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

A responsible tax system could accomplish the same without causing people to pay 100x the value of a good product over their lifetime.

The substitution of individual ownership for a communal one in which individuals retain a stake - a real community, or at a larger scale, a democracy - is not inherently bad. The problem with our recent trend is that we aren't getting communal ownership in return; we're getting nothing but convenience.

Silicon Valley has morphed and commercialized the term "sharing". You aren't "sharing" when you use Uber or AirBnB; you aren't pooling resources when you use Netflix or Amazon Books. You're renting. You're renting from a centralized company which outsources the generation of actual value to others, and pays them as little as possible. You aren't shifting your dependence from yourself to a community, but from yourself to a company that wants nothing more than to make money.

"Our fridges are more power efficient!"

"Ours have advanced health monitoring!"

"We have the greenest recycling program!"

Fridge?

And I have three actually. One runs on propane, one standard power and one is a deep freeze, like what one would put in a garage.

All were cheap, all work well, all take modest to very liw resources to run.

The gas powered one works no matter what. That has saved me a time or two when there was no power. I may well get another. It is insane cheap to use.

Anyone selling me something that is planned to break gets the following:

Added to avoid list.

The product gets hacked wher it is posdible to untether it and or remedy the failure.

I tell others.

Now I realize all of that is contrary and toxic to many business models today. I rarely buy new.

I grew up poor, and had time which I invested in skills. Those have paid me off many, many times over.

I also think maximizing what has been produced makes good jobs, is better, with some qualifiers, for the environment, increases personal agency, lowers personal risk and cost.

Among many other good things.

Service models can make sense. For many basics, they just do not make sense.

I would much prefer we distribute repair, support modifications, upgrades and such across many enterprises as we used to do.

TV's were a good example. I grew up learning to repair them. Used to do it for date money. Offered in home service too.

Cars remain a good example. John Deere is the other extreme.

A blanket, "this way is good" makes little sense to me.

Would much rather have many local relationships than the same with big enterprises. More options, and if I do work, I get the immediate returns of lowered cost and risk.

In the past, you had what you purchased, what was in stock at the video rental place, and what you could VCR-program or catch live on maybe a couple dozen TV channels. Nowadays, bajillions of TV shows and movies are instantly available, such that people don't even have time to watch everything interesting that's available.

I would venture to say that more shows & movies are being created now than in the past, and a lot of them are quite good (probably more quality from series than movies, though).

The value of any individual piece of decent quality media has gone down, given the oversupply. However, there will always be individual pieces of media that are held in importance to a viewer, and those will want to be preserved in some form. Many with a naive assumption that their favorite piece will always be instantly streamable (legally) will certainly have a cold reckoning at some point.