161–170 of 478 posts
> Between late 1978 and early 1981, drivers in the U.S. saw the price at the pump nearly double from 63 cents to $1.31 a gallon. Not sure how that change would amount to NEARLY doubling...
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Debateable. The reason rich kids turn into such pieces of shit isn't material abundance (since, after all, anyone born before ~1990 in the middle class also experienced material abundance) but the unearned high social status and the impunity that comes with it. Deprivation and poverty, on the other hand, fuck people up severely--often, through no fault of their own--and there's tons of empirical evidence showing this…
Huh? Social status is relative, that is, defined by some kind of difference in a characteristic over which there is some competition (like wealth, looks, connections, fame, etc.). So how do you get that rich kid status without reference to material abundance? Remember, most people are comparatively poor: the wealth histogram is heavily skewed toward zero and with a wide tail toward infinity. It's impossible for every…
Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. It makes you penny wise and pound foolish, adverse to taking risks in your career and investments, can destroy your confidence in yourself, while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head.
it is like saying: ohhh my mommy was so bad to me and now i have issues, ohhh my mommy was so good to me and now i have issues.
victim mentality
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>Could you explain what you mean? Sure. I realize I waste a lot of time in supermarkets, shops or online stores, browsing/walking around and comparing prices just to penny pinch on low value things, when the savings I would make would have no meaningful impact on my yearly net worth, but the time and mental energy wasted browsing/walking around comparing prices could have better return on investment if used on other…
Strangely, I've observed the same behaviour with people on the exact opposite side of the spectrum too (i.e. UHNW). A friend of mine worked on superyachts which were £400k a week to rent. He said that without fail the owners would be penny pinching at the end over a few £ here and there (on food, drink, suncream etc.) Same with upper-class Brits who had hundreds of years of intergenerational wealth but won't turn the…
Poor penny pinching is often about doing what's necessary to survive, even if it's a terrible outcome in the medium term.
Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. It makes you penny wise and pound foolish, adverse to taking risks in your career and investments, can destroy your confidence in yourself, while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head.
you can make the same argument (in reverse) about being rich. it is like saying: ohhh my mommy was so bad to me and now i have issues, ohhh my mommy was so good to me and now i have issues. victim mentality
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> It makes you penny wise and pound foolish while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Could you explain what you mean? I grew up pretty poor, single income PhD student/post-doc salary family with two kids. Eventually my father got a proper position at a university, but until then we were pretty poor. My parents used to sleep on the floor, we had almost no furniture(I remember playing footbal…
I remember feeling like I'd bought cheap shirts at my first job. I didn't want to spend £25-£100 on nice shirts when there were cheapass shirts you could buy for £10. Made me look cheap at a place where the bosses were driving Ferraris. Also, not buying a holiday until well into my 20s. I still feel like it's mostly not worth it, even though I can pay for it and it's probably sensible to take a break from time to tim…
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Plenty of us didn't always have 'a couple hundred cash' at all, much less 'free' to just carry around 'in case of emergency'. I can now , but don't for the most part, partially because of decades of not being in that position. We have a modest amount of cash on hand at home - we sometimes pay service folks in cash, or can tip a delivery person now and then, but those are rare instances. Neighbor kids selling door to…
> If there's earthquake/hurricane/etc with resulting power outages, most of the places I'd go to wouldn't be able to even open their POS systems to take cash in the first place. Businesses or anyone wanting to get paid will figure out an alternative. Dealing with cash is not complicated.
Cards require a machine, some kind of network connectivity, and an account. It's actually a lot easier to deal with as a small business. Most of the people I know who go to conventions as vendors prefer cards because it greatly simplifies their logistics.
Being poor in general, during your childhood, scars you for life. It makes you penny wise and pound foolish, adverse to taking risks in your career and investments, can destroy your confidence in yourself, while always having to look over your shoulder monetarily speaking. Habits that even after you remove poverty from your live, you still feel the the anxiety and triggers in your head.
you can make the same argument (in reverse) about being rich. it is like saying: ohhh my mommy was so bad to me and now i have issues, ohhh my mommy was so good to me and now i have issues. victim mentality
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If there's earthquake/hurricane/etc with resulting power outages, most of the places I'd go to wouldn't be able to even open their POS systems to take cash in the first place. Businesses or anyone wanting to get paid will figure out an alternative. Dealing with cash is not complicated.
Dealing with cash is complicated actually. You need to protect it from theft. You need to count it daily. You need a bank to deposit it. You need to have change because people don't bring exact amounts. Having change requires a bank or some other facility to exchange currency with. Cards require a machine, some kind of network connectivity, and an account. It's actually a lot easier to deal with as a small business.…
In the case of getting paid something versus getting paid nothing, I am guessing most merchants will opt to put in the work to accept cash rather than shut down.
I worked in a grocery store in the late '90s, and the older customers (who grew up in the Great Depression) always carried penny pouches, because they remembered a time when one had to keep track of cents to survive. This is how I know that, even if we miraculously fixed our medical system tomorrow and outlawed private health insurance by a constitutional amendment, we'll still have, thirty years from now, 60-year-ol…
The generation of the Great Depression didn't have ubiquitous forms of usury. With credit cards, personal loans and student loans, I imagine the future stinginess of Millennials will be short lived.