Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous(bloomberg.com) |
Americans Own Less Stuff, and That’s Reason to Be Nervous(bloomberg.com) |
Reduced access is bad.
Reduced ownership is bad only if it leads to reduced access.
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I have a lot of books here at home that I haven't read in a long time. If I didn't own them that would not affect me in any way, since their resell value is very low. My exclusive ownership of these books makes them highly inefficient.
Same goes for a lot of stuff that people own but hardly ever use. Owning fewer things is not necessarily bad.
I think I this is a big one. There's a very degree of trust that public services and even private ones will be there whenever we need. Not just things like reliable hospitals and electrical grid, but also one-day shipping on whatever we need. There is no longer a need to keep things on hand.
I'm now able to own more other, actually useful stuff because I pay just a couple dollars a month to stream literally everything ever recorded. This is so much better.
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.
The phone acts as a communication device, a GPS, a flashlight, a camera, a music player, a library, etc. etc. It's also the end-all entertainment device.
It's natural to own less stuff. There's too much interesting stuff right there in your palm.
"The erosion of personal ownership and what that will mean for our loyalties to traditional American concepts of capitalism and private property"
If the lament here is for the mountain of garbage that each individual generates in the name of private property, color me not-amused. Think of those broken old DVDs that were used at most once or twice. Think of those cars that sit on parking lots and garages 99% of their lives. Wounding the earth to extract all that resource and burying our future in a carbon cloud. And for what! To hold on to some vague notion of private property like a comfort blanket.
The future is one we have not seen before, of all powerful trillion dollar companies. But the recent past is a hell scape which led to global warming and other atrocities. We should be willing to walk boldly into this unknown future if only for the promise of reducing waste and possibly a better climate future.
Stopped reading after that. This guy has a very loose understanding of what real people's lives are like. Throw Occam's razor out the window - the reason people own less stuff is not because they might have less money - no its because "society" has changed its "values" or some other air-headed notion ppl who live in airconditioned offices dream up.
The reason Americans own less stuff is because for 80%+ of the population wages haven't seen an increase in 3 decades and are up to their eyeballs in debt. "But GDP is so high!" - but nothing. What matters is the money that average people take home and for that they havent seen their income rise but they have seen the cost of education and healthcare go through the roof. If you're the kind of person who thinks like this guy you're probably in the camp who thinks Trump got elected because "Far-Right Racists/Russian Hacking /The Patriarchy"
Sorry for the rant. I get an Inspector Dreyfus twitch when I read this sort of stuff by supposed 'smart' people
The "traditional American concepts" where the pioneering spirit and individualism (and of course various forms of protestantism and religious nuttery and so on).
Not consumer capitalism. It took a lot of advertising and nudging to turn the more independent 1920s and 30s American into a consumer, and even more to turn him into a consumer of today's proportions.
I don't understand the author's premise. The author is largely lamenting that people are buying services over goods, but that doesn't show a dwindling loyalty towards capitalism in the slightest. I might think it strengthens loyalty to capitalism, as many of these services require an ongoing relationship with the market.
I'm also unsure about how "private property" is a traditional American concept and the author does a poor job explaining why changing loyality to it is a reason to be nervous...
And here's a mirror of just the article raw text: https://pastebin.com/bqBWgDPk
Also great to see them deliberately misuse "private property" when discussing ownership of personal property.
Why is the fact that people without property were not given the right to vote because they "didn't have a stake" as our nation was founded being lifted up as a good thing? It's such a bizarre thing to say that this ideology was a good one. The author can't really believe that renters have less a stake in the system as property owners?
When you own property, you care more about the place where that property exists because what affects the surroundings directly affects the value of your possession. That incentivizes you to care about and invest in your neighborhood, community, state, and country.
If you aren't tied to the place, it's easier to just jump ship and say "not my problem" when something goes awry. You have fewer incentives to put effort into long-term projects that improve the community since you're less likely to be there to reap the benefits.
In other words, renters are less likely to plant trees, but a neighborhood with trees is better for us all over the long term.
They're talking about the ways in which non-property-owners were viewed at this country's founding, as not having a stake in the system. That argument was absolutely made in regards to voting rights and is the reason so many were denied this basic right. It's a very dangerous idea.
But let's explore it.
Renters have just as much a stake in the system as property-owners. They just have DIFFERENT stakes and incentives. Let's use your tree example. Maybe you are correct that renters are less likely to plant trees. That's not because they have less a stake in a system, but because the stakes for renters is different. For example, they may have to pay for the local government to plant the tree as taxpayers. Or maybe they don't like the way the tree looks. Or maybe they're worried wind will blow it over and onto their car. Or it obstructs a view. There's absolutely a stake in the system. True, they might oppose it because they may not get to ever enjoy the shade as it grows, if they move. Or maybe they want the rent to stay as low as possible. But that's still not an argument they have less of an interest -- just the opposite, it shows they have DIFFERENT interests.
Books for us are about space. Growing up, having a full-wall bookshelf was one of my favorite things. It had sentimental value, it was a family gathering place, each ripped page or blemished cover had a story. We now dont have space for a second full-wall bookshelf. We've completely stopped purchasing books and just use Kindle or the library. It works, it just doesnt have the love of a physical books. But we also dont have the space for physical books.
Living in Brooklyn, going from a 2BR to 3BR meant another $500,000 in cost. We now living outside DC, which is less expensive, but still not enough to have room.
So we rent.
Music and movies are for convenience. For me, most music and movie CDs/DVDs never carried as much sentimental value. It is great not having to carry around disks and having temporary access to a much larger library. We subscribe to Apple Music and have never looked back.
I also favor getting digital media from my library. It cost $200/year to belong to our local library in Illinois but the number of ebooks and audio books available is fantastic.
I have also started buying my very favorite movies in Google Play. This probably does not make much sense, but I like to ‘own’ my very favorite movies.
The world of digital entertainment is fantastic and the cost is very low compared to other costs of living.
Even a cursory understanding of licensing of Wikipedia content is an anti-dote to the loss of ownership the author describes. If you download the current state of Wikipedia that data is yours under a very liberal license. No one can call foul and remove it from your machine.
By ignoring these important concepts the author's piece makes it sound as if digitization itself is somehow making people forget the importance of ownership.
Anyone else find this odd and disappointing?
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 the weeds but it's funny to think about how a society's definition of wealth changes over time and how that might affect consumer behavior.
Both are transactions where resources
are being traded for "goods".
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.
Netflix takes that $X per subscriber per month and splits it up between all its different licensing contracts with different publishers. From the publishers' POV it's not all that different. In the past if they released good movies more people would buy more tickets, tapes, DVDs, etc. to view them; today, Netflix is willing to pay more to host better movies. I don't think that Netflix would pay the same for Citizen Kane and The Emoji Movie (now, which one they would pay more for I can't answer, but their analytics probably can make a guess :)).
In many cases in the real world, the economics of the rent-based solutions are the only ones that make sense for the consumer, because alternatives require steep barriers to entry that are hard to surmount. This is the case when prices on land and houses require loans and money down, or when comparable services don't exist due to requirements in capital, expertise, and IP. Sometimes this price is artificially low (Google, Facebook, Uber) or artificially high (mobile data), but it's hard to compete with free, and hard to start a cellphone network. In one case, giant corporations are dumping at a fictitious price to encourage an ecosystem, while in the other, giant corporations are buying into a moat of intellectual property while paying large bills on the immense infrastructure that enables their service model.
When fewer people can afford to become meaningful shareholders, or band together to start alternatives, the more likely they are to be on the passive end of this transition. This is what we're seeing now.
The important discussion should be not about American's losing their idea of private ownership but about American's learning the idea of owning their information and data about them. I don't care that I stream media, use SaaS for email or don't own a car but rather rely on ride share and public transit. But what I do care about is the companies that provide these services are brokerages for data about me.
I'm not aware of a single American politician who has as a prime issue the idea of private data ownership. That we can make laws that ensure that any data gathered about you belong to you and that companies are privileged to use it and do not get to dictate terms around it. That if you want to do business in a way that includes personal data of any kind then there are laws you have to follow that greatly restrict what you can do with that data. That upon request every single data point about a person can be disclosed to that person and how you've used that data and an audit trail with regards to that information.
Civil Rights for private data could be a thing.
The conclusion that you have a "stake in the system" if you are a property owner is 180 degrees backward and that is apparent in his own logic.
If you don't physically own something you are using, like in his examples of music, or books, then you are relying on "the system" to ensure it will be there and are heavily bought in. Such a reliance is not necessary if you own it outright.
Consider that, if you want to ensure without question that you won't lose access to something, then you buy it outright. How this contradiction isn't clear is baffling.
Owning something removes you from the group/system that could support it. For example, shared real estate vs owned real estate. If I own a piece of land that I live on, I can do whatever I want on it and there is nobody to tell me I can't and I don't have to consider anyone else. If I instead share ownership of the land I live on, then I have to take consideration for the others on the property.
I think if there is a complaint here, it should be that there is a power imbalance between leasees and owners in today's world. As a user of spotify, uber etc... you're beholden to the owners of the content and platform to allow your paid access to it, which they can revoke at any time for any reason, with little recourse from the user.
That is actually what America was built on and is simply an extension of hundreds of years of rent seeking. We should be moving to more intentional distributed ownership (I'm not invoking blockchain here) of capital and property. Not, simply becoming renters to the capital class.
Perhaps it's not so much that Americans own less stuff, but rather the supply of stuff has grown so much that we became overwhelmed with too much ownership and have resorted to rents on more and more of those items by percentage.
Cellphones are an interesting side point, as they don't fully fit into either classification (own or rent). They kind of take on the worst of both. In fact, perhaps there's a market for a phone that's more purely "rent". Given the state of technology and the speed of change, I don't know if there's any real market for a purely "own" phone, unless it's like an ultra-secure dumb phone, in which case yeah there's probably a market for that too.
Then rents went up, education became more expensive, wages went stagnant, the rich got richer, and suddenly owning property and buying "stuff" to fuel the insatiable furnace of capitalism doesn't seem like such a great life goal. If that means we're not participating in "the system", well... maybe it's time to change the system.
Also, I think it strange the author questions what the death of property ownership means for capitalism, and then cites various examples of capitalism in action that are working to corrode property ownership -- e.g. Apple, Amazon, etc. The rise of subscription services over shrink wrapped software or hardware to which you own the rights arose directly from capitalism.
I immediately felt a deep shame, like I was the biggest sucker on the planet. But I thought to myself, what was the alternative? Buy the friggin BluRay? I don't want a pile of plastic boxes like it's the 00s and I don't have a player anyway. I just want THE FILE . IN FULL HD. Not the right to stream the file from Amazon's servers when I happen to have a good connection and a device with their App. Just the video file please. This article is spot on.
The good thing about the digitization of this content is the fact that it will be more likely to be preserved in the long term. There are tons of books that are out of print and movies that were produced before DVDs that will never be released. This is going to be much less of an issue going forward. So, while you may need to pay for access again if you haven't watched a movie in 20 years, at least you'll be able to obtain it like you would any other movie.
The stuff you "buy" from services like Amazon or Steam is going to be around for a very long time. I have digital content that's almost 20 years old now and I still have access to all of it.
Even today, media you "own" on services like Amazon can disappear when the cloud provider's license for this content expires. In my opinion, it is far better to purchase a Blu-Ray or CD copy of media titles you wish to retain, rip them to disk, and stream them to the device of your choice via Plex or Kodi.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18am...
Give me break, collections of books, DVDs and CDs have always been largely worthless. Cars was never an investment tool.
Real estate, stocks, bonds is property with at least some value. Put stats on that before arguing that private ownership is in decline. (I'm not saying it isn't)
I'm merely saying consumerism was never about private ownership, or am I missing something?
This author sounds reactionary. The sky isn't failing, its just a different hue of blue today.
That notion presumably had something to do with why, in a nation with a population of well over 5 million, fewer than 40,000 people participated in the first US Presidential election.
Everyone who lives in the country has a stake in the system, by virtue of the fact that they are subject to its laws and their lives are impacted by its policies.
At what point does capitalism stop being what it is and evolve into something else entirely?
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 utopia, the corporation has no incentive to build a long-lasting Machine, especially since the Machine can build it's own parts. The corporation may also upgrade Machine capabilities (a new XBox/PS) that make it desirable to upgrade, forcing the town to pony up more money or resources. And what about the people who work at those corporations? Do they not live like the folks with the Machine? Why do they have to work, for money presumably? Again, haves and have-nots.
3) Resources in a local area are finite. What happens when the water runs out?
4) If the Machine removes the need for money, how do the townsfolk pay for the Machine? How does it all start?
You are a technological optimist. Like other technological optimists, there is a basic human psychological need that is not being acknowledged in this solution. That is, the desire to be better than your fellow man: Whether this is at an individual level, family level or society level is less relevant, but so long as this need exists, no amount of technology can fix the problem, as any new technology can be bent to increase, not decrease, disparity.
So to answer your question... some of us?
(To be exact, I drive a 15-yr-old Skoda, not a Yaris, but you get the idea.)
If someone gave me a BMW, assuming it wasn't a close friend or someone I had to worry about offending, I would sell it and continue using my old car.
I actually ended my Apple Music subscription thinking I would be better if buying things from iTunes I listen to over and over. But they tried their very best to make that a non-option and now I actually don’t know what to do. At this point Murfie Music seems like the only option that makes sense, but I’m assuming the music industry will manage to make them illegal sooner or later so not to keen on that either.
You haven't said a ton, but it seems like you're using "community" as code for home values. However, that might not at all in the best interest for many in the community. It's particularly of importance to home-owners. It might be to the detriment of renters.
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!
What I was trying to demonstrate is that classes exist because humans want them to exist. Technology cannot solve a behaviour problem. Through evolution, we learn that a certain percentage of selfish actors in a large pool of altruistic actors is long-term stable, which blew me away the first time I read about it.
Finally, have you read Cory Doctorow's "Walkaway"? If not, suggested reading.
The substitution of individual ownership for a communal one in which individuals retain a stake - a real community, or at a larger scale, a democracy - is not inherently bad. The problem with our recent trend is that we aren't getting communal ownership in return; we're getting nothing but convenience.
Silicon Valley has morphed and commercialized the term "sharing". You aren't "sharing" when you use Uber or AirBnB; you aren't pooling resources when you use Netflix or Amazon Books. You're renting. You're renting from a centralized company which outsources the generation of actual value to others, and pays them as little as possible. You aren't shifting your dependence from yourself to a community, but from yourself to a company that wants nothing more than to make money.
To me, this isn't isolated loners. It's the first real community I've ever known. The first one I've ever actually felt like I was a part of, where I was always welcome and could always rely on finding people like me.
I understand that some people dislike this shift. It's easy to see where it might be inconvenient for local communities that used to depend on coercing membership to exist. It used to be easy to erase those who were alone in the crowd.
You're absolutely right. We didn't get a Global Village. Instead, we have a network of Global Villages. They are many and diverse and offer genuine community to everyone in ways that the old approach no longer did. This is beautiful and terrible - it's a shift from surviving to thriving.
We finally get to see that there's an option other than ghettos run by the tyranny of geography.
The "thing that is happening" is a sort of etherealization of property. One underlying cause is that the bits of "property" themselves are digital/ethereal. Books, songs, films... They are no longer physical, and the economic norms around them are changing to reflect that. In conjunction, I think the cultural impact of consuming more digital goods (and probably a million other things) is that people are used to this type of economy. They want the same for their car, bike, etc.
I would call uber a step passed renting, or an extreme form renting. Leasing has already been the norm for a while, along with financing that is indistinguishable from leasing.
The "handful of corporations" part is... more of a consequence, I think. Etherealization/digitization is proving to be very centralization (or winner-take-most) friendly. There are a bunch of drivers to this though. One big reason is centralization of wealth. Big piles of money need big investments to go into. Uber could raise money on better terms than an "uber-for-aukland," adjusting for scale. $1 of profit/revenue/DAU is simply worth less than 1/100th of $100 in profit, on the "speculative investment" market.
I agree on your main points. There is a danger of becoming more of a "rentier" economy. If this trend continues (projecting trends is always speculative) we could end up with more property/wealth in corporate hands, and private individuals will only have liabilities and consumption.
The big elephant in this room is the same elephant that stomped through pyramid rooms 5,000 years ago: real estate, or "land" as it was once known. This is the big ticket item, and represents most of the wealth ordinary people own if they own anything. Cars, CDs and such just don't add up to much value, not anymore.
Up until this point in history having cash was all you needed to complete a transaction. Now you have to maintain your status as a “good” consumer, under the threat that you will be defacto excluded from a part of society by an algorithm. At which time you lose access to the platform as well as all your previous purchases.
There are also companies who are commoditising digital reputation. So a single, private, company will be able to effectively turn you into a pariah.
Amen. What grind my gears even more is when governments adopt that novspeak and promote the uberization of entire sectors under the guise of "sharing resources".
It's not necessarily bad, but it is a major change to share something among thousands of people or millions of people vs. just among family and friends.
Saying that the people sharing are a "community" makes it sound wonderful, but it's actually a large group of people that may have interests very different from yours. Decisions need to be made and it's hard to get consensus among a lot of people, so you are basically talking about a government of some kind, along with all the conflicts that creates.
Private ownership is not particularly convenient, but it has a very interesting relationship with freedom that we should not cast away lightly.
Renting is an accurate descriptor of Netflix or Kindle (and Google Play movies actually does have "rent" on the label of the button when you want to rent a movie). And I can see what you mean from the perspective of the guest or rider, but not from the perspective of the host or driver.
I would argue that you're still renting from Uber and AirBnB, who are just outsourcing their labor and properties to others. Companies like this - I'm looking at you, Facebook - like to claim that they're only impartial platforms, but the reality is that they gain an enormous amount of power over both sides; stealthily, because they hide behind that image.
They're just the early middlemen of budding industries that, in an optimistic future, will not even need middlemen.
Channel control is.
IMO it's still terrible if there is effectively only one product option. A democratic decision is just as bad as a shareholder one if it's choosing to favor a majority group over the minority (2 wolves and 1 sheep voting for dinner choices).
>outsources the generation of actual value to others
If you don't think there is value in the network, feedback mechanisms, and simplicity of using Lyft/Uber/whatever, you have completely missed why they are popular. Cabs would still dominate and would have been as popular as Lyft and Uber are now if all of the value was generated by drivers with cars. I think you probably meant to say 'outsourcing the labor' to others, which is completely different and companies have been doing that for centuries.
Labor != Value. I can go dig ditches in a yard for 10 years and not create any value.
Well that really depends on a) whether someone (including you) wants or needs ditches (farming irrigation? undertaker? dog hiding bone?) and b) the amount of time required to produce an article under the normal conditions of production, and with the average degree of skill and intensity prevalent at the time. If someone really wants a ton of ditches, and you can dig faster and deeper than anyone else, is your labor more valuable? As programmers we should hope so.
I don't mean to sidetrack the conversation but let's not make sweeping statements of fact without thinking about them!
Add: I also feel this is why new home sales is such an important metric to judge the momentum of the US economy, lots of new home sales means lots of new home-wares. You buy or build a house you also buy a refrigerator, microwave, carpet, furniture etc. Mostly on credit. If we truly become a communal society the cycle is broken, the same people who said "no new house and no new car, I'll just save my cash" now earn less 5 years later because there are many fewer things sold and the interconnected supply chain stalls.
Not every industry has to survive forever. Can the telegraph industry survive the ~0% of sales it had before? Cars just aren't that useful in densely populated areas. The US will have to move away from personal vehicle transport and to mass transport/walking/cycling.
Besides, a for profit service can create a community just as well as a communal repartition of it. It adds another risk to the community, of the service provider going bad, but it's not some overwhelming factor that makes all other irrelevant. Like it or not, you are sharing stuff when you rent them, the resource pooling is present (more or less present, depending on the renting modality), people are coming together (or not, depending on how it's shared), and there is social development just like with a communal resource.
The problem of Uber|etc and Netflix|etc is much more on how they do the renting than on they actually renting things.
There is some related problem you didn't point, in that once people start pooling some resource they didn't use fully, they should become more wealthy. We are not seeing this, so is it that the pooling isn't efficient or is it because people are being forced into pooling them by poverty? Either way, it's a problem.
If ever these corporations cause trouble, our government (well, maybe not the US government, but most sensible governments) will step in to remedy the situation. We've done so with privacy laws, we've done it with non-compete laws, we're going to do it with other companies as well.
Europe has been doing a great job of picking up our slack lately, but there's only so much they can do. Most of these companies are based in America, and most of the world's market is in Asia. There's a ceiling on how much the EU can fine companies before it's easier to just stop operating there. I'm sure those numbers have been crunched and that they're walking that line.
I might be an outlier. I make a deliberate effort to own instead of rent. My commute is enormous because I moved to a place I can afford to own a house, rather than be beholden to some landlord whose interests are not aligned with my own. I’ve never leased a car because I value the ability to repair and upgrade it myself. I don’t rely on streaming services for media, which could one day disappear without replacements. I do my own taxes. I don’t even eat at restaurants often. I feel that relying on services is risky coupling, unnecessarily involving another party in my success/outcome/enjoyment of the product. If I have the MP4 on my hard drive, Netflix can’t wake up one day and decide I can’t watch it anymore. I’ll only (grudgingly) subscribe to a service if there is no other realistic option, such as with Internet service.
The most bizarre statement is when he says "The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system." It's pretty obvious to me that a deliberate and intentional effort has been made to ensure that only people who own a lot of property have any voice in the system; to flip that relationship around and make it a moral statement is frankly a little scary. People really think like this?
Look, what Americans need is to spend more time with their friends, their children, their spouses, their families. Not to spend time collecting fancy cars or other hollow pursuits. This is a lunatic point of view.
> Each of these changes is beneficial, yet I worry that Americans are, slowly but surely, losing their connection to the idea of private ownership. The nation was based on the notion that property ownership gives individuals a stake in the system. It set Americans apart from feudal peasants, taught us how property rights and incentives operate, and was a kind of training for future entrepreneurship.
Whether you own music or rent it doesn't give you a stake in the system, nor does owning a car vs using public transport.
What gives you a stake is your net worth -- whether in a bank account, investments, land, a house, a company, or several.
And being able to rent services instead of buy permanent goods is an economic gain, allowing you to deploy your savings in a more targeted way toward whatever really matters the most to you.
If we want to be nervous, let's investigate inequality of net worth and the policies that lead to that -- and not be distracted by something totally irrelevant like whether I buy or license my books.
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 as possible.
EDIT: Besides eliminating planned obsolescence, there are more advantages:
- Increased market transparency. The market is more transparent if I know exactly what a service costs me per month, as opposed to buying a product and not knowing when it will fail. A more transparent market leads to better competition.
- Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including recycling it, becomes a natural responsibility of the company.
The statements about books are not accurate. Ebook sales are still just a fraction of print sales in many genres - NPD data indicates ebooks are less than 20% of total unit sales for nonfiction, children, and young adult titles (self-published ebooks excluded). Total ebook unit sales were 162 million in 2017 from the 450 publishers tracked by NPD, down from 180 million units in 2016.
Source: Publishers Weekly, "Ebook sales fell 10% in 2017" https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content...
Excerpt: "The great American teenage dream used to be to own your own car. That is dwindling in favor of urban living, greater reliance on mass transit, cycling, walking and, of course, ride-sharing services such as Uber and Lyft."
The teenage dream is not to own the car but to get to where they want to go, e.g., autonomy to see their friends, go to activities. When the consumer says they want a quarter of an inch drill bit, what they actually want is a quarter of an inch hole in a particular wall. The author doesn't seem to appreciate the difference.
Second point:
The right to repair or alter devices you own, e.g., farmer hacking their own tractors -- that part I agree with.
This I don't care about really.
Although I remember Richard Stallman wrote a satirical article about there being no libraries and having to pay to read anything (as in pay to read per page or something kind of ridiculous) now his article doesn't feel so ridiculous anymore.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
The SCARY thing, the thing that he doesn't really predict is that nobody will own anything and nobody will be allowed to read anything but also nobody will care about it either. They'll all be too busy with their bread and circuses and the 2 minutes hate or whatever.
If you don't have the capital to own, or it becomes too difficult to manage the things you own, it gets harder. I don't think ownership is a problem for people with plenty of capital, it's just a lot more scarce than it used to be for most of the population. Kindle books are cheaper and tinier, therefore I sacrifice a bit of rights for practicality - otherwise Amazon may not put out the books for fear of piracy, or the publisher wouldn't grant the rights. (mix of convenience plus moving / inventory costs / cheaper purchase cost)
Additionally, companies that provide these services have no incentive to give consumers additional rights to these devices and happily remove these rights - sometimes without a reason at the time - and fight them in court.
I totally agree with him that a consumer rights movement needs to gain steam ASAP to counter potentially misinformed abdication of consumer rights, and to establish solid baselines that is better for consumers. This needs to happen at a grass roots level and then wallets need to fix the behavior.
As for the lack of capital / buying things - much bigger question but I wish Mr. Cowen would at least acknowledge it.
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 move out into a tiny apartment. What's wrong with you!"
As adults: "Why aren't you buying physical things and hoarding crap anymore? What's wrong with you!"
If you took millenials and plopped them in the economic context that the young generations of the 50s (or even 70s/80s) had I think this would be a very different story.
Freedom to move. Freedom from debt. Freedom from "keeping up with the Joneses". Freedom from soul-crushing jobs.
When I got stationed in Northern Virginia, I thought about buying a condo. But almost everywhere I looked, there were absurd HOA fees, some as much as $400/mo. Considering I could rent a room for $750/mo, it didn't make sense to buy. If RENT < HOAFEES + MTGINTEREST, you're better off investing the money instead of pouring it into equity.
As for physical possessions, they all cost money (in rent!). Sure, I could own my own kayak and ATV. But it'll cost me $150/mo for a storage unit to keep them in. So until such time as I spend $1800/year on quad and kayak rentals (not even counting the amortized purchase prices), its more financially sound for me to rent them.
There are exceptions. I own my truck, which I bought used, and I know I'll drive it for years and years until it's beyond fixing. In the long run, it's cheaper than renting.
Still not as easy as a truck. I drive mine into the ground too. Not just to figure out if selling a used one or getting the trade-in is the most effective use. Buying new car way less effective than buying a good in shape 16 year old accurately for $1700 currently. I value more varied vehicles over one nice one. it's also nice to say well this one didn't start today oh well how bout this one.
It's also nice not to give zero fucks about a dent or scratch. Some people get so worked up keeping their cars perfect, like its jewelry or something.
There's also the factor of how it's going to affect your job and life if your car breaks down. A 2-decade-old car is going to break down at some inopportune time, like it or not, even with the best maintenance.
I don't much mourn the lack of ownership of a lot of worthless junk that doesn't bring fulfillment or human flourishing. The late 20th century West let itself fill garages and storage units with consumerist nonsense.
But it's important to recognize that the corporate consumerist system is all too willing to mutate, to adapt to people's changing tastes and to offer them a product they feel is liberation. If you've heard "Don't buy things, buy experiences," then you've heard this new advertising. Companies are all too willing to make you think that an "authentic" vacation around the world will bring happiness and meaning in the form of selfies. Restaurants play up the 'foodie' advertising to make consumption of their product seem like a life-altering experience. The companies realize they can sell the same thing again and again digitally to customers who binge-watch Netflix and pride themselves on cutting the cord and not vegging in front of the TV like their parents did. And at the end of the month you find yourself subscribed to so many services, so many pseudo-addictions, you wonder where your money is going.
Rather than buying things or buying experiences, consider what you can make yourself or find for free. There is already more than enough media content out there to last many lifetimes; why not look for old material that has stood the test of time? Why not build a skill and learn the value of becoming self-reliant in some small way?
[1] https://nypost.com/2017/09/03/americans-work-harder-than-any...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/02/22/the-a...
What I'd really like to see is a push for "drm-less" books, so you wouldn't be tied to Amazon's systems in order to read something you've bought rights to access.
Same thing goes with Spotify. Tools exist to strip the encryption from the offline cache (they are either encrypted mp3 or vorbis, don't remember), but it's a workaround. I suspect it's why they killed off libspotify, which sucked because I used that to make a hackjob spotify client for RPi...
I've noticed it happening slowly over time, but there are dangers[0] even if you believe you "own" your media.
There are no good solutions, people are willing to trade ownership for convenience because /mostly/ you're getting the same value- why do you care if you can't access that song you liked in 30 years?
Personally; I fight this notion as much as possible; if I buy digital media- it's backed up. I do not give my custom to anyone who wishes to own my digital rights (thus, I avoid DRM) and, where possible, I buy physical copies of goods.
However, I work in an industry which is moving towards providing "service", namely; I work in video games. And we have a new concept: "Game as a service", the idea being that the game lives and grows and dies, rather than being a static art which is subject to the non-decay or altering hand of time immemorial. Thus, the games we played in 1995 can be played to day, but the games we played in 2010 are much less possible, and the games we play in 2018 will be impossible to play 10 years on.
I don't have a particular point, I'm more frustrated with the state of affairs. Also: Apple Music can sincerely fuck off.
[0]: https://blog.dijit.sh/importance-of-self-hosted-backups
I've found that every physical thing I own has an ongoing cost. Firs there is the obvious cost of physically storing the thing. Then there is the labor cost of cleaning it and keeping it nice. Then there is the mental cost of remembering where it is. And finally there is a cost of worrying about it. What if the house burns down? You spend a lot of time and money and effort preventing and planning for such an event that may never occur at all. And for those of us who have lost everything that way, coming to the realization that it's all just stuff feels like anti-gravity. It's like living on Jupiter your entire life and then moving to the Moon.
then, yes, there's the ongoing cost of storing it and backing up, but not cleaning it, and most digital media is easy to sort and find..
There is of course value (to me) in owning a library of books - but for different reasons than, say, owning intellectual property or real estate.
A Spotify subscription that allows me to listen to practically any song that was ever recorded is of far more utility than a pathetically limited personal music collection.
The only reason I could think of was a potential implied subtitle: "the reason to be nervous is that if we stop buying things then those equity values go down" (which is honestly what I first thought when reading the headline)
It's a trend that is in my honest opinion one of the more increasingly troublesome and negative aspects of modern human civilisation. Xaas has a nasty side-effect of concentrating wealth and power to fewer and fewer individuals, it creates a much deeper power structure, since one finances another who finances another who...and so on, and the more you financialise the more you can financialise - an unstable equilibrium, or "positive feedback loop". With classical unfinancialised markets, it is a more Slack(the app)-like flat structure, where products are exchanged and ownership is transfered. Everyone becomes an owner. Power, wealth, and resources diffuse similar to that of the heat equation.
We can see this nasty effect in the housing markets, for example. The current situation where the law and society in general allows a growing number of ownership-hoarders who buy up many houses in an area and lets them out to their fellow underlings is a rather dangerous and volatile setup, and historically does not end well for anyone, but especially those up top.
We’ll have ovens and thermostats that you set with your voice, and a toilet and bathroom that periodically give you the equivalent of a medical check-up.
Until we are required to have such things, I do not care that I have the option. I have a Nest, I have Hue lights, I've gone to the trouble of hacking together a HomeKit server that can talk to the cameras. You know what? All of that shit could disappear tomorrow and I wouldn't care much. Oh, I was all excited when I got the gear, it's handy, and I would be inconvenienced by the disappearance. But the novelty of that stuff wore off fast for me, and I don't consider it a requirement in my life.
And I think that's key: as long as we can do without your subscription whatever, the author's hand-wringing is a bit overdone.
I've owned VHS's, they're worthless I've owned houses - that I had to short sell I've owned DVD's - they're worthless I've owned Books - they're worthless
What is the value of owning over just paying to enjoy access?
I like spotify because i can sync music to my phone to play offline - but "owning" all this music is worthless... I had a HUGE cd collection growing up but they were all stolen one day. Owning was worthless..
It seems we're substituting "ownership" with control. There are landlords that let you "control" your house - paint it, update it, customize to your liking - without having to own it yourself. This is a win-win since you get the benefit of fix annual costs whereas owning the place you could be liable for so much more.
heck, Everything i "own" actually owns "me" and burdens me with costs... but i can cancel spotify/netflix/hulu and re-sub later. I like the flexibility of our new model. I get the 4k version without having to "Re-own", i get higher bitrate songs without having to re-encode or re-buy, i get more quality content because i'm paying the producer - not a middleman distribution.
I honestly find this unbelievable and amazing. You have never rewatched a video, or re-read a book? You've never lent a movie or a book to a friend? You've never used a movie or a book to job your memory and spark a conversation with someone?
There is value in all of those things to me, not to mention the value of being able to watch a movie or read a book whenever I want, regardless of my current state of subscription to netflix/hulu/xfinity/cbs/amazon prime/hbonow/etc.
In renting, when you are done with the item, you terminate, yielding access and recouping none of the money. In ownership, when you are done with the item, you sell, yielding access and recouping some money.
High-end hobbyist equipment such as camera lenses and woodworking tools are great things to own; they offer great enjoyment, tend to retain value, and you can typically find a buyer if and when you want to sell.
Things that are difficult to sell and poor at retaining their value are good things to rent.
I've heard compelling arguments for both Renting and Owning of Houses and Cars and it really comes down to circumstances, but it's always good to own something you can use and sell if the need arises.
But you do not control anything any more with those companies. They can revoke your accesses, they can ban you from using their services for any reason, they can change the terms of services, the offers, the rates, whenever they wish.
Unlike you, I would say you lost the control which came implicitly with ownership, and did not regain another form of control. At least not as much, far from that.
I mean, I get where you were going, but this statement is incorrect. I'm willing to bet that you consume a lot of content that you didn't get directly from the people that produced it.
To your other points I largely agree. I have a giant box of cd's that I move with me from residence to residence, but never open. At this point it's really more of a burden, far outweighing the value I might get out of it someday if I ever decide to finally open it back up.
Just keep them long enough, one day some hipster will come out and claim that "vintage" technology has something more than modern technology... Just like what happened with vinil disks /s
For example, I recently went through several lists of underrated (i.e. not the megahits like Ghostbusters or Indiana Jones) movies from the 80s and 90s and I'm hunting them down and watching them. Of the seven movies I watched this past couple of weeks (About Last Night, How to Get Ahead in Advertising, Nothing But Trouble, Other People's Money, The Wrong Guy, Top Secret, Used Cars), ZERO of them can be found on Netflix or Hulu. Five of them can be rented individually from Amazon Prime at $4 a pop, but aren't included in their prime subscription that I already pay ~$100 a year for. That's the full extent of how you can get access to these movies from subscription services. I could have just stuck with what subscription services offer, but if it's not something new the selection gets increasingly worse and worse.
Is that what you want the future to be like? Where these movies might as well have disappeared off the face of the earth because no one can get ahold of them anymore? Because that's the direction we're starting to go in with more and more things going digital only and subscription only.
I used to work in the video game industry, but I have almost nothing to show for it outside of some trailers on Youtube, because almost all of those games were released on digital channels and are no longer available to download. I had two games on the Wii Shop and the Wii Shop is now closed and the company is defunct, so those games are gone. Another on Xbox Live for 360, and a couple of Xbox Indie Games that you can't get anymore because they killed the service. The only game you can still get is Neverland Card Battles on the PSP, and that's because it was released as a physical game.
You can still also play my Flash games I did before I got into the industry, at least until browsers kill Flash off entirely. There was a whole thread on HN recently about how we're about to lose a whole decade of culture from Flash and how one guy is trying to preserve it as best as he can.
Not being able to own the media (even if only in digital form) sucks, because companies can't be trusted to always remain solvent, always have license agreements in place, and always care about keeping all the content available for people to get. If you don't care about the content, then you probably don't care that you only get some access to some stuff some of the time, but for those that care about the time and energy that creators put in and want to experience and share those things with people that may have missed it the first time around or whole new generations of people, this current trend is terrible.
That's actually one reason why I shifted gears and started designing board games the past few years. I have perfectly good and playable copies of board games that are 60 years old now, decades after the companies have gone out of business. I won't have to go through extra effort to make sure that people can still have access to my board games long after I'm dead.
That is the base that Richard Stallman created for the open source movement. You should own your own hardware, and the only way of fulfilling that is to own the software that makes it run. And I also thought that this is common sense at least for the past generation of developers. I am not so sure how much the message has been lost, but it is not so strong as it used to be.
Edit:I needed to be clearer, I know fusion isn't electron, but I've had no luck at all using it offline. Very rarely will it work. And unless things changed in the last 6 months, the Github desktop app can't commit locally without an internet connection.
I understand what you mean, but RMS is very against "open source": https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....
I think you and the author conflated ownership of "stuff" with ownership of--or a stake in--society. All of the things you listed as owning versus the not-owning (whether it's called renting or leasing or subscribing) are trade-offs you made because you value the concept of ownership of stuff over the opposite.
My view is different: I want ownership of society; I want to be a full participant in society, regardless of the actual state of being of the physical and electronic objects around me. This is why, for example, I give money to local journalists on Patreon, and why I deliberately live in a smaller place in a large city where I can pay taxes to a well-funded library system. This is the type of "ownership" I value.
Other things I do, like ride mass transit, subscribe to Spotify, and pay my city electric bill (I wasn't aware that buying electricity from my municipality impacted my "ownership" of anything, as the author claims), are all things I do because I find them to be more efficient or more useful to me. There are things I unequivocally own, like records or my treasured collection of baseball cards, that have value to me beyond my simple possession of them. There are some things I own, like my residence, where ownership has been more of a burden to me than a non-ownership method would have. It's all about balance.
(One last question: Could you clarify "I do my own taxes?" What is it that doing taxes yourself, presumably by pen and calculator, gains over downloading a product like TaxAct and saving the PDF of the result?)
The general principle I failed to articulate is that all other things being equal, I value Self Reliance over Interdependence.
There are varying levels of interdependence though, maybe I can take a stab at ranking them from least objectionable/risky to most.
1. Dependence on friends and family: largely acceptable in my view
2. Dependence on local community, groups, churches, etc.
3. Dependence on local government, public transport, libraries, etc.
4. Dependence on state/national government
5. Dependence on local businesses
6. Dependence on remote/global businesses
You might notice that the ranking is also ordered by how accountable (at least in theory) they are to you in terms of their actions, where businesses tend to be the least accountable. You can’t vote them out or alter their bad behavior, and their interests least align with yours.
EDIT
Also, I don’t see how paying a corporation for a Spotify subscription gives me any kind of “stake in society”.
In GENERAL, it seems like it takes a lot more money and resources nowadays to do this, relative to other benefits you can have. In Media, having a wall of $19.99 blue-rays and an apple music full of albums is going to cost you a lot more given how must people consume media (a lot, and constantly). The cost to get that permanence is like an order of magnitude over more or less the same content with subscription services + rentals.
I tend to think of it like this - if netflix takes a show off that I watch constantly, I might buy the series online. If Netflix as a whole goes down along with all the other streaming services, then the whole internet and society is probably down, and I suddenly don't care about all the media I'd be consuming, because there's bigger stuff happening in the world.
Of course, "disconnecting" is probably undervalued - I'm just old enough to remember the time when offline was the default for media. Not having to deal with the engagement machine and autoplay was a bit of a blessing.
What if Netflix bans you from using their service?
If you're talking about small ticket items, this seems true, but it certainly doesn't hold for more consequential expenditures like real estate or even cars.
And:
> rather than be beholden to some landlord whose interests are not aligned with my own
It sounds like you're now beholden to a situation that's misaligned with your interests. You've traded one kind of serfdom for another.
You're not an outlier if you live in the USA. You might be part of the problem. "Drive till you qualify" is peak consumerism.
I succumbed and buy music and movies online because that battle is already lost; I'm not going to commit to maintaining VHS, DVD etc players forever and obsolescence is built into the format. Hell there are probably people with laserdiscs that they can’t play anymore.
But I still buy physical books because they are a real thing.
That's not true. The reason why property ownership was required to vote is because in a democracy, the founders knew that if the majority of voters didn't have property then they would eventually just vote to take away the property of others. But they also knew that if the majority of people didn't own property then the government would also fail. So their solution was to only allow property owners to vote, but to make it easy and basically free for all citizens to become a property owners, and to heavily incentivize them to do so.
Early American democracy only worked because there was basically an unlimited amount of free land to give way. And to the extent that it still works, it's because technology and intellectual property have replaced land as the primary sources of capital.
American democracy is designed around broad-based capital ownership, not broad-based ownership of stupid shit you don't need. This is why this article doesn't make sense, because it would be far better for democracy if e.g. the average American owned $20,000 worth of Uber stock rather than $20,000 worth of car. Stock is capital, whereas a personal car isn't.
That argument seems to fly in the face of the 5th Amendment:
"... nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation."
It's technically true. It's clear that the original law of the land assumed that only landowners had a stake in running things.
I didn't get the impression that the author claimed this was a moral truth. Rather, I thought he was saying that the resulting culture made the country prosperous and productive. As more and more groups started owning things, they became enfranchised into the system.
The Roman Republic had a rule that to serve in the army you had to be a landowning Roman citizen (with a minimum-value requirement for the property). Largely for this reason: if you owned land, you had a stake, something to fight for.
It didn't work out so well, because -- and it's up to you if you see parallels here -- the Roman Republic was also incredibly corrupt, and its wealthy/powerful classes used every trick they could come up with to commandeer productive land, leaving Rome in a situation where there weren't enough eligible citizens to form a useful army.
The further, and longer-lasting, consequence was that Gaius Marius reformed the system, creating essentially a standing force of professional soldiers, rather than a landowners' militia that had to be re-recruited and re-trained for every war. This was a big boost to Rome's military capability, but also resulted in soldiers having loyalty to their general (who would pay/reward them) rather than to Rome. And that played a part in the eventual change from Republic to Empire.
So do keep in mind that a "rights for property owners" system can in theory expand rights as more people gain property. But can also reduce them and concentrate power as unscrupulous people work the system to accumulate property in their hands instead of others' hands.
This is such an important sentence. People high in the chain need to understand, that exploiting and hoarding every dollar from those at the bottom will only lead to one thing. And as history shows, first victims of rising of the masses are the people highest in the chain of an old system.
Does this take mortgages into consideration?
To understand the point of the author you need to look back, deeply back, at the history of human society. For most of human history, most people did not own any property. In a feudal society, for example, a few lords owned everything, and everyone else worked for them and owned nothing.
The "American experiment" was radical in that it placed the individual at the center of governance. The U.S. system of government is "built up" from citizen consent, not "pushed down" from a divinely-granted right of hereditary rule.
In order for this system to work, citizens must own property. Otherwise, they don't have the resources to collectively enact change. The Bill of Rights presumes citizens who have the resources to speak, associate, petition, etc. That's why it is worded to constrain the government's power, not worded to grants things to citizens.
The fundamental idea behind American democracy is that Americans have the means to pursue their goals and to influence each other.
This is why it was so much easier for early U.S. citizens to found churches and corporations than it was in Europe. European churches and corporations were top-down, and therefore few and conservative. U.S. organizations were bottom-up, and therefore many, diverse, and innovative.
So... that's why property ownership is at the heart of American democracy.
But what about:
> deliberate and intentional effort has been made to ensure that only people who own a lot of property have any voice in the system
There's actually a lot of evidence against this, for example the entire labor and environmental movements. Collective citizen action has worked a lot of change to the U.S. over the years, and I predict it will continue to do so.
All that said, I think it's a pretty far reach to claim that the American experiment is at risk because a few people don't want to buy CD's or cars anymore. People still like money and things! The real estate market is not drying up. There's plenty of property being owned and desired by Americans.
I think that lack of money is a bigger issue. Over 40 million people in the U.S. live below the poverty line! I think that's a much bigger problem for American "stake in the game" than whether someone who has disposable income decides to spend it on a Kindle instead of books.
Ownership culture has always exhibited this sort of pathological tendency. People who live next to a park with a basketball court insist on an inferior hoop in their driveway. The suburbs are littered with garden sheds full of identical, mostly-idle tools. We insist on a car for every member of the household.
Similar examples are readily conjured.
To the extent that any of these involve practical advantages, they're far outweighed, it seems to me, by the bizarre psychological impulses that are really driving all this compulsive behavior.
Well, it hasn't been a deliberate and intentional effort to exclude those without property or net worth from the decision making process - People like that, who reside at the bottom of the hierarchies they inhabit, have never in history been looked to for guidance or input on any decision. I'm making an evolutionary biology claim: Folks with no clout can only have a say if it is deliberately & intentionally given to them. It's the opposite of your speculation that it's been taken from them.
And frankly why _should_ someone who cannot gather value for themselves have a say in economic decisions that will affect others? The reason we have these big evil hierarchies, where the poor are dispossessed and a small group of tycoons at the top make the decisions, is because they have a track record of good decisions. If you suddenly took some progressive initiative to invite some idlers to give input on tax law, they might make a decision that inadvertently lowers your country's GDP by half a percent for five years.
Second, maintaining these kinds of hierarchies does not happen as the result of some kind of natural process. It requires violence.
Good decisions FOR THEM.
You're correct, but it does at least give you some agency independent of the system. If you own a DRM-free mp3, you can listen to that song every day for the rest of your life if you want to. Whereas if you just have a Spotify subscription, a record company can decide to pull the track whenever they please (which usually happens across all streaming services at once), and then it's just gone.
The tradeoffs are debatable, but they exist.
If one record company pulls a track, so be it. That track will simply be out of my rotation. If I happen to be listening to popular music and I really want to hear the song, it is probably available other places. If I can't find it, so be it: I'll listen to something else and soon forget about that song. No big deal. In the end, I'm still dependent on the record company making it available in some way or another.
As an example I enjoy games and my Steam account likely now is 'worth' some thousands of dollars that I should be able to sell at some depreciated rate. Except it's not, and I cannot. As I'm effectively renting access to these products instead of actually 'buying' them, my account is worth exactly $0. I could try to sell it nonetheless, but it would be unlawful. If I was instead able to actually own these games, my little hobby would still have cost me money, but I'd be able to recoup a substantial portion of it at a later date -- or perhaps even work to monetize "my" games in some way, again within the confines of the law.
This is sort of a microcosm of what causes wealth inequality. A more typical example would be a poor individual spending decades paying rent each month that is simply subtracted from his net worth. A wealthier individual might be paying off a mortgage on a property that eventually begin to earn money for him, or at the minimum provide him a residence with no rent due other than that which the government demands. It's interesting to consider this aspect of the migration to cities. People move into these extremely dense areas where they're obligated to rent homes which, due to high demand, consume a very large chunk of their earnings - and then at the end of the days, weeks, years, decades, they have absolutely 0 to show for what will amount to hundreds of thousands of dollars for most people.
I don't think a bank account applies here. If I have a large bank account but no other ties to the community, I have no real skin in the game as it applies to community proceedings. I'll vote however and if I make mistakes I will leave with no losses.
'Property and stakes' in the context of American history and feudalism means land, not doodads. It's so many banal platitudes. Tyler is a smart guy but some of the stuff he writes and says is just...bad.
And we should find ourselves completely at ease at the end of our investigation, for in every species success is distributed inequitably. Inequality of net worth is a natural law, and human society is no exception. And we need to keep very hard working people motivated to keep working very hard by ensuring them that they will always keep the lions share of their labour's products.
The connection between hard work and wealth is also rather more attenuated than your simple ideal suggests.
I'd love to agree with you and rewarding work is very important, but in our current society outcomes seem mostly determined by starting conditions. People born into poor household that cannot offer good parenting & education are expected to "work way harder" to achieve a similarly happy life than people who spawned lucky. That's fine to some degree, but should be kept under control. Once enough people feel the system isn't fair and rigged against them will they burn it to the ground.
you're joking with this part, amiright?
don't you think "very hard working people" receive more like the vulture's share, only after the lions have fully fed?
Tell that to a single mom who works 2 jobs.
Samsung made the largest fridge available. I got the $2500 model: stainless steel, no IoT but digital, double doors over drawer freezer. It looked really solid and durable. It failed in so many distinct and interesting ways!
The door shelves constantly shattered, at $50 each. The structure had been compromised by artistic design, with two kinds of plastic joined together. The ice maker died. The main shelves broke a couple times. The temperature display (blue 7-segment numbers) became nonsense. The drawer handle had a hinge made from plastic which broke and non-stainless steel which rusted out. The compressor went out, as we determined by diagnostic codes. The tech sent to fix that ignored us, never checked diagnostic codes, didn't look at the compressor, insisted that our problem was the ice maker (which was indeed broken but not our complaint), charged us $75 for nothing, and fought us when we did a credit card charge-back.
I cut that fridge up with a demolition saw to get it out of my house. This was satisfying.
The replacement is a pair of smaller fridges that were about $400 each. One of them even has old-style wire shelves that seem unlikely to shatter. We've only had two broken shelves so far, in the other one.
Famously, there was a "lemons and cherries" paper on the economics of used cars. I think it also somewhat applies to new goods. There is information asymmetry here. I can't know that the hinges are fragile plastic and non-stainless steel. The fridge looks nice, and it says "stainless steel". I've learned my lesson: do not pay more in an attempt to get quality, because you'll just pay more for the same old junk.
Price does communicate some usable information. The problem is that most people naively assume that the more expensive item must be better, while the good items are actually fighting for an informed customer looking for a good cost/benefit. That means that most of the very low price stuff is crap, but also that if the value you can take from an item has a ceiling (limited comfort options, limited maintenance savings, limited "extra durability"), most of the very high price items are also crap.
So, Mr Customer, how do you really feel about our product?
Yeah, definitely satisfying. Well played.
I don't agree. I think you can still buy quality things. The problem is that the market pushed the prices so low for "good enough" products, that it's difficult to justify paying much more. In the case of refrigerators, you'd have to pay at least three times more for a Sub-Zero fridge, for example.
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 will work".
Sometimes that's because the person paying to build the building is going to sell it once it's rented out, so they won't have to deal with the long term consequences. Sometimes it's just budget restrictions that won't permit the funds to buy the high-quality option. Sometimes it's just short-sightedness. It's rare to meet an owner who truly wants to invest in high quality, long-term solutions.
This is a great example, and it also has many parallels in—e.g. provision of online services.
The gp isn't wrong, service-providing companies are incentivised to optimise for low waste in certain areas, but it breaks down in other areas like this because service providers aren't optimising for QoS, they're optimising for perceived value.
For example (from the gp's comment):
> 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.
This depends. If the company is doing the above by leasing you a fridge you keep in your house and are responsible for maintaining, they getting you the worst fridge and replacing regularly may be better for them (see also ISP routers). Your statement only holds if they're running a large refrigeration warehouse where you keep your food at all times, in which case the logistics get a bit tricky.
The "perceived value" argument gets worse when you have large corporations with multiple offerings outside of their core: here the core competency can lend credence to less optimal/efficient/sustainability-friendly side-offerings.
A fridge service provider might run the hardware longer, but they wouldn't care much about your power bill, nor fridge features - if old phone monopolies, cable boxes and current isp's are any indicator.
And good luck trying to prove to a fridge service provider that their unit has an intermittent thermostat problem...
Recycling might be the responsibility of the company, but they might systematically find the cheapest way to do it without regard to the full externalities of how it's accomplished.
It's a lot easier to hold few companies accountable, than to hold millions of consumers accountable.
> And good luck trying to prove to a fridge service provider that their unit has an intermittent thermostat problem...
That's also a problem when you buy a product.
> but they wouldn't care much about your power bill, nor fridge features
I suppose the market will do its job. Cost of ownership is transparent (monthly fee plus power use), so consumers can easily choose, and they can easily switch.
> It sounds like a nightmare to me.
I'm already having nightmares about the environment right now.
"Our fridges are more power efficient!"
"Ours have advanced health monitoring!"
"We have the greenest recycling program!"
What we are missing today is meaningful competition. You can’t buy an appliance that isn’t a piece of garbage because we have a financial environment that encourages consolidation above all else. There’s only a few companies making anything, so there is no incentive to use quality as a differentiator.
I first started become aware of this when I started having trouble finding shoes. In many categories, all shoes are made by one manufacturer, often in one factory in Guangdong.
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.
Sure, as long as you assume higher power consumption doesn't increase the cost of operating the fridge.
If you're not willing to assume that, then "regardless of power consumption" doesn't make a lot of sense.
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/service
You just described a grocery store...
They keep food and beverages at certain temperatures. When you are ready to consume that food or beverage, you can pick it up (or have it delivered). And best of all, you pay no subscription fee :) But in reality, that's not practical. Most families eat 3 meals a day, and consume multiple glasses of some drink a day. To make a trip to the grocery store (or fridge depot subscription place) every time you want to eat or have a cold drink is not practical (and increases environmental pollutants). So maybe you want to go once a day, you'll still need some device at home to keep your groceries and drinks cold until you want to consume, some device like a fridge :p
If you found a solution, that'd be great. But you'd probably just be a food delivery startup with some fancy marketing lingo. And we have plenty of those already.
The Prime-Member-only prices appearing at my local Whole Foods suggest that this may be increasingly untrue in the future.
Fridge?
And I have three actually. One runs on propane, one standard power and one is a deep freeze, like what one would put in a garage.
All were cheap, all work well, all take modest to very liw resources to run.
The gas powered one works no matter what. That has saved me a time or two when there was no power. I may well get another. It is insane cheap to use.
Anyone selling me something that is planned to break gets the following:
Added to avoid list.
The product gets hacked wher it is posdible to untether it and or remedy the failure.
I tell others.
Now I realize all of that is contrary and toxic to many business models today. I rarely buy new.
I grew up poor, and had time which I invested in skills. Those have paid me off many, many times over.
I also think maximizing what has been produced makes good jobs, is better, with some qualifiers, for the environment, increases personal agency, lowers personal risk and cost.
Among many other good things.
Service models can make sense. For many basics, they just do not make sense.
I would much prefer we distribute repair, support modifications, upgrades and such across many enterprises as we used to do.
TV's were a good example. I grew up learning to repair them. Used to do it for date money. Offered in home service too.
Cars remain a good example. John Deere is the other extreme.
A blanket, "this way is good" makes little sense to me.
Would much rather have many local relationships than the same with big enterprises. More options, and if I do work, I get the immediate returns of lowered cost and risk.
I think component complication for planned obsolescence is much more of a thing than programming something in X years to kill itself.
There are things that I would like to buy for life. Kitchenwares, Desk, etc. There are things that are consumable and may be being a services would be better.
The world already has made a Subscription model for an Expensive and long last fridge and that is called installment plan.
Now, the one place a company with a fleet of fridges could really do the world good would be maintenance & repair. When you've got all your own repair crew on the payroll and you operate one kind of fridge, those costs plummet.
They will happily externalize as many costs as possible as well. Your electric bill is high? Oops, guess you should have negotiated that in the contract. Five hundred dollars of fresh groceries went bad because we gave you a shoddy refurb? We'll have a new unit out to you tomorrow, good luck with the rest.
Yes, so the market will ensure that this kind of company will prevail.
You can't buy a residential clothes washer designed to last longer than five years; laundromats won't tolerate that; solution, pretend Home Depot doesn't exist and buy a Speed Queen that your kids can probably inherit.
An interesting side effect is residential / contractors special type stuff has a very low initial cost of purchase but overall lifetime cost is always lower for commercial grade stuff; this makes sense, if it was cheaper to buy residential garbage the beancounters would force it to officially be commercial...
They also have an incentive to make it last a long time so you're a loyal customer. Loyalty is extremely important if you only purchase a half dozen of something your entire life. Guess which incentive is stronger?
As a corollary, there is a big difference between being incentivized to do something and simply not being incentivized to do the opposite. The average full-size refrigerator lifespan is 17 years. The fact that Maytag doesn't spend millions of dollars developing a fridge that can last 30 years doesn't mean they're incentivized to make a shitty fridge, it just means people don't care enough about years 18-30 that they're willing to pay what it would cost to get that fridge.
Only if they don't have competitor for your business with a reputation for longer-lasting fridges that are otherwise of similar utility.
Planned obsolescence should be illegal
A responsible tax system could accomplish the same without causing people to pay 100x the value of a good product over their lifetime.
So I disagree with your premise based on the example you gave. I would say it would be fine with items you only keep a few years and not long term appliances. I really do not think it encourages them to create units that fail because many companies still want their reputation to be built upon longevity. Simply put, the sales volumes are already great enough to not require shenanigans like what you suggest
History shows otherwise:
And another line item on your revolving monthly expenses.
People need to own, people need to be reaponsible with their decisions, and to think a business or corporation can do it better is dangerous.
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 communistic society to keep my food and beverages at a certain temperature, then this society has the incentive to make the fridge last as long as possible.
EDIT: Besides eliminating planned obsolescence, there are more advantages:
- Increased market transparency. The market is more transparent if I know exactly what a 4 years planned product costs me per month, as opposed to buying a product and not knowing when it will fail. A more planned society leads to better resource distribution.
- Another advantage is that the whole life-cycle of the product, including recycling it, becomes a natural responsibility of one society.
For me, it’s less strain on my eyes, it always works even without electricity, I can lend it out to friends easily, and I like to expand the aesthetic of my bookshelf. I’m also more likely to reread all or part of a physical book. Ebooks are simply inferior.
I still buy books once in a while, but those are either non-fiction or I want them for the pictures (e.g. a book by Brom whom I knew through his art on MtG cards)
All that said, I've also returned to paper for essentially anything I anticipate wanting to take more than a few notes in, or really referring back to at all.
Also after having moved my books between four apartments and our current house, the next time we move I’m prepared to just toss the lot of them.
You can use one to take your entire library on vacation instead of just a few books.
Some of them have lights built in for reading in dark environments.
They're much easier to use one-handed than most paper books.
Some of them are waterproof and will survive being dropped in the bathtub better than a paper book.
You can change the font and text size to suit your preferences.
You can instantly download a new book when you want to read it instead of waiting for it to arrive in the mail or going to a bookstore or library.
They are not "simply inferior" as you put it, even if you happen to prefer paper books.
Sure, there's an aesthetic to certain books but that doesn't apply to the random paperback or even popular hardcover novel. And I appreciate the decrease in clutter. I recently donated a bunch of older "classic" paperbacks that are works I can download for free or near-free anytime I want.
I can buy a used (and sometimes new) paper copy cheaper than an Ebook and when I'm done I can decided if I want to keep it sell it or give it away.
Your point about paper copies often being cheaper is definitely true, and for books I plan to re-read, refer to, etc., I now default to this. But one of the reasons I like my Kindle is that I can take an entire library with me on a month long trip, change my mind about what I want to read, buy a new book if it comes out while I'm gone, and sample things I'd otherwise need to go into a bookstore to find.
I am sympathetic to the argument against DRM though. It seems criminal that I can't leave my ebook collection to somebody after I die.
So far, the data is showing that most people still prefer reading on paper versus on screen, by a decent margin (only 14% prefer screen). However, people still read more ebooks than paper books, likely due to the convenience factor. This can be squared with the NPD data because library ebooks are included in our poll, not just purchased ebooks.
I've been surprised at what small percentage of people use a monochrome Kindle (less than 25%), and the lack of a dominant platform (Amazon — 35%, OverDrive — 19%, Apple — 11%, Nook — 8%, Other — 27%). I guess it's good for consumers that there isn't one big leader here.
I wonder what the numbers are for people who read books to completion on ebook or paper formats. Or how far into the different formats people choose to read.
I know that most of the time when I read any ebooks, I end up never finishing the book. When it's paper, I usually finish the book.
I think it's mainly because with a paper book it's harder to get distracted than when I'm looking at ebooks. If it's a topic I'm studying, or need / really want to know then I'll get the paper version.
Is that really it, though? I mean, that seems really weird on its face... "I'd like to own my own copy of this movie rather than just stream it, but I really have to get back to hating Republicans." That doesn't seem all that plausible.
Personally, I am happy streaming things I don't care to own. At this point, most of the things I watch, I want to watch once. The world is so abundantly overflowing with good video content that I have little reason to return back to something. Those few things, I frequently will buy. Some of my "season DVDs" I'm quite glad I hung on to... some of them were on Netflix for a while, but are no longer, and are still fairly expensive to buy.
If the stream services went away, ultimately I'd be slightly inconvenienced.
Music, by contrast, I tend to listen to a given track/album that I like quite a bit, and I take possession of. YMMV. I'm very music oriented compared to most people.
And Stallman's arguments about software are yet again something different; there are reasons for having the source and using open source that have no media equivalent, because software isn't just media, it's a machine.
Largely.
> I mean, that seems really weird on its face... "I'd like to own my own copy of this movie rather than just stream it, but I really have to get back to hating Republicans."
That's beause you are assuming that, e.g., political identity fights are an alternative to economic concerns, rather than forces which shape the cogntive filters that determine the perception of the nature, cause, blame, and appropriate response to economic disappointment.
They're not necessarily related semantically, but in terms of allocation of attention (a finite resource), they are competitive.
That was actually a perfect summary of /r/technology
renting at Amazon Kindle doesn't make sense. You could pay $9.99 to rent a digital version indefinitely (or until Amazon loses the rights to rent), or you can pay $6.50 to buy a paperback version that you have second sale rights to.
With that said, this article does a number of things that I find obnoxious. Namely:
1) The article gives Amazon a pass for implementing DRM into their books, and instead blames the people who buy Amazon ebooks. I consider that victim blaming. Amazon more or less has a monopoly on the ebook market, meaning if you buy an ebook, you're likely buying from Amazon. If you own a Kindle (which is, bar none, the best ebook reader on the market), you're buying from Amazon. And if you buy from Amazon, your books don't truly belong to you.
2) The article seems very much targeted at the younger generation. Buying digital books, digital music, and smartphones is a thing everyone does, but again, the older generation seems to get a pass on it. They own houses, after all, so from the author's perspective they surely won't "los[e] their connection to private ownership". But those poor naive youths simply can't buy an album off iTunes without giving up their stake in the system.
3) Many of the author's (valid) concerns have actionable ways to resist, which the article fails to mention. You can strip the DRM off ebooks. You can rip your own music and movies. You can load an after-market OS onto your Android phone when the carrier decides to stop supporting it. Some of these can be difficult and time-consuming, but that's the tradeoff for getting both the digital convenience and the freedom of true ownership.
To be clear, I very much dislike this trend of "licensing" everything for the sake of having it streamed to you. But I would argue that this is a business trend rather than a societal trend, as it has been implemented top-down by the nation's most powerful tech companies. The vast majority of people simply picked what was most easily available to them.
Put another way, I think it would be shameful to yell at a poor college student about contributing to the elimination of individual property for choosing to rent his college textbooks for the semester at 1/3rd of the price it would've cost to buy them. And that's largely what this article does.
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.
1. "Experiences over objects" is driven by the need to share it on social media. Photos at the Eiffel Tower garner more likes than a new BMW car.
2. Peer pressure: Experiences of others being shared on social media and garnering likes causes the follower to do the same.
3. Being raised by relatively wealthy parents with all the stuff, and being disillusioned by hoarding and ownership of stuff.
4. Cheaper and more accessible transportation coupled with a general increase in per capita income.
5. Real estate is expensive now, and being forced to live in small rental units, you've learnt to spend time outdoors.
The average price of a house sold in the US in 2018 is around $375,000.
If we adjust the 1989 dollars for inflation, that $145,000 becomes about $295,000.
That means, in 2018 dollars, the average house price has gone up around $80,000 or 27% over the past 29 years.
That's a significant increase and we should be concerned about whether or not Americans can afford to purchase houses, but framing the problem as "houses are now 35-40 times as expensive as they were in the late 80's" is terribly inaccurate as a general metric.
house price data: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ASPUS
inflation calculator: https://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
In the past, you had what you purchased, what was in stock at the video rental place, and what you could VCR-program or catch live on maybe a couple dozen TV channels. Nowadays, bajillions of TV shows and movies are instantly available, such that people don't even have time to watch everything interesting that's available.
I would venture to say that more shows & movies are being created now than in the past, and a lot of them are quite good (probably more quality from series than movies, though).
The value of any individual piece of decent quality media has gone down, given the oversupply. However, there will always be individual pieces of media that are held in importance to a viewer, and those will want to be preserved in some form. Many with a naive assumption that their favorite piece will always be instantly streamable (legally) will certainly have a cold reckoning at some point.
You're free from the task of maintaining and securely storing the thing. My biggest personal switch has been selling my car. Granted I live in an urban area where the dollar and time cost of owning a car are greater than otherwise, but I REALLY don't miss worrying about parking tickets, breakins, this and that funny sound coming from the motor, etc. Dollar wise it's been a wash.
If you own a car and a house, you're pretty much stuck where you are.
I think in any situation, if you're living paycheck-to-paycheck you don't have freedom. A prerequisite to any kind of freedom is the ability to live well within your means and save a lot so that you're insulated from financial setbacks.
If you can't do as you please with the things you buy, there is less advantage to owning over renting. The responsibilities involved in ownership start to look like rental contracts and terms of service agreements.
If I stop paying the average per-mile maintenance and operations cost for my car, it runs out of gas or breaks down. It is sometimes cheaper for me, with my own car, to rent one anyway for a long road trip, because they rent it per day without a per-mile surcharge, and that's just money paid now that does not get spent at the mechanic later, and could be recovered on resale or trade-in.
You really have to look at each rent-vs-buy decision on its own merits. It makes sense to own your DOCSIS modem, your underwear, and a cast-iron pan. All the other stuff is debatable.
Renting the exact same stuff for the same period of time still gives more of one kind of freedom: flexibility. You can usually more easily get rid of that stuff, and you're usually less responsible for it if it breaks, etc. Yes, there's usually a higher financial cost for that, which is less freedom in another sense.
But the reality is that renting often means just paying for the time that you're using an item, instead of paying for it forever even if your utilization window is small. So jumping in an uber for 20 mins a day instead of owning a car 24/7, or renting a movie for 20% of the price to buy it, which might make sense if you're only going to watch it once or twice, etc.
Renting absolutely means more freedom to move. It also means less freedom to, say, tear down a wall in the house. I think home ownership is over-rated, but I wouldn't draw such a clear line on "freedom."
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_ho...
[2] - https://qz.com/574693/americans-working-less-than-ever-befor... (media article, but based on study which is cited with relevant numbers and figures shown)
According to [1] for 2015, the US #13/35 (in the top 37%, so not the middle) on the list on the OECD ranking of average hours worked per worker. In 2015, the US had a Human Development Index (HDI) of 0.920 tied for #10/188 in the ranking of HDI [2]. The only 2 countries with a higher HDI than the US that works more hours in 2015 than the US is Ireland and Iceland. Iceland in 2015 had a population of 329,425 [3] and Ireland in 2015 had a population of 4,688,464 [4], while the US had a population of 321,773,631 [5]. Given that Iceland has an extremely low population compared to the US, Ireland is the only country of comparable population and HDI where the workers work _more_ than US workers.
In contrast, Mexico works the longest hours according to the OECD ranking, but is #77/188 on the HDI ranking list [2].
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#Average_annual_ho...
[2] - http://hdr.undp.org/en/composite/HDI
[3] - https://www.populationpyramid.net/iceland/2015/
[4] - https://www.populationpyramid.net/ireland/2015/
[5] - https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-states-of-america/2...
I think a lot of older generation Americans grew up obsessed with ownership, particular of cars and houses, as crucial symbols of status and success. In my conversations with them I often hear them portray these as indicators rather than just symbols. So it’s not just that owning a home impresses your parents, it’s that you’re not an adult until you own your own home.
At the end of the day I think it’s hard for each generation to understand how much the world has changed and how much the culture of next generation has changed as a result. And they’re uncomfortable with this change, maybe understandably.
Therefore it’s understandable, though IMO misguided, for them to point at changing preferences and behaviors and mistake these as causes of the negative societal shifts they see, rather than understand them as being effects of the societal changes that have happened already.
Easiest case in point, the first generation of car-using adults suddenly experienced a massive glut of “useful” land and housing, and then a subsequent era of high inflation, thus it was very easy for them to buy a home and those who did prosepered at the expense of the banks as their mortgages hedged a bunch of value against inflation.
The second generation (the boomers) didn’t get quite as good of a deal, but it was still pretty easy for them to own a comfortable home with a reasonable commute, and they experienced long runs of appreciation, so their belief that this was the “best way to live” was validated.
But for the kids of the boomers (millennial), urban sprawl had already consumed most of the best near-city land, while the rural economy has been stagnant. Thus the trade-off to follow the old recipe is a brutal commute or else house prices that are out of reach for most of us. Many also came of age in the recession.
Therefore it should not be surprising that the Millenials did not find it viable to be obsessed with ownership, and that they would have backlashed against it in some ways including this preference for finding ways to enjoy things without incurring capital costs, as the so-called “sharing economy” has emerged to offer.
It may be that the Millenial generation is much less wealthy in the end. But that seems to me mostly the fault of the Builders and the Boomers and the result of the choices they made, and that the “renter” mindset is more a result of their lower wealth and harder economic prospects rather than the cause.
Spotify is $10 / month, the price of one album. For that, I get an essentially infinite [1] library of music that's basically always available to me whenever I want, curated playlists, discovery features, sharing features [2], etc, etc. It all just works, I never have to think about it, etc.
By contrast, unless I'm pirating music, what does $10 get me? An album a month? So after a year, I own 12 albums and had to hassle with the files and downloads, whereas with Spotify it just works and I've listened to 10x - 100x that much music.
Yes, if / when I stop paying for Spotify, I'll lose access, but so what? I wasn't planning on spending 20 years paying a fortune to accumulate a music library and then stopping cold and never paying again, just listening to that music I bought. I'm happy to just pay $50 - 100 / month until I die for subscriptions to huge and ever-growing libraries of music, movies, TV shows, books, etc. Seems like a fantastic deal.
1. I don't have niche tastes or a deep attachment to any particular artist that I simply MUST have, so their selection is far beyond anything I really need.
2. I don't use these, but still.
Spotify is great. I can listen to charts/viral music from different countries. I can usually find music from other countries as well if I need to.
You just proved the point though. It's not about how much labor was expended. If we are irrigating and I spend 20 hours digging a ditch by hand and someone spends 10 minutes using heavy machinery, they both produced the same value. Labor is independent of value.
>If someone really wants a ton of ditches, and you can dig faster and deeper than anyone else, is your labor more valuable?
Only if time and depth are a factor. It's the result that has value to the purchaser, not the labor. If said company could hire someone for half the price that does it in twice the time while still meeting the company's deadline, your labor is definitely not more valuable.
But on a corporate level oligopoly would be better. A few corporations dominating an entire market segment.
An example is Microsoft with Netscape. Microsoft was sued with anti-trust laws not because IE or Windows owned the entire market, but because Windows gave Microsoft a privileged place in the web-browser market that they abused.
> I'm sure those numbers have been crunched and that they're walking that line.
A large company is not going to leave a market because it doesn't want to comply with regulation, esp. one the size of the US, the EU, or China.
They would if it became unprofitable, between the fines and the costs of compliance. Google was recently fined $5 billion; that's a significant chunk of their annual revenue, of which Europe is probably a minority. Add onto that the cost of updating for GDPR, and the EU is pushing about as hard as they can afford to.
I'm not saying this is a reason for Europe not to take a strong position. I'm just saying their leverage is finite, and less than that of the U.S. government.
Historically everything from the ownership society has died - everything. Do you still buy betamax players? lazerdisc players? minidisc or walkmans? no...
When the hell have you ever been banned from netflix? If the price goes up, i'll just cancel the service. I don't "collect" netflix shows or have any desire to do anything to feel complete so a change of terms of service, rates, offers or even content doesn't matter to me. I only buy the service because it affords what I want and if that stops, i'll choose a different service.
Historically and basing the future on the explosive growth of current trends, our options are ONLY increasing. There are networks just for science documentaries. I paid 25 bucks with one service to watch probably 200 documentaries over 5 months that i could have NEVER experienced anywhere else and would i want to own them? never... but guess what. in a few years as new content is produced and i can pay another 25-30 bucks and re-binge a bunch of stuff and if this service goes out there are already competing services.
I have more control, more flexibility, more content, more freedom of choice, more freedom of how i can consume, more ways to download, stream, watch, play than i've ever had in my life.
Netflix works on my tv, phone, tablet, computer, Xbox, it works on chrome, safari, edge, firefox.
How can you not see how democratizing this is? I'm so glad I don't have to wait 3 years for disney to "unlock their content warehouse and have a special release of a movie that cam out 10 years ago for the great low price of 99.99" - we're you around for those days?
Better example: It's extremely frustrating to be in the middle of an intense movie and have your internet become flaky or go out completely at that moment. On the other hand, nothing would have stopped you finishing that movie if you owned it, save perhaps a power outage.
Granted, movie watching isn't important enough for me personally that I find owning movies worth the costs, as I'm sure is the case for most people, but for some it very well might be—it just depends on your priorities. For instance, when I commuted to work (about an hour each way), I didn't use Spotify because I didn't want my music listening on the train to be at the mercy of my mobile connection.
Thought experiment:
There are two channels. One airs very compelling content (the king), but is low quality. The other has tepid content, but is excellent quality.
Which do you use?
Over time, I have asked this of a ton of people and have A/B tested it a few times in my home. Originally about legacy, broadcast media and choices I did not understand.
Compelling is the majority answer people give. And yes, that varies, but not so much as to make the discussion moot.
Yet, what we see is majority tepid, regardless of production and delivery quality. Secondly, peak quality is rare. Choice comes before that. Broadcast wants multiple streams more than fewer, better ones. Almost every time.
Channel control is king. Competition gets balanced to avoid mass tune outs.
Anyone doing all compelling, goid quality, few to no ADS will win big, costing others a lot.
Watch Netflix, Amazon, YouTube and the legacy media sorting all that out right now.
That's control over channel.
Only problem is that this/these sort of project(s) would entail an enormous amount of energy and effort to develop. And then you'd also need to ensure you have sufficient marketing clout so it doesn't just lay dormant. And then in the end it's a completely decentralized system. The idea of a creator sitting around skimming money off every transaction is not really part of this picture.
So it's not really the most enticing of projects to take on. Big investment, minimal personal reward. On the other hand, I think it will happen - eventually. We just need another Tim Berners-Lee type individual. Except preferably one that happens to be a brilliant engineer, salesperson, and billionaire.
They are not “sharing” anything in the sense that people normally understand the word. Money is exchanged for services, as normal. The only thing they do differently is evade regulations and taxes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect
A bunch of people independently operating their cars to give rides with no common means to find them, schedule them, and pay them makes them almost completely useless. The network is the only thing making them useful to consumers.
It's like claiming Google is only valuable because it has websites to crawl.
No, this statement is entirely and purely false. The reason the network has value is because there are people on the network doing the work. If no one was doing the work, the network would be worthless.
Stop falling into the trap of believing that the people actually doing the labor are not contributing, or do not have value.
That is not what pathseeker said. You said (and pathseeker agreed) that the network is only valuable because there are people in it to do the labor. Pathseeker also said that having people willing and able to do the work is only valuable with a network to organize them and connect them to the people who need work done. You're both right. The people and the network are both contributing, and they both have value. Neither would be valuable on its own.
Yep. I know a guy that hang with him for a while and Stallman behaviour was already off. That was years ago.
But the original idea it is still relevant today. It is important to detach the message from the messenger.
> Thinking back, it's like we forgot our rights aren't guaranteed and didn't need to be protected or even considered at those levels.
Yes. I think that the success of the open source movement makes it commercially important and the message got diluted. There was a lot of pushback against LGPL and GPL licenses at that time.
Nowadays people contribute to projects that any company can take on and convert to a closed product. Just put some effort in some improvements - a nicer interface and some documentation - and the freemium version will overtake the free version. GPL was designed to make that move impossible unless the original company owned all the code, as then it can change the license whenever they want.
Fixed :)
UK: I'm just old enough to remember visiting a great-grandmother who lived in a cottage without electricity and who regarded the cold water tap and separate water heater as luxuries. And the great aunt who still cooked on a range. Their houses were dark and sparse. Both paid rent for their houses by the way.
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.
Here's another, more complicated problem: even if the math proves that, say, over a long enough horizon, you'll make more money with the longer-lived, repairable version of the product, that isn't necessarily the best way to maximize returns for shareholders/owners. If that concern overrides all others, then you may well be better off maximizing profits short-term, through any (hopefully legal!) means possible regardless of the effect on the long-term viability of the business, and investing them in other markets with higher returns.
I have the same behavior pattern you mentioned, though it's hard to know whether this is strictly a bad thing. If word-search-ability means I can get all the relevant stuff out of a book, then perhaps that's more efficient than reading the whole thing.
Technically, you could, but doing that would be.... criminal.
It's a bummer for sure, but this is probably overkill. I think the main issue is that the price doesn't necessarily reflect this limitation. For many books, it probably wouldn't affect people's willingness to pay that much, but for books that they'd like to be able to give away or bequeath, it could matter a bit.
I went looking at high-end oven/range things one day, after having had the Samsung fridge experience. I noticed that underneath the fancy knobs they had the same crappy quarter-inch shafts as the low-end models. Some of the knobs looked like seriously impressive chunks of steel or brass... but that only put more weight and leverage on the standard-sized shafts.
I saw somebody take apart an older iPhone, maybe the 4. The phone had some really nice looking buttons on the side, machined out of stainless steel. Inside the phone it was a very different story: really flimsy crap.
Pretty much. Most of the time I am more than happy to watch something on the current rotation of Netflix/Amazon/HBO. It doesn't work when you're trying to seek out something specific, but the streaming world works better when you let the content come to you. I certainly don't want to fill my home with plastic discs of movies and if I ever want to watch something specific I can almost always pay to stream it. If it's not available as a rental I can just watch another movie. There is more content than anyone can ever watch, if it's not accessible to me I feel no need to go out of my way.
It's sort of like having a very well done company cafeteria (a la Google) vs going out to a restaurant. I may not get exactly what I want every day, but it's good food without having to go anywhere and at an unbeatable price. I'll probably choose that over a restaurant 9/10 times.
This means that you'll have a higher quality median (note, not mean) experience at the cost of experiencing any true outliers. The best way it's been put to me is the follows:
* (AI/ML/Algorithmic Recommendation) = 8/10 products you will like, none you'll love or hate
* (Serendipitous Searching) = 5 products you will guaranteed like, 1 you will hate, 1 you will absolutely love
By only having access to the current rotation on Netflix/Amazon/HBO you cannot find the 'diamonds in the rough' that suit your taste.
Yep, and for you to report them when they scam you on rides and lie about broken credit card machines. But alas, most cab companies don't have this so you turn to the apps that do provide it.
That, however, does not mean that their network affects are worth their externalities as any individual company could provide services in a city where you knew the price up front, but did not rely on their global network effects
At the very tail end of the top 37%, which makes it part of the middle third and part of the middle two quarters.
Yes. That is true for most things. Eat fatty and sugar-rich food, have pleasure now pay it later. Drink a lot of alcohol, have fun now pay the consequences later. Burn fossil fuels have cheap energy now have catastrophic consequences later. Spend all money now, not have savings in the future.
You are prioritizing current convenience against future consequences. That is a very human thing to do.
Most of the complaints around big companies seem to be around things they might do (e.g. Amazon could gain monopoly power and raise prices to exorbitant levels) but haven't yet done, and could easily end up never doing.
This is false, at least in the way you're thinking. Electron apps are written with web technologies, yes, but they generally don't load their UI via the web; all HTML/CSS/JS lives locally on your machine. I don't use the GitHub app, but if it's true that it can't commit without an internet connection, that's just bad design, as opposed to something inherent with Electron.
Wait, what? Why?
I understand the need here and would humbly suggest trying to support development of FreeCAD for this reason. - FreeCAD Dev
I signed up for an insane promo with Sprint in December where we switched from Verizon and got 13 months of unlimited everything (except 4G tethering, I think that's capped at 10gb per month) for free.
Honestly though, we don't use all that much bandwidth anyway. I'm usually on wifi and for the times that I'm not going to be, my playlists and podcasts download in the background when I am.
Local businesses will often be more sensitive to their customers than local governments. National governments will be even less sensitive.
I live in Austin, and I'm tired of hearing how traffic bad is from people who decided to buy a 3,500 sq foot home 40 miles outside of town and complain about "traffic" driving in.
we have a pretty messed up view of "owning" something without realizing that "owning" doesn't mean much other than "being owned by..." that big commute owns YOU
I'm not trying to say how you should or shouldn't feel. I did lots of commuting over the years and I too said the same things you said...
but now that I'm 42, now that my kids are older and now that life seems to be going by faster and faster, I super regret spending years of my life behind the wheel rather than doing what I really wanted to do.
That bigger house wasn't worth it, the bigger tv wasn't worth it, the bigger commute wasn't worth it.
I had no time for my wife, my friends, my kids, my hobbies. I didn't go kayaking, biking or running as much as I wish...
I thought my commute time was my time, but it was "alone time" but not necessarily objectively "me" time - i was still upset at the traffic, delays, weather, people everywhere and no one talking, everyone just mindlessly going places while being jerks and i had to use books/music to escape...
only to go home to pay a big mortgage, stay up late to have that hour of time, get up early to try and have more time. Before long i was spending all my mental energy trying to justify it all and it became overwhelming.
Today, I live 6 miles from work, a 15 minute drive in worst of traffic. I'm home, i'm not mad, i can still listen to music/audio books but more importantly i'm there - i don't mind driving home to pickup kids to take them to scouts or off to music - because i didn't just spend 1.2 hours commuting. my rage is less, i'm there more, i'm more present and i have time for hobbies/friends/family and ME
There's pretty clearly something deeper here.
IDK why there has to be something deeper.
>public park's pristine full-courts
I mean there's only so many courts maybe you don't want to play with other people you just want to take shots, and it's convenient.
>Neither does it shed any light on the sad way in which suburban dads build rickety basement bars
They do it to hang out with their friends. Same way you order a pizza and eat it at home instead of at the restaurant. What are you after the pizza or "being at a restaurant". For most people it's the pizza. The phenomenon of rickety basement bars as you call them is just people hanging out at home drinking cheaper beer at a home built bar. They get some of that "I'm out of the house" vibe while getting all the "hanging out with my friends" that they really want.
I don't know what else you are implying could be operating here. So I'll have to assume you just hate improvised home bars.
but often the network gets a disproportionaly large share of the reward (i.e., the extraction of value is higher on the network side vs the labour side). This is the same as the capital vs labour argument - one without the other isn't going to produce value, but the capital side is able to extract a higher value than the labour side.
Saying capital is relatively scarce compared to labor is flat out false. Look at the last 10 years or so. Venture Captial has been flush just about anywhere you look.
In my opinion, the added value with Uber at an airport is knowing the price up front. That's not always possible with whatever driver is first in line at the taxi stand.
After going through 3 washing machines in 9 years, i bought a Speed Queen commercial washer without a cashbox. It is not very pretty, and cost $50 more than the mid-range residential washer that it replaced, has a 5 year warranty, and an expected life of 10-15 years.
This is true for most categories of consumer products. Appliances, shoes, pants, furniture, etc.
The problem is optimization as energy efficiency and lifespan for example are often at odds. Further you can measure energy efficiency much easier than lifespan so the incentives get out of whack from what consumers want in favor of what they can measure.
We probably spend exponentially more energy manufacturing, distributing and delivering new appliances that fail due to pointless efficiency engineering than we shave off.
I'm not going to put a Bosch dishwasher in when someone is going to let their kid sit on the door while it's open, not maintain it properly (cleaning out the drain screen monthly), and so on. Maybe some tenants will, but most do not. I make sure to pay for the extended warranty, and my credit card tops the warranty up some more, because one service call is more expensive (and it's built into the cost of the rent). Something breaks? I file a warranty claim or service call, schedule it with the tenant, and move on with my day. My tenants are entitled to working appliances, not fancy appliances. If those appliances are durable and long lasting, bonus.
An issue where the incremental benefits to one individual may have negative externalities throughout the society as a whole,
You and I (but not various other folks on this thread) place a lot of value on not avoiding hassle, and a pleasantly low albeit non-zero price for a reasonable subset of the output of Hollywood.
People who are deeply invested in being able to apply their own personal filter on what media is available seem less satisfied.
I know other people who play out the same disagreement for comedy and music.
For some reason not for dance. Where’s the cheap version of Netflix for the ballet?
Maybe somewhere on YouTube; I refuse to use YouTube so I wouldn’t know.
But I don't think this is a good idea for the world to become like this as a whole. The more things are centralized (stream from one server as opposed to living in a bunch of locations all over the world), the easier it is for parts of our culture to disappear.
The artifacts we find from thousands of years ago are a super tiny handful of many, many, many more that existed (perhaps not exact copies, but the same types of things), and we have lost who knows how knowledge and cultural artifacts from the past, in particular the ancient past, due to things like libraries and museums getting burned down or destroyed, statues being removed, massive wars fought, etc.
Even in our own lifetimes there have been the Taliban that have destroyed ancient Buddhist statues in Afghanistan[1], ISIS destroying artifacts in Iraq museums[2], and looters destroying or stealing artifacts from a Cairo museum while the Arab Spring was underway[3]. Along with many, many other examples[4].
We collectively have the capability to have exact or near-exact copies of all sorts of documents, art, video, audio, etc. The more people that hang on to these things, the more future generations benefit from it. And the more we can benefit from the archival actions of others now.
But again, it doesn't require that everyone do it, or even for each person to try to have a copy of literally everything that exists. Just that enough people own copies of the things they love and share them with people as much as they can, helps insure the survival of our cultural heritage.
BTW, I found an interesting site that chronicles all the various types of media that are known to have existed but are now lost. It's called LostMediaWiki, if you're curious. I was surprised how long the list was just for video games, which aren't that old as a medium.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhas_of_Bamiyan
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_Mosul_Museum_ar...
[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-12442863
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_destroyed_heritage
So I don’t agree it’s worse for society.
I do think it would be nice if game producers would put their code and assets in escrow, so once the platform they were built for goes away, and the producer decides to not invest in a succesor platform, the assets/code could be released to the public.
Certain reference manuals (The O'Reilly Zoo, for example) are more useful as physical books, as well.
Besides, if I got hit by a bus tomorrow (not planning on it today), it's not there's anyone to inherit my stuff.
As a reader of many many Kindle unlimited military sci-fi books I sympathize and recommend the "Nameless War" ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12356877-the-nameless-wa... ) trilogy as the rose in the manure of books I have read of this genre in the last few years.
There are occasional spelling mistakes etc but the story itself is fantastic and the military scenario believable.
If you think modern refrigerators are wasteful I'd ask you to prove it. The design choices they make are manufacturing trade offs—not simply cutting corners to make it break. A refrigerator might only last 10 years, but its a net gain if it cost 1/10 the energy to build, uses 50% of the power, never leaks refrigerant and uses a small ammount.
In nearly every case over time, you'll pay more to rent it than own it.
I had a not-so-drastic experience with a high-end samsung fridge: A design flaw where the recirculation fan would accrue ice, and symptoms were that it sounded like a chainsaw every time it turned on, and eventually the fan would freeze over. The only way to "fix" it was to thaw it out every few weeks, and any attempt to replace parts was futile since it was a design flaw, not a mechanical failure.
If the shelf is glass, and the glass is not resistant against wide temperature variations, the glass weakens and eventually will shatter.
My shelves are generally packed with large jugs. For example, on a main shelf I might have 4 gallons of milk and a half dozen half-gallon containers of juice and then more stuff to fill out the remaining space. Door shelves are similarly packed, with the ones in the Samsung being about 12x8 inches and thus big enough for gallons of milk.
The fridge is constantly used by kids. It needs to be mostly restocked every other day.
Glass shattered in one of the $400 fridges. The other $400 fridge is wire. Glass shelves in the Samsung would break around the edge, leaving me with an intact sheet of glass and some broken plastic. Door shelves are always plastic. Samsung snapped white and clear plastic together to make the shelves, with a fragile zig-zag at the joint. I got to wrapping the shelves with string-embedded packing tape before installing them, which increased the typical life from weeks to months.
Give me forged metal grates please, or at least something like rustproof storm drain covers.
Capital is not money, but rather durable goods which contribute to more efficient production. It is the networks which are the capital here. Money can be used to buy capital, but only if someone goes to the trouble of designing that capital first. There is plenty of available labor looking for productive work to do, just as there are plenty of VCs searching for ventures likely enough to succeed to justify the investment. It is a lot easier to find people able to do whatever work is required than it is to find the right capital (networks) to organize them and enabled them to do the right work productively.
Both capital and labor are needed. The networks receive a greater portion of the reward because they are more scarce than labor as well as contributing more to overall productivity.
As an example - while my grandfather may have a bit of trouble figuring out how to get started on Netflix, once he's chosen something to watch, he won't really notice a difference from when he watched things on VHS in terms of how to navigate. The same is not true for giving him a book on a Kindle.
I actually disagree with that one--at least for certain types of footnotes. When I was an IT industry analyst I got into the habit of using footnotes at the bottom of the page to provide parenthetical detail, substantiation, caveats, etc. that I thought might be useful but which would break up the flow of the writing. On the page, this works well because you can just glance down. On an ereader, it's often more distracting than just putting it inline would be.
For just references that you'll only sometimes want to look at, it's fine but for the way I often use them, I liked the old way better.
I mostly agree with your broader point. The fact that used books are often cheaper and you can't typically lend your ebook when you're done probably also contribute.
Yes I know this is going to be a controversial question. I'm genuinely interested in what people's opinions are.
No, this does not follow. It is perfectly possible to ensure that every child has a reasonably good start and every chance to become a productive citizen without stealing from anyone, if only the people who are specifically interested in "evening things out" give up some of their wealth for the purpose. As a bonus, the children then get to grow up in a society where theft and parasitism are not deemed normal and acceptable forms of behavior.
Having these physical DVDs or whatever really is a very mild burden, but even that mild burden is larger than the mild benefit provided, people just like having their DVDs on their shelf because of the intrinsic value of owning "stuff".
Have I rewatched every video I own enough times to offset the cost of renting it for each time I've watched it? Overwhelmingly "no". Not even close. Rentals of even new things are a couple bucks, DVDs are often $20 or more. I'm quite free to lend stuff out too, but it's still <1 on average and even if you include "every lend == the full cost to buy it on launch day" I'm still in the negative. Most people I've run into who would be interested already have it or have already watched it.
Add in that the stuff I do rewatch is relatively old and rent-able for dirt cheap, and it's even more "no". There are a literal handful I'd buy, that's it.
Same pattern with books, except that odds are pretty good that the library has a copy of it :) And even slightly not-super-famous books are pretty likely to be new to people I lend to because there are so many. (technical books are another matter, they're frequently not in libraries, but there too I've only reread a couple that are meaty enough to actually justify more than one pass)
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Books I still keep buying, especially since much of what I read for fun is somewhat old and available for extremely cheap. But I haven't bought a movie in... a decade? And I feel zero desire to do so.
I'm not sure re-watching or re-reading anything is really limited or granted by owning...
Lets take netflix for example. If there is something on netflix that i want a friend to see and they don't have netflix, i can just bring my phone/tablet over to their house and cast the show to the TV and watch it there or they can pay a few bucks and watch the entire series in a month.
I don't have to collect anything, store anything, remember who borrowed what and quite honestly there is enough content on a few select services that i don't need them all and i'm quite content in having so much new stuff to enjoy that the need for having a favorite to watch over and over is sort of history for me.
I watched the shit out of goonies as a kid becasue it was only 1 of 5 movies our entire family could own. Had we had on-demand everything that habit would have been a non starter for me. That doesn't mean i don't love goonies to this day and that i won't ever re-watch it but i may only re-watch it when it makes a round again on netflix and magically shows up as available - and i think that kind of experience to me is much better than feeling i owe myself to watch it because i'm moving it, storing it, seeing it, shelving it and having it occupy my life in some way.
If we can ignore ethics for a moment, piracy still provides a superior product than rentals because pirated objects don't lock you into particular ecosystems nor does it prohibit you from using the product in any way.
Given the choice, I don't want to have to buy an apple, android, or windows phone/tablet just to download movies to watch while camping or something. I would rather have the freedom to do whatever I want with the things I paid for.
For example, i don't buy from itunes or google store if they restrict me to those marketplaces. But i do subscribe to netflix and hulu because they don't give a crap where i login from.
piracy isn't ownership either... even if i pirate shit, i have to provide a service akin to that netflix provides to be able to watch it on my tablet/tv/phone or on the road
Amazon Kindle doesn't own the content of the books to be able to censure them, they can't legally censor or edit books that weren't censored or edited by the writer/publisher.
Also, there are dozens of ebook stores - a vast competitive market to choose from - not to mention many libraries have ebooks and print books available and interlibrary loans are awesome to get things you want even if not available locally.
Now, services like Kindle or Steam deciding to revoke access to prior purchases is a potential Big Problem...but as of yet, it remains just that: potential. And at least in theory, there are government agencies that are charged with protecting against abusive behavior towards consumers (obviously actual results there are somewhat mixed).
...unless they somehow pissed off Amazon and lost their account. Or the publisher/auther pissed off Amazon and got taken down. Or...
Different strokes I guess?
Likewise, a book's value is not in the paper and binding, but the content of the writing. I concede that I have an attachment to the exact copies of my favorite books, but I don't feel like I should. The important things are the what I take with me from reading, not the physical books themselves.
I'm tired of consumerism, I'm tired of articles complaining about the change of paradigms since the baby-boomer generation. I'm not going to consume media in the same way a middle class worker from the 70's or 80's did. A subscription service lets me listen to any song I can think of on a whim while driving in my car, not limited to the selection of CD's I can jam into a binder. If the apocalypse hits and Amazon Web Services goes down I'll start buying CDs again.
The model being peddled on TV/radio/etc isn't "Rent a fridge." is it?
This is just another "language war". The airwaves and communications channels are monopolized by discourse that protects the known way of doing business. It's not a law of physics it be that way.
The only other me-time I have is getting up at 05:30 to go for a run, which is magnitudes less pleasant than sitting on a bus.
So, as you say, everyone's opinion of commuting time differs. For me it is a highlight of the day.
Now my morning run is me time - I run where I want to run, I wave to people, I smile, I pet the random dog that runs up to me, I smell the fresh air, I sense the warmth of summer, the coolness of fall and the crispness of winter. I feel the sun on my back, the wind on my face. I can listen to music, I can listen to an audiobook - my mind is clear - think the most and remember the most when i'm out on my jog.
When I commuted to work, it was so mindless sometimes I forgot how I even got from point a to b. On the bus or the train or sitting in my car, I wasn't there with nature, I wasn't there in mind/body/spirit. I was kept busy by stuff I didn't really pay attention to because it was all a distraction from the commute that I lied to myself was what mattered as me time.
at 5:30 in the morning - there is a good chance you will see the stars set and the sunrise - the birds chirp. You run - you start feeling better, you feel healthier, you feel more alive. You get back home and that coffee tastes better, that shower feels better. YOur muscles ache less and less as you do it.
That commute - unless you happen to be lucky enough to be bush pilot flying the mountains of Alaska to get to work or a park ranger driving thorugh a national park to get to work usually doesn't offer what we take foregranted but forget what life should be about.
When I lived in PA i had to commute 1.5 hours each way and i too swore to myself how good that "me time" was...
figure 253 working days a year, in one year I spend 759 hours just getting back and forth to work - not including all the extra time, bad days, slow days or working late, or having to come in early or use my free time to study, answer alerts/pages or stay ahead of tech/services/requirements that is a lot of time. Really put into perspective when you realize 750 hours is essentially 19 weeks of man hours of worka year. I couldn't name a book, or learn anything new or remember a damn thing that happened during those commuting days - but i could remember how bad traffic was, what time every school got out and how often i ran across the same asshole on the way to work or home and what frequency life sucked because of holidays/events/activities going on.
i guess my point is, if you can enjoy it, by all means enjoy it, but don't do what i did and fool yourself into enjoying it without realizing you weren't getting out of it what you perceived you were.
Its kind of a shame we're good at convincing ourselves something like a jog, where we're alone in nature with mind, body and spirit is "bad" but in the hustle and bustle of senseless rush to get to work or get back home - we see that as a me time. (not saying this is how you feel, but how i perceive the quirks of our society)
Also, lets not forget, if you had a 10 minute commute to work your run may be at 7:30 instead of 5:30 or it could be at 5:30 pm instead of 5:30 a.m which may be more enjoyable for you. Or you could go fishing before/after work or just spend an hour at starbucks enjoying a coffee rather than sitting in traffic by choice.
The first year i stopped commuting i started going fishing at a small pond on my way to work. I'd just keep a collapsable rod in my car and some lures. I got good at catching large mouth bass and crappy and i got to see the bats, birds, fish, deer and that 45 minutes of fishing before work was the best healing for my spirit i could ever ask for. Thats mother fucking ME time right there!
If you want to talk about "convincing ourselves", I look at some of my co-workers who live in tiny apartments that don't even have fully functioning kitchens, for the sake of being a few blocks from work. They talk about how great it is to have a short commute and seem oblivious to the fact that they've chosen lives slightly better than those of Chinese factory workers, only the company doesn't pay for the exorbitant rent on the tiny pods they're living in or all the meals they have to order from delivery services because they only have a mini-fridge and a microwave.
Legislation against this practice isn't unheard of, there are fines and jail time for it in France.
My guess is that Apple will simply claim that they can't make the phone as small/thin when the battery has to be replaceable.
No, no, no! The plebs will live happier and more fulfilling lives if they meet their friends at the bar for a pint (and stop pursuing the illusory control of their very-own basement bar). [0] This is about looking up, not down!
[0] By the way, I'm just the kind of guy to want to build his own basement bar. These are message-board musings, not cultural edicts.
When I hang out with the same friends at their rickety basement bars more of them show up and we're all very engaged, we talk or play games and I drink more moderately. I'm only out $14 for a 12 pack and if I overdo myself I can just crash on the couch for a bit.
Personally I find the basement bar more fulfilling.
One can be a Chicken Little to the point that I would ask, why drive at all? It's just not worth the risk. A sixteen-year-old car has airbags and designed-in crumple zones. It ain't no 2019 Volvo, but "kill you in a crash that a new one will let you walk away from" is ridiculous hyperbole.
A 2-decade-old car is going to break down at some inopportune time, like it or not, even with the best maintenance.
Brand-new cars do the same thing. In fact, I view cars like I do electronics: if it makes it through the first six months, you're probably good for 100K miles. And if it breaks down, so what? You email your "flexible hours" employer, tell them you'll miss standup this morning, then dip into the massive amount of funds you saved by not having a car payment to get it fixed. Oh, it's an inconvenience for sure, but is it worth $600/month to avoid once in a great while (or not at all, if Honda or Toyota)? Hell, our VW camper is 37 years old, and I'd rely on it to get me to work every day, and I think VW makes shitty cars. Take care of your shit, and it will take care of you, even if it's a VW.
Some are obviously so scared of breakdowns and that life-ending crash that is assuredly just around the next corner that they'll foot the $600/month (or whatever a car payment is these days) for their big-ass SUV that they make any excuse to justify. Others, IMO, manage risk much more realistically.
The risks of injury in an automobile accident should absolutely weigh into the calculus of car ownership. Especially considering the staggering amount of progress made in vehicle safety in the past 10 years. If a brand new Camry saves you from a single ER visit that you would have had driving an 2008 Camry, then it's already paid for itself.
It's not really any different from buying a fancy $150 toothbrush that does a better job at preventing cavities, or any of the many other purchases that statistically save you money in the long-term.
But I am curious what progress you feel has been made in auto safety in the last ten years that is "staggering". By 2008, I think we got the low-hanging fruit: 1. ABS 2. Airbags 3. Side-curtain airbags 4. Sacrificial crumble zones
I do not consider lane keeping and automatic braking to be "staggering" progress, but incremental.
If a brand new Camry saves you from a single ER visit
That is the very definition of begging the question.
While, 2002 car may be relatively safe, I would still prefer to have the safest car on the road. Usually it will require less servicing than an old car and be more dependable too.
A 2018 car will have front and side airbags designed to work as well on 120lb woman as a 200lb man, backup cameras, very advanced stability control systems, and will have been tested against the most common causes of crash deaths since 2002.
You can go to the NHSTA website and download the raw crash test and see how many gs your head will experience or how many netwons of force will be applied to your femurs. Using this information, I can see that you would be very likely to sustain a concussion in an accident in a 2002 Camry and your chest would be compressed by 30mm, while in a 2018 Camry you're at minimal risk for any head injury and your chest would only compress by 23mm.
It's pretty interesting stuff. TL;DR: cars are safer today than 20 years ago, by a lot.
But economic incentives might push the renting model to become the main - or even only - model to use many goods and services in the future. Similarly, trends about the number of service providers seem to point towards consolidation as well.
So if those trends hold true, we might at some point have Megacorp Inc. offering Living-As-A-Service. And then we would have a problem.
"Bird and Lime deactivate scooter services in Santa Monica for a day in protest"
iPhone users either get the battery replaced, sell the phone, or they trade the phone in. The trade in then gets sold again, and likely again after that. The iPhones resale value makes sure it is a long time before any are simply thrown in the trash.
These recycled phones either end up as refurbished phones in other markets, or are taken apart by their special robots down to the individual pieces, which are then recycled themselves.
Your second sentence is no argument, just a claim. I counter-claim that I do have that right. So it seems to be a stalemate with respect to claims.
Go to a better one.
As far as safety progress over the past ten years -
2008: SID-II Crash test dummies. These dummies are designed to simulate smaller humans (women and children).
2010: NHSTA revamps five star rating because cars became "too safe." Almost every vehicle on the road had a five star rating so they made the requirements more stringent.
2014: NHSTA adds small-overlap tests to accident ratings. Many cars failed during the first year.
2015: NHSTA revamps safety standards again, this time adding considerations for rollover and crash avoidance technology (automatic braking).
Other considerations added over the past decade, but I can't find an exact date implemented for: side pole crash, fuel system integrity assurances, deformation barrier tests. There's a bunch more but I'm tired of reading research papers on teh subject.
Suffice to say, advances in safety from 2008-2018 were staggering.
Well, thank you for taking the time to post what you did in response to my question.
why would anyone entertain let alone engage opposing viewpoints when it's much more comfortable to just retreat to a place with common similar beliefs. Make no mistake Hn is an echo chamber as well.
People want to be in a place with common similar beliefs - this isn't a bad thing, its human nature. Its far safer to be around people you know don't like to eat people like you.
The main argument seems to be that because we're not having forced arguments and considerations in meatspace, mano-a-mano, we're not challenged enough. I'd argue we're extremely challenged nowadays, but most of the difficulty is in finding how to deal with the new stage upon with the game is set. Its like arguing that we've lost the ability to form up a cavalry line because of the airplane. You're right in a way, but its irrelevant. The game is changing, and everyone is scrambling to figure out what the new meta is.
But in the original "community", you wouldn't actually be exposed to opposing viewpoints all that often either. You actively had to seek them out too. Ancestor comment pointed out that community was required for survival. Once survival and security is guaranteed, then you can start thinking about self-actualisation, which is a different kind of community.
> when it's much more comfortable to just retreat to a place with common similar beliefs
This is an age-old argument, but taking a new form. Of course people like just doing what's comfortable; we've just replaced the 5 hours of broadcast TV a day with 5 hours of mindless social media refreshing. It's only a minority that actively seek to challenge themselves.
I mean, "more comfortable to just retreat to a place with common similar beliefs" is a good theory. But it is hardly the only one I can think of. Off the top of my head I also have:
1) Wealth is being eroded by the response to the '08 crisis leaving known-bad cultures to thrive in the lending industry. Social fabric starts to unravel due to lack of wealth creation.
2) Academics have had a long history of being in tension with democratic ideals. Famously, right when they came up with the idea of 'academies' Socrates was executed by a jury trial. More recently, communism had strong support in academic circles of Europe. We've massively increased the exposure of people to the university culture in the last 1-2 generations. Maybe technocrat leanings are leaking out? Technocrats don't compromise well on social issues, they believe there is a best answer.
Basically, the problem might not be algorithms and search bubbles, even though this is a forum that knows a lot about algorithms and search bubbles.
The rule that seems to be working itself out is this: people can pursue any interest they want, but we have social contracts when those interests interact with other people. Groups converge and have little friction when many people share at least some of the values, so you get things like HN, reddit, etc, but not unmoderated.
Alternately, by removing yourself from your community you failed to give them examples that would've broadened their horizons.
Like, this is one form of problem with today's filter bubbles--they help polarize communities by preventing the natural mechanisms of discovery and compromise that are required for groups of humans to coexist in meatspace.
That said, as all things, there's a balance. The Internet is a great tool for bringing people virtually close together and spreading ideas. Sharing those ideas is a great way to enhance your local community.
> tyranny of geography
Haha. We're a long way from being omnipresent so you better get used to having neighbors. ;-)
You're very right! Sharing ideas to enhance your local community can be incredibly valuable and rewarding! However, some people occasionally find that their local communities do not always uniformly and enthusiastically welcome the ideas they want to share. Some people, faced with such experiences and fears, might consider that analog and digital communities offer different tradeoffs.
It depends. I find the fact that people can isolate themselves into communities where it's very easy to censor out any possible dissenters and dissenting opinions to be pretty damn damaging to our society.
Until that, the current virtual "communities" seem like a poor substitute for actual communities, long-term. Yes, you get to meet like-minded people (or more precisely, one aspect of the personalities of some like-minded people), however what you can actually do with them is tightly restricted to the online sphere. No common activities, no parties, no activism outside the internet, no dating. No differing viewpoints. No even knowing who you are talking with.
This seems like a poor substitute to (non-coerced) physical communities.
People who think like you do, who will never challenge you about anything important, or expose you to uncomfortable ideas or opinions, or cause you to question your assumptions about the world.
This seems to be true of most squishies, no matter how they connect.
Communities built around what they love are usually good, but what if what you love is terrible?
I don't see anything you've stated as mutually exclusive to the previous comment.
I point out what I perceive as dismissive because I think there are important aspects of human character that 'tyrannical' circumstances help to shape, enabling us to learn patience and tolerance of opposing views.
It's how we ultimately achieve error correction in culture and progress as a society, and it's not clear to me that an option for people to utterly extinguish all of that from one's environment is an upgrade.
Apologies, but I don't agree that's nearly sufficient enough an "ontology", in the philosophical sense if you will, of community. You are involved in a community the moment you hear someone screaming out for help nearby; you are involved in a community when you're one of those scmucks stuck communicating to work in a packed trainer in the morning, you're involved in a community when you respond to the presence of minorities or certain of other races in a manner which may make them uncomfortable (100% not alleging a thing btw, most certainly not the point right now); you clearly join a community when you join the military, but you have, for better or for worse, shockingly few rights and freedoms therein.
My point is that, for human beings, we are by definition, as social animals, involved in a community some way, some how, because we inherently respond to one another's presence, even when that response is indifference (perhaps in the face of someone screaming out for help nearby). This is almost, for myself, the entire lesson of watching Mister Rogers (if you're an America, I don't know if you are).
Choosing a community for yourself, therefore, shouldn't be a reprieve, relief, or, worse case, a retreat from those other communities you're involved in, like your neighborhood or family. We all may have run into that person who appeared to us to be way too chatty and friendly in some public space that we were constrained to, say, the train; they're just answering to their involvement in a different way.
Have you stopped to consider the unintended consequences of this? Mainly, that you become so comfortable with lack of adversity and diversity (of ideas, etc.) that when the time comes to leave the bubble you're unprepared. You don't have the tools and mindset to adjust to those who are unlike you.
Yes. It's nice to find others similar to you. But just the same, there's also value in being an island and still being capable of interacting with strangers.
It's a terrifying thing. You've described the experience many have upon moving out of a small town in the Midwest. A good friend is having the same experience now when she looks to move away from the Bay Area.
I.e. echo chamber.
Not everyone is happy, plenty of people were and are misfits to particular bubbles they were born into.
There are communities where you pick the people who are associated with, and communities where you don't get to do that (or do it as much).
The internet gives you huge control over picking communities that think/have interests exactly like yours (and that's exactly what the parent was mentioning to like about the internet communities).
In real life communities that are not e.g. a chess club, but more like neighborhood, school, etc, you are forced to live with, and deal with, all kinds of people, not just the one you chose to. At best, you can move to a different location, but you still don't have the control to pinpoint and seggregate interests the internet gives you.
I love my echo chamber, thank you very much! :)
But I get what you are saying and agree, but also with OG comment as well.
I think we want same things, more genuine connection with people who are meaningful to us.
We have the law to regulate what is acceptable or unacceptable - almost all laws are there to regulate person-to-person interactions. If what you love requires murdering someone, we already call that out. If what you love involves playing "I Will Survive" with a kazoo, we don't call you out unless you have a very loud kazoo and people are trying to sleep.
Laws and social pressure are also a moderating force. Forcing 2 people that are very opposed to have a forced interaction about the things they are opposed on probably results in quite a few bar fights - more often than not though they leave.
If the lack of general empathy and over-demonization of the "other" is a problem, well, try being a person of color in the 50s or before. If anything interactions have gotten better, except for those who need to have everyone look and act like them in order to function.
Perhaps this was true in the days prior to the internet, but it certainly isn’t the case now. In fact, social pressures in the online sphere can be the opposite of a moderating force. In the analysis of the online culture wars, many authors have pointed out how the alt right bursting into the mainstream was in many ways a response to the societal pressure to conform to ever increasing (and at times, absurd) rules of a radical “PC culture”.
As a disclaimer, this isn’t to justify the alt right movement or to condemn political correctness wholesale. But the point is that societal pressure is not moderating anything. On the contrary, the internet has allowed people to simply retreat from the parts of society that previously may have pressured them into moderation, and instead to enclose themselves in the parts of society that not only accept their radical culture, but encourage it.
> If the lack of general empathy and over-demonization of the "other" is a problem, well, try being a person of color in the 50s or before.
And yet the rights of racial minorities still made massive strides in absence of the internet. Many of the commenters here have made arguments that along the lines of “a gay person would never have found acceptance without the geographical boundary breaking communities of the internet”, and frankly, I’m not sure that is true. The changing attitudes towards LGBT persons isn’t any more radical than many of the other social revolutions that have taken place without the internet.
It's possible that this kind of conformity might be best treated as something other than a universally positive force.
I should rephrase: this is the first experience I've had of what is commonly described as "community". I hope that clarifies matters. I am not describing a community encountered as an artifact. I am describing the experience of being a member of a community. I hope this helps! Do let me know if I can help clarify more.
The comment to which I was responding took a very narrow view of what defines a community. The definition offered is one that would have been obvious to an illiterate serf a thousand years ago - people nearby they have no choice but to cooperate with for basic survival. For the most part, you had two choices: membership or death. And membership meant conforming.
Some might consider such a choice coercive. Such a person might even consider the circumstances that require that choice tyrannical.
I have offered a much more expansive one, where a person can be a member of multiple communities non-exclusively in a way that allows them to find communities that suit them. This formulation, unfortunately, can be seen as dismissive of the value of the communities of the past.
This is a very understandable viewpoint. After all, the expansive definition would seem to do away with the basic tenants of the narrow one. Yet, it's perhaps possible that this view could become even more correct than it already is! There's absolutely value in what even the narrowest of definitions would consider a community. They teach the value of belonging, of collaboration, and of many hands making light work. It just might be worth considering that there could be other lessons to be learned in this world that might not be fully captured there.
After all, humans are not TCP/IP. Capital-T Truth is not always easy to come by. There are still people in this world who consider (for example) failing to say the right ritual words at the right ritual time every day to be a grievous error in need of correction.
In a world where the obvious truths of the past are today's errors to be progressed beyond, we are presented with the wonderful opportunity to let endless forms of community bloom most beautiful. That we might learn from this glorious array what can be progressed beyond and how.
Though I understand if some would prefer not to.
Thank you very much, from the bottom of my heart, for the opportunity to engage.
It seems as though we are illuminating more nuance of the varied interaction and outcome of communal constructs.
I find what you've elaborated to be true and insightful, and reminds me that our perspective can always miss significant factors that may determine our outlook to be optimistic or pessimistic.
I wonder if what the aforementioned comment suggested is still unresolved; would some or all of us lose incentive and/or mechanisms that temper and shape our proclivity to compromise and coexist despite still unaltered and conflicting values and behaviors?
If it's true that the range and resolution of possible human values and behavior has grown considerably, with new nuance blooming all the time, it would seem to follow that there are new lines along which to fracture as well. Though not necessarily in a unique way never overcome before.
You bring up very good points.
> Technocrats don't compromise well on social issues, they believe there is a best answer.
You are absolutely correct. Algorithms and search bubbles are just symptoms not the disease. Elite untouchable tech giants with no oversight molding human thought and behavior to increase their bottom line and power with a 'move fast a break things' attitude in regards to the any social or ethical implications - that's the disease.
However, is it perhaps possible that I may have explicitly considered this kind of purely physical analog community? Maybe that I could have even been thinking explicitly about such examples when commenting that all kinds of communities are echo chambers?
One of the common characteristics of communities is that they enforce norms on the people who are their members. Physical neighborhoods and cities and schools are not different in this way. They are echo chambers too, generally reinforcing a distilled version of regional thinking, and the main lesson they teach tends to be how to bite your tongue.
The big difference between these analog communities and most digital ones is that in the case of the latter, a person can generally search for communities with amenable norms.
You're completely right! Communities of interest are very different from non-optional analog communities. It's just worth considering that despite this major difference, it may not significantly affect their echo chamber nature.
Like most things, I suspect it may be best regarded as a tradeoff. Is presenting as your idealized in a restricted environment more or less harmful to society than being unable to present as anything that vaguely resembles yourself in a less restricted environment?
There might not one answer that's right for everyone.
Would some of us lose the pressure to conform? Yes. And I think this is all to the better.
Ultimately, I think that conformity is what this entire conversation is all about. I do not value conformity and I reject the notion that forcing people to conform is a societal gain.
In meatspace social pressure exists unlike on the internet. An example is racist/misogynist jokes are not acceptable in most IRL contexts (especially those that are being logged/recorded permanently as is the case on the majority of the modern web) whereas on the internet it's not only discouraged but it's actually a great way to build a following quickly.
The internet is fundamentally changing how we communicate, ingest news, and share information.
The argument is that before safe spaces and echo chambers online, individuals that aim to engage general public with their message in any meaningful context are forced to compromise their extreme views. In my view Alex Jones wouldn't be a nationally recognized name before the internet, at best he'd be able to get influence over 30 or so of his local conspiracy theorists. No publication would print his views, because of how large a portion of the population they would alienate and anger. I'd argue this pressure is a net positive and having it removed online is leading us down a dark path.
That is my point and what is changing, as people figure out how to interact in the platform. In Oklahoma yesterday nearly all local news outlets reported on a group of adults threatening violence (or to have their children/grandchildren commit violence) on a 12 year old transgender girl. They did that on Facebook, and their names are out there along with their identities. People are moving towards more identifiable or at least moderated spaces, because frankly most people don’t want to interact on a platform that’s main feature is they allow anyone to say anything with no consequences.
Alex Jones may not exist if it weren’t for the internet, but the backlash to views like his is real as public spaces on the internet figure out how to deal with bad actors.
That can be said about every development ever. But it being more easy / efficient can bring out existing systems out of balance at some point, once counter-acting forces are overwhelmed... especially if those don't improve (as fast).
> reach out to other communities and individuals and make them feel welcome.
That doesn't seem to be a winning strategy in current US politics. And the shared consensus seems to be eroding fast. I understand there are a lot of additional problems (like the shitty two party voting system) feeding into that, even strengthening each other. But finding a shared consensus seems absolutely necessary when living with other people in the same city/country/planet at a time were we can dramatically effect each others lives.
There are lots of different parties between different constituencies that are incentivized to sow discord between them. I'm not sure any olive branches that are offered are even seen by the other side given all the blades flying about.
Yet, is it possible that this isn't remotely new? Is it possible that digital communities enable people to find communities where they are not pushed out, instead of being coerced into ones where they are? And that perhaps many people have had the experience not of isolating themselves in dangerous and damaging ways, but of being isolated by the people who are supposed to be their community?
You're absolute right about the danger. It's just possible that there might be some room for subtlety here.
I believe that our tendency to view unpopular beliefs a stain upon a person's immutable character is a more fundamental (as in, earlier in the causal chain) cause of the damage to society you describe.
What makes it "our" society? I've never felt like a part of it.
People weren't unenlightened because LGBT people were hiding, LGBT people were hiding because of a fear of violence and ostracization. Only when it became unacceptable to be violent towards people did they change, and that's a slow process. Only then can you effect any change. There are braver people than I who stayed in those situations, but most of them were also a lot better at fitting in with the community in the first place.
The only way to get to people like that is to hurt them, either physically, mentally, economically or socially. That's what we're doing as a collective by changing norms so that it's no longer considered acceptable to beat people up for being <insert whichever unique attribute you want>.
Doing that will result in conflicts. Sometimes those conflicts will escalate into violent ones. As a single person it's often not viable to proceed into that territory alone, and so it's better to widthdraw from that society.
For every MLK there were hundreds of lynchings. You can’t lead with no followers.
With that said, a more charitable reading might be that the person was noting the power of representation and role models to inspire.