Surprised the author didn't make any attempt to estimate the cost of renting an equivalent apartment today. 4 bedroom flat with extra living room in London today? Whee.
Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car
491–500 of 500 posts
Re: Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
While you're right, bear in mind, the worldwide population was 1/8th what it is now 100 years ago. That would mean, on average, worldwide, using naive metrics, housing cost would be 1/8th what it is today, even adjusting for inflation. One thing to keep in mind, the population in the UK at that time was very high, the population replenished back to pre WW2 levels only in 2017 and that includes immigration that didn't…
you are also making an assumption that the homebuilding rate globally for the past 100 years has been zero
No, I'm assuming that the available land has not increased. Historically until very recently (the past ~50 years) the vast majority of human beings built their own housing, available land would be the limiting factor and therefore most of the cost factor.
Re: Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car
#493Re: Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car
#494Earlier quoted context omitted.
in the west buying stuff usually requires no human interaction at all, even the cashiers are getting replaced by automatic checkout. But, on the other hand, you do need negotiation skills, be it in career, private live, or elsewhere. So maybe we all just need to do a year of backpacking and learn how to haggle
> in the west buying stuff usually requires no human interaction at all And then you step foot in a car dealership, and you might as well be in a souk
yup, stuff like cars, or, god forbid, houses, are not only expensive AF, but the buying requires skills most people never had a chance to practice.
fuck it, I'm cycling to save the planet and my nerves
Re: Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car
#495Re: Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car
#496Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hospitals in Belgium charge you by your income level. We know this because my wife had to be briefly hospitalized in Brussels during the nearly 8 years we lived there, and the hospital made it very clear to us that we were being charged in this way. Ironically, we still paid less out of pocket for that week-long hospital stay without insurance than we would have paid for a single day hospital stay here in the US with…
> Ironically, we still paid less out of pocket for that week-long hospital stay without insurance than we would have paid for a single day hospital stay here in the US with insurance. I'm curious about this one. I've been to the hospital one time in my adult life. Stayed overnight, got multiple tests including an Xray and an MRI. Got medication, etc. Having heard the horror stories I was ready for a big bill. It was…
A person without insurance would have payed many thousands. This is why you absolutely need good insurance in the USA.
Re: Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car
#497That is being said, she managed to buy one soon after, when cars were still an exotic luxury.
“I will confess here and now that of the two things that have excited me most in my life, the first was my car: my grey bottle-nosed Morris Cowley. The second was dining with the Queen at Buckingham Palace about forty years later.”
Agatha Christie in her autobiography
Re: Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car
#498Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on what I've heard from people of the area, the maid is usually an immigrant. And "universal" tends to mean "universal amongst proper citizens". Relatedly, I was surprised to learn that some women who "universally" wear a hijab before men feel no need to do so before a male immigrant.
Even if the immigrant is Muslim?
More about social standing than religion as I understand it. The rule of thumb as I was told is basically: "is there any slight chance in I marry this person? If yes, hijab. If no, doesn't matter." Religion plays a role in such analysis, but considering a Muslim immigrant laborer versus some arbitrary Abrahamic doctor (for instance), the doctor would be more likely to see the hijab. (For married women, the husband decides)
Re: Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
It does, otherwise they're called immigrants.
Expats usually don’t have immigrant visas. They also receive packages from their companies for their temporary assignments. If you go to the country on your own to fund a job, you usually won’t be referred to as an expat by those with packages who refer to themselves as expats. But you won’t be referred to as a migrant worker either unless you are poor and doing construction or farm work. We used the term half-pats t…
H1 does not lead to a green card. Infact H1 approval receipt will show Temporary Non Immigrant Worker visa. You have to apply to get a green card, entirely separate.
Re: Agatha Christie could afford a maid and a nanny but not a car
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's not enough space for everyone to do this. It's also often not free, you have to pay the city for using up the street space etc. New housing in Europe is planned with underground garage space exactly for this reason. SEA cities are even more densely populated.
But aren't we talking about single family houses here, with a garden? If you have room for a garage in your garden, surely you have room for a car without a garage?
The other poster mentioned Vietnam, I would expect cities there to be quite dense with townhouses or a tiny "garden" that's more like the smallest gap between houses that you can get away with while not breaking the construction code.