throwaway22032

The issue is basically this:

If you have issues with impulse control you are likely to become poor because you will slowly bleed out money and opportunities from bad decision making.

The opposite is also true: it’s just less correlated because it is harder to gain money than to spend it, so not everyone makes it.

This is obvious to anyone who grew up poor and escaped, or who grew up well off and watched people on the fall. How long does a middle class heroin addict remain?

So what is stopping anyone in principle just reselling API access through a middleman?

Should I set up the company now and rake in the billions?

Because there are significant privacy benefits and benefits in removing the middlemen etc.

If you don’t care, you don’t care. I gave up a long time ago too. In that case it would be annoying enough if the privacy preserving card were just 1cm longer or something that you wouldn’t use it.

Sure.

I suppose my argument is along the following lines - books are too cumbersome so let's scroll Instagram instead.

It's a fake argument, it's not that big a deal, you just didn't care enough about reading books.

Budgeting with the data trail of a card is significantly easier if you have a lot of transactions.

It's also generally cheaper due to cashback and other incentives.

Other than that I've always found the idea that cash is "inconvenient" a bit of a child-like argument. Okay, yeah, you have to count some coins, you also have to brush your teeth and use a knife and fork instead of your hands, come on.

This is to some extent a kind of tautology, though.

There is more money available to chase housing in urban areas because it's where most of the jobs are due to network effects, so if you are a labourer you gravitate towards that (as you say, it's a commute thing).

It's not necessarily intrinsically more desirable. If you gave the average person 5 million quid I don't think they would choose to live in Central London.

"That's just like, your opinion, man."

The car is clearly not the best way to navigate a dense city. It is impractical to have, say, tower block apartments and also have a car for each resident. It is unreasonable to build enough parking for peak time around every destination that anyone might want to go to.

On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout their lives. It was profit maximising and also a lot of fun for me to live in the inner city in my early to mid 20's. Now that I can afford to not maximally push my career I prefer the outer parts of the city / more rural areas, and that's where the car shines.

The issue with this is that inevitably the locked down devices, which will end up being 98%+ of the market, become required for ordinary living, because no-one will develop for the 2%.

Open hardware is essentially useless if I need to carry both an open phone and a phone with the parking app, the banking app, messenger app to contact friends, etc.

Classic cars being refit to be electric is like using strawberry flavoured candy to replace fruit, or GPU shaders to replace a Trinitron.

Modern cars already exist, you can just use those. There aren’t enough proper classics in existence to matter from a carbon perspective.

I feel as if I've been reading some variant of this for the last 30 years (not just American, UK too).

But then what of it? I had more money at age 20 than I did at 15, more at 25 than 20, more at 30 than 25, and so on and so forth.

When I'm 70 I'll have more in real terms than I do now. Each year, barring some sort of disaster, most people work and bring in enough to survive whilst the surplus stacks up.

The main difference in my mind driving the rate of change in the proportions is just that the median person is more aware of things like the stock market, real estate, etc, now.

Basically, people are acting more efficiently. I'm more savvy than my parents were; they are/were proper working class "spend it as soon as it comes in, it might be gone" whereas I'm more like "never touch the capital, diversify".

(There are some issues, like how in the UK pensioners are given _extremely_ generous benefits, but I don't think that's relevant to the global picture).

If you're disciplined enough to put something in your calendar and do it over a period of months, without someone breathing down your neck to do so, whether you feel like doing it or not, then you are likely able to apply that effort in other areas of life.

So then it's a bidirectional correlation. You're more likely to be fit if you are wealthy and more likely to be wealthy if you are fit.

Essentially, what you're looking at is that people who engage in self improvement end up better off than those who don't.

It's a priori obvious but some people are uncomfortable with it for some reason - trauma response / coping mechanism, something like that.

Well, new things are generally more expensive than second hand and retrofitting older things is more expensive than doing nothing.

So, water is wet.

I would also argue that it isn’t necessarily true in the strictest way of thinking, because personally if I had infinite money and technicians to maintain things I’d have 70s-90s sports cars before everything got massive and wide and heavy. That’s way more expensive and luxurious than a new Model 3 or something.

They are both force multipliers. The issue of course is that technology almost always disproportionately benefits the more intelligent / ruthless.

The whole stranger danger thing in my view as an adult feels like a downward spiral. It's not like this in many countries.

In the UK it's kind of like - kids don't wander about alone because they might run into baddies, and now adults are afraid to interact with kids because they might be seen as a baddy, and this kind of loops around until no-one is interacting.

Basically, it's like any adult man is seen as a potential child predator, when in reality it's some tiny tiny fraction and in an ideal world we would be able to assume that they get sectioned / locked up quickly so we don't have to worry about it.

Meanwhile I can travel around many parts of Asia, for example, and parents and children alike have no issue interacting with strangers.

As a Brit my feeling is that the state has basically given up on the concept of doing the right thing (not even from an ivory tower moral perspective, but from a realpolitik grow the economy / fix the issue sense) and is just throwing sticking plasters everywhere.

The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.

The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.

There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.