WTF is Wrong with Rich People?

[HughBeaumont]

https://www.salon.com/2017/11/11/wtf-is-wrong-with-rich-people/

Friends of mine who have had a passing familiarity with this world over the years have told me stuff like, “money is the way they keep score.” Well, usually you “keep score” in games that have a beginning and a middle and an end, but this goddamn game they’re playing doesn’t have an end. It just keeps going and going and going, and they keep accumulating more and more millions and billions, and they keep buying shit with it — Gin Lane estates, $1.5 million Ferraris, Gulfstream 550s, 220-foot-long mega-yachts.

I have a friend who takes care of a boat for a billionaire who owns a very well-known sports team. Every year, that boat — it’s about 32 feet and it cost a couple million — is put on a trailer down in Palm Beach and it’s driven up here for the summer. Last couple of years, the billionaire sports team owner hasn’t taken the boat out on the water for even one hour. It’s so underused that my friend has to “exercise” the boat every couple of weeks to keep the engines in good shape, so we take it out and zoom around — it will do 35 knots; it’s a hell of a lot of fun — and then we tie it up in an expensive marina. When September rolls around, the boat is put on a trailer and hauled back down to Palm Beach, where it goes back in the water and then . . . who knows? It probably just sits there.

Which brings us to the question raised in the title. I have to say, I don’t have a clue what’s up with rich people. I mean, I’ve got friends here in Sag Harbor who do stuff like building teak decks and painting houses and plumbing and electrical work, and every single one of them has trouble getting paid when it comes to summer people, which is to say, when it comes to rich people. Working for locals isn’t a problem.

But rich people? They don’t pay on time and they fight over the bill. I don’t remember asking for that concrete, they’ll say, pointing to the bill. Well, sir, you can’t put posts in the ground for your deck if you don’t sink them in concrete, so that’s why the eight sacks of concrete are on the bill. Or they’ll complain about paying two or three grand for pipe and have to be reminded that’s the stuff the water goes through, and building codes say it has to be copper, and copper costs money. The thing is, none of them — not a single one of them — will just take the damn bill and pay it. They have to nitpick things to death before they write a check on an account that’s linked to some offshore trust in the Caymans.

[dchill]

1. They are ill. It's a disease.

For which I have zero compassion.

[no_hypocrisy]

2. IMO, Scott Fitzgerald had The Rich nailed if only via The Great Gatsby.

And the more things change, . . .

"You're a rotten driver," I protested. "Either you ought to be more careful or you oughtn't to drive at all."
"I am careful."
"No, you're not."
"Well, other people are," she said lightly.
"What's that got to do with it?"
"They'll keep out of my way," she insisted. "It takes two to make an accident."
"Suppose you met somebody just as careless as yourself."
"I hope I never will," she answered. "I hate careless people. That's why I like you."


They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made…

[Zoonart]

3. Yep!

In the 90's I worked with two other artists painting interior and exterior murals for the rich of PA and NYC. We had the same experience getting paid. They would try to argue for a reduction in the bill if they found a single hair from a paintbrush in the work. They would pay one third up front and you had to chase them for the rest.

Finally, we began to charge them up for the inconvenience of having to fight for payment. We called it the AHSC- the asshole sur-charge and applied it to our estimates. IN our business, we found that they would generally not pay about $2000.000 on the final bill, just enough to keep a contractor from going to small claims to collect. My husband has a design build landscape firm at the time and had the exact same problem.

It's a game for them. They take pride in getting over on contractors and the little guy. Says a lot doesn't it?

[HughBeaumont]

9. Which is why I don't get why the "little guy" SUPPORTS these thieves.

Their ultimate thief, their representative who has a record of stiffing contractors, labor and mom-and-pops (he can, because they don't have the monetary means to collect from him) is now in the White House.

In the end, they're not rich and they're still stiffed.

[mercuryblues]

4. When you use money as a way to keep score

you have no friends. That is what is up with rich people.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

5. These "people" - and I use that term loosely - are sick, sick, sick.

[lostnfound]

6. Some lose the ability to make friends, because they are taught to be suspicious of others

The flip side of having money is that many of the people they interact with are only wanting money. These days there’s a givers/takers meme (probably spread by some political strategist) that’s quite common in their vocabulary now. The whole logic is that anyone less wealthy than you is after your money, and if someone less wealthy than you tries to pick up the tab once in a while or give you a gift, then they are poor because they are wasteful.
I live in a well off area and the repair bills, vet bills, haircuts are all twice as expensive.i don’t mean at fancier places, either. It reinforces suspicions that they are always being ripped off.

[Raven]

7. My mother would say: "How do you think they got rich?"

[HughBeaumont]

10. The bigger the wealth, the bigger the boots -

[Buns_of_Fire]

8. "Only the little people pay their bills."

I don't think Leona Helmsley ever said that, but I'll bet she THOUGHT it.

I think some (not all) of them really ENJOY making life difficult for the "little people." Making contractors and the like grovel. "They're lesser beings than we are, you see, so they deserve to be jerked around."

It's a game. They'll play it until the day they die. It's the only entertainment that stimulates them.

[OldEurope]

11. My father used to say: from the rich you learn to be grasping.

My father was hard working in the construction business here in Germany. He had to give up in the 1980s due to rich assholes not paying duly for his work. Ebenezer Scrooge is alive and well and avoids bad dreams at all means.

[workinclasszero]

12. Poor man wanna be rich, rich man wanna be king

Badlands

Workin' in the fields
'til you get your back burned,
Workin' 'neath the wheels
'til you get your facts learned,
Baby, I got my facts
Learned real good right now,
You better get it straight, darlin'
Poor man wanna be rich,
Rich man wanna be king,
And a king ain't satisfied,
'til he rules everything,
I wanna go out tonight,
I wanna find out what I got

Matthew 19:24
I'll say it again--it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of God!"


Jean-Jacques Rousseau: When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich.

[MissB]

13. At a party a few years ago

the host was quite drunk. He is the son of someone on the Fortune 500 although he’s rich enough in his own right. Spends the summers in the Hamptons, etc.

Anyway, at the party he stated to me and a friend “I’m a part of the 1% and I want to stay a part of the 1%!” The money is all that matters.

For the rest of us, it’s people that matter.