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“People simply empty out”

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Re: “People simply empty out”

#451

Post by smsm42 »

kokotko wrote: post #297
homosaur wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100K is the point where you have the illusion of financial freedom because you can purchase a BMW, buy a nice home in a bland cul-de-sac with a bunch of nameless white dudes, and it's not until you're in your 40s and you're in danger to losing the job to a robot or a whipper-snapper that you understand that kind of "freedom" is actually enslavement. You made the wrong choice because you wasted your life buying plasti…

I think more and more Gen Y people in advanced European countries see owning a car as a failure - you are a fool for wasting money, when transportation can be done cheaply and also often for free. You are basically penalized for owning a car by high taxes, and for those few occassions in a year when you need a car (moving stuff) it's easy enough to rent. Spending your life in traffic jams is just a plain fail. Having…

Try living in something like Silicon Valley and not owning a car. Shopping for groceries would probably take a whole day, if you're lucky, and you can forget about doing anything else.

Re: “People simply empty out”

#453

Post by hippee-lee »

eli_gottlieb wrote: post #393
mattmanser wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people will get married and have kids and actually want to enjoy life a little bit while working 9-5. They want to stay near their close family & friends, because they love them and want to see them and want their kids to grow up around them. Which means spending X per month on a house. They want to have a car that doesn't embarrass them when they drive into work or round their friends, because o…

It's children that are the real financial issue. Even one child, last I heard, is the difference between early retirement as a reward for spending your 20s and 30s on grad-student frugality while earning plenty of money, and just having to work a 9-5 until it kills you.

N of one here. I have on child. Started saving in early 20's because I remembered two things my parents struggled with in the 80's. 1) being under water wrt their mortgage and 2) just making ends meet meant that they were never able to effectively save for retirement until they were in their mid/late 30's.

Got married to someone who thinks like I do wrt to retirement and with one child we are on track to 'retire' when we want to. Barring us doing something dumb or global financial meltdowns - by mid 50s or so. I put retire in quotes because who believe in retirement where one site on their ass all day and says I'm so glad I don't have to work any more? I don't. Retirement means we will be able to give meaningful time to .org's that need it. But this will still be 'work'. I can't imagine a worse hell than retirement where I have no meaningful work to do.

Note: with two or more children much of what I can still do would need to be re-evaluated.

Re: “People simply empty out”

#454

Post by smsm42 »

dnautics wrote: post #20

I don't happen to believe the wage system is slavery (I do happen to believe we have a modern slavery system, but that's another story) "They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work." But then why don't the slaves leave? Unlike in the past, nobody is holding a gun to their head. One possibility, probably popular among entrepreneurial types, is the sla…

You can easily leave, but you want to eat. You want to have a place to live, and in a nice neighborhood. You want to be transported to other places. You want to have internet access, to have TV, to have cell phone, to wear nice clothes, etc.

You can not do all of it on your own. Other people have to do it for you. But why other people would do it for you? They don't know you and have no obligations towards you and have no desire to work for you just because you're such a nice person. And even if they wanted, there's a scarcity of resources and time, why would they choose you? You have to offer them something. Like work for them in return, to do something they want but can't or won't do. Of course, you can't work for every person that participated in making your cellphone personally - that's where the money comes in.

Now when you talk about leaving - you can mean giving up all goods that our civilization gives us, sever your links with the mutual work exchange system and do it on your own. You can do that. But do you really want to? Your clothes, food and shelter would suck huge time. A simple caries may kill you. Your life would be brutal, miserable, full of pain and short (at least compared to what the civilization could give you). Is it worth it?

You can also talk about being essentially a parasite - not contributing anything and putting the surrounding people before the choice of giving you stuff for nothing or watching a disturbing picture of you slowly and painfully dying in their front porch. In our modern society, you can pretty safely bet most would choose give you something in order to avoid that. But is that really what anybody would want to be, given a choice?

You can also do worse - you can take weapons and threaten to harm your neighbors unless they work for you. If you demands are modest enough, they may choose to comply instead of creating a security layer that protects against you, since it'd be cheaper. But is it a really moral choice for anyone? If being slave is bad, how about being an enslaver?

If you have another alternative to participating in mutual work exchange system - what is it? How does it compare on outcomes and on morality?

Re: “People simply empty out”

#455

Post by sliverstorm »

enraged_camel wrote: post #448
sliverstorm wrote: post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our ancestors in the African Savannah weren't going out of their way to acquire material goods. Then how do you explain the necklaces, earrings, headpieces, etc etc etc found in the histories of tribes all around the world all through history?

I think you missed the "going out of their way" part. Can you imagine a tribesman thinking, "man, I should work extra hard today and bring home more meat so I can afford that necklace the other guy has"?

Yes, I can easily imagine a tribesman coveting what his tribemates have. As for how exactly he acquired those things... it probably did not involve "affording" anything, because there was no currency. But I'm sure there were fights, theft, etc as well as plenty of labor invested in manufacturing more trinkets. Necklaces were not simply found on the ground; you would have needed to come up with a needle, thread, possibly a drill... all much harder to procure in the days before Home Depot!

Re: “People simply empty out”

#456

Post by smsm42 »

drone wrote: post #328
LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think I played with the words. No debt == freedom. And to have no debt isn't easy mostly due to social pressure - keeping up with the Jones. But it wouldn't really hurt to plan in such a way that before one hits 45 they are debt free and own house among other things.

There's a lot of hyperbole about "debt," I see propagated about, especially amongst the far-left and far-right. Debt != Slavery. Conversely, No Debt != Freedom, there are plenty of people I know with no debt who are no more free to do what they please than the people I know with crushing debt. Debt is leverage. Leverage, applied correctly, is an excellent means for accelerating the furtherance of a goal. Is having de…

Debt is a time machine. You get today the money that you may have in 30 years. Of course, if you watched any sci-fi movies, you know what happens when you abuse time machines... bad, bad things.

Debt isn't bad, debt is great - provided a) your time machine use doesn't cost too much and b) you really will have this money in the future (or, in other words, can keep up with the payments). Most problems with debt stem from misunderstanding the concept that it doesn't produce money, only shifts money around in time, and does not produce, but rather consume money - and of course from failure, deliberate or out of ignorance, to predict one's future amount of money. People also tend to double-count future money - once they debt-shifted it to present, they still consider it being there in the future, available for another debt-shift. This is where the trouble starts.

Re: “People simply empty out”

#458

Post by _delirium »

gaius wrote: post #441
kokotko wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think more and more Gen Y people in advanced European countries see owning a car as a failure - you are a fool for wasting money, when transportation can be done cheaply and also often for free. You are basically penalized for owning a car by high taxes, and for those few occassions in a year when you need a car (moving stuff) it's easy enough to rent. Spending your life in traffic jams is just a plain fail. Having…

I think you may need to recalibrate your idea of failure. I own a car specifically so I can load it up with gear at the weekends and go diving or camping. I know a few people who are rabidly anti-car and ride fixies. They spend their weekends bar-hopping and nursing hangovers. Fair enough, but that's not the lifestyle that particularly interests me. Having to wear a nice suit is not failure either. Both cars and suit…

Most of the SF people I know who use a car only on weekends just use Zipcar or a rental for that. Depends on precisely how often you use it, but if you're not driving the car daily for commute, the economics of owning vs. renting shift considerably.

Re: “People simply empty out”

#459

Post by nhangen »

vendakka wrote: post #433
nhangen wrote: post #359

I have three things to say about this: 1. Many people are horrified by the thought of not being a simple worker bee. They say they want change, but they don't. They want the security of someone else taking care of them. The reason wealth exists is because there are people that cannot live this way, and thus, make their own way. You cannot fault hard working business owners because their employees put themselves in a…

Life is suffering? I find that to be overly pessimistic. Life is not simple and there will be sorrow. However, there will be joy as well. "Suffering" is a very strong word to use. There is happiness and there is sorrow. To expect only happiness is not pragmatic, but to expect only sorrow is unfortunate. Life can be beautiful, even if it is not always so.

It's a tenet of buddhism. I'm just re-stating it.

Re: “People simply empty out”

#460

Post by JVIDEL »

mattmanser wrote: post #430
nilkn wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They want to have a car that doesn't embarrass them when they drive into work or round their friends, because owning a BMW has been a secret dream and it's a totally reasonable price, and a smooth ride and great acceleration. This is really pushing it. Anybody buying a BMW on $100k in Silicon Valley while paying SV-level rents is a pretty big over-consumer. If you have a family on top of that, well... you won't be…

What I've seen in my friends is that certain men will buy an expensive car on a loan, keep it 3-4 years and then swap it for a family friendly car when they have kids. Often they will buy the car 2nd hand. The car retains the majority of its value, they enjoy the car, they're not actually spending massive amounts of money like you seem to think they are. It's essentially a hobby item that they enjoy driving. And it's…

Not only that but leasing an expensive car can actually cost you less than the value of the car you lose for using it.

I remember checking how leasing a Porsche for 3 years would cost me less than half of the value the car would lose in that time.

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