Things I Never Knew About Las Vegas Until I Ran a High-Roller Suite
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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.
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.
"American cheese-like product" is a more adequate description.
> "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.
That should tell you something about the relative desirability of these lives for most people, even if the dollar amounts are unreliable.
(BTW, the richest people in China and India are very rich, oftentimes richer than their counterparts in the U.S. - the article said that 50% of the occupants of the Boulevard Penthouses were from China. So that's not really a fair comparison. Take a population of 2.5B and compare it with a population of 300M and even if the means of the former are much lower, the outliers are likely to be higher.)
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.
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.
... what is the worldview of these people?
"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-...
Oww, come on ... James Bond of course could if he wanted to, the issue is that they insist on stirring Martini's:
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.