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Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

bloomberg.com

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Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#81

Post by wink »

amelius wrote: post #6

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…

services have predictable longtime cost and that's why some people (especially businesses) favor this, but for me and many other people it's a different model: I NOW have a certain amount of money I am willing to spend on a fridge or other thing. Sure, it can break or something could happen, but that's another discussion. I have it, I paid for it, I can do whatever I want. I don't have to keep the mental burden in my head of "amount $x per month for thing $y" - and yes, I have a stable income but I guess for people without one it's a lot more financial security to not have running costs. (please ignore power costs for the fridge, I do think those are a lot more easily budgetable, like "power is 50 EUR per month, period")

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#82

Post by mnm1 »

This article confuses the issue of preferring walking, biking, and mass transit to owning a car with the issue of software freedom. The former is still based on ownership of sneakers and bikes. More importantly, it's not the same issue as proprietary software licenses that prevent users from running software as they see fit. I think RMS would be happy to see such a piece about the importance of software freedom in such a mainstream publication. It's too bad that they didn't fully research it and tie these issues back to the disappearance of general computing from our lives, but it's great to see this issue getting wider exposure in the mainstream media even if it is slightly dumbed down for the masses. RMS has been writing about this issue for decades (1) and it most certainly is one of the biggest issues of our time.

(1) https://www.fsf.org/

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#83

Post by F_r_k »

EADGBE wrote: post #32
amelius wrote: post #6

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…

Instead of you owning the fridge, now the service company does. It'll just buy you a new fridge every time some little thing goes wrong; because it's cheaper to pay for delivery of a new one than to pay skilled labor to come and fix it (multiple times, usually).

It'll exchange you for a new one. But once you own thousands of fridges, I'm sure it's more economical to repair them afterwards with in-house technicians

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#84

Post by michaelt »

March_f6 wrote: post #47

1.) How does the market (in the most basic sense) make any meaningful distinction between "owning" a rack of DVDs and "owning" a Netflix subscription? Both are transactions where resources are being traded for "goods". 2.)The idea of spending more resources on experiences rather than goods has become more pervasive over the years so the trend of people owning less stuff would make sense. 3.)This is a little more in t…

  Both are transactions where resources
  are being traded for "goods".
When people own a rack of DVDs, film industry revenue rises when more good films are released, and falls when fewer good films are released - it's not a fixed-sum competition.

When people own a netflix subscription the industry is in a fixed-sum competition. The industry makes $X per subscriber per month, whether the average movie is Citizen Kane or The Emoji Movie.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#85

Post by squozzer »

AdmiralAsshat wrote: post #49

Oh goody, another article telling me why everything I do as a Millennial is wrong. Here's what we were told as children: "My gosh, you always want more toys, more comics, more videogames. Don't you ever get enough? What's wrong with you!" As teenagers/young adults: "Look at all this crap you've collected over the years, taking up all this room, and you're barely an adult! You'll never have space for all this when you…

As someone whose cohort is either X or Boomer depending on the meaning of 1965, the "millenials are dumb" argument will pass once your successor generation is old enough to make adult mistakes.

Having said all that, I dropped $5 a couple of days ago on a little pink pig keychain for my girlfriend. It probably cost $0.10 to make. But it was a vacay trinket and kinda cute.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#86

Post by smallnamespace »

Gustomaximus wrote: post #62
brightball wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really just have an incentive to make sure that on average you pay more than enough to make them a profit over the expected lifetime of your fridge. They also have an incentive to get you the least expensive fridge with the longest lifetime, regardless of power consumption or any other factors. You already have something very close to this with home warranties and the providers tend to be awful in my experience.…

> The goal is just to extract money from you and keep costs down While this mentality definitely exists, this doesn't account for brand and a wish to protect reputation. Hence why personally I tend to stick with established companies for things like trades as in the absence of a personal relationship, knowing someone has a brand to protect (and history against it) improves my chance of receiving a quality good/servic…

> this doesn't account for brand and a wish to protect reputation

While the preservation of a brand might be rational for a corporation as a whole, it might be somewhat easy for executives that are paid quarterly and annual bonuses to temporarily goose profits by sacrificing long term reliability and brand (which only shows up with a long lag time, years down the road), then take their bonuses from investors before going somewhere else.

This theory of 'looting' by executives might leave both customers and long-term investors worse off, but is caused by the inability of customers and investors to perfectly incentivize (or monitor) long-term decisionmaking.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#87

Post by desireco42 »

If true, this is great news, for americans and for the environment.

Life is easier when you don't have too many things. Now people go to extremes, like they always will, but overall, this is very good trend. I think people will lead healthier lives when they are not oppresed with owning stuff and paying credit cards.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#88

Post by yhoneycomb »

imgabe wrote: post #66
amelius wrote: post #6

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…

> 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 as possible. Theoretically, landlords would have the same incentive to purchase the longest lasting things for their rental units. In my experience, both as a renter and someone who designs buildings, the directive is "get the cheapest possible thing that wi…

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

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#89

Post by mud_dauber »

_ah wrote: post #31
mud_dauber wrote: post #13

It's simple. Less stuff equals more freedom. Freedom to move. Freedom from debt. Freedom from "keeping up with the Joneses". Freedom from soul-crushing jobs.

I think it's more subtle than that. Needing less stuff gives freedom. Renting stuff instead gives less freedom... you have many of the same expenses as ownership, but if you ever stop paying your useful stuff disappears. Owned objects of utility provide insurance to ride out times with limited income.

Agreed. That’s a fair rebuttal.

Re: Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous

#90

Post by TaylorAlexander »

glitchc wrote: post #34
TaylorAlexander wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To help change the system, we could build The Machine: http://tlalexander.com/machine/

The Machine doesn't fix the problem. Just some problems off the top of my head: 1) Some groups will just use the resources of the Machine, while others will work on improving The Machine. Over time, Machines in some areas will be vastly more capable than other areas. This will create haves and have-nots, urge migration and give rise to a system very similar to the current worlds (first-, second-, third-). 2) In your…

Nothing can “fix the problem”, but I propose that putting the essential machinery of production in to common ownership can help. In the stories I write, no one can force someone else to “pony up” for upgrades, and everything is open source.

Much of my writing is meant to be a thought experiment. I think it may be an improvement if groups of people support one another voluntarily, and share in common ownership of critical factors of production.

My writing is a way to explore a class free society (economic class that is) free of wasteful consumerism. It is not necessarily meant to be a literal plan.

However you ask about resource consumption: society already uses resources at an unsustainable rate. I claim The Machine will improve on our resource consumption by reducing consumerism and needless consumption. But the fact that a society with the machine may still be unsustainable does not mean it isn’t an improvement. The Machine only fails if you expect that I am proposing a solution to all problems, which is not the case.

Humans will still have inequality, but I don’t claim to totally solve that. I think The Machine could help reduce inequality, but it depends on how we use it.

Anyway, I’m a bit rushed and I’m sorry I haven’t provided a clearer reply. I just wanted to give you some kind of answer. Thanks for reading my work!

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