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Comment by StilesCrisis | Hacker News Reader

Sadly, having more money doesn’t buy time. At least, not until you have enough money that you can hire assistants, but that’s pretty extreme.

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I know a lot of people who DoorDash, have groceries delivered, have a house cleaner, and call a contractor for every small thing that needs to be done. They’re buying time.

It’s never quite as much time as expected, though. Each is a marginal addition of free time that brings its own complications (like my friend who did an alarming amount of DoorDash and is now investing a lot of time into dropping weight and managing cholesterol and blood sugar)

I am hardware developer and certified electrician as a hobby. I have regularly clients that are buying time while I do really simple things on the property. It’s really cringe to be asked to vacuum their dirt for couple hours. I am paid premium while the clients watch Netflix and later whine about running out of money. I tried politely ask to do rudimentary things by themselves, but it never worked out. I grew in poverty and have hard time understanding this.

My parents buy groceries delivery what is really useful and time saving on other hand. House cleaner is difficult topic, they do seldom a good job even when offered more money. Typical example: there is dirt under edges of carpet after vacuuming.

Separately, what is a certified electrician - are you licensed in your state?

Yes. Not only that, but I can work with electricity meters and put seals. It’s in Germany and very complicated and best unemployment insurance I could find.

> I am paid premium while the clients watch Netflix and later whine about running out of money.

This really bothered me when I was in social situations with college students who would alternate between bragging about how much they spent on DoorDash and complaining about how they’re always struggling with money.

It was only a handful of people out of a larger group of mostly rational students, but it drove me crazy.

This is a core reason for my own burnout - why should I work for a culture that seemingly promotes lazy/hypocritical behavior? Reminds me of "Idiocracy" or "burn after reading" the "league of morons"

Hello, I am a little confused about your post. Why are they having you vacuum things if you are an electrician?

I am asked to do that. You’ll never say “no” to a client when you are paid hourly.

Glad you brought up your friend in the 2nd bit there as it seems to have become relatively common for some people to make food delivery services a very regular part of their lifestyle without really paying attention to the staggering amount of saturated fat they are ingesting even from the majority of "healthy" options available on these services (nevermind the even worse fast food options)

Of course this has always been a thing with prepared restaurant food (just listen to various comments Anthony Bourdain made over the years about restaurants and butter use) but I'm somewhat convinced the friction removal of having these foods delivered at nearly any time of the day is going to cause an uptick in middle age heart disease in a group of people who are going overboard in trading money for time without thinking of the long term consequences.

Saturated fat is not the demon we've been lead to believe for the past 30-40 years. Sugar is. And there's a lot of sugar in prepared food too.

I think you'll find scientific consensus isn't on your side here. The American Heart Association certainly doesn't agree with your assessment

The American Heart Association has a huge investment in a narrative they've been pushing for 40 years.

Randomized controlled trials show LDL consistently drops with lower saturated fat intake, and randomized controlled trials show LDL strongly correlated with coronary risk. It’s one of the best-established causal relationships in nutrition science.

The American Heart Association’s narrative is based in observed clinical relationship between saturated fat intake, LDL, and coronary events.

Excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both bad.

There’s been a big social media push to turn saturated fat into a good thing, but everything I actually read in the research still points to excess saturated fat being a bad idea.

It's not about buying time though, it's about what you do with the bought time. I see a lot of people using these expensive services and then wasting the extra time - or worse, filling time while they wait for the completion.

Time is time. If one values doing nothing more than doing house chores, then they are buying time by paying a cleaner.

It is about spending your time doing what you want (including doing nothing if that's your thing), and outsource the things that you don't want to do.

I was with you until...

> and call a contractor for every small thing that needs to be done. They’re buying time.

I _really_ wish I could find a contractor that didn't suck up more time than they save every single time!

Hiring a housekeeper to come every couple of weeks has pretty much directly bought me time, at a pretty reasonable price. I like living in a neat and tidy home, but never cared much for scrubbing grout or polishing the stovetop in my free hours. I’m delighted every time she comes, and I never wake up Saturday thinking I’ll have to vacuum under the couch cushions.

That’s the best improvement to my life ever. I migrated from a normal-person rental to a million-dollars house, but to me the true luxury is, having someone to set the house back to impeccable state. I should have done that in my 42sqm flat.

Enough money to not work and care for your children is the correct answer.

But sadly the people I know who made enough money to be able to retire young are workaholics that will hire people to raise their kids. Because their workaholism is what made them rich in the first place. See Elon for an extreme example, I doubt he can even name all his biological children.

X0–X127, easy.

Ah so their names are just ARM64 registers. Now I get it.

Who needs assistants? I'll make do with enough money to draw a monthly stipend covering my expenses and leisure from for life. You know, like a salary, but without wasting my time on pointless tasks that give me no satisfaction.

I mean, it does for people like me who decide to work less as they don't need to earn as much.

I decided to breathe for a while after a startup was out of runway and minimized my consumption while figuring out what to do once grew up.

It was a revelation to find out how little one needs materially to feel happy.

But a basic income or something is mandatory IMO as it's the only thing that can remove us from the rat race and free us from the zillionaires. Oh, sorry. We need to get rid of the zillionaires first, the last thing they want is normal people who aren't hungry and desperate for pennies.

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