If you have issues with impulse control you are likely to become poor because you will slowly bleed out money and opportunities from bad decision making.

The opposite is also true: it’s just less correlated because it is harder to gain money than to spend it, so not everyone makes it.

This is obvious to anyone who grew up poor and escaped, or who grew up well off and watched people on the fall. How long does a middle class heroin addict remain?

Should I set up the company now and rake in the billions?

If you don’t care, you don’t care. I gave up a long time ago too. In that case it would be annoying enough if the privacy preserving card were just 1cm longer or something that you wouldn’t use it.

I suppose my argument is along the following lines - books are too cumbersome so let's scroll Instagram instead.

It's a fake argument, it's not that big a deal, you just didn't care enough about reading books.

It's also generally cheaper due to cashback and other incentives.

Other than that I've always found the idea that cash is "inconvenient" a bit of a child-like argument. Okay, yeah, you have to count some coins, you also have to brush your teeth and use a knife and fork instead of your hands, come on.

There is more money available to chase housing in urban areas because it's where most of the jobs are due to network effects, so if you are a labourer you gravitate towards that (as you say, it's a commute thing).

It's not necessarily intrinsically more desirable. If you gave the average person 5 million quid I don't think they would choose to live in Central London.

The car is clearly not the best way to navigate a dense city. It is impractical to have, say, tower block apartments and also have a car for each resident. It is unreasonable to build enough parking for peak time around every destination that anyone might want to go to.

On the flip side - not everyone wants to live in a dense city, and people's opinions on this change throughout their lives. It was profit maximising and also a lot of fun for me to live in the inner city in my early to mid 20's. Now that I can afford to not maximally push my career I prefer the outer parts of the city / more rural areas, and that's where the car shines.

Open hardware is essentially useless if I need to carry both an open phone and a phone with the parking app, the banking app, messenger app to contact friends, etc.

Modern cars already exist, you can just use those. There aren’t enough proper classics in existence to matter from a carbon perspective.

But then what of it? I had more money at age 20 than I did at 15, more at 25 than 20, more at 30 than 25, and so on and so forth.

When I'm 70 I'll have more in real terms than I do now. Each year, barring some sort of disaster, most people work and bring in enough to survive whilst the surplus stacks up.

The main difference in my mind driving the rate of change in the proportions is just that the median person is more aware of things like the stock market, real estate, etc, now.

Basically, people are acting more efficiently. I'm more savvy than my parents were; they are/were proper working class "spend it as soon as it comes in, it might be gone" whereas I'm more like "never touch the capital, diversify".

(There are some issues, like how in the UK pensioners are given _extremely_ generous benefits, but I don't think that's relevant to the global picture).

So then it's a bidirectional correlation. You're more likely to be fit if you are wealthy and more likely to be wealthy if you are fit.

Essentially, what you're looking at is that people who engage in self improvement end up better off than those who don't.

It's a priori obvious but some people are uncomfortable with it for some reason - trauma response / coping mechanism, something like that.

So, water is wet.

I would also argue that it isn’t necessarily true in the strictest way of thinking, because personally if I had infinite money and technicians to maintain things I’d have 70s-90s sports cars before everything got massive and wide and heavy. That’s way more expensive and luxurious than a new Model 3 or something.

In the UK it's kind of like - kids don't wander about alone because they might run into baddies, and now adults are afraid to interact with kids because they might be seen as a baddy, and this kind of loops around until no-one is interacting.

Basically, it's like any adult man is seen as a potential child predator, when in reality it's some tiny tiny fraction and in an ideal world we would be able to assume that they get sectioned / locked up quickly so we don't have to worry about it.

Meanwhile I can travel around many parts of Asia, for example, and parents and children alike have no issue interacting with strangers.

The recent issues with crime are, at root, apparently down to the fact that we don’t have enough prison places and we don’t have enough police.

The obvious solution is to hire more police, raise the wages, compulsory purchase a big field somewhere, make a massive prison and lock up the worst offenders for a long time.

There is some obsession with “making the books balance” as if this even matters. The Government is sovereign but acts as if somehow they have to do everything at market price like a private individual would.

I see society as being cutthroat at the larger and more economic scales (e.g. global, obtaining / keeping your place within the elite of your country, etc) and more cooperative at the smaller scales (e.g. neighbours in your street, your friends, business partners).

The blue haired woman won’t date the fisherman and the farmer girl won’t date the metrosexual city boy.

Somehow you’re getting stuck on one side being universally correct, which in some extreme cases might be reasonable, but generally you are just looking at a societal split rather than one side moving hard.

IME, as a mid 30’s bloke in the UK in a stable relationship, guys haven’t significantly moved right wing, society as a whole has feminised (mostly in large cities). If anything it’s the women moving away from the previous norms - polling struggles with this because it defines “how the world was 30 years ago” (e.g. the home that almost everyone I know grew up in) as being hard right / conservative.