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Comment by _Microft | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn't be surprised if this could actually work.

"Being poor is expensive" as it is said and it is a vicious cycle as well. Because not being able to pay the total upfront cost of - in the long run - cheaper solutions, they can be stuck paying smaller amounts but more in total over time. People with cashflow problems might not be able to pay in time, leading to dunning costs cutting into their budgets. Cashflow problems might make them pick single tickets for the bus while a monthly pass would be cheaper on the long run. Not being able to pay for maintenance of the car now? Pay for a more expensive repair later instead. Same goes for health issues.

Once they are able to avoid these costs for a while, they might save enough that they are no longer actually poor (albeit still at risk of becoming trapped in this cycle again when unexpected expenses appear).

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Sir Terry sums this problem up quite nicely in Men at Arms:

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."

This in spades.

As a very real example, my family was not very well off growing up. My parents could typically only afford used Chrysler cars. The result was invariably getting stuck with vehicles that quite frankly were at least as expensive as the competition after repair costs and extra insurance.

And, speaking as someone who thankfully doesn't have to worry nearly as much about such things thanks to the sacrifices my parents made...

The DIFFERENCE in quality of life changes too. Its not just the cost of buying the cheap stuff every time, it is also that frustration of watching it break over and over.

Also, dare I say. One of the biggest silent accelerators of our class divide (financially) is this dilemma.

In the 40s-60s stuff was built to last. Lower income families could save and buy an expensive appliance but know it would last or at least be repairable. A fridge was a real investment. A set of silverware had the extra couple mm of thickness or even a square handle so it wouldn't bend at the first sign of trouble.

Now? Its all disposable, so those who have money to keep up with planned obsolescence will pull ahead. Consumers save 5-10$ on a 100$ tool, but now it lasts 3-5 years instead of 30-50

This makes me think about some of the reviews I read for a book that came up in an article I read back in the end of May

https://www.amazon.com/Unheavenly-City-Nature-Future-Crisis/...

Search them for future and time and you'll hit upon the main thesis quickly, eg:

    Banfield carefully defined class membership, not in terms of income status,
    such as government statistical poverty levels, but in terms of orientation toward the future, or time preference.

I can't say I ever heard such an idea so clearly stated before. I still haven't dug into the argument too much to know one way or another or be able to offer much in way of a critique, but it's caught my eye and attention enough to make it a reading TODO.

I haven't read the book either, but from reading the reviews it seems like the thesis is that your wealth is a function of your time orientation - whether you prefer to plan short term or long term.

If that's the case, I disagree strongly. It seems like a post-hoc conclusion; if you are wealthy, you can afford to plan for the long term; if you are poor, often you can only orient your behavior towards immediate needs and survival. Poor people know that its better to save for a house than pay rent to a landlord - they're not stupid. But your kid has a cavity that need filling, the rent you are paying is due, and god help you if you have an unexpected expense like your car breaks down.

Does the author account for decades of wage suppression that prevents all from sharing in the nation's wealth? The systematic erosion of labor rights? The (I'm assuming the author's American) carceral state that makes people unhireable and takes away some of their most productive years for earning and saving? In the case of the Black community, does he account for the generational effects of centuries of stolen labor? The list goes on.

Poverty is a cycle[1] and is worthy of serious study and consideration. Paternalistic victim blaming has no place. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_poverty

The time-orientation theory reminds me of the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

The follow up studies on this are also quite interesting, especially the one with the "unreliable tester". There are many factors that go into individuals' decision making processes, and trust is a big one.

> afford used Chrysler cars

> In the 40s-60s stuff was built to last.

On the surface, I assign this to nostalgia and maybe survival bias;

Automobiles alone provide an example where, in the the 80s, Japanese manufacturers began dumping automobiles in the the U.S. market (and making cheap quality products in the U.S. in the 90s) where the base model could last 2-3x as many miles as the prior domestics (GM, Chryslers).

I also make this statement with a 25 year old refrigerator, washer, and dryer) and a 16 year old luxury import automobile with 180k miles on the original clutch (that I bought used) and have spent very little on preventative maintenance on.

*Side anecdote on cars and unwise subscription to brand loyalty. A 1989 Mazda (made in Japan) that I bought used in 2005, had more security (key encoding, immobilizer) features than two friend's 10+ year newer Chryslers that were stolen in ~2010

Survivorship bias and security through obscurity.

A 1989 Mazda is old enough to not have anything worth stealing (ie. airbags) and with few cars still running no one has bothered to even try and crack the immobilizer. Your friends' late model Chryslers probably have $3000-$6000 worth of airbags alone.

I do wonder how this all shakes out now that many brands are selling out as glorified drop-shippers of increasingly poor quality products.

When brand is meaningless what other signals will consumers use to filter? Will we all need test machinery to vet every purchase?

Brands have been meaningless for a long time. Open an applicance made by Whirlpool, Amana, Kitchen-Aid, Jenn-Air or Maytag and you'll find nearly identical internal components. They are all owned by Whirlpool. Yet this has no effect on people swearing by or swearing at any one brand.

Buying a car, you can try to shop by brand but surveys by Edmunds and Consumer Reports have the car companies trading places frequently year over year. Even perennial favorites Lexus and Toyota have model/year combinations that perform worse than other brands.

I'm not even sure that drop-shippers are hocking lower quality items. The items are so similar to name brand kit that I'm pretty sure they're using the same supply chains to source a lot of that stuff.

> On the surface, I assign this to nostalgia and maybe survival bias

There's some aspect of truth to it in some industries (though not cars, as you say). Kind of. So a washing machine that you buy now probably won't last as long as a washing machine that you bought in 1980 (though it will be cheaper to run). The catch is that the purchase price is, in real terms, _much_ lower. And you can actually buy washing machines that last a long time today, but most people simply aren't willing to spend thousands on one.

The modern machine costs a few hundred euro and if the drum goes, well, that's the end, buy another one. You can get one with a replaceable drum for maybe 1500 euro, but you're probably not going to, realistically.

> And you can actually buy washing machines that last a long time today, but most people simply aren't willing to spend thousands on one.

i don't believe that. A company selling washing machines have incentive to make one that breaks _just_ after the warranty expires, so as to enable more sales. It can't be both true that the consumer saves money, and the company maximizing profit. One of the have to suffer - and it's usually the consumer.

There's not much brand loyalty for washing machines, so the manufacturers are probably not going to see a second scale. Of course they will cheap out on parts if they can (as long as the parts will last just longer than the warranty), so that doesn't make much difference in practice. But you can buy from a company that offers a longer warranty if the longevity is worth it to you.

You can buy a Speed Queen washing machine today, they're supposed to be comparable in quality to their commercial products. A front load washer will set you back about two grand though.

Higher end Miele machines have a very good reputation on this, as do some BSG machines (again on the high end). Honestly, given the pricing, Miele probably still wins by selling you a 1500 euro machine that might last 30 years, vs a 300 euro Indesit that would be lucky to make it to 10 years.

It's not rocket science; to make a reliable maintainable washing machine, you need to make one where all important parts are feasibly replaceable. In particular, if a machine has replaceable drum bearings, that's a good sign.

Appliances are a bit of a pickle, because with energy efficiency alone you can save so much money on running costs by upgrading.

In fact, you can save so much energy that at least one utility I've had over the years has a program to pay people to replace appliances, because it turns out that's cheaper than new power generation and transmission.

> Now? Its all disposable

Part of me also thinks that this Nostalgia is related to maintenance ideology.

Ie, it's not that Washers, Dryers, TVs, Cars never went bad, but they had repairable parts and were worth the money to have repaired.

This is not unrelated to ongoing maintenance at a house; Derelict houses (and popular poverty highlight - hookworm related Septic maintenance) are maintenance items that still need to be done; having these maintained creates jobs; but are derelict.

Modern appliances and cars are highly repairable. I've repaired many of my own appliances and vehicles to significant savings. The difference is that labor is expensive. Fixing things takes problem solving skills that are generally highly valuable on the market. Especially when you couple those skills with a little bit of specialized knowledge.

My dad always bought used cars. He avoided chrysler. It's not like their used cars are somehow the only cheap ones.

These days I'd say the highest quality cars are definitely not the most expensive. At least in the US where it seems like the biggest luxury brands require the most maintenance and depreciate the fastest. If you want to lose the least money by depreciation, buy an unimpressive used toyota.

For that matter I can't really think of anywhere significant that the little parable applies. The way to get rich is to spend like you're poor, and save your income.

Meh... Products today have shorter life spans because we figured out how to build them that way, while being far cheaper and no less (often more) reliable for the intended lifetime.

It’s just basic mathematics: when reliability depends on hundreds of parts, their individual failure rates are amplified. You need either extremely tight tolerances (today), or design with so much excess that it raises mean time to failure far beyond your intended minimum.

>As a very real example, my family was not very well off growing up. My parents could typically only afford used Chrysler cars. The result was invariably getting stuck with vehicles that quite frankly were at least as expensive as the competition after repair costs and extra insurance.

As someone who used to flip $200-$2k cars and still drives those kind of cars I feel very, very comfortable saying that the difference between a Carvan and a Sienna is more or less "pay as you go" vs "lump sum up front". The difference is that the guy with the Sienna never says anything bad about it because they have all this up front money tied up in it and would feel stupid bad mouthing it.

"Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars."

But then there were LeBron Nikes made in China with cheap labor and sold for $225. Those were the kind of shoes poor people bought using their credit cards.

Not sure why this is being down voted. Perhaps some consider it punching down?

While a generalisation it is true that some economically disadvantaged spend a lot on 'luxuries' like shoes or cars. Often this is for social signally and sometimes because it's a luxury they can afford now vs those which appear completely unattainable forever.

Some rich people too spend extravagantly beyond their means. It's just less obvious since they aren't obviously hurting for money on other ways.

In college, I lived with roommates in a working class urban neighborhood three or four blocks away from campus. The block I lived on featured the convenience of only one side of the street having houses on it. The other was nose-in parking, facing a creek.

The cars that lined the other side of the street were uniformly nice. Every time I remarked about that, my roommates would dump on the working poor for buying showy cars they couldn't afford.

They never once considered that the street was used as free overflow parking by university employees, which even cursory observation showed to be the case.

So yes, "they buy nice cars they can't afford" is a mean cliche, even if I'm sure you can find some case of it being true.

Troubled Teens Mock Social Worker's Car

https://local.theonion.com/troubled-teens-mock-social-worker...

A lot of people on HN are from Upper-Middle-class backgrounds and it's funny how the same just-so stories and excuses come up when discussing the poor. The idea that poor folk are going to use their UBI to buy the 24 pack of eggs instead of the 12 pack, or the leather boots instead of the faux-leather boots, and spend the long-term savings towards a Coursera subscription just isn't realistic, howsoever common.

Ouch, that one hits home. My partner is a social worker and her car leaves a lot to be desired..

Maybe I am alone but I disagree and agree here. I agree that rich people know how to spend less but one does not become rich on savings alone. It takes the ability to make value out of nothing whether it be your the lord of feudal lands which you rented out to peasants or online book company that made buying and selling slightly easier. Those people made money because they made value. Not just saved value.

I think this well intentioned advice can actually act as a hindrance to escaping poverty. If you spend a ton of your time walking through the grocery story saving a couple bucks buying cheaper eggs you really lost a lot of your potential earns in that time you spent. Because this is a behavior you will repeat and repeat and the accumulation of this time is a net minus on what you could have saved if you spent that time learning a valuable skill. I think that's why any major uptick in peoples wealth is usually (not always) correlated by education. Places with smarter people tend to have more money because smart people generally speaking know how to create value.

You missed it. He was saying that amortized costs are cheaper, but poor people can't pay the upfront costs.

Yeah, good money-saving tricks are the ones where you only spend a lot of time thinking once, and that helps you switch from one type of auto-pilot to another type of auto-pilot. If you have to think every time, then you pay with your time, and you quickly run out of available time.

For example, if you notice that X is equivalent to Y and costs less, it may take some time to notice, but afterwards buying Y is just as simple as buying X, once you develop the new habit. Or if there are two shops in the same distance, and you spend some time researching which one sells more cheaply the stuff you usually buy. (Or a more distant shop, that is so much cheaper that you can afford to pay for having the stuff delivered to your home, and still save money.)

I don't think the feudal lord made the land or the value from it. And what his son, and the son's son, who inherited the status and the land?

I love Terry Pratchett, but is there any evidence that this is true in our modern economy? As opposed to just being a cute story that reinforces our existing biases that "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer" which is demonstrably false over the past few hundred years?

I bought a 7 yr old $8000 dollar car, that's still going strong 12 years later, if I'd bought a $40000 car, could I expect it to last 512= 60 years? And that's being generous and assuming a linear relationship. If we use the example from the book, spending 5 times as much should give me a car that lasts up to 10 times* as long, so 120 years!

If you can deny the rise in inequality that is at this point obvious, the decimation and precarity of the lives of service workers and former manufacturing workers, the unhealthiness of what should be the most univerally gleaming and glittering society in the history of humanity, I don't know what to tell you.

yes. if you have money you invest and get richer. poor might not get poorer, but for them it is problematic to save any significant amount. One example: buying a house vs renting it. (where I live amount for rent is approx the same as interest amount for mortgage). one who bought a house has a cushion (house is an asset) for retirement, one who always rented has to continue to rent.

The Cost of Being Poor is a well known comparative study of the urban poor in Indiana, United States that addresses this directly. There have been numerous others.

These are people who definitely could not get together the $8,000 for a 7 year old car in good condition, or get a loan at all besides a Payday one. They live paycheck to paycheck.

The question is not just a quantitative one of the car cost, depreciation, years of use. It’s a qualitative one, as in quality of life. A poor person who can only afford to take the bus loses time sitting on a bus instead of grocery shopping, taking care of their kids, etc. and needs to exert mental energy to plan their day around bus rides and schedules. They generally “pay” in numerous ways besides the pure value of the vehicle vs. some other more expensive vehicle. Above all, they pay in mental bandwidth. They spend most of their mental energy worrying, planning, and stressing about being poor. That distinction can help clarify this argument a lot, and that old boot example doesn’t capture that.

Not to mention the fees that you typically face when poor, like bounced checks and exorbitant payday loan interest charges.

Or medical costs because your low-paying job offers minimal health insurance.

Or extra costs because the government system designed to help those with low income is crushed under the weight of COVID, so your benefits take months longer to arrange and arrive (something a friend of mine is battling right now).

> These are people who definitely could not get together the $8,000 for a 7 year old car in good condition, or get a loan at all besides a Payday one. They live paycheck to paycheck.

I also thought it was a bit funny that the parent poster cited an $8k purchase in a discussion about poverty. But either you're being a bit disingenuous yourself here or else you are similarly out of touch. Since you should know one can get a well-functioning used car for a lot less than that.

Also in many countries, people take public transit at all income brackets. I've done it in the US for long periods myself. Personally I find it less stressful than driving in traffic.

"I love Terry Pratchett, but is there any evidence that this is true in our modern economy?"

Certainly. It is well-documented that the supermarket chains that pop up in economically disadvantaged parts of the USA while established supermarkets pull out, are actually more expensive. While the package on the shelf might seem the same price as in a more mainstream supermarket, it in fact holds less contents.

> While the package on the shelf might seem the same price as in a more mainstream supermarket, it in fact holds less contents.

They are often just the same packages at higher prices, the more “upscale” supermarkets can make up for the lower margin on goods both stores sell with higher margin goods that wealthier clientele will buy alongside core goods (things like in-store cut deli meats and cheeses, high-end alcoholic beverages, gourmet cheeses, in-store kitchen prepared ready-to-eat food, etc. When both kinds of stores exist within a radius where they compete with customers—the wealthier being more mobile—they use this fact in marketing, too, because this also let's them win same-good price comparisons.

Some brands offer products at dollar stores that are identical to traditional store products except by volume; a hair or so less weight/volume per buck. It adds up.

The claim is not that it's a linear relationship, it's a step function. There's a threshold where you spend enough to get a high enough quality that it lasts longer and saves money. Beyond that you reach diminishing returns and you're paying for minor luxuries or status symbols.

I agree in principal but

But that step is a hell of a lot lower down the price ladder than your "stereotypical average yuppie" with their 4Runner full of Whole Foods groceries they're gonna mix in their Kitchenaid says it is.

Of course it is.

It doesn’t have to be a durable good, it can be a service.

I live in NYC. A monthly unlimited subway pass is 120 dollars. If you can’t afford that lump sum all at one, you can 2.75 pay per trip. If you use the subway 2 times a day (to and from work) for 30 days, that’s 165 dollars... more than the upfront of an unlimited pass.

And this is where credit is useful - if you can't afford the $120 lump sum, but you _could_ afford the $165 spread out, then it should be possible for somebody to profit off this arbitrage.

They lend you $120, and ask for slightly less than $165 back - let's say $145. So you save up the money you normally would have spent on tickets daily and at the end of the month, you pay back the $145, and you have saved yourself $20, while the lender made a return on investment of about 20% (a very respectable amount, given it's unsecured).

Lender only makes money when the loan is repaid.

yes, i think that's pretty obvious.

For taking on the risk of an unsecured lender, they get a very high interest rate - ~20% a month! That's almost illegal!

So credit in this case would just be a way for a third party to benefit from the disparity without altering the situation much. That doesn't sound very useful to me.

That’s the tricky part with interest rates. They have to make sense in gross dollar terms as well as percentages.

That’s why merchant credit card fees are painful for small shops. Ie 3% + 35 cents isn’t so much until your average ticket size is $5 and all of the sudden 10% of your revenue is going to intermediary.

There’s fixed cost associated with moving cash around so that 20% return is likely negative under current infrastructure.

Except there are closer to 20 working days per month for month for most people, and it's kind of a wash at that point.

What you do get though is freedom from thinking about the cost of rides, which is pretty great.

Not for people who can't get better than part-time hours at either of their jobs.

Work adds an artificial limit to the number of times the subway is used. The point is, if you go out once a day using the subway, it’s costs you more if you can’t bare the upfront cost.

You get well into the point of diminishing returns fairly quickly with cars. A poor person might not even be able to scrape one or two thousand together for a car, let alone the cost of maintenance, fuel etc.

This seems like something that is obviously not linear. There are prices that are about quality, then there are prices that are about style, and other objectives.

A $20 shovel is going to be more durable than a $1 shovel. A $15000 solid gold shovel is not going to be, as you arent paying for durability anymore.

It's even true of shoes.

My Mephistos are excellent shoes, which I wore constantly around the world. Not so much as a stitch is out of place. When the soles wear out, they can be repaired.

Going on four years now, my father had a pair for two decades. If I were wearing sneakers from Payless, I'd be a few pairs in by now, no question about it.

That particular brand is a bit on the luxury side of the tradeoff spectrum, but it remains the case that you can spend a couple hundred on lifetime shoes, or fifty bucks on shoes for a season.

A lot of things are like this. Cars aren't one of them.

>As opposed to just being a cute story that reinforces our existing biases that "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer" which is demonstrably false over the past few hundred years?

The point of this story is to let the upper middle class feel smug about driving 4Runner instead of SantaFes and wearing Levis instead of Walmart jeans. It's saying that consuming "nice" things is right and justified by the numbers. The "the rich get richer, the poor get poorer" theme is just a sideshow for plausible deniability. The upper middle class love the quote because it's telling them they're doing it right. The fact that it may confirm their biases is tangential.

On minimum wage it can take years to save up $8k. Better paying jobs are available but you need a car to get to them.

I think this is true of some items, but not most items. Most spending is on food, shelter transportation, healthcare, and entertainment.

It's not true of food.

It's not really true of shelter except maybe rent vs buy.

It's not true of cars, health insurance, or entertainment.

food nutritional quality i can afford the 1$ greaseslab but not the carrots

with shelter think about having to live farther from the business district spending more money on a longer bus to get to work.

cars i buy a junker cause that's all i can afford it breaks, i spend more money to fix it all because i couldn't afford the extra 1000 to buy a slightly more reliable car.

....

A lot of people can't get a car in the first place and thereby miss out on employment opportunities.

You bought the good boots! It's like the rich guy in the story complaining that he can't spend one hundred dollars for boots that last 40 years...

This is a fun and often repeated quote, but bears little relation to the modern world. A nice pair of boots doesn't cost more than a months salary. They cost 2 days of labor at minimum wage and last for years.

A nice of pair of hiking books can be had for $100-$200. I can spend more than that and it may be worth it to do so for specialty purposes. But you can buy a pair of what may literally be the best custom 3-season hiking boots for ~$700.

Are those a good buy? If you do a lot of hiking, yes. (Though they're big and heavy so I only wear them for some things.) In any case, they may be at best 10x of the cheapest pair of boots you can buy at Walmart, which are incredibly cheap footwear historically.

Interestingly, the most expensive boots at places like Walmart are not for rich people but for working class people who need high quality since they wear them all day in their jobs doing construction or whatever.

It will definitely help separate those that are eager and able to escape poverty from those that aren't.

For example; It can be stated that fixing a homeless issue by giving people homes isn't addressing all of the root causes of homelessness. In slice of the homelessness concerning mental health issues, some people will have sold their homes and have nothing, others will be in a similar sort of position (perhaps even somehow kicked out of their own home) as others have just taken advantage of them.

I think everyone is eager to escape poverty. But to your point, poverty and homelessness are the visible symptoms of a whole web of problems. There are those who were temporarily nudged into poverty by misfortune, and those that are bound to it by addiction and mental illness and much more.

All that to say, I think we as a society should offer the most compassionate programs that we can to anyone experiencing homelessness or poverty. I started supporting my local chapter of pathways to housing, which provides condition-free housing, stipend, and medical care to homeless people. That large upfront investment - giving people space to sort out their underlying issues - leads to 85% of participants having homes 5 years after entry. It's a cool program that I'm still learning a lot about.

My parents actually taught me an important life lesson, by buying expensive and quality stuff instead of cheap ones to save money.

When I asked them why we were buying only expensive stuff, they said: "We are not rich enough to buy cheap stuff."

There is a lot to this. I have a unfortunately close relation to someone who would just continually buy new undershirts and other clothes instead of washing what they had already. Closet full of still tagged clothing. An adult, married with children. They made enough money to waste it.

Do they donate the clothes in the end or just throw them into the trash?

Honestly I have no idea, sorry. I would love to think they were donated but I'm pretty sure they wouldn't be. All guessing.

nobody wants donated clothes anymore.

Can COVID survive a washing machine? It should be fine, as long as you wash them in my opinion.

If you wash them and then leave them to dry for a few days, that should be safe. The virus dies when exposed to fresh air; how quickly, that depends on temperature (a few days in winter, a few hours in summer), but err on the side of safety and give it a week. The high temperature of the washing machine, the soap, and drying for a few days, all of them combined should kill the virus almost certainly.

Also, you don't need to literally kill all virus particles. Reducing their number already reduces the probability of getting sick. A certain amount is needed to attack you successfully; a lonely virus particle is mostly harmless. Also, the virus cannot enter your body by being in the clothes your wear, only if you touch the clothes and then your mouth/nose/eyes.

tl;dr - yes, if you wash the clothes and leave them dry for a few days, it is safe

I'm not talking about cleanliness. I'm talking about the fact that most items fall apart and new items are so cheap that used items are getting less and less desirable. There's been articles on here about the way the used clothing industry has imploded over the last decade. There might still be some thrift shop usage, but the longer tail that allowed retailers to offload the majority of donations is disappearing.

The trick is identifying expensive and quality stuff. Nowadays there's lots of stuff that is expensive and crap.

Exactly. I can say that we were a low-middle class family, so whenever we wanted to buy something, we would just go and buy the best one that will last for a while, even if it meant that it is twice as expensive. Nowadays, it is really getting hard to find something that fits this criteria.

It's still possible, but it'll take you 6 hours of research, wading through garbage links on Google Search and instead of twice as expensive, it'll be 5x as expensive.

A big problem of this was positioning of customer reviews over things like Consumer Reports or other publications that have to maintain a long-running reputation (the random reviewer who gives 5 stars doesn't). Reviews became what people trusted, then those were manipulated or paid for, but nothing has filled the trustworthy vacuum because of that just yet.

(Consumer Reports is still there of course, just not as popular of a source as reviews for some reason)

Just as a plug / FYI for Consumer Reports - it's worth checking your local public library to see if they've got a subscription to C.R. that you can use for free.

Nowadays, with everything being online, you might even be able to use the Consumer Reports website for free, through your local public library.

> Consumer Reports that have to maintain a long-running reputation

Tell me more about the "long-running" reputation of Consumer Reports. I will then tell you why Suzuki Samurai is no longer sold in the US.

>Tell me more about the "long-running" reputation of Consumer Reports.

Compared to random people leaving reviews, they do have to be more careful.

I find the cheapest thing and go up a few percentage points (5-10%) and buy that instead... you have to remember a corner or two were cut on the way to the cheapest thing. Buying the most expensive stuff is often not worth it.

Pretty similar to my strategy. I buy 4 star items because compared to 5 star items, they're typically 80+% of the quality at 50% of the price.

"We are not rich enough to buy cheap stuff." - I'll promote this too, whenever I can, as long as I'll have expensive stuff to sell. As for friends and family, it's just "lean to quality" (not necessarily the expensive type).

I think that was the point my parents were trying to make, since, usually, cheap means bad quality stuff in my native language :)

German has the two words "günstig" and "billig". Both can mean inexpensive but "billig" also has the negative connotation of something being of bad quality.

I usually use this logic nowadays whenever someone asks me about buying a 300$ laptop, UNLESS the use case is, in fact, literally email, static html, and word processing (which I've only seen once).

Spending that extra 150-200 can make a huge difference in longevity.

I always tell people to buy a used business class (latitude, probook, etc). Electronics that last 2 or 3 years and are in a repairable form factor will last way longer then the cheap consumer stuff. You can get parts for them for close to a decade.

Most economists probably would be surprised if it could actually work in general. Cash handouts do not cause the behavioral changes necessary for individuals to develop sustainable habits. Most poor people are not poor because they don’t have access to the market, but because they either don’t know what to do, or they don’t have the discipline to do what they know they should. Cash handouts can make this even worse as people become complacent and dependent on them, and the impetus to work out a sustainable solution dissolves. The implementation of welfare programs in the US during the 60s has a strong negative correlation with progress in lower income (and often minority) communities.

An ideal solution might involve temporary relief for catastrophic events that can help an otherwise mostly sustainable lifestyle, but avoid misaligning incentives in a way that makes the problem even worse.

> Cash handouts do not cause the behavioral changes necessary for individuals to develop sustainable habits.

That's because cash handouts given are usually not even close to being enough to develop sustainable habits.

#1 help in developing a sustainable habit is receiving an education that allows an individual to pursue a better job. Education is very expensive in the US.

It is doubly expensive if the adult in question has to take care of dependents. AFAIK, there's not a single program that would come close to let an adult improve their education, while also helping them take care of kids.

Possibly true, but I'd like to see this thinking applied to the welfare and misaligned incentives we grant big business FIRST before we apply it to the already disenfranchised.

There are no poor businesses that get free cash handouts on a recurring monthly basis.

This is so true. I'm happy to have finally escaped the poverty trap, but I worry one day I'll lose it all over medical issues since I'm in the USA.

This is a very interesting perspective. I'd never considered this before but it makes total sense.

I'd be very surprised if this would actually work. There are many contributing factors to poverty, not just a lack of resources.

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