Notices by Dan Luu (danluu@mastodon.social), page 3

I don't find it odd that stuff is listed well below market value. At the individual level, a lot of people selling stuff just don't care about the money. And then for companies where this is their bread and butter, like car dealerships, well, I know a guy who runs two dealerships (https://mastodon.social/@danluu/110841855982720659) and have played board games with him where you can price stuff perfectly because you can compute the exact value of items. He makes bad errors in this simpler environment with perfect info, so

of course he makes even worse errors in real markets, which are much harder to price.

I've seen this myself every time I've gone car shopping as well, e.g., when the time-before-last I bought a car, I saw a bunch of cars that dealers had overpriced cars, put in reasonably priced offers for them, which were all rejected. Many months later, I looked up all of those cars. They hadn't sold and were listed for less than I offered due to depreciation, so the dealerships lost a ton of money on those.

Interesting to see Google not allowing people to install benchmarking software on the new Pixel phones.

The comments I've seen mostly focus on how reviewers are blocked from installing benchmarks, but I find blocking normal users from installing benchmarking software to be much stranger than blocking reviewers.

In some ways, this is more extreme than Oracle's stance on benchmarking (https://danluu.com/anon-benchmark/), though it's also less extreme in some ways.

@peterbautista I think things like that are definitely extremely expensive, but no one I knew growing up would touch something like that with a ten foot pole, and lot of folks were refugees who came to the country with absolutely nothing and were, financially, doing as poorly as is possible in the U.S., often with significant medical issues as well, e.g., my father was severely injured in the Vietnam war and had significantly reduced function and chronic pain for life.

@peterbautista I could see needing something like that if you have no friends and no community, but the poor people I've known and polled would borrow from a friend rather than take out extremely expensive short term debt, would get a bank account, etc.

A lot of this feels to me like "making poor decisions can have really bad consequences if you're poor and sort of doesn't have consequences at all if you're middle class", which seems quite different from Vimes' boots, IMO.

@Adamlett For cost of rent, yes. For insurance, I feel like it's the other way around — now that I'm fairly well off, I forgo a lot of insurance to save a trivial amount of money, e.g., I only carry liability car insurance have to pay for my repairs if I'm at fault, if my car gets vandalized, etc.

But, even there, if you look at my total automotive expenses, they're much higher now than they were when I was poor because my car actually costs something, so I don't think this qualifies.

@Adamlett I think, on my current car, I save something like $1k/yr by not insuring the vehicle itself because I live in a place with super expensive car insurance, but that amount would be more like $50/yr (just guessing based on the car's value of ~$500) when I had my worthless beater and of course the difference in depreciation between the beater and my current car dwarfs $50/yr.

@Adamlett I don't think that has any relevance to the point, but no, that's just the sticker price. I have no idea how much I'm saving in expectation and I don't think the calculation is really even possible since the state-run monopoly here only uses a few gross factors to price insurance and the true cost will be based on my own driving and I don't think it's really possible for me to model the expected cost of that decently.

@Adamlett If, at any point in time, you have enough that you don't want to be wiped out, you can buy insurance (we did eventually get a house for something like $75k and I believe we had it insured). If for some reason we couldn't afford it and had to sell the house, we'd have $75k, which is enough to live on for a while even with no income (after graduating, I lived on ~$12k/yr).

@Adamlett What does being wiped out here mean? And what are you insuring here? When I was a kid, we rode bikes a lot and took the bus a lot. We had a cheap beater car that sort of didn't work so if it got totalled, that wasn't much of a loss. We had an apartment that we didn't own and if it got burnt down, we'd declare bankruptcy and have nothing, so same as before.

I mean no offense by this, but I feel like you're not really in the mindset of a poor person here.

@dkalintsev As with the car example, I don't think the monetary cost of this can really catch up. Say you pick up a fridge by the side of the road that's extremely inefficient and uses an absurd 2kWh per day more than a nice fridge that a rich person would buy (this isn't really even plausible). Locally, this costs $70 of power per year. A "nice" fridge is $1k+ and you're never going to catch up to that for as long as a rich person keeps their nice fridge.

Roughly speaking, Vimes' boots theory of poverty is the idea that, if you're poor, you're forced to buy cheap products, such as boots, that wear out quickly and need to frequently be replaced, causing a kind of poverty trap.

Below are some quotes that illustrate typical examples of how people think about Vimes' boots theory.

2. The numbers have bounced around a bit, but it's been fairly consistent that ~20% of people marked themselves as having grown up starvation-level poor, which should not be true in a poll that's representative of the U.S., let alone one of a population of people on Mastodon who are mostly programmers.

In surveys, you'll see 20% of some disadvantaged populations with some food insecurity, but that's less a lower level of poverty than this poll's definition of regular starvation or equivalent.

I was going to write this after the poll expired to avoid poisoning the results, but since I don't find the results remotely plausible for at least two reasons, no reason to wait.

1. I posted this poll at ~1am PT / 4am ET and the response rate is basically the same as for any other poll I post around this time even though I asked for U.S. and Canadian folks only. I have decent info on, geographically, who will see things depending on when I post based on when I post and this makes no sense.

If you grew up poor and find Vimes' boots theory to be anything but silly, I'd be curious to hear why (this question is the point of the thread).

As someone who read the Pratchett bit when I was a poor kid and appreciated it as a bit, I've been baffled by how often I see people take it seriously, both on the internet (it's frequently the top comment in poverty discussions) as well as IRL.

I've polled quite a few poor people about this and literally everyone has had the same reaction as me.

"wtf was the person doing who was buying shoes every year until they bought $200 boots? I still have my XYZ shoes I got for free ten years ago, my ABC goes I got for free six years ago, [etc.]"

And, BTW, none of these people are currently poor, although many still have deeply ingrained habits. And the last comment was from a former elite athlete and serious mountaineer, who was certainly putting more intense wear on their gear than the person from the quote, who was walking around Boston.

Anyway, I polled everyone I personally know who grew up poor (by the definition above) and zero of them thought that Vimes' boots theory made sense. Additionally, on the specific quotes above, people found them laughable, with comments like

"what kind of poor person is buying a new shirt?" [the implication, too obvious to be stated, is that you'd get hand-me-downs or buying shirts at a secondhand store], "how much does this guy think it costs to operate a beater car?", and

For everyone who's replied with "haha well no one thinks it's about boots [even though I literally quote someone who specifically cites boots], it's actually about how you spend less if you buy quality", please name the classes of items that are significant expenses where, as you get richer, you spend less by buying better items.

Multiple people I talked to found this bit — what major expense do you spend less on as you get richer? Food? No. Clothing? No. Housing? No. Medical care? No. etc.

As I've discussed elsewhere (https://danluu.com/talent/, https://twitter.com/danluu/status/1477001191548542980, https://mastodon.social/@danluu/109537224752779343, etc.), of course there are massive advantages to growing up middle class and even larger advantages to growing up wealthy but, AFAICT, none of the advantages are related to this Vimes' boots thing people love trotting out.

People I polled had the same reaction — being poor is terrible, just not for the Vimes' boots reason that middle-class people and rich people love to cite.

I think a lot of this comes from people having no idea what a poor person might spend on something. If you eat rice and beans from 50lb bags, that's really cheap. If you want to beat this cost with "purchasing only a rich person can do", you basically have to buy by the pallet. How many middle class or rich people do this?

I do know one person who does this (a formerly poor person, of course) but, in practice, rich people aren't spending less on food because they can buy in bulk or whatever.