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Comment by pyre | Hacker News Reader

The fact that you're talking about $650k - $700k being in your price range means that you're doing better than a lot of people.

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It seems explicit that $650k is not in the poster's price range, but they offer those valuations as examples of the lower end or nicer housing options available.

Is that the metric you want to choose to decide how happy you should be about a given situation?

Comparative performance with people in the same demographic and income range seems a lot better. Otherwise you can pretty argue ad absurdum that yeah, you aren't starving, you aren't dead so everything is good! R-r...right?

well, the reality is that level of optimism is required for the 800 million people living on a dollar a day, and if they can do it then perhaps those more fortunate could learn something there, as the Somalian I met said, 'nobody promised me tomorrow', or the popular 'yesterday was better than today, and today will be better than tomorrow'...

Oh please, I am barely holding back my tears.

Is that unreasonable for people to improve their living conditions and be disappointed when those don't even match the ones of their parents? Or should they just accept the extreme poverty threshold as the sole upper bound required to be content about their lives.

Ok, if you go that route, don't complain about rich people wanting more and more. They are just "improving their living conditions".

>don't complain about rich people wanting more and more.

I don't. That's the basic human thing to do and harnessing that greed has lifted billions of people out of poverty.

But the comment you were replying to was implying that nobody is going to get sympathy because they are in the top 1% and feel like they must be in the top 0.5%.

There's 'sweet, a promotion, I can finally afford that nice car' "greed" and then there's 'lets destroy 6000 people their jobs to make the shareholders happy so I can get a $1.000.000 bonus' greed.

So, accumulating ever more amounts of personal wealth is fine as long as you aren't the the top 1%, er 0.1%, er 0.01%, er, as long as you have less than someone you know.

There has to be a line somewhere. I don't claim to be the person qualified to draw it, but society has to be willing to define it and say "Wealth accumulation on this side of the line is OVERALL healthy for promoting fair and evenly distributed prosperity, and wealth accumulation on the other side is OVERALL destructive and benefits only a small few."

And what if that line was drawn and you are on the wrong side?

That would be a nice problem to have.

I can't say whether it's unreasonable. Doing better than their parents and is certainly what many people have come to expect. But it seems like an unsustainable expectation at least in the absence of some revolutionary breakthrough in energy and food production.

And our parents' lives don't have to serve as a measuring stick for our lives. There is no law of nature that says we deserve to live better than our parents, or in fact live in this world at all.

why is it reasonable ? what right did your gene line earn to be a permanent recipient of privilege?

I think your rhetorical questions distill down to: "Is it unreasonable that societies expect conditions improve over time and act so as to bring that about"?

No, I don't think that's unreasonable at all. I think it's a good value to adopt and a good goal to strive for. No guarantees of success, of course, but it's the road I wish more of us would choose.

None of those dollar a day people are living in London or anywhere within 2000km. You need to earn a dollar a minute to even have a hope of a basic apartment in the city. Even then it's a long-shot.

Thats about 75K a month...

$60/hour is 75k/mo?

Ha. I had an extra 8* in there...9600 per month.

525k a year to rent a basic apartment?

You don't spend a year of salary on a house, most people don't have anything close to that cashflow. And here, OP is talking about their budget which implies they are taking a mortgage on at least 15 years.

Grandparent said:

>You need to earn a dollar a minute to even have a hope of a basic apartment in the city.

I guess you could choose the ridiculous interpretation that the poster meant $1/ minute, 24 x 7 x 365....

Or you could have picked the more charitable (dare I say reasonable?) interpretation that they meant earnings of $10k/mo, which is a little bit low tbh, if we're talking pre-tax dollars.

Comparative performance with people in the same demographic and income range seems a lot better.

That seems like a great way to always be depressed about your position in life. Someone is always doing better than you are.

While it may be true that the OP is "doing well" salary wise, your comment detracts from the point he is making. just because someone makes a lot of money doesn't mean that their problems are any less valid.

I think it is more OP calling the world mad when $6000,000NZ is the price range for a "decent" house. Heck, even the ability to move to another country is luxury enough. The 1% calling crazy what the 0.1% do is laughable to most I presume. I'm in the 1% so I'm not sure how the 80% really view such comments but I imagine it's farcical to them.

OP is upper middle class, at best. Let's not use rethoric that would only apply to people that are actually considerably wealthy regardless of the comparative entity you choose to rank them against i.e billionaires and millionaires.

A couple trying to buy a nice house with their combined salaries isn't insane. In particular when that is the norm they were used to and who is slowly disintegrating.

In terms of purchasing power for the world they are not upper middle class. They are in the higher eschalons in terms of wealth and economic means. I don't decry their plight but rather seek to put context to it. People in their income bracket have driven up land and housing prices in Belize, Costa Rica, Panama, Thailand, and elsewhere. That didn't make the world crazy in their eyes but having prices driven up in Auckland did. That perspective is crazy.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/07/16/are-you-in-t...

$80,000 USD for 4 people is "High Income" globally.

600k NZD is mad, in my life experience. It's a crazy amount of money compared to average incomes in NZ - especially for a house that likely needs work.

Of course it does. People with money have options - they have no excuses for not being comfortable with their life.

The poor guy can only choose among a few places on earth to live, needs to work a lot and will have a hard time surviving otherwise.

This complaining guy can live basically anywhere or could have been living at the level of the poor guy and retire after a few years of earning his 99th percentile income.

I just can't fathom the mindset of people who think they deserve to live a high society lifestyle. Their position is FAPP strictly better than 99% of people currently alive on Earth.

Standard of living is relative but largely local/regional. Saying that everyone in NZ has it made because they should just be happy they weren't born in Bangladesh or something is incredibly short-sighted.

Thinking on a global scale is the literal opposite of short-sightedness.

The median home price in Auckland is > NZ$1M. He is saying a house he would refuse to buy costs $700k.

Unfortunately for those in many industries, Auckland is one of the few viable options for those that want to live in New Zealand and have access to a good job market. It has effectively priced out many from owning a home, even those earning a good income.

Those are median prices in the area.

He didn't say that's his price range, he said those are the prices.

Big difference.

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