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Parable of the Sofa

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Re: Parable of the Sofa

#151

Post by TeMPOraL »

wruza wrote: post #130
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…

Labor costs don’t rise tenfold with proper wood though. It’s the same wooden board they have to cut and mount. US wood-based markets are notoriously ridiculous.

No, but perhaps labor drops tenfold with switching from proper wood to glue mixed with toilet paper. You throw sheets of that pulp on a machine that laminates them, then throw that on a CNC cutter, add a bag with some screws and glue, a sheet with instructions, and ship the complete flat-pack piece of furniture to customer. Not much human labor involved, and it scales well.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#152

Post by Joeboy »

parpfish wrote: post #136

I always thought “lifestyle business” meant something else. In this article it means “small business that supports the lifestyle of its owner/employees” I thought it meant that it was a business that provided a non-essential usually-trendy “lifestyle goods/accessories” for its customers.

I thought the "lifestyle business" negativity was chiefly around trendy businesses that are only viable due to being covertly subsidized, eg. by family money.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#153

Post by throwawayFinX »

waciki wrote: post #84
TeMPOraL wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it’s broadly accepted that WW2 forced or accelerated inventions such as: jet planes, radios, synthetic rubber, radar, the Jeep, duct tape, nukes.

The cold war -> the space race.

Drone tech/military AI in Ukraine is perhaps a more recent example.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#154

Post by jprete »

PaulHoule wrote: post #143
bunnie wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It occurs to me that one reason we have such a winner-take-all tech economy might be that VCs don't want anything else to exist.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#155

Post by TeMPOraL »

throw0101c wrote: post #150

> 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 val…

> 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.

In the same sense the human brain has no intentionality or sentience - it's simply neurons wired together, trading chemicals and jolting each other for shits and giggles.

Sometimes a high-level process works in a way not obvious from looking at individual parts, or even dependent on them. See also: corporations are effectively alien minds, AIs executing on top of a runtime made of humans.

> 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 (...)

That breaks down in practice, because people have finite time and energy to evaluate and make choices, while sellers have a lot of leeway in plain lying to their customers. As a result, people mostly chose out of what's available, and quietly endure it being shit.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#156

Post by jprete »

throw0101c wrote: post #150

> 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 val…

There's value in identifying what the incentive structure is doing even if it can only be expressed in anthropomorphic terms.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#157

Post by TeMPOraL »

monero-xmr wrote: post #146
TeMPOraL wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Nobody cares about customer loyalty anymore, that's the entire point! Customers still loyal to brands are just marks about to be exploited.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#158

Post by andrepd »

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).

They would be a much more critical and well-functioning part of the economy (performing vital information-discovery and dissemination functions) if advertising was banned or at least severely curtailed.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#159

Post by card_zero »

nakedneuron wrote: post #142
card_zero wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well yeah, there's no potential to cheat the environment by pretending to be fit (as somebody already commented), except mimicry is a way to do that (as also already mentioned). But you can be successfully unconcerned about quality, hoping for returns on rare successes, like with the Chinese Santa snowglobes mentioned elsewhere in the comments.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#160

Post by nakedneuron »

fire_lake wrote: post #82
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.

I asked ChatGPT and it came up with these cases of deception strategies in nature (I wasn't excluding mankind, it thinks man, and probably itself doesn't belong there):

Mimicry/false signaling/bluffing (look more dangerous, look inpalatable, distract attention, attract prey), camouflage (avoid being preyed), brood paratism (cokoos get parenting for free).

None of them involve deceiving partners into pretending higher level of fitness.

Thinking about this it becomes a little clearer why this is.

When you're buying a sofa the seller usually doesn't buy a sofa made by you. So there is an assymmetry. The sofa dealer not only monopolizes most information about the deal (factual quality, costs; competitors are shared information). Also, the dealer can influence what you think. Economies of scale at play both in advertising and production.

Secondly, only if those two sofas you exchanged were to be used to produce the next generation of sofas and only if those newly merged sofa designs would be the sole base of contemporary sofa design would this comparison hold.

Then it becomes clear that if both parties engage in deceiving each other the species as the hypthetical owner of all evolving sofa designs must lose.

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