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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duralex
Here in the UK (and I believe in the US) there was a peculiar fad in the 1970s for gas stations to give away a free glass with the purchase of a tank of fuel. Such profligacy would be unimaginable under communism, not for any philosophical reason, but simply because they lacked the productive capacity.
Or waiting 5 years for the option to buy a car (of course no say in the color or equipment, take it or leave). Or 2 years for sofa FFS, who cares you don't like the shape, color or material. If you think this is funny, I gave examples from my own childhood, and could go on for a very long time.
Centrally planned economies really don't work well. On top of clusterfuck that communism consistently was by itself.
My entire family to this day is compelled to load up on whatever discounted-because-of-oversupply items when shopping, on the premise that they will not be available in the future due to asinine production planning.
For some reason that reminds me of that arch-capitalist, Henry Ford.
I remember in which direction people were trying to escape across the iron curtain.
From countries that used secret service against it's own citizens to countries that used it to assassinate inconvenient democratically elected leaders of other countries?
And now, with the threat of "communism" (no, it wasn't one, because communism would have meant giving up state power), capitalism is slowly getting just as awful to the people in the core as it was to the people on the periphery.
The progress you so enjoy is the product of trade, truly. Across thousands of years. But best trade is free trade. One where nobody is coerced by police NOR implicitly by having choices stripped away from them by the capitalist ruling class that just wants to maintain it's position. People deep in debt, living from paycheck to paycheck, cannot make their choices freely.
Imagine running away from USSR only to have to send you kid there:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/business/child-labor-meat...
"Not real communism"
If it's only viable in theory, as shown by many practical failures, it's not worth discussing at all.
> The progress you so enjoy is the product of trade, truly. Across thousands of years. But best trade is free trade. One where nobody is coerced by police NOR implicitly by having choices stripped away from them by the capitalist ruling class that just wants to maintain it's position. People deep in debt, living from paycheck to paycheck, cannot make their choices freely.
This sounds like you'd like welfare capitalism. Bur your comment conflates and gish-gallops so many things that it's impossible to have a conversation with you.
Because the term has been perverted by both anti and pro crowds.
Capitalism isn't equal to free market (arguably Adam Smith was first to give scathing rejection of capitalism)
Communism isn't equal with state control and planned economy, no matter how much Imperial Russian traumatised politicians insisted on everyone.
Nevertheless, the reasons were because people hated being forced to do and to say things that they did not want to do and to say, and because there were many categories of things that they were completely forbidden to own.
On the other hand, among the few categories of things that they could have, many were quite nice things in comparison with what is available today everywhere.
For instance the quality of clothes and of food has been lowered dramatically after the communists lost the power, the internal market was opened to global commerce and the local factories had been destroyed by their managers (who had stolen all their assets in order to transform themselves from communist bureaucrats into capitalist businessmen).
I grew up in a capitalist country. Being poor doesn’t give you access to things just the same.
Then it came capitalism. For the first time in history, a country eliminated famines just by adopting the new of organizing production. They were still poor people who lacked things, but they lived in the only part of the world where at least they could count on not starving to death.
Then some countries organized as socialism, and they caused huge famines, that in a rare historical event, were not caused by climate or a natural catastrophe, but by wrong resource allocation.
You can criticize capitalism, but not on terms of producing what people want. In that field we don't know any other system that does it better. Capitalism is bad at distributing the wealth equally to everyone, causing that some people cannot have some things, but also we don't know a better model that does it while keeping poverty away.
If people today doesn't have unbreakable glassware (it exists!) is just because they prefer cheaper and fancier glasses from Ikea. When I need a truly unbreakable "glass" I buy a titanium made camping glass. In general we don't want all products to last a long time: we want to change our car to get the newest fancy things, we want a bigger and faster phone. We don't want a single pair of shoes that last forever, but lots of shoes to match with lots of clothes. There are long lasting shoes, but they don't sell well (i.e. people don't want them, even if they say so).
People in the west have no grasp at the level of abject poverty that communism creates.
It's always rich kids that benefited from capitalism their entire life that seem to fetishize communism the way that video does.
When you have that level of information asymmetry, people might value qualities like durability but can't guide their purchasing decisions with it because they don't know what ion exchanged glass is and why they should be looking for it. Not everyone is an engineer/scientist.
Neither of which fit your example which is search cost. Not everyone knows a lot of things, it is impossible to know everything. Therefore tradeoffs are made. Which is rational.
I've got a big house with a lot of can lights, and it's not really possible to buy for durability. Obviously, incandescents are out, but if I buy a batch for a room to see if a model is durable, by the time I have a good idea, I can't actually get that model anymore, so it's not super helpful. And I'm not a monster, so I don't use multiple models in one room, so it's better to buy several at once. Different brand incandescents are fine together, but LEDs outputs vary and their startup and shutoff delays vary, and their response to dimming varies, and their failure modes vary... So yeah.
Well, there’s your problem.
These things are just not a good idea; the heat has to go somewhere.
Eight years ago, I bought a bunch of Ikea GU-10 LED bulbs, I believe 6EUR for two; I think roughly a quarter have since died. But they’re exposed spotlight fittings rather than recessed. Never heard of those lasting particularly long.
It’s naive to believe only buyer behavior drives what products are available, when the market is fixed to limit offer. You’re probably confused between the meaning of capitalism and free market.
It's easier to sell long-life lamps than high-efficiency lamps (bulb failures are obvious, but few people had the test equipment to measure efficiency of individual bulbs). The cartel avoided competition on lifespan that would have wasted a lot of electricity.
But you're claiming something different. What's an example of a "nice thing" we'd enjoy today except for those evil capitalists blocking the path?
E.g. do you think Apple could have released the iPhone 15, 14, 13, etc. in 2007, but held back because Steve Jobs was counting his billions?
Also, maybe you intended "every other year" as a figure of speech, but I buy an iPhone only every four or five years, and my last one was free (to me) with a "commitment" to the very affordable carrier plan I already had. I do occasionally need to replace the battery, but if better battery tech exists, I have not heard about it. Are the Chinese and Koreans complicit in this gatekeeping?
Last but not least, do you work in the tech industry? I used to work for a well-known chip manufacturer, and if we were gatekeeping our chip releases to increase future profits, I certainly didn't hear about it. That reminds me - a key feature of capitalism is COMPETITION. If someone is holding back on building magic devices, the field is open for someone else, maybe you, to profitably build them.
Are you suggesting that Arm and AMD and Apple and Huawei and Intel and Nvidia and Samsung are all colluding to stay at roughly the same level of chip technology - when they could easily be generations ahead?
Microsoft's OEM agreement, which came to light in 1998, was that a manufacturer, say Dell, had to pay Microsoft for every computer they sold, regardless of if it had Windows on it or not. This means, that if Dell sold a computer with BeOS on it, they still had to pay for a Microsoft Windows license for that box! From a business perspective, that means Dell doesn't need to bother selling BeOS. Business hasn't changed, so even though Arm and AMD and Apple and Huawei and Intel and Nvidia and Samsung haven't been taken to court on an antitrust case, there's all sorts of anti-competitive behavior going on.
I can't buy a Samsung phone with an Apple A17 chip as the CPU.
I think if the market were better regulated, I would be able to, but because we don't prohibit that kind of vertical integration, the result is an anti competitive market, and that's holding us back. We couldn't easily be generations ahead, because it's a lot of hard work, fighting lots of powerful people, but we could be.
As for the rest of it, you think that forcing arch rivals to collaborate on their key products, in other words, reducing competition, is the best way to help the consumer?
Good luck in your Marxist-Leninist fantasy world.
Increasing competition is the best way to help the consumer. I think leveling the playing field increases competition and is the best way to help the consumer. I don't know why you think I'm a communist simply because I think there's anticompetitive behavior going on.
Take CPUs. Between AMD and Intel, I have to pick a motherboard that supports one or the other. This fantasy world I'm pushing would say hey you two, make a standard that both of you can agree on, so that one motherboard can have either an AMD or Intel CPU. I don't know what's communist about that. That then lets Transmeta and other players actually compete, reduces e-waste, and lets consumers decide for themselves. In my mind, setting and enforcing standards and limiting the amount of vertical monopolizing that can happen increases competition, and doesn't put you on a train to Siberia.
Why were Oracle (I used to work there) and Sun even competitors? They're both so monstrously big that they had overlap, and so they were, but Oracle is known for its database software, and Sun is known for its hardware. In my fantasy world, Sun would never have competed with Oracle. Oracle would have competed with Sybase to see who could write better database software, and Sun would have competed with HP and Dell to see who could make better hardware. IBM would be split into a bunch of smaller companies that competed in each area, instead of being the monstrosity that it was and is today.
Still don't see how that makes me a communist.
What exactly is unhealthy or unnecessary about running shoes?
It's impossible to reconcile my experience, and the experience of so many other barefoot (and minimalist - although I don't recommend it) runners, with the advertising from Hoka and from podiatrists.
So I certainly would not think of telling others they must be minimalistic, too. And if I would run in the cities on concrete, I would get myself good running shoes, too.
I understand your skepticism, since I used to be the same way. What I've learned is this: good running form isn't "pogo stick," it's "unicycle." But if what you're doing is working for you, no reason to change.
That STILL doesn't excuse the cost of running shoes. For public shoe companies, just take a look at their financials, how much money goes to "R&D" versus "sales and marketing."
I don't know much about running shoes, but about trekking shoes. And there I can attest, that higher quality exists and indeed costs more and is worth it. I assume the same to be true for running shoes, no matter that they have a big marketing budget, that should rather be R&D. (All marketing should be.)
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/energy-charter-treaty-climate-ch...
Now, like everyone, it’s routine today for the Autumn sky to darken as pumpkin season begins and we get everything pumpkin from cereal to coffee to toothpaste and motor oil.
However, Paneras pumpkin muffin was not seasonal, but a staple. And now it’s gone.
I’m betting the mustache twisting, stove piped hat capitalists in the smoke filled room of leather chairs and warmed snifters didn’t decide to stop making the muffins in order to lose money.
And they were REALLY GOOD pumpkin muffins.
You might know the meme. This is you enacting it.