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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Wife's friend just took a vacation to Florida with her boyfriend (who doesn't contribute to her bills).
They rented a Wrangler to drive down there because they couldn't afford round-trip tickets. Besides the fact that a Wrangler is a terrible choice for a 1,400-mile trip, she and her boyfriend each have their own cars.
She came home with just $12 to her name. She's in her late 40s and has a double-digit bank account.
She's hoping that with her tax return, she can pay off enough that she'll only owe $500 on her financed 2008 Jeep Patriot. She's not going to put that money towards credit card debt.
She'll order Jimmy John's delivered. It's literally next door. It's closer to her mailbox than her actual apartment is.
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Jimmy johns charges 1.5$ for deliveries and they don't have any bullshit fees, so an 8$ sandwich costs 10$ after everything. It's not a bad deal if you're not a total poor
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She has $12 to her name.
She is a total poor.
Again, when she walks out to grab her mail, JJ is closer than her apartment unit.
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That's true, but poors aren't people, so I don't think about them a lot.
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lol I lived next to a guy that financed his down payment for a jeep by liquidating his 401k
Dude treated poverty strategies like a pro sport. I still have a hard time believing him if not for the 3 jeeps he owned while living in an apartment complex that doesn't even have a garage
I gotta be really clear: he didn't just get a loan for the jeep, he got a different loan for the initial down payment as well for a THIRD vehicle
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Driving a wrangler on the highway fricking sucks. They handle like butt. They belong off-road; there are too many Larpers using them as mommobiles
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I can't see the word "wrangler" without putting the word "tard" in front of it
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The amount of wranglers I see parked with no evidence of mud or dirt in their wheel wells amazes me. You can't get dirt out of the seems of your wheel well easily (not that it matters that it's there) so it just proves to me how many of those cars aren't being used for their optimal purpose.
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