"Fortunes" and Wealth

The state of Ca-lol-fornia is maybe the premiere example of the difference between "wealth", i.e. value, and money, i.e. price. It's also a great example of a strange, related phenomenon of an ability to build infrastructure, and an inability to maintain it.

Silicon Valley is filled to overflowing with funny money digits. The money goes into all kinds of stupid projects run by ostensibly private companies to computerize and digitize everything. Untold grillions of monies are going into telecommunications infrastructure to host the "internet of things".... that nobody wants or needs.

At the same time all that is going on, California can't maintain its electric infrastructure and has to shut it off if there are high winds because apparently funds for rudimentary maintenance and man power costs aren't available?

The Internet of Things bullshit is a tippy top priority that absorbs oodles of resources and the best and brightest minds, while fundamental things like electrical power can't be maintained.

Similarly, a guy like Faceberg or almost any other bazillionaire will amass a "personal" giant wad of digits, start a "foundation", but actually give no monies away or solve the simplest rudimentary problems even in their back yard.

There really might not be enough resources to repair a massive structure like the California power grid, while there are enough resources to build a bunch of useless hardware and software so toasters can be online. The internet of things is like racing stripes on a car. The electric grid is like a foundation on a house. Similarly, the grillions of monies some guy like Bezos or Faceberg collected might not be convertible to actual stuff in any meaningful way.

There are currently about 14 US dollars base money per tree (228 billion trees) in the United States, but the "market value" of all the paper assets in the US probably exceeds the number of leaves on all the trees in the United States many times over. The total "market cap" of the S&P 500 for example is over $15 trillion. ($65 per tree)

It's hard to tell if the chronic inability to maintain public works is a side effect of the debt money/money printing system or is a real expression of the increased "cost"/value of real stuff that's more scarce over time.

I think we'll see similar phenomenon with McMansion houses in 10-20 years. People are able to buy them, but probably can't afford to maintain them.