What a lovely article. A lot to learn from that old man. I quoted a few things, for the HN crowd (myself included) that often reads comments and seldom reads articles:
>He’s also a youthful, gentle man glowing sans peur et sans reproche while bringing a moment of grace, manners and style to largely impolite, undignified and profane times. That’s why people, even the known and confident, seek admission to his court, to be touched by politesse: Because he’s an escape, a salve that somehow, just for a moment, delivers us from what’s out there, which is harsh and threatening. Or as friend and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik says: He is our perception of the ideal grandfather. Or how grandfather would be if he left grandmother home. “People . . . ask to meet Irving just so they can say they had at last met a man who has it all figured out,” says Gopnik, now living in Paris. He sees Link as a true California type as much as any snazzy actor or wealthy courtesan. “He puts me in mind of some great performance piece. Irving is his own creation.”
...
>Yet Link’s daily ritual hasn’t gone away. He walks two miles from home each morning to the hotel, for granola, bananas and berries over The Times and the trades. One cup of decaf. Then onto Wilshire and Camden and Little Joe’s barbershop, where little Giuseppe Bausoue (“I make house calls to Frank Sinatra”) coiffures, blow-dries and sprays Link’s pearl-white hair into a stiff sculpture. Max, chauffeuring the hotel’s black Rolls-Royce, has Link back at the Peninsula around 9:30 a.m. Upstairs to the spa, into a terry robe and slippers, and out to a cabana for the first of dozens of incoming and outgoing phone calls. Maybe a turkey sandwich lunch alongside the pool where tans are oiled umber, cellular phones tinkle incessantly, and nobody swims. Usually there’s gin rummy twice a week, Fridays and Sunday, for 5 cents a point. Sometimes dinner at Drai’s. But always the framework of a permanent schedule. “Call me a creature of habit,” suggests Link. He doesn’t drive, doesn’t move far from the Peninsula, doesn’t shock his system with unfamiliar experiences, doesn’t get close to people who converse in negatives. “That creates stress, which is the root of bad health. A routine means I don’t worry about what I have to do this afternoon, or should be doing later in the week, or must get done by next month. “That way, I hope to live to 100.”
...
>“Everything went,” Link says. “I sold our home and our properties and moved into an apartment in Santa Monica.” But he did have the support of a wife and his children. “They knew that in both cases I had done the right thing,” he says. “So I really couldn’t have cared less what other people thought. I didn’t mind eating at McDonald’s.” He picked up new work as a $15,000-a-year public relations spokesman for National Distributing Co., his brother-in-law’s liquor business. At 64, for the first time in his adult life, Link was working for someone else; a hired hand, a salaried employee. “That was the saddest point of my life,” he says. “What I really cared about was what I had done to myself and my reputation and my self-respect. I could find excuses. I could come up with explanations. But deep down I knew. I blamed myself.”
...
>Believe part of that. Friends suggest that engineering something for nothing today is a smart way of setting up deals for tomorrow. It has to do with quid pro quo, creating allegiances, issuing markers. Link is aware of his gift: “You approach this business the way you approach life. Positively. With a sense of fun, with humor, and with a certain amount of mental creativity. “But if you aren’t sincere and are involving yourself with perceptive people who know facts from bull----, then you’ve created a negative. Then your deal’s off.”
...
>Link gets a 10-minute coif, stiff enough to last until July.
...
>“You have the impression that [Link] irons his socks and gets dressed in the middle of the night just to go to the bathroom,” Davis says. “I think he truly believes in the saying that anybody will be in good spirits and good temper if they’re well dressed.”
...
>“I miss the past to a degree,” he muses. He’s drinking Evian at lunch and saving his one Chardonnay for dinner. “But I’ve adjusted to what exists now. I’ve learned to prefer the day I’m living in. If you don’t grow with the times, you grow old with the past.”
...
>Link has tallied his life. Its rewards are “family and friends who have supported me, loved me, cared for me.” The price has been no higher than “always giving a little more than you get.”
> ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk.
It's funny how much life cycles. I do kinda remember a phase where people were eating a "healthier" breakfast of some kind of fruit, and when granola became popular, and when milk fat was considered the worst thing you could do to your body.
I always find fun these "generalizations". Like: "Eggs are fine". If you are a 50kg person that eats 20 eggs for breakfast each day I doubt it would be fine.
We would need something like LD50, or even better a range over a period (eggs are mostly fine if you eat between 2 and 5 per week)
> Then Irving would either walk back home to his wife and two children
What the... he'd leave his wife at home with the kids while he hung out all day at the pool with "magnificent-looking young women, full of theatrical drive" and eat all his meals at the hotel?
The article mentions that he'd go home for dinner, up until his wife died. The hotel pool was apparently also where he did his "job": being a deal-making middleman for a 2% cut, per a later description in the article.
His job, or at least his former jobs, paid well enough to have a home in Beverly Hills, drive a gold lexus, and wear beautiful suits every day.
So they weren't necessarily estranged - he just worked long days every day that afforded a very nice lifestyle.
"As Link tells it, Nan’s attention from their births went to son Rand and daughter Gale. There was no time for his work, his life and love. Despite separating ways, Link says, they stayed married for the sake of the children. Because that’s what parents used to do."
Was looking to buy an apartment which had had a single owner for decades, likely since it was built in the 70s.
At the viewing I noticed how it looked quite distinctly worn.
Like, the ceiling above the stove was full of grease from frying and the interior of the oven had clear signs of only being used for frozen pizzas. Looked like he'd only ever made like pork chops or frozen pizzas.
The floor in the main bedroom was very well preserved, except for a noticeable worn path leading to the bed and a small oval next to the bed. Similar things in the living room.
I mentioned this to the agent, which replied: *Oh yeah, the guy bought the place so he could stay here when he needed a break from his wife. Apparently he'd come here every few weeks or so and stay for a couple of days."
Reading the article, looking at pictures from the Beverly Hills Hotel in the 70ies and 80ies, and considering the fact that Irving V. Link acted in a movie once, I get the strong feeling that an episode of Columbo in which Link played himself as a wrongfully accused prime suspect (saved by Columbo in the end) would've been excellent.
what stands out of me is a sense of place the hotel represented that isn't present anywhere today. if you were at the hotel when something occurred, the hotel was a part of america and by being there, you were there, a small part of the story. the starkness in the story to me is that the culture today lacks belonging. no matter how many followers you have, you will never belong anywhere the way this Irving character had become a fixture. he was a part of the story.
maybe I'm just nostalgic, but there's an essential dynamic in the story that isn't present in the culture now.
the hotel was a place with durable meaning that cohered in the culture over a long period of time. I couldn't name one place now that isn't just a theme park to its former meaning, full of toursts taking selfies, people who themselves know they don't belong somewhere. the thrill of taking photos of themselves or their food is the same as they might get from shoplifting a lip balm. maybe what's changed in the culture is the people lack belonging and go from place to place like this stealing bits of meaning without their lives becoming any richer, or particularly less poor.
the physical places themselves didn't change, but I think the identity of people who use places to tresspass and share with their imaginary followers somewhere else has hollowed out the presence and meaning of these places, and that is what has made characters with romantic and interesting lives like this Irving guy something from the past. maybe people just don't act like they belong anymore.
If you enjoyed this consider William Least Heat Moon's "Blue Highways". He is a quiet unassuming guy, or at least I assume he is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice that strangers open up to.
As opposed to this monster of minutia that is one life, Moon traveled the back roads and collectively met hundreds of people and made conversation, gathered famous and obscure lore of the places he visited. He encountered them on their own turf and elsewhere. Even a chance meeting by a lake with a mosquito-bitten teenage runaway girl who opened up to him about the awful life from which she had just fled, and he made the 'courageous' decision to drive her across Wisconsin and deliver her safely to her grandmother's house in Green Bay.
He is essentially a documentarian, and delivers the plain truth of the tales told to him. It is a transformative read.
> assume he is unassuming, because he presents a human edifice that strangers open up to.
In my experience it is multiple traits that people open up to. Zero judgement, approachability, interest, friendliness and non-gossipy/tight-lipped about sensitive information.
Most people present as judgemental. It's hard not to appear judgemental, and it's even harder not to be judgemental. I love non-judgemental people, and have managed to collect a few (mostly female) as friends. One or two get told the most intensely personal stuff
I was thinking: "an entire article about a guy who used to tan at a hotel pool... when we start focusing on such trifles, it's usually a foreshadowing of some major upheaval coming."
I don't know why I found this so interesting to read. After the first few paragraphs I wondered why this was in The New Yorker, afterall, this is about a place in CA. The answer did appear, eventually...
“My story begins on the Lower East Side of New York,” he said...
The NY specificity implied by the publication name is archaic. Apart from the event listings or performance/exhibit reviews, The New Yorker's long form coverage has been nationally (sometimes globally) focused for decades, albeit through the lens of what America's coastal elites find interesting.
This is like being confused if The Atlantic had an article about the west coast, only to believe the question of topicality for the publication's article was resolved when the article mentioned the east coast.
> I don't know why I found this so interesting to read.
It’s a well-written piece by a professional journalist, published in a magazine that people were willing to pay money for. It stands out against the kind of ad-supported click-optimized dreck that passes for journalism today.
one national newspaper where I live is famous for viewing everything from the perspective of 'their office'/the city they are in.
An great example of this was when they discussed something happening in a different city in same country, and they would proceed to write
"... <name of city> (that is 275 km west of here) ..."
which only makes sense when you are in their offices/city.
Article summary:
“ Irving V. Link spent 42 years at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, where his meticulous daily routine of breakfast, sunbathing, and gin rummy became legendary. He was admired by hotel staff and Hollywood figures alike, symbolizing the timeless charm of a bygone era in Los Angeles. His life was deeply intertwined with the hotel’s evolution, reflecting the glamour of old Hollywood and the shifting dynamics of its clientele. The hotel’s closure by the Sultan of Brunei for renovations disrupted his routine and marked the end of an era. Link’s personal narrative weaves together memories of luxury, business intrigue, and cultural transformation. Ultimately, his story is a poignant meditation on the inevitability of change and the enduring power of tradition.”
>Ultimately, his story is a poignant meditation on the inevitability of change and the enduring power of tradition.
I wish, occasionally, AI would close with
>Ultimately, his story is a trite and shallow distraction which fails to leave a lasting impression upon the reader.
The article may indeed be a "poignant meditation" (I liked it personally). but when AI shoehorns the last sentence of every summary into this exact same sort of vaguely-positive cliche, it becomes worthless as an uncorrupted signal of real information.
A fun experiment would be to ask your favorite AI
"Find me a recent article that is not worth reading and has no worthwhile journalistic, philosophical, emotional, or any other kind of takeaways."
Then (separately) ask it to summarize the article and see how it closes...
> Often he and the hostess, Bernice Philbin, would be the first two people there, and they would have a polite conversation before Irving took his place in his booth—the first half circle to your left as you came in—and ordered breakfast: scrambled eggs back in the days when people ate eggs, and, more recently, banana and granola with skim milk.
TIL that my last 30+ years of egg eating has been a faux pas.
The article is from 1993. If you are old enough to remember that time, it was indeed when official nutritionist advice was a complete failure. Eggs were advised against because it was thought their high cholesterol levels raised blood cholesterol, which is false for most people who consume a moderate amount of eggs. This is the time during which fat was demonized (anyone remember SnackWell's???), the "foot pyramid" was the rule of the day that was based on eating lots of bread, pasta and carbs.
Eggs had a rough go of it in the 90s. There were studies where it seemed like even looking at an egg would cause your cholesterol to sky rocket and kill you.
you're earnestly wondering if there might have been discrimination of some kind at one of the most legendary Los Angeles celebrity institutions between between the 1950s and the 1990s?
I didn't get the impression that the article was a celebration of the man, it was more like a deep dive into the oddity of the whole thing.
I think you're assigning an agenda where there is none. The author isn't trying to glorify the guy. The story is an interesting story because the circumstances are so unusual.
I realize the scale of wealth skewed far upward from the typical working class person, but I will also point out that you don't really have to be very wealthy to afford to do nothing all day and buy meals at a hotel pool and not work. It sounds like the hotel was really just charging him money for his meals, it's not like he was staying overnight at the hotel.
That's not really Elon Musk territory, that's attainable via the 4% rule [1] if you've got single digits of million dollars saved up (in 2025 dollars).
Even less money is needed to live this kind of lifestyle if we are talking about low cost of living countries with beachy vibes like Thailand/Cambodia/Laos.
Weird take, it seems to me like his success was driven by being a net value-add for his community. Going to his same barber everyday is less "being waited upon by legions of servants" and a lot more sharing your success with the community.
He helped the hotels he hung out at earn lots of money by getting rich people to come often and spend money. If he got paid in dollars instead of free cabana time when it's empty it'd be called sales. Everyone seems to enjoy his presence, and talking to the staff and giving them yearly presents definitely seems worth letting a guy stay a couple hours after they've finished their purchased meal.
If living alone in a small one bedroom flat with no car after retirement constitutes "excesses and inequalities of capitalism", then I can only assume you are anti-elderly and would rather they produced value for you until death.
My goodness, 42 years of sun bathing at the same latitude as Tunisia. Should he have got skin cancer or did he benefit from all the naturally produced Vitamin D?
The article takes some poetic license, and makes it seem like he sunbathed daily. There's another article in the LA Times, linked in a few comments here, that is a bit more "serious". He certainly didn't sunbathe every day, and it seems there were periods of time (not even only during his "riches to rags" time period) where it seems he didn't visit the hotel every day.
He also had a poolside cabana that he used often; cabanas are usually covered and provide shade.
pvg|1 year ago
bryanlarsen|1 year ago
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...
Aloha|1 year ago
6stringmerc|1 year ago
owenversteeg|1 year ago
What a lovely article. A lot to learn from that old man. I quoted a few things, for the HN crowd (myself included) that often reads comments and seldom reads articles:
>He’s also a youthful, gentle man glowing sans peur et sans reproche while bringing a moment of grace, manners and style to largely impolite, undignified and profane times. That’s why people, even the known and confident, seek admission to his court, to be touched by politesse: Because he’s an escape, a salve that somehow, just for a moment, delivers us from what’s out there, which is harsh and threatening. Or as friend and New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik says: He is our perception of the ideal grandfather. Or how grandfather would be if he left grandmother home. “People . . . ask to meet Irving just so they can say they had at last met a man who has it all figured out,” says Gopnik, now living in Paris. He sees Link as a true California type as much as any snazzy actor or wealthy courtesan. “He puts me in mind of some great performance piece. Irving is his own creation.”
...
>Yet Link’s daily ritual hasn’t gone away. He walks two miles from home each morning to the hotel, for granola, bananas and berries over The Times and the trades. One cup of decaf. Then onto Wilshire and Camden and Little Joe’s barbershop, where little Giuseppe Bausoue (“I make house calls to Frank Sinatra”) coiffures, blow-dries and sprays Link’s pearl-white hair into a stiff sculpture. Max, chauffeuring the hotel’s black Rolls-Royce, has Link back at the Peninsula around 9:30 a.m. Upstairs to the spa, into a terry robe and slippers, and out to a cabana for the first of dozens of incoming and outgoing phone calls. Maybe a turkey sandwich lunch alongside the pool where tans are oiled umber, cellular phones tinkle incessantly, and nobody swims. Usually there’s gin rummy twice a week, Fridays and Sunday, for 5 cents a point. Sometimes dinner at Drai’s. But always the framework of a permanent schedule. “Call me a creature of habit,” suggests Link. He doesn’t drive, doesn’t move far from the Peninsula, doesn’t shock his system with unfamiliar experiences, doesn’t get close to people who converse in negatives. “That creates stress, which is the root of bad health. A routine means I don’t worry about what I have to do this afternoon, or should be doing later in the week, or must get done by next month. “That way, I hope to live to 100.”
...
>“Everything went,” Link says. “I sold our home and our properties and moved into an apartment in Santa Monica.” But he did have the support of a wife and his children. “They knew that in both cases I had done the right thing,” he says. “So I really couldn’t have cared less what other people thought. I didn’t mind eating at McDonald’s.” He picked up new work as a $15,000-a-year public relations spokesman for National Distributing Co., his brother-in-law’s liquor business. At 64, for the first time in his adult life, Link was working for someone else; a hired hand, a salaried employee. “That was the saddest point of my life,” he says. “What I really cared about was what I had done to myself and my reputation and my self-respect. I could find excuses. I could come up with explanations. But deep down I knew. I blamed myself.”
...
>Believe part of that. Friends suggest that engineering something for nothing today is a smart way of setting up deals for tomorrow. It has to do with quid pro quo, creating allegiances, issuing markers. Link is aware of his gift: “You approach this business the way you approach life. Positively. With a sense of fun, with humor, and with a certain amount of mental creativity. “But if you aren’t sincere and are involving yourself with perceptive people who know facts from bull----, then you’ve created a negative. Then your deal’s off.”
...
>Link gets a 10-minute coif, stiff enough to last until July.
...
>“You have the impression that [Link] irons his socks and gets dressed in the middle of the night just to go to the bathroom,” Davis says. “I think he truly believes in the saying that anybody will be in good spirits and good temper if they’re well dressed.”
...
>“I miss the past to a degree,” he muses. He’s drinking Evian at lunch and saving his one Chardonnay for dinner. “But I’ve adjusted to what exists now. I’ve learned to prefer the day I’m living in. If you don’t grow with the times, you grow old with the past.”
...
>Link has tallied his life. Its rewards are “family and friends who have supported me, loved me, cared for me.” The price has been no higher than “always giving a little more than you get.”
james4876|1 year ago
NathanKP|1 year ago
mixmastamyk|1 year ago
https://patrickdowns.photoshelter.com/image/I0000Hbr_mkY_p2A
brink|1 year ago
Cthulhu_|1 year ago
urbandw311er|1 year ago
kelnos|1 year ago
It's funny how much life cycles. I do kinda remember a phase where people were eating a "healthier" breakfast of some kind of fruit, and when granola became popular, and when milk fat was considered the worst thing you could do to your body.
But now eggs are fine, again. Great, even.
b800h|1 year ago
EfficientDude|1 year ago
[deleted]
vladms|1 year ago
We would need something like LD50, or even better a range over a period (eggs are mostly fine if you eat between 2 and 5 per week)
irrational|1 year ago
What the... he'd leave his wife at home with the kids while he hung out all day at the pool with "magnificent-looking young women, full of theatrical drive" and eat all his meals at the hotel?
magneticnorth|1 year ago
His job, or at least his former jobs, paid well enough to have a home in Beverly Hills, drive a gold lexus, and wear beautiful suits every day.
So they weren't necessarily estranged - he just worked long days every day that afforded a very nice lifestyle.
compiler-guy|1 year ago
So they were effectively separated most of those years. Just informally so.
bryanlarsen|1 year ago
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-05-19-ls-5806-s...
elif|1 year ago
magicalhippo|1 year ago
At the viewing I noticed how it looked quite distinctly worn.
Like, the ceiling above the stove was full of grease from frying and the interior of the oven had clear signs of only being used for frozen pizzas. Looked like he'd only ever made like pork chops or frozen pizzas.
The floor in the main bedroom was very well preserved, except for a noticeable worn path leading to the bed and a small oval next to the bed. Similar things in the living room.
I mentioned this to the agent, which replied: *Oh yeah, the guy bought the place so he could stay here when he needed a break from his wife. Apparently he'd come here every few weeks or so and stay for a couple of days."
plasticsoprano|1 year ago
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/latimes/name/irving-lin...
Alex63|1 year ago
https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/pressdemocrat/name/rand...
jpmattia|1 year ago
lqet|1 year ago
Just imagine Peter Falk and Link conversing next to that pool: https://www.americanexpress.com/en-us/travel/discover/photos...
nelblu|1 year ago
ubermonkey|1 year ago
motohagiography|1 year ago
maybe I'm just nostalgic, but there's an essential dynamic in the story that isn't present in the culture now.
the hotel was a place with durable meaning that cohered in the culture over a long period of time. I couldn't name one place now that isn't just a theme park to its former meaning, full of toursts taking selfies, people who themselves know they don't belong somewhere. the thrill of taking photos of themselves or their food is the same as they might get from shoplifting a lip balm. maybe what's changed in the culture is the people lack belonging and go from place to place like this stealing bits of meaning without their lives becoming any richer, or particularly less poor.
the physical places themselves didn't change, but I think the identity of people who use places to tresspass and share with their imaginary followers somewhere else has hollowed out the presence and meaning of these places, and that is what has made characters with romantic and interesting lives like this Irving guy something from the past. maybe people just don't act like they belong anymore.
Michelangelo11|1 year ago
HocusLocus|1 year ago
As opposed to this monster of minutia that is one life, Moon traveled the back roads and collectively met hundreds of people and made conversation, gathered famous and obscure lore of the places he visited. He encountered them on their own turf and elsewhere. Even a chance meeting by a lake with a mosquito-bitten teenage runaway girl who opened up to him about the awful life from which she had just fled, and he made the 'courageous' decision to drive her across Wisconsin and deliver her safely to her grandmother's house in Green Bay.
He is essentially a documentarian, and delivers the plain truth of the tales told to him. It is a transformative read.
robocat|1 year ago
In my experience it is multiple traits that people open up to. Zero judgement, approachability, interest, friendliness and non-gossipy/tight-lipped about sensitive information.
Most people present as judgemental. It's hard not to appear judgemental, and it's even harder not to be judgemental. I love non-judgemental people, and have managed to collect a few (mostly female) as friends. One or two get told the most intensely personal stuff
Loughla|1 year ago
prasadjoglekar|1 year ago
profsummergig|1 year ago
Then I saw the year of publication: 1993.
1024core|1 year ago
tolerance|1 year ago
blakesterz|1 year ago
tmiku|1 year ago
TeaBrain|1 year ago
ubermonkey|1 year ago
It's not a magazine about a city. The first few pages DO remain "Goings On About Town," but that's a fraction of the page count.
I have the February 10th issue on my desk right now, actually. The long articles in this one are:
- A discussion of an unusual development in a high-rise condo
- A long article by MacArthur winning music critic Alex Ross (ie, not the comics artist of the same name) on Alma Mahler-Werfel
- A piece on the struggle of the US Military to keep recruiting up ahead of ordinary depletion
- An article on the pursuit of an artificial blood substitute
Incidentally, if you're interested in modern classical music at all, Ross' book THE REST IS NOISE is pretty great.
jl6|1 year ago
It’s a well-written piece by a professional journalist, published in a magazine that people were willing to pay money for. It stands out against the kind of ad-supported click-optimized dreck that passes for journalism today.
fifticon|1 year ago
"... <name of city> (that is 275 km west of here) ..."
which only makes sense when you are in their offices/city.
punnerud|1 year ago
schiffern|1 year ago
A fun experiment would be to ask your favorite AI
Then (separately) ask it to summarize the article and see how it closes...foundart|1 year ago
My point being that for a story like this the journey is more important than the destination.
poglet|1 year ago
kristianp|1 year ago
rzz3|1 year ago
tolerance|1 year ago
excalibur|1 year ago
TIL that my last 30+ years of egg eating has been a faux pas.
hn_throwaway_99|1 year ago
bena|1 year ago
So it's kind of a tongue-in-cheek jab at contemporary cultural mores.
unknown|1 year ago
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fxtentacle|1 year ago
dmayle|1 year ago
ziptron|1 year ago
samoots1|1 year ago
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IncreasePosts|1 year ago
Aeolun|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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lordleft|1 year ago
jerrycruncher|1 year ago
tanujsh979|1 year ago
permo-w|1 year ago
do people not eat eggs anymore?
bena|1 year ago
buildsjets|1 year ago
1024core|1 year ago
Jtsummers|1 year ago
The article is from 1993, not today.
Dig1t|1 year ago
I wasn’t around in 1993 but I’m pretty positive my parents and grandparents ate eggs in 1993.
I guess this line made more sense in the context of other news articles at the time.
unknown|1 year ago
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bdangubic|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
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EfficientDude|1 year ago
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sensanabae|1 year ago
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unknown|1 year ago
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dandsupernig|1 year ago
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trhway|1 year ago
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trial3|1 year ago
rfwhyte|1 year ago
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dangus|1 year ago
I think you're assigning an agenda where there is none. The author isn't trying to glorify the guy. The story is an interesting story because the circumstances are so unusual.
I realize the scale of wealth skewed far upward from the typical working class person, but I will also point out that you don't really have to be very wealthy to afford to do nothing all day and buy meals at a hotel pool and not work. It sounds like the hotel was really just charging him money for his meals, it's not like he was staying overnight at the hotel.
That's not really Elon Musk territory, that's attainable via the 4% rule [1] if you've got single digits of million dollars saved up (in 2025 dollars).
Even less money is needed to live this kind of lifestyle if we are talking about low cost of living countries with beachy vibes like Thailand/Cambodia/Laos.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/f/four-percent-rule.asp
scottyah|1 year ago
He helped the hotels he hung out at earn lots of money by getting rich people to come often and spend money. If he got paid in dollars instead of free cabana time when it's empty it'd be called sales. Everyone seems to enjoy his presence, and talking to the staff and giving them yearly presents definitely seems worth letting a guy stay a couple hours after they've finished their purchased meal.
If living alone in a small one bedroom flat with no car after retirement constitutes "excesses and inequalities of capitalism", then I can only assume you are anti-elderly and would rather they produced value for you until death.
endoblast|1 year ago
kelnos|1 year ago
He also had a poolside cabana that he used often; cabanas are usually covered and provide shade.
reddalo|1 year ago
hengheng|1 year ago
fifticon|1 year ago
psyclobe|1 year ago
kittikitti|1 year ago
16mb|1 year ago