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" I eventually got £60 off the miserable excuse for a cunt who had his new Aston Martin parked on the carpark directly outside the window. " Why does owning an
by pgrote 11y ago
" I eventually got £60 off the miserable excuse for a cunt who had his new Aston Martin parked on the carpark directly outside the window. "
Why does owning an Aston Martin make someone a cunt? I am American and unfamiliar with British cars.
- mplewis 11y agoThey're $80,000 cars. Having one means you spent $80,000 on a vehicle.
- akerl_ 11y agoDo British cars not support leases or loans? It seems odd to look out the window at the car park and think you can judge somebody's whole financial situation, and from that extrapolate how they should handle other peoples' money.
- irishcoffee 11y agoIf he financed the whole car, hes paying ~ $1,400/month usd. Thats a mortgage payment for some people, and a months salary for for some people.
- brobinson 11y agoPeople don't think about how little a car can possibly cost. In San Francisco, it seems that every third car you see is a BMW 3 series. If I asked the majority of my friends/coworkers who know nothing about cars what they thought about the owner's finances, they would state that that person is probably well-off. A used 3 series can be had for less than $15,000, around $12,000 if you get a much older one, less than the cost of a new, say, Mazda 3. The 2005 Ferrari F430 your boss drives may have cost as little as $100,000, and your boss may have financed part or most of it. Good credit + an above zero net worth will get you very nice finance terms. If you looked at the car alone, you might deduce that your boss is quite wealthy, but in reality their net worth could be less than $25,000. Even if you are into cars, a person's choice of vehicle is probably not going to give you any meaningful insight into their personal finances. Many people just like status symbols because they communicate how the person wants to be seen, not how they actually are. Flashing status symbols in front of people who can't or don't realize they could obtain them is uncouth, though.
- jackmaney 11y ago> The 2005 Ferrari F430 your boss drives may have cost as little as $100,000 Only $100K?! Holy fucknozzles, I'll take five of them! [eyeroll]
- brobinson 11y agoThat is about 1/3 of what its out-the-door price was at time of introduction. The $15,000 BMW 3 series is around 1/3-1/4 the original price, too. People generally assume brand new price = price that was paid by current owner. This contributes to the "flashy car = very wealthy" outlook, despite it not always being the case.
- jackmaney 11y agoWell, $15K for a BMW? I'll take ten!!!1! [eyes nearly roll out of head]
- simoncion 11y agoI guess you've never actually priced a car? Low end for okay new cars is $10->30k. Most BMWs are quite nice, reliable cars with low maintenance costs. Acquiring a used one for the price of a new lesser car is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. Now, if you're snarking at spending $15k on something, I'm not sure what I can tell you. If you've never spent $15k or more on something in a year, I guess you've owned neither a vehicle nor a house, and don't rent in a highly desirable part of a metropolitan area.
- roel_v 11y ago"Most BMWs are quite nice, reliable cars with low maintenance costs." I like mine and it's reliable, but 'low maintenance costs', that I wouldn't say...
- jackmaney 11y ago> I guess you've never actually priced a car? Your guess is absolutely incorrect. The difference is that I don't consider $15K to be chump change. By all means, though, do continue your condescending snobbery. It just makes everyone around you look all the better.
- philwelch 11y agoIt's a conspicuous display of wealth either way; people can and do lease luxury cars, but only if they're trying to look richer than they are, which is still a cunt move.
- akerl_ 11y agoObvious troll is obvious.
- EliRivers 11y agoI knew a guy who leased a nice car. Every couple of years he changed it. Sometimes he liked to run a Porsche, once he had some kind of Audi. One summer he got a hankering for a convertible. Anyway, the point of this is twofold; firstly, he leased luxury cars because he really liked them but knew he'd want to swap models a lot, and to protect himself against the day he knew was coming that he would need to just stop (which happened when he got a mortgage; lease cancelled, outgoings on a car dropped to zero - ironically, given that the house he bought cost a cool million in a London suburb, I suspect he actually could easily just buy a luxury car, but he prefers to dump the money into the mortgage). The second part of the point here is that you're ignorant, unimaginative and small-minded.
- philwelch 11y agoDid you friend lay off a bunch of people making minimum wage while his luxury car was parked right in front of the workplace? If not, then it's not actually comparable.
- dang 11y ago> you're ignorant, unimaginative and small-minded I'm sure you know that personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News. Please don't do this.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- TylerE 11y agoWay more than that. The current cheapest model, with UK fees and taxes, at today's exchange rate, is $134,860. If you want one with a V-12 (Which, if you're buying an Aston you do), you're looking at $200k, minimum.
- ascendantlogic 11y agoMaybe a used V8 model from 6-8 years ago. New ones go in the mid 100's to start.
- jblow 11y agoI drive an expensive car. I've also put 40x the cost of the car into a company in order to pay people their salaries. The expensive car barely registers as noise on this budget. If I had to lay people off, that would still be true.
- roel_v 11y agoSomeone who's never run a business can't understand that. I mean, they can 'realize', at a rational level; but they can never understand. Just like I can never understand what it's like to be a single dad (or mom, although that'd be physically impossible for me...) working a minimum wage job or whatever. (I guess this opens me up to be jumped upon with 'cry me a river, being a single parent is much harder than having a business' or whatever, which I have no interest discussing or grading; my point is that some (most?) things cannot be understood until one has lived them)
- AtmaScout 11y agoProbably the combination of the price of the car and no severance/ bar money, in this case.
- UberMouse 11y agoAston Martins are expensive, it's just a way to show the guy had a lot of money and he still had to pry the £60 out of his hands.
- philbarr 11y agoOwning an Aston Martin does not necessarily make one a cunt. Laying people off who are on minimum wage with little more than a sorry whilst having your fancy car on full display outside the window does, however.
- shawndumas 11y agocan we stop using that word? please and thanks.
- ascendantlogic 11y agoSo this is legitimately interesting. I know that word has a very strong negative connotation in some parts of the world (US), but other parts of the world don't really seem to treat it as more than just another four letter word. I'm not commenting either way on my own feelings regarding the word, just being fascinated at (very small) culture clashes online.
- donovanr 11y agoI don't mind profanity at all per se, but the tacit misogyny of that one does bum me out. I'm from the US, if it matters.
- taneq 11y agoYeah, using a crude name for a specific gender's genitalia as a pejorative is a bit of a dick move.
- shawndumas 11y agoThere is a profound difference between a powerful contingency using the genitalia of a less represented one as a curse and vice versa.
- aaronem 11y agoUnless it's "dick" or a close equivalent, which no one minds in the same way. I wonder why that is.
- irishcoffee 11y agoOwning an expensive car doesn't make one a cunt. Displaying wealth and hesitating to make one nice, small monetary gesture to people who you just laid off, this might make people think of that person as a bit cunty.
- ascendantlogic 11y agoIt's a very expensive car and the sentiment here is that the person had no empathy at all. Drove up in a car that cost as much as people's houses and fired a bunch of people without any thought beyond just the dollars saved (at least that's the impression I'm getting from the story).
- ascendantlogic 11y agoI wouldn't go so far as to call one of my former bosses a "cunt" but he owned a Porsche 911 and would park in the best spot all the time. Hearing him talk about how there was no budget for raises while seeing his $100k car outside was definitely a bit of cognitive dissonance. I know it's his company and it's not a charity, etc etc, but the impact of being told you can't have more money despite the job you're doing while seeing the fact that the person telling you this makes a LOT more than you definitely stirs up some emotions. They may not be entirely rational, but they're definitely real.
- ascendantlogic 11y agoThis is why if I ever own my own company I may just get something like a Ford Escape to drive to and from work and keep the toys at home.
- Killswitch 11y agoOr maybe not a be a cunt of a boss and give a little shit about the people who work for you... I mean, you expect them to give a shit about their job right? Mutual benefit. Care about your employee, they'll most likely care more about you and the job and not run off when stuff starts going bad. What I would have personally done in the situation would be to sell anything I had that I didn't need, to keep the company afloat, and my employees paid, because I know if we can weather it, it'll pay off in the end. But a lot of people are assholes and don't give a shit about their employees... And that's why they have a revolving door and churn through employees like no tomorrow.
- ascendantlogic 11y agoI feel like you're yelling at me over a hypothetical situation that hasn't occurred yet.
- roel_v 11y agoWelcome to the internet :)