111–120 of 357 posts
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?
r/K selection is about the tradeoff between quantity and quality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory
When I discovered a polity full of SMEs and resilient lifestyle businesses, I immigrated here.
Some vague thoughts from a few decades of trying to figure out specifically why it seems to work so much better than the Old Country:
Resilient family farms: that is indeed hefty regulation, as well as willingness to forgo the last percentage point or two of economic efficiency.
Resilient lifestyle businesses: the apprenticeship system plays some role here, and I bet the same consideration to efficiency applies?
I guess part of it depends upon who's making the investment decisions:
- Owners are often happy to shave off a few percentage points in favour of intangible benefits.
- Workers (here, the term includes outside management) are less happy, as they're agents, and a few points for the owner may be 20-50% of the agents' vig.
- Finance types run at full efficiency or nothing, as their entire business is built around picking up nickels in front of the steamroller, you can't expect them to leave nickels around that are only in the path of tricycles.
Final thought: if you want a lot of new businesses, fast, you're going to get "late capitalism" and the goods & services equivalent of row crops.
If you've had your economy for some time and are just fiddling at the edges for growth, you can have a bunch of lifestyle businesses, the goods & services equivalent of orchards.
(I once lived in a neighbourhood in the Old Country that still had corner stores, because it was older than the automobile, and although "late capitalism" prevents corner stores from arising in new neighbourhoods it's more or less neutral towards existing ones)
EDIT: for exact identities, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39861369 and my comment history more generally, or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry#Personal_life_a...
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=reuJ8yVCgSM (2017)
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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…
Every time I read takes like this I think people forget why big brands exist? Small business (or “lifestyle business”) vs big brand is often framed about being high quality vs cheap price, because in practice it often is. But in theory the two things are completely unrelated. Yes fixing stuff is good for the planet. But big brands could offer customer service just fine if people wanted it. Small business vs big brand…
So, how often do you eat at McDo?
(whose entire value proposition is "just" get some calories, simply and predictably)
One good way is to pay attention to the details, learn how things are made (YouTube helps with this!) and not be impressed by shitty work, in general. I buy plenty of MDF-built products but I also know the difference. There are just so many people who have no idea.
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…
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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.
> I’m not smart enough to figure out what the regulatory regime is that would ban most of what private-equity does and tilt the playing field in favor of resilient lifestyle businesses. When I discovered a polity full of SMEs and resilient lifestyle businesses, I immigrated here. Some vague thoughts from a few decades of trying to figure out specifically why it seems to work so much better than the Old Country: Resil…
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Doesn't remove the fact that we had good sofas 40 years ago. Perhaps capitalism is only good while it's kept in check by the menace of communism.
He paid somewhere between 3 and 4 thousand dollars for that couch in 1999, which is probably over $6k in today's money. Sure a $999 leather couch from Ikea may not be the greatest, but is it really so impossible to get a good quality leather couch for $6500 today? That sounds ridiculous to me actually, I'm certain that you could find many great options at that price. And I don't believe that mere availability of chea…
Today, buying a couch and chair on sale for $6300 sounds like a lot of money, but I imagine I'd need to budget at least as much. Not from the same company though, they now sell shit couches for $2500 and people complain the quality is garbage and capitalism is failing. Or.... maybe you are just a cheap SOB.
I still have the same couch and chair, now super comfy, though it took years to break in. Leather is in excellent condition.