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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I remember riding in an uber driven by a large woman with a gajillion anime stickers and figurines everywhere. I asked her about them just to make conversation and she said "its an addiction" and said she spent around 2700 in the past month on anime crap. She later said she was driving uber because she was having trouble making ends meet
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I met a fat foid who was a C-level of some non-profit "make ur business green" nonsense. She lived in a dump of a guest house as wide as a trailer and had bought 1000s of dollars worth of weird gimmicky figurine shit. Probably hadn't cleaned the place since she moved in. She said she was making six figures and maybe so, but it screamed of poor. She also had that white hoodrat accent.
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admitting it is the first step
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Yeah but changing your behavior is the second
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