I don't know about you, but one of the reasons I am accumulating less stuff is that I already have plenty of stuff, more than I can comfortably fit in my house. I need to get rid of stuff before I can get more stuff.
"My house" is rented, so everything I own is a liability. I'm currently getting ready to move again (to find work), and selling off some of the few things I accumulated since the last move (~3 years ago) since there won't be any space for them.
We are starting to recognize that we don't need alf the things we buy. We are getting to the point that we don't own things, things own us. A sugestion, if you want to get rid of stuff, do it because you don't need the oject, not to get more stuff.
> The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship.
Then rents went up, education became more expensive, wages went stagnant, the rich got richer, and suddenly owning property and buying "stuff" to fuel the insatiable furnace of capitalism doesn't seem like such a great life goal. If that means we're not participating in "the system", well... maybe it's time to change the system.
Also, I think it strange the author questions what the death of property ownership means for capitalism, and then cites various examples of capitalism in action that are working to corrode property ownership -- e.g. Apple, Amazon, etc. The rise of subscription services over shrink wrapped software or hardware to which you own the rights arose directly from capitalism.
The Machine doesn't fix the problem. Just some problems off the top of my head:
1) Some groups will just use the resources of the Machine, while others will work on improving The Machine. Over time, Machines in some areas will be vastly more capable than other areas. This will create haves and have-nots, urge migration and give rise to a system very similar to the current worlds (first-, second-, third-).
2) In your utopia, the corporation has no incentive to build a long-lasting Machine, especially since the Machine can build it's own parts. The corporation may also upgrade Machine capabilities (a new XBox/PS) that make it desirable to upgrade, forcing the town to pony up more money or resources. And what about the people who work at those corporations? Do they not live like the folks with the Machine? Why do they have to work, for money presumably? Again, haves and have-nots.
3) Resources in a local area are finite. What happens when the water runs out?
4) If the Machine removes the need for money, how do the townsfolk pay for the Machine? How does it all start?
You are a technological optimist. Like other technological optimists, there is a basic human psychological need that is not being acknowledged in this solution. That is, the desire to be better than your fellow man: Whether this is at an individual level, family level or society level is less relevant, but so long as this need exists, no amount of technology can fix the problem, as any new technology can be bent to increase, not decrease, disparity.
Nothing can “fix the problem”, but I propose that putting the essential machinery of production in to common ownership can help. In the stories I write, no one can force someone else to “pony up” for upgrades, and everything is open source.
Much of my writing is meant to be a thought experiment. I think it may be an improvement if groups of people support one another voluntarily, and share in common ownership of critical factors of production.
My writing is a way to explore a class free society (economic class that is) free of wasteful consumerism. It is not necessarily meant to be a literal plan.
However you ask about resource consumption: society already uses resources at an unsustainable rate. I claim The Machine will improve on our resource consumption by reducing consumerism and needless consumption. But the fact that a society with the machine may still be unsustainable does not mean it isn’t an improvement. The Machine only fails if you expect that I am proposing a solution to all problems, which is not the case.
Humans will still have inequality, but I don’t claim to totally solve that. I think The Machine could help reduce inequality, but it depends on how we use it.
Anyway, I’m a bit rushed and I’m sorry I haven’t provided a clearer reply. I just wanted to give you some kind of answer. Thanks for reading my work!
The Machine will result in different kinds of inequality, possibly worse over the long run.
What I was trying to demonstrate is that classes exist because humans want them to exist. Technology cannot solve a behaviour problem. Through evolution, we learn that a certain percentage of selfish actors in a large pool of altruistic actors is long-term stable, which blew me away the first time I read about it.
Finally, have you read Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway"? If not, suggested reading.
I kept reading expecting The Machine to be a metaphor for local economies or something, but no, they want to actually build a Star Trek-style replicator that runs on a trickle of water and garbage that's funded by Kickstarter.
I’m the author. Actually building the machine is one possible outcome but essentially The Machine is a metaphor for local economies. A fact I’ve felt I should clarify in a subsequent essay.
But society has willfully embraced living "in the present"...who here would give up their SF rental in exchange for a property in Gilroy they will eventually own? How many here would give up their leased 2018 BMW for a used Toyota Yaris?
I mean this is all what I’m considering. I hate working day in and day out in the Bay Area. I grew up in the Santa Cruz mountains in the forest and now I commute through an asphalt jungle to a concrete building where I’m pampered every day like a fragile snowflake. I’m constantly working to figure out how I could afford a home in the outskirts of this region. I’ve already moved from an Audi to a Honda although it’s kind of an expensive Honda, so I’m considering switching to something cheaper. And I’m dreaming of finding land in pescadero.
I did exactly this. I gave up my $3500 apartment in SF and moved to the central valley. People in SF and the Bay shit all over the central valley, but I've never been happier.
Sure. I don't feel any urge to pay several hundred per month for several years for a car, when I can have an equally functional (if less flashy) car that I bought outright for less than the up-front deposit on the BMW.
(To be exact, I drive a 15-yr-old Skoda, not a Yaris, but you get the idea.)
I think that was all intentional. He's not at any point saying this is good or bad. Just that it's uncharted territory and the long-term impact is unknown and not being prepared for.
I'm sure it's intentional, but I think it's still strange given the implications. The author is on to something, but I think they need to keep going on this line of thought. If market forces are driving companies to work against the notion of property ownership, and the idea of capitalism is predicated on the notion of property ownership, the current trend doesn't seem tenable.
At what point does capitalism stop being what it is and evolve into something else entirely?
It may be better for the environment to not own stuff, but instead use services.
For example, take a fridge. If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence".
However, if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.
EDIT: Besides eliminating planned obsolescence, there are more advantages:
- Increased market transparency. The market is more transparent if I know exactly what a service costs me per month, as opposed to buying a product and not knowing when it will fail. A more transparent market leads to better competition.
- Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including recycling it, becomes a natural responsibility of the company.
Interesting, but in your example how would the food be delivered to your home?
But maybe a delivery service once a week or so is better than every individual taking their car to the supermarket? Interesting topic anyway.
They really just have an incentive to make sure that on average you pay more than enough to make them a profit over the expected lifetime of your fridge. They also have an incentive to get you the least expensive fridge with the longest lifetime, regardless of power consumption or any other factors.
You already have something very close to this with home warranties and the providers tend to be awful in my experience. The goal is just to extract money from you and keep costs down.
If the buyer/owner of the of the fridge is the landlord but the user and power bill payer is the renter then the landlord has little incentive to care about power consumption.
> The goal is just to extract money from you and keep costs down
While this mentality definitely exists, this doesn't account for brand and a wish to protect reputation. Hence why personally I tend to stick with established companies for things like trades as in the absence of a personal relationship, knowing someone has a brand to protect (and history against it) improves my chance of receiving a quality good/service
> this doesn't account for brand and a wish to protect reputation
While the preservation of a brand might be rational for a corporation as a whole, it might be somewhat easy for executives that are paid quarterly and annual bonuses to temporarily goose profits by sacrificing long term reliability and brand (which only shows up with a long lag time, years down the road), then take their bonuses from investors before going somewhere else.
This theory of 'looting' by executives might leave both customers and long-term investors worse off, but is caused by the inability of customers and investors to perfectly incentivize (or monitor) long-term decisionmaking.
An essentially never discussed option is also that the fridge could be open source. Now when it breaks there is both motive and opportunity for third party repair companies to offer upgrades and fixes.
Most fridges are repairable modulo buying one with a complex motherboard. Even then they're still fixable just spendy to do so. Also most aren't complex enough that you couldn't just reverse engineer the Mobo easily. People do this for cars and computers.
They could be much cheaper to repair if they used standard parts so repair places didn't have to order in custom pieces that they only use about 1 per year because every fridge has it's own version.
well one bad trend recently in HVAC services is companies trying to get people to lease the units for their homes. this then prevent easy sale as the HVAC leases usually allow the leasing company to require payment in full for the units or credit check the buyer to insure continuance of the lease.
So I disagree with your premise based on the example you gave. I would say it would be fine with items you only keep a few years and not long term appliances. I really do not think it encourages them to create units that fail because many companies still want their reputation to be built upon longevity. Simply put, the sales volumes are already great enough to not require shenanigans like what you suggest
Definitely. A key example is phones whose batteries cannot be replaced by the end-user (and end-user repairability in general). Forcing users to update their phone's OS to newer versions which require more power from the newer models is another example. Printer ink cartridges often contain chips whose only purpose is to disable the cartridge - even if it's still got plenty of ink - after a certain amount of time passes. Also consider video games which require an internet connection to play, but do all of the logic on the client - when the servers disappear, well, time to buy this year's game instead.
Legislation against this practice isn't unheard of, there are fines and jail time for it in France.
350,000 phones were being into landfills every day in 2010. Fuck Apple's "thinnest phone ever", it's not worth the social cost. Dumb consumer vanity isn't the metric for optimization here.
I'm not sure Apple is the one to yell at here. The iPhone is one of the only phones that continues to get updates and is useful beyond 18-24 months. Short of destroying the motherboard, few iPhones are likely sent to landfills until they are many years old. They certainly do not end up in landfills because the lack of a user replaceable battery.
iPhone users either get the battery replaced, sell the phone, or they trade the phone in. The trade in then gets sold again, and likely again after that. The iPhones resale value makes sure it is a long time before any are simply thrown in the trash.
Apple will recycle any Apple product for free just by handing it to them in any of their stores. An Apple phone ending up in a landfill is the consumer's fault.
These recycled phones either end up as refurbished phones in other markets, or are taken apart by their special robots down to the individual pieces, which are then recycled themselves.
Yes. The distinguishing feature of planned obsolescence is that the customer doesn't know the real design lifespan of the product. Just require companies to declare that and the problem goes away. Looks like the EU already does: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence#Regulatio...
Instead of you owning the fridge, now the service company does. It'll just buy you a new fridge every time some little thing goes wrong; because it's cheaper to pay for delivery of a new one than to pay skilled labor to come and fix it (multiple times, usually).
It'll exchange you for a new one. But once you own thousands of fridges, I'm sure it's more economical to repair them afterwards with in-house technicians
> However, if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.
Theoretically, landlords would have the same incentive to purchase the longest lasting things for their rental units. In my experience, both as a renter and someone who designs buildings, the directive is "get the cheapest possible thing that will work".
Sometimes that's because the person paying to build the building is going to sell it once it's rented out, so they won't have to deal with the long term consequences. Sometimes it's just budget restrictions that won't permit the funds to buy the high-quality option. Sometimes it's just short-sightedness. It's rare to meet an owner who truly wants to invest in high quality, long-term solutions.
Or maybe it's because landlords know that it doesn't matter how long something is supposed to last in the hands of someone who has no willingness or incentive to preserve it
Exactly this. I'm a landlord, and I can't tell you how poorly some people will treat your appliances and other interior household components.
I'm not going to put a Bosch dishwasher in when someone is going to let their kid sit on the door while it's open, not maintain it properly (cleaning out the drain screen monthly), and so on. Maybe some tenants will, but most do not. I make sure to pay for the extended warranty, and my credit card tops the warranty up some more, because one service call is more expensive (and it's built into the cost of the rent). Something breaks? I file a warranty claim or service call, schedule it with the tenant, and move on with my day. My tenants are entitled to working appliances, not fancy appliances. If those appliances are durable and long lasting, bonus.
You have two options: pay a premium for a durable fridge that needs less/no maintenance or send out your staff to perform regular maintenance. It's more or less what the tenant is paying for when you rent your appliances.
> Theoretically, landlords would have the same incentive to purchase the longest lasting things for their rental units. In my experience, both as a renter and someone who designs buildings, the directive is "get the cheapest possible thing that will work".
This is a great example, and it also has many parallels in—e.g. provision of online services.
The gp isn't wrong, service-providing companies are incentivised to optimise for low waste in certain areas, but it breaks down in other areas like this because service providers aren't optimising for QoS, they're optimising for perceived value.
For example (from the gp's comment):
> if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.
This depends. If the company is doing the above by leasing you a fridge you keep in your house and are responsible for maintaining, they getting you the worst fridge and replacing regularly may be better for them (see also ISP routers). Your statement only holds if they're running a large refrigeration warehouse where you keep your food at all times, in which case the logistics get a bit tricky.
The "perceived value" argument gets worse when you have large corporations with multiple offerings outside of their core: here the core competency can lend credence to less optimal/efficient/sustainability-friendly side-offerings.
services have predictable longtime cost and that's why some people (especially businesses) favor this, but for me and many other people it's a different model: I NOW have a certain amount of money I am willing to spend on a fridge or other thing. Sure, it can break or something could happen, but that's another discussion. I have it, I paid for it, I can do whatever I want. I don't have to keep the mental burden in my head of "amount $x per month for thing $y" - and yes, I have a stable income but I guess for people without one it's a lot more financial security to not have running costs. (please ignore power costs for the fridge, I do think those are a lot more easily budgetable, like "power is 50 EUR per month, period")
Another example I‘ve run into yesterday is that HP now sells ink subscriptions, eg €3 per month for max 50 pages (+50 pages rollover to following months). The printer orders new ink automatically when it runs low. I can imagine that those ink cartridges will not be half empty, as usually.
A fridge service provider might run the hardware longer, but they wouldn't care much about your power bill, nor fridge features - if old phone monopolies, cable boxes and current isp's are any indicator.
And good luck trying to prove to a fridge service provider that their unit has an intermittent thermostat problem...
Recycling might be the responsibility of the company, but they might systematically find the cheapest way to do it without regard to the full externalities of how it's accomplished.
Yeah I was trying to parse this too, if my fridge SP was awful in all the ways mentioned, wouldn't I be looking at the competition, especially now that it's easy to cancel a contract and get a better one so easily - instead of paying $1k for a new fridge.
I think you mean "Few people elect to do the thing they barely know exists."
The model being peddled on TV/radio/etc isn't "Rent a fridge." is it?
This is just another "language war". The airwaves and communications channels are monopolized by discourse that protects the known way of doing business. It's not a law of physics it be that way.
I suspect for long term goods that are below some cost, it's just cheaper for people to own them vs renting over the lifetime of the device. A corporation will tend to finance the capital cost of the good if it's renting, then needs to pass on the interest costs of those goods to the renters. On top of that a rental corp also need to maintain techs to install/remove appliances. It all adds up to higher cost to rent than own in this area.
I rent my apartment, and it comes with a fridge, so I guess I'm renting the fridge too. IS this not common? Do people usually bring their own fridge in when they rent?
Right, but it doesn't seem like a fridge vendor would be a monopoly. It would be a competitive market where power consumption would be an attribute consumers consider.
> Recycling might be the responsibility of the company, but they might systematically find the cheapest way to do it without regard to the full externalities of how it's accomplished.
It's a lot easier to hold few companies accountable, than to hold millions of consumers accountable.
> And good luck trying to prove to a fridge service provider that their unit has an intermittent thermostat problem...
That's also a problem when you buy a product.
> but they wouldn't care much about your power bill, nor fridge features
I suppose the market will do its job. Cost of ownership is transparent (monthly fee plus power use), so consumers can easily choose, and they can easily switch.
> It sounds like a nightmare to me.
I'm already having nightmares about the environment right now.
Consumers largely dispose of waste through municipal pickup which is already well overlooked. Setting up oversight for industrial disposal by a bazillion corporate entities in this theoretical shareconomy of appliances would be an enormous burden on the already undercapable county and state EPA offices. It would probably all just get shipped out of the country anyway.
If you think modern refrigerators are wasteful I'd ask you to prove it. The design choices they make are manufacturing trade offs—not simply cutting corners to make it break. A refrigerator might only last 10 years, but its a net gain if it cost 1/10 the energy to build, uses 50% of the power, never leaks refrigerant and uses a small ammount.
It's not just disposal. It's also the choices that are made when building/buying the product. Consumers are easily persuaded to choose based on different qualities than environmental-friendliness. Also, the recycling facilities may be optimized specifically for the type of fridge that a service-provider uses.
Cable, certainly, but the phones you rented from Ma Bell were nearly indestructable. My uncle has a lake house with several phones that were originally provided by the phone company. They still work and will no doubt continue to do so as long as pulse dialing is supported.
I think you assume too much about which type of fridge represents the lowest cost. Countless enterprises have already embraced "cheap to buy, cheap to replace" products in favor of long lasting reliable products.
Now, the one place a company with a fleet of fridges could really do the world good would be maintenance & repair. When you've got all your own repair crew on the payroll and you operate one kind of fridge, those costs plummet.
They will happily externalize as many costs as possible as well. Your electric bill is high? Oops, guess you should have negotiated that in the contract. Five hundred dollars of fresh groceries went bad because we gave you a shoddy refurb? We'll have a new unit out to you tomorrow, good luck with the rest.
> The one place a company with a fleet of fridges could really do the world good would be maintenance & repair. When you've got all your own repair crew on the payroll and you operate one kind of fridge, those costs plummet.
Yes, so the market will ensure that this kind of company will prevail.
Not necessarily, depending on all kinds of market factors, e.g. like stickyness of the transaction: how lazy would consumers be about changing out a fridge provider with poor service, or locking in the consumers with time boxed commitments. The slower and more inconvenient the transaction, the more the provider can wedge in rentier profits, and the poorer the market will respond.
There are a lot of assumptions hidden in "the market always works" statements like that. In this case, there's the assumption that the line you're quoting represents a business model that's cheaper than "buy the cheapest fridge possible and replace it with another cheap-as-possible fridge when it breaks," especially when you factor in that you no longer need a repair crew on the payroll (because you don't repair things).
Here's another, more complicated problem: even if the math proves that, say, over a long enough horizon, you'll make more money with the longer-lived, repairable version of the product, that isn't necessarily the best way to maximize returns for shareholders/owners. If that concern overrides all others, then you may well be better off maximizing profits short-term, through any (hopefully legal!) means possible regardless of the effect on the long-term viability of the business, and investing them in other markets with higher returns.
That’s a perspective that is common these days, but awful in practice. I don’t want to be a tenant, period — it’s almost never a better deal or value for me. I don’t need to pay a premium for the overhead and financing of a “cold food as a service” company while getting a level of service that meets the most minimum standard possible.
What we are missing today is meaningful competition. You can’t buy an appliance that isn’t a piece of garbage because we have a financial environment that encourages consolidation above all else. There’s only a few companies making anything, so there is no incentive to use quality as a differentiator.
I first started become aware of this when I started having trouble finding shoes. In many categories, all shoes are made by one manufacturer, often in one factory in Guangdong.
The only way you can possibly justify that sort of view point is the implicit hard cap on what you're willing to pay. You can't find "quality" (in appliances, in shoes, in just about anything) because you're not willing to pay for it.
The problem is optimization as energy efficiency and lifespan for example are often at odds. Further you can measure energy efficiency much easier than lifespan so the incentives get out of whack from what consumers want in favor of what they can measure.
Energy efficiency is one of the most noxious concepts in appliances.
We probably spend exponentially more energy manufacturing, distributing and delivering new appliances that fail due to pointless efficiency engineering than we shave off.
No way. Price is all about market segmentation, there is little or no correlation with quality. The most expensive built-in refrigerators, for example, have very high failure rates.
After going through 3 washing machines in 9 years, i bought a Speed Queen commercial washer without a cashbox. It is not very pretty, and cost $50 more than the mid-range residential washer that it replaced, has a 5 year warranty, and an expected life of 10-15 years.
This is true for most categories of consumer products. Appliances, shoes, pants, furniture, etc.
Eh, I just think this reflects changes in lifestyle and values. You can still buy shoes that are handmade in America and will last decades (like Alden and Allen Edmonds for mens dress shoes), they just cost a fortune and people don't wear those kinds of shoes nearly as much as they did 50 years ago. People today own more shoes, they wear fitness shoes as everyday shoes, styles change constantly, etc. Most people seem to want to buy hundreds of different styles of shoes over their lifetime, so they need to be cheap. There are people who want to own 5 pairs of shoes for their entire life and are willing to pay for the privilege, but they're a vanishingly small minority.
You seriously think that’s a good idea? I’m all for capitalism (until we have somrthing better) but creating that kind of dependency between people and a service will put too much power in the hands of businesses like Amazon.
People need to own, people need to be reaponsible with their decisions, and to think a business or corporation can do it better is dangerous.
>For example, take a fridge. If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence".
However, if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.
You just described a grocery store...
They keep food and beverages at certain temperatures. When you are ready to consume that food or beverage, you can pick it up (or have it delivered). And best of all, you pay no subscription fee :) But in reality, that's not practical. Most families eat 3 meals a day, and consume multiple glasses of some drink a day. To make a trip to the grocery store (or fridge depot subscription place) every time you want to eat or have a cold drink is not practical (and increases environmental pollutants). So maybe you want to go once a day, you'll still need some device at home to keep your groceries and drinks cold until you want to consume, some device like a fridge :p
If you found a solution, that'd be great. But you'd probably just be a food delivery startup with some fancy marketing lingo. And we have plenty of those already.
I think you missed the point that in both situations there will be a fridge in your house. It's just that in the case of a service, you don't own it but a company does.
I would much rather they build an Appliance that were design to last 10+ years, and with an warranty of 10 years for a higher price. Such design would means the company has an incentive for the fridge not to break in the 10 years, and extremely simple to fix within the 10 years.
There are things that I would like to buy for life. Kitchenwares, Desk, etc. There are things that are consumable and may be being a services would be better.
The world already has made a Subscription model for an Expensive and long last fridge and that is called installment plan.
I think Miele has ten year warranties for some appliances, and it wouldn't surprise me if Viking does. I know that Sub-Zero warranties some parts for up to 12 years. So, if you are really willing to spend big money on appliances, you can get lengthy warranties. Anecdotally, Viking, Miele, and Bosch appliances last a very, very long time.
Frankly, I deliberately avoid nearly everything with recurring revenue attached. It is hard to save, take risks, etc. where minimum payouts per month add up.
Fridge?
And I have three actually. One runs on propane, one standard power and one is a deep freeze, like what one would put in a garage.
All were cheap, all work well, all take modest to very liw resources to run.
The gas powered one works no matter what. That has saved me a time or two when there was no power. I may well get another. It is insane cheap to use.
Anyone selling me something that is planned to break gets the following:
Added to avoid list.
The product gets hacked wher it is posdible to untether it and or remedy the failure.
I tell others.
Now I realize all of that is contrary and toxic to many business models today. I rarely buy new.
I grew up poor, and had time which I invested in skills. Those have paid me off many, many times over.
I also think maximizing what has been produced makes good jobs, is better, with some qualifiers, for the environment, increases personal agency, lowers personal risk and cost.
Among many other good things.
Service models can make sense. For many basics, they just do not make sense.
I would much prefer we distribute repair, support modifications, upgrades and such across many enterprises as we used to do.
TV's were a good example. I grew up learning to repair them. Used to do it for date money. Offered in home service too.
Cars remain a good example. John Deere is the other extreme.
A blanket, "this way is good" makes little sense to me.
Would much rather have many local relationships than the same with big enterprises. More options, and if I do work, I get the immediate returns of lowered cost and risk.
It may be better for the environment to not own stuff, but instead have it produced by a socialistic society.
For example, take a fridge. If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence".
However, if I subscribe to a communistic society to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then this society has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.
EDIT: Besides eliminating planned obsolescence, there are more advantages:
- Increased market transparency. The market is more transparent if I know exactly what a 4 years planned product costs me per month, as opposed to buying a product and not knowing when it will fail. A more planned society leads to better resource distribution.
- Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including recycling it, becomes a natural responsibility of one society.
> If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years
They also have an incentive to make it last a long time so you're a loyal customer. Loyalty is extremely important if you only purchase a half dozen of something your entire life. Guess which incentive is stronger?
As a corollary, there is a big difference between being incentivized to do something and simply not being incentivized to do the opposite. The average full-size refrigerator lifespan is 17 years. The fact that Maytag doesn't spend millions of dollars developing a fridge that can last 30 years doesn't mean they're incentivized to make a shitty fridge, it just means people don't care enough about years 18-30 that they're willing to pay what it would cost to get that fridge.
Not to mention, if you buy from a company that makes a quality, reliable fridge, you'll recommend it to friends who need a new one; if they intentionally sell you a barely-qualified lemon, you'll steer everyone away from them where possible.
I got burned by "buying a product and not knowing when it will fail".
Samsung made the largest fridge available. I got the $2500 model: stainless steel, no IoT but digital, double doors over drawer freezer. It looked really solid and durable. It failed in so many distinct and interesting ways!
The door shelves constantly shattered, at $50 each. The structure had been compromised by artistic design, with two kinds of plastic joined together. The ice maker died. The main shelves broke a couple times. The temperature display (blue 7-segment numbers) became nonsense. The drawer handle had a hinge made from plastic which broke and non-stainless steel which rusted out. The compressor went out, as we determined by diagnostic codes. The tech sent to fix that ignored us, never checked diagnostic codes, didn't look at the compressor, insisted that our problem was the ice maker (which was indeed broken but not our complaint), charged us $75 for nothing, and fought us when we did a credit card charge-back.
I cut that fridge up with a demolition saw to get it out of my house. This was satisfying.
The replacement is a pair of smaller fridges that were about $400 each. One of them even has old-style wire shelves that seem unlikely to shatter. We've only had two broken shelves so far, in the other one.
Famously, there was a "lemons and cherries" paper on the economics of used cars. I think it also somewhat applies to new goods. There is information asymmetry here. I can't know that the hinges are fragile plastic and non-stainless steel. The fridge looks nice, and it says "stainless steel". I've learned my lesson: do not pay more in an attempt to get quality, because you'll just pay more for the same old junk.
Samsung fridges are hot garbage and imo should be avoided at all costs.
I had a not-so-drastic experience with a high-end samsung fridge: A design flaw where the recirculation fan would accrue ice, and symptoms were that it sounded like a chainsaw every time it turned on, and eventually the fan would freeze over. The only way to "fix" it was to thaw it out every few weeks, and any attempt to replace parts was futile since it was a design flaw, not a mechanical failure.
I doubt it. I open the door of course, but I don't put hot things into the fridge.
My shelves are generally packed with large jugs. For example, on a main shelf I might have 4 gallons of milk and a half dozen half-gallon containers of juice and then more stuff to fill out the remaining space. Door shelves are similarly packed, with the ones in the Samsung being about 12x8 inches and thus big enough for gallons of milk.
The fridge is constantly used by kids. It needs to be mostly restocked every other day.
Glass shattered in one of the $400 fridges. The other $400 fridge is wire. Glass shelves in the Samsung would break around the edge, leaving me with an intact sheet of glass and some broken plastic. Door shelves are always plastic. Samsung snapped white and clear plastic together to make the shelves, with a fragile zig-zag at the joint. I got to wrapping the shelves with string-embedded packing tape before installing them, which increased the typical life from weeks to months.
Give me forged metal grates please, or at least something like rustproof storm drain covers.
> I've learned my lesson: do not pay more in an attempt to get quality, because you'll just pay more for the same old junk.
Price does communicate some usable information. The problem is that most people naively assume that the more expensive item must be better, while the good items are actually fighting for an informed customer looking for a good cost/benefit. That means that most of the very low price stuff is crap, but also that if the value you can take from an item has a ceiling (limited comfort options, limited maintenance savings, limited "extra durability"), most of the very high price items are also crap.
> I've learned my lesson: do not pay more in an attempt to get quality, because you'll just pay more for the same old junk.
I don't agree. I think you can still buy quality things.
The problem is that the market pushed the prices so low for "good enough" products, that it's difficult to justify paying much more. In the case of refrigerators, you'd have to pay at least three times more for a Sub-Zero fridge, for example.
I wouldn't trust the Sub-Zero fridge. I suppose I could feel somewhat safe with a refund/replace warranty (at my choice) with hefty payouts for downtime.
I went looking at high-end oven/range things one day, after having had the Samsung fridge experience. I noticed that underneath the fancy knobs they had the same crappy quarter-inch shafts as the low-end models. Some of the knobs looked like seriously impressive chunks of steel or brass... but that only put more weight and leverage on the standard-sized shafts.
I saw somebody take apart an older iPhone, maybe the 4. The phone had some really nice looking buttons on the side, machined out of stainless steel. Inside the phone it was a very different story: really flimsy crap.
> If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence".
Only if they don't have competitor for your business with a reputation for longer-lasting fridges that are otherwise of similar utility.
The market can only sort it out if the lifespan of the product is made clear. If I buy a fridge today, I have no idea how long it will last. I can't see what standards the fridge was engineered to or what shortcuts they took and by the time it's known how long that model lasts it's already off the market and replaced with a new one.
Something I'd suggest is being a parasite off the commercial businesses and pretend the retail market doesn't exist.
You can't buy a residential clothes washer designed to last longer than five years; laundromats won't tolerate that; solution, pretend Home Depot doesn't exist and buy a Speed Queen that your kids can probably inherit.
An interesting side effect is residential / contractors special type stuff has a very low initial cost of purchase but overall lifetime cost is always lower for commercial grade stuff; this makes sense, if it was cheaper to buy residential garbage the beancounters would force it to officially be commercial...
That's a huge oversimplification. Who controls when the fridge stops working? Who has the right to end the contract and when? Who decides if the fridge has internet access or not?
>We used to buy DVDs or video cassettes; now viewers stream movies or TV shows with Netflix
This I don't care about really.
Although I remember Richard Stallman wrote a satirical article about there being no libraries and having to pay to read anything (as in pay to read per page or something kind of ridiculous) now his article doesn't feel so ridiculous anymore.
The SCARY thing, the thing that he doesn't really predict is that nobody will own anything and nobody will be allowed to read anything but also nobody will care about it either. They'll all be too busy with their bread and circuses and the 2 minutes hate or whatever.
"They'll all be too busy with their bread and circuses and the 2 minutes hate or whatever."
Is that really it, though? I mean, that seems really weird on its face... "I'd like to own my own copy of this movie rather than just stream it, but I really have to get back to hating Republicans." That doesn't seem all that plausible.
Personally, I am happy streaming things I don't care to own. At this point, most of the things I watch, I want to watch once. The world is so abundantly overflowing with good video content that I have little reason to return back to something. Those few things, I frequently will buy. Some of my "season DVDs" I'm quite glad I hung on to... some of them were on Netflix for a while, but are no longer, and are still fairly expensive to buy.
If the stream services went away, ultimately I'd be slightly inconvenienced.
Music, by contrast, I tend to listen to a given track/album that I like quite a bit, and I take possession of. YMMV. I'm very music oriented compared to most people.
And Stallman's arguments about software are yet again something different; there are reasons for having the source and using open source that have no media equivalent, because software isn't just media, it's a machine.
I think the argument would be more along the lines of, "I marginally dislike the concept that I no longer own these products, but I absolutely hate the other team, which therefore deserves my attention to a much greater degree."
They're not necessarily related semantically, but in terms of allocation of attention (a finite resource), they are competitive.
> I mean, that seems really weird on its face... "I'd like to own my own copy of this movie rather than just stream it, but I really have to get back to hating Republicans."
That's beause you are assuming that, e.g., political identity fights are an alternative to economic concerns, rather than forces which shape the cogntive filters that determine the perception of the nature, cause, blame, and appropriate response to economic disappointment.
>"I'd like to own my own copy of this movie rather than just stream it, but I really have to get back to hating Republicans." That doesn't seem all that plausible.
That was actually a perfect summary of /r/technology
Sometimes it's just not worth it to own everything. Renting makes a lot of sense for a lot of people. Blockbuster et al were doing this forever ago. If you only cared to watch/use something once; renting it made a lot of sense, and still does.
renting at blockbuster made sense. You could watch a movie unlimited times within a 5 day period for $1.99, versus purchasing the video for $29.99.
renting at Amazon Kindle doesn't make sense. You could pay $9.99 to rent a digital version indefinitely (or until Amazon loses the rights to rent), or you can pay $6.50 to buy a paperback version that you have second sale rights to.
Right, but then this paperback takes up physical space. Having boxes and boxes of books is probably really nice for some people, and sounds nice in the abstract, but it's a right pain to move around! I'd rather have PDFs than any residual "second-sale" value.
As someone who has given away a couple thousand dollars worth of crappy music from the 80s and 90s, I can say for certain that I am glad I don't own it anymore.
A Spotify subscription that allows me to listen to practically any song that was ever recorded is of far more utility than a pathetically limited personal music collection.
I'm glad it's all on a hard disc these days rather than having to flip through CDs or vinyl all the time, but I still like knowing that the bits are under my control. Ongoing availability is a lot better with music than video to be sure. And I might feel differently if I didn't already own GBs of favored music. But I still wouldn't feel comfortable just flushing all my music and trusting in Apple, Spotify, or Amazon to permanently provide me with everything I want.
Why on earth would you pay $ per month to have access to music you like, when you can just have it in MP3/Ogg form, stored on multiple devices (PC, phone, backup HD) and be able to listen to it at any time you want for free?
Assuming you buy it in the first place and you buy the storage/server and you pay for the backup then it isn't free. I just switched to Apple Music so I don't have to deal with all that stuff.
From my point of view, why on Earth would you bother to have music in MP3/Ogg form where you have to manage it and plan what you want to listen to? Spotify is a paradigm shift for music consumption and I would never want to go back to collecting manually.
Having made the jump, this mentality seems insane to me :)
Spotify is $10 / month, the price of one album. For that, I get an essentially infinite [1] library of music that's basically always available to me whenever I want, curated playlists, discovery features, sharing features [2], etc, etc. It all just works, I never have to think about it, etc.
By contrast, unless I'm pirating music, what does $10 get me? An album a month? So after a year, I own 12 albums and had to hassle with the files and downloads, whereas with Spotify it just works and I've listened to 10x - 100x that much music.
Yes, if / when I stop paying for Spotify, I'll lose access, but so what? I wasn't planning on spending 20 years paying a fortune to accumulate a music library and then stopping cold and never paying again, just listening to that music I bought. I'm happy to just pay $50 - 100 / month until I die for subscriptions to huge and ever-growing libraries of music, movies, TV shows, books, etc. Seems like a fantastic deal.
1. I don't have niche tastes or a deep attachment to any particular artist that I simply MUST have, so their selection is far beyond anything I really need.
I signed up for an insane promo with Sprint in December where we switched from Verizon and got 13 months of unlimited everything (except 4G tethering, I think that's capped at 10gb per month) for free.
Honestly though, we don't use all that much bandwidth anyway. I'm usually on wifi and for the times that I'm not going to be, my playlists and podcasts download in the background when I am.
I think it's more subtle than that. Needing less stuff gives freedom. Renting stuff instead gives less freedom... you have many of the same expenses as ownership, but if you ever stop paying your useful stuff disappears. Owned objects of utility provide insurance to ride out times with limited income.
When I read the OA, I thought of how many possessions a typical farm worker would own in (say) 1890 and compare that to now.
UK: I'm just old enough to remember visiting a great-grandmother who lived in a cottage without electricity and who regarded the cold water tap and separate water heater as luxuries. And the great aunt who still cooked on a range. Their houses were dark and sparse. Both paid rent for their houses by the way.
You're free from the task of maintaining and securely storing the thing. My biggest personal switch has been selling my car. Granted I live in an urban area where the dollar and time cost of owning a car are greater than otherwise, but I REALLY don't miss worrying about parking tickets, breakins, this and that funny sound coming from the motor, etc. Dollar wise it's been a wash.
Well, if you just rent your apartment and use Uber or public transit to go anywhere, while owning a minimal amount of furniture, you can get up and go anywhere you want, whenever you want. That's freedom.
If you own a car and a house, you're pretty much stuck where you are.
I think in any situation, if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck you don't have freedom. A prerequisite to any kind of freedom is the ability to live well within your means and save a lot so that you're insulated from financial setbacks.
Renting the exact same stuff for the same period of time still gives more of one kind of freedom: flexibility. You can usually more easily get rid of that stuff, and you're usually less responsible for it if it breaks, etc. Yes, there's usually a higher financial cost for that, which is less freedom in another sense.
But the reality is that renting often means just paying for the time that you're using an item, instead of paying for it forever even if your utilization window is small. So jumping in an uber for 20 mins a day instead of owning a car 24/7, or renting a movie for 20% of the price to buy it, which might make sense if you're only going to watch it once or twice, etc.
Having rented things, and owned things, I have learned that some of the things I "purchased" just traded in lease contract terms for state laws, local ordinances, secured loan contract terms, community norms, and covenants.
If you can't do as you please with the things you buy, there is less advantage to owning over renting. The responsibilities involved in ownership start to look like rental contracts and terms of service agreements.
If I stop paying the average per-mile maintenance and operations cost for my car, it runs out of gas or breaks down. It is sometimes cheaper for me, with my own car, to rent one anyway for a long road trip, because they rent it per day without a per-mile surcharge, and that's just money paid now that does not get spent at the mechanic later, and could be recovered on resale or trade-in.
You really have to look at each rent-vs-buy decision on its own merits. It makes sense to own your DOCSIS modem, your underwear, and a cast-iron pan. All the other stuff is debatable.
Renting absolutely means more freedom to move. It also means less freedom to, say, tear down a wall in the house. I think home ownership is over-rated, but I wouldn't draw such a clear line on "freedom."
That's a somewhat reductive take on it (e.g., car ownership, though often a huge hassle, also bestows an immeasurable degree of freedom), though I do empathize with the general sentiment. I personally find that each thing I own causes me a small amount of additional anxiety that accumulates and can only be relieved by getting rid of things (or better, not spending money on something I don't really need in the first place)... does it make sense to describe it as a mild version of the opposite of hoarding?
Amazon’s Kindle and other methods of online reading have revolutionized how Americans consume text. Fifteen years ago, people typically owned the books and magazines they were reading. Much less so now.
The statements about books are not accurate. Ebook sales are still just a fraction of print sales in many genres - NPD data indicates ebooks are less than 20% of total unit sales for nonfiction, children, and young adult titles (self-published ebooks excluded). Total ebook unit sales were 162 million in 2017 from the 450 publishers tracked by NPD, down from 180 million units in 2016.
Anecdotal, but every reader I know (including me) flirted with ebooks and then switched back to paper.
For me, it’s less strain on my eyes, it always works even without electricity, I can lend it out to friends easily, and I like to expand the aesthetic of my bookshelf. I’m also more likely to reread all or part of a physical book. Ebooks are simply inferior.
As long as it's mostly just flowing text, I much prefer ebooks. A lot of my long form reading happens when I travel and a tablet or a Kindle Paperwhite works much better than a book in poorly-lit planes or hotel rooms.
Sure, there's an aesthetic to certain books but that doesn't apply to the random paperback or even popular hardcover novel. And I appreciate the decrease in clutter. I recently donated a bunch of older "classic" paperbacks that are works I can download for free or near-free anytime I want.
Counter-anecdata: I have purchased and read far more ebooks than I have paper books in the last decade. I currently use a Kindle Paperwhite at a somewhat large type size which has completely relieved my eye strain.
Also after having moved my books between four apartments and our current house, the next time we move I’m prepared to just toss the lot of them.
Opposite for me (for fiction). I started reading ebooks with the original Kindle keyboard and never looked back. I always felt that books were cluttering everything up (I read 20-60 per year), I enjoy not having my arms hurt from holding books in an awkward position and I feel that the eInk display is just as good as books, but it's better for reading in some light conditions.
I still buy books once in a while, but those are either non-fiction or I want them for the pictures (e.g. a book by Brom whom I knew through his art on MtG cards)
Same here - I tend toward military sci-fi (most of it is very bad) and so disposability is key to not building up a huge collection of junk. The few physical books I own now are tabletop RPG manuals, because they are needed as reference during games when batteries running down would be inconvenient.
Certain reference manuals (The O'Reilly Zoo, for example) are more useful as physical books, as well.
Besides, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow (not planning on it today), it's not there's anyone to inherit my stuff.
> Same here - I tend toward military sci-fi (most of it is very bad)
As a reader of many many Kindle unlimited military sci-fi books I sympathize and recommend the "Nameless War" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12356877-the-nameless-wa... ) trilogy as the rose in the manure of books I have read of this genre in the last few years.
There are occasional spelling mistakes etc but the story itself is fantastic and the military scenario believable.
I'm of the opposite opinion. While I enjoy the look and feel of a book, I'm tired of carrying them around when I travel and moving them when I, well, move. Best of all I can sit on my couch, wine glass in hand, and seconds after reading a book review in the Times I've got that very book in my hands.
I personally try to read all of my books on Kindle. I take a lot of notes and highlights in my books, and with Kindle I can export those and keep them forever (and also have it be searchable), whereas a book it takes up a ton of space and is much less accessible.
Ebooks solve specific problems that paper simply cannot, the biggest being that you can carry an entire library in a package smaller than a typical paper book. Beyond that, ebooks can be acquired immediately, and many vendors allow you to sample the book prior to reading.
All that said, I've also returned to paper for essentially anything I anticipate wanting to take more than a few notes in, or really referring back to at all.
Adding to my prior comment - I agree that the actual experience of reading a paper book hasn't been matched too closely by ebooks (yet, to be fair). However, there are two things that ebooks do wildly improve - long books are not any heavier, and footnotes/endnotes are just way, way more consumable on a Kindle than a physical book.
Let's assume ebooks are 20% (I know that's the upper bound you're positing, but let's start with that). If my salary were reduced by 20%, I would definitely say that I was making "much less". Would I say the same if my salary were reduced by, say, 10% rather than 20%? Maybe, maybe not, but I doubt I'd go so far as to say that characterization was simply "not accurate".
I think it's fair to say that eBooks haven't revolutionized the way the majority of people read books to anything like the degree that was expected (or has happened with music and video).
While ebooks are somewhat similar to the shift to streaming in music and video, the actual experience of watching a streamed show or listening to streamed music is essentially the same as it was when you owned a movie on DVD/VHS or had an album/CD (Play-Stop-Pause-Rewind-Fast Forward). It's the discovery process that's been revolutionized). With an ebook, the experience is fundamentally different - the concept of "pages" essentially disappears or is redefined substantially, the physical act of reading is different, and the relative standardization of displays and ability of the user to customize fonts and sizes limits some of the options available to physical books (that said, ebooks have wildly improved the footnote experience). I imagine that this is a big reason the ebooks haven't taken off in the same way.
As an example - while my grandfather may have a bit of trouble figuring out how to get started on Netflix, once he's chosen something to watch, he won't really notice a difference from when he watched things on VHS in terms of how to navigate. The same is not true for giving him a book on a Kindle.
>ebooks have wildly improved the footnote experience
I actually disagree with that one--at least for certain types of footnotes. When I was an IT industry analyst I got into the habit of using footnotes at the bottom of the page to provide parenthetical detail, substantiation, caveats, etc. that I thought might be useful but which would break up the flow of the writing. On the page, this works well because you can just glance down. On an ereader, it's often more distracting than just putting it inline would be.
For just references that you'll only sometimes want to look at, it's fine but for the way I often use them, I liked the old way better.
I mostly agree with your broader point. The fact that used books are often cheaper and you can't typically lend your ebook when you're done probably also contribute.
Probably true about types of footnotes. If it's just citing sources, doesn't improve. But if the footnotes add additional detail, I find it much better. More than anything, it improves the endnote experience.
I know that I have started to borrow more ebooks rather than buying now that my Kindle is finally compatible. Also prices on a lot of books are kind of high compared to new paper books, like a lot of times the price difference is $1-2. For things that I can wait on, I've switched back to buying used books and waiting.
Ebooks have too many advantages that I can't give them up. For example, I can make the text as large as I need and for many of us, that's a killer feature.
I am sympathetic to the argument against DRM though. It seems criminal that I can't leave my ebook collection to somebody after I die.
> It seems criminal that I can't leave my ebook collection to somebody after I die.
It's a bummer for sure, but this is probably overkill. I think the main issue is that the price doesn't necessarily reflect this limitation. For many books, it probably wouldn't affect people's willingness to pay that much, but for books that they'd like to be able to give away or bequeath, it could matter a bit.
You can lend many Kindle books (source: I do it semi-regularly). Many public libraries also offer ebooks.
Your point about paper copies often being cheaper is definitely true, and for books I plan to re-read, refer to, etc., I now default to this. But one of the reasons I like my Kindle is that I can take an entire library with me on a month long trip, change my mind about what I want to read, buy a new book if it comes out while I'm gone, and sample things I'd otherwise need to go into a bookstore to find.
My reading-related startup is in the middle of conducting a poll on ebook usage.
So far, the data is showing that most people still prefer reading on paper versus on screen, by a decent margin (only 14% prefer screen). However, people still read more ebooks than paper books, likely due to the convenience factor. This can be squared with the NPD data because library ebooks are included in our poll, not just purchased ebooks.
I've been surprised at what small percentage of people use a monochrome Kindle (less than 25%), and the lack of a dominant platform (Amazon — 35%, OverDrive — 19%, Apple — 11%, Nook — 8%, Other — 27%). I guess it's good for consumers that there isn't one big leader here.
Doubt you would have this data but in case you do...
I wonder what the numbers are for people who read books to completion on ebook or paper formats. Or how far into the different formats people choose to read.
I know that most of the time when I read any ebooks, I end up never finishing the book. When it's paper, I usually finish the book.
I think it's mainly because with a paper book it's harder to get distracted than when I'm looking at ebooks. If it's a topic I'm studying, or need / really want to know then I'll get the paper version.
I had the exact same thought. I might add this question in, or add it to a later survey (we're doing a bunch of surveys on paper versus screen for ebooks, news, PDFs, etc.).
I have the same behavior pattern you mentioned, though it's hard to know whether this is strictly a bad thing. If word-search-ability means I can get all the relevant stuff out of a book, then perhaps that's more efficient than reading the whole thing.
So, generating less waste is a reason to be nervous?
fuck off.
The only problem here is the immense power (out of control) of those companies, not everything going to the cloud.
I'd agree young Americans are less interested in owning their media and there does seem to be a general trend away from materialism and towards spending any extra income on experiences over objects. However, I reject the notion that the younger generations are less interested in owning property. Young people do want to have a stake in the system, but most places young people are living (especially where they're moving to) it's nearly impossible for most of them to get into the property/housing ownership game to begin with due to housing price inflation and stagnant wages.
If you took millenials and plopped them in the economic context that the young generations of the 50s (or even 70s/80s) had I think this would be a very different story.
One shift in owning vs streaming media is that so much is accessible now.
In the past, you had what you purchased, what was in stock at the video rental place, and what you could VCR-program or catch live on maybe a couple dozen TV channels. Nowadays, bajillions of TV shows and movies are instantly available, such that people don't even have time to watch everything interesting that's available.
I would venture to say that more shows & movies are being created now than in the past, and a lot of them are quite good (probably more quality from series than movies, though).
The value of any individual piece of decent quality media has gone down, given the oversupply. However, there will always be individual pieces of media that are held in importance to a viewer, and those will want to be preserved in some form. Many with a naive assumption that their favorite piece will always be instantly streamable (legally) will certainly have a cold reckoning at some point.
Yeah, this is a "blame the millenials" article in disguise. The problem is that we're pretty broke compared to our parents, because the big purchases (housing, education, cars) cost way more relative to our incomes. The elder dev sitting across from me bought his house for 10k around 1989. Now every house in that neighborhood costs ~350-400k (and it's one of the bigger and better ones).
The average price of a house sold in the US in 1989 was around $145,000.
The average price of a house sold in the US in 2018 is around $375,000.
If we adjust the 1989 dollars for inflation, that $145,000 becomes about $295,000.
That means, in 2018 dollars, the average house price has gone up around $80,000 or 27% over the past 29 years.
That's a significant increase and we should be concerned about whether or not Americans can afford to purchase houses, but framing the problem as "houses are now 35-40 times as expensive as they were in the late 80's" is terribly inaccurate as a general metric.
"A stake in the system" comes with restrictions. It's hard to move around when you own a house. And there's various forms of "stake", too. I'd much rather own stocks & bonds and other instruments that I can look at in an app versus a complex bureaucratic like a house. The transaction and maintenance costs are unbelievable.
The issue is that ownership used to constitute a form of wealth, but now it constitutes a relentless financial drain.
When I got stationed in Northern Virginia, I thought about buying a condo. But almost everywhere I looked, there were absurd HOA fees, some as much as $400/mo. Considering I could rent a room for $750/mo, it didn't make sense to buy. If RENT < HOAFEES + MTGINTEREST, you're better off investing the money instead of pouring it into equity.
As for physical possessions, they all cost money (in rent!). Sure, I could own my own kayak and ATV. But it'll cost me $150/mo for a storage unit to keep them in. So until such time as I spend $1800/year on quad and kayak rentals (not even counting the amortized purchase prices), its more financially sound for me to rent them.
There are exceptions. I own my truck, which I bought used, and I know I'll drive it for years and years until it's beyond fixing. In the long run, it's cheaper than renting.
If how+mortgage is even slightly more than rent you still end up doing well as soon as you are able to clear the agent and closing costs in recouping. Renting is easier to move for sure. But stay there 3 years and the story may be different. Stay there 8 years and you're making out well over rent. But being statitioned I can see why you might not. Then again I have friends with rentals in 5 cities for the same reason.
Still not as easy as a truck. I drive mine into the ground too. Not just to figure out if selling a used one or getting the trade-in is the most effective use. Buying new car way less effective than buying a good in shape 16 year old accurately for $1700 currently. I value more varied vehicles over one nice one. it's also nice to say well this one didn't start today oh well how bout this one.
Oh definitely. The Accord I bought for my son that I drive cause millenials don't or mine doesn't... it'd got a slightly banged up roof and a black front bumper on a gold car. I think it looks great and terrible. which for $1700 is what I'm going for.
A 16-year-old car will kill you in a crash that a new one will let you walk away from. That's one big, important factor in the new vs. used debate.
There's also the factor of how it's going to affect your job and life if your car breaks down. A 2-decade-old car is going to break down at some inopportune time, like it or not, even with the best maintenance.
Now many more cars have curtain airbags. Safety standards have improved over the years. Crumple zones have improved. Now many cars come with back up cameras, back up sensors, line keep assist, emergency breaking.
While, 2002 car may be relatively safe, I would still prefer to have the safest car on the road. Usually it will require less servicing than an old car and be more dependable too.
This is not fear mongering, it is actually true. NHTSA reports have shown repeatedly that newer cars have fewer fatalities. Perhaps there is some other reason for this correlation, e.g. maintenance. https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Those safety features have improved a lot over the years. A 2002 car will have a airbags designed for 160lb men, probably lack side-impact airbags, may or may not have stability control (and if it does, it will be primitive) and will passed only a handful of crash tests.
A 2018 car will have front and side airbags designed to work as well on 120lb woman as a 200lb man, backup cameras, very advanced stability control systems, and will have been tested against the most common causes of crash deaths since 2002.
You can go to the NHSTA website and download the raw crash test and see how many gs your head will experience or how many netwons of force will be applied to your femurs. Using this information, I can see that you would be very likely to sustain a concussion in an accident in a 2002 Camry and your chest would be compressed by 30mm, while in a 2018 Camry you're at minimal risk for any head injury and your chest would only compress by 23mm.
It's pretty interesting stuff. TL;DR: cars are safer today than 20 years ago, by a lot.
A 16-year-old car will kill you in a crash that a new one will let you walk away from. That's one big, important factor in the new vs. used debate.
One can be a Chicken Little to the point that I would ask, why drive at all? It's just not worth the risk. A sixteen-year-old car has airbags and designed-in crumple zones. It ain't no 2019 Volvo, but "kill you in a crash that a new one will let you walk away from" is ridiculous hyperbole.
A 2-decade-old car is going to break down at some inopportune time, like it or not, even with the best maintenance.
Brand-new cars do the same thing. In fact, I view cars like I do electronics: if it makes it through the first six months, you're probably good for 100K miles. And if it breaks down, so what? You email your "flexible hours" employer, tell them you'll miss standup this morning, then dip into the massive amount of funds you saved by not having a car payment to get it fixed. Oh, it's an inconvenience for sure, but is it worth $600/month to avoid once in a great while (or not at all, if Honda or Toyota)? Hell, our VW camper is 37 years old, and I'd rely on it to get me to work every day, and I think VW makes shitty cars. Take care of your shit, and it will take care of you, even if it's a VW.
Some are obviously so scared of breakdowns and that life-ending crash that is assuredly just around the next corner that they'll foot the $600/month (or whatever a car payment is these days) for their big-ass SUV that they make any excuse to justify. Others, IMO, manage risk much more realistically.
Driving is the most dangerous thing most of us do, and we do so on a regular basis.
The risks of injury in an automobile accident should absolutely weigh into the calculus of car ownership. Especially considering the staggering amount of progress made in vehicle safety in the past 10 years. If a brand new Camry saves you from a single ER visit that you would have had driving an 2008 Camry, then it's already paid for itself.
It's not really any different from buying a fancy $150 toothbrush that does a better job at preventing cavities, or any of the many other purchases that statistically save you money in the long-term.
How often have you considered taking the money for a new Camry and applying to any of a plethora of defensive driving schools or track schools? My thinking is that those fancy airbags only do you any good if something sets them off.
But I am curious what progress you feel has been made in auto safety in the last ten years that is "staggering". By 2008, I think we got the low-hanging fruit:
1. ABS
2. Airbags
3. Side-curtain airbags
4. Sacrificial crumble zones
I do not consider lane keeping and automatic braking to be "staggering" progress, but incremental.
If a brand new Camry saves you from a single ER visit
That is the very definition of begging the question.
I used to be a fixture in the local SCCA, but my wife has been in far few accidents than me, so probably not a great use of time/money.
As far as safety progress over the past ten years -
2008: SID-II Crash test dummies. These dummies are designed to simulate smaller humans (women and children).
2010: NHSTA revamps five star rating because cars became "too safe." Almost every vehicle on the road had a five star rating so they made the requirements more stringent.
2014: NHSTA adds small-overlap tests to accident ratings. Many cars failed during the first year.
2015: NHSTA revamps safety standards again, this time adding considerations for rollover and crash avoidance technology (automatic braking).
Other considerations added over the past decade, but I can't find an exact date implemented for: side pole crash, fuel system integrity assurances, deformation barrier tests. There's a bunch more but I'm tired of reading research papers on teh subject.
Suffice to say, advances in safety from 2008-2018 were staggering.
I share the observation that we are living in a "rent economy" of the things we pay for, especially intellectual property or creative works.
I've noticed it happening slowly over time, but there are dangers[0] even if you believe you "own" your media.
There are no good solutions, people are willing to trade ownership for convenience because /mostly/ you're getting the same value- why do you care if you can't access that song you liked in 30 years?
Personally; I fight this notion as much as possible; if I buy digital media- it's backed up. I do not give my custom to anyone who wishes to own my digital rights (thus, I avoid DRM) and, where possible, I buy physical copies of goods.
However, I work in an industry which is moving towards providing "service", namely; I work in video games. And we have a new concept: "Game as a service", the idea being that the game lives and grows and dies, rather than being a static art which is subject to the non-decay or altering hand of time immemorial. Thus, the games we played in 1995 can be played to day, but the games we played in 2010 are much less possible, and the games we play in 2018 will be impossible to play 10 years on.
I don't have a particular point, I'm more frustrated with the state of affairs. Also: Apple Music can sincerely fuck off.
I'm exactly the opposite. I'm happy that all my media is digital. If it's gone one day, I'll find new media to love and enjoy. If it's something I can't live without, I might hang on to it for a while, but I've been around long enough now that I know something I "can't live without" today is just another thing that will be forgotten and replaced eventually.
I've found that every physical thing I own has an ongoing cost. Firs there is the obvious cost of physically storing the thing. Then there is the labor cost of cleaning it and keeping it nice. Then there is the mental cost of remembering where it is. And finally there is a cost of worrying about it. What if the house burns down? You spend a lot of time and money and effort preventing and planning for such an event that may never occur at all. And for those of us who have lost everything that way, coming to the realization that it's all just stuff feels like anti-gravity. It's like living on Jupiter your entire life and then moving to the Moon.
So what? How many people know that, and of the people who do, how many bother to do it? Even among those who do, the legality of what they're doing is unclear. I don't see how it changes anything the article says.
The author is talking about a societal shift whose consequences are difficult to foresee; one person electing to only use CDs, DVDs, flip-phones, and the like makes little difference to the broader trend.
I didn't say anything about exclusively using CDs, DVDs, etc. I'm talking about removing DRM. Amazon et al do not get to unilaterally enforce their notions of ownership. Consumers can take control of the things they buy if they choose to.
The author is talking about a societal shift whose consequences are difficult to foresee; one person electing to [strip DRM from media they purchase in violation of US law] makes little difference to the broader trend.
> The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system.
Why is the fact that people without property were not given the right to vote because they "didn't have a stake" as our nation was founded being lifted up as a good thing? It's such a bizarre thing to say that this ideology was a good one. The author can't really believe that renters have less a stake in the system as property owners?
The author isn't talking about voting rights, they are talking about incentives.
When you own property, you care more about the place where that property exists because what affects the surroundings directly affects the value of your possession. That incentivizes you to care about and invest in your neighborhood, community, state, and country.
If you aren't tied to the place, it's easier to just jump ship and say "not my problem" when something goes awry. You have fewer incentives to put effort into long-term projects that improve the community since you're less likely to be there to reap the benefits.
In other words, renters are less likely to plant trees, but a neighborhood with trees is better for us all over the long term.
> The author isn't talking about voting rights, they are talking about incentives.
They're talking about the ways in which non-property-owners were viewed at this country's founding, as not having a stake in the system. That argument was absolutely made in regards to voting rights and is the reason so many were denied this basic right. It's a very dangerous idea.
But let's explore it.
Renters have just as much a stake in the system as property-owners. They just have DIFFERENT stakes and incentives. Let's use your tree example. Maybe you are correct that renters are less likely to plant trees. That's not because they have less a stake in a system, but because the stakes for renters is different. For example, they may have to pay for the local government to plant the tree as taxpayers. Or maybe they don't like the way the tree looks. Or maybe they're worried wind will blow it over and onto their car. Or it obstructs a view. There's absolutely a stake in the system. True, they might oppose it because they may not get to ever enjoy the shade as it grows, if they move. Or maybe they want the rent to stay as low as possible. But that's still not an argument they have less of an interest -- just the opposite, it shows they have DIFFERENT interests.
Are renters not part of the community, or are you saying they don't know what's in their self-interest?
You haven't said a ton, but it seems like you're using "community" as code for home values. However, that might not at all in the best interest for many in the community. It's particularly of importance to home-owners. It might be to the detriment of renters.
Renters have less incentive to care for the commons because it’s much easier to move on. That’s just one example, understanding the concept of skin in the game and consideration of how it applies in this context allows easily finding many more.
You're just saying "the commons" instead of "the community" now. Are renters part of the commons? If so, what it means to care for the renters is part of what it means to care for the commons.
I think there is a difference between “owning stuff” and “owning assets” that this post is clouding. It is the owning of assets - that are worth more than what you paid for them - that seems to form the backbone of American entrepreneurship in the way that the author wants the owning of “stuff” to do in his setup.
There is of course value (to me) in owning a library of books - but for different reasons than, say, owning intellectual property or real estate.
Owning a library is a fun example, since some books are assets by your definition. I have several in my library that cost multiples of what I paid for them. One was recently destroyed in a move and that was quite the bummer.
I disagree and don't think the author knows what is going on in "the real world" today.
I still read books that I buy from the bookstore and would NEVER own a kindle. In fact I don't know many people who do own a kindle. My grandma owns one, she doesn't even use it anymore.
I still own and buy DVD's. I watch more videos on prime, netflix, and get movies from various other sources. However, when you don't have internet (or a TV with a USB), DVD's are still there.
Owning a car is still necessary in most places, and is still sought after by teenagers and adults alike.
I don't use a cell phone. I have one but its been dead in a drawer for over two years. I don't feel the need to have people be able to reach me 24 hours a day, it's a nuisance, and people are relying on it way to much these days.
The article is just a rant, an opinion of people (because there is an editor AND an author for some reason..) who don't know how to adapt and can't even see how to adapt to a changing world full of technology.
The 'idea of private property' is about private ownership of means of production, which is what definition of capitalism is. Basically it is about idea of owning capital privately and start your own business employing that capital, with a goal to increase that capital. It is not about owning 'stuff'. And in that sense, it is not going anywhere. So i think it is an empty reason to worry.
This article makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims and is very light on actual data. For example a blatant assertion like "Amazon’s Kindle and other methods of online reading have revolutionized how Americans consume text." has no support in the article itself. For what it's worth I know only a few people that use e-books; the majority purchases and reads plain old paper books. Likewise, "...now viewers stream movies or TV shows with Netflix...now Spotify and YouTube are more commonly used to hear our favorite tunes....". This is unsubstantiated. Nearly all of the video content I want to watch is not available on Netflix; and anything that is is liable to disappear at any time. Just last month I purchased VHS tapes, DVDs, and Blu-rays to get content I wanted, so if the writer isn't going to go to the effort of researching and presenting information, then my anecdotal experience completely contradicts this thinkpiece.
1.) How does the market (in the most basic sense) make any meaningful distinction between "owning" a rack of DVDs and "owning" a Netflix subscription? Both are transactions where resources are being traded for "goods".
2.)The idea of spending more resources on experiences rather than goods has become more pervasive over the years so the trend of people owning less stuff would make sense.
3.)This is a little more in the weeds but it's funny to think about how a society's definition of wealth changes over time and how that might affect consumer behavior.
Both are transactions where resources
are being traded for "goods".
When people own a rack of DVDs, film industry revenue rises when more good films are released, and falls when fewer good films are released - it's not a fixed-sum competition.
When people own a netflix subscription the industry is in a fixed-sum competition. The industry makes $X per subscriber per month, whether the average movie is Citizen Kane or The Emoji Movie.
Treating "the industry" as a single entity doesn't make sense.
Netflix takes that $X per subscriber per month and splits it up between all its different licensing contracts with different publishers. From the publishers' POV it's not all that different. In the past if they released good movies more people would buy more tickets, tapes, DVDs, etc. to view them; today, Netflix is willing to pay more to host better movies. I don't think that Netflix would pay the same for Citizen Kane and The Emoji Movie (now, which one they would pay more for I can't answer, but their analytics probably can make a guess :)).
Oh goody, another article telling me why everything I do as a Millennial is wrong.
Here's what we were told as children:
"My gosh, you always want more toys, more comics, more videogames. Don't you ever get enough? What's wrong with you!"
As teenagers/young adults:
"Look at all this crap you've collected over the years, taking up all this room, and you're barely an adult! You'll never have space for all this when you move out into a tiny apartment. What's wrong with you!"
As adults:
"Why aren't you buying physical things and hoarding crap anymore? What's wrong with you!"
As someone whose cohort is either X or Boomer depending on the meaning of 1965, the "millenials are dumb" argument will pass once your successor generation is old enough to make adult mistakes.
Having said all that, I dropped $5 a couple of days ago on a little pink pig keychain for my girlfriend. It probably cost $0.10 to make. But it was a vacay trinket and kinda cute.
While I don't know that I agree with Tyler Cowen's original article, I don't think this is a particularly fair reading of it. Should we never question whether a societal trend is good or bad, because doing so can never come from any place other than "let's wave our canes at the younger generation?"
The point is certainly worth considering. I would personally consider myself more interested in truly owning the things I buy more than the average person, insofar as I regularly purchase and rip my own CD's so that I control the format, strip all of my Kindle books of DRM using Calibre, and contribute to the development of free software and free/libre operating systems so that I can be in complete control of my PC's hardware.
With that said, this article does a number of things that I find obnoxious. Namely:
1) The article gives Amazon a pass for implementing DRM into their books, and instead blames the people who buy Amazon ebooks. I consider that victim blaming. Amazon more or less has a monopoly on the ebook market, meaning if you buy an ebook, you're likely buying from Amazon. If you own a Kindle (which is, bar none, the best ebook reader on the market), you're buying from Amazon. And if you buy from Amazon, your books don't truly belong to you.
2) The article seems very much targeted at the younger generation. Buying digital books, digital music, and smartphones is a thing everyone does, but again, the older generation seems to get a pass on it. They own houses, after all, so from the author's perspective they surely won't "los[e] their connection to private ownership". But those poor naive youths simply can't buy an album off iTunes without giving up their stake in the system.
3) Many of the author's (valid) concerns have actionable ways to resist, which the article fails to mention. You can strip the DRM off ebooks. You can rip your own music and movies. You can load an after-market OS onto your Android phone when the carrier decides to stop supporting it. Some of these can be difficult and time-consuming, but that's the tradeoff for getting both the digital convenience and the freedom of true ownership.
To be clear, I very much dislike this trend of "licensing" everything for the sake of having it streamed to you. But I would argue that this is a business trend rather than a societal trend, as it has been implemented top-down by the nation's most powerful tech companies. The vast majority of people simply picked what was most easily available to them.
Put another way, I think it would be shameful to yell at a poor college student about contributing to the elimination of individual property for choosing to rent his college textbooks for the semester at 1/3rd of the price it would've cost to buy them. And that's largely what this article does.
Note that the majority of these offending articles come from one source - and that source is Bloomberg. Once I learned to ignore Bloomberg I started to realize relatively few outlets are disparaging of millennials anymore.
It's only a single example but vinyl record ownership has continuously increased dramatically over the last few years and continues to do so. Maybe if you make an object worth possessing against the digital version, they'll be an audience for it?
The important discussion should be not about American's losing their idea of private ownership but about American's learning the idea of owning their information and data about them. I don't care that I stream media, use SaaS for email or don't own a car but rather rely on ride share and public transit. But what I do care about is the companies that provide these services are brokerages for data about me.
I'm not aware of a single American politician who has as a prime issue the idea of private data ownership. That we can make laws that ensure that any data gathered about you belong to you and that companies are privileged to use it and do not get to dictate terms around it. That if you want to do business in a way that includes personal data of any kind then there are laws you have to follow that greatly restrict what you can do with that data. That upon request every single data point about a person can be disclosed to that person and how you've used that data and an audit trail with regards to that information.
There's a strange conflation in the article between "owning things" and "owning land." I think there is something fundamentally different about the two, in that having a patch of ground for which you are responsible for can help build a sense of self-reliance, investment in the future, skin in the game. Accumulating a wall-full of VHS tapes doesn't do that.
I don't much mourn the lack of ownership of a lot of worthless junk that doesn't bring fulfillment or human flourishing. The late 20th century West let itself fill garages and storage units with consumerist nonsense.
But it's important to recognize that the corporate consumerist system is all too willing to mutate, to adapt to people's changing tastes and to offer them a product they feel is liberation. If you've heard "Don't buy things, buy experiences," then you've heard this new advertising. Companies are all too willing to make you think that an "authentic" vacation around the world will bring happiness and meaning in the form of selfies. Restaurants play up the 'foodie' advertising to make consumption of their product seem like a life-altering experience. The companies realize they can sell the same thing again and again digitally to customers who binge-watch Netflix and pride themselves on cutting the cord and not vegging in front of the TV like their parents did. And at the end of the month you find yourself subscribed to so many services, so many pseudo-addictions, you wonder where your money is going.
Rather than buying things or buying experiences, consider what you can make yourself or find for free. There is already more than enough media content out there to last many lifetimes; why not look for old material that has stood the test of time? Why not build a skill and learn the value of becoming self-reliant in some small way?
> Perhaps we are becoming more communal and caring in positive ways
I think I this is a big one. There's a very degree of trust that public services and even private ones will be there whenever we need. Not just things like reliable hospitals and electrical grid, but also one-day shipping on whatever we need. There is no longer a need to keep things on hand.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 309 ms ] threadThen rents went up, education became more expensive, wages went stagnant, the rich got richer, and suddenly owning property and buying "stuff" to fuel the insatiable furnace of capitalism doesn't seem like such a great life goal. If that means we're not participating in "the system", well... maybe it's time to change the system.
Also, I think it strange the author questions what the death of property ownership means for capitalism, and then cites various examples of capitalism in action that are working to corrode property ownership -- e.g. Apple, Amazon, etc. The rise of subscription services over shrink wrapped software or hardware to which you own the rights arose directly from capitalism.
1) Some groups will just use the resources of the Machine, while others will work on improving The Machine. Over time, Machines in some areas will be vastly more capable than other areas. This will create haves and have-nots, urge migration and give rise to a system very similar to the current worlds (first-, second-, third-).
2) In your utopia, the corporation has no incentive to build a long-lasting Machine, especially since the Machine can build it's own parts. The corporation may also upgrade Machine capabilities (a new XBox/PS) that make it desirable to upgrade, forcing the town to pony up more money or resources. And what about the people who work at those corporations? Do they not live like the folks with the Machine? Why do they have to work, for money presumably? Again, haves and have-nots.
3) Resources in a local area are finite. What happens when the water runs out?
4) If the Machine removes the need for money, how do the townsfolk pay for the Machine? How does it all start?
You are a technological optimist. Like other technological optimists, there is a basic human psychological need that is not being acknowledged in this solution. That is, the desire to be better than your fellow man: Whether this is at an individual level, family level or society level is less relevant, but so long as this need exists, no amount of technology can fix the problem, as any new technology can be bent to increase, not decrease, disparity.
Much of my writing is meant to be a thought experiment. I think it may be an improvement if groups of people support one another voluntarily, and share in common ownership of critical factors of production.
My writing is a way to explore a class free society (economic class that is) free of wasteful consumerism. It is not necessarily meant to be a literal plan.
However you ask about resource consumption: society already uses resources at an unsustainable rate. I claim The Machine will improve on our resource consumption by reducing consumerism and needless consumption. But the fact that a society with the machine may still be unsustainable does not mean it isn’t an improvement. The Machine only fails if you expect that I am proposing a solution to all problems, which is not the case.
Humans will still have inequality, but I don’t claim to totally solve that. I think The Machine could help reduce inequality, but it depends on how we use it.
Anyway, I’m a bit rushed and I’m sorry I haven’t provided a clearer reply. I just wanted to give you some kind of answer. Thanks for reading my work!
What I was trying to demonstrate is that classes exist because humans want them to exist. Technology cannot solve a behaviour problem. Through evolution, we learn that a certain percentage of selfish actors in a large pool of altruistic actors is long-term stable, which blew me away the first time I read about it.
Finally, have you read Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway"? If not, suggested reading.
Then I guess we need to change human psychology :)
If someone gave me a BMW, assuming it wasn't a close friend or someone I had to worry about offending, I would sell it and continue using my old car.
So to answer your question... some of us?
(To be exact, I drive a 15-yr-old Skoda, not a Yaris, but you get the idea.)
At what point does capitalism stop being what it is and evolve into something else entirely?
For example, take a fridge. If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence".
However, if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.
EDIT: Besides eliminating planned obsolescence, there are more advantages:
- Increased market transparency. The market is more transparent if I know exactly what a service costs me per month, as opposed to buying a product and not knowing when it will fail. A more transparent market leads to better competition.
- Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including recycling it, becomes a natural responsibility of the company.
And another line item on your revolving monthly expenses.
You already have something very close to this with home warranties and the providers tend to be awful in my experience. The goal is just to extract money from you and keep costs down.
Sure, as long as you assume higher power consumption doesn't increase the cost of operating the fridge.
If you're not willing to assume that, then "regardless of power consumption" doesn't make a lot of sense.
While this mentality definitely exists, this doesn't account for brand and a wish to protect reputation. Hence why personally I tend to stick with established companies for things like trades as in the absence of a personal relationship, knowing someone has a brand to protect (and history against it) improves my chance of receiving a quality good/service
While the preservation of a brand might be rational for a corporation as a whole, it might be somewhat easy for executives that are paid quarterly and annual bonuses to temporarily goose profits by sacrificing long term reliability and brand (which only shows up with a long lag time, years down the road), then take their bonuses from investors before going somewhere else.
This theory of 'looting' by executives might leave both customers and long-term investors worse off, but is caused by the inability of customers and investors to perfectly incentivize (or monitor) long-term decisionmaking.
I think component complication for planned obsolescence is much more of a thing than programming something in X years to kill itself.
So I disagree with your premise based on the example you gave. I would say it would be fine with items you only keep a few years and not long term appliances. I really do not think it encourages them to create units that fail because many companies still want their reputation to be built upon longevity. Simply put, the sales volumes are already great enough to not require shenanigans like what you suggest
History shows otherwise:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
Legislation against this practice isn't unheard of, there are fines and jail time for it in France.
My guess is that Apple will simply claim that they can't make the phone as small/thin when the battery has to be replaceable.
iPhone users either get the battery replaced, sell the phone, or they trade the phone in. The trade in then gets sold again, and likely again after that. The iPhones resale value makes sure it is a long time before any are simply thrown in the trash.
These recycled phones either end up as refurbished phones in other markets, or are taken apart by their special robots down to the individual pieces, which are then recycled themselves.
Theoretically, landlords would have the same incentive to purchase the longest lasting things for their rental units. In my experience, both as a renter and someone who designs buildings, the directive is "get the cheapest possible thing that will work".
Sometimes that's because the person paying to build the building is going to sell it once it's rented out, so they won't have to deal with the long term consequences. Sometimes it's just budget restrictions that won't permit the funds to buy the high-quality option. Sometimes it's just short-sightedness. It's rare to meet an owner who truly wants to invest in high quality, long-term solutions.
I'm not going to put a Bosch dishwasher in when someone is going to let their kid sit on the door while it's open, not maintain it properly (cleaning out the drain screen monthly), and so on. Maybe some tenants will, but most do not. I make sure to pay for the extended warranty, and my credit card tops the warranty up some more, because one service call is more expensive (and it's built into the cost of the rent). Something breaks? I file a warranty claim or service call, schedule it with the tenant, and move on with my day. My tenants are entitled to working appliances, not fancy appliances. If those appliances are durable and long lasting, bonus.
This is a great example, and it also has many parallels in—e.g. provision of online services.
The gp isn't wrong, service-providing companies are incentivised to optimise for low waste in certain areas, but it breaks down in other areas like this because service providers aren't optimising for QoS, they're optimising for perceived value.
For example (from the gp's comment):
> if I subscribe to a service to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then the company has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.
This depends. If the company is doing the above by leasing you a fridge you keep in your house and are responsible for maintaining, they getting you the worst fridge and replacing regularly may be better for them (see also ISP routers). Your statement only holds if they're running a large refrigeration warehouse where you keep your food at all times, in which case the logistics get a bit tricky.
The "perceived value" argument gets worse when you have large corporations with multiple offerings outside of their core: here the core competency can lend credence to less optimal/efficient/sustainability-friendly side-offerings.
A fridge service provider might run the hardware longer, but they wouldn't care much about your power bill, nor fridge features - if old phone monopolies, cable boxes and current isp's are any indicator.
And good luck trying to prove to a fridge service provider that their unit has an intermittent thermostat problem...
Recycling might be the responsibility of the company, but they might systematically find the cheapest way to do it without regard to the full externalities of how it's accomplished.
The model being peddled on TV/radio/etc isn't "Rent a fridge." is it?
This is just another "language war". The airwaves and communications channels are monopolized by discourse that protects the known way of doing business. It's not a law of physics it be that way.
"Our fridges are more power efficient!"
"Ours have advanced health monitoring!"
"We have the greenest recycling program!"
It's a lot easier to hold few companies accountable, than to hold millions of consumers accountable.
> And good luck trying to prove to a fridge service provider that their unit has an intermittent thermostat problem...
That's also a problem when you buy a product.
> but they wouldn't care much about your power bill, nor fridge features
I suppose the market will do its job. Cost of ownership is transparent (monthly fee plus power use), so consumers can easily choose, and they can easily switch.
> It sounds like a nightmare to me.
I'm already having nightmares about the environment right now.
If you think modern refrigerators are wasteful I'd ask you to prove it. The design choices they make are manufacturing trade offs—not simply cutting corners to make it break. A refrigerator might only last 10 years, but its a net gain if it cost 1/10 the energy to build, uses 50% of the power, never leaks refrigerant and uses a small ammount.
Now, the one place a company with a fleet of fridges could really do the world good would be maintenance & repair. When you've got all your own repair crew on the payroll and you operate one kind of fridge, those costs plummet.
They will happily externalize as many costs as possible as well. Your electric bill is high? Oops, guess you should have negotiated that in the contract. Five hundred dollars of fresh groceries went bad because we gave you a shoddy refurb? We'll have a new unit out to you tomorrow, good luck with the rest.
Yes, so the market will ensure that this kind of company will prevail.
Here's another, more complicated problem: even if the math proves that, say, over a long enough horizon, you'll make more money with the longer-lived, repairable version of the product, that isn't necessarily the best way to maximize returns for shareholders/owners. If that concern overrides all others, then you may well be better off maximizing profits short-term, through any (hopefully legal!) means possible regardless of the effect on the long-term viability of the business, and investing them in other markets with higher returns.
What we are missing today is meaningful competition. You can’t buy an appliance that isn’t a piece of garbage because we have a financial environment that encourages consolidation above all else. There’s only a few companies making anything, so there is no incentive to use quality as a differentiator.
I first started become aware of this when I started having trouble finding shoes. In many categories, all shoes are made by one manufacturer, often in one factory in Guangdong.
The problem is optimization as energy efficiency and lifespan for example are often at odds. Further you can measure energy efficiency much easier than lifespan so the incentives get out of whack from what consumers want in favor of what they can measure.
We probably spend exponentially more energy manufacturing, distributing and delivering new appliances that fail due to pointless efficiency engineering than we shave off.
After going through 3 washing machines in 9 years, i bought a Speed Queen commercial washer without a cashbox. It is not very pretty, and cost $50 more than the mid-range residential washer that it replaced, has a 5 year warranty, and an expected life of 10-15 years.
This is true for most categories of consumer products. Appliances, shoes, pants, furniture, etc.
People need to own, people need to be reaponsible with their decisions, and to think a business or corporation can do it better is dangerous.
You just described a grocery store...
They keep food and beverages at certain temperatures. When you are ready to consume that food or beverage, you can pick it up (or have it delivered). And best of all, you pay no subscription fee :) But in reality, that's not practical. Most families eat 3 meals a day, and consume multiple glasses of some drink a day. To make a trip to the grocery store (or fridge depot subscription place) every time you want to eat or have a cold drink is not practical (and increases environmental pollutants). So maybe you want to go once a day, you'll still need some device at home to keep your groceries and drinks cold until you want to consume, some device like a fridge :p
If you found a solution, that'd be great. But you'd probably just be a food delivery startup with some fancy marketing lingo. And we have plenty of those already.
Fixed :)
The Prime-Member-only prices appearing at my local Whole Foods suggest that this may be increasingly untrue in the future.
A responsible tax system could accomplish the same without causing people to pay 100x the value of a good product over their lifetime.
There are things that I would like to buy for life. Kitchenwares, Desk, etc. There are things that are consumable and may be being a services would be better.
The world already has made a Subscription model for an Expensive and long last fridge and that is called installment plan.
Fridge?
And I have three actually. One runs on propane, one standard power and one is a deep freeze, like what one would put in a garage.
All were cheap, all work well, all take modest to very liw resources to run.
The gas powered one works no matter what. That has saved me a time or two when there was no power. I may well get another. It is insane cheap to use.
Anyone selling me something that is planned to break gets the following:
Added to avoid list.
The product gets hacked wher it is posdible to untether it and or remedy the failure.
I tell others.
Now I realize all of that is contrary and toxic to many business models today. I rarely buy new.
I grew up poor, and had time which I invested in skills. Those have paid me off many, many times over.
I also think maximizing what has been produced makes good jobs, is better, with some qualifiers, for the environment, increases personal agency, lowers personal risk and cost.
Among many other good things.
Service models can make sense. For many basics, they just do not make sense.
I would much prefer we distribute repair, support modifications, upgrades and such across many enterprises as we used to do.
TV's were a good example. I grew up learning to repair them. Used to do it for date money. Offered in home service too.
Cars remain a good example. John Deere is the other extreme.
A blanket, "this way is good" makes little sense to me.
Would much rather have many local relationships than the same with big enterprises. More options, and if I do work, I get the immediate returns of lowered cost and risk.
For example, take a fridge. If I buy a fridge, the company I buy it from has an incentive to make it break in N years, so they can sell me a new one, i.e. "planned obsolescence".
However, if I subscribe to a communistic society to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then this society has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.
EDIT: Besides eliminating planned obsolescence, there are more advantages:
- Increased market transparency. The market is more transparent if I know exactly what a 4 years planned product costs me per month, as opposed to buying a product and not knowing when it will fail. A more planned society leads to better resource distribution.
- Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including recycling it, becomes a natural responsibility of one society.
They also have an incentive to make it last a long time so you're a loyal customer. Loyalty is extremely important if you only purchase a half dozen of something your entire life. Guess which incentive is stronger?
As a corollary, there is a big difference between being incentivized to do something and simply not being incentivized to do the opposite. The average full-size refrigerator lifespan is 17 years. The fact that Maytag doesn't spend millions of dollars developing a fridge that can last 30 years doesn't mean they're incentivized to make a shitty fridge, it just means people don't care enough about years 18-30 that they're willing to pay what it would cost to get that fridge.
Samsung made the largest fridge available. I got the $2500 model: stainless steel, no IoT but digital, double doors over drawer freezer. It looked really solid and durable. It failed in so many distinct and interesting ways!
The door shelves constantly shattered, at $50 each. The structure had been compromised by artistic design, with two kinds of plastic joined together. The ice maker died. The main shelves broke a couple times. The temperature display (blue 7-segment numbers) became nonsense. The drawer handle had a hinge made from plastic which broke and non-stainless steel which rusted out. The compressor went out, as we determined by diagnostic codes. The tech sent to fix that ignored us, never checked diagnostic codes, didn't look at the compressor, insisted that our problem was the ice maker (which was indeed broken but not our complaint), charged us $75 for nothing, and fought us when we did a credit card charge-back.
I cut that fridge up with a demolition saw to get it out of my house. This was satisfying.
The replacement is a pair of smaller fridges that were about $400 each. One of them even has old-style wire shelves that seem unlikely to shatter. We've only had two broken shelves so far, in the other one.
Famously, there was a "lemons and cherries" paper on the economics of used cars. I think it also somewhat applies to new goods. There is information asymmetry here. I can't know that the hinges are fragile plastic and non-stainless steel. The fridge looks nice, and it says "stainless steel". I've learned my lesson: do not pay more in an attempt to get quality, because you'll just pay more for the same old junk.
I had a not-so-drastic experience with a high-end samsung fridge: A design flaw where the recirculation fan would accrue ice, and symptoms were that it sounded like a chainsaw every time it turned on, and eventually the fan would freeze over. The only way to "fix" it was to thaw it out every few weeks, and any attempt to replace parts was futile since it was a design flaw, not a mechanical failure.
If the shelf is glass, and the glass is not resistant against wide temperature variations, the glass weakens and eventually will shatter.
My shelves are generally packed with large jugs. For example, on a main shelf I might have 4 gallons of milk and a half dozen half-gallon containers of juice and then more stuff to fill out the remaining space. Door shelves are similarly packed, with the ones in the Samsung being about 12x8 inches and thus big enough for gallons of milk.
The fridge is constantly used by kids. It needs to be mostly restocked every other day.
Glass shattered in one of the $400 fridges. The other $400 fridge is wire. Glass shelves in the Samsung would break around the edge, leaving me with an intact sheet of glass and some broken plastic. Door shelves are always plastic. Samsung snapped white and clear plastic together to make the shelves, with a fragile zig-zag at the joint. I got to wrapping the shelves with string-embedded packing tape before installing them, which increased the typical life from weeks to months.
Give me forged metal grates please, or at least something like rustproof storm drain covers.
https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/492544/samsung-...
So, Mr Customer, how do you really feel about our product?
Yeah, definitely satisfying. Well played.
Price does communicate some usable information. The problem is that most people naively assume that the more expensive item must be better, while the good items are actually fighting for an informed customer looking for a good cost/benefit. That means that most of the very low price stuff is crap, but also that if the value you can take from an item has a ceiling (limited comfort options, limited maintenance savings, limited "extra durability"), most of the very high price items are also crap.
I don't agree. I think you can still buy quality things. The problem is that the market pushed the prices so low for "good enough" products, that it's difficult to justify paying much more. In the case of refrigerators, you'd have to pay at least three times more for a Sub-Zero fridge, for example.
I went looking at high-end oven/range things one day, after having had the Samsung fridge experience. I noticed that underneath the fancy knobs they had the same crappy quarter-inch shafts as the low-end models. Some of the knobs looked like seriously impressive chunks of steel or brass... but that only put more weight and leverage on the standard-sized shafts.
I saw somebody take apart an older iPhone, maybe the 4. The phone had some really nice looking buttons on the side, machined out of stainless steel. Inside the phone it was a very different story: really flimsy crap.
Only if they don't have competitor for your business with a reputation for longer-lasting fridges that are otherwise of similar utility.
You can't buy a residential clothes washer designed to last longer than five years; laundromats won't tolerate that; solution, pretend Home Depot doesn't exist and buy a Speed Queen that your kids can probably inherit.
An interesting side effect is residential / contractors special type stuff has a very low initial cost of purchase but overall lifetime cost is always lower for commercial grade stuff; this makes sense, if it was cheaper to buy residential garbage the beancounters would force it to officially be commercial...
This I don't care about really.
Although I remember Richard Stallman wrote a satirical article about there being no libraries and having to pay to read anything (as in pay to read per page or something kind of ridiculous) now his article doesn't feel so ridiculous anymore.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
The SCARY thing, the thing that he doesn't really predict is that nobody will own anything and nobody will be allowed to read anything but also nobody will care about it either. They'll all be too busy with their bread and circuses and the 2 minutes hate or whatever.
Is that really it, though? I mean, that seems really weird on its face... "I'd like to own my own copy of this movie rather than just stream it, but I really have to get back to hating Republicans." That doesn't seem all that plausible.
Personally, I am happy streaming things I don't care to own. At this point, most of the things I watch, I want to watch once. The world is so abundantly overflowing with good video content that I have little reason to return back to something. Those few things, I frequently will buy. Some of my "season DVDs" I'm quite glad I hung on to... some of them were on Netflix for a while, but are no longer, and are still fairly expensive to buy.
If the stream services went away, ultimately I'd be slightly inconvenienced.
Music, by contrast, I tend to listen to a given track/album that I like quite a bit, and I take possession of. YMMV. I'm very music oriented compared to most people.
And Stallman's arguments about software are yet again something different; there are reasons for having the source and using open source that have no media equivalent, because software isn't just media, it's a machine.
They're not necessarily related semantically, but in terms of allocation of attention (a finite resource), they are competitive.
Largely.
> I mean, that seems really weird on its face... "I'd like to own my own copy of this movie rather than just stream it, but I really have to get back to hating Republicans."
That's beause you are assuming that, e.g., political identity fights are an alternative to economic concerns, rather than forces which shape the cogntive filters that determine the perception of the nature, cause, blame, and appropriate response to economic disappointment.
That was actually a perfect summary of /r/technology
renting at Amazon Kindle doesn't make sense. You could pay $9.99 to rent a digital version indefinitely (or until Amazon loses the rights to rent), or you can pay $6.50 to buy a paperback version that you have second sale rights to.
A Spotify subscription that allows me to listen to practically any song that was ever recorded is of far more utility than a pathetically limited personal music collection.
Spotify is great. I can listen to charts/viral music from different countries. I can usually find music from other countries as well if I need to.
Spotify is $10 / month, the price of one album. For that, I get an essentially infinite [1] library of music that's basically always available to me whenever I want, curated playlists, discovery features, sharing features [2], etc, etc. It all just works, I never have to think about it, etc.
By contrast, unless I'm pirating music, what does $10 get me? An album a month? So after a year, I own 12 albums and had to hassle with the files and downloads, whereas with Spotify it just works and I've listened to 10x - 100x that much music.
Yes, if / when I stop paying for Spotify, I'll lose access, but so what? I wasn't planning on spending 20 years paying a fortune to accumulate a music library and then stopping cold and never paying again, just listening to that music I bought. I'm happy to just pay $50 - 100 / month until I die for subscriptions to huge and ever-growing libraries of music, movies, TV shows, books, etc. Seems like a fantastic deal.
1. I don't have niche tastes or a deep attachment to any particular artist that I simply MUST have, so their selection is far beyond anything I really need.
2. I don't use these, but still.
I signed up for an insane promo with Sprint in December where we switched from Verizon and got 13 months of unlimited everything (except 4G tethering, I think that's capped at 10gb per month) for free.
Honestly though, we don't use all that much bandwidth anyway. I'm usually on wifi and for the times that I'm not going to be, my playlists and podcasts download in the background when I am.
Freedom to move. Freedom from debt. Freedom from "keeping up with the Joneses". Freedom from soul-crushing jobs.
In nearly every case over time, you'll pay more to rent it than own it.
UK: I'm just old enough to remember visiting a great-grandmother who lived in a cottage without electricity and who regarded the cold water tap and separate water heater as luxuries. And the great aunt who still cooked on a range. Their houses were dark and sparse. Both paid rent for their houses by the way.
You're free from the task of maintaining and securely storing the thing. My biggest personal switch has been selling my car. Granted I live in an urban area where the dollar and time cost of owning a car are greater than otherwise, but I REALLY don't miss worrying about parking tickets, breakins, this and that funny sound coming from the motor, etc. Dollar wise it's been a wash.
If you own a car and a house, you're pretty much stuck where you are.
I think in any situation, if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck you don't have freedom. A prerequisite to any kind of freedom is the ability to live well within your means and save a lot so that you're insulated from financial setbacks.
Renting the exact same stuff for the same period of time still gives more of one kind of freedom: flexibility. You can usually more easily get rid of that stuff, and you're usually less responsible for it if it breaks, etc. Yes, there's usually a higher financial cost for that, which is less freedom in another sense.
But the reality is that renting often means just paying for the time that you're using an item, instead of paying for it forever even if your utilization window is small. So jumping in an uber for 20 mins a day instead of owning a car 24/7, or renting a movie for 20% of the price to buy it, which might make sense if you're only going to watch it once or twice, etc.
If you can't do as you please with the things you buy, there is less advantage to owning over renting. The responsibilities involved in ownership start to look like rental contracts and terms of service agreements.
If I stop paying the average per-mile maintenance and operations cost for my car, it runs out of gas or breaks down. It is sometimes cheaper for me, with my own car, to rent one anyway for a long road trip, because they rent it per day without a per-mile surcharge, and that's just money paid now that does not get spent at the mechanic later, and could be recovered on resale or trade-in.
You really have to look at each rent-vs-buy decision on its own merits. It makes sense to own your DOCSIS modem, your underwear, and a cast-iron pan. All the other stuff is debatable.
Renting absolutely means more freedom to move. It also means less freedom to, say, tear down a wall in the house. I think home ownership is over-rated, but I wouldn't draw such a clear line on "freedom."
The statements about books are not accurate. Ebook sales are still just a fraction of print sales in many genres - NPD data indicates ebooks are less than 20% of total unit sales for nonfiction, children, and young adult titles (self-published ebooks excluded). Total ebook unit sales were 162 million in 2017 from the 450 publishers tracked by NPD, down from 180 million units in 2016.
Source: Publishers Weekly, "Ebook sales fell 10% in 2017" https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content...
For me, it’s less strain on my eyes, it always works even without electricity, I can lend it out to friends easily, and I like to expand the aesthetic of my bookshelf. I’m also more likely to reread all or part of a physical book. Ebooks are simply inferior.
Sure, there's an aesthetic to certain books but that doesn't apply to the random paperback or even popular hardcover novel. And I appreciate the decrease in clutter. I recently donated a bunch of older "classic" paperbacks that are works I can download for free or near-free anytime I want.
Also after having moved my books between four apartments and our current house, the next time we move I’m prepared to just toss the lot of them.
I still buy books once in a while, but those are either non-fiction or I want them for the pictures (e.g. a book by Brom whom I knew through his art on MtG cards)
Certain reference manuals (The O'Reilly Zoo, for example) are more useful as physical books, as well.
Besides, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow (not planning on it today), it's not there's anyone to inherit my stuff.
As a reader of many many Kindle unlimited military sci-fi books I sympathize and recommend the "Nameless War" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12356877-the-nameless-wa... ) trilogy as the rose in the manure of books I have read of this genre in the last few years.
There are occasional spelling mistakes etc but the story itself is fantastic and the military scenario believable.
All that said, I've also returned to paper for essentially anything I anticipate wanting to take more than a few notes in, or really referring back to at all.
You can use one to take your entire library on vacation instead of just a few books.
Some of them have lights built in for reading in dark environments.
They're much easier to use one-handed than most paper books.
Some of them are waterproof and will survive being dropped in the bathtub better than a paper book.
You can change the font and text size to suit your preferences.
You can instantly download a new book when you want to read it instead of waiting for it to arrive in the mail or going to a bookstore or library.
They are not "simply inferior" as you put it, even if you happen to prefer paper books.
As an example - while my grandfather may have a bit of trouble figuring out how to get started on Netflix, once he's chosen something to watch, he won't really notice a difference from when he watched things on VHS in terms of how to navigate. The same is not true for giving him a book on a Kindle.
I actually disagree with that one--at least for certain types of footnotes. When I was an IT industry analyst I got into the habit of using footnotes at the bottom of the page to provide parenthetical detail, substantiation, caveats, etc. that I thought might be useful but which would break up the flow of the writing. On the page, this works well because you can just glance down. On an ereader, it's often more distracting than just putting it inline would be.
For just references that you'll only sometimes want to look at, it's fine but for the way I often use them, I liked the old way better.
I mostly agree with your broader point. The fact that used books are often cheaper and you can't typically lend your ebook when you're done probably also contribute.
I can buy a used (and sometimes new) paper copy cheaper than an Ebook and when I'm done I can decided if I want to keep it sell it or give it away.
I am sympathetic to the argument against DRM though. It seems criminal that I can't leave my ebook collection to somebody after I die.
It's a bummer for sure, but this is probably overkill. I think the main issue is that the price doesn't necessarily reflect this limitation. For many books, it probably wouldn't affect people's willingness to pay that much, but for books that they'd like to be able to give away or bequeath, it could matter a bit.
Technically, you could, but doing that would be.... criminal.
Your point about paper copies often being cheaper is definitely true, and for books I plan to re-read, refer to, etc., I now default to this. But one of the reasons I like my Kindle is that I can take an entire library with me on a month long trip, change my mind about what I want to read, buy a new book if it comes out while I'm gone, and sample things I'd otherwise need to go into a bookstore to find.
So far, the data is showing that most people still prefer reading on paper versus on screen, by a decent margin (only 14% prefer screen). However, people still read more ebooks than paper books, likely due to the convenience factor. This can be squared with the NPD data because library ebooks are included in our poll, not just purchased ebooks.
I've been surprised at what small percentage of people use a monochrome Kindle (less than 25%), and the lack of a dominant platform (Amazon — 35%, OverDrive — 19%, Apple — 11%, Nook — 8%, Other — 27%). I guess it's good for consumers that there isn't one big leader here.
I wonder what the numbers are for people who read books to completion on ebook or paper formats. Or how far into the different formats people choose to read.
I know that most of the time when I read any ebooks, I end up never finishing the book. When it's paper, I usually finish the book.
I think it's mainly because with a paper book it's harder to get distracted than when I'm looking at ebooks. If it's a topic I'm studying, or need / really want to know then I'll get the paper version.
I have the same behavior pattern you mentioned, though it's hard to know whether this is strictly a bad thing. If word-search-ability means I can get all the relevant stuff out of a book, then perhaps that's more efficient than reading the whole thing.
If you took millenials and plopped them in the economic context that the young generations of the 50s (or even 70s/80s) had I think this would be a very different story.
1. "Experiences over objects" is driven by the need to share it on social media. Photos at the Eiffel Tower garner more likes than a new BMW car.
2. Peer pressure: Experiences of others being shared on social media and garnering likes causes the follower to do the same.
3. Being raised by relatively wealthy parents with all the stuff, and being disillusioned by hoarding and ownership of stuff.
4. Cheaper and more accessible transportation coupled with a general increase in per capita income.
5. Real estate is expensive now, and being forced to live in small rental units, you've learnt to spend time outdoors.
In the past, you had what you purchased, what was in stock at the video rental place, and what you could VCR-program or catch live on maybe a couple dozen TV channels. Nowadays, bajillions of TV shows and movies are instantly available, such that people don't even have time to watch everything interesting that's available.
I would venture to say that more shows & movies are being created now than in the past, and a lot of them are quite good (probably more quality from series than movies, though).
The value of any individual piece of decent quality media has gone down, given the oversupply. However, there will always be individual pieces of media that are held in importance to a viewer, and those will want to be preserved in some form. Many with a naive assumption that their favorite piece will always be instantly streamable (legally) will certainly have a cold reckoning at some point.
The average price of a house sold in the US in 2018 is around $375,000.
If we adjust the 1989 dollars for inflation, that $145,000 becomes about $295,000.
That means, in 2018 dollars, the average house price has gone up around $80,000 or 27% over the past 29 years.
That's a significant increase and we should be concerned about whether or not Americans can afford to purchase houses, but framing the problem as "houses are now 35-40 times as expensive as they were in the late 80's" is terribly inaccurate as a general metric.
house price data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS
inflation calculator: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
When I got stationed in Northern Virginia, I thought about buying a condo. But almost everywhere I looked, there were absurd HOA fees, some as much as $400/mo. Considering I could rent a room for $750/mo, it didn't make sense to buy. If RENT < HOAFEES + MTGINTEREST, you're better off investing the money instead of pouring it into equity.
As for physical possessions, they all cost money (in rent!). Sure, I could own my own kayak and ATV. But it'll cost me $150/mo for a storage unit to keep them in. So until such time as I spend $1800/year on quad and kayak rentals (not even counting the amortized purchase prices), its more financially sound for me to rent them.
There are exceptions. I own my truck, which I bought used, and I know I'll drive it for years and years until it's beyond fixing. In the long run, it's cheaper than renting.
Still not as easy as a truck. I drive mine into the ground too. Not just to figure out if selling a used one or getting the trade-in is the most effective use. Buying new car way less effective than buying a good in shape 16 year old accurately for $1700 currently. I value more varied vehicles over one nice one. it's also nice to say well this one didn't start today oh well how bout this one.
It's also nice not to give zero fucks about a dent or scratch. Some people get so worked up keeping their cars perfect, like its jewelry or something.
There's also the factor of how it's going to affect your job and life if your car breaks down. A 2-decade-old car is going to break down at some inopportune time, like it or not, even with the best maintenance.
While, 2002 car may be relatively safe, I would still prefer to have the safest car on the road. Usually it will require less servicing than an old car and be more dependable too.
A 2018 car will have front and side airbags designed to work as well on 120lb woman as a 200lb man, backup cameras, very advanced stability control systems, and will have been tested against the most common causes of crash deaths since 2002.
You can go to the NHSTA website and download the raw crash test and see how many gs your head will experience or how many netwons of force will be applied to your femurs. Using this information, I can see that you would be very likely to sustain a concussion in an accident in a 2002 Camry and your chest would be compressed by 30mm, while in a 2018 Camry you're at minimal risk for any head injury and your chest would only compress by 23mm.
It's pretty interesting stuff. TL;DR: cars are safer today than 20 years ago, by a lot.
One can be a Chicken Little to the point that I would ask, why drive at all? It's just not worth the risk. A sixteen-year-old car has airbags and designed-in crumple zones. It ain't no 2019 Volvo, but "kill you in a crash that a new one will let you walk away from" is ridiculous hyperbole.
A 2-decade-old car is going to break down at some inopportune time, like it or not, even with the best maintenance.
Brand-new cars do the same thing. In fact, I view cars like I do electronics: if it makes it through the first six months, you're probably good for 100K miles. And if it breaks down, so what? You email your "flexible hours" employer, tell them you'll miss standup this morning, then dip into the massive amount of funds you saved by not having a car payment to get it fixed. Oh, it's an inconvenience for sure, but is it worth $600/month to avoid once in a great while (or not at all, if Honda or Toyota)? Hell, our VW camper is 37 years old, and I'd rely on it to get me to work every day, and I think VW makes shitty cars. Take care of your shit, and it will take care of you, even if it's a VW.
Some are obviously so scared of breakdowns and that life-ending crash that is assuredly just around the next corner that they'll foot the $600/month (or whatever a car payment is these days) for their big-ass SUV that they make any excuse to justify. Others, IMO, manage risk much more realistically.
The risks of injury in an automobile accident should absolutely weigh into the calculus of car ownership. Especially considering the staggering amount of progress made in vehicle safety in the past 10 years. If a brand new Camry saves you from a single ER visit that you would have had driving an 2008 Camry, then it's already paid for itself.
It's not really any different from buying a fancy $150 toothbrush that does a better job at preventing cavities, or any of the many other purchases that statistically save you money in the long-term.
But I am curious what progress you feel has been made in auto safety in the last ten years that is "staggering". By 2008, I think we got the low-hanging fruit: 1. ABS 2. Airbags 3. Side-curtain airbags 4. Sacrificial crumble zones
I do not consider lane keeping and automatic braking to be "staggering" progress, but incremental.
If a brand new Camry saves you from a single ER visit
That is the very definition of begging the question.
As far as safety progress over the past ten years -
2008: SID-II Crash test dummies. These dummies are designed to simulate smaller humans (women and children).
2010: NHSTA revamps five star rating because cars became "too safe." Almost every vehicle on the road had a five star rating so they made the requirements more stringent.
2014: NHSTA adds small-overlap tests to accident ratings. Many cars failed during the first year.
2015: NHSTA revamps safety standards again, this time adding considerations for rollover and crash avoidance technology (automatic braking).
Other considerations added over the past decade, but I can't find an exact date implemented for: side pole crash, fuel system integrity assurances, deformation barrier tests. There's a bunch more but I'm tired of reading research papers on teh subject.
Suffice to say, advances in safety from 2008-2018 were staggering.
Well, thank you for taking the time to post what you did in response to my question.
I've noticed it happening slowly over time, but there are dangers[0] even if you believe you "own" your media.
There are no good solutions, people are willing to trade ownership for convenience because /mostly/ you're getting the same value- why do you care if you can't access that song you liked in 30 years?
Personally; I fight this notion as much as possible; if I buy digital media- it's backed up. I do not give my custom to anyone who wishes to own my digital rights (thus, I avoid DRM) and, where possible, I buy physical copies of goods.
However, I work in an industry which is moving towards providing "service", namely; I work in video games. And we have a new concept: "Game as a service", the idea being that the game lives and grows and dies, rather than being a static art which is subject to the non-decay or altering hand of time immemorial. Thus, the games we played in 1995 can be played to day, but the games we played in 2010 are much less possible, and the games we play in 2018 will be impossible to play 10 years on.
I don't have a particular point, I'm more frustrated with the state of affairs. Also: Apple Music can sincerely fuck off.
[0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups
I've found that every physical thing I own has an ongoing cost. Firs there is the obvious cost of physically storing the thing. Then there is the labor cost of cleaning it and keeping it nice. Then there is the mental cost of remembering where it is. And finally there is a cost of worrying about it. What if the house burns down? You spend a lot of time and money and effort preventing and planning for such an event that may never occur at all. And for those of us who have lost everything that way, coming to the realization that it's all just stuff feels like anti-gravity. It's like living on Jupiter your entire life and then moving to the Moon.
then, yes, there's the ongoing cost of storing it and backing up, but not cleaning it, and most digital media is easy to sort and find..
Why is the fact that people without property were not given the right to vote because they "didn't have a stake" as our nation was founded being lifted up as a good thing? It's such a bizarre thing to say that this ideology was a good one. The author can't really believe that renters have less a stake in the system as property owners?
When you own property, you care more about the place where that property exists because what affects the surroundings directly affects the value of your possession. That incentivizes you to care about and invest in your neighborhood, community, state, and country.
If you aren't tied to the place, it's easier to just jump ship and say "not my problem" when something goes awry. You have fewer incentives to put effort into long-term projects that improve the community since you're less likely to be there to reap the benefits.
In other words, renters are less likely to plant trees, but a neighborhood with trees is better for us all over the long term.
They're talking about the ways in which non-property-owners were viewed at this country's founding, as not having a stake in the system. That argument was absolutely made in regards to voting rights and is the reason so many were denied this basic right. It's a very dangerous idea.
But let's explore it.
Renters have just as much a stake in the system as property-owners. They just have DIFFERENT stakes and incentives. Let's use your tree example. Maybe you are correct that renters are less likely to plant trees. That's not because they have less a stake in a system, but because the stakes for renters is different. For example, they may have to pay for the local government to plant the tree as taxpayers. Or maybe they don't like the way the tree looks. Or maybe they're worried wind will blow it over and onto their car. Or it obstructs a view. There's absolutely a stake in the system. True, they might oppose it because they may not get to ever enjoy the shade as it grows, if they move. Or maybe they want the rent to stay as low as possible. But that's still not an argument they have less of an interest -- just the opposite, it shows they have DIFFERENT interests.
You haven't said a ton, but it seems like you're using "community" as code for home values. However, that might not at all in the best interest for many in the community. It's particularly of importance to home-owners. It might be to the detriment of renters.
There is of course value (to me) in owning a library of books - but for different reasons than, say, owning intellectual property or real estate.
I still read books that I buy from the bookstore and would NEVER own a kindle. In fact I don't know many people who do own a kindle. My grandma owns one, she doesn't even use it anymore.
I still own and buy DVD's. I watch more videos on prime, netflix, and get movies from various other sources. However, when you don't have internet (or a TV with a USB), DVD's are still there.
Owning a car is still necessary in most places, and is still sought after by teenagers and adults alike.
I don't use a cell phone. I have one but its been dead in a drawer for over two years. I don't feel the need to have people be able to reach me 24 hours a day, it's a nuisance, and people are relying on it way to much these days.
The article is just a rant, an opinion of people (because there is an editor AND an author for some reason..) who don't know how to adapt and can't even see how to adapt to a changing world full of technology.
2.)The idea of spending more resources on experiences rather than goods has become more pervasive over the years so the trend of people owning less stuff would make sense.
3.)This is a little more in the weeds but it's funny to think about how a society's definition of wealth changes over time and how that might affect consumer behavior.
When people own a netflix subscription the industry is in a fixed-sum competition. The industry makes $X per subscriber per month, whether the average movie is Citizen Kane or The Emoji Movie.
Netflix takes that $X per subscriber per month and splits it up between all its different licensing contracts with different publishers. From the publishers' POV it's not all that different. In the past if they released good movies more people would buy more tickets, tapes, DVDs, etc. to view them; today, Netflix is willing to pay more to host better movies. I don't think that Netflix would pay the same for Citizen Kane and The Emoji Movie (now, which one they would pay more for I can't answer, but their analytics probably can make a guess :)).
Here's what we were told as children: "My gosh, you always want more toys, more comics, more videogames. Don't you ever get enough? What's wrong with you!"
As teenagers/young adults: "Look at all this crap you've collected over the years, taking up all this room, and you're barely an adult! You'll never have space for all this when you move out into a tiny apartment. What's wrong with you!"
As adults: "Why aren't you buying physical things and hoarding crap anymore? What's wrong with you!"
Having said all that, I dropped $5 a couple of days ago on a little pink pig keychain for my girlfriend. It probably cost $0.10 to make. But it was a vacay trinket and kinda cute.
With that said, this article does a number of things that I find obnoxious. Namely:
1) The article gives Amazon a pass for implementing DRM into their books, and instead blames the people who buy Amazon ebooks. I consider that victim blaming. Amazon more or less has a monopoly on the ebook market, meaning if you buy an ebook, you're likely buying from Amazon. If you own a Kindle (which is, bar none, the best ebook reader on the market), you're buying from Amazon. And if you buy from Amazon, your books don't truly belong to you.
2) The article seems very much targeted at the younger generation. Buying digital books, digital music, and smartphones is a thing everyone does, but again, the older generation seems to get a pass on it. They own houses, after all, so from the author's perspective they surely won't "los[e] their connection to private ownership". But those poor naive youths simply can't buy an album off iTunes without giving up their stake in the system.
3) Many of the author's (valid) concerns have actionable ways to resist, which the article fails to mention. You can strip the DRM off ebooks. You can rip your own music and movies. You can load an after-market OS onto your Android phone when the carrier decides to stop supporting it. Some of these can be difficult and time-consuming, but that's the tradeoff for getting both the digital convenience and the freedom of true ownership.
To be clear, I very much dislike this trend of "licensing" everything for the sake of having it streamed to you. But I would argue that this is a business trend rather than a societal trend, as it has been implemented top-down by the nation's most powerful tech companies. The vast majority of people simply picked what was most easily available to them.
Put another way, I think it would be shameful to yell at a poor college student about contributing to the elimination of individual property for choosing to rent his college textbooks for the semester at 1/3rd of the price it would've cost to buy them. And that's largely what this article does.
The important discussion should be not about American's losing their idea of private ownership but about American's learning the idea of owning their information and data about them. I don't care that I stream media, use SaaS for email or don't own a car but rather rely on ride share and public transit. But what I do care about is the companies that provide these services are brokerages for data about me.
I'm not aware of a single American politician who has as a prime issue the idea of private data ownership. That we can make laws that ensure that any data gathered about you belong to you and that companies are privileged to use it and do not get to dictate terms around it. That if you want to do business in a way that includes personal data of any kind then there are laws you have to follow that greatly restrict what you can do with that data. That upon request every single data point about a person can be disclosed to that person and how you've used that data and an audit trail with regards to that information.
Civil Rights for private data could be a thing.
I don't much mourn the lack of ownership of a lot of worthless junk that doesn't bring fulfillment or human flourishing. The late 20th century West let itself fill garages and storage units with consumerist nonsense.
But it's important to recognize that the corporate consumerist system is all too willing to mutate, to adapt to people's changing tastes and to offer them a product they feel is liberation. If you've heard "Don't buy things, buy experiences," then you've heard this new advertising. Companies are all too willing to make you think that an "authentic" vacation around the world will bring happiness and meaning in the form of selfies. Restaurants play up the 'foodie' advertising to make consumption of their product seem like a life-altering experience. The companies realize they can sell the same thing again and again digitally to customers who binge-watch Netflix and pride themselves on cutting the cord and not vegging in front of the TV like their parents did. And at the end of the month you find yourself subscribed to so many services, so many pseudo-addictions, you wonder where your money is going.
Rather than buying things or buying experiences, consider what you can make yourself or find for free. There is already more than enough media content out there to last many lifetimes; why not look for old material that has stood the test of time? Why not build a skill and learn the value of becoming self-reliant in some small way?
I think I this is a big one. There's a very degree of trust that public services and even private ones will be there whenever we need. Not just things like reliable hospitals and electrical grid, but also one-day shipping on whatever we need. There is no longer a need to keep things on hand.