When I lived in a low CoL country, it was pretty convenient to throw money at problems like home maintenance (repairs, cleaning, etc.) instead of doing it yourself. Doing that in a high CoL country isn’t feasible long term unless you’re rich enough.
When if ever did "Throw Money at The Problem:" actually work? Instead of being about 75 percent useless?
Submitted 3 hours ago by Patnou@lemmy.world to [deleted]
Comments
scytale@piefed.zip 18 minutes ago
HubertManne@piefed.social 6 minutes ago
thats kinda how its supposed to work. people learn to do something well and you do the thing you are good at and hire someone to do the stuff you have not learned to do well. It still blows my mind the old tv shows with the milkman, mailman, tv repairman, phone repair man.
snooggums@piefed.world 23 minutes ago
Never, because when the appropriate amount of money is used they don’t call it ‘throwing money at the problem’. It is a phrase that means something along the same lines as wasting money on a thing instead of doing what is really needed.
StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org 1 hour ago
Throwing money at a problem works, when you are actually throwing money at the problem and not at a symptom.
For me currently, my car is a good example.
Problem: I need reliable transportation.
My car is almost old enough to vote here in the US and while it has been a reliable ride now things are starting to fail left and right. I could spend money replacing the parts that break as they break. Or I could simply replace the car.
My solution: Just replace the car. More expensive short term, but it’ll be cheaper and far less headache long term.
Tiresia@slrpnk.net 55 minutes ago
IMO that’s what the “throwing at” is meant to convey. The person doing the throwing is doing it at a distance and with low accuracy.
neidu3@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
Ot works when money can purchase what is actually needed in detail, and the people on the receiving end are competent.
Steve@communick.news 1 hour ago
Every moment of every day, money solves peoples problems.
It’s kind of amazing how money realy is a problem solving superpower.AskewLord@piefed.social 43 minutes ago
Then why do so many rich people I meet tell me all their problems are much bigger and worse than mine?
Steve@communick.news 32 minutes ago
Because their money already fixed all the kinds of problems you have. They have new problems now. They’re also exaggerating those problems.
howrar@lemmy.ca 38 minutes ago
That must be why they need so much more money than the rest of us.
howrar@lemmy.ca 33 minutes ago
Any problem that requires active work to solve will benefit from having money thrown at it.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 2 hours ago
On a large scale, when has it not worked? All examples I can think of it not working tend to be things like a guy trying to fix a problem in his home, by himself, but has no idea how to do things and keeps spending money on better equipment and parts, but still has a problem because he has no ability to use any of them properly.
You put more money into roads, the roads get better.
You put more money into education, children get taught better.
You put more money into war machines, you get shit that can obliterate all the people in a city without destroying the infrastructure.
AskewLord@piefed.social 24 minutes ago
Education is a issue on which if fails repeatedly.
Flooding a school system with money does jack shit if that school is in a poor community where the students and parents don’t value education.
j4k3@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
Throw enough money and THE expert comes to fix the problem.
Like, my fridge is broken – so I hired the entire engineering research and development department at [company] to solve the issue.
BingBong@sh.itjust.works 2 hours ago
I feel like Tesla and SpaceX are examples. An idiot with a lot of money at the helm that buys top talent and can afford constant failures until success comes through. Tesla is back on the way down now but was a success story for this for a while.
AskewLord@piefed.social 45 minutes ago
Throwing money at the problem works when it’s a money problem.
It doesn’t work when it’s a social problem.
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 49 minutes ago
Where do you get the 75% useless?
What is a specific situation you’ve seen where it didn’t work?
Serious, not trying to start trouble.
GreenBeard@lemmy.ca 1 hour ago
I ask myself the same question every time a company raises its prices.
bizarroland@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
I was redoing the roof on my house, and I had some family over helping me do that.
For context, I live in a geodesic dome home, and so it’s not as simple as scrape off old roof, slap on new roof, you also have to account for the angles of the hundreds of triangles that comprise the roof.
Further, instead of using a cedar shake, which was what was already on there, I decided to use an aluminum shake. The main reason was cost. Cedar shake was going to cost about $10 a square foot, whereas aluminum shake only cost me about $1 a square foot.
Even though my home is 2600 square foot and in a normal flat roof house that would mean you would have somewhere between 2600 and 3000 square foot to cover because it’s a dome, it curves, you have a lot more wastage and so I was looking at buying about 4000 square foot of shake.
Going aluminum extended the lifespan of the roof from a 25 year to a 50 year, which is nice, and also cut $30,000 out of the cost.
However…
Once we got the old roof off, my family members decided that they didn’t want to do this anymore, and they left.
So I had to, all of a sudden, call around and find someone else to help me install the roof.
You remember that $30,000 I saved buying aluminum shake instead of cedar shake?
That’s what it cost for me to get the aluminum shake installed after the old roof had been peeled off, not counting what I paid my family members for the help that they did provide in the interim.
Naich@piefed.world 2 hours ago
Nuclear bombs, landing on the moon, for two.
the_riviera_kid@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
When the problem is lack of money it works everytime.
aeronmelon@lemmy.world 2 hours ago
When the problem is bills.
uenticx@lemmy.world 12 minutes ago
Hosting email and paying for a spam proxy.