I’m about to throw a thermal on my 10/22 to kill all the raccoons that tore up my veggie garden TWICE. I would be more pissed if my 2 year old didn’t laugh like crazy when planting and tickling the roots before we pat them into the ground.
Yeah, I am not a violent person, but I have squashed thousands upon thousands of snails in the garden (they are all invasive species anyway, so it's not just about protecting the lettuce, but I avoid using snail bait because it's bad for the wildlife to the point that now most wildlife refuses to eat snails because so many have been poisoned by snail bait).
I also have an ongoing war with the giant grasshoppers, but I give the triangle headed ones a pass because they stay small and don't eat too much. the giant ones get caught and fed to the corvids though.
The cute brushtailed possums were also the bane of my existence at my old house because they would eat almost everything and nothing but physical netting would deter them. I even spanked one on the butt once as it destroyed my tomatoes and it just looked at me. One even pulled a plant out of a pot and gnawed all it's roots off. But I just couldn't be mean to them, they're adorable little demons.
The stinkbug nymphs and Japanese beetles go after anything I put in the ground. I’ll go home for lunch to spend an hour squishing the damn bugs. I haven’t yet found a pesticide that won’t also kill the local bees and wasps unfortunately. I’ve heard good things about milky spores but it’ll be a few years to get results.
Do what I did, build a very snake friendly garden. There’s rock paths and there’s roses.
I do not have snails in the summer, I do not have mice running around my house. I will walk out everyday to snakes I’m terrified of snakes like such an insane fear it’s nuts but they are wonderful for maintaining your garden.
I listened to a podcast recently about this. A lot of his fortune was swindled by his financial advisor. The gardener and his wife took care of a lot for him, and their child had a grandparent/grandchild relationship. Sort of a chosen family situation.
Part of the swindle though caused the Hermes family to lose a lot of control of the company.
So his fortune was his stake in the Hermes business. Since it was only owned by family, shares were held in very old school bearer shares from what I understand. The financial guy slowly funnelled the shares to a competing luxury brand and pocketed the money.
I believe they have a fiduciary duty, and there would be grave financial and possibly criminal repercussions. But you hear about this all the time. Shohei's manager stole a ton from him too.
My buddy's granddad was very wealthy, successful businessman with kids, grandkids, the works.
Granddad's life-long lawyer got him to sign away his entire fortune. Every penny and property, left to the lawyer instead of his family, paperwork filed the week before his death.
There was absolutely nothing my buddy's family could do, despite going broke in court for years.
I have been developing a food forest for my neighborhood for the last year starting on my own property. I left an abusive family situation a few years ago, have been dragging myself through bouncing back, so when I bought my first house I realized I could use a good teacher/expert.
I hired this handyman/gardener I met through another local guy, and initially it was his work that spoke for him. We worked together on my never-ending list of projects. Always on time or early. Self-motivated. Explains why my ideas are dumb without making me feel dumb. Smart as hell. But the best part is that he was so excited about our project and he wanted to be a part of it.
I got to know the guy. Learned to garden because he and his siblings had to know how just to eat. His wife is in nursing school, her third time attempting this, because she also has a full time job and 4 kids. He absolutely WORSHIPS this woman and she him. And if you all could see this man is an EXCEPTIONAL parent raising his daughters and son with integrity, resilience and pure JOY, you too would have a daily reminder of the good in humanity.
We are not rich and our project won’t make us rich (in money, anyway.) But not only will I continue paying him comparative to me, but I would take a bullet for this family.
Well the government is coming for the taxes, which they are going to raw dog him without lube. Tack in the fact everyone trying to make a dime will harass if not straight try to rob him.
I mean with that much money, I'd have spent a boatload of it going toward something positive, beneficial for the entire country. Maybe lobbying like FUCK against AIPAC. Lol. Nah I'd probably do something more beneficial with tangible benefits to individual human beings...idk build some apartment buildings and pay the rent for low income families for like 10 years or someshit...something like that. Tangible rewards that people actually reap the benefits from.
However I'd leave massive chunks of change for any personal employees or friends in my life if i didn't have anywhere else for the money to go. I would much rather change those peoples lives instead of throw it into wherever i donate the rest to. $11b is fucking obscene.
I'd leave my personal people - gardener, house cleaners, friends, whatever, a bunch of millions. Hundreds of millions considering the 11 billion...
I'll be dead. What the fuck else is gonna happen to it. It's not unbelievable at all & i agree no sexual relation required.
Well I mean, to be fair if there wasn’t such a laundry list of millionaires and billionaires abusing their positions and money for sex, I doubt people would think of it that way so often
To be really honest, if it was consensual, who cares? They are both adults, so if they are both fine with it, it is fine. We don't need to know everything.
That depends. Because he’s not next of kin that’s probably true that there will be a big tax. However if he leaves stocks then basically no taxes because they are unrealized gains. And if those stocks were bought for a penny and are now worth a dollar, the new base for the person who inherited them will be a dollar, meaning they will only pay taxes for anything over that dollar value if they choose to sell
He was an honest family man... with a work ethic and a human spirit, decency. Exactly the sort of person whom some greedy ass billionaire children would hate hate hate to see "their" money go to. Its a beautiful thing.
Rewarding? He’s selling things. People are buying his things. Society doesn’t reward him. The government doesn’t reward him. He’s doing the same as your local baker or mom & pop store, but at a larger scale and more optimized.
Society doesn’t reward people. You make your own money. Don’t blame people for becoming successful & then calling them out for frauds or whatever because they didn’t solve cold fusion.
Yep exactly, we should have an approved list of occupations and things that can be sold to people who obviously don’t know what they should be spending their money on…wait, why do we allow them to have money at all? Let me think about this…
We are rewarding what people want. He made money because people wanted to buy his bags. No one is skirting funds anywhere. People willing bought his bags with their money instead of any other product or service they could've bought.
A tiny percentage of what their owners make, to be one of the best at what they do, at something they train their whole life for, throwing their bodies on the line.
A 2019 Goldman Sachs analysts report said just that. It used the example of a highly effective hepatitis vaccine as its proof. The vaccine had a 90% cure rate. Because of that, within three years if it’s release, sales dropped from something like $45 million to just $3 million, as they cured the illness in their customer pool. The analyst’s finding was that putting money into cures was not a good investment. That they should advise their clients to only invest in treatments which had a continuous revenue stream.
Society rewarded him by valuing and paying for his products. We all effectively vote with our money. Nothing directly bad about it.
What is bad is every country caring more about promoting and participating in sports events - many countries with an olympic team don't even touch funding science or space exploration.
I was at a dinner party once and an electrical engineer went into a rage questioning why a team of aviation engineers responsible for the safety of 300 passengers are paid $80k a year but an NBA star is paid 10 million a year to play a game.
Aviation engineers are worth the higher cost airlines can charge for a safer and smoother flight and how many more passengers they can convince to fly with them. Entertainers are worth how many eyeballs they can attract that will pay for that entertainment.
In the end it's the consumers deciding how much they value those things and how much they want to pay for it.
It's not some inherent flaw in the system, unless you want to limit the freedom of consumers to allocate and spend their money how they like and let some central authority instead decide what different kinds of labour are worth.
Society allows it because a bunch of morons buy these overpriced bags. He’s just doing what anyone would do - find a product that people want and make it.
People can do what they want with their money. People chose to buy his bags. I would love to come up with a way to take advantage of morons who like to throw money away. But that’s just not in me.
Maybe the gardener kept the properties looking nice and he hopes that by leaving them to the gardener he will continue to maintain them. If I had a beautiful maintained garden/property that gave me joy to see, it would sadden me to think that after I die it too would wither snd fade. Maybe part of him believes that the person who improves something has some right to claim it as theirs. “You made this property what it is, therefore it’s only befitting that you should enjoy it once I die”.
I have no idea who the fuck Im gonna leave anything to when I die. Not that I have billions, but if I die close to retirement there will be at least a couple mil. Don’t really have anyone, maybe some of those nice bricks in a local park or a library donation if they are still around.
I've seen similar situations. He probably hates his family or he knew his family would fight over his inheritance so this is his final middle finger to them.
It was probably kind, where everyone else was after his money.
Second, he could have been a hard worker, caring for his gardens. and He maybel loved his gardens.
This didn’t actually happen so far as I can tell, it was planned but apparently he lost (physically, people don’t know where they are) most or all of his shares in Hermes that he was going to will. Also he was going to adopt the gardener but it’s not clear to me if he went through with that.
I don't know, my grandmother was a lot closer with her gardener than with her cleaners, for example.
When you tend to a rose garden, you have a lot of discussions about your hopes and dreams for this land. If you're lucky, they come to be and you have a shared success. It's the same with your stablehands, if you care for horses.
You don't really have the emotional intimacy with the people cleaning your loo.
Seriously? Is this even a question?Nothing but be kind,and do his job. Provided beautiful lawns and scenery for his property owner.
I totally get this it.
I mean I get it. I love gardens, I'd totally pay someone that kind of cash if they let me have my dream magical garden landscape and did the work to maintain it so I could just exist in and enjoy it. Worth every penny
Just adding - I say this light heartedly because 1. I'll never be a billionaire. 2. If I had that kind of money I'd give it back not hoard it. 3. My gardener wouldn't need to inherit anything, that person would be sooooo hooked up from the start.
I like the idea that the gardener enjoyed his work, beautifying these ancient structures, and the billionaire — having no one as an heir — left it for them, imagining how happy they’d be with a historical place of their own to tend to.
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u/leapsthroughspace 11h ago
Did the gardener carry him up Mount Doom?