h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Time is Money, as Benjamin Franklin once said. But was he right?

I appear to have some time on my hands but not a great deal of money.

So what are the simplest ways to convert between the two?

Work.

More specifically, somebody else's work. You usually get a better exchange rate.

Prostitution.... drug dealing... arms selling... or just good olde fashioned bank robbery?

Time can be used to reduce your expenses if you have relevant skills. If you can prepare food yourself, you'll eat cheaper than you would at restaurants. Fixing cars, spot-welding, carpentry skills, all are possible ways to reduce your cost of living.

If you have lots of money, you can pay others to d what you don't have time for.

On a more literal level, Franklin's adage applies to professionals who charge by the hour: psychiatrists, ladies of the evening , attorneys, etc.

Time is money, and just like spacetime, space-money is a single interwoven coin-tinuum .

QOTD!

There is a exclusion principal here: you can have time or you can have money, but you can never have both concurrently.

Most people have both, in varying proportions. When they run out of time, they are dead, though. When they run out of money, they are poor.

Luckily for uls the government wants to change that round, so that your also dead when you run out of money... ingenious of them

Whereas the other lot of government want to keep taking money from you after your death

I believe it's the same government that is doing that.

I have mixed feelings about estate taxes. How often does a large inheritance prove to be well managed by the heirs? James Cagney [the actor] and Warren Buffett [the money manager] bequeathed their children very little. They believed that wealth means more when you have had a hand in earning it. In my country, I know of several families that squabble over inherited assets. Why couldn't the wealth have been given to either governments or charities? At least governments will take a certain amount of it and fill potholes/hire policemen/provide entertainment in the form of congresses or parliaments, etc. Give a spoiled young man an obscenely expensive Maserati that he proceeds to total after a drunken spree, and what possible good can that do for society at large? Or for the spoiled young man himself? Or maybe the money goes to heirs that are more responsible. Maybe they enlarge the family mansion or build a new one, with all sorts of amenities. The huge spaces require tons of money to heat them in Winter, but money is no object. Meanwhile, there are many people who never inherited a dime, who struggle to pay their heationg bills in much smaller homes.

As a living person, I can choose to give my children whatever I want of what I own whether it is 'good for them' or not. Why should that be different just because I'm dead?

PP.

It's different because after you are dead, you can no longer make any choices whatsoever.

Allegedly...

However you can specifically write it into your will, if you want to save your kids from the dangers of money.

I'm a public sector worker - I've been saving my kids from the danger of money all my life.

Of course you can write it into your will. That's a choice you can make while you're still alive.