this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2023
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submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by sunshine to c/solarpunk
 

Based on the excerpt from this Discworld book, what other items do you use regularly that would fit in this theory? (Boots and shoes are fair game!)

Text transcript for people who want it:

[The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.]

Bonus: suggest ways you can repair/restore your item/other people's items.

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[–] bastian_5@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

I would say it's not so much that they managed to, it's that they could afford to spend less money. You cannot afford good food, so you eat crappy food and get sick, so you have to go to the doctor. You cannot afford good insurance, so you have to spend a ludicrous amount to get good care that will fix the problem, but you cannot afford that, so instead of a one time charge, you now have the worse prescription that still costs a bit, and it doesn't even keep you healthy, it just keeps you moving forward, barely. Because of your condition, you now can't even work as well as you could, so you get paid even less, all the while your health is deteriorating because the medicine you can already barely afford isn't actually what you really need.

How the fuck do you get out of that on your own?