481–490 of 500 posts
> But Starbucks would never adopt such a robot, because they know customers wouldn’t like it. Incorrect - I would much prefer getting top-quality coffee from a robot than some barista all other things being equal.
Not sure if it was a bad thing or not. If you look at the things of which the prices have increased, they are all essential things. The things of which the prices have decreased are mostly luxury (and bad for the environment). And cars, but with good enough public transport you really shouldn't need a car.
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I wonder how finance worked. Today a car might cost 3 months of salary, but I can get a loan to pay it off over 6 years. If I had to buy a new car without a loan I couldn't afford it because I don't normally keep that much savings. (Ignoring retirement savings which technically I could tap into)
In Romania something like this happened with house prices. I bought my first flat just as credit was becoming available for the general population - it costed me 27k USD; at that time, it was customary that you'd pay in full for an apartment, people were actually looking suspicious at you for involving the bank! One colleague of mine wanted to keep saving and pay for an apartment in full; he didn't manage to, even th…
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> It benefits nobody, because that's the price the transaction would have happened at anyway. But this is not true. Haggling is price discovery. Either way, I think this is mostly a cultural thing that's lost on a lot of westerners.
> Haggling is price discovery True, but the discovery is made necessary by artificial opacity. It does not benefit society as a whole and that's why shops are legally required to have transparent pricing in most countries.
I have a different conclusion. The article mentions that the car would have cost her 3 months of income. That doesn't sound too much and is roughly about the same what people pay for cars today, maybe even more. The reason she thought about the car as a luxury and not a necessity is that then the society wasn't dependent on cars like we do today. They travelled less, worked closer to home, milkman brought milk to hom…
> maybe even more Average new car sale price at the end of 2021: $47,077 Average monthly household income at the end of 2021: $5,307 Even highly paid FAANG engineers are probably spending a few months income on a new car.
* No heater * No air conditioning/cooling * No radio/CD/Bluetooth/Carplay/Android Auto * No speakers, let alone not 6 or 8 speakers that some cars have * No heated and cooled seats * No power mirrors * No power seats * No power steering * No power brakes (!!) * No ABS brakes or traction control * No self-driving capabilities, blind spot detection, automatic lane change, "smart" cruise control or any cruise control at all * No rear defrost * Not even a dome light! * No power windows * No power locks * No all-wheel drive. In fact, it was mostly single-wheel drive! * No in-screen dash or touchscreen controls * No massage seats * No "slow close" doors * No door sill illumination * No turn signals (until later, that is)! * No seatbelts (or if there were, they crude early versions) * No meaningful safety mechanisms, like collapsible steering columns and automatic airbags, side impact airbags, and proper crumple/structure design * No in-car entertainment options for movies, etc. * No in-car navigation systems * No OBD diagnostics to let you know when you are running low on oil or other critical fluids
We could keep going ... but on the one hand, cars might cost "similar" or even more in today's standards, but they also DO so much more. Even if you said, well let's build the same vehicles they had then today, you couldn't. Government regulations force things like safety mechanisms that will cost more to deliver a final product.
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How exactly would that "should" work if there just isn't a standard set price?
There is a standard price, or at least there could be. It would be trivial for the apple seller to calculate the average price he ends up negotiating, and setting that as the published, firm price. That is what's frustrating about negotiating for commodities like food. The seller is taking advantage of information asymmetry. They know what the standard price is, and they hope that you don't. It's scummy. It is differ…
Even a published price is nothing more than a free option for buyers. It’s a ceiling. There’s nothing that prevents the seller from offering a lower unpublished price.
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> The societies telesilla and Blahah are referring to are not ones where a housekeeper works 40 hour weeks Mon to Fri and gets PTO Nor is the "high-growth" tech sector, which is notorious for long hours and de-facto little time off. The money might be good, but the lifestyle can be miserable. You're working for billionaires instead of millionaires, but you're still in a situation where a "?" from the top means you've…
I do not even know how to respond to a comparison of the quality of life for an employee in the tech sector to a housekeeper or driver in a developing country. One has weekends and holidays, can send their kids to fancy schools, go on international vacations, choose to retire by 40, has access to great healthcare, choose to work a different profession or their hobby or whatever they want.
The poster you replied to was very clearly limiting the scope of their comparison to the "so they do not have to do menial tasks for richer people" standard you gave originally. Listing any number of other differences is orthogonal to the point they are making.
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I have heard of the same in Ethiopia around the 90's. For white worker it was expected to: - rent a house - hire a house guardian - hire at last one maid - hire a chauffeur if you own a car It was also recommended than they come form the local neighborhood. It was a social norm, and if you do not do it you can expect the local policemen to "fine you" every time you take the car, the food cost to be x5 the price (or m…
> (I will avoid the more complicated subject of the maid...) I'm really curious now. Why is the maid a more complicated subject?
Some of the maid where indeed expected to also do "night duties" if asked. It was not a racial power stuff. It's was more a problem with a sort of "cultural prostitution" witch was everywhere in Ethiopia. The maids where still primary maids and not prostitute, and to be fair, the same problem also did exist in Europe at the time of Agatha Christie (How many European maid had become pregnant and then fired ?).
I thinks than it's now worst than in the 90's because Ethiopia had sadly become a tourist sex place since then. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_Ethiopia