Comment by frmersdog
5 hours ago
In this job market, in this political environment, with Luigi Mangione a Bonnie-and-Clyde-tier folk hero, the bit you quoted was perhaps a clue to the lack of wisdom in humblebragging that you spend a family's annual food budget on 5 pounds of spun sheep keratin.
I imagine that I will be the bad guy for pointing this out. (Perhaps even to myself, considering that there's certainly utility in rich people yapping incautiously about the reasons others might want to turn on an Enes Yilmazer video and figure out where the panic room is.)
I don’t make nearly that kind of money, but I don’t think people who do should keep it a secret like you’re trying to enforce some norm of secrecy on him
> you spend a family's annual food budget on 5 pounds of spun sheep keratin
Maybe they're obscenely rich, or perhaps they're just living up to their username?
Thankfully this username was related to a post I created this account to comment on, not me personally :)
Luigi wouldn't have been famous if he offed a guy for wearing tailored pants and a rolex, he's famous because the CEO was a scapegoat of everything wrong with health insurance.
>> there's certainly utility in rich people yapping incautiously about the reasons others might want to turn on an Enes Yilmazer video and figure out where the panic room is.
Can you explain what you mean by this? I hope I'm misunderstanding it.
He wasn't 'humblebragging'. He was answering a question on an anonymous forum honestly.
The irony is the majority of people on here are the ones screaming "tax the rich" at Mamdani's acceptance speech, but then are the same ones upvoting this guy, his 10M net worth and defending him being rich.
The world is a very confusing place these days.
To make it even more confusing I’m a rich guy cheering for people like Mamdani.
I pay lots of taxes, probably in top 0.1% of the world on a % basis. I don’t have to, I’m not a US or French citizen so I could easily just choose to relocate a couple of minutes away and pay essentially no taxes.
If I did choose to stop paying taxes, I’d do so in order to donate a similar amount of my income to some charity. I’m just not sold on that being so much more efficient to be worth the hassle. OTOH, it’d definitely greatly improve my philanthropy credentials which would very much be worth it to some for purely selfish personal reasons.
> at my income level the price difference between that and Zara is pretty much immaterial
this is probably just regular bragging, right?
now, discussing how donating $100 versus $10k to a cause or community being negligible to their economic security would at least front-load some humility, but capitalists gon' capitalist. oops!
thank god this is Hacker News though, and not some safe-haven for boring rich people!
I'm just a lowly peon and don't make anywhere near that kind of money, but I do NOT consider that bragging in this context.
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Can you describe a way of communicating that same point without it being bragging in your eyes? I guess I could’ve engaged in the gymnastics of saying SWIM like they used to do on some drug forums :)
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Nope, he's stating how he feels about something.
This feels like Reddit leaking over a little bit.
Let me remind you that this is a forum operated by a VC fund looking for people to give lots of money to so they can build billion dollar businesses. Those who succeed are routinely celebrated here, but actually discussing that money being spent rapidly becomes judgmental.
Hard to reconcile it being super cool to build an unicorn (a cute term we’ve come up with to describe billion dollar startups which have made their founders tremendously wealthy), but somewhat disgusting to actually have or spend that money.
News.ycombinator.com seems like the wrong place to complain about capitalism.
FWIW I don’t even get a Silicon Valley salary, am not in any way extraordinary, but have spent 10+ years building 100+ small online businesses out of which none have been particularly successful (but in total the little streams add up)
Sorry for jumping on this off-topic but I'm a junior engineer hoping to build out some of those small online businesses but I've been a bit unsure of how to go about it. When you say small online businesses do you mean like micro-SaaS kind of things? Or like tangible items? Sorry, just curious :)
Micro-SaaS and digital products. Just figure out a good stack to work with for billing and try to crank out one little thing a week that will be useful to someone.
One of my best projects just sells some pdf files you can submit to the government to achieve a thing you would usually unnecessarily hire a lawyer for.
Another in a similar vein simply offers an easy-to-fill PDF version of a government form that does not exist online, and a nice HTML interface that will help you mostly automatically fill it.
Most of these took less than a day to build and take next to no maintenance. Both of the above earn more than $100k annually.
Just make sure your customers can get in touch with you very easily so you don’t end up with broken websites running on autopilot charging customers for broken stuff, I made that mistake once and ended up having to call a bunch of people to apologise when I discovered what had been happening.
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I donate approximately 47.5% of everything I earn to the French government, is that not enough? (And yes, taxes are a voluntary donation in my case. I could move less than a mile across the border to Monaco and incorporate elsewhere if I wanted to pay ~0%)
Of course, when I spend 10000 euros in the Loro Piana boutique or anywhere really, 20% of that goes to the government too.
Could I afford give more? Sure! To whom? How much? Figuring that out seems like another full time job, and the track record of the effective altruism folks doesn’t seem all that great.
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This is such a broken take. Jealousy is so ugly. It's like you expect those doing better than you to Harrison Bergeron themselves for your sake.
I'm sorry you're unhappy with your lot in life. Maybe work hard and do better, rather than expecting others to pretend like they're not doing well to appease your feelings.
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> I say weird because 99.9% of people in the world would consider it on a range of weird all the way to unethical that you spend tens of thousands on pants.
TIL it's unethical to spend a lot of money on clothes. It's not like the sub-thread's OP was spending $10k on a pair of <Insert crazy designer brand name> pants that actually have more form than function. It's a $500 pair of pants. God forbid people spend money on their own preference for their own comfort.
Pragmatically, capitalism brought in more good than bad. Are we arguing that we would've been better off if the world had gone the way of the soviet/pre-80s China way of life?
I'm sitting here trying to figure out why you haven't sent 90% of your income to the poor people in Sudan.
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