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

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

#671

Post by al_borland »

atwrk wrote: post #559
al_borland wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Poor people pay next to nothing in taxes, yet they don’t end up wealthy from this. The tax systems doesn’t create wealthy people, it just doesn’t cut their legs out from under them.

Tax systems create wealthy people in two ways: a) by disproportionally tax the poor vs. the rich. In the United States, "42 states tax the top 1 percent at a lower rate than the bottom 20 percent, while 46 states tax the top 1 percent less than the middle 60 percent of earners." https://media.itep.org/ITEP-Who-Pays-7th-edition.pdf b) by using the taxes to disproportionately benefit the upper income brackets, e.g. by…

I guess I was just thinking about federal taxes. As long as I can remember, even when I wasn’t making much, I remembered state being less and I didn’t may much attention to it.

Looking into it more, I was ignoring sales tax and some of those other, as they are more indirect, but consumption taxes will hit harder for those with less… it’s just not as easy to quantify.

Looking at big more it seems like the split between federal/state taxes for the bottom 20% may be 20/80, while for the rich it’s flipped at 90/10.

While all this is interesting, and has opened my eyes a little in this area… I would still stand by the latter half my original statement. The wealth is created elsewhere before taxes even come into the picture. The local taxes can hit a point of being very low impact long before someone hits the 1% or is considered wealthy, and that isn’t turning anyone into a billionaire.

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

#672

Post by ty6853 »

rcbdev wrote: post #670
ty6853 wrote: post #646

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The real cost of hiring people to do stuff for your house is it's actually hella expensive to get licensed and bonded legal employees with references that attest they aren't thieves, and if you don't eventually they steal your shit or they get hurt and sue you for a billion dollars. I could easily hire people to do it, but I sweat bullets everytime I am guilt tripped into letting a neighbor kid mow the lawn because I…

The quintessentially American perpetual fear of lawsuits is sickening to the unwitting bystander.

Don't worry, we made qualified immunity so the government employees, also of whom are the people that enforce the lawsuits they are immune from, don't have to eat their own dogfood.

There is some seriously crazy stuff in America. Like guys who go around asking mom & pop shops to use a normally private bathroom "for an emergency", then sue the shit out of them because it's not considered handicap accessible and now that they let the public use it it is now a public bathroom. The effect is a lot of places would rather you shit yourself than open themselves up to lawsuit.

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

#673

Post by saltcured »

tcfhgj wrote: post #552
fragmede wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IoT, and in the near future, arms for self loading and unloading. Who knows what advancement in UI will happen? If we knew what they were beforehand, we'd be doing then already. For example, the microwave. Older microwaves have a cumbersome enter time, hit start procedure. Newer microwaves also have a "quick start" button for 30 seconds which you can just press four times to get it to go for two minutes, or enter the…

I have a rotating knob on the micro wave, no manual digital input although it's only a few years old. Fwiw it could be a decade or two old And I am happy with it. Pretty much prefer it to using buttons. Just rotate it to about 30, done.

We have a pretty modern one that is a hybrid of these things. It has a knob that is a rotary encoder to quickly spin up a digital time, so it's become "flick of the wrist, START" to hit times I use frequently like 25s, 2m, and 2m50s at full power.

It also has the instant 30s button which my wife seems to prefer to the rotating input.

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

#674

Post by moneywoes »

safety1st wrote: post #248
alexey-salmin wrote: post #176

The referenced reply is dull. It's very pretentious but just reiterates common knowledge, it doesn't convey any useful information. For example I wish someone told me about the existence of Miele kitchen equipment before I accidentally rented an apartment of a well-to-do woman. She renovated it for herself but then rented out when circumstances changed. Similarly it took me a long time to realize just how much better…

On a personal level I know several guys who are worth $10-30M, one who's worth probably $40M, and one who's worth around $700M, this is LNW. Not much in the Reddit reply checks out for me. It's true that the $700M guy socializes with "Senators/Congressmen/community leaders." He travels a lot, and comfortably, but has no ownership in a jet. He retired young-ish and no longer works so maybe that's why. He doesn't flash…

how did they create their networth, self made or inheritance

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

#675

Post by crossroadsguy »

HardCodedBias wrote: post #5

I really like this post since it shows how very little there is for the wealthy to buy other than status goods. The life of the rich, other than status, is very much like the life of upper middle class. The same phones, the same digital entertainment, the same appliances in their homes. We have very few items for the rich to buy. Honestly, it is a problem it breaks incentives and it drives the rich more towards statu…

When I started earning much more money than I have had before (not “rich” money by any means - that’s not the point; but much much more than I grew up in or started my career with) I realised it’s not about buying things, it’s more about being able to pay for things without giving a thought if needed/wanted. That’s really a very relaxing or freeing feeling. (And they say money doesn’t bring peace :P)

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

#677

Post by geodel »

bjourne wrote: post #216
0xDEAFBEAD wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The incentives for the ultra-rich are screwed up. I remember a few years ago Mark Zuckerberg announced that he was donating 99% to charity. The internet got very angry about it, based on flimsy reasoning: https://qz.com/564805/5-criticisms-of-billionaire-mega-phila... Bill Gates has saved millions of lives through his philanthropy, and the internet is full of malicious rumors about him. Other billionaires who do far…

Gates giving away his money is good, but it would be better for the billionaire class not to exist. Money is power is a zero sum game.

Huh, earth would be better if human as species don't exist.

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

#678

Post by bluGill »

canucker2016 wrote: post #664
bluGill wrote: post #643

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That has been getting much less common. My dad used to have "his secretary" do tasks like schedule is meetings and book travel - the secretary was a department secretary for a couple dozen engineers and was kept busy just serving those needs. Today I don't have a secretary for several hundred engineers. My computer is better at scheduling meetings than the secretary ever was. Go back 100 years and the rich would have…

I would love a virtual assistant that could handle the tasks a human personal assistant does. VA would be available 24x7, would perform consistently regardless of time of day/how long they've been running/awake, would know/ understand my particular habits/preferences. Maybe there's some bespoke software firm that does provide such a service for rich-enough people. Of course it'd have to run mostly locally/on-premises…

The rich can afford humans to do this job. While a lot of the jobs the assistant does would be easy to automate, the hard part is from the vague description of what they want to getting something acceptable. If I ask for "famous singer" do I need that singer, a cover band, or any band in that style, any live music, or a good DJ - depending on the situation any might be acceptable (and sometimes several of the above are not available at any price). Scheduling just the famous singer is easy - just send a calendar request and see if they accept (it is more complex than that, and odds are the singer isn't signed up for this service, but that is all details), but trying to figure out which substitute is available and acceptable is hard.

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

#679

Post by fennecbutt »

FreebasingLLMs wrote: post #500
myself248 wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mom worked at a law firm where one of the partners retired, moved to England, and bought a castle. As one does. He told this story while back in the States for a party: Castles are old. And drafty. And need a LOT of renovations to bring them up to a modern standard. So he had immediately set upon this work, hiring contractors, picking out high-end appliances, arranging for the import of Italian marble countertops.…

[flagged]

Damn bro, shut your damn mouth using that offensive word for people like me. It's fucking 2025. Hurr durr 4chan kid, that site is dead now time to grow up.

I hope dang senses a disturbance in the force.

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

#680

Post by nonameiguess »

geodel wrote: post #522
fragmede wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Scale the dollar amount up a few orders of magnitude But that's what makes it "weird". Most people can't afford to do that. As you point out, it mashed a certain amount of sense, but we're in the midst of an housing crisis. People who have enough money to own, not just multiple houses, but so many cars that they got tired of different cars so they just bought more of the same? Weird because I've never done that. Ho…

I don't know if its weird. This seems to me using money to reduce hassle. At my even lower level of existence I do similar thing in sense I keep one pair toothbrush and paste in upstairs bathroom and another pair at main level just to avoid whatever inconvenience I've thought of in my mind. Same with multiple pair of glasses at different location I work from. I have not done these things when I had less money and now…

Just wanna say I do a few things like this, too. Examples being duplicate toiletries and clothing I keep permanently packed so I don't need to actually pack when traveling. I have duplicates of the same vacuum cleaner and broom/dustpan combos on every floor of my house so I don't need to go down or up stairs to get one. If I was wealthy enough to have a vacation home, I could see owning a duplicate car to keep there, assuming I was a more typical person who drove more.
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