I'm one of those that save/invest 70% of their take-home income. It's not about frugality at all - I would gladly pay for an increased quality of life - but it's simply not on offer.
Past a certain threshold, a threshold well within the reach of western upper-middle-class households, the exchange rate between money and the quality of life becomes essentially zero.
What's left are pointless status seeking games, scams and useless trinkets. The Bible's Book of Ecclesiastes describes it poignantly:
> I denied myself nothing my eyes desired; I refused my heart no pleasure[...] Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun
Fully agree with you. I believe a few years ago there was research stating that roughly speaking, 70K per year (in spending) is the happiness threshold.
Any spending above it leads to no, marginal, or only temporary extra happiness.
I put that bar far lower, personally. We already have the stuff we need and don't enjoy shopping. We're basically stuck at a particular spending level whilst income grows over time. Saving a large portion of our income is effortless, and not at all a sacrifice of quality of life.
The secret to life is to not want so much. It makes life so much easier and better.
The study is cited frequently but it’s misinterpreted frequently or in a disingenuous way. It merely says that among people earning so much, more money does not contribute as much for happiness. This has some sad realities: by and large the wealthier / higher income are much happier than our poorest, and giving money to our poorest have the largest gains in aggregate happiness. This is consistent with other studies on happiness - money makes everyone a little happier at least, and not having enough is a big problem. Sure, other studies also show how our poorer may be fairly happy and connected to communities and all that, but if you take a look at the data they are from decades and decades ago and include retirees as well.
There is certainly an argument that diminishing returns is true in terms of happiness, but at the same time incomes explode beyond a certain point and data points become a lot more sparse and difficult to correlate back to the population.
It’s quite difficult to not want so much given much of social pressures in developed countries are around consumption. This, the criteria to me is more broad than merely not wanting much - the question is about resisting social pressures and to be comfortable and thankful, and this seems to be inline with the data so far on happiness and social relationships as a whole (happy couples tend to have certain habits and innate drives prior to marriage like being selfless, gracious, etc for example)
I think the direct implication of saying that 70K is the point of diminishing return is that people making less than it are less happy? I think the study therefore is consistent with what you're saying?
For very high incomes, even without research data, I still find it only logical that excessive spending doesn't add much to happiness. This is due to almost every product/service not linearly improving as you spend more on it.
A sports car is awesome but after 2 weeks you realize it still only takes you from A to B, and you internally normalize it. You can buy 30K worth of audio equipment but it will not sound 30 times better than 1K equipment, more like 5% better.
Note that I'm purely looking at it from a spending perspective.
As for societal pressures, I disagree. There's a lot of room for a compromise here. For example, our expenses on daily consumables is zero. We don't do Starbucks, going out for lunch, or any of it. Zero.
Nobody is pressuring us to make those daily expenses and by looking at us, you can't tell whether we do or don't. This alone is a considerable monthly savings.
We may use our clothes and shoes twice longer than a typical person, yet the wardrobe is large enough that absolutely nobody would be able to tell. Or care, for that matter.
When you enter our house, you won't see some stripped down project by a frugalist. In fact, it is above average luxurious. We have furniture that is of such quality that it is effectively ever lasting. We have very high end electronics, not budget stuff. And so on.
We may even appear richer than average whilst spending less than average. So the societal pressure is zero, because we don't appear poor or poorer compared to our peers.
Cut daily expenses, buy quality and utilize the longer lifespan, put this delta into additional savings. Spend part of savings to lower cost of living (mortgage, energy bill), and get even more savings.
The difficulty isn't for folks like you and myself - curtailed, very conspicuous, TCO-conscious consumption is not that hard if one has the brain cycles and will to defy a lot of social norms. But given the efficacy of advertising campaigns and how spending tends to go up with income it's clear that people spend more on average when they make more money even with more time and brain cycles to spare.
As someone that's had a great deal of difficulty justifying a lot of longer lifespan timeline consumption patterns due to moving constantly weighing living circumstances and career I'd say that difficulty varies considerably for households even when one's aware of the TCO. I'm not going to tell an undocumented migrant family that they can just save more and spend less with more conspicuous consumption like buying a reliable econobox car like I did. Decisions and habits are also much easier when one has a partner or support system aligned with one's longer term goals and habits. It seems quite tone deaf to outright declare all of these factors are simply "easy" because it is easy for one's own intrinsic and extrinsic factors.
With "easy" I mean that our strategy does not deny quality of life in any significant way. That's what got this conversation started: the perception that saving a good portion of your income is painful. A massive sacrifice. It isn't.
I started saving at age 6, on a 1 guilder (I'm from the Netherlands) weekly allowance.
When I landed my first job, still single, low income, I still saved 30%. I save significantly regardless of income. This to say that I'm not some privileged armchair commenter. I come from the lowest of the lower working class, and have plenty of experience with poverty.
So it's not tone deaf, it's an attitude. Which indeed most people don't have. That's a lack of education or awareness. Not a matter of it being difficult. A few minor tweaks do wonders.
I do agree with one point: it won't work if you don't have a partner that aligns with such a strategy.
Maybe, but most people who do have the option to save 70% of their take home pay don't. Perhaps our definition of what it means to live comfortably is partially to blame. I know a family of 10 that live very comfortably in a small 3 bedroom home, but most people wouldn't define it as comfortable for themselves.
same experience here. i can afford everythihg but i dont need much. i dont think people understand what kind of stress relief is to say that u can live the life you want for 30-40 years without having to work.
A lot of truth to this comment. I can’t believe the amount of money I wasted in my early 20s on…junk. Things that, with the benefit of hindsight, actually brought me no pleasure at all.
I’m glad I realised this, and I totally agree - once you realize that consumerism doesn’t materially improve your life, your “minimum income threshold” drops considerably.
For me, the biggest exception is travel, which really adds up if you want to take a couple of overseas trips per year.
A large reason is likely to double dip on the EV subsidies. Scoop 200,000 x $7,500 subsidies under the name 'Ford', then another fraction of 200,000 x $7,500 as partial owner and supplier under the name 'Rivian'
FSD occasionally requesting driver to take over in genuinely difficult situations would be completely fine.
The videos in the Twitter feed are nothing like that. The car makes potentially catastrophic blunders, like driving straight into a concrete pylon, with 100% confidence.
But IMHO it's not full self driving if it requests the driver to take over even once.
If there's an insane storm or something then it's ok for FSD to know it should disable and then you have to drive 100% control. The middle ground is more like assisted driving which doesn't seem safe according to most HN comments.
It doesn't matter how many hours of video there is, all it takes is hitting one pole to dramatically impact your life or the lives of others.
As a pedestrian and someone who shares the road with drivers who use FSD, I don't get to opt out of this "closed beta", and I certainly wouldn't care about how many hours of quality content it has on YouTube if it caused a car to hit me or drove me off the road.
a closed beta of a system that is "orders of magnitude better, completely reimagined"... videos like this certainly don't seem to show revolutionary growth in the usability of FSD, indeed "more of the same".
Propulsive landing has been achieved routinely and with perfect precision since the 60s - Apollo's lunar modules, Lunar surveyor, Lunokhod rovers.
The question has never been about the feasibility of landing the booster stages - what has been questioned is whether it's worth doing. The fuel used up during landing is fuel that cannot propel the payload. The landing might fail. The effects of thermal and material fatigue are not well understood. The transportation, refurbishing and QA are unlikely to be cheap anyway.
Battery manufacturing needs a lot of land, which is dirt cheap in Northern Sweden. Another activity that needs a lot of land is mining, which is one of the primary economic activities in the otherwise desolate region.
> Corporate tax rate 22%, Mineral Production tax rate 0.2%. (1)
Also, the location has to do with special, naturally occurring deposits of anode materials nearby. iirc, either silicon or graphite forms "clumps" of just the right size and shape in this region, enabling them to skip some steps of the manufacturing process.
There's a lot of corporate fraud like this, even in countries that have a reputation of being well governed.
I personally saw a respectable Finnish company leeching on government innovation funds, asking employees to log their working hours under a specific project. The kicker - nobody in Finland was working on that project, in reality it was developed in another country.
The article echoes what General Jim Mattis commented on the topic of leadership in one of his interviews - (paraphrasing) decisions take an hour to make, the rest of the day is spent crafting the message to ensure there's no room for ambiguity or misunderstanding.
Low fees - but only once you're in the crypto ecosystem.
If you're after dollars or euros, the on-ramp and off-ramp at exchanges adds a comparable, if not higher layer of fees than existing payment mechanisms, kind of defeating the whole purpose.
The trained model is a guarded treasure. There's a reason why very few ML papers publish their trained models; or Deepmind/OpenAI never releasing the resulting models - it's expensive to train the network, but cheap to use it afterwards. You don't want anyone unauthorized to get their hands on it.
AirBnB investors just highlight the symptoms.