Motivation…for wealth

Our government continues to roll out opportunities for we the Guyanese people to become rich – the latest being business ideas to youngsters with funding by our new Development Bank loans! To motivate them, your Eyewitness will highlight what may be ahead by mentioning how the already-wealthy are living. He scoured the news from the States – which still has most of the success stories!
According to the New York Times, Lauren Sanchez Bezos – the wife of the Amazon founder, Jeff – revealed she and her husband spend every morning reciting 10 gratitudes – as they sip coffee in the sunroom of their $230 million island compound in South Florida!! With Amazon – their “family business” according to Lauren – grossing US$719 billion, you might say they got a lot to be grateful about!! But that would mean you’ve missed that “gratitude” is having a moment, despite – or maybe because of – the challenges of this war-torn year!! “Gratitude practice” being the “in thing”– the Bezoses are clearly in that vanguard.
According to the Daily Mail, they drove their $500 million superyacht to Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands for a vacation this week!! Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reported that Amazon has agreed to acquire satellite operator Globalstar for $11 billion- their latest effort to compete with (rival?) Trillionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink!! But some folks just don’t appreciate the beneficence of the super wealthy. Imagine the democrats are alleging that Amazon’s $40 million payment to license Melania Trump’s vanity documentary – THREE TIMES higher than the next highest offer! – is actually a bribe by trying to buy the President’s favor by dumping millions into the Trump family’s pockets!! Can you believe that??!!
Meanwhile, in other news in super-richdom, the research firm Emarketer reported that Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook-now-Meta is projected to generate US$243.46 billion from its advertising business this year alone!!  You might be pleased to know that according to Financial Times, Meta’s building and testing an AI simulacrum of Mark Zuckerberg that’s gonna appear as an on-screen digital avatar, mimicking his mannerisms, speech patterns, and opinions!! The company wants to use the AI version of its chief executive to hold meetings and interact with employees, believing the model might make them feel more “connected to the founder through interactions with it”!! Isn’t this soooo thoughtful?? It’s gonna make all 79,000 employees feel soooo special!!
Finally, a report from NBC News on Tuesday found that Grok, the chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI firm, is still generating sexualized images and videos of real women without their consent!! The owner of Tesla wanted to know what’s so wrong about that – since Meta and Google also does it!!
And Tesla’s gonna be paying him US$1 trillion over the next 10 years!!

…for self sufficiency
Your Eyewitness is pretty chuffed that we’ve started producing onions in Reg 9 in commercial quantities!! With the government’s help, the farmers harvested 2600 bags of our go-to flavour perk – bringing the total production to 52,000 kilograms of onions!! With each bag weighing 20 kilograms and sold at $6,000 per bag, this works out to $136 per pound. Unfortunately, the Missus informed your Eyewitness that she just bought – at RETAIL – onions at the local market for $100/pound!!
And this will be our challenge to produce all the other ‘non-traditional” items we’re valiantly trying to produce – such as wheat and potatoes: to match the prices from those countries that are way ahead of us in the learning curve. Plus, they have achieved economies of scale, etc!! So, we gotta keep on intensifying our efforts notwithstanding that we heard the Straits of Hormuz is open after Israel-Lebanon 10-day truce!!
Even if that lasts, something’s else gonna explode that will be pushing prices of foreign stuff ever upwards!!

…for gossip mongering
We’re informed by a credible polling agency that Americans no longer turn to TV and newspapers as their primary source of news. Instead, they’ve swiveled to online opinion personalities and comedians over social media and elsewhere in cyberspace!!