"The super-rich are making their homes ‘invisible’"

"Privacy is perhaps the greatest luxury anyone can buy, hence the trend for properties hidden from prying eyes and online searches."

What the area’s occupants — who reportedly include Kim Kardashian, Miley Cyrus, Justin Bieber and Jennifer Lopez — value above all is privacy. That includes banning Google’s photography vehicles from entering (and declining to talk to the FT; a spokeswoman for the area’s management company said it had a policy of not giving interviews to the press).

Academics have long used the names “hidden communities” or “invisible communities” to denote areas with high concentrations of deprivation and social marginalisation. Yet some of the world’s most privileged people are choosing to hide from the public eye to protect their homes from burglars and other forms of unwelcome attention.

In an evermore connected world, privacy is perhaps the greatest luxury anyone can buy.

“There was a time when people really flaunted their wealth; now they don’t,” says David Forbes, head of private office at estate agent Savills who advises wealthy buyers. “People’s priorities over the years have shifted. Now right at the top of the list it’s security.” (more)

"In 1916, the average person owned a horse and was "rich" if they owned a car. In 2016, it's the other way around." via r/ #Showerthoughts

"What kind of fun "poor" experiences do you believe the wealthy are missing out on?"

Top voted Reddit comments...

The joy that comes from knowing your friends like you for being you and not because of your money.

Musical Bills.
That's where you pay your monthly bills randomly and when the money stops, the last one to find a chair doesn't get paid.

Inventing a meal based on what you have in your place because you can't afford more groceries.

That joy of finding 20 dollars somewhere that you didn't know you had.

Small consolation? It seems driving a Ferrari every day is not all it's cracked up to be...

UN Climate Experts Fly Into Davos And Announce True Agenda

This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution

h/t Sissy Willis on Twitter

This isn't the first time for blatant candor from the warmists. Four years ago, I noted that the true agenda was wealth redistribution.

“These are the highest-luxury goods man has ever known”

"One of the reasons there’s so much talk about money is that it’s so much easier to talk about than the art,” Zwirner told me one day. You meet a lot of people in the art world who are exhausted and dismayed by the focus on money, and by its dominance. It distracts from the work, they say. It distorts curatorial instincts, critical appraisals, and young artists’ careers. It scares away civilians, who begin to lump art in with other symptoms of excess and dismiss it as another garish plaything of the rich. Of course, many of those who complain—dealers, artists, curators—are complicit. The culture industry, which supports them in one way or another, and which hardly existed a generation ago, subsists on all that money—mostly on the largesse and folly of wealthy art lovers, whether their motivations are lofty or base."

"Since the doldrums of the early nineties, the market for contemporary art, which has various definitions (work created after the Second World War, or during “our” lifetime, or post-1960, or post-1970), has rocketed up, year after year, flattening out briefly amid the financial crisis and global recession of 2008-09, before resuming its climb. Big annual returns have attracted more people to buying art, which has raised prices further. It is no coincidence that this steep rise, in recent decades, coincides with the increasing financialization of the world economy. The accumulation of greater wealth in the hands of a smaller percentage of the world’s population has created immense fortunes with a limitless capacity to pursue a limited supply of art work. The globalization of the art market—the interest in contemporary art among newly wealthy Asians, Latin Americans, Arabs, and Russians—has furnished it with scores of new buyers, and perhaps fresh supplies of greater fools. Once you have hundreds of millions of dollars, it’s hard to know where to put it all. Art is transportable, unregulated, glamorous, arcane, beautiful, difficult. It is easier to store than oil, more esoteric than diamonds, more durable than political influence. Its elusive valuation makes it conducive to extremely creative tax accounting." (long read)

Anderson Cooper: "I don't believe in inheriting money"

"So he's far from miffed that his famous heiress mom, Gloria Vanderbilt, has told him he doesn't stand to inherit her fortune. In fact, he sounds relieved."

"My mom's made clear to me that there's no trust fund," Anderson Cooper, 46, told Howard Stern on his radio show Monday. "There's none of that."

"Who has inherited a lot of money that has gone on to do things in their own life? From the time I was growing up, if I felt that there was some pot of gold waiting for me, I don't know that I would've been so motivated."

That question begs some research, which would/could mean he is passing on a chance to be a pioneer... or something.

"My dad (Wyatt Emory Cooper) grew up really poor in Mississippi ... I paid attention to that because I thought that's a healthier thing to pay attention to than, like, some statue of a great-great-great-grandfather who has no connection to my life."

When Anderson Cooper "came out", he said in an email to Andrew Sullivan...

I’ve also been reminded recently that while as a society we are moving toward greater inclusion and equality for all people, the tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.

I don't know. Maybe Cooper could have made the case for using that money to advance the tide of history. That's the bottom line, isn't it? 'Money makes the world go around', pulling and tugging the moon, advancing and retreating the tides. What do you think?

The Chemistry Of Wealth Accumulation

Researchers at the University of Exeter have found a correlation between wealth and the types of heavy metals and organic residues found in their urine: Link

Rich people have more arsenic, cesium, mercury, and thallium; poorer people accumulate more cadmium, antimony, and lead. The sources for rich people are shellfish and seafood; the sources for poor people are attributed to a great incidence of smoking.

They also found that wealthy people sequester more benzophenone-3 (from sunscreen) and poor people have more bisphenol A (from plastics).