Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is guaranteed to last you years.
I lived through the 60s and know what the goods were.
TVs, for example. They had tubes then, and crummy B+W pictures. They were constantly going on the fritz, to the point that drugstores had tube testing stations. You'd bring in the tubes from the TV and test them in this device that looked like an arcade game, and buy replacements.
Cars then required a lot more maintenance then. And I mean a lot. I've owned and repaired them.
I'm sorry but I will need a second opinion. I just don't believe there was not a single brand of TV that was reliably good the way some brands of clothes, furniture, power tools, phones, spices, perfume, refrigerators, light fixtures, record players, guitars, lawn mowers, and basically all non-perishable goods on the market were.
You could get the cheap stuff, or you could get the quality stuff, and you knew which is which. Neither of these is true nowadays.
My dad had a Mercedes in the 1960s. It was not a very reliable car. He later bought a Chevy which was much more reliable.
I bought a 1963 230SL Mercedes as a young man. It was such a beauty! But it was a terrible car. As an engineer, I could see that it was a patchwork of brilliant design and stupid design. The latter caused lots of problems. Sadly, I gave up on it. Stupidly, I bought a Mercedes wagon some years later, and it, too, suffered from the patchwork of stupidity. Got rid of it.
My 1967 Mustang was much better engineered. Ford gets a lot of guff, but their cars are inexpensive and easy to repair, which I appreciated. It had a sad end being crushed on the highway by a truck. I had a 1989 Bronco II and drove it for 20 years.
A friend of mine is restoring an old Mercedes, and he (also an engineer) discovered the Mercedes patchwork of stupidity. One of the problems is the radiator is undersized, making the car prone to overheating. He's engineering a fix for that.
You are literally calling one car much better engineered than another car. So what exactly are you arguing against? I said that you could pick bad car or good car back in the 60s, and it was easy to tell which one is bad and which one is good by the brand alone (usually). Isn't that so? Unlike nowadays where the brand means absolutely nothing and nearly all reviews are fake, and also most brands are manufactured by the same 2 or 3 companies worldwide so there isn't much to choose from in the first place.
What they're describing is that TVs had consumable items in the circuitry. It isn't possible to have had a TV without tubes. Tubes were basically really fancy lightbulbs and had a finite life. No amount of quality could make consumables not necessary. TVs needed maintenance and manual back then. They sucked. It's like saying that buying a higher quality car means you don't need to buy tires.
The broader point is that we think that things lasted longer back then because of survivorship bias, but on the whole they really didn't. The incredible old fridge in grandpas garage is incredible because it was an exception. 100k miles used to be a car that was ready for the wrecker. You used to have to get tune-ups several times per year where points, timing, carburetors, spark plugs, and other things needed replacing or adjusting. That's why every gas station had a mechanic. Now, half those things have been replaced by more reliable longer lasting mechanisms that adjust themselves, and the stuff that still exists like spark plugs last for years instead of months.
The highest quality stuff from back then doesn't really stack up to many modern things, especially if you pay the same inflation adjusted price.
From your list:
clothes: higher quality, several times more expensive (inflation adjusted. Levis 501 were $90 adjusted in 1975, Amazon has them for $45)
furniture: cheap shit and expensive stuff was available, just like now
power tools: almost universally, I would trade old corded, brushed tools for new cordless brushless. Old machine tools are the exception where old is as good as new.
phones: you didn't have a choice, the phone company gave you whatever they had in stock and charged you a monthly fee for the privilege.
spices: less variety and freshness. Good luck getting spices that weren't part of your local cuisine.
perfume: no idea
refrigerators: incredibly inefficient, harmful chemicals, and today you can still buy a VERY nice fridge if you are willing to pay what a shitty fridge from 1975 would have cost ($2,200 inflation adjusted for the cheapest one from sears).
light fixtures: same as furniture, you get what you pay for then and now
record players: see furniture
guitars: see furniture
lawn mower: see furniture
The enshitiffication of known brands is a real problem today, but that doesn't mean that everything was perfect and known back then.
I wasn't saying things were better then than now. I was saying exactly what you're saying - cheap shit and expensive stuff was available, see furniture, see furniture, see furniture.
Except no, it's like that anymore. It's literally impossible - and I mean literally literally - to find any mass-produced brand (as in not needing to be custom made) of furniture that consistently, across all its products, will last more than warranty period. I haven't been an adult for that long, and I've had multiple beds break down under me and multiple sofas sag down entirely. And no, none of them were cheap. I paid extra specifically to avoid this kind of thing. It didn't work. And there's no alternative for me, literally nowhere I can buy furniture that doesn't break down unless I make it myself or pay some craftsman to.
Everyday I am reminded about these brain dead arguments in my local town by people who can't think one step ahead.
You made this generalized statement probably from some propaganda you've read or some trauma you've experienced growing up. Yet, if you look at the current state of the situation its in clear decline. The only ways forward are to accelerate the decline and live with the consequences (ie. doing nothing) or to consider moving in the other direction(ie. leftist things).
In the US I think there are two sources of this mentality: 50% of the population don't have a passport so they have never seen how people in say Europe/Canada deal with this, EU/Canada/AUS/UK have higher standards and don't tolerate this kind of crap as much
Example: Hyundai removed immobilizers in their cars...but only in the US because Canada/EU had regulations requiring an immobilizer.
End result: Someone on TikTok discovered that you could steal cars with a screwdriver and a USB cable. This resulted in insurance costs shooting up, people stuck without cars due to lengthy repair times and overall lower quality of lives.
The braindead response that comes from people with OP's mentality would be "you should have researched the car better beforehand its all your fault".
Yea ok people with limited budgets and time looked at which cars had good reviews and Kia/Hyundai were winning many of those (likely BS ) awards like "North American Car of the year".
People are already stressed for time trying to survive in this jungle and now the "free market" played games with them and anyone suffering from this might be having a worse life now because of this mess. Why are they having to spend all their miniscule free time just to not be screwed?
Wouldn't it have been better if we had European style regulations that would have established a minimum standard that all cars in this era should have?
NO! We can't have things like that because people like OP (and a lot of conservatives) have these imprinted beliefs from a lifetime of fear mongering, or trauma if they immigrated from some garbage country with poor institutions(ex. Cuban immigrants opposed to Universal healthcare or eastern european immigrants opposed to anything with the word [commun/social]ist)
I've volunteered in the past for Progressive candidates that have a #1 criteria for not taking any corporate money. It is so much of a time sacrifice to get an AOC or Bernie type candidate only to have that progress stymied by endless amount of money pouring in on the other side. Why are we even doing it when day after day people like OP crop up with this nonsense? Whats the point of constantly fighting to enlighten person after person who starts off their beliefs with these 1-dimensional arguments? Its makes me want to just watch it all burn down just as long as people with your mentality go down with the ship. I get why a lot of wealthier people are just leaving the country. The fix requires decades of effort and will just break many people that try to go down that path. If you are wealthy and you have this one and only life, is it really worth it to have to deal with people like OP? Or is it better to just leave and let them wallow in their ignorance. I guess it depends on how important the country is to you. Even that concept of loyalty to a country seems to be eroding in this era of passport wealth.
Yes I know the Democrats take tons of corporate money and outspend any outsider. So do Republicans (including Trump). Thats the fundamental problem. My efforts to push back against this seemed to have gone over your head. Reread my paragraph about progressives.
Regardless of what the fundamental issues are, its pointless to discuss with you.
You have nothing but a default dismissal of anything that does not conform to your imprinted beliefs. In your original message and followups you have not even given any possible reasoning as to why you believe just as all the other people that think exactly like you do.
I guess this is something I should be thankful to Elon for: He exposed how surface level the thinking is on the right when he opened Twitter up to the masses, how easy they are to grift off of. Once can argue its even become pop culture at this point: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xoim0K4WPMI
I'm still grappling with how to respond to people that are so solidified in their propagandized thinking. Like I mentioned in my post, its likely best to just let you experience the maximum amount of pain from your dumb decisions.
>Why do you discount their experience with universal healthcare? Have you ever experienced it?
YES! Actually I attribute my blessed fortune of being wealthy enough to quit a bad job early on in my tech career and take almost an entire year traveling the world. I lived in Europe in various countries and learned hands on how different people think and how different fundamental level things are including healthcare.
Coming back to the US you realize how people are stuck in this collective trauma of the current system. I mentioned in my post that 50% of the country does not have a passport. For some perspective, the US is only 5% of the world population. There are so many ways of thinking out there that people just have never had exposure to. I'd argue its a life half lived.
You traveled the world and had a major health problem and experienced socialist healthcare?
I have a friend who decided he'd be better off as a Canadian. It wasn't long before he came back to the US. And Canadians still come to America when they have a serious health problem.
Since you've discovered that life in other countries is so much better than America, what's stopping you from immigrating to your favorite?
BTW, I've actually lived in foreign countries. I also toured East Berlin in 1969.
I recall an online discussion years ago by survivors of Chernobyl. They remarked that a root canal was free in Russia, but you had to buy your own anesthetic. Generally, the health care workers expected bribes.
Keep in mind, though, that the US health care system is very heavily interfered with by the government and all their programs. It's not very free market, but it's still better than socialism.
I have a couple friends who grew up in the USSR. They'd laugh at your contention that socialism makes better products. They both moved to America to get away from socialism.
Socialism has never worked out very well.
As for loyalty, I am a true blue American and vote in the country's best interests.
> European style regulations
Yah, read my other post about experiences with Mercedes "quality".
>They both moved to America to get away from socialism.
Yes and they brought their trauma to the US so when the fundamental system desperately needs reform due to underlying conditions changing their trauma serves as a liability to the continued improvement of the country. Instead they buckle down and demand no changes as conditions continue to deteriorate. Fortunately a lot of the second generation did not internalize that trauma and have different plans. I only lament that its going to take a long time for these liabilities to die off and finally free the country to make fundamental changes to move forward. The people who care enough about this country not to just leave and not waste their one life trying to fix this mess are all trapped until then.
>As for loyalty, I am a true blue American and vote in the country's best interests.
I don't know what "true blue American" means. Is that another dumb slogan pushed by one of the major propaganda outlets? If you are referring to being a Democrat, then what kind of Democrat are you? Regardless it does not matter as its not the point. The right had at least one amazing honest candidate this year who eschewed corporate corruption and tried to stick his neck out to do the right things for the country only to be rewarded by his voters voting for a last minute plant just because Trump told them to vote for the outsider. That was definite proof that the right is just gone. The party as it stands has no long term future. Its just how much pain are we all going to collectively endure until it finally does.
Forget about voting, you should start by looking at all the issues in a more objective lens and try to understand underlying causes. Then understand how many of these problems occurred elsewhere and how others successfully solved the problems. Are other places perfect? No, but fundamental lessons are always better to be learned rather than mistakes repeated.
We've asked you before not to post slurs against groups of people on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. Please stop. We have to ban accounts that do this habitually. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is guaranteed to last you years.
I lived through the 60s and know what the goods were.
TVs, for example. They had tubes then, and crummy B+W pictures. They were constantly going on the fritz, to the point that drugstores had tube testing stations. You'd bring in the tubes from the TV and test them in this device that looked like an arcade game, and buy replacements.
Cars then required a lot more maintenance then. And I mean a lot. I've owned and repaired them.
I can go on, but the point is made.
I'm sorry but I will need a second opinion. I just don't believe there was not a single brand of TV that was reliably good the way some brands of clothes, furniture, power tools, phones, spices, perfume, refrigerators, light fixtures, record players, guitars, lawn mowers, and basically all non-perishable goods on the market were.
You could get the cheap stuff, or you could get the quality stuff, and you knew which is which. Neither of these is true nowadays.
My dad had a Mercedes in the 1960s. It was not a very reliable car. He later bought a Chevy which was much more reliable.
I bought a 1963 230SL Mercedes as a young man. It was such a beauty! But it was a terrible car. As an engineer, I could see that it was a patchwork of brilliant design and stupid design. The latter caused lots of problems. Sadly, I gave up on it. Stupidly, I bought a Mercedes wagon some years later, and it, too, suffered from the patchwork of stupidity. Got rid of it.
My 1967 Mustang was much better engineered. Ford gets a lot of guff, but their cars are inexpensive and easy to repair, which I appreciated. It had a sad end being crushed on the highway by a truck. I had a 1989 Bronco II and drove it for 20 years.
A friend of mine is restoring an old Mercedes, and he (also an engineer) discovered the Mercedes patchwork of stupidity. One of the problems is the radiator is undersized, making the car prone to overheating. He's engineering a fix for that.
You are literally calling one car much better engineered than another car. So what exactly are you arguing against? I said that you could pick bad car or good car back in the 60s, and it was easy to tell which one is bad and which one is good by the brand alone (usually). Isn't that so? Unlike nowadays where the brand means absolutely nothing and nearly all reviews are fake, and also most brands are manufactured by the same 2 or 3 companies worldwide so there isn't much to choose from in the first place.
My point was the brand was not a determinant of quality. People assumed Mercedes was the quality brand, but it was inferior to Ford.
What they're describing is that TVs had consumable items in the circuitry. It isn't possible to have had a TV without tubes. Tubes were basically really fancy lightbulbs and had a finite life. No amount of quality could make consumables not necessary. TVs needed maintenance and manual back then. They sucked. It's like saying that buying a higher quality car means you don't need to buy tires.
The broader point is that we think that things lasted longer back then because of survivorship bias, but on the whole they really didn't. The incredible old fridge in grandpas garage is incredible because it was an exception. 100k miles used to be a car that was ready for the wrecker. You used to have to get tune-ups several times per year where points, timing, carburetors, spark plugs, and other things needed replacing or adjusting. That's why every gas station had a mechanic. Now, half those things have been replaced by more reliable longer lasting mechanisms that adjust themselves, and the stuff that still exists like spark plugs last for years instead of months.
The highest quality stuff from back then doesn't really stack up to many modern things, especially if you pay the same inflation adjusted price.
From your list:
clothes: higher quality, several times more expensive (inflation adjusted. Levis 501 were $90 adjusted in 1975, Amazon has them for $45)
furniture: cheap shit and expensive stuff was available, just like now
power tools: almost universally, I would trade old corded, brushed tools for new cordless brushless. Old machine tools are the exception where old is as good as new.
phones: you didn't have a choice, the phone company gave you whatever they had in stock and charged you a monthly fee for the privilege.
spices: less variety and freshness. Good luck getting spices that weren't part of your local cuisine.
perfume: no idea
refrigerators: incredibly inefficient, harmful chemicals, and today you can still buy a VERY nice fridge if you are willing to pay what a shitty fridge from 1975 would have cost ($2,200 inflation adjusted for the cheapest one from sears).
light fixtures: same as furniture, you get what you pay for then and now
record players: see furniture
guitars: see furniture
lawn mower: see furniture
The enshitiffication of known brands is a real problem today, but that doesn't mean that everything was perfect and known back then.
I wasn't saying things were better then than now. I was saying exactly what you're saying - cheap shit and expensive stuff was available, see furniture, see furniture, see furniture.
Except no, it's like that anymore. It's literally impossible - and I mean literally literally - to find any mass-produced brand (as in not needing to be custom made) of furniture that consistently, across all its products, will last more than warranty period. I haven't been an adult for that long, and I've had multiple beds break down under me and multiple sofas sag down entirely. And no, none of them were cheap. I paid extra specifically to avoid this kind of thing. It didn't work. And there's no alternative for me, literally nowhere I can buy furniture that doesn't break down unless I make it myself or pay some craftsman to.
Everyday I am reminded about these brain dead arguments in my local town by people who can't think one step ahead.
You made this generalized statement probably from some propaganda you've read or some trauma you've experienced growing up. Yet, if you look at the current state of the situation its in clear decline. The only ways forward are to accelerate the decline and live with the consequences (ie. doing nothing) or to consider moving in the other direction(ie. leftist things).
In the US I think there are two sources of this mentality: 50% of the population don't have a passport so they have never seen how people in say Europe/Canada deal with this, EU/Canada/AUS/UK have higher standards and don't tolerate this kind of crap as much
Example: Hyundai removed immobilizers in their cars...but only in the US because Canada/EU had regulations requiring an immobilizer.
End result: Someone on TikTok discovered that you could steal cars with a screwdriver and a USB cable. This resulted in insurance costs shooting up, people stuck without cars due to lengthy repair times and overall lower quality of lives.
The braindead response that comes from people with OP's mentality would be "you should have researched the car better beforehand its all your fault".
Yea ok people with limited budgets and time looked at which cars had good reviews and Kia/Hyundai were winning many of those (likely BS ) awards like "North American Car of the year".
People are already stressed for time trying to survive in this jungle and now the "free market" played games with them and anyone suffering from this might be having a worse life now because of this mess. Why are they having to spend all their miniscule free time just to not be screwed?
Wouldn't it have been better if we had European style regulations that would have established a minimum standard that all cars in this era should have?
NO! We can't have things like that because people like OP (and a lot of conservatives) have these imprinted beliefs from a lifetime of fear mongering, or trauma if they immigrated from some garbage country with poor institutions(ex. Cuban immigrants opposed to Universal healthcare or eastern european immigrants opposed to anything with the word [commun/social]ist)
I've volunteered in the past for Progressive candidates that have a #1 criteria for not taking any corporate money. It is so much of a time sacrifice to get an AOC or Bernie type candidate only to have that progress stymied by endless amount of money pouring in on the other side. Why are we even doing it when day after day people like OP crop up with this nonsense? Whats the point of constantly fighting to enlighten person after person who starts off their beliefs with these 1-dimensional arguments? Its makes me want to just watch it all burn down just as long as people with your mentality go down with the ship. I get why a lot of wealthier people are just leaving the country. The fix requires decades of effort and will just break many people that try to go down that path. If you are wealthy and you have this one and only life, is it really worth it to have to deal with people like OP? Or is it better to just leave and let them wallow in their ignorance. I guess it depends on how important the country is to you. Even that concept of loyalty to a country seems to be eroding in this era of passport wealth.
> only to have that progress stymied by endless amount of money pouring in on the other side
Hillary outspent Trump 2 to 1.
Kamala outspent Trump 2 to 1.
> Cuban immigrants opposed to Universal healthcare or eastern european immigrants opposed to anything with the word [commun/social]ist
Why do you discount their experience with universal healthcare? Have you ever experienced it?
Yes I know the Democrats take tons of corporate money and outspend any outsider. So do Republicans (including Trump). Thats the fundamental problem. My efforts to push back against this seemed to have gone over your head. Reread my paragraph about progressives.
Regardless of what the fundamental issues are, its pointless to discuss with you.
You have nothing but a default dismissal of anything that does not conform to your imprinted beliefs. In your original message and followups you have not even given any possible reasoning as to why you believe just as all the other people that think exactly like you do.
I guess this is something I should be thankful to Elon for: He exposed how surface level the thinking is on the right when he opened Twitter up to the masses, how easy they are to grift off of. Once can argue its even become pop culture at this point: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/xoim0K4WPMI
I'm still grappling with how to respond to people that are so solidified in their propagandized thinking. Like I mentioned in my post, its likely best to just let you experience the maximum amount of pain from your dumb decisions.
>Why do you discount their experience with universal healthcare? Have you ever experienced it?
YES! Actually I attribute my blessed fortune of being wealthy enough to quit a bad job early on in my tech career and take almost an entire year traveling the world. I lived in Europe in various countries and learned hands on how different people think and how different fundamental level things are including healthcare.
Coming back to the US you realize how people are stuck in this collective trauma of the current system. I mentioned in my post that 50% of the country does not have a passport. For some perspective, the US is only 5% of the world population. There are so many ways of thinking out there that people just have never had exposure to. I'd argue its a life half lived.
You traveled the world and had a major health problem and experienced socialist healthcare?
I have a friend who decided he'd be better off as a Canadian. It wasn't long before he came back to the US. And Canadians still come to America when they have a serious health problem.
Since you've discovered that life in other countries is so much better than America, what's stopping you from immigrating to your favorite?
BTW, I've actually lived in foreign countries. I also toured East Berlin in 1969.
I recall an online discussion years ago by survivors of Chernobyl. They remarked that a root canal was free in Russia, but you had to buy your own anesthetic. Generally, the health care workers expected bribes.
Keep in mind, though, that the US health care system is very heavily interfered with by the government and all their programs. It's not very free market, but it's still better than socialism.
I have a couple friends who grew up in the USSR. They'd laugh at your contention that socialism makes better products. They both moved to America to get away from socialism.
Socialism has never worked out very well.
As for loyalty, I am a true blue American and vote in the country's best interests.
> European style regulations
Yah, read my other post about experiences with Mercedes "quality".
>They both moved to America to get away from socialism.
Yes and they brought their trauma to the US so when the fundamental system desperately needs reform due to underlying conditions changing their trauma serves as a liability to the continued improvement of the country. Instead they buckle down and demand no changes as conditions continue to deteriorate. Fortunately a lot of the second generation did not internalize that trauma and have different plans. I only lament that its going to take a long time for these liabilities to die off and finally free the country to make fundamental changes to move forward. The people who care enough about this country not to just leave and not waste their one life trying to fix this mess are all trapped until then.
>As for loyalty, I am a true blue American and vote in the country's best interests.
I don't know what "true blue American" means. Is that another dumb slogan pushed by one of the major propaganda outlets? If you are referring to being a Democrat, then what kind of Democrat are you? Regardless it does not matter as its not the point. The right had at least one amazing honest candidate this year who eschewed corporate corruption and tried to stick his neck out to do the right things for the country only to be rewarded by his voters voting for a last minute plant just because Trump told them to vote for the outsider. That was definite proof that the right is just gone. The party as it stands has no long term future. Its just how much pain are we all going to collectively endure until it finally does.
Forget about voting, you should start by looking at all the issues in a more objective lens and try to understand underlying causes. Then understand how many of these problems occurred elsewhere and how others successfully solved the problems. Are other places perfect? No, but fundamental lessons are always better to be learned rather than mistakes repeated.
Socialism solved the problems? LOL.
America has a lot of problems. Socialism isn't going to solve any of them. Remember, I have toured East Berlin in its heyday of communism.
Trying to browbeat and insult me is never going to work.
No thanks.
[flagged]
We've asked you before not to post slurs against groups of people on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. Please stop. We have to ban accounts that do this habitually. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html