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Comment by delgaudm | Hacker News Reader

A fine heuristic if you have enough money to make the choice in the first place.

[1]Sam Vimes’s ‘Boots’ Theory of Socio-economic Unfairness, propounded in Men at Arms:

"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 the 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."

Men at Arms"

[1] https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...

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There are solutions. I find myself posting this [0] here on HN from time to time. It doesn’t work for everything (I’m not sure how well it would work for a pair of leather boots, though the same approach is theoretically possible there as well) but it is a step up from just continuing with the status quo.

[0]: https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg003...

what is this link? I only saw mailing lists, but this looks like a detached email

That’s him posting to his own list. Think of it as an old-fashioned blog post.

I think this post generally is good, but the diet stuff triggered me. Some table setting here, I can't stand daily food prep, I've done a 100% Soylent phase, I've done a 100% eating out phase, I've written apps to balance macronutrient ratios and plan meals, and I've written apps to balance both macro and micronutrient ratios/amounts and plan meals. I now essentially throw random stuff into an Instant Pot and hope for the best.

For almost everyone--and I hate to admit it but this group includes me--food is a core, irreplaceable pleasure. Even when just doing it alone, not even for social purposes. At this point, I'm receptive to arguments that it's the main thing that most people look forward to every day. You can set up all kinds of plans (read: diets) and tech to assist you in this experience, but I think if you live in the rich world, the primary goal of eating is to feel this pleasure, it is a major part of your pleasure life, and as a result these plans and this tech will only ever assist you in that endeavor. They will never be more than assistants, secondary to this goal.

Next, micronutrients are best ingested in whole food form. Multivitamins are literally a supplement, they really shouldn't be your primary source of micronutrients; unless you're willing to do lots of research, you really shouldn't submit yourself wholly to their vicissitudes. Not only are there micronutrients that can't be combined because they interfere in each others' absorption (iron and calcium are the most infamous for this but there are others), but only some multivitamins will actually show you the amounts that your body absorbs in the first place, and you have to know how to look for that (look for amounts in IUs basically, but that's not 100%). You also can't be sure you're not just eating coagulated sawdust, or worse straight up poison (if you think this is hyperbolic just google around).

It's also likely (though the research on this is pretty fuzzy) there are lots of negative microbiome implications for switching from a varied diet to a diet of soy pancakes and multivitamins.

This diet doesn't have enough of the various forms of fats (Omega 3/6/9s, not just sunflower oil). The only way to get here via supplement is to take them by the handful, which you shouldn't do, if only for cost reasons.

This diet really only has half the fiber content you need (the RDA for which is arguably pretty low, i.e. if you were eating RDAs for leafy greens and whole grains you'd easily exceed it). Add that to your list of supplements.

---

To totally argue against myself here, it might be hard to believe but I'm also open to the idea I've seen around that none of this stuff matters as much as research indicates, or at least we're missing something huge. The general idea is that humans have known basically nothing about nutrition for all of our existence--including right now--yet we have somehow thrived, so it seems like no matter what trash we jam into our digestive tracts our bodies find a way to make it work. This is obviously true up to a point, the question is up to what point exactly.

You speak of food as a pleasure only to describe it as a chore.

Food and nutrition do not require that much thought for the average breathing human.

Your hominid ancestors figured it out already— without an app.

Oh, yeah this probably got lost in my wall of text. I 100% agree with this; I might even say that all the fixation with it by people like me is a way of coping with general anxiety, or a brain that always needs something to do, or a person who was so consistently let down by the knowledge, traditions and ways of their people that they groped around wildly for any idea of how to feed themselves / live their lives.

To be clear, I was not linking it for the specific dietary recommendations but rather the approach enabling one to - progressively - avail one’s self of more expensive upfront but cheaper-per-unit options.

Haha fair, sorry to hijack. I do think strategic buying can be super advantageous, but it's hard to do that when you're also laboring under the mental load of being poor. But, yeah clear guides or maybe just less opportunity to buy junk (better regulations) would probably bear a lot of fruit here.

It's expensive to be poor.

Money follows money, that's how it works.

If someone invests 100€ and makes 1% of profit, they got an extra 1€. You can maybe buy a cup of coffee with it.

But if a someone invests a million euros and gets 1% of profit, they get 1000€. That's a cup of coffee every day for almost 3 years.

Exact same investment, very different outcomes.

1% of a million is 10k. But your point is still valid :]

More to the point: living expenses.

If someone starts out with $10k, invests at 5%/y, that's $500/y added.

If that person's rent + food + utility bills are $1000/month, that $500/y is 'peanuts', and other income (like regular job) is needed to make ends meet long-term.

(ignoring inflation for simplicity)

But if starting with $100k, 5% is $5k/y which would cover 5 months/year living expenses. And no worries about losing a job.

Starting with $1m, that's $50k/y interest, or all living expenses covered, no need to have a job, AND $38k/y left over to increase capital or do fun stuff.

That's apart from effect of increases in the cost of living.

So very different effect even if interest % and all else equal. Moving up the ladder from $1k -> $10k -> $100k etc as savings, can take a loooonng time (if possible at all).

> Exact same investment, very different outcomes.

not exactly the same. The quantity is itself a difference.

All investments would have a risk. The $1million investment has 1000x the risk, and thus, they obtain 1000x the reward. So, the weighted reward for both situations are the same per dollar.

Yes, that is true if you're assuming the exact same risk for both situations.

The one with 100€ won't have access to investment consultants or private banking. Maybe a few youtube videos.

The one with 1M€ will have an accountant, private banking access and unless they found the 1M€ off the street they'll have contacts for investment tips the other person will never have.

I'm not a millionaire, but I do kinda know a few who could be measured as such. I've made good money following investment tips from them. Not life-changing, but fancy vacation amounts.

"The poor man's dollar goes to market twice" is a saying where I grew up

Buying cheap in the US is more often due to ignorance of the item, quality, and frequency of future use.

Even most poor people, when educated about certain products can afford the quality item or change their habits to not need the item at all.

I wonder what would be example of a product that people would not need at all if educated?

I'd say bunch of cleaning chemicals when vinegar does the job or "branded chemicals" simply contain vinegar anyway.

It's cheaper to cut up a chicken than buy chicken breasts. It's cheaper to make your own burger than buy takeout. Of course there's TidePods etc.

That said, there's also the other side. I've seen people prioritize paying down their 3% mortgage with extra payments, because, "debt is bad", when they could be earning 5% on that same money and have a "rainy day fund".

Very few people these days don't have access to credit. If you knew you would save 50% over a couple of years, even credit card rates would be better than break even. The real problem is a lack of knowledge, interest, or simply caring about priorities. More likely the CC get's maxed out and payday loans are the next step in a downward spiral.

Very few people in your country perhaps. But I'm pretty sure the % of the world's population with access to credit isn't especially high (apparently there are 2.5 billion credit cards in existence worldwide. But of course many of us in developed nations have more than 1).

> ignorance of the item, quality, and frequency of future use

That is to say, formerly reliable companies outsourcing their production and selling their future good name for current profits.

That might have been relevant 50 years ago, but even good boots are not that expensive. And if you save that much, put the boots on a credit card, the cost of that is less than what you save on the better boots.

Also getting boots repaired is expensive now, more costly than the average new pair.

The Boots theory is funny because it's absurd. It's not actually applicable to life in powerty. There is no class of items where if you are poor you spend more on it than when you're wealthy. People in poverty spend more _time_ on things, yeah, but not more money or money per use.

You can see some discussion on that from people who actually grew up poor in https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111068036776213383

Hmm, there were many things in the UK that used to have essentially rental kind of options that were much more expensive in the long run (TVs and sofas) as well as energy being more expensive if you were poor (prepayment meters). The last one is still true, but much more limited now.

You don't need starvation level poverty though, remember the comparison point is with a salaried captain of the police. So if the point was "they don't spend more because they can't buy any shoes" it doesn't relate to the original Pratchett bit.

> There is no class of items where if you are poor you spend more on it than when you're wealthy.

What about something like laundromat fees being higher than the running cost of a washing machine? There's also the concept of "poverty tax".

It's only not true because once you have money you're instinctively driven to advertise that to other people, meaning you'll spend money on items that say "I can afford these". But I certainly know of people who incorporate "buying well and buying once" into their general financial strategy and do well out of it. However I disagree it means they spend less time on things - even expensive well-made items need time invested into their maintenance to truly last (something I acknowledge despite being woefully bad at looking after almost anything I own).

What? There are a thousand things like that, not the least of which is healthcare.

it's true of household supplies and food. you can save a lot of money buying in bulk, but you need a car, ample storage, and cash up front to actually do this. I spend substantially less on paper towels and toilet paper than I did when I was limited to purchasing only what I could physically carry home with me.

of course, now that I can afford a car and a place to store months worth of paper towels, they are no longer a substantial part of my budget. go figure.

All items are cheaper in bulk, so the class of items that are more expensive for poor people is actually pretty much everything.

Being poor means your friends and family and roommates and neighbors are also broke, so you can't buy in bulk because they gonna steal yo shit. So you're forced to buy singles, which are more expensive. Being able to store the bulk goods from a CostCo run without them walking off is a privilege that you're taking for granted.

I see somethign similar to this in poor countries I've visited. people who are very poor don't have enough money to maintain a bank account so they just store cash. they have a mindset of spending what they have and never saving. I thought it was stupid till I realized that having a bunch of cash at home just makes you a target for getting robbed. SO you end up with people who spend as soon as they have over a certain amount of money because they never have enough to open a bank account. if you try to save enough for a bank account, there's a good chance the money will be stolen before you even get that far.

Ridiculous that banking isn't free. I never pay banking fees. But also.. it's the poor that get hit with the NSF fees and high interest rates which is also predatory.

In a place like that, the banking infrastructure must be really poor.

And as a consequence, anyone who can improve this banking infrastructure can reap the rewards from this infrastructure.

The US would be included in that category. The problem is that NSF fees are legal, and when you're close to the edge of your money, the payroll company having a problem and taking an extra day to deposit your paycheck, or two extra weeks at the start of a new job, means that the bank account gets hit with several NSF fees that you can't ever pay back, so you just have to let the account get closed for being overdrawn.

You should go to a Midwest Dollar General and buy a days worth of food for a family of 5 and report back on if you think the theory still doesn't apply.

If you step back a bit from the boots example you can see the boots theory in action.

Consider socks (I know there's another thread that calls this a 'micro-optimization', likely right, but still...).

Never buy a pair of socks. Or, never buy one pair of socks -- buy a few packs, identical, well priced, and ideally on sale. If on sale, buy them now: if they're clearance, you may not get to come back tomorrow. Now you save:

- money: when one sock wears out, you don't need to discard an orphan. Also, if they are prone to early wearing out, you get enough warning to look for another sale.

- time: when sorting, you don't need to match individual socks --- the green ones all match

But a dozen or more pairs of socks looks like an investment when you are on minimum wage.

There are many things where the poor spend more: laundry; check cashing; many groceries; and anything else where smaller purchases are less efficient.

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