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Comment by pjmorris | Hacker News Reader

Someone I know posted a picture of an empty rolodex today, saying that they'd moved their friends to 'the cloud.' I'm sure you can look at your phone apps and see other things that would've been physical objects ten or twenty years ago. So, that's one way material use has, at least, shifted.

There are two other trends that worry me more. One is visible in the freezer section at the grocery store; a "half-gallon" of ice cream is no longer actually a half-gallon. Many other food items have shrunk. The article's example of lighter buildings is what I view as the same category, something blogger Yves Smith terms 'crapification.' We've now had at least two generations of spreadsheet-wielding MBA's optimizing corporate costs to reduce what is spent on materials and labor. Evidence of their success is showing up across the economy, and politics, and society at large.

The other trend is money supply; One of the chief problems leading to the 2008 financial crisis was that much more credit had been extended than could ever be paid back by those to whom it was loaned. The 'solution' was to have central banks 'pay back' the loans that never should've been made. That put a lot of credit in to the economy, which shows up as economic growth. I'd like to see an analysis of 'economic growth' where the contributions of resources and credit are accounted for separately.

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In the EU, shops are required to display the price per <appropiate round value>, i. e. all coffees have a (usually smaller, but readable) Euro/500g price.

There used to be an even more drastic law proscribing certain sizes and disallowing all others. Flour would only be available in 500g and 1kg bags, for example. They got rid of it, possibly because they got sick of people making fun of EU regulations (that's what happened with the famous banana ratings)

>In the EU, shops are required to display the price per <appropiate round value>, i. e. all coffees have a (usually smaller, but readable) Euro/500g price.

Grocery stores in the US do this, but it's not something you necessarily see in food service shops.

It's not consistent. Sometimes they $/lb sometimes they price $/item - for the same class of item.

It's as often design to mislead and prevent comparison as it is to inform you that "store brand is definitely cheaper than name brand".

Since none of it is mandated, they do only what benefits their bottom line or they are publicly pressured to.

They do that in the EU/Germany, too

€/item, €/100g, €/1kg are all common

In 99% this is _not_ a EU thing.

Maybe some German law?? Or just common practice in Germany?

Edit: I think I confused your response with parent. I understand price/kg is a thing although I didn't knew it was mandated by law. What I don't understand is being forced to use some odd unit like price per 500g.

Same in Hungary. Everything has price / kg or litre shown next to the item’s price.

I read panpanna's post as saying that it's not common to have different units, not that there's no price per unit value next to labels.

It's at least law in Sweden since a while.

I do not remember ever seeing price per 500g

Yep, every item I see is price per kg. I can't think of exceptions.

In the UK it is typically either per 100g or per kg. Or per litre or per unit. Depends on the category of product.

Its unit price as required by directive 98/6/EC.

A unit is how the product is customarily sold (singly) in the member state.

So for items typically sold as 500g in Germany, all items of that type in Germany would be labelled with 500g as the unit size for comparison. That same product may typically be sold in the UK as 1kg, so in the UK they would use 1kg.

Are we talking about stuff that can vary in size but isn't weighted? Like kiwi's or cucumbers have a fixed price each while apples or bananas have a kg price. But I don't remember seeing processed food without a kg price.

The only time I remember having difficulty comparing was different formats of toilet paper when our usual brand was out of stock... #rolls × #sheets / pack price was a bit to much for me to do in my head. Yeah, I'm not really complaining.

At least comparing 100g to 1kg is trivial.

It may be trivial, but it can be equally trivial for a manufacturer to to use misleading fonts or units to cause sufficient confusion to increase sales by a small margin. Every label under every product I see has the price per kg preventing such deception.

> Grocery stores in the US do this, but it's not something you necessarily see in food service shops.

They do an absolute shit job of it, because there are no standards or regulations. Most times I see this, similar items next to each other on the shelf are using different "standard" units making comparison impossible (e.g. price per ounce vs. price per piece). I've even seen two sizes of the same brand/product use different "standard" units on the grocery store price label.

Luckily, my local Publix that I shop at does it quite well.

You're being way over dramatic. 99% of the time the unit makes sense and is the same for comparable products.

That may be your experience based on what you shop for and where you do it.

America is way behind Europe on this. 99% of the time I go to Safeway, I have to bring out my calculator because the reference volume/weight is different from the other items on the same shelf.

Safeway and other grocery chains all list price per ounce next to the price.

Interesting, yeah the Safeways I've been to have all had price per ounce pretty consistently.

What is a bit irritating is having to recalculate when items are discounted.

They usually include the price per for the discounted tag also. Only when it’s a buy x get y free is it hard.

When I want to buy cherry tomatoes in German REWE, usually half the varieties have their unit price listed in €/100g, while the rest is in €/1kg. While metric does make converting in your head easy, I bet this still throws off a lot of the non-mathematical people and is done very much intentionally.

Even with in the exact same product but different sizes I seem them use different units to make to hard to figure out which size provides the best value

That seems odd to me. Wouldn’t the store want you to purchase the bigger product, and thus spend more money?

You’d think it would be in their interest to display the per-unit price comparison, to emphasise where a bigger package is better value.

Only if the bigger product is actually the better value, that is not always the case.

I know of several products that the Mid Size packaging has the best Per Unit value.

And several where they are the EXACT same price per unit, so they want to push you to the bigger one hoping you will waste most of it.

Most stores near me make the lettering very small... if you don't have near perfect vision good luck reading the price per ounce.

Safeway does this on the west coast. Annoying, not to mention using English/American units that are difficult to convert (how many ounces in a gallon?).

Fluid ounces, you mean. 128. Not a fan of base 2, I take it.

Is coffee really per 500g? That's a weird quantity. I'd expect kilo or 100g.

The UK used to require bread to be 400g or multiples (so a regular sized loaf of bread is 800g) but it eventually got rid of that rule. Obviously years ago (this rule was hundreds of years old) it will have been some amount in an obsolete unit rather than grams, but once metrication happened the bakers picked 400g as the replacement size. I'm told it got rid of this law a few years back, but certainly last time I bought a loaf of bread it was still 800 grams.

500g coffee packs are pretty much the regular size in Germany too, at least for pre-ground [0]. Packs with whole roasted beans are usually on the bigger end.

[0] https://www.idealo.de/preisvergleich/OffersOfProduct/354801_...

Bread used to always be 1lb (454g) and 2lb (908g) loaves. They shrank a little with the move to metric. :)

"used to be" prior to World War 2. The loaves shrank (and ingredient quality worsened) as part of rationing. After the war better ingredients became available but loaves remained 14oz, which is slightly less than 400g. Conveniently 14oz is not enough under 400g to count as "undersize" in the regulations, so generously filled 14oz tins produced compliant 400g batches when Britain went metric.

Hmm, never knew that. :)

I knew of the Bread Act that set it 1lb/2lb, and the Middle Ages origins that worked "backwards" - when the price of the loaf was fixed and the weight of the loaf was varied as the price of wheat changed.

In some sense that makes much more sense - the people are starving? Well, supply more grain then.

Doesn't quite gel with modern manufacturing, though!

Even if the price per unit didn’t change, when the pack size gets smaller, there’s more packaging per litre/kg.

Although packaging could be thinner, a lot of packaging is to protect from external impact/environment, and remains just as thick, but the surface area to volume ratio has increased.

If I need 3L, it’s annoying to buy 4x 750 instead of 3x 1L like I could in the past.

But the opposite can be true too: a 12 pack of soap may be 12 boxes inside a box...

I didn't know there was such regulation, and now I wish we could get it back. Not a month goes by without me or my wife noticing another product in the supermarket that lost a few percent of its mass while retaining its price.

Sadly it doesn't translate very well to every kind of grocery item.

Kitchen paper towels and toilet paper can still give you a pretty good math exercise to figure out what's more affordable.

My local supermarket sells their budget fruit brands (which are actually owned/leased from the supermarket itself) as a pack with no actual weight measurement given, so the price is per apple. Every other brand lists their weight and prices are given per 100g, so if you actually want to figure out what is cheaper you need to go weigh the budget brand on the scales and then do the maths yourself!

And when I think about it, those are 2 items I’d like to buy by the kilogram.

For accuracy sake, the banana curveness ratings were a lie created by Rupert Murdoch's tabloids.

This was flamboyantly repeated and amplified by the current UK Prime Minister who was then 'journalist' Boris Johnson.

There is quite literally an archive in the European Comission containing, clarifications regarding lies and misrepresentation of facts (the large majority of which created by UK newspapers).

https://blogs.ec.europa.eu/ECintheUK/curved-bananas/

This little video of a an 80's desk versus a contemporary one has been bouncing around Twitter today...it's a really great visual showing how apps have slowly been replacing everything that used to clutter a desk.

https://twitter.com/SteveStuWill/status/1181708302943539200?...

I love the idea of someone having to use a globe in their job.

A lot of it is due to sticky prices. Customers don't like seeing the number on the label go up, so the companies do what they can to keep the product quality the same at the same price point, which results in reduced quantity. The alternative is to reduce quality, which usually results in a death spiral.

Also, a great way to trick people into buying less.

> The alternative is to reduce quality, which usually results in a death spiral.

Or increase cost.

I think consumers would be more willing to see the number on the label go up if they saw the number on their paychecks go up. Wages in the US peaked about 1968, a number of forces have been working to reengineer that deal ever since.

Similar to your point, executives don't like seeing the number on their costs go up. Isn't it possible that quality could take a hit in how the executive chooses to reduce costs?

Nominal wages in the US have most certainly gone up since 1968 a great deal, this much is really obvious. You might be talking about real wages, but those are irrelevant when we talk about sticky prices, because people don't accurately understand the changes in their real wages over time (and those have also gone up, though not as much as some people would expect).

Similar to your point, executives don't like seeing the number on their costs go up.

Yes, but they do go up, so they try to exploit quirk of human psychology to reduce the impact of rising costs on consumers.

Isn't it possible that quality could take a hit in how the executive chooses to reduce costs?

It sure is possible, and no doubt happens with lots of products across the board. Usually, it is wrong move, and the company eventually succumbs to competitors.

real wages have gone up on average, but median wages have gone down. If you're in the business of selling household staples the median income of your customers matters more to you.

> ”a "half-gallon" of ice cream is no longer actually a half-gallon. Many other food items have shrunk.”

This is a common phenomenon in the UK, and there’s a name for it: Shrinkflation.

It’s a way to raise prices by stealth by not actually changing the price, but by shrinking the product instead.

#Toblerone-gate [0]

[0] - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-37904703

I'm only slightly surprised that a comment full of anecdote without a shred of actual scientific evidence is the top comment in this story.

MBA's have optimized everything... which is great! We don't need to spend incredible amounts on labor. We don't need to buy incredibly large homes. Make work more efficient... its the only way to compete with low cost emerging economic markets. Specialization and efficiencies are the only way to remain competitive.

From my perspective, the only real structural damage has been done by the success of concentrated moneyed interests in regulatory capture. We need to tax these efficient corporations and individuals fairly, and use those tax dollars to invest in universal healthcare, environmental protection and education.

They've optimized for the wrong things-- short-term profit while making the products crappy. For example almost all of the household appliances I've purchased in the past 7 years have failed because of poor design and inferior plastic parts. My expensive oven doesn't have enough insulation around the electronic control and its failed from heat, etc etc.

More anecdotes. While you complain about your Owen, the efficient supply chains built across nations has enabled keeping costs low enough for Americans with stagnating wages to afford a reasonable standard of living.

Then maybe we should focus on fixing the wage stagnation problem, and not kicking the can.

I mean, YES, of course we should. That’s what I’m arguing for. Tax wealth better, use the generated revenue to improve people’s lives in scientifically proven ways (Ie provide healthcare, poverty assistance, more funding for education). Let’s accept that our world has changed, but let’s use the benefits of that efficiency by building a more equitable and just society.

But we won’t. Most societies that become too successful suffer a similar fate. They become too polarized, and destroy the very foundations of what them great.

I do hope the US is different. Most of humanity has lived under authoritarian rule. For a brief period of time it seemed like a democracy could be the most powerful country in the world. But that’s fast unraveling...

You can cry anecdotes all you want, but planned obselesence is a highly observed and we'll documented phenomenon. A very cursory Google search will tell you as much.

I wonder if the reason wages are stagnating is that the "efficiency" is a result of skimming off the top, and removing much of the value added by removing people from the process. Maybe appliances failing as soon as the warranty expires introduces market externalities that someone will dearly pay for some day...

Or maybe we are paying for it today! Have you ever heard of the [broken window fallacy](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window)? Basically, someone may claim that breaking windows increases spending on window repairs, which is a net benefit to the economy. This, of course, ignores what could have been bought had the window not been broken to begin with.

I don't really believe in planned obsolescence if it isn't enforced by electronics. In the 20th century it was common to use metal for things that we use plastics nowadays. Metal is expensive but lasts longer, plastic is cheap but it breaks easily. If you want to provide a cheap product then metal is out of the question. The end result is that we have too many crappy products but that doesn't mean they have been engineered to fail.

One of the big efficiencies they've found though, is that no one prices externalities properly.

By damaging the rest of society in ways that they're not directly accounted for, they find new ways to profit. Many have stayed competitive by costing the human race more that they provide in the long term in many cases.

Who is "they" here? Executives with MBA's? Middle managers? If so, this is true but only in aggregate. If you see private corporations strip mining the environment and society for profits, the Government and regulations are meant to be a check on that.

“Optimizing” so you’re labeling is lying about how much you food your selling is not optimization, it’s fraud.

Making products as low quality as possible is simply destroying your brand. It’s not actually optimizing for efficiency or anything but how effectively you can trade brand loyalty for some quick cash.

Sure, it’s easier to try and cheat your customers than actually improve efficiency and our compete your competitors. But, that’s a long term losing strategy.

Are you suggesting that scientific evidence for product shrinkage or for an increase in the money supply can't be found, and so my arguments have to be anecdotal?

> increase in the money supply

There is scientific evidence for this, yes.

> scientific evidence for product shrinkage

No. The term "product shrinkage" itself is undefined, or poorly defined. You're saying the digitization of services has rendered unnecessary a lot of material needs. Counterpoint: it has enabled commercial transactions on an unbelievable scale, enabling smaller industries to reach wider audiences.

Just because you mix in a fact with an anecdote doesn't make the whole argument better :)

The research referred to in the article is my evidence for what I called 'product shrinkage' and what the article calls 'reduced material needs', namely:

He had found substantial evidence not only that Americans were consuming fewer resources per capita but also that they were consuming less in total of some of the most important building blocks of an economy: things such as steel, copper, fertilizer, timber, and paper. Total annual U.S. consumption of all of these had been increasing rapidly prior to 1970. But since then, consumption had reached a peak and then declined.

The rolodex and the ice cream were just examples to ground the idea. I'm sure there's more to the story than spreadsheet-wielding MBAs, but I think it's reasonable to claim (and evidence can be provided for): 1) Spreadsheets have been used for two generations (VisiCalc, 1979) 2) MBAs are trained to optimize things like capital and labor costs, including the price and quantity of materials used in the products and services they manage.

'That put a lot of credit in to the economy, which shows up as economic growth.' - Unfortunately its not quite true!

Fractional reserve banking (FRB) as is taught in most econ textbooks and courses is a myth. There's a very nice paper by the bank of england debunking this (Money creation in the modern economy). The idea behind QE and bailing out the banks was to create lending and liquidity in the market largely via the FRB mechanism however that failed to materialise for reasons the bank of england paper goes into but basically banks don’t lend out their reserves as the theory expects but it’s the process of lending that creates deposits not the other way around. The money given to banks didn't result in increased lending but instead went into financial markets buying up assets. There was some wealth effect going on so people with some assets got richer and then spent more but overall it was a really trickled down effect.

> The money given to banks didn't result in increased lending but instead went into financial markets buying up assets.

This statement is precisely what I meant by 'put a lot of credit in to the economy, which shows up as economic growth.' The trick is that QE took the bad mortgage loans (which are created as you say, loan first, not deposit first) off of the banks hands, and put real Fed-created money in the place of the loans (around 1.5-2T of QE went to mortgage-backed-securities.) That converted the bad loans into good credit, then used in the way you describe.

> There are two other trends that worry me more. One is visible in the freezer section at the grocery store; a "half-gallon" of ice cream is no longer actually a half-gallon. Many other food items have shrunk.

A half-gallon seems like an absolutely obscene volume of ice-cream. That's over two litres! Why would anyone possibly need ice-cream measured by the gallon? Isn't it good that sizes are reducing from that much?

A half-gallon is slightly less than two liters, and is not intended to be one serving. Its a bulk purchase to serve a family, usually multiple times.

(Although I have eaten one in one go when I was a young man.)

But why are people buying a rare treat like ice cream as a bulk item to eat repeatedly? Seems like something we want to discourage?

Because

a) when you split it over four people it's only ~two evenings worth of desert.

b) don't tell me what to do with my body.

You don't eat all the ice cream in one sitting. If this random ice cream[1] is an indication, serving size is half a cup, so a half gallon should provide 16 servings. If you like the flavor, why not buy 16 servings at a time; if you live in a household with four people, that's 4 sittings of ice cream.

[1] https://www.target.com/p/breyers-original-ice-cream-natural-...

In the UK I don't think even the largest ice cream comes in more than 1 litre. Most is around 0.5 litres. And even that for a family seems like a hell of a lot of ice cream. One litre is a crazy party volume of ice cream. A half-gallon sounds absolutely bonkers.

https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/shop/browse/groceries/frozen/i...

Of course, with as much air as comes in the ice cream here, a half gallon is probably only a liter of actual ice cream. They definitely don't weigh nearly as much as they look like they should.

You need air in the ice cream. Ice cream without air is frozen flavored cream and you'd need tools more substantial than an ice cream scoop to serve it. The manufacture will vary the air content to dial in a particular hardness.

Ice cream in Australia is available in 4L tubs down to smaller tubs for premium brands or more exotic flavours. Doesn't seem excessive given it (ideally) takes over a week to get through.

>You don't eat all the ice cream in one sitting.

Kinda like how you don't drink a twelve pack in one night?

Maybe you don't

Besides the fact that American portion sizes are generally larger, with the related implications to health and food waste, a half gallon of ice cream is usually for many people, like at a party.

When I was a kid, we'd buy whole gallons of ice cream, and that would last us at least a week!

The same is true of coffee. A 1 pound coffee can is the same size it always was but now has 10 or 11 ounces of coffee in it.

This is especially annoying when you realize that ever brand is different. There will be seven different brands of coffee in identically-sized bags, yet one may have 5.7oz of coffee and another will be 12.8oz.

Is it possible they are trying to sell for the same price but with wildly varying costs of each varietal of coffee? I.E. they want to sell a bag for 15 bucks across the board but some beans cost them far more than others to source?

It still seems purely disingenuous to package them deceptively to appear to be the same quantity.

Up to some value of volumeDelta * productCount it actually makes sense to use the same container due to sourcing/manufacturing cost from the variance so I wouldn't say purely disingenuous, there is real reasoning behind some of it... it's just marketing gets in the way of when you should actually add that second container size i.e. it's costing you more to always use the bigger container but the marketing department says the increase in sales due to confusion outweighs it.

So then why not just keep putting the same amount of coffee in the can?

It's on us though. They're lying to us to get our money, our labor, our consent. We let them.

Why?

Because it pays, and for some reason not many people have the guts to say marketing is rotten to the core, and advertising is cancer on the society. Maybe because the market encourages it structurally. Lying costs little and yields good profits, so acting immorally gives competitive advantage.

Because demand curves don't work like that unless you have a highly inelastic good. With normal goods keeping quantity constant as price changes puts you on a suboptimal point on the demand curve. Coffee's price certainly hasn't been inelastic and changing can size at every spike would have netted you decent production cost increases instead of savings: http://www.aboutinflation.com/_/rsrc/1368022029715/coffee-vs...

The varying of quantities in the same sized container is not the problem and is certainly not illogical. The problem is when we allow marketing departments to lie/cheat/fool the product onto a different portion of the demand curve instead of letting the $/amount naturally flow back when price decreases or when it makes sense to switch to cheaper containers.

This is why I prefer buying bulk when I can (with reusable containers/bags [1]). Bulk Coffee + airtight/cool storage hasn't resulted in bad coffee for me.

Why put up with deceptive packaging?

[1] Yes I know that most of that product came arrived in even more packaging, but doing what I can for now.

I guess what I am learning about myself lately is that I have the power to lie to people and convince them to do things they don't want to do or don't know better.

People know this about me. They know it almost instantly. I sense it in them.

I sense the same about other people. They have that power over me.

However, I make an effort not to. Or, when I do, I work especially hard to steer them in the direction of their goals or somewhere that will benefit them. Even if it's at my own expense sometimes and that can be sad or disappointing.

And so, through that, I have come to resent people who don't think that way. Who think, "People won't look at the number of ounces in the can, they'll just see it's the same size and think they're getting the same amount."

It's a lie. Deception. It's wrong.

But yet, we allow it in society.

It's destroying us. It's all around us. Fake news. The US President. Marketing. Stack Overflow.

So, why put up with it? It's not that you even know you're putting up with it. Some of us do. Most don't. Scammers proliferate.

It's more like, How do we protect the innocent people? Why as a species, do we allow some of us to prey on others?

It doesn't seem good to me.

I stand with you here. I recognized something like this myself - I phrase it as "I want to live in a world of cooperation, of win-win deals", but there are still people who prefer to exploit others, play "win-lose" games.

That's why I despise the advertising industry so much. They're all playing win-lose games with society, and the collateral damage slowly eats at the base of what keeps our societies together.

Yes! I remember someone asked me one time, "What do you want?"

I said, "I want to create synergistic relationships with other people."

I despise advertising too, but I realized I have to advertise so people know about my products. There are people who want them. Advertising helps them find my products that solve their problems.

And then I realized the advertising platforms like adwords and such were also deceptive. So I stopped advertising.

It doesn't help me though or the people who I could help if they knew.

Like almost all big problems of our times, this too is a coordination problem.

When everyone around you shouts through a megaphone, you need a megaphone too just so that the person next to you can hear you. If someone took all megaphones from everyone at the same time, people would have the ability to finally have a conversation.

Advertising currently is this. It's oversaturating our attention. Of course, for a market to function, you need a way for people to know what's available to buy. If done honestly, it's totally fine, and I don't have anything against it. My beef is with the existing industry, with all the things I've mentioned here[0]. I want someone to take their megaphones away, so that we could talk to each other like human beings.

[0] - http://jacek.zlydach.pl/blog/2019-07-31-ads-as-cancer.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

I'm interested in your thoughts on one public policy example of this. Back when AIDS first hit, the community of scientists and public policy makers said that while it was starting in the gay and drug community any moment it would hop into the general population. They knew this was a lie, but told us this because they didn't believe Americans would spend money helping gays and junkies.

I've come to understand that to varying degrees a lot of public policy works this way.

Thank you for saying that. Conditioning on this being accurate information, I just lost that much trust in the community of scientists.

This is how "hacking" the public policymaking fucks up society. And then people are surprised antivaxxers are a thing. They are a thing because we're all being constantly manipulated, and some people just don't have the capacity or patience to separate the truth from bullshit.

How can one even lose trust in "the community of scientists"? It's such a vague concept.

WRT. "the community of scientists", I was just parroting the expression the comment I replied to used. I primarily meant medical reporting and its public policy implications.

I don't think that was even a lie - disease doesn't respect tidy social boundaries of guilt and innocence. Especially with unscreened blood at the time.

Yeah, I don't think it was a lie either. It was an expectation about the future. We worry about diseases jumping demographics all the time, sometimes even from one species to another.

What's Stack Overflow deceiving us about?

You may have missed a lot of recent drama, some of which involves deceptive advertising practices.

It goes back to the very beginning:

https://blog.codinghorror.com/introducing-stackoverflow-com/

> Stackoverflow is sort of like the anti-experts-exchange (minus the nausea-inducing sleaze and quasi-legal search engine gaming) meets wikipedia meets programming reddit. It is by programmers, for programmers, with the ultimate intent of collectively increasing the sum total of good programming knowledge in the world.

The key part is "minus the nausea-inducing sleaze" except that their behavior of late is exactly nausea-inducing sleaze.

https://www.wired.com/2012/07/stackoverflow-jeff-atwood/

>Atwood was bothered that the community doing all the work wasn't getting paid...

Yet, the contributors to the stacks don't get paid either. Now the creators and VC are trying to sell the stacks and make money -- exactly what he said his competitor was doing and shouldn't be.

> He and Spolsky decided to create an ad-supported free alternative, and released all answers under a Creative Commons license, so that the users could use the content elsewhere if Stack Overflow ever shut down or started charging for subscriptions.

Now they've decided to retroactively change content users created for them to their benefit.

https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/333089/stack-exchan...

> we will continue forward under version 4.0 of the CC BY-SA license. This change encompasses all Subscriber Content as described in our ToS including data dumps as well as any content previously made available by Stack Exchange under the terms of version 3.0 of the CC BY-SA license.

Coffee goes stale very quickly. I wouldn’t do that if I were you.

> We've now had at least two generations of spreadsheet-wielding MBA's optimizing corporate costs to reduce what is spent on materials and labor. Evidence of their success is showing up across the economy, and politics, and society at large.

Or on other hand we are enjoying more from life with less resources. Not only it helps more companies to be more profitable thus keeping more people employed, it also does a great service to the planet and the future as we continue to reduce our footprint.

I agree with your point about the loan paybacks which of course is off topic.

It is not "crapification", my take on is "replaceability". People hail washing machines from communism era as really good, working for 30 years (they don't take into account survivorship bias but that is another point).

Earlier you could afford only one pair of shoes for your entire life. Lots of physical things could be inherited because they were valuable and they were really expensive.

You would not let your kids inherit your shoes now. The same with buildings. Kids will probably want to have their "own dream house" not stick with their parents dreams. Those kids probably will also have to move to other state or other city because jobs their parents did will no longer be there, and they will have to find their own place to get a job. Son of a carpenter is not going to be a carpenter. You want buildings easily replaceable. Buildings should last not more than 100 years and be easy to recycle.

That said, all stuff that would be replaceable, should also be easy to repair

Exactly. And we have that magnesium and other macro-nutrients are declining in fruits and vegetables (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6163803/). Unregulated capitalism will grow "food" in the form of apple shaped buckets of water and sell as many as they can as the soil is exhausted.

We're doomed.

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