There Is Too Much Stuff | Hacker News Reader

There Is Too Much Stuff

theatlantic.com

222 pointsSQL2219206 comments

I don’t want to come off as all holier-than-thou, and probably will, but here goes.

My girlfriend moved in with me about a year ago and, in the process, we cleaned out a lot of ‘stuff’. Personal stuff, kitchen stuff, knick-knack stuff, furniture stuff, memento stuff, clothes stuff ... just all the stuff that you accumulate as you move through life. (We’re both ~40.)

Since then, we’ve been very careful not to accumulate more stuff. I’m not exaggerating when I say that we deliberate over a new kitchen utensil. We don’t buy anything unnecessary.

It’s amazing. Our home is amazing. We live in a mid-sized apartment but it feels spacious because it’s not full of stuff. Life is simpler. There’s less to clean. What there is to clean is easier because—you guessed it—it’s not covered in stuff.

Buy less stuff. Throw most of your stuff away. You almost certainly don’t need it.

We went through a similar process after moving country (not worth the shipping costs so we simply sold 99% of our stuff) and felt the same.

A year later we now have just as much stuff as we used to, maybe even more. No matter how hard you try, you will always end up accumulating new things, whether it's through gifts or because you need something in particular for a specific occasion (specialty screwdrivers for example).

I think it's healthy to go through all (and I mean all) of your stuff at least once every two years and sell anything you have not used in a year or more.

You can have a certain amount of stuff but don't let it get excessive. I used to have boxes and boxes full of items that weren't even organized. Like literally....I knew I had that one item...but good luck finding it in the mountain of boxes! If you are at that point then it is time to start reducing your items. The stuff you have needs to be neat and organized and not overly excessive.

A rule we apply at home: if you haven’t use it in the last six months, get rid of it.

Sell or give away before throwing away. I have listed a bunch of stuff I don't particularly want on eBay it costs me nothing and often someone near by eventually finds it and wants it. I recently sold something I listed in 2017.

Yep, anything useful goes on Gumtree for $0. Usually disappears within the hour.

Listing anything for free makes the crazies come out of the woodwork though. Usually too much hassle than it is worth imho.

God forbid you have to interact with white trash in order to get rid of a set of 3/4 used tires. /s

Getting rid of something for free is such a quick transaction that IMO complaints about the people you're transacting with aren't really meaningful/valid.

I've found it's actually better to list things for a small price than to try to give it away for free. When you list for free, tons of non-committed people contact you and it's too difficult to hold for someone who ends up falling through. And sometimes you upset the beggers who think they claimed it first. When there's at least a small transaction price, you have a much better chance of getting a serious buyer.

Listing items for a sixpack of their favourite makes for friendly, casual interactions. And you try out new things!

My wife uses local "giveaway" Facebook groups. Whenever we clean, some clothes, books or items go there and get picked up over the next days. We also source things from these groups ourselves occassionally. Overall, we feel great about it; a lot of perfectly good things get a second, third or nth life.

Pawn shops can be useful for this, too. You won't the same price you would on ebay, but you do get to get the stuff out of your house now.

When I tried the ebay route, I found that my place never actually got any cleaner. All the stuff that I had decided to declutter would still sit around the apartment, taking up space all the while, while it spends months or years waiting to be sold.

Yeah, a lot of the stuff I have listed is stuff I don't mind owning but if someone wanted to offer the right price I would let go of them.

There's groups on Facebook for giving away stuff. They all go so fast on there and it help someone that need it.

Completely agree, I am the same way. It is well worth it to live a minimalist lifestyle. I also threw out boxes and boxes of worthless junk recently - thousands of baseball cards, beanie babies, old broken items, obsolete gadgets (cd players) etc. Living minimalist is the way to go, here is why: when you need to clean the home, it is easier to clean. You can get a roomba and the roomba is able to clean the entire carpet because there aren't boxes of junk everywhere. Also when you have less stuff, your house can be better organized. Just look at home design magazines - almost all have minimalist design to them.

We live in London, two of us in a tiny flat (~500sqft). For a while we had a lodger in the spare room (yes, two bedrooms in 500sqft). We have very few things we don't need or use, and have pretty frequent clearouts of all the crap that still manages to accumulate somehow.

Even living in this tiny space, there is almost nothing that we need that we can't fit in there. People often wonder how we manage, and partly it's possible because we draw on the public resources around us (e.g. who needs bookshelves of books when you have a library), but also because we have almost no 'stuff' - things we needlessly store and hardly use.

You might be interested in this 10 year old (well, ancient, but rebranded for millennials) trend called "minimalism":

https://www.becomingminimalist.com/what-is-minimalism/

https://www.theminimalists.com/archives/

And relevant vloggers:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrf_dMnatW0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVcwvCL2C2c

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCZ40QwZtFs_7h5MZ0ZTTwg

and so on...

I was wondering whether someone would bring up the Minimalists. They were great for the first 160-170 podcast episodes. After a certain point you will see that the average episode dropped from 2h to 35mins, and most of the 35mins are pushing to their Patreon paid podcast.

They added immense value in my life, but after a certain point they live to advertise their own services. They keep saying that "advertisements suck", well, this has been their game for a few months now.

Back to the topic of minimalism, we tend to ignore some aspects of our lives. Consuming, owning senselessly makes things worse every day even if/when we don't realise it. I would suggest that you pick a random episode of the minmalists (between 1-160) and if you like what you hear download and go through the first 160 episodes.

> They were great for the first 160-170 podcast episodes. After a certain point you will see that the average episode dropped from 2h to 35mins, and most of the 35mins are pushing to their Patreon paid podcast.

For a minimalist podcast, it doesn't seems minimalist at all to have 2h podcast ;).

There are alternatives to Amazon!

For general household stuff, my go to store is manufactum.com

They only offer very few things, but the things they have are very high quality. If you buy something from Manufactum, you know it'll last for the rest of your life.

The stuff there is of course outrageously expensive compared to the plastic crap from Amazon, but for me that means I really think about the purchase. Do we really need two of those metal baskets for the shower that hold your shampoo bottles? Not if it costs 100€.

For tools, there's dictum.com, which follows a similar philosophy. They don't offer a million choices; they make a very deliberate choice which products they sell, so you don't have to make the choice. You can rely that something you order from them is a good choice.

My problem with sites like manufactum is that I have the feeling that I get exactly the same stuff as I would get from somewhere else but with an insane price markup. I can either buy a random organic cotton shirt for thirty Euros, or I can buy an organic cotton shirt from manufactum and pay four times as much. What's the extra value I get?

At the very least, a price point that doesn’t externalize the real environmental cost of the item, perhaps?

Unless you're a "brain-washed hippy environmental activist", the markup definitely feels like a ripoff - which is the fundamental problem with any ethical shopping website. I'd gladly pay Amazon price + 5 dollars,any more and my ethics bow down to my trained budgeting

Which probably accounts for a lot of people's behaviours, but the real cost of most products is going to be more like 100-500% markup, not a flat $5, especially once you get into cheap flights or items that have been shipped large distances.

I'm not someone who believes that changes in individual consumer behaviour is going to keep up under 5 degrees of global warming, but if we don't start getting used to some of this, then there will never be the political will to enact the policies that will head off the worst of climate change.

I'd be ok with all stores everywhere being hit with a plastic tariff that meant that a plastic bucket cost 25 euro. I'm not ok with spending 25 euro on a bucket[0] "just because" - it just feels like I'm stuffing someone's pocket at that point.

[0]https://www.manufactum.com/swiss-plastic-bin-p1448058/?a=772...

You are paying for someone in Switzerland to make a high quality bucket. Yes, that person earns a lot more than the average chinese factory worker. But in exchange you get a better bucket. I've had a lot of cheap plastic buckets break, so I kinda understand why someone would want to get a better plastic bucket.

I agree with incorporating negative externalities into the cost of a product, but if the money isn't actually going toward paying for those externalities then it's just profit for the owner.

It's not like the extra Euros are used for sucking carbon out of the atmosphere or cleaning up the oceans. They'll most likely end up in Manufactum's pocket.

The stuff from Manufactum is not comparable to cheap stuff from somewhere else. It's a lot better quality. It's not just "organic cotton"; there's a lot more that differentiates products from Manufactum than just the type of cotton it is made from.

You can see from the extremely elaborate description that they write about every manufacturer (it's a German store, so the English texts aren't as detailed) that they don't just resell random stuff from far away factories. They put a lot of thought into the products they offer.

Usually Manufactum isn't the cheapest option, but their markup is not as bad as you think. If you can find the item at other stores, it'll cost about the same (+/- 10%). For example, this Herder knife costs 94€ plus shipping at Manufactum [1] and 109€ with free shipping at Amazon [2].

[1]: https://www.manufactum.at/herder-kuechenmesser-kesselscher-w...

[2]: https://www.amazon.de/Windmühle-Messer-Windmühlenmesser-Univ...

I share GP's worry. Long descriptions are only proof they spend more on content. Given the sleaziness of on-line retailers in general, how can I tell this is a genuine signal and not faked one?

You'll have to take my word!

Manufactum is not a random online retailer. They have been around for some time, and have a certain reputation around here. They have been selling things from a paper catalog before the internet got popular. They actually still have paper catalogs, and reading them is a wonderful pastime. (I don't really use the website much, unless I am looking for something specific)

But even if you don't trust me, at least they have very detailed descriptions and high resolution photographs of the products on their site.

And if you order something, and you end up not liking it, you can always return it (eg. for a leather bag it's hard to judge from a photograph if you like it or not).

Fair, your word is enough for me to go and look at them closer.

My problem is that there's just so many fly-by-night stores selling the same chinesium with varying degree of markup - from "we just import this stuff" to "we put nice photos and descriptions, and pretend we're a premium brand" - that I just gave up and don't try to discover new stores myself. I only check them out based on word of mouth now. Beyond that, I either buy a particular item of known quality, preferably from manufacturer or a bigger chain (so I have legal recourse if they screw me over), or accept that what I'm going to get is going to be garbage.

I came here to recommend Manufactum too. Often, I've noted they offer the same products I have arrived to after extensive research elsewhere. E.g. SNS Herning jumpers.

What is more, after talking to SNS Herning owner, I discovered Manufactum sells a unique version of their jumpers with organic wool. Because they explicitly requested this.

On the other hand, I have also noted a few, but not all, items have big markups vs buying directly from the producer.

Aside, what drives me totally insane about current online and offline shopping is complete dishonesty about refurbished items. Many many sellers and Amazon warehouses have absolutely no ethics and they repackage and reseal used and returned items to sell them as new. It sucks big time.

The scam is so widespread that, for example, Leopold mechanical keyboards are sent to EU and US retailers without any seals. So that returned items never have damaged boxes. Whereas if you buy them straight from the manufacturer, you get some nice tamper proof seals.

Elaborate writing in a catalog to signal value is not new. In fact, it’s featured in Seinfeld: https://www.jpeterman.com/category/104235/owners-manual-no-1...

I think what grandparent meant was the "markup" (wrong word) between different products: random knife vs herder. Manufactum does not have an insane markup on the identical product, they just exclusively stock high(er)-end products.

Hilariously, the catalogue is a problem even within Amazon. Moving from Austria to the UK, I noticed that amazon.co.uk isn't showing me the same products as amazon.de. Looking for vacuums the latter (in the top 10) shows me Miele, Siemens and Philips (all over EUR 100). amazon.co.uk shows me random brands I have never heard of for < 50 quid, despite me never having bought that type of product (within a category).

I can't believe how fast that website is. I actually wrote to their contact address to ask how the heck they managed that.

> If you buy something from Manufactum, you know it'll last for the rest of your life.

That sounds like the opposite of how I want to shop. I don't want to have to think really hard about which trivial household item I want to spend the rest of my life with. I'd rather pick a random cheap one and then not feel too bad about replacing it, if necessary.

Things that last a lifetime can often be resold.

I _very_ much do not want to concern myself with pointless interaction that comes with personally selling used stuff. I never buy used things and I never sell them.

You leave a lot of value on the table then, or in the trash.

Oh, so it's people like you I have to thank for not being able to buy quality items anymore. I thought it was a trend driven by companies, but it turns out the population of people who prefer disposable, short-lived items is real after all :/.

My guess is that it is driven by nobody in particular; it's just a natural consequence of how things are working these days.

Consumers shopping at big box stores happens for a reason; it saves them time and, at least in the short run, it saves them money. Big box stores offering excessive variety happens for a reason; they're trying to be all things to all people, and ultimately, having more different things on their shelves is an important part of their image as a one-stop-shop, and therefore a big part of how they compete for customers. Customers tending to just by the cheapest thing also happens for a reason. Having ended up in a store with excessive variety, and with no shopkeepers who know the product well enough to make any useful recommendations, just about the only concrete things they can reliably compare by are price and feature list. Manufacturers making cheap gizmos happens for a reason. They know that this is what consumers ultimately end up doing, so they realize that their job is to cram as many bullet points onto the back of the box as possible at as low a price as possible. They also know that consumers know that they do this, which is why they subvert what few heuristics consumers have left for trying to discern quality by doing things like sticking metal weights into the product for no other reason than to make it feel heavier.

etc. etc. etc. If there was ever a backstop to limit these forces, it was the specialty shop with the knowledgeable proprietor who had years or decades' worth of experience with every single product or brand on the shelves, and heard back from their customers when things turned out to be cheap crap. But nobody's shopping there anymore, because just picking something up while you're already at Shopko will shave your time spent running errands by 45 minutes, and nobody's shopping at their website, either, because paying 8 moneys to ship something that only costs 20 moneys doesn't really make any sense.

You're completely missing the point.

The hardware shop of old - most now long gone in the destruction of so many brick and mortar shops - generally sold things that would last years or a lifetime. No thinking was required. You could pretty much shop with brain off, and eyes closed and get decent stuff.

For each of those items, there's probably now 300 replacements on Amazon, and maybe one meets the old quality and life. Many of those aren't even cheaper. Sometimes the one that worked, the original from which all those cheap copies stole, is gone, killed by avalanches of shite. Now there's none at all that work as well as the one that spawned the shite. Thank you Amazon and eBay.

To buy a knife that retains an edge for longer than 20 seconds, or even stainless steel that remains properly stainless in typical kitchen use, or container that handles washing, freezing and maybe a few cycles through the dishwasher requires effort. Effort picking apart hundreds of eBay and Amazon listings selling almost nothing but awful shite. Effort to spend even £2, or you'll inevitably get shite. Effort to find and pay extra for some artisan variant that'll cost a bomb, and might - only might be adequate. Shite has become the normal expected state of things.

I would far rather not buy 20 shite things that I don't feel bad about replacing, in the search for just fucking one that works. Yet very often that's the only option left. Shite in a sea of shite.

And you don't feel any qualms when your random cheap stuff breaks (or simply doesn't do the job very well) and ends up in landfill?

Sorry to sound critical, but you (and millions like you) are a problem.

Sorry, but I've moved at least 6 times since my kids started school. I rent and rents go up or I need to resize my home.

All of these moves have been within the same elementary school district, but it's really turned me off lasts forever stuff.

If it doesn't break, it gets lost in storage, or left behind on accident.

edit: I'd love to buy a house, but prices...

When I was in maybe third grade (around 2001-2002), I managed to convince my parents to get me and my brother each a CHF 55 fixed blade knife from Manufactum. Sadly they don’t sell that particular model anymore.

Made in Finnland especially for kids, full tang, thick carbon steel bladestock (you definitely wont snap it), and a robust (kiddiesize) grip lined with red-dyed donkey intestines. Came with a leather sheath.

We (ab)used them extensively and all out friends at summer camp, who “only” had Swiss Army Knives were very impressed. I even lost mine in our garden for a few years, but when I found it two years ago I polished the blade, sharpened it up and it was back in action like new. I then gave it to my smallest brother (11 y/o rn) who enjoys it very much.

If he doesn’t lose it, I am confident his children will also get to play with it.

Finding a deal like that on Amazon will be significantly more challenging. We just flipped through the catalogue and the only knife they recommended for our use case has worked flawlessly.

EDIT: It’s not for sale anymore, but here’s a picture, all though mine doesn’t have an engraved blade. https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ae/48/d8/ae48d8a31c3963e3993b...

Oh thanks for those, the problem with a lot of the online retailers I frequent is that there's just too much stuff on there, and it's really hard to discern quality from churn; filtering by price is useless because retailers will just play with prices, filtering by reviews is also useless because people are just as likely to give a cheap product 5 stars than their expensive counterpart. It's also hard to just discover quality products you never thought about getting in the first place (like a good pen + case as I've seen on there).

Brits can look at https://www.objectsofuse.com/ (there's an actual store in Oxford).

Another one for people in the UK: https://www.labourandwait.co.uk

Apparently they also now have shops in New York and Tokyo.

To be clear, though, the type of things Labour and Wait sells are selected based on criteria that have more to do with fashion than practicality or ecological sustainability. It is totally a hipster fetishization of a certain idealized time in the past.

Personally, I like that style a lot, but what they offer only covers a limited range of household needs.

https://www.independent.co.uk/property/interiors/back-to-bas...

Otherwild in Los Angeles has recently opened a department that sells zero-waste products. That seems to have a bit more of an environmental agenda, but it's still within this kind of fashion frame: https://otherwild.com/pages/about-otherwild-general

and don't forget ebay....which probably beats most everyone's prices by far. If you don't mind the extra few days waiting for shipping then that is by far your best bet. Also if you aren't afraid of buying second hand then going to your local thrift shop will give you by far the biggest bang for your buck, especially for clothing.

Ha! I actually went to eBay to purchase an ergo keyboard very recently. The description said new, dented box. The photos still had the manufacturer stickers on it. They literally slapped a label on the keyboard box and shipped it to me. If it wasn't dented before it definitely would have been now. What ended up coming was a used keyboard with a key missing.

I messaged the seller about it and they completely ignored me. The seller even went ahead and opened a claim on me. They would accept the item back, but I would eat the shipping costs. The item was $17 with $20 shipping; so that would mean I lose $20 returning the item.

The case ended up being closed on me since I didn't ship it back within the stated timeframe. During that time I was trying to contact the seller before I lost both my item and money.

I can probably escalate this some more, but the $20 isn't worth my time to contact eBay and deal with this seller. The seller has 8 negative feedback within the last month from doing the same thing to other buyers.

This reminded me why I pay a little more and shop on Amazon instead.

This. The count of miserable experiences I've had on eBay more than outweighs the few times I feel I've gotten a fair deal, or felt like I had a good experience with a buyer. eBay has high hopes to be the center of the future of commerce, but they need to work harder to protect users from bad sellers, and sellers from bad users, without making the experience (more) miserable for all.

When caveat emptor is the only rule in a bazaar or shop, I and many others take our money elsewhere. Some love to bargain and to take their lumps gracefully, but my time (and money) is better spent elsewhere.

(Well, until I again stumble on that one of a kind thing that I had when I was a kid and never thought I'd see again...)

> There are alternatives to Amazon!

That just means there's even more choice!

https://xkcd.com/927/

US users might find Lehman's to be a helpful/similar resource. Their product selection skews towards old-timey/simpler life/non-electric stuff. They are located in a part of Ohio that has a large Amish population, which does explain that a bit.

Lehman's is great — but there's a visible quality line between the items they sell to Amish people who use it every day, and the other stuff they stock for dabblers. The gadgetier the item is, the less good the quality is likely to be.

What the actual fuck, that site hijacks middle clicks as left clicks. Who decided that was OK?

One of the frustrations of raising young children in the USA is the monthly ritual of birthday parties where everyone takes turns being the recipient of two cubic yards of "stuff". The gifts are almost invariably plastic junk from China via Walmart or Amazon. They hold my children's attention for about a week and then spend the rest of their lifetime occupying space in my house or in a landfill.

I absolutely hate this. Why can't we stop doing it? I look around and it's like no one sees the futility and stupidity of it. The social manipulation is so effective and complete that there's not even a single thought of the consequences of all this waste to the environment or even our own lives.

Recently, everything is covered in this pernicious glitter that rubs off when you touch it and leaves a trail of microplastic pollution everywhere it goes.

It's not hyperbolic to say that I put on a stoic face but inside I am on my knees begging for us to wake up and stop the madness.

Here in Ireland we got around this by providing a small sum of money (agreed by parents) in a card in lieu of cheap presents. That way the child gets to put the money towards savings, or a great present like a computer game.

We started giving a book or two with 2 - 3 chocolates on top. Even if the kid reads it in a week, they can then bring it to the used book store to trade it in for a different book.

We do a book exchange where everyone brings a wrapped book and each kid takes one when they leave. Generally we bring a few backup books for the guests who accidentally brought a regular gift. It’s worked out well so far.

Similarly it's the same feeling I have towards cards. Birthday cards, get-well cards, mother/father day cards, valentine cards. All thrown out in a matter of days if not the same day, yet the older generations still think they are important to get piece of card often with a generic salutation. To reject this tradition is akin to aversion of showing good will. There needs to be a acceptable token of appreciation that's not thrown away.

"The internet-shopping boom has spawned an excess-stuff economy, in which retailers such as Overstock.com buy up extra product from full-price retailers."

It was a problem _before_ internet shopping.

The article focuses on America, but it's a problem all over (obviously). For example, online shopping is so bad in mainland China, that people don't even trust major retailer stores on Taobao or Tianmao. It might be fake (at least, in their eyes).

That said, it's striking how much stuff there is. Walking around outside, you're kind of sheltered from it, but go into any market, mall, or shopping district and just... stand there and look.

There's so much _stuff_ that it's insane. How do these stores stay in business? Why is there so much crap all over the shelves?

Speaking as one person, I don't buy much. And I understand that these stores need to be able to potentially sell to a lot of people, but is there really a need for this much?

I agree. This has been a problem for decades. The only difference now is that it's much more obvious since we now have a more complete, centralized catalog of all the stuff that exists.

Of course, I could get on my intellectual high horse and talk about things like chaos theory and market complexity and the value of redundancy and competition. But I won't do that because I completely understand where this article is coming from on a human level.

Insane indeed. As someone who lives in the bush, the craziness of it all smacks me in the face when I make city trips. It's a prime example of the boiling frog syndrome - generations have become insensible to physical reality. As waves of consequent ecological catastrophes wash over our 'civilisation', violence will inevitably ensue: citizens against governments, governments against citizens, communities against communities, all against all.

Some will ask whether it was all worth it for temporary abundances of cheap plastic crap. Most will just be helplessly enveloped.

IMO it's the twin problems of the relatively high price of labor here, and the relatively low price of labor elsewhere. E.g., I don't want to accumulate a ton of stuff, but an entire pipe sweating kit that I might use once or twice a year costs less than one ten minute visit from a plumber. (multiply by every single other trade applied around the house)

As a homeowner, I completely relate to this. Every single task around the house requires "stuff" that you may or may not ever use again. That is of course unless you pay $100+ an hour for a contractor, and that's IF (and big if) they are even willing to show up for a small simplistic job. Many contractors worth their salt are only interested in larger jobs that are more profitable. Good luck finding someone to do handyman work.

It’s too bad tool-banks (communal or otherwise) aren’t too popular. One alternative (for seldom used things) is renting tools from home improvement centers/large hardware stores. Even auto parts stores have rentals or loaners for a deposit programs.

Tool renting is complex. Is the renter open at the time I need the tool? How long does it take to go there, get it, and come back?

Many of the stuff I have is there just because I can't rent it when I have a bit of time to use it.

It doesn't have to be complex to be useful. I had a small plumbing project, needed a pex crimper. My local plumbing store will loan it to you for free if you buy the parts there. There is no schedule, no set time to return it. If it is there, you can have it. If not, you can wait, they will call you when it comes in.

Ah, the wonder of old-fashioned hardware (etc) stores. I bet your local store could not only lend you the tool but also give you useful advice on using it, or on your project in general.

What a loss to our communities as online retail drives them out of business. If I can get my supplies from Amazon for 20% less, but then have to buy the tool that I could have borrowed from the local store, and spend twice as long doing the job because I didn't talk it over with the experienced guy behind the counter, have I really come out ahead?

An almost equivalent model to renting is buy used/sell used. Because they biggest value loss of anything new happens during unboxing, the average loss between buying used and selling used is the transaction cost plus an approximation of actual wear and breakage. You won't get charged for not returning by this-and-that date.

Of course, if you are a tool hoarder like me you won't ever get further than buy used, but I guess that would still be "less stuff" than buying new.

On a related note, my favorite business that does not exist would be a chain of second hand stores that deals in all that "beach vacation crap" (inflatable rubber things, objects to enjoy and/or deal with sand/wind/sun etc) that tends to get hauled home just to die silently in an attic. It would absolutely have to be a chain to make experience transferable between destinations.

I've rented tools from Home Depot and regretted it. The prices they charge are sufficiently high that you're typically better off buying instead of renting if you think you're ever going to use that tool again at all. Or, even cheaper still, is buying the relevant tool used off Craigslist, in which case you can generally use it for free, and sell it back for what you paid for it if you don't end up needing it again.

A couple of nearby communities 10,000 and less population have tool libraries run by local clubs or charities. They are great!

I sometimes wonder what percentage of a piece of green land between houses is taken up by fences and garden sheds. We'd all get so much free space back if there was a communal shed. Problem is, you have one sunny Saturday then everyone wants the spade. (Writing from perspective of terraced houses in Britain.)

All the chain car parts stores rent all the specialized tools they sell. You put down the cost to buy the tool and get your money back when you return it.

Yeah, it doesn't take me long to decide to Amazon a replacement valve, 2 pipe wrenches, tape and dope for less than half what it costs for a plumber to walk through the door. I haven't used those pipe wrenches since then.

Ugh, I have a watch vise for exactly this reason (replacing batteries on my snapback watch). It was something like $16 on Amazon, and will pay for itself within five years from me not having to pay much inflated prices to have a jeweler replace my watch's battery (and crucially, will save me a lot of time going to and from the reasonably priced watch repair places in Chinatown).

When you say it will pay for itself, are you including the soft cost of storage? It may seem negligible, but if you applied that logic to every item you use only once per year, the cost becomes apparent. It's hard to measure, but it's real.

The amount of stuff I have has never led me to rent a larger apartment than I otherwise would've, so it seems like the marginal cost of more stuff is zero for me, at least for now? It's not like I'm renting additional storage space or anything (which is an option in the basement of my apartment building, but that certainly wouldn't be worth it).

All the extra tools, parts, and such that I have fit into two normal sized moving boxes, which can easily be stuffed under the bed or take up a shelf in a closet.

I have more of a problem with books than I do with tools and parts.

> As someone who lives in the bush, the craziness of it all smacks me in the face when I make city trips. It's a prime example of the boiling frog syndrome - generations have become insensible to physical reality. As waves of consequent ecological catastrophes wash over our 'civilisation', violence will inevitably ensue: citizens against governments, governments against citizens, communities against communities, all against all.

Boiling frog syndrome is an interesting way of putting it....I wonder how many social influencers there are that "live out in the sticks" where they have a true separation from the change the rest of society is going through.

This is one of the fascinating things (in my mind) in economics. Not everyone can contribute directly to the production of our most basic needs; those who don't must convince the productive members that they have a good worth spending money on. It might actually be worthless, but what else will those productive people do with their excess cash? Once they have met their basic needs, boredom sets in. So they buy garbage to pass the time.

That's a simplification, sure, but there's truth to it. I think the populace is comfortable with this model because they prefer to have people do pointless work for their money rather than just get a handout.

> Not everyone can contribute directly to the production of our most basic needs; those who don't must convince the productive members that they have a good worth spending money on.

I think it's actually much worth because it's the other way around. Productive members usually have to convince unproductive to spend money.

http://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-b...

Yeah, I eye rolled at that quote. My dad worked in lower Manhattan when I was growing up. There were at least three different job-lot, odd-lot chains that he’d get us weird or overstock items from at lunchtime.

The reason why that stuff so abundant in China is because that’s where it’s made. In 1970s/80s, when my dad was picking up deals at lunch, New York was a declining industrial powerhouse. Toys and clothes and 10000 other things were made in NYC. My little league uniform was made 20 blocks away in Astoria. (My mom kept it, and my son is wearing the pants 30 years later!) Ball caps were made in Buffalo, etc.

Now, we export cash, and that’s what you find collecting in US cities.

fuck when are you opening up tours in nyc? this is just fascinating for a west coaster that has no ties here

Lol, I’d make a poor guide. My grandpa knew seemingly everything. At his peak, he owned a few taverns with his brothers and seemed to know and get along with everyone.

There are hilarious stories I've heard and read about the way that things used to be "built to last" something a while back about an small Irish village mailman who rode the same bike for decades without ever getting a flat. It was a book I think, can't remember the name though but that image stuck with me. I'm sure that nostalgia and the way stories work have a large part to play in that kind of reminiscents, but there's certainly something to it, and we don't have much of that something these days. I also don't buy much, and I've been rocking my few pair of jeans for years and will for years to come. But my old laptop frame is cracked in many places, my phone screen is cracked for the first time and has been a while now, just waiting for a wayward meeting with water now.

To make it relevant to software, though I admit I haven't read the article, it just seems on topic for the forum and I like the conversations around here. Why are versions, or going out of date, or legacy systems such "a thing"? How did we not realize that the databases airlines used 40 years ago were just going to sit in place until something bad happens, and why is keeping them current or really just lubricated so hard? I have a bike I've been needing to do a little work on lately, just a few things all hitting end of life at around the same time, but it's been treating me well for years, and the fixing up process is simple and obvious. New chain and cassette, replace the cables, replace the break pads and tires. It's clear and obvious how I can take care of my thing, the people at my local bike shop are clear and honest with me and I don't have to take their word for it the first time, I know enough to check and confirm. Those guys are good guys, my bike is a good bike. I'm a good owner (mostly). It's a good happy system.

I don't know my electronic stuff, I don't know my hardware and I don't know my OS and I don't know my software. I can't tell whether the guy at Fry's or Newegg is cheating me or not. I don't really get how displays have so many damn names and resolutions and surfaces. I mean I get it, but what is a "Retina Display" or a "butterfly keyboard". As if I was selling you a "Surefire chain". What the heck is a "surefire"? I want a bike chain. I know my computer very well, I fight it sometimes, and over the years I got to know it better. I really enjoy playing with tiling wms and xmodmap and I think there is a world of opportunity there (mostly because our modern pop culture doesn't care so much about input devices as PC innovators used to). But my phone? Man, I wish. It seems so clear to me that I can do so many magical handy things with my phone. I know the area, I've lived here for years, but it's a bigger city. Can you just get me to the freeway then turn off the nav? Not a chance. Ah I just accidentally swiped that notification or, what's this, my alarm did go off when I wanted but then it decided to stop and just let me know I overslept. Where are these software logic decisions being made? Can I prevent some action? How do I know what non-visual state changed and most importantly why!? Please give me a simple state dashboard, this is how the real world works. I can see why my sink is leaking or my shelf fell over. I can find why my feet are getting wet and the trash smells. Give me digital physics please so that I can see what is happening to me. Where are things logged? I have a GPS, can I use it? Can I have the best contouring route down this mountain? No it's not likely anyone has been here before or done this with a phone in hand, no I don't care the time prediction or reviews, I just want some lines on a map. I just have a quick question about literal figures my software systems have access to and I can see it, but no way for me to use this ui to get it without coding my own thing up.

This is why I enjoy coding, because I can make it do what I want. But also screw that; hours of work for a simple connection between two things that I decided should be connected in an instance of use. I can't do this for everything, I know most things are extensible, but I don't have the energy or interest to figure them all out. I want my whole digital experience to be mine, I'll buy other people's pieces to put in, like I buy furniture for my house. But it's my house, not Google's or my local municipality's. I really enjoy woodwork, I'm not so skilled myself, but my friends are. So I want their stuff, or my simple stuff, or the local farmer's market stuff. I want a simple digital life. I want simple software. If I don't get to see all the latest events or robberies I'm ok with that. I'll find ways to incorporate my neighborhood at my own pace, and with those people directly in mind. I want it designed for me as an individual, not the way something like NextDoor (what's that apps name?) Is designed for what seems to be "The American Neighborhood", that's way too damn broad.

I want my tools to work the way I want them to work.

Well, long uncertain ramble. Thanks for reading, and I'm glad your kid is using your pants, I think that's hilarious and great. I love all my Dad's stuff, or even just stuff I get to use with him. My Grandad also can tell stories for endless hours, and it's become one of my favorite qualities in the friends I have, and one I love to share with the people around me. Cheers.

(I wrote this on mobile, though I'm sure I'll get to cleaning this up in the next couple days, I apologise in advance for autocorrect and punctuation)

"I wrote this on mobile, though I'm sure I'll get to cleaning this up in the next couple day"

That's a very ironic conclusion on a remark on there being too much low quality, throwaway or fix-it-when-I-get-there stuff...

That's fair. Good point. I wish I hadn't notified you so that I could get a content based response from you who seems to have read it. But the fact would still stand, and this isn't great writing by any means. As the other guy said, this isn't the right content for hn, and I see that now. Here I learn my lesson that I can't delete comments on hn.

FWIW there's an edit window beyond which you're not allowed to edit it any more. It's certainly less than a couple of days.

Thanks for the tip, it looks like I hit it.

At first glance this is way too much to read for a comment. Consider a Medium post.

There are plenty of long hn comments, and they are usually more worthwhile than a two sentence comment. But I see your point and I appreciate you making it.

This would be a fun idea to explore thoroughly in a formal writing rather than a comment on a discussion forum.

You're right, and with that said I think you have some pretty interesting thoughts on this.

Internet shopping is a reaction to a lack of free time by an overworked population. Not this cause of all evil capitalism the retailers would like us to believe.

I find online shopping far more frustrating than in-person because there's seemingly no minimum standard, or at least if there is, I'm not attuned to it.

There's just too much absolute codswallop out there. Amazon and eBay are the pound shop/dollar store for low value items.

I can go to a supermarket and buy an economy brand tin of beans and it's going to be.. a tin of beans. It might, if I'm not careful and don't check, have added salt or sugar or something.

By contrast if I go and buy a low value item on Amazon like, say, a USB cable, 3.5mm cable, whatever, there's a really good probability of it being utter bollocks. Either broken in some way or just terrible to begin with.

I really, really wish this sort of thing could somehow be eliminated. Reviews don't cut it because even if they're not fake, I don't want to read reviews. I want your store to not sell dogshit items.

That's a false equivalency. The USB cables I buy in random shops off the street are usually much worse, and more expensive, than any I've gotten from Amazon. And I'd wager that if you got a can of beans on Amazon it would taste perfectly fine. Maybe there is lower quality on Amazon, but comparing such different products is essentially meaningless.

A random "junk shop" perhaps, but I'm to the point where I'd much rather go down the street to Target and pick up some slightly higher priced piece of electronics because I know it is quality controlled, than wade through Amazon.

If I'm shopping for a particular brand, okay Amazon, if it's just needing something in particular that's guaranteed to have hundreds of Chinese knockoffs with no way of differentiating between reviews (like a bike headlight, or LEDs, or a USB adapter), I go to a B&M that stocks those things.

Or order it from Target.com?

Right, exactly.

I don't buy, well, basically anything, from random corner shops because it's likely to be crap.

Does Amazon actually want to be like that? They don't have to be Waitrose, they just have to be even like, Lidl.

So in this analogy, Amazon is basically a junk shop. Yet they have a much better reputation than that, somehow.

Note that I don't buy things at junk shops in real life.

That's what name brands are for. Buy Anker or Apple or Samsung or Sony or Panasonic or whatever and you won't get crap.

It's not difficult to buy name brands.

"But name brand is charging $20 and generic is $8"

Yes, that's the price of wanting to avoid reading reviews.

"But there are counterfeits"

You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback. Just look if it's at least 95% and over say 100 feedback. Yes, some sellers that meet that will sell counterfeits and it's possible that commingling will mean it's a different seller's unit that gets sent but those are rare.

Imagine a world in which buying food at the supermarket were like this. You could only ever buy name brand anything, otherwise your cereal might be cardboard or your baked beans might taste like vinegar or whatever.

I'd much rather there were just a nonshit Amazon that didn't gouge.

Maybe it's that UK supermarkets' economy ranges are just really good.

Food isn't a valid comparison for many reasons. If you buy food from Amazon you'll be fine.

And if you go to your local flea market and buy random electronics you're likely to get just as bad a result as if you do that on Amazon.

If you want a curated selection go to a place that curates it.

>I'd much rather there were just a nonshit Amazon that didn't gouge.

Aren't most online retailers that control their supply like this? Amazon and Ebay are platforms, but walmart and target for example have actual warehouses full of every item they sell right?

I think Walmart’s online store works the same way amazon does. It’s full of third party crap too.

Just restrict yourself to "available in store" if that's what you want then.

Everything in a supermarket was selected by a buyer. It's not a two-sided marketplace that just connects random sellers and buyers, takes its cut, and disclaims all responsibility for whatever is being sold. Someone is responsible for every item on a shelf in a supermarket.

There are still plenty of stores that work this way for electronics. Buy a USB cable at Apple, Best Buy, Target, Walmart, heck, even Walgreens, and you're going to get a USB cable that some person sourced from a wholesaler. The retailer is going to stand by it and exchange it if it doesn't work.

The real shame of Amazon is that it started out that way and developed a great reputation as a result--and now they have thrown it away by letting anyone sell anything on their platform, even counterfeit crap. I don't understand it.

>The retailer is going to stand by it and exchange it if it doesn't work.

Amazon also accepts returns within 30 days. And most stores will reject returns after a certain amount of time even if it doesn't work.

I don't want to have to return things! What a waste of packaging and shipping and effort. Now fraud detection and product QA are added to the gig economy, and we're paying for the privilege.

Then, as above, buy name brand items. The cost of buying off-brand is that occasionally you need to return.

I do that but still care about the environmental impact of thousands of other people that don't have either the means to buy name brand or the awareness of the problem they are causing.

I'd really like for crap products to disappear but... I don't see this happening in this world anytime soon.

Have you considered that people are making a rational choice to get something cheaper yet lower quality?

Many electronic items under $10 can only be returned at an staffed Amazon pickup location. In urban areas (e.g. Bay Area), that's a BART ride or a toll charge.

The round-trip BART ride will be $6 or more. The toll charge maybe $5.00 or whatever FastPass costs (not factoring in gas, maintenance, parking).

Such items are essentially un-returnable, unless you want to pay more to return it than simply dispose of it.

I make it a point to return such items. Having done so a handful of times, I now buy most of my electronics gear from brick-and-mortar shops.

You should always be able to return with free shipping any item that's defective. That's amazon's stated policy. In what cases are you saying they don't follow their policy?

It's been a while, but if my memory serves me correctly, some items can only be returned at a staffed Amazon location.

That is: the return shipping is free but getting to the staffed Amazon location is not.

I'm pretty sure this has happened with some items I've picked up from an unstaffed Amazon drop-off location that can only be returned via a staffed Amazon location.

EDIT: add adjective "return" in second sentence.

FWIW, this is not the case in the UK. Most of the time, for a low-value item (<£5 or so), Amazon will say not to bother returning it, and just refund.

> Amazon.com does not accept returns for items fulfilled by third-party sellers. The seller determines the return policy.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?ie=UTF8...

The concept of a "third party seller" does not exist in stores that use buyers to stock inventory, like supermarkets or Target.

3p sellers must have a return policy at least as good as amazon themselves. I.e. they must offer free return shipping on defective products. If not Amazon will step in and refund you.

It's not worth my time to return cheap items. It's a huge hassle, because I need to go somewhere with a printer to print the return receipt, attach that to the box, then go somewhere to ship it. Definitely not worth all that trouble to get a few bucks back.

Recently in the UK I can often return items at corner shops with their own printer. You just scan a QR code and hand over the box. The dropoff points are everywhere.

Sellers can get de-listed from Amazon with enough poor reviews. For low-ish value items, they may offer a free replacement to avoid bad seller feedback. Leave feedback and wait a few days for them to contact you.

I don't want a free replacement if it's just going to be the same crap. The problem is that the product itself is crap, not necessarily that any given one is defective. Replacements won't be any better.

And this is still way more hassle than I want to deal with.

> I'd much rather there were just a nonshit Amazon that didn't gouge.

It is with no small uneasiness that I wonder if Walmart (or Target) might or will fill those shoes.

“...a nonshit Amazon that didn't gouge.”

It's disruption time!

There's a guy on Youtube called Mike Jeavons who has a week on series, where he will eat only a particular UK supermarkets economy range for a week, it's pretty good.

> You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback.

I doubt that very much. Many sellers never see their products, their suppliers can scam them whenever they like. That's why Amazon themselves have sold fake CPUs repeatedly over the years: https://www.heise.de/ct/artikel/Amazon-verkauft-manipulierte... (German), https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3014009/amazon-is-... ...

> Yes, that's the price of wanting to avoid reading reviews.

> You can avoid 99% of counterfeits by buying only from sellers with good feedback. Just look if it's at least 95% and over say 100 feedback.

Reviews and feedback are all thoroughly gamed. Can't speak for Amazon, but my wife worked for couple e-commerce companies selling on Allegro, our local Amazon/eBay equivalent, and from her I know (and seen it myself) that the following are common practices:

- When someone leaves a negative review, the company will do its best to bribe the customer - free gifts, rebates for next purchase, whatever, just so that they cancel the negative review.

- In order to boost its positive/negative ratio and keep it around ~99% positive, the company would routinely order its employees to make orders from home, choosing "payment on delivery" as an option. After couple of days they were to mark the orders as completed and give stellar feedback with some realistic-sounding review texts. The orders of course went to /dev/null themselves, so the only cost to anyone was the sales percentage Allegro took.

i see no difference between 8$ and 20$ branded item. They all manufactured in China, probably at the same plant.

It would be nice if there was a website like Amazon, but that had some sort of editorially vetted product line. I just want a cheese grater that works well and isn't counterfeit. I'm willing to pay a few dollars more for the work that goes into verifying the products. It really seems like there would be a market opportunity here...

isn't that a website like williamssonoma.com?

Yeah, I normally use Sur la Table for cookware. But I meant more of a "general purpose" site like Amazon, rather than niche sites for each category of product.

Wirecutter seems to be good

Search for review sites for the product you're looking for. There are a shocking number of such sites all chasing Amazon's affiliate cash for sending traffic there.

Right but they tend to phone it in! 9/10 if you pick a review site off google, they never looked at the product.

I can’t say how many times I’ve been looking at product comparison sites where it’s clear the content is written by a farm writer comparing box specs, who has never used or even held in their hand the type of product they are reviewing let alone the actual items.

So what we need is a review site for review sites, I guess...(?)

Look for real photos of the product. Any legitimate review will have at least one.

Good idea, yes, it is possible with some digging, just frustrating to dig through a layer of meta-trash.

Curation lists help. There are people who specialize in finding the good stuff. If you trust them, then it is vetted.

Target, Costco, and Best Buy fill that void for me.

B&H generally has generally pretty good quality items.

Wirecutter seems to be the closest to what you're looking for. Here's their "best grater", for example: https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-grater/

For larger purchases, a $30/year Consumer Reports subscription is absolutely worth it.

Wirecutter is great, can recommend. They don't always have reviews for particular things I want, but when they do, I end up going with one of their picks and I never had a single problem with these purchases. For instance, the first thing I bought off their recommendation was a Bluetooth earpiece, some 3+ years ago, and unlike my previous attempts at buying one, this one not once had a problem with any of my devices, and works perfectly to this very day.

I heard good things about Consumer Reports, and I wish there was something like this for the EU market. I found Wirecutter useful because the things they tend to review are available both in the US and EU (read: electronics), but if I wanted to buy regular life items off recommendations, I'm not sure what to follow locally.

In the UK the Consumer Association product the Which? magazine and website. which.com

Any brick and mortal retailer’s online stores are basically like this. Jet is too (also owned by WalMart IIRC).

The solution that I would like to see is for online stores to add the ability to refine your search by what you DON'T want. For example, when looking for a game on Steam it would be helpful to exclude features that are deal breakers for me (e.g. permadeath). Or on Amazon it would be useful to be able to exclude Chinese brands.

I don't know how it would be implemented, but it would also be useful to be able to see what the "standard" and "entry level" products in a given category is. For example, I might be looking for a piece of equipment for a hobby that I am trying out and I want to know "what is the cheapest thing that isn't a shoddy knockoff". Or when I'm looking for a tool I'm often looking one that "I may replace it with a more expensive version when I become an expert, but I would never HAVE to replace it in order to progress".

Want less stuff cluttering people’s lives? Divorce them from having to ensure their basic survival and self worth in a zero sum economy. I genuinely think if people didn’t have to sell the largest, most productive parts of their lives to someone else they would focus more on social connections instead of social status. It feels pretty humbling to spend almost all of your day doing something you otherwise would never do, perhaps hate doing, only to be passed by a car worth more money than you’re likely to earn in your entire life summed altogether. But if I spent my day doing things I love doing, and would gladly do them over and over every day, I just might see that same car and not internalize it.

If you value your freedom this strongly, then it's time to make bold choices regarding the rate at which you save money.

Since there is such a huge gap between people who hold a lot of material status and the rest, why even play the game at all?

Most people like not being homeless and not starving, I guess?

This is a false dichotomy. I'm not advocating for living in the woods, but just taking a hard look at the choices you make everyday and how much actual utility and satisfaction you get from them. Are those expensive clothes and cars worth it to you? Maybe they are. But you have to compare them to the months or years of labor you could avoid if you saved that money instead, or perhaps even invested it.

Perhaps our world is extremely proficient at generating insane amounts of envy, but that doesn't mean you are completely powerless to respond in a life-affirming way.

Ultimately your way asks people to change their innate behavior.

Sounds like a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. I seriously doubt that there is an innate barrier against regulating your consumption at least a little bit. If you blame external factors exclusively then you will obviously never change anything about your life and never discover what was inevitable and what wasn't.

You can try your best and still fail, but what you can't do is pretend that you don't have a choice presented to you from the outset.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Edit: while I have you—could you please stop posting snarky and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've done it a lot, unfortunately, and we've had to ask you multiple times already. Continuing this way eventually gets your account banned.

I don't want to ban you, so it would be good if you'd fix this. We're trying for a different sort of internet discussion here, as the site guidelines should make clear if you review them.

I think they would focus less on wealth as a driver of social status, but they'd definitely still focus on social status. Instead it would be based around what hobbies you had, how important your volunteer work is etc...

How is ability to choose a bad thing? I disagree with your statement about economy: it's not zero sum economy. Everyone's quality of life is getting better as economy grows, if it was zero sum - you earning money would mean somebody losing it. Even basic survival requires smaller part of income, while more comfort will take a bigger cut (better house, better bed, better food and etc.). There is housing that's getting more expensive, but it still is affordable outside of big cities reach

> if it was zero sum - you earning money would mean somebody losing it

Earning money means somebody loosing it. It is only possible to earn w/o somebody loosing by either narrowing the definition of somebody, or limit the time frame in which the process is occurring.

For example, most of the animals are not considered somebody, that's why their loss of habitat, is not considered somebody loosing money.

I think in economics these are called externalities. It's not that they don't have a cost, it's just that we prefer to ignore it, because there's nobody to complaint about it,

Sure, I agree about scope of the process - if we consider all particles in universe part of economy discussed- exchanges are zero sum. However, I was appealing to the parent's basic survival and self worth zero sum economy where humans making money will mean others losing. That is simply not true, simple natural resources, ideas, innovations are making our economy non zero sum.

> That is simply not true, simple natural resources, ideas, innovations are making our economy non zero sum.

Thats exactly what I am talking about. Natural resources sre making the economy non zero sum game. This is the reduction I am talking about, its easy to think the natural resources are simply there to use and nobody owns them ( thus breaking out of the zero sum) but is this smart thing to believe? Where does it end? When everything that can be turned into money has been, what happens then?

"According to sustainability experts, we currently need 1.7 planets to support humanity's demand on Earth's ecosystems."[0]

How long do you think this fairy tale about natural resources being something there outside of our economics game will last.

[0] https://m.dw.com/en/the-earth-is-exhausted-were-using-up-its...

> Earning money means somebody loosing it. It is only possible to earn w/o somebody loosing by either narrowing the definition of somebody, or limit the time frame in which the process is occurring.

That's absolutely not true and completely at odds with any kind of mainstream economics.

You're focusing on money, where what you should be really focusing on is wealth - and wealth can absolutely be created "from thin air". (Luckily, money can also be created from thin air to keep up with the new amount of wealth in the world, but that's a whole other topic).

The simplest example of new wealth creation is new technology - if I figure out a way to make the same product, only faster/better/etc, then I'll be able to offer the same "product" at less money, thereby making everyone better off. Assume for the sake of argument that I'm the only one creating this product - in the real world, this might hurt competitors in the short run, which makes sense - it gives me an incentive to create new technology! But technology propagates in the long run, so eventually everyone is making the prodcuts more cheaply, and anyone who buys them wins.

> That's absolutely not true and completely at odds with any kind of mainstream economics.

Yes, because mainstream economics has everything righ in their story.

> The simplest example of new wealth creation is new technology - if I figure out a way to make the same product, only faster/better/etc, then I'll be able to offer the same "product" at less money, thereby making everyone better offThe simplest example of new wealth creation is new technology - if I figure out a way to make the same product, only faster/better/etc, then I'll be able to offer the same "product" at less money, thereby making everyone better off

You see we live in times where apparently microplastics and pesticides are detectable in human bodies. I personally don't buy the fairytale about the magic technology. Yes you've managed to make product that is faster/better and you managed to externalize the costs for this so it seems like it's only win.

Economy is not zero sum. By working you create added value.

Every now and then in the grocery store, a thought comes up: this is an exceptional circumstance. I can walk in here and grab as much nutrient content as I can hold, for only a couple hours of labor?

That situation is something that only appears for brief flashes in the natural world: when the ecosystem is tremendously off balance and some organism manages to capture the difference.

I've been daydreaming about a new sort of consumer's union to address this, among other problems (designed obsolescence, meaningless redesign cycles that make an existing product more cheaply--but not cheaper, astroturfed reviews, etc.)

The part I'm not so sure about is how to prevent infiltration/compromise/hostile takeover. I think I would prefer it to not exist than to make something useful and principled only to see it turned into a trojan horse.

I also have daydreamed about this on and off for the past couple years. In the end, it doesn't look much different from consumer reports, but with broader scope for both reviewed items and reviewers.

Authentication is a hard problem, and I've not really hit on anything that seems feasible besides a paycheck.

Not unrelated to CR, but I'd like to take it further than they do. A more comprehensive effort to cobble together a purchasing block as leverage to encourage better behavior from producers, develop lists of design/production/marketing/sales/support practices that'll earn blacklisting, distribute the costs of trialing new products, hire experts for teardowns, etc.

In the Netherlands we have a consumer union (although wikipedia calls it a league) which quite some success.

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

It seems like a problem that's related to wages and consumption.

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, there was just less stuff to be had. My family (8 kids, 2 parents) had one car for a long time. Today, it seems every high school kid has a car.

The same is true of other things. Bicycles, furniture, house size, etc. There is just more stuff today. A lot of it comes from lowest-cost retailers.

A visit to a GoodWill or Salvation Army outlet shows lots of product for very low prices. I don't remember it being this way in past years.

I'm not saying it's bad-- today's poor people seem to have more basic stuff than yesterday's-- but it is different.

I feel like the manufacturing complex just got a lot more efficient at making pretty much everything, so the costs are down a lot in relative terms. It's probably mainly due to offshoring and automation.

Coincidentally I feel that burglaries got a lot less frequent. It's almost as if the flow of value reversed - burglars don't want any of our crap, and the equivalent to a burglary today would be dumping a truckload of stuff in someone's house.

> burglars don't want any of our crap, and the equivalent to a burglary today would be dumping a truckload of stuff in someone's house.

There's a Chuck Palahniuk novel in there somewhere.

It reminds me of Fahrenheit 451 where the fireman burn books (because there are no accidental fires anymore).

Dumpsters are relatively cheap. When we remodelled our house we got a 7 foot tall, 6 foot wide, 21 foot long dumpster for 2 weeks for just $370. You can fit a lot of junk in there.

I believe -- if I remember the workshop I attended correctly -- that there's a fair amount of economics literature on the types of things that people steal in burglaries and the rates over time, and yes, burglary rates for things like stereos and TVs have plummeted. The top things stolen now are cash, jewelry, and guns. The economists see connections to consumer prices in general: ordinary electronic crap is so cheap that there's not much point in setting up a black market for stolen electronics. Guns, jewelry, and cash still have plenty of value for burglars, though.

I've been thinking about the apparent drop in burglary too; seems like there's not too much worth stealing nowadays, aside from jewelry, firearms, and perhaps carpets, art, and sculpture at the very high end. More homes have security systems, and there appears to be virtually no market for fine china, a 55" television is very bulky and fragile relative to its market value, any laptops or other computers are likely to be depreciated to nil. Folks don't keep coin collections, nor cash on hand.

> burglaries got a lot less frequent

Burglaries are less frequent because your TV is too big and your laptop has a near-zero resale value, but cell phone robberies are up 10-20-30 times [1] in some places -- because even when sold for parts, a $1000 phone is worth some risk...

[1] https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/624/cpsprodpb/69E6/production/...

TVs have exponentially lost weight over the last few decades.

The price of stuff is just so cheap now. I can go out and buy just about any luxury item I want while hardly thinking about the price but it would take me a decade to buy a house if I spent $0 each year.

It is particularly sad when you realise that all this stuff drives climate change. While not necessarily making anyone happier. And then people advocate to expand nuclear power so we can produce even more stuff.

Something like 70% of the us economy is entirely driven by consumer spending....the acquisition of more and more trinkets. If people reduced their consumption then the USA would immediately go into a recession. That would be a serious problem considering how many people live paycheck to paycheck with no savings at all.

You are absolutely right. It's tragic that the livelihoods of people actually depend on polluting the planet. We are gonna have to find a way to restructure our economy. Maybe we can draw inspiration from Bertrand Russell (http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html) and John Keynes (http://www.econ.yale.edu/smith/econ116a/keynes1.pdf)

That's absolutely not why people advocate nuclear energy...

That's not why we need nuclear energy. We need it for two things. One, it's very unrealistic to expect people to cut down on this stuff in meaningful amounts and short time (and if you tried to force them, a lot of blood would be shed and a lot of misery caused; we've covered that topic in other threads of the past few days, I saw you there ;)). Two, we kind of need clean energy for other things as well. Undoing the environmental damage, in particular, will be energy-intensive.

Hi there. I hope the discussion is not over yet :)

It depends on what you mean by "unrealistic". If you mean politically unrealistic, then it's hard to disagree. Entrenched interests are too powerful and motivated to give it up easily. (That's not to say that we shouldn't try)

If you mean it's unrealistic because it's human nature to consume more and more, that it's inherent human desire, then I will disagree. We don't need to force anyone to stop consuming. It's the other way around - we need to stop forcing them to consume. And force them we do. It takes a massive constant propaganda campaign to keep the desire to consume alive. Campaign that costs us about 1% of GDP. You know what I am talking about. Marketing.

If you mean it's unrealistic because most people already consume the bare minimum to guarantee their livelihoods and there is not much to cut. Well, the good news (or bad, depending how you look at it) is that most people don't emit most emissions. David Wallace-Wells in "The Uninhabitable Earth" writes: "If the world's most conspicuous emitters, the top 10 percent, reduced their emissions to only the E.U. average, total global emissions would fall by 35 percent." Is it too much to ask the rich to lower their emissions to the E.U. average?

It's never over :).

When I say cutting down consumption to meaningful levels is unrealistic, I mean a few things.

One, the level itself isn't "EU average"; to offset the expected rise of emissions of developing nations, EU and US need to become carbon neutral.

Two, it's not necessarily human nature to consume more (but it is to improve one's life when one has means and options for it). It is human nature however to not like having freedoms, choices and comfort taken away. This (among other things) makes voluntary cuts unlikely (not at the level that's needed), and forced cuts painful. Carbon tax is probably the least unrest-building option here (it's not really about cutting consumption, just moving it around, but at least initially, reduced consumption is expected), and plenty of people are already up in arms about it (c.f. yellow vests in france).

Three, related to point two - even if, by means of a miracle, consumption went down significantly and rapidly, the effect on economies of western countries would be severe to disastrous. Our economies are too strongly tied to consumption at this point. That's another argument for why we need emission-free alternatives to consume instead of just trying to get by without buying stuff.

Ultimately, I believe we can kick the habit of consumption. It'll just have to happen very gradually, on the order of decades (at least).

"Too much stuff" is the gift of death: https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/

George Carlin on "Stuff":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvgN5gCuLac

That is my favorite Carlin bit.

The thread title is misleading: the article is about consumers being presented with too many options, not about there being too much stuff.

This isn't even first world problems, this is just rich people problems.

You sort by price from low to high and buy the highest up thing on the page that meets whatever your criteria are.

If you are constantly buying the cheapest thing that meets your criteria sometimes you get burnt but that's very rare.

Finding out what thing meets the criteria is sometimes hard.

I wanted to buy a set of nail clippers the other day. I wanted a nicer set than the last one I had, which had slowly loosened up while I used them which led to me twisting and ripping my nail a few times. There is also this feeling that there might be better designed products than the cheap $3 ones you buy at CVS. So many basic products have been improved recently (or perhaps we just have greater access to better products that always existed before), at least in my opinion, that I thought there might be some overall better option.

Well, there are options on Amazon, as you will see, but it is very difficult to tell which is better. The reviews are a disaster. Many fake reviews, many products with multiple distinct and unrelated products under the same listing. Even when I found some that I thought seemed good, I would find a review saying that the machining was off with a picture of the front of the clipper misaligned, which caused their nails to be bent instead of cut... etc.

It was not clear at all, even ignoring price, which was the best option.

Amazon used to be my go to place precisely because they provided working tools to help me wade through that mountain of stuff.

Recently not so much. Not a good sign.

Same here but now amazon has so many of these knockoff type Chinese products that you don't even know what to pick. Most of it ends up being of questionable quality as well.

This is partially why I like shopping at Costco. Usually there is only one or at most a few of one thing, and usually it’s of good quality.

Sometimes I feel like life has gotten too cluttered. And I imagine that if I got rid of a lot of my stuff my life would feel less cluttered as well. But honestly I don't think getting rid of a bunch of random stuff in my apartment will make life feel less cluttered. I think figuring out how to slow down, spend more time away from my phone, in nature, and with close friends and family would have a much larger impact.

> But honestly I don't think getting rid of a bunch of random stuff in my apartment will make life feel less cluttered.

You will never know unless you try.

It sounds more like you are just alone. In situations like that, yes it is important to go out and meet new people or family.

The article has nothing to do with clutter, it is about choice paralysis.

>The human brain can’t contend with the vastness of online shopping

This doesn't matter much since our brains can not contend with the vastness of the universe, existence, life and death and many many other things anyways

I agree, there's too much stuff. In particular, there's far too much software.

If you advocate against too much stuff, just don't forget that making someone's stuff is someone else's livelihood.

This paragraph mirrors something I'd been thinking for a while:

>For a relatively new class of consumer-products start-ups, there’s another method entirely. Instead of making sense of a sea of existing stuff, these companies claim to disrupt stuff as Americans know it. Casper (mattresses), Glossier (makeup), Away (suitcases), and many others have sprouted up to offer consumers freedom from choice: The companies have a few aesthetically pleasing and supposedly highly functional options, usually at mid-range prices. They’re selling nice things, but maybe more importantly, they’re selling a confidence in those things, and an ability to opt out of the stuff rat race.

I really value it when companies offer some simple differentiated product lines, and are confident enough in the products to recommend one. If you go to Apple.com wanting a computer and click "Mac" at the top, then the site breaks it down into only a couple categories. The page has big pictures of one of their flagship desktop options and of one of their flagship laptop options. You're probably not going wrong in picking one of them. Apple stands by them and updates them and those machines have their current recommended experience and software setup, though really that also goes for any of the other machines. The other laptop categories are mostly about how thin you want your laptop; the categories aren't perfect but it's not hard to imagine how to pick between them.

Now go search for "dell laptops" or "lenovo laptops". You get pages leading to giant grids of laptops with no obvious categorization or ordering. -- Do I consider myself as looking for a "professional" laptop or a "home office" laptop? Do the "gaming" laptops have the best hardware, or do they just have the same hardware as the "professional" laptops with flimsier gamer-themed cases? Which models do they put the Superfish crap/malware on again? -- The part that really feels the strangest to me is that there's no flagship model. My eyes are glazing over looking at these grids. If I were in a store, this is the part where I'd tell the salesman that I'd love it if they could recommend me their standard new general model, and I'd hope they'd hand me a machine they were confident in. I feel like the Dell site isn't confident enough in any of the models to push it onto shoppers. It makes me want to run away back to Apple's site.

Maybe my thinking is really influenced by my phone experience. Years ago, I used to have a certain popular but cheaper phone carrier. When I went to their site, they had a big grid of phones to choose from. I picked one of the ones near the top that wasn't the cheapest, that I think I remembered from some ad, and assumed it was one of their flagship choices. It was slow, didn't support certain features like tethering, was on an old Android version, and never got updates. I spent a long time wondering whether this was really the average customer experience of theirs, or did I just accidentally pick an old model that they hadn't gotten around to de-listing?

Eventually I decided to switch phone services, and most phone carriers looked pretty much the same. A billion phone options, and also lots of plan options. Even if I'd heard good things about the company and they presumably had a good average customer experience, I was worried that I'd pick a wrong choice and have a worse experience. Then I found Google Project Fi, which just had one plan option, and heavily recommended the Pixel phone. I went with them and haven't regretted it. The Pixel has good hardware, but it also has regular Android on it, regular updates, and a lack of crapware. I'm sure there's other providers that offer good choices like that, but it feels like it would take some research and risk to figure out the non-risky "right choice" at a different provider.

It all depends on your 'hunter-gatherer' personality type. The age-old Apple vs. Android war illustrates this fairly well. One group wants simplicity and predictability and can't understand why someone would waste time on fiddling around. The other group wants personalized and specific features and can't understand why someone who choose something with so many limitations.

Just to be clear, my point was more about the shopping experience and organization of it rather than the devices themselves, and the difference between "Here's one good polished device for X that we stand behind, and there's a few other variants and options on the next page if you want" versus "Here's a hundred choices ... some of them might be real stinkers, and it's your own fault if you pick one of those, so it would be unfair to blame us for that ... We're not going to recommend any specific one because that would be showing favoritism".

I think it's possible to offer a lot of choices while still being like the first category. A site could emphasize how the other products differ from the recommended flagship model, instead of leaving you to try to figure out how exactly all the products differ.

The problem is that sites like Dell do not satisfy the fiddler either. Behold the terribleness:

- Head over to dell.com and search for Products->Desktops->For Home (already forced into one choice I don't want to make, Home vs Work)

- Look at the AMD options. Threadripper is listed under processors, so pick that (noting in passing that "AMD Radeon" is somehow also listed as a processor option, and remind yourself this is one of the largest PC retailers in the world not knowing the difference between a CPU and GPU.)

- Get presented with 12 options, none of which are ThreadRipper machines.

- Notice the box at top right that says "Sort By" is set to "Lowest Price". Change it to sort by "Relevance". Finally a ThreadRipper model shows up - but only in 2nd place after an Intel system (!)

I wonder if they make it intentionally confusing so that high volume corporate clients can get gouged...

If you've ever seen a Dell quote, this wouldn't even be a question. The quotes are HTML tables of random items in no particular order, including such line items as "No Mouse," "Power cable," etc. It is near impossible to compare quotes machine to machine, even those generated by the same sales associate. It's horrid.

The article is not about stuff itself, but the issues caused by the amount of choice such variety offers and the inability of humans to cope with the choice. Choice and freedom certainly increases stress, but I'd take that any day over less choice or less freedom.

What we need to ensure is that the choice we have is effective choice - e.g, the same company selling the same product with different names is just adding stress without any value. That is increasing choice in name but not effectively. Likewise, companies not properly listing what exactly makes their product different, apart from marketing buzzwords - this increases choice, but effectively the choices remain the same.

In fact i think there is a startup opportunity there, because cleaning up / getting rid of stuff is work.

I have already talked about it on another thread, but that is the reason why my wife and I shop at Aldi. Less choice, good prices and we can do our weekly grocery shopping in less than 20 minutes.

I don't need 20 different kinds of hangers and 30 types of hot sauce. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't exist but simply that it is not a necessity for some people like us.

The paradox of choice is a pretty powerful phenomenon.

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