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Comment by ClumsyPilot | Hacker News Reader

I used to hate the word 'privilidge', but it applies here perfectly.

Like a person who has spare $10,000 laying around and a lawyer on retainer can't even fathom how this is a problem.

Maybe you lost $3000 of tickets for a family flight, and booking replacement tickets will costs 2x as much because you are booking short notice.

And maybe if you cant get replacement tickets, now you loose $5,000 of hotel, so now your total losses are 8k.

And if you don't know the law and don't have legslly literste friends, maybe you never get compensation

Also known as poverty premium

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I think the problem with the word “privilege” is it’s used in a context that suggests someone is granted something of value by virtue of their “just existing” that others don’t have.

In the case of having a money cushion this could be true if you’re born into a wealthy family and have a trust fund. But it’s not the case for someone who has built wealth for themselves. They aren’t “privileged” in this sense. They earned it.

> But it’s not the case for someone who has built wealth for themselves.

I used to think so untill I encountered:

"You young people don't know what it's like to work hard, I started with nothing and bought a house. You can't buy a house because you spend all your money on Avocado on toast."

Now I realise it's a polite way of saying 'you are an idiot'.

It's a mindset where you don't understand what life is like for the person you are trying to lecture. It doesn't matter if you are hostile or helpfull, it just means you don't understand the relevant problems.

You think avocado is relevant to house purchasing, you design benefits system for homeless people that asks for your address. You asks people how is it a problem that you need to file a lawsuit to get your money back - like who can't file a lawsuit. Or who doesnt have internet?

If you 'self-made' your wealth 20 years ago, you will have forgotten how it was, and times have changed. So it helps, but is not strictly relevant.

I don't know about Germany, but small claims courts (where this level of damages would belong) are really quite accessible. Hiring a lawyer for one is overkill.

If you can get to a public library, you have internet.

Not everything is an intractable problem, though I'll agree that avocado on toast is an unlikely reason to not be able to buy a house (though is a reasonable hyperbole for "bad financial planning", if rather insultingly dismissive).

Furthermore, "privilege" makes it sound like the advantageous state should be seen as the exceptional condition, and that social equality would be served by getting rid of the "privilege". Whereas actually, we should aspire to reform our society such that everyone has the economic power to represent themselves.

If you read enough Italian Elite Theory and some Nietzsche it pretty much comes down to a strategy to become the master class/elite of a society. Instead of earning status outright, another approach is to agitate for it using masses of people to prop you up. Hence identity politics designed by some hopeful elites to recruit masses of wannabe but never will be elites wrapped in a formal claim of justice or some other such emotional nonsense. The actual issue is “I want power over others”.

Players of RTS games will note that this is why you have to build resource storage as well as extraction - storage functions as a "shock absorber" that saves you money in the long run. (A consumer credit line is, for example, a kind of virtual/worse type of storage that is, ironically, not even available unless you already have significant flow.)

Well, it's more that resource storage allows adaptivity rather than being a shock absorber, per se.

For example, in the fog of war or the early game we don't know if the enemy is teching, econo-expanding, or rushing. In the mid-game we know an attack is coming, but we're uncertain its unit composition. So in the early game we store some resources while we scout. If we see them teching we can dump everything into military expansion since they'll have neither the army nor the production to counter any attack. Same idea for mid-game: knights -> build pikeman, archers -> build knights.

If it were merely about shock absorption we may as well have dumped it all into walls, archers, and castles.

I would describe those as shocks. I may prefer to set money aside and then fix my car before it breaks down from a transmission issue or whatever, but I don’t know that it will be a problem. In the same way I would prefer to blind counter in an RTS, but I just don’t have that information.

Well, why not dump all the money into units then? Right? It's fundamentally about the adaptability not the defence depth.

It’s still about lack of information. Building random units in an RTS without information is like replacing random car parts, it might work but it’s likely to be wasteful.

Of course risk vs reward can still favor replacing parts early or building units / eco.

Yeah, and there are a lot of horror stories about credit lines being cut off at exactly the times you need them. I remember one on a personal finance UK forum about someone who quit his job and was going to draw on his standing home equity line of credit to start a business but then had the request denied because "lol you don't have income anymore".

Perhaps travel via airplane in general should begin to be viewed as privilege considering its impact on the planet.

I hate to use the word 'privilege' but it applies the other way as well. Like someone is probably in a privileged position to demand immediate refund and a handsome EU compensation on top of that, many people in more unprivileged parts of the world wouldn't be so lucky to get any of that at all. Privilege arguments can go so many ways.

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