Three Levels of Wealth - <AUTHOR> http://awealthofcommonsense.com/2018/08/the-3-levels-of-wealth/ <comment><USER2> It's interesting the categories the author chose, as I had a similar tone with my mother when I finally started making good money.

I grew up in a divorced household. On one side I had a father and step mother who made large amounts of cash in a relatively inexpensive area. They vacationed regularly to Hawaii and Las Vegas, and prioritized spending money on themselves.

My mother and step father combined to earn around $30k, were hyper frugal, and stressed about every expense. Any expense whatsoever was agony, and they made sure my sister and I understood their inability to buy things on a whim.

So, as I bounced between houses each week, I yo-yo'd between borderline poverty (although they made it work) and quite high wealth.

When I hit my mid to late 20s, my wife and I hit a point where we had no debt. Could go out anytime. Could rent any reasonable home in our area (couldn't buy because we didn't have that kind of down payment money), and traveled a few times a year throughout the world. When I contrasted this against how I felt after undergrad, while in grad school, where I was heavy in debt, had no car, and felt constant financial stress, it's remarkable.

As I've continued to grow older, I've now come to realize it wasn't the travel, eating out, or the things I could buy that helped me to be less stressed, it was the lack of burden of worrying about how I would pay for X, Y, or Z. I make way less money now as I run my own startup, don't go out that much as I do all the cooking, don't travel that much because we can't afford it, yet I carry the same lack of stress and worry as I did years back.

Part of why I'd like to see universal, free at the point of delivery, health care in the United States is for this very reason. I've first hand experienced and witnessed the choice of not going to get needed medical care because of the financial burden. UBI is still highly experimental, and many other wealth normalization techniques have severe downsides that potentially outweigh the benefits; however, universal health care has enough clear data points of success in the rest of the world, from my vantage point, that maybe that can be the "level 0" of wealth in the United States.

<comment><USER3> My wife and I are about 30. We still have ~50k in student loan debt. We make enough that her entire paycheck goes towards our student loans and we should have it paid off in a year and a half or so.

However, we want to have children and we don't want our debt to impact their lives. How sad is it that American workers can't afford to have children because of how expensive our education is? Imagine if one of us had medical debt...

College education and healthcare /should/ be free for all in this country(USA). They are fundamental to the social mobility and freedom that our founding principles were created for.

<comment><USER4> >College education and healthcare /should/ be free for all in this country(USA). They are fundamental to the social mobility and freedom that our founding principles were created for.

We had this. It was called high school. But then standards were lowered so it was no longer a good filter for intelligence and conscientiousness. Standards were lowered to increase "social mobility." This did not work. Now college performs the same function. But the average IQ of college graduates will continue to decline as the percent of the population that graduates approaches 100, and so masters degrees are becoming increasingly common.

Will this, too, increase social mobility?

Social mobility in a meritocratic society is hard given the heritability of valuable mental traits. If we keep sacrificing our schools on the alter of social mobility, we will end up burning the first 30 years of or lives getting Phds in mopping floors.

<comment><USER5> First of all, your post shows that you think that education or going through a school is a social signal rather than an educational experience. I disagree with this.

Secondly, you seem to imply that no improvement in the education level has happened because of the normalization of high-school education. I disagree with this also. I have no numbers to back this up, but by looking at the world around us, at all the inventions and the added complexity and our increasing ability to handle complex systems, I think we have become smarter.

Thirdly, maybe social mobility was hijacked by some rhetoric or became a symbol for this or that group. But at its core, social mobility means allowing people to rise to their potential and not stifling them. How can we be "sacrificing our schools on the alter of social mobility" when social mobility is supposed to be _more_ meritocratic, not less?

<comment><USER6> To your first point, you may be interested to read Bryan Caplan's "The Case Against Education." He makes a very strong, quantitative case that education is primarily a signaling device.

For instance the difference between 3.5 years without graduating and 4 years + graduation is immense, whereas in a non-signaling model, they should have very similar outcomes.

<comment><USER7> There is a huge selection bias in these groups. 3.5 years without graduating is likely to be students who are doing poorly since if you were a top tier student you aren't going to quit 0.5 years off from a degree under most circumstances. People quitting university after 3.5 years most often have a number of failed courses and aren't 0.5 years from a degree.

<comment><USER8> Another example then: college students forget a lot they learn inside of a few years. The only thing they hold for a significant amount of time is the prerequisite knowledge they needed to learn everything else they were taught. This applies especially to subjects largely unrelated to their degree / interests.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Level 0 is missing here. They want to know if they can afford rent AND food this month. They might be able to squeak by if nothing goes wrong. But something always does. Whether the 12 year old car needs an expensive repair or someone gets sick and misses work or even a parking ticket can leave them struggling to get by.

Also missing is level 4: I don't have to work to be at level 3 levels of comfort.

There's a tiny fraction who own significant wealth that are in a special level 5 or higher. "I don't care what _anything_ costs."

<comment><USER10> I don't know... all these levels are over complicating a simple concept. The way I look at wealth is binary: "Can I stop working today and maintain a lifestyle that I am comfortable with indefinitely?" Most people, even those who consider themselves well-off, cannot say yes to that question. People like to try to gauge whether they are middle class or upper middle class or upper lower middle class... whatever. There is no real defining characteristic. At the end of the day, most of us are N missed paychecks away from insolvency. N may be large but unless it's infinite, we are in the same bucket: our labor pays for our existence, not capital.

There are people who can just sit there collecting checks and their lifestyle is never in jeopardy, because of investment income. They're the only ones I'd consider truly wealthy.

<comment><USER11> Yep, people in the "upper-middle class" delude themselves into thinking they are in some special transition zone between the serfs and the aristocrats. A grasshopper is much larger than an ant, but neither are worthy of notice next to a bear.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> There's definitely another level of wealth there for the very few. Weird thought one day while dreaming, if I somehow managed to get a job where I cleared $1 million a week, it would still take me over 1500 years to attain the net worth of Warren Buffet. If I managed to up that and clear $1 million a day, I still wouldn't manage in my lifetime (224 years). That to me put in perspective the insanity of the wealth of the very rich.

<comment><USER13> If you made $52M a year, with 5% growth per year in some super conservative investment, you'd have Warren Buffet's wealth in 87 years

If you got 10% it would be 50 years

Warren Buffet is definitely impressive, but compounding capital is a huge benefit

(Ok ok I ignored taxes, inflation blah blah)

Edit: just because this is fun: at $365M a year, you get WB wealth in 50 years at 5% and 32 years at 10%

Edit2: if you take Berkshire Hathaway's historical annualized return (20.8%), compounded quarterly, starting with $52M and no additional capital after that, you get WB wealth in 36 years.

<comment><USER14> To be fair that would get you WB's present wealth. If Warren Buffet was still alive and investing just like you did, you would never catch up. This is one of the reasons social stratification can increase over time.

<comment><USER15> He's still alive....

<comment><USER16> The wording is a bit confusing, but I believe they are saying that it would take that long to catch up to Buffett's current wealth. If you assume his assets continue to grow at the same pace as yours, you will never catch up.

<comment><USER14> Yeah sorry, I was assuming he will die sometime in the next 50-87 years being discussed and his money will be donated to charity. So Hypothetically if he became immortal or decided to give all the money to his children. Since historically the rate of return on capital is higher than the growth in income the gap between people who inherit a lot of capital and wage earners tends to increase over time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I think about this very topic sometimes, but my levels are different. Mine are something like

1\. Paycheck to paycheck. Includes constant worry and frustration about living expenses and basic necessities. Any unexpected cost will lead to not being able to pay the bills. Money is on your mind 24/7, life in this category is hell. Very difficulty to escape this category once you fall into it.

2\. Able to afford living expenses with a little left over. I guess you'd call this middle class? Or maybe upper lower class. These people have an income that lets them pay their bills without worry, so they have a cushion of a few hundred/thousand dollars a month. These people don't experience stress over standard bills anymore, they are free to enjoy living life a bit fancy. Can go out to eat at good restaurants, can afford to do miscellaneous activities.

3\. Anything above #2 really. This is the bracket and beyond that has plenty of income in that expenses don't matter anymore. Stress about affording living expenses is non-existent.

<comment><USER18> I would disagree with 3 because there are many in 2 and 3 which can go to 1 just by losing their job and e.g. having one high medical bill (in the states at least).

So surely there must be differentiation on whether any given job or emergency can affect your standard of living significantly.

<comment><USER19> Medical bills aside (the US system is batshit!!) good financial planning should make going from 2 and 3 to 1 far less likely. Unfortunately many people don't bother to save significant backup funds while things are going well.

<comment><USER20> There's also divorce. Trust me, it can drop you down to 1 in a heartbeat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> The problem I have when discussing "wealth" is that it's almost always done in comparison to others at this time. For example, I'm "rich" or "poor" compared to the richest and poorest people around me today.

If we compared it with other people internationally, or even historically, we're _filthy_ rich at almost any level of the ladder.

<comment><USER22> That's a good point. I also don't like that these discussions of wealth are always accompanied by a discussion of income and then they end. Especially in an article where debt is featured so prominently. Significantly raising one's income and seeing it as the sole dividing factor between oneself and others becomes part of a false system of hope for many.

A saving habit _and_ reasonable living on one's income, no matter the level, will _often_ quickly result in the kind of savings that will pay for those big restaurant meals, if needed, or those vacations, if needed. My friends who are good savers tend to take vacations to really nice places without needing to spend a lot when they get there. So they have more money for the next vacation, etc.

There are people who are unfairly saddled with debt, to whom this doesn't really apply as readily, but it'd be nice if messages like "wow, sad, income levels make life so hard" could be accompanied by "but here's what many of you who are reading this can do at any level to feel on top of things." We are short-changing our children by not bundling that more realistic discussion with discussions of income.

<comment><USER23> That's an interesting comment. It made me think about having two different kinds of wealth: wealth enabling things and wealth freeing from problems. If you can do fancy things with careful planning, that's one thing. Doing fancy things without burdening yourself with complicated cost-benefit analysis is the other, and it's probably the latter that gives more freedom and the one the article talks about.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> Income is not wealth.

If prolonged inactivity will force a radical restriction in what you consume, you are not wealthy.

Many people with high incomes think they are wealthy because of their income. You are wealthy only if you have stored wealth.

See Picketty's "Capital in the 21st Century" for more about income distribution and wealth distribution.

<comment><USER25> Exactly. I think it's easier describe wealth in terms of time (yours and that of others'), not income.

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> This is pretty weird. I don't care how much flights and lodging costs, not because I can afford to do whatever I want, but because I simply don't take travel vacations very often. I can spend somewhat outlandishly on travel and not ruin my annual budget. On the other hand, there are things I do routinely that I have to be price sensitive about; for instance: I am price sensitive about parking fees. For that matter, despite its status as "wealth level 2", I am more price sensitive about restaurant meals than about travel.

<comment><USER27> Travel is highly variable and can get really expensive if you aren't super careful, even if you aren't really going all out. A two-week vacation for two to Europe, staying in the (not over the top) Four seasons, and going to reasonably nice-restaurants could easily cost $20k airfare +8K accomodation + $5K daily incidental. You have to be at different level of wealth to take a $33K vacation without worrying about how to pay for it. I don't have any friends at that level.

On the flip side, going out to dinner with friends, and discovering that you may be on the hook for $100, and not stressing about how you are going to pay for it, is withing reach of a lot more people. I have several friends who have reached that level.

I think the levels are pretty good. Though I would also add two levels of wealth that materially change people's happiness - L0 (Can I pay my bus fare, rent, groceries without stressing. L0 is very, very real). And also, L4 - which is no longer flying commercial. Being able to go where you want on your schedule, without ever having to walk through an Airport/TSA is, I have heard, a material change to personal happiness.

<comment><USER28> Absurd

You can just as easily spend $1500 a person for a two week vacation in Europe and enjoy essentially all the same things as if you're paying 10x as much.

$5K daily incidental, are you kidding me?

Don't fly business class unless your business is paying or you're on a honeymoon or something.

<comment><USER23> Offtopic, but: why would business actually pay for business class?

<comment><USER29> So that employees don't try to avoid critical business travel.

When Apple started flying engineers in business class to China, suddenly they got dramatically more likely to go to work out production issues rather than trying to convince management that the issues would work themselves out. A few million dollars in employee travel was immaterial to the increase in production reliability.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> These seem more like levels of income than wealth (hint, the three levels are not worrying about debt/dinner bills/vacation costs).

Wealth is the ability to generate such income levels passively (having control over your time).

<comment><USER31> Agreed, I spend about 95% of my earnings every month and dont worry about any of these. I live a privileged life yet I have only accumulated $80,000 in assets over the years which puts me in the lowest 40 to 59th percentile and below the average americans net worth of 100k.

<comment><USER32> > I spend about 95% of my earnings every month

> I live a privileged life yet I have only accumulated $80,000 in assets

Maybe you should save more? Even just spending 90% would make a huge difference and then you can continue to live a privileged life forever.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Here's another interesting breakdown based on net-worth:

[https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_i...](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/2s9u0s/what_do_insanely_wealthy_people_buy_that_ordinary/cnnmca8)

<comment><USER34> Ah, I'm glad someone else tracked this comment down. One of the most fascinating things I've ever read on reddit.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I strongly disagree with the proposition that the final level is "you don't care how much your vacations cost"\-- in fact I think it's downright ridiculous and a person would only stop there for lack of imagination or for modesty.

Because beyond those 3 levels is the world of "I can spend money to improve the lives of people around me, or to improve the world in general" e.g. starting foundations, making donations, seeing things created like hospitals or homes or new companies....all of these are things some people would like to do, and which require a level of wealth far beyond "I don't care what my vacation costs."

<comment><USER36> Sure, but in the context of lifestyle changes those are really the three major leaps. This is a paradigm that looks at what categories of stress are removed as your wealth increases, not how your raw capability to drive the means of production changes.

The distinctions laid out across these three tiers are both practical and relatable. Each step is another dimension of stress which subsumes the ones below it, which implies that eliminating one level also eliminates the level below it.

Level 1 means you have no debt. That already puts you well ahead of e.g. most Americans. It means you don't have to worry about your purchases in the past. Level 2 is a step beyond that, because it means you need not care about the cost of small luxuries in the present. And at level 3, you need not care about the size of large luxuries in the present.

The floor and utility of money increases categorically at each stage. Without debt, you can focus on "things" unencumbered. If you don't need to worry about the cost of restaurant bills, you can focus on "luxurious things". Vacations realistically cost thousands of dollars. If you don't need to worry about the cost of those, you can happily spend four or five figures on an "experience" that lasts perhaps a week to a month. And if you're not truly not caring for the cost of these things, at each step you can partake of the benefit many times in one year.

I concur with another commenter that you can formulate a step 4, which is "I don't need to work to enjoy step 3", but beyond that I think you're really splitting hairs when it comes to lifestyle changes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I typically thought of "wealthy" as discernible through a single question:

"Is the vast majority of the money you spend on a daily basis from capital, or wages?"

If capital, you're wealthy. If wages, you're not.

<comment><USER38> This used to work better than it does today due to the rise of very high salaries in the past 30 years. It used to be that very rich people didn't work. Now there are quite a few people who just get paid a ton. Though the question of whether that's properly understood as wages or capital gets blurry.

(Of course, if you work at a salary of $500,000 for a few years you start to accumulate capital pretty quickly, but it would take a lot of saving for investment income to get bigger than your salary.)

<comment><USER39> I'd argue that until you have that accumulated capital, you are not wealthy even if you may be living large.

<comment><USER37> Precisely. "Living paycheck-to-paycheck, but with bigger numbers." is not wealth.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I wish there were data that distinguished between top 1% by income and top 1% by wealth. Income inequality may be worth targeting in itself, but if the turnover of top-1% income earners is high it doesn't matter as much as if it's fixed. Similarly, if wealth is not being maintained generation after generation then concentration is not as important either.

<comment><USER24> Check out "Capital in the 21st Century" by Thomas Picketty. The picture is bleak, and it describes how the truly wealthy (top 1% of stored wealth) must self regulate or risk passing a tipping point.

And how they are failing to do so between 1980-2010, as modern conditions globally approach those of the French Revolution.

</comment></comment><comment><USER41> Other than focusing on caring about the price of restaurants or vacations, what about adding financial independence to the equation?

Somehow that is something that does not seem to be valued enough when it comes to this type of discussions.

Financial independence does not mean necessarily being rich, as much as it means not needing to work for someone else and still be able to make a comfortable living.

<comment><USER42> The independence can only ever be relative. No one is truly independent. As a self-sufficient farmer, you depend on weather. As a millionaire, you depend on the continuing functioning of the financial system.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> The fed's net worth quantiles are all positive. It's depressing to learn that I came from the bottom of the bottom tier. Income was median, but my dad bought (mortgaged) an 'unbuildable' foreclosed lot and we built a house as a family activity in a rich town. I never knew the difference, didn't even notice the fancy clothes and expensive cars. I still don't know what wealth is supposed to feel like, nor do I care. I have zero interest in restaurants and luxury travel. The more free I am with purchases, the more bullshit accumulates in my life that I never use. If I had to choose objectively based on experience, I'd probably stick with being poor. The best was zero money and possessions as a vagabond because I was forced to be social to survive. But I'm not throwing it away just yet, because that next level of wealth is supposed to be oh so much better. Can't wait for the disappointment on that one.

</comment><comment><USER44> Along a similar vein, I define "rich" as "Could live comfortably for the rest of one's life without ever 'working' again". No need for a wage-paying job, or owning a business that requires day-to-day attention.

</comment><comment><USER45> It's interesting that the charts everyone uses for share of household wealth are from the 1970s until today. If you take it back a bit further, to the 30s/40s (or even further to 1916) the share of the lowest and middle classes is significantly improved and the top 1% has lost wealth. It IS true that that trend has been reversing since the 70s, but it's still not close to pre 30s levels of inequality. I agree we need to figure out what's been going on since the 70s, but I also kind feel like we need to include all the charts for the best perspective.

</comment><comment><USER46> I break it down into 5 levels of wealth/freedom:

Class 1: you can afford your current lifestyle without concern for daily expenses, and could withstand 1 or more major emergencies (job loss, car destroyed, $30,000 bill) without reducing your lifestyle.

Class 2: your assets are sufficient that with a reduction in lifestyle you never have to work again.

Class 3: your assets are sufficient that with no reduction in lifestyle you never have to work again.

Class 4: no amount of incremental wealth will increase the amount you'd spend on a primary home, and you never have to work.

Class 5: no amount of incremental wealth will affect your spending on vacation homes, yachts, or planes and you never have to work.

There are obviously levels of subsistence below these. But these are, to my mind, the levels of wealth/freedom. Below these I wouldn't call someone financially secure or say have "financial freedom."

I think when creating these tiers it's important to acknowledge that lifestyle is a variable and some people's preferences make it easier to achieve different levels. If you have caviar tastes, you need more money to make it into class 1. If you are extremely frugal and well paid, it doesn't take much actual money to make it into class 5. Lifestyle vs freedom is a choice and there's a trade off - do you use extra money to buy lifestyle or to buy freedom?

</comment><comment><USER47> The self-identification chart is pretty interesting. It looks like within the past few years ~10% of people who would have identified as lower/working class are now identifying as middle/upper-middle despite the middle class continuing to decline while the lower and middle-upper classes have slowly increased

</comment><comment><USER48> The levels seem arbitrary.

I'd make it (and like the ones in TFA, those all start above normal middle class status and end below < 5 million dollars -- beyond that it's mostly extravagance and political power and influence rather than actual quality of life changes).

1) Level 1. I'm not stressed out about debt: People who no longer have to worry about their credit card debt or student loans.

2) Level 2. I can buy for anything I fancy within reason (e.g. I could get buy a new high-end laptop every year, lots of clothes, eat out regularly at fancy restaurants, have a $5K watch and so on), but not extravagant stuff (e.g. no Ferrari collection or yacht).

3) Level 3. I might work, but I don't have to work. I can take a vacation anytime I want for as long as I want, and stay in a 5-star hotel for as long I like.

</comment><comment><USER49> I'm kinda amazed by how many wealth ppl there are in America, especially given all the negative headlines about debt, student loans, ppl not having enough for retirement, etc. It's actually easier to be a multi-millionaire (statistically speaking) than a member of Mensa.

</comment><comment><USER50> There's always a $150 plate of macaroni and cheese, or a $25,000 heli-skiing trip.

Don't define wealth by saying "you don't care what a meal or vacation costs." You always care, it's more that most meals and vacations are easily affordable.

<comment><USER51> I would expect there's a level of wealth (well, well above mine) where you only ration time and attention and completely stop rationing money on meals and vacations.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I think there are much more interesting ways to view hierarchies of wealth.

Level one is living on the fruits of ones labors. Your wealth is based on what you do.

Level two is living on your assets, or capital. Your wealth is based on what you have.

Level three (rare in 20th/21st century) is living on your conquest and subjugation of others. Your wealth is based on who you are.[1]

[1] I speak not so much of colonial conquest, or subjugation of native peoples by outsiders, but rather of local conquest - you may not have killed all the other claimants to the local throne, but your grandfather did and nobody is challenging you.

<comment><USER53> Is this a useful view, though? It seems like level 1 is 99% of people, level 2 is 1% of people, and level 3 doesn't happen in the western world.

<comment><USER54> > level 3 doesn't happen in the western world.

What? Crimea? Iraq?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Ru...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annexation_of_Crimea_by_the_Russian_Federation)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_conflict_(2003%E2%80%93pr...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_conflict_\(2003%E2%80%93present\))

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> I think once you hit his final wealth level you realize there's another one that isn't obvious to people lower down the wealth ladder. At some point your assets are making a substantial portion of your annual income for you passively. If you've hit that point, congrats. If not, you definitely know it and are probably working toward it. And I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't another break point above that, probably to do with how much you think about the cost of large purchases like a home (or homes).

</comment><comment><USER56> I find Yonatan Zunger's "financial shock wealth" far more useful:

 _This number is probably the truest measure of a person's real wealth: What is the largest unexpected financial shock you could sustain without the cost of that to you suddenly becoming ten times the original cost or more?_

[https://shift.newco.co/your-financial-shock- wealth-4845e6dc1...](https://shift.newco.co/your-financial-shock- wealth-4845e6dc1d2f)

</comment><comment><USER57> I think there's a 4th level of wealth that wasn't mentioned which is financial independence. This is independent of how you think about expenses - it's more the freedom and stress removed of knowing you don't care if you're RIF'd and you don't need to impress someone or depend on someone for income or a job.

</comment><comment><USER58> It's strange that he would classify how wealthy you are to be how discriminate you are with prices in level 2 and 3. Spending as much as possible without considering the value isn't something I would associate with wealth.

I think there are better, more tightly specified definitions in this thread.

</comment><comment><USER59> How about defining levels of wealth based on how you optimize your food/meals:

level 1: Optimize for most calories per $$$. My budget on food is money.

level 2: calories have become cheap, so I have to worry about getting fat. The budget for food is calories.

level 3: I only ever optimize for time. The budget for food is how much time meals take.

</comment><comment><USER60> Level 4: I don't care how much I have to pay someone to work for me full time.

Level 5: Legal limits are the limiting factor in my political contributions.

Level 6: I don't care how risky an investment is because I won't even notice if I lose the money.

Level 7: If I told you about this level, my life would be in danger.

</comment><comment><USER61> If you stop working today, how many months/years can you maintain your standard of living?

<comment><USER62> At least 20 years...

</comment></comment><comment><USER49> I think many can agree that there is another level: where money is as abundant as air and dropping $50k is like taking a deep breath.

</comment><comment><USER63> I think the author missed a level - stop working tomorrow and have no worry to carry on with life.

</comment><comment><USER64> i get what the author was trying to say, but i'd put it differently (as others in the thread have already indicated). i envision a few different modes of life. these modes or levels are strongly entrenched. downward mobility is more likely than upward mobility by a huge margin, but it still takes a large negative shock to generate downward mobility.

level 0: primitive accumulation of non-liquid assets. the image here is a homeless person trucking around all of their possessions in a shopping cart or perhaps someone living in a shantytown. there is no ability to pay for any kind of costs, except by the generosity of others. severe mental illness is guaranteed.

level 1: destructive equilibrium. wealth remains constant (and low) despite consistent or inconsistent income. this is where many of the working poor are -- no getting ahead, but a large potential for falling behind. a small number of fixed costs may be sustainable, but stability is very low and anxiety is very high. there is no purchase which can be made without budgeting. mental illness is highly probable.

level 2: unstable accumulation. wealth is low, but there is a slow rate of accumulation of wealth. the wealth is often dipped into during times of crisis, so on the long run, there isn't much compounding going on even if the wealth does accumulate. many purchases require budgeting, but the smallest of purchases (like a pack of gum) can escape deliberation. the rest of the working poor and most of the "middle" class fall into this category. mental illness is probable, because there is never true stability -- the amount of wealth in the bank is never enough to protect against more than one problem at a time.

level 3: stable accumulation. wealth accumulates reliably, and compounding interest makes the long-term view rather rosy. less-trivial purchases like TVs or nice dinners don't require deliberation. the real defining feature of this level is that for the first time, the means for having nice things increases over time. someone might be only able to afford one vacation a year at the start of their career, but if they stay within this level they could afford four by the end. mental illness is less likely because there are enough resources to protect against more than one shock at a time. note that major purchases like houses or cars are never beyond at least some deliberation for this level, even if other things are. this is the "upper" middle class.

level 4: accelerating accumulation. these are the upper classes. shocks are irrelevant to this level because a shock of sufficient size to threaten their well-being would probably be the end of the world or at least major chaos. at this level, budgeting does not really exist. the economic deliberations of the lower levels are replaced by a consumption deliberation. the question is no longer "can we afford this" but rather a purely hedonic "would i like to have/do this". the wealth base at this level is so large that even excessive consumption will not slow its accumulation by an amount which would require cutting down on future excessive consumption. the people at this level hold most of the world's financial resources.

is this view of things reductive? yep. the takeaway lesson is that the vast majority of the people with a positive net worth do not have genuine stability.

<comment><USER65> I think you're overstating the effect of money on mental health. While I don't disagree that homeless people suffer mentally and the working poor's high stress levels are bad for health, it's not a guarantee that you'll go nuts. People are more resilient than that. They had to be or we would have never survived as hunter-gatherers.

I would like to reinforce your point about the super rich. They have so much money now that it's basically impossible to spend it faster than its growing. They will continue to accelerate away from the general populace for the foreseeable future. This represents a tremendous failure of policy on the part of our government. It's locking up more and more of the wealth of the country at the top where it does nothing useful while the majority of the people who drive the economy get squeezed harder and harder. It is the government's responsibility in a capitalist system to prevent the capital feedback loop from destroying the system--nobody else has the power or will to do it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER66> These are to a large extent the same observations as the ones made by Thomas Piketty in _Capital in the 21st Century_. I'm a classic liberal in the Smith/Mill sense, but nevertheless found it to be a thoughtful criticism of the capitalistic system. Besides a thorough look at the dynamics of wealth and income inequality, Piketty's main thesis is that the higher rate of return that you typically see on capital, as compared to the equalizing effects of economic, will lead to an ever increasing concentration of wealth unless checked. I didn't find his position to be anti-entrepeneurial, rather he seems bothered by the fact that collecting rent tends to pay better than value- creation through labour, including entrepeneurial efforts.

</comment><comment><USER67> Level 4; You don't know what your vacation cost.

</comment><comment><USER68> the most important one is missing. when you don't need to work anymore. fuck restaurants

</comment><comment><USER69> The title is a bit misleading. This is mostly about inequality, using the "three levels of wealth" are a jumping off point to explore how income inequality has changed over time. The conclusion is nothing new: inequality is rising.</comment>


Ask HN: Which of your side projects can I/we buy for less than 1k? - <AUTHOR> <comment><USER2> Those that are worth less than $1000 to the seller.

</comment><comment><USER3> Are you really only purchasing the idea? Because it seems that you would have to start from scratch on a lot of dusty code.</comment>


Ask HN: How do I bootstrap selling an E-book - <AUTHOR>

I have a niche site in home wine making, www.frugalwinemaking.com. I have also been teaching classes on home wine making for about 2 years now. I've decided to create an e-book on how to make wine and would like to sell it from my site.  My hosting provider wants 49.99\month for a package to sell E-books.
I've been following the discussions here on selling e-books (sorry don't have the link), which is part o the reason I'm doing this, but now that I'm thinking about implementing it I have a couple questions?
1. Is there a better, less expensive way, to start selling an E-book?
2. Do I need to set up a company to start selling e-books? (I'm located in Pittsburgh, PA USA)
This site is something I do to try and "find my passion". It is built on Wordpress. I don't have any illusions that this will make me lots of money, but I'd be happy if I could make enough to cover my hosting costs.
Thanks in advance for any advice! <comment><USER2> eBooks are my thing so let me save you time and energy: Format it for Kindle and sell it via Amazon, PERIOD. That's where people go to buy eBooks, period. They have at least 80% of the market and it's not worth it to try to fight that. Most of your customers are bound to have Kindles too.

<comment><AUTHOR> Excellent idea, it never occurred to me to try and sell this on Amazon. I think in the spirit of "bootstrapping" this would be step 2 or 3 on the list due to the start up costs.

<comment><USER3> It never occurred to you to sell your ebook on Amazon? I'm not trying to be disrespectful or anything but whoa.

<comment><AUTHOR> No offense taken.

I will be the first one to admit that I don't know everything. It never occurred to me, in part, because I had misconceptions about the barriers to entry. Those misconceptions have been corrected because of this post.

Simply put, I thought it would be more expensive to publish on Amazon. :)

<comment><USER2> You were probably thinking of print, not eBook.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Try payloadz.com - they auto-link to paypal, basic account is free and your customer will be able to download book automatically, it cant get better than this :-) you can go on vacation and dont even have to check emails but pls keep checking bank account :-) --- alternatively you may also try selling your ebook thru clickbank.com ... GOOD LUCK

</comment><comment><USER5> Surely the cheapest way would be to create a sales button in PayPal (Log in, click "Profile", click "My saved buttons") and then email the book to anyone who pays. If your book (I hope!) turns out to be a seller you can invest the money, otherwise do it by hand :-)

<comment><AUTHOR> Would there be a way to set up Paypal to auto email the book to the customer? If I were a paying customer, I'm not sure I would want to wait to get my book. I think the expectation of buying an e-book is to get it instantly...

<comment><USER5> Yeah totally possible. PayPal supplies an HTML form as part of the code they give you. All you need to do is add a hidden element with a name of notify_url and set the value to a PHP script on your site. PayPal will do an http post to that script and one of the fields they post is payer_email, so you could set up a PHP script to email the ebook to that email address.

Now, this is all horribly insecure - if someone discovered the name of their script you can see how easy it'd be to get it to email the ebook to whoever - but for no-cost boot strap solution, it'd do the job initially.

I'd happily lend you a hand getting started with this stuff, my email address is in my profile.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> ejunkie.com is a lot cheaper. Darren Rowse over at problogger.net has done several successful ebooks through them, and there are several Wordpress- ejunkie tutorials out there.

I'm not an accountant, but I'd imagine that you'd declare this as self- employed income.

<comment><USER7> Correct, E-Junkie is $5/month and works for 99% of uses.

</comment></comment><comment><USER8> As mikecane pointed out - get your book on Amazon. I've found that 80% of my book sales come via Amazon - if possible put out an ebook version and a publish-on-demand through them as well as people still do go for the physical book often enough to make it worth the small investment in time to get both set up.

You do have to deal with Amazon taking their cut of the sales but they have the market size to more than make up for this.

ebook: <http://dtp.amazon.com> publish-on-demand: <http://www.createspace.com>

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Thank you everyone, I think I have a rough draft of my plan now.

1\. Sell my book via either payloadz or ejunkie. I want to investigate the reputation of each service, but I like the free account to start on payloadz.

2\. If sales can cover my costs so far, and can pay for the cost of moving to Amazon, sell on Amazon.

3\. If sales on Amazon cover my costs, add paperback print on demand.

How does that look for a business plan?

<comment><USER9> Combine steps 1 and 2. It is free to list your book with Amazon, so go ahead and do it from the start in addition to selling on your own site.

Alternatively, you can use a distribution service. I run Book Hatchery (www.bookhatchery.com), a web service that helps authors publish their books digitally. You can sign up for free and we'll format your book and get it listed on Amazon, B&N, and Apple. We also have a paid plan at $25/mo that provides you ISBNs (which normally cost $125 and required by Apple and some other ebook retailers), print on-demand help, and some other features. We are a startup working with an alpha product, so our service is constantly evolving. Of course we'd like all of the feedback we can get, especially from authors :)

Also, regarding question #2, that choice is up to you. For most authors selling ebooks you can simply operate as a sole proprietor (no fancy/expensive legal work required). If you ever make some reasonable money from your books you might consider forming an LLC.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> I'm not sure what you get for $50/month, but I had an ebook site a few years ago, and I wrote a custom script that automatically watermarked the PDF with the PayPal email address of the buyer. It was just plain PHP so I could host it on my $6/month unlimited domain shared hosting along with 50 other sites I had there, making the cost negligible.

</comment><comment><USER11> If the $50/month package does what you want it to do, it sounds like a great move to me. Unless you are going to seriously underprice your e-books, you only have to sell a couple each month to make your nut.

Have you done a dry test to gauge the interest out there?

<comment><AUTHOR> I have not done testing to gauge interest yet. I was looking at what else is out there and the sites I have seen look like they are just there to make money. The material I looked at doesn't cover what I go over in class, so I think I can offer something new.

So how would I go about testing interest??

<comment><USER11> Well, the classic way is to set up a web site describing the book, which has a "Buy" button. If/when people click, you explain the the book is not available yet, and collect their email address to notify them when it is available. Then, you pay for some Adwords traffic (say, $25 worth) to drive people to the site, and see what your Conversion Rate is.

In your case, though, if you already have a website in that niche that gets decent traffic, there are probably simpler ways to take the pulse of your current readers.</comment></comment></comment>


Show HN: Exchange business cards like never before - <AUTHOR> http://www.carddrop.com

<comment><AUTHOR> We just went live in the App Store. We also have a complimenting mobile web app when you use your smartphone to access the site. We (2 iOS devs) rolled the app/site in 6 months working nights and weekends while keeping our day jobs. Looking for critiques to help us polish the product. App Store link: <http://carddrop.com/download></comment>


Are You Proud Of Your Code? - <AUTHOR> http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/10/0744259

<comment><USER2> Sometimes when confronted with adding more crap to someone else's crappy program, I just decide to rewrite it right. Probably more often than most others would recommend. My reasons? 1. In the long run, everyone will be better off. 2. If's not how quickly you get started; it's how quickly you get done. 3. I just don't feel like working on crap today (or any other day). 4. I want to write something I could be proud of.

Sometimes it just takes a rewrite in order to put yourself in a position of writing code you can be proud of.

<comment><USER3> I've wondered about that myself at times. Some code that I've inherited was truly atrocious and much of that ended up rewritten, but other had been impenetrably dense. Those I had a mind to leave alone simply because I feared breaking the existing code. Usually we ended up "putting up dikes" around it and then clean it up piecemeal. Sometimes it is difficult to tell highly tuned and optimized code from a seething pile of cruft, but a quick run with a profiler against some performance benchmarks usually settles that question.

Oh and by the way, yes there is some code that I've written that I am somewhat proud of even if I recognize some of its shortcomings and ugly warts.</comment></comment>


Show HN: Expensive Chat – Pay one cent per letter - <AUTHOR> https://expensive.chat <comment><USER2> Reminds me of that 1000x1000 ad site from the 90's where you could buy an ad based on how many pixels you purchased. Allow someone to pay to set the chat room topic, the colour scheme, etc. Maybe some Rich instagram kids will throw some cash at it for bragging rights.

<comment><USER3> The page is still up :-) [http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/](http://www.milliondollarhomepage.com/)

History: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Million_Dollar_Homepage)

<comment><USER4> The ads also still get traffic, A while back I wrote a script to list all the domains that had expired and bought one at random for shits and giggles. GA reported about 100 uniques per month.

<comment><USER5> Hilarious! I just scraped all the domains and did nslookups on all of them to see which where expired. Then I registered the one with the largest area (milliondollarconnect.com occupied 1000 pixels) at x1, y1 = 710, 750 (the ad that looks like a glassy oval). Will report back on traffic.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This looked oddly similar to [https://highscore.money](https://highscore.money) and... it's the same guy, Marc.

For what it's worth, we had one of top ten spots on the highscore.money, got some traffic from it (and still get a trickle), but all of them were immediate bounces. Caveat emptor.

</comment><comment><USER7> I'm reminded how, last year, at work, they changed the length limits on performance reviews from characters to words. They found that character limits resulted in men having more room to express themselves than women -- "she" is longer than "he"; "girl" is longer than "guy", and "female" is longer than "male".

Twitter also has interesting per-country dynamics because it uses a character limit. In Chinese or Japanese, 140 characters can express more words than in English.

<comment><USER8> ^ I also find it culturally interesting that basically every female descriptor I can think of is more characters than the male counterpart.

<comment><USER9> That's because most of them are modifiers "wo"-men, "fe"-male, etc. Which really is pretty demeaning if you think about it.

Over the years, there have been efforts in feminist and academic circles to introduce alternate spellings that are not derived this way. [0]

0: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn)

<comment><USER10> Genuine question and not some MRA trolling, but how is that demeaning? How would the etymology of English pronouns would be demeaning to anyone?

<comment><USER11> The etymology of "woman" is very demeaning. It literally means "wife of man" or "servant".

[https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman](https://www.etymonline.com/word/woman)

<comment><USER12> > The etymology of "woman" is very demeaning. It literally means "wife of man" > or "servant".

Your own source disagrees with you; while it does say that it came from a word formed from "wif" plus "man", "wif" didn't mean what "wife" means now but what "woman" means now, and "man" meant what "person" means now (which is among the current meanings of "man", too.)

The literal meaning of the compound is "woman person". It's true that the compound "wifman" was used both for "woman" and "female servant", but it's worth noting that the modern English word "man" includes among its meanings (and has for centuries) both "male person" and "male servant" (the latter being most commonly used preceded by a possessive indicating _whose_ male servant is being referred to), so that the old "wifman" was a pretty exact equivalent of the modern "man" ignoring the (semantic, not grammatical) gender neutral senses of the latter.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> It's such an obvious idea, and it has been around for as long as spam e-mail has been a problem. I absolutely do not understand why it has not yet been adopted for all e-mail traffic worldwide. If an e-mail were to cost just one cent, it would never add up to an amount that a normal person would even notice, yet it would solve the problem of spam e-mail over night.

<comment><USER14> This was one of the motivators described in the original Bitcoin white paper

<comment><USER15> And Hashcash, 12 years before that.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Hi all. About 2.5 years ago I created Highscore Money. I was looking at pay- to-play games and wondered what would happen if you'd take it to the extreme. The result was just a leaderboard you'd pay your way into. Whatever you pay, that's your score.

Today, I'm launching a new social experiment. A chatroom where you pay for every message you send. Normally chatrooms can get messy quick, because there's no cost to sending a message. Expensive Chat changes this dynamic.

<comment><USER16> What makes this a social experiment rather than a simple cash grab? Are you donating all the money to a charity?

<comment><USER17> Are you shaming HN users for trying to monetize something?

<comment><USER18> That question is comparable to the type of question which is often used in politics to silence opponents. In that sense it _should_ be against HN rules, as to whether it is I don't know.

As far as I'm concerned he just asked a question which can be answered without the need for 'defenders' to show up and challenge the questioner - and with that stifle the discourse here.

<comment><USER19> The same logic applies to the question you're replying to. Were it me that was asked the question, I'd simply say "no, I was just curious."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> Hmm, don't think I'm giving a random site (that breaches EU online business laws: must have an irl address for service) my CC info.

If you spend 1¢ on posting ":smiley:" every day, won't that cost him about 20¢ transaction costs? Eventual DoS by CC transaction costs??

Love the spirit of it on an intellectual level though.

<comment><USER21> It's using Stripe for payment, so this site never sees your CC info.

<comment><USER22> Yes, but the costs are still the same. Even stripe has a 2.9% + 30¢ cost per transaction.

<comment><USER23> Better write something worth the money then.

<comment><USER24> Stripe doesn't bill the end-user these fees. In many US states, it would be illegal to do such as well.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> I just broke this website sending this: " sending unicode characters for fun "

<comment><USER26> where did you find those characters?

<comment><USER27> Try this: [https://beautifuldingbats.com/hey-howd-you-do- that/](https://beautifuldingbats.com/hey-howd-you-do-that/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> The implementation is clean AF and the idea is super fun! Really neat job there! This probably won't take off as-is but I feel like there's untapped potential to be leveraged.

<comment><USER29> The creator is the same guy that made wip.chat & betalist. I wouldn't be surprised if he keeps building on it and it succeeds.

<comment><USER28> Of course it is! What an inspiring community.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> Interesting language effects at play. There's a message in there: "你好吗?" Which is priced at 4c

The equivalent message in English "how are you?" Is 10c

<comment><USER31> We can make it more fair by pricing UTF-8 bytes.

你好吗 = 9 bytes

how are you = 11 bytes

<comment><USER32> not really. according to [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8) and [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roadmap_to_Unicode_BMP.sv...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Roadmap_to_Unicode_BMP.svg), any codepoint bigger 0x80 (second half of the first box) is 2 byte per character, and codepoint bigger than 0x800 (anything past the 8th box) is 3 bytes charater. so while it might be fair for CJK languages, it's even less fair for languages that don't mostly use the latin alphabet.

<comment><USER31> That's true, considering the name of the website they would have the privilege of an even more expensive chat.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> It reminds me of writing SMS messages - using all the awful txt spk to use as few characters as possible and save money.

<comment><USER34> Not just to save space.

Typing with T9 was much more time-consuming that our autocomplete touch keyboards.

<comment><USER35> Are you sure you're not thinking of multi-tap on a keypad and not T9?

Once you've learned T9 (the one where you tap a key a single time for each letter in the word and a lookup is made based on the combination). You can surely be faster than Qwerty.

This was also the reason I developed [https://typenineapp.com](https://typenineapp.com) [1] for iPhone once they allowed custom keyboards.

I am on average 20wpm faster (50wpm for english, 60wpm for my native language danish) with Type Nine on my iPhone compared to the apple qwerty keyboard.

Even though you don't have the tactile feedback of the previous T9 phones on the iPhone I can type without looking just the same way as on a phone with a physical keyboard.

[1] More on my thoughts here - [https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone- typing-experienc...](https://medium.com/porsager/a-better-iphone-typing- experience-77c6da52131)

<comment> karate-fu This perpetuated myth has annoyed me greatly. Somehow, very few people actually know how a T9 keyboard actually works.

In fact, T9 is one of the last few reasons why I only VERY recently got myself an iPhone. T9 is superior in almost every way to a full touch-based QWERTY when writing texts.

So, great idea and product, mate. This is a buy from me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> Such compression tricks were also used save money on costly telegraph messages. The telegraph was arguably the first internet device, tying the world together at lightspeed. But wires were expensive and messages consequently so. A standard ten word message cost a workers average day wage. So people used abbreviation tricks seen in texting and twitter. And companies had code word dictionaries where a single word might mean a whole sentence. This saved cost and disquised messages.

In the early days messages were limited by the number of wires, the speed of human operators at both ends and electrical degradation of long wires. 20 bits per second was a good speed. Physicists like Faraday and Maxwell figured out how to lessen degradation. Inventors like Thomas Edison figured out how to multiplex multiple signals on the same wire. And how transmit messages at superhuman speeds with tape players and recorders at both ends.

<comment><USER15> Those codes are still in use.

73 OM TNX

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> I love that people are already working around the model by embedding part of the message in the username.

That took all of three messages...

</comment><comment><USER38> The cheer fact that people actually payed to use it is boggling my mind. I suppose the conclusion is that I need to work a lot more to even start understanding how people think !

</comment><comment><USER39> It looks like you're using stripe to process your payments. Does this mean that if I send a 1-character message it will cost you money?

<comment><USER40> I have the same feeling. With only 300 bucks we can make this guy lose 10K :D

( $10.000 / ( 0.3 + ( 0.029 * 0.01$ ) ) * 0.01 = $333,01

We would need a javascript script that would make 33301 payments of 1 cent.

This would be a very cost efficient attack between business rivals.

<comment><USER41> Are you a business rival to Expensive Chat?

<comment><USER40> No but I might be a rich asshole with too much free time :D

<comment><USER42> "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> I'm curious, is it needed to generate an invoice for every payment received? How is the accounting managed?

<comment><USER44> Interesting question! I would assume that some invoice must be generated, but it can be in electronic form (e-mail). Getting this right internationally is still a major problem as far as I'm aware, but would love to know if there is a (cheap enough) service that solves it...

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> I want people to pay per letter they email me ...

"Hey it looks like you want to send Amelius an email. Please visit this page, where you can pay and make sure your email actually arrives"

</comment><comment><USER46> Are you able to process payments as low as 1c and if so, aren't fees exceeding the amount charged?

<comment><USER47> That screams blockchain, doesn't it? ;-)

<comment><USER48> Does it? I thought even bitcoin had transaction fees.

<comment><USER47> It was a joke.

But you can use cryptocurrencies/blockchains to send messages, and you would use the proof of work to make sure the price is paid.

<comment><USER49> You can use messaging software to send messages and CC transactions to make sure the price is paid. Crypto/blockchain adds nothing to this scenario and creates headaches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> This could make for an interesting idea for 'Quora for mentors', whereby someone pays money (maybe more than 1c) to ask a specific question to a 'business leader'.

<comment><USER49> Various companies have been doing this for a while (and it's a business model that existed long before the internet).

This is the one I know best and have used: [https://clarity.fm/](https://clarity.fm/)

It was great a few years ago for validation for a B2B product we wanted to sell and needed unbiased feedback on.

<comment><USER51> "It was great a few years ago for validation..." It isn't good anymore?

<comment><USER49> I don't know, as I haven't had a reason to use it.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER52> It's interesting that this favours pictographic languages. You can express a lot more in a few "characters" of Chinese than you can in English! Might be a little more fair if you charged per byte instead of per character, but they would still have a big advantage.

I suppose the same kind of thing applies to the character limit on Twitter.

<comment><USER53> Yes. If I remember correctly when Twitter rose the character limit to 280, it was kept to 140 for tweets in CJK languages.

</comment></comment><comment><USER54> One thought: you should let the user know that you are using Stripe(?), instead of a random credit card form. Cool thing!

<comment><AUTHOR> added! thanks for suggestion

</comment></comment><comment><USER55> what about making something similar, but where the cost formula is an^2? a should be some constant factor like a tenth of a cent and n should be the number of chars, i.e. per message or in the last 24 hrs. If Twitter worked that way instead of an arbitrary 140/280 char limit, it would be so much cleaner.

</comment><comment><USER56> Seems it has been taken down? Now it only returns three dots.

<comment><AUTHOR> Server went down. Up now :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> This reminds me of Twitch, where many streamers have it set up so that you can get a message displayed or even automatically read out on stream if you accompany it with a donation. Of course there it is in addition to a regular free chat and more often used to get the streamer's attention

</comment><comment><USER58> This sounds really fun! It is one of those ideas that when you first hear it doesn't make a lot of sense. I'm not sure how it will handle transaction costs though. It might be better to allow a minimum of $1 to be added in credits and use that to charge for letters.

</comment><comment><USER59> Lightning network, where are you?

</comment><comment><USER60> Sounds like something that would make sense to implement on top of Twitch chat. You already have a payment infrastructure tgat allows attaching arbitrary amounts of money to each message, as well as a baseline reading for either free or sub-only($5/month) chat.

Of course you'd need to do it in cooperation with an established Twitch partner. Can't just create a new channel and start charging.

</comment><comment><USER61> Looks like telegraph commercial codes are poised and ready to make a comeback! ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_(communication...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_\(communications\)))

</comment><comment><USER62> MrBeast just enter the chat. ;)

</comment><comment><USER63> Nice :) We were just talking about something like this several days ago:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19253464](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19253464)

</comment><comment><USER17> I created something similar but with a smart contract: [https://davidwong.fr/FiveMedium/#/](https://davidwong.fr/FiveMedium/#/)

</comment><comment><USER64> Is there a micropayment service he could have used, to avoid micropayments showing up on a bank statement? Do any such services event exist?

Is this PCI compliant, since CC numbers are typed on his page?

<comment><USER49> Apparently it uses Stripe, and as long as the dev isn't trying to intercept/store payment info (e.g. in logs), Stripe handles PCI compliance

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> "letter" seems ambiguous? I thought it meant "message" but it means "character". I'm not a native English speaker though so maybe it's just me.

<comment><USER66> I can see why that might seem ambiguous, but I've never heard anyone refer to an electronic message as a "letter". A letter is always in physical form.

"Character" has its own ambiguities (am _I_ a character in this chat room?)

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> I posted a few comments but they didn't show up. Oh well.

<comment><USER68> same

</comment></comment><comment><USER69> No new messages for 45 mins, tried to chat, doesn't work.

</comment><comment><USER70> Hihihi this is fun and brilliant ! Had the chance to see it working for a few minutes. It doesn't seem to work now, just a blank page. Hello javascript :(

</comment><comment><USER71> I feel like if a long message I typed doesn't even get wrapped - I'm not getting what I paid for and hence am entitled to a refund.

Plus some damages for my lost time

<comment><AUTHOR> good luck with that

</comment></comment><comment><USER72> That'd make a nice cyberpunk billboard in 10 years.

</comment><comment><USER73> "Spend money to chat with strangers who spend money to chat with strangers." That's a demographic that doesn't deserve my time.

</comment><comment><USER74> Am I supposed to be impressed? This makes no sense whatsoever. The reminds me of that card game that raised money to dig a hole.

<comment><USER75> > The reminds me of that card game that raised money to dig a hole.

Honestly, that's quite a compliment.

</comment></comment><comment><USER76> ... still cheaper than a Slack subscription.

</comment><comment><USER77> BitChat: [https://bitchat.bitdb.network](https://bitchat.bitdb.network)

</comment><comment><USER78> I just get an "application error"

</comment><comment><USER79> Need to add font enhancement features. Can I pay 2 cents per letter to have the letters animated in fire?

</comment><comment><USER80> Seems to have gotten a hug of death showing a standard Rails error.

"We're sorry, but something went wrong."

</comment><comment><USER81> It's dead

</comment><comment><USER82> I'm curious,how are they processing the micropayments? Wouldn't transaction fees crush them?

</comment><comment><USER83> Really strange, typically I'd expect you to have to pay to read, not to be heard.

<comment><USER49> There's a long history of paying to be heard: advertising.

<comment><USER83> I hope it was obvious that I was speaking in the context of consuming a service. Why is pedantry so rampant on this site?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> I shouldn't but I love the UI of this thing. It's fresh and bold.

</comment><comment><USER85> drawo.sh obviously wins. Not just because they paid the most. Because its the first ad ive clicked on in ages that gave me exactly what I expected it to. And asked for nothing.

</comment><comment><USER86> The TLD choice is a missed opportunity. With that idea they should have at least used the ".rich"

More info: [https://www.nic.rich/](https://www.nic.rich/)

Jokes aside, this business model is not going to see any kind of wide adoption.

</comment><comment><USER87> Business idea: corporate email system that offers a limited amount of emails per month, and once the limit gets hit, discounts money from employee's salary.

Add a formula that makes it exponentially more expensive if you add more people to CC.

Problem with corporate mailing hell solved.

<comment><USER88> That would just mean employees would make every email like 1,000 words long

<comment><USER87> Well, that would be a clear win, because you would reduce the amount of distraction.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER89> You need to make clickable URLs more expensive!

</comment><comment><USER90> should have used Lightning Network

</comment><comment><USER91> To be frank, I don't get it

</comment><comment><USER92> Can I use hanzi though?

</comment><comment> another-dave Looks nice & seems like a fun experiment but can't help thinking that — at scale, this becomes Twitter, where the average person has relatively short messages like now, but Donald Trump gets an unlimited character count…

</comment><comment><USER93> what ui kit is this?

<comment><AUTHOR> I custom designed it.</comment></comment>


Soylent: A Word Processor With A Crowd Inside - <AUTHOR> http://code.google.com/p/soylent/ <comment><AUTHOR> See also Bruce Sterling's take on it (with a video of it in action): [http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/09/soylent-a- wor...](http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2010/09/soylent-a-word- processor-with-a-crowd-inside/)

<comment><USER2> The scariest thing about that video is how easily they refer to Soylent as 'it', as in 'it cuts down your text', 'it fixes grammar errors', even though when Soylent is in use it's clearly a 'they'. Or perhaps that distinction is as nonsensical as referring to the bundle of neurons in your head as 'they'...

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Remember in the 80s how AI was going to allow computers to do all sorts of things that only humans could do well?

Just a few decades down the line, and now computers can get humans to do all sorts of things that only humans can do well.

</comment><comment><USER4> Soylent Green is made of People[1]! At the very least it's a clever name.

Really smart, interesting concept. I'm not sure I trust other random people to correct my grammar though.

[1] Thanks to Mr. Kenuda, 11th Grade Physics teacher, who convinced me to watch that movie.

</comment><comment><USER5> On one level it's quite cool to see human intelligence pipelined as a service, but on another I worry that this may represent a new form of slavery with the turkers being paid at such a low level that other social problems may arise as a consequence.

<comment><USER6> While I'm sympathetic to this worry about crowdsourcing (which Jonathan Zittrain has been writing and speaking about for years), I'm still optimistic that the architecture of ecosystems like Mechanical Turk can protect people from exploitation. And hopefully the market will set fair compensation per task (although I don't think it has yet).

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> This would be really useful for programming, particularly refactoring. Imagine being able to quickly apply a relatively mechanical refactoring that still required human judgement (pretty common), and have other programmers do it for you.

I imagine it would work something like this:

\- Select the files/directories/blocks of code that you want the refactoring applied to.

\- Describe (in english) what the refactoring work should be, and do an example on one piece of the code.

\- The work gets split (by file?) and distributed via a mechanical turk-like interface (extra points if it opens tasks in your favorite editor with syntax highlighting). As workers submit their work, the code is automatically built and tests are run (could be a callback to your local development environment, so you don't have to worry about shipping all your code up to the cloud and figuring out how to build it there).

Could be pretty awesome, particularly if you could enlist an army of freshman CS majors, bored programmers, and eager overseas engineers. I wonder if intellectual property concerns would be too high for people to actually use it though.

EDIT: If I still worked at Google, this would be a fun project to try internally as 20% project. There are lots of mechanical refactoring tasks that need to be done across large portions of the codebase, good build/test infrastructure to easily verify success/failure for a given task, and lots of bored/eager engineers that feed off of reward-based systems:)

</comment><comment><USER8> Here's my human macro for all you high school/college students:

"Expand these bullet points into a 5 page paper"

Even though it mentions things that are along the lines of correction, this could pretty easily be moved into the realm of crowd-sourced cheating.

</comment><comment><USER9> I guess you need to be careful not to use this on any confidential documents.

</comment><comment><USER10> I wonder if shortn could be used to turn regular Wikipedia articles into those fitting of simple Wikipedia[1].

[1] <http://simple.wikipedia.org>

</comment><comment><USER11> Mechanical Turk has been the brute-force behind a lot of unique concepts, it seems. Really cool use of crowd-sourcing, and you've gotta love the name. "Soylent is people" indeed.

</comment><comment><USER12> wow! At 4pm today I was giving a talk in my lab about how cool this work is.

What really impresses though is not that it works. It is the Find-Fix-Verify design pattern which tries to set some good practices in crowd-sourcing. For example in GUI/web engineering MVC is considered good practice.

Refference: Bernstein, M.S., Little, G., Miller, R.C. et al. Soylent: A Word Processor with a Crowd Inside. UIST '10, ACM Press (2010)

</comment><comment><USER13> Heck, I want this in my hacking. Grep for all the TODO/FIXME and run it through MTURK....

hmmm

Might work better if you write a test for the code.

</comment><comment><USER14> This would be very useful as a Wordpress plugin.

<comment><USER10> It would be amusing [and expensive] if it was enabled for comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER15> Soylent is made of People!

</comment><comment><USER16> So will there be a programming language with human powered functions?

<comment><USER17> In some sense, this is what TurKit already is:

<http://groups.csail.mit.edu/uid/turkit/>

And I think TurKit is part of the back-end for Soylent.</comment></comment>


Lit-Html, JavaScript Templating from the Polymer Team at Google - <AUTHOR> https://malloc.fi/lit-html-javascript-templating-from-polymer-team-google <comment><USER2> I don't understand how this is possible in 2017. It is like they are reinventing PHP.

<comment><USER3> How is this like PHP (didn't touch PHP in 8 years)? It is closer to hyperHTML or JSX with different syntax I think.

<comment><USER2> HTML as strings in the middle of your program - yuck! same applies to JSX by the way.

<comment><USER3> Hm, I believe that the templates will be inlined in your elements in build step. Or at least easly can be, since I also did components with separate preprocessed css, separate js and HTML template.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Elon Musk is doing for executive compensation what he did for electric cars - <AUTHOR> http://www.marketwatch.com/story/another-tesla-win-elon-musks-compensation-plan-is-executive-pay-done-right-2016-04-22 <comment><USER2> "Multi billionaire who would never have to work another day in his life, who could quit now and spend a million dollars a DAY for the next say forty years of his life and still have money in bank, agrees to compensation plan based on value added, not increasing his treasure chest."

Or "man who doesn't need more, doesn't ask for more".

<comment><USER3> Exactly. Most people aren't in a position to waive their salary for a few years on the off-chance a moonshot works out.

<comment><USER4> IIRC with Musk he put _all_ his fortune into the basket with SpaceX and Tesla at the same time. That's yet another level.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> I think this is an interesting compensation plan and agree that this seems like a more modern and practical compensation plan than the example from Ford.

I'm curious what sort of milestones/requirements Musk would put in place as Chairman if he were to hire another CEO. I would guess this might include some sort of environmental requirements to continue things like Musk's strong dedication to 100% electric (no long-range gas tank).

<comment><USER6> A part of why people are buying Teslas is because of the vision of getting rid of most CO2 car emissions. If the vision would change, people wouldn't buy as many cars which would impact the value of the company quite badly, so it won't happen.

</comment></comment><comment><USER7> What I like about old compensation package vs this one is that before, they didn't even pretend that CEO's have a huge influence on the quality of product. Now, Musk gets to pretend he had some important role in creating a quality product.

<comment><USER8> This strawman argument detracts from a bigger point: many people dislike the idea of a CEO getting bonuses no matter whether the company's chips are up or down. It's not revolutionary, but the signaling is still appreciated and important.

Tangentially, I think it's disingenuous to say that Elon Musk hasn't had a large amount of input in Tesla Motors, or any other venture he's a part of. Even a cursory glance of his Twitter shows that he clearly has deep knowledge in the automotive/aerospace fields, and further searching shows he was involved heavily in the Roadster design[1], which was a pretty important piece of establishing Tesla Motors as a bonafide manufacturer - both from a "cars people want to buy and drive" and "cars which are pushing the status quo" aspect.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Tesla_Motors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk#Tesla_Motors)</comment></comment>


Bookmarklet for Reloading just CSS on a page - <AUTHOR> http://gist.github.com/649650

<comment><USER2> For a bit of a different flavor, here's the one I've been using that accomplishes the same aims:

<http://gist.github.com/649724>

It's a good bit more compact, recursively refreshes the CSS in all frames in the window, and uses a timestamp instead of a long random number.

</comment><comment><USER3> I've been using this one for many many years. Is your version better / more efficient in any way?

<http://david.dojotoolkit.org/recss.html>

<comment><AUTHOR> Nah, don't think so. I wasn't aware of any existing so I just wrote one. Apologies for lack of novel idea :P

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you're using Firefox, the CSS Reloader addon is nice because it gives you a hotkey.

<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/46211/>

</comment><comment><USER5> Forgive me for asking, but what's wrong with just reloading?

<comment><USER6> Maybe you are six levels deep into a JS-heavy webapp? If you reload, you would have to re-navigate to what you want to fix.</comment></comment>


The Department of Defense is setting up shop in Silicon Valley - <AUTHOR> http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2015/04/pentagon-sets-silicon-valley-outpost/110845/?oref=defenseone_today_nl

<comment><AUTHOR> Worth citing: [https://medium.com/@AreDangerousMen/a-dod-embassy-in- silicon...](https://medium.com/@AreDangerousMen/a-dod-embassy-in-silicon- valley-239750345bae)</comment>


How did you setup an affiliate program for your startup? - <AUTHOR> I am doing some research on marketing before I build my startup. Have any of you had any successful affiliate programs? Were they built in house or did you use an existing program? The biggest issue seems to be getting affiliates interested in marketing your software.<p>I found that there are websites like Commission Junction and Clickbank that take care of it all. Anyone used any of these or any others? Any specific ones good for tiny startups? <comment><USER2> In terms of software checkout [http://www.leaddyno.com/](http://www.leaddyno.com/) and [http://www.hasoffers.com/](http://www.hasoffers.com/)

for affiliate networks (as you mention, cj and clickbank) but also [https://www.shareasale.com](https://www.shareasale.com) , [http://www.linkconnector.com/index.htm](http://www.linkconnector.com/index.htm) , [https://peerfly.com](https://peerfly.com)

<comment><USER3> Hasoffers.com is the Shizznitz! Fully-developed platform, Good UI/UX for Admin management and setup, Good affiliate tracking, Been around for years... Where Groupon and a bunch of other companies ran/run their affiliate programs... and your not paying the big affiliate programs a monthly nut... Only downside is that you're then stuck recruiting affiliates, tending the tribe- community managing... depends on application and people talent available...

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you are just looking for an affiliate tracking system: [http://www.hasoffers.com](http://www.hasoffers.com) and [http://www.offerit.com](http://www.offerit.com) are very cheap solutions that should be able to do everything you need.

If you are looking to add your "offer" to an existing affiliate network with an existing publisher base then you should look into Commission Junction, Clickbank, LinkShare, ShareASale, etc. Many networks specialize in different verticals. Be sure to do your research.

</comment><comment><USER5> Your questions are a little too vague; what sort of affiliate program are you looking for? What sort of software are you selling, to whom, in what context, for what purpose? Without those details, any solution anybody presents you is going to be very general and probably not very helpful.

</comment><comment><USER6> Clickbank is the best one and I am using it as an affiliate. It is better for your company to use it to get high number of affiliate marketers for your product...</comment>