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I came across a Reddit post a while back and the user said that for whatever reason people of wealth were attracted to them. As a result, they were able to lear

I came across a Reddit post a while back and the user said that for whatever reason people of wealth were attracted to them. As a result, they were able to learn a lot about their lifestyles, habits, etc, on an intimate level that most of us wouldn't know. Based on the detailed information that OP provided, it wouldn't surprise me if it was true. They said that one of the most important factors for the ultra-wealthy was time. This involved wealthy individuals: - Hiring personal assistants (to run errands) - Hiring personal chefs (no time wasted cooking) - Owning a private jet (no time lost booking a flight, going through security, etc) We can't control the flow of time, but we can most certainly use it to our benefit. Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_insanely_wealthy_people_buy_that_ordinary/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...

JorgeGT 7y ago
Time is the ultimate luxury. I remember two separate reddit AMAs with centenarian women, who had lived from candle-lit houses and horse-drawn carriages to moon landings and the internet. When asked what was their favorite invention in their lives, both answered the washing machine. They suddenly had much more time for themselves!
- heymijo 7y ago
  And electricity powers washing machines. Robert Caro masterfully paints the picture of what life was like in rural Texas for women making homes before their area was electrified. It wasn't just time saved. It was hard, physical labor that caused their bodies to break down that they were saved from. Really quite hard to fathom for any of us accustomed to growing up without that burden.
  - mjbellantoni 7y ago
    I remember this chapter vividly -- just one of many reasons to recommend Caro's epic biography of LBJ.
    - heymijo 7y ago
      Vivid is the right word for it! I had no understanding of what that sort of life must have been like before reading the chapter, but after it stuck with me so strongly. I felt wholly inadequate trying to summarize it above.
    - misiti3780 7y ago
      which book was that in ?
      - coachtrotz 7y ago
        Believe it was the first - title: The Path to Power.
        heymijo 7y ago
        Goodreads link https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86524.The_Path_to_Power https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86524.The_Path_to_Power
    - dredmorbius 7y ago
      If you're ever in the Austin area, the ... jaunt ... out to Johnson Ranch (Stonewall, TX) is an interesting one. It's about 60 miles from Round Rock or downtown. I prefer the northern route. The ranch is ... out in the middle of nowhere. And if you keep on heading West, even that seems densely populated. Imagining that without power, gas, or phones, gives pause. https://www.nps.gov/lyjo/planyourvisit/visitlbjranch.htm https://www.nps.gov/lyjo/planyourvisit/visitlbjranch.htm
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    Back then I imagine the real problem wasn't the "hardness" and physical demands of the labor, but the risk of physical injury due to poor safety controls/practices that "caused their bodies to break down." For women especially, hard physical labor, assuming it's done safely, will do more good than harm. It's one of the few effective means to combat osteoporosis, and something folks have to go out of their way to try reintroduce in the form of exercise and gym memberships these days. I have a construction worker father and stay-at home sedentary mother whose only labor in life was childbirth and light house cleaning. There's no way in hell I'd sign up for her outcomes over his, even including his acute injuries from easily prevented poor worker safety like the nail in the eye or skin cancer from decades of shirtless hard labor.
    - heymijo 7y ago
      It seems like it was both. I have framed houses and I have shingled roofs. The former is physically demanding. The latter is back breaking. Some excerpts from Caro: > the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands > the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
    - jscholes 7y ago
      > light house cleaning. I'm blind, and my screen reading software's speech synthesizer amusingly pronounced this as "lighthouse cleaning". Which is a very different thing and made you sound fairly unreasonable...
- irrational 7y ago
  My grandmother grew up on a ranch. It now is mostly family cabins, but the original cabin is still there with the original hand cranked washer. One summer we spent a month there and had to do our laundry by hand and then dry it on the line. It gave me a great appreciation for modern washers and dryers.
pgrote 7y ago
Exactly. Back in the day I did consulting work on a personal level for an ultra-wealthy person. He was into making electronic music as a passion. This was in the days of 486/pentium, so the tools available to do this were relatively expensive. He'd create something and slip a couple of hundred to a club DJ to play it when he went out. Anyway, he would use a floppy and throw it away. I realized he did this to save time. No need to format the disk and reuse, he would just pull another one out. He was buying time. It infuriated a relative of mine when I told the story due to waste, but I explained to her those minutes he would spend formatting the disks wasn't spent. He came out ahead.
- urbanjunkie 7y ago
  I'm glad you finally managed to take your tongue out of his asshole
- shhshahassa 7y ago
  your a bootlicker
- wavefunction 7y ago
  It's easy to be wasteful and come out ahead in the short-term. I guess it's just some more plastic in the ocean or landfill to him.
  - irrational 7y ago
    "Back in the day" this wasn't even a consideration. It's only been very very recently that people have started thinking about plastics breaking down and going into the water system.
    - kick 7y ago
      That's simply not true. It's been a concern for decades.
      - irrational 7y ago
tomatocracy 7y ago
The really big time benefit to flying private is about schedule flexibility rather than security etc (though that's important too). Flying private an executive can turn up and leave 5 minutes later, and be on the road 5 minutes after landing. If a meeting overruns and there's only one commercial flight a day with the relevant city pair, then they're just out of luck. Flying private, it's not a problem. The economics of whether to own vs rent (netjets etc) is essentially about scale.
- BlameKaneda 7y ago
  I completely agree. If I wanted to fly down to Austin, TX for BBQ I could do so in a day, rather than fly in and fly back home based on the airline's schedule.
  - RickJWagner 7y ago
    Elvis used to fly himself and his posse to Colorado (from Memphis) for fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Then back, right after the meal.
  - vonseel 7y ago
    Austinite here... your hypothetical BBQ trip sounds exactly like the type of thing some super-rich outsider would do. Personally, I don’t buy into the hype. The BBQ is good but not “wait in line for hours” good. I’d rather smoke my own meats if it’s going to take all day.
    - blankaccount 7y ago
      presumably its about the people attending, not the food...
  - samstave 7y ago
    Funny thing was a guy went to Texas for this super famous BBQ from NY... When he got there, he told them "I came all the way from NY just for this" The BBQ place looked at him and said "uh... we ship directly to NY, you know" hehehe
magduf 7y ago
> Owning a private jet (no time lost booking a flight, going through security, etc) The problem with private jets is that they severely limit where you can travel, unless you don't care about leaving the continent. Private jets tend to be small (unless you're John Travolta), and small jets have limited range. Accordingly, they can't easily cross oceans. If all you care about is going between NY and FL or CA, then they work fine, but if you want to fly to Asia, you'll have to book a ticket on a major airline like the rest of us.
- robk 7y ago
  You just have to be rich enough. At this level these folks fly transatlantic without a second thought. Netjets/fractional level yeah you're scraping by at small airports but your own Gulfstream and you're at a whole new level.
- txcwpalpha 7y ago
  A Gulfstream 5 has a range of 12,000km. For comparison, a Boeing 787-8 (one of the longest ranged commercial airliners, often used for transpacific travel) has a range of about 13,000km. Even the smaller private jets, such as a Citation, have a range of 6,500km, which is still more than enough to go transatlantic in a single flight, or even US<->Asia in 2 hops. For comparison, a Boeing 757 (often used for smaller US<->Europe and US<->South America flights) has a range of 7,200km.
  - JCharante 7y ago
    Yeah I got my dreams crushed by looking into private jets. The distance to go from BOS to HAN is ~13,000km, of which only one of the newer gulfstreams with a range of ~14,000km might be able to do. I guess that's why a lot people still fly business/first class.
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      That’s a pretty exotic route with zero nonstop business/first class options available.
trianglem 7y ago
Growing up in a middle class home in Asia usually has two of the above three items in the list.
- BlameKaneda 7y ago
  I have relatives in an Asian country where even the middle class can afford to have maids and a driver or two. Whenever I visit I'm never quite used to having someone take your dishes away (versus cleaning them yourself), doing your laundry, etc. I doubt I'll get over it any time soon.
vorotato 7y ago
By this logic you should always take public transit or train where you can stay productive and connected while in transit.
- BlameKaneda 7y ago
  True, but taking public transit means that you abide by certain schedules. If I had a chauffeur then we'd leave when I wanted.

JorgeGT 7y ago

Time is the ultimate luxury. I remember two separate reddit AMAs with centenarian women, who had lived from candle-lit houses and horse-drawn carriages to moon landings and the internet. When asked what was their favorite invention in their lives, both answered the washing machine. They suddenly had much more time for themselves!

heymijo 7y ago
And electricity powers washing machines. Robert Caro masterfully paints the picture of what life was like in rural Texas for women making homes before their area was electrified. It wasn't just time saved. It was hard, physical labor that caused their bodies to break down that they were saved from. Really quite hard to fathom for any of us accustomed to growing up without that burden.
- mjbellantoni 7y ago
  I remember this chapter vividly -- just one of many reasons to recommend Caro's epic biography of LBJ.
  - heymijo 7y ago
    Vivid is the right word for it! I had no understanding of what that sort of life must have been like before reading the chapter, but after it stuck with me so strongly. I felt wholly inadequate trying to summarize it above.
  - misiti3780 7y ago
    which book was that in ?
    - coachtrotz 7y ago
      Believe it was the first - title: The Path to Power.
      - heymijo 7y ago
        Goodreads link https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86524.The_Path_to_Power https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/86524.The_Path_to_Power
  - dredmorbius 7y ago
    If you're ever in the Austin area, the ... jaunt ... out to Johnson Ranch (Stonewall, TX) is an interesting one. It's about 60 miles from Round Rock or downtown. I prefer the northern route. The ranch is ... out in the middle of nowhere. And if you keep on heading West, even that seems densely populated. Imagining that without power, gas, or phones, gives pause. https://www.nps.gov/lyjo/planyourvisit/visitlbjranch.htm https://www.nps.gov/lyjo/planyourvisit/visitlbjranch.htm
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  Back then I imagine the real problem wasn't the "hardness" and physical demands of the labor, but the risk of physical injury due to poor safety controls/practices that "caused their bodies to break down." For women especially, hard physical labor, assuming it's done safely, will do more good than harm. It's one of the few effective means to combat osteoporosis, and something folks have to go out of their way to try reintroduce in the form of exercise and gym memberships these days. I have a construction worker father and stay-at home sedentary mother whose only labor in life was childbirth and light house cleaning. There's no way in hell I'd sign up for her outcomes over his, even including his acute injuries from easily prevented poor worker safety like the nail in the eye or skin cancer from decades of shirtless hard labor.
  - heymijo 7y ago
    It seems like it was both. I have framed houses and I have shingled roofs. The former is physically demanding. The latter is back breaking. Some excerpts from Caro: > the farm filth had to be scrubbed out in hours of kneeling over rough rub-boards, hours in which the lye in homemade soap burned the skin off women’s hands > the heavy flatirons had to be continually carried back and forth to the stove for reheating, and the stove had to be continually fed with new supplies of wood—decades later, even strong, sturdy farm wives would remember how their backs had ached on washday.
  - jscholes 7y ago
    > light house cleaning. I'm blind, and my screen reading software's speech synthesizer amusingly pronounced this as "lighthouse cleaning". Which is a very different thing and made you sound fairly unreasonable...
irrational 7y ago
My grandmother grew up on a ranch. It now is mostly family cabins, but the original cabin is still there with the original hand cranked washer. One summer we spent a month there and had to do our laundry by hand and then dry it on the line. It gave me a great appreciation for modern washers and dryers.

pgrote 7y ago

Exactly. Back in the day I did consulting work on a personal level for an ultra-wealthy person. He was into making electronic music as a passion. This was in the days of 486/pentium, so the tools available to do this were relatively expensive. He'd create something and slip a couple of hundred to a club DJ to play it when he went out. Anyway, he would use a floppy and throw it away. I realized he did this to save time. No need to format the disk and reuse, he would just pull another one out. He was buying time. It infuriated a relative of mine when I told the story due to waste, but I explained to her those minutes he would spend formatting the disks wasn't spent. He came out ahead.

urbanjunkie 7y ago
I'm glad you finally managed to take your tongue out of his asshole
shhshahassa 7y ago
your a bootlicker
wavefunction 7y ago
It's easy to be wasteful and come out ahead in the short-term. I guess it's just some more plastic in the ocean or landfill to him.
- irrational 7y ago
  "Back in the day" this wasn't even a consideration. It's only been very very recently that people have started thinking about plastics breaking down and going into the water system.
  - kick 7y ago
    That's simply not true. It's been a concern for decades.
    - irrational 7y ago

tomatocracy 7y ago

The really big time benefit to flying private is about schedule flexibility rather than security etc (though that's important too). Flying private an executive can turn up and leave 5 minutes later, and be on the road 5 minutes after landing. If a meeting overruns and there's only one commercial flight a day with the relevant city pair, then they're just out of luck. Flying private, it's not a problem. The economics of whether to own vs rent (netjets etc) is essentially about scale.

BlameKaneda 7y ago
I completely agree. If I wanted to fly down to Austin, TX for BBQ I could do so in a day, rather than fly in and fly back home based on the airline's schedule.
- RickJWagner 7y ago
  Elvis used to fly himself and his posse to Colorado (from Memphis) for fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Then back, right after the meal.
- vonseel 7y ago
  Austinite here... your hypothetical BBQ trip sounds exactly like the type of thing some super-rich outsider would do. Personally, I don’t buy into the hype. The BBQ is good but not “wait in line for hours” good. I’d rather smoke my own meats if it’s going to take all day.
  - blankaccount 7y ago
    presumably its about the people attending, not the food...
- samstave 7y ago
  Funny thing was a guy went to Texas for this super famous BBQ from NY... When he got there, he told them "I came all the way from NY just for this" The BBQ place looked at him and said "uh... we ship directly to NY, you know" hehehe

magduf 7y ago

> Owning a private jet (no time lost booking a flight, going through security, etc) The problem with private jets is that they severely limit where you can travel, unless you don't care about leaving the continent. Private jets tend to be small (unless you're John Travolta), and small jets have limited range. Accordingly, they can't easily cross oceans. If all you care about is going between NY and FL or CA, then they work fine, but if you want to fly to Asia, you'll have to book a ticket on a major airline like the rest of us.

robk 7y ago
You just have to be rich enough. At this level these folks fly transatlantic without a second thought. Netjets/fractional level yeah you're scraping by at small airports but your own Gulfstream and you're at a whole new level.
txcwpalpha 7y ago
A Gulfstream 5 has a range of 12,000km. For comparison, a Boeing 787-8 (one of the longest ranged commercial airliners, often used for transpacific travel) has a range of about 13,000km. Even the smaller private jets, such as a Citation, have a range of 6,500km, which is still more than enough to go transatlantic in a single flight, or even US<->Asia in 2 hops. For comparison, a Boeing 757 (often used for smaller US<->Europe and US<->South America flights) has a range of 7,200km.
- JCharante 7y ago
  Yeah I got my dreams crushed by looking into private jets. The distance to go from BOS to HAN is ~13,000km, of which only one of the newer gulfstreams with a range of ~14,000km might be able to do. I guess that's why a lot people still fly business/first class.
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    That’s a pretty exotic route with zero nonstop business/first class options available.

trianglem 7y ago

Growing up in a middle class home in Asia usually has two of the above three items in the list.

BlameKaneda 7y ago
I have relatives in an Asian country where even the middle class can afford to have maids and a driver or two. Whenever I visit I'm never quite used to having someone take your dishes away (versus cleaning them yourself), doing your laundry, etc. I doubt I'll get over it any time soon.

vorotato 7y ago

By this logic you should always take public transit or train where you can stay productive and connected while in transit.

BlameKaneda 7y ago
True, but taking public transit means that you abide by certain schedules. If I had a chauffeur then we'd leave when I wanted.