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Comment by steveBK123 | Hacker News Reader

"An example from Ogilvy Vice Chairman Rory Sutherland: If you’re a top executive, turning up to work on a bicycle is a high-status activity because it was a choice and not a necessity. But if you work at Pizza Hut, turning up on a bike means you can’t afford a car."

This tidbit reminds me of a similar anecdote (that my experience aligns with) re: the modern upper class that wearing a $2k Rolex or driving a $70k BMW is frowned upon. But instead they have eccentric "hobbies" requiring $10ks of of equipment, inclusive of "needing" $10k viking stove/range, and $10k subzero fridge/freezer in your kitchen because you are a "foodie" and doing a $500k home Reno because you have good architectural taste and style. They probably still own a $70k Volvo (or now Tesla) anyway :-). In these scenarios I think it's because the $2k watch or $70k car is too easily attained by lower classes that they are no longer considered signals by the upper classes. However blowing $500k renovating a perfectly livable home, or $10k on an appliance you could spend as little as $1k on.. is not.

Another countersignal that the article points in the direction of is level of professional vs casual attire in the workplace. My friends and I are far enough in our careers that personally I've worn sneakers to work for the last 10 years, no business slacks, and sporadically tuck in my collared shirt. The last round of job searching doing zoom interviews, I wore my hoodie for half the calls. If I had done this while job searching out of college, during my internship, or at my first job.. I would not be where I am today.

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I think there's a bit of an idea now that you should be expressing yourself with your money, not expressing society's ideas. Around cars and watches, this creates a little bit of a "dead zone" for prestigious professionals.

For example, if you aren't showing up in a $200k Maserati, your car had better be under $50k (maybe $70k with inflation). Only posers who aren't really into cars but want to show off their wealth spend $120k on a car.

For watches, the same thing happens: if you're wearing a watch less than $50k, it had better be under $500. Otherwise you probably don't care much about watches.

Clothing seems to be the same at many companies: you had better wear tailored suits and shirts or be less dressy than "business casual."

Yes this is very well put, you really hit the nail on the head here on the sort of reverse bell curve of signaling..

For the very wealthy.. If you show enough interest in something to make signaling purchases, it's expected to be "up to snuff" .. this can mean very very high expense or high esotericness.

So that might mean a $200k sports car, or it might mean some uncommon though inexpensive limited production vintage vehicle even though it may be of reasonable price, the time & effort you took to acquire & maintain it is a signal of taste.

Otherwise you'd be better off signaling complete disinterest with a very vanilla middle of the road options.

On menswear I think to your example, you could say you'd be better off not wearing a suit than in wearing a $200 Men's Wearhouse suit. To that end, these days, the type of people you tend to see in suits are either security / front desk staff or very senior corporate executives. Those in the middle have enough labor negotiating power to not be required to wear a suit, but probably not the desire/wealth to spend $2k on a properly tailored suit.

Very senior/wealthy people can get away with whatever they want. It's why Zuckerberg can look like a total slob at Facebook (notice he still wore a suit while testifying to Congress though).

If a senior executive wore a $200 suit to work, nobody would say a word.

Zuckerberg wears $800 tshirts amongst other carefully selected pieces of his wardrobe. He isn’t rummaging through a local Target for a basic tee and jeans. I think this is a good example of countersignal interpretation!

$800 tshirts have the same fabric as a Uniqlo tshirt (or maybe worse?).

> amongst other carefully selected pieces of his wardrobe

so if it was not that carefully selected, he'd look like a homeless?

> Zuckerberg can look like a total slob at Facebook

Huh, custom tshirts and well fitting jeans counts as "looking like a total slob" now? Fwiw I'd rather work with / for someone that dresses like that over formal any day of the week.

Yes.

I like t-shirts and jeans and never want to go back to suits and ties but..

When I went to Japan a decade ago, I realized just how informal and slovenly American working attire had become.

Notice how that's all for show too. Relatedly, Japanese people often don't work harder than Americans, they simply stay at the office longer. I also prefer what lack of formal attire signals: in Japanese workplaces, the more senior, the more respect for their ideas, regardless of whether the idea is actually better. Formal attire legitimizes their seniority but I'd rather have a meritocratic system of vetting ideas, and informality signals that too.

This is true.

Though I think many imitate regardless of the tribe/workforce/culture in order to fit in.

Look at the schools. It’s informal but there are definitely trends and fashions to follow in order to relate.

Just a thought, but the change in attire, then, is to create some formal distance between management and direct reports.

Japanese suits/uniforms are often pretty cheap (and look that way) - thus the low end “recruit suit”. They are tailored, but the level of body-fitting they are would be actively unacceptable in the US. By which I mean, everyone would think you’re gay.

On the other hand, Japan is the home of expensive high end recreations of American casual clothes - look up Take Ivy, BEAMS, nice selvedge jeans, etc.

> On the other hand, Japan is the home of expensive high end recreations of American casual clothes - look up Take Ivy, BEAMS, nice selvedge jeans, etc.

I remember some acquaintances running a decent side business buying and then selling vintage American clothes back in Japan (shipping or flying back).

This was back in the 1990s so I believe it.

(it also brought back some fond memories)

When Japanese enthusiasts scoured American thrift stores for the last remaining stock of vintage American denim, it supposedly constituted the largest ever transfer of clothing from the USA to Japan, exceeding even the postwar used clothing charity drives.

But the point is everyone looks like they’re trying to conform to the dress code. Much better than America, where just when you think it’s hit bottom, people plumb the depths further. (Most recently, by way of hair, tattoos, earrings on men, etc.)

I have rings in both my ears and sleeve tattoos on both arms. What does that say about me?

>By which I mean, everyone would think you’re gay. Is this really true, though? Plenty of straight dudes wear tight fitting clothing, especially if they work out.

Perhaps it's just a higher ratio of gay guys that work out vs straight guys that work out that's skewed your views.

Well, it's only in the context of the radical casualization of menswear since the mid-60s that jeans and a t-shirt can be seen as stylish. When men first started wearing this outfit, it was considered rebellious in part because it was so obviously inappropriate to wear in public. The t-shirt originated as a military undergarment and jeans as mining equipment.

True, but they are more likely to wear a $400 hoodie than a $200 suit.

Outside SBF, even the executives dressing "casually" are still doing so expensively.

If a sr exec wore a $200 suit to work, it would be noticed. Maybe in a warren buffet folksy sort of way. How they tell defense attorneys not to dress too flashy

(notice he still wore a suit while testifying to Congress though).

Don't like the guy, his company, his policies. And I tend to repect our elected officals more than most.

But the idea of showing up dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, and/or a hoodie, make me smile broadly.

You may enjoy Dee Snider's speech to the Senate: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S0Vyr1TylTE

Amusing, thanks. Doubly amusing that the garb was a strategy.

I had a business associate point out once how my mont blanc watch didn't have its own movement.

Singapore is an interesting place in this regard. We had several young guys in our office who wore $10k plus watches while still living with their parents.

There is a chance he was trying to help you and not be condescending to you. I am not a watch person, but even I know that Mont Blanc, kind of like Beats Audio, is not really known for their fine craftsmanship in watches. They're more about marketing, like Beats.

In my experience East Asian culture prioritizes having nice clothes, nice cars, and nice jewelry over having a nice home.

Other buy a home well beyond their needs but drive a honda shitbox and wear old navy (me).

Having plenty of experience in both the car and watch worlds, what you're saying is somewhat true but it's based on brands, models and exclusivity rather than the price (which is a derivative of those factors).

It's knowing which car or watch to buy, and also recognizing it on others, that acts as the signal.

This rings true to me. My hobbies aren't especially expensive, but in all of them there are certainly ways to spend money that would tell me that you don't "get it". "It" being what I find interesting about the hobby. Not that it's necessarily worse or that I want to pass judgment on it, just that the connection isn't there.

But I wonder, in cultures very different from mine, which we generally see as more status-competitive, is that also true? Is it a faux pas to buy an expensive gold chain over a "proper" one?

Not faux pas, but there are obviously "cool" items. Often it's because of some history, provenance, technology/construction, or some other story that bestows that notoriety and a few times it's just because the group collective considers it special.

Where is this place where showing up in a Porsche 911 outs you as a car dilettante because you didn't shell out an extra $90k for the Maserati? I think the status symbols there might be reversed.

If anything it's driving the Maserati that outs someone as a dilletante. Possibly the worst value for money of any luxury car brand.

This is the kind of thing people who see cars as appliances go 55 in the left lane in a Prius (or maybe if you're a homeowner you've traded up to a Tacoma) say.

People buying "100k+ rich man's toy" cars don't care about value for money the way you or I do.

Edit: appeasing nit pickers

Maseratis aren’t exotic cars though, that’s the thing. They’re mediocre luxury cars marketed as exotic cars. You can get a new Maserati for less than a new BMW M3. Not exactly exotic car territory.

Whilst I agree, it seems non-car-folks seem to relate them to ~Ferrari levels. I.e. expensive, rare, etc.

That entirely depends on the models. People who only know brands aren't "car" people anyway, and price isn't a great comparison.

Modern Maserati's are great driving cars with Ferrari heritage (and engines) that do command more prestige than a typical M or AMG model, especially in the Trofeo versions.

People who see cars as appliances don't buy 911s either.

That's what I was thinking, too. (I'm not a car person and someone can easily school me here).

Yeah, if you want a 911 and have a little more money to spend, then there are more expensive variants of the 911 that Porsche will be happy to sell you. And they’re generally very good cars. Would get a Carrera GT over a Maserati any time.

LOL, Carrera GT is in a different league (~$1.5mm). 911 is kind of like a Speedmaster, it's a classic, and even a basic one is "acceptable" for most car folks. The S, GTS, GT3, etc would be the more premium. Countersignalling might be to buy older versions, as most folks won't expect the prices, and they're "classics" (e.g. 993s, 964s).

yes, my bad, I was thinking of the 911 Carrera GTS and forgot about the Carrera GT, lol

Value isn't the consideration with those cars. There are plenty of high-end Maserati's.

I'm not a car person, but I think showing up in a 911 is okay, but showing up in a random Mercedes is not. Other commenters have pointed out that a Maserati is also not a great brand to be driving, despite the price.

The "uncanny valley" of wealth display.

That's not really the case with watches.

> Clothing seems to be the same at many companies: you had better wear tailored suits and shirts or be less dressy than "business casual."

There’s a running joke in my circle about the “dad professional class”. People who are older (40-60s) and go to the office in a remote-work-accepting world mostly because they seem to want to leave their family at home. They all dress like shit in ill-fitting clothes, but because they’re older than the “office casual” dress code, they tend to dress in overly professional button downs and slacks. The business attire that look out of place in tech next to a 25yo in a tee shirt. They don’t seem to know people don’t always take them seriously, and think “they’re not here to [change the world/be the best/rise in the ranks/etc], they’re here to avoid their wife and collect a salary”.

TLDR: stop telling people you try to avoid your family, and start tailoring your clothes, it’s honestly not expensive.

Or maybe by their 40s-60s they have lost all interest in what 25yos, tee-shirted or not, think about their attire. They have seen the fashion wheel spin more than once, and are no longer compelled by it.

(Source: upper 60s, go into the office mostly because a) it's not far, b) my office setup is a bit better, c) I don't want to wake my wife with Zoom calls. I do have some tailored shirts but seldom wear them.)

> maybe by their 40s-60s they have lost all interest in what 25yos

Its not about the fashion, its about looking put together. Its signaling that you care. Of course, there's the article which says that people who made it can stop signaling, so maybe that's you.

Filtering out snobs just sounds like a bonus.

You have little nothing to offer people who have been in the field decades more than you. They don't care what signal they're broadcasting to you.

This.

Don Draper "I don't think about you at all" elevator meme in real life.

Originally a Coco Chanel quote: "I don't care what you think about me. I don't think about you at all."

Doreen dropping the knowledge. I just learned another fun Coco Chanel quote: "Those who create are rare; those who cannot are numerous. Therefore, the latter are stronger."

Little known fact: before he was Pied Piper's cool attorney in Silicon Valley, but after his first job at a Superstore, Ron LaFlamme lived in NYC where he was told that he "wasn't thought about at all" by Don Draper. https://youtu.be/LlOSdRMSG_k

There are a lot of people who think signalling you care [about fashion, to be clear] is somehow essential, and that to not care about fashion is to show you don't care about life, or about yourself...

Sorry, no. There's nothing wrong with me for not putting effort into what aesthetic "signals" I'm sending, because there is no true signal. It's noise. If someone's unclean, that's one thing, because cleanliness matters to health. Fashion does not.

Arguments that fashion matters are all circular, which tells you something. (It matters because people think it matters, and is therefore worth taking seriously!)

Fashion is LITERALLY what you just defined.

If you want to look put together, put your body together first. Clothes are a cheap signal, one that many older people have given up caring about because clothes and appearance are less relevant at their age. And genuinely fit people look good in almost anything.

You can tailor your slacks and shirts too, and it's pretty cheap. It will make you look a lot better than what most people expect if you're the type to dress business casual. That is, if you care.

Suits are very expensive to tailor by comparison.

I’d be careful making assumptions about a group of people like you’ve done here. I’m not quite old enough to be in the “dad professional class”, but I’ve been around long enough to have worked with plenty of people who are. In my experience, the people who dress “like shit in ill-fitting [overly professional button downs and slacks]” have been dressing like that for at least the last 20 years, and that it was common (at least in IT/development) to dress like that.

Tech workers dressing casually at the office is only a (relevantly) recent phenomenon. Working from home, for a lot of people, is even more recent.

You’ve made a lot of assumptions, and I would consider that this group of people are just defaulting back to what they’re used to, rather than “avoid their wife and collect a salary”.

I don’t know where you work, what industry, or the demographics of who works there, but if “people [who work there] don’t always take them seriously”, and it’s based on older people dressing like older people, then there is a culture problem.

If people like that dressed like you, you'd probably be laughing at them even harder and sending around the Steve Buscemi "how do you do, fellow kids?" meme in the group chat.

The problem is with you, I'm afraid.

> There’s a running joke in my circle about the “dad professional class”. People who are older (40-60s)

I fit this demographic.

> and go to the office in a remote-work-accepting world mostly because they seem to want to leave their family at home.

There’s some truth to this, though I’ve avoiding coming in. It’s not about escaping the family but just a change of scenery.

> They all dress like shit in ill-fitting clothes, but because they’re older than the “office casual” dress code, they tend to dress in overly professional button downs and slacks.

I have a reasonable taste in fashion, but my cost-conscious self doesn’t allow it.

Age also forces a more conservative style and colors; and it says I’m sacrificing for the kids.

> “The business attire that look out of place in tech next to a 25yo in a tee shirt.

Business attire is like a uniform. You don’t need to spend a lot to look presentable.

> They don’t seem to know people don’t always take them seriously,

Is this a bad thing?

> and think “they’re not here to [change the world/be the best/rise in the ranks/etc], they’re here to avoid their wife and collect a salary”.

Rise in the ranks?

There’s nothing wrong with working to live. You get my best for 8 to 9 hours.

We live in a world where “leadership” is valued, and everything else is devalued. For engineers, this is purgatory.

Like, it’s a huge mental and emotional burden and I’d gladly take a 1/3 paycut to be an IC; except nobody else really wants it.

> They don’t seem to know people don’t always take them seriously

Because of their clothing? All other things being equal, of what possible objective value could fashion conformity hold?

I think the idea you should get your clothes tailored is just foreign to them. Uniqlo is the only brand that offers it in the US at mall clothes prices.

Agism, not cool.

Youths are like that. He'll learn better over time, but by then a new gaggle of pretentious younglings will be making fun of him for not wearing fruit replicas on his head, or something similar.

I've been reading Ubik by Phillip K. Dick. He hammers this point home frequently, with hilarity.

> re: the modern upper class that wearing a $2k Rolex or driving a $70k BMW is frowned upon.

always has been moon meme.

unless you're neveaux rich or stupid or both it is in your absolute interest not to show what you have. driving a Prius used to be that signal but today it has shifted. My direct boss was a Schenker heir (the freight forwarding company) and the only way he showed off is by living in a rental house (albeit manged by his management company so he essentially paid rent to himself), drove a Nissan, didn't spend unless you took a closer look (art purchases for his 4th wife) didn't brag with fancy dinners in Michelin star places (but certainly bragged to his wife about putting her on the map with her silly paintings as a wannabe artist - lol "Sex rules everything around me C.R.E.A.M get the money").

Only lower ranks criminals and new-rich idiots show what they have. Everyone else has learned the lesson: if you show it (the plebs and the IRS), they'll come for you.

Also all the people who're truly rich do NOT play by the same rules as the rest of you. YOU decide where, and how much tax you pay, if you have the cash to pay lawyers and accountants to insulate you from the Plebs.

The US is the biggest tax[1] haven in the world today forget the Hollywood propaganda about Cayman or Panama - only idiot cartels and Victor Bout use these jurisdictions but not the white collar crime lords ...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Islands

> driving a Prius used to be that signal but today it has shifted

The new 5th generation that just came out looks amazing, so it wouldn't surprise me if Priuses eventually become trendy again.

> neveaux rich

nouveau riche, or nouveaux riches

Sorry if this comes off as pedantic, but as a French, I couldn't resist :D

pas de soucis, absolutely fair point :D

Rolex hatred seems like it is about expressing contempt towards the previous establishment. Presidents used to wear them (still do actually) but it's not uncommon to see very rich politicians wearing very cheap watches probably deliberately. Same goes for suit wearing.

I think pg wrote an article on his blog about how suit wearing was for people who thought like conformists and obviously being a conformist was not for hackers. I am paraphrasing because I can't remember now exactly what he said. But I just think it was contempt of previously established people working in finance or law. Now, the largest companies in the US skew towards tech companies.

I don't know why that happens that newly successful people seem to dislike the symbols of the previous elite rather than just mind their own business. Wearing a suit to a tech company will probably get you ostracized even if you just like wearing suits. This is in spite of the claim that the hoodie culture is not concerned what you dress up in, in fact they are. Maybe you could call that counter counter-signalling. It's just like taking a large salary at a tech company instead of having a $1 salary and getting enormous options and stock payouts. Somehow taking a large salary is worse despite that being normal for CEOs previously.

> Wearing a suit to a tech company will probably get you ostracized even if you just like wearing suits.

Not true. If you are a menswear enthusiast who is genuinely into fine tailoring, then people will respect it and even show interest. Generally, having hobbies and interests adds to one’s character. Now wearing a suit because you think it will make people take you more seriously will get you some side eye.

Which is a shame. Someone wearing business casual is so much more pleasant to the eye than typical sloppy hacker wear. Especially once you start getting older and flabbier.

These are also culturally dependent, and are in-group/out-group signals. Many people in Silicon Valley explicitly want to keep people who believe that business casual is more pleasing to the eye out of their social circles. It's a value judgment; to them, hoodies are more pleasing to the eye, and more comfortable, and they don't want people who believe otherwise in their companies.

Right, that's the point of the parent of this subthread. They (the hoodie-wearers) would probably insist that they don't judge based on dress or appearance, but they do, and maybe more harshly than the suit-wearers. It's just what people do. I grew up wearing suits to work, shaving every day, and wearing a short neat haircut. I don't as much anymore, but I don't wear hoodies with pizza sauce stains either, and I don't respect the people who do as much as the ones who look like they at least glanced in the mirror before they left the house.

You'll meet suit-wearing people, business casual people, and pizza-stained-hoodie people. Some will be conventionally attractive, some not. Some old, some young, some male, some female, some of one race, some another. Some will be skilled, diligent, and productive, some will be well-spoken and good communicators, some will be honest, some will be punctual... some will be not.

Some of those things are choices that matter and should impact your respect for someone else. Some are not, do not, and should not.

Personally, as a controls engineer who frequents messy manufacturing facilities, dressing in a suit gets in the way of getting work done. It subtly conveys "I'm too important to get my hands dirty, I'll leave the grunt work to the grunts." That kind of unwillingness to do whatever's required to get the job done is a point against those folks in my circles. I do understand that people who come to work in a suit may have different struggles vying for status and trying to send the right social signals in conference rooms, and I don't envy them those tasks - but please don't think less of me as a human because of what I choose to wear.

You said:

> please don't think less of me as a human because of what I choose to wear.

But doesn't:

> dressing in a suit gets in the way of getting work done. It subtly conveys "I'm too important to get my hands dirty, I'll leave the grunt work to the grunts."

mean that you think less of others because of what they choose to wear?

Only because it affects the ability to accomplish our shared goals. If we're sitting in an office at keyboards, and you want to wear a suit, go right ahead! A woman in heels in an environment that ought to have steel-toed boots, or a hoodie wearer in an office whose hygiene is so poor that the smell affects those around them, both impact things that are actually important.

But when those personal choices are immaterial, whether choosing to over- or under-dress, they shouldn't affect what I think of others or what others think of me.

I didn't say it but I was talking in the context of a standard office setting that most of us probably work in.

It’s more about the effort I think than the style. Well fitted suits and business casual looks good, but so does a well fitted shirt and jeans. On the flip side, a poorly fitted suit looks only marginally less sloppy than poorly fitted hacker wear. Comp-sci types who don’t put effort into their wardrobes don’t really look any better in business casual, at least in my experience from working in places where such clothes were required.

Doesn’t business causal mean like slacks and a lame tucked in pastel polo shirt? I think both a suit and hacker wear are more interesting

Don't forget about the Patagonia fleece vest! Many VC firms require someone to wear one to every meeting.

At this point, don't Polo shirts essentially say "Welcome to Chipotle/Best Buy"?

I think it's more like slacks and a button up. Polo shirts are super casual.

Depends on the context. When I was a SV biglaw associate, I wore slacks and button down, generally without coat (only for meetings). On 'casual Friday' I wore polo, typically with jeans. Basically, SV law firms are always 'business casual' unless you're going to court or a deposition. And on casual Fridays, it's even less formal.

I assume tech companies are more casual than big law firms, and that things may have gotten more casual in the decade since I left the law.

maybe. I'd like to think that is true but was not in my experience but I wish I had experimented more before everything went remote so maybe take what I am saying with a grain of salt on this matter. I definitely took shit for it although some people were fascinated. I think the exception is if you have long hair or are a steampunk enthusiast. I am not really kidding. Even then you might come off as odd.

I sometimes would have to go to nearby tech companies we worked with and the leads who would greet me would mention something like "oh sorry we didn't tell you that you don't have to wear a suit". You have to explain yourself and there is the implication that wearing a suit is somehow inappropriate.

If you need someone to disrespect you for being a steampunk enthusiast, I’m available. Nobody looks good in brown, and it seems to be the kind of people who think wearing a sleeveless vest is “fancy” - they actually look like wedding bartenders.

> You have to explain yourself and there is the implication that wearing a suit is somehow inappropriate.

If you're the only one wearing a suit, you look overdressed. It's as simple as that.

Interestingly, the $1 salary (with large equity) gives you massive flexibility in how and when you get taxed, and also a lot of additional negotiating power and flexibility with ex-wives (and the Court) on child support and alimony, at least in California.

Courts are oblivious to equity and other non-salary compensation?

The calculations are based on income, which equity (until sold) is not. In most cases even then (capital gain).

Stock also varies a lot in price/value (sometimes being nearly impossible to value, say for private companies) and many arguments can be made (up or down) as to its value or potential.

A good lawyer can start to get traction there of course, and it won’t get ignored, but it is not easy compared to, say, a $5mln/yr salary, or 5 years of bonuses of $10mln, which you can just plug into the calculator and go.

[https://childsupport.ca.gov/guideline-calculator/]

I’ve never understood where this meme came from of hoodie culture having some kind of disdain for suits. I enjoy a nice suit when the time calls for it! Say, a wedding or a holiday party.

The reason I prefer a hoodie to suit on a daily basis is that putting on a suit is kind of arduous and owning 20 well-fitting suits gets expensive. It has nothing to do with signaling or whatever. Hoodies are far more practical and comfortable! They’re a continuation of what I wore in high school and college, though sadly the skateboard logos have been replaced by tech company logos.

Anyway, if you want to wear a suit, that’s fine, just don’t expect it from me.

It’s real, but I think the anti-suit culture has less of a point when tech has been ascendant so long.

https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-were-apple-we-don...

Also, I think it was originally because the west coast is warm all year.

>the modern upper class that wearing a $2k Rolex or driving a $70k BMW is frowned upon.

There was a time, not that long time ago in which good clocks were expensive and expending 2ks on a good clock was similar to expending 2k on a laptop today, a functional, reasonable decision.

My uncle earned a much more expensive Rolex than 2k in a Golf tournament and wearing it nobody believed it was genuine, even a watchmaker could not differentiate it from sight, there are very good Chinese knockoffs for cheap anywhere.

Also, after quartz oscillator clocks, a 2k clock does not work better than a 100 one.

People spend their money on whatever they see fit. One of the great things of having money is having freedom in your life but few people knowing that you have it.

In places like Spain or France people do not admire you for having money, on the contrary they envy you, and you better not show off. Also gold diggers and interested parties like banks start to harass you all the time. And criminals what to take it from you by force.

Is it envy, or disgust? If someone tells me they live in a castle, my initial instinct isn't "wow I wish in a castle too", but "wow what a wasteful needless thing to brag about".

Be cautious, the word "envy" is typically thrown around by folks that want to justify "greed". OC, there are reasonable scales between the two but equating success to having nicer material things is really a subjective value judgement.

In all honesty the salient points in the OP about judging instead of thinking, is a commonly attributed aphorism to Carl Jung yet there is no reference to it. The point about tardiness and drawbacks this apparently has on socialising and career progression comes across as utilitarian to the point of sounding sociopathic.

Last time the lowest-end Rolex was $2k was probably 30 years ago. :-)

I'm going to make the assertion that personal clocks were basically never with that much. They were as functionally useful as a gold bracelet for the best majority of owners.

> In places like Spain or France people do not admire you for having money, on the contrary they envy you, and you better not show off. Also gold diggers and interested parties like banks start to harass you all the time. And criminals what to take it from you by force.

You're saying that wealthy people in France and Spain don't show it, and if they do they are commonly robbed?

> In places like Spain or France people do not admire you for having money, on the contrary they envy you

Or maybe not. You mileage may vary.

This would depend a lot on how do you earned it.

Technically a Rolex, however expensive, will always be much worse as a watch than a 20$ Casio. But recently there's another aspect to this: there are now watches that are technically (mechanically) identical to rolexes. Same design, same mechanics, virtually impossible to tell the difference when you tear it apart. Rolex has always been more about marketing (artificial scarcity, waiting list etc) than mechanics, but now it's pretty much exclusively about marketing, since you can get the same engineering orders of magnitude cheaper. It's like DeBeers' diamonds.

Correct, a G-shock would get the job done better.

I always viewed watches as the only mainstream sociable acceptable form of male jewelry.

And regardless of which model, generally no more expensive than a woman's engagement or wedding ring, and actually usually cheaper.

Plus it does something other than look pretty - tells time & date!

Prestige cars, mega yachts, private jets, and corporations that make rockets and satellites are also male jewellery.

But the article: it's repetitive and slightly rambling and reads like it was written by some variant of GPT.

The point is fair, but it's also well known to class watchers. In the UK nouveau means a gigantic new build mansion full of chrome and glass, a private gym, and plastic and dental surgery. Old means a small country estate, a Georgian pied-à-terre somewhere near the City, tweedy clothing, and perhaps some pedigree dogs. And horses.

Old money tends to underdress - sometimes sloppily - and on casual acquaintance is indistinguishable from the merely middle class.

It's not until you get an invite to the manor house that you discover the ridiculously impractical and expensive Aga stove, the collection of wildly expensive antiques whose prices are never mentioned [1], the relaxed air of charming quizzical bafflement. (Very few of these people are unusually bright or talented. But socially polished - yes.)

The visuals are not the point. Anyone can tweed, but not everyone can tweed like they've been doing it their entire lives and really mean it.

[1] A 17th century silver spoon for £5000? How fascinating!

> Prestige cars, mega yachts, private jets, and corporations that make rockets and satellites are also male jewellery.

If we're going down this line, why stop here? You forgot the 'trophy wife' which is definitely more prevalent than the dig at Musk/Bezos.

Watches, pens, pocket knives, flashlights, seem to be a cluster of male jewelry. Fidget spinners too, at one time.

> I always viewed watches as the only mainstream sociable acceptable form of male jewelry.

Cufflinks are a big deal, in certain circles.

> I always viewed watches as the only mainstream sociable acceptable form of male jewelry.

Now we have iDweebs, those Apple ear things.

Somewhere I read that a Rolex has a very practical purpose - a real one is a commodity that can fairly easily be turned into cash or a bribe in an emergency, but as a watch, it's not susceptible to being seized by authorities in many circumstances where cash or gold might be.

I don't know if this is true, but it makes a good story.

Applies to jewelry in general, however Rolex tends to hold its value better than most jewelry (vs price paid)

Along this vein, I've heard somewhere that pimps wear lots of jewelry because they can pawn it for bail money. Apparently cash can be seized on arrest, but jewelry is classified as some sort of personal property and thus won't be taken.

That is the reason women used to own jewelry and you were supposed to give them expensive wedding rings. They couldn’t have bank accounts!

I have a more obscure watch, but one that those that care recognize. It has signaled me as part of the 'correct' crowd more than once and definitely done it's purpose.

What purpose is this? What happens when your watch signals that you belong to the correct crowd?

People with money and power respect you more and are more likely to drop their guard in some ways. This applies to in-group signaling generally. In this case the in-group is the rich and powerful.

Where can one get those similar Rolex’s? For science

The search term you want is just "Replica." RWI, RWG, RepTime on Reddit, and other private forums will analyze the quality and details of these clones in ridiculous detail. They also have reviews of each reseller and each factory.

I don't even own any fake watches at this point and I've found these forums highly addictive/interesting - honestly, the average skill/knowledge level is quite high compared to most "watch enthusiast" forums.

Thanks for the hints. About the replicas: Yes but usually you’ll find a few challenges with those. First, pure replicas are illegal, so what you can find legally are called hommages with another logo. That doesn’t make them worst by itself, but here are the drawbacks:

First the maintenance. What is the probability those watches will still be serviceable in 50 years? I own a watch that’s more than 50 years and wear it regularly because it is still maintained by the company who made it.

Second the value holding. Sure you can sink your money in any gear. The special value of great mechanical watches is that they maintain their used value well on the second hand market for decades. An hommage will have little reputation of its own to maintain.

Of course this is all subject to special cases, but, etc because the watch world is very complex. For example many brands copy each other, some replica brand make great quality, and some great brands barely hold their value (which is a good thing for passionate collectors).

No doubt there is a great skilled and passionate community around reproduction, like in music or art. To build a replica you need way more skill than the average watch enthusiast. They rarely outskill the examples they copy still.

> They rarely outskill the examples they copy still.

Sure, that's why you have to find the ones that do. The forums linked make this a trivial task.

>First the maintenance. What is the probability those watches will still be serviceable in 50 years

Extremely high, given that they tend to run on clones of incredibly popular movements like the ETA2824.

Have a look at this guy's AliExpress watch reviews: https://www.youtube.com/c/JustOneMoreWatch/videos You should be able to get a reasonable Rolex hommage well under $500.

(Not a Rolex immitation, but I'm wearing a JDM Casio Oceanus S100 which is all the watch that anyone would ever need.)

Invicta has made some watches that are pretty similar for a long time. They aren't "high quality" replicas or counterfeits, but if you just like the look of a Submariner they seem to have similar watches for well under $100.

What’s an example of a watch that’s mechanically identical to a Rolex?

A Seiko SKX (or a spiritual successor) with a regulated NH35 will fall into the same “100m water resistance, accurate to within 10 seconds per day” category as a Rolex for about a 10th of the price.

>...accurate to within 10 seconds per day

That is hilarious to me. A quick search is showing one can expect a POS Casio to be +/- 15 seconds per month.

But then you don't get as many excuses to display your watch from needing to adjust the time

It's pretty common now to find "Super Fakes" of designer brands, that are very difficult to tell apart from the real thing. They'll be expensive but not as expensive as the real thing.

Tudor, but it is a different division of Rolex

I bought a fake "Rolex" in Thailand, for $10.

It actually didn't work very well. I guess there's a hierarchy even among the fake.

Back in the 1990s my dad's oldest brother went to the outskirts of NYC and was really impressed with the fake "Rolex" he bought. My mom was indignant about it because she sold men's clothing for a living and could tell you exactly how a fake Tommy Hilfiger shirt was worse in so many ways than a real one.

Two weeks later the watch stopped running.

Around the same time, though, my mom's youngest brother was driving on the cross-Bronx throughway, stopped to help somebody whose car was pulled over on the side of the road, and found the driver had been shot dead.

>Around the same time, though, my mom's youngest brother was driving on the cross-Bronx throughway, stopped to help somebody whose car was pulled over on the side of the road, and found the driver had been shot dead.

I don't get what this has too do with the fake rolex.

The outskirts of NYC were pretty rough back in the day. I don't think the guy got shot because he was involved in a fake Rolex gang though...

Run on sentence makes you wonder.

7/10 meme

> My mom was indignant about it because she sold men's clothing for a living and could tell you exactly how a fake Tommy Hilfiger shirt was worse in so many ways than a real one.

Gomorrah opens with a description of Italian clothing manufacturing. As described there, the difference between a fake shirt and a real shirt is that they were made to the same specifications under one and the same contract, by different factories, and the real one got delivered faster than the fake one did. Only the first guy to deliver gets paid.

It's an interesting book. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250145031/

> It's an interesting book. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250145031/

They also made a movie of it [0], I lived in Italy during the financial crisis and it had become commonplace to see large migrating Chinese coming from the North (likely illegal migrants in Milan's clothing factories) come to the central part of Italy looking for work on farms and restaurants. It was hard times as this was taking place as the large migration from N. Africa was happening and they were living in the parks and making the locals irate.

It all came to light when our resident cheese maker, who used to work in the fashion Industry, had to tell them in broken Mandarin that we were fully staffed and couldn't accommodate them, but to try elsewhere further South--a typical way to brush-off a problem as is the running theme with Gomorrah.

I soon realized how dirty the Fashion Industry was as the Zara scandal was ettin into full swing and the workers were taking to writing messages about not being paid for the garments they made [1] as the factories were in sweatshops in Xinjiang or Brazil.

I wouldn't all it interesting so much as it is sobering and eye opening to the perils of offshore manufacturing practices and Italy's fashion Industry was just one of many of these horrors; Foxxcon's electronic manufacturing reliant on African rare earth mine exploitation make all of this pale in comparison.

> That's Italy!

It's anywhere you want to see where manufacturing costs get pushed to be the smallest possible line-item/expense in a value chain; the US is notorious for using forced labour in prisons for these kind of things, too. It's sad because it is a common practice in the worst labour camps/prisons in Russia (Siberia). It's where Britney Griner was going to serve her sentence, which incidentally is also where the Nadya of Pussy Riot spent several years in and was very candid about what was awaiting for her there.

0: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0929425/

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdNvPSD8H1k

That's Italy!

I bought a $400 fake rolex. Aside from the glass not being sapphire you cannot tell the difference visually

From whereabouts?

I got some fakes from a big warehouse in Shanghai. They had all levels of prices/quality. Our corporate guide found the shop for us. They had a whole wall of fake watches of different brands. My ex-wife got purses. I much preferred my real watches, but the fakes were for fancy dinners downtown in the big city in case I got mugged.

Look for fake watch forums and their trusted vendor list. That’s how I found the seller I bought from.

Took 4 weeks to arrive direct from China

Is the escapement running at the same rate? A big part of the "rolex" appearance that is very hard to copy is the 8 ticks per second that the second hand goes through. I have seen very high quality Rolex copies before that don't do that, and are instantly recognizable as a fake to people who know a little bit about watches.

Is the escapement running at the same rate?

Absolutely. Modern fake Rolexes can only be told apart from a real one by an expert examining it with a loupe. And 8 tick pr second isn't that hard to replicate. Several ETA and Sellita calibers do it as well.

> wearing a $2k Rolex or driving a $70k BMW is frowned upon. But instead they have eccentric "hobbies" requiring $10ks of of equipment, inclusive of "needing" $10k viking stove/range, and $10k subzero fridge/freezer in your kitchen because you are a "foodie" […]

Isn’t this conflating status signal with lifestyle?

The wealthy have always enjoyed expensive lifestyles and hobbies. In and of itself, expensive hobby equipment is not a status signal (it can be, of course, if you plaster it all over your personal social media)

> The wealthy have always enjoyed expensive lifestyles and hobbies.

Sorry to jump in.

There is a 2003 documentary by the name "Born Rich".

This is about the children from the wealthy people and how they are coping with the boredom of being able (afford) to do anything.

Many are naturally isolated and invent obscure hobbies and life-styles not fitting their "wealthy statuses".

Not sure how it is changing in more responsible adulthood, when it is becoming their turn to manage the estate. I guess this is then mostly about turf-wars among relatives.

(edit: formatting)

> This is about the children from the wealthy people and how they are coping with the boredom of being able (afford) to do anything.

See also the excellent Korean documentary "Squid Game"!

> ...coping with the boredom of being able (afford) to do anything.

That’s mostly a lack of sufficient education and rearing to arm them with enough knowledge and grit to choose and tackle from an infinite number of problems to advance towards a possible solution. Most of those problems don’t take generational wealth scale money to make a dent into, but a tremendous amount of hard work for years and even decades without expectations of acclaim commensurate with their generational wealth background.

Which points out the other problem: most of them want (or are pushed since childhood to want) the acclaim accrued by their inherited wealth also attached to their efforts in whatever direction they choose. It’s why we get the dilettante phenomenon among them so much.

Tightly coupling wealth to accomplishment across generations is possibly a very leaky abstraction.

For example I would contrast the following three scenarios of people in my circle.

* Having professional landscapers plant grass and plants on an outdoor terrace of a penthouse apartment for $100k

* Growing a large vegetable garden from seeds & seedlings, from your vacation home outside the city

* Raising houseplants in your apartment windowsill

All three of these people may describe themselves as having green thumbs or being into gardening as a hobby...

I am into collecting slightly obsolete audio gear, I've spent maybe $600 on the hobby in the last six months.

I know some people would think $120 is a lot for a minidisc player since you can get a flash player for so much less. Other people would think it's a trivial amount of money. Like all these things it comes in multiple scales: back in the day there were people who would spend 50x that on audio gear (there are some $20,000 speaker sets that sound great)

I don't expect to impress anybody: the last person I showed my portable minidisc player was a professor in the music department who's won one more than one Grammy award and teaches sound engineering who I ran into at the bus stop and his comment is "God, how can you listen to something compressed like that?" ("... yeah, I've been wondering about some of the coding tools they use.")

We are probably going to have some people over for a party and I don't expect many people to notice the difference with the 5.1 DTS discs I have in my CD changer but I do.

I love & miss minidiscs :-D

Used ones cost slightly less than they cost new, particularly considering inflation.

I started watching Techmoan and similar YouTubers. I have some nostalgia for compact cassettes and saw a video where they used a Dolby S deck and metal tapes and made very good recordings... Hardware like that came in around the time I was in grad school and went into a hole so it was "better than I remembered". There are Dolby S decks on the market for prices that seem within reach but the metal tapes are like $40 a piece now.

Optimal cassettes might sound as good or better than minidisc but rewinding is a hassle. They still make cassette decks and tapes but they are much worse than what was made 30 years ago. With NetMD you can record audio from your computer to a MD the same way you do with a computer which is easy: there's something to say for media that let you record your own music so you aren't stuck with what got released on SACD or can find on vinyl (which isn't too bad.)

It still seems silly when I've got several devices in my backpack usually that can play music including the Tracfone I use for emergencies.

I’ve been tempted to dig out my minidisc recording deck and player from storage, and use them for to add a bit of friction for more constrained listening. I’m probably projecting other problems onto music streaming services, but I often shut down with the endless choices and frustratingly flippant auto-generated playlists. Of course I can, and do, curate playlists for specific moods and tasks, but I also seem to lack self-control these days to not jump to another music tangent without getting lost from my original intent.

The nostalgia/quaintness of burning/updating a dozen or so minidiscs seems like an “fun”enough construct to build a deliberate ritual that outweighs the friction—similar to friction of making a pour over coffee helps force a nice 10min break and tends to limit number of cups/day to something reasonable. Either way, just more of a thought exercise at the moment.

In my case it is YouTube I am trying to get away from. Really listening to music on YouTube is a pretty good experience, it is great for discovery, and it even does a good job of making mixes for me. For many reasons though I don't want to be plugged into it and I try to listen to files on my computer, jellyfin or minidisc when I use my computer.

Upstairs I have a home theater receiver, I also have one downstairs where the HDMI out is burned out but it is good for music. I have an XBOX ONE plugged upstairs and it works for games but it seems to get worse all the time as a media player, it doesn't even play CDs although it plays DVD and Bluray. Upstairs I have the minidisc player for stereo music and one of these

https://www.crutchfield.com/S-92WonNqYEjS/p_158CDPX355/Sony-...

which is connected to the receiver with an optical cable and is full of 5.1 DTS discs which I am a huge fan of. There are some good 1970s quad recordings such as Fragile by Yes but also a lot of good stuff in the the 2000-2010 period such as Supernature by Goldfrapp and some artists like Donald Fagan who always believed in multichannel. Like stereoscopic cinema I think a lot of people don't see a big difference but I like it a lot.

There are different audiences.

I worked for a company that sold products and services to sales managers. The CEO and his wife (who was also an owner of the company) lived in a house in Rochester that had the biggest kitchen I'd ever seen anyone actually use. We would have holiday parties there and it was clear cooking was a hobby they liked to but that entertaining is also a way to enjoy your status.

Yes I think my point is that they simply signal differently by for example regaling you about how they spent $5000 on custom designed esoteric tiles from a local artisan for their shower.

Personally I don't think things that are 90% purchase/consumption (housing/renovations/appliances) are hobbies in the same way as photography/kitesurfing/gardening/cycling which may be expensive but have some sort of skill/learning/activity attached.

I worked for a wealthy man.

I remember two stories among many:

He once told me he was upgrading the doorknobs and hinges in this house. The bill just for those items came to $45K.

We were both getting coffee in the office once, and he looked towards me and ask, “My socks cost more than everything you’re wearing.”

And he liked me.

Nono, the price of his socks were more than everything you’re wearing. They probably cost the same as your socks :)

I have a couple clients like that. 40k on this, 25k on that. Doinky little overpriced home-improvement geegaws. And I'm thinking, "I could pay off my credit cards and take a year off for my own serious projects, for what you're spending to upgrade your stupid crown molding".

Two nouveau riches run into each other shopping on the Fifth.

- Look at this, got me this tie for $1000

- Hah what a dummy you are, they sell them for 1200 two blocks away!

How did he create this wealth

> “My socks cost more than everything you’re wearing.”

That’s a strange thing to waste money on for signaling. It just showed the lack of understanding on marginal utility on commodity items.

> It just showed the lack of understanding on marginal utility on commodity items.

I think you're showing the lack of understanding of marginal utility.

By the time you're spending $45k on doorknobs, $400 on socks might offer equal marginal utility per dollar.

I think a lot of what this thread shows is that everyone has a different utility function.

That's kind of whats interesting about the modern economy is we can all express our preferences in how we spend. The bottom end has gotten much cheaper and the top end has gotten exponentially more expensive, and in many markets the middle has sort of disappeared.

This contrasts a lot with the 1950s boom era where there was a big thick middle end and not a huge range from bottom to top.

I have a t-shirt I bought at the Gap around 1996 that is still wearable, though a bit worn-looking where the collar meets the shoulder seams. Thick, sturdy cotton. It was probably around $15, which would be about $30 today.

There is no such plain ladies’ fit t-shirt consistently offered anymore. Either tissue-thin and less than $20, or involves a silly print and/or ruffles and lace.

> The bottom end has gotten much cheaper and the top end has gotten exponentially more expensive, and in many markets the middle has sort of disappeared.

This enrages me so much. I hate cheap crap, but I equally hate over the top, necessary, expensive crap.

I prefer something well made, with minimal functions, for a middle price. But finding this is becoming increasingly rare as time goes on.

Renovation isn’t the hobby here, they’re not doing it themselves. But a passion for cooking justifies the high end kitchen. An interest in architecture and design justifies bringing good examples of it home.

Sure, if you have the money and interest, spend it.

But people often conflate "investment" & consumption when its anything related to home renovation. I'd still argue these types of "hobbies" are 90% consumption, and for most of the people I know.. usually financed with loans.

No one I know with a $100k kitchen cooks any better than my poor immigrant grandmother did.

Think of it like a machine shop. Expensive tools work way, way better than cheap ones.

I also have a restaurant grade toaster. It costs quite a bit more than the usual toasters do. But the usual ones would always break after a year or two. The restaurant toaster makes better toast, and has worked fine for 25 years now. It was actually cheaper to get the restaurant grade one over the long haul.

> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles. But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

On the other hand, if the wealthy person bought the $10 boots and invested the other $40, the investment could throw off enough money to keep him in annual $10 boots forever.

What are you doing to your toasters? My toaster had a good 10+ year run before I ultimately gave it away because I purchased a toaster oven. This was a Target/Walmart unremarkable kit that must surely have cost <$40, most likely something around $20 because I was a broke college kid.

They would just quit. Like my drip coffee maker. The heating element or the switch always breaks after a couple years. It's hard to buy an expensive one, as those always come with lots of buttons and a manual. I just want one that I put the coffee and water in and turn it on.

A sociologist would tell you that there is no such thing as a lifestyle which isn't a performance of one's status.

There are but it's considered a personality disorder.

There are folks that are genuinely uninterested in social status, and it usually goes along with being uninterested in social relationships. Think of autistic/Asperger's individuals; certain psychopaths & sociopaths; people with schizoid, schizotypal, avoidant, or antisocial personality disorders; et al. No relationships = no status = no need to worry about social status and social signaling.

It's much like how where there's people, there's politics. Where there's social, there's status. Take away the social and you take away both the performance and the status.

I think there are some people who are fine with exhibiting themselves (and their status) as they are without it being performative.

Saying more about their frameworks/models/worldview than reality.

Sure, this is vacuously true in the sense that if you are studying peoples behavior then any lifestyle option is a data point that can be correlated across other metrics, and hence we can call any lifestyle “a performance of one’s status” for the sake of study status and lifestyles.

But that’s not really relevant. From an individuals perspective there’s a big difference between keeping up with the joneses and focusing on what makes you happy.

Even if it turns out that what makes you happy is actually still correlated to your status and you’re not really a unique snowflake.

Reason 5,434 why sociology is a not a science.

> But instead they have eccentric "hobbies" requiring $10ks of of equipment, inclusive of "needing" $10k viking stove/range, and $10k subzero fridge/freezer in your kitchen because you are a "foodie" and doing a $500k home Reno because you have good architectural taste and style.

Or maybe they just like to cook and enjoy having good hardware?

Not everything is for signaling purposes. It's really cynical to start viewing everyone's personal expenditures as some sort of socially manipulative tactic. This is especially true when it comes to people's hobbies, where many of us are just trying to enjoy ourselves and appreciate having good hardware around.

When I worked at Google I always had the distinct feeling that my hard work was paying for some manager’s $500k home renovation. I’m way more interested in working hard to help people who really need it, and I’m glad I’m not working at a place like that anymore.

Where did you end up that is helping people who really need it?

I’m doing an open source solar powered farming robot nonprofit thing! [1] It’s an amazing feeling finishing a huge PCB design project for work and then immediately pushing the changes to GitHub. I’ve got a new brushless motor controller in the works that costs under $40 per board fully assembled for high current dual motor control, and anyone can order them (ideally wait till design is slightly more mature). [2]

[1] https://community.twistedfields.com/t/march-2022-update-simu...

[2] https://github.com/Twisted-Fields/rp2040-motor-controller

Cool problem and I can imagine it would be fun to solve - wish you the best of luck!

Thank you. It’s very fun indeed!

The food part is big. It’s wild how in the US especially there are about three classes of grocery stores and each cater almost exclusively to a certain social class. You don’t see many laborers or fast food workers grabbing a meal from the local co-op or Whole Foods and the local Aldi or Walmart rarely sees an executive unless they’re infamously stingy

You see this A LOT in food spend in US especially in rich urban areas.

I have friends who would kind of scoff at a Rolex but proudly describe the latest $500-for-2 dinner they went to last week.

Similarly I had a friend who only upgraded his iPhone with hand-me-downs from his teenage daughter, so he'd be like 3-4 years behind the curve. Meanwhile he owned like 4 homes and dined out similarly to my other friend.

> You see this A LOT in food spend in US especially in rich urban areas.

This won't resonate withh you unless you are or were ever a cook, I fear we had so much more left to capture and were forced to leave on the table that was taken away because of COVID, but this transition in the US food culture was paid with lots of hard work and countless sacrifices that most will never get beyond watching an episode of The Bear.

Two big blows came in hard after Bourdain's death (so many concepts and projects were abandoned that never came back) and then followed with COVID destroying the Industry in such a way that I'm doubting will ever get much further than this in my Lifetime any more: food culture in the US still has so much left to catch up with Asia and Europe but we were making massive progress towards that, but I'm staring to accept this will probably be the high-water mark that the next generation of tech workers and cooks alike will need to build off of. And no, ghost kitchens and burning VC money from Softbank on DD is not a solution.

So far, outside of small boutique restaurants and kitchens, all I've seen is a race to the bottom profit seeking with almost no motivation other than to capture what marketshare remains from corps who benefited from PPP and ZIRP at whatever cost it takes and cutting corners until they got bought out by a large Restaurant group. This may seem like hyperbole but ~60% of all restaurants shutdown forever [0] after covid in what was already I high-failure sector with incredibly costly CAPEX/OPEX business models and low profit margins even during the best of times.

My last encounter with a delivery driver from a large vendor (think Shamrock or Sysco type corp) brought it all home: they had essentially succumb to the same exploitative delivery and monitoring systems that an Amazon delivery driver has, which was a stark contrast to getting deliveries from local farmers for produce/protein ha were the highlight of the menu and accompanied with items from small artisans and purveyors for cheeses, deserts breads etc...

We've lost something very vital coming out of COVID, and I'm not sure what can be done to not undo the progress that was made since the culture-shift has swung so hard to this Amazonification of this Industry.

Really really depends on areas.

In the US, there was clearly a consolidation where the big corporate run restaurant groups were able to weather the storm better nationally in the early COVID days.

However, pretty quickly in NYC by say summer 2021 the industry seems to be back and stronger than ever. Everyone was dining indoors again, they kept their expanded outdoor space, maintained their new more extensive to-go services, and did it all with reduced staff never seeming to re-hire their pre-pandemic staff levels.

NYC restaurants are once again annoyingly crowded and hard to get reservations to, with eye popping prices compared to 2019.

So great for restaurant owners but not great for employees.

That said, the wages being offered are crazy compared to 2019 and they are still unable to fill roles. So one would take it that they've found better employment prospects elsewhere, so good for them.

> In these scenarios I think it's because the $2k watch or $70k car is too easily attained by lower classes that they are no longer considered signals by the upper classes.

Or it's about signaling that you're "in the know" with the in-group.

I read some list from (I believe) the 1800s that listed the different vocabulary used by aristocratic vs. middle class English people. It wasn't anything fancy (e.g. graveyard = aristocrat, cemetery = middle class). But as soon as that list was published and the middle class strivers knew to imitate those parts of the dialect, I'm sure the aristocrats quickly deprecated those signals.

if you're thinking U vs non-U it was mid-XX, and a bit of a U joke[0] that non-U peeps took way too seriously.

I wonder: has anyone made a list of all the different ways we Sneetches have besides our bellies, to distinguish in- and out-groups?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English

[0] when Jilly Cooper shows up in the References of a Wikipedia page it's all a bit of a lark

Doing something for pure status signalling is considered crass.

Expensive hobbies are not. I think they should be, but they're not.

when I had my last kitchen remodel done (a modest one,but very nice), the builder that did it said with all his clients there is an inverse relationship between how much people spend on their kitchen and appliances, and how much cooking they do - i.e. the people who spend the most, actually do the least cooking, and vice-versa. In my own limited experience, I tend to agree.

I'll take an awesome cook (my spouse in this case) and a modest kitchen, over a modest cook and an awesome kitchen any day.

I was appliance shopping recently and it seems like the most expensive appliances are often not the best. If you just want to cook, you're usually better off with a good LG or GE oven than with a Viking, which test notoriously poorly. Same with many consumer products - a Honda or Toyota will be more reliable with more convenience features than a BMW or Rolls Royce; a Chicco or Britax carseat is often safer, more comfortable, and more convenient than a Peg Perego; a Samsung or Apple smartwatch has a lot more features than a Rolex. A good rule of thumb I've had for getting good consumer products is to buy the high end of the mass market; don't skimp on budget items, but also don't buy products that are priced so the average person can't afford them.

Makes sense economically. Mass market manufacturers can amortize their R&D and quality control over many more units than luxury brands. The point of the luxury brand is explicitly countersignaling, showing that you can afford to spend more money on an inferior product.

> - a Honda or Toyota will be more reliable with more convenience features than a BMW or Rolls Royce

What convenience features? Is the Honda or Toyota really meaningfully more reliable during the first couple of years of ownership?

More cupholders, the ability to seat 3 carseats abreast, fabric rather than leather seats, better gas mileage, fits more easily in tight parking spots (and you care less if it gets dinged because you didn't pay $70K for it). Only thing the BMW really has on them is soundproofing (and probably acceleration & handling, but I don't care much about that).

And I care more about how reliable it is at > 10 years of ownership, not < 3 years (when nearly everything is reliable). My Honda Fit is coming up on 14 years old and runs like new.

Rich people probably only care about the first few years of ownership since after a few years they’ll upgrade the the newer model.

Right, but this subthread is explicitly about efficiency, i.e. getting value & quality for your money, and not about what's adapted to rich people's lifestyles. The context is people who cook a lot but don't spend a lot of money vs. people who cook only infrequently but spend a lot on kitchen appliances.

> Is the Honda or Toyota really meaningfully more reliable during the first couple of years of ownership?

It sounds like the comment you replied to was not about efficiency, but about rich people's preferences and whether they're justified.

Yes, many of the more expensive finishes are extremely cosmetic and have negative utility.

Stone backsplashes require frequent maintenance and special chemicals. If you don't stay on top of it, they are basically impossible to keep looking clean.

A lot of newer kitchens have wooden floors, which is insane.

I've seen kitchens with thin coated bright shiny copper/brass handles on everything which immediately tarnish and can never be maintained in new looking shape.

A lot of modern gas ranges are fairly hard to clean with lots of parts you have to remove, while a solid middle class electric glass countertop one is zero effort.

I once rented a place where the guy had wooden edges on the kitchen counters which of course aged poorly, plus a porcelain kitchen sink which immediately broke any glass wear that dropped even a couple inches while cleaning.. and was impossible to keep clean looking.

> A lot of newer kitchens have wooden floors, which is insane.

What's insane about this? I grew up in a pretty basic old house with a wooden floor in the kitchen, I don't recall it being an issue in any practical sense.

Exactly. To me, a $500k unnecessary renovation throws more money away than a $70k vs $40k car. At least with the car you are likely getting safety features and extensive sensor suites for driver assist for the money, that have tangible impact on your driving experience.

Or Spending 5-10x on a $10k appliance where a $1-2k one would do. These people tend to get the whole set, so it's a good $30-40k worth of kitchen appliances that could easily be replicated for $5k total otherwise. Does a better fridge/freezer really help you cook better? Do even most experienced cooks get noticeable benefit of a $10k range or oven?

I dunno. We recently bought a house where the kitchen had been recently renovated. I don't know if our appliances are super high end but they are definitely on that side, and it makes the kitchen feel great. We probably wouldn't spend as much time in it otherwise. So let's say that kitchen cost 40k (I have no idea)...but lasts us 20 years. That's 2k a year for a very enjoyable part of our house, probably the most used space by far.

On the contrary, if we had spent an additional 40k on our car, how much of a game changer would that have been and how long would it have lasted?

Again you are talking a $40k renovation, I am talking $500k renovation.

$40k for a kitchen is on the order of magnitude of getting all your appliances reasonably up to date, plumbing/fixtures, electrical and cabinetry/countertop refreshed, without anything being exotic or luxury. The bare bones one could probably refresh everything in the kitchen has to be easily $20k, so the incremental "above bare minimum spend" here is only $20k and therefore very reasonable.

That is a reasonable level of taking something outdated which is hard to market and making it up to date move-in ready and therefore quicker to sell.

To contrast for example in my experience, a Miele dishwasher for $800 washes dishes vastly better than a $400 GE. To the point it is significantly labor reducing. On the other hand, does a $10k subzero freezer/fridge keep my vegetables better than a $2k Samsung?

Most people underestimated how much of their homes value appreciating over the 5-20 years of ownership is purely the land value increases over the long term due to real estate inflation and the relative performance of their local markets. Ie - if all the condos in NYC went up 2x from 2004-2007, mine going up similarly isn't because I put fancy tiles in my toilet.

One slight different is that spending on your home will generally add value to it. It may not be necessary, and you may not get a dollar-for-dollar out of it, but it’s added value nonetheless.

I cook a lot, I personally would like a higher quality stove - I’ve killed one before because I (an)use the broiler a lot (it wasn’t terribly old), but I probably would do an NXR or something. maybe in the $2k. Or a used Wolf/viking from one of the people you mention

I’d rather buy a nice oven than a bunch of shit appliances though. People love their air fryers, over the stove microwave, countertop oven, instant pot, etc…

I think most people delude themselves that their big renovations added any incremental value to their home. Usually the cost was financed and thus even higher than the sticker price, all-in. Further, the holding periods are measured in a decade +/- often, so the general market moves contribute more to the sales price than whatever you'd done to the kitchen/bath.

On the margin, having a move-in ready home that's been renovated well enough recently enough, generically enough, ensures reasonable liquidity of being able to sell the home for a reasonable price reasonably quickly.

For many this means replacing some dated appliances, repainting, and strategic spending on a few items that may be out of style or more aged, like bathroom vanity or replacing a linoleum top.

Extravagant, expensive, specific renovations may actually detract because the general markets taste are not your taste and so you've either reduced the number of likely buyers, or half the universe of buyers are going to actually deduct value of your renovation because they may want to undo whatever you've done.

Spending $2k replacing a worn appliance or buying a $200 air fryer are two orders of magnitude off from the expenditure levels I am referring to.

Renovations basically never add value unless you check more checkboxes or add on-paper features. Cramming a shower stall into a half bath, adding a dishwasher where there wasn't one, finishing an attic/basement, that kind of stuff.

>On the margin, having a move-in ready home that's been renovated well enough recently enough, generically enough, ensures reasonable liquidity of being able to sell the home for a reasonable price reasonably quickly.

This is the motivation I have to invest further in what already feels like a generally "move-in ready" home; my "move-in ready" is not others' "move-in ready", so my goal is to find all the objections and invest in making them less objectionable :)

In my area, if I were to spend $50k renovating my home, the value would increase by approximately $0.

If I were to spend $300k renovating my home, the value would increase by approximately $100k.

The only real increase in home value comes from additions which add bedrooms. If I were to spend money converting an attic, a basement, or adding an add-on, I'd probably come out even at the sale.

And renovations are quickly depreciating assets. I'm much better off doing that right before a sale. A new dishwasher will be an old dishwasher before too long.

>I'm much better off doing that right before a sale.

I would love to see industry averages on if pre-sale renovations make any sense at all. Considering the outright financial expenses, possible financing, potentially weeks/months of organizing contractors, dealing with overages, delaying the house sale, yada yada.

If the work takes more than a week (so not just appliances, painting, etc) is there generally a positive expected return?

> I would love to see industry averages on if pre-sale renovations make any sense at all. Considering the outright financial expenses, possible financing, potentially weeks/months of organizing contractors, dealing with overages, delaying the house sale, yada yada.

They must surely make sense, given that there are people who "flip" houses (buy a house, do a quick paint/bathrooms/kitchen renovation on it and sell it for a nice markup).

I was considering that, but flippers are likely better prepared to purchase a house, do the N activities which make time/financial sense, and get out of the market as quickly as possible. They likely possess the skills to do some of the work themselves, have existing relationships with plumbers/electricians to perform specialized work, know how to handle required permitting, have a realtor on the ready, and a dozen of other things which I am ignorant.

The average homeowner is unlikely to have any of those relationships or knowledge, so there are a lot more things that could go wrong that delay the project or cause costs to balloon. Maybe a lot of people mistakenly believe that renovating the kitchen for $20k will add $40k value to the house, but in practice, the project will cost $34k, take five weeks, and ultimately only raises the final sale price to $35k.

500k or 500m in renovations will increase the value of the property. A car is worth 20% less the day you drive it off of the lot and keeps losing value. Having freezer space can save you thousands of dollars in food.

Cars are absolutely depreciating assets.

However a $70k car generally has a much better set of class leading accident avoidance & safety features than a $25k car which will generally be minimum legally required for compliance. A new car has a much different safety profile than a 10 or 20 year old car. Watching crash videos on YouTube is very illuminating as to how far we've come even versus a car from 2000.

Modern advanced cars will warn you about rear & front cross traffic, actively keep you from driving off the road if you fall asleep, emergency brake for obstacles, keep you from changing lanes into a car in your blind spot, and many other things that were pretty unheard of 10-20 years ago. My car even flashes lights and beeps at me if I am opening the door and it detects oncoming cars or bikes.

A $500k renovation of a home is usually financed and adds less than the $500k of value to the resale price to the homes (lets say, $400k to be generous), while costing north of $750k by the time all the payments are made. So $100-350k of waste, conservatively.

The crash videos of old vs new cars are very interesting (and scary). Especially 1959 Bel Air vs 2009 Malibu. In the older car, you smash into the dashboard and then the passenger compartment collapses and crushes you. In the new car, you hit the airbag. Of course you don't expect much from 1959, but even 1992 Nissan vs 2016 Nissan is a huge difference in survivability.

I highly recommend the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TikJC0x65X0

You will never see a matchup that makes the old car look "eh, good enough" because the incentive for the kinds of organizations doing these kinds of tests is to showcase their work. If they produced content downplaying their work heads would roll.

Eh, a bit conspirational much. There have been dramatic improvements in car safety in each of the last few decades. Accidents that used to be death sentences are now dust yourself off and walk away.

Actuarially as well, the value of a human life is so high that a few $1000 in safety options on a car for marginal increases in safety will almost always be worth it.

https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...

Arguably the other thing you can do is live in a state with a 55~65mph max speed limit. Looking at the state level auto fatalities stats is pretty striking how much lower fatality rates are in the low limit / high traffic (and therefore low speed) northeast .. whether you measure per capita or per mile driven.

The most interesting but hard to measure metric would be per vehicle hour, I would suggest. Commutes are driven more by time than distance, and in congested areas people commute shorter distances at lower speed vs some of the super commutes people do at 75mph+. You can see this sort of reflected in the stats where the per capita fatality rates are 1/3 to 1/2 the level of the Deep South, however on a per-mile basis closer to 2/3. You can also see that the northeastern per-capita miles driven is 1/2 ..

I'm not being conspirational. You can F right off with that implication.

Follow the incentives. You will NEVER see them show you the difference between like a 93 and 94 of a given model (tons of vehicles went from airbags optional to airbags standard over that year so that's basically what you'd be testing) because a single variable or low variable test doesn't get them the DARE-esque messaging and "look how far we've come" back patting that these sorts of old vs new comparisons are meant for. Watching a dummmy face plant into the steering wheel of a 93 OJ bronco and then do the same thing into the airbag of a 94 (to just pick one example) just doesn't scratch those itches the same way comparing vehicles that are half a dozen major engineering revisions and 20yr of model bloat apart from each other.

>Arguably the other thing you can do is live in a state with a 55~65mph max speed limit.

Eh, I think you're reading too much into it.

Speed limits don't reflect reality, anyone from the northeast will tell you that limited access highway speeds are predicated on traffic, weather and road conditions and 80mph middle lane speeds aren't uncommon pre and post commuting "hour" (in sarcasm quotes for obvious reasons).

Reducing potential for high speed traffic conflicts probably matters a lot more than you're giving it credit for. You almost never have cross roads just dumping traffic onto a state highway where traffic goes 70+ in the northeast. This is pretty standard once you get out of the beltway in the more rural states and account for a lot of avoidable crashes.

> However a $70k car generally has a much better set of class leading accident avoidance & safety features than a $25k car which will generally be minimum legally required for compliance.

That’s empirically false. Toyota and Subaru both make 25k cars with vastly better active driver assistance features than Tesla, as shown by every independent test that’s ever been done.

Yeah I’m not gonna put Tesla on a pedestal for class leading active driver assist by any measure lol.

Subaru specifically punches above their weight in terms of safety per dollar and given their close relationship with Toyota I could see them being similar.

And to my point - the $25k Subaru with all the option stay be a historical memory or marketing fallacy.

If you open up the pricing tool on the cheapest Subaru wagon/SUV model, the Crosstek, and want all the active driver assist options, you quickly end up at the $30k top-tier "Limited" spec which is $31k after fees, and if you add any functional options/accessories (GPS nav, auto dim mirror, etc) is more like $35k.

Similarly their most famous model, the Outback may START at $28k, but if you want the trim with all the safety options, thats the $41k Touring. You can knock a few of the safety options off by going with the Limited for $36k (and add a few of the safety features on optionally to end up at $39k).

And I'm not even including markups, which dealers spent the last 2 years adding. Personally my mom spent 6 months hunting down a Subaru dealer who would sell her a car at sticker price after having her old one totaled in an accident. Then another 2 months waiting for it to arrive. This is probably over now, but again the $25k car is so rare as to almost be mythical.

> A car is worth 20% less the day you drive it off of the lot and keeps losing value.

But so does a kitchen rennovation.

> Having freezer space can save you thousands of dollars in food.

It can, if you use it that way. How many of the people buying these expensive kitches do?

of course it will, but spending 500K in remodeling, doesn't mean the house is necessarily going to be worth 500K more - it might, it might not.

That renovation probably paid for a lot of renovators Raptors.

exactly, which closes the circle explaining how average car prices have gone up so much.. largely driven by expensive pickups hahaha!

>$2k Rolex

I thought the cheapest Rolex is substantially more expensive. Am I wrong?

Fair point. My numbers are probably off on everything now.

Before the 2020s era inflation you could definitely pick up a mens one used for $2k, like a Datejust model for example.

Likewise a $70k car is neither particularly rare or exotic now with how much the average car price has been pushed up by big trucks and EVs.

> Likewise a $70k car is neither particularly rare or exotic

Just for the sake of nitpicking, but going back to the BMW example, you could get a well-optioned Z4 in this range, which I would argue is rather exotic and will make heads turn, if not very expensive.

You CAN get something rare/exotic for $70k these days.

However you can get a lot of pretty surprisingly run of the mill vehicles at that price range as well, especially for at truck or EV. Like a Ford F-150, Tesla Model 3/Y, entry level Mercedes or BMW electric car, even a Ford Mach E, etc.

The slowing inflation, high interest rates and collapse of the economy in the coming 6-18 months will probably wind some of that back.

It's pretty easy to add a few options and pay $70K or more for a Ford F-150 these days. At least here in Canada.

People love their pickup trucks.

It's truly crazy to me how quickly pricing has ramped up especially in EVs. Imagine telling someone 10 years ago that people would line up to buy a $60k Hyundai EV, or $80k on a luxury Hyundai sub-brand EV?

The Tesla Model 3/Y range can easily run up above $70k with options now, and the bigger Tesla Model S/X is a six-figures vehicle!

Likewise, gas powered BMWs seem to have disappeared in the $30-40k range and pretty quickly get into the $50k+ range.

I figure GP's talking about gas trucks. We're talking working class people spending over a year's gross income on a truck, when in the past they'd be buying a "work truck" with a single bench seat, no A/C, and an AM radio.

I don't want to make assumptions, but it's my understanding that they're usually on finance which means they're paying much more than sticker price.

I certainly don't know many middle class people with 70k in savings to throw around, either everyone is doing a lot better than they otherwise expose or there's easy money on the table.

I think we'll see price corrections downward for cars over the next 5 years, as interest rates change. I've asked a handful of importers while I try and source a car from Japan, with the Japanese import market being hyper inflated. They've all suggested that during the pandemic, financed purchases were making up the majority of their sales. I imagine that's set to change as interest rates change and loans get harder to acquire.

Of course people are financing them. Vehicles are expensive. I believe the average used car price is over $40K now here. Even an average used car was about $20K.

Let's stick to the truck, though. F-150s are everywhere.

If I head to the Ford Canada website, an F-150 XL (the cheap one) is $39K before you get started. A Platinum brings you up to $87K, and the Limited brings you up to $98K.

The website is definitely NOT including taxes, licensing fees, financing fees, interest, etc.

I couldn't imagine paying that for a work truck. The trades are fairly well payed, but to that extent?

The average new car transaction price is currently $48K.

https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/kbb-atp-september...

What's the histogram? Surely the mean is highly skewed.

I can't see the logic in it either, by the time they're done paying off a typical loan even for the $87k variant, you would be up into triple figures for it. It could have cost as much as some people's homes.

Isn’t the average price of a F150 is like 55-60k so that’s pretty damn close. An F250 can easily run over 100

I’m…old now? Old enough to be shocked how much car prices have gone up. And I follow the industry.

Why, back in my day, you could get a “stripper” model of a truck (my dad’s term for the most-basic-possible model with crank windows and a stick shift) for like $15,000. Now?

https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/

Good luck getting off the lot for less than $40,000 for a full-size truck.

…though to give Ford some credit here:

https://www.ford.com/trucks/maverick/

They do still sell a truly cheap-and-cheerful truck. Will it tow much? No. Is it going to take you to the bottom of the Grand Canyon or whatever off-road macho fantasy? No. Will it get several bags of mulch back from Home Depot? Absolutely—which is what people actually use trucks for. (If that.)

"2020s era inflation" started just this year. And it's, what, 11%?

Well its nearly 2023, and we have had 10%-ish inflation going on about 2 years.

In specific areas such as cars, you had complete dislocations. For example used cars which normally depreciate 15-20%/year, instead inflated about 15%/year for 2 years.

Over the summer I traded in a 4 year old car at the end of its warranty of 85% of what I paid for it new. I probably could have sold private party and haggled harder to get closer to 90%+ Normally 85% is what you can expect to sell your car for right after you drive it off the lot on your second day of ownership.

This was a knock on effect of new car production shortages, and pent up demand from low 2020 sales and people having a lot of cash on hand.

Related to this you had dealers adding market (ADM) on not even luxury/exotic vehicles of $10-15k in some areas. So never mind not being able to negotiate a few $1000 off, people were paying sticker+$15k for new vehicles for the privilege of being able to buy one. And this was on top of the sticker prices ticking up over the course of the pandemic and related inflation.

So no, for many things, it was not "just a year of 11% inflation".

> Well its nearly 2023, and we have had 10%-ish inflation going on about 2 years.

Are you not in the US? We haven't even had 10% inflation for all of the past year.

Particularly for cars, and especially used cars.. inflation was >10% for >1 year, before turning over ~3-4 months ago.

https://publish.manheim.com/content/dam/consulting/ManheimUs...

That's not inflation. That's two cherry picked product categories. One of which is a luxury good.

Similarly for watches, luxury watches basically doubled during the pandemic in pricing before crashing from their springtime 2022 peak. Still +40% versus pre-pandemic levels.

https://watchcharts.com/watches/brand_index/rolex

New Rolex watches are more expensive (around $6k I think), but the Rolex to happy meal ratio is lower than it has ever been.

The Toyota Land Cruiser has been a popular car in certain upper-class circles. At $87k it's fairly expensive, but it doesn't look expensive.

Precisely!

Not to mention a fully specced out Tesla Model 3 is $80k and Model Y is now.. $90k, and the tax credits are basically gone! I remember getting a pretty well configured Model 3 for $50k after tax incentives in their first year of production.

For ~$70k you used to be able to get a Model S, which now STARTS at $105k. Easily configurable into the $130-160k range now.. insane.

Agreed that they are expensive cars that have gotten even more expensive over the last decade.

But comparing absolute numbers for a car you bought five years ago may be misleading because the majority of the increase is likely due to inflation.

Back of the envelope math: If you were in CA and got $7.5k federal and $2.5k state credits that means the Model 3 you bought in 2017 was ~$60k or ~$73k in today's dollars. If it's now $80k then that's a real price increase of ~$7k in today's dollars.

That's certainly an increase, but making an expensive car slightly more expensive doesn't seem particularly insane to me.

Inflation is a huge factor here for sure. Most people probably can't get their heads around a well equipped Toyota Corolla approaching $30k or Honda Accord hitting $40k. Mentally to me these are BMW 3-series prices, but that's not been true for some time!

If you are in the market for a 3-row / 7 seater, you can spend $55k on a Toyota Highlander SUV or $40k on a Toyota Siena minivan.

It's genuinely pretty challenging to spend under $30k on a new car now outside fairly basic 2-4 door smaller sedan/hatchback vehicles in their base trim without options.

> outside fairly basic [...] vehicles in their base trim without options

Nothing wrong with basic vehicles "in their base trim without options", we have two parked outside the house right now, and the vehicle we owned before them was similar.

Agreed.

I am only trying to illustrate that the line between luxury/excess in autos has shifted substantially in the last few years partially inflation driven and partially cheap credit / long loan terms driven.

The universe of under-$30k cars is now quite limited whereas 5 years ago, one could possibly describe $30k+ as being luxury.

Hell, somehow my brain is still stuck in the 90s, where $30k would get you a very nice car indeed. I was a teenager then, so perhaps I'm anchored there because it's when I first started getting interested in things like that, and first started driving. (Gas was also 92 cents per gallon for a bit while I was in high school, oof.)

My family also always only bought used cars (and I continued this practice), so I guess that further skewed my conception of car cost downward. I only just bought my first new car recently, and I still haven't really adjusted to the reality of both what current prices are like, and how much more expensive a new car is.

I could have written the same comment and have mixed feelings about turning into the old person who feels that everything was cheaper "back in my day".

I try and remind myself that for the most part it's not that cars are that much more expensive but that dollars are worth so much less.

Franchise dealers typically stock few if any vehicles in their base trim without options. Those vehicles often exist only in token numbers so that the manufacturer can advertise a low starting price, but they're not readily available to most consumers. Of course that varies by brand.

> For ~$70k you used to be able to get a Model S, which now STARTS at $105k. Easily configurable into the $130-160k range now.. insane.

For a shit car with the interior fit and finish of a poverty-spec Skoda, and all the important controls replaced with a bloody great iPad that blinds you at night.

Oh, and it's from an obscenely "techbro" company.

Am I the only one not impressed in any sense by Teslas?

> Am I the only one not impressed in any sense by Teslas?

I am very impressed by their batteries and I like the look of the Model S but I'm utterly unimpressed by the build quality of the interior and the cheap materials used.

At that price I'd except to be entering a comfortable car using luxurious materials.

FWIW I tried the Porsche Taycan and the interior is leaps and bound ahead of the Teslas (but the batteries aren't up to par yet and the software ain't either I think).

Look at really any of the competition at the Model S price level from the Germans and the interior is spectacular. Honestly the battery range on the Germans is also better than you realize.

Tesla exaggerates their range and few actually achieve the quoted EPA range, so you can deduct 10-15% for real world.

The Germans, especially Porsche undersell their range and real world you can get about 10-15% longer out of the BMWs & MBs and something insane like 35% more out of the Taycans.

InsideEVs has a nice real world 70mph highway range comparison, and the ranking would surprise you compared to the advertised ranges. https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/

So an advertised 350mi Model S and a 225mi Taycan in fact meet somewhere in the middle, closer to 300mi +/- for both.

> Am I the only one not impressed in any sense by Teslas

I could excuse the drawbacks you cited and the cost if they were the Framework laptop of the automotive world. But at those price points, and a repairability narrative that is not much better than, “out of warranty and one accident away from into landfill”, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I’ll buy a Tesla.

> repairability narrative that is not much better than, “out of warranty and one accident away from into landfill”

I have a couple of old Range Rovers. There are very few things you can't fix with a half-inch spanner and a hammer, and those you can fix with a 7/16th spanner and a bit of sticky tape.

They run on propane, so they get cheap tax and can be registered as Low Emission Vehicles, which is pretty hilarious for a 4-litre V8.

Combined they probably still have a smaller ecological footprint than making one Tesla Model S.

They've also got far comfier seats.

> They run on propane

How does fueling work? Perhaps I just haven't noticed (because I have to reason to), but I have never seen a fueling station advertise propane, outside of tanks for grilling and similar.

Big doughnut-shaped tank in the spare wheel well, bit of plumbing to the front (copper in old installs, plastic on newer ones - my "old" Rangie has plastic pipe because I refurbed it about seven years ago), and a thing like a diving regulator that lets the engine "suck" gas through after boiling it off using engine coolant, and feeds it into the throttle body. More sophisticated ones use solenoid injectors that work alongside the normal petrol injectors and provide a more "direct" flow of fuel and better performance. On my oldschool install there's a stepper motor that adjusts the fuelling based on what it reads from the existing lambda sensors. When you switch to gas, a pair of modules (four cylinders each so a V8 needs two) switch some resistors in series with the petrol injectors so they cannot fire but the ECU still sees continuity, cutting off the petrol, and the gas solenoids switch on allowing propane through.

To fuel up you just go to a filling station with an LPG pump (getting harder to find here unfortunately) and instead of poking the nozzle down the filler neck and holding down a trigger on the filler gun, you plug in a hose with a fitting like a BNC plug the size of your wrist and hold down a button on the pump until you've put enough in. It clicks off when it's full.

No difference in performance (in theory you could adjust it to get more because it's the equivalent of 115RON fuel!) and a bit more fuel consumption, but roughly 2/3 the price of petrol.

LPG (liquified propane gas) stations are slowly on the wane but still common enough for practical use in Germany.

Common enough and cheap enough that I still feel a bit prescient for buying a 2017 Ford Focus wagon with about 30k km on the clock that was factory modified for LPG, in August 2021, for about half what the original owner paid.

In Poland, these are about as common as regular gas stations.

Which specific models are your units?

I'm impressed in the sense that Tesla has done amazing things with battery technology, and has made EVs "cool". It's sometimes easy to forget, but before Tesla, EVs were ugly and nobody wanted them.

But yeah, whenever I'm in a Tesla, the interior looks cheap, and the giant iPad (in the Model 3 at least) looks bolted-on rather than designed-in. Not to mention the real-time display of what's around the car is laughably bad, with cars and pedestrians flickering in and out, and sometimes not even showing up at all.

I'm glad people drive them, though; more EVs on the street is a good thing.

No, you're not alone, but they still have a cachet in a certain crowd (the "green" and "forward-thinking" types love them). Hopefully it goes away soon.

i dunno my parents fit in that category and told me they will not consider a Tesla as long as it’s associated with Musk. EVs of other companies are really quite nice these days so i don’t think they are losing anything. Right now that have a new plugin hybrid RAV4.

However, the Land Cruiser will be passed down for many generations, so the amortized cost of a Land Cruiser is not expensive.

Also, Land Cruiser has apparently been discontinued.

> the Land Cruiser will be passed down for many generations

Wait, what sort of longevity are we taking about? 15 years? 20?

I don't think we humans can reproduce quickly enough for that to span "many generations". :-)

We came close to that with a Camry my mother-in-law owns. She drove it, my sister-in-law drove it for a while, and then they tried to pawn it off on my oldest. At the end of the day, I didn’t want my kid driving a car missing out on 25 years of safety enhancements.

You made the right decision. Watching YouTube crash test videos of a 2022 vs 2000 vs 1980 car is extremely illuminating.

Both of my Range Rovers are 25 years old. One's heading for a light refurb and overhaul at nearly 300,000 miles, the other has just had its first "big" service at 100,000 miles.

Fuel availability considerations notwithstanding, there's very little that would stop them going another 25 years.

Way more. Land Cruisers can last 40+ easily. Do a craigslist search and you’ll find them in fully working condition.

I don’t think the so-called “safety features” developed in the next 20 years are as valuable as the others predict. We’re already very safe in cars, especially massive modern ones like the cruiser. If you’re driving fast/reckless enough to get killed in one today more safety features aren’t what you need.

It's valuable for pedestrian.

I don’t think many people are scrapping their cars for the safety of pedestrians. Also, personal accountability. If you’re going too fast/distracted to react in an area with the potential for pedestrian interference, that’s a you problem, not your car’s.

People need to be more mindful of the fact they’re operating multi-ton death machines, not sit back behind increasing layers of technology and text their buddy while driving because they know their “safety features” will protect them.

This is partially why I disabled my airbags - pedestrians don’t have them, why should I? Gives me more skin in the game.

Vintage Land Cruiser is even bigger status symbol.

That sounds like a response from a Large Language Model.

Nah, it's from someone who hasn't owned a car in over ten years.

I can totally see how a car could get passed down from father to son, but a single car and "many generations" doesn't really add up in this part of the world (could be totally different in other parts of the world, of course).

Not in Australia?

But then you do get articles like https://www.betootaadvocate.com/uncategorized/brisbane-accou...

For anyone not from aus the Betoota is a (great) satire publication similar to the onion

> Also, Land Cruiser has apparently been discontinued

For those not from the US like myself, this is only the case in the US. I'm sure we'll still get plenty down under.

And even one that's 6 years old with 100k miles is still over $50,000 lol.

Interesting observation. I agree with what you've written, but I might even go one step farther, the wealthy like extremely expensive things that don't require much money.

Yeah, I'm being a little glib there. But what they love is golf, tennis, violin lessons for kids. Yes, they own expensive golf clubs (and memberships) and tennis rackets and violins. But what they love is that they can slum it with a very inexpensive tennis racket or golf club or violin, whereas the expensive gear is useless in the hands of someone who hasn't had a lifetime of lessons that cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. Even if you have the money, you can't buy the technique, and people who play these sports/instruments can recognize instantly if you know what you're doing (even in movies, tennis, golf, and violin, faked technique is immediately recognizable). It helps a lot of your parents had money and trained you up in these things when you were a child.

Let's take a step back from the signalling perspective and recognize that hobbies (expensive or not) are a lot more fun than watches, which provide almost nothing but status. The same goes for remodeling, which is an extended form of decoration and also a hobby for some people.

Unless watches are a hobby.

I find mechanical watches to be fascinating. This is obsolete technology, and yet, innovation continues. This is precision engineering, but at least for the high end, mostly done by hand. A lovely anachronism, which is a fitting word for a timepiece. It is like real life steampunk. I fully understand the appeal beyond status signalling. How can geeks not be at least a little interested in watchmaking?

I know some people don't care and for them it is just status signaling. But it the same as for supercars: just because it is status doesn't mean there isn't something behind it.

Watchmaking and watch buying are different things.

> * The last round of job searching doing zoom interviews, I wore my hoodie for half the calls. If I had done this while job searching out of college, during my internship, or at my first job.. I would not be where I am today.*

That's not just status, it's got change over time mixed in.

It's partially status in that, I'm advanced enough in my career that I don't really care to work anywhere that would ding me in a zoom interview over my outfit. Earlier in my career I could not have afforded to be so picky.

One of the starkest power dynamics in dress code I've observed is in non-tech firms that have large tech orgs to support the revenue generating roles. While there were official dress codes that tech largely abided, our internal customers who generated revenue often showed up in tee shirts or wore ball caps in the office ...

> I don't really care to work anywhere that would ding me in a zoom interview over my outfit

I've often found that people who say (and believe) that they don't ding people who dress poorly, do ding people who dress poorly.

I’ve heard someone say a few months back that a zoom setup is the new business suit/attire. After spending the pandemic working from an unfinished/unheated garage near a loud expressway, I definitely felt there were situations where I was “dinged” for it at a FAANG company.

>inclusive of "needing" $10k viking stove/range, and $10k subzero fridge/freezer in your kitchen because you are a "foodie"

Haha, don't forget the classic combo of the $10k Caesarstone countertop plus half a dozen blunt knives.

LOL yes, thank you. People might argue somehow the appliance makes them cook better but the countertops and cabinetry is a pretty tough sell.

Every time I look at my 30 year old kitchen & bathrooms, and tally up what it would cost to update them, I can't help but think I'd rather just retire a bit earlier.

Yes things need to be replaced as they break, and ultimately some renovation will be needed.. but I know people gutting 10-15 year old kitchens & baths purely for aesthetics every time they move. Full employment for tradesmen.

Is Caesarstone nice?

Yes, but more important is that it is trendy and differentiated from similar options such as granite.

> and doing a $500k home Reno because you have good architectural taste and style

This is basically the cost to add a second floor to your crappy home you bought a several years back because that’s all you could afford to buy in Seattle at the time. Probably even worse in some other cities.

Renovations that increase the square footage are a rare exception that genuinely add serious value. They are rare often due to the zoning rules and permitting requirements in most areas.

I’m speaking of interior renovations of basically aesthetic changes that are generally negative value add.

I had learned a saying recently "cars for the poor, watches for the rich". The idea is that cars have higher utilities so even though cars are higher price in general, watchers show higher status signal.

As it turns out, this was an old Chinese saying a couple decades ago, where "cars" really meant bicycles.

This makes me think of Adam Carolla's Rich Man-Poor Man. E.g. "Made love next to a fountain." "Doesn't drive himself to work." Many examples on Twitter and Reddit.

There is currently an insane market for high end wrist watches. Not the 2k Rolexes, I mean the 200k Phillip Patels.

There’s even a hot market for historical wristwatches. 2 million for a watch that would have been $100,000 10 years ago is not unheard of.

Viking and sub zero aren't even good appliances. I'm not sure why they're so popular other the price

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