Please keep your comments civil/constructive. Calling someone a douche because you disagree with their materialism does not add to the discussion, and is frowned on here.

I wasn't calling him a douche. I realized halfway through reading his post that he was being ironic.

It wasn't total hyperbole. I don't think it's fair to demonise one person's vanities over another on the basis of personal preference.

My vanity is technology. I also place a premium on having a living space that is aesthetically pleasing. A colleague of mine gets a similar aesthetic thrill from beautiful clothes. I tend to judge people whose vanities are primarily outward facing, e.g. buying an expensive car not because you appreciate the craftmanship but because you want to look snappy in it, but that's for the potential insecurity it alludes to rather than the indulgence itself.

A $17 million purchase is proportionally peanuts to some people. What you and I may call peanuts is a lifetime of difference to someone in the third world. Classifying materialism on such a high level seems absurd.

Someone who's obsessed with silly status-signalling stuff like that is almost guaranteed to be a bad leader.

That's why there's no correlation between the pay and the results, and that's why what you're defending is perverse.

The point I had was things can be bought for their inherent aesthetic value, independent of status signalling. Status signalling, while a deeply rooted biological behaviour, is a primitive imitation of the former.

Also, there is a correlation between pay and performance. You can't just strike out the empirical record for rhetorical convenience. It's closer tied to portion of pay in low-struck options, etc. versus cash pay but statistically significant nonetheless.

Paying $10 million for artwork and never looking at it makes a person a douche. The person is paying eight figures to deprive someone else of having it-- nothing more. It's not "supporting the arts". It's being a hypercompetitive shitfuck.

Paying $50 million for trophy real estate instead of investing it into better transportation (the only long-term solution to the real estate problem in New York and Silicon Valley) makes a person a douche.

Using a private 747 for casual transportation, logging an unconscionable ecological footprint through the unnecessary combustion of hydrocarbons in enormous amounts, makes one a douche.

Developing a tight social network to keep global society exclusive, closed and impoverished is a douche move.

Corrupting the U.S. political system and getting the world's most powerful nation into an unwinnable War of Corporate Enrichment (Iraq) is a douche move.

Morally speaking, the tip-top upper classes of the U.S. owe their lives to us in the cognitive 1 percent. They are deep in moral debt to us, and what keeps us from collecting is that we have more interesting things to do (in technology, where we can make positive-sum contributions to the world). We have the persuasive capability and the technological know-how to rise up and take them out, Paris 1793 style. We don't, because for enough of us, life remains pretty good. We're not "among them", and they constantly remind us of this fact; but we can work in technology, live pretty well, and generally control our own destinies. If that ever changes, though, those people need to watch the fuck out.