Our good buddy Carlos Slim is once again the world's richest person. On a related note, has anyone else noticed the price increases for food items lately? By my math the peso is stronger today than it was a year ago, yet the prices for everything still keep going up... (and then stores have to audacity to put a "save" sticker under the new and improved HIGHER prices like we're total idiots! but that another rant... :ranting1: )
I've noticed it, Life, seems to be about 10%, on average. When the dollar weakens further, we'll really begin to feel it. Our frame of reference is Florida, where many of the things we like to buy in the supermarkets already cost less than here.... __________________ Slim's a marvel, a class of person I simply can't imagine (sorry to be so unimaginative!), with ambition (avarice?) knowing no boundaries that mean anything. He wouldn't be richest, if he'd been busy giving away the majority of his wealth. He wouldn't have to look hard to find some projects worth taking on, as others have done (Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, just to name two).
If Bill Gates didn't continually give most of his earnings to charity he would probably be over the 100 billion mark by now. When Slim does "donate" he does so in a very limited manner and then spends more to advertise his "donations" than he actually donated to start with. Case and point, a few years back you couldn't watch television without seeing an advertisement showing how Telcel had built or refurbished a small school someplace in Mexico. It went on for a good 30 or 45 seconds about how much Telcel was helping Mexico and cared about the poor people and so on... Literally every wall in that school had the TelCel logo painted all over it, and I'm sure that they spent many, many times more on airing the advertisement about it than the actual cost to build that billboard... or school, whatever you want to call it. The local Wal-mart had a posting at the entrance one time that said "helping the community" (in Spanish) and showed several pictures of its employees painting the curbs around the store... I remember thinking "how the F#% is that helping the community?!" Costco has had a sign up near their exit for a long time now showing that they donated a few hundred backpacks to some school kids someplace.... thats nice I thought.. that a store that brings in 15-25 million dollars a year would find the resources to hand out a few backpacks then brag about it all year.... I guess its better than nothing, but it just really irritates me when corporations do the bare minimum of "charity" then brag about for their own gain....
A well-intentioned, and generous individual of modest means could have done as much: it's a joke, for a corporate giant, as you described it, Life, whether for Telcel, Walmart or Costco.
