throwaway22032

The issue is basically this:

If you have issues with impulse control you are likely to become poor because you will slowly bleed out money and opportunities from bad decision making.

The opposite is also true: it’s just less correlated because it is harder to gain money than to spend it, so not everyone makes it.

This is obvious to anyone who grew up poor and escaped, or who grew up well off and watched people on the fall. How long does a middle class heroin addict remain?

So what is stopping anyone in principle just reselling API access through a middleman?

Should I set up the company now and rake in the billions?

Because there are significant privacy benefits and benefits in removing the middlemen etc.

If you don’t care, you don’t care. I gave up a long time ago too. In that case it would be annoying enough if the privacy preserving card were just 1cm longer or something that you wouldn’t use it.

Sure.

I suppose my argument is along the following lines - books are too cumbersome so let's scroll Instagram instead.

It's a fake argument, it's not that big a deal, you just didn't care enough about reading books.

Budgeting with the data trail of a card is significantly easier if you have a lot of transactions.

It's also generally cheaper due to cashback and other incentives.

Other than that I've always found the idea that cash is "inconvenient" a bit of a child-like argument. Okay, yeah, you have to count some coins, you also have to brush your teeth and use a knife and fork instead of your hands, come on.

This is to some extent a kind of tautology, though.

There is more money available to chase housing in urban areas because it's where most of the jobs are due to network effects, so if you are a labourer you gravitate towards that (as you say, it's a commute thing).

It's not necessarily intrinsically more desirable. If you gave the average person 5 million quid I don't think they would choose to live in Central London.

"That's just like, your opinion, man."

The car is clearly not the best way to navigate a dense city. It is impractical to have, say, tower block apartments and also have a car for each resident. It is unreasonable to build enough parking for peak time around every destination that anyone might want to go to.

On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout their lives. It was profit maximising and also a lot of fun for me to live in the inner city in my early to mid 20's. Now that I can afford to not maximally push my career I prefer the outer parts of the city / more rural areas, and that's where the car shines.

The issue with this is that inevitably the locked down devices, which will end up being 98%+ of the market, become required for ordinary living, because no-one will develop for the 2%.

Open hardware is essentially useless if I need to carry both an open phone and a phone with the parking app, the banking app, messenger app to contact friends, etc.

Classic cars being refit to be electric is like using strawberry flavoured candy to replace fruit, or GPU shaders to replace a Trinitron.

Modern cars already exist, you can just use those. There aren’t enough proper classics in existence to matter from a carbon perspective.

I feel as if I've been reading some variant of this for the last 30 years (not just American, UK too).

But then what of it? I had more money at age 20 than I did at 15, more at 25 than 20, more at 30 than 25, and so on and so forth.

When I'm 70 I'll have more in real terms than I do now. Each year, barring some sort of disaster, most people work and bring in enough to survive whilst the surplus stacks up.

The main difference in my mind driving the rate of change in the proportions is just that the median person is more aware of things like the stock market, real estate, etc, now.

Basically, people are acting more efficiently. I'm more savvy than my parents were; they are/were proper working class "spend it as soon as it comes in, it might be gone" whereas I'm more like "never touch the capital, diversify".

(There are some issues, like how in the UK pensioners are given _extremely_ generous benefits, but I don't think that's relevant to the global picture).

If you're disciplined enough to put something in your calendar and do it over a period of months, without someone breathing down your neck to do so, whether you feel like doing it or not, then you are likely able to apply that effort in other areas of life.

So then it's a bidirectional correlation. You're more likely to be fit if you are wealthy and more likely to be wealthy if you are fit.

Essentially, what you're looking at is that people who engage in self improvement end up better off than those who don't.

It's a priori obvious but some people are uncomfortable with it for some reason - trauma response / coping mechanism, something like that.

Well, new things are generally more expensive than second hand and retrofitting older things is more expensive than doing nothing.

So, water is wet.

I would also argue that it isn’t necessarily true in the strictest way of thinking, because personally if I had infinite money and technicians to maintain things I’d have 70s-90s sports cars before everything got massive and wide and heavy. That’s way more expensive and luxurious than a new Model 3 or something.

They are both force multipliers. The issue of course is that technology almost always disproportionately benefits the more intelligent / ruthless.

The whole stranger danger thing in my view as an adult feels like a downward spiral. It's not like this in many countries.

In the UK it's kind of like - kids don't wander about alone because they might run into baddies, and now adults are afraid to interact with kids because they might be seen as a baddy, and this kind of loops around until no-one is interacting.

Basically, it's like any adult man is seen as a potential child predator, when in reality it's some tiny tiny fraction and in an ideal world we would be able to assume that they get sectioned / locked up quickly so we don't have to worry about it.

Meanwhile I can travel around many parts of Asia, for example, and parents and children alike have no issue interacting with strangers.

As a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere.

The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.

The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.

There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.

I think that's the point, showing vulnerability in front of others helps them to trust you.

If I offer to sell you a copy of Mein Kampf, should the dollar you try to hand me spawn a force field and prevent you from handing it to me?

I’m not really sure what cutthroat and cooperative mean in this context.

I see society as being cutthroat at the larger and more economic scales (e.g. global, obtaining / keeping your place within the elite of your country, etc) and more cooperative at the smaller scales (e.g. neighbours in your street, your friends, business partners).

You’re just seeing division.

The blue haired woman won’t date the fisherman and the farmer girl won’t date the metrosexual city boy.

Somehow you’re getting stuck on one side being universally correct, which in some extreme cases might be reasonable, but generally you are just looking at a societal split rather than one side moving hard.

IME, as a mid 30’s bloke in the UK in a stable relationship, guys haven’t significantly moved right wing, society as a whole has feminised (mostly in large cities). If anything it’s the women moving away from the previous norms - polling struggles with this because it defines “how the world was 30 years ago” (e.g. the home that almost everyone I know grew up in) as being hard right / conservative.

If you are overweight enough that running carries a significant risk of joint issues then just walking at speed is likely to be enough cardio for you.

They are just being daft.

Most of the UK has laws or bylaws at least against antisocial drinking e.g. if you're being a twat, violent, homeless, etc you will be asked to pour it out and leave, in incredibly rare cases I guess you might be fined but probably not.

Just having a beer in public at a picnic with friends is fine and is a national pastime.

These editorials all have a common fault which is that they fail the sniff test of “would you actually do this”. I don’t know if you would call it classism, or an attempt at manipulation, or what, it’s just weird.

It’s like - okay, I’ll have a wife and kids, go fishing with the boys, a house with a garden, a car, will fly on holidays etc, but “we” (real meaning: you) should use all of these weird technological bad substitutes.

The literal embodiment of the “eat bugs and be happy” meme.

It seems that you agree that they are wealthier than they would otherwise be because they try to minimise taxes.

The rest of your comment seems to be a political commentary on whether inheritance is legitimate. You're entitled to your opinion, but it comes across a bit like sour grapes to me.

It's always funny to read this sort of thing because it's like you're so close to connecting the dots but don't quite get it.

Is it not entirely logical that a cohort that actually pays attention to where 20%, 30%, 40% of their money is going ends up wealthier than one that doesn't?

You don't take out 50% to buy another asset.

You take out a few % a year to pay for your cost of living. For example, you rent a house, or take out a mortgage and pay for the house over time using the few % a year.

Even ignoring all tax considerations it's often better to buy with a mortgage rather than full cash.

For example a few years back you could get 1-2% mortgage rates in the UK. Right now it's more like 4-5%.

Ignoring tax fun, if you have 10 mil in a share index returning say 7-8% annually and you want to buy a 5 mil house then your best strategy is to sell say 500k for the deposit, then sell just enough to pay the interest + minimum repayment in all following years.

I agree with you that driving manually will become a luxury but it's important to recognise that it will manifest as a discount on self driving, not a surcharge on manual.

The only way in which I can see a surcharge on manual happening is if it becomes so incredibly rare that it becomes a niche product, or if there ends up being a bias e.g. it turns out that the pool of manual drivers is now biased towards people who like to drive in a risky manner.

If anything, in a competitive market that is able to price individual risk appropriately, the cost of manual insurance for you or I should be lower in the self driving world, because most other drivers are now "superhuman" and thus we should get into fewer accidents.

The greatest privilege I suppose I have is that I am able to consider a bog standard three bedroomed terraced family house as being normal regardless of how much bad Governmental policy has managed to inflate the market value.

I can pay taxes on one dollar. It's the principle.

In my country our threshold is significantly lower by the way - it's around a million, so bog standard houses get hit by it.

I think that inheritance taxes are wholly equivalent to wealth taxes, e.g. "you have a thing, I like that thing, give me that thing", and therefore morally wrong.

I could agree with them on the basis that the money were minimal and solely used for security e.g. police and military, it's an insurance policy against theft, the Government has a monopoly on force and that's better than warlords.

It's not used that way though, so I reject the premise.

I think that categorising it as hoarding is a bit of a loaded stance.

I own a home and I have assets that I use to pay my daily expenses. I am, by your definition, asset rich. I don't need to "do" anything other than maintain the investments. (I also do work, but that's besides the point).

On an intellectual level I realise that if we are to have a public sector it needs to be paid for, and that I'm never going to be the arbiter of exactly how the money is spent.

But at the end of the day, I sit here and think, how much do the police, military, and the other basic functions really cost, and is the right way to do that really to say -

Hey, you bought something, give me 20% of that!

Hey, you earned something, give me 20,40,45% of that!

Hey, you sold something, give me 20,28% of that!

Hey, you died? Give me some of that!

etc. etc. If you minimise nothing and just do the "golden path", then you end up paying well over 50% when you stack it, and it feels more like theft than a "trade for civilization" as some like to put it, because I know that it doesn't cost that much.

In my country taxation functions less like "we need this to run the Government", and more like "it's politically popular for us to redistribute". Which is logically how democracy is always going to function, but it doesn't mean that I have to agree.

I prefer to pay for things that I derive benefit from and I think my family, community, country etc benefit from, I prefer not to pay for things that don't, it's honestly no different to me than say, I'll buy a TV if I want one, I won't buy a 100 inch TV because I think that's unnecessary.

Because most of the time it takes a nice, feel good story and immediately sets the tone.

It's like having a casual chat with a colleague and then they trauma dump about what happened to them when they were 15 or whatever. Like okay, cool, take it to therapy, this isn't the place, you're just making things awkward for everyone.