If you spend enough time around poor people, you stop thinking of this Dril tweet as satire & realize that it's pretty accurate. "Candles" is just a stand-in for a suite of astoundingly profligate behaviors. https://t.co/ZnY5482Kpf
— Bachman (@ElonBachman) January 22, 2024
Other highlights from the thread, cbf pulling up responses but I assume poors be mad:
Couple of times in life I've found myself holding the actual budget of a poor person (compiled more or less under duress, following a family intervention), & each time it's basically been the Dril tweet. Like the rank orders of the categories don't even make sense.
Real life anthropology of poors here 
20% of income on salons, more spent on car than on rent, etc.
But also just pervasive high time preference. E.g. making minimum wage but buying a bottle of water on the way home from work.
Yes, this is one of the crazy juxtapositions of "poverty" in the US. You can meet poor people who spend more on entire categories than do people who own private jets.
Personal adornment is the common one.
Poors be shopping 
This topic makes me realize that "time preference" is a misnomer, because the thing that poor people spend most extravagantly is time.
Three hours getting ready on a Saturday, entire days spent shopping for a hat, months each year watching TV
And he veers into race realism to close it off 
:
Big puzzle piece for me was hearing someone point out that below a certain cognitive ability, people don't have hobbies, that there are entire countries where nobody has hobbies in the classic sense
What's this have to do with poverty?
A hobby creates artificial structure to gamify some part of reality. It's the kind of shape rotation that you notice is not happening among the dull. There's no engagement with relations, with things as exemplars of classes.
Now imagine you're poor and it's Saturday...
If creating experiences is beyond your mental ability, your menu of options is just stimulus/response gradients: go to mall; buy the brand name hat; buy the flavorful snack; prettify body or car
These are the most complex things you can imagine, poverty just results emergently
This is why poverty often presents as a puzzling mix of profligacy and miserliness; luxury car lease and reusing Ziploc bags 100 times
It's not that they don't know things are expensive, it's that their only joy comes from passive consumption of rich stimulus
There's a lot more 
but I cbf doing the markdown (if you highlight replies I'll pin your comment). In conclusion: nerds rule, poors drool 
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Everytime I see poor people spend money they go so cheap that their lives get worse with every purchase. Even things they need.
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Products like cheap dish soap make no sense. A bottle lasts over a year if you're handwashing everything, you're "saving" twenty cents a month on shit that doesn't work. Who cares if all salt is identical, Morton's is worth 30 cents a year in placebo value alone.
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Branding does impact perception of flavor, knowing it's bullshit doesn't change anything. Embrace and manipulate your psychology.
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I have never thought about my salt brand ever
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Cute twink
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People at the factory masturbate into the generic salt boxes. Well, at least at the one I was at. Well, at least for all the boxes that went by me.
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ackshually
salt brands each have their own distinct texture and composition which influences how it interacts with certain food (and therefore the taste). This is why certain recipes will say "2 tsp Morton salt" because it really is a guessing game how it will taste otherwise.
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Person I know spent a good chunk of change for ziplock bags and aluminium foil for packaging lunch. I've been using silicon bags that are machine washable and don't shed microplastics if you look at them wrong
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Those silicone bags are great. However, the taste of the soap gets stuck in them occasionally.
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Silicone? Why not just use a glass container or metal lunchbox or something?
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Every time i see a poor person spend money its either on cigarettes or mountain dew.
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Sounds like your lived experience disagrees with that of the source text. Care to unpack that?
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