Granite Countertop Craze Has Cost U.S. More Than First Gulf War | Hacker News Reader

Granite Countertop Craze Has Cost U.S. More Than First Gulf War

blogs.forbes.com

19 pointslotusleaf198716 comments

What an idiotic article. Granite countertops are discretionary consumer spending. People buy them with their own money. They are not purchased by the government with taxpayer money. Individuals chose to buy them on their own free will. Unless the writer shows that people are somehow forced or tricked into buying them (and he does not), this is not in any way wasted money, because individuals that buy them presumably get enjoyment out of them that is proportional to their cost.

Also his financial analysis is so dumb it is amazing. He bases his estimates on out of thin air numbers thought up by industry insiders, and then compares that to the gulf war which happened 18 years ago without taking account of inflation.

So Forbes actually pays someone to write this tripe. This is why magazines are dying.

"Granite countertops are discretionary consumer spending. People buy them with their own money. They are not purchased by the government with taxpayer money. "

Well... Until the government bails out the bank that bought the RMBS that contained a slice of the liar loan that was used to buy the newly-built house that contained the granite countertop.

Look up "positional externality". There is a cost beyond manufacturing costs.

A few years ago I was surprised to hear there were radiation concerns about granite countertops. According to the EPA it's not a serious threat.

Any naturally formed rock material has the potential of containing varying amounts of naturally occurring radiation. Natural radioactive elements like uranium, radium, and thorium can be present in a wide number of minerals that appear as crystals in granite from around the world. So, it is not unusual for materials such as granite to have some amount of radioactivity (emissions of alpha or beta particles or gamma rays). Depending on the composition of the molten rock from which they formed, some pieces of granite can exhibit more radioactivity than others.

http://www.epa.gov/rpdweb00/tenorm/granite-countertops.html

However - Radon does kill 20,000 americans every year and is the biggest source of lung cancer in non-smokers. http://www.epa.gov/radon/healthrisks.html

This article seems to have been stimulated by the sort of thought I occasionally have while using the bathroom.

Thinking "there are three urinals in here. There are two bathrooms on each floor. There are five floors in the building..." Then my urinal-consciousness expands to all the other buildings in the area, and all the urinals they must contain. Then I think of how many there must be in the country. And how many valves and other plumbing. And how many rolls of toilet paper.

It kinda blows your mind how much stuff there is.

That's kind of Zen.

Next step would be for us to calculate the actual utilization of them.

  > So what’s the total damage? The granite-countertop
  > craze got rolling in the late 1990s, so even using
  > Reis’ much lower figures, we’ve spent $12 billion.
  > There’s a pretty good argument to be made we spent
  > $15 billion.

But that's money that has been put straight back into the economy. It's not as if the money were burned (and even if it were, it would just make the existing money worth more), but it's been put into circulation and created employment.

Is that bad?

If the money were burned it would be less worse, since no underlying resources would disappear. It would just be mildly deflationary. What was actually burned was resources; labor and diesel (shipping to China and back to be polished).

Someone might argue that giving all that money to Halliburton and other private war profiteers does the same thing -- so war is good for the economy, right? And maybe it is -- but at least granite countertop makers presumably pay taxes (unlike our favorite govt contractors), and the money comes from consumer discretionary spending.

Article is pretty inane. Isn't forbes a so-called financial magazine? Why would such nonsense appear there.

On one side, we accumulate the total cost of some countertops purchased over a decade by 307 million people of whom a certain percentage pay for these kitchen remodels that benefit their life, and which are paid for using their hard earned salary.

On the other hand, money stolen from the same people going to fight warns that are less than useless, they create other wars, and bailouts that benefit a very small number of financial elite.

And then the implication is that the people remodelling their kitchens paying for it with the fruits of their own labor are greedy bastards squandering what should have rightly been the governments money.

What a twisted perspective and insidious state propaganda. Complete madness.

They purchase them to "benefit their life" at the detriment of others (perpetuating a status arms race). They are almost as pure an example of a Veblen good as is possible to find--right up there with wedding rings, only (possibly) more labor intensive.

I believe some Veblen goods can be major net positives just from the incentive to work that they provide, but certainly not labor (or energy) intensive ones. If everyone works to produce Veblen goods so that they can in turn buy Veblen goods, the nature of Veblen goods will mean everyone (collectively) is wasting their time.

The idea that people redecorating their homes using money they have personally worked themselves to earn is a "detriment to others" is outlandish hogwash and propaganda. The term "detriment" implies they are harming people and should be stopped, while ignoring the harm caused by needless wars and vast theft of resources from the working man and redistribution to useless bureaucratic eaters, financiers and speculators.

In the case of granite countertops, I do think it should be stopped. And not by the government. Stopped through cultural change--hopefully brought about by people pointing out that the practice is wasteful. It should lower status rather than raise it.

I'm not ignoring other harms, you are inventing that out of the air.

You think it is wasteful. Do you drive to work, or take a vehicle powered by nonrenewable resources? Live or work in a residence or facility that has heating and air conditioning? Eat meat you have not raised yourself? Many would say all these things are wasteful and harmful as well and they would have a better argument than one against owning polished stones. Why should you have moral authority to claim that things other people do that you are not interested in are harmful or wasteful, while you engage in harmful and wasteful practices that others object to but you are unwilling to change? Are you better than they are? Who decides what things will be allowed and which forbidden? You? Why? And who is your master, or do you fancy yourself servant to none, but master to all?

Proves the point that thanks to the internet you can literally think of the title first, then write the article.

So here's the fuzzy-math behind his argument:

"The granite-countertop craze got rolling in the late 1990s, so even using Reis’ much lower figures, we’ve spent $12 billion. There’s a pretty good argument to be made we spent $15 billion. And it might be we spent $60 billion."

So he guestimates based on loosely researched studies with a range of $12b to $60b in TOTAL spend on countertops accross 20 years.

Then compares that figure to the $6b the USA spent on the gulf war, tossing out the other $54b we spent, but other nations remunerated.

Let me try one:

"Drinking Coffee Craze: US Spends More on Coffee than on Education!"

So we spend roughly $18b a year on coffee, so let's go look back from the "late 90s".

With that logic we've spent over $100b dollars on Coffee alone, and we only have $63b in FY 2010 discretionary appropriations earmarked for education so . . .

Reminds me of that old "73% of statistics are made up" line.

grumble.

http://www2.ed.gov/about/overview/budget/index.html

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