3 ms·
There's a lot of jobs/markets where the physical hardware is not even remotely the main cost. Think - $2-3k/mo Bloomberg terminal, various proprietary data ven
by steveBK123 3y ago
There's a lot of jobs/markets where the physical hardware is not even remotely the main cost.
Think - $2-3k/mo Bloomberg terminal, various proprietary data vendors at $25k/50k/100k per year, etc. If you are professionally managing money (like a family office or something) at a scale of say $1B then having all these soft costs add up to say $1M/year is basically nothing.. 0.1%. In that world, a $1k vs $4k MacBook is basically irrelevant. If they were smart, they'd have multiple devices on standby so they can immediately get back online in case of any failures.
That said, in most cases day trading is basically just high end gambling and a mechanism of turning a large fortune into a small one.
Put another way, if you are in any non-technical role that makes $1M/year but you depend on reliable computer access.. every day of being offline is worth $4000, or say $500/hour.
For a lot of people, computers are a means to an ends and just a tool. Think about how a professional chef thinks about their dishwashing machine or a car enthusiast thinks about garage door openers. You just expect it to work, and in the 0.0001% scenarios it does fail its really annoying.
- gen220 3y agoThese stories of justifying great expenses amuse me, because I can't help but compare them to Warren Buffet's office (which is mostly sports memorabilia, loose papers, a telephone [1]). >That said, in most cases day trading is basically just high end gambling and a mechanism of turning a large fortune into a small one. Poignant! There are plenty of people and businesses happy to pry off a chunk along the way. :) [1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/take-a-candid-and-personal-tour-of-warren-buffetts-office-guided-by-the-oracle-of-omaha-himself-2012-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/take-a-candid-and-personal-t...
- steveBK123 3y agoWarren Buffett is probably the great exception to the rule of Billionaires pretending to live commonly. Most of the other "oh I drive a Honda" or "I live with roommates" origin stories turn out to be factual, but incomplete as we find out they have roommates in a $20M penthouse / commute in the Honda for optics but have a garage full of luxury vehicles / own 27 homes / etc. Kind of like the classic Steve Jobs "hide the Porsches" story. That said, I bet Buffett owns at least 2 MacBooks? And really at the end of the day, anyone with a FAANG level job should have backup compute in the case of failure. It's a nothing expense next to the income we derive from using compute.
- FireBeyond 3y agoEven Elon, "I don't own a house" (but I have a holding company that owns several), but "I stay in a friend's $50M home which has a household staff".