Comment by cwdegidio | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cwdegidio | Hacker News Reader

My grandfather, born in the back hills of West Virginia, was forced to leave school when he was around 6 years old to chop lumber so his family had enough to survive. After he left WV, he worked a press at a forge and was a landscaper at night an on the weekends. He never has learned how to read, and sadly he is in the early stages of dementia so I think that ship has sailed. But... he was always a whiz with finances.

He was the kind of guy that can take a dollar on Monday and give you back $100 on Friday. He owns, I believe at this point, 8 properties including his own home.

I always regret not staying back home for a bit to try and help him, but I think by the time I would have been in a place to do it he would have told me he had just accepted the fact he would never learn to read. I can't imagine going through life like he did, how much I would hav missed.

But it also was always an inspiration to me. Every time I would feel my motivation for something academic or professional start to wane, I remind myself that this man who gave me and my siblings anything to help us succeed didn't get to do 90% of the things I take for granted.

It's really sad to see some folks on this thread call this man an idiot. From first hand experience, that's not necessarily the case and often people like him become far more clever than I'll ever be as a means of survival.

One of my grandfathers was illiterate as well. Not a finance whiz, but not stupid either. He was a rural blacksmith and he was rather good with engines and small appliances, repairing them for paying customers.

This is also a good moment to meditate on "right of repair". As recently as approx. 1970, most of the machinery in daily use could be repaired by a skillful, even though illiterate, person. The advent of semiconductors did away with that and nowadays even highly qualified people struggle to update a firmware against the vendor's wishes.

It's interesting you mention this. I got a chance to visit the family holler (rural mountain farmstead) when I was a teenager. Everyone back there was still driving old pickups, most of their tools were pretty old as well. You could tell a lot of things were kept just because of that very idea that they could repair them.

I know my grandfather, growing up as poor as he did, NEVER threw anything broken away until he was absolutely convinced that it could not be repaired. I wouldn't be suprised if most of his gardening equipment was from the 60's and 70's.

There is a little bit of a survivorship bias with regards to old tools. The crappy ones broke long ago but the quality ones survived. But also, there were not the modern manufacturing methods we have now back there. There was no hammer with a plastic integral handle, everything was wooden and cast iron or tool steel. You could easily buy or make a wooden replacement handle when the old one rotted away. There was no dirt cheap Chinese forged metals so everything was more expensive and you took better care of the metal parts. Dulled edges were sharpened, peened hammers would get grinded down, broken rivets could be replaced. The few electric tools were beefy, simple, and offered easy replacement of the brushes. You also may have just experienced what happens when poor people have little access to the latest and greatest cheap stuff at the store, they make do with what they have. Compare that to the numerous old cars still on the road in Cuba, parts are difficult to source so when something breaks you'd go to the mechanic with a rudimentary machine shop that could fabricate a replacement part.

We still have quite a few tools from the early 1900s at home. Scissors, a hammer, an old meat grinder. Everything made of iron, heavy as hell, but nigh indestructible.

The cleverest, wealthy guys, I know, barely finished high school.

I'm talking self made guys, and not guys from wealthy sympathetic families whom fund their kids until something turns a profit. Jonny at Dentek--you don't count, but daddy was a wiz.

If I had a child, buying real-estate, and learning the stock market, would be right up there with the three R's.

What you are describing is rent-seeking. Its easy to make money when house values and the stock market are expanding greater than the cost of money, particularly when you buy in at the start of the bubble.

Typically the limitation for real estate ownership is lack of access to credit, or a stable job enabling you to stay in one place.

Not all investing is rent seeking.

Rent seeking REQUIRES manipulation of public policy to benefit you.

Being a landlord at the 5 building scale gives you no leverage in public policy. It makes you a capitalist.

Rent-seeking behaviour isn't always about manipulating public policy. If public policy allows you to commit rent-seeking behaviour, you can still choose not to carry it out. (Of course, you could make a lot more money by rent-seeking from those who have no other options…)

But yes, your main point is valid: it is entirely possible to (e.g.) be a landlord without being abusive. Heck, you can even give your tenants a better deal than they could've got otherwise, if the circumstances are right. The issue is that this behaviour (in many places) is actively disincentivised, so unethical people can push out the ethical ones.

By that definition, wouldn't saving for retirement be rent-seeking?

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