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Parable of the Sofa

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Re: Parable of the Sofa

#81

Post by TeMPOraL »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #75
tmnvix wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A significant portion of the cost is labour, so if you translate that into a local non-US cost does it still seem absurd? I may have misunderstood your point, but I don't think it is a good argument for why running a business fixing things using local labour should be a fantasy. Aside from that, in my view a world where a sofa costs less than one weeks wages is the absurd and unsustainable one. We've adopted an attit…

I think there are two issues that are going in parallel 1. fixing stuff As long as some dude on the other side of the world is willing to make a new sofa and send it to you for cheaper than it is to fix it locally, the idea of fixing it locally will just never take off. You can ban/limit international trade, but then you're just screwing over poor people on the other end of the world for a "feel good" kind of thing 2…

The goal isn't necessarily to eliminate the bottom tier from the market. The issue isn't with that, but with the tendency for the market to hollow out, which results in there being no middle-tier products available at all. You have a variety of products ranging from literally shit to figuratively shit, then nothing, then high-end custom-made professional grade stuff you can't afford, and probably can't source unless you know someone who knows someone. Any business trying to do OK stuff for OK price is forced to either sink to the bottom-tier, or become a niche high-end brand.

Or, in short: the problem isn't that I can buy cheap crap. The problem is that I cannot buy moderately expensive good stuff - there's only cheap shit, and moderately expensive shit pretending to be good (and then the good stuff I can't possibly afford).

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#82

Post by fire_lake »

nakedneuron wrote: post #74

Quality (or the lack thereof) as a hidden property seems to be a man-made artifact. Are there any examples in nature (excluding mankind) coming up with this? Evolution doesn't seem to choose this path. Why do we?

Some animals pretend to be more dangerous than they are by mimicking colors etc.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#83

Post by card_zero »

ginko wrote: post #70
concordDance wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very much an information problem. One needs a company that can go do all the research and tell their readers what stuff is well made and good quality. Things like Consumer Reports and Which are supposed to full this niche but they only assess big brands (and are probably under used by people).

>It's very much an information problem. One needs a company that can go do all the research and tell their readers what stuff is well made and good quality. This role used to be filled by reputable stores.

Curating stuff means:

You aren't offering most of the things people can imagine,

You aren't offering all the latest trendy stuff, important in the moment,

You're paying people to check the quality of your limited range of dusty goods.

(Wikipedia has solved this problem by having an army of 120,000 active and mostly conscientious volunteer editors, but that's some kind of magic trick or luck that cannot be deliberately copied into other domains.)

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#84

Post by waciki »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #77
nakedneuron wrote: post #74

Quality (or the lack thereof) as a hidden property seems to be a man-made artifact. Are there any examples in nature (excluding mankind) coming up with this? Evolution doesn't seem to choose this path. Why do we?

Plummage and other external indicators of fitness, which animals use to game the mating game? Still, nature is first and foremost red in tooth and claw. Fighting for survival has a magical ability to cut through all the bullshit and reveal things for what they are. Quality won't stay hidden for long if it's directly relevant to you eating your next meal, instead of becoming one. Related, I believe this is why humanit…

> this is why humanity seems to have made major leaps in science and technology during and after military conflicts

Did it? I can't really find numbers on that.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#85

Post by throwaway2562 »

verisimi wrote: post #52
bunnie wrote: post #42

The bit about "lifestyle business" always being uttered in contempt resonated with me. I always assumed it was just me being overly sensitive to folks expressing concern over my life choices, urging me to snap out of my "mid-life crisis" and do something "useful" like raise money and scale up, or "apply myself" at famous institutions with "real impact".

> In conversation with venture capitalists, you hear the phrase “lifestyle business”, meaning one that is doing nicely and rewarding the people who run it and which isn’t planning for unbounded growth. The words “lifestyle business” are always, of course, uttered in a voice dripping with contempt. This makes me wonder what other type of business is there? How do VCs describe their business, what is their aim? Is it t…

The contemptuous phrase ‘lifestyle business’ is just VCs saying the quiet part out loud. You want to run a company that feeds your family and provides some decent stable jobs, indefinitely? You must be a clown, they think.

The other memorably awful/ macho bullshit line I once personally heard when pitching an idea to a young thruster was: “Who gets fired?” by which the guy meant, whose jobs are on the line if you build your business successfully?

Not all games are zero-sum, I had to tell him.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#86

Post by TeMPOraL »

solidasparagus wrote: post #64
lordnacho wrote: post #29

This is something that has bothered me for a while. When we're discussing capitalism, people seem to get it in their head that it's either what we have now, or you can fuck off to North Korea. How I would characterize my ideal economy is one where the feedback loop works: people can make reasonable guesses about what a product is, how long it will work for, and what its cost is. They can adjust their purchases accord…

That leaves a market gap and then a better company can fill it, unlike centralized economies. Is that happening? I would say yes, at least in some cases. High-quality, direct-to-consumer brands are great. I rely on purchasing guides for many of my buys and those point me to brands whose primary attribute is quality (or cost effectiveness) instead of marketing or historic adoption. That's great for me and great for th…

> That leaves a market gap and then a better company can fill it, unlike centralized economies. Is that happening?

Not really, as the gradient points towards those companies cheapening out or folding. After all, under information asymmetry, companies that sell low-quality crap for mid-level price and lie about their product quality outcompete those selling mid-quality goods for mid-level price honestly.

> I rely on purchasing guides for many of my buys and those point me to brands whose primary attribute is quality (or cost effectiveness) instead of marketing or historic adoption. That's great for me and great for the company!

That's assuming any of those guides aren't paid advertisements, which I believe most are. Even Wirecutter is questionable nowadays. And that's before considering that manufacturers do stuff like giving first high-quality batch of products to reviewers, and then, couple months down the line, swapping components and process for cheaper, low-quality ones, but retaining the SKU.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#87

Post by TeMPOraL »

concordDance wrote: post #62
lordnacho wrote: post #29

This is something that has bothered me for a while. When we're discussing capitalism, people seem to get it in their head that it's either what we have now, or you can fuck off to North Korea. How I would characterize my ideal economy is one where the feedback loop works: people can make reasonable guesses about what a product is, how long it will work for, and what its cost is. They can adjust their purchases accord…

It's very much an information problem. One needs a company that can go do all the research and tell their readers what stuff is well made and good quality. Things like Consumer Reports and Which are supposed to full this niche but they only assess big brands (and are probably under used by people).

Doesn't help you at all when the company waits until the review is done (possibly speeding it up by soliciting independent reviews early), and then swaps out the components and manufacturing process for cheaper, worse one, without changing the product name and the SKU. Big brands have already been caught red-handed doing it; most recent big story I recall was about hard drives.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#88

Post by rocqua »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #75
tmnvix wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A significant portion of the cost is labour, so if you translate that into a local non-US cost does it still seem absurd? I may have misunderstood your point, but I don't think it is a good argument for why running a business fixing things using local labour should be a fantasy. Aside from that, in my view a world where a sofa costs less than one weeks wages is the absurd and unsustainable one. We've adopted an attit…

I think there are two issues that are going in parallel 1. fixing stuff As long as some dude on the other side of the world is willing to make a new sofa and send it to you for cheaper than it is to fix it locally, the idea of fixing it locally will just never take off. You can ban/limit international trade, but then you're just screwing over poor people on the other end of the world for a "feel good" kind of thing 2…

This is indeed hard to solve. But there is need for a solution. Not because I want a good couch for 4 figures, but because we should have more sustainable and goomd couches. Not just for reducing environmental impact, but also for improving quality of life and financials for all but the poorest, by letting them actually get long lasting furniture.

Currently anyone who would produce that needs to compete with IKEA, and somehow needs to convince customers that their furniture will last longer. Currently the best way to do that is hand-cut dovetails and only hardwoods. But there's quality to be had with modern solutions that are muuuch cheaper than the old methods.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#89

Post by stana »

GolfPopper wrote: post #37
monero-xmr wrote: post #21

The wonderful thing about the free market is that consumers have choice. There is indeed a large market for high quality products at a higher price. Old brands become shitty, and new brands pop up. Bernie Sanders, a famous modern-day socialist, is famous for saying we don’t need so many brands of deodorant: https://fortune.com/2024/02/12/too-many-products-bernie-sand... This is where I fundamentally disagree. Only th…

The framing of 'government bureaucrat' vs. 'consumer choice' is at best misleading. As lordnacho pointed out, such a free market only works for consumers when the consumers have real agency. We exist in a state of immense information asymmetry, where vendors have immense advantages over the buyers. (Immense resources focused on highly misleading marketing vs. individual expertise, with attempts by consumers to organi…

Yes. We are heavily manipulated by the media to think that we need 20 brands of deodorant. I think this is the subject of Herman/Chomsky book "Manufacturing Consent" (from a more political angle but I think applies to advertising as well) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

(edited typo)

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#90

Post by jll29 »

Of course from a venture capitalist's perspective, running a lifestyle business is the ultimate failure: not only don't they get their investment back with a nice 40x return, but also they cannot write off the investment as a loss as long as the business keeps going.

This is not a judgment about lifestlye businesses per se, it's just not a match for risk capital regarding funding.

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