The Rich Don't Penny Pinch
seanmcclure.substack.com
seanmcclure.substack.com
> 1. Futile investment of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues. quotations 2. Procrastination.
My take is that bike shedding is focusing on and possibly inventing a task because you enjoy that task, at the expense of something else more pressing.
I find that the anecdote is useful occasional to bring it up when it is happening without seeming like a jerk
The author has clearly not spent a lot of time in normal mode around people who have to wear their mask for their full shift. Yes, those people forget. Not us keyboard warriors who put it on twice a day for a few minutes.
Plus wearing a mask somewhere hot sucks but cars have AC so they're cool and this drawback is removed.
You might as well say “have you ever seen someone wearing a hat in their car even though they’re inside a climate controlled car and don’t need sun protection on their head?”
Wearing masks since 2017, WHILE DANCING.
If you just keep it on you avoid the risks - and you get to breath less pollution and allergens as an added benefit.
Meanwhile the entire globe has been anxiously sanitizing their hands and everything they touch for 18 months (a lot of people in my family were even washing the grocery produce with soap and setting them aside for one day before use). All this long, long after scientists had pretty much figured out that risks of fomite transmission of Covid were vanishingly small.
Do all actually occur through aerosol? Some most likely happened like that, others may have been bigger droplets released talking or coughing, others may have been fomites from the droplets...
In my humble opinion, all of those forms occur. Viruses are passive things, they travel in respiratory secretions of any size big enough to contain them. They will lay there doing nothing until they get in contact with a target they can couple to and start replicating. It's better to think of contamination as a probabilistic event modulated by some factors, likely-hood of the event, resiliency of the virus outside of the body under the conditions that lead to the event, etc...
I highly doubt that the virus becomes incapable of infecting in a fomite in a doorknob, elevator button or keyboard. It may be unable to infect after a few hours but that should be plenty of time for an infection to occur.
Covid appears to have low probability of fomite infection - but there is little reason to take unnecessary risks (given how ineffective humanity has been at stopping the infection).
Plus, I know people who just caught the flu. Why not kill two birds with a stone?
That seems to have been the mindset behind authorities deciding not to disseminate this information to the public. But I am not convinced.
That argument only makes sense if people's ability to be cautious and attentive and disciplined in following rules is an infinite resource. You have given people multiple rules they need to follow to avoid getting the virus without informing them which ones are more important to follow than others. For example consider the two guidelines: don't meet people in indoor spaces and don't touch unsanitized surfaces. Both require similar amount of effort/discipline but breaking the first is thousands of times more dangerous than the other.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...
Just spending 15-20 minutes once talking indoors with a person, whose covid status you're unsure of, is more dangerous than not bothering with the whole surface cleaning, hand sanitizing theatre during the entire pandemic. I am not sure that most people appreciate this.
Your understanding of the virus is based on incorrect understanding of how the virus worked that people had in the first few months of the pandemic. This was exactly the point I was making. While the scientific knowledge improved, this information was never really communicated to the people.
We also had to test every week. I've had so many swabs up my nose that that i keep a completely straight face when doing that kind of test now.
I also don't take off my shirt, pants, and shoes the second I get in the car.
> If we are only taking into consideration the information that is immediately available then the situation does indeed seem pretty ridiculous. But if we stop and consider what might be the broader context we can imagine scenarios where wearing a mask alone makes a lot of sense.
Also,
> Imagine you are in your car driving and you notice someone in another car, alone, wearing a mask. This is during the covid pandemic so seeing someone wearing a mask is not overly surprising. But then you stop and think wait a second, this person is alone and wearing a mask. Isn't that odd? In fact it seems downright ridiculous. Why would anyone wear a mask in their car when they are alone?
> ...
> Doesn't it makes more sense to just give yourself a blanket policy that says "I put my mask on whenever I leave the house, and don't take it off until I get home." That beats trying to keep track of who needs me to wear the mask, chances of dropping the mask, dirty hands touching the mask, losing the mask, etc.
> I'm not trying to suggest here whether or not people should wear their masks in the car when by themselves.
This begs for "I Wear My Face Mask in the Car"[1].
A penny pincher is the person who goes to dinner with a dozen people and ends up spending an hour trying to "fairly" divide the check among everyone. Or, the one who says a few days later that you should treat him to lunch because he only had a single glass of wine whereas everyone else had two or some such.
Sure, it is a good idea to follow useful rules of thumb to minimize cognitive load, but it is also important to be able to know when a rule of thumb should be discarded.
Whether the rich are rich because they do this stuff or because we notice it more when a rich person acts this way is not clear.
Alcoholic drinks in most popular cities are $10+ per drink, if not $18+ in tier 1 cities. If someone that does not drink alcohol is called a penny pincher for not wanting to spend thousands of pennies for others’ alcohol consumption, then what is a person who expects others to spend thousands of their pennies for their alcohol consumption called?
Same situation with vegetarians going out with meat/fish/poultry eaters, since meat dishes cost a decent amount more.
Very odd to me that expecting someone else to pay vastly more for your consumption is considered OK, effectively ostracizing the budget constrained people in your network from dining out with you.
If this is a weekly or daily event, it makes sense to make this more fair.
In my opinion, stressing about anything less than $100/year is penny pinching.
It is just crazy to me that with all the price increases and increase in income/wealth gap, and increases in variety of diets, that it would still be considered taboo to not want (or even be able to) pay for others’ excess.
I go out of my way to make sure if I am having extra to chip in extra, but I certainly would not look down on anyone that insisted on paying for only what they consumed.
Definitely true one should not judge when you see someone insisting on paying their fair share. You never know the details of their personal lives.
Yes, literally, the dictionary meaning of a "penny pincher" is one who does not want to part with his pennies.
The author of the article, on the other hand, seems to call people "penny pinchers" if they do not adopt rules of thumb but instead painstakingly analyze all alternatives. Sure, paralysis by analysis can be bad or there is nothing wrong with focusing one's cognitive energies sparingly etc, but there is very little in the article about penny pinching.
You preferences may say "it is more important for me to save seven bucks in this context." That does not compel other people to enjoy your preferences.
In my life, I have been in groups where if a few people consumed some relatively more expensive food or drinks, they are responsible enough to take care of that.
Also, when you go out with a large group, you do tip the wait staff generously, right?
I understood the context to be pennies being insignificant. Thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of pennies are not insignificant (to most people), so penny pincher would be a useless term in that situation. The alternative is where even saving a billion dollars, since it can be translated to 100 billion pennies, is being a penny pincher.
> You preferences may say "it is more important for me to save seven bucks in this context." That does not compel other people to enjoy your preferences.
It is not usually seven bucks when you are out with a decent size group in a city for a few hours.
> In my life, I have been in groups where if a few people consumed some relatively more expensive food or drinks, they are responsible enough to take care of that.
Ideally, but many times I have been out where it needs to be brought up. But that does not make one a penny pincher.
> Also, when you go out with a large group, you do tip the wait staff generously, right?
How is this relevant?
Dining out isn't about the food, it's about company and companionship, and I don't eat with anyone I'm not willing to pick up the entire tab for, because the pleasure of their company is well worth it. If their company is not worth that, I'd say that's the definition of wasted time.
So you restrict yourself to life opportunities (restaurants) where you can afford an entire group tab?
You naughty penny pincher!
Who is imposing on whom? I did not write the vegetarians and teetotalers force others to not eat meat or not drink alcohol.
> Also, if someone is struggling financially, adding a social purity constraint to their lives seems like a self sabotaging substitute where they are choosing for luck and opportunity to pass them over instead of accepting their circumstances and changing them. As though they can afford purity, without considering what it costs.
I do not even understand what the context of the word “purity” is in your comment. I find the whole theme of the comment to be bizarre.
> Dining out isn't about the food, it's about company and companionship, and I don't eat with anyone I'm not willing to pick up the entire tab for, because the pleasure of their company is well worth it. If their company is not worth that, I'd say that's the definition of wasted time.
I would go out almost every day of the week in my 20s in a very expensive city. With lots of different people, and random people could be invited at anytime by anyone. I certainly do not think it reasonable to want to, or even be able to, pick up the entire tab for all the groups one goes out with.
I am not talking about a small group or one on one meal with a friend you see once every year. For that, yes, paying or splitting evenly is not a big deal, although I would never let my friends consistently pay extra for me outside of occasions.
Well said. In fact, I've made it a personal rule that if I invite someone out I pick up the tab to simply remove any budget constraint barriers for people spending time with me. Some of the people I most enjoy spending time with are much more budget constrained than I am, but I have no issue with picking up the tab if it lets me have a conversation with them for a few hours in a place where they can be relaxed enough from the stress of their daily life to mutually enjoy it.
I'm curious about this. Why not? I'm not vegetarian, but I go out for dinner with vegetarian friends all the time. They order a vegetarian dish, I order a meat one. It isn't an issue.
Similarly with drinking. As long as they want to be there, why would I care if they drink? If they're judging you for drinking, that's a tangential issue.
You say "Dining out isn't about the food" - so then why do you care what food your companion eats? As long as they're happy, what difference does it make?
I also have friends that are on restrictive diets or who don't drink and I invite them out with me regularly. The reality though, is that many people take personal choices and turn them into a religion that they then feel the need to proselytize. I simply don't spend time with people like that, but I can imagine those are the sorts of people grandparent has in mind when they wrote that comment.
If you said to someone "we should get a coffee sometime" and they said, "thanks, but I don't drink coffee," they would have missed the point or were being bizzarely rude. I'm saying many dietary choices have the same effect. If I said, "we should get a burrito," and you said, "No thanks, I'm gluten intolerant," you're not going to get a second invitation, not because you have a medical issue, but because the person inviting you was expecting a, "yes lunch in principle, and we'll deal with details after."
Maybe you legit used your condition as an excuse to avoid socializing, which fine and your own business, but when you decline invitations, they dry up and nobody owes you another one. Being "lame," means too weak or injured to do something, and a lot of restrictions when you lead with them just make people think you are lame.
That's quite harsh to all the people who cannot join you for dinner on a hike because of some illness or disability.
Describing non-drinking as a "control ritual" and "self sabotaging substitute" is an equally harsh description of people's personal choices or medical needs. E.g. pregnancy.
> I don't eat with anyone I'm not willing to pick up the entire tab for, because the pleasure of their company is well worth it.
I never thought of measuring friendship and companionship with money...
In the scenario you propose, the disabled person meets us at the bar, the recovering alcoholic drinks cranberry juice, and the pregnant woman buys because she's probably the only one with a job, some chirp back and forth, nobody complains, and we get to be together. It's not hard. The lifestyle vegan isn't there because we have other things to talk about, and we can always see him at crossfit.
If we have something to manage in a social situation, I think it's still on us to show we are capable of enjoying ourselves.
That's not paying for other people's alcohol consumption. It's paying a fair share of the expenses that were involved to create this particular communal experience. Which also means that if somebody is budget constrained, the group may want to keep that in mind - no matter what they order. I've been routinely in groups where somebody with budget constraint paid less. Not because they ate or drink less. But because the group decided that it was their fair share, based on the group's perception of fairness.
That is interesting, I have never been in this situation because it seems awkward to bring it up explicitly. That is why I think it is better to simple expect people to pay for what they consume, so it may be implicitly understood that they may be budget constrained without it being a topic.
I imagine most people who are budget constrained simply opt to decline an invitation to meet with friends if they know the average bill will include an extra couple drinks they cannot afford. To me, this is a worse outcome than spending the very little mental effort required to allocate expenses individually.
One can also remedy this by not spending time with people who do not on their own initiative recognize the inequity of the situation and help make it fair. In fact perhaps you can think of it as an excellent investment of one's money to ferret out the inconsiderate, in order to eliminate them from the friend circle.
As an ex-vegetarian (who does drink), i think it's ok and many have ways around this. If someone invited me to a steak-house, and all i got was a salad, i'd probably ask that host to cover the check and i'd buy everyone drinks elsewhere or a meal another day. It hides the "my $15 salad to your $45 steak" issue with a veil of generosity.
Also regarding drinks, I do drink - but if someone at the table didn't drink and the rest of the table did, i'd do the same thing as the steak-eater and cover their meal and make up later, again, act generously. Also, i would never order more drinks than anyone else, or n+1 from the lowest number of drinks consumed as a social policy.
Most restaurants will assume you want to split the check by default when you're with a big group, and most restaurant software lets you ring in dishes by the seat rather than by the table, while also splitting shared things across all of the checks at a table (this also helps service teams deliver the right dish to the right guest). Add to that the convenience of chip and pin machines that come to the table, and it is just a non-issue.
I'm American, so I understand that lots of restaurants in the US resist doing things this way. But it is quite silly considering that the software and hardware already exists to handle it all.
Well said. I disagree with the article title, due to my experience with delivering pizza.
We all certainly knew the non-tippers. And they almost always were in the wealthiest neighborhoods. So once you go to a house 3 or 4 times, and get stiffed (or hear about it from the other drivers), they become your lowest priority.
Working class and poor neighborhoods almost always got better service and faster food delivery from us because we knew they tipped more often. The non tippers typically ended up with cold pizza and dropped 2 liters cause we didn't give a crap.
Not saying your experience can't also be true! I was fortunate to have my parents help with money and was fairly charitable, so maybe i didn't notice other behavior.
On the other hand, the "gig economy" has really screwed up pizza delivery since the shops started laying off their own drivers. There is no control over quality, and tips don't really count for anything anymore. The dude who showed up an hour late with a cold pizza got no tip, but so what? He'll never be back, and doesn't answer to the manager of the restaurant. Good tip for a good, prompt delivery, sure. But that won't earn better service, because we'll never see that driver again, either.
Maybe the author is struggling with some sort of penny pinching behavior that preceded a life loss, but this is an incorrect conclusion.
Sometimes life just happens. And it has nothing to do with the validity or value of your preceding actions, but it's certainly a commentary on the futility of many of our efforts. The author sounds like he needs a good wisdom walk down the book of Ecclesiastes:
I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all."
Ownership of things that have actual value is the number one way to becoming wealthy. Owning flashy toys and extravagant dinners all the time is a quick way to spend it all for 'the rich'. One dude I follow put it best the wealthy exploit the rich by renting them flashy toys, the rich try to get money from the middle class by selling them things.
--->
Pennywise, pound-wise.
If you want to read real, well-researched data about the demographics and behaviors of actual millionaires, Thomas J. Stanley compiled and analyzed the data, and wrote a number of books on the topic. Furthermore, Felix Dennis, the late but an actual billionaire, wrote a hilarious book with a tongue-in-cheek title.
Biggest correlations with wealth are the marshmallow test as a child and then not participating in low-/no-skill chance gambling as an adult.
People spend too much time thinking about some things relative to the marginal benefit of each second/minute/unit of time spent on that decision. Conversely, people spend too little time on some decisions whose outcome will be greatly improved by spending another second/minute/hour...etc.
There is a heuristic I learned related to a bunch of others, but it's being able to do a fast assessment of the returns on precision. I talk about it to clients in conceptual terms of doing depth-first searches vs. breadth-first. Technologists tend to be depth first and very deep in a relatively narrow context, where dynamics people tend to be breadth first across a wider set of contexts.
The penny pinching metaphor the author uses reduces to an admonition to look at the "bigger picture." Personally I dislike that trope, but a general set of cognitive tools for depth-first thinkers to pop up conceptual levels, particularly into ones where they can apply their skills to navigate the uncertainties of breadth-first thinking with its dynamics of multiple simultaneous equivalents, it would be really useful to summarize and teach.
There is the issue where the details of precision in fact have nonlinear effects and they are worth drilling down into, but that's part of the analysis.
In the realm of direct interpersonal credit, greedy solving often seems like "the answer:" you study for the test if you want to pass it, follow the polite mannerisms of your society, and take logical steps presented to you by your environment(like following signs and signals to navigate traffic). Situationally, it can work. And top performers in competitive fields are extreme examples of the greedy solution working: monastically training to be the best at what you do with regular drills, harsh lifestyle modifications and risky medicine does get results.
But everyone who's lived long enough without losing their head knows that the greedy path falls off a cliff eventually. You can't "just" follow the advice of professionals and scholars to be healthy, wealthy and wise. And neither does getting the gold medal give you the happy end. But as the article points out, there isn't an easy story to apply to a complex framing of life.
if youre worrying about wether your part of the check is $7.23 or $11.17 because you didn't have wine, you're not in the right mindset to make money.
i follow the rule: if im going to argue over money, its because im going to sue you.
if its not enough to warrant a lawyer, i just take the L and forget about it.
i am however very serious about work and investments.
If they can’t cover and never do, that’s fine - you simply take the L and call it an “investment” in the experience of sharing time with someone you care about.
That being said, there's good frugality and bad frugality. Bad frugality is being "penny wise and pound foolish," spending less now in ways that result in spending more later.
Saving money now on regular checkups, which leads to a health emergency later is an obvious one. But what about spending money on ergonomics, PPE, diet, exercise, etc. It can be hard to quantify the long term risk/benefit.
Admittedly, I've been notoriously bad at realizing that I've entered that phase. On three high-profile occasions (two computers and a car) I've exceeded the saleable value of the thing in upkeep costs, in the span of just a few months - it would've been cheaper to divest and replace.
Determining that you've crossed that inflection point is, I assume, a skill.