Hacker News Reader

Comment by HardCodedBias | Hacker News Reader

I really like this post since it shows how very little there is for the wealthy to buy other than status goods.

The life of the rich, other than status, is very much like the life of upper middle class. The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes.

We have very few items for the rich to buy. Honestly, it is a problem it breaks incentives and it drives the rich more towards status goods which help no one since they are zero sum.

We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.

View on HN

Buying "things" really is the level 0 of wealth. What matters is that you don't have to sell your time for money, that alone changes your entire existence. Then you have access to better healthcare, education, seeing your kids grow, &c.

That's why a lot of poor people who unlock large amount of money go broke quite fast, they still think like poor people

Time is indeed a very major thing, but it’s more accessible than most realise - I am only marginally wealthy, high 7/low 8 figures, and that’s ample for me to not need to work for a living and live very comfortably. Frankly, once you have even $1M in free liquid capital, you are in the endgame, as money makes money far more efficiently than labour. I spend perhaps 20 hours a year farting around with our finances, place some bets, and that’s it. I decided to go full on idle-rich when I was still practically a pauper, and have grown my worth significantly since.

Perhaps my sample pool is skewed, but the billionaires and centimillionaires I know live pretty modest lives in general - yes, they fly first class, stay in the best hotels, and all that jazz, but they’re unpretentious, and you wouldn’t know them from the upper middle class family sat at the next table. In fact, one I know regularly gets weird looks because he’ll be in some elite country club in his coffee-stained slacks and threadbare jumper - but there’s the rub - he doesn’t care. The guy who looks rich is probably up to his eyeballs in debt. The guy who looks like the janitor probably owns the place.

I think the single biggest thing wealth buys is not giving a shit what other people think. You don’t have to play status games when you know you’re the big dog in the room, even if nobody else knows it. I mean, I take perverse joy in showing up at places looking like I just crawled out of a gutter, because I know it doesn’t matter - my money is good.

I also like showing up at places and don’t give a shit what other people think. It’s even more fun not being wealthy at all.

I agree with this so much.

I'm not your level wealthy, but I don't work, live comfortably, and I'm happy.

I prefer not to eat at expensive restaurants, but I enjoy restaurants that serve good food. I don't really want to fly to an expensive city and spend lots of money. I'd rather spend time in nature, hike, try to ID plants, and spend time with my wife and our animals.

Yeah, that’s pretty much our schtick too - we live off grid in the boondocks of Portugal, and our idea of a holiday is to go spend a month hiking somewhere or other. Spend my days hauling gravel and digging pits. It’s good.

Really? What a coincidence. Where in Portugal? We live in the Algarve near the border with Spain.

> In fact, one I know regularly gets weird looks because he’ll be in some elite country club in his coffee-stained slacks and threadbare jumper - but there’s the rub - he doesn’t care. The guy who looks rich is probably up to his eyeballs in debt.

This is so strangely true.

I arranged a dad's dinner once, and we had a drug dealer there. Stereotypical hard man, wife dressed in branded clothes, fancy car, very obviously not in the line of business that he pretended. Trying extremely hard to flash how he used the private airport.

Seated with him was an actual billionaire, one whose family made their money a while back so you wouldn't know if you hadn't come across it before, like me. This guy just behaved like a normal middle class dad. Dressed like everyone else, ordinary SUV. No flashy moves.

Other two I know in that class are also just ordinary. No supercar, just a Merc or upper end car. They send their kids to private schools that ordinary top 5% people can afford, but no big arm movements.

This could be true but it depends on the person. Marc Andreesen is a billionaire and he wears Rolexes quite prominently. In fact a lot of rich people wear Rolexes lately.

> it’s more accessible than most realise

> I am only marginally wealthy, high 7/low 8 figures

We must have a very different definition of "accessibility"

Anyone on a programmer's salary should be able to get to low 7 figures in a decade, and better in 2 decades. In fact I'd go further and say that if you're on a six-figure salary you really must do it. We can't be sure our privileged position will continue for too much longer.

lol, lmao even... Most devs aren't even making 100k a year, even in the US the median is at like 120k.

Let's say you make 100k a year in Berlin, you're already in the top 1% so "accessibility" is out of the equation at that point, that's 4.8k net. Let's say you manage to invest ~60% of your salary, that's about 3k a month, 36k a year. Now let's say you get 8% return per year (which you won't), you're barely above 500k after 10 years.

So yeah sure, if you're in the top 1% to begin with, and live on what basically amounts to your local minimum wage while investing everything else, you can get to 1 million after 15 years or so...

Ah, and don't forget the tax man, he'll take his 20-30% cut on your million.

Being able to say no to things, take your time, be present. That's a whole different kind of freedom

I'd say it really depends on the mentality of the very rich person

The very wealthy are going to fly private. Upper middle class could swing this on a case-to-case basis, but not regularly and especially if not if they frequently travel

Other than that, the main difference is the very wealthy having a mentality of getting people to "take care of problems" to a much larger extent. For example, routine tasks like cleaning. An upper MC person might have a weekly cleaner at best. But they still have to load/unload dishwasher, do their own laundry, etc. A very rich person has a full-time housekeeper.

The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems. Like having "a lawyer" who they go to for and have known for years. There seems to be much more of a sense of personal relationships / loyalty. Almost like the old feudal oaths.

> The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems.

At the higher levels, there's a "family office" which takes care of such things. All bills go there, and anything that needs to be done, they take care of. The first big one was the Rockefellers', which was in Rockefeller Center in New York. (That turned into a business. Now it offers Being Rich as a Service.)

Family offices manage investments. Personal staff are typically separate.

Traditionally, yes. That's for the people who inherited a mansion, retainers, and trusts. Now there are family office concierge services. "Luxury lifestyle as a service" is available.[1] That's for people who made a lot of money all at once and need guidance in spending it.

(The people I've known with serious money made most of it themselves, and didn't need a family office. Except for one married couple who blew through 8 figures and went broke.)

[1] https://www.maisonbenjamin.com/familyoffices

> Now there are family office concierge services

These are between multi-family offices and scams targeting new money. (The intersection between the best hospitality folks you can privately hire and the best money managers is roughly zero. Consolidating those functions makes no sense unless someone cannot afford them.)

> These are between multi-family offices and scams targeting new money.

That's a good way to look at it.

Just take the website you presented. There is a contact us page. Who do you think they’re targeting?

Maybe I'm not rich enough to get it, but in the footer this site identifies itself as a member of a travel agency which is itself a member of a third travel agency. I'm getting the same vibe you see from the "wealth advisors" who run around trying to feed people structured notes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quintessentially_Group would be another one. American Express has a concierge service for their wealthier clients as do most big banks with services for their wealthy clients

What comes to mind here is Up In The Air starring George Clooney.

Now Ryan Bingham doesn't command any particular status or wealth, but he makes a living firing people on behalf of other companies ("Concierge firing-as-a-service"?) and he leads a nomadic lifestyle that many of us would find completely intolerable.

His one lifelong dream is to earn 10,000,000 Frequent Flyer miles and hold the special Unobtanium card from American Airlines. [SPOILER WARNING] He achieves this during the final flight of the film, and when he dials the number on the back, he comes to realize that this is his unique number and there is a specially-assigned staffer waiting by the phone to personally take his call.

I can envision this sort of revelation as the experience of someone who comes into money and suddenly finds their needs being personally met by a concierge or family office.

> this is his unique number and there is a specially-assigned staffer waiting by the phone to personally take his call.

For small values of "personally". I once visited a rent-an-office place which had a live receptionist. She had a phone with about thirty line buttons. Each time she answered a different line, she gave a different company name.

Virtualization.

I would pay to avoid flying : private or public…

You can hire a private rail car: https://www.amtrak.com/privately-owned-rail-cars

Well your link is to have Amtrak tow your private rail car. You have to provide it yourself. There is a different company that offers luxury private cars that I can’t remember the name of now.

There’s a number that provide rentals (many are preservation societies/charities that hire out their cars for income).

https://www.aaprco.com/charter-a-private-car

Of course, if you’re really rich, you’d have your own. ;)

If it's continental, having a driver and a comfortable car would go a long way then.

> A very rich person has a full-time housekeeper.

So does any middle class family living in a developing country with high economic inequality.

And it would be heartless not to. Those housekeepers need jobs and incomes.

Perhaps not exactly comparable, but I went to a talk at wlog REI from some relatively ordinary person who climbed some famous, but accessible peak (Kilimanjaro?). I asked about the practice of hiring local porters, and got basically this answer.

The local economy pretty much depends on the influx of foreign money from the people climbing. A fit person would be physically capable of carrying their full load, but it simply isn't done because of the economic disparity between the foreign climbers and the local porters. I don't know if that was enforced by law or custom, but the presenter was quite clear that it's not really possible to climb without local porters.

On Kilimanjaro you must employ a guide, a cook for the guide, and a porter to carry the gear of the cook and the guide. You are welcome to carry your own gear but at this point you've already got a support team of 3 people and are paying $1500+. An extra porter is probably around $100.

I don't know why you are getting downvoted. Over the years I have heard several anecdotes from "expat" wives in various places (Kenya, Philippines, New Guinea) of being taken aside by a local headman soon after arrival and being told that they will hire a cook and a housekeeper and a laundrymaid.

On the mediocrity principle, I think this is how things worked in general. Necessary to the local economy.

Yeah I think this is something that people in countries like the US don't instinctively understand, or at least I didn't.

My Filipino friend explained to me that back home, if you have more than a certain amount of money, it's seen as incredibly selfish not to employ people as housekeepers, etc.

I'd imagine that's true in a lot of places with income disparity and/or high unemployment numbers. It made a lot of sense to me.

We have that in the USA for some things - depending on where you live.

Some places if you’re the only house on the block who mows their own lawn, you’ll be considered stingy or weird.

My mom visited a professor in an African country a few years back, as part of a project.

She told me the professor had a guy employed to open and close the gates for when he drove to work and came home in the evening. That's all the guy did. Full time job.

Sounded so preposterous at first, but after thinking a wee bit I came to a similar conclusion that the alternatives might be a lot worse. It was steady income, albeit not a lot.

I assume he also stayed actively present at the gates during the day and/or night and functioned as some kind of watchman?

Sounds like any gated community with a security guard post at the entrance.

I understand where this is coming from but that argument simply doesn’t make sense. There are many ways to give back to society; providing low-status jobs is only one of them. And a poor one, because it locks people in that status and heteronomy. Within 10 minutes, anyone can come up with some ideas that would contribute to other people’s development and growth in a more sustainable fashion.

It serves other purposes. That narrative is a convenient collective lie, full stop.

> And a poor one, because it locks people in that status and heteronomy

What is the current alternative? Are they any better?

When I was kid growing up (in Brazil), we had a live-in housekeeper. She moved to São Paulo from some poor rural area in the South of Brazil. As many people from poor rural areas, she was forced to drop out of school on 3rd grade to help her family.

If I remember it correctly, she was 21, 22 years old when she first moved in. The agreement was she would get minimum wage + regular benefits + free housing. She would work from ~7:30am until 3pm, get a break in the afternoon and then go to night school from 7 to 10pm. On weekends she was free, so she could either be out with her friends or coming along our weekend camping trips.

She worked with us for 5-6 years, finished school, moved out of our home when she got married. Had two daughters, the oldest one just finished college. I know all that because 30+ years later my mom and her still keep in touch.

Possibly stories like these are not the majority, but they were pretty common. Today, this would be unthinkable not because economic inequality has diminished, but because whatever we had that passed for "middle class" in Brazil got completely squeezed out by governments over the last 25 years.

    There are many ways to give back to society

Right, but ultimately what (nearly all) people want is frigging jobs. Or to be even more specific: steady, dependable income.

    because it locks people in that status and heteronomy

Yeah there's so many incorrect assumptions here.

I can tell you that here in the US, my somewhat upper middle class aunt used to clean homes part time. Husband was an engineer, she was a housewife, kids were away at school. Not the type of person with hobbies and such. Was a bit bored.

Not sure of the specifics but I think she pulled in a couple of grand a month cleaning. Pretty handy when you're putting two kids through college. Or so I thought. Thanks to you, today I learned it was all "a lie." ((giant eye roll))

It's not an uncommon side gig for bored suburban housewives. There are a few women in my middle class town that do it.

I don't think full time housekeeping, which seems more common in other countries, necessarily locks anybody into anything. Anecdotally I think it's a fairly common thing to do when getting an education. I also don't know that it's always low-paid, either, especially if it includes nanny duties etc.

> Yeah I think this is something that people in countries like the US don't instinctively understand, or at least I didn't.

Guilty as charged. I have the American mentality due to being raised here, and I would be horrified to hire a housekeeper or servant. The "well, it's better than nothing" argument, while true, feels icky and exploitative. "Better than nothing" is a terrible bar and a sign of a broken society, and I personally just don't want to be part of continuing that brokenness. Totally understand if someone grew up in a different culture, they likely have a totally different view on it.

Does it feel "icky and exploitative" to you to use Über/DoorDash/TaskRabbit?

Kind of. I don't do food delivery at all, and only hire uber/lyft when all other options are exhausted, and when I do, I at least I feel sufficiently bad about it. I would definitely feel "icky" hiring a personal shopper or hiring a chauffer to drive me everywhere.

And yea, I know there are other less visible areas in every product and service value chain where people are exploited and yet I am part of society. I don't have an answer or solution to this that is politically feasible.

> I would definitely feel "icky" hiring a personal shopper or hiring a chauffer to drive me everywhere.

Do you feel "icky" by going to a supermarket and having a cashier scanning your products? Do you feel "icky" by taking a taxi? How about by taking a public bus, train or plane?

Do you go to restaurants or bars? Do you feel "icky" about someone taking your order, cleaning up your table, pouring out drinks for you?

Do you have kids? Have you ever hired a babysitter? Do you feel "icky" about someone else being temporarily responsible for the well-being of your child?

> I know there are other less visible areas (...) where people are exploited and yet I am part of society. I don't have an answer or solution to this that is politically feasible.

I'm honestly more concerned about people who think that they should have "an answer to this" than all the exploitation that exists.

I can tell you what it's *not* the solution. Eliminating all sort of manual labor is *not* a solution. Eliminating manual labor will lead to even more isolation and atomized individuals. It will put us all in different bubbles and make us completely unable to relate to other people and it will make us even more susceptible to be defined by what we consume.

If you are part of a society, it will be better for everyone if you start participating in it. Instead of looking down on people whose work is not as valuable as yours (because that's what honestly your "feeling icky about it" seems to boil down to), look at these interactions as opportunities for mutual, voluntary help. If you think their work is worth more than what they are getting, tell them so and back it up with your generosity. There is no point in "feeling bad" about it.

Are all jobs and incomes alike?

It doesn't heartless.

You can, instead of paying for a housekeeper pay for machines etc. made in the country in question, thus creating technical jobs there that might develop people more than housekeeping does.

The machines are more expensive than the housekeeper and the housekeeper doesn't have the education to make them.

In the US (and Europe...) labor is expensive so it make sense to have technical people design machines.

Personally I'd hate the lack of privacy

Or an UN judge living in UK https://www.reuters.com/world/ugandan-un-judge-jailed-britai...

Wait, you can't be serious.

One of my coworkers - a senior engineer - came to the US from India and found it a big change - sure he knew how to cook, but he didn't realize he would have to cook every meal. He has two house keepers before who would come in the morning make breakfast, and clean the house. They would then leave for the afternoon and return to make supper and minor tidying up. He really only had enough work for 1 house keeper but having 2 meant if one was sick or quit he had time to find a second. Since he was paying them less than $1/day each the total cost was very reasonable.

Who know if or how long the above will continue, but it is still possible in many countries if you can get a job there.

Yup, no big deal. One of my cousin has like 2 housekeepers full time and 2 comes are different time of day like help with cooking and cleaning during lunch and dinner. Their luxury car is however lowest end Audi and another is Corolla.

On flip side he had to change 2 jobs because travel distance as ~20 miles but in term of duration it was 4+ hrs daily. And no such thing as peak hours there, day-in/day out, morning, afternoon, late night, week day, weekend, same worst possible traffic.

Any interaction with real world outside of home can wear people down specially the kind who keep multiple household helps. From traffic, to pollution, medical care, school admissions, doing groceries, shopping, parking and on and on.

One way to think is at absolute top level like senior most politicians, industrialist, CEOs, other types of super influential people, developed vs developing countries' lifestyle can match, but as one start moving down the ladder, the quality falls very rapidly in developing world and serious compromises can start just 2 step down from top.

> Other than that, the main difference is the very wealthy having a mentality of getting people to "take care of problems" to a much larger extent. For example, routine tasks like cleaning. An upper MC person might have a weekly cleaner at best.

Pfft... amateurs. I've solved the same problem by just living in filth.

It's one of the soft skills I picked up in college, like drinking three mountain dew game fuels in a day

>The very rich have circles of people they rely on to take care of problems. Like having "a lawyer" who they go to for and have known for years. There seems to be much more of a sense of personal relationships / loyalty. Almost like the old feudal oaths.

That has more to do with owning business interests than wealth. The guy who owns a small chain of a mundane business, has stake in another business via investment, etc, etc, his social circle looks roughly the same.

The answer is out-of-topic because the question ask what is something that ordinary people do not know.They go on a tangent about perspective and power over society, but nothing listed was a thing that I do not know.

>Access. You now can just ask your staff to contact anyone and you will get a call back.

Funnily, my parents always call back within 60 seconds even midnight, while a certain someone get disowned by their kids.

>For a donation of $100k+ to his charity, you could probably play a match with him.

For a donation of 16k you can have a 1 on 1 zoom call with Keanu Reeves. He advertised this pretty well, so "ordinary people" should know this.

At this point, all the riches and riches are on SNS flexing their wealth, I don't think there is anything left that ordinary people just couldn't browse SNS and see what can you buy with those money.

The post is probably written by a non-rich who does not know but suspect that there is something? may be there is that we do not know now? ;)

> which help no one since they are zero sum

Signalling Status plays a big role in group formation/group maintenance/social cohesion etc.

The larger groups grow, the more complex the group dynamics get, keeping groups of people together and preventing them from disintegrating is one of the most complex problem we face, given all the differences in culture, religion, language, class, personalities, ambitions, values, needs, intelligence, skill, education level, interests etc etc

A short cut frequently used (cause its easy) is using Leisure and Luxury (see Theory of the Leisure Class).

"So you like what I wear, where I stay, what I eat, who my friends are, what toys I have and want to be like me or hang out with me then do what I say". This works pretty well. In fact Veblen's prediction in Theory of the Leisure Class was that since Tech has a tendency to eliminate waste, tech would eventually eliminate the need for a Leisure/Status signalling Class that keeps large groups from unraveling.

But social cohesion of large groups is such a complex problem, society even today requires all kinds of Status Signalling to keep the groups together.

If you find ways to keep groups together without status signalling you are onto something special.

In my experience roaming many different groups, the ones who do not signal status typically are the most powerful/influental. Their membership is safe; they don’t need to signal status, or rather, signaling it draws too much attention (annoyances by those seeking to gain status by affiliation). I remember reading a study about this some years back to find my own findings confirmed.

The people I know with a net worth over 10m do not display it. Why would they want to. It only has downsides and no upside. Same applies to other forms of status/rank/belonging.

(Not contradicting your points, merely adding to them.)

If you want to experiment with that, try to NOT match other people’s style AND radiate a deep sense of security/belonging/entitlement. Do not hide your (other) insecurities; those with status don’t have to hide their authenticity. This may sound like a contradiction at first, but you can develop an universal sense of belonging that remains authentic. You will be surprised which people will suddenly find you to talk with you, once you stop seeking their attention.

> the ones who do not signal status

> AND radiate a deep sense of security/belonging/entitlement.

That's also signaling status.

"Don’t be so humble — you’re not that great" -- Golda Meir.

And of course:

"You cannot not communicate" -- Paul Watzlawick

Not to be trite, but signaling status is only complicated due to animals/humans making it complex. These are games and they are zero sum games.

We should strive to remove ourselves from these games as much as possible and not to lean into them as LVMH would like.

Rejecting such superficial signaling only enhances one's life, IMO.

I think status signaling is fascinating.

Veblen goods are the most simplistic and superficial form of intentional status signaling and yes, the world would be much better off without them.

Other kinds of status signaling are more interesting and more subtle. If I talk about my weekend softball team, I'm not doing it to impress anybody, but it unavoidably does convey some things about my status.

It tells you I almost certainly have a car, I have leisure time, people like me enough to at least tolerate me on their team, that I have a few hundred dollars to spend on gear/fees, and that I have some basic level of physical coordination/strength/ability. It also strongly hints that I grew up middle class or higher because middle class+ kids are the most likely to have learned the game as kids and continued with it as adults.

There are only 24 hours in a day. Signaling (or looking for others' signaling) is inevitable if one wants to curate their interactions. There are uncountable types of signaling, other than the LVMH style.

Not sure how any individual or society could function otherwise, due to the limits physics places upon us.

In fact they depend on the upper middle class in order to have those things. I'm thinking about cell phones. Nobody can have a cell phone unless enough people can afford them to create an incentive to build and improve the infrastructure.

Same thing with 401k enrollments at businesses. Management gets way more of a benefit from them than the wage slaves, but needs to maintain a minimum amount of people enrolled.

Without people to buy from, money is worthless.

Sometimes it's fun to realize that if we all just decided dollars were worthless, they would be. There'd be nothing the government could do about it.

Crypto ain't it, though. Even the better-scaling blockchains still don't scale very well. I've heard of a few different mesh-network currency projects, and I wonder if any of them could scale by essentially giving each user their own blockchain. However, in a mesh-network currency, you still have to find a conversion path with enough capacity, and pay a fee at each step, so maybe that's not it either.

I’ve tried saying this the other way around to people and I’ve only received blank stares. Maybe I should describe it like that.

Money is only valuable because we decided it has value. It can’t really do anything for you except be spent. It isn’t like a log, which could be burned, or ground into paper, turned into a weapon, etc

My viewpoint is that money is a technology, and people will choose whatever technology works for their use. A technology can be designed so that some favored uses are much more likely than others. For our government money, those uses are as a medium of exchange, temporary store of value, and tool of government economic policy. Also, some money transactions are delimited by regulations.

People already choose that their government money is worthless, e.g., the people of Venezuela and Russia. They will risk prosecution to move their wealth into assets valued in dollars or euro's. Even in the dollar and euro zones, people use other technologies for storing and exchanging wealth. Most wealthy people don't store their wealth directly in dollars already.

The value of government money is based on expectations about the future behavior of the government. This is at least a little better than being arbitrary or a collective delusion, in the short term. There are already ways to bet against it if you want.

To the point about dollars, there very much is something the government can do about it: taxes.

If the government requires taxes to be paid in dollars, that sets a "floor" on the value of a dollar as a medium of exchange - for most people in the US living a "normal" life, you have to acquire some amount of dollars throughout the year, under penalty of jail/loss of property (property tax). Then, since you already have 300m+ consumers in a massive market using the currency, odds are you'll use it too.

The only way you'd truly render dollars worthless is through government action or malfeasance; the fictional scenario where every person on earth not only agrees dollars are worthless, but also agrees to forfeit all property in the US, all employment in the US, and interests in any US financial holdings is quite a few steps beyond the point where "the people just decide to rebuke the dollar's lack of backing".

Doing this in an environment where nobody is using dollars will lead to guillotines. The dollar has to be useful for exchange first, and then they can demand tax to be paid in it.

Uhm no? This is illogical. You just declared money worthless. Nobody is gonna bring out the guillotines if the government demands worthless paper. They'll happily give the worthless paper to the government.

How will they acquire the worthless paper?

So this thought experiment isn't just that "everyone decides dollars are worthless" but also that the state is dissolved, along with all the property rights and the govt's monopoly on violence?

That's more like saying "Dollars are worthless in a scenario like Fallout or The Road", rather than making any relevant point about government efforts to maintain fiat currency.

In the original scenario of "people decide dollars are worthless... nothing the government can do", my point was that the government has a lot of levers to pull to backstop value, albeit at a far lower level than today's dollar.

Any idea of an instantaneous, sweeping change, is utopian. But more gradual actions are possible. For instance the government could decide to let the dollar serve as a medium of exchange while discouraging its use as a long term store of value. They could do this by triggering a mild inflation, such as 2% per year, that would encourage people to move their wealth out of dollars and into things like land, goods, factories, etc.

The dollar wouldn't become worthless, but it would become worth 2% less per year.

No, they wouldn't. There'd still be debt in dollars, which would lead to people losing collateral etc.

What you say is true of Bitcoin though, since there's so little debt denominated in Bitcoin.

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

"if we all decided dollars were worthless" does a lot of heavy lifting

Consider the following scenario:

If everyone except one person decided that dollars were worthless then on day one everyone would think that the one person accepting money must be insanely stupid. That person now has all the worthless money.

Turns out, money is created through contractual obligations that mandate the acceptance of money in equal amount to the created quantity. Everyone is now indebted to that person.

People who can't fulfill their contractual obligations must go and declare insolvency. The person with all the money offers a single dollar for all the assets that this person owns, since that person owns all the money, there isn't a second dollar to go around to compete with him.

After spending his first dollar, the economy now has one dollar representing the entire worth of the economy. The next insolvency will be auctioned off for two dollars, four dollars and so on.

What I'm getting at here is that "if we all decided that dollars were worthless" implies the abandonment of the rule of law, which makes the statement significantly less interesting. You can do a lot of things in a failed state. Abandoning the currency is one of the least interesting ones.

The very wealthy had mobile phones years before they were commonly available/affordable. The only things they can't have are things that are technically/physically impossible. A Gilded Age railroad titan could not have had a mobile phone. But the wealthy had them in the 1940s.

Sure, but they were giant beasts with limited functionality. My first boss's wife had one for her real estate business. It came in a shoulder bag. The investment that produced today's smart phones and infrastructure required broader access.

That cell phone cost as much as modern smart phones despite not adjusting for inflation as well. That was just to pay, they were so expensive per minute to use that most who had one avoided using it if they had other options. Which is to say real estate agents had them and they tried to keep all calls to under the first incoming minute free.

The mobile phones they had were absolute garbage, service was abysmal, and the security was non existent.

There was no way to get to a smartphone without cumulatively trillions of dollars of investment in silicon, software, network rollouts, and so on. A person with 100 billion in 1998 could not have bought one despite it being a decade away for the entire population.

The very wealthy cannot get things that are that special and it’s actually pretty amazing. Warren Buffet has called out several times that he lives like a regular middle class American and the main exception is flying private, but if were forced to choose he would dump the jet over the iPhone.

> A person with 100 billion in 1998 could not have bought one despite it being a decade away for the entire population.

Oh? What d'you call this, then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_9000_Communicator

Now, granted, most very rich people would probably not have _wanted_ one of these.

That’s not a smartphone. Re-read what I wrote. No amount of money would have produced anything close to an iPhone.

The average rural farmer in India has instant access to a world of information and entertainment at his fingertips 24/7 via his phone

Even just 30 years ago the most a billionaire would have were staff who would find information (at a far slower speed) from large libraries and copies of broadcast TV and most films available relatively quickly (perhaps even same day)

A mobile phone today is a world away from Dick Tracy's radio watch, or even a nokia 3210 on a digital network in a western city

The other piece is that there's no incentive to keep prices out of reach.

There might be reasons for high prices, like costly manufacture, but no one is going to refuse to expand their market by 10000x if they are able to bring costs down.

I knew a son of two entrepreneurs with a ~30m yacht, they own a (ex) monastery they use, either for parties, events, or as a residence

They have Miele appliances, but having "same appliances" doesn't make justice to the fact that there are deeper differences. Yes, they're status goods, but I think one's life might greatly improve by being very wealthy - even if your life can still be shitty as a wealthy person

Miele makes really good stuff. I have their stackable W1/T1 washer/dryer. It's unbelievably good at washing or drying pretty much anything. They also supposedly last forever, even today. I'll let y'all know how true that is in 20 years LOL

Have the same set, as well as dishwasher and vacuum.

Nothing but good stuff to say in coming up on 10 years of use.

Oh no... Ok, Miele rant - I got a whole set in the new house. Their firmware SUCKS. Turning on the oven/dishwasher takes 5-10s. The dishwasher takes 3 power button presses with no feedback. The oven has no indication when it starts turning on and it's a touchpanel, so you stand there like an idiot deciding is the next press will work or be perfectly timed to turn it off again. Then once you start the drying after steaming, you can't cancel (~20min). The washer needs a strong long press on "start" because it's somehow read twice in software and you can get into an in-between state where the controls go away but the washing doesn't start. ("Known issue, press harder") Their kitchen extractor fan has "loud" and "jet engine" settings. (At least that one's hardware)

Would not recommend this to anyone who can't easily test them in a showroom and even then not really... They do the actual job well, but their UX makes me angry every day.

The biggest difference more money would make is that I could have someone else deal with those issues.

your last line sums it. most rich/powerful have others to deal with UX. those products do not improve in UX.

The microwave in my apartment also has bad firmware. It beeps four times when the timer runs down and it turns off. Unfortunately, the beeping continues unnecessarily after opening the door. I believe Frigidaire (the brand) contracted a manufacturer to build the model, but they have their own people install the official firmware. Then the manufacturer produces extras, installs their own firmware, and sells them, cutting out the brand. And that's how I end up with a "Frigidaire" microwave that beeps when it shouldn't and says "GOOD" instead of "DONE". At least that's my theory.

Firmware is an important part of the appliance. An appliance with Frigidaire hardware and third-party firmware is counterfeit.

Maybe the same thing happened with your Miele appliances?

I don't believe Miele would go for selling the rebranded production extras as their own. But that beeping-after-open is common in many models and super annoying.

idk; i feel like lacking UX is a common thread amongst appliance manufacturers

My apartment has Miele appliances. It came with the apartment and I'm honestly not impressed at all besides the fact that they still work after 18 years (when they were installed).

The oven is mediocre at best, my Annova Precision Oven is much much better, much better control of temperature, heats up much faster, has more features, infinitely cheaper.

The range hood needs to be repaired because it makes a lot of noise. Repair of Miele appliances are super expensive.

The only appliance I'm impressed with is the wine cave but that's a white labeled Liebherr

If I were rich, I would have a personal data center, an aeronautics lab, a tropical farm, mediaeval fort, things like that. Not this yatches and crap.

And I would sell tickets (at a loss, ). Because whats something cool if nobody witnesses it.

Why sell tickets then? :)

to filter out people completely uninterested in the topic

‘The Manor on Stagecoach’

https://g.co/kgs/tgHhdkD

You aren’t alone

when the 3D printing stack gets a little further, we'll all get "a utopian, post-scarcity space society of humanoid aliens and advanced superintelligent artificial intelligences living in artificial habitats spread across the Milky Way galaxy."

> We have very few items for the rich to buy

Goods, yes. Services, fuck no. Look at the Four Seasons and Amangani yacht and jet programmes for a <$10mm example of the sorts of experiences wealth opens up.

These are mostly positional items.

The four seasons isn't materially better than the hilton next door. The rooms are basically the same, the fixtures at the four seasons are fancier, the bedding is prettier, some random furniture may be sourced from a different supplier. The four seasons will be in a location which has somewhat better views.

The four seasons has prettier and more attentive staff, and there are less "less well off" at the four seasons. And you get to brag that you went to the "four seasons" but it really isn't that much better.

It's almost all status.

I stayed at the 4 seasons a few years ago just to give it a try. Not even remotely worth it. The only real difference I noticed was the obsequiousness of the staff.

If you want hotel employees to kiss your ass and pretend to respect you, then this is the place for you. But the quality of the room wasn’t noticeably better than other places I’ve stayed.

I will give you a good example of something that most upper middle class people can’t afford or at least can’t afford frequently.

Disney World VIP tours. My wife has family who are club 33 members and they gifted us a VIP tour as a wedding present. The tour guide drives you around to the different parks and walks you backstage through tunnels and hidden areas to get you the very front of any ride you want to go on.

> the quality of the room wasn’t noticeably better than other places I’ve stayed

I broadly agree with you on their hotels. But I’d note that Four Seasons doesn’t compete on room quality, but service. If you planned your stay perfectly they shouldn’t outperform. But if you forgot something, or need help with something weird, they have a habit of being halfway legendary. (Colleague left his suit at home. They had one made overnight. Concierge apparently knew a suit maker’s cell.)

This is exactly it. The middle class (even upper) aren’t really used to the “mention something, get it fixed” type of lifestyle. But that’s what you’re paying for.

Memorable experience at a four seasons in Shenzhen (memorable for how well they fixed my screwups that is), I had forgotten my laptop charger (apple laptop). They didn't have any I could borrow, went to the apple store to buy one and lent it to me. I forgot my phone in the taxi arriving at the airport. Noticed immediately, I tried calling my phone, the taxi driver hung up immediately on me (so he knew I left my phone there and was probably planning on selling it). I called Four Seasons, they had kept a record of the taxi number, got the phone fedexed it to my destination.

> four seasons isn't materially better than the hilton next door

I’m not comparing the hotels, I’m comparing their yacht and jet programmes.

Status signalling is mostly an upper middle class game—the truly wealthy tend to use their wealth to buy power or privacy.

These days I feel like I’m getting nickel-and-dimed more at the grand Hyatt than at Hyatt place

Depends on which one you go to. Supposedly the experience is insanely better internationally.

Regardless, at luxury hotels, the rooms are nice, sure [^0], but you're mostly paying for top-tier service.

If you want to travel somewhere within the US where you _know_ your room will be tip-top and don't want to lift a finger, the Four Seasons/Ritz/St. Regis is it.

[^0] They do have some huge, amazing suites that you won't find at a Westin, though.

> The four seasons isn't materially better than the hilton next door

I think it would be more fair to say that the Four Seasons isn't materially better than the _Conrad_ next door. I've stayed in some amazing Hilton-branded properties, but also some terrible ones. I guess I am expecting the hotel brand to denote the _minimum_ level of comfort, and there are some Hiltons that truly drag along the bottom, where I'd be very surprised to find myself at a shitty Four Seasons (or Conrad, which is the HHG's next step up from a Hilton).

Can't say I've stayed at the Four Seasons, but we stayed in the St Regis in SF last year. We got upgraded to the Metropolitan Suite and that was quite the experience. Note that I paid exactly zero as I'm a long time Bonvoy Gold Member and was burning points on one of their regular rooms for a vacation, then they elected to upgrade us. I think it was due calling ahead asking for an accommodation for my autistic son (which they were amazing regarding).

I have nothing bad to say and everything good about how they handled our stay. Whether it was worth the price is (as this whole topic is about) relative to your means. I would say that it was more than we would have paid, but now that we've experienced it it's on my radar as a reasonable value. Their signature "Butler" service was beyond amazing; traveling with my son is difficult at the best of times and they handled everything.

They essentially allowed me to have an actual vacation vice allowing me to handle a series of challenges and let the rest of my family have a vacation (which is the normal way things go).

Now take that experience, put it on a private jet and yacht, with staff who know you personally and can be prepositioned to ancitipate your needs and you're around where the hundred millionaires live. (Billionaires operate like mini heads of state.)

In my experience, if you value your privacy, freedom etc... I'd say living like a millionaire with close to 100 (but not above) is much nicer than living above that. Below 100 million, you don't need bodyguards and private security, you can be as low key as you want.

Depends where you live, but plenty of countries you're at risk of kidnapping at 1/100th of that net worth and thus need bodyguards

Oh yeah of course, depends entirely of the country and the income disparity. I live in HK and regularly I see some members of the Li Ka-shing family go to one of my favourite restaurant (Chiu Tang, a nice but not too expensive fine dining place). They're always accompanied by 4-6 bodyguards and have to dine in a private room.

I've heard that it's even worse (better?) the more you go to the past. Bret Deveraux [argues] (https://acoup.blog/2020/07/24/collections-bread-how-did-they...) that this is one reason why lots of farmers choose to stay in subsistence level, because there's not really better things they can buy anyway. So they just conserve energy and time (which some outsider may see as lazy) and focus on long term resiliency (through building horizontal and vertical social relationships) to ensure that no disaster may pull them down all the way to starvation.

I clicked through hoping for something interesting and different, and got the same impression.

So... More plus influence.

I think the only thing listed that people with less money don't really "know about" is how much perspective changes with staff. You know people have people, but not necessarily how it changes things.

I'm on the very low end of that - I run a small DevOps consultancy and can, now employ a few people in low cost countries, and though I've managed large teams before, having unilateral ability to set people to work on things because I want them is a game changer, and it's hard to get used to asking for things instead of doing them.

The rest feels like things everyone knows, if not directly then from TV and movies.

Yet people still hate the thought of a "maximum wage" or limit to wealth. Everyone should have a life of comfort, not just those who won the lottery or were born into it.

The problem with a maximum wage is deciding what that maximum is. Outsides returns are what incentivize people to start companies. A earning cap will cap that incentive accordingly.

Progressive tax scales solves that problem neatly.

Tax on income keeps wealth with people who have wealth, and people without wealth wage slaves.

If you rent a $10m house you pay $500k a year for it. With 50% tax you'd have to earn $1m a year to pay the rent.

If you own a $10m house you pay no rent, and have to earn $0 a year to live there.

Wealth tax is a thing.

The maximum wealth should be capped exactly where it becomes a tool to buy or assert influence over democracy.

People hate the thought because it's repeatedly failed to work historically, with even explicitly Marxist states deciding that it's best to allow some billionaires.

It’s easy to determine what income would be if everyone made the same amount - average income, which is $72,000 per worker.

That includes everyone who filed a tax return from the kid working at McDonald’s to Warren Buffet.

Not sure what you’d call a comfortable life but a single mom making $72,000 per year would be struggling in many major cities.

People don’t become ultra wealthy from a high income, they generally own a business that increases in value.

Sure, but the only way they can access that wealth is to sell ownership, which would produce income.

So all those people who sold $100M businesses are included in that $72,000 figure.

What a complete non-sequitur. A wealth cap of, say, a billion dollars would have none of the same implications

It’s not a non-sequitor.

The comment I replied to referenced a “wealth cap” and “redistribution” so “everyone could have a comfortable life”.

My point is that take to an extreme of equal redistribution to everyone, people would end up in a barely comfortable position.

Your point is that too much of something to an extreme is bad. That's true of everything. What's the point?

Some of us believe in liberty of property and maximum wages is not compatible with that.

> We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.

Those are called philanthropic charities - research institutes or the like. Some of the very rich have them.

Edit: the town I was born in had a Carnegie Library[1].

Edit 2: the point being that the very rich buy social status and respect.

1. https://www.nzgeo.com/stories/carnegie-libraries/

The incentives for the ultra-rich are screwed up.

I remember a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was donating 99% to charity. The internet got very angry about it, based on flimsy reasoning: https://qz.com/564805/5-criticisms-of-billionaire-mega-phila...

Bill Gates has saved millions of lives through his philanthropy, and the internet is full of malicious rumors about him. Other billionaires who do far less good, but keep a lower profile, get much less hate.

A common meme on the internet is "if your intent was truly charitable, you wouldn't care whether anyone said thank you".

But this is a false dichotomy. Many people find the idea of charity appealing to some degree, but most of us aren't die-hard saints either. When we see the good deeds of others get devalued or even punished, that makes us less enthusiastic about doing good ourselves.

"Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome." Punishing do-gooders is one of the most anti-social things you can do. On the other hand, praising do-gooders is a very cheap way to incentivize people to do more good in the world.

I believe that once you get to a certain level of wealth, you start caring more about your personal reputation than your material goods. Sadly, there is so much reflexive skepticism towards billionaire philanthropy at this point that it's not even clear to me whether doing philanthropy is reputationally net-positive.

Bill Gates gets a lot of hate for good reason. His business practices killed off a lot of good products. BeOS, anyone?

This article, and Google's and Bing's AI overviews for "how did microsoft kill off beos", disagree with that premise:

https://lowendmac.com/myturn/02/0403.html

(Edited to add, another more detailed article: https://macfolkloreradio.com/be/)

People make this claim about a lot of software (Netscape being the poster child) but typically whenever I look into it, the nuanced answer turns out to be "Microsoft may have thrown it's weight around, but the product largely failed on it's own merits."

Except for education, you had to buy a browser. You could go to a CompUSA and buy a copy of Netscape Navigator.

Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer for free with Windows, essentially destroying Netscape’s business overnight.

Sure, and there was a huge antitrust trial about it too, and we all knew how it turned out. The trial surfaced a whole bunch of shady stuff, but that was more related to them abusing their monopoly position (i.e. "throwing their weight around"). Netscape died because:

1) Browsers were destined to be a commodity, given the first browsers (like Mosaic) were effectively free, and even then it was clear that a browser would be as critical a component of a consumer OS as, say, a file explorer or a calculator.

2) Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE and other browsers like Opera (which survived despite IE being free and Microsoft's shenanigans, and is a thing to this day.)

> Netscape simply was an inferior product compared to IE

The book of the battle - Competing for the Future - makes it clear how much of a mess Netscape was in internally

Essentially they had alternate code bases for every other version of the browser and we forever porting feature and bugs between the two (and often forgetting and so getting regressions)

You're right. On one hand he has saved millions of lives and nearly eradicated some diseases in developing countries. On the other hand we could have had another computer operating system. Really tough to balance.

For the sake of preventing perverse incentives, I would encourage you to just make this claim in discussions of BeOS or perhaps early Windows, and not when Bill's philanthropy comes up.

Otherwise other billionaires will think: "If I get into philanthropy, people will take it as an opportunity to publicize un-flattering facts about me."

His business practices in the 90s and 00s were terrible.

His actions since then have been far better.

The hate he gets now tend to be from people attacking his more recent actions. "Trying to cure malaria - clearly mind control" sort of stuff.

Well, his company does help Israel in its genocide against Palestinians.

the gates foundation?

Microsoft.

In Bill Gates's post about changing his charitable giving goal to give most of it away in the next 20 years, he references Chuck Feeney as someone he admired.

from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Feeney

  Until he was 75, he traveled only in coach, and carried reading materials in a plastic bag." He did not own a car or a house and wore a $10 Casio F-91W watch

He gave away most of his fortune and required recipients not to reveal the source of the donation.

>He gave away most of his fortune and required recipients not to reveal the source of the donation.

I suppose that's one way to avoid the bad press :-P

Wiki: "Beyond Mr. Feeney's reticence about blowing his own horn, 'it was also a way to leverage more donations—some other individual might contribute to get the naming rights.'"

NYT article(1):

..when asked what had driven him into such deep secrecy:

“I feel it’s my life,” Mr. Feeney said. “I’d be the last guy to tell a wealthy person what to do with their money. They’re entitled to do whatever they want.”

quote from his kid: "...he sheltered us from people using the money to treat us differently,” Leslie Feeney Baily said. “It made us normal people.”

when asked why he had chosen to reveal himself:

“A lot of wealthy people, they don’t realize they have the alternatives of spending the money for good,” he said. “If they knew it gives so much satisfaction, I wouldn’t have to persuade them."

(1): https://archive.ph/gLfLY

> Bill Gates has saved millions of lives through his philanthropy, and the internet is full of malicious rumors about him.

But that's not related to his philanthropy mostly. There's evil business stuff he actually did and there are some conspiracy freaks. Those would exist anyway. But I've never seen a significant number of people with criticisms because of the programs he enables.

The conspiracy freaks around vaccines wouldn't exist if it weren't for his philanthropy. I just don't like to see someone punished for good-faith efforts to do good.

Gates giving away his money is good, but it would be better for the billionaire class not to exist. Money is power is a zero sum game.

>Money is power is a zero sum game.

Just the opposite. By engaging in positive-sum transactions, society as a whole becomes wealthier. That's how economic growth occurs.

Not everything is accurately seen through this nihilistic, conspiratorial power lens.

Nothing nihilistic or conspiratorial about it. Money gives you power over other people. You having more power over others means by definition that they have less power -> Zero sum.

Huh, earth would be better if human as species don't exist.

This is a disingenuous post.

Philanthropy is often used a strategy to lobby politicians and drive policy that benefits other investments while avoiding most taxes.

Nobody voted people like Bill Gates to have such a massive influence over media and institutions via "donations".

If you knew anything about NGOs and politics you wouldn't simply go for "They're asking for or donating money so they're obviously awesome, their intentions are great and it's a net positive".

Calling skepticism reflective is like saying that if you think your company doesn't have your best interest at heart like it says you're being paranoid.

>Philanthropy is often used a strategy to lobby politicians and drive policy that benefits other investments while avoiding most taxes.

Forbes estimates that Gates would be a trillionaire if it weren't for his philanthropy. Perhaps some philanthropists pursue the strategy you describe, but it's unreasonable to assume this is their strategy by default.

>Nobody voted people like Bill Gates to have such a massive influence over media and institutions via "donations".

In a free society, not everything people do needs to be authorized by the government. I believe that Gates has sincere concern about the well-being of people in the developing world, so it doesn't particularly bother me when he lobbies on their behalf.

Insofar as cynicism is justified, it should be easy to provide concrete and compelling evidence that Gates has bad intentions in his philanthropy. So why isn't there any such evidence in your comment?

We should have 90% top marginal tax rates instead.

How about we do the exact opposite?

Create expensive products which materially improve the lives of those with wealth? Align the incentives of the rich so that they don't spend on these zero sum status goods. Also incentivize the rich to get richer so that they can buy these products that make their lives better in a non-shallow way.

Work with incentives instead of against incentives.

That's the current status quo, isn't it?

There's yachts and fancy houses and supercars to buy for the rich. They make their lives better, in some way. A lot of people are employed to make those things.

I don't see how this helps anyone. If wealth were distributed more equally, those people would work on making the lives of everyone better, not just the lives of a small elite.

Ah that sounds smart, so in a way the wealth will trickle down to the common man? Someone should try it.

You can't talk about top rates without also talking about where they kick in. Italy's top rate of 43% kicks in for everything over 50k euros. The 50k feels a bit low to me, and maybe 100k euros would be better. 90% of everything over 5M may work, but then you run into another problem where people that rich are not bringing home a salary. So you lower where it kicks in and then just impact the working professionals, which also isn't who you really want to target. And if you do want to target those working $500k+/year, removing the cap (176,100 this year) on SS payments is probably a better path.

So now we're back to the ultra-rich where you need to first think about taxing dividends as income without hurting retirees, and second think about some wealth tax. It could be small like .2% on everything over 5M or something, but it would actually put some tax burden on the people you're trying to put it on.

Well - there is an alternative take. Whisper it... but we don't actually need to have ultra rich people in our society. They serve no purpose that normal rich people don't, and arguably introduce distortions that are profoundly corrosive.

we didn't arbitrarily select people to make rich, they are externalities of our wants and needs, and a sign that those things are being ~ satisfied.

They are decidedly a result of the taxation system of a country. The country decided they wanted to have this class of people to exist. (The degree of) Wealth inequality is always a product of society.

Poor people pay next to nothing in taxes, yet they don’t end up wealthy from this.

The tax systems doesn’t create wealthy people, it just doesn’t cut their legs out from under them.

Public wealth vs private wealth. Trump has correctly identified that rising public debt is a problem, but not that the missing liquidity is trapped in his own class's pockets.

Tax systems create wealthy people in two ways:

a) by disproportionally tax the poor vs. the rich. In the United States, "42 states tax the top 1 percent at a lower rate than the bottom 20 percent, while 46 states tax the top 1 percent less than the middle 60 percent of earners." https://media.itep.org/ITEP-Who-Pays-7th-edition.pdf

b) by using the taxes to disproportionately benefit the upper income brackets, e.g. by investing more in universities than schools, or infrastructure in wealthy neighborhoods than poor neighborhoods (both true for the US).

I guess I was just thinking about federal taxes. As long as I can remember, even when I wasn’t making much, I remembered state being less and I didn’t may much attention to it.

Looking into it more, I was ignoring sales tax and some of those other, as they are more indirect, but consumption taxes will hit harder for those with less… it’s just not as easy to quantify.

Looking at big more it seems like the split between federal/state taxes for the bottom 20% may be 20/80, while for the rich it’s flipped at 90/10.

While all this is interesting, and has opened my eyes a little in this area… I would still stand by the latter half my original statement. The wealth is created elsewhere before taxes even come into the picture. The local taxes can hit a point of being very low impact long before someone hits the 1% or is considered wealthy, and that isn’t turning anyone into a billionaire.

In the spirit of engaging in open conversation to try and broaden my mind and understanding, may I say that I feel your statement "The tax systems doesn’t create wealthy people, it just doesn’t cut their legs out from under them" begs a question: What is it that creates wealthy people?

I think that there are a few things that are needed for lots people to become wealthy (of course, the ability to exact physical violence on others can enable a few to become very very wealthy as well).

1) Property rights that are equally enforced. That you have important friends shouldn't give you the ability to take my business.

2) Liquidity. There needs to be mechanisms that enable investment.

3) Civil infrastructure & some sort of safety net. People who are frightened of what awaits their children, or them in their old age, or of sickness, are reluctant to invest. They will be happy to work themselves half to death, but even if they have enough money, they will be very very risk averse.

Is this what you think, or are there other mechanisms that you have in your mind?

Those things can create an environment to help create, grow, and maintain wealth. I'd say actually creating it requires producing something of value to society with enough scale and margin to make a profit. Typically it requires doing this consistently for decades. There are a few exceptions to this, but by and large, it seems to be how things work, at least under capitalism.

This is reddit level oversimplification.

Oh the irony.

taxation or it's condoned avoidance/evasion does not create wealth or at least not to the same level as actual in-demand products and services, unless you believe that it is supposed to act as a filter between transactions by default rather than the standard accounting practice to tax after-the-fact.

I suppose this naiveté is a by product of swallowing the media's constant garbage about the reason Jeff Bezos (et al...) has a yacht is purely down to avoiding tax.

It's really curious that something as personal to people as smartphones don't have a rich-person equivalent the same way cars do. What is the McLaren of iPhones?

There's gold plated / jewel encrusted versions of phones or graphics cards [0] but that's just making things look garish for the people that want to look rich. But as far as I know there's no 'bespoke' phone manufacturer on the same level as Swiss watches or hand-built cars. No real reason either; with a watch, any performance has peaked years ago so the only thing that remains is design. Phones are mostly functional, although I suppose you could do something cool with the back side.

[0] https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/graphics-cards/one-day-the-...

It’s remarkable how every market where Apple makes itself at home basically has no real luxury bracket anymore.

Almost every visible accessory or piece of functional equipment has luxury models that may be only slightly functionally better (sometimes not even better, sometimes actually worse) but also charge massive margins.

Not so much with phones, tablets, or laptops. It’s as if the world has collectively decided that you simply can’t beat Apple, which astoundingly in the meantime completely ignores the luxury market. Even if you charged $50K+ per unit—I’m sure Samsung and every other maker would love to charge exorbitant prices for end-game devices—you’ll make a fool of yourself: iPhone will objectively be more premium, work smoother, have all the high-end apps, etc. There’s no choice but to tighten your belt and thin your margins to stay competitive.

I’m not sure how this (undoubtedly impressive) achievement makes me feel. Maybe it’s the feeling of finally being able to afford one, or the ability to say “it’s a cute expensive toy, but it’s objectively worse for X and Y reasons”, but there is something about the Leicas and Ducatis of the world.

Back in the day, Nokia had a luxury brand: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertu

It was exactly the "expensive watch" model; priced absurdly high on the Veblen good theory. It didn't work.

The problem was that technological advances made this a very tough market. Nokia used to have a separate marque called Vertu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertu) to serve this market. But rapid technological progress meant that next year's $300 phone is batter in most functional aspects as last year's $5000 luxury model, so even the very wealthy would probably prefer this year's iPhone 17 Air to last year's diamond-encrusted iPhone 16.

The market might get revived when the tech improvement flattens flattens. like they did for cars.

When I started earning much more money than I have had before (not “rich” money by any means - that’s not the point; but much much more than I grew up in or started my career with) I realised it’s not about buying things, it’s more about being able to pay for things without giving a thought if needed/wanted. That’s really a very relaxing or freeing feeling. (And they say money doesn’t bring peace :P)

> We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.

We do. It's just that "wealthy" is far past the point of diminishing returns when it comes to buying high-quality expensive items.

No, we don't need to come up with things for the rich to buy just to fix their incentives. We should be asking ourselves how to decrease wealth inequality, not how to make it more fair to those on top.

I'm not sure what you argument is here. But I world rather have inexpensive things that improve lives. There isn't a huge market for expensive things that improve lives. It are you trying to say you want rich people to spend their money trying to build things to improve lives? Some do. Why do you think we have star link, for example

I don’t think StarLink was built to improve lives. See: how it’s being used as a control and power mechanism.

Starlink was built to provide a customer for large numbers of space launches.

Maybe in part, but you build an ISP (and then strong arm people into using it) because you want to control the data and the access. Especially when you clearly prioritize those things in your side jobs.

Commissioned art and other things of little intrinsic utility plus occasional trappings of status are the discriminants for some. If you don't need these things, life is simpler and cheaper. It is nice to do things that aren't solely about advancing utility sometimes. Art is another good way to hide, transport, and increase wealth.

Little, but largely impactful in certain circumstances * money for health care * education * money to walk away from a bad job + money to hold you over for extended periods during hard times

After health and edu, your points do not apply. Filthy rich do not have jobs, hard times etc And at least in Europe we have (mostly) low cost health and edu and we do not (mostly) get jealous about the rich

I'm French and, out of all the countries I've lived in (US, developing countries in South East Asia, China, ...) I have a hard time thinking of a country where there's more hatred for the rich than in France. So I'm not sure that the statement of Europeans not getting jealous about the rich tracks. If anything Americans seem to dislike their rich less.

> The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes.

This stuff isn't life, it's just the random trinkets we fill our lives with. Time is life. The rich can do with their time what they please.

Like, at some point there's no real "better," just "rarer."

Jets, art, yachts, vacation homes.

That's quite enough actually.

Well, they have access to more medical treatments.

well, except for:

  IMPACT. Your money can literally change the world and change lives.

what the super-rich can buy that the middle class can't isn't really things (except for luxury goods, which are meh), it's people (through services). you can buy someone to do anything that you want to be done (that can be done!) so you don't have to do it. nannies, companions, builders, killers, bodyguards, drivers, pilots, cleaners, house managers, lawyers, secretaries, etc. That's what you do with the money. You buy farmers to grow macadamia nuts on your hawaii estate to feed cows raised by more farmers so you can call your property a farm, get a tax break, and brag about the quality and freshness of the steak when people come over for dinner. and so on.

you can even buy people to make more money for you, so you don't have to do it yourself, either through your "family office" investment firm, or through venture capital. You don't have to do anything but ask for what you want and there it is.

> We should have expensive products which actually improve lives.

Maybe the super rich should take up training LLMs as a hobby.

That's literally the case already: each tech oligarch has their own toy AI company.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com