Hi, you may have missed my last couple of posts in this thread, such as this one!
Yes, it can cost $1K+ all told. Yes, your average American can’t afford to drop that casually.
There are plenty of Americans who can and do save that much, over the course of a year, to go to a con, or a music festival, or the beach, or just do the rounds visiting relatives. When I worked at Speedway, one my coworkers went on a week-long ocean cruise every summer. A gas station cashier. Yes, he scrimped for it all year, and he had a shitty apartment and no one to support, but it was possible.
And:
If you want to say that being able to save enough for a yearly vacation makes you a rich fucking pig…well, that could be a coherent position, in the modern world. A lot of Americans can’t do that, and the number is rising, and that sucks. Maybe we should all be more aware of that.
The reason I don’t buy that argument from anyone here is that BoingBoing loves comic cons. Every year there’s a bundle of posts about Cory’s panel or Adam Savage’s costume or just all the cool shit that people are dressing up as this time. And nobody ever complains that it’s just a bunch of disgustingly rich hedonists throwing themselves a party.
If you can explain to me why dropping a couple grand to camp out in the desert, party with people wearing weird homemade costumes, and gawk at weird art installations is more Richie Rich than dropping a couple grand to stay at a nice hotel in San Diego, party with people wearing weird homemade costumes, and gawk at corporate advertising panels, I’ll concede the point.
