The Rich Don't Penny Pinch
seanmcclure.substack.comI absolutely hate these sorts of "take a broad generalization, blindly run with it to extremes then pontificate about edge cases in where it breaks" articles. They accomplish little but to indulge online commenters desire to engage in behavior that runs the spectrum from bike shedding to virtue signaling. Of course everyone has a bone to pic with some specific part of the article. Of course everyone wants to elaborate their anecdotal examples. This article was written to facilitate just those things. This is a trash tabloid article for people who think they are too good to read trash tabloid articles.
Bikeshedding
> 1. Futile investment of time and energy in discussion of marginal technical issues. quotations 2. Procrastination.
This misses the essence of bike shedding to me. It can be a sub category of procrastination but it isn't procrastination itself.
My take is that bike shedding is focusing on and possibly inventing a task because you enjoy that task, at the expense of something else more pressing.
I find that the anecdote is useful occasional to bring it up when it is happening without seeming like a jerk
> But then you stop and think wait a second, this person is alone and wearing a mask. Isn't that odd? In fact it seems downright ridiculous. Why would anyone wear a mask in their car when they are alone?
The author has clearly not spent a lot of time in normal mode around people who have to wear their mask for their full shift. Yes, those people forget. Not us keyboard warriors who put it on twice a day for a few minutes.
When I was in the mandatory army service earlier this year, we had to wear masks all the time and change them multiple times a day. After doing that for months, I literally don't even realize that I have a mask on anymore if I have it on. It doesn't seem to annoy or obstruct me in any way whatsoever. I even felt weird not having to wear a mask in the time after my service ended...
We also had to test every week. I've had so many swabs up my nose that that i keep a completely straight face when doing that kind of test now.
It could also just be that someone deliberately wanted to wear a mask for literally any reason whatsoever. It’s just ludicrous to judge someone for that or to consider it “ridiculous.”
You might as well say “have you ever seen someone wearing a hat in their car even though they’re inside a climate controlled car and don’t need sun protection on their head?”
I was raised to always remove my hat when getting inside something. Maybe OP did too and extrapolates that behavior to mask wearing when not with someone.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ayo+and+teo
Wearing masks since 2017, WHILE DANCING.
I'm a keyboard warrior who only puts on my mask when I'm out in crowded places but I've (more than once) walked all the way home (about 10 minutes) from the grocery store and found myself in my kitchen unpacking my groceries before I realize that I've still got my mask on. Some of us are just scatterbrained...
It's just convenient. You know where the mask is at all times, you can't lose it, etc
Plus wearing a mask somewhere hot sucks but cars have AC so they're cool and this drawback is removed.
On top of that, when I'm going to have to put it back on in less than 5 minutes, I'll often just leave it back on. It's really not that big of a deal to wear.
The author does not think it's ridiculous at all. The next paragraph exactly addresses your comment:
> If we are only taking into consideration the information that is immediately available then the situation does indeed seem pretty ridiculous. But if we stop and consider what might be the broader context we can imagine scenarios where wearing a mask alone makes a lot of sense.
Oh man, this comment thread is about as divorced from this context as you’re likely to see on HN. Thanks for sharing.
Yes, my wife is an emergency medicine doctor. She frequently ends up wearing her mask in the car and other places where it’s unnecessary until I remind her she’s wearing it.
And some people just aren't bothered by wearing it, so it isn't weird to just leave it in place when you're driving.
I also don't take off my shirt, pants, and shoes the second I get in the car.
Taking the mask on and off introduces risk of infection when touching it. And risk of forgetting to put it on when needed.
If you just keep it on you avoid the risks - and you get to breath less pollution and allergens as an added benefit.
How many people have have gotten Covid from fomite transmission so far? Last I checked the number of such confirmed cases varied from zero to one.
Meanwhile the entire globe has been anxiously sanitizing their hands and everything they touch for 18 months (a lot of people in my family were even washing the grocery produce with soap and setting them aside for one day before use). All this long, long after scientists had pretty much figured out that risks of fomite transmission of Covid were vanishingly small.
There is no scientific experiment in the canonical sense that could confirm it due to ethical concerns. Once it was accepted that aerosol transmission occurs, since it is a much easier form of transmission it's very easy to tag all infections as having occurred through aerosol.
Do all actually occur through aerosol? Some most likely happened like that, others may have been bigger droplets released talking or coughing, others may have been fomites from the droplets...
In my humble opinion, all of those forms occur. Viruses are passive things, they travel in respiratory secretions of any size big enough to contain them. They will lay there doing nothing until they get in contact with a target they can couple to and start replicating. It's better to think of contamination as a probabilistic event modulated by some factors, likely-hood of the event, resiliency of the virus outside of the body under the conditions that lead to the event, etc...
I highly doubt that the virus becomes incapable of infecting in a fomite in a doorknob, elevator button or keyboard. It may be unable to infect after a few hours but that should be plenty of time for an infection to occur.
> I highly doubt that the virus becomes incapable of infecting in a fomite in a doorknob, elevator button or keyboard
Covid appears to have low probability of fomite infection - but there is little reason to take unnecessary risks (given how ineffective humanity has been at stopping the infection).
Plus, I know people who just caught the flu. Why not kill two birds with a stone?
>but there is little reason to take unnecessary risks
That seems to have been the mindset behind authorities deciding not to disseminate this information to the public. But I am not convinced.
That argument only makes sense if people's ability to be cautious and attentive and disciplined in following rules is an infinite resource. You have given people multiple rules they need to follow to avoid getting the virus without informing them which ones are more important to follow than others. For example consider the two guidelines: don't meet people in indoor spaces and don't touch unsanitized surfaces. Both require similar amount of effort/discipline but breaking the first is thousands of times more dangerous than the other.
Except that it is proven that the risk of fomite transmission is extremely low. The chance of a transmission when you directly touch an infected surface and then touch your face is around 1 to 10^4.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/more/science-and-r...
Just spending 15-20 minutes once talking indoors with a person, whose covid status you're unsure of, is more dangerous than not bothering with the whole surface cleaning, hand sanitizing theatre during the entire pandemic. I am not sure that most people appreciate this.
Your understanding of the virus is based on incorrect understanding of how the virus worked that people had in the first few months of the pandemic. This was exactly the point I was making. While the scientific knowledge improved, this information was never really communicated to the people.
I do wonder if we'll continue to see elevated rates of hand-washing in the years to come (as people have started to make it a habit), and if that will correlate to decreased rates of common colds/flus.
The author and I ascribe different meanings to "penny pinching" ...
Also,
> Imagine you are in your car driving and you notice someone in another car, alone, wearing a mask. This is during the covid pandemic so seeing someone wearing a mask is not overly surprising. But then you stop and think wait a second, this person is alone and wearing a mask. Isn't that odd? In fact it seems downright ridiculous. Why would anyone wear a mask in their car when they are alone?
> ...
> Doesn't it makes more sense to just give yourself a blanket policy that says "I put my mask on whenever I leave the house, and don't take it off until I get home." That beats trying to keep track of who needs me to wear the mask, chances of dropping the mask, dirty hands touching the mask, losing the mask, etc.
> I'm not trying to suggest here whether or not people should wear their masks in the car when by themselves.
This begs for "I Wear My Face Mask in the Car"[1].
A penny pincher is the person who goes to dinner with a dozen people and ends up spending an hour trying to "fairly" divide the check among everyone. Or, the one who says a few days later that you should treat him to lunch because he only had a single glass of wine whereas everyone else had two or some such.
Sure, it is a good idea to follow useful rules of thumb to minimize cognitive load, but it is also important to be able to know when a rule of thumb should be discarded.
Whether the rich are rich because they do this stuff or because we notice it more when a rich person acts this way is not clear.
> A penny pincher is the person who goes to dinner with a dozen people and ends up spending an hour trying to "fairly" divide the check among everyone. Or, the one who says a few days later that you should treat him to lunch because he only had a single glass of wine whereas everyone else had two or some such.
Alcoholic drinks in most popular cities are $10+ per drink, if not $18+ in tier 1 cities. If someone that does not drink alcohol is called a penny pincher for not wanting to spend thousands of pennies for others’ alcohol consumption, then what is a person who expects others to spend thousands of their pennies for their alcohol consumption called?
Same situation with vegetarians going out with meat/fish/poultry eaters, since meat dishes cost a decent amount more.
Very odd to me that expecting someone else to pay vastly more for your consumption is considered OK, effectively ostracizing the budget constrained people in your network from dining out with you.
If food or drink consumption was the primary purpose of going out, there'd be no reason to coordinate and meet. If a group of people meets for food, they don't meet for food. They meet for each other. They meet to enjoy each others company, the mood, and good discussions. The price of food and drinks for the group is meant to facilitate these things. For the group.
That's not paying for other people's alcohol consumption. It's paying a fair share of the expenses that were involved to create this particular communal experience. Which also means that if somebody is budget constrained, the group may want to keep that in mind - no matter what they order. I've been routinely in groups where somebody with budget constraint paid less. Not because they ate or drink less. But because the group decided that it was their fair share, based on the group's perception of fairness.
> I've been routinely in groups where somebody with budget constraint paid less. Not because they ate or drink less. But because the group decided that it was their fair share, based on the group's perception of fairness.
That is interesting, I have never been in this situation because it seems awkward to bring it up explicitly. That is why I think it is better to simple expect people to pay for what they consume, so it may be implicitly understood that they may be budget constrained without it being a topic.
I imagine most people who are budget constrained simply opt to decline an invitation to meet with friends if they know the average bill will include an extra couple drinks they cannot afford. To me, this is a worse outcome than spending the very little mental effort required to allocate expenses individually.
The most common solution to this I’ve seen is “I’ll get this one, you get the next one.” And the person that simply can’t just… doesn’t get it until they can, or chips in as much as they’re able (provided they’re at least covering themselves) in cash to the person getting it.
I think it also depends how many times a year you are in this situation. If you go out with big group 5 times a year and end up paying $10 more than you should, you end up down $50/year.
If this is a weekly or daily event, it makes sense to make this more fair.
In my opinion, stressing about anything less than $100/year is penny pinching.
Of course, but it is never $100 per year.
It is just crazy to me that with all the price increases and increase in income/wealth gap, and increases in variety of diets, that it would still be considered taboo to not want (or even be able to) pay for others’ excess.
I go out of my way to make sure if I am having extra to chip in extra, but I certainly would not look down on anyone that insisted on paying for only what they consumed.
I read the article as a guide for my own behaviour, rather than as a template to judge others.
Definitely true one should not judge when you see someone insisting on paying their fair share. You never know the details of their personal lives.
To be fair, OP was more specific than "not wanting to spend thousands of pennies for others’ alcohol consumption." The penny pincher also goes out of their way to be compensated, going against the social etiquette.
One can also remedy this by not spending time with people who do not on their own initiative recognize the inequity of the situation and help make it fair. In fact perhaps you can think of it as an excellent investment of one's money to ferret out the inconsiderate, in order to eliminate them from the friend circle.
Sometimes you go out, and your friends invite their friends, and you are no longer with your core friend circle. I would say it happened most nights in my 20s in a big city.
> penny pincher for not wanting to spend thousands of pennies
Yes, literally, the dictionary meaning of a "penny pincher" is one who does not want to part with his pennies.
The author of the article, on the other hand, seems to call people "penny pinchers" if they do not adopt rules of thumb but instead painstakingly analyze all alternatives. Sure, paralysis by analysis can be bad or there is nothing wrong with focusing one's cognitive energies sparingly etc, but there is very little in the article about penny pinching.
You preferences may say "it is more important for me to save seven bucks in this context." That does not compel other people to enjoy your preferences.
In my life, I have been in groups where if a few people consumed some relatively more expensive food or drinks, they are responsible enough to take care of that.
Also, when you go out with a large group, you do tip the wait staff generously, right?
> Yes, literally, the dictionary meaning of a "penny pincher" is one who does not want to part with his pennies.
I understood the context to be pennies being insignificant. Thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands of pennies are not insignificant (to most people), so penny pincher would be a useless term in that situation. The alternative is where even saving a billion dollars, since it can be translated to 100 billion pennies, is being a penny pincher.
> You preferences may say "it is more important for me to save seven bucks in this context." That does not compel other people to enjoy your preferences.
It is not usually seven bucks when you are out with a decent size group in a city for a few hours.
> In my life, I have been in groups where if a few people consumed some relatively more expensive food or drinks, they are responsible enough to take care of that.
Ideally, but many times I have been out where it needs to be brought up. But that does not make one a penny pincher.
> Also, when you go out with a large group, you do tip the wait staff generously, right?
How is this relevant?
Maybe they wouldn't be as budget constrained if they were easier to invite places? I can't invite my teetotaling and vegetarian friends out to many of the casual things I enjoy, and their purity issues create a self-imposed artificial constraint on their life opportunities. Someone with an actual medical issue learns to adapt to life and live it, where someone with a purity constraint selects for oppotunities where they can impose it on others. Not all vegetarians/non-drinkers, etc, but often it's a control ritual that could be satisfied psychologiclaly in other more productive ways. Also, if someone is struggling financially, adding a social purity constraint to their lives seems like a self sabotaging substitute where they are choosing for luck and opportunity to pass them over instead of accepting their circumstances and changing them. As though they can afford purity, without considering what it costs.
Dining out isn't about the food, it's about company and companionship, and I don't eat with anyone I'm not willing to pick up the entire tab for, because the pleasure of their company is well worth it. If their company is not worth that, I'd say that's the definition of wasted time.
> I can't invite my teetotaling and vegetarian friends out to many of the casual things I enjoy
I'm curious about this. Why not? I'm not vegetarian, but I go out for dinner with vegetarian friends all the time. They order a vegetarian dish, I order a meat one. It isn't an issue.
Similarly with drinking. As long as they want to be there, why would I care if they drink? If they're judging you for drinking, that's a tangential issue.
You say "Dining out isn't about the food" - so then why do you care what food your companion eats? As long as they're happy, what difference does it make?
Dining out isn't about the food because you can make anything yourself with a little effort, and splitting the bill based how many calories you ingest misses the point of going out.
If you said to someone "we should get a coffee sometime" and they said, "thanks, but I don't drink coffee," they would have missed the point or were being bizzarely rude. I'm saying many dietary choices have the same effect. If I said, "we should get a burrito," and you said, "No thanks, I'm gluten intolerant," you're not going to get a second invitation, not because you have a medical issue, but because the person inviting you was expecting a, "yes lunch in principle, and we'll deal with details after."
Maybe you legit used your condition as an excuse to avoid socializing, which fine and your own business, but when you decline invitations, they dry up and nobody owes you another one. Being "lame," means too weak or injured to do something, and a lot of restrictions when you lead with them just make people think you are lame.
> I'm curious about this. Why not?
I also have friends that are on restrictive diets or who don't drink and I invite them out with me regularly. The reality though, is that many people take personal choices and turn them into a religion that they then feel the need to proselytize. I simply don't spend time with people like that, but I can imagine those are the sorts of people grandparent has in mind when they wrote that comment.
> I can't invite my teetotaling and vegetarian friends out to many of the casual things I enjoy, and their purity issues create a self-imposed artificial constraint on their life opportunities. Someone with an actual medical issue learns to adapt to life and live it, where someone with a purity constraint selects for oppotunities where they can impose it on others.
Who is imposing on whom? I did not write the vegetarians and teetotalers force others to not eat meat or not drink alcohol.
> Also, if someone is struggling financially, adding a social purity constraint to their lives seems like a self sabotaging substitute where they are choosing for luck and opportunity to pass them over instead of accepting their circumstances and changing them. As though they can afford purity, without considering what it costs.
I do not even understand what the context of the word “purity” is in your comment. I find the whole theme of the comment to be bizarre.
> Dining out isn't about the food, it's about company and companionship, and I don't eat with anyone I'm not willing to pick up the entire tab for, because the pleasure of their company is well worth it. If their company is not worth that, I'd say that's the definition of wasted time.
I would go out almost every day of the week in my 20s in a very expensive city. With lots of different people, and random people could be invited at anytime by anyone. I certainly do not think it reasonable to want to, or even be able to, pick up the entire tab for all the groups one goes out with.
I am not talking about a small group or one on one meal with a friend you see once every year. For that, yes, paying or splitting evenly is not a big deal, although I would never let my friends consistently pay extra for me outside of occasions.
> Dining out isn't about the food, it's about company and companionship, and I don't eat with anyone I'm not willing to pick up the entire tab for, because the pleasure of their company is well worth it. If their company is not worth that, I'd say that's the definition of wasted time.
Well said. In fact, I've made it a personal rule that if I invite someone out I pick up the tab to simply remove any budget constraint barriers for people spending time with me. Some of the people I most enjoy spending time with are much more budget constrained than I am, but I have no issue with picking up the tab if it lets me have a conversation with them for a few hours in a place where they can be relaxed enough from the stress of their daily life to mutually enjoy it.
> Someone with an actual medical issue learns to adapt to life and live it
That's quite harsh to all the people who cannot join you for dinner on a hike because of some illness or disability.
Describing non-drinking as a "control ritual" and "self sabotaging substitute" is an equally harsh description of people's personal choices or medical needs. E.g. pregnancy.
> I don't eat with anyone I'm not willing to pick up the entire tab for, because the pleasure of their company is well worth it.
I never thought of measuring friendship and companionship with money...
I have numerous friends who don't drink or eat meat and for different reasons (religious, addiction, medical, health, caste, politics, personal), and they manage because they know how to navigate socially. I can think of more than a few invites I don't get for related reasons.
In the scenario you propose, the disabled person meets us at the bar, the recovering alcoholic drinks cranberry juice, and the pregnant woman buys because she's probably the only one with a job, some chirp back and forth, nobody complains, and we get to be together. It's not hard. The lifestyle vegan isn't there because we have other things to talk about, and we can always see him at crossfit.
If we have something to manage in a social situation, I think it's still on us to show we are capable of enjoying ourselves.
> pick up the entire tab for, because the pleasure of their company is well worth it. If their company is not worth that, I'd say that's the definition of wasted time.
So you restrict yourself to life opportunities (restaurants) where you can afford an entire group tab?
You naughty penny pincher!
that was very well said.
> Very odd to me that expecting someone else to pay vastly more for your consumption is considered OK,
As an ex-vegetarian (who does drink), i think it's ok and many have ways around this. If someone invited me to a steak-house, and all i got was a salad, i'd probably ask that host to cover the check and i'd buy everyone drinks elsewhere or a meal another day. It hides the "my $15 salad to your $45 steak" issue with a veil of generosity.
Also regarding drinks, I do drink - but if someone at the table didn't drink and the rest of the table did, i'd do the same thing as the steak-eater and cover their meal and make up later, again, act generously. Also, i would never order more drinks than anyone else, or n+1 from the lowest number of drinks consumed as a social policy.
This is a solved problem up here in Canada, at least in my experience.
Most restaurants will assume you want to split the check by default when you're with a big group, and most restaurant software lets you ring in dishes by the seat rather than by the table, while also splitting shared things across all of the checks at a table (this also helps service teams deliver the right dish to the right guest). Add to that the convenience of chip and pin machines that come to the table, and it is just a non-issue.
I'm American, so I understand that lots of restaurants in the US resist doing things this way. But it is quite silly considering that the software and hardware already exists to handle it all.
A penny pincher is someone who takes money out of the communal meal payment (deposited on the table like a poker pot) because it represents more than 5% tip. In other words, they effectively reduce their own tip below 5% because someone else tipped a higher, more socially-acceptable percentage.
>What I want to talk about here is how the type of behavior that makes us look smart in the moment (i.e. penny pinching) ends up not being smart in the long run.
Well said. I disagree with the article title, due to my experience with delivering pizza.
We all certainly knew the non-tippers. And they almost always were in the wealthiest neighborhoods. So once you go to a house 3 or 4 times, and get stiffed (or hear about it from the other drivers), they become your lowest priority.
Working class and poor neighborhoods almost always got better service and faster food delivery from us because we knew they tipped more often. The non tippers typically ended up with cold pizza and dropped 2 liters cause we didn't give a crap.
Based on my own experience, I would slightly adjust what you say. The wealthy neighborhoods did have more repeat non-tippers than they should, but they also had some of the best tippers. There were also a fair number of non-tippers in the crappiest poor neighborhoods, but I was fine with that.
On the other hand, the "gig economy" has really screwed up pizza delivery since the shops started laying off their own drivers. There is no control over quality, and tips don't really count for anything anymore. The dude who showed up an hour late with a cold pizza got no tip, but so what? He'll never be back, and doesn't answer to the manager of the restaurant. Good tip for a good, prompt delivery, sure. But that won't earn better service, because we'll never see that driver again, either.
Urg I completely agree. My college had a good mix of richer kids and middle class ones, and you could always tell their background because the richer ones would penny-pinch everything. They'd ask you to pay a couple dollars for gas if you went to the grocery store together, or one of my friends bought a couple of decorations for the our shared house and asked us to pitch in for it. If you went with one of the poorer people there would be a sort of understanding that you might split a pizza together later and so you don't have to pay for gas now, and felt much more charitable. It was interesting how stark the difference always was.
Weird - i had experienced the opposite, where most rich kids didn't care about the money (it was their parents anyways!) so they would buy you dinner today, and you'd buy it tomorrow while the middle-class ones had to work for their money, so they wanted it to be "fair" and split by person because they only had so much.
Not saying your experience can't also be true! I was fortunate to have my parents help with money and was fairly charitable, so maybe i didn't notice other behavior.
I guess they liked cold pizza if they kept ordering more.
It means that the nitpicking, planning, penny pinching behavior that preceded the loss was pointless
Maybe the author is struggling with some sort of penny pinching behavior that preceded a life loss, but this is an incorrect conclusion.
Sometimes life just happens. And it has nothing to do with the validity or value of your preceding actions, but it's certainly a commentary on the futility of many of our efforts. The author sounds like he needs a good wisdom walk down the book of Ecclesiastes:
I have seen something else under the sun: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all."
I don't remember where I saw it, but there's a version of that: The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet.
The world is full of people who take a casual attitude towards their finances. They are the ones we keep reading about when we are told most people can't raise $1000 in an emergency or don't think they will ever be able to afford retirement.
It's difficult for me to sympathize with coworkers who have trouble making rent, knowing that they make the same amount of money I do, but have wildly different spending patterns. Juxtaposing $200k+ of student debt with $100+ bar tabs, multiple nights per week (to be fair, the company we were at was on a death march at the time) doesn't seem like taking an opportunity, to use the article's phrasing - it seems frivolous.
Except that sometimes those bar tabs are where opportunities abound, not only for friendship but for future business. Many a startup has been started out of coworkers hanging out together after hours.
Not sure why the downvotes?
The world is full of people with a hoarding attitude toward an arbitrarily chosen store of value. They are the ones we keep reading about when we are told poor decisions have collapsed buildings, destroyed ecosystems, caused wars and unnecessary human suffering.
The rich by and large aren't hoarding cash. They own things with intrinsic value.
They then use those items and borrow cash against them as needed. Think about some the large property companies. Renting property is a pain to do. Yet some of these companies are huge and have millions of dollars they are floating. Why? Because the owners borrow against them to fund their other ventures. Then use the profits of that to pay off anything they borrowed.
Ownership of things that have actual value is the number one way to becoming wealthy. Owning flashy toys and extravagant dinners all the time is a quick way to spend it all for 'the rich'. One dude I follow put it best the wealthy exploit the rich by renting them flashy toys, the rich try to get money from the middle class by selling them things.
Your view is that ecosystems are destroyed by people who consume less?
Hoarding != Consumption
Pennywise, pound foolish.
--->
Pennywise, pound-wise.
If you want to read real, well-researched data about the demographics and behaviors of actual millionaires, Thomas J. Stanley compiled and analyzed the data, and wrote a number of books on the topic. Furthermore, Felix Dennis, the late but an actual billionaire, wrote a hilarious book with a tongue-in-cheek title.
Biggest correlations with wealth are the marshmallow test as a child and then not participating in low-/no-skill chance gambling as an adult.
It seems that many people are overly focused on examples in the article. Rather, isn't the main point of the author that some people don't accurately value their time in relation to life outcomes?
People spend too much time thinking about some things relative to the marginal benefit of each second/minute/unit of time spent on that decision. Conversely, people spend too little time on some decisions whose outcome will be greatly improved by spending another second/minute/hour...etc.
In the context of ML, there is a great blog post from years ago that compares the ROC curve to an indifference curve in economics, which describes how without a sense of what the costs and conseqeunces of the precision in the ROC curve are, you can't really optimize a model well. It's a question of internal vs. external consistency.
There is a heuristic I learned related to a bunch of others, but it's being able to do a fast assessment of the returns on precision. I talk about it to clients in conceptual terms of doing depth-first searches vs. breadth-first. Technologists tend to be depth first and very deep in a relatively narrow context, where dynamics people tend to be breadth first across a wider set of contexts.
The penny pinching metaphor the author uses reduces to an admonition to look at the "bigger picture." Personally I dislike that trope, but a general set of cognitive tools for depth-first thinkers to pop up conceptual levels, particularly into ones where they can apply their skills to navigate the uncertainties of breadth-first thinking with its dynamics of multiple simultaneous equivalents, it would be really useful to summarize and teach.
There is the issue where the details of precision in fact have nonlinear effects and they are worth drilling down into, but that's part of the analysis.
This started well and went downhill fast with absolutely ridiculous examples.
Completely nonsensical article - making broad generalizations without evidence, ascribing "penny pinching" to all kids of behaviors.
Another way to frame the dichotomy for the CS-inclined is greedy versus backtracking solutions. A penny-pincher is taking the best locally optimal choice at each step, just like a greedy matcher. A "backtracker", while not always able to exhaustively explore, approximates it by testing alternatives when given multiple runs.
In the realm of direct interpersonal credit, greedy solving often seems like "the answer:" you study for the test if you want to pass it, follow the polite mannerisms of your society, and take logical steps presented to you by your environment(like following signs and signals to navigate traffic). Situationally, it can work. And top performers in competitive fields are extreme examples of the greedy solution working: monastically training to be the best at what you do with regular drills, harsh lifestyle modifications and risky medicine does get results.
But everyone who's lived long enough without losing their head knows that the greedy path falls off a cliff eventually. You can't "just" follow the advice of professionals and scholars to be healthy, wealthy and wise. And neither does getting the gold medal give you the happy end. But as the article points out, there isn't an easy story to apply to a complex framing of life.
Maybe I'm alone in this assessment but, this reads like it was written by the economics teacher on Ferris Bueller's Day Off. I can't decide if it is on-target brilliant or completely off the mark.
See also, Sam Vimes ’Boots’ theory of socioeconomic injustice: https://samvimesbootstheory.com/
invest all the time you use penny pinching into making more money. youll have a lot more in the end and be better liked.
if youre worrying about wether your part of the check is $7.23 or $11.17 because you didn't have wine, you're not in the right mindset to make money.
i follow the rule: if im going to argue over money, its because im going to sue you.
if its not enough to warrant a lawyer, i just take the L and forget about it.
i am however very serious about work and investments.
Interesting take. For a 'one off' I would not worry about it. But if they are doing it to you a few times, speak up. They are just taking advantage of you. It is not the 5 bucks. It is the fact that you are doing it to you...
If they can cover, and never do, they quickly stop getting hung out with. This is generally true, in my experience.
If they can’t cover and never do, that’s fine - you simply take the L and call it an “investment” in the experience of sharing time with someone you care about.
Bingo! Not all friends are in the same strata, unless one prefers to travel in a narrow socioeconomic bubble. Some are above, and if they offer to cover my meal, I'm happy to accede. Others are below, and for them I always offer to cover their meal. It may not seem fair, but is ultimately just.
The converse is not true; you don't get rich by spending freely.
That being said, there's good frugality and bad frugality. Bad frugality is being "penny wise and pound foolish," spending less now in ways that result in spending more later.
The problem with bad frugality is that it can be really hard to detect - especially when it comes to things that affect your health.
Saving money now on regular checkups, which leads to a health emergency later is an obvious one. But what about spending money on ergonomics, PPE, diet, exercise, etc. It can be hard to quantify the long term risk/benefit.
I've noticed a bathtub curve in cost of ownership on many things. Typically, I do save a good bit of money up front by buying used, and then try hard to repair rather than replace. Eventually, though, a failure mode of all gadgets seems to be an increasing-at-an-increasing-rate amount of spend needed on upkeep.
Admittedly, I've been notoriously bad at realizing that I've entered that phase. On three high-profile occasions (two computers and a car) I've exceeded the saleable value of the thing in upkeep costs, in the span of just a few months - it would've been cheaper to divest and replace.
Determining that you've crossed that inflection point is, I assume, a skill.