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Comment by xrd | Hacker News Reader

It's wild that you said that amount because that was exactly the number.

I have other friendships that have been tested for similar amounts that have survived. But, it leaves a mark.

I had an ex-employee who worked for me under starvation wages in a startup long ago. He was upset about that and some tax implications, and brought it up with me. I gave him a smallish lump sum and enabled him to put a down payment on a house. I need to ask him about that, it was really brave to ask me to clean something up, and I never did that with the friend from the OP. I wonder if it would have gone differently.

I'm seeing a lot of people in my circle struggling right now. I bet 2024 is going to be a bad year for friendships.

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Wow. $20k seems like a paltry sum to end a friendship over.

This forum is so out of touch with reality sometimes I'm just left blinking and shaking my head. 20,000 dollars is an enormous amount of money to a supermajority of people in the developed world. Almost half an annual wage for most industrial workers in the EU and US.

$500,000 USD is a middle class wage in the Bay Area /s

thou, the question is, wheather you can buy a friendship with the money. the answer is probably, no, hence it's not worth it.

That's a very privileged perspective to have... I know plenty of people for whom a sudden $20k shortfall would be existential.

I probably could have phrased it better, but my comment was taken out of context. What I mean is $20k is a paltry sum for a tech startup to screw someone over for. I don’t think it’s a small sum for most individual wage earners (especially with young children).

I struggle to find any situation where 20k is a paltry sum

I was going to say "maybe to launch a rocket into space" but then I realized SpaceX has made even that much cheaper than it used to be. (Still more than 20K though :))

Really? Try glancing the sorts of wages and earnings that literally 99% of the world's population makes on downwards and you'll quickly see that it's far, far from "paltry" for the vast majority of people.

An interesting thought experiment to me is how much I would be willing to spend to preserve a friendship. Various situations over the past few years, including some businesses with friends made me think about hypotheticals.

I'm unsure why my sibling comments seem to think the sentence ends at "sum".

Is it possible to buy a real friendship for $20k? Is a friendship of many years worth more to you than $20k - would you stop being friends if someone else offered you that much to do so?

This isn't a paltry sum of money, it is a paltry sum to end a friendship over.

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