181–190 of 566 posts
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In other words, monopoly.
Nothing in the parent comment indicates or requires a monopoly. At all.
We’ll have ovens and thermostats that you set with your voice, and a toilet and bathroom that periodically give you the equivalent of a medical check-up.
Until we are required to have such things, I do not care that I have the option. I have a Nest, I have Hue lights, I've gone to the trouble of hacking together a HomeKit server that can talk to the cameras. You know what? All of that shit could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn't care much. Oh, I was all excited when I got the gear, it's handy, and I would be inconvenienced by the disappearance. But the novelty of that stuff wore off fast for me, and I don't consider it a requirement in my life.
And I think that's key: as long as we can do without your subscription whatever, the author's hand-wringing is a bit overdone.
Amazon’s Kindle and other methods of online reading have revolutionized how Americans consume text. Fifteen years ago, people typically owned the books and magazines they were reading. Much less so now. The statements about books are not accurate. Ebook sales are still just a fraction of print sales in many genres - NPD data indicates ebooks are less than 20% of total unit sales for nonfiction, children, and young ad…
Anecdotal, but every reader I know (including me) flirted with ebooks and then switched back to paper. For me, it’s less strain on my eyes, it always works even without electricity, I can lend it out to friends easily, and I like to expand the aesthetic of my bookshelf. I’m also more likely to reread all or part of a physical book. Ebooks are simply inferior.
All that said, I've also returned to paper for essentially anything I anticipate wanting to take more than a few notes in, or really referring back to at all.
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 would much rather they build an Appliance that were design to last 10+ years, and with an warranty of 10 years for a higher price. Such design would means the company has an incentive for the fridge not to break in the 10 years, and extremely simple to fix within the 10 years. There are things that I would like to buy for life. Kitchenwares, Desk, etc. There are things that are consumable and may be being a service…
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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.
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. One can be a Chicken Little to the point that I would ask, why drive at all? It's just not worth the risk. A sixteen-year-old car has airbags and designed-in crumple zones. It ain't no 2019 Volvo, but "kill you in a crash that a new one will let you walk away from" is rid…
The risks of injury in an automobile accident should absolutely weigh into the calculus of car ownership. Especially considering the staggering amount of progress made in vehicle safety in the past 10 years. If a brand new Camry saves you from a single ER visit that you would have had driving an 2008 Camry, then it's already paid for itself.
It's not really any different from buying a fancy $150 toothbrush that does a better job at preventing cavities, or any of the many other purchases that statistically save you money in the long-term.
The most bizarre statement is when he says "The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system." It's pretty obvious to me that a deliberate and intentional effort has been made to ensure that only people who own a lot of property have any voice in the system; to flip that relationship around and make it a moral statement is frankly a little scary. People really think like this?
Look, what Americans need is to spend more time with their friends, their children, their spouses, their families. Not to spend time collecting fancy cars or other hollow pursuits. This is a lunatic point of view.
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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.
Fear monger. A 2002 car still has safety features such as airbags, seatbelts, anti-lock brakes that a 2018 will also have.
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Or maybe it's because landlords know that it doesn't matter how long something is supposed to last in the hands of someone who has no willingness or incentive to preserve it
You have two options: pay a premium for a durable fridge that needs less/no maintenance or send out your staff to perform regular maintenance. It's more or less what the tenant is paying for when you rent your appliances.
This is beyond ridiculous. The crux of the article is: > Each of these changes is beneficial, yet I worry that Americans are, slowly but surely, losing their connection to the idea of private ownership. The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of…
You're correct, but it does at least give you some agency independent of the system. If you own a DRM-free mp3, you can listen to that song every day for the rest of your life if you want to. Whereas if you just have a Spotify subscription, a record company can decide to pull the track whenever they please (which usually happens across all streaming services at once), and then it's just gone.
The tradeoffs are debatable, but they exist.