261–270 of 396 posts
> I'll be writing about those next. I doubt it, you didn't write about this! You prompted it and signed your name to it.
How can you tell?
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A cheap backpack ended up being the most expensive backpack I have ever owned. In 2004 I was very young and all my income came from summer jobs, so I got a backpack from Walmart. It was one of their nicer models, had a lot of features and looked pretty good. IIRC it cost $20. I had worked all summer to save for an MP3 player, and 2 months after getting that backpack I getting off a bus, when I realized there was alre…
I spent ~$400 on a Deuter baby/toddler backpack two years ago and it still works. Beautiful thing.
While I personally find this kind of thing extremely annoying, to me, the main problem is the _difficulty_ of determining quality. The Donut media guys did a (relatively unscientific) video comparing a whole bunch of products from the 50s to modern day across several price points. What they found was that the things that "looked" the same now were simultaneously worse and also much cheaper. They also found that, if i…
That's a worthwhile observation. It's good that there are lower-quality alternatives available. It means that people who couldn't in the past afford something at all, are now more likely to have some path to getting it. And even if you could afford the higher quality, you may not need it anyway. I've got a number of tools in my workshop that I'll probably use less than 10 times ever. I have no need of a high-quality…
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I don’t see why that would be proof of being written by a LLM. It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing, hammering the message home by repetition of blows.
"Stylistic writing" that just happens to perfectly match Claude's current default codeslopped output style, and the exact same style as the majority of posts that have made it onto the front page of HN in recent months. Just endless streams of short punchy sentences that are really just glorified bulleted lists with no substance to them. Let's quit the gaslighting and acknowledge that no human actually writes this wa…
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"a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70). That's a lot less than $17. Add $1.28 To double check, in 1983 a hambu…
Like at a diner, not at the cheapest possible place that existed.
Diners like the one portrayed in The Olympia Restaurant sketches on SNL were cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puJePACBoIo
Others now are far more than $18.
My first >$20 burger dinner was in 1997. That's >$41.15 now.
EDIT: Ahh, here - price for a hamburger in the staffed dining car of a passenger train from Houston to Chicago, 1972, was $2, from https://archive.org/details/spacecity03spac_44/mode/2up?q=%2... while $3 gets you "grey sole with soup, salad, rolls, vegetables, and dessert." The author suggests the hamburger price is high, as an inducement "to observe formalities."
$2 then is $15.80 now. Fries not included.
At https://archive.org/details/neworleansunderg0000coll/mode/2u... we read that an excellent hamburger at Ruby Red's in New Orleans cost $1.25 in 1970, which is $10.64 now. While at Bud's Broiler hamburgers run from $0.40 to $0.60. https://archive.org/details/neworleansunderg0000coll/page/22...
So I find it hard to believe most people back in 1970 were paying the equivalent of $17 for a burger and fries.
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How can you tell?
Its got this ... cadence: > Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct. > That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is t…
Why do we allow megacorporations to exist at all?
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That is what I miss the most from the old stores. I knew when I went to Sears I'd get a good enough thing. I could often find the exact same thing under a different name for less elsewhere if I looked (Sears made no secret that their house brands were someone else's product with the Sears name on it). I knew I could often find better if I looked. However I could trust that it was a good enough product for my needs an…
This is me with Costco. They're selective with what they stock, their margins are capped so I know I'm not getting fleeced buying abject junk. I have bought stuff from them based on trust of the store and not knowledge of the product. It's the opposite of amazon, where not only do I have no trust in anything, everything feels adverserial. If I'm not vigilant, I will get hosed. I find it extremely unpleasant.
I almost bought my Bosche dishwasher from them last year, because it was a bit cheaper than getting it at lowes. And then I noticed buried in the detail that the reason for that was it didn't have an auto-open drying feature that was one of the main reasons I was buying the dishwasher.
I guess this is kind of the opposite side of it though. I had done a bunch of research, and if I'd wanted to skip that and just buy the dishwasher at costco I would have ended up with a very good option at a reasonable price, even if it didn't have every feature possible, and costco would have done the work of eliminating all the cheap builder-grade junk for me.
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> They also found that, if inflation adjusted, you get could, in most categories, the same or better quality for the same price. I argue you must evaluate against median purchasing power; it accounts for inflation and (lack of) wage increases. Comments from your linked video: > The problem with the “adjusted for inflation” argument is that it does not factor in buying power. The increase in wages has risen at out hal…
Purchasing power is probably a better metric in a vacuum, but it's hard to analyze accurately For example, the comment you're citing is claiming that because minimum wage has increased only 3x over the same period of time in which inflation has eroded the relative value of a dollar by 6x, that wages overall have increased at half the rate of inflation. But minimum wage is a measurement of a minimum, while inflation i…
What I’d be interested to understand is whether changes to materials (be that buildings or home appliances) has caused an increase in the cost to manufacturer.
I’d wager most things have gotten cheaper to produce these days because the same improvements in technology that can be integrated into the product also applies to technology used to reduce the cost to manufacturer. Plus if wages are below inflation then any labour costs would have declined (relatively speaking) in that time too.