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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

”The company recently got a boost after Gwyneth Paltrow flagged one of its villages on her website as a good Christmas present.”

I thought this was a joke, but clicking on the link reveals that a $172k village in Spain was indeed listed in “gift ideas” alongside such more traditional items as a $7700 Hermès surfboard.

As fitting a portrait of our present era’s wealth distribution as any. Future generations may look back on us as a bunch of Marie Antoinettes tinkering with our programming languages while the world burned.

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This is the premise of the TV show Schitt’s Creek.

A wealthy family bought a small village called “Schitt’s Creek” as a joke in 1991 and it ends up being their sole remaining asset after losing everything and they have to move there.

It's a pretty darn funny show to boot! Glad you mentioned this.

The Goop article that's linked to is titled "The Ridiculous but Awesome Gift Guide." Goop's click-bait content game is strong.

And they're not the only ones, of course. That Hermès surfboard is an amazing artifact of our time, too. (Thanks for noting it -- I would have missed it otherwise.) It's a conspicuous consumption collaboration between Hermès and Ardmore, a media-savvy artists' collective in Kwazulu-Natal.

On the subject of "après nous, le déluge," I once did a product demo for some people who worked for a very wealthy family. TWe didn't have much background info except that the family office was "very interested" in our product (a high-end video conferencing/collaboration environment).

It turned out that the use case revolved around "gifting." I didn't understand what that meant. "The family gives a lot of gifts," was the explanation, "to each other, to other people outside the family." The people I gave the demo to were the two people on staff in charge of gifting. Two full-time people.

Heck, just look at the thread on the cancellation of Apple's wireless charger. Part of me wished I could post a gif of the daunting and terrifying task of putting a phone in a docking station.

Ya I just buy a new one when my current one runs out of juice.

There is a story from my home town Vienna that a certain celebrity would come to the phone shop ever 2 weeks buying a new battery. That continued for a few months until some clerk asked her what she did with all of those and she was thus introduced to charging.

I know what you are thinking now. The battery lasted 2 weeks!!!

What I'm thinking is : why so much time before the shop workers asked about the batteries ?

Obviously an older story since I don't know of any recent phones with removable batteries. The modern version would be, of course, "...a certain celebrity would come to the phone shop ever 2 weeks buying a new phone..."

You say that in jest, but that is actually how this process works. Remember when touchID came out and many people mockingly thanked Apple for not having to enter 4-6 digits? Now how many people get pissed off when their wet thumb doesn’t read right and they have to enter their pin?

People get used to new luxuries.

I’m wondering if I’m not the only person who’s not locking his smart-phone. At the same time I’m also making sure to never leave it out of sight and I have no Internet banking. I also have my WiFi network at home open, have had it for more than 10 years now.

That seems unnecessarily risky to me.

It makes me not put on my phone things that I consider sensitive, like any of my CC details (the Apple account is connected to a spare debit card which hasn’t had any funds on it for quite some time), no sexting, no nude photos etc. I consider that a positive (and that’s why I thought a guy like Bezos would have been smarter than he really was, you cannot trust any electronic security thing when there’s literally a picture of your genital parts involved). On the other hand I’ve encountered lots of security-obsessed people here in HN who have given their fingerprints or, even worse, their face details to Apple on the premises of making their life more secure. I find that incredibly stupid.

That’s going to be fun when someone decides to use your connection to make a bomb thread, or worse, upload copyrighted content.

We don’t have that many bomb-threats in the country I live in and fortunately the big media companies haven’t yet got the local authorities by the balls when it comes to copyright infringement. Agreed, had I lived in a country like Germany I might have done differently.

I never used to lock my phone, but with fingerprint unlock the effort went away and so left it on.

At least apple’s implementation of it is so flawed it seems to require me to retry at least once >50% of the time.

Their face recognition however is amazing and works even in shitty conditions (such as dim light).

Good grief; this has been the case for as long as there have been people. Rich people and extravagant gifts aren’t some kind of new invention. Not everything has to be a commentary on class struggle or some kind of Marxist validation. And the world isn’t burning; it is more prosperous and has higher standards of living as well as the lowest absolute poverty than any other time in history. Life expectancy has never been higher: the world isn’t burning and unlike the time of Marie Antoinette, people aren’t starving in the streets. Our poor people are actually fat. Poor people during that time actually starved to death in some cases.

The WHO still considers hunger the greatest public health threat (more than AIDs, malaria, etc.). Starvation is far from a solved problem.

Just because things are slowly improving doesn’t mean we can’t critique the status quo.

I disagree. You argument is because something exists, that has always existed, it should be criticized. Yet this has been consistently declining. So we are making improvements on it year over year.

Rate of change is as important a concept as change itself.

You surely must be aware that life expectancy is dropping in your country, that starving in the streets still does happen, that the wealth gap is very real, and that the planet is on a path to being uninhabitable. And yet you propose that because poor Americans are fat, that the world must be OK?

I'n not disagreeing that history repeats itself. It does. And there is good in this world. But you might want to take a wider look around a bit before declaring how great everything is.

All of those statements are frames for our astronomical & rising across-the-board material abundance.

a) We have so much food and so little need for the human body to expend energy (cars, infrastructure, oil, etc) that it’s a public health crisis.

b) We’d rather have $0 than see our neighbor get $10 while we get $5. Indicating that we have satisfied all material desires and the only thing left to do is play social status games. It’s seriously incredible that inequality (rather than deprivation) can be anyone’s main concern.

c) The planet is profoundly affected because participation in (a) is getting less unequal, spreading from rich countries to the whole world.

You are describing the tradeoffs of too much improvement, not a general downward trend.

> As fitting a portrait of our present era’s wealth distribution as any.

Wishing to buy a $172k real estate property is hardly a problem or a sign of income inequality for a US citizen, where the average home listing price is about twice that value.

There is a difference between a $172k "gift idea" and the single largest purchase most people make in their entire lifetime as a loan repaid over most of their working career.

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