If it’s not a luxury, what is it? A necessity? An investment? An uncancelled term in the Matrix?
I’m old, and I have learned that things mean less and less as you get older. I fact I’m trying to get rid of things now. It’s amazing as to what one accumulates over a long lifetime.
If there is one thing I would buy irresponsibly, it would be tea. The finest and freshest DanCong teas, the ripest Sheng PuErh, and Rock Oolongs. And I would drink them everyday while listening to the sound of the loons in the early mornings.
Or maybe a real vacation somewhere. Me and Grandma haven’t ever taken a vacation in over 40 years. She would love that I think.
I’ve actually become more materialistic, but in a “I want more tools so I can learn more skills and do more things” sort of way.
I want to brew my own beer and make my own cheese. Experience tells me I enjoy things I make with my hands much much more than when I buy them.
I used to brew years ago. I come from a long line of beer brewers, even before it was legal in my state. Look up Rocky Raccoons honeyed Lager some day. I quit because my wife was diagnosed with celiac, and we could no longer drink it together. Kind of took the fun out of brewing for me. I smoke pounds of bacon and such now. And I still try and build a new model steam engine every winter when I’m not ice fishing.
Hobbies are a good thing. They keep your mind sharp and your hands functional.
I too want to make cheese! It’s exciting! And at the end I might have cheese!!
I got into wine making in the past 2 years and it is consuming me. I hardly drink any myself but I love tweaking the recipe and giving it away.
Yes yes yes to the tea!
Also good tea sets in a variety of forms. I have a teeny set for travel, large set for hotels and where I have luggage to carry it around, and I want to eventually get a full GongFu tea table with integrated drain and kettle filling station.
What I love about it is it’s really cheap. The most expensive tea I have is $4 per session and it’s delicious 😋
I tried Gong Fu, but it’s not for me. My personality is wrong for it. Too much action and not enough stillness I guess. So I brew Grandpa style. I’m jelly of you! And there are all kinds of decent and good teas that won’t break the bank. And half the fun is looking for them.
Remember: Drink the tea you like the way you like it!
I just went through a big purge of stuff a few years ago. At first it was difficult to let go of the I-may-need-it-someday thoughts about things I haven’t used or seen in 5+ years. Then it occurred to me that if I do need this thing I can always buy it later. It became much easier to donate most of the stuff. And honestly, today I couldn’t even tell you what I got rid of, which tells me how unimportant it really was in my life.
And it was so liberating wasn’t it!
We’re just barely over 40 and are taking stock over the massive quantity of things we’ve built up. We have a ton of stuff from previous times in our lives that still work, but we haven’t used in 5, or even 10, years. Some examples are easier, like college text books. Others are a bit more fraught like my original PlayStation, Dreamcast, and Xbox that all still work, but just aren’t getting used.
It’s amazing isn’t it. The rule I try, (try is the operative here), to live by is if I haven’t used it in over a year, get rid of it. It’s often hard to follow on though.
Completely agree. A decent amount of the clutter is aspirational. The kids will totally want to play my old consoles and not spend all their time on our PS5! That hasn’t really panned out and I’m coming to terms with reality.
On the good news side, we’re going to have to get everything out of our basement to replace the floor. We’re going to be very choosey regarding what goes back down.
Kids have a kaleidoscope of ever-changing interests that often aren’t the same as mommy’s and daddies. I highly recommend encouraging those quick changes of course.
I’m selling everything right now, too. I’m over stuff.
I’m old, and I have learned that things mean less and less as you get older.
I was gonna agree with you because at first I thought you just meant like words haha.
Nothing means anything, people just say make sounds with their mouth and the dictionary is useless. But yeah physical things also, we’re all flesh and bones, just cherish that while you can, seen enough shiny pretty things in my life that im over them.
A house, but with little slots in walls every few meters hiding over 100 watt power delivery usb c sockets
If the topic really is “a luxury I can’t live without,” then quality coffee is a great example, and a private plane is a profoundly bad example.
It’s so shockingly wrong that it’s hard to imagine it’s not just a bit that they worked out ahead of time.
The rich will claim you’re driving them to abject poverty if you tax them into only having a million dollars.
There are no good billionaires
My bare minimum standard for calling a person “rich” is whether they can live in luxury purely on the passive income from their investments. By that standard, a person with only a million dollars would not be rich. You probably need more like 10 million.
I agree one million isn’t abject poverty, but it would be a giant change in lifestyle. They’d either have to give up on most luxuries and live somewhere cheap, or they’d have to actually work for money.
6% interest in 10million is 600k plenty to live on unless you have multiple houses, personal cruise ships or private jets.
A safe withdrawal rate on funds invested is usually 3-4%, not 6%.
Not that $300k isn’t more than sufficient for a high quality lifestyle. Your point is more than valid.
Where are you getting 6%?
Historical average of the stock market, who the fucking knows now. I get shit because I’m not saving at the moment.
I’m not sure you’re trying to say that I did, but I didn’t mean that 10 million was the minimum needed to say a person is rich.
I was saying my standard for rich was in the neighborhood of 10 million, compared to 1 million. If you have 1 million, your 6% would be 60k, but you don’t get interest on your house where you’re living, so if you purchased a house in today’s market that might be 250k, and now you’re down to 45k. Certainly not a salary where you can live in luxury.
A house for 250k? Lucky!!
About $2million is enough for a trust fund one can live relatively comfortably on. $10million and you can live in excess indefinitely.
Like, sorta, but also no. “Most luxuries” and “live somewhere cheap” are both insane things to say, too.
I know what you’re trying to get at, and I get it, but to say that someone who can still drive any car they want, live pretty much wherever except for some very specific places, get into whatever niche hobby their heart desires, and never needs to fear unemployment is not rich is just silly. I also said “tax them”, which means they’d still have everything else they currently own and could make money on that stuff, too.
A person with a million dollars is a person without any meaningful restriction on their life.
Edit: Goddamn, a lot of ya’ll really upset about this comment. Too bad, learn to read, and, failing that, find a high bridge over deep water ‘cause dealing with ya’ll just ain’t worth it.
You said “tax them into only having a million dollars,” which I cannot reconcile with your latest statement “they’d still have everything else they currently own and could make money on that stuff, too.”
If you are talking purely about how much cash they have in the bank, then every person would just buy stocks until they had under that amount. Almost nothing would change.
FWIW, stocks also need to be taxed a lot more than they are, or sharply limited in their trading potential and/or as compensation. Compensation in stock is how most of the billionaires of today amass their wealth, and it needs to stop being the loophole that it is.
Isn’t a million like the price of a house these days? I get that we’re all poor and we’re never gonna own property, but the price of a house isn’t enough to live in luxury for life.
Well, if I had a million right now and stopped working, and everyone in my family would not work either anymore, that million will not last us even until my retirement age, that’s also if the inflation is 0% until then. A million 50 years ago would probably be enough for that, but not now
To be fair, a million dollars in some parts of the US gets you a decent size house and one car. You still need to work every day. You can still be bankrupt by medical debt.
Contrast that with actual rich folks who can burn a million dollars in a bon fire every morning and still have more money at the end of the year than they started with.
Point is: The former are more comfortable than many. The latter are a literal cancer on society that must be addressed.
I know man but with a million bucks you can choose to move somewhere cheap to live. The rest of us can’t do that because there aren’t good jobs in the cheap areas. There’s plenty of beautiful homes for $200k in my state but there all in the middle of nowhere 3 hour drive from the closest city that has a hospital.
Okay, let’s say I move somewhere cheap. Now I have a million bucks.
I can’t retire. Still got to work. Still need health insurance. Still at the whims of the fate of the universe.
Is it more comfortable? Sure! I’d love that. But these people aren’t the problem. The yacht with the garage for a smaller yacht in it is the problem.
I mean yeah it’s cheap so you can retire there lol, but those people are a problem because they’re still trying to become billionaires and also they’re the soldiers of the billionaires. For $100k a year theyre the ones denying good insurance claims and areesting peaceful protestors, Bezos and Musk themselves don’t hurt society with their own bodies, they pay upper middle class folk to do that for them. Then they retire with a mil or two in the bank and try to blame the people they agreed to work for their whole lives.
I guess it depends what people consider the “millionaire lifestyle”, which must go up with inflation like everything else.
a decent size house and a car ≠ abject poverty
the rich
abject poverty
You realize that there are options in-between those, right?
Yes i do and i totally agree with your point, just pointing at a flaw in your reasoning
Oh, I’m still not seeing it. Sorry.
The top 1% are cancer on society. Quite literally. They consume resources and expand to the point where it kills the host.
People in the top 20%, excluding the 1%, aren’t like that. They’re surely more comfortable. They surely have better opportunity. But their existence doesn’t threaten the rest of us.
The comment you replied to states “The rich will claim you’re driving them to abject poverty if you tax them into only having a million dollars.”
You say people with $1.000.000 still have to work, they are not “actual rich folk”. But that’s not relevant to the comment you reply to, since them “having to work all day” and them still being able to be “bankrupt by medical debt” still doesn’t equal the abject poverty the rich claim they’ll be driven to. In other words, it doesn’t matter that people with one million are not in the same position as the people with ten million, because neither would be living in abject poverty; ergo my comment.
Larry King is a well known numbskull, he would literally avoid researching his interviewees before because he thought it made for better interviews, but it ended up just making him look ignorant
That was one thing I did like the concept of, but it is terrible on TV.
I like it because it’s like being at a party and just chatting, only to discover you’re talking to a world famous heart surgeon, but they’re too humble to explain it all. It may also be refreshing to them, as they’re so used to getting all the attention and here is this person interviewing them who isn’t a stan.
Larry though kind of has a chip on his shoulder. He is always bragging and name dropping. Which makes him intolerable to watch.
The fact that we can buy quality coffee, spices, and salt for such cheap prices would be unfathomably luxurious to almost every other person from human history pre-1910.
Imagine the richest king from 1700 watching you throw away mushy brown bananas. He’d think you were loaded.
“Sure, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system, and public health … what have the Romans ever done for us?”
Dont forget access to light 24hours a day, pumped water and sanitation plumbing. Those where more than luxuries when my grandparents were kids
I remind myself of these things you and the person above you said every day. Plus, I would be dead without soap and antibiotics. I’m richer than most royalty throughout history and I’m on disability. I could be homeless and dead inside a month, I’m good right now, but there’s zero security. I tell myself I could be a Queen from back in the day living with an execution writ over her head if something goes wrong she has no control over, and try to handle things with as much grace as I can. The gratitude for all these things I can take for granted is profound though. Air conditioning is just amazing!
I can also make my sunday breakfast everywhere. It’s still a luxury. What silly reasoning.
I love asking people what their first irresponsible purchase would be if they won the lottery.
Everyone has the day dream of paying off medical debt, your parent’s mortgage, new car, fun vacation. But that’s all responsible. I want to know what the unhinged thing you probably shouldn’t do is. My favorite answer was Baja Blast on tap bedside.
An auto shop.
Just spend my days fixing cars, I’d have a few dozen and just restore em. Nothing crazy, I’d have things like a pristine geo metro. All the cheap cars that I just enjoy. I’d sell em, but I like keeping old stuff working.
Or I’d spend a year and go to every Cubs game. Just follow em around the country.
Fully fitted set of 15th c. style gothic plate armour and accompanying zweihander.
Custom made modern, or actually reconditioned ancient?
Idk im probably autistic but like i just wouldn’t buy anything irresponsible lmao like i dont get the question i guess, if you really enjoy something it’s not irresponsible and you’re rich as hell so go for it.
if you really enjoy something it’s not irresponsible and you’re rich as hell so go for it
That’s how lottery winners lose everything very fast.
Not quite, they buy crazy expensive things that don’t actually make them happy – that’s the irresponsible part. Spend thousands on bottle service at the club wake up in the morning feeling empty and used and find the next socially encouraged stupid thing to soend money on. One fancy sports car won’t affect a lottery winner’s finances much, but they buy one lose the novelty of it after a few days and then they end up with 12 sports cars and now they’re actually at risk of going broke. But if they spent that money on something that actually made them happy, not just what society says is supposed to be fun, they wouldn’t become spending addicts. They’d get plenty of happiness and usage out of those things and not perpetually search for the next high.
Oh god that’s the sort of question I would have to ask if they really want to know the TRUE first thing or the first thing appropriate for general audiences lol.
Two chicks at the same time.
You don’t need a million bucks to do two chicks at the same time.
Most of the times I’ve done that I was broke
I do for the kinda chicks that would double up on a guy like me.
Fuckin A
Hit up Ren Fairs?
Hi it’s me. I’d like to know more about topic.
Renaissance Fairs seem to be great places for ppl who are unique to meet and get a date, just from what female friends I have who go to them have told me
RenFaire/SCA events are amazing for that because, in my experience, you can meet a lot of kinky people if you know the right people/group or can pass a vibe check with rhem
Can confirm. It’s actually free to vibe with people.
I will confess: I bought two. I did not need two. The second one was not hunger. It was gratitude, and it was delicious.
I want to hire a hairdresser that washes my hair and does the head massage every morning. Everyday my head shall be rubbed.
Buy areas next to churches and put sex shops in them. Although, now that I think about it, those places would probably rake in cash, like 70% of pastors are massive perverts with too much money
Make sure you donate all profits to charity, and advertise as such.
I think if I was a perverted pastor and wanted lots of freaky sex stuff but felt I needed to keep that aspect of myself hidden for appearance’s sake, I’d hardly pop in to a sex shop right next to my church where members of the community would see me and where the owners of the shop, who almost certainly set up that shop in that spot specifically to be provocative, could also see me.
I’ve never been interested in Vegas. But recently I found out there’s a place near Vegas that lets you rent a tank and then you can run over cars and I think you can shoot it too. And you can shoot a real minigun! To shoot that gun for a minute is like $14,000. So I take a few of my friends to go do that,
To shoot it for 10 seconds is about $400. I go there myself to shoot the ww1 guns.
Buy a large tract of land and do my best Hobbit impression
A rich weirdo did that in Knoxville, but as an overpriced themed resort.
Neat!
I remember lewis black said ball scrubber for unhinged thing.
10 acre quail farm
Realistically irresponsible or insanely irresponsible?
Realistically irresponsible: I’d buy a huge piece of land out in the woods. Build a house, add a 1 acre pond with an island in the middle where I could go and sit and read.
Insanely irresponsible: I’ve often wondered how much it would cost to live full time at Disney World. Full deal, Park passes, meal plan, etc.
Understanding that they’d make you change rooms every month to avoid letting you have tenant rights. That’s assuming the lottery winnings aren’t enough to just buy enough stock to control the company.
I’d strongly recommend you change the pond to a river. Just cleaner, especially if you buy all the way upstream too.
I’ve also wondered how much it would cost to live fulltime in my worst nightmare’s version of hell.
You do you.
You would read up until the mosquitos and spiders came at you from that swamp. Then the frogs would start their croaking and splashing. Followed by the chorus of crickets and cicadas. And more likely some dick blue Jay would show up and yell at you for no good fucking reason, with its ugly ass noise it makes, like can you even call that a bird call?
Well, the mosquitos aren’t that big a deal. The fish and the frogs take care of them. I don’t mind the noise of the frogs, crickets, or cicadas. Their sounds are nowhere near as bad as the noise people make.
I already make ponds on the property I have. I just dream of a larger one.
Rescue 99 Dalmatians so I can have the Dalmatian Plantation I was promised at the end of 101 Dalmatians.
I’d buy an abandoned old villa or chateau in Italy or France and rebuild it.
Pretty sure there are programs where you can just get a castle so long as you maintain it. Hell I think both Italy and France will pay you to do it for some of the remote ones.
Castles are relatively cheap to buy, at least compared to luxury villas. Sure, you can throw few millions in one if you wish, but I’ve seen listings around the internet for around 50k. But you’ll still likely need few millions for upkeep and repairs, regardless of purchase price.
I can’t say for Italy but in France it’s basically free indeed. Maintenance costs are high and the repairs must follow strict patrimony preservation rules with certified workers.
Do they pay for the renovation costs too, or is that where you’re actually spending all your money?
That is where you spend your money in practice. There is not enough state money to maintain all the castles. To be fair, there are a fuckton of them, even though our government is garbage, we can’t realistically justify to maintain all of them anyway.
Idk isn’t that admirable and not irresponsible at all lmao?
Buy a massive bowl of cocaine and dump my face in it
Omnitrack VR, and that stem cell clinic
I’d buy a tank or have one commissioned. Depends how much money I’d have from said lottery.
A full set of Brady’s drums! They’re the best drums in the world, they’re made of jarrah wood.
Danny Pudi is a gem
And the new DuckTales was a pretty good show.
Really good! An amazing example of how a reboot can respect its previous incarnations while elevating them to make an entirely new experience.
And creating a Disney Afternoon universe within the show was a fantastic bonus!
Did they ever come out with a movie?
Wtf. Larry, do you know how expensive really good coffee is? It’s like $20-30 USD for 12 oz / 340g of really good, independently-roasted stuff. That shit is not cheap.
Totally. I’m not rich at all, but I can afford good coffee. Still, I simply can’t justify the price.
Compared to private plane it is pennies.
Plus, you certainly can’t get good coffee anywhere. FFS, Larry! Is it your first day on Earth?
I can’t tell if Larry King just assumed that Danny is wealthy because he’s an actor, or if he was really so out of touch with reality that he didn’t realize there are people out there who can’t afford private jets.
Larry King was that out of touch. His circle of friends owned media conglomerates and had private islands. His guests typically did too or some flavor of access to the mechanisms of wealth. It was strange seeing a voice actor get interviewed by the biggest softball interviewer but it gave us some gems.
He’s not just a voice actor, he was on a successful live action NBC sitcom and then on a successful live action Appletv show.
Not when this interview took place as far as I’m aware
I think it was after community and before mythic quest
Really? The color grading makes it feel so much older lol
Yeah looks like it was April 3 2014, community ended in 2015 and mythic quest started in 2020. Larry Kings audience would have preferred an older looking color grading I’d imagine
Ducktales was only 2017 tho, so it’s at least that,.
At the very least, Community started in 2009, eight years before Ducktales.
For some reason Ducktales sounded like something from the 90s lol.
There was a Ducktales show in the 90s, but Danny Pudi was on the reboot in 2017. So you’re not wrong.
There was a 90s show, but Dani Pudi was on the 2010s reboot
¿Porque no los dos?
Yeah, this better because Danny tried again with nice running socks which also fits the description before Larry came in with the private plane. He should’ve realized his question was not what he thought it was at that point lol
I find myself in agreement with those luxuries. Nice socks, good coffee, and being able to get whatever food I want at the grocery do signal to me that we are well off. I can remember having only a bag of potatoes and 5 days till payday after paying rent & power & water, and our neighbor bringing us some vegetables he dumpster dived because he was worried about us, so comparatively rich for sure, but also I would argue that not having to worry about the household budget because there is enough each month is also objectively well off, and those things are luxurious.
I am sitting here enjoying some good locally roasted coffee right now in fact and feeling so grateful for the position we are in at this moment. Will it last? Who knows? Maybe not. But enjoying it while we have it.
Rich? It depends on how you measure it I guess. Compared to the median maybe? But neither of us could quit working and survive.
Nice running socks are awesome.
And expensive.
Danny was talking about SmartWool socks, and those for everyday would be a extravagant luxury.
I like to wear thick work socks
Hear me out: wool toe socks
They’re great
Isn’t Danny a runner? So he understands why they’re such a luxury.
Hahaha yep, WAY better in video form 😂 I acually L’ed OL instead of S’ed OMN (snorted out my nose?)
Great comedian, loved him as Ahmed
But not shitty-youtube. It sucks since googol bought it.
As long as they can afford it, anyone can book a private jet with little to no effort. The same cannot be said about finding a proper good cup of coffee.
Considering most everyone I’ve ever met drowns their coffee in HFCS “flavored creamer”, I doubt many people know what a good cup of coffee tastes like. Even those so-called gourmet shops can’t do a decent cup of coffee. 🤮
plenty people do, plenty of people dont
Indeed. I’ve been kind of ruined by the coffee culture where I’m at. I will judge a town/city/village based on their espresso, and judge them hard. 😆
Like SoCal. What the hell SoCal?
You should totally try Turkish espresso /s
I have. 🙂 It’s different. Not bad.
Hence why I led with “most everyone I’ve met”.
It is a very regional thing. Creamer might just be popular where you are. In Hong Kong, for example, it’s not uncommon to mix your coffee with white tea.
But good is relative, since it’s a matter of personal taste. Some people like the taste of powdered instant coffee, others may not.
But good is relative, since it’s a matter of personal taste.
Well, i do think there’s a level of intelligence involved so that you can recognize something is good or bad despite your personal preferences. Like i can taste a high quality roast coffee with strong floral notes, and I just don’t like floral notes on my coffee it doesn’t sit right on my tongue, but i can still appreciate it’s a very high quality coffee and recommend it to my friend who loves those kinds of coffee.
At the same time, i have a weakness for mcdonalds coffee black, it’s not good, it’s bad, but for some reason i drink it it reminds me of childhood and i feel good.
And i dont think that’s a lot to ask of human intelligence, like you dont even need 100 IQ to just understand the concept that there are high quality and low quality coffees, but any individual can prefer the taste of any of them.
A-woo-oo.
Everyday they’re out there making Duck Tales, A-woo-oo!
