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Comment by BlameKaneda | Hacker News Reader

I came across a Reddit post a while back and the user said that for whatever reason people of wealth were attracted to them. As a result, they were able to learn a lot about their lifestyles, habits, etc, on an intimate level that most of us wouldn't know. Based on the detailed information that OP provided, it wouldn't surprise me if it was true.

They said that one of the most important factors for the ultra-wealthy was time. This involved wealthy individuals:

- Hiring personal assistants (to run errands)

- Hiring personal chefs (no time wasted cooking)

- Owning a private jet (no time lost booking a flight, going through security, etc)

We can't control the flow of time, but we can most certainly use it to our benefit.

Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...

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The really big time benefit to flying private is about schedule flexibility rather than security etc (though that's important too). Flying private an executive can turn up and leave 5 minutes later, and be on the road 5 minutes after landing. If a meeting overruns and there's only one commercial flight a day with the relevant city pair, then they're just out of luck. Flying private, it's not a problem.

The economics of whether to own vs rent (netjets etc) is essentially about scale.

I completely agree. If I wanted to fly down to Austin, TX for BBQ I could do so in a day, rather than fly in and fly back home based on the airline's schedule.

Elvis used to fly himself and his posse to Colorado (from Memphis) for fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches.

Then back, right after the meal.

Austinite here... your hypothetical BBQ trip sounds exactly like the type of thing some super-rich outsider would do. Personally, I don’t buy into the hype. The BBQ is good but not “wait in line for hours” good. I’d rather smoke my own meats if it’s going to take all day.

presumably its about the people attending, not the food...

Funny thing was a guy went to Texas for this super famous BBQ from NY... When he got there, he told them "I came all the way from NY just for this"

The BBQ place looked at him and said "uh... we ship directly to NY, you know" hehehe

Is there a GrunHub for private jets?

First thing that came to mind was Goldbelly: https://www.goldbelly.com/

If I were rich, I'd use it all the time.

In many cases, you can also land at smaller, regional airports, that are closer to your destination/meeting.

I think the comment you're replying to meant that there was no time lost going through the security that common people have to.

That has a strong parallel with how I went from public transit to driving a car. Before, I had to leave at an exact time to make the train, if I didn't I'd be half an hour late. I guess private jets are the same on a long distance scale. And a few orders of magnitude in cost.

Time is the ultimate luxury. I remember two separate reddit AMAs with centenarian women, who had lived from candle-lit houses and horse-drawn carriages to moon landings and the internet. When asked what was their favorite invention in their lives, both answered the washing machine. They suddenly had much more time for themselves!

And electricity powers washing machines.

Robert Caro masterfully paints the picture of what life was like in rural Texas for women making homes before their area was electrified. It wasn't just time saved. It was hard, physical labor that caused their bodies to break down that they were saved from.

Really quite hard to fathom for any of us accustomed to growing up without that burden.

I remember this chapter vividly -- just one of many reasons to recommend Caro's epic biography of LBJ.

Vivid is the right word for it!

I had no understanding of what that sort of life must have been like before reading the chapter, but after it stuck with me so strongly. I felt wholly inadequate trying to summarize it above.

which book was that in ?

Believe it was the first - title: The Path to Power.

Goodreads link

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86524.The_Path_to_Power

If you're ever in the Austin area, the ... jaunt ... out to Johnson Ranch (Stonewall, TX) is an interesting one.

It's about 60 miles from Round Rock or downtown. I prefer the northern route.

The ranch is ... out in the middle of nowhere. And if you keep on heading West, even that seems densely populated.

Imagining that without power, gas, or phones, gives pause.

https://www.nps.gov/lyjo/planyourvisit/visitlbjranch.htm

Back then I imagine the real problem wasn't the "hardness" and physical demands of the labor, but the risk of physical injury due to poor safety controls/practices that "caused their bodies to break down."

For women especially, hard physical labor, assuming it's done safely, will do more good than harm. It's one of the few effective means to combat osteoporosis, and something folks have to go out of their way to try reintroduce in the form of exercise and gym memberships these days.

I have a construction worker father and stay-at home sedentary mother whose only labor in life was childbirth and light house cleaning. There's no way in hell I'd sign up for her outcomes over his, even including his acute injuries from easily prevented poor worker safety like the nail in the eye or skin cancer from decades of shirtless hard labor.

It seems like it was both. I have framed houses and I have shingled roofs. The former is physically demanding. The latter is back breaking.

Some excerpts from Caro:

> the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands

> the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.

> light house cleaning.

I'm blind, and my screen reading software's speech synthesizer amusingly pronounced this as "lighthouse cleaning". Which is a very different thing and made you sound fairly unreasonable...

My grandmother grew up on a ranch. It now is mostly family cabins, but the original cabin is still there with the original hand cranked washer. One summer we spent a month there and had to do our laundry by hand and then dry it on the line. It gave me a great appreciation for modern washers and dryers.

Exactly.

Back in the day I did consulting work on a personal level for an ultra-wealthy person. He was into making electronic music as a passion. This was in the days of 486/pentium, so the tools available to do this were relatively expensive. He'd create something and slip a couple of hundred to a club DJ to play it when he went out.

Anyway, he would use a floppy and throw it away. I realized he did this to save time. No need to format the disk and reuse, he would just pull another one out. He was buying time.

It infuriated a relative of mine when I told the story due to waste, but I explained to her those minutes he would spend formatting the disks wasn't spent. He came out ahead.

It's easy to be wasteful and come out ahead in the short-term. I guess it's just some more plastic in the ocean or landfill to him.

"Back in the day" this wasn't even a consideration. It's only been very very recently that people have started thinking about plastics breaking down and going into the water system.

That's simply not true. It's been a concern for decades.

Obviously it was a concern since the very first plastic item was manufactured. But who was aware this was a concern? It's only been in the last 5 years or so that I can recall hearing anything about it. And only in the last 2 years or so has it really risen to the level of concern for me. Maybe we are reading totally different sources that it has been on your radar for decades.

As a datapoint... Back in elementary school 25 years ago, they most certainly were teaching my class that plastic doesn’t decompose and how important it was to reduce waste.

As one anecdata point, I was born in 1978 and I can't remember ever not having this concern. Not sure what you mean by very recently, though--one could say plastic was even invented very recently.

My parents grew up in an environment (semi-rural) where/when it seems to have been normal to leave trash around, though. This was in the 50s. I guess they saw the issues and raised my siblings and me differently.

It makes me happy that more people are thinking about not trashing their environment!

That really is a government and market policy concern though. Expecting people to globabally adjust their profit-seeking behavior to include ecology is just wishful thinking. People simply are not able, even if well intentioned, to decide what matters and what doesn't.

Many will say that expecting the government to help is hopeless. However, that is fatalism, and an improperly functioning government doesn't negate the fact that only government can guide the market to preserve the resources of the future (including our health.)

These are not the people of the lowest class though. The privilege of earning more is given by others, so you should learn how to behave and move the society towards a better future since that future is where your wealth is going to be preserved better.

> "The privilege of earning more is given by others"

Meaning what exactly? Anybody is free to create value and realize profit from it. It's not a privilege. Nor does it mean you "should" do anything.

Except that this exact thinking is what led a bunch of liberally-minded people to be outvoted in favour of Trump.

No one “should” do anything, except that you pay for not doing it in the end.

Also fewer problems. Reused floppies had more “I/O Error” and dirt transfer into drives.

> Owning a private jet (no time lost booking a flight, going through security, etc)

The problem with private jets is that they severely limit where you can travel, unless you don't care about leaving the continent. Private jets tend to be small (unless you're John Travolta), and small jets have limited range. Accordingly, they can't easily cross oceans. If all you care about is going between NY and FL or CA, then they work fine, but if you want to fly to Asia, you'll have to book a ticket on a major airline like the rest of us.

You just have to be rich enough. At this level these folks fly transatlantic without a second thought. Netjets/fractional level yeah you're scraping by at small airports but your own Gulfstream and you're at a whole new level.

A Gulfstream 5 has a range of 12,000km. For comparison, a Boeing 787-8 (one of the longest ranged commercial airliners, often used for transpacific travel) has a range of about 13,000km.

Even the smaller private jets, such as a Citation, have a range of 6,500km, which is still more than enough to go transatlantic in a single flight, or even US<->Asia in 2 hops. For comparison, a Boeing 757 (often used for smaller US<->Europe and US<->South America flights) has a range of 7,200km.

Yeah I got my dreams crushed by looking into private jets. The distance to go from BOS to HAN is ~13,000km, of which only one of the newer gulfstreams with a range of ~14,000km might be able to do. I guess that's why a lot people still fly business/first class.

That’s a pretty exotic route with zero nonstop business/first class options available.

I wonder if he meant BOS-HND instead, which is a very common route. (HND is Haneda airport in Tokyo.)

No I meant BOS to HAN :)

I'm not aware of any direct fligts, but usually it's just 1 layover away.

It's a great city (Hanoi), although I have no doubts that Tokyo is awesome too.

One thing that I'm always amused with is for some reason or other many of these business jets can fly way higher than commercial planes. Most commercial air traffic don't fly higher than like 41,000 feet.

If you go into any flight tracker app that lets you filter air traffic by altitude, you'll find many of these business jets buzzing around up at 50,000 feet or so. Not sure what regulations (or lack of) lets them fly so much higher than normal commercial aircraft but there you have it....

They have a better power to weight ratio and the smaller air-frames can handle the pressure differential better.

Taking multiple stops to cross the Pacific is still greatly lengthening your trip, and not just because of the pit-stop. See the other response here from JCharante about flying BOS-HAN; you can't do that with a 6500km range. And you can't stop in the middle, because there's no airports near the North Pole. So you'll have to do something like stop on the west coast, then stop again in Hawaii or Guam. Your total trip will be much greater. Why bother with this when you can do it non-stop in first-class with JAL or ANA? You'll have more comfort and better service than on your Citation too.

You could always do Boston to Anchorage to Hanoi

For most intercontinental routes, you're not going to be lucky enough to have a decent airport to do a fuel stop at without taking a significant detour, which costs both fuel and time.

A mid-size jet Cessna Citation has range of 5,100 miles - it's one of the most popular mid size jets.

5100nm isn't nearly far enough to go from the east coast of the US to Asia.

It is not, but that much range is an exception even with airliners.

It's not an "exception", it's totally normal for the huge jets that Asian airlines fly for their intercontinental routes. Sure, you don't need that much range to go from NYC-LON, but I'd argue that that's an "exception" as such a short route that happens to cross an ocean and is also popular. The Pacific is a much larger ocean. You're not going to get between any major Asian destination (China, Japan, Korea) and other major endpoints (Australia, US, Europe) non-stop with such short range, but the Asian airlines do these routes all the time.

Are most airliners intercontinental? I am not sure, I know data for Europe.

Most airliners? I doubt it; the smaller ones like 737 are usually used for shorter routes. By numbers, I would guess the large majority of air traffic is shorter-route, and with smaller planes. Most air travelers, after all, are not traveling between places as far apart as Syndey and NYC.

But that's not the issue here; my contention way above was the private jets aren't any good for extremely long-distance intercontinental routes, and no one has disproven this assertion yet, though several have tried.

Modern private jets have ranges competitive with commercial airliners. They can also land and refuel in many places along the way that big jets can't.

I know a few people who travel across oceans in private jets. Even with the stops, you can come out ahead in travel time and total comfort.

>Even with the stops, you can come out ahead in travel time and total comfort.

I seriously doubt that. I've been in corporate jets like Citations. They're really tiny inside; I can't stand up in them at all. Small jets do much worse with turbulence, and being so small inside, they just aren't going to have the amount of space available that you get with a first-class "cubicle" that you get on one of the top-tier international airlines. And no, you won't come out ahead in total travel time; those little planes just can't cross the Pacific in one hop, especially if you're coming from the East Coast US.

The people you know probably just go from the East Coast to London or something, which is a pretty short trip. Try flying to Australia or Japan instead.

By this logic you should always take public transit or train where you can stay productive and connected while in transit.

True, but taking public transit means that you abide by certain schedules. If I had a chauffeur then we'd leave when I wanted.

Growing up in a middle class home in Asia usually has two of the above three items in the list.

I have relatives in an Asian country where even the middle class can afford to have maids and a driver or two. Whenever I visit I'm never quite used to having someone take your dishes away (versus cleaning them yourself), doing your laundry, etc. I doubt I'll get over it any time soon.

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