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by jsnk 5129 days ago
What is it about a person being rich that bothers you?
4 comments

People being rich doesn't bother me, reading fluffy New Yorker articles about them just doesn't interest me. Other people obviously enjoy it, but it doesn't really read like the kind of article I look for on HN, or even in the New Yorker.

Thiel's nose is bulbous? I needed to know that for some reason? It just read like a fawning article about some rich guy to me. The author met with Thiel in this fancy coffee shop, Thiel recently bought 2 multi-million dollar houses blah blah blah. Great, just not anything I personally care that much about.

I didn't think it was fawning, in fact quite the opposite - that some of these details were intended ironically, and the tone of the piece was actually more negative? Did I just read what I wanted to see?
I read a few paragraphs, started skimming, and eventually gave up, maybe it was only those first few paragraphs. It just didn't seem like a meaty article to me, and if it was, it was too much work for me to get to the meat. The internet may have made me lazy.

Or maybe I read jwz too often and was pre-biased against Thiel - http://www.jwz.org/blog/2011/08/paypal-founder-has-played-fa...

You cannot deny it carries with it certain effects and consequences, and debatably, pre-existing personality traits.
He is rich in terms of money but incredibly impoverished in his personal world view.
> incredibly impoverished in his personal world view

Translation: I think X is important, he thinks Y is important, therefore it's not merely a matter of having different priorities, but "he is wrong" and - worse than that - "his worldview is impoverished".

I love how "tolerant people" can't tolerate people.

Moral priorities will always be subjective. There isn't much sense to prepending "I think" to a sentence when it's implied by the context.

Being tolerant doesn't mean that one cannot be critical.

Being critical doesn't mean that one cannot be respectful.
Being rich is no problem. Acting like being rich means you're better than other people (or smarter, more hard-working, or even luckier, anything other than richer) is a huge problem, because it leads to a kind of economically-driven idolatry.