This is a very good thread that explains how conservatives play the law game (esp. with regard to “religious freedom”).
https://twitter.com/MikeSacksEsq/status/1231958024945897472?s=19
Significantly easier said than done. Particularly since if you have that combo of intelligence and willpower making money isn’t super hard.
Seems to imply that an increased minimum wage would not do much to improve well-being.
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Nice.
If it was easy, people wouldn’t be able to make a living coming up with ways to help people do it.
Spending time with actual rich people is one of the most depressing things you can do. Almost without exception, they are maddeningly shallow and usually very unhappy. Their personal interactions are almost never genuine. They’re terrible parents. They are cartoonishly misinformed about almost everything outside their direct area of expertise. When you see that all the plunder and greed and selfishness is for so damn little, it’s incredibly depressing.
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This of course raises the perpetually fruitless topic of what you mean by “actual rich”. My peers are mostly professional class people (doctors, lawyers, etc.) and are rich by a lot of meaningful metrics. They’re also by and large a pretty conscientious group - they care about parenting, worry about climate change, etc., etc. I don’t claim that they’re all saints but they lean toward inspiring as opposed to depressing to spend time with.
I have definitely met lots of people that fit the mold you’re describing but I don’t think it’s universal across the top, say, 1% of the socioeconomic ladder. The vast majority of people I have met that are like the ones you are describing are the ones that inherited a productive small business from their parents.
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Lol, I know. What I am trying to do is not reopen that debate, but get some clarity from Riverman on the types of people he’s talking about. I think you can get more insight into what is causing X% of the population to be sociopaths but looking for characteristics that provide more insight than “rich”, which as we know has almost no meaning.
You are literally reopening the debate. That’s how it always starts.
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It’s definetly not correct to say anyone in the 1% is rich. Well to do, sure. Top 1%-0.75% are “upper middle class”, while top 0.75%-0.35% are perhaps better described as on the borderline between quite well-to-do and well off. Then when you get up to the top 0.15% that’s where you can probably start talking about actual rich people.
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But which people are Riverman talking about? How and why was he interacting with them? Was there something more useful to “define” them as a group than trying to guess what their percentile was/is?
He was probably just using the standard definition of rich that most people use regardless of income, which is “they make 50% more money than I make”.
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JFC
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I swear to God this has potential to be interesting. Forget about “rich” all together, Riverman is asserting he has met this group of people that “almost without exception, they are maddeningly shallow and usually very unhappy”. I think that’s got to be a very specific subset of the population that shares some damning characteristics.
I pretty obviously meant the ownership class. Like tens of millions and up. Not people with W-2 income.
Real estate developers. Car dealers. Private Equity guys. Not freaking doctors and lawyers.
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That makes a lot of sense. Sorry it wasn’t obvious to me, I didn’t mean it as a criticism or argument against what you’re saying.
One interesting shared characteristic of those specific groups is that most of their interactions with people will be to try to “win a deal” against them. That’ll make you a terrible person if you’re at all success at it. You’re basically training yourself to be a manipulative psycho.
I think this is accurate. How you make your money is incredibly predictive of the type of person you’re going to be. If you’re from an industry where you have to build long term win-win relationships with people to prosper you’re going to be a very different person than some of these guys Riverman is talking about. Then again I suspect those people have less need for Riverman’s product (you’re in commercial banking right Riverman?)
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These numbers are pure Keeeeeeeeed. I don’t have a problem saying anyone making 5x the median income is rich. If the rich can post bullshit videos about the poors not eating out at restaurants until they are out of debt then I’m not going to consider someone making 300k a year and paying 80% of it on a mortgage “struggling.” Hell, I could probably drop that down to 3x and not feel bad.
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