I'm no exception to your rule, but are you really so confident that all of humanity shares the same appetite for status signalling? I'm not a particularly social person, but even I can think of some counterexamples in my personal life. Obviously, we can also consider most of the extremely wealthy (Zuckerberg, Bezos, etc) as well.
My income has recently 5x'd and I already was making over 6 figs.
I'm doing the opposite of status signaling. I'm hiding my wealth. I don't need people to know I just bought an expensive computer or 3D printer. Heck, that makes me a target.
It also alienates friends who are insecure. I already ran into this when I graduated college, got a real job, and my blue collar high school friends got weird about it.
Heck, I knew I was going to be very well off. When I had my home built, I made sure the front-most peak of the house was on the first floor rather than the second floor. I didn't want my home to appear grand.
I want to object to what GP says, but whenever I think about it, I realize that I too am evidence in favor. Different methods, different groups. Some spending more of effort than money. Some substituting an idea for a group. But the need to belong somewhere - that is common to all.
I'm confident that all humans enjoy status. I suspect this is an innate characteristic of social creatures. Less than basic desires like food or reproduction but significant nevertheless.
The hypothesis about status signalling is more difficult because many individuals acquire status by rejecting conventional status objects. Many people respect Socrates, AOC and Gandhi in large part because of their modest lifestyles. It's possible to describe their behaviour as buying status via the opportunity cost of other consumption, but I worry the opportunity cost approach makes my theory too overpowered to the point of being unfalsifiable.
No, they may not explicitly enjoy it, yet they likely appreciate the ease the automobile-focused society brings, even though it contributes to around 7000 pedestrian fatalities annually. Anyone rational would view such preventable loss of life as disastrous. However, the solutions — improved street layouts, less wide roads, use of speed cameras and so on — are often deemed so unpalatable that it prompts a flag on the article. It appears as though a number of readers here don't find 7000 annual deaths significant enough.
We have some real snowflakes who flag every headline that could be read as the least little critical of any facet of US culture/politics/society.
I mean, this headline can start a site-appropriate discussion of the technical details behind the facts. But, nooo, the snowflake interprets it as criticism of their culture, and instinctively downvotes to protect their sense of self. It’s sad more than anything, that level of fragility.
What? Clearly this man receives a great deal of value(>$50k) in having these statues in front of his home. Just because in theory, he's creating value for the franchise that he isn't capturing, doesn't mean he's being exploited. He's no more an idiot than a Disney fan wearing a Mickey Mouse hat or shirt.
Yes, he's paying more than 50k to advertise a franchise. Sounds a bit idiot-ish to me. But hey, it's his money so it's not like I'll argue too much about it.
Regarding the t-shirt, at least you get actual use out of wearing branded clothes, even though to me the same logic applies to an extent.
> it's far more eco friendly and lower carbon Footprint to own an rv and travel and stay in it in various places than to own several properties and fly between them.
It's considered worse to drive (vs fly) unless you have more than 2 people-- and that's for a normal car. With a truck+trailer the break-even point would need more passengers.
The info you posted doesn't include the property and accommodations, it's only the travel, which of course is higher, the savings overall is in the stay, so you have to compare it to flying AND accommodations, not just flying.
For the comparison parent post is making - leisure travel - I think there's a big difference in that flying enables much larger distances, thus much more emissions.
You can easily fly 1000 miles each way for a weekend trip. Not as easily with a car, the travel tends to be much shorter.
And also doesn't take into account economy of scale, a family of 4 has 4x the emissions in the plane example, same as 1 person in the car example. So if you do the math as a family of 4 it really changes things.
Really? I ride a bike and I can't wait for lots of people to use e-bikes to get around. Research shows that "the more people ride bikes, the safer all bike riders are on the streets." [0]. Also... I'd much rather get hit by an ebike than a car.
Based on my experience with dangerous ebike riders in NYC, I do think this is a problem. It's just that it's so much less of a problem than cars that it's hard to care about this "gotcha" when we talk about bike infrastructure.
Assuming any US cities focus on bikeability, by the time we've figured things out enough to actually worry about this problem, hopefully the Dutch will have figured it out. I know ebikes are a very real concern in the Netherlands and there's a lot of active lawmaking on the subject right now.
