Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

old.reddit.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 829 posts

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#601

Post by jakubmazanec »

ackbar03 wrote: post #544
noboostforyou wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Price is 3-4 times higher but it lasts 5-10 times longer and is much more pleasant to use. "The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about…

I'm curious about this though, does a rich man actually wear the same pair of boots for 10 years? That being said, I've noticed that a lot of clothes that I bought 10 years ago or so are of pretty high quality compared to today, (and no, they are not rich man's clothes). Some of them I actually have been wearing for more than 10 years now.

You don't have to be rich to buy shoes ([1]) that can last you 10 years if you take care of them and re-sole them few times.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodyear_welt

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#602

Post by imtringued »

immibis wrote: post #66
BurningFrog wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-netwo…

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.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#603

Post by vel0city »

nickd2001 wrote: post #472
shrx wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What would make a microwave start to "leak" microwaves over time? Assuming the enclosure is still intact.

I honestly don't know, might be paranoia on my part, but stuff degrades over time right? Maybe less good a seal etc.

A 2.4GHz wave has a wavelength of ~12mm. The concept of blocking the emissions of a microwave oven is to only have small gaps, much smaller than the wavelength, in the metal casing. That's why you can have those 1-2mm holes in the door window without having much leakage; the holes are much smaller than the waves.

So as long as the gaps on the doors and panels of the microwave are still aligned right and the door closes somewhat tight (only a couple of mm gap) you're still trapping the extreme majority of the energy in the box.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#604

Post by canucker2016 »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #162
dehrmann wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there any scenario where a pro runner can gross $4M in lifetime running earnings?

I'm sure taking the bronze or silver in the Olympics is a great talking point for a future as a lawyer or financial analyst, so the backup plan is in place.

Roger Bannister, the first person to run a sub-4 minute mile, did minimal training compared to modern day athletes.

from his wikipedia entry:

  When asked whether the 4-minute mile was his proudest achievement, he said he felt prouder of his contribution to academic medicine through research into the responses of the nervous system.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#605

Post by imtringued »

immibis wrote: post #373
alex43578 wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#606

Post by isleyaardvark »

al_borland wrote: post #416
bombcar wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those who know how to handle wealth never become billionaires because once they have a few million they retire and do what they want to do.

The way I’ve heard it, billionaires are generally not chasing money. They have some other mission/purpose that is driving them. If it was just about the money they would give quit.

There are plenty of people whose driving purpose is to make money go up.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#607

Post by KeplerBoy »

enneff wrote: post #379
KeplerBoy wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don’t want your home to feel like an ikea catalog surely!? Who wouldn't? The people that arranged the furniture in those renders have a much better idea of interior design than I do.

It’s your home. Nobody knows how it should be better than you.

If it were up to me I'd be stuck at the local optimum of standing desks with workstations randomly distributed through the apartment and a mattress in some corner.

Thankfully my wife also has a vote on things.

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#608

Post by jbs789 »

It's probably obvious but the more they have then the more they spend (as a share of total spend) on appreciating rather than depreciating assets. The appreciating assets often aren't visible - stakes in companies for example. (But sometimes they are, such as real estate.)

Re: What do wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about? (2015)

#610

Post by jl6 »

dhuk_2018 wrote: post #520
jl6 wrote: post #475

The richest people I know don’t have work-life balance, they have a supercritical work-life fluid.

Can you further explain this?

At high temperatures and pressures, some substances are neither liquid nor gas, but a fluid with properties of both.

Whereas most people work to live, and prefer boundaries between the two, worklife is an intertwined way of being.

Brunch with your business partners, afternoon shaking hands on a golf course, dinner with a senator, placing bets on Wall Street, a penthouse suite at the resort hotel where you’re keynoting, hosting a fundraiser at your home…

Post reply on HN