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lotsofpulp 2 hours ago

Referring to a person rich enough to buy human labor as “time poor” is interesting because poorer people working 12+ hour shifts who don’t get paid time off or holidays would consider themselves “time poor”.

bigfishrunning 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource.

When i was a kid, i couldn't afford to buy all of the toys and games i wanted to, but i had plenty of time with the toys and games i did have. Now as an adult i can afford to buy whatever i want (within reason), but life gets in the way of me enjoying those things. I think "time poor" is just the latter part of that transition.

Also, "rich enough to buy human labor" is a silly phrase as well. If you've ever stopped at a coffee shop instead of brewing coffee yourself, or if you've purchased bread instead of farming your own wheat, you've "bought human labor". Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.

20shampoo an hour ago | parent | next [-]

When you purchase something from a company you are buying the commodity not the labor used in its making. A commodity has many costs wrapped into it, including labor. The profit a commodity brings to a company doesn't have a 1-1 relationship with the wage of a laborer, so a consumer buying a coffee isn't buying the labor of someone else, they are buying a product. "Buying human labor" means you are an employer paying a wage or rate. Generally employers are people or entities that have accumulated wealth through profit. It's fair to say these people skew towards wealthy, hardly a silly statement at all.

lotsofpulp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Sure, poorer people are also very busy, but i think the GP poster is using "time poor" to refer to people for whom time is their most scarce resource.

This is the framing I am talking about. Surely, the scarcity of time for a poor person who has to do shift work until they are probably dead is a little more scarce than a rich person who chooses to play the game longer than they have to to put food on the table.

I would have written cash rich to refer to people who can afford to buy other people’s services in the quantity/quality being referred to above.

>Don't try to paint willful employment as some evil.

I don’t know what you’re referring to, but obviously poor people can’t afford to buy anywhere near as much (or as high quality) human labor as rich people.

ehnto an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Agreed to be fair, the saying better pertains to time-poor people but I didn't want to misrepresent the original idiom.

SecretDreams 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Both rich and poor people can be time-poor. Depends a lot on priority and values. I value spending time with my family and I will often trade money for time to enable that.

Half my comment was on readability. "Time-poor" reads better than "time poor" when no quotation marks are used. When using quotations like you did, either approach is fine.