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Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

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Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#101

Post by magduf »

grogenaut wrote: post #55
torstenvl wrote: post #21

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 As for physical possessions, they all cost money (in rent!).…

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…

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.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#102

Post by lucideer »

imgabe wrote: post #66
amelius wrote: post #6

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…

> 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 wi…

> 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.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#103

Post by gascan »

amelius wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#104

Post by rurounijones »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #75
Semaphor wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

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…

> 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.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#105

Post by Spooky23 »

amelius wrote: post #6

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…

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.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#106

Post by magduf »

ryandvm wrote: post #12

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.

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?

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#107

Post by dragonwriter »

jerf wrote: post #19
Someguywhatever wrote: post #7

>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. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html T…

"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 thi…

> Is that really it, though?

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.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#108

Post by tyrust »

michaelt wrote: post #84
March_f6 wrote: post #47

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 t…

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…

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 :)).

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#109

Post by amelius »

gascan wrote: post #103
amelius wrote: post #6

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…

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,…

> 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.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#110

Post by adreamingsoul »

amelius wrote: post #6

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…

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.

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