Mike: The other day, I added $40 to my subway card, except I discovered later that the machine messed up and actually didn’t add any money to the card. When I got home and checked my bank account, $40 was of course debited from the machine. I had just finished work, and was hungry and just wanted to take off my shoes and relax, but I walked back to the subway station and asked the person in the booth what I should do. He told me I had to fill out a form, mail the Metrocard and that form plus my receipt to MTA headquarters where they would try to sort things out for me within seven business days. But I still had some money on my card, so I decided to use it until the money ran out and then mail it in with the form. Which is my 1 Thing to take care of today. Anyway, it seems like a bit of a hassle to get this corrected, and I’m wondering if there are people out there who would be like, “forget this,” and just consider it money lost.

Logan: RAISES HAND. Also: You have the receipt?!

Mike:Yes, I always get a receipt. For record-keeping purposes! Wait, you wouldn’t try to get your $40 back? It’s $40! I’m going to be okay if I lose $40—like, it’s not going to mean I’m going to go hungry. But if I know there’s a way to get that money back I’m going to do it.

Logan: I mean, maybe I would talk to the person at the counter? Actually I probably wouldn’t because I would just know that she would need me to go through some other steps and hurdles. I don’t know I just don’t think I would. Shit happens! Except I would be nervous to refill my Metrocard until the end of time. I might not ever refill it again actually and only buy Fresh Ones. In related news, I still haven’t returned my busted headphones from last week, so.

Mike: Haha, Logan, if the machine in the subway station ever messes up, let me know so I can help you get your money back! Or at least let the MTA person know so that they can get their dumb machine fixed. And you’ve probably taken the effort to get money back before. Actually, I know you have. Also, it’s easy to think about what you’d do in a theoretical situation, but I sort of have the feeling that if a machine ate $40, you’d be like, “Uh, what? No, give me my money back.”

Logan: You’re right I need to stop making blanket statements based on the idea that I am “bad with money” and “lazy” and “not the type of person that would ______.” Everyday is a new day. Each moment is a new moment. Each me is a new me. Maybe I would go straight to the post office and write and lean against that counter in the back and write a strongly-worded letter and demand it all be fixed. And send it priority mail! It could happen!

Also Mike. Mike. I just had a startup idea. A sick sick startup idea. Everyone does everyone else’s Terrible Tedious Tasks for them. Like, I’d get you your $40 back. And you’d return my headphones. And maybe like, we’d split the proceeds? Actually this might not work at all because it would involve me getting the headphones and the receipt to you, and if I’m going to go through all that effort, I may as well just return the headphones myself, which I haven’t done, which we’ve already established, and I guess we’re back at the start! What is the missing element, what am I not seeing. Does it need to be an APP???????

Mike: Actually, I kind of like the idea of doing someone’s thing they don’t want to do in exchange for a percentage of the money. But I think it would mostly work in situations like, “Ugh, I have all these old gadgets I’m not using anymore, I should put them on eBay or Craigslist.” You could give that stuff for someone to sell for you, and then split the money however you think is fair. I think this is a seed to an idea! But it needs to be hashed out a bit more.

Logan: Aaaaannnnnnd I just got bored with it. Also it must exist. Everything exists.

Mike: Anyway, this sort of reminds me of the time Mallory got overcharged when she bought chicken wings. When do we let things slide? I think I’m likely to chase after that $40 or $5 that I know is owed to me most of the time if it doesn’t cost me in other things like time, which is also valuable to me.

Logan: I just had another thought about it, which is, it probably depends on how valuable that $5 or $40 is for your At That Moment. Like, if that $40 was my last $40 for a long time, I’d go after it like a A Large Cat. But if I had a full bank account, I’d be like, W H A T E V E R. Our personal value of a dollar changes with circumstance!

Mike: Omg. This reminds me of a time I worked for a wealthy person who told me that while he was on his lunch break, he pulled $400 out of the ATM and when he walked out of the bank, the wind blew it out of his hands. He was laughing as he was telling me this story and in my head I was thinking, “If I lost $400 to the wind, I’d cry.” And then he said, “This very interesting thing happened which was that after the money blew down the street, other people went chasing after it, and then they ran back up to me to give me the money!”—as if he expected people to just run off with it? But it’s sort of true what you’re saying: It seemed to him like no big deal to lose $400 because he probably had a million dollars in that account, but: circumstances!

Let it be this one about Australian mining billionaire Gina Rinehart.

Is she an heiress? Inarguably. And yet she has, by hard work and guile and historic luck, multiplied the value of the business she inherited several hundred times over. The “h”-word seems to be partly a gender thing. The male scions of Australian family fortunes, such as Lachlan Murdoch (the eldest son of Rupert), are not routinely described in the press as heirs. Rinehart is the only woman among the rough lot riding the mining boom at tycoon level, and none of the others probably have to read much in the papers about how they really should be able to afford a hairdresser or a personal trainer.

Oh but there is so, so much more.

How Swiss bank and offshore accounts work for tax evasion—and also how you get caught. (“He visited his clients in the U.S., delivering cash from their undeclared accounts or taking cash back to deposit in Switzerland, court records show.”)

Of the 1,426 billionaires on our list, not one–not even the vainglorious Donald Trump–goes to greater measure to try to affect his or her ranking. In 2006 when Forbes estimated that the prince was actually worth $7 billion less than he said he was, he called me at home the day after the list was released, sounding nearly in tears. “What do you want?” he pleaded, offering up his private banker in Switzerland. “Tell me what you need.” Several years ago he had Kingdom Holding’s chief financial officer fly from Riyadh to New York a few weeks before the list came out to ensure that FORBES used his stated numbers. The CFO and a companion said they were not to leave the editor’s office until that commitment was secured. (After a granular discussion the editor convinced them to leave with a promise to review everything.) In 2008, I spent a week with him in Riyadh, at his behest, touring his palaces and airplanes and observing what he told me was $700 million worth of jewels.

Forbes’s popular billionaires issue is out and Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Alsaud is number 26 on the list—but he’d really, really like to have a higher ranking. He’s even sent out press releases with Photoshopped covers of himself on Forbes, Vanity Fair, and TIME. Apparently, he has learned that having billions of dollars can buy you a lot of things—except having more money than the billionaires who have more money than you.

On Tuesday, Jia talked about how she often finds herself falling down an Internet k-hole while looking at the Harper’s Index. I just learned a bunch of things while looking at the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which is a ranking of the world’s richest people. Oh, but it is so much more than a simple ranking! Its “Intelligence” section is full of fun facts. For example:

• Carlos Slim, the world’s richest man, doesn’t have a computer and loves the New York Yankees.
• The second richest man in the world, Bill Gates, paid the Rolling Stones $10 million for the rights to use “Start Me Up.” He also owns Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester.
• The richest woman in the world is Christy Walton, who owns 12 percent of the Wal-Mart empire. Her husband died in 2005 after his homebuilt aircraft crashed.
• David Thomson, the patriarch of Canada’s richest family who owns 55 percent of Thomson Reuters, flies coach between Toronto and Winnipeg.
• Liliane Bettencourt, Europe’s richest woman who owns 31 percent of L’Oreal, advocates higher taxes for France’s rich people.

I could spend hours reading through this thing, but I’m going to pull myself away from it because I’m never going to become a billionaire if I spend all of my time in this k-hole.

“Until roughly the year 2000, becoming a billionaire was something that everybody saw as a good thing in India. They saw it as a coming of age,” he explains, as we sit in his home in a fancy neighbourhood of New Delhi. “Now being wealthy has been given a bad name.”

The generation that rose in the period immediately after India’s reforms in the early 1990s amassed fortunes in areas such as information technology and outsourcing, he contends. However, recent times have seen a more troubling economic trend. “In the last decade, almost all of the billionaires created in India have been created because of the proximity to politics,” he says. “They have been created in specific areas where government policy determines whether you make a billion or you don’t, which includes land, real estate, infrastructure, and natural resources.”

The Financial Times examined some of India’s newest richest people (men), and found that as India’s economy rapidly grew in the last decade, the wealth found a way to corrupt people (surprise!). Not everyone is so bad: The country has its own version of Warren Buffet in the guise of Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, a financier who made a bundle spotting undervalued companies, and who recently promised to donate at least a quarter of his fortune to charity. Interestingly enough, the two words you’ll find missing from the piece are the words “poverty” and “poor.” The only time the word “slums” appears is in the context of where India’s richest man has decided to build his mansion—the $500 million home is located in a city where half of the residents live in slums.

I went to a Duane Reade near the East Village to withdraw $40 and found this ATM receipt stuck in the machine. It’s just sort of this stunning reminder that rich is relative, and New York City is a wild and diverse place. Millionaires are just like us! They use the Duane Reade ATM in the East Village and forget their receipt! Most likely on his or her way to buy 200 Mamoun’s falafel!

[Ed. Note: There's no doubt that this person is rich, but speaking of rich is relative, remember the $100 million savings account receipt found in The Hamptons last year?]

In recent income inequality news, the top 1 percent of owners have received 93 percent of income growth in 2010, and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke has acknowledged that low interest rates are affecting savers right now, but we’ll all benefit as the economy strengthens. That doesn’t make me feel any less bad about the tiny interest rates I’m seeing in my ING account right now.

Our plutocracy now lives like the British in colonial India: in the place and ruling it, but not of it. If one can afford private security, public safety is of no concern; if one owns a Gulfstream jet, crumbling bridges cause less apprehension—and viable public transportation doesn’t even show up on the radar screen. With private doctors on call and a chartered plane to get to the Mayo Clinic, why worry about Medicare?

Something for the weekend: The American Conservative’s Mike Lofgren, who served 16 years on the Republican staff of the House and Senate Budget Committees, has a piece looking at how America’s super-rich has essentially escaped from society and the needs of our country. They need to have, as hedge fund billionaire Stephen Schwarzman has argued about low-income people who pay no income tax (but a heck of a lot in payroll taxes), “skin in the game.” [via]

Mitt Romney—how rich is he, really? The answer to that question can be found in these three graphs comparing his wealth to that of our last five presidents (you know, just normal middle-class dudes). No comparison, would be how to describe the graphs in two words. Insane, would be how to describe them in one. LOLOLOLOL, would be how to describe them on the internet.