I thought it was fairly well known that call centers are all a numbers game. Management wants minimum call duration and maximum calls per employee; they're not really interested in solved problems.
The more calls you can handle, the fewer people you need (and all the associated overhead costs) and the more profit you make. It's really that simple.
Employees who actually take the time to help people get bad numbers and ultimately get canned, even if they're good at helping people. The successful employees figure out how to crank through their calls ASAP, as well as how to game the system so that they can sneak idle time without appearing to ignore calls in queue.
It's essentially the rules associated with factory work applied to answering the phone.
It's not that it's surprising that Microsoft would be buying influence at the UN; most of the member states are headed by kleptocratic governments whose first question is "How much for me?" Even when the governments aren't fatally corrupt, payoffs are the way to get things done in most places the UN represents.
That MS is playing by those rules isn't surprising at all, and I'm sure the Bush adminstration is rooting for standards tied to corporate interests and IP as well.
Whether he's right or wrong on all the details doesn't matter, really. He has three things going for him that are mmediately obvious to me:
1) He has long-term experience in the field. You discount this and I'm a little inclined to discount it too, not because I don't believe his experience-based knowledge, but because the past 9 years have been kind of a roller coaster economically: a fabulous economy that ran smack into the worst unemployment since the 1970s. Plus I think 10 years is kind of a "minimum" for an expert in any field. But regardless, you and I have maybe 1.5 years of experience over our entire careers in job seeking; he has concentrated experience nearly 10 times that. I'm inclined to believe that he knows how it works.
2) His advice mirrors that of what most career experts say. They ALL say you have to work it yourself, and you really need to work personal contacts. Jobs that end up on search boards and newspapers are hard to fill, less lucrative jobs. GOOD jobs go to friends, acquiantances and other trusted people.
3) He's well spoken, and doesn't seem at all condescending or arrogant. Job seeking is distasteful, and we hate to be told we have to go jam ourselves down others' throats, plus we hate to be told we're wrong when we think we know how something works.
None of this means that you can't be successful elsewhere, but I'd wager this guy is more right than wrong.
This is a problem in America: people for whom the system has worked reasonably well have no call to question whether it works that well for everyone. They just assume it does, because that thought is comforting. If it doesn't work for someone, they assume that it is that person's fault, not the system's.
I can almost hear Jello Biafra...I'm actually rather surprised that the LA police were all that interested in the ID of someone not directly involved in the comission of a crime.
Finding a fraudster from an email is difficult, but certainly not impossible.
The US federal government's most successful prosections against organized crime and drug trafficking have been centered on "breaking" highly complicated financial schemes.
Aren't most all SPAMs associated with credit card transactions? Those should be trivial to track, and I'd bet there's more than a few banks with shady merchant setups that would warrant more investigation.
Even though "the internet" doesn't fall into any single local jurisdiction, it's trivial to argue that spam is largely a federal enforcement issue from even a small sampling of it.
As I said in my previous post, I know this won't get operations that are exclusively overseas -- but even following the money trail on this *can* hinder the ability of overseas spam/fraud gangs from getting money out of the US.
Follow the money trail. Get the people committing outright theft (ie, no product), selling fraudulent products ("your dick a yard long in 24 hours"), or otherwise illegal products ("valium overnight"). Make a few RICO cases where you can ensare anyone even remotely involved in the business. Send them all to jail for 20 years with millions in fines.
Why is this so hard? This will put an immediate dent in spam. I'm not naive enough to think it will end it forever, but if enough people get nailed hard enough (including ISPs, banks, and others through a RICO prosecution) it will be damn difficult and daunting to even BE a spammer, let alone make any money at it.
Instead we'll waste countless hours talking about making spam illegal, when it's the smallest of all the crimes involved in a typical spam message.
Someone with deeper telecomm operations experience should be able to answer this, but given that we have cell number portability, do the numbers belong to *anyone* other than NANPA (North American Numbering Plan Administration)?
A related question for your hard-core telcomm people, since portability presumes any number can go anywhere, how do carriers assign new numbers to new devices? What pool do they come from? And what happens when service is terminated -- where do those numbers go?
My *guess* is that NANPA assigns NXX blocks (prefix/exchanges) to carriers, who then assign them to end nodes. Portability simply means that when someone wants to move to another carrier, the ported number gets put into an exception database someplace that is shared among carriers. Numbers not in the exception database are routed to whoever was assigned the NXX block originally. When service ends for a number, an exception database entry is removed if it exists, and the number "returns" to the NXX block assignee it originated from.
All of that is moot, though, if number portability means ALL numbers are in an exception database and number assignments simply happen in a queue from this master number database, and NANPA no longer assigns NXX blocks to carriers this way.
If this is true, then it seems fair game for me to re-assign my number to anyone else since only NANPA would have any claim on it. If the other assertion is true (NXX assignments to carriers, with an exception database and return-to-assignment on release), then Verizon or other carriers may have a legit beef, especially if they have to buy NXX blocks from NANPA or pay fees for them.
This is something that's bothered me for a long time. If spam largely is fraudulent (direct ripoff) or advertising fraudulent products (real product, doesn't work), or even criminal (selling drugs illegally), why don't we ever hear about prosecutions for this?
Presumably the money trail is the easist thing to follow in a spam message, particularly with the scary new laws associated with money movement these days. It also seems that RICO statutes could be used to ensnare pretty much everyone involved as part of a corrupt enterprise. And then you go away for hard time, 10-20 and forfeit most of your assets to $100k+ fines.
Given that these laws are powerful and their penalties severe, it would seem that a couple of major RICO busts would put a serious dent in the overall spam business. It would not eliminate it completely, but serious jail time for some of the larger members as well as continuing prosecutions might make it much more scarce.
My own theory is that the government is loathe to prosecute fraud, simply because "aggressive marketing" is so entrenched in otherwise "legitimate" business. My tinfoil hat extension to this theory is that otherwise legitimate businesses are profiting immensely from spam (albeit at an arm's length), and have told FTC/FBI to go easy on it (naturally through their paid-up contributions to their favorite officials).
Although to this day, I'm still wondering why nobody seems to go to jail for selling bogus penis pills and Valium without a perscription.
The problem with your IP technique is the same one with RBLs -- collateral damage. Spammers will just move their sites to shared servers on the same IP address, and you'll be blocking other users access to those same servers.
I personally don't have a problem with the collateral damage; while it does hurt some sites, they should be pressuring their ISPs to not colocate them on subnets or systems used by spammers. ISPs that won't do this should lose business, and it should become harder for spammers to get hosting and harder for ISPs to host spammers without incurring pain from other customers.
This is not entirely a trollish statement. A friend of mine with a PhD in history says that the US is setting the stage for either a Balkan-style civil war over cultural values clashes caused by non-integrating cultures and language gaps, or a neofascist government brought to power for economic and social reasons.
He's rather convinced that blacks and whites will align due to their closer shared history than any other group, although he said that a large muslim immigration would favor a white/black/mexican alliance on religious grounds.
While I think he's largely crazy, look closely at the areas of the world where divergent cultures and geogrpahy match up -- the Balkans, the Middle East, Southern Russia. It's easy to dismiss these conflicts as the products of recent history, but the historical reality is a massive back and forth for centuries.
I doubt that our capitalist spirit, where making a buck is our strongest value, will allow us to have that kind of situation, but its not entirely out of the question.
Did PC diagnostics ever do anything worthwhile? I've been around PCs and Macs on a support/troubleshooting/technical basis for 15 years and I've never found a diagnostics program other than MEMTEST86 find a damn thing wrong with a PC or indicate if there was a problem. I'm excluding FDISK/fsck from this as corrupted disks are more of a database/software problem than a hardware problem.
Nobody uses them because they don't do anything. Whining only slightly louder than the ventilation system will get you a motherboard swap from most vendors at the IT dept. level, at the consumer level you're stuck with at least one "vendor default image".
It's too easy and cheap to swap out systems entirely, wipe your hands and walk away in 30 minutes than it is to BS around with diagnostics which might tell me that a nonreplacable surface mount component is bad.
There are no good diagnostics because nobody cares about $75 motherboards and $100 CPUs.
I got kind of excited when I saw the DC mockup showing extra info on the additional monitor, and disappointed when I saw it wasn't possible (I have an Nividia dual-head setup so I pretty much knew that).
But BF1942/DC could really use this, as could any FPS that involves a lot of secondary display info (maps, sensors, multiplayer chat, etc). I think that'd be a great step forward.
A triple screen where you actually get a broader field of view would be amazing, although I won't hold my breath. Plus the desk space is a pain -- I have a custom-built desk I made specifically to hold 2-3 21" displays and it still feels cramped. Unfortunately the money for 3 x 21" LCDs just isn't there.
Something tells me that fighting MS, or SCO, or even John Ashcroft is nothing compared to the dark, scary menace of some committee made up of the top 27 central banks in the world. Aren't they better known as "the Illuminati"?
They're fun to play with, since they're usually pretty inexperienced (call-center wise) amateurs. I usually speak in a very slow, semi-confused tone of voice and ask kind of inane questions.
My favorite with highly liberal candidates is "Do you favor any kind of socialism?" Sometimes they say "Yes." And I say "I'm glad we agree. I like socialism, especially the national kind." If they're really gullible they'll agree to this and I'll finish the call by saying "I'm glad the candidate has national socialists working for him -- he'll get my vote."
At which point I hang up the phone and laugh, wondering if the guy understands he just agreed he's a national socialist.
It can also work during this cycle to ask them if the candidate supports the do not call list. If they're simple, the caller will agree that he does. At that point you can ask them why the candidate doesn't support the spirit of the DNC list and not just the letter of it, and leave me alone.
I feel bad sometimes, because I know these people are all just honest-abe citizens wanting to get out the vote and participate in something, but then I remember they're mostly zealots or stooges of the powerful and realize they probably need or deserve a good trolling.
Simple, they could borrow a trick from SCO and say "It would be impossible for the FOSS developer to do X unless they had seen the M$ code."
And how well has that worked for SCO so far? It'd be easier for MS to do what's often been claimed about the SCO code -- deliberate insertion to claim copyright violation.
What you claim *may* be true for code like WINE or Samba, which has to work very closely with Windows, but I'd imagine those developers long ago got careful about what code they inserted and what they exposed themselves too. It'd be harder for something like Sendmail or another application which which is written to follow a public spec or standard.
Was the e-card itself (as viewed at the web site 123greetings.com) a problem, or was it the message itself the problem?
I get those stupid e-cards from relatives occasionally, and I never open the messages in anything but pine because they're usually loaded with crap I don't want to run.
In this case, I viewed the email in pine, copied the ecard number and viewed the stupid thing on the web site, presuming it would be from my brother (an AOL lifer), since it was my anniversary. It was unattributed on the site, so I figured it was just a spam/traffic generator.
You're totally right, but it'll be hard for a lot of people to not look at it. I say this tongue in cheek, but people will slow to look at a car wreck -- why not the "Windows" source code? Plus these are highly curious people.
I think the better encouragement is not to *keep* the source code. It would be quite difficult for MS to "prove" that any given developer had seen the purloined source, barring the conspiratorial notion that MS is running false-flagged IRC channels and web sites and collecting evidence on who is grabbing it. But not keeping a copy of it (which would be illegal anyway), they remove the easiest proof that they have been tainted by it.
What counts as inherited wealth, though? Is it cash from one's parents in excess of a certain amount or is it any amount? Does it include gifts or other familial support?
I knew kids in college who got everything "paid for" by their parents, including a car of some sort. During college and after I "lost" around $20k in investable money because I had to use my earnings to support myself, buy a shitty car (that broke, costing more money), pay for student loans -- things that other people I knew didn't pay for. Some of them used their investable income wisely and bought houses at age 23 and now sitting far prettier than others, but some pissed it away on clothes and bullshit and never took advantage of it except to live at a higher lifestyle.
I guess my point is that not all "head starts" are inheritence or even clearly claimable as inheritence, but they're advantages that most people didn't have and they can lead to $200k or more gains in net worth by age 40 or even earlier. Couple that with frugal living until age 35, and you could be a "working millionaire" by age 45.
It's true that there are a lot of people that can be referred to as "savings millionaires"; those who have lived below their means, saved and invested well.
Many that I've known that fit this category also got lucky with investments or had that extra $25k from their grandparents or whatever that gave them that very early leg up to invest when the rest of us were paying rent in college, paying student loans or something else that sapped our ability to invest at that critical young age when the payoff is the greatest.
Some also live unusually frugal lives that, frankly, aren't terribly compatible with normal social interaction. I can think of two guys that have a ton of money through frugal living, but who also have little social life, no girlfriends or wives, and lifestyles that are generally incompatible with any of those things.
Overall, I wouldn't count either these kinds of people or the flashy nouveau rich as really "rich"; I'd only count people that have had at least a generation significant financial wealth.
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I thought it was fairly well known that call centers are all a numbers game. Management wants minimum call duration and maximum calls per employee; they're not really interested in solved problems.
The more calls you can handle, the fewer people you need (and all the associated overhead costs) and the more profit you make. It's really that simple.
Employees who actually take the time to help people get bad numbers and ultimately get canned, even if they're good at helping people. The successful employees figure out how to crank through their calls ASAP, as well as how to game the system so that they can sneak idle time without appearing to ignore calls in queue.
It's essentially the rules associated with factory work applied to answering the phone.
It's not that it's surprising that Microsoft would be buying influence at the UN; most of the member states are headed by kleptocratic governments whose first question is "How much for me?" Even when the governments aren't fatally corrupt, payoffs are the way to get things done in most places the UN represents.
That MS is playing by those rules isn't surprising at all, and I'm sure the Bush adminstration is rooting for standards tied to corporate interests and IP as well.
Whether he's right or wrong on all the details doesn't matter, really. He has three things going for him that are mmediately obvious to me:
1) He has long-term experience in the field. You discount this and I'm a little inclined to discount it too, not because I don't believe his experience-based knowledge, but because the past 9 years have been kind of a roller coaster economically: a fabulous economy that ran smack into the worst unemployment since the 1970s. Plus I think 10 years is kind of a "minimum" for an expert in any field. But regardless, you and I have maybe 1.5 years of experience over our entire careers in job seeking; he has concentrated experience nearly 10 times that. I'm inclined to believe that he knows how it works.
2) His advice mirrors that of what most career experts say. They ALL say you have to work it yourself, and you really need to work personal contacts. Jobs that end up on search boards and newspapers are hard to fill, less lucrative jobs. GOOD jobs go to friends, acquiantances and other trusted people.
3) He's well spoken, and doesn't seem at all condescending or arrogant. Job seeking is distasteful, and we hate to be told we have to go jam ourselves down others' throats, plus we hate to be told we're wrong when we think we know how something works.
None of this means that you can't be successful elsewhere, but I'd wager this guy is more right than wrong.
This is a problem in America: people for whom the system has worked reasonably well have no call to question whether it works that well for everyone. They just assume it does, because that thought is comforting. If it doesn't work for someone, they assume that it is that person's fault, not the system's.
...how I feel about X Windows!!!!
I can almost hear Jello Biafra...I'm actually rather surprised that the LA police were all that interested in the ID of someone not directly involved in the comission of a crime.
Finding a fraudster from an email is difficult, but certainly not impossible.
The US federal government's most successful prosections against organized crime and drug trafficking have been centered on "breaking" highly complicated financial schemes.
Aren't most all SPAMs associated with credit card transactions? Those should be trivial to track, and I'd bet there's more than a few banks with shady merchant setups that would warrant more investigation.
Even though "the internet" doesn't fall into any single local jurisdiction, it's trivial to argue that spam is largely a federal enforcement issue from even a small sampling of it.
As I said in my previous post, I know this won't get operations that are exclusively overseas -- but even following the money trail on this *can* hinder the ability of overseas spam/fraud gangs from getting money out of the US.
It's like what, 600 some megs?
And I thought the Paris movie was a lot to download.
Follow the money trail. Get the people committing outright theft (ie, no product), selling fraudulent products ("your dick a yard long in 24 hours"), or otherwise illegal products ("valium overnight"). Make a few RICO cases where you can ensare anyone even remotely involved in the business. Send them all to jail for 20 years with millions in fines.
Why is this so hard? This will put an immediate dent in spam. I'm not naive enough to think it will end it forever, but if enough people get nailed hard enough (including ISPs, banks, and others through a RICO prosecution) it will be damn difficult and daunting to even BE a spammer, let alone make any money at it.
Instead we'll waste countless hours talking about making spam illegal, when it's the smallest of all the crimes involved in a typical spam message.
Someone with deeper telecomm operations experience should be able to answer this, but given that we have cell number portability, do the numbers belong to *anyone* other than NANPA (North American Numbering Plan Administration)?
A related question for your hard-core telcomm people, since portability presumes any number can go anywhere, how do carriers assign new numbers to new devices? What pool do they come from? And what happens when service is terminated -- where do those numbers go?
My *guess* is that NANPA assigns NXX blocks (prefix/exchanges) to carriers, who then assign them to end nodes. Portability simply means that when someone wants to move to another carrier, the ported number gets put into an exception database someplace that is shared among carriers. Numbers not in the exception database are routed to whoever was assigned the NXX block originally. When service ends for a number, an exception database entry is removed if it exists, and the number "returns" to the NXX block assignee it originated from.
All of that is moot, though, if number portability means ALL numbers are in an exception database and number assignments simply happen in a queue from this master number database, and NANPA no longer assigns NXX blocks to carriers this way.
If this is true, then it seems fair game for me to re-assign my number to anyone else since only NANPA would have any claim on it. If the other assertion is true (NXX assignments to carriers, with an exception database and return-to-assignment on release), then Verizon or other carriers may have a legit beef, especially if they have to buy NXX blocks from NANPA or pay fees for them.
This is something that's bothered me for a long time. If spam largely is fraudulent (direct ripoff) or advertising fraudulent products (real product, doesn't work), or even criminal (selling drugs illegally), why don't we ever hear about prosecutions for this?
Presumably the money trail is the easist thing to follow in a spam message, particularly with the scary new laws associated with money movement these days. It also seems that RICO statutes could be used to ensnare pretty much everyone involved as part of a corrupt enterprise. And then you go away for hard time, 10-20 and forfeit most of your assets to $100k+ fines.
Given that these laws are powerful and their penalties severe, it would seem that a couple of major RICO busts would put a serious dent in the overall spam business. It would not eliminate it completely, but serious jail time for some of the larger members as well as continuing prosecutions might make it much more scarce.
My own theory is that the government is loathe to prosecute fraud, simply because "aggressive marketing" is so entrenched in otherwise "legitimate" business. My tinfoil hat extension to this theory is that otherwise legitimate businesses are profiting immensely from spam (albeit at an arm's length), and have told FTC/FBI to go easy on it (naturally through their paid-up contributions to their favorite officials).
Although to this day, I'm still wondering why nobody seems to go to jail for selling bogus penis pills and Valium without a perscription.
The problem with your IP technique is the same one with RBLs -- collateral damage. Spammers will just move their sites to shared servers on the same IP address, and you'll be blocking other users access to those same servers.
I personally don't have a problem with the collateral damage; while it does hurt some sites, they should be pressuring their ISPs to not colocate them on subnets or systems used by spammers. ISPs that won't do this should lose business, and it should become harder for spammers to get hosting and harder for ISPs to host spammers without incurring pain from other customers.
This is not entirely a trollish statement. A friend of mine with a PhD in history says that the US is setting the stage for either a Balkan-style civil war over cultural values clashes caused by non-integrating cultures and language gaps, or a neofascist government brought to power for economic and social reasons.
He's rather convinced that blacks and whites will align due to their closer shared history than any other group, although he said that a large muslim immigration would favor a white/black/mexican alliance on religious grounds.
While I think he's largely crazy, look closely at the areas of the world where divergent cultures and geogrpahy match up -- the Balkans, the Middle East, Southern Russia. It's easy to dismiss these conflicts as the products of recent history, but the historical reality is a massive back and forth for centuries.
I doubt that our capitalist spirit, where making a buck is our strongest value, will allow us to have that kind of situation, but its not entirely out of the question.
Did PC diagnostics ever do anything worthwhile? I've been around PCs and Macs on a support/troubleshooting/technical basis for 15 years and I've never found a diagnostics program other than MEMTEST86 find a damn thing wrong with a PC or indicate if there was a problem. I'm excluding FDISK/fsck from this as corrupted disks are more of a database/software problem than a hardware problem.
Nobody uses them because they don't do anything. Whining only slightly louder than the ventilation system will get you a motherboard swap from most vendors at the IT dept. level, at the consumer level you're stuck with at least one "vendor default image".
It's too easy and cheap to swap out systems entirely, wipe your hands and walk away in 30 minutes than it is to BS around with diagnostics which might tell me that a nonreplacable surface mount component is bad.
There are no good diagnostics because nobody cares about $75 motherboards and $100 CPUs.
yay. Maybe they should force all CPUs to run at 450Mhz PII speeds. It's not fair someone has a better graphics card or CPU.
I got kind of excited when I saw the DC mockup showing extra info on the additional monitor, and disappointed when I saw it wasn't possible (I have an Nividia dual-head setup so I pretty much knew that).
But BF1942/DC could really use this, as could any FPS that involves a lot of secondary display info (maps, sensors, multiplayer chat, etc). I think that'd be a great step forward.
A triple screen where you actually get a broader field of view would be amazing, although I won't hold my breath. Plus the desk space is a pain -- I have a custom-built desk I made specifically to hold 2-3 21" displays and it still feels cramped. Unfortunately the money for 3 x 21" LCDs just isn't there.
Something tells me that fighting MS, or SCO, or even John Ashcroft is nothing compared to the dark, scary menace of some committee made up of the top 27 central banks in the world. Aren't they better known as "the Illuminati"?
They're fun to play with, since they're usually pretty inexperienced (call-center wise) amateurs. I usually speak in a very slow, semi-confused tone of voice and ask kind of inane questions.
My favorite with highly liberal candidates is "Do you favor any kind of socialism?" Sometimes they say "Yes." And I say "I'm glad we agree. I like socialism, especially the national kind." If they're really gullible they'll agree to this and I'll finish the call by saying "I'm glad the candidate has national socialists working for him -- he'll get my vote."
At which point I hang up the phone and laugh, wondering if the guy understands he just agreed he's a national socialist.
It can also work during this cycle to ask them if the candidate supports the do not call list. If they're simple, the caller will agree that he does. At that point you can ask them why the candidate doesn't support the spirit of the DNC list and not just the letter of it, and leave me alone.
I feel bad sometimes, because I know these people are all just honest-abe citizens wanting to get out the vote and participate in something, but then I remember they're mostly zealots or stooges of the powerful and realize they probably need or deserve a good trolling.
Simple, they could borrow a trick from SCO and say "It would be impossible for the FOSS developer to do X unless they had seen the M$ code."
And how well has that worked for SCO so far? It'd be easier for MS to do what's often been claimed about the SCO code -- deliberate insertion to claim copyright violation.
What you claim *may* be true for code like WINE or Samba, which has to work very closely with Windows, but I'd imagine those developers long ago got careful about what code they inserted and what they exposed themselves too. It'd be harder for something like Sendmail or another application which which is written to follow a public spec or standard.
Was the e-card itself (as viewed at the web site 123greetings.com) a problem, or was it the message itself the problem?
I get those stupid e-cards from relatives occasionally, and I never open the messages in anything but pine because they're usually loaded with crap I don't want to run.
In this case, I viewed the email in pine, copied the ecard number and viewed the stupid thing on the web site, presuming it would be from my brother (an AOL lifer), since it was my anniversary. It was unattributed on the site, so I figured it was just a spam/traffic generator.
You're totally right, but it'll be hard for a lot of people to not look at it. I say this tongue in cheek, but people will slow to look at a car wreck -- why not the "Windows" source code? Plus these are highly curious people.
I think the better encouragement is not to *keep* the source code. It would be quite difficult for MS to "prove" that any given developer had seen the purloined source, barring the conspiratorial notion that MS is running false-flagged IRC channels and web sites and collecting evidence on who is grabbing it. But not keeping a copy of it (which would be illegal anyway), they remove the easiest proof that they have been tainted by it.
No, it was a true pan-European effort:
Italian looks, French engines and British electrical systems, with German price tags.
What counts as inherited wealth, though? Is it cash from one's parents in excess of a certain amount or is it any amount? Does it include gifts or other familial support?
I knew kids in college who got everything "paid for" by their parents, including a car of some sort. During college and after I "lost" around $20k in investable money because I had to use my earnings to support myself, buy a shitty car (that broke, costing more money), pay for student loans -- things that other people I knew didn't pay for. Some of them used their investable income wisely and bought houses at age 23 and now sitting far prettier than others, but some pissed it away on clothes and bullshit and never took advantage of it except to live at a higher lifestyle.
I guess my point is that not all "head starts" are inheritence or even clearly claimable as inheritence, but they're advantages that most people didn't have and they can lead to $200k or more gains in net worth by age 40 or even earlier. Couple that with frugal living until age 35, and you could be a "working millionaire" by age 45.
It's true that there are a lot of people that can be referred to as "savings millionaires"; those who have lived below their means, saved and invested well.
Many that I've known that fit this category also got lucky with investments or had that extra $25k from their grandparents or whatever that gave them that very early leg up to invest when the rest of us were paying rent in college, paying student loans or something else that sapped our ability to invest at that critical young age when the payoff is the greatest.
Some also live unusually frugal lives that, frankly, aren't terribly compatible with normal social interaction. I can think of two guys that have a ton of money through frugal living, but who also have little social life, no girlfriends or wives, and lifestyles that are generally incompatible with any of those things.
Overall, I wouldn't count either these kinds of people or the flashy nouveau rich as really "rich"; I'd only count people that have had at least a generation significant financial wealth.
But as a chick who like shopping, can you buy one of everything in the Prada store in three different sizes and not worry about your credit line?
I mean, we're talking about people who don't drive not because they don't want to but because they've never HAD to..