The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.
As a fat dude, I assure you, being fat sucks. It gets expensive; "enough" food for a meal slowly creeps up, your feet hurt all the time and can increase in size (making it harder to find shoes that fit, which are generally a higher starting price). A lot more health issues can crop up and can be harder to treat properly. Lack of energy is fucking awful.
Meanwhile, in the US, the government paid ISPs for fiber to be ran and they just pocketed it instead.
Now we've got smaller companies running fiber and charging less for synchronous gigabit than you'd pay for copper 500mb down 5mb up, and ISPs are panicking a bit.
All the fiber maps have big empty zones where apartment complexes are, sadly.
