Technology is really amazing. We saw the opera Don Giovanni this past Friday at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. It was broadcast in high definition live from the San Francisco Opera. The opera was simulcasted (via satellite) free to four different venues for a combined audience of 10,000 people. The other venues were in Davis, Santa Rosa, and San Jose. I never would have imagined such a use for technology, but it was really impressive. The opera house's next big experiment is coming in September where they'll be simulcasting the opera Samson and Delilah in AT&T Park (again for free!). The ballpark has the highest quality outdoor high definition scoreboard in North America. Should be cool.
So there's rich, and then there's super rich. I recently read an article in the WSJ about the top 400 taxpayers based on income. Pretty incredible statistics. Those top 400, or what they call the "Fortunate 400", pulled in $85.6 billion in income in 2005. That's over $200 million each ... in one year! Here's a quick graphic to drive that home: Very impressive. There's all the obvious jaw-dropping statistics to go with that. For instance, to make the cut to be in the 400 you had to pull in at least $100 million. With an average of $200 million, that means there's people pulling in well over that number. Obviously, quite crazy numbers, and generally speaking not necessarily anything to be concerned about. I'm all for capitalism. But one of the more disheartening statistics was that adjusting for inflation, the minimum income to make the cutoff into the Fortunate 400 has nearly tripled since 1992. That's probably not a good sign as I imagine that...
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