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Comment by vinhboy | Hacker News Reader

The wide spectrum of the human experience never cease to amaze me. Reading the stories in this article just made that spectrum a little bit bigger. Just wild. I am too shocked to have any sort of moral opinion about it.

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It's really hard to imagine "scale my net worth up to billions" and work out what that practically means - even just your random billionaire can hire people to do things we wouldn't even think of considering, like having multiple houses around the country/world that are identical, and you have staff at each that makes sure they remain identical - if you left the New York Times on your desk in Milan, it will be on your desk in New York when you walk in the room.

Power cuts both ways. Move one or two random items to a location they’ve placed them before but haven’t in awhile, call coworker in Milan with list of things to update, note down reactions and make slight adjustments to tactics until they snap and buy a social media network for $40bn. Never mess with the help.

Your example sounds infuriating. First, I want items where they are supposed to be, not where I left them. But who wants the same thing all the time? If I go out to a large meal and every course tastes the same because it's all covered in the same sauce, it doesn't matter if it is my favorite sauce. I want to have variety. Similarly, when I travel, different spaces please. On the other hand, I would like to arrive at a hotel and be handed a key as I walked in and had the closets already populated with my clothes.

Wait, are you just suggesting this as a hypothetical, or is this a real thing people do?

It’s rsync in real life!

This would be so much fun. I imagine being rich and without meaning or a direction. I'd spend my time messing up my housing, secretly taking photo's of it. then flying around for a few hours in a jet to my identical house and yelling at the staff for not having it match the photos.

Super extravagant, but to blow $150k any random weekend you "only" need to be making ~$10M/year. A massive amount, but I'm guessing even many HN users have businesses making in excess of that (feel free to invite me to your next party).

I don't understand where you got the 10MM/year number from. Blowing 150k/weekend requires 7.8MM/year. Double it for taxes and you get to make 15MM/year just to pay for the talent on your private shows. If you want to live indoors or eat you'll need more money.

Do it as a company event with pre-tax money!

bemmu said a random weekend, not 52 weekends a year.

Bemmu said a random weekend, so I would expect it to cost about the average of what they spend when no big events were happening . I didn't even add blow out weekends for vacations or major events.

But bemmu also calculated that you need $10 million, as if he were calculating doing this every weekend. I mean, to do it once, you only need $150,000.

Here's an alternate explanation for his calculation. People usually spend around 2-4% of their annual income on vacations. Depends on a lot of factors of course, but that's a reasonable amount. A person earning $10M could afford to blow 2% on one weekend ($200k), 2% on fancy vacations rest of the year and still spend consider themselves fairly responsible.

How much would an ordinary person earning $60,000 be prepared to spend on a big weekend blowout with live music, drinking, partying, clothes etc. Now scale that up to a person earning $10,000,000.

It doesn't scale linearly, more like exponentially. Wealthy people can devote a much, much larger percent of their income towards discretionary spending.

There is absolutely nothing new here.

This is just a symptom of our regression back to a dominate aristocratic class that is pleased when the king hires Mozart as the court musician.

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