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"I mean, when you see the principal renting a chalet and spending over £1 million on a week’s holiday, and then you look at the full spectrum of the household,
by demondemidi 3y ago
"I mean, when you see the principal renting a chalet and spending over £1 million on a week’s holiday, and then you look at the full spectrum of the household, it can be jarring. You’ve got the housekeepers who might’ve come from a less developed country"...
Absolutely disgusting.
I like my exploited labor to be hidden through two or at least three layers of abstraction so that I don't have to feel sick about it: like electronics or clothing or produce harvesting or ... just about everything produced at scale. But scale feeds the wealth of billionaires' theft so my sarcasm is ourobourean.
I seem to recall reading a book about this back in the 2000's. Wealth was split into three groups:
1-10 million
10-100 million
100-1000 milllion+
The first group tends to be very conservative, as they worked extremely hard to amass that wealth (recall this book is from like 2003, not today where there are over a million millionaires in the US, albeit paper).
The second group tends to be inherited wealth and is more liberal.
The third group is absolutely cuckoo bananas. Once you cross the into the near-billion/billion range, you live in a bizarre fantasy world curated to your every whim.
Maybe David Brooks wrote it? I can't for the life of me remember, but it was fascinating. There was a woman who paid a young lady $100k a year to sprinkle birdseed around her house so that her indoor cats would be able to watch the birds. And there were a number of stories of kitchen staff servers who do nothing but show up and serve food in highly choreographed ways, but still need to go to a finishing school for a year to do this.
- ghaff 3y agoThe definition of conservative is flexible. The first category is probably not willy-nilly flying private jets and having a lot of dedicated personal staff today. So, in that respect it does seem different from the other categories. Of course, priorities play a role.
- medler 3y agoSounds like Richistan by Robert Frank
- hilux 3y agoI don't know exactly how much money my friends and relatives have, but I suspect that several are in the second group, and none inherited that wealth. A book written in the 2000s may pre-date much of Silicon Valley wealth creation.
- demondemidi 3y agoAugust of 2000 is right when the first round of paper millionaires suddenly weren't. I was there with the rest of my peers looking at our options sheets going "damn... almost."
- ChainOfFools 3y ago> The third group is absolutely cuckoo bananas. Once you cross the into the near-billion/billion range, you live in a bizarre fantasy world curated to your every whim. Whenever I need a dismal reality check I remind myself that in our country, the people who for the most part can least afford to throw hard earned money into a fire have been habituated to do so gladly, willingly and regularly in a roughly weekly sacraficial ritual which has the effect of minting a new member of the class such as you mentioned above, from scratch, six to eight times a year. These people, usually from backgrounds not exactly experienced in managing such sums, promptly (on the advice of lawyers) vanish from the face of the Earth for all intents and purposes, except for the generation of another pulse of trashy Instagram bougie bragging by various second and third order beneficiaries of this sudden transfer of wealth.
- demondemidi 3y agoYou’ve got skill with words.