I found this little bit of silliness and thought I would share it. While a little pricey it is not actually the world's most expensive pen.
https://youtu.be/Za9PwwZATAA
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I found this little bit of silliness and thought I would share it. While a little pricey it is not actually the world's most expensive pen.
https://youtu.be/Za9PwwZATAA
I watched enough to get the idea. Didn't want to sit through the full 14 minutes of those guys.
I think that if I could easily afford $10,000 for a pen, I still would never buy one, just because I wouldn't want to encourage those kind of pen prices. On the other hand, when I add up all that I have spent on my accumulation of pens, I'm not on such firm ground, although the actual numbers are classified.
I did watch it all except the advert piece between 3 and 4 minutes. For the most part I felt that the pen's writing abilities was the least of their concerns. The other 5 or so pens were interesting to look at too. There was some nice nib porn. My small collection has been acquired by the most parsimonious means, and if I had $10K to spare it would also not be going on pens. Though I do know a guy who bought an MB Alexander set and keeps it in a safe, unused.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kaputnik
Wow, and these goofs have almost 2.5 million subscribers.
... and over a million views for this vid alone. The world is absurd.Quote:
Originally Posted by Blue Note
What makes this pen cost $10,000 to buy? YouTube vidiots who want to show off. Or maybe Wix paying him per view for those embedded spam ads?
And how much did that pen cost to make? ;) Methinks somebody paid a lot for the logo.
Ah to be young, foolish, unmarried, with no kids and gobs of discretionary spending budget...
The pen is insanely gorgeous but if I had 10k screaming to be spent, my preference would be to outfit my 4Runner, get a really sweet fishing boat, buy a camper trailer, buy a full watchmaking tool set, get a cnc micro mill and lathe, etc.
Hey if someone has the money and desire to get this or any other super expensive pen or watch or whatever, who am I to judge? I spent at least twice this on my old jeep over the last 20 years. Such a pen would probably last at least 10 years if not 50. So, whatevz.
My current pen spending upgrade trajectory, extrapolated, means I will escalate to a $10k pen about the time I turn 375 (±5 years). Assuming I don't retire first.
Buy two. And don't leave it on the counter at the post office. BTDT
https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=h...a85ae00aee&f=1
Too much Bling!
Well... I dunno. What is there to say? Of course you have to be very wealthy or very foolish to pay 10,000 for a pen. But many of us here do not consider it weird that we own pens costing 200 or 300 dollars, we're all probably in skilled labour of some kind, or maybe even quite wealthy. And someone working unskilled labour might say that's absurd, that they'd have to be a fool or wealthy to pay that much for a pen. And they would be right.
There are sad realities to wealth inequality, that's always what I think of when it comes to luxury products. I'm happy I can afford nice things, I'm not too sad I can't afford bling. I don't really like the presenters, but I'm quite alien to their demographic. I feel there's something ugly about products which are expensive purely because of exclusivity, using inefficient materials and methods of production to create a product no greater than something 1/10th its cost, where it's very virtue is that only a few people can afford it, so to the wealthy person it is an ultimate expression that they like a particular type of thing, even if the object itself is not really that special.
And obviously as Fred shows, you can drive up the cost of anything by encrusting it with precious stones, which is on the level of an emperor or king's desire to have symbols of his immense wealth.
There's much to think about when contemplating why such products exist, what psychological purpose they serve.
While I realize that this $10,000 pen was cranked out primarily by a series of soulless machines, skilled eyes had to have examined it and skilled hands touch it at some point in the process. Other luxury items, however -- say a very high-end yacht for example -- require a lot of skilled labor to produce. Woodwork done by enormously talented woodworkers, etc. If an "enlightened " society did away such, ahem, decadent, luxurious things, a lot of expert workers would have to step down their game to survive. Of course, during the French revolution, many artisans and craftsmen who'd made things for the aristocracy were executed for it. I suppose that would be the logical next step for an "enlightened" society.
You don´t have to buy bling to spend this amount of money in a FP, just check some of the upper end Japanese Maki-e pens, you will be surprised.
How much you wanna bet they get a nice kickback from MB? How much you reckon MB just got a bump to sales?
Beyond that, I reckon that Sapphire is around $300-$400 wholesale to a jeweler. Which probably adds around $1000 to the pen as a minimum.
But lets be real, in the lifestyles of the rich and famous, scarcity and exclusivity is king.
Also, can you say tax write-off?
Sorry, I tried to watch the video, got to 1:24 mark and I can't continue.
Whatever I'm missing in the rest of the video, I'd miss it with bliss.
Pure siliness. My goodness, don't these young people have better things to do?
I wonder how many views they need to break even. I absolutely do not understand influencer economics.
When you start talking about gemstones, even artificial scarcity will make them cost more, a lot more. For example, the entire diamond market is controlled — the world's largest diamond producers will only release a small fraction of their goods at a time, lest the market become flooded and prices drop. OPEC does essentially the same thing with oil.Quote:
Originally Posted by AzJon
Most people have no idea what the gems or gold or silver in an item are worth. For example, most solid 14K gold nibs consist of about $10 or $15 worth of gold. The 2.5mm sapphire on the MB? Here's a link to an online dealer who will sell you eight 3mm ones for about $75: https://www.gemselect.com/sapphire/sapphire-497096.php
A lot of times it's the perception of value that drives the price. "Ah, but madame, it is solid silver!" Yes -- about $3.50 worth of silver, to be precise!
I don't think skilled workers would be out of luck if we did away with extremely luxury products. That's kind of the whole industrial revolution, which we are sort of still living in. Engineering driven toward making it cheaper and easier to create things which then a larger number of people can afford. What's a different topic is what will happen as the resources that are cheap today become harder to sustain for a larger population, but this is a question that has been asked repeatedly for generations, even before the industrial revolution. We always think we're at the end of our rope and we can't grow any bigger, and then somehow we innovate and find a way. The quality of life of people is driven way up by skilled work, even for the common person.Quote:
Originally Posted by calamus
What's unfortunately true is that some kinds of skilled work are made redundant by other kinds of skilled work, so your security of income is never really guaranteed, and it can be hard to switch into another form of skilled labour depending on what you do. But if you say what you do is artisanal, then even if your skill has become redundant you can still charge an arm and a leg for it :) Or you can put a smiley face on a pastry and charge 10x the cost for a form of labour that never was and still isn't particularly skilled. Excuse me, I'll let myself out.