Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

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(Maybe TMI) Last week my wife was admiring a pair of Patagonia boxers she gave me over 10 years ago. I did note they still looked great after probably a few 100 cycles of washing and drying. I commented that Patagonia made great stuff and actually cared about their materials. So this video is timely.

I'm reminded about what Scott Bessent, the new Treasury Secretary, said earlier this month: Cheap goods are not part of the American Dream [0]. In the US we love our big houses and we fill them up with crap. When the crap overflows it just gets stored in our big garages were we also put our oversized cars. [1]

How we got here today is just the result of the post-WW2 world-order. Global trade was designed to make cheap stuff. While labor rates skyrocketed. So you make more money but you can surround yourself with status symbols and things that supposedly make you more comfortable.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/06/treasury-secretary-bessent-s...

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLoge6QzcGY

It's worth mentioning that Americans (or the industrial revolution) made a ton of formerly high status goods available to everyone. Specifically meat. Those high status goods have absolutely insanely high environmental footprints.

Most people didn't regularly consume red meat before industrialization. However, once we made it "cheap", the everyman could eat steak for dinner every night! Same goes for all kinds of goods, especially plastic.

It's wild how many things changed around the turn of that century, for the worse, but we accept all these things as just the way things are and should be. Like, seriously, widespread use of toilet paper is just over a century old. That's not that long for something most people probably assume has just always been that way.

Sorry if this is a bit off topic. It's just something that boggles my mind; how close we are yet so far away from our past.

> I commented that Patagonia made great stuff and actually cared about their materials

Last I checked a lot of their clothes were full of forever chemicals and processed plastics but maybe they've made progress.

https://www.insidehook.com/gear/patagonia-major-microplastic...

> Cheap goods are not part of the American Dream

The difference in manufacturing between a $100 and $500 jacket is like 20-30 bucks of material and labour. Patagonia boxer and dollar store boxer like $2. Occasionally you have products like $4 costco wool socks with same performance as $40 darn toughs.

Reality is US can fill their big houses with cheap, none crap, but brand extraction,market segmentation etc.

100 cycles of washing and drying over a decade? Really hope you're not wearing it frequenty, that's 10 washes a year! o__O

I maintain a 2-week supply of boxers, but do laundry every week. Over 10 years theres roughly 520 laundry cycles. I change my boxers at least once a day. Assume each boxer has equal probability of being selected, so it creates a 50% chance of being in that wash cycle. So its feasible that they've been through ~260 wash cycles.

Right. And that's one wash every 36 days, so if he has a dozen pairs of underwear and "a few" means three, the math checks out for regular use.

Those underwears have so much character they can literally stand on their own.

A few 100

I think you've forgotten to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_storage

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