Make Mine Miserable

An Austrian millionaire is tried of being miserable.

Sure, so am I.

Karl Rabeder, as reported on AOL News, has decided that wealth compromises the quest for happiness.  He grew up poor, made a pile and, now, at forty-seven (retirement age in Europe) wants to give it away.  Maybe it is because his wealth is in Euros (i.e., that used to be real money) and he understands this whole Greek budget mess may drown the Euro in Retsina

Republicans are, rightly, horrified.  Retsina tastes like gasoline futures.

Nonetheless, Karl seems to have felt his happiness threatened by his villa in the Alps and  forty-two acres of French estate.  I guarantee the six--count them, six--gliders screwed up his whole day.  Where do you keep six gliders?  Oh, I could find room on my 42 acres, if I had 42 acres and what is that in 1440 square foot increments? 

You wonder how a guy so used to soaring in one of six gliders could want to be so down to earth.

What it God's name awoke this feeling?  Three weeks in Hawaii.  Sure, I'll have to try that trip to guaranteed torment.  Still, that vacation coupled with gliding (in, I presume, only one glider) over the poverty rife in the Southern Hemisphere turned Karl's values upside down.  The glider is the key here.  In a 777 Dreamliner, all you would see are specks of poverty so tiny they look like, well, grains between your toes on that beach in Maui.  But gliders are pretty low to ground and you can't miss how bad it really can be.

Forget that Dreamliner reference.  In that, all you would see are dozens of life-sized Boeing engineers trying to glue on a wing.

Karl can't completely purge the kind of thinking that made him so nearly soullessly rich in the first place.   He is raffling off the villa.  You can buy in for 100 Euros, more or less.  Yes, it sounds like Karl is just making more filthy lucre, but you are the soulless one to be thinking that of him.

The guy is putting all his money into MyMicroCharity (distinct from this blog's preferred charity, MyNanoPleaseClickOnAnAd).  This outfit does loans even smaller than the fragment of your mortgage Lehman math majors packaged and sold to Iceland in 2006.  They lend, say, 118 Euros at a pop to enterprising folks in way-underdeveloped countries to start them on their own path to money-based misery. 

Karl, did you think this through?

Upon reflection at about 5 o'clock somewhere, this afternoon, I came to the conclusion that my own recently amassed pile of blog-generated nano-dollars is making me miserable, too.  I was definitely miserable when paying my Comcast bill this afternoon before the Scotch.

Hmm.  You know Karl?  It did feel like I was giving it away.  Maybe, my soul will feel lighter tomorrow, too.