Finally, due to popular demand. Cheap People: The Evil Within...
HankHeIl@HankHeil
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Nov 12, 2026
~6 min read
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Finally, due to popular demand.
Cheap People: The Evil Within
Dedicated to the Cheap Bastard who originally inspired this concept for me, Stockton Rush of the infamous Oceangate Titan disaster.
Cheap People: The Evil Within
Dedicated to the Cheap Bastard who originally inspired this concept for me, Stockton Rush of the infamous Oceangate Titan disaster.
HankHeIl@HankHeil
In addition to my Magnum Opus on the evilness of Cheap People, I will someday write my manifesto on why stranger adoption is actually just allowing evil into the life of everyone you care about.
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In one's personal and professional life, you will eventually interact with enough people that you begin recognizing patterns which slowly form into archetypes. Cheap People are a particular archetype I've grown to focus on due to their universally negative interaction value.
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In the case of Stockton Rush, many people ascribe his doomed vision for deep ocean exploration to a number of dark triad adjacent personality traits. Sociopathy, narcissism, an unquenchable, burning will combined with an impenetrable stubbornness.
Nope, he was simply Cheap.
Nope, he was simply Cheap.
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To be Cheap is not to be thrifty or cost conscious. It is a multimodal failure of the human value system that is displayed by an inability to properly assess value of any sort. A Cheap Person does not value your Time, your Safety, your Interests, your Expertise, or the Future.
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Learning to identify this archetype will save you from much heartache in the both personal and professional spheres. Cheap People will consume everything you give them without even a hint of reciprocity. This is their original sin, the root of their evil.
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Within hours of reports that the Oceangate Titan had gone missing, some of Rush's comments came bubbling to the surface. One early thread people latched on to was his statement that he didn't want a team of "50 year old White guys" designing his sub.
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Many people flagged this as a case of "Woke Gone Wrong", especially in the climate of 2023. Instead, my instinct for identifying Cheap People immediately pegged this guy as a Cheap Bastard 1st and foremost in a way that was continually rewarded by the release of further evidence.
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It is a particular quality of Cheap People to not place value on the expertise of others. As damning evidence of firings and reprisals against the few experienced, capable engineers in his employ racked up, the truth was revealed.
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A Cheap Person does not pay you for your expertise which they assign a value of 0. They pay you what they consider to be a princely sum to do what they can't. You aren't hired as an engineer to tell him no, you are hired to find a way to make it work. "That's what I pay you for!"
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This is why Cheapness is a multimodal failure. You don't arrive at a staff of college interns just because you want to spend less money. For anyone else the "this is insane" alarm starts going off well before that point but when combined with the need to hear "yes"...
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The recently released documentaries lend imagery to the news reports and court documents to further illustrate the sins of Cheapness. The first and most shocking is the image of the Titan left outside, fully exposed to the elements for the winter.
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Money troubles or not, the blatant disregard for safety and the future consequences of his Cheap decision is fully on display. Freeze and thaw cycles, corrosion, rodents in the wiring, all easily avoided by a bare minimum outlay against the entire future of the business.
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Clearly the "Crazy Alarm" was going off for most everyone around him at this point but not for a Cheap Bastard. All the concerns don't even echo, it's not even an insane display of his drive, he just doesn't even think about the consequences. To think about costs is painful.
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The next offers a segue to a more personal experience of cheapness and that's their use of a cherry picker in place of a proper gantry or forklift. It stood out to me because I used to pick up shifts at a warehouse feeding an auto plant and used one just like it.
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It's the sort of deranged thinking inherent in Cheapness that you'd risk a fall suit just to save $1,000 on buying a wheeled gantry. You can even see earlier in the project them using proper equipment when forced to by the need to have the design independently tested
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Cheap People are constitutionally incapable of a Cooperate decision in game theory. They will never independently coalesce to a single cost that isn't imposed in them by higher authority. They believe they are smarter than you for dodging anything up to that level of consequence
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Which brings me around to my hours spent scooting around that warehouse. It was an easy job to hop in and out of because turnover meant they'd take you whenever nothing else was available and a few bucks is better than none.
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It was a smaller company feeding small parts to a Big 3 auto plant and the owner's secret sauce was that he'd never be underbid for a contract renewal. With 90% of the company's revenue coming from that one contract, that was a pretty weak plan to place all your hopes on.
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Believe it or not, every person alive has thought "I can make more money or lower my costs if I just lower my expenses". It isn't a novel idea and in fact, it's literally the first thing everyone does and there is always going to be someone smarter and better than you at it.
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If you own a business with multimillion dollar contracts and you think it's a good use of your time (in 2009!) to be reviewing invoices from the company that restocks the Maxwell House and paper cups, then spending time on the phone to argue over $5, you are a defective leader.
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Going beyond defective, you are actively dangerous to the livelihoods of your employees who depend on you doing things like running a stable business. Arguing over a coffee invoice may not seem evil, but the downstream effects of a such a mindset is.
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Cheap People never value the future. The Here and Now takes precedent over the Soon and Eventually. Investment into their businesses and others is anathema to them. Buy warehouse software so we have better inventory accuracy? "Just do your sheets or I'll find someone who will."
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Pay the people whose working knowledge keeps the entire operation running? "I already pay them too much". It's just a cancerous mindset.
What eventually happened? Did they run out of workers or have some huge catastrophe that closed the doors?
What eventually happened? Did they run out of workers or have some huge catastrophe that closed the doors?
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The ending was simple. They got underbid. A big, national company came in and underbid him because decades of investment and overall better values meant they were more efficient. They weren't Cheap and now his business is a distant memory.
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Generalizing these behaviors to the societal level and you can see how Cheap People are behind so many of our modern ills. Illegal farm and slaughterhouse labor? Cheap People. H1Bs? Cheap People. Jamming datacenters down people's throats with no messaging? Cheap People.
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"Cheap People could be here" he said to himself out loud, "I hate Cheap People"
