craftsmanship, consumerism, virtue, privilege, and quality

you mean vinylphilia? there are plenty of audiophiles who swing wildly in the other direction, like a V.U. needle.

keep trying to resist the urge to argue about this but...between knives made by OH NO HIPSTERS!!!1!! and one made by people who aren't being paid a living wage, gimme the oh no hipster knife

nah I mean like Monster™ Cables audiophilia, not so much in regards the hand-made/artisanal sound, but in the pursuit of the truest/most authentic listening experience that is really just conspicuously consuming Veblen good wooden receiver knobs or whatever the balls those people spend their money on

xp seems fair to me aero

also would purchase a children's book entitled "Oh No! Hipsters!"

ok time to go to my local neighborhood artisanal butcher to buy some local free range ground beef (seriously this is what I'm doing now)

keep trying to resist the urge to argue about this but...between knives made by OH NO HIPSTERS!!!1!! and one made by people who aren't being paid a living wage, gimme the oh no hipster knife

― unlistenable in philly (underrated aerosmith bootlegs I have owned), Sunday, November 6, 2011 2:23 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark

if you don't buy the serially oppressed knife, that person is gonna lose her job and become even more unable to live :(

make sure to pick up some brioche buns xp

btw this ^xp^ is why utilitarianism and consequentialism more generally are complete horseshit

edit his experiences into a lifestyle

this is such a disgusting phrase!

everyone should just buy less stuff, regardless of where it comes from

alternative to 'below-living wage' is not necessarily 'living wage' iirc

everyone should just buy less stuff, regardless of where it comes from
yeah - it's weird to me though that in the artisanal etc mindset there isn't more of a culture of re-use; it's there (see: a trillion etsy shops making use of found/repurposed materials) but like...idk I have this idea that if there were a cultural movement to stop producing shit for a year or two, to just quit making new stuff for a while, it'd be good for everything. I guess if yr position is more extreme ("you don't need more stuff whether it's new or used") then it doesn't matter, but that horse has left the barn in this culture, ppl are gonna consume, the only q is whether it's going to use up more resources or less.

there are things we can do to make environmentally unfriendly consumption more expensive than less-environmentally unfriendly consumption

if people stopped producing shit then you couldn't convert labor into value

capitalism would be ruined

the marxists would win

one of the thing drives me nuts is lamps -- and similarly cheap and simple electrical goods -- being apparently considered unrepairable nowadays, so that you have no choice but to chuck em out when they stop working

millions of non-economists would starve

it's not that they're considered unrepairable, it's that they're cheap enough that it's not even practical to repair it unless it's a really expensive lamp

(sound of 100 ilxor minds churning to come up w/ a good lamp joke)

there are things we can do to make environmentally unfriendly consumption more expensive than less-environmentally unfriendly consumption

yes but most of them involve doing an end-run around democratic processes which puts you in a tight spot, no?

xp @ mark s not just lamps!! when I was a kid there were these big awesome electrical-age TUBE TESTERS at supermarkets, and at shoe repair shops too if I remember right. they were for checking the tubes in your television for whether they were the source of why your TV wasn't working. (presumably also for your radio or amplifier.) present philosophy of "it's cheaper to replace than repair" 1) sucks and 2) is true; I can get a new TV cheaper than I can repair my new-ish TV

yes but most of them involve doing an end-run around democratic processes which puts you in a tight spot, no?

yup, pretty hard to convince a majority of americans that they're not paying enough $ for shit. at the same time we genuinely are overpaying for other things (housing, transit, health care) so even middle class people feel poor. everything's related and fixing those issues is gonna have to happen before we can get people to feel like they should pay more for consumer goods.

you can convert labour into value if decrease production, also marx was right so w/e

i guess my opinion is:

- productivity gains are generally p good for ppl at the bottom since they make goods cheaper and increase wealth
- reverting to pre-industrial means of producing goods is p stupid for that reason
- at the same time many industrial/postindustrial goods dont reflect their 'true' cost since producers take advantage of all sorts of externalities
- if you want to own a tv you should be paying the cost of poisoning the air above shenzen &c
- we need to find ways of taking advantage of productivity gains and efficiencies w/o encouraging consumption

- if you want to own a tv you should be paying the cost of poisoning the air above shenzen &c

lol TVs weren't always made in Shenzen man!

- we need to find ways of taking advantage of productivity gains and efficiencies w/o encouraging consumption

ya can u get on this? we need an answer by like... 100 years ago

we used to poison the air over pittsburgh...toledo...akron.... man those were the days

it's so nice that america's skies don't have to be polluted anymore, we can just outsource it to china

we used to poison the air over pittsburgh...toledo...akron.... man those were the days

who can tell me with a straight face they wouldn't repoison akron & toledo to bring back the glory days of shenzen

shenzhen used to be a nice quiet fishing village. 30 years ago a fisherman would catch a fish.

100% would sacrifice toledo & akron to make that fisherman happy

- we need to find ways of taking advantage of productivity gains and efficiencies w/o encouraging consumption

the key is that 'consumption' includes services and 'goods' that are 1s and 0s. and we should encourage a shift to that type in the long run and in lots of ways it's happening already. otoh is buying an iphone app for $5 better for the world than buying a hamburger for $5? if you just isolate that purchase, yeah, but a. can't isolate that b. I guess we're also more willing to spend money on these 1s and 0s in a world where we can already afford the material goods we want.

idk aero, I guess my point is that if america wants TVs then america should be ready to handle the pollution that comes with it instead of dumping it all elsewhere

it's so nice that america's skies don't have to be polluted anymore, we can just outsource it to china

chinese air pollution already reaches california iirc

Has anyone informed the Minnesota ilxors that they may be untapped reserves of cultural capital? This knife dude seems to have a fair amount of press relating the fact he is from REAL PLACE, MINNESOTA

idk aero, I guess my point is that if america wants TVs then america should be ready to handle the pollution that comes with it instead of dumping it all elsewhere

― ASPIE Rocky (dayo), Sunday, November 6, 2011 3:12 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark

or rather, that if americans want flatscreen TVs, then hopefully they would not be against paying a higher price so that the waste associated with manufacturing TVs doesn't get improperly dumped into the environment, whether that environment happens to be in china or in toledo

but that would mean TVs would cost more, guess it's okay for poor people in china to suffer from heavy metal poisoning in their land and in their food so that joe sixpack can watch football on his 60" as cheaply as possible

ya can u get on this? we need an answer by like... 100 years ago

ok c u soon

dayo I'm not sure who you're arguing w/. I'd be in favor of heavy enough tariffs to stop China from ruining itself to provide worthless consumer goods to the west, but can you really put that ruin on the west? China had several systems that didn't result in the destruction of China, they had various pluses and minuses; participating in the market capitalism of the west seems easily the most destructive of them to my mind, but I don't think western demand gets to shoulder all the blame for the fate of rural China

participating in the market capitalism of the west seems easily the most destructive of them to my mind

wait what

I think China about thirty years from now will make the worst years under Mao look like a picnic

there really isn't any way to make 30 million people starving to death look like a picnic

hold that thought man!

a key component of a good picnic is making sure that everyone has food

lol max u are on fire today

arguably that is the #1 most important characteristic of a good picnic

ants

picanic baskets

China had several systems that didn't result in the destruction of China, they had various pluses and minuses; participating in the market capitalism of the west seems easily the most destructive of them to my mind, but I don't think western demand gets to shoulder all the blame for the fate of rural China

wait what? I'm as critical of deng xiaoping as anybody but this is just trolling

I do agree though that if china could get into a time machine and go back to mid-qing dynasty living, everybody would probably be better off

right but where are you going to make that time machine, shenzen?

bespoke time machine handcrafted in brooklyn by artisans

dayo I'm not sure who you're arguing w/. I'd be in favor of heavy enough tariffs to stop China from ruining itself to provide worthless consumer goods to the west, but can you really put that ruin on the west?

heavy-tariffs to stop china from letting american businesses make things and sell things to americans is patronizing 'stop-hitting-yourself'-esque logic btw. otoh you can argue that china's currency manipulation is *bad for people in china*.

there isn't an easy answer for 'how do you lift a billion people out of poverty without fucking up the world'. you can blame the west for having fucked up consumption patterns and being way behind the curve when it comes to dealing w/ its own environmental issues and you can blame the chinese government for being very short-sighted when it comes to the real costs of pollution. but tariff wars aren't gonna help anybody in any sense, esp. since any long-term solutions require a lot of international coordination.