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Parable of the Sofa

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Re: Parable of the Sofa

#141

Post by thrance »

immibis wrote: post #100
thrance wrote: post #76

It's weird how many people here will shout against any (assumed) critic of capitalism. "So you want to live in North Korea???". No, I don't. What I want is a system where we can get quality products that are not manufactured by slaves on the other side of the world, and that didn't require burning 3 bathtubs of gasoline. And our system definitely ain't it.

There are two types of countries observable in the world today: ones that are shit like capitalism, and ones that are shit like North Korea.

Good luck convincing the chinese worker that made your phone of the merits of capitalism.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#142

Post by nakedneuron »

card_zero wrote: post #124
nakedneuron wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality of care is distinct from fitness (gene quality if you will). It seems like offspring without much care is more needy of fitness than K-strategists.

Uh, sort of? Genetic variants are like gambles or conjectures. You can spew a lot of them out, let most of them die, and adapt quickly - that's the low-quality (and modern-sounding) r-strategy. It's not that the variants necessarily lack quality (here meaning fitness), it's just that you aren't banking on it, you aren't investing in them individually.

I don't see the connection to intentionally banking on lower quality across the board here.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#143

Post by PaulHoule »

bunnie wrote: post #97
throwaway2562 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bui…

I think maybe it's the case that the VC's biggest competition for top talent and good ideas are from the innovators that they hope to invest in. If they encourage a thousand lifestyle business bloom, one might turn into a boot-strapped "unicorn" that didn't take their money, so it's in their own interest to make lifestyle businesses seem like a terrible idea. The more talented people are convinced the only way to sta…

Lately I’ve been a bit depressed by startups I respect going down, most of all post.news which was a refined product developed in one and a half years by a moderate-sized team and funded by Scott Galloway and Andreessen Horowitz. The official statement was that it was not growing fast enough to make it as a consumer product:

https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/post-news-the-a16z-funded-...

Though I think there could be more to it than that: (1) the full development of that site would have required cooperation from the news industry that isn’t easy to get and (2) I don’t think they got the word out well because despite star-studded founders and investors and my being interested in that sort of thing (to the extent of doing market research and product analysis for that kind of thing) I never heard about it until the last week…. And that’s for a business much more interesting and innovative that the comparable Threads or Bluesky.

From the outside though it seems like 1.5 years is not a lot of time to exhaust the possibilities of growth for a site like that. (As I see it Reddit took more like 3 years for subreddits to become what we know)

On the other hand there are the zombie unicorns.

I have been watching Temu: I saw the ads, I bought what could be most of my halloween costume this year and two rolls of fox stickers (not sure if that was a mistake or a dark pattern) and a dragon figurine. Almost everything was smaller than I expected and afterwards I got a huge volume of irrelevant but seemingly personalized emails. I think they’re a paper tiger: I can be impressed by their advertising spend but they don’t seem like masters of marketing and algorithms to me.

The of course there is Uber and the other ride hailing and food delivery services. Uber has spent over $25 billion on giving subsidized taxi rides and there is no end in sight. Even at American prices, $25 billion could have built a lot of subway or light rail but Uber won’t leave such a legacy. Or if it does it will be breaking the economics of both chain and independent restaurants who have reshaped their businesses around a delivery business for which the economics doesn’t really work.

The strength of VC is it can make it bets like Temu and Uber but that can be very much a finger trap.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#144

Post by eloisant »

xorax wrote: post #59

IKEA warranty most of its sofa 10 years now. But I doubt any other large furniture store will do the same.

That's the thing, if it's good quality a sofa should last a lifetime and still be usable. Not just 10 years. Of course you'll need to change the leather or do other repairs at times like Tim did, but we have to get out of this mentality of "things have a lifetime of x years then you need to throw them away".

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#145

Post by eloisant »

animaomnium wrote: post #101
thrance wrote: post #76

It's weird how many people here will shout against any (assumed) critic of capitalism. "So you want to live in North Korea???". No, I don't. What I want is a system where we can get quality products that are not manufactured by slaves on the other side of the world, and that didn't require burning 3 bathtubs of gasoline. And our system definitely ain't it.

3tubs × 40gal/tub × $3.50/gal = $420. Wow, you're spending $420 on shipping? How far away are they keeping those slaves?

Shipping doesn't come by car, with gasoline bought at a US gas station.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#146

Post by monero-xmr »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #106
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…

Brands are dead now. We have arbitrary number of deodorant brands, as producers can, and do, create new brands all the time, and recycle or trade old ones. Between this and influx of faux brands for white-label dropshipped goods, there's very little signal in brand labeling today.

Creating new brands all time time is poor for creating consumer loyalty, which is the entire point of a brand. You are missing the whole point!

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#147

Post by keepamovin »

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".

Yeah, and lifestyle businesses are not the ones YC will ever fund. Perhaps the contempt should be reserved, if people deem it's needed, for those venture vultures who feel they know the price of everything, but in actuality know the value of nothing.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#148

Post by thrance »

buffalobuffalo wrote: post #103
thrance wrote: post #76

It's weird how many people here will shout against any (assumed) critic of capitalism. "So you want to live in North Korea???". No, I don't. What I want is a system where we can get quality products that are not manufactured by slaves on the other side of the world, and that didn't require burning 3 bathtubs of gasoline. And our system definitely ain't it.

I agree that such mockery isn't very charitable, but there is an underlying line logic to their thinking. We know that a system like North Korea's is possible. We know a system like ours is possible. We don't have any evidence that any other system is actually possible. Sure you could imagine something better. But such a system could very easily have fatal flaws you didn't imagine. In fact, North Korea started as jus…

I think North Korea was always an authoritarian state from the get go, it was built by the soviets over the ruins of the Korean war. It's just coated in a socialist paintjob just like many other dictatorships.

You're right in that reverting to a previous system will always be a temporary solution, but I don't believe there is any perfect system able to endure until the end of times.

"Do you want to live in North Korea?" should never be used as an argument against any kind of reforms deemed "socialist" by the Right.

As a start, would it be so bad to implement a carbon tax? Tighter control of human rights on foreign imports? Stronger social nets? The list goes on...

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#149

Post by throw0101c »

temporarely wrote: post #68
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…

The political system angle is a red herring, imo. The issue is how is money created, who gets to create it, and what sort of political economy then grows around it. Our system is based on private entities creating money out of thin air and then charging interest on it. Everybody else must service these debts so continual "growth" is baked into the system. IMF (surprisingly) allowed two economists to take a look at an…

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_plan

Doing a quick read: this appears to be the Gold Standard by another name.

Irving Fischer is associated with it, and Fischer was a mentor/inspiration to Milton Friedman, who, amongst other things, gave us:

> The Friedman doctrine, also called shareholder theory, is a normative theory of business ethics advanced by economist Milton Friedman which holds that the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.[1] This shareholder primacy approach views shareholders as the economic engine of the organization and the only group to which the firm is socially responsible. As such, the goal of the firm is to increase its profits and maximize returns to shareholders.[1] Friedman argues that the shareholders can then decide for themselves what social initiatives to take part in, rather than have an executive whom the shareholders appointed explicitly for business purposes decide such matters for them.[2]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

You know, the philosophy that Boeing's management has been following the last decade or so.

The post that you are replying to wrote:

> The thing that seems to characterize the economy now is that businesses will violate your trust in order to make money.

Under the ideology of Fischer and Friedman this is just fine. So I'm not sure putting forward an economic idea ("Chicago plan") by them would really help in preventing/reducing/rolling back 'Late Stage Capitalism' (or whatever) or accelerate its effects more. Probably the latter.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#150

Post by throw0101c »

> This kind of transaction is exactly what modern capitalism is trying to stamp out.

The author is attributing intentionality to something that has no free will or even sentience.

Capitalism and the market economy are simply people who owns things and who make decisions to buy things.

People need/want a certain item, value it to a certain extent, and are willing to part with some number of dollars to receive that value. If a large number of people do not highly value an item (e.g., sofas), then they will not be willing to allocate a large number of dollars towards it, so companies that charge a high dollar amount will not be able to collect them. If you are 'forcing' such companies to exist, then they have to be able to collect monies to not go bankrupt, which basically means you are forcing these high(er) prices onto the public. If the individuals who make up the public are not interested in these high(er)-cost items why should they be forced to pay the money to buy them instead of allocating their dollars to something they do value?

(Of course the prices need to reflect all the costs associated with making them, which is where things like (e.g.) carbon pricing comes in for the environment.)

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