TheEllenShow
5 HN mentions · mentioned in 5 months, 2019–2024
4:20 · 41M views · Feb 21, 2018
On The Ellen Show, Bill Gates plays a game guessing the prices of grocery items.
Linked to show that a billionaire's price guesses are reasonable, usually in threads about out-of-touch wealthy people.
5 comments from Hacker News
That was a scene from the fictional TV show Arrested Development. > Lucille: Don’t you judge me. You’re the selfish one. You’re the one who charged his own brother for a Bluth frozen banana. I mean, it’s one banana, Michael. What could it cost, ten dollars? Gates' actual guesses were pretty reasonable: this video
If you're going to ask people to watch something, it would be nice of you linked to it. Maybe this is what you wete refering to, but I could only find Bill Gates guessing grocery item prices: this video
Likely that they conflated it with this video of Bill Gates guessing grocery prices on the Ellen show: this video
I don't think that's what people are "objecting" to about this (well, not even objecting in many cases, just... flabbergasted). The author appears to do very little work, while he pays someone to sit there and be his surrogate mother, so that he can be a bit more productive. It seems somewhat attention-seeking (I personally believe it's honest, though it does invoke Poe's Law). That's fine too, people seek attention on HN, but they usually offer something insightful in return. This is more the equivalent of the Tiktok user who posted her "day in the life of an employee at (Meta? Airbnb?)" that involved very little work. Also fine, work isn't the point of life. But when you're showing off a flamboyantly eccentric "productivity hack" that got you to work 80 hours in a month instead of 25, so you could spend more time starting blog posts, breakdancing, doing yoga, going to the gym, "unironically starting a company (it's in stealth, sorry!)", doing online courses (at least this is at least somewhat related to the job they are presumably actually paid to do)... many people reading are going to be amused at the very least. It seems like they have time management issues that make this "experiment" only potentially useful to people who also struggles to get anything actually done due to battling severe ADHD while balancing working at a very casual pace, and shooting off in 10 different directions at once all the time. They would very likely benefit from some combination of a reality
It's not like speeding tickets are inevitable. I've been driving for over 17 years and I've never been pulled over once (knock on wood). But sure, I don't mind proportional speeding tickets (I never get them), but I think it's a slippery slope of socialism where you start thinking everything should have proportional costs. Why should rich and poor both pay $3 for a gallon milk? Shouldn't the rich pay $30 for a gallon of milk? Heck, they are so out of touch with food costs anyway they probably wouldn't notice.[1] [1] this video