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?
Besides, how will they know? Creating a new proxy account for every real account would make it almost impossible for Anthropic to know that someone is coming from China, only that some set of accounts (say, 100k) are coming in from a small set of IPs, but they're still paid accounts!
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[1] The idea is probably DoA for other reasons, such as why would someone proxy through you when they can use a VPN. Or openrouter.
Yeah, sorry, that was a joke :-) In addition to Openrouter, I think big users from China can fairly easily set up a company in Singapore or something (to get volume discounts, perhaps).
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.
The necessity of making change is major usability/privacy/fungibility roadblock that shows up in more than just cash. For example, it presents a problem for chaumian e-cash or other private money systems like pre-MLSAG monero.
If it's possible to do the equivalent of cash, but with some sort of smartcards that exchange some sort of offline zero-knowlege proofs, then that would be preferable over physical cash, because it could eliminate the need for change or marked bills and it would be even more private.
Why would I care about how I pay for things though? You're the one saying I should value some particular method over others. But the reality is I don't care at all: I'm trying to buy milk and go home.
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.
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.
> On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout their lives.
If you look at the cost of living in an urban area it’s clear there is a lot of demand. Rural is cheaper because most people don’t want a long commute.
Urban living isn't even possiple without a high cost of living. Building a single story builing is massively cheaper than going up - unless land costs are extreemely high.
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.
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.
For security reasons it makes sense for them to be different devices. People and services may not want to allow insecure devices to communicate with them.
It would be easier to spoof such identities and some services may not want to deal with the overhead of using the legal system. Spammers today already can be taken to court, but in practice people don't do that.
I think there is space for both. While I like preserving the technology, there are cases where the EV conversion adds some charm to the original vehicle. The period-incorrectness is captivating in many instances.
Plus, there are designs where the internal combustion engine is not a goal, but the best tech available at the time - those designs can only be fully realized with technology that wasn't available when the original design came out.
Thinking of the Bizzarrini Manta, the Ferrari Modulo, the Maserati Boomerang, or the Citroen Karin.
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.
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?