This is a REALLY good point. The benefits of being frugal are increased when the majority is not. It's sort of the same thing with the birth rate. Our economy will grow as long as we keep replacing the workers.
Yes, the best position to be in is to be the guy who only owns a bicycle but sells ferraris. It becomes difficult to be frugal when other people are because business and government don't actually want to let that happen.
I remember when the recession started in the UK, there was a lot of advice going around to the effect of, "When you go shopping, don't buy brand name foods instead by the supermarket value brand equivalent'.
The supermarkets seem to have responded by simply taking a lot of the value brand products off the shelves or making them only available in bulk quantities.
This has a negative effect on equality. If your business is struggling because the lower and middle class aren't buying your products you must either decide to take lower margins or you will focus your products instead on the remaining people left who do have disposable income and start producing high end products only.
If you can get a raise, that's fantastic, and congrats! My experience however is that without asking "why do I buy the things I do", people tend to raise their spending to their new salary level. Why not two or three latte's per day? That's what $15 per day, or about $4000 per year.
I'd recommend this too. It's a financial blog by a married 38yo former software engineer. If you're into hacking your finances and living a less consumer driven lifestyle, I'd check it out.
I'm relatively new to HN, and also learning to program. I don't comment much. I rarely submit. But I read pretty much everything, including the comments.
And when I see posts about improving HN, I must admit that I just don't see it. Yes some comments are not constructive, but you'll always have that. I'm surprised we don't have more of this to be honest.
So is there a correlation between time spend on HN and your personal view of it's quality? Good question. How do you measure quality then? How do you separate yourself out?
I really like this. Clean and simple. Would be nice if I wasn't forced to use twitter to track my blogs though. What about an equally clean and simple user dashboard?
The original use case I had in mind was to allow twitter users to write more than 140 characters. I've since drifted away from that, and a plain ol' user registration option might make a lot more sense now.
