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The Rich Don't Penny Pinch

seanmcclure.substack.com

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Re: The Rich Don't Penny Pinch

#71

Post by vineyardmike »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #4
nanis wrote: post #2

The author and I ascribe different meanings to "penny pinching" ... Also, > Imagine you are in your car driving and you notice someone in another car, alone, wearing a mask. This is during the covid pandemic so seeing someone wearing a mask is not overly surprising. But then you stop and think wait a second, this person is alone and wearing a mask. Isn't that odd? In fact it seems downright ridiculous. Why would anyo…

> A penny pincher is the person who goes to dinner with a dozen people and ends up spending an hour trying to "fairly" divide the check among everyone. Or, the one who says a few days later that you should treat him to lunch because he only had a single glass of wine whereas everyone else had two or some such. Alcoholic drinks in most popular cities are $10+ per drink, if not $18+ in tier 1 cities. If someone that do…

> Very odd to me that expecting someone else to pay vastly more for your consumption is considered OK,

As an ex-vegetarian (who does drink), i think it's ok and many have ways around this. If someone invited me to a steak-house, and all i got was a salad, i'd probably ask that host to cover the check and i'd buy everyone drinks elsewhere or a meal another day. It hides the "my $15 salad to your $45 steak" issue with a veil of generosity.

Also regarding drinks, I do drink - but if someone at the table didn't drink and the rest of the table did, i'd do the same thing as the steak-eater and cover their meal and make up later, again, act generously. Also, i would never order more drinks than anyone else, or n+1 from the lowest number of drinks consumed as a social policy.

Re: The Rich Don't Penny Pinch

#72

Post by adwi »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #29

I absolutely hate these sorts of "take a broad generalization, blindly run with it to extremes then pontificate about edge cases in where it breaks" articles. They accomplish little but to indulge online commenters desire to engage in behavior that runs the spectrum from bike shedding to virtue signaling. Of course everyone has a bone to pic with some specific part of the article. Of course everyone wants to elaborat…

Bikeshedding

> 1. Futile investment of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues. quotations 2. Procrastination.

https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/bikeshedding

Re: The Rich Don't Penny Pinch

#73

Post by [deleted] »

wink wrote: post #12

> But then you stop and think wait a second, this person is alone and wearing a mask. Isn't that odd? In fact it seems downright ridiculous. Why would anyone wear a mask in their car when they are alone? The author has clearly not spent a lot of time in normal mode around people who have to wear their mask for their full shift. Yes, those people forget. Not us keyboard warriors who put it on twice a day for a few min…

[deleted]

Re: The Rich Don't Penny Pinch

#74

Post by goodpoint »

pa7x1 wrote: post #67
alex_smart wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people have have gotten Covid from fomite transmission so far? Last I checked the number of such confirmed cases varied from zero to one. Meanwhile the entire globe has been anxiously sanitizing their hands and everything they touch for 18 months (a lot of people in my family were even washing the grocery produce with soap and setting them aside for one day before use). All this long, long after scientists h…

There is no scientific experiment in the canonical sense that could confirm it due to ethical concerns. Once it was accepted that aerosol transmission occurs, since it is a much easier form of transmission it's very easy to tag all infections as having occurred through aerosol. Do all actually occur through aerosol? Some most likely happened like that, others may have been bigger droplets released talking or coughing…

> I highly doubt that the virus becomes incapable of infecting in a fomite in a doorknob, elevator button or keyboard

Covid appears to have low probability of fomite infection - but there is little reason to take unnecessary risks (given how ineffective humanity has been at stopping the infection).

Plus, I know people who just caught the flu. Why not kill two birds with a stone?

Re: The Rich Don't Penny Pinch

#75

Post by diggernet »

gtfoutttt wrote: post #31

>What I want to talk about here is how the type of behavior that makes us look smart in the moment (i.e. penny pinching) ends up not being smart in the long run. Well said. I disagree with the article title, due to my experience with delivering pizza. We all certainly knew the non-tippers. And they almost always were in the wealthiest neighborhoods. So once you go to a house 3 or 4 times, and get stiffed (or hear abo…

Based on my own experience, I would slightly adjust what you say. The wealthy neighborhoods did have more repeat non-tippers than they should, but they also had some of the best tippers. There were also a fair number of non-tippers in the crappiest poor neighborhoods, but I was fine with that.

On the other hand, the "gig economy" has really screwed up pizza delivery since the shops started laying off their own drivers. There is no control over quality, and tips don't really count for anything anymore. The dude who showed up an hour late with a cold pizza got no tip, but so what? He'll never be back, and doesn't answer to the manager of the restaurant. Good tip for a good, prompt delivery, sure. But that won't earn better service, because we'll never see that driver again, either.

Re: The Rich Don't Penny Pinch

#76

Post by alex_smart »

pa7x1 wrote: post #67
alex_smart wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many people have have gotten Covid from fomite transmission so far? Last I checked the number of such confirmed cases varied from zero to one. Meanwhile the entire globe has been anxiously sanitizing their hands and everything they touch for 18 months (a lot of people in my family were even washing the grocery produce with soap and setting them aside for one day before use). All this long, long after scientists h…

There is no scientific experiment in the canonical sense that could confirm it due to ethical concerns. Once it was accepted that aerosol transmission occurs, since it is a much easier form of transmission it's very easy to tag all infections as having occurred through aerosol. Do all actually occur through aerosol? Some most likely happened like that, others may have been bigger droplets released talking or coughing…

Except that it is proven that the risk of fomite transmission is extremely low. The chance of a transmission when you directly touch an infected surface and then touch your face is around 1 to 10^4.

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...

Just spending 15-20 minutes once talking indoors with a person, whose covid status you're unsure of, is more dangerous than not bothering with the whole surface cleaning, hand sanitizing theatre during the entire pandemic. I am not sure that most people appreciate this.

Your understanding of the virus is based on incorrect understanding of how the virus worked that people had in the first few months of the pandemic. This was exactly the point I was making. While the scientific knowledge improved, this information was never really communicated to the people.

Re: The Rich Don't Penny Pinch

#77

Post by dghlsakjg »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #4
nanis wrote: post #2

The author and I ascribe different meanings to "penny pinching" ... Also, > Imagine you are in your car driving and you notice someone in another car, alone, wearing a mask. This is during the covid pandemic so seeing someone wearing a mask is not overly surprising. But then you stop and think wait a second, this person is alone and wearing a mask. Isn't that odd? In fact it seems downright ridiculous. Why would anyo…

> A penny pincher is the person who goes to dinner with a dozen people and ends up spending an hour trying to "fairly" divide the check among everyone. Or, the one who says a few days later that you should treat him to lunch because he only had a single glass of wine whereas everyone else had two or some such. Alcoholic drinks in most popular cities are $10+ per drink, if not $18+ in tier 1 cities. If someone that do…

This is a solved problem up here in Canada, at least in my experience.

Most restaurants will assume you want to split the check by default when you're with a big group, and most restaurant software lets you ring in dishes by the seat rather than by the table, while also splitting shared things across all of the checks at a table (this also helps service teams deliver the right dish to the right guest). Add to that the convenience of chip and pin machines that come to the table, and it is just a non-issue.

I'm American, so I understand that lots of restaurants in the US resist doing things this way. But it is quite silly considering that the software and hardware already exists to handle it all.

Re: The Rich Don't Penny Pinch

#78

Post by alex_smart »

goodpoint wrote: post #74
pa7x1 wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no scientific experiment in the canonical sense that could confirm it due to ethical concerns. Once it was accepted that aerosol transmission occurs, since it is a much easier form of transmission it's very easy to tag all infections as having occurred through aerosol. Do all actually occur through aerosol? Some most likely happened like that, others may have been bigger droplets released talking or coughing…

> I highly doubt that the virus becomes incapable of infecting in a fomite in a doorknob, elevator button or keyboard Covid appears to have low probability of fomite infection - but there is little reason to take unnecessary risks (given how ineffective humanity has been at stopping the infection). Plus, I know people who just caught the flu. Why not kill two birds with a stone?

>but there is little reason to take unnecessary risks

That seems to have been the mindset behind authorities deciding not to disseminate this information to the public. But I am not convinced.

That argument only makes sense if people's ability to be cautious and attentive and disciplined in following rules is an infinite resource. You have given people multiple rules they need to follow to avoid getting the virus without informing them which ones are more important to follow than others. For example consider the two guidelines: don't meet people in indoor spaces and don't touch unsanitized surfaces. Both require similar amount of effort/discipline but breaking the first is thousands of times more dangerous than the other.

Re: The Rich Don't Penny Pinch

#79

Post by Zelphyr »

Maybe I'm alone in this assessment but, this reads like it was written by the economics teacher on Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I can't decide if it is on-target brilliant or completely off the mark.

Re: The Rich Don't Penny Pinch

#80

Post by DiggyJohnson »

mankyd wrote: post #65
wink wrote: post #12

> But then you stop and think wait a second, this person is alone and wearing a mask. Isn't that odd? In fact it seems downright ridiculous. Why would anyone wear a mask in their car when they are alone? The author has clearly not spent a lot of time in normal mode around people who have to wear their mask for their full shift. Yes, those people forget. Not us keyboard warriors who put it on twice a day for a few min…

The author does not think it's ridiculous at all. The next paragraph exactly addresses your comment: > If we are only taking into consideration the information that is immediately available then the situation does indeed seem pretty ridiculous. But if we stop and consider what might be the broader context we can imagine scenarios where wearing a mask alone makes a lot of sense.

Oh man, this comment thread is about as divorced from this context as you’re likely to see on HN. Thanks for sharing.
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