The rich niche(therebooting.substack.com) |
The rich niche(therebooting.substack.com) |
Even for financially comfortable people, a one-off donation to a charity is easier to reason about than taking the same amount of money and dividing it into 24 bi-weekly payments. Then I'd have to remember where to get the end of year receipt for those payments when I do my taxes. I'd also burden myself with the decision of when to cancel the donations, which is something the charity probably makes as difficult as possible to increase their retention numbers. If I did decide to cancel, I'd have to invest potentially an hour or more to track down the information, maybe call someone, deal with their retention pitch over the phone, and then remember to check in a few weeks to confirm it actually ended.
It's all a lot of hassle that I really just don't want or need. Far easier to just donate once at donation time and then file the receipt in my tax folder. I can always decide to donate again next year.
I already have probably 20 or more monthly recurring payments from my mortgage to all of the insurance payments and internet, gas, water, electric, NetFlix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, all of the software services I use and so on. Running a business can easily add 10-30 more monthly bills. I really, really don't want to add anything else to that list if I can avoid it.
And, yeah, to the other point, while I have subscriptions to various things it's not something I really want to do when I have a choice given that such things tend to be out of sight/out of mind.
I dunno how many Bay Area SWEs/PMs can even grok such a lived experience, for them to prioritize it as a feature request.
But the only reason I can imagine routing charitable giving through work is to take advantage of company matching. At a past company that did 100% dollar-for-dollar matching (up to something like ten thousand dollars) I was happy to shift as many of my donations as possible through work to direct more of the company's giving towards my preferred charities. At my current company that does 0% matching there's no reason for me to involve work in my charitable giving.
Once I reach that level of income I'd probably do the same, even if on a take-home basis I didn't feel "rich" due to high CoL.
Right now though, my primary concern is having a big enough pot in retirement, so my tax advantaged contributions go to pension (401k equivalent)
That seems to ignore...the entire history of publishing. Like how a newspaper used to cost a quarter and everyone read it.
Anyway, it's pretty eye-opening to see how much of the paper in the late 70s was ads. Like, 3/4 of most pages in the front section, after the first three. The Sunday paper was 300+ pages. They were raking it in. They could afford to subsidize some foreign bureaus.
Why was that? There was no other good way to reach the Southern California audience. I got my job at Xerox by answering an ad in the Sunday Times.
So they had a monopoly, and now it's gone.
As a side note, does anyone find it ridiculous that a combined household income of $100k is supposedly “affluent?” When my partner and I broke that barrier, we were living in a shitty apartment with a roommate. Didn’t feel affluent
It's 150% of the median household income[0] in the United States, so no I don't think it's that ridiculous.
[0] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2021/demo/p60-27...
In addition, most zoning regulations reduce the supply of housing and thus raise prices as demand go up. Someone who bought a place in California or New York or Boston 30 years ago may have seven figures in a primary asset and relatively low earnings.
Annual vacations, family car, 3 bd house at an affordable price. Sure, we didn't have cable but we would get dvd rentals and broadcast TV worked pretty well. Now you are lucky to get 3 channels that work consistently even with an amplified antenna.
I can survive on minimum wage in the UK, therefore if I earn min wage + 1,000 (after tax), I can afford these subscriptions.
The question is whether I prefer that over other things.
I prioritised learning materials, computers, etc in my youth when I had a hilariously low budget and it paid dividends.
The questions IMO are:
1) to what extent is the economy zero sum, e.g. can everyone avoid being a retail worker
and
2) if we satisfy 1, how do we expand critical thinking such that people invest in themselves
Daily or even weekly, maybe monthly reading of the news is over 95% noise and is a pure negative for personal development.
Orwell's Books vs. Cigarettes is just as poignant today as it was then.
By forgoing that pint at the pub earlier and buying textbooks, now I can afford both.
That said, it requires actually reading the news for someone to come to the same conclusion that you did through first hand experience, rather than just taking your word for it.
https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/513499-republicans-i...
Open up the side menu and you'll see you can select each of Puck's area of interest:
- Hollywood
- Wall Street
- Silicon Valley
- Washington
It would be easier to describe these as "bubbles".
It's not actually a valid criticism, and it is also not a problem.
Anybody who worries about that is free to launch another publication targeted at whomever they fancy.
What IS a problem is that people really think that kind of thinking has merit.
Even as a white collar worker, you'll quickly realize that the executives calling the shots are generally already rich themselves, and their bosses the investors are even richer. Money dictates everything we do down to the mission of our companies and the role of our jobs. Sure you can opt out, but then you're essentially taking a vow of poverty, and unless you're rich already that's a pretty big risk. It's no surprise that workers realizing that they are effectively servants of the rich have backlashed and opted out.
This phenomenon of serving rich people exists not just within our labor market, but also in politics. In theory a democracy should reflect the will of the people, but in practice the rich own the media/advertising, and the poor are too busy working to make ends meet to be politically active.
cliches, riches, niches. (Proounced clee-shays, ritches, nee-shiz.)
Hooray English!
Shockingly, a good substack article.
> Jonah Peretti was right in 2017 when he warned that paywalls are “bad for democracy.” Credible information shouldn’t be a luxury good.
Paywall does not automatically mean luxury? I think the actual problem is the average internet user expects everything to be free, independent from his/her income.
Anecdotal: I have friends with iphones of whom I wonder how they can spend so much on a mobile. It is about making choices.
Of course, this is more or less precisely the opposite of what an economy is supposed to do, but is simultaneously obviously the inevitable behavior of an economy structured and run by the assumptions of 21st century US capitalism.
Haven't we also come to the conclusion that ad-supported clickbait journalism is bad for democracy?
Couldn't care less.
This article is decrying the outcome of that, maybe.
I also don't agree with those big name-things donations by HNWs. If you really want to give, why name the thing after yourself? And depending on the charity of billionaires is a sign of a broken system anyway.
I think a lot of the people who read HN are probably in a life situation where they can help. Please do so.
[EDIT] On reflection, I've even built subscription systems reliant on credit card payments, and didn't know you could do this.
Credit cards are paid in arrears, usually with a 15 day grace period, so you are effectively getting a 15-30 day interest free loan on all purchases. When you set up a credit card, you can select any payment date you want. So, if I get a new AMEX, I can choose to have the bill due on the 1st, or 12th, or any day I want.
If I pay all my bills (i.e. Netflix, car insurance, etc.) with my AMEX, I know the AMEX bill is due every 12th (or whatever day of the month I choose). For any bill paid by the credit card (i.e. Netflix, car insurance, etc.), it doesn't matter what day of the month that particular bill gets charged to the AMEX. I only pay AMEX once a month, on the day I selected. So, by choosing what day my AMEX gets paid, I am effectively choosing which date I am required to pay all of the bills that got charged to my AMEX.
There are very few things that you can't pay by credit card. For those (i.e. mortgage, some utilities), you can schedule auto-payments on any day you want, through your bank.
No, no, no. You have it wrong. You're not thinking about being able to charge late fees. How are you going to charge late fees if nobody is ever late?
