You can click on the pictures to see the original home ads in the Sears catalog, with prices (e.g. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_011...) $1062 for the parts to a beautiful American Craftsman style bungalow ($34,394.38 adjusted for inflation)! Some assembly required :)
On a tangential note: Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon. Now, even their landmark highrise, the Sears Tower, has been unceremoniously renamed Willis Tower.
I still like the idea of mail order house parts & plans though. Someone should start a startup to make and build them.
When folks say things like "Sears could have been Amazon," I feel like they don't quite see the whole picture.
They adopted digital tech earlier than most other companies.
Sears co-founded the Prodigy dialup service eons before "The Internet" was a household name, and they were selling hardgoods on the web (for delivery or free in-store pickup) when Amazon was still mostly a cheeky book store.
Sears died mostly because of corporate raider tactics that made it impossible for them to survive.
The Red Dead Redemption 2 video game which takes place in 1899 has a story arc about buying a house from a catalog, receiving the parts and assembling it.
I mean, GM came kinda close with the EV1. It was essentially as good as a Nissan Leaf was, in the 90s! It was more of an organizational failure than a technical one that killed it.
Sears did have an internet store on Prodigy (an AOL competitor) in the early 90s it went nowhere... a lot of these megacompanies weren't going to turn it around even if they were first movers.
[Company A] killed the [business], just as the [trend] was starting to take off. They could have been [Startup B].
Here are my values:
Google ... online news Reader ... social media ... Global Media Inc.
I don't know how to stress Google's dominance and ability in literally crushing the entire media world. Google News, Google Reader, Blogger, Read-it-Later, Google Books, Google Podcast, YouTube ... were all part of a big conglomerate of information extraction + information production.
Of course, the curse of antimonopolistic eyes, M+FAANG competition, and media envy would have followed.
Agreed but worth it to note that since then building standards have gone up by a lot. It was much easier to offer cheap homes based on old-growth planks and lead paint.
> However, the production and distribution of commodities is entirely unorganized so that everybody must live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle, in this way suffering for the want of everything.
I think it's more that there's a sizeable chunk of people who want to live the same lives that their parents lived for the equal sweat cost, and are seeing a large disparity in what they're putting in compared to what is coming out
Monopolies drive the cost of items and services up. (besides having all the other negative effects that are always caused by a huge concentration of power in the hands a non-democratic institution).
And as we see and know very well, e.g. by looking around us, monopolies or (at best) duopolies are always the outcome of unregulated markets.
More or less in all sectors, and especially in this very globalised world, where economies of scale drive profits up for those who put them to effect. This of course includes the Financial sector.
So, I'd say the exact opposite of you statement is true.
I'm replying to your comment because you statement is kind of the prototypical statement of free-market champions. I'm sure this conversation has already happened tens of thousands of times.
Still, do you think you can share any more insights about how can you possibly think regulations are the reason of a higher cost of living?
Can you please provide an example of a single unregulated market?
Free markets do not exist. Capitalism does not exist. Socialism does not exist. Communism does not exist. Humans seem to be completely incapable of implementing any such systems. Human systems invariably seem to become oligarchies and/or fascism.
As regards your assertions of monopoly, a monopoly is essentially impossible without either a state apparatus to exploit. Otherwise, the moment money were made in any given industry, competition would result. Only via regulatory barriers to entry or via corporate welfare can a monopoly be built and maintained for any serious amount of time.
> Human systems invariably seem to become oligarchies
That's what I'm saying.. We seem to agree here :)
> Only via regulatory barriers (..) can a monopoly be built.
This is, to me, an absurd idea. There are a lot of other very common, real-world barriers that exist...
I don't know what you mean by corporate welfare exactly, but yes, large established capitals are a barrier.
Physical assets are a barrier. Think factories, etc. A new entry cannot just "acquire" a production plant or a datacenter or an oil pipeline. Hence having worse economies of scale, etc.
Network effects are a barrier, especially in tech. Think social networks, etc.
Control over Media channels is a barrier that huge corporations in various sectors employ very effectively.
Established guilds and cartels are a barrier. Nothing socialist about those.
Knowledge itself is a barrier, and in my opinion an underestimated one. If a firm recruits lots of very technical, hard to find knowledge on how to do a process, they'll become the best at it. Well, nothing wrong with that if they are useful. But if they congregate too much knowledge in disparate domains, without sharing it, and have the capital to defend it, they become basically unbeatable. This brings more capital, and that is how a monopoly is formed.
If anything, you should regulate that knowledge should be shared. Because that's definitely not what happens with the knowledge that actually matters.
> Only via regulatory barriers (..) can a monopoly be built.
Honestly, this is such a weird option to me, that I wonder if there are people out there who gain from intentionally pushing this propaganda.. (probably yes)
Sure, in that regulation preventing many of those people from fucking dying when they drank milk-flavored lead with breakfast or sleeping in asbestos blankets. If we would have just let them die in agony, goods could be cheaper. But since we insist on having regulations, we're as helpless to societal decay as the lamb before the lion. There is no such thing as an economy that enriches the majority both in health and wealth, and we can't invent one. Right?
I specifically focus on the U.S. because we're perceived to be one of the most affluent countries in the world. Given that we throw away a third of our food, how is it that 12.8% of us are experiencing food insecurity? Are people just too lazy to eat?
Be careful when interpreting those stats -- food insecurity often does not mean "doesn't have food". If you gave every single one of those people free meals for the year, we'd still have 12.8% food insecurity, because people who get free meals are counted in that number.
The whole reason "food insecurity" topics like unhealthy diets, skipped meals, relying on food assistance, etc, are even a cause for concern is because starvation really isn't anymore.
The absolute minimum we should be aiming for is that nobody is starving to death or dying of other easily solved causes like unsafe water. Congratulating ourselves for progress up to that point is all fine and good as a motivation but we really haven't accomplished as much as we might like to think.
I agree with your first statement. I don't think self-flagellation is useful though and the West is pulling more than their share in global welfare. Your vitriol would be better directed towards, say, Arabian wealthy dictatorships.
You are clearly out of touch with reality. Even official state statistics in western countries clearly show the downward trend in life quality, you don't even need to use any reasoning, it's just math.
Maybe your problem is judging the quality of your life by ”state statistics.” My recommendation is picking up a philosophy book or two and looking at things from a new angle.
Thank you for your recommendation, it is a very good one which i have already acted uppon. The philosophical conclusion is that even though, in absolute metrics, the average life is better as centuries go by, in relative metrics it is getting worse and worse.
Our knowlegde and technology are being underutilized, thus obstructing access to modern quality of life to the majority of the people on earth who, by the way, do not live in the western countries
This is my favorite edition, as it is the one I discovered from my parents' bookshelf in my early college years. Highly recommend the translation, and the photos. Lao Tsu's writing is just as relevant today as when it was originally written, thousands of years ago.
I made this an intentional part of the game's design: once you've been free-falling for a couple seconds, your bike switches into Glider Mode, where you can shift gravity while you're falling by steering.
Score only goes up when you're on solid ground, so the idea is to make cool looking recoveries after falling off, and land them with style. :)
The track is constructed procedurally, so it's different each time you play it, but remains static after it's been constructed. There are about 20-30 "chunks" that get remixed into the track at random, except for a small number of "black listed" tracks after certain chunks, where they would make the track too hard. Additionally, some of the more difficult chunks only appear after the first 20-30 seconds.
This is a time-tested strategy for simple procedural "endless" games, starting with Adam Saltsman's Canabalt in 2009, and one of this game's inspirations, Terry Cavanagh's Super Hexagon from 2012.
Found unresponsive in his hot tub. That's sad. He was very funny and charismatic in his acting roles, and it was not that long ago he was giving interviews about his life, post sobriety. 11 months ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oZuK0ri7Y8
There may be some design issues with this. First, the graphics depend on color and don't lend themselves really well to a monochrome display. We may try to emulate another intermediate shade by flicker in order to overcome this, which should be possible on a 60Hz display. But, even we should solve this, the max RAM configuration for the PET is 32K (30K of this actually available to a program) and the game looks to be bigger than this. (Mind that the C64 has double the total memory. The file size of that program is actually 37.68 K. So we may have to strip some features or levels.)
You can click on the pictures to see the original home ads in the Sears catalog, with prices (e.g. http://www.searsarchives.com/homes/images/1908-1914/1911_011...) $1062 for the parts to a beautiful American Craftsman style bungalow ($34,394.38 adjusted for inflation)! Some assembly required :)
On a tangential note: Sears killed the mail order catalog in 1993, just as the Internet was starting to take off. They could have been Amazon. Now, even their landmark highrise, the Sears Tower, has been unceremoniously renamed Willis Tower.
I still like the idea of mail order house parts & plans though. Someone should start a startup to make and build them.