Excellent points and questions:

<<Why do super rich people continue to amass greater and great quantities of money, far beyond what they could possibly spend? >>

Well I rub shoulders with these people a lot and have come dangerously close to being one of them on a few occasions (close enough that I've spent a lot of time wondering how I whould choose to live if I became super rich).

Consider this: you've built a company, created the best product in the world, blew away all of your competition, and cashed out for hundreds of millions of dollars. Now what? Most people assume at this point that it's margaritas and palm trees until you're 100 years old. But the sad truth of the matter is is that margaritas and palm trees get really old after a few months. Seriously, retirement sucks. Ok, so you pick up a hobby, maybe its building rockets or perfecting a mesh network or building the better mouse trap. Damn, you just created a new kick ass company and you've got another 100 million coming down the pipe from a "hobby" idea.

The reason that rich people keep making money is because, honestly, its an excellent way to push yourself to be faster smarter better. Its a great way to take a bunch of dead time and turn it into fun and adventure.

AND if you understand economics it is very altruistic. Most people have a wrong headed idea of economics which assumes that there's a finite amount of wealth in the world and if one person is rich its at anothers expense. If I eat more pizza then you have to eat the box. This is wrong. Wealth is created. If I invent a better mousetrap and make millions, everyone is better (except the guy who owned the mouse trap company I put out of business). Every time someone makes money legally its because the provided some service that was not there before and they made the whole economy richer. To really get a good idea about how this works consider how the poor lived in the USA 200 years ago vs now. The difference is economic growth which was created by people making money by providing goods and serives that no one had before.

A guy I know retired with hundreds of millions from his first company. His wife gave him grief because he spent too much time playing with his go-carts and told him to get back to work. So he started this company that makes these amazing little mesh network sensors that are really easy to program and use and can provide amazing amounts of real time data to anyone who needs to collect it. He's going to make hundreds of millions more AND he's help the world as a whole because now there's this amazing new product on the market that was not there before.

So yeah, making money is a great way to kill time with tons of upsides and no downsides since you're MAKING the money, not stealing it.

<< I fail to see why decscribing Rite-Solutions "Opinion Money" as an alternative currency is silly.>>

When I said "silly" I was refering to the idea of making an alternative currnecy to leverage the educations and ideas of the third world. If these people's educations and ideas have value they can sell them for normal currnecy. If their ideas have value and for some reason they cannot be sold for currency then there is no doubt some kind of government block preventing it and THAT problem needs to be addressed. Case and point, there's a LOT of people with PhD's in China that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to US companies but immigration law prevents them from being brough over here and utilized. Instead companies are having to build offices IN China in order to leverage their skills in country and the governmental borders on the markets screw up the supply and demand curves allowing these people to be hired for far less than they would be worth in an open market.

As for the Rite-Solutions Option Money, you could argue that this is an Alternate Money but I don't think that's the interesting part about it. Just in the same way that monopoly money is an alternative money, the interesting part about it is the board game, not the fake money. In this case the interesting thing is the use of a Market to sieve out good ideas. Markets are really only recently being identified as a tool for leveraging the brains of a huge ground of unorganized people. The two most basic models are the pryamid and the market. Traditionally we always try and orgaize into prymids because the seem the most efficent, and markets only tend to crop up on accident since a real market can't really be designed. Case and point, there was an article a while back going around about how durning the invasion into Iraq there was a peroid of time where command and control lost contact with the forces on the ground. During this peroid of time the tanks had only basic radio communication with each other and had to adapt without anyone being in charge. During this peroid of time they had far higher kills and far fewer fatalities than when under top down control.