This post appears to me like two paragraphs of correct and important information, cut in two by a seemingly unrelated quote that summarizes to nothing more than "rich people are evil". People with greater wealth having access to certain services and procedures that normal people don't is unrelated to all rich people supposedly looking down on everyone else.
There's a whole thread about interpreting the quote debating whether it paints rich people in a positive or negative light, and amazingly nobody focused on the part that says "they think they are better than we are".
Perhaps that's what the HN audience really thinks of rich people and thus skipped that point? Someone thinking they are better than others based on wealth alone is an unmistakable negative in my book.
Having different values from "you and me" doesn't make people evil.
For most of history, it (mostly erroneously) did. In 2019, this also applies. It's just applied much faster over global distances through the Internet.
Cynicism is definitely a virtue in a certain light. Trust is good for everyone while being bad for the individual, cynicism is good for the individual while hurting society.
Personally I think both extremes are terrible, but leaning on the side of cynicism seems safer.
I read "soft" as more mellow and chilled out, and less stressed about (what seems) trivial stuff. In a way, even kinder. And from what I've read by rich people (such as Diane Disney Miller) cynical is a lot about the difficulty of establishing genuine relationships.
That is how I read it as well. I’d imagine being someone that is cynical and wealthy protects your wealth from forces that would suck less cynical people dry (multilevel marketing, get-rich-from-real-estate seminars, stocks currently riding the wave of the hot rumour of the week).
The irony is that these "they think they are better than us" type posts always to me read with an implicit but unsaid "but really we are better than them." In reality, people are people, and thinking you're better than others is absolutely not something that the rich have a monopoly on. This attitude is rampant in many groups and underlies much of the current hatefulness in the world.
>This post appears to me like two paragraphs of correct and important information, cut in two by a seemingly unrelated quote that summarizes to nothing more than "rich people are evil".
Which is nonetheless both pertinent and important to keep in mind.
Do you know old money? I do, and I also know people with hundreds of millions who grew up in rags. There's nothing incorrect about what the parent poster said.
The point of the quote is to demonstrate that using poor-folk calculations to try and figure out what things cost for rich folk is pointless, and has been for the past ~100 years.
Poor people measure their stuff by its momentary monetary value, rich people measure their assets by their long-term projected intrinsic value. Rich people look for good value, not a good price.
The rich man’s mentality can also work for middle class people if every purchase they make is a long-term well-informed decision, rather than flying with the pop culture of what everyone else is currently buying, wearing or visiting. For example, buy timeless durable unfashionable clothing, buy a used but durable car from which you can extract the best value in the long run, buy products which can be utilised for many purposes, etc.
Note that this is constrained by IRL effects that middle-class people experience that rich people are much less vulnerable to.
With enough money, you can afford to wait for a good deal because you don't need the money right now to live. When you're wealthy, you can brave health issues, accidents, sudden crossings with the law, etc. without ever truly touching the money-in-wait for a good deal. When you're middle-class you definitely don't have as much cushion.
This is similar to the logic of "the best time to buy is a recession", except its difficult to buy during a recession purely because it's more likely that a middle class person's cushion is gone due to economic conditions and thus has no money to buy good deals.
The rich real estate guys I know phrase this as "you make all the money on the day you buy". That is, they want to buy from desperate owners, so that prices are so low they are guaranteed profits. Lots of businesses are more desperate in recessions.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.” ― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
