exasperation
@exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 17 hours ago:
Kinda depends on the price of the place, right? A $500/night hotel might have a few upper middle class folks on a splurge (a honeymoon, some kind of points-based play on their credit card, etc.). A $2000/night place filters out the merely rich and leaves only the ultra rich. And a $10,000/night place isn’t even accessible as a bucket list item for even the 1% but not 0.1% types.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 23 hours ago:
I assume in your city, $4/month/sq ft isn’t considered “crazy expensive,” though. In a place like San Francisco or New York, a $2000/month apartment that is 500 square feet wouldn’t register as anything notable.
If it’s not considered “crazy expensive,” people wouldn’t assume you’re crazy rich just by living there.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 23 hours ago:
I don’t think this answer truly internalizes how some of the ultra rich live. Yes, many are living a normal looking life, going to their jobs and doing a lot of the same activities that the upper middle class do. They generally eat at the same restaurants, have the same hobbies, and enjoy the same television shows that the rest of the middle class does. Often they go to the same live events (sports, concerts, plays, stand up comedy) that middle class people do, and often don’t bother with luxury boxes or things like that. They’re members at the same gyms, and might plot out the same run trails as normal people.
It’s just that they tend to fly private instead of commercial, stay at very nice luxury hotels unique to that particular location rather than the chains you’ve heard of. They have multiple homes. They’re members of clubs that require a lot more money to keep up in. They have lots of paid staff, both seen and unseen, smoothing over their day to day lives, washing dishes and laundry, maintaining houses and cars and landscaping, making reservations and doing paperwork on their behalf, etc.
The form of stealth wealth isn’t that they’re all among us doing normal things, with no obvious indicators of wealth. It’s that they often aren’t even around us to begin with. So the sheer amount of time that they’re around non-rich people, and actively interacting with non-rich people, may be a tiny portion of their time. Even if they do a lot of the same stuff we do, and go to a lot of the same places we do. They do it in ways that don’t necessarily interact with us directly.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 23 hours ago:
There are all sorts of filters:
- Expensive clubs. Members only associations like country clubs can skew towards the ultra rich. Yacht clubs and polo clubs are kinda an extreme version of this, but there are all sorts of organizations where the membership can be assumed to be rich.
- Expensive hobbies. Wine tasting, skiing, golfing, boating, horse stuff, biking, and traveling/vacations can range from the slightly expensive to prices that only the ultra rich can afford.
- Related to both of the above, expensive places. If you’re skiing in an expensive resort town, and hanging out in the lobby of a $2000/night hotel, you’ll probably only see employees of these places or other very rich people. Some have even layers beyond that, like an exclusive members only club in an expensive area, or a separate lounge for only people lodging in the most expensive rooms in the hotel. Or if you’re at a private jet airport, and weather causes delays and cancellations, standing around in the terminal might allow you to mingle with other private jet people. Or if you live in a crazy expensive neighborhood or building, your neighbors are pretty much guaranteed to be rich.
- Third party verification. Networking, introduction by mutual friends/acquaintances, even social media or dating apps where you have to prove your status/wealth.
It’s not all or nothing, either. Some places have a disproportionately high number of rich people but aren’t necessarily exclusive to the rich (private schools, certain types of clubs, certain types of activities/hobbies, public parks/restaurants/libraries/museums in rich areas). So a lot of rich people do mingle with the middle class, but often will feel comfortable letting their guard down more or less in particular places or in particular groups.
- Comment on How do wealthy people know if the people they meet are wealthy or not? 1 day ago:
There are about 2700 billionaires in the world. There are probably about 10,000 centimillionaires in the U.S. alone.
Especially if you include family members, it’s not just a few dozen.
- Comment on Are there any story ripoffs that are actually good? 1 day ago:
After Michael Crichton’s Westworld bombed, one of his friends recommend he explore the same themes with dinosaurs instead, so he wrote Jurassic Park.
- Comment on Are there any story ripoffs that are actually good? 1 day ago:
Where does Tom Cruise’s The Last Samurai fit into this?
- Comment on Are there any story ripoffs that are actually good? 1 day ago:
Lion King is as much Hamlet as Frozen is The Snow Queen, which is to say, it really isn’t.
Lion King is loosely inspired by, but doesn’t actually follow the same story structure or present the same conflicts/tension or explore the same themes as Hamlet.
- Comment on Are there any story ripoffs that are actually good? 1 day ago:
Would that fit OP’s question of “actually pretty good” though?
- Comment on Dumb glasses 5 days ago:
It’s not about wavelength, but about intensity.
At night, in darker conditions, cameras dial up their light sensitivity so that they can see faint light (the human eye does the same thing through the iris). So in that mode, they’re sensitive to the brightness that can be produced by human-made light emitters.
But during the day, they’re already set for sunlight levels of brightness so that blinding them in that setting will require more light than is feasible to produce using normal light emitting technology. Infrared or visible light.
Think about trying to blind someone with your car headlights in the middle of a bright sunny day. It just doesn’t work.
- Comment on A sudden epiphany. 6 days ago:
My version of this was still being among the smartest people at my good engineering school but realizing I didn’t have the discipline to thrive without externally imposed structure. I coasted on skipping classes and catching up just fine my first semester, but that didn’t last all that long (a year before I was no longer near the top of any given class, 2 years to where I was struggling to understand because my grasp of the prereqs wasn’t as solid).
So it took a few years to learn how the world doesn’t inherently reward intelligence for the sake of intelligence, but that intelligence is still a good tool towards accomplishing other things the world does value.
I’m still sometimes the smartest person in the room, but I’ve learned to stop assigning any value to that fact.
I’m pretty happy these days, and I directly credit my intelligence and introspection for that. Even though the “smart but lazy” label gave me some trouble early on, and I had a little quarter life crisis when I realized that being smart wasn’t enough, eventually being thoughtful gave me the flexibility to recover from some setbacks early in my career, has helped me with my social life, helps me manage the day to day life outside of work (finances, chores, hobbies, interests, family life, etc.), and otherwise has helped me set up the things that are important to me and find contentment in a chaotic world. It’s certainly a form of intelligence, just productively channeled at some point to make things better for myself.
- Comment on Lemmyshitpost lately 1 week ago:
- Comment on I just want juice, is that so much to ask? 2 weeks ago:
There’s no alcohol. Just orange juice.
Like, the mixer?
Yeah, people drink it.
- Comment on Name this Paper 3 weeks ago:
The main substance that burns but doesn’t necessarily get metabolized is dietary fiber, which is a category of some different polysaccharides that burn but don’t get (fully) digested.
So high fiber foods would tend to give incorrect results in bomb calorimetry.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
What’s the trap, though? Is this eventually gonna become a patreon where we can pay $1/month for some shitposts?
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
It is impossible to get to 47 followers without making enemies. Thus, everyone with 47 followers has made enemies. Put another way, if you haven’t made enemies, you haven’t done the bare minimum required to eventually get 47 followers.
- Comment on Game over 3 weeks ago:
No, but by referencing their childhoods I’m covering their parents and grandparents, too, while avoiding the complications of the discussing food culture during the total war posture of World War II. Of every generation still alive today, each generation generally knows more about food than their parents.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Isn’t she just…Italian?
- Comment on Game over 3 weeks ago:
What are you talking about? Every generation in the US knows more about food than the ones before.
Boomers were raised on canned/frozen nonsense and basically had no variety. Their vegetables were underseasoned and overcooked. Their pickiness about cuts of meat left many delicious parts of the animals underappreciated scraps. They knew each fruit as basically one cultivar, like how all apples were the utterly mediocre red delicious. Even their bread was boring.
Their restaurant scene was pathetic, with Italian American food representing the pinnacle of exotic cuisine. Any immigrant opening a restaurant for American diners would have to carefully water down their traditions to fit American tastes and the American supply chain.
No thank you, I’d never travel back in time to eat or cook the way people did 50 years ago. Food is better now, and it’s largely because today’s cooks and diners know way more about food than people did back then.
- Comment on [deleted] 3 weeks ago:
Have you A/B tested this before?
- Comment on The script is mysterious and important. 3 weeks ago:
I honestly think he’s kind of a child or childish.
Becoming rich and famous at a young age is probably terrible for one’s development.
He became a successful recording artist at 18, became a TV star at 22, and had a wildly successful run in both music and acting throughout his entire 20’s and early 30’s.
He never had a normal life, and it probably baked in a lot of things that one would normally outgrow by the age of 25 or 30.
- Comment on The meaning of life? 3 weeks ago:
Yes, there’s that, too.
But even if you don’t like your job and don’t find much meaning out of it, it’s still worth trying to find contentment and happiness in other parts of your life.
I’ve had jobs I hated with coworkers I loved. I’ve had jobs I’ve liked in places I hated. I’ve had jobs I mostly hated that I actually appreciate having taught me important skills I still use today (for example, a 3-year stint in restaurants in my 20’s was miserable in a lot of ways, but it helped me stretch a tight grocery budget and fed me plenty of staff meals, and 20+ years later I’m still a great cook).
Jobs don’t define us. For many people, they’re just a small part of us. And we should go on to build fulfilling lives for ourselves across many domains, not just at work.
I had fun in college. My major didn’t define my actual day to day, or my memories of that time. I had fun in high school. I had fun in elementary school too. I don’t remember everything or even everyone, but I know I had a blast at those stages in my life, and most of the fun was had outside of school.
- Comment on The meaning of life? 3 weeks ago:
You should be having fun during the 20 years that you’re studying. And you should be having fun during the 40 years that you’re working.
- Comment on “Glide Ratio Optimization in the Olympic Ski Jump via Cosmetic Penis Enlargement” 4 weeks ago:
Sure, it’s possible, but the margin of error is pretty narrow for making up for unexpected turbulent wind or slight imperfections in how the person exits the aircraft.
In a normal ski jump, even though they can move more than 250m through the air, they’re never more than 6m above the ground at any given point.
So jumping out of an airplane would require a level of precision that probably couldn’t be safely achieved.
- Comment on Two sides to every story 4 weeks ago:
Go outside, nerd!
- Comment on ```curl -u "lab_tech:olympic_medalist" https://usa-curling.org/podium``` 4 weeks ago:
We don’t fund sports for shit.
That’s wrong. A big part of the reason why the US dominates in women’s sports generally is because our higher education funding system is based on a bedrock legal principle from Title IX that schools must spend as much on women as they do on men, including in extracurricular activities like sports. So as a result, with college football being a men’s only sport that raises a ton of revenue, a majority of our universities robustly fund women’s sports programs in a large number of sports.
Plus the US has a relatively unique culture of youth sports associated with their school, sponsored by the schools and their funding.
So we do fund a lot of youth and amateur (and semi professional) sports, indirectly through schools at various levels, including through whatever government subsidies and policies affect those schools.
- Comment on BIG (like Americans) IF TRUE 4 weeks ago:
51% is the threshold for calling it “process cheese food.” The stuff that is called “process cheese” is only allowed additives off of a particular list: water, salt, milkfat up to 5% of the weight of the total, acidifying agents, spices, artificial coloring, mold inhibitors up to 0.2% or 0.3% of the total weight.
There’s basically not an easy way to make something match the legal definition of American cheese without making it out of at least 90% cheese, because the amount of water and fat you can add to fit within the requirement that the end result be 47% fat, except that only 5% of the total can be from added fat, makes it hard to cut corners.
- Comment on 2 North American 4 you has been created 5 weeks ago:
Every culture takes/mixes foods from other cultures and makes it their own.
Perhaps more importantly, every generation remixes their parents’ and grandparents’ food.
French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Mexican food aren’t the same as they were 50 years ago. Lots of new dishes were invented and remixed, sometimes from imported influence. It’s not like chefs sit around and refuse to do anything different from how they learned. They do invent and innovate and tweak recipes. That’s, like, the job.
- Comment on When did it become normalized to start passing credit card processing fees to the customer? 5 weeks ago:
Cash is riskier, yeah. But it’s also a lot cheaper depending on what the services and machines cost.
No, I don’t think this is true, and most merchants are coming around to this view. Adding an extra 15 minutes to the cashier’s shift counting cash, adding an hour to the manager’s shift driving the cash to the bank, doing all sorts of analog counting processes, maintaining a secure chain of custody so that the cash doesn’t get lost or stolen, the risk of actual violent robbery, it’s all going to cost more than the 3% fee that the processor charges.
but you have to keep the receipts from those as well just like you need to keep cash
No, everyone’s POS systems are totally digitized. There’s a database with all the transactions, not a pile of paper receipts. And the database actually links each transaction to an actual distinct card payment, rather than a digital note that the cashier took that much cash and put it into the register.
- Comment on When did it become normalized to start passing credit card processing fees to the customer? 5 weeks ago:
Even just reconciling the register every day is way easier with just cash.
No, it’s the opposite. Humans make mistakes with cash, and the overall drag on the store’s operations (from needing a safe for large amounts of cash, physically transporting cash to be deposited at the bank, dealing with theft/loss) tends to be higher than credit cards.
That’s why a lot of places have switched to entirely cashless operations, because cash is slow and expensive for them.
