Well yea, it's the luxury that underpins most of the other ones on this list. The real luxury is not having to worry about money so you can focus on things like this. A luxury that is increasingly out of reach..
Everybody worries about money no matter how much they have got. I remember some study where people were asked how much they would need to feel comfortable. No matter where they were on the wealth scale the answer was always about 50% more than they have now.
I don't subscribe to that absolute of "everybody".
Counter-example: me. I define enough money as not having to worry how to pay rent, bills and food, and being able to do spontaneous purchases without thinking too much about if I can afford it. I'm at that point with my medium-high middle-class income, and I don't want to earn more. I probably wouldn't refuse if it was offered to me, but having more money than I do now would also very likely make me feel very guilty. I don't need more, and I'm already in an incredibly luxurious position that I feel pretty conflicted about because of how much it was all down to luck.
I suspect most of my best friends, who are predominantly about as not-rich-but-comfortable as me, feel similarly. Otherwise we probably wouldn't be such good friends.
I agree, for at least some listed, though many people blow past the amount of money actually needed. Money starts as a proxy measure for attaining these things, but it eventually replaces them as the goal, per Goodhart's law.
I humbly disagree a bit. Most items on that list do not have to cost a lot of money (besides a washing machine and a dishwasher) and some of them cannot be bought. It is also a mindset. I adore slow weekends.
I think often it takes time to build relationships with others, so that they can love you back. And that is much easier, when you have a lot of money.
What's more is, many people looking for a partner are looking for a social step upwards, and these days the perceived social level is a lot about money. You got no job and no income? Good luck finding a partner! In that situation you usually simply aren't given even a chance to build a relationship. Cut off before there is even a chance for the other person to love you back.
Money also enables you to have many great shared memories more easily than in other ways. That wonderful vacation trip you shared to your partner's $dream-location costs money. Traveling simply costs money, but can also be a chance to get out of a dead sea and meet people who think differently and behave differently, which might more align with you.
The only risk is, if others find out about your money and want you for your money. Other than that I don't see how having more money would reduce your chances of having people who love you back.
Yes, but the size of community matters. In a 100 people tribe everybody knows everyone else. In 1M city most people are strangers, a.k.a. competitors, enemies even.
Well, if a person has a good story but can’t write, for example some civil rights activist, or war/catastrophe survivor, they will often use a ghostwriter to help with the actual writing.
That’s not what I’m referring to. Good writing is not limited to professional writers, and focus on the medium can often be a distraction from good ideas.
This is a top-level example but you do not have to look at the top, really. The whole private insurance system is a scam at every level. I mean: I immigrated to US couple years ago, and I can tell you that any hospital visit, or a diagnostics, such as CT scan or ultrasound are 15-20x more expensive here than in my home country (which is in the EU).
Funny thing is: if you tell the hospital that you do not have an insurance they will charge you a price that actually sounds reasonable, say $700 for a CT scan (which is still like 2x more than in my home country, but then the US is a high cost of living place), but if you do have insurance they will try to extort as much money as possible from your insurer: initial bill will be like $10k, and then they will settle for, say, $6k.
>The whole private insurance system is a scam at every level.
All for profit insurance must by definition bring in more than it pays out. From cars to homes to health to pets.
If instead of paying all your premiums, you'd be far more likely to be able to afford the services that the insurers are supposedly paying for. Like, yeah, there's a chance you need a new engine, and a small chance that all of your monthly car insurance totals up to less than the cost of the engine, but the entire point of the company is that they know that it is far more likely that you will end up paying more for their service than you'd have actually payed for turns out the only thing that ever went wrong was a small crack in your windshield.
On car insurance, you have a competitive market with actuaries trying to identify actual risks, and that, with their prices, modify bad behavior and purchases of cars that are expensive to repair. So all in all, you can end up with very narrow margins, and end up ahead only on the float between receiving premiums and paying out. Health insurance, especially how it works in the US, with no public system williyto cover all the expensive stuff for catastrophic situations and chronic conditions, would compete by trying to fail to insure risky people. But since most insurance is handled by employers, all the levers for that fail too, so it's an especially bad insurance system. Home insurance, car insurance, normal life insurance... all more competitive and more beneficial economically, as their efforts lower costs overall.
Why can't they just charge higher rates to more risky people. If you are a risky driver you pay more, and if you have a risky body you should also pay more.
>...Funny thing is: if you tell the hospital that you do not have an insurance they will charge you a price that actually sounds reasonable, say $700 for a CT scan
That has not been my experience. Insurance negotiates lower rates and without insurance, the full fare price suggested price has always been higher.
Providers are contractually forbidden by insurers to show you the much lower "out of pocket+ price schule if you have insurance. It's why the first question posed to new patients is always " do you have insurance?"
I'm clueless about healthcare economics, but this sounds fishy to me. Why would insurers go along with that? In fact I would expect insurers to be in a much better position to bargain with a hospital than a private party. Actually it's if the hospital were billing the govt (not as motivated as a private party) where I would expect that overcharging to creep up and up.
Insurers can only spend 15% of premiums on admin spend (e.g. salaries, etc). That means if the CEO (and everyone else) wants more money, they need to pay more money to the hospitals, so their 15% cut grows.
Also, for beyond that, unspend premiums have to be refunded, which also cuts into the potential admin spend bucket, so it's best to always ensure your paying as much as possible in claims.
Plus, patients hate denied claims, because typically your forced to sign paperwork saying your responsible for anything insurance refuses to pay.
And with most health insurance spending being locked to employer benefits, the big market is the group market, which means your stuck with either getting your job's option(s), finding a new job, or not getting insurance basically.
In other words, you don't have a price choice as an individual in a group.
It's even worse when they claim to be "in-network" and they make you sign that. To me, the entire point of being in network is I shouldn't have to worry about the provider filing claims correctly on my behalf, and if there is an issue, it should be on the "network" side, not my side.
Hm, seems to be a bit of a contradiction between what you’re saying in terms of “insurers want to pay more” and the infamous tendency of insurers to deny claims as much as possible?
Well, they also need to ensure they aren't spending past their premiums coming in...
Alot of insurers the past few years have actually gone bankrupt from ballooning costs and claims.
So, they want costs to go up, so the next year they can up the premiums, so they can then up their admin spend, but the costs still need to below the premium. And they can't just up the premium without an associated rise in cost, because groups are owed their premium money back if it isn't paid out.
The problem is: average person is bad at counting calories. They overestimate number of calories burnt, and severely underestimate number of calories consumed. Once you get your math right and get into real, not imaginary calorie deficit you'll start losing weight. Rule of thumb: whatever you think the amount of calories is in your current meal, double your estimate.
Isn't this tool directly violating NVIDIA license terms? I thought they disallow running CUDA on non-NVIDIA hardware. Or is it just because there's no money for NVIDIA in suing poor, Eastern European programmer?
ZLUDA was funded by AMD for several years. Somewhat ironically, AMD's legal team went after them for releasing that code as open source and the developer rebuilt it from a pre-AMD funded version.
As to whether it's violating the EULA terms. Maybe, depends exactly what they did and how they did it. The better question is probably "and are those terms actually legally enforceable" which ratchets things up another level. Depending on their jurisdiction, how they did things, and what exactly Nvidia tried to go after it could be anything from illegal to gray to not. I'd lean towards the latter end of that spectrum, even if the EULA had some scare terms around it, but I'm also just some dude on the internet who hasn't even read the exact terms in the EULA or looked into if they'd be relevant to how ZLUDA was built/used.
This one is completely useless. Congress may regulate, but why would they? They directly benefit from more money in politics.
If anything this should be more direct, and read: "Political donations may only come from individual US citizens, and cannot exceed the amount of monthly minimum wage per person, per year".
Or maybe just add a field in the tax return form where anyone can name a party to receive some fixed amount donation, subtracted from person's taxes.
Campaigns already have strong limits. They get around it by giving money to PACs, which can spend money opposing other candidates or talking about issues in particular.
Should there be limits on spending on messaging opposing a certain candidate? Or supporting / opposing a specific policy? It's going to be pretty tough to draw a line there that doesn't sound a lot like solidifying and entrenching the powers that already exist. And it usually includes an ugly way of determining what speech is "political" and what is not.
> Congress may regulate, but why would they? They directly benefit from more money in politics
One, they have. Repeatedly.
Two, the reasons historically varied, but it tended to range from it being good for them when winning elections to most electeds being okay fundraisers and not wanting to compete with the great fundraisers.
I am waiting till apple copies the "allocation" concept from high end car manufacturers. "Sure, buy the 25 iphones ans we will gladly put you on the waitlist."
And it's not like Apple hasn't dabbled in the luxury space, with utterly predictable results. Anyone remember the 24 carat gold plated Apple Watch Series 0, sold at ultra-high-end luxury boutiques?
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