This is an excellent point: Unexpected and unavoidable costs are precisely the sort of problem that have repeatedly been shown to thwart the accumulation of wea

This is an excellent point: Unexpected and unavoidable costs are precisely the sort of problem that have repeatedly been shown to thwart the accumulation of wealth among the poor. Ironically, the referenced book (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scratch_Beginnings) was specifically written to rebut Barbara Ehrenreich's first person book on poverty, Nickel and Dimed. A major theme of that book is the debilitating impact of catastrophic costs, health care in particular, on the poor. "Without health insurance you risk a small cut becoming infected because you can afford neither a visit to the doctor nor antibiotics... [an] impacted wisdom tooth requir[ed] frantic calls to find a free dental clinic" was the NYTimes summary (http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13gallagt.html?_r=1 http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/05/13/reviews/010513.13galla...) So the book referenced by the grandparent comment was derailed exactly as predicted in the very book it was trying to rebut. It is not only the poor who like "things that make life less boring." We all do, and I'd argue we all need these things for sanity. That's why I don't beat myself up too hard for occasionally wasting time doing things like, say, posting comments on Hackers News.