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China and "our standard of living"

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Re: China and "our standard of living"

#41

Post by zimbabwe »

gaius wrote: post #26
whughes wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you couldn't. You spend $10y on a computer or a cellphone made in Germany, it'll still be completely useless within a decade or two. Tech is different .

But that isn't true. 10 years ago were you having less fun on the original Playstation than you have on a PS3 now? What about 10 years before that on the Sega Megadrive? The upgrade treadmill is just fashion and marketing.

Wow, Gaius, somebody's downvoting every one of your posts.

There's a big movement towards emulators among the gamer scene I'm able to observe, because a lot of gamers are realizing that games haven't become fundamentally better in the last decade. Yesterday evening at a friend's, the Wii was forsaken for a Genesis; it's surprising how entertaining those games still are, because we've been conditioned to think you can't have fun without being cutting-edge.

Re: China and "our standard of living"

#42

Post by zimbabwe »

jfoutz wrote: post #37
gaius wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that isn't true. 10 years ago were you having less fun on the original Playstation than you have on a PS3 now? What about 10 years before that on the Sega Megadrive? The upgrade treadmill is just fashion and marketing.

Entertainment competition goes up. More tv, more books, more movies, more games, more music. I don't think i can objectively quantify fun had in a game 10 years ago or a game now. However, I think we can agree that how people spend their leisure time is a pretty good indicator of how much fun activity X is. In the early 80's movies were more fun than video games for just about everybody. Now, you see moms playing gam…

That's because video game consoles are more popular, and they've become more accepted by the media.

30 years ago, my father and his brothers played Atari. I grew up with parents that both understood video games, at least somewhat. There's nothing objective about the way we view video games, or any other form of media.

For instance: I primarily look for media with some sort of emotional power, which is all-but-impossible to find in video games. I can think of perhaps five or six video games that had any emotional impact on me. I can name far more movies that have had a similar impact. My secondary search is for polish, and there movies also have an edge over modern games. The things I look for aren't what you look for, though - they're subjective. I remember having much more fun on an SNES than I did with, say, the Xbox. Your milage varies.

Re: China and "our standard of living"

#43

Post by timr »

silentbicycle wrote: post #35
jfoutz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pop culture disagrees. 22 years ago, Dark Helmet: Out of order? FUCK! Even in the future, nothing works! I'd bet when you think of old stuff, you think of a singer sewing machine or a '57 chevy, stuff that withstood the test of time. well the world was full of crap then too, most of it broke and got thrown away. My toys are more than 20 years old. they are cheap plastic. they aren't even painted, just a few sucky sti…

Indeed. It's easy to think that things were manufactured better in the good old days (whenever that was) when anything that didn't survive is out of sight and therefore out of mind. While it's quite possible that several specific things were manufactured objectively better at some point in the past, basing judgments about the past solely on nostalgia and the few pieces that are still holding up well is not the founda…

Small problem with this logic: twenty-two years ago was 1987. It's not as if we weren't importing cheap crap from China by the truckload in the 1980s.

If you want to make a valid comparison, the "good old days", for the purposes of this question, are probably before the 1960s. I'm not saying that there isn't some confirmation bias going on in the OP, but it's wrong to say that products were bad in 1987, and that therefore products aren't getting worse over a longer window of time.

Re: China and "our standard of living"

#44

Post by gaius »

zimbabwe wrote: post #41
gaius wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that isn't true. 10 years ago were you having less fun on the original Playstation than you have on a PS3 now? What about 10 years before that on the Sega Megadrive? The upgrade treadmill is just fashion and marketing.

Wow, Gaius, somebody's downvoting every one of your posts. There's a big movement towards emulators among the gamer scene I'm able to observe, because a lot of gamers are realizing that games haven't become fundamentally better in the last decade. Yesterday evening at a friend's, the Wii was forsaken for a Genesis; it's surprising how entertaining those games still are, because we've been conditioned to think you can…

Touched a nerve I guess. Heck, I got 4000+ points, I'll call it like I see it.

You're right, we are conditioned to value the wrong things. The same game with more polygons is the same game.

Re: China and "our standard of living"

#45

Post by sengan »

jfoutz wrote: post #31
cmars232 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap in price, but also quality. The crap we buy today feels like garbage compared to 20 years ago. Maybe I'm getting old, but consumer products today seem watered down and made of the weakest thinnest plastic that the masses will put up with. This applies to consumer electronics, appliances, kid's toys, you name it.

Pop culture disagrees. 22 years ago, Dark Helmet: Out of order? FUCK! Even in the future, nothing works! I'd bet when you think of old stuff, you think of a singer sewing machine or a '57 chevy, stuff that withstood the test of time. well the world was full of crap then too, most of it broke and got thrown away. My toys are more than 20 years old. they are cheap plastic. they aren't even painted, just a few sucky sti…

My Atari ST still works. Never needed a repair. Its Syquest harddrive still works.

The WD harddrive I bought last year crashed... My 3 year old mac needed a repair.

Yes, things run hotter, and faster, and are smaller, and whatever. But they are less reliable.

Re: China and "our standard of living"

#46

Post by Periodic »

sengan wrote: post #45
jfoutz wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pop culture disagrees. 22 years ago, Dark Helmet: Out of order? FUCK! Even in the future, nothing works! I'd bet when you think of old stuff, you think of a singer sewing machine or a '57 chevy, stuff that withstood the test of time. well the world was full of crap then too, most of it broke and got thrown away. My toys are more than 20 years old. they are cheap plastic. they aren't even painted, just a few sucky sti…

My Atari ST still works. Never needed a repair. Its Syquest harddrive still works. The WD harddrive I bought last year crashed... My 3 year old mac needed a repair. Yes, things run hotter, and faster, and are smaller, and whatever. But they are less reliable.

How many other things did you have that broke? Oh, you probably don't remember them because they weren't around very long and don't evoke strong happy memories.

You can't rebut an argument about lack of data and selective memory with anecdotes.

Re: China and "our standard of living"

#47

Post by Periodic »

gaius wrote: post #20
axod wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect mainly because in the world of tech, things only have a life of maybe 2 years before they're considered 'old'/'obsolete'/'stupid looking' etc. Memory, megapixels, storage, screen, speed etc are all advancing so quickly that it doesn't make any sense to bother making something that'll last beyond a few years. It would however be cool and responsible to make these devices more environmentally friendly, but tha…

We (the West) get a LOT of stuff from China. On a Chinese-made frying pan, for example, the handle is broken in a year, the non-stick coating comes off in a few washes. My (American-made) cast-iron skillet, on the other hand, cost more but I'll never need another. Heck, my grandkids, if I ever have any, could probably still use it...

I think we make the mistake of thinking everything made in China is cheap. You might be surprised to find out that some expensive and quality items are made in China. Somehow we have come to expect everything made in China to be cheap, though it is more a result of American companies looking for cheaper goods to advertise on the shelf because consumers are not qualified to make an informed decision.

The fact is, any labor will be cheaper in China than in the US. This could be factory garment assemblers or traditional metal workers. The cost of living is so much lower over there that even the best costs less from China than from the US.

Re: China and "our standard of living"

#48

Post by neilk »

garply wrote: post #39
biohacker42 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well not quite spot on. It did mention that these people were willing to do what ever to get away from the hellish alternative they were born into. But if you blinked you missed it, you missed the most important point: People are doing this voluntarily. Rumors of forced labor are greatly exaggerated. Perhaps somewhere in Burma but in China and India and other places, people do this hard work because the alternative i…

Thank you for making this point. This happens to be the position on the economic ladder where these people are. A few people are higher, most people are at a level equal or lower to this. In some ways I feel like the tone pieces like this take when discussing Chinese life is condescending. For some people this is just 'work.' Consider using this kind of pity to talk about American blue collar workers - does it seem a…

It kind of does, when you consider that we're forcing local workers to compete with people who are just desperate to get out of the same crappy apartment with 12 other relatives.

Do I owe the local worker a living? Of course not. But we both pay taxes to the same government, and he is getting shafted due to China's MFN status, and I as a professional who can afford iPhones am getting an awesome deal.

Re: China and "our standard of living"

#49

Post by philwelch »

mrshoe wrote: post #12

This exposes the truism that there is always a standard of living continuum in society. In a different era there were Kings and Lords and Peasants. Now we have Europeans and Americans and Chinese and Indians. If globalization can succeed at improving the standard of living for those at the bottom of the continuum, it will have to be at the expense of those at the top. It's a zero sum game.

Actually, globalization does improve the standard of living for those at the bottom, to the benefit of those on top. People work in sweatshops (which sucks from the point of view of rich Westerners), but they voluntarily chose to do so because it was an improvement on their previous standard of living. So their standard of living improves, and so does the standard of living for those of us who buy manufactured goods at lower prices.

Re: China and "our standard of living"

#50

Post by mrshoe »

zimbabwe wrote: post #23
mrshoe wrote: post #12

This exposes the truism that there is always a standard of living continuum in society. In a different era there were Kings and Lords and Peasants. Now we have Europeans and Americans and Chinese and Indians. If globalization can succeed at improving the standard of living for those at the bottom of the continuum, it will have to be at the expense of those at the top. It's a zero sum game.

How is it zero sum? I'd make you a bet that right now, more people are living happily than ever did in the past. The bar constantly rises.

It's zero sum at any given moment, but you are correct that the sum constantly increases. It's similar to the stock market in that way.
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