To be honest, actual cheddar from GB/Ireland is very different from the yellow goop served at most fast food chains. Not surprising that got associated with cheddar instead of the real thing.
"American cheese-like product" is a more adequate description.
"Almost all of the clients are men, ranging in age from millennials to 70-year-olds, and they stick around for three to five years before going dark—usually due to bad investments, dips in the economy, or divorce."
This entire article made me sick to my stomach, money can be so terribly corrupting and empty.
Absolutely none of the "rich person" activities in that article even remotely appealed to me. I am confident that even if I had a bazillion dollars, I wouldn't demand the sorts of things that some of these people were asking for.
Their wants and needs sound almost like those you might have seen in a past era lunatic asylum - with the exception that these people have the $$$ to actually get people to acquiesce to their insane demands and normalise them.
>Absolutely none of the "rich person" activities in that article even remotely appealed to me. I am confident that even if I had a bazillion dollars, I wouldn't demand the sorts of things that some of these people were asking for.
That's nice virtue signalling, but how can you be so sure before you really are in that situation ? Wealth and power are known to alter brain chemistry and behaviour. Furthermore, these butlers will be happy to help you take to their absurd end whatever indulgences you find normal.
Accusations of virtue signaling are in themselves virtue signaling, where you ride forth on your little horse and neigh at people who make statements which your self-respect would not allow you to claim, little knight.
In light of downvotes and flagging I would like to reaffirm my position. Accusations of “virtue signaling” are hypocritical nonsense and don’t belong in civilized discourse.
As you can see, the swipey bit at the beginning of your comment ended up derailing the discussion. That's too bad, because the point you went on to make was a solid one, and it got lost. This is why we ask people to edit such bits out of their comments here. If you'd review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and do that in the future, we'd appreciate it.
Their wants and needs sound almost like those you might have seen in a past era lunatic asylum - with the exception that these people have the $$$ to actually get people to acquiesce to their insane demands and normalise them.
Paying someone to wear pyjamas and read you a bedtime story seems pretty harmless. There’s a hotel in London that will provide people for you to pillow-fight with, which is a little weirder perhaps but still harmless.
I think you're looking at it the wrong way. I think it's an extremely positive thing for society that people who are dumb enough to squander their fortunes are given an opportunity to squander it, especially if those fortunes are unearned. It's very meritocratic. I hope Las Vegas is filled with the children of billionaires.
I think that if they gave those fortunes for something more worthy like progress of science or charities, it would be much more positive for society. Squandering is just spending money on unimportant things, which DO NOT give benefit to society. Yeah, some of this money will make it into hands of other people, but most of this is just removing value from society.
You are right, but goods represented by money can be destroyed. Maybe we should all break some windows [1] from time to time, to stimulate economy? This will transfer some money to the other people. Or buy some lemons and dump them in volcano. This will be very good for all lemon farmers and if we do this often enough, prices for lemons will increase, so farmers will have even more money...
Where is value removed? The money ends up in the hands of casino companies that spend it on architecture and arts or it is paid out to shareholders who will invest it in new opportunities. It's really difficult to remove value from society. Even if they burn bills, it will only increase the value of every other Dollar because the supply of Dollars just shrunk. You have to maliciously commission bad art or create toxic waste to remove value.
Imagine a millionaire, which went through towns breaking windows for fun (he likes the noise and throwing rocks) or art (broken windows make nice reflections on sidewalk) and payed for every broken window. Is this not destroying value?
You also destroy value if you throw away your trash with all those nice boxes and bottles. The value is not in the objects but in the production knowledge. Increasing the demand for glass will improve production and drive down costs for everybody in the long run. Breaking windows is only taxing on society if there is full employment and there are not enough people to do all available tasks.
> some of this money will make it into hands of other people, but most of this is just removing value from society.
I'm not an economist, but... surely near-as-anything 100% of this money is going to other people? Some tiny fraction is paid to the electricity company to keep the lights on at the casino, and some tiny faction of that is the cost of the fuel that is literally burned for that purpose. I think basically the same goes for the various luxury consumables the casinos are comping to these guests. The actual cost of the base raw materials that are consumed is going to be tiny (relative to the huge sums being gambled, anyway).
Sure it would be better if these gamblers gave their money to science/charities instead. If you think you know how to convince them to do so, then go for it.
A number of people made a similar comment to yours and that the money isn't lost, it just changes hands. The response that most people are giving is that it's an example of the broken window fallacy.
With gambling, though, there's nothing being broken but the money is still stagnant and it's frustrating for poor folk to watch. If you treat the 0.1% as a single entity, then the transfer of money between those who are extremely wealthy--while nothing is being produced for it--is equivalent to no economic activity happening (effectively the same as a father and daughter handing a million-dollar bill back and forth). The electricity and consumables you mention -- you're right that those are the most broken-windowy of all the expenses, but I'd say the real loss is that the money effectively doesn't move at all. There are billions of dollars changing hands, but the money gets stuck in a small, closed system that it doesn't seem to come out of.
If the rich people who make money from casinos were the type of people to donate to science/charity, then gambling would be an unusual and convoluted way of paying for that science or public well-being. Since they're actually more likely the type of people to hold on to their money or invest in things that only benefit themselves, then giving them more money absolutely is just removing value from society.
Eccentric billionaire gives $300K tip to casino dealer.
Casino dealer pays for kid's college education.
Kid grows up to become scientist.
Eccentric billionaire has now made a charitable contribution to advancing the sciences!
(I'm half joking, but only half. The actual consequences of economic activity are often strange and difficult to predict. Oftentimes, a billionaire giving millions to science means scientists get paid more but no more actual science gets done. Similarly, a billionaire giving millions to charity pays the salary of many grant-writers, but the effect on the ostensible beneficiaries is muted or even negative. Meanwhile, the biggest driver of American scientific dominance post-WW2 was Adolf Hitler, who a.) forced all the good scientists in Europe to emigrate or die b.) convinced America that they really needed an atom bomb before Germany got it, which got all of the best scientists in the world working together in close proximity and c.) setup the Cold War, which was the gift that kept on giving for U.S. government science & technology funding.)
Well, it's just transferred from one bank to another with some taxes/salaries/products paid. Nothing has really happened or disappeared. Maybe that second bank got bolder in giving loans for science or whatever.
The reality is that most children of billionaires have no idea how to make money, know it, and stick to whatever conservative investment strategy their banker tell them too to do.
Well, it does go to someone who probably needs it more.
Except for when it goes to fuelling drug wars in Mexico or providing a market for human trafficking (which always seemed like a too-polite word for what it is - slaving).
It goes to the casino, owned by yet another member of the 1%-of-the-1%. There is some trickle down in the form of big tips, but $500 when tens of millions have passed hands is just loose change.
As long as it is not fueling more criminal stuff, it is better for that money to be circulating around. At least a part of that money is being redistributed around to people working the casino, making it possible for them to do other things. The bad part is not these people, it is people who are going into debt and stealing from their children to fuel their gambling addiction. I don't mind the Singapore model where you have to have an income above a certain level to gamble in the country.
There's a great line from the book Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie where the narrator of the book remarks that (and I'm paraphrasing here), there's loads of ways in the world to be poor, but apparently there's only one way to be rich - indulge in the same 'luxuries'.
I think context is king with these articles. It’s not a sneak peak into the lives of the wealthy, it’s a peak into the very vip section of a casino. The article itself is written mainly to sell the drama and the sleaze, and it’s purposedly focusing on the worst bits.
It’s fascinating, sure, but I think it’s also kind of useless informationwise, when you take the context into mind. If anything I think it’s more sad than sickening. I doubt those rich bastards are very happy, and no one is helping them find a better path in life. In fact the casino seem to have build an environment that specifically enables their bad behavior because it’s profitable.
This line does more than almost anything else I've read to explain the wealth disparity between the 1%ers and the rest of the world:
> "Those are stakes of roughly $600,000 per minute, or $36 million per hour. (That nearly matches the 2017 gross domestic product of Tuvalu: $40 million.)"
Indeed, we all long for the days, before 1800 or so, the overwhelming majority of human history, when the people living on more than $2 a day were a vanishingly small minority.
The expansion of health, wealth, education and prosperity since WW2 has been particularly revolting. Education and lifespan have increased on every continent and wealth per person has increased on every continent bar Africa.
This is not the wretched poverty, suffering and disease, the death in childbirth, the children dying in their droves in infancy that we deserve.
You're just sat in the 1%, looking up at the .01% and decrying the immorality of their success. Worldwide, the number of people living in extreme poverty has IIRC halved since the 90s. Fatal diseases in third world countries are being prevented. Things are getting better for the most vulnerable people but everyone is focused on how unjust it is that Warren Buffett or Jeff Bezos makes more than them. Why care?
I'm not in the 1%. The reason I care is because the primary reason for still so many people living in poverty, is the people hoarding money and doing what they can against anything that could change that.
so what? Should we all have the same, or similar? I would've thought the focus would be on lifting up the poorest, not bringing down the richest. If you bankrupted every billionaire in the world you could give everyone on the planet about $1000, and that's presuming that a) net worth estimates are accurate and b) liquidating a billionaire's net worth would actually result in that amount of cash (it wouldn't). Ultra-rich individuals hoarding money aren't exactly emptying out the economy.
OK, but the primary reason billionaires are so rich is from running or founding companies that produce much more value than the billionaires extract. Take away the idea that a successful founder can keep maybe 1% (at most, probably a vast overestimate) of the value they generate, and you'll have vastly fewer founders unless you find another way to motivate them.
In terms of power, ideally there would be a clean separation between money and political power. Some countries are better at this than others. Extremely wealthy people can wield a lot of power internationally, and that's bad. But them having more resources is not a bad thing in my mind unless they can use those resources to hurt people. As far as I'm aware, most don't.
> OK, but the primary reason billionaires are so rich is from running or founding companies that produce much more value than the billionaires extract. Take away the idea that a successful founder can keep maybe 1% (at most, probably a vast overestimate) of the value they generate, and you'll have vastly fewer founders unless you find another way to motivate them.
You are contradicting yourself. The value is generated by the company, i.e. the workers. Not the founder. The founder just extracts this value and makes themselves more powerful.
There can be no clean separation between money and political power. Politics is the struggle for the power to allocate ressources. Money is ressources.
> You are contradicting yourself. The value is generated by the company, i.e. the workers. Not the founder. The founder just extracts this value and makes themselves more powerful.
This is just ideological rubbish. It's not either-or. Workers perform the manual labour and such, but management plans, organises and directs. Labour can't exist without management beyond a trivial level, and the founders (or more realistically, the executives) design and direct the whole company's strategy. If you look around you can see plenty of examples where incompetent direction can kill a company and strong direction can build an extremely valuable one. Founders also accept the risk of failure, and are expected (in any sane workplace) to make more sacrifices than the employees while the company is still small. In essence, the company is the vehicle for the founders' will. Labour is fairly interchangeable compared to that.
> There can be no clean separation between money and political power. Politics is the struggle for the power to allocate ressources. Money is ressources.
You know what I mean. Elections should be won on the strength of the platform, not the size of the budget won from super PACs or wealthy single donors. Of course politicians, when in power, shuffle money around.
> It's not either-or. Workers perform the manual labour and such, but management plans, organises and directs.
Both of these things are work, yes. But one is not thousands of times more valuable than the other. The income of the owners is derived from their ownership of the company. Not from the work.
>You know what I mean.
Yes, I know what I mean. But what you mean doesn't actually make sense. Money in politics is a problem, because it gives some people more power over the politics, i.e. how ressources are allocated.
Billionaires who control a similar amount of ressources as a government through ownership aren't any better though. They have just as much power, and they don't even have to go through the trouble of fixing an election for it.
> The income of the owners is derived from their ownership of the company. Not from the work.
The company isn't going to be worth anything unless the founders turn it into something valuable. In that way, the income of the founders is derived from their ability to create value. That's an alignment of incentives if ever I've heard one. Investors derive their income from their ability to gauge risk and value, and allocate resources to founders who will create the most value with them.
> Yes, I know what I mean. But what you mean doesn't actually make sense. Money in politics is a problem, because it gives some people more power over the politics, i.e. how ressources are allocated.
To be honest my preferred solution is to minimise the ties between money and politics in general - the state shouldn't be given free reign to dick around in the economy, but only regulate and redistribute when it can be shown that a specific industry is broken in a specific way (negative externalities, natural monopolies, etc). I don't have a solution to this problem, but I think it would work better than what we have right now. When the state can basically do what it pleases there's a lot more room for backroom deals and loopholes.
> Billionaires who control a similar amount of ressources as a government through ownership aren't any better though.
But they are, because they don't have a military or police force to wield as a weapon against people they don't like. They can still be dicks but they are limited in their ability to harm others. Governments have no such restrictions, and have shown their propensity to use violence over reason on plenty of occasions.
>To be honest my preferred solution is to minimise the ties between money and politics in general - the state shouldn't be given free reign to dick around in the economy, but only regulate and redistribute when it can be shown that a specific industry is broken in a specific way (negative externalities, natural monopolies, etc). I don't have a solution to this problem, but I think it would work better than what we have right now. When the state can basically do what it pleases there's a lot more room for backroom deals and loopholes.
That is still politics deciding how ressources are allocated. Your solution is to give over the power over ressources to private individuals, instead of controlling them democratically. I think this process gives too much power to a few individuals.
> Your solution is to give over the power over ressources to private individuals, instead of controlling them democratically.
The idea that we democratically control the government is basically a myth. Once we elect a party based on some loose promises, they have free reign to do whatever they want. We're basically voting for one of 2 sets of ideas that we dislike the least, and then giving absolute power to the people who parrot those ideas. Those that aren't part of the elected party (department heads outside the cabinet) are also effectively unelected leaders and will continue to hold power after a new party is elected. What I want is a limit on absolute power, for anyone. Currently the state apparatus is a form of absolute power, and thus a magnet for the kinds of corruption we're talking about. I'd much rather we kept a balance of power between the economy, the individual and the state such that each has its own power and none can force the hand of another. But that's just idealism really, I just think that for now billionaires are the lesser evil compared to the state.
That is a very specific description of the american voting system. I am not american. I agree that the current models of democratic control are severly and fundamentally flawed. But it's frightening to me that you think giving the power to private Billionaires with no democratic legitimization instead is a better solution.
This is what people mean when they say Capitalist Libertarianism is a form of Authoritarianism.
I'm also not American, I'm British. We had a direct democratic vote very recently, which (regardless of whether you like the outcome or not) was surrounded by the most irrational propaganda I've ever seen, from both sides of the aisle. If you want more democracy, expect more of that. I'm also not a libertarian nor particularly a capitalist (I prefer syndicalism on a conceptual level), so your characterisation is both incorrect and reductionist.
OK so if giving private citizens more power (though I'd phrase it as axing bad regulations) is "scary", what's the worst outcome? Compared to giving more power to the state? Because as far as I'm aware, almost all historical atrocities have been committed by states. The first three billionaires who jump into my head immediately (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos) pioneered personal computing, founded one of the most impactful charities in existence, vastly improved the portability of computing, and commoditised online shopping and started a private space agency. Can you think of anything billionaires have done that doesn't involve political corruption that is really really bad compared to the good that said individual has brought to the world?
(without diving into the intricacies of whether people like Carl Icahn provide a net benefit, but I'm pretty against Wall Street and the public stock market anyway).
Because humans (apes also do this) don't look at absolutes. They look at the relative. And they ask if it's fair. Human-like primates obsess about fairness.
I originally phrased that sentence as "the 1% and the remaining 99%" but I changed it to "the 1%ers". I realised it isn't a 1-99% of the global population, but my understanding of the term "one percent-ers" is that it described the elite rich amongst even the elite rich, i.e. the multiple billionaires that are few and far between in society.
> To make the Global Top 1% you have to earn $32,400
It always troubles me when people throw this global piece into it. This global number is absolutely meaningless outside of a regional and often even city based economy.
The quality of life someone can purchase for their family with a $34,000 salary if we live in SF is a terrible and incredibly rough quality of life.
When people speak about the 1%, they are typically speaking colloquially about the 1% from any given region.
The quality of life one can purchase for their family with a $34,000 salary in NYC is still just awful when compared to quality of life of the richest people in China or the richest people in India.
You'd still be living way better than the global 90%, who are living off rice and sleeping on dirt floors. I get your comment though, it's really inconvenient when people make you consider reality.
Again, when looking at wealth disparity, these numbers immediately lose their meaning once you begin to remove regional and local context.
We must take into account what quality of life that salary will purchase for the location in which the worker actually inhabits. Not what that salary would purchase somewhere the worker doesn’t live.
With your example the US based salary of $55,000 is not 1% in the US. In the US a one percenter salary begins at ~$389,400/yr. The quality of life you can purchase with a salary is incredibly location specific.
A salary becomes meaningless once you remove location specific variables. This is why salaries vary for the exact same job depending on what city you live in—a network analyst in SF will likely make more than a network analyst in Keokuk, Iowa. Generally we try to get salaries to have equivalent purchasing power based on the local economy in which the worker will actually be existing.
We can’t meaningfully look at wealth gaps and disparities if we remove all context of what quality of life a local job’s salary can purchase in that specific locale.
The part where they talk about denying people spending >$1mm the fulfillment of orders for drugs or sex that amount to $500-1000 is ridiculous farce.
They don’t operate in a vacuum, and a casino that won’t cater to legitimate and reasonable demands of a high roller will lose them to one who does, duh.
Well obviously they have to say that they don't supply drugs and prostitutes in these articles. What they do or tell the suckers staying at the casino is another matter...
Oh no, a casino that allows drugs for wealthy people, how dare them, I will stay elsewhere! Said no one ever.
I know several people who worked in palaces in several places and drug is NOT a problem to get. Either it is supplied directly by employees with a reasonably high commission, or the employees just answers something like "oh no we can't do that here. I heard however that there is a guy outside that can fix that for you".
Prostitutes are not a big deal either but you have to keep it classy and do not make scandal (so no screaming or too weird stuff and no cheap prostitute or underage girl, and they should look like fancy ladies most of the time).
Overall it's not really a big deal as long as it's not a client openly asking for drugs in the lobby.
Yeah, I'm skeptical. Not only would they have to say that while facing strong incentives to do it, I've also been told by a former high roller that they happily brought multiple prostitutes to his suite at a time. He'd decided that his former lifestyle was not a path to happiness but shared some wild stories of what the casinos will do to keep customers like his former self happy.
If you're interested in reading about the darker side of gambling, I recommend this long-form from The Atlantic: "How Casinos Enable Gambling Addicts."
"Did Scott Stevens die because he was unable to rein in his own addictive need to gamble? Or was he the victim of a system carefully calibrated to prey on his weakness?"
>Those are stakes of roughly $600,000 per minute, or $36 million per hour.
This is an odd thing about gambling when compared to drugs, prostitution or other vices. Gambling can scale up to consume whatever amount of money you happen to have.
It is no doubt a lot but there is some upper bound on how much heroin/cocaine/whatever you can consume without outright killing yourself.
Similarly, there is some upper bound on how much any single human can spend on prostitutes.
Gambling has no upper bound. It can scale up infinitely in line with the gamblers financial means.
I don't know what that theoretical cost ceiling is for drugs and prostitution but I'd hazard a guess and say its way lower than $36 million per hour.
There are other vices that can eat into millions. Conspicuous consumption and buying ridiculous luxury vehicles, for two examples. There's diamond studded, gold plated everything these days for the millionaire who wants to own the most expensive phone, bra, watch, shades, handbag and so on.
But even the price of a diamond has a limited range. Art on the other side has no upper limit. A little canvas with something conceptual drawn on it can easily reach tens of millions of dollar.
I always thought that part of the pleasure people get by shopping is purchasing things that are stlighly more expensive that they can afford. That goes from buying the cheapest scarf at Hermes to buying an expensive car and anything in between depending on your means.
Problem, how do you get that pleasure when you have over $500m at the bank? Comes art dealers, who will happily make you believe that this really exclusive conceptual thing is worth more than an entire building. I don’t think most wealthy buyers care the slightlest about art. But they can finally access that same stingy pleasure a secretary can get buying a Hermes scarf.
If you "appreciate art", you're going to buy $20,000 pieces from brilliant artists, not the name brand stuff that is only marginally more merit worthy if at all.
Since perceiving art is highly subjective, couldn't it be subject to the same kind of placebo-like effect that makes a more expensive wine taste subjectively better than a chemically identical cheaper wine?
A great deal of art collecting by the wealthy are people who discovered a particular artist while young, and they felt a great impact from that art, but only later in life were they able to spend the large sums needed to own some of it for themselves. Parts of David Bowie’s collection are an example of this, artists whose work he fell in love with in the 1960s as a young man still far from wealth.
Art is an investment and if it's worth $1 million now, it's guaranteed to be worth a lot more in 10 years. Same with exclusive cars - although the gaudy gold plated ones probably won't appreciate as much as the 60 year old Ferrari mentioned elsewhere.
Art is an investment and if it's worth $1 million now, it's guaranteed to be worth a lot more in 10 years.
If you know that for sure I have some crypto currencies to sell to you. Guaranteed to make you a mint in 10 years.
Sarcasm aside. You're statement is bullshit. While it's possible that art apreciates significantly it's also very possible that a piece of art depreciates in value massively.
Usually this has very much to do with an artist falling out of fashion. Suddenly the prices for his works are only 1/3rd what they used to be.
If you want to read up on a more knowledgeable opinion I provide a link.[1]
Money quote :
Certainly, it [art] can. A couple of decades ago, a Rand Corp. study estimated that only 1/2 of 1% of all paintings being sold at that time ever resold for more money than they had originally sold for.
I wouldn't claim guaranteed. The price only goes up while enough people believe the price should increase, and I think certainly counts as a 'greater fool' investment. On one hand, there is an entire industry propping it up. On the other hand, it is a fashion. On the third hand, it will become less useful as a store of wealth as banking and tax regulations tighten.
Old cars are interesting. A 60 year old Ferrari is now worth so much because they are so rare. When they were made, those Ferrari's were a terrible investment because most of them would not be around in 60 years time.
the most expensive car you can buy is like a 60 year old ferrari, and its definitely under a billion, unlike the drug trade, but op is right that gambling scales so easily.
i wonder how these poker sites are allowed to operate from offshore and take all my money :(
By that standard, the maximum amount of money you could spend on strippers, and the number of strippers you could enjoy per day, would be $0. But it is common to engage multiple prostitutes for a single job even though you're only able to have sex with one of them.
Their lives, and the lives of people whom they happened to become close with before their downwards spiral. I know some stories and they're not pretty.
These must be the 'guests' that 'go dark after 2-3 years', according to the article.
Churn must be interesting for casinos, there has to be a continual search for new 'guests' that haven't already been fully fleeced. The out of this world hospitality is probably the best advertising they have.
Although gambling is as old as money and can be found all over the world, the phenomenon of Las Vegas is extremely American. In the rest of the world there is 'pecking order' with a hierarchy where everyone knows their place, whether they like it or not. This is useful as there is no pressure to 'become king' as that position is not open to you. You can be relatively happy with your status even if you are 'just' a school dinner lady. Furthermore you can gamble on a regular basis to improve your situation (in your dreams). There are the 'turf accountants' on the High Street or at the actual races. Sports betting also allows for the gambling interest to be masked, you can pretend that you 'love' horses, football or dogs.
Meanwhile, in the land of the free, where the dollar is king, there is some pressure to show you have made it, that you are eligible for the top table. With this pressure comes status anxiety, so you 'have' to make it or die trying. Since you can't just pop in to the 'turf accountant' to waste some money on horses (America lacks bookies), you have to save up and go to Vegas, to live it up whilst you are there. Interesting 'monopoly' Vegas has going on there.
As a foreigner in US, I have observed some interesting lifestyle choices at play.
Most popular media propagates "impulsive", "care-free" choices as the way to "live your life". Add an abundance of options to spend money you don't have (credit cards, personal loans, financing options, Lease Vs. Buy, subscription models, etc.) and you have yourself an ecosystem that is highly likely to overspend, run out of money and fall straight into debt.
Throw in social media into the mix and you have cheap, scalable, autonomous marketing campaign that pulls in the masses.
I don't think you've been to or are aware of Macau. What you are describing is certainly at play in America but it's by no means exclusive of or born in that country.
The article didn't explicitly say this, but it was heavily implied that many of the guests were Chinese or East Asian (99 ranch, male enhancement fungus, superstitious rituals). Not to mention it's characteristic of the nouveau rich of China that have no idea how to properly invest their money.
House edge on most table games is significantly bigger than 1%. Single zero (euro) roulette is about 3%, blackjack can be played near to 0% with skill but the rest is all terrible.
No, not necessarily. I remember a story, featuring Bobby Baldwin iirc, who wanted to raise the stakes so high at a casino that the floor manager had to come in and say no. Bobby (if that's actually him, still unsure), left disappointed, saying "And I thought you had a no-limit table...".
>There is one habit that even the brattiest clients tend to avoid: getting blindingly drunk. When you’re gaming at such astronomical dollar values, after all, it’s critical to keep your wits.
The author would be surprised. Besides, those are only "astronomical" for them and their salary, not for e.g. oil heirs. It's not like those people came there to strategically win...
>Also in the category of demands that can’t be fulfilled: hookers.
Yeah, right.
>Requests for drugs—usually cocaine—are also once-a-week occurrences that come with a hard “no.” (Unless, of course, butlers see a valid prescription.)
Or, you know, if a employee working at the casino will make a thousand $ for their middleman role, for little risk.
The cocaine one is not true at all hotels. A friend of mine spent an evening with a high roller. This guy literally ordered cocaine via room service phone and it came up on a tray in lines. To be fair it was around 20 years ago so maybe times have changed...
It really depends on whether law enforcement is able to barge in there and do a bust. I wouldn't be surprised if the local government keeps an eye closed, given how much the high rollers contribute to local businesses. Don't know if the local government makes much money off of the casinos though (e.g. taxes).
> Some guests are completely phobic about having anything thrown away, lest the discarded object be something lucky. Hot winning streaks may be accompanied by mounds of cigarette ashes, crumpled paper, or random assortments of trash. It’s so common, most butlers know never to remove anything from a gaming table without triple-checking.
I worked as a cashier at a riverboat casino in the midwest. Some nights I would be in the little cage in the high limit slot area. About once a month a specific woman would come in and take a whole row of the $10 and $25 slots (around 10 machines) and just walk up and down the row putting coins in the machine, hitting the button, and moving on to the next machine without even waiting to see if she won.
> Anyone living on $34K in NYC has the option of living like a peasant in China, India, or even poorer countries. If you don't want to emigrate, you can do Peace Corps or other volunteer work and have all your expenses paid for, as well as still knowing that your American citizenship and all your assets will still be here when you get back. Relatively few people take advantage of this option. A very, very large number of people living in those countries are willing to risk everything for a shot at immigrating to the U.S. and living on a lot less than $34K in NYC.
Using an entire paragraph to simply restate the old saying "If you don't like the US of A, you can just get the hell out" doesn't make the argument any more compelling than it is as a simple sentence.
Some of us would prefer to rather than point at the worst nations and say "Welp, guess we should stop asking questions because at least we don't have it that bad." that we should look at places who appear as if they may be doing better and ask "What are they doing differently from us? And can we emulate any of their policies to improve our own society?"
Looking for new information in order to possibly optimize systems is logical from my perspective.
But if you believe people should not be allowed to ask these questions unless they're first willing to "get the hell out" I suppose that is your prerogative.
Oh well. I don't think any of these "high net worth" clients are actually there to make money.. they're probably there to blow away a few million that they can recover easily from other investments or revenue sources. Re: cheese and sweeping things from hotels.. lol, they're human afterall :)
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] thread"American cheese-like product" is a more adequate description.
This entire article made me sick to my stomach, money can be so terribly corrupting and empty.
Their wants and needs sound almost like those you might have seen in a past era lunatic asylum - with the exception that these people have the $$$ to actually get people to acquiesce to their insane demands and normalise them.
/s
That's nice virtue signalling, but how can you be so sure before you really are in that situation ? Wealth and power are known to alter brain chemistry and behaviour. Furthermore, these butlers will be happy to help you take to their absurd end whatever indulgences you find normal.
You mean like a peacock’s tail? An expensive, and therefore hard to fake, action that demonstrates deep commitment to a particular value system?
Paying someone to wear pyjamas and read you a bedtime story seems pretty harmless. There’s a hotel in London that will provide people for you to pillow-fight with, which is a little weirder perhaps but still harmless.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p70PsKwv1Cg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19DqyJCk86s
That was my first Valentine's Day weekend date with my eventual wife - we went to the San Jose pillow fight together.
edit: and maybe not evil, but just pointless.
but who are you to judge what somebody else likes to spend their money on?
At least these people are merely indulging their fantasies and desires, and not spending it on acquiring more power or bribery.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
There are other ways they can destroy more value, of course...
I'm not an economist, but... surely near-as-anything 100% of this money is going to other people? Some tiny fraction is paid to the electricity company to keep the lights on at the casino, and some tiny faction of that is the cost of the fuel that is literally burned for that purpose. I think basically the same goes for the various luxury consumables the casinos are comping to these guests. The actual cost of the base raw materials that are consumed is going to be tiny (relative to the huge sums being gambled, anyway).
Sure it would be better if these gamblers gave their money to science/charities instead. If you think you know how to convince them to do so, then go for it.
Definitions of value in this economy are tautologous.
What has monetary value? Anything that can make more money - the quicker the better.
It's actually rather stupid.
With gambling, though, there's nothing being broken but the money is still stagnant and it's frustrating for poor folk to watch. If you treat the 0.1% as a single entity, then the transfer of money between those who are extremely wealthy--while nothing is being produced for it--is equivalent to no economic activity happening (effectively the same as a father and daughter handing a million-dollar bill back and forth). The electricity and consumables you mention -- you're right that those are the most broken-windowy of all the expenses, but I'd say the real loss is that the money effectively doesn't move at all. There are billions of dollars changing hands, but the money gets stuck in a small, closed system that it doesn't seem to come out of.
If the rich people who make money from casinos were the type of people to donate to science/charity, then gambling would be an unusual and convoluted way of paying for that science or public well-being. Since they're actually more likely the type of people to hold on to their money or invest in things that only benefit themselves, then giving them more money absolutely is just removing value from society.
Casino dealer pays for kid's college education.
Kid grows up to become scientist.
Eccentric billionaire has now made a charitable contribution to advancing the sciences!
(I'm half joking, but only half. The actual consequences of economic activity are often strange and difficult to predict. Oftentimes, a billionaire giving millions to science means scientists get paid more but no more actual science gets done. Similarly, a billionaire giving millions to charity pays the salary of many grant-writers, but the effect on the ostensible beneficiaries is muted or even negative. Meanwhile, the biggest driver of American scientific dominance post-WW2 was Adolf Hitler, who a.) forced all the good scientists in Europe to emigrate or die b.) convinced America that they really needed an atom bomb before Germany got it, which got all of the best scientists in the world working together in close proximity and c.) setup the Cold War, which was the gift that kept on giving for U.S. government science & technology funding.)
I'm sure that some scientists could and did stay in Germany, like Von Braun.
Except for when it goes to fuelling drug wars in Mexico or providing a market for human trafficking (which always seemed like a too-polite word for what it is - slaving).
It’s fascinating, sure, but I think it’s also kind of useless informationwise, when you take the context into mind. If anything I think it’s more sad than sickening. I doubt those rich bastards are very happy, and no one is helping them find a better path in life. In fact the casino seem to have build an environment that specifically enables their bad behavior because it’s profitable.
> "Those are stakes of roughly $600,000 per minute, or $36 million per hour. (That nearly matches the 2017 gross domestic product of Tuvalu: $40 million.)"
To make the Global Top 1% you have to earn $32,400. [1]
Being a billionaire puts you in the top .00003% of human. There are ~2200 billionaires out of 7.55 billion people.
The expansion of health, wealth, education and prosperity since WW2 has been particularly revolting. Education and lifespan have increased on every continent and wealth per person has increased on every continent bar Africa.
This is not the wretched poverty, suffering and disease, the death in childbirth, the children dying in their droves in infancy that we deserve.
In terms of power, ideally there would be a clean separation between money and political power. Some countries are better at this than others. Extremely wealthy people can wield a lot of power internationally, and that's bad. But them having more resources is not a bad thing in my mind unless they can use those resources to hurt people. As far as I'm aware, most don't.
You are contradicting yourself. The value is generated by the company, i.e. the workers. Not the founder. The founder just extracts this value and makes themselves more powerful.
There can be no clean separation between money and political power. Politics is the struggle for the power to allocate ressources. Money is ressources.
This is just ideological rubbish. It's not either-or. Workers perform the manual labour and such, but management plans, organises and directs. Labour can't exist without management beyond a trivial level, and the founders (or more realistically, the executives) design and direct the whole company's strategy. If you look around you can see plenty of examples where incompetent direction can kill a company and strong direction can build an extremely valuable one. Founders also accept the risk of failure, and are expected (in any sane workplace) to make more sacrifices than the employees while the company is still small. In essence, the company is the vehicle for the founders' will. Labour is fairly interchangeable compared to that.
> There can be no clean separation between money and political power. Politics is the struggle for the power to allocate ressources. Money is ressources.
You know what I mean. Elections should be won on the strength of the platform, not the size of the budget won from super PACs or wealthy single donors. Of course politicians, when in power, shuffle money around.
Both of these things are work, yes. But one is not thousands of times more valuable than the other. The income of the owners is derived from their ownership of the company. Not from the work.
>You know what I mean.
Yes, I know what I mean. But what you mean doesn't actually make sense. Money in politics is a problem, because it gives some people more power over the politics, i.e. how ressources are allocated.
Billionaires who control a similar amount of ressources as a government through ownership aren't any better though. They have just as much power, and they don't even have to go through the trouble of fixing an election for it.
The company isn't going to be worth anything unless the founders turn it into something valuable. In that way, the income of the founders is derived from their ability to create value. That's an alignment of incentives if ever I've heard one. Investors derive their income from their ability to gauge risk and value, and allocate resources to founders who will create the most value with them.
> Yes, I know what I mean. But what you mean doesn't actually make sense. Money in politics is a problem, because it gives some people more power over the politics, i.e. how ressources are allocated.
To be honest my preferred solution is to minimise the ties between money and politics in general - the state shouldn't be given free reign to dick around in the economy, but only regulate and redistribute when it can be shown that a specific industry is broken in a specific way (negative externalities, natural monopolies, etc). I don't have a solution to this problem, but I think it would work better than what we have right now. When the state can basically do what it pleases there's a lot more room for backroom deals and loopholes.
> Billionaires who control a similar amount of ressources as a government through ownership aren't any better though.
But they are, because they don't have a military or police force to wield as a weapon against people they don't like. They can still be dicks but they are limited in their ability to harm others. Governments have no such restrictions, and have shown their propensity to use violence over reason on plenty of occasions.
That is still politics deciding how ressources are allocated. Your solution is to give over the power over ressources to private individuals, instead of controlling them democratically. I think this process gives too much power to a few individuals.
The idea that we democratically control the government is basically a myth. Once we elect a party based on some loose promises, they have free reign to do whatever they want. We're basically voting for one of 2 sets of ideas that we dislike the least, and then giving absolute power to the people who parrot those ideas. Those that aren't part of the elected party (department heads outside the cabinet) are also effectively unelected leaders and will continue to hold power after a new party is elected. What I want is a limit on absolute power, for anyone. Currently the state apparatus is a form of absolute power, and thus a magnet for the kinds of corruption we're talking about. I'd much rather we kept a balance of power between the economy, the individual and the state such that each has its own power and none can force the hand of another. But that's just idealism really, I just think that for now billionaires are the lesser evil compared to the state.
This is what people mean when they say Capitalist Libertarianism is a form of Authoritarianism.
OK so if giving private citizens more power (though I'd phrase it as axing bad regulations) is "scary", what's the worst outcome? Compared to giving more power to the state? Because as far as I'm aware, almost all historical atrocities have been committed by states. The first three billionaires who jump into my head immediately (Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos) pioneered personal computing, founded one of the most impactful charities in existence, vastly improved the portability of computing, and commoditised online shopping and started a private space agency. Can you think of anything billionaires have done that doesn't involve political corruption that is really really bad compared to the good that said individual has brought to the world?
(without diving into the intricacies of whether people like Carl Icahn provide a net benefit, but I'm pretty against Wall Street and the public stock market anyway).
Because humans (apes also do this) don't look at absolutes. They look at the relative. And they ask if it's fair. Human-like primates obsess about fairness.
It always troubles me when people throw this global piece into it. This global number is absolutely meaningless outside of a regional and often even city based economy.
The quality of life someone can purchase for their family with a $34,000 salary if we live in SF is a terrible and incredibly rough quality of life.
When people speak about the 1%, they are typically speaking colloquially about the 1% from any given region.
The quality of life one can purchase for their family with a $34,000 salary in NYC is still just awful when compared to quality of life of the richest people in China or the richest people in India.
Earning at least $55,000 per year in the US with a household of one adult puts you in the top 1%.
$32,000 puts you in the top 3.4%, which is still pretty good.
We must take into account what quality of life that salary will purchase for the location in which the worker actually inhabits. Not what that salary would purchase somewhere the worker doesn’t live.
With your example the US based salary of $55,000 is not 1% in the US. In the US a one percenter salary begins at ~$389,400/yr. The quality of life you can purchase with a salary is incredibly location specific.
A salary becomes meaningless once you remove location specific variables. This is why salaries vary for the exact same job depending on what city you live in—a network analyst in SF will likely make more than a network analyst in Keokuk, Iowa. Generally we try to get salaries to have equivalent purchasing power based on the local economy in which the worker will actually be existing.
We can’t meaningfully look at wealth gaps and disparities if we remove all context of what quality of life a local job’s salary can purchase in that specific locale.
They don’t operate in a vacuum, and a casino that won’t cater to legitimate and reasonable demands of a high roller will lose them to one who does, duh.
I know several people who worked in palaces in several places and drug is NOT a problem to get. Either it is supplied directly by employees with a reasonably high commission, or the employees just answers something like "oh no we can't do that here. I heard however that there is a guy outside that can fix that for you".
Prostitutes are not a big deal either but you have to keep it classy and do not make scandal (so no screaming or too weird stuff and no cheap prostitute or underage girl, and they should look like fancy ladies most of the time).
Overall it's not really a big deal as long as it's not a client openly asking for drugs in the lobby.
"Did Scott Stevens die because he was unable to rein in his own addictive need to gamble? Or was he the victim of a system carefully calibrated to prey on his weakness?"
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/12/losing-...
This is an odd thing about gambling when compared to drugs, prostitution or other vices. Gambling can scale up to consume whatever amount of money you happen to have.
It is no doubt a lot but there is some upper bound on how much heroin/cocaine/whatever you can consume without outright killing yourself.
Similarly, there is some upper bound on how much any single human can spend on prostitutes.
Gambling has no upper bound. It can scale up infinitely in line with the gamblers financial means.
I don't know what that theoretical cost ceiling is for drugs and prostitution but I'd hazard a guess and say its way lower than $36 million per hour.
I always thought that part of the pleasure people get by shopping is purchasing things that are stlighly more expensive that they can afford. That goes from buying the cheapest scarf at Hermes to buying an expensive car and anything in between depending on your means.
Problem, how do you get that pleasure when you have over $500m at the bank? Comes art dealers, who will happily make you believe that this really exclusive conceptual thing is worth more than an entire building. I don’t think most wealthy buyers care the slightlest about art. But they can finally access that same stingy pleasure a secretary can get buying a Hermes scarf.
Call it an investment. But that still not for the love of art.
But not all pieces appreciate in value. There have been many cases of forgery and other fraud perpetrated by high profile galleries.
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/th...
If you know that for sure I have some crypto currencies to sell to you. Guaranteed to make you a mint in 10 years.
Sarcasm aside. You're statement is bullshit. While it's possible that art apreciates significantly it's also very possible that a piece of art depreciates in value massively.
Usually this has very much to do with an artist falling out of fashion. Suddenly the prices for his works are only 1/3rd what they used to be.
If you want to read up on a more knowledgeable opinion I provide a link.[1]
Money quote : Certainly, it [art] can. A couple of decades ago, a Rand Corp. study estimated that only 1/2 of 1% of all paintings being sold at that time ever resold for more money than they had originally sold for.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Can-a-fine-art-painting-lose-value
edit : change of a redundant word + parts of my comment ended up in the quote
Old cars are interesting. A 60 year old Ferrari is now worth so much because they are so rare. When they were made, those Ferrari's were a terrible investment because most of them would not be around in 60 years time.
i wonder how these poker sites are allowed to operate from offshore and take all my money :(
...what? How could this possibly be the case?
Look at the amount King Ludwig I spent on one prostitute (Lola Montez).
Proper prostitution operates at market prices, and its enjoyment doesn't scale beyond one body and 24 hours a day.
Churn must be interesting for casinos, there has to be a continual search for new 'guests' that haven't already been fully fleeced. The out of this world hospitality is probably the best advertising they have.
Although gambling is as old as money and can be found all over the world, the phenomenon of Las Vegas is extremely American. In the rest of the world there is 'pecking order' with a hierarchy where everyone knows their place, whether they like it or not. This is useful as there is no pressure to 'become king' as that position is not open to you. You can be relatively happy with your status even if you are 'just' a school dinner lady. Furthermore you can gamble on a regular basis to improve your situation (in your dreams). There are the 'turf accountants' on the High Street or at the actual races. Sports betting also allows for the gambling interest to be masked, you can pretend that you 'love' horses, football or dogs.
Meanwhile, in the land of the free, where the dollar is king, there is some pressure to show you have made it, that you are eligible for the top table. With this pressure comes status anxiety, so you 'have' to make it or die trying. Since you can't just pop in to the 'turf accountant' to waste some money on horses (America lacks bookies), you have to save up and go to Vegas, to live it up whilst you are there. Interesting 'monopoly' Vegas has going on there.
Most popular media propagates "impulsive", "care-free" choices as the way to "live your life". Add an abundance of options to spend money you don't have (credit cards, personal loans, financing options, Lease Vs. Buy, subscription models, etc.) and you have yourself an ecosystem that is highly likely to overspend, run out of money and fall straight into debt.
Throw in social media into the mix and you have cheap, scalable, autonomous marketing campaign that pulls in the masses.
The author would be surprised. Besides, those are only "astronomical" for them and their salary, not for e.g. oil heirs. It's not like those people came there to strategically win...
>Also in the category of demands that can’t be fulfilled: hookers.
Yeah, right.
>Requests for drugs—usually cocaine—are also once-a-week occurrences that come with a hard “no.” (Unless, of course, butlers see a valid prescription.)
Or, you know, if a employee working at the casino will make a thousand $ for their middleman role, for little risk.
... what is the worldview of these people?
Oww, come on ... James Bond of course could if he wanted to, the issue is that they insist on stirring Martini's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shaken,_not_stirred
Using an entire paragraph to simply restate the old saying "If you don't like the US of A, you can just get the hell out" doesn't make the argument any more compelling than it is as a simple sentence.
Some of us would prefer to rather than point at the worst nations and say "Welp, guess we should stop asking questions because at least we don't have it that bad." that we should look at places who appear as if they may be doing better and ask "What are they doing differently from us? And can we emulate any of their policies to improve our own society?"
Looking for new information in order to possibly optimize systems is logical from my perspective.
But if you believe people should not be allowed to ask these questions unless they're first willing to "get the hell out" I suppose that is your prerogative.