I posted the following image on Facebook with the preface “Certificated helicopter pilot and former divorce plaintiff flee Buckingham Palace via bus. #LEGOdrama #LowCarbonFootprint”:
(Check lower left corner of the frame; Built by a friend’s daughters in Bermuda.)
Whew, you freaked me out for a second there. I thought the kid spontaneously built it out of generic LEGO that was laying around, from a picture or a mental image: “Now we know. Philg and his friends are raising a colony of extraterrestrially intelligent children in Bermuda. That’s it for us monkeys.” I was relieved to find there’s an actual Buckingham Palace kit. She still did a very nice job.
https://www.lego.com/en-us/product/buckingham-palace-21029
I like their attitude. We don’t need the Monarchy. “F” the Monarchy. Now if William and Kate would do the same, England could save themselves literally billions of dollars a year in a corrupt and expensive institution which should have been eliminated 100 years ago after Edward. Let the monarchy end with QE II. We should do the same with the President and instead elect a Prime Minister like our more progressive European counterparts. And term limits and vote of no confidence.
My take is that Meghan and Harry got tired of slumming it as members of the Royal Family and have decided to move to America and do the first thing that comes naturally: make an enormous amount of money. Now they’re commoners but with a Royal pedigree and nothing but an empire to build. They no longer receive public funds or carry the titles His and Her Royal Highness, and they’re going to pay back the $3.1M for the Frogmore Cottage refurb, but they’ll be able to do that out of the $300M they earn on their new ventures. The idea that they somehow did this to remove themselves from the public eye is ridiculous: they just want to control the terms and make more money at it.
They didn’t decide to move to Peru and raise alpaca to escape the constant gaze. They are moving to North America to be the Next Big Thing: Meg & Harry, the Lifestyle Brand and Philanthropy. They’re going to get all the good advice in the world and their Rolodexes are as deep as the Library of Congress.
What did you think of Bermuda?
I will do some separate posts on the place. Hospitality from locals was wonderful.
http://worldpopulationreview.com/countries/countries-by-density/
shows that Bermuda is one of the most densely populated places in the world and the lack of open space takes some getting used to (a lot of the locals have small boats and maybe that is how they get out in nature).
I think https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/211rank.html may get the GDP wrong. Bermudians do not seem 66% richer than Americans. I was told that a typical salary for a “regular job” is about $50,000/year. Prices for housing, food, restaurant meals, transportation, etc. are much higher than in the U.S. Even a highly paid actuary or insurance executive won’t live in a huge house with a vast amount of land.
One good thing: Teslas are illegal and therefore there are no Facebragging Tesla owners lecturing fellow citizens about how the marvelous innovations coming out of Elon Musk’s latest coffee-stained napkin scribble exceed the combined intelligence of every automotive engineer in Germany and Japan.