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Parable of the Sofa

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Re: Parable of the Sofa

#51

Post by contrarian1234 »

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 disbalances of the world doesn't equilibrate (that's on a centenial scale), it's never going to make sense to fix a sofa

"But I’d sure vote for a political party that convinced me it was trying to achieve that"

The only way you can achieve this is by going full North Korea and self sufficient. There is no real upside to this fantasy

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#52

Post by verisimi »

bunnie wrote: post #42

The bit about "lifestyle business" always being uttered in contempt resonated with me. I always assumed it was just me being overly sensitive to folks expressing concern over my life choices, urging me to snap out of my "mid-life crisis" and do something "useful" like raise money and scale up, or "apply myself" at famous institutions with "real impact".

> In conversation with venture capitalists, you hear the phrase “lifestyle business”, meaning one that is doing nicely and rewarding the people who run it and which isn’t planning for unbounded growth. The words “lifestyle business” are always, of course, uttered in a voice dripping with contempt.

This makes me wonder what other type of business is there? How do VCs describe their business, what is their aim? Is it to be 'king of the world'? Have more money than god? Have power to control others?

If that's it, lifestyle businesses sound much more human. Who wants to pretend to be god, rather than being oneself?

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#53

Post by dmurray »

monero-xmr wrote: post #21

The wonderful thing about the free market is that consumers have choice. There is indeed a large market for high quality products at a higher price. Old brands become shitty, and new brands pop up. Bernie Sanders, a famous modern-day socialist, is famous for saying we don’t need so many brands of deodorant: https://fortune.com/2024/02/12/too-many-products-bernie-sand... This is where I fundamentally disagree. Only th…

At some point a politician does have to make a decision on these things.

The decision won't look like "should anyone who introduces an additional brand of deodorant be thrown in prison?" but more like "should we give a tax break to this deodorant company here, or to that aerospace company there?" Or "should deodorant imports from China be treated as healthcare products, at a 15% tariff, or cosmetics, which get a 30% tariff?"

When making that decision, you need to take into account whether your citizens already have adequate suppliers of deodorant and cruise missiles.

You might not like this situation, and have an idealistic answer like "We shouldn't have tax breaks for anyone, there should be a flat corporate tax of X%", but you're not going to get that genie back into the bottle.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#54

Post by CJefferson »

refulgentis wrote: post #32
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…

This sort of thing is satisfying to write and even more satisfying to read and nod along to. But it's paper-thin histrionics. "an ad said I'd value something and I didn't" and "I didn't read the license agreement" are trans-mutated into "abuse" that should obviously be illegal, and somehow become grist for all sorts of grand invocations, GDP, capitalism, MBAs, North Korea... You're free to check what joins your sofa…

How do I check what joins a sofa has? Companies won’t tell me, and don’t have to tell me. I can’t start tearing apart sofas in the showroom.

I’d love a world where companies had to simply, and truthfully, explain how their products were built, maybe even do some standard testing and tell me how long it’s likely to last.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#55

Post by Terr_ »

lordnacho wrote: post #38
refulgentis wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of thing is satisfying to write and even more satisfying to read and nod along to. But it's paper-thin histrionics. "an ad said I'd value something and I didn't" and "I didn't read the license agreement" are trans-mutated into "abuse" that should obviously be illegal, and somehow become grist for all sorts of grand invocations, GDP, capitalism, MBAs, North Korea... You're free to check what joins your sofa…

There's always someone who writes the rebuttal you're writing here. I used to do it all the time as well. It's always the same rebuttal, "why don't you just check this then", along with "well all the information is out there". In isolation, it is true. You could spend a day going out on the internet to try to learn what kinds of join your sofa might have. I suspect you would never even have considered the problem, an…

"Look, all you need to do is educate yourself a bit on the engineering details of every individual kind of durable good that you will ever purchase..."

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#56

Post by TeMPOraL »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #23
sokoloff wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High quality furniture is still being made and sold, just not for $300 for a couch. Cheap shit is going to be cheap shit. Growing up, furniture was something that was expensive, carefully shopped for, and hand delivered fully assembled. I see the availability of cheap (to make and to transport) furniture as filling a gap in the market previously not addressed, but if you’re in a position to buy a piece you’d like to…

Yeah... maybe, theoretically you could assess if the expensive furniture was crap or not but in practice it's problematic, so you pay for some expensive crap. Also the thing is that IKEA hollowed out the middle market, there is only cheap crap, medium crap but still crap, expensive crap that masquerades as expensive quality, and expensive quality. The sofa that the author bought was not expensive quality, it was medi…

It's not Denmark-specific. Hollowing out the middle has happened across every product and service class everywhere in the west. It's a broad problem, in no way limited to sofas.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#57

Post by tmnvix »

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…

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 attitude of being incredibly entitled to cheap tat and that needs to stop.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#58

Post by eastbound »

rPlayer6554 wrote: post #49

How is "modern capitalism" to blame? Modern capitalism allowed a small business to sell you the higher quality option, and you were able to direct your purchasing power to the product you wanted. If you convince more consumers to do the same (like you are) big brands will loose money and change. That's capitalism. The best term I can come up with to describe the phenomenon you dislike is _modern consumerism_ (althoug…

The capitalist part is that the new options aren’t even cheaper anymore, but the manufacturer has cheapened out on material quality “because it earns more money”.

However, one can blame capitalism, but the soviets also used to cheap out on material quality, shops, distribution, wages and maximize bribery.

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