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Comment by dkrich | Hacker News Reader

I think this line of thinking, while interesting, is backwards-looking.

One of the major advancements of mankind was precisely being able to manufacture goods at a minimal marginal cost. Set up a billion dollar stamping machine and now you can produce widgets for a marginal cost of a few cents.

Compare that to centuries past where manufacturing goods of any kind- metal, clothing, or food took enormous amounts of resources compared to today and therefore goods were either too expensive to purchase, or had to be shared. Ironically, computers are probably the single best example of this. Previously they were complex and expensive to make, so the fortunate few who had access to one had to share it. Nowadays you can go to Best Buy and buy your own for a few hundred bucks. That is a huge leap in progress. Why would you want to move the other way?

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That's a different use case. Computer owners usually use their computers every single day for multiple hours, while drill owners, unless they are professionals or hobbyists in construction, use them very rarely, maybe once or twice a year.

But the cost is vastly different as well. You can get a drill at Wal-Mart for under $40 and it barely takes up any room. People's time is a lot more expensive than the drill so there will never be a time that it will be economical to pay somebody to do just that for you instead of buying a drill and doing it yourself.

Abundant commodities, energy, and capital make low cost mass manufacture possible.

There are numerous items consumers, buy, use a few times, and then discard or store. There are even more items consumers use, and due to poor quality turn in to trash.

I'm not sure which is more backwards thinking. I am annoyed when something breaks and the cost to repair it exceeds the replacement cost.

This works for most goods, but some goods still cost $1k+ to manufacturer and need to be manufactured at some level of quality to be of value to the user. Also, even if these goods could be manufacture cheaply, do I really want to own, store, and maintain all of these items? There are many things that maybe I could purchase and own. Just because I can, doesn't mean I want to. Examples: -A $1500 bouncy castle -A floor sander -Safe and high quality ocean kayak -100 folding chairs

I'm in total agreement- and as such just about everything you listed you would rent instead of buying, and businesses exist to rent them out. When the purchase price drops below some point, it becomes cheaper to buy and own than to rent and so the economics of trying to lend or rent them just don't work out.

There is also a middle ground. For example, many people choose to rent their washer and dryer or living room furniture while most people purchase it. But for an item like a $20 drill, I don't think there is a point at which the small amount of room it takes up outweighs the cost and inconvenience of having somebody come and create the holes for you. Which goes back to my original point- this logic is backwards-looking. There may have been some time in the past when you simply didn't have a tool to make holes so you would have to hire somebody. But because people's time is expensive (as well as the tools) the invention of a battery-operated drill would be viewed as a huge leap in convenience. Now I can just go out to the garage and get my own and in ten minutes do the job that would have previously been very costly.

Most people use their computers a lot more frequently than their power drills, even now when power drills are cheap.

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