Prince’s Mad Money

[topum]

As many of you know, after I joined LJ slightly over two months ago I was surprised how strong the Russian segment of it was. I could barely find active journals in English but there seemed to be an ocean of super active journals in Russian. I got interested. Many of you also know how much I am into Google Translation. I read Russian journals via Google Translate sometimes, you might remember these.

Today I was looking at a couple of their top journals and saw a post about Prince. I got curious what the Russia's top blogger's take on it would be. Below is that post Google Translated from Russian with some minimal tweaks only to the bits which did not make sense at all after GT. I had to make those using a vocabulary.

I thought you might be interested too.

Google Translated from this post by miss_tramell, Russia's top blogger.

Prince’s Mad Money

Prince left an estate of $800 million.

-Photo of Prince-

He did not leave a will. The money will go to his nearest relative - his sister - a former drug addict and prostitute.

Here she is:

-Photo of Prince's sister-

And this is one of Prnice’s villas:

-Photo of Prince's lavish villa-

I absolutely do not care that the amount that can not even be comprehended (so huge it is), will go to a former drug addict and prostitute. It is absolutely none of my business.

What absolutely infuriates me is: why the singer Prince is worth nearly a billion dollars?

What he has done for mankind? He wrote a dozen hits in the '80s? Not just hits, but super-hits? OK. More than a dozen? Accepted. But is it really worth that huge amount of money?

Humanity is insane. I realized it a long time ago. It is unjustifiable for songs - no matter how good they may be - to pay millions. Showbiz Workers do not produce anything that moves humanity forward. They do not save lives. Their relatively light work should not be paid so obscenely high.

Every day 22 thousand children die in conditions of extreme poverty.

-Photo of a kid covered in flies-

In 2011, 6.9 million children under 5 died of hunger and thirst. Every hour took the lives of 800 children. They did not have enough food. They did not have enough water. They did not have enough basic medicines.

At the same time the singer Prince amassed a fortune of $800 million.

Showbiz in our world is severely overvalued, and human life is sorely underestimated.

Madness. Cruelty. It is, but it should not be. This is not even the way to the Apocalypse. This is the Apocalypse.

Comments

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I think it's framed pretty well, but I'd probably ask it right back: if a person sellsl a product for $1, and 800,000,000 people buy it, who is at fault? I think the answer is to heavily tax people that make that kind of money, and use that money to pay the teachers and ditch-diggers who are making stuff we'll need tomorrow.
The problem is that a majority of my fellow Americans disagree with me.
Then you have to decide whether the government gets to overrule the majority, and once you've decided that, you have to figure out what happens when the government decides to do other things the majority doesn't like, like lock them all up.
Unfortunately I don't think that would translate into Russian very well.

[topum.livejournal.com]

I really want to respond to you but will have to do it tomorrow. Writing (even a short comment) is a huge pain for me even in my native language and English is my third. I literally cry every time I have to write more than three lines I hate it so much. That's why I post pics mainly.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I understand. I occasionally try to argue in Japanese. It's like pulling my own teeth.

[topum.livejournal.com]

In short, I would be against the super tax but I would welcome a tax / donation hybrid instead. Such that it is mandatory as tax but allows me (some) freedom to choose from a range of predetermined things it is going towards.

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I would like to see all income tax done that way: you have to pay X but you can allocate some percentage of it to only be spent on specific things.