Really, who the fuck reads guides to being cool rich? I mean really reads it, in the sense of actually getting to be ever so slightly someone else as the last word sinks in. Oh, I can already picture the whole army of millionaires who got there because they *read* a guide and they did all the exercises, discovered their inner millionaire, stretched their long-forgotten money-making muscle (or got savvy at planning lunches and pinching pennies), got in tune with the universe and otherwise finally understood the world they lived in. No? Can't quite picture it like that? Why, isn't this how it happens *really*?

Despite such tremendous usefulness of this kind of guides, I ended up reading no less than two of them in a single day! Simply by virtue of following two blogs who occasionally talk to one another as it were: one says he's cheep (and Pete), the other outrageous (and Mircea), both of them basically solve all your problems on the matter and send you home to do your homework (be that better money planning a la housewife's school of 1930's¹, budget well and stick to it or stoic acceptance a la ..1930(?) know your place and stick to it or otherwise commit suicide, but plox don't miss).

Quite a lot of stick in both guides, if you haven't noticed. But at least the second one comments on the first, so I'll take it from there and comment in turn: I don't quite buy this thing with "People who are better are better, there's nothing specific they need to do or commonly bother doing for the future to flow their way." At the very least, they need to do what they can do, as it were. And that's where all the difference is in the end: some got to do more, some got to do less, some got to do increasingly more and some died before they even got a chance to try to do anything. Some of them surely read guides too - what difference did that make?

This "they are better" thing is just a label with all the meaning and importance of a piece of paper glued on with shit: by the time you get to put it on, it's already obvious and by the time it starts flaking out, what it used to stand for is already long gone. So all that this "they are better" thing says and perhaps rightly so is: gotta spin the future so that it works for you - and if you don't spin it, then it will spin you quite mercilessly. Not that people can't find joy in being spun either, but if that's not the kind of joy you're after, than best fight tooth and nail to do the spinning, as there is no place in between.

So not as much as a guide really, but more of a warning, for all the good that warnings ever did.

And on a side and lighter note, I think Stanislav Datskovskiy is quite like Grigore Moisil in at least one respect: he'll have a wife and a mistress so that he can tell each of them he's with the other, while he finally gets to enjoy Cramer and Shoup (with a generous serving of Roquefort in times of need, if I got that right). He might thus rest assured that he is certainly not "a monstrous thing from beneath the ocean," but quite in agreement with the very pioneers of computer science as a field. While I really don't know whether Moisil considered himself poor, rich or anything in between, all his students that I ever had the pleasure to talk to consistently painted an image of him as not only brilliant, but also a joyous and otherwise humorous person at quite all times. Don't know how many guides he read intent on "improving himself" though, do you?

1. Hey, they were even taught to have separate envelopes for different types of expenses, with money allocated to each of them at the beginning of each month - those were just basic housekeeping lessons, nothing fancy. And no, I wasn't there in the 1930's but I spent my childhood reading old books and talking to older people who were FAR more interesting to me than the younger idiots, yes. I still think that was just about what saved me from a lot of stupidity. ↩

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