Freshwater, sewage, fire codes, elevators, foundations, load-bearing structures, HVAC all get more difficult as you add more floors (beyond some small number around 4 where it's all pretty trivial). Another advantage 5-over-1s have (which the NYT article also mentions) is that they are cheap and easy to build. Very tolerant to cheap building materials, lots of prefabricated parts, lots of contractors who are familiar…
> lots of contractors who are familiar with how to build them that's a bit circular, no?
You do what you're good at which you got good at by doing.
It's much worse. It's global submission to the machine, which is not even a political project. What is easy, convenient, efficient, from a machine perspective, therefore is aspirational, desirable, wholesome from a human perspective. This is what's happening. We are all becoming widgets, that is to say, mere participants in bureaucracies, cogs in mechanized processes. Compare the existential dread people experienced…
To repeat the question a couple of levels up: how would you differentiate convergence on the best (so far) solutions from "submission to the machine" ? The outdoor gear (hiking, camping, cycling) that I use today is an order of magnitude better than the stuff I used in the 1970s. And even though the brands vary (to some degree) worldwide, the designs, features, and materials have pretty much converged everywhere. Gor…
I don't dispute we've seen quality improvements in some areas. Hiking gear is a complete triviality though. Nothing stopped people from enjoying hiking 50 years ago with bad gear, and the qualitative experience of camping, "enjoying the great outdoors", communing with nature, is not better today than it was then. What has improved is maybe the convenience. The real shift is in our core surroundings, what real should matter, and there quality and diversity has completely plummeted (homes, furniture, art, ...). Outdoors people generally celebrate the inherent value of large biodiversity, but seeing diversity in human expression completely collapse is suddenly "convergence". That is what is meant by submission to the machine. Simplicity, uniformity is desirable from a machine perspective (e.g. easier to operate simple machine, easier to operate simple bureaucracy). Those values humans now have internalized as aspirational as well.
To repeat the question a couple of levels up: how would you differentiate convergence on the best (so far) solutions from "submission to the machine" ? The outdoor gear (hiking, camping, cycling) that I use today is an order of magnitude better than the stuff I used in the 1970s. And even though the brands vary (to some degree) worldwide, the designs, features, and materials have pretty much converged everywhere. Gor…
I don't dispute we've seen quality improvements in some areas. Hiking gear is a complete triviality though. Nothing stopped people from enjoying hiking 50 years ago with bad gear, and the qualitative experience of camping, "enjoying the great outdoors", communing with nature, is not better today than it was then. What has improved is maybe the convenience. The real shift is in our core surroundings, what real should…
> Nothing stopped people from enjoying hiking 50 years ago with bad gea
we can't prove it's the gear, and it is likely not to be the dominant factor, but vastly more people do in fact participate in this sor of activity today than they did 50 years, so i would argue that actually, gear did play a role in "stopping people from enjoying hiking". Not "all people", but some people.
however, i feel that you're overly focused on the details of my examples. i could have picked dozens of hundreds of examples of where the things we have available today (where notable convergence in design has occured) are just better. i don't feel that you've answered my question about you would differentiate the two processes, and instead have tried to use the "outdoor gear" example as a way to simply come up with a reiteration of your initial claim.
I don't dispute we've seen quality improvements in some areas. Hiking gear is a complete triviality though. Nothing stopped people from enjoying hiking 50 years ago with bad gear, and the qualitative experience of camping, "enjoying the great outdoors", communing with nature, is not better today than it was then. What has improved is maybe the convenience. The real shift is in our core surroundings, what real should…
> Nothing stopped people from enjoying hiking 50 years ago with bad gea we can't prove it's the gear, and it is likely not to be the dominant factor, but vastly more people do in fact participate in this sor of activity today than they did 50 years, so i would argue that actually, gear did play a role in "stopping people from enjoying hiking". Not "all people", but some people. however, i feel that you're overly focu…
maybe it's tautological. convergence is a euphemism for the downstream effects of prioritizing efficiency and simplicity due to mass manufacturing.
My biggest gripe with 5 over 1's is the interior and the pricing. They're all cheap drywall with no insulation, quartz counter tops with an island and stainless steel appliances, and vinyl, wood grain flooring. They then claim that because they hit all of the "luxury" points, they are "luxury" apartments and can charge an extra $750 more than other apartments. In the end, all new apartments are like this, and beside…
Kind of weird that you are calling out drywall here, what other building material makes sense for interior walls? And when you say no insulation do you mean in the interior for sound proofing? Exterior walls certainly have and require adequate insulation to be to code.
I'm reasonably certain it's an exaggeration on the authors part.
Makes me wonder what ChatGPT has to say about all of this.
> It's natural to feel that way sometimes, but the perception that everything and everyone looks the same is likely more a result of the ubiquity of certain trends and designs, rather than an actual lack of diversity. We live in a globalized world where information, ideas, and styles are shared quickly and easily, leading to the widespread adoption of popular trends. This can create a sense of uniformity in various a…
What the article describes is correct, but I don't think the words "average" or "homogeneity" or "conformity" are the right terms, as they seem to carry negative connotations here. Rather, the right word is "convergence". The point is, people like certain things aesthetically. It used to be that artists and designers were still trying to figure out what looks good, and trying all the things. But now we've tried so ma…
Yep. I love that I don’t have to think about Car. Because I don’t care about Car. If I’m lucky enough to buy new Car then I _know_ Car will work great because we figured out Car. Interiors, exteriors, etc… great. I’m glad there are building codes that make buildings safe, and that ugly poorly made furniture is kind of hard to find. Convergence is a great word for this phenomenon. I’m glad humans tend to converge arou…
Isn't it great that you can converge on the things you don't care and specialize on the things you're interested in, like speccing and customizing your toothbrush.
Looking at etsy or the long list of artists on Spotify putting out music without hitting the mainstream radio, I'm not convinced the world has converged everywhere. I have far more variety that appeals to me available to me than ever before - and so does a person with opposite tastes. Expensive to build or change things have - houses or cars - but art or more commodity products have fractured. The people/media one is…
To bolster this point, the bestselling album of all time is still Michael Jackson's Thriller, released in 1982. So it has been literally over 40 years and nothing else has topped that for mainstream popularity, musically speaking. It has sold over 70 million copies. The next nearest album is AC/DC's Back in Black, released in 1980, at 50 million copies, a 20 million copy difference. A present day musician would be ov…
Album sales have become an increasingly obsolete metric for popularity during the last 20 or so of those 40 years.
> new (hopefully superior) stuff. And this is a big deal, too. We've made huge strides in cars and appliances. Outside of specialty needs furniture and carpentry hasn't changed much over the years. > there will be fewer and fewer "other people". This is going to take a long time (when measured over the typical human lifespan), and won't be very noticeable outside of child-oriented institutions. Major changes in indus…
The transition of Japan from a fast growing "tiger" to a society with few children, older people dominating, and contracting industry occurred very much within my lifetime, and I'm not an old person yet.
> We have eliminated the middle ground. what would be such a middle ground? The bespoke stuff is expensive, since there's literally only 1 customer. Think mega yachts. The 'almost everybody can afford this' is because it's sold to everybody, and thus economies of scale _allows_ it to be affordable. The old 'middle ground', to me, is a pre-industrial idea that locally sourced craftsman and materials can be used to ser…
In furniture, for example, the old middle ground (20th century) was hundreds of factories, churning out regional furniture that was shipped to cities that had multiple showrooms with reputations based on their curation. This wasn't as expensive as bespoke furniture, but much more than Ikea, or ChinaDirect. In the US North Carolina, Illinois, New York, Michigan, Massachusetts, all had furniture industries. I don't kno…
In 1886 the average daily wage for a laborer was about $1.47 ( https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015059385339&vi... ). So that bedroom set would be a week's wage. That's a really good price, even today. And it was solid oak (harder to come by these days given the decline in old growth forests).
The thing about clothes is they were made to last because of the high price of labor for their making. Once automation really took off following WW2 they became a lot cheaper, and so were treated cheaper. And also weren't repaired nearly as often.
