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Comment by basisword | Hacker News Reader

He wasn't 'humblebragging'. He was answering a question on an anonymous forum honestly.

The irony is the majority of people on here are the ones screaming "tax the rich" at Mamdani's acceptance speech, but then are the same ones upvoting this guy, his 10M net worth and defending him being rich.

The world is a very confusing place these days.

To make it even more confusing I’m a rich guy cheering for people like Mamdani.

I pay lots of taxes, probably in top 0.1% of the world on a % basis. I don’t have to, I’m not a US or French citizen so I could easily just choose to relocate a couple of minutes away and pay essentially no taxes.

If I did choose to stop paying taxes, I’d do so in order to donate a similar amount of my income to some charity. I’m just not sold on that being so much more efficient to be worth the hassle. OTOH, it’d definitely greatly improve my philanthropy credentials which would very much be worth it to some for purely selfish personal reasons.

> at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial

this is probably just regular bragging, right?

now, discussing how donating $100 versus $10k to a cause or community being negligible to their economic security would at least front-load some humility, but capitalists gon' capitalist. oops!

thank god this is Hacker News though, and not some safe-haven for boring rich people!

I'm just a lowly peon and don't make anywhere near that kind of money, but I do NOT consider that bragging in this context.

"I buy more $10,000 cardigans than you buy Hanes undershirts" is kinda the definition of bragging. What a weird ass corner of the internet where it's just assumed everybody earns $millions. Like, lol, no outside SV, London, and NYC, that's truly exceptional. Like, the average CEO in the US doesn't even clear $1 million (according to Google's AI search results).

> "I buy more $10,000 cardigans than you buy Hanes undershirts" is kinda the definition of bragging.

Except that's not what they wrote / how they framed it.

Perhaps that's just how you perceived it. I think that speaks more about you, than it does about them.

You can construct a philosophical argument that value is all relative without having to casually drop anecdata demonstrating that you personally spend many hundreds of times more on an everyday object than is typical without consideration.

Simmel managed it ok. [1]

[1] https://brocku.ca/MeadProject/Simmel/Simmel_1900.html

Can you describe a way of communicating that same point without it being bragging in your eyes? I guess I could’ve engaged in the gymnastics of saying SWIM like they used to do on some drug forums :)

"I have spent more than $500 dollars on pants before, because I'm lucky to be in a position where for me these things are a matter of taste and whim, rather than budget, and don't really affect my finances too much whether I do or don't buy them."

I don't think I have to explain to you how the gap between what you said, and what I wrote above, is what is causing offense here. You likely deserve 100% of your success, but its just common sense to obscure the specifics of it if you are way out of band in relative terms.

Its like saying: "You know, I never really get ill" at the cancer ward. Sure, its true, but read the room.

Well, after all it’s HN and this is the kind of content that attracts much of the users. I’d certainly be more careful with that wording on a website that caters to a very different audience, but it’s not long ago when indiehackers posts of people “bragging” about their successes were consistently at the top of the front page.

Not convinced I misread the room, especially considering the upvotes.

"you can lead a horse to water"

> don't really affect my finances too much whether I do or don't buy them

Isn't this the same brag as before?

I can't tell how this is different than throwing some numbers in the mix, the person relating their personal experience expresses they have fuck-it-bucks either way

Not naming numbers is precisely the point, because you obfuscate the reality of the size of the gap, which in the end is what everything is about. The gap creates the offense. Everybody knows there's rich people, but being confronted by exactly how rich, to the detail of a number, is the offensive part (if done by that rich person without any clear reason).

I'm not sure why people keep piling up to pretend this is such a normal thing, this is literally why people don't discuss salaries despite it technically being in their own interest: specifics ground the fuzzy notion of inequality into reality like nothing else.

The offensive post inflates the perceived inequality from "500$ pants is too much for pants" to "10k means nothing to me" while my version leaves the specifics outside of the conversation. In my version, the person could put the level of "too expensive for pants" at 1k, still an order of magnitude lower than the offensive post.

Finally, I acknowledge that this is a privileged position to be in explicitly, because that signals that you are aware that this is an exceptional situation to be in (which I'm not sure the offensive post author is aware of, even now).

Thanks for elaborating your perspective, I wouldn't have thought of it that way

You could have omitted "but at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial." and come across more matter-of-fact than brag. IMO.

Sure, you could just omit that entire sentence, no? Retains readability but avoids unnecessary specifics.

I think without that sentence it fails to communicate the absurdity of trying to figure out a generic answer to whether or not something is worth it.

With a total rewrite I could certainly have communicated that point in a much more clinical manner. I just don’t see the point.

No it doesn't. He's establishing the fact that he can afford very expensive clothes and why, from personal experience, he believes them to be worth it if you can afford it. If you omit the entire sentence the whole meaning of the post changes. I think you may just be upset because he's wealthier than you.

Also later tried to briefly establish the fact that had I been offered such products a couple of years ago, I too would’ve found the pricing completely ridiculous.

I've had a similar journey to yours, albeit on a smaller scale. I used to think that buying jeans that cost over $40 was outrageous, but more recently I learned the value of buying nice raw denim jeans that can cost upwards of $300-400. They last way longer and look so cool after years of wear. With a little maintenance they can be permanent additions to your wardrobe.

> I think you may just be upset because he's wealthier than you.

Aw, Mark; that's not it, pal. His last paragraph about tailored clothing captures the thought well without throwing around dollar amounts or brand names. But thanks for trying to defend your capitalist masters like a good little right-winger!

Nope, he's stating how he feels about something.

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