The Fancy Rug Dilemma | Hacker News Reader

The Fancy Rug Dilemma

epan.land

73 pointsericpan6465 comments

I can’t speak for the rugs you viewed, but some products take literally hundreds of man hours to make.

My partner recently picked up some fine crochet bedspreads. These intricate bedspreads each must have consumed multiple weeks of labour. I understand this is also true of hand crafted Chinese and Afghan rugs - around a month per square metre for an Afghan.

In contrast, those basketball shoes you collect are mass produced and apparently consume around 3 hours of direct labour. You could have many tens or even hundreds of those basketball shoes for the labour value of a moderately size Afghan rug.

Creating a single basketball shoe from an existing template takes three hours. Coming up with that design and all the associated expenses (marketing etc) plus the tooling needed to produce the shoe consumes much more labor and accounts for the vast majority of the shoe's cost.

Hand-woven rugs, on the other hand, are largely unique in design and created by a single person.

Silk hand-woven rugs need no marketing at all in order to fetch absurdly large amounts of coins.

“Silk” is the marketing.

Plus nearly 2,000 years of accumulated marketing spend via the Silk Road and everything around it.

And yet, Steppenwolf was singing their praises in 1968. Bullfrog put out an well know advergame in 1994. Plenty of marketting of the properties of silk rugs through portrayals in popular media.

Even if hand-woven rugs were made on a pattern, they would take hundreds of hours to make.

The innovation in the design is almost icing to the cake, in terms of labor overhead.

Mentioning the man hours would make sense, if the ones producing the product taking the majority cut from the purchase price.

Otherwise, it's more of a strategy to set a higher price tag, and the reseller and all the middleman taking all the extra revenues.

Not really.

Irrespective of price, the inherent value of the rug is much greater - it still takes over 100x the labour to produce.

That it still costs less than 100x basketball shoes to purchase is more circumstantial, yet further demonstrates the fallacy of the argument.

It takes a long time to make small scale reproductions of movie scenes out of popsicle sticks, the time spent doesn't make them valuable on its own.

Yeah, value was a poor choice of word. I probably meant cost, and where I say cost I probably meant price.

I wonder how many hours it would take to make a rug out of hundreds of disassembled basketball shoes.

Hey HN - long-time lurker and decided to start writing essays (inspired by PG and many of y'all as well). This one came from months of joking with my friends about different "fancy rug" problems which led me to think about my own "fancy rugs". Enjoy!

Merging all the dimensions of the question into Value as a function of Cost seems part of the challenge.

Value is such a subjective concept. You finally get down to "We all need things transcending pure utility, connecting us to stories bigger than ourselves." at the end of the post.

Even if "bigger than ourselves" takes on some explicit religious angle--thinking the Amish here--there is still copious room to dislike the fact that the Amish are rolling around in "them new-fangled buggies" instead of being on foot like they were in the Good Book.

I think part of the Amish line of thought is instead of randomly and quickly adopting technology/growth a community should take time to understand what the impacts are of using them.

Some people think Amish don't use electricity, but that's not true. You'll find quite a few of them with things like solar panels and LED lights. These things tend to have very long lifespans and no grid connections limiting needs from outsiders.

Indeed, and the infrastructure behind these are very communally owned.

I guess if the unit of group analysis stays small enough, they can avoid the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons .

The Amish way is ultimately impractical to practice without being embedded in a society which is much larger and inimical to their own way of thinking as otherwise those willing to both bear the cost of accepting modern ways of and willing to do violence burn your shit and settle on your land. In more peaceful times people may chose only to impoverish your people and buy your lands but the net effect is the same.

The inherent built-in futility limits the virtue of this approach.

I don't disagree with your point, which is, I think, that the Amish are essentially freeloading on the security afforded by the surrounding society.

Indeed, the smaller "tribal-esque" approach of the Amish may be considered similar to that of the Native American tribes, and American History seen as a natural experiment of how the Amish would fare if government security were to vanish.

I have to ask... why the extra lettuce? At In-N-Out I sometimes ask for less lettuce because I feel like it's unnecessary filler compared to the other ingredients, lol. Maybe they've just been giving my unused lettuce to you...

Not OP but I also order extra lettuce on burgers. Lettuce is free "crunch", basically. Crunch is good in general - and especially necessary on burgers, which otherwise tend to sliminess.

Have you ever made your own burgers?

Lettuce is one of the least appealing things I can imagine adding to a half decent burger. I’ve also never once cooked a burger I’d describe as “slimy”.

Obviously it’s all subjective at the end of the day.

Thanks for lettuce-sharing :-D agree with other post-er on extra "crunch". Personally I like the lightness of the lettuce in contrast with the burger oils and onions, it's the right balance for me. And in my mind it's more free food (my stomach capacity is quite large)

Thanks for writing. This was an enjoyable read.

So in the spirit of this blog post what kind of rug did you make and where would you guess the audience/audience distribution falls on the graph?

Thank you for the read and glad you enjoyed it!

For me, writing this up was like finally laying-out and using some "fancy rug" ideas and admitting to myself they're nice though not necessarily practical nor particularly special. Though they're special to me and that's something I've come to appreciate for what it is.

I hope this was a "sweet deal" read for a good amount of people! And seems likely mostly somewhere in the middle, though confident that most people can take something interesting back with them

Is there an unspoken assumption here that value is absolute and deviations pathological?

I can't understand how heirloom quality is abstract any more than say color scheme.

How is valuing a sneaker collection more abstract than valuing, say, minimalism or utilitarianism?

I've re-read the post multiple times, but I'm clearly missing something basic to allow comprehension.

It would be case by case for me. In a sense, all of them stem from identity. Another lens to explore this is effects: what first, second third order effects would a sneaker collection have versus minimalism? Some are more functional than others.

This is not really Veblen situation. A lot of these are primarily money laundering outfits, the artificially high prices, are simply a means of converting cash into bank deposits. Similar schemes exist in art, sculptures, and jewelry. There are some mom and pop type stores that are legit and some of the money goes to actual artists who make these but the ones in Palo Alto (or similarly unattainable rent neighborhood rug shops), are not that.

What kind of dirty money do you believe these stores are laundering? What kind of illegal businesses/schemes are the source of it?

Wrong question. There is no reason to link the sort of dirty money with the type of laundering business. The process of laundering, and need thereof, are universal to criminal industries.

That’s internet lore. Nobody is buying a $50,000 rug with cash. If any of the people were, the rug guy wouldn’t have a place to bank. Reality is you can move a few rugs a month and make ok money.

There’s a market for these types of businesses. In my area there’s a dude with a company that sells and maintains $50-150k+ Christmas light and decoration displays. He has ~100 customers. The men’s clothing place I go to is a group of guys hanging out having a good time - it doesn’t look busy, but their 4-5 customers a day are dropping $3-10k/visit.

Stores like that are “laundering” money like the rest of the commercial real estate world… by playing games with various (legal) tax schemes. They are no more illegal than a Hampton Inn or AirBnb guy.

Real money laundering places are restaurant/bar, laundromats, arcades, and low income residential.

Tax schemes are there to save taxes using legalism loopholes, these places are happy to pay the taxes on "cash" purchases to bank the proceeds. Nobody is buying 50K rugs is correct, most of the transactions are self reported for the purpose of paying taxes and depositing funds. IRS and fincen are not in it together, in fact IRS encourages people to pay taxes on ill gotten gains.

Interesting read, I'm surprised nobody has brought up Pejman Nozad who is the owner of one of the more popular rug shops. https://pear.vc/team/pejman-nozad/

His money doesn't come from the rug shops. He sells rugs, but the rug shop was where he used to meet investors and founders and make investments. I assume the rug shop in Menlo Park has a similar background.

I’m confused. What did this guy do?

He owned/owns a rug shop. Had an office upstairs he rented to start-ups, and became a central figure in the angel investment community.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2012/03/21/silic...

It’s thirteen years old now (2012), but there’s a fascinating old Forbes article (from when, I think, it was a respectable publication) about the cross-pollination between Palo Alto’s rug dealers, and Palo Alto’s venture capitalists:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2012/03/21/silic...

Love this (as someone with a love for rugs). Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for the share! Super cool read

This really made me think - and not just because I went to Artsy Rugs last week and talked with the someone there about a rug that I bought at an estate sale and which I would like more information about ( http://provenancevault.com/treasures/12x16-persian-rug-ajrk8... ) but also because I've been moving to a new house the last few months and going through a lot of the possessions I've accumulated, deciding what to keep (definitely things with strong sentimental value or family history) and what to get rid of (a lot) but also what it means to have things. They can be both a joy and a connection with the past as well as a burden.

And because of that, I started building this website https://provenancevault.com/treasures/discover (it's probably not ready to introduce widely yet, but relevant to this conversation)

Oddly enough, I know some of the long time rug sellers on University Ave and another without a storefront as a side business. Some of the vintage collectible ones go for $150k+.

I inherited my grandparent's 40-year-old Tibetan silk rug about 4x6m with a crazy dense weave. It's in storage, lol, because using it would wear it too much and sending it for cleaning it is a PITA. It's basically a white elephant item. I wished I had walls tall and long enough, because I'd consider framing it like a tapestry if direct sun wouldn't hit it.

Small thing: keeping old books is a bit like a physical memory palace. Granted, it may be pointless/way to costly to cling to a collection of say outdated books read as an adolescent, but we tend to remember better if we can access at least the visual image of the cover.

So my advice is to take the pictures of book covers you have to get rid of. And organize them be it by the time period you have read them, topic or something else. One day you may be able to fish out memories you didn't think exist anymore.

I always assumed that the rug shops were for money laundering.

Palo Alto may buy a lot of rugs, but it seems like one shop should be sufficient to supply the entire city.

Though now I am imagining Palo Alto rolling out its new, grand vision for commerce: to become the Rug Shop Capital of the Greater Bay Area. In cooperation with Stanford Business School's new program in Rug Store Management, and the department of Rug and Textile Studies.

Rug stores also seem to be perpetually "going out of business", but I don't know if this is actually the case and why.

Very much appreciated the essay. The abstract / meaning / story component of many current-day products (value propositions) these days is unbelievable. I’d like to understand it better.

Basically, if you want to create a successful product, you have to offer some kind of relatable and attractive story for people to buy. And it is not the same thing as producing a good product per se. I’m struggling with that. And see great many people around struggling too.

I thought those stores are basically hobbies for the wealthy local commercial landowners that own the building(s). They may anecdotally also be money laundering. They don't need to actually be a profitable business. The only cost to run it is basically lost rent for that space.

There are so many of them that I've always kinda suspected this, yea. I maybe-literally never saw anyone in any of them across a few years prior to COVID (despite working near enough to two that I saw them multiple times a day). But at the prices they go for I suppose they might only need to sell ~two a month if they got them for dirt cheap somehow, and owned the property or were grandfathered into extremely low rent? Or one person furnishing a mansion a year.

Sure, let's take a rug as an example. I don't think there is one breakpoint. I think there are a set of axis of quality you invest into, roughly sequentially, as you go up the price scale of objects:

- $50 - Something rug-shaped exists

- $100 - Durability

- $200 - Materials

- $500 - Comfort and design

- $1000 - Basic craftsmanship

- $2000 - Refinement of craft

- $5000 - Artistry & identity

- $10000 - Tradition

- $20000 - Mastery

- $50000 - Rarity/historical importance

- $100000+ - ?

Because most people don't cross-shop $20k rugs and $200 rugs, most people are focused on one or two aspects around their personal budget. The essayist mentioned being amazing by the craftsmanship and artistry (see scale above). A broke college student might just want something that holds up in their dorm room and see what materials it's made out of and comfort as meaningless and abstract. And a billionaire shopping for a rug for their office might take everything other than rarity/historical importance as a given and just be thinking about that.

I think there is a large cognitive bias to consider everything you can easily afford "tangible and important improvements" and everything you can't as "abstract"!

You might need to add a category for rugs that tie the room together. They're worth quite a lot.

Dude, really?

What is the downward sloping arrow in those charts?

Enshitification. It's where the price goes up, but the quality actually goes down.

I was thinking more of something like mechanical watches - more expensive than a quartz watch and less accurate.

Those are the same as fancy rugs. A machine will make better rugs, but you're paying for the artisanal story, or whatever your abstract value is.

I really love the recommended background music while reading this article. More blogs should adopt that - really quirky.

What a nice personal website! I like the quotes section, the essays section. It's cozy and personal.

Thank you and glad you like it! Took some time to get the feel right though was able to slowly add stuff to make it more personal over time :-)

They really tie rooms together

I realize the OP was using rugs as a metaphor, but they are works of art, just as much as samurai swords would be for Japan.

Rugs were prized in nomadic and semi-nomadic cultures like Iran, where all your valuables had to be mobile. Traditional rugs require many, many hours of craftsmanship and are indeed works of art with deep cultural resonance. Turkmenistan even features a rug on its national flag.

Sadly, also a dying art despite its millennia of history as most rug weavers in Iran or Turkey have better options in factories or jobs. For the moment dirt-poor areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Tibet still weave, but the future is machine-woven rugs from China, possibly with machines deliberately designed to mimic the imperfections of hand-woven ones.

I appreciate the reading music, thanks.

The idea of rugs as heritage and identity so thoroughly offends every anti-consumerist ideal I have that I find it impossible to take this author seriously. Please tell me this is satire?

I'm no rug expert, heritage or otherwise, but it looks like there are some really expensive rugs out there: this[1] site lists 9 worth over $1M USD. So I'd assume there's a big spread between that and rugs you get at Ikea. So I think he's being genuine, not satirical.

1. https://www.luxxu.net/blog/top-10-most-expensive-rugs-in-the...

Not satire though I get where you're coming from -- the idea of rugs costing so much was shocking to me too. Though some of the other comments re artistry, amount of time put into craft, etc help put it into perspective too

Bro almost discovering Marx, Veblen and the others

...or marginal utility?

They reference Veblen in the very first footnote.

Agreed. But don't be harsh, see xkcd's "Today's lucky 10,000": https://xkcd.com/1053/

Candidly the first draft was more naive and thought I was onto something special (naively). Digging through and realizing so many concepts have been covered before, so made sure it at least tied-in some personal perspective

At a certain point, most things can be boiled down something some philosopher has covered (and that's just through their specific lens). So the ideas are rehashed in this sense, though it'll be new to some people, and the perspective could help the concept to "connect" for someone else

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