Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2016/10/19/rich-people-can-afford-to-buy.html
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More groundbreaking revelations from the N. S. Sherlock institute. I think anyone could have told you that. Rich people don’t do shift work, either.
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No shit. They also have more time to take care of themselves. You too could look like a Hollywood star if you could afford someone to make you get your ass out of bed and work out for 4 hrs + a day, 5 days a week.
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They also don’t have a family of four stuffed into a tiny one bedroom apartment with paper thin ceiling and walls, don’t have to wake up themselves in the middle of the night with their children, and have a decent bed they can replace whenever they want. They have someone to prepare their meals, have all the best sleeping meds, can take sick days whenever they want and can actually address aches, pains and other things that keep people up at night. They have only one job, if that, and never have to lay awake at night wondering about getting fired or making ends meet, as getting fired actually means a windfall blowing their golden parachute toward a pile of stock options. There’s a lot of reasons before digging all the way down to “they have better GPS…”
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Poor commuters in the study leave their homes later, and return later, than rich ones
Shouldn’t that be “leave their homes earlier”?
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Not necessarily. I’m pretty sure this is a reference to shift work.
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and still some manager and politician types are proud to “function on only 4 hours of sleep per day”.
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I’m a student. I’m not supposed to sleep for the next six years and I’m pretty resigned to it. But the latest I’ve been allowed to come in to most of my jobs was 9AM. 5AM was more typical. Fun fact: I no longer use an alarm clock unless I know I need to wake up in three hours or less.
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One of them is running for President right now, although I suspect cocaine affects his sleep cycle at least a little bit.
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I am reminded of this passage from John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar:
One of the first concomitants of affluence is a rapid raising of privacy-standards: someone from a comparatively low-income background has to accept that his childhood will be lived in a crowded, busy environment – in contemporary household terms, one room of the dwelling (if it has more than one) will be a family-room and that’s the centre of operations. Someone from a more prosperous home, however, will take it for granted from about the time he learns to read that there’s a room where he can go in and shut the door against the world.
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Um, exactly what should wealth allow you to buy, if not a more comfortable life?
And before anyone takes an “eat the rich” attitude, from the quoted section of the article, being able to afford a private vehicle would be one indication of being rich (which it is).
However, if you actually look at the data:
__________class 1___class 2___class 3___class 4___class 5___class 6 (min) AM___35.22_____32.56_____29.26_____25.70_____24.71_____25.92 ______MD___28.14_____26.30_____25.49_____23.68_____22.52_____24.16 ______PM___39.97_____35.33_____31.96_____27.07_____26.19_____27.73
it appears that being in class 6, the rich Columbians (best guess, annual income around $30K) saves you about 10 minutes off your commute each way compared to the poorest (class 1). Not trivial, but not quite what the article leads one to believe.
So, agreed that ethically speaking, most of us elites earning more then $35K US should probably have most of our obscenely large income taxed away instead of wasting it on frills like a (not necessarily new) vehicle, but I’d like Cory to state that upfront rather than implying it in a fashion that allows most of us to not notice that we are the fat-cat rich who are the target of his ire.
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