'm sure if you prefer the events they attend, that it works out for them in referrals.

> I would have called that home, hobby, toys (exotic plants), and charity,
> not other. If all that depends on the lottery, you don't seem set
> on making it happen.


I'm not. I said it was a fantasy. By and large, I'm content with my life as it is.

As long as you're doing something you enjoy as much.

> As long as you're doing something you enjoy as much.

Pretty much so. I love my job, I love coming home in the evening to Sharon and Grant. Some things I could do without, but that would be pretty much true in any situation.

Yeah. Strip away the contextual conceptions and time spent with a daisy could be as fascinating as with some exotic corpse plant.

> Yeah. Strip away the contextual conceptions and time spent with a
> daisy could be as fascinating as with some exotic corpse plant.


In other words some may have the ability

"To see a world in a grain of sand
And Heaven in wildflower
To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour"?

That's what I'm talking about. I've been there a lot. Who's the quote from?

Because I also realize that as complex as I get, that I can also amuse myself with cheap things like wind-up toys, there was a time I bought my luxuries with a smiles-per-dollar formula. These days though I've refined it down to investing mostly in whatever is practical for making projects, with a few exotic garments thrown in.

> That's what I'm talking about. I've been there a lot. Who's the quote
> from?
>

It is from the first lines of the poem Auguries of Innocence by William Blake

Ah. I like Blake.

Yeah, me too. I think my favorite piece by him is The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

The cover plate looks like two women. I wals delighted to find a synagogue, the centerpiece of the stained glass appearing to be an eve and eve sitting embraced to watch the sunset over the valleys and mountains. I did a real bender myself tonight, dressing as a male crossdresser street prostitute., painted on 5 o'clock shadow, bushy brows and body hair with mascara, wore blatant falsies under a corset, visibly taped down a dildo under frillie panties - good fun.

I was just hearing last night that Jonny Appleseed was a Swedeborgian, but that in his style of planting the results were hard cider crops.


Wow, thanks for the link. I was familiar with some phrases. It deserves more time than I gave it. A study of it could take a year with all the retranslation of the creatures of Ezekiel and such. Appropriate for Samhain and All Saints day.

I need to research Swenborg further, but as far as I can tell, in spite of denouncing him, Blake is extracting the essence of the new age animist mystic principles Swedenborg was promoting. Reading the Wiki on him, the guy clearly had a kundalini awakening as overturned my life as well when I was 26. Without reading about Blake, he strikes me as one who was born a mystic, as the few small children I've known started out. Sadly we eradicate rather than refine the mysticism in children by the time they reach grade school. My chidren were toddlers at the time of my awakening so I took the chance to nurture their gifts instead. I'm not so sure it was best course, as I ended up with children spiritually wise in some domains, but jaded, cynical, and disapointed about many earthly matters. ..and then my son shot himself. I dreamed the night before that we met at the nothingness bridge, and that he was thinking to cross over and see what was on the other side, whereupon I advised that I didn't know, but doubted it was any better. Unlike Swedenborg, following those in the afterlife is not really one of my gifts. Actually it was on an all All Hallows, All Saints Eve when I went through my minesterial ceremony, and the first two nights of meditation-sleep were full of meeting lost souls looking asking for my advice. Of course I couldn't advise a thing, as until then I didn't even know such persons existed. Hmm.., I suddenly understand that event. The prior time I encountered that realm was during my own kundalini rebirth, and those persons were probably undergoing just what I was earlier. maybe. I had the idea at the time though that they had physically died and were simply in limbo.

Yes, Blake was a visionary since childhood, subject to frequent visions of angels, demons and other entities. His father would punish him for talking about these things, thinking he was lying. The world is fortunate Blake was born in the time he was, if were born in our time he would have been stuffed with Thorazine or other anti-psychotics and our literature would be so much the poorer for it.

You have mentioned your son before, I never did say that I am sorry for your loss, but please accept the sentiment as a genuine offering of sympathy. Sorry, I'm not much good at this type of thing. I happen to know that when such a loss occurs in my life, I just tend to withdraw into myself and pay little attention to sympathetic offers from others.

I suppose it's become old history finally. I never knew what to do during peoples loss myself, including my own.

I've been preprared for a debate that's never happened where if my brilliance were questioned for being on assistance, I

I suppose it's become old history finally. I never knew what to do during peoples loss myself, including my own. When it hit hard enough I suppose I found that that's because there's really nothing to be done except to be genuine.

I've been preprared for a debate that's never happened where if my brilliance were questioned for being on assistance, I'd point out that in today's world Einstein himself would probably have been on welfare. The guy needed people to point out his front door and cash his pay checks for him.

It's a mixed world now. At the same time the core is more systemized and the allowable fringes more diverse.

I'd probably just buy nicer furniture and maybe fix up the house a little bit. I'm not really into spending big just for the heck of it. I'd probably help out other people who need it. I might travel more.

I would fix up my home. I would keep my house stocked with groceries. I would take my pets to the vet more often.

> "The things you own end up
> owning you." -- Tyler Durden

That movie was genius.

agreed

Definitely move into a nicer home. Fixing up this crappy place wouldn't be enough. We'd still be living in a bad neighborhood.