For example, if you aren't showing up in a $200k Maserati, your car had better be under $50k (maybe $70k with inflation). Only posers who aren't really into cars but want to show off their wealth spend $120k on a car.
For watches, the same thing happens: if you're wearing a watch less than $50k, it had better be under $500. Otherwise you probably don't care much about watches.
Clothing seems to be the same at many companies: you had better wear tailored suits and shirts or be less dressy than "business casual."
For the very wealthy.. If you show enough interest in something to make signaling purchases, it's expected to be "up to snuff" .. this can mean very very high expense or high esotericness.
So that might mean a $200k sports car, or it might mean some uncommon though inexpensive limited production vintage vehicle even though it may be of reasonable price, the time & effort you took to acquire & maintain it is a signal of taste.
Otherwise you'd be better off signaling complete disinterest with a very vanilla middle of the road options.
On menswear I think to your example, you could say you'd be better off not wearing a suit than in wearing a $200 Men's Wearhouse suit. To that end, these days, the type of people you tend to see in suits are either security / front desk staff or very senior corporate executives. Those in the middle have enough labor negotiating power to not be required to wear a suit, but probably not the desire/wealth to spend $2k on a properly tailored suit.
If a senior executive wore a $200 suit to work, nobody would say a word.
> amongst other carefully selected pieces of his wardrobe
so if it was not that carefully selected, he'd look like a homeless?
Huh, custom tshirts and well fitting jeans counts as "looking like a total slob" now? Fwiw I'd rather work with / for someone that dresses like that over formal any day of the week.
I like t-shirts and jeans and never want to go back to suits and ties but..
When I went to Japan a decade ago, I realized just how informal and slovenly American working attire had become.
Though I think many imitate regardless of the tribe/workforce/culture in order to fit in.
Look at the schools. It’s informal but there are definitely trends and fashions to follow in order to relate.
Just a thought, but the change in attire, then, is to create some formal distance between management and direct reports.
On the other hand, Japan is the home of expensive high end recreations of American casual clothes - look up Take Ivy, BEAMS, nice selvedge jeans, etc.
I remember some acquaintances running a decent side business buying and then selling vintage American clothes back in Japan (shipping or flying back).
This was back in the 1990s so I believe it.
(it also brought back some fond memories)
Perhaps it's just a higher ratio of gay guys that work out vs straight guys that work out that's skewed your views.
America would be a lot better if people thought less about how to “express” themselves, and more about how to keep the social environment around them tidy and orderly.
Outside SBF, even the executives dressing "casually" are still doing so expensively.
Don't like the guy, his company, his policies. And I tend to repect our elected officals more than most.
But the idea of showing up dressed in a t-shirt and jeans, and/or a hoodie, make me smile broadly.
It's knowing which car or watch to buy, and also recognizing it on others, that acts as the signal.
But I wonder, in cultures very different from mine, which we generally see as more status-competitive, is that also true? Is it a faux pas to buy an expensive gold chain over a "proper" one?
Singapore is an interesting place in this regard. We had several young guys in our office who wore $10k plus watches while still living with their parents.
Other buy a home well beyond their needs but drive a honda shitbox and wear old navy (me).
People buying "100k+ rich man's toy" cars don't care about value for money the way you or I do.
Edit: appeasing nit pickers
Modern Maserati's are great driving cars with Ferrari heritage (and engines) that do command more prestige than a typical M or AMG model, especially in the Trofeo versions.
There’s a running joke in my circle about the “dad professional class”. People who are older (40-60s) and go to the office in a remote-work-accepting world mostly because they seem to want to leave their family at home. They all dress like shit in ill-fitting clothes, but because they’re older than the “office casual” dress code, they tend to dress in overly professional button downs and slacks. The business attire that look out of place in tech next to a 25yo in a tee shirt. They don’t seem to know people don’t always take them seriously, and think “they’re not here to [change the world/be the best/rise in the ranks/etc], they’re here to avoid their wife and collect a salary”.
TLDR: stop telling people you try to avoid your family, and start tailoring your clothes, it’s honestly not expensive.
(Source: upper 60s, go into the office mostly because a) it's not far, b) my office setup is a bit better, c) I don't want to wake my wife with Zoom calls. I do have some tailored shirts but seldom wear them.)
Its not about the fashion, its about looking put together. Its signaling that you care. Of course, there's the article which says that people who made it can stop signaling, so maybe that's you.
Sorry, no. There's nothing wrong with me for not putting effort into what aesthetic "signals" I'm sending, because there is no true signal. It's noise. If someone's unclean, that's one thing, because cleanliness matters to health. Fashion does not.
Arguments that fashion matters are all circular, which tells you something. (It matters because people think it matters, and is therefore worth taking seriously!)
Don Draper "I don't think about you at all" elevator meme in real life.
Little known fact: before he was Pied Piper's cool attorney in Silicon Valley, but after his first job at a Superstore, Ron LaFlamme lived in NYC where he was told that he "wasn't thought about at all" by Don Draper. https://youtu.be/LlOSdRMSG_k
Suits are very expensive to tailor by comparison.
Tech workers dressing casually at the office is only a (relevantly) recent phenomenon. Working from home, for a lot of people, is even more recent.
You’ve made a lot of assumptions, and I would consider that this group of people are just defaulting back to what they’re used to, rather than “avoid their wife and collect a salary”.
I don’t know where you work, what industry, or the demographics of who works there, but if “people [who work there] don’t always take them seriously”, and it’s based on older people dressing like older people, then there is a culture problem.
The problem is with you, I'm afraid.
I fit this demographic.
> and go to the office in a remote-work-accepting world mostly because they seem to want to leave their family at home.
There’s some truth to this, though I’ve avoiding coming in. It’s not about escaping the family but just a change of scenery.
> They all dress like shit in ill-fitting clothes, but because they’re older than the “office casual” dress code, they tend to dress in overly professional button downs and slacks.
I have a reasonable taste in fashion, but my cost-conscious self doesn’t allow it.
Age also forces a more conservative style and colors; and it says I’m sacrificing for the kids.
> “The business attire that look out of place in tech next to a 25yo in a tee shirt.
Business attire is like a uniform. You don’t need to spend a lot to look presentable.
> They don’t seem to know people don’t always take them seriously,
Is this a bad thing?
> and think “they’re not here to [change the world/be the best/rise in the ranks/etc], they’re here to avoid their wife and collect a salary”.
Rise in the ranks?
There’s nothing wrong with working to live. You get my best for 8 to 9 hours.
We live in a world where “leadership” is valued, and everything else is devalued. For engineers, this is purgatory.
Like, it’s a huge mental and emotional burden and I’d gladly take a 1/3 paycut to be an IC; except nobody else really wants it.
Because of their clothing? All other things being equal, of what possible objective value could fashion conformity hold?
always has been moon meme.
unless you're neveaux rich or stupid or both it is in your absolute interest not to show what you have. driving a Prius used to be that signal but today it has shifted. My direct boss was a Schenker heir (the freight forwarding company) and the only way he showed off is by living in a rental house (albeit manged by his management company so he essentially paid rent to himself), drove a Nissan, didn't spend unless you took a closer look (art purchases for his 4th wife) didn't brag with fancy dinners in Michelin star places (but certainly bragged to his wife about putting her on the map with her silly paintings as a wannabe artist - lol "Sex rules everything around me C.R.E.A.M get the money").
Only lower ranks criminals and new-rich idiots show what they have. Everyone else has learned the lesson: if you show it (the plebs and the IRS), they'll come for you.
Also all the people who're truly rich do NOT play by the same rules as the rest of you. YOU decide where, and how much tax you pay, if you have the cash to pay lawyers and accountants to insulate you from the Plebs.
The US is the biggest tax[1] haven in the world today forget the Hollywood propaganda about Cayman or Panama - only idiot cartels and Victor Bout use these jurisdictions but not the white collar crime lords ...
The new 5th generation that just came out looks amazing, so it wouldn't surprise me if Priuses eventually become trendy again.
nouveau riche, or nouveaux riches
Sorry if this comes off as pedantic, but as a French, I couldn't resist :D
I think pg wrote an article on his blog about how suit wearing was for people who thought like conformists and obviously being a conformist was not for hackers. I am paraphrasing because I can't remember now exactly what he said. But I just think it was contempt of previously established people working in finance or law. Now, the largest companies in the US skew towards tech companies.
I don't know why that happens that newly successful people seem to dislike the symbols of the previous elite rather than just mind their own business. Wearing a suit to a tech company will probably get you ostracized even if you just like wearing suits. This is in spite of the claim that the hoodie culture is not concerned what you dress up in, in fact they are. Maybe you could call that counter counter-signalling. It's just like taking a large salary at a tech company instead of having a $1 salary and getting enormous options and stock payouts. Somehow taking a large salary is worse despite that being normal for CEOs previously.
Not true. If you are a menswear enthusiast who is genuinely into fine tailoring, then people will respect it and even show interest. Generally, having hobbies and interests adds to one’s character. Now wearing a suit because you think it will make people take you more seriously will get you some side eye.
Some of those things are choices that matter and should impact your respect for someone else. Some are not, do not, and should not.
Personally, as a controls engineer who frequents messy manufacturing facilities, dressing in a suit gets in the way of getting work done. It subtly conveys "I'm too important to get my hands dirty, I'll leave the grunt work to the grunts." That kind of unwillingness to do whatever's required to get the job done is a point against those folks in my circles. I do understand that people who come to work in a suit may have different struggles vying for status and trying to send the right social signals in conference rooms, and I don't envy them those tasks - but please don't think less of me as a human because of what I choose to wear.
> please don't think less of me as a human because of what I choose to wear.
But doesn't:
> dressing in a suit gets in the way of getting work done. It subtly conveys "I'm too important to get my hands dirty, I'll leave the grunt work to the grunts."
mean that you think less of others because of what they choose to wear?
But when those personal choices are immaterial, whether choosing to over- or under-dress, they shouldn't affect what I think of others or what others think of me.
I assume tech companies are more casual than big law firms, and that things may have gotten more casual in the decade since I left the law.
I sometimes would have to go to nearby tech companies we worked with and the leads who would greet me would mention something like "oh sorry we didn't tell you that you don't have to wear a suit". You have to explain yourself and there is the implication that wearing a suit is somehow inappropriate.
If you're the only one wearing a suit, you look overdressed. It's as simple as that.
Stock also varies a lot in price/value (sometimes being nearly impossible to value, say for private companies) and many arguments can be made (up or down) as to its value or potential.
A good lawyer can start to get traction there of course, and it won’t get ignored, but it is not easy compared to, say, a $5mln/yr salary, or 5 years of bonuses of $10mln, which you can just plug into the calculator and go.
The reason I prefer a hoodie to suit on a daily basis is that putting on a suit is kind of arduous and owning 20 well-fitting suits gets expensive. It has nothing to do with signaling or whatever. Hoodies are far more practical and comfortable! They’re a continuation of what I wore in high school and college, though sadly the skateboard logos have been replaced by tech company logos.
Anyway, if you want to wear a suit, that’s fine, just don’t expect it from me.
https://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-were-apple-we-don...
Also, I think it was originally because the west coast is warm all year.
There was a time, not that long time ago in which good clocks were expensive and expending 2ks on a good clock was similar to expending 2k on a laptop today, a functional, reasonable decision.
My uncle earned a much more expensive Rolex than 2k in a Golf tournament and wearing it nobody believed it was genuine, even a watchmaker could not differentiate it from sight, there are very good Chinese knockoffs for cheap anywhere.
Also, after quartz oscillator clocks, a 2k clock does not work better than a 100 one.
People spend their money on whatever they see fit. One of the great things of having money is having freedom in your life but few people knowing that you have it.
In places like Spain or France people do not admire you for having money, on the contrary they envy you, and you better not show off. Also gold diggers and interested parties like banks start to harass you all the time. And criminals what to take it from you by force.
I always viewed watches as the only mainstream sociable acceptable form of male jewelry.
And regardless of which model, generally no more expensive than a woman's engagement or wedding ring, and actually usually cheaper.
Plus it does something other than look pretty - tells time & date!
But the article: it's repetitive and slightly rambling and reads like it was written by some variant of GPT.
The point is fair, but it's also well known to class watchers. In the UK nouveau means a gigantic new build mansion full of chrome and glass, a private gym, and plastic and dental surgery. Old means a small country estate, a Georgian pied-à-terre somewhere near the City, tweedy clothing, and perhaps some pedigree dogs. And horses.
Old money tends to underdress - sometimes sloppily - and on casual acquaintance is indistinguishable from the merely middle class.
It's not until you get an invite to the manor house that you discover the ridiculously impractical and expensive Aga stove, the collection of wildly expensive antiques whose prices are never mentioned [1], the relaxed air of charming quizzical bafflement. (Very few of these people are unusually bright or talented. But socially polished - yes.)
The visuals are not the point. Anyone can tweed, but not everyone can tweed like they've been doing it their entire lives and really mean it.
[1] A 17th century silver spoon for £5000? How fascinating!
If we're going down this line, why stop here? You forgot the 'trophy wife' which is definitely more prevalent than the dig at Musk/Bezos.
Cufflinks are a big deal, in certain circles.
Now we have iDweebs, those Apple ear things.
I don't know if this is true, but it makes a good story.
I don't even own any fake watches at this point and I've found these forums highly addictive/interesting - honestly, the average skill/knowledge level is quite high compared to most "watch enthusiast" forums.
First the maintenance. What is the probability those watches will still be serviceable in 50 years? I own a watch that’s more than 50 years and wear it regularly because it is still maintained by the company who made it.
Second the value holding. Sure you can sink your money in any gear. The special value of great mechanical watches is that they maintain their used value well on the second hand market for decades. An hommage will have little reputation of its own to maintain.
Of course this is all subject to special cases, but, etc because the watch world is very complex. For example many brands copy each other, some replica brand make great quality, and some great brands barely hold their value (which is a good thing for passionate collectors).
No doubt there is a great skilled and passionate community around reproduction, like in music or art. To build a replica you need way more skill than the average watch enthusiast. They rarely outskill the examples they copy still.
Sure, that's why you have to find the ones that do. The forums linked make this a trivial task.
Extremely high, given that they tend to run on clones of incredibly popular movements like the ETA2824.
(Not a Rolex immitation, but I'm wearing a JDM Casio Oceanus S100 which is all the watch that anyone would ever need.)
That is hilarious to me. A quick search is showing one can expect a POS Casio to be +/- 15 seconds per month.
In all honesty the salient points in the OP about judging instead of thinking, is a commonly attributed aphorism to Carl Jung yet there is no reference to it. The point about tardiness and drawbacks this apparently has on socialising and career progression comes across as utilitarian to the point of sounding sociopathic.
You're saying that wealthy people in France and Spain don't show it, and if they do they are commonly robbed?
Or maybe not. You mileage may vary.
This would depend a lot on how do you earned it.
It actually didn't work very well. I guess there's a hierarchy even among the fake.
Two weeks later the watch stopped running.
Around the same time, though, my mom's youngest brother was driving on the cross-Bronx throughway, stopped to help somebody whose car was pulled over on the side of the road, and found the driver had been shot dead.
I don't get what this has too do with the fake rolex.
7/10 meme
Gomorrah opens with a description of Italian clothing manufacturing. As described there, the difference between a fake shirt and a real shirt is that they were made to the same specifications under one and the same contract, by different factories, and the real one got delivered faster than the fake one did. Only the first guy to deliver gets paid.
It's an interesting book. https://www.amazon.com/dp/1250145031/
They also made a movie of it [0], I lived in Italy during the financial crisis and it had become commonplace to see large migrating Chinese coming from the North (likely illegal migrants in Milan's clothing factories) come to the central part of Italy looking for work on farms and restaurants. It was hard times as this was taking place as the large migration from N. Africa was happening and they were living in the parks and making the locals irate.
It all came to light when our resident cheese maker, who used to work in the fashion Industry, had to tell them in broken Mandarin that we were fully staffed and couldn't accommodate them, but to try elsewhere further South--a typical way to brush-off a problem as is the running theme with Gomorrah.
I soon realized how dirty the Fashion Industry was as the Zara scandal was ettin into full swing and the workers were taking to writing messages about not being paid for the garments they made [1] as the factories were in sweatshops in Xinjiang or Brazil.
I wouldn't all it interesting so much as it is sobering and eye opening to the perils of offshore manufacturing practices and Italy's fashion Industry was just one of many of these horrors; Foxxcon's electronic manufacturing reliant on African rare earth mine exploitation make all of this pale in comparison.
> That's Italy!
It's anywhere you want to see where manufacturing costs get pushed to be the smallest possible line-item/expense in a value chain; the US is notorious for using forced labour in prisons for these kind of things, too. It's sad because it is a common practice in the worst labour camps/prisons in Russia (Siberia). It's where Britney Griner was going to serve her sentence, which incidentally is also where the Nadya of Pussy Riot spent several years in and was very candid about what was awaiting for her there.
Took 4 weeks to arrive direct from China
Absolutely. Modern fake Rolexes can only be told apart from a real one by an expert examining it with a loupe. And 8 tick pr second isn't that hard to replicate. Several ETA and Sellita calibers do it as well.
Isn’t this conflating status signal with lifestyle?
The wealthy have always enjoyed expensive lifestyles and hobbies. In and of itself, expensive hobby equipment is not a status signal (it can be, of course, if you plaster it all over your personal social media)
Sorry to jump in.
There is a 2003 documentary by the name "Born Rich".
This is about the children from the wealthy people and how they are coping with the boredom of being able (afford) to do anything.
Many are naturally isolated and invent obscure hobbies and life-styles not fitting their "wealthy statuses".
Not sure how it is changing in more responsible adulthood, when it is becoming their turn to manage the estate. I guess this is then mostly about turf-wars among relatives.
(edit: formatting)
See also the excellent Korean documentary "Squid Game"!
That’s mostly a lack of sufficient education and rearing to arm them with enough knowledge and grit to choose and tackle from an infinite number of problems to advance towards a possible solution. Most of those problems don’t take generational wealth scale money to make a dent into, but a tremendous amount of hard work for years and even decades without expectations of acclaim commensurate with their generational wealth background.
Which points out the other problem: most of them want (or are pushed since childhood to want) the acclaim accrued by their inherited wealth also attached to their efforts in whatever direction they choose. It’s why we get the dilettante phenomenon among them so much.
Tightly coupling wealth to accomplishment across generations is possibly a very leaky abstraction.
* Having professional landscapers plant grass and plants on an outdoor terrace of a penthouse apartment for $100k
* Growing a large vegetable garden from seeds & seedlings, from your vacation home outside the city
* Raising houseplants in your apartment windowsill
All three of these people may describe themselves as having green thumbs or being into gardening as a hobby...
I know some people would think $120 is a lot for a minidisc player since you can get a flash player for so much less. Other people would think it's a trivial amount of money. Like all these things it comes in multiple scales: back in the day there were people who would spend 50x that on audio gear (there are some $20,000 speaker sets that sound great)
I don't expect to impress anybody: the last person I showed my portable minidisc player was a professor in the music department who's won one more than one Grammy award and teaches sound engineering who I ran into at the bus stop and his comment is "God, how can you listen to something compressed like that?" ("... yeah, I've been wondering about some of the coding tools they use.")
We are probably going to have some people over for a party and I don't expect many people to notice the difference with the 5.1 DTS discs I have in my CD changer but I do.
I started watching Techmoan and similar YouTubers. I have some nostalgia for compact cassettes and saw a video where they used a Dolby S deck and metal tapes and made very good recordings... Hardware like that came in around the time I was in grad school and went into a hole so it was "better than I remembered". There are Dolby S decks on the market for prices that seem within reach but the metal tapes are like $40 a piece now.
Optimal cassettes might sound as good or better than minidisc but rewinding is a hassle. They still make cassette decks and tapes but they are much worse than what was made 30 years ago. With NetMD you can record audio from your computer to a MD the same way you do with a computer which is easy: there's something to say for media that let you record your own music so you aren't stuck with what got released on SACD or can find on vinyl (which isn't too bad.)
It still seems silly when I've got several devices in my backpack usually that can play music including the Tracfone I use for emergencies.
The nostalgia/quaintness of burning/updating a dozen or so minidiscs seems like an “fun”enough construct to build a deliberate ritual that outweighs the friction—similar to friction of making a pour over coffee helps force a nice 10min break and tends to limit number of cups/day to something reasonable. Either way, just more of a thought exercise at the moment.
Upstairs I have a home theater receiver, I also have one downstairs where the HDMI out is burned out but it is good for music. I have an XBOX ONE plugged upstairs and it works for games but it seems to get worse all the time as a media player, it doesn't even play CDs although it plays DVD and Bluray. Upstairs I have the minidisc player for stereo music and one of these
https://www.crutchfield.com/S-92WonNqYEjS/p_158CDPX355/Sony-...
which is connected to the receiver with an optical cable and is full of 5.1 DTS discs which I am a huge fan of. There are some good 1970s quad recordings such as Fragile by Yes but also a lot of good stuff in the the 2000-2010 period such as Supernature by Goldfrapp and some artists like Donald Fagan who always believed in multichannel. Like stereoscopic cinema I think a lot of people don't see a big difference but I like it a lot.
I worked for a company that sold products and services to sales managers. The CEO and his wife (who was also an owner of the company) lived in a house in Rochester that had the biggest kitchen I'd ever seen anyone actually use. We would have holiday parties there and it was clear cooking was a hobby they liked to but that entertaining is also a way to enjoy your status.
Personally I don't think things that are 90% purchase/consumption (housing/renovations/appliances) are hobbies in the same way as photography/kitesurfing/gardening/cycling which may be expensive but have some sort of skill/learning/activity attached.
I remember two stories among many:
He once told me he was upgrading the doorknobs and hinges in this house. The bill just for those items came to $45K.
We were both getting coffee in the office once, and he looked towards me and ask, “My socks cost more than everything you’re wearing.”
And he liked me.
- Look at this, got me this tie for $1000
- Hah what a dummy you are, they sell them for 1200 two blocks away!
That’s a strange thing to waste money on for signaling. It just showed the lack of understanding on marginal utility on commodity items.
I think you're showing the lack of understanding of marginal utility.
By the time you're spending $45k on doorknobs, $400 on socks might offer equal marginal utility per dollar.
That's kind of whats interesting about the modern economy is we can all express our preferences in how we spend. The bottom end has gotten much cheaper and the top end has gotten exponentially more expensive, and in many markets the middle has sort of disappeared.
This contrasts a lot with the 1950s boom era where there was a big thick middle end and not a huge range from bottom to top.
There is no such plain ladies’ fit t-shirt consistently offered anymore. Either tissue-thin and less than $20, or involves a silly print and/or ruffles and lace.
This enrages me so much. I hate cheap crap, but I equally hate over the top, necessary, expensive crap.
I prefer something well made, with minimal functions, for a middle price. But finding this is becoming increasingly rare as time goes on.
But people often conflate "investment" & consumption when its anything related to home renovation. I'd still argue these types of "hobbies" are 90% consumption, and for most of the people I know.. usually financed with loans.
No one I know with a $100k kitchen cooks any better than my poor immigrant grandmother did.
I also have a restaurant grade toaster. It costs quite a bit more than the usual toasters do. But the usual ones would always break after a year or two. The restaurant toaster makes better toast, and has worked fine for 25 years now. It was actually cheaper to get the restaurant grade one over the long haul.
There are folks that are genuinely uninterested in social status, and it usually goes along with being uninterested in social relationships. Think of autistic/Asperger's individuals; certain psychopaths & sociopaths; people with schizoid, schizotypal, avoidant, or antisocial personality disorders; et al. No relationships = no status = no need to worry about social status and social signaling.
It's much like how where there's people, there's politics. Where there's social, there's status. Take away the social and you take away both the performance and the status.
But that’s not really relevant. From an individuals perspective there’s a big difference between keeping up with the joneses and focusing on what makes you happy.
Even if it turns out that what makes you happy is actually still correlated to your status and you’re not really a unique snowflake.
Or maybe they just like to cook and enjoy having good hardware?
Not everything is for signaling purposes. It's really cynical to start viewing everyone's personal expenditures as some sort of socially manipulative tactic. This is especially true when it comes to people's hobbies, where many of us are just trying to enjoy ourselves and appreciate having good hardware around.
[1] https://community.twistedfields.com/t/march-2022-update-simu...
[2] https://github.com/Twisted-Fields/rp2040-motor-controller
I have friends who would kind of scoff at a Rolex but proudly describe the latest $500-for-2 dinner they went to last week.
Similarly I had a friend who only upgraded his iPhone with hand-me-downs from his teenage daughter, so he'd be like 3-4 years behind the curve. Meanwhile he owned like 4 homes and dined out similarly to my other friend.
This won't resonate withh you unless you are or were ever a cook, I fear we had so much more left to capture and were forced to leave on the table that was taken away because of COVID, but this transition in the US food culture was paid with lots of hard work and countless sacrifices that most will never get beyond watching an episode of The Bear.
Two big blows came in hard after Bourdain's death (so many concepts and projects were abandoned that never came back) and then followed with COVID destroying the Industry in such a way that I'm doubting will ever get much further than this in my Lifetime any more: food culture in the US still has so much left to catch up with Asia and Europe but we were making massive progress towards that, but I'm staring to accept this will probably be the high-water mark that the next generation of tech workers and cooks alike will need to build off of. And no, ghost kitchens and burning VC money from Softbank on DD is not a solution.
So far, outside of small boutique restaurants and kitchens, all I've seen is a race to the bottom profit seeking with almost no motivation other than to capture what marketshare remains from corps who benefited from PPP and ZIRP at whatever cost it takes and cutting corners until they got bought out by a large Restaurant group. This may seem like hyperbole but ~60% of all restaurants shutdown forever [0] after covid in what was already I high-failure sector with incredibly costly CAPEX/OPEX business models and low profit margins even during the best of times.
My last encounter with a delivery driver from a large vendor (think Shamrock or Sysco type corp) brought it all home: they had essentially succumb to the same exploitative delivery and monitoring systems that an Amazon delivery driver has, which was a stark contrast to getting deliveries from local farmers for produce/protein ha were the highlight of the menu and accompanied with items from small artisans and purveyors for cheeses, deserts breads etc...
We've lost something very vital coming out of COVID, and I'm not sure what can be done to not undo the progress that was made since the culture-shift has swung so hard to this Amazonification of this Industry.
In the US, there was clearly a consolidation where the big corporate run restaurant groups were able to weather the storm better nationally in the early COVID days.
However, pretty quickly in NYC by say summer 2021 the industry seems to be back and stronger than ever. Everyone was dining indoors again, they kept their expanded outdoor space, maintained their new more extensive to-go services, and did it all with reduced staff never seeming to re-hire their pre-pandemic staff levels.
NYC restaurants are once again annoyingly crowded and hard to get reservations to, with eye popping prices compared to 2019.
So great for restaurant owners but not great for employees.
That said, the wages being offered are crazy compared to 2019 and they are still unable to fill roles. So one would take it that they've found better employment prospects elsewhere, so good for them.
Or it's about signaling that you're "in the know" with the in-group.
I read some list from (I believe) the 1800s that listed the different vocabulary used by aristocratic vs. middle class English people. It wasn't anything fancy (e.g. graveyard = aristocrat, cemetery = middle class). But as soon as that list was published and the middle class strivers knew to imitate those parts of the dialect, I'm sure the aristocrats quickly deprecated those signals.
I wonder: has anyone made a list of all the different ways we Sneetches have besides our bellies, to distinguish in- and out-groups?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
[0] when Jilly Cooper shows up in the References of a Wikipedia page it's all a bit of a lark
Expensive hobbies are not. I think they should be, but they're not.
I'll take an awesome cook (my spouse in this case) and a modest kitchen, over a modest cook and an awesome kitchen any day.
Makes sense economically. Mass market manufacturers can amortize their R&D and quality control over many more units than luxury brands. The point of the luxury brand is explicitly countersignaling, showing that you can afford to spend more money on an inferior product.
What convenience features? Is the Honda or Toyota really meaningfully more reliable during the first couple of years of ownership?
And I care more about how reliable it is at > 10 years of ownership, not < 3 years (when nearly everything is reliable). My Honda Fit is coming up on 14 years old and runs like new.
It sounds like the comment you replied to was not about efficiency, but about rich people's preferences and whether they're justified.
Stone backsplashes require frequent maintenance and special chemicals. If you don't stay on top of it, they are basically impossible to keep looking clean.
A lot of newer kitchens have wooden floors, which is insane.
I've seen kitchens with thin coated bright shiny copper/brass handles on everything which immediately tarnish and can never be maintained in new looking shape.
A lot of modern gas ranges are fairly hard to clean with lots of parts you have to remove, while a solid middle class electric glass countertop one is zero effort.
I once rented a place where the guy had wooden edges on the kitchen counters which of course aged poorly, plus a porcelain kitchen sink which immediately broke any glass wear that dropped even a couple inches while cleaning.. and was impossible to keep clean looking.
What's insane about this? I grew up in a pretty basic old house with a wooden floor in the kitchen, I don't recall it being an issue in any practical sense.
Or Spending 5-10x on a $10k appliance where a $1-2k one would do. These people tend to get the whole set, so it's a good $30-40k worth of kitchen appliances that could easily be replicated for $5k total otherwise. Does a better fridge/freezer really help you cook better? Do even most experienced cooks get noticeable benefit of a $10k range or oven?
On the contrary, if we had spent an additional 40k on our car, how much of a game changer would that have been and how long would it have lasted?
$40k for a kitchen is on the order of magnitude of getting all your appliances reasonably up to date, plumbing/fixtures, electrical and cabinetry/countertop refreshed, without anything being exotic or luxury. The bare bones one could probably refresh everything in the kitchen has to be easily $20k, so the incremental "above bare minimum spend" here is only $20k and therefore very reasonable.
That is a reasonable level of taking something outdated which is hard to market and making it up to date move-in ready and therefore quicker to sell.
To contrast for example in my experience, a Miele dishwasher for $800 washes dishes vastly better than a $400 GE. To the point it is significantly labor reducing. On the other hand, does a $10k subzero freezer/fridge keep my vegetables better than a $2k Samsung?
Most people underestimated how much of their homes value appreciating over the 5-20 years of ownership is purely the land value increases over the long term due to real estate inflation and the relative performance of their local markets. Ie - if all the condos in NYC went up 2x from 2004-2007, mine going up similarly isn't because I put fancy tiles in my toilet.
I cook a lot, I personally would like a higher quality stove - I’ve killed one before because I (an)use the broiler a lot (it wasn’t terribly old), but I probably would do an NXR or something. maybe in the $2k. Or a used Wolf/viking from one of the people you mention
I’d rather buy a nice oven than a bunch of shit appliances though. People love their air fryers, over the stove microwave, countertop oven, instant pot, etc…
On the margin, having a move-in ready home that's been renovated well enough recently enough, generically enough, ensures reasonable liquidity of being able to sell the home for a reasonable price reasonably quickly.
For many this means replacing some dated appliances, repainting, and strategic spending on a few items that may be out of style or more aged, like bathroom vanity or replacing a linoleum top.
Extravagant, expensive, specific renovations may actually detract because the general markets taste are not your taste and so you've either reduced the number of likely buyers, or half the universe of buyers are going to actually deduct value of your renovation because they may want to undo whatever you've done.
Spending $2k replacing a worn appliance or buying a $200 air fryer are two orders of magnitude off from the expenditure levels I am referring to.
This is the motivation I have to invest further in what already feels like a generally "move-in ready" home; my "move-in ready" is not others' "move-in ready", so my goal is to find all the objections and invest in making them less objectionable :)
If I were to spend $300k renovating my home, the value would increase by approximately $100k.
The only real increase in home value comes from additions which add bedrooms. If I were to spend money converting an attic, a basement, or adding an add-on, I'd probably come out even at the sale.
And renovations are quickly depreciating assets. I'm much better off doing that right before a sale. A new dishwasher will be an old dishwasher before too long.
I would love to see industry averages on if pre-sale renovations make any sense at all. Considering the outright financial expenses, possible financing, potentially weeks/months of organizing contractors, dealing with overages, delaying the house sale, yada yada.
If the work takes more than a week (so not just appliances, painting, etc) is there generally a positive expected return?
They must surely make sense, given that there are people who "flip" houses (buy a house, do a quick paint/bathrooms/kitchen renovation on it and sell it for a nice markup).
The average homeowner is unlikely to have any of those relationships or knowledge, so there are a lot more things that could go wrong that delay the project or cause costs to balloon. Maybe a lot of people mistakenly believe that renovating the kitchen for $20k will add $40k value to the house, but in practice, the project will cost $34k, take five weeks, and ultimately only raises the final sale price to $35k.
However a $70k car generally has a much better set of class leading accident avoidance & safety features than a $25k car which will generally be minimum legally required for compliance. A new car has a much different safety profile than a 10 or 20 year old car. Watching crash videos on YouTube is very illuminating as to how far we've come even versus a car from 2000.
Modern advanced cars will warn you about rear & front cross traffic, actively keep you from driving off the road if you fall asleep, emergency brake for obstacles, keep you from changing lanes into a car in your blind spot, and many other things that were pretty unheard of 10-20 years ago. My car even flashes lights and beeps at me if I am opening the door and it detects oncoming cars or bikes.
A $500k renovation of a home is usually financed and adds less than the $500k of value to the resale price to the homes (lets say, $400k to be generous), while costing north of $750k by the time all the payments are made. So $100-350k of waste, conservatively.
I highly recommend the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TikJC0x65X0
Actuarially as well, the value of a human life is so high that a few $1000 in safety options on a car for marginal increases in safety will almost always be worth it.
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
Arguably the other thing you can do is live in a state with a 55~65mph max speed limit. Looking at the state level auto fatalities stats is pretty striking how much lower fatality rates are in the low limit / high traffic (and therefore low speed) northeast .. whether you measure per capita or per mile driven.
The most interesting but hard to measure metric would be per vehicle hour, I would suggest. Commutes are driven more by time than distance, and in congested areas people commute shorter distances at lower speed vs some of the super commutes people do at 75mph+. You can see this sort of reflected in the stats where the per capita fatality rates are 1/3 to 1/2 the level of the Deep South, however on a per-mile basis closer to 2/3. You can also see that the northeastern per-capita miles driven is 1/2 ..
Follow the incentives. You will NEVER see them show you the difference between like a 93 and 94 of a given model (tons of vehicles went from airbags optional to airbags standard over that year so that's basically what you'd be testing) because a single variable or low variable test doesn't get them the DARE-esque messaging and "look how far we've come" back patting that these sorts of old vs new comparisons are meant for. Watching a dummmy face plant into the steering wheel of a 93 OJ bronco and then do the same thing into the airbag of a 94 (to just pick one example) just doesn't scratch those itches the same way comparing vehicles that are half a dozen major engineering revisions and 20yr of model bloat apart from each other.
>Arguably the other thing you can do is live in a state with a 55~65mph max speed limit.
Eh, I think you're reading too much into it.
Speed limits don't reflect reality, anyone from the northeast will tell you that limited access highway speeds are predicated on traffic, weather and road conditions and 80mph middle lane speeds aren't uncommon pre and post commuting "hour" (in sarcasm quotes for obvious reasons).
Reducing potential for high speed traffic conflicts probably matters a lot more than you're giving it credit for. You almost never have cross roads just dumping traffic onto a state highway where traffic goes 70+ in the northeast. This is pretty standard once you get out of the beltway in the more rural states and account for a lot of avoidable crashes.
That’s empirically false. Toyota and Subaru both make 25k cars with vastly better active driver assistance features than Tesla, as shown by every independent test that’s ever been done.
Subaru specifically punches above their weight in terms of safety per dollar and given their close relationship with Toyota I could see them being similar.
If you open up the pricing tool on the cheapest Subaru wagon/SUV model, the Crosstek, and want all the active driver assist options, you quickly end up at the $30k top-tier "Limited" spec which is $31k after fees, and if you add any functional options/accessories (GPS nav, auto dim mirror, etc) is more like $35k.
Similarly their most famous model, the Outback may START at $28k, but if you want the trim with all the safety options, thats the $41k Touring. You can knock a few of the safety options off by going with the Limited for $36k (and add a few of the safety features on optionally to end up at $39k).
And I'm not even including markups, which dealers spent the last 2 years adding. Personally my mom spent 6 months hunting down a Subaru dealer who would sell her a car at sticker price after having her old one totaled in an accident. Then another 2 months waiting for it to arrive. This is probably over now, but again the $25k car is so rare as to almost be mythical.
But so does a kitchen rennovation.
> Having freezer space can save you thousands of dollars in food.
It can, if you use it that way. How many of the people buying these expensive kitches do?
I thought the cheapest Rolex is substantially more expensive. Am I wrong?
Before the 2020s era inflation you could definitely pick up a mens one used for $2k, like a Datejust model for example.
Likewise a $70k car is neither particularly rare or exotic now with how much the average car price has been pushed up by big trucks and EVs.
Just for the sake of nitpicking, but going back to the BMW example, you could get a well-optioned Z4 in this range, which I would argue is rather exotic and will make heads turn, if not very expensive.
However you can get a lot of pretty surprisingly run of the mill vehicles at that price range as well, especially for at truck or EV. Like a Ford F-150, Tesla Model 3/Y, entry level Mercedes or BMW electric car, even a Ford Mach E, etc.
The slowing inflation, high interest rates and collapse of the economy in the coming 6-18 months will probably wind some of that back.
People love their pickup trucks.
The Tesla Model 3/Y range can easily run up above $70k with options now, and the bigger Tesla Model S/X is a six-figures vehicle!
Likewise, gas powered BMWs seem to have disappeared in the $30-40k range and pretty quickly get into the $50k+ range.
I certainly don't know many middle class people with 70k in savings to throw around, either everyone is doing a lot better than they otherwise expose or there's easy money on the table.
I think we'll see price corrections downward for cars over the next 5 years, as interest rates change. I've asked a handful of importers while I try and source a car from Japan, with the Japanese import market being hyper inflated. They've all suggested that during the pandemic, financed purchases were making up the majority of their sales. I imagine that's set to change as interest rates change and loans get harder to acquire.
Let's stick to the truck, though. F-150s are everywhere.
If I head to the Ford Canada website, an F-150 XL (the cheap one) is $39K before you get started. A Platinum brings you up to $87K, and the Limited brings you up to $98K.
The website is definitely NOT including taxes, licensing fees, financing fees, interest, etc.
I couldn't imagine paying that for a work truck. The trades are fairly well payed, but to that extent?
https://www.coxautoinc.com/market-insights/kbb-atp-september...
Why, back in my day, you could get a “stripper” model of a truck (my dad’s term for the most-basic-possible model with crank windows and a stick shift) for like $15,000. Now?
https://www.ford.com/trucks/f150/
Good luck getting off the lot for less than $40,000 for a full-size truck.
…though to give Ford some credit here:
https://www.ford.com/trucks/maverick/
They do still sell a truly cheap-and-cheerful truck. Will it tow much? No. Is it going to take you to the bottom of the Grand Canyon or whatever off-road macho fantasy? No. Will it get several bags of mulch back from Home Depot? Absolutely—which is what people actually use trucks for. (If that.)
In specific areas such as cars, you had complete dislocations. For example used cars which normally depreciate 15-20%/year, instead inflated about 15%/year for 2 years.
Over the summer I traded in a 4 year old car at the end of its warranty of 85% of what I paid for it new. I probably could have sold private party and haggled harder to get closer to 90%+ Normally 85% is what you can expect to sell your car for right after you drive it off the lot on your second day of ownership.
This was a knock on effect of new car production shortages, and pent up demand from low 2020 sales and people having a lot of cash on hand.
Related to this you had dealers adding market (ADM) on not even luxury/exotic vehicles of $10-15k in some areas. So never mind not being able to negotiate a few $1000 off, people were paying sticker+$15k for new vehicles for the privilege of being able to buy one. And this was on top of the sticker prices ticking up over the course of the pandemic and related inflation.
So no, for many things, it was not "just a year of 11% inflation".
Are you not in the US? We haven't even had 10% inflation for all of the past year.
https://publish.manheim.com/content/dam/consulting/ManheimUs...
Yeah, I'm being a little glib there. But what they love is golf, tennis, violin lessons for kids. Yes, they own expensive golf clubs (and memberships) and tennis rackets and violins. But what they love is that they can slum it with a very inexpensive tennis racket or golf club or violin, whereas the expensive gear is useless in the hands of someone who hasn't had a lifetime of lessons that cost in the tens of thousands of dollars. Even if you have the money, you can't buy the technique, and people who play these sports/instruments can recognize instantly if you know what you're doing (even in movies, tennis, golf, and violin, faked technique is immediately recognizable). It helps a lot of your parents had money and trained you up in these things when you were a child.
Not to mention a fully specced out Tesla Model 3 is $80k and Model Y is now.. $90k, and the tax credits are basically gone! I remember getting a pretty well configured Model 3 for $50k after tax incentives in their first year of production.
For ~$70k you used to be able to get a Model S, which now STARTS at $105k. Easily configurable into the $130-160k range now.. insane.
But comparing absolute numbers for a car you bought five years ago may be misleading because the majority of the increase is likely due to inflation.
Back of the envelope math: If you were in CA and got $7.5k federal and $2.5k state credits that means the Model 3 you bought in 2017 was ~$60k or ~$73k in today's dollars. If it's now $80k then that's a real price increase of ~$7k in today's dollars.
That's certainly an increase, but making an expensive car slightly more expensive doesn't seem particularly insane to me.
If you are in the market for a 3-row / 7 seater, you can spend $55k on a Toyota Highlander SUV or $40k on a Toyota Siena minivan.
It's genuinely pretty challenging to spend under $30k on a new car now outside fairly basic 2-4 door smaller sedan/hatchback vehicles in their base trim without options.
Nothing wrong with basic vehicles "in their base trim without options", we have two parked outside the house right now, and the vehicle we owned before them was similar.
I am only trying to illustrate that the line between luxury/excess in autos has shifted substantially in the last few years partially inflation driven and partially cheap credit / long loan terms driven.
The universe of under-$30k cars is now quite limited whereas 5 years ago, one could possibly describe $30k+ as being luxury.
My family also always only bought used cars (and I continued this practice), so I guess that further skewed my conception of car cost downward. I only just bought my first new car recently, and I still haven't really adjusted to the reality of both what current prices are like, and how much more expensive a new car is.
I try and remind myself that for the most part it's not that cars are that much more expensive but that dollars are worth so much less.
For a shit car with the interior fit and finish of a poverty-spec Skoda, and all the important controls replaced with a bloody great iPad that blinds you at night.
Oh, and it's from an obscenely "techbro" company.
Am I the only one not impressed in any sense by Teslas?
I could excuse the drawbacks you cited and the cost if they were the Framework laptop of the automotive world. But at those price points, and a repairability narrative that is not much better than, “out of warranty and one accident away from into landfill”, there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell I’ll buy a Tesla.
I have a couple of old Range Rovers. There are very few things you can't fix with a half-inch spanner and a hammer, and those you can fix with a 7/16th spanner and a bit of sticky tape.
They run on propane, so they get cheap tax and can be registered as Low Emission Vehicles, which is pretty hilarious for a 4-litre V8.
Combined they probably still have a smaller ecological footprint than making one Tesla Model S.
They've also got far comfier seats.
How does fueling work? Perhaps I just haven't noticed (because I have to reason to), but I have never seen a fueling station advertise propane, outside of tanks for grilling and similar.
To fuel up you just go to a filling station with an LPG pump (getting harder to find here unfortunately) and instead of poking the nozzle down the filler neck and holding down a trigger on the filler gun, you plug in a hose with a fitting like a BNC plug the size of your wrist and hold down a button on the pump until you've put enough in. It clicks off when it's full.
No difference in performance (in theory you could adjust it to get more because it's the equivalent of 115RON fuel!) and a bit more fuel consumption, but roughly 2/3 the price of petrol.
Common enough and cheap enough that I still feel a bit prescient for buying a 2017 Ford Focus wagon with about 30k km on the clock that was factory modified for LPG, in August 2021, for about half what the original owner paid.
But yeah, whenever I'm in a Tesla, the interior looks cheap, and the giant iPad (in the Model 3 at least) looks bolted-on rather than designed-in. Not to mention the real-time display of what's around the car is laughably bad, with cars and pedestrians flickering in and out, and sometimes not even showing up at all.
I'm glad people drive them, though; more EVs on the street is a good thing.
I am very impressed by their batteries and I like the look of the Model S but I'm utterly unimpressed by the build quality of the interior and the cheap materials used.
At that price I'd except to be entering a comfortable car using luxurious materials.
FWIW I tried the Porsche Taycan and the interior is leaps and bound ahead of the Teslas (but the batteries aren't up to par yet and the software ain't either I think).
Tesla exaggerates their range and few actually achieve the quoted EPA range, so you can deduct 10-15% for real world.
The Germans, especially Porsche undersell their range and real world you can get about 10-15% longer out of the BMWs & MBs and something insane like 35% more out of the Taycans.
InsideEVs has a nice real world 70mph highway range comparison, and the ranking would surprise you compared to the advertised ranges. https://insideevs.com/reviews/443791/ev-range-test-results/
So an advertised 350mi Model S and a 225mi Taycan in fact meet somewhere in the middle, closer to 300mi +/- for both.
Also, Land Cruiser has apparently been discontinued.
Wait, what sort of longevity are we taking about? 15 years? 20?
I don't think we humans can reproduce quickly enough for that to span "many generations". :-)
Fuel availability considerations notwithstanding, there's very little that would stop them going another 25 years.
I don’t think the so-called “safety features” developed in the next 20 years are as valuable as the others predict. We’re already very safe in cars, especially massive modern ones like the cruiser. If you’re driving fast/reckless enough to get killed in one today more safety features aren’t what you need.
People need to be more mindful of the fact they’re operating multi-ton death machines, not sit back behind increasing layers of technology and text their buddy while driving because they know their “safety features” will protect them.
This is partially why I disabled my airbags - pedestrians don’t have them, why should I? Gives me more skin in the game.
I can totally see how a car could get passed down from father to son, but a single car and "many generations" doesn't really add up in this part of the world (could be totally different in other parts of the world, of course).
But then you do get articles like https://www.betootaadvocate.com/uncategorized/brisbane-accou...
For those not from the US like myself, this is only the case in the US. I'm sure we'll still get plenty down under.
I find mechanical watches to be fascinating. This is obsolete technology, and yet, innovation continues. This is precision engineering, but at least for the high end, mostly done by hand. A lovely anachronism, which is a fitting word for a timepiece. It is like real life steampunk. I fully understand the appeal beyond status signalling. How can geeks not be at least a little interested in watchmaking?
I know some people don't care and for them it is just status signaling. But it the same as for supercars: just because it is status doesn't mean there isn't something behind it.
That's not just status, it's got change over time mixed in.
One of the starkest power dynamics in dress code I've observed is in non-tech firms that have large tech orgs to support the revenue generating roles. While there were official dress codes that tech largely abided, our internal customers who generated revenue often showed up in tee shirts or wore ball caps in the office ...
I've often found that people who say (and believe) that they don't ding people who dress poorly, do ding people who dress poorly.
Haha, don't forget the classic combo of the $10k Caesarstone countertop plus half a dozen blunt knives.
Every time I look at my 30 year old kitchen & bathrooms, and tally up what it would cost to update them, I can't help but think I'd rather just retire a bit earlier.
Yes things need to be replaced as they break, and ultimately some renovation will be needed.. but I know people gutting 10-15 year old kitchens & baths purely for aesthetics every time they move. Full employment for tradesmen.
This is basically the cost to add a second floor to your crappy home you bought a several years back because that’s all you could afford to buy in Seattle at the time. Probably even worse in some other cities.
I’m speaking of interior renovations of basically aesthetic changes that are generally negative value add.
There’s even a hot market for historical wristwatches. 2 million for a watch that would have been $100,000 10 years ago is not unheard of.
As it turns out, this was an old Chinese saying a couple decades ago, where "cars" really meant bicycles.
This tidbit reminds me of a similar anecdote (that my experience aligns with) re: the modern upper class that wearing a $2k Rolex or driving a $70k BMW is frowned upon. But instead they have eccentric "hobbies" requiring $10ks of of equipment, inclusive of "needing" $10k viking stove/range, and $10k subzero fridge/freezer in your kitchen because you are a "foodie" and doing a $500k home Reno because you have good architectural taste and style. They probably still own a $70k Volvo (or now Tesla) anyway :-). In these scenarios I think it's because the $2k watch or $70k car is too easily attained by lower classes that they are no longer considered signals by the upper classes. However blowing $500k renovating a perfectly livable home, or $10k on an appliance you could spend as little as $1k on.. is not.
Another countersignal that the article points in the direction of is level of professional vs casual attire in the workplace. My friends and I are far enough in our careers that personally I've worn sneakers to work for the last 10 years, no business slacks, and sporadically tuck in my collared shirt. The last round of job searching doing zoom interviews, I wore my hoodie for half the calls. If I had done this while job searching out of college, during my internship, or at my first job.. I would not be where I am today.