[ronaldx]

Suppose you are one of London's 72 resident billionaires, and you're making 5% or so on your income.

You can pay for this digger in an hour, by spending that hour sitting on your ass, and it's not that you will be re-spending that money in your lifetime anyway. Fill it in or have someone salvage it, do whichever is quicker: you've got other things to do with your life and one of those things is to enjoy your new pool.

(Whether true or not, this acts as a good illustration of the scale of income inequality)

[woah]

Why would the billionaire in question even be concerning himself with the transportation of some machinery? This decision would be taken by whoever was in charge of the excavation.

[refurb]

I'd have to agree. Just tell someone "there is a fully functional digger down, it's free, but you have to get it out."

Hell, people will come and haul away scrap steel from the bottom of a lake. A digger worth $10,000? 4 guys and 8 hours and each of them just made $2500 for a day's work.

[S_A_P]

I don't think someone catering to exclusive clientele would bring "scrap riff raft" into a property. It seems ludicrous and completely credible to me.

[sp332]

Chances are you didn't get to be a billionaire by throwing away $5k if it's easily recoverable.

[ronaldx]

Chances are you don't get to be a (self-made) billionaire without throwing away $5k here and there.

If you're spending your time saving easily recoverable $5ks, you might get to be a millionnaire but you will never get to be a billionaire: it's totally irrelevant on that scale.

Equivalent statement: You don't get to buy a house without picking pound coins up off the street.

[rdtsc]

> Chances are you didn't get to be a billionaire by throwing away $5k if it's easily recoverable.

Even better chances are you probably did a basic cost analysis and didn't just go based on hunches.

And best chance yet, you probably inherited the billions.

[rmc]

Or you inherited it? Or your a middle eastern minor prince, or your a Russian who was in the first place at the right time and got a good deal ( ;-) ) on some Soviet privitaisation.

Not all billionaires pulled themselves up by their bootstraps

[spikels]

I think it says more about the extremely high cost of strict planning regulation. Not everything is about inequality.