Life, self-love, nature, peace, good works and space.
Don’t just focus on the books, as impactful as that is worldwide. Dollywood is the largest employer in the Pigeon Forge area now. She founded a bald eagle sanctuary in the 90s. Tons of scholarships in Sevier County to help address a dropout rate that was, at the height of her popularity in the 90s, over 30%. Coronavirus research donations and vaccine awareness. AIDS research funding (through a charity album). She helped fund a hospital, helped with wildfire and hurricane relief, so much more.
You might be right to go “well some of those were probably tax writeoffs”, but she clearly took the words and idea of the early country stars she knew like Johnny Cash and decided “all this money and power is worthless unless I help people with it.”
She’s helped Tennessee so much. I’m hoping to visit Dollywood next year, I’d much rather support that than give Disney more money.
tax writeoffs
There’s no amount of writeoff that makes donation profitable, compared to simply keeping the money. The exception is when the rich “donate” to “charities” that they then use for their personal benefit. Then they get a writeoff AND full control of the money.
This isn’t that.
I mean, kind of? Usually you’re donating to a charity or something to minimize your tax burden or claim a loss.
“Profitable” is kind of a relative term, but if I pay a little bit of nothing for a good stock (for example) and I hold it for a long time, I might have to pay capital gains on like 90 percent of the value of a stock. If I have some more recently purchased stock with a out the same value, what I can do is donate my old stock money that super grew tax free and use it to offset the value of selling a LOT of more recent stock. This puts money in my pocket from the market basically for free.
It is definitely profitable to figure out how to get money from the market that doesn’t require you to pay a quarter of it in taxes up front. If the weight is “how much I put in” vs “how much I took out” you can definitely make profitable tax write-offs.
Also, all of her Dollywood employees get their college paid for too. I came across that when our son was looking for a summer job.
Heck, if every billionaire did this many tax writeoffs to real charities, not their own personal foundations, maybe the world would be a better place.
Charity, is perhaps more fitting of her.
Science: Carl Sagan
Not just science but the courage and value in knowing the world as it is, rather than live in fantasy. But lacking a better term, science may work.
Tim Curry: Antici…pation!
Tim Curry just died too.
Superheaven has a new saint ;~;7
I still don’t understand how Steve Irwin ended up so beloved. He seemed more in love with adrenaline than the animals
His kids are just like him. It’s the genuine love of learning and nature and wanting to share that. And there’s some real science on the show tagging and documenting animals as well as medicating and moving them.
PITA edge lords are cringe, the man handling snakes carefully for 5min so millions of people learn and are less terrified of them is more of a service to animals than any of you will do.
The same reason that the MythBusters are considered science educators. You may not like it, but those were the influencers of the 2000s. There are a lot of people who grew up to be veterinarians or other vocations dealing with animals because of Steve Irwin, just like there are a lot of people who grew up to be engineers or similar because of the MythBusters, and that’s what makes him and his message special.
I’m sure in a couple years we will be hearing about the people who loved VSauce or one of those other YouTube channels and there will be some curmudgeon commenting about how they never understood how Michael was likable.
Never watched much of vsauce, but I don’t recall him molesting numbers, chemistry, or history.
On the other hand, I can honestly say that I’ve probably watched more of Steve Irwin than anyone else in this comment section. Possibly by an order of magnitude. I’m not sure whether my opinion, formed via vhs obliteration, counts as curmudgeonly
PR for the way he died. That bit of fondling animals was getting old.
Dieing at the peak of popularity before any scandal could have come up made him beloved by his works.
Edit: This isn’t a negative, he didn’t do anything bad but also never got the chance. We can go on knowing he was good. But he did die young.
