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Parable of the Sofa

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Re: Parable of the Sofa

#211

Post by TeMPOraL »

nakedneuron wrote: post #123
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…

I think immediacy is key here. A bad sofa that falls apart after five years of use is a delayed loss (that fallacy has to have be discovered already). A small investment, prospects of gambling it and the inability to see through seem to play a role so lottery (poor people's tax) comes to mind. > pace of fraud Isn't it if the stakes are high more eyes are watching and thus quality control works (better)? I'm at a loss…

What I meant by pace of fraud: think of US military R&D around World War II and the Cold War, vs. now., and whether they translate into anything actually useful for the soldiers in the field. What I think is a big part of the difference is that back then, US was fighting with peer powers and it was possible for it to lose. Over time, it transitioned to only fighting wars with much weaker opponents - wars with no "lose" condition, where the only variable is how much money the US is going to spend on any particular conflict before getting bored and recalling soldiers home. The latter kind of conflict doesn't create much of pressure to deliver working solutions, or even test bed to verify them.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#212

Post by nakedneuron »

coldtea wrote: post #208
nakedneuron wrote: post #207

Has anybody made the same observation? : Philosophy seems to be concerned with furniture a lot. I'm compiling a list of examples I encountered where in a philosophical (sometimes not philosophical) context someone brings up the table (rarer so the chair) as an instance of a physical thing. I started compiling this list when I was convinced this is a thing. Further examples (book citations, links) greatly encouraged i…

> I have an idea of why this is. Because they are convenient examples of things everybody in their audience has seen and knows about, and are quite simple too? One could use dogs for example, to make somebody understand the Platonic Ideas (in this case, dogness), but they have a lot more aspects and variables than tables (even questions about unique personality and soul might creep in, whereas for tables it wont).

While this is true, there are billions of convenient examples everybody knows. Also there are things that have a lot less variables than a table.

I'm not convinced. (I don't thing so.)

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#213

Post by Anon1096 »

istultus wrote: post #171

Let me posit an ad-hoc theory built on our anchoring bias in regards to price and our inability to think in terms of inflation/hyperbolic discounting: tl;dr - Once a cheap alternative is on the market, us frugal folks can't imagine paying for what was once the default and only option, distorting our understanding of what constitutes good quality * He says buying a new sofa of the same quality today would cost upwards…

I've had my IKEA sofa for close to a decade, saying you need to change it every 5 years is not even close to true. There's a perception that more expensive=will last longer, but it just doesn't hold out in reality. Oftentimes the mass market product really is just a solid product.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#214

Post by temporarely »

throw0101c wrote: post #149
temporarely wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 respon…

There is an abstract in the paper which is more authoritative than wikipedia. You should read the paper. Also whatever Friedman said or did is entirely irrelevant to the so-called Chicago Plan - it's not called the Friedman plan after all :

At the height of the Great Depression a number of leading U.S. economists advanced a proposal for monetary reform that became known as the Chicago Plan. It envisaged the separation of the monetary and credit functions of the banking system, by requiring 100% reserve backing for deposits. Irving Fisher (1936) claimed the following advantages for this plan:

(1) Much better control of a major source of business cycle fluctuations, sudden increases and contractions of bank credit and of the supply of bank-created money.

(2) Complete elimination of bank runs.

(3) Dramatic reduction of the (net) public debt.

(4) Dramatic reduction of private debt, as money creation no longer requires simultaneous debt creation.

We study these claims by embedding a comprehensive and carefully calibrated model of the banking system in a DSGE model of the U.S. economy. We find support for all four of Fisher's claims. Furthermore, output gains approach 10 percent, and steady state inflation can drop to zero without posing problems for the conduct of monetary policy.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#215

Post by [deleted] »

contrarian1234 wrote: post #51

If you get out of the US bubble, the prices are simply insane fix a sofa: it's equivalent to a month's salary/stipend here in Asia. 200 bowls of noodle (if it's a cheap noodle then it's more like 500) new sofa: "new leather sofas of the “not flat-packed sawdust and glue” variety quickly get into five figures" So like a year's worth of stipend/expenses Could be that just the US dollar is crazy - but until the economic…

[deleted]

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#216

Post by tristor »

thrance wrote: post #141
immibis wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s funny you say that, because the primary beneficiaries of capitalism have been exactly those workers over the past four decades. While not good for American workers, off-shoring and outsourcing have lifted over a billion people out of poverty since the 1980s.

China had the fastest growing middle class in the world, so much so, that as a buying market they’re absorbing the entire stock of many categories of high quality or luxury goods that are preferred by the middle class.

The Chinese worker making my phone may hate their job for similar or different reasons than the investment banker, both who famously have jumped from buildings due to work stress, both famously faces of capitalism. But, that Chinese worker is now able to provide for their family including their education and onward advancement in a way that wasn’t possible before.

Since the 1980s China has been speed running the Industrial Revolution, with massive cities forming of people who were almost entirely in rural areas previously in abject poverty and doing subsistence agriculture, all of whom now work jobs that have elevated them out of that poverty.

You can say a lot of truthful negative things about capitalism but pointing to manufacturing jobs in China is completely missing the thread.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#217

Post by HenriTEL »

rocqua wrote: post #88
contrarian1234 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is indeed hard to solve. But there is need for a solution. Not because I want a good couch for 4 figures, but because we should have more sustainable and goomd couches. Not just for reducing environmental impact, but also for improving quality of life and financials for all but the poorest, by letting them actually get long lasting furniture. Currently anyone who would produce that needs to compete with IKEA, an…

Ikea already understood that there is a market for this kind of goods. They sell a few hardwood furnitures which are not crazy expensive.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#218

Post by photon_lines »

beowulfey wrote: post #179
Micoloth wrote: post #110

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…

The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently. Small "lifestyle" businesses do not operate under this principle and encourage reuse and renewal. They represent opposing philosophies. Whether you can "just" get a sofa from big business or not, that i…

'The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently.' - Sorry to interject here, but this is extremely wrong and nowhere did I find this take-away from the posted article. There are massive businesses that do sell extremely high-quality products - in fact, Japan went through a transition where their businesses went from producing absolute junk (i.e. just like the stuff we import from China today) to producing extremely high quality products (see Juran, Crosby, and cost of quality measures etc...). The key point of the article is that consumers today choose low-priced products since the market gives it to them. If you allow a person to buy a $800 sofa which looks great on the outside and is made in China albeit with extremely low quality materials vs. a sofa which looks almost exactly the same but is priced at $1500 but is of much higher quality - most consumers will obviously choose the $800 dollar sofa vs the $1500 since that's how the free-market functions. Is this rational though?

Well - the consumer will need to buy 4 of the $800 dollar sofas just from having to replace them throughout a 20 year period vs. having the ability to buy one (the $1500) one but that's not obvious to the consumer and it's not clear how to even make this type of judgment. Which sofa really costs the most to you given the information I just provided? The high-quality $1500 one or the $800 dollar one? To a rational person having all of the above information - the more costly one is cheaper - but to an average consumer not having this information the clearly cheaply made product is the better choice. People also are prone to more short-term thinking in many societies which also doesn't help things but the takeaway in general which you posted there is very wrong: mass production and scale usually result in higher-quality products not lower quality ones.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#219

Post by borski »

photon_lines wrote: post #218
beowulfey wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently. Small "lifestyle" businesses do not operate under this principle and encourage reuse and renewal. They represent opposing philosophies. Whether you can "just" get a sofa from big business or not, that i…

'The point of the article is that the big business model is "continued growth", which depends on constantly increasing sales, which means products necessarily get shittier so that they must be replaced more frequently.' - Sorry to interject here, but this is extremely wrong and nowhere did I find this take-away from the posted article. There are massive businesses that do sell extremely high-quality products - in fac…

The problem is that sofas haven’t come down significantly in price. These shittier products aren’t actually much cheaper than, for example, a custom made sofa. I know this because I just bought a custom made sofa.

But the quality is incomparable.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#220

Post by nakedneuron »

card_zero wrote: post #166
nakedneuron wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you don't mind another Wikipedia page, there's the (biology) theory of honest and dishonest signals in general: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_theory

I don't mind at all. Thanks for sharing, it looks like a very interesting read!
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