Another company (Revisalt, an university spinoff in Freiberg/Germany) claims that time and cost for producing such chemical strengthened glass has been much improved:
> While the Superfest glass is by far more durable than normal glass, when they shatter – the burst into a million fine pieces and are a total nightmare to clean up. I’m not sure if it’s because of their potassium chloride coating or because they are made to be super thin, my advice is to not drop them.
maybe the same reason [the super hard] prince rupert's drops explode. really high internal stress.
Unsurprising, but I'd still totally buy a Superfest glass set with this in mind. I've owned glassware that was both fragile and prone to exploding into jagged particles, and it wasn't very cheap, either.
I have some toughened cocktail glasses made by a commercial (i.e. for bars and restaurants) company called Utopia.
As I was making cocktails one evening I accidentally knocked an empty glass from my
kitchen worktop onto my stone-tiled kitchen floor. I was astonished when the glass bounced on its rim and rebounded back up in the air. I somehow managed to catch it. Not the slightest damage. Five years later that glass is still in use.
I bought a box of 12 because that was the smallest quantity they came in, but normally only use two. So I think that box will last me for 20 years or more. They are incredible.
We have a bunch of "duralex" glasses that are similarly resistant. We went to buy some more a while ago and I'm sad to say all the new ones have shattered since. The old ones are still going strong though!
In the EU we have, since decades, the "Arcoroc" brand and it does glasses and plates that really do not break easily. As teenagers we'd have fun with others who weren't aware: we'd take a pile of plates in our left hand and tell the other person "catch them all, quick!" and throw with our right hand plates one after another.
Invariably he'd miss one then many and be in a state of panic and yet none would break when hitting the kitchen floor.
Silly teenagers we were. I see that brand is still around. It's solid.
No, I don't think it is loaded, or at least not unnecessarily. The communist background of the glass is an important element in the video. Especially when they discuss the fact they couldn't sell it in the west, due to (tendencies of) capitalism.
That they made it in east germany and made up an excuse for being bad at sales?
corning the guys they bring up at the very end is also the company that did pyrex. they spun that business off in the 90s. They don't mention that because you'd recognize it and go "wait my cabinet's been full of that my whole life"
You dont understand communism then, and didnt grow up under such regime.
Most people involved in such projects were far from what you can call communists, not involved with regine, not members of the party (or if they were it was just to be allowed certain positions in the system, literal ticking checkbox on the requirements list), some even secretly hating it and conspiring against it. This reductionism is unnecessary and outright incorrect.
One can claim it was invented in communist East Germany (although the official name was literally German democratic republic), and thats about it.
You also slap 'invented by american capitalists' onto every single invention coming out of US of past 250 years?
It isn't that wild, really, that people who have even the most basic awareness of history are concerned about the spread of the single most destructive ideology in all of history.
Communism problem is that it goes together with authoritarianism and corruption.
Yes, you can get both of those things with capitalism, just look at Russia, but looks like they are more likely to happen with communism.
Authoritarianism is responsible for many people's deaths, while corruption is why things were so bad that it pushed for invention of this.
The reason why the glass is not popular right now is because we as consumers are perfectly fine with this. We let companies get away with it instead of voting with our wallets. Nearly all of us are guilty purchasing smart phones that won't last longer than 2 years, pre-paying for games when companies frequently stiffed us that way. Almost no one puts time to research which companies produce quality product so such manufacturers frequently go out of business.
> is evidenced by their using the term as a synonym for authoritarianism.
You can't deny the fact though that all socialist (or what people from beyond the pond like to call "communist") countries turned towards authoritarianism on their "journey" of eventually achieving communism (even if some of those countries might have started off with the best intentions to actually improve things). And it happened with such regularity that it cannot be explained away with "no true scotsman (pardon: communist)" arguments.
Oh if anything I think you're being too timid with your critique here so let's say the quiet parts out loud. The movement was coopted by sociopaths and used as cover to promote naked authoritarianism. This doesn't excuse failure to grasp the original stated goals or (worse) trying to utilize red scare propaganda to handwave past capitalism's obvious flaws.
> You also slap 'invented by american capitalists' onto every single invention coming out of US of past 250 years
Try criticising capitalism and you'll soon encounter exactly that rhetoric, even for things that exist only thanks to government direct action (the most socialist org in USA, the Department of Defense, is directly and indirectly responsible for huge part of innovation that people assign to "capitalism" despite it having little to do with it)
> The communist background of the glass is an important element in the video. Especially when they discuss the fact they couldn't sell it in the west, due to (tendencies of) capitalism.
And that's nonsense. The real problem was the reunification and the collapse of the East German economy. The East Germans got rid of their government, peacefully and the result was the unification of a protected plan economy to an open social market system (West Germany did not and still does not have US style capitalism -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy ). The East German market was not having access to current technologies and raw materials (for example due to the lack of money to buy on the world market). The companies in the east were not competitive and they lost their protecting system.
There were LOTS of glass manufacturers, both in West Germany and in the surrounding countries. Those were eager to take the market and a small and expensive glass production was an easy victim. There are lots of examples where GDR products were replaced by Western products, which were much more efficient in production and distribution.
It has very little to do with "capitalism", just that there was a much larger and more efficient market around, eager to take over. The "communist" economy wasn't communist and it was behind a self-built "protective" wall. When the wall collapsed and the system which protected the wall collapsed (-> the whole eastern Europe incl. the former Soviet Union largely collapsed), then during reunification of East and West Germany, the East German economy also collapsed (products were no longer competitive, lost their markets, etc.). The West German companies did not have the time to protect small scale producers, their problem was to deliver on the expectations of the East Germans: create same living standards, provide access to the larger market without scarce products.
For the East German population it was mostly clear, they wanted to buy western products, which for a long time were either not available or far too expensive or both. East German brands were out of fashion.
The attraction of the West German economy and political system, together with the failure of the East German system (and its soviet-influenced model), caused the collapse of the political and economic system of the GDR.
Later the "Ostalgie" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie ) made people aware that there was also a loss: familiar brands were gone, familiar products were gone, jobs were gone, people were gone, (-> many went to West Germany to work there) western products were not always better, ...
TLDR; -> the company was a victim of the turmoil of the reunification and introduction of a larger&open economy.
Side note: that East Germans needed to take care of scarce products (see the cars which had long waiting lists) did not mean that the East German production was environmentally friendly. Just the opposite, East German production was as environmentally unfriendly or even more, as in the West. An environmental movement (like the Greens in West Germany) was not possible in the one-party-rules system of the GDR dictatorship. Later, a lot of production got closed(& sometimes replaced) because of old and dirty factories and production processes.
Side note 2: Germany now has a large scale "Mehrweg- und Pfandsystem" for bottles. This means that in any super market one can buy bottles of, say, beer and one pays a higher price. The markets are required to take back the empty bottles and pay the consumer the "Flaschenpfand" (bottle deposit). Bottles get reused a lot (50 times) and this system has 43% market share. One can imagine that lighter/more durable glass bottles might have an advantage in such a system. Currently we see either heavy glass bottles or lighter plastic bottles (reused 25 times).
> Side note 2: Germany now has a large scale "Mehrweg- und Pfandsystem" for bottles.
This was already standard procedure in East Germany though, pretty much everything from glass bottles (via a "Pfandsystem" much the same as today's minus the deposit machines) to paper to scrap metal was recycled. We even had regular 'waste paper collections' at school which were organized like a competition. This had little to do with environmentalism but instead to get more independent from resource imports.
(as you mentioned, the environment was much worse off in East Germany than it is today, especially around industrial locations)
They provide the Coke and you provide a glass. Sounds efficient for me. That's how I usually handle it, when buying beverages.
You can get old used Superfest glasses on ebay for 10$ per piece. That's sustainable capitalism: they don't get thrown away and the seller makes a great price.
Plus: you can get the original DDR/GDR design from 30 years ago and fill it with any beverage you want.
Sorry Eastern Germany was a communist place. Lefties are just angry that it failed so they do the usual excuse ("it was better than Capitalism" to "Usa is the reason why it wasn't working" to "It wasnt real communism." To "we should try communism." )
The most productive areas of Eastern Germany were private but Commies didn't like it so they shut it down in 70s. Hence Eastern Germany became poor.
It was called "real socialism" (or "Real existierender Sozialismus" in German), because the party elite was fully aware that the promises of a socialist utopia collided hard with reality in East Germany (and the rest of the Eastern Europe socialist countries). So the propanda idea was basically to hold the carrot dangling in front of the people of achieving "actual socialism" as a first step, and then at some later point (maybe a few hundred years in the future) "communism" (as envisioned by Marx/Engels) - "just work harder and then it will get better, you'll see Genosse!".
Of course nobody in their right mind believed such bullshit (not even most party members).
Private companies were shut down a lot earlier than the 70's, more like the 50s and early 60s. Later this was relaxed again. It was actually possible again in the 80s to run a small privately owned business (my parents were both self-employed). A privately owned company in East Germany still doesn't mean that there's any competition though, or ability to be better off than a worker in a state-owned company. The entire economic enviornment just wasn't compatibly with the idea of running a business that's not controlled by the state.
Still, compared to some of the poorer Eastern European countries, East German people were somewhat well off. Maybe on a level like Portugal or Greece, but of course piss-poor when compared to West Germany. And in any case much worse when it comes to personal freedom of course (which was a much more critical problem than the economic problems).
Also, all those things don't change the fact that East German engineers sometimes came up with brilliant solutions despite the less than ideal conditions.
One hardly needs to be either a leftist or angry about anything to accept the rather obvious critique of capitalism that the general lack of durable products on the market provokes. It is fairly uncontroversial that designed obsolescence is ubiquitous.
> accept the rather obvious critique of capitalism that the general lack of durable products on the market provokes
This doesn't have anything to do with capitalism, but apathy of consumers.
The lack of durable products is because consumers don't value durable products enough to seek them out and pay more for them. In a communist or command economy, the exact same thing would happen if the leader decreed that goods needed to be cheaply made. There's nothing intrinsic to capitalism here.
You should read and think about the HN guidelines, and whether your comments are motivated by curiousity and intellect, or base emotions and religious dogma.
The deception and malice that you've shown in this thread is incredible.
> I'm not the one that defaulted to pointing at the guidelines when my views were challenged.
I pointed at the guidelines because you're blatantly and flagrantly violating them, and refusing to read them.
I also successfully defended my views using logic and reason. You resorted to redirection ("Lowering production costs and increasing sales volume are both achieved by producing lower quality merchandise" is irrelevant and betrays a total lack of understanding as to how capitalism works) and base emotional manipulation (such as "Are we now so desperate to defend capitalism that we're going to pretend shareholder value isn't the primary goal" and "accept the rather obvious critique of capitalism" and "ironically accurate" and "Have a nice day" as a way to terminate an argument in a belligerent manner).
Your attitude is utterly unsuitable for Hacker News. We do not want comments like this here, that intentionally lie and spread false information and dodge questions and emotionally manipulate.
If you refuse to read the guidelines, you should not post. Reddit is a better place for comments such as the ones you've been making.
I have a set of French Vereco (now Duralex I believe) dishes and bowls[1] from the 60s or 70s which I'm the third generation in my family to use and own.
The tempered glass is almost indestructible as well. I can only remember one time when one of them broke when I dropped it (like with Superfest it'd smash into a million pieces).
You regularly find similar Vereco glassware in thrift stores and flea markets. Mainly because it's almost indestructible. Mine are getting a bit scratched up by now so I'm considering getting new tableware but it's kind of hard replacing something that still works perfectly fine.
You can buy vintage Vereco glassware for 400 EUR/8 pc -- probably less in a thrift store --, or new Duralex glasses for like 40 EUR/12 pc. They're not fancy and they're not expensive. I've stopped doing the party trick of intentionally dropping them to show how sturdy they are because they do break sometimes and it's a huge mess.
Duralex glasses are impressively durable. I am not quite sure how they make them, but they bounce several times when dropped. I don’t recall them exploding in tiny shards either, but I may be misremembering.
Incidentally. They seem to be close to bankruptcy (again) and to be looking for investors.
It seems like everyone I know owns at least one piece from their Beau Rivage (swirly brown) set they bought in the 90's. And Auchan had a huge sale of them (the same pattern!) a few years back.
People get so into this romantic fantasy of sturdy glass. Simultaneously completely blinded to the downsides and believing that we don't have, CAN'T POSSIBLY have, widely available modern equivalents, because "evil capitalism".
Y'all, it's called Corelle, and you can buy it literally everywhere. It's extremely available. Ubiquitous even. And it's just not worth it for the same reason given right there at the very end in the epilogue:
> While the Superfest glass is by far more durable than normal glass, when they shatter – they burst into a million fine pieces and are a total nightmare to clean up. I’m not sure if it’s because of their potassium chloride coating or because they are made to be super thin, my advice is to not drop them.
The reality is that the failure mode absolutely sucks. Dropping one and having it survive is a neat party trick, but all it takes is one break for the observer to completely swear off the experience forever.
> The reality is that the failure mode absolutely sucks. Dropping one and having it survive is a neat party trick, but all it takes is one break for the observer to completely swear off the experience forever.
I'd much rather sweep up the equivalent of very coarse sand than deal with shards of glass. There's no need to keep the dog away, or wrap the stuff in a newspaper so you don't shred the bin bag etc. You just sweep it up and are done with it.
That's Corelle Brands (previously Instant Brands) the holding company.
Corelle is also a product brand owned by said holding company and their still massively available primary products use their Vitrelle hardened glass material.
Yeah, also came here to point out Corelle. For many years I had a set of Corelle plates and bowls and such that they sold at Target, cheap and aimed at college students.
Likely there's a very mundane reason it hasn't replaced all standard glassware, such as being slightly more expensive or having limited design shapes/forms (thinking of the plates). This doesn't exactly strike me as "evil capitalism," just "throwaway culture". The difference is the consumer makes that choice when both options are available, but one is cheaper.
IMO the reason it hasn't replaced all standard glassware is that the pro of surviving some drops is massively outweighed by the con of sometimes exploding. People just are not dropping their dishes all the time, and when they do they would rather not have to deal with a kinetic burst of razor shrapnel.
Ion-strengthened glassware is manufactured in at least Turkey (Nude glass), France (Duralex) and Portugal (closed the tab and don't remember).
There doesn't appear to be a US brand making glassware with the process, which is a shame. But the US is the leading manufacturer of ion-strengthened glass for technical products, supplying Asian brands. You probably have a piece of it in your pocket.
I think it's still possible to source this kind of glass as sheets – https://www.delphiglass.com/oceanside-compatible-glass-96-co... seems to come pretty close in appearance – but I can't seem to find anyone selling consumer products made out of it. (Unless they make replicas and sell them as "authentic Jugendstil ca. 1908")
I don't get the Capitalism bashing aspect of the article. You can find reinforced glassware, its just more expensive so you don't hear a lot about it. It's not planed obsolescence, its customer preference.
I make pumps that are 5 to 10 times expensive than Chinese pumps and 5 to 10 times durable, I sell 1/10 as much as Chinese pumps. This is restricting research in improving pump, instead all research goes in reducing the cost.
In this article, the author makes the claim that very hard glass could not have been invented under capitalism, because capitalists are too focused on things breaking and having to be replaced. Which is ridiculous for any number of reasons, as is the implication that products developed under the economic model of the GDR were typically durable and long-lasting. It seems to be common for people to be both confused about what capitalism and socialism are, and very confident about what they represent.
> It all started when I was browsing through some film developing chemicals at one of my preferred photo shops (Fotoimpex).
This must be a pretty old article, as Fotoimpex have renovated and frustratingly removed almost their entire storefront - you can't really browse their merchandise anymore. I've found I have to order through their website despite the store being 30 mins away.
I actually have a couple of those Superfest glasses - they were in the house I bough in 2021 (which was full of junk and generall a bit messy). But I have no idea how they got here as the house is in western germany.
Anyone who grew up in France will fondly remember Duralex glasses - made of thick tempered glass, they are practically indestructible. They're still available, they just fell out of fashion because capitalism affords us the luxury of choice. Consumers prioritise factors other than durability, because they can afford to.
Here in the UK (and I believe in the US) there was a peculiar fad in the 1970s for gas stations to give away a free glass with the purchase of a tank of fuel. Such profligacy would be unimaginable under communism, not for any philosophical reason, but simply because they lacked the productive capacity.
Oh, 70s gas station giveaways were numerous. Towels(!). All sorts of games (match two halves and win). Ways to establish brand uniqueness when price competition did not really exist.
Simply not have things period would be a better description imo. It was common that you would have money/tokens/vouchers to buy soap or shoes or any commodity really, and there just wouldn't be any at the shop.
Or heaps of same tuna cans if stars aligned. You want what? Bananas for your kids? Lol come next week, stand in the queue in freezing cold for 3 hours on sunday early morning, and maybe you will get lucky. Lemons are only available via family or communist party contacts.
Or waiting 5 years for the option to buy a car (of course no say in the color or equipment, take it or leave). Or 2 years for sofa FFS, who cares you don't like the shape, color or material. If you think this is funny, I gave examples from my own childhood, and could go on for a very long time.
Centrally planned economies really don't work well. On top of clusterfuck that communism consistently was by itself.
My entire family to this day is compelled to load up on whatever discounted-because-of-oversupply items when shopping, on the premise that they will not be available in the future due to asinine production planning.
It's very cool and awesome how any criticism of capitalism results in an anti communist comment. As if there are only two possible economic systems and dislike of planned obsolescence + inequality means you want to die in a gulag.
To the countries that were doing the exploiting in South America, Africa and Asia as opposed to staying in a country being exploited by Russia?
From countries that used secret service against it's own citizens to countries that used it to assassinate inconvenient democratically elected leaders of other countries?
And now, with the threat of "communism" (no, it wasn't one, because communism would have meant giving up state power), capitalism is slowly getting just as awful to the people in the core as it was to the people on the periphery.
The progress you so enjoy is the product of trade, truly. Across thousands of years. But best trade is free trade. One where nobody is coerced by police NOR implicitly by having choices stripped away from them by the capitalist ruling class that just wants to maintain it's position. People deep in debt, living from paycheck to paycheck, cannot make their choices freely.
Imagine running away from USSR only to have to send you kid there:
> And now, with the threat of "communism" (no, it wasn't one, because communism would have meant giving up state power)
"Not real communism"
If it's only viable in theory, as shown by many practical failures, it's not worth discussing at all.
> The progress you so enjoy is the product of trade, truly. Across thousands of years. But best trade is free trade. One where nobody is coerced by police NOR implicitly by having choices stripped away from them by the capitalist ruling class that just wants to maintain it's position. People deep in debt, living from paycheck to paycheck, cannot make their choices freely.
This sounds like you'd like welfare capitalism. Bur your comment conflates and gish-gallops so many things that it's impossible to have a conversation with you.
I have grown up in a country occupied by communists and of course everybody was trying to escape across the iron curtain.
Nevertheless, the reasons were because people hated being forced to do and to say things that they did not want to do and to say, and because there were many categories of things that they were completely forbidden to own.
On the other hand, among the few categories of things that they could have, many were quite nice things in comparison with what is available today everywhere.
For instance the quality of clothes and of food has been lowered dramatically after the communists lost the power, the internal market was opened to global commerce and the local factories had been destroyed by their managers (who had stolen all their assets in order to transform themselves from communist bureaucrats into capitalist businessmen).
Being poor is the natural state of humans. We have been poor for thousands of years, with regular famines eveywhere. Even in the richer parts of the world, there where deaths due to starvation if the year was bad.
Then it came capitalism. For the first time in history, a country eliminated famines just by adopting the new of organizing production. They were still poor people who lacked things, but they lived in the only part of the world where at least they could count on not starving to death.
Then some countries organized as socialism, and they caused huge famines, that in a rare historical event, were not caused by climate or a natural catastrophe, but by wrong resource allocation.
You can criticize capitalism, but not on terms of producing what people want. In that field we don't know any other system that does it better. Capitalism is bad at distributing the wealth equally to everyone, causing that some people cannot have some things, but also we don't know a better model that does it while keeping poverty away.
If people today doesn't have unbreakable glassware (it exists!) is just because they prefer cheaper and fancier glasses from Ikea. When I need a truly unbreakable "glass" I buy a titanium made camping glass. In general we don't want all products to last a long time: we want to change our car to get the newest fancy things, we want a bigger and faster phone. We don't want a single pair of shoes that last forever, but lots of shoes to match with lots of clothes. There are long lasting shoes, but they don't sell well (i.e. people don't want them, even if they say so).
Just to add some numbers for context, in 1980 the US poverty line family income was ~ $8k year. In the USSR the MEDIAN family income was ~1200 rubles a year, which is around $400/year using the real exchange change.
People in the west have no grasp at the level of abject poverty that communism creates.
So to prove your point, you picked the richest country in the west to compare with the USSR, but generalized to “people in the west don’t know what poverty is”. The “west” is more than the US you know, unless you’re not talking about this side of the meridian.
Being poor in a capitalist country still puts you in the very top of the ladder in any communist place. Everyone was poor there, and way poorer than you, myself included.
Partially true - capitalism will give you what you choose through your actual behavior of making a purchase rather than what you say you prefer or wish you preferred. I bought LED lights for my house back when they were $30/bulb and few people even talked about CFLs. My reason? I am super lazy about changing lightbulbs, especially in inconvenient places like a fixture in the middle of a staircase. Many years later I sold the house with original set of lights still working. I am similarly lazy about cleaning up glass shards from floor or dishwasher, but this one will not help, when it shatters it shatters into a bigger mess. Anyway, if consumers started to demand durability, market would respond, but most want pretty glasses at low price. No economic system is a match for human stupidity and on the other hand very smart people would make any economic system work by modifying it to be practical (add some social safety net and environmental protection to capitalism, turn socialism into hybrid system that also includes free market).
That's one of the problems with a 100% free market. There's an implicit assumption that everyone is a perfectly rational economic actor that understands what goes into lightbulb durability. But does the average person really have the scientific knowledge to determine the mean-time-to-failure of different lightbulbs and the math skills necessary to know whether it's more cost effective to buy several cheap bulbs or 1 durable one?
When you have that level of information asymmetry, people might value qualities like durability but can't guide their purchasing decisions with it because they don't know what ion exchanged glass is and why they should be looking for it. Not everyone is an engineer/scientist.
Rationality and imperfect information are different things.
Neither of which fit your example which is search cost. Not everyone knows a lot of things, it is impossible to know everything. Therefore tradeoffs are made. Which is rational.
$30/bulb worked back then, but if you do it now, it could be a quality bulb that will last, or a $5 bulb that probably won't.
I've got a big house with a lot of can lights, and it's not really possible to buy for durability. Obviously, incandescents are out, but if I buy a batch for a room to see if a model is durable, by the time I have a good idea, I can't actually get that model anymore, so it's not super helpful. And I'm not a monster, so I don't use multiple models in one room, so it's better to buy several at once. Different brand incandescents are fine together, but LEDs outputs vary and their startup and shutoff delays vary, and their response to dimming varies, and their failure modes vary... So yeah.
These things are just not a good idea; the heat has to go somewhere.
Eight years ago, I bought a bunch of Ikea GU-10 LED bulbs, I believe 6EUR for two; I think roughly a quarter have since died. But they’re exposed spotlight fittings rather than recessed. Never heard of those lasting particularly long.
Go read the story… the east german manufacturer tried exporting it, but resellers thought selling virtually unbreakable glassware was a bad business. Same thing happened with the GE/Osram cartel for pushing shorter lived incandescent lamps to the market.
It’s naive to believe only buyer behavior drives what products are available, when the market is fixed to limit offer. You’re probably confused between the meaning of capitalism and free market.
The Phoebus cartel isn't comparable, because incandescent lamps have an inherent tradeoff between lifespan and efficiency. Most of the output of an incandescent lamp is infrared. Running it hotter shifts it more into the visible spectrum, increasing lumens per watt, but also makes the filament fail sooner.
It's easier to sell long-life lamps than high-efficiency lamps (bulb failures are obvious, but few people had the test equipment to measure efficiency of individual bulbs). The cartel avoided competition on lifespan that would have wasted a lot of electricity.
Isn’t that rather some kind of tragedy of the commons thing? I mean the system isn’t rigged because of those who care. But because of everyone else who doesn’t.
Capitalism gets people to buy tons of unnecessary and unhealthy crap, that's for sure. (Like $150 running shoes, and sugary drinks and junk food that support the diabetes industry.)
But you're claiming something different. What's an example of a "nice thing" we'd enjoy today except for those evil capitalists blocking the path?
Let’s start simple: what about, like, any modern electronic device that can be serviced and doesn’t stop working whenever the manufacturer decides from a distance? I would enjoy not having to buy a new phone every other year just so my apps keep fucking working.
Star Trek shows me lots of devices we'd like. What's your evidence that the device you want EXISTS TODAY (or could exist, given existing technology), but Apple and Google or whoever are gatekeeping it?
E.g. do you think Apple could have released the iPhone 15, 14, 13, etc. in 2007, but held back because Steve Jobs was counting his billions?
Also, maybe you intended "every other year" as a figure of speech, but I buy an iPhone only every four or five years, and my last one was free (to me) with a "commitment" to the very affordable carrier plan I already had. I do occasionally need to replace the battery, but if better battery tech exists, I have not heard about it. Are the Chinese and Koreans complicit in this gatekeeping?
Last but not least, do you work in the tech industry? I used to work for a well-known chip manufacturer, and if we were gatekeeping our chip releases to increase future profits, I certainly didn't hear about it. That reminds me - a key feature of capitalism is COMPETITION. If someone is holding back on building magic devices, the field is open for someone else, maybe you, to profitably build them.
Assuming a level playing field. If I have good cash flow from my operating system and office software business, I can make a web browser, and give it away for free, which screws up the market for companies that sell web browser software. no one can compete with that price so a company that only makes web browser software gets screwed. Until such time that a different company with a monopoly in another area is able to fund development of a competing browser which they can give away for free, the market for web browser software was and it's dominated by one free option to the next. Point being, free markets and competition is great, but there isn't always going to be competition because the game is fixed.
The question was about (hardware) "devices," which tend to be limited by chip technology, not browsers.
Are you suggesting that Arm and AMD and Apple and Huawei and Intel and Nvidia and Samsung are all colluding to stay at roughly the same level of chip technology - when they could easily be generations ahead?
Ask Sun, DEC, and Cray about that. Worse but better wins for business reasons that aren't related the quality of the underlying technology. I'm not saying they're colluding, or that there's some grand conspiracy, but because Apple has bought out the production lines at TSMC to make their Apple Silicon chips, Samsung can't use those lines which means comparing products from the two isn't fair because Apple has those lines and Samsung can't use them to produce chips for their phones. I'm saying we, the human race, could be further along, if we made the markets more of a fair fight.
Microsoft's OEM agreement, which came to light in 1998, was that a manufacturer, say Dell, had to pay Microsoft for every computer they sold, regardless of if it had Windows on it or not. This means, that if Dell sold a computer with BeOS on it, they still had to pay for a Microsoft Windows license for that box! From a business perspective, that means Dell doesn't need to bother selling BeOS. Business hasn't changed, so even though Arm and AMD and Apple and Huawei and Intel and Nvidia and Samsung haven't been taken to court on an antitrust case, there's all sorts of anti-competitive behavior going on.
I can't buy a Samsung phone with an Apple A17 chip as the CPU.
I think if the market were better regulated, I would be able to, but because we don't prohibit that kind of vertical integration, the result is an anti competitive market, and that's holding us back. We couldn't easily be generations ahead, because it's a lot of hard work, fighting lots of powerful people, but we could be.
I used to work for Sun. As for Cray, did you know that Cray used AMD chips on many of their supercomputers? I bet you didn't.
As for the rest of it, you think that forcing arch rivals to collaborate on their key products, in other words, reducing competition, is the best way to help the consumer?
The fact that the Cray XD1 used AMD chips is well documented, but I'm not sure why that's even relevant, or why you feel the need to insult my knowledge.
Increasing competition is the best way to help the consumer. I think leveling the playing field increases competition and is the best way to help the consumer. I don't know why you think I'm a communist simply because I think there's anticompetitive behavior going on.
Take CPUs. Between AMD and Intel, I have to pick a motherboard that supports one or the other. This fantasy world I'm pushing would say hey you two, make a standard that both of you can agree on, so that one motherboard can have either an AMD or Intel CPU. I don't know what's communist about that. That then lets Transmeta and other players actually compete, reduces e-waste, and lets consumers decide for themselves. In my mind, setting and enforcing standards and limiting the amount of vertical monopolizing that can happen increases competition, and doesn't put you on a train to Siberia.
Why were Oracle (I used to work there) and Sun even competitors? They're both so monstrously big that they had overlap, and so they were, but Oracle is known for its database software, and Sun is known for its hardware. In my fantasy world, Sun would never have competed with Oracle. Oracle would have competed with Sybase to see who could write better database software, and Sun would have competed with HP and Dell to see who could make better hardware. IBM would be split into a bunch of smaller companies that competed in each area, instead of being the monstrosity that it was and is today.
You make it seem I’m talking about sci-fi technology. I’m talking about not intentionally crippling the product to force upgrades (easily replace batteries, backwards compatible software). It’s not rocket science and we had it before.
The materials in running shoes cost under $10, and many people seem to do just fine without them. E.g. I have run two marathons barefoot with fewer problems than when I ran shod. And I'm not genetically blessed.
It's impossible to reconcile my experience, and the experience of so many other barefoot (and minimalist - although I don't recommend it) runners, with the advertising from Hoka and from podiatrists.
It shouldn't be necessary to disclaim, but I do barefeet running even in snow. But since I did not train barefeet running while my feet were developing, I could not run a marathon without shoes, I would damage my bones, my barefeet range has a limit.
So I certainly would not think of telling others they must be minimalistic, too. And if I would run in the cities on concrete, I would get myself good running shoes, too.
The first time I ran barefoot, I was older than you probably are now. (Since this is HN.)
I understand your skepticism, since I used to be the same way. What I've learned is this: good running form isn't "pogo stick," it's "unicycle." But if what you're doing is working for you, no reason to change.
That STILL doesn't excuse the cost of running shoes. For public shoe companies, just take a look at their financials, how much money goes to "R&D" versus "sales and marketing."
"That STILL doesn't excuse the cost of running shoes."
I don't know much about running shoes, but about trekking shoes. And there I can attest, that higher quality exists and indeed costs more and is worth it. I assume the same to be true for running shoes, no matter that they have a big marketing budget, that should rather be R&D. (All marketing should be.)
I'd gladly drop $150 on a pair of shoes if I could ensure the product is well-made and will last me forever. Unfortunately, higher price does not correllate with either.
Panera Bread has apparently discontinued their Pumpkin Muffin.
Now, like everyone, it’s routine today for the Autumn sky to darken as pumpkin season begins and we get everything pumpkin from cereal to coffee to toothpaste and motor oil.
However, Paneras pumpkin muffin was not seasonal, but a staple. And now it’s gone.
I’m betting the mustache twisting, stove piped hat capitalists in the smoke filled room of leather chairs and warmed snifters didn’t decide to stop making the muffins in order to lose money.
https://www.soulbottles.de/en/ultraglass
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paulkupfer/ultraglass-s...
Recent update:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/paulkupfer/ultraglass-s...
The research for this was done at the University of Bayreuth: https://www.glas.uni-bayreuth.de/en/projects/strongbottles/i...
German TV reported about the background here, 20:45 onwards:
https://www.3sat.de/wissen/nano/240315-sendung-epigenetik-ar...
https://www.cfh.de/en/neues-investment-revisalt-gmbh/
https://revisalt.com/en/
maybe the same reason [the super hard] prince rupert's drops explode. really high internal stress.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xe-f4gokRBs
https://youtube.com/watch?v=y02AXdec1sE
As I was making cocktails one evening I accidentally knocked an empty glass from my kitchen worktop onto my stone-tiled kitchen floor. I was astonished when the glass bounced on its rim and rebounded back up in the air. I somehow managed to catch it. Not the slightest damage. Five years later that glass is still in use.
I bought a box of 12 because that was the smallest quantity they came in, but normally only use two. So I think that box will last me for 20 years or more. They are incredible.
https://www.nisbets.co.uk/utopia-moda-fully-toughened-coupe-...
Invariably he'd miss one then many and be in a state of panic and yet none would break when hitting the kitchen floor.
Silly teenagers we were. I see that brand is still around. It's solid.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEvBpjCOBu0
What a loaded headline.
corning the guys they bring up at the very end is also the company that did pyrex. they spun that business off in the 90s. They don't mention that because you'd recognize it and go "wait my cabinet's been full of that my whole life"
Most people involved in such projects were far from what you can call communists, not involved with regine, not members of the party (or if they were it was just to be allowed certain positions in the system, literal ticking checkbox on the requirements list), some even secretly hating it and conspiring against it. This reductionism is unnecessary and outright incorrect.
One can claim it was invented in communist East Germany (although the official name was literally German democratic republic), and thats about it.
You also slap 'invented by american capitalists' onto every single invention coming out of US of past 250 years?
Yes, you can get both of those things with capitalism, just look at Russia, but looks like they are more likely to happen with communism.
Authoritarianism is responsible for many people's deaths, while corruption is why things were so bad that it pushed for invention of this.
The reason why the glass is not popular right now is because we as consumers are perfectly fine with this. We let companies get away with it instead of voting with our wallets. Nearly all of us are guilty purchasing smart phones that won't last longer than 2 years, pre-paying for games when companies frequently stiffed us that way. Almost no one puts time to research which companies produce quality product so such manufacturers frequently go out of business.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_killings_under_communist_...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_Ameri...
You can't deny the fact though that all socialist (or what people from beyond the pond like to call "communist") countries turned towards authoritarianism on their "journey" of eventually achieving communism (even if some of those countries might have started off with the best intentions to actually improve things). And it happened with such regularity that it cannot be explained away with "no true scotsman (pardon: communist)" arguments.
Try criticising capitalism and you'll soon encounter exactly that rhetoric, even for things that exist only thanks to government direct action (the most socialist org in USA, the Department of Defense, is directly and indirectly responsible for huge part of innovation that people assign to "capitalism" despite it having little to do with it)
And that's nonsense. The real problem was the reunification and the collapse of the East German economy. The East Germans got rid of their government, peacefully and the result was the unification of a protected plan economy to an open social market system (West Germany did not and still does not have US style capitalism -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_market_economy ). The East German market was not having access to current technologies and raw materials (for example due to the lack of money to buy on the world market). The companies in the east were not competitive and they lost their protecting system.
There were LOTS of glass manufacturers, both in West Germany and in the surrounding countries. Those were eager to take the market and a small and expensive glass production was an easy victim. There are lots of examples where GDR products were replaced by Western products, which were much more efficient in production and distribution.
It has very little to do with "capitalism", just that there was a much larger and more efficient market around, eager to take over. The "communist" economy wasn't communist and it was behind a self-built "protective" wall. When the wall collapsed and the system which protected the wall collapsed (-> the whole eastern Europe incl. the former Soviet Union largely collapsed), then during reunification of East and West Germany, the East German economy also collapsed (products were no longer competitive, lost their markets, etc.). The West German companies did not have the time to protect small scale producers, their problem was to deliver on the expectations of the East Germans: create same living standards, provide access to the larger market without scarce products.
For the East German population it was mostly clear, they wanted to buy western products, which for a long time were either not available or far too expensive or both. East German brands were out of fashion.
The attraction of the West German economy and political system, together with the failure of the East German system (and its soviet-influenced model), caused the collapse of the political and economic system of the GDR.
Later the "Ostalgie" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ostalgie ) made people aware that there was also a loss: familiar brands were gone, familiar products were gone, jobs were gone, people were gone, (-> many went to West Germany to work there) western products were not always better, ...
TLDR; -> the company was a victim of the turmoil of the reunification and introduction of a larger&open economy.
Side note: that East Germans needed to take care of scarce products (see the cars which had long waiting lists) did not mean that the East German production was environmentally friendly. Just the opposite, East German production was as environmentally unfriendly or even more, as in the West. An environmental movement (like the Greens in West Germany) was not possible in the one-party-rules system of the GDR dictatorship. Later, a lot of production got closed(& sometimes replaced) because of old and dirty factories and production processes.
Side note 2: Germany now has a large scale "Mehrweg- und Pfandsystem" for bottles. This means that in any super market one can buy bottles of, say, beer and one pays a higher price. The markets are required to take back the empty bottles and pay the consumer the "Flaschenpfand" (bottle deposit). Bottles get reused a lot (50 times) and this system has 43% market share. One can imagine that lighter/more durable glass bottles might have an advantage in such a system. Currently we see either heavy glass bottles or lighter plastic bottles (reused 25 times).
This was already standard procedure in East Germany though, pretty much everything from glass bottles (via a "Pfandsystem" much the same as today's minus the deposit machines) to paper to scrap metal was recycled. We even had regular 'waste paper collections' at school which were organized like a competition. This had little to do with environmentalism but instead to get more independent from resource imports.
(as you mentioned, the environment was much worse off in East Germany than it is today, especially around industrial locations)
Wikipedia describes that here (in German): https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SERO
Great! Where can i buy coke in this glass?
You can get old used Superfest glasses on ebay for 10$ per piece. That's sustainable capitalism: they don't get thrown away and the seller makes a great price.
Plus: you can get the original DDR/GDR design from 30 years ago and fill it with any beverage you want.
The most productive areas of Eastern Germany were private but Commies didn't like it so they shut it down in 70s. Hence Eastern Germany became poor.
Of course nobody in their right mind believed such bullshit (not even most party members).
Private companies were shut down a lot earlier than the 70's, more like the 50s and early 60s. Later this was relaxed again. It was actually possible again in the 80s to run a small privately owned business (my parents were both self-employed). A privately owned company in East Germany still doesn't mean that there's any competition though, or ability to be better off than a worker in a state-owned company. The entire economic enviornment just wasn't compatibly with the idea of running a business that's not controlled by the state.
Still, compared to some of the poorer Eastern European countries, East German people were somewhat well off. Maybe on a level like Portugal or Greece, but of course piss-poor when compared to West Germany. And in any case much worse when it comes to personal freedom of course (which was a much more critical problem than the economic problems).
Also, all those things don't change the fact that East German engineers sometimes came up with brilliant solutions despite the less than ideal conditions.
This doesn't have anything to do with capitalism, but apathy of consumers. The lack of durable products is because consumers don't value durable products enough to seek them out and pay more for them. In a communist or command economy, the exact same thing would happen if the leader decreed that goods needed to be cheaply made. There's nothing intrinsic to capitalism here.
This kind of content isn't appropriate for HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> I'm not the one that defaulted to pointing at the guidelines when my views were challenged.
I pointed at the guidelines because you're blatantly and flagrantly violating them, and refusing to read them.
I also successfully defended my views using logic and reason. You resorted to redirection ("Lowering production costs and increasing sales volume are both achieved by producing lower quality merchandise" is irrelevant and betrays a total lack of understanding as to how capitalism works) and base emotional manipulation (such as "Are we now so desperate to defend capitalism that we're going to pretend shareholder value isn't the primary goal" and "accept the rather obvious critique of capitalism" and "ironically accurate" and "Have a nice day" as a way to terminate an argument in a belligerent manner).
Your attitude is utterly unsuitable for Hacker News. We do not want comments like this here, that intentionally lie and spread false information and dodge questions and emotionally manipulate.
If you refuse to read the guidelines, you should not post. Reddit is a better place for comments such as the ones you've been making.
Ok so pointing to designed obsolescence as an obvious failure of capitalism is which of these things?
The tempered glass is almost indestructible as well. I can only remember one time when one of them broke when I dropped it (like with Superfest it'd smash into a million pieces).
You regularly find similar Vereco glassware in thrift stores and flea markets. Mainly because it's almost indestructible. Mine are getting a bit scratched up by now so I'm considering getting new tableware but it's kind of hard replacing something that still works perfectly fine.
[1] Like this: https://l-art-copenhagen.com/products/526194
Incidentally. They seem to be close to bankruptcy (again) and to be looking for investors.
Y'all, it's called Corelle, and you can buy it literally everywhere. It's extremely available. Ubiquitous even. And it's just not worth it for the same reason given right there at the very end in the epilogue:
> While the Superfest glass is by far more durable than normal glass, when they shatter – they burst into a million fine pieces and are a total nightmare to clean up. I’m not sure if it’s because of their potassium chloride coating or because they are made to be super thin, my advice is to not drop them.
The reality is that the failure mode absolutely sucks. Dropping one and having it survive is a neat party trick, but all it takes is one break for the observer to completely swear off the experience forever.
Google "corelle exploded".
I'd much rather sweep up the equivalent of very coarse sand than deal with shards of glass. There's no need to keep the dog away, or wrap the stuff in a newspaper so you don't shred the bin bag etc. You just sweep it up and are done with it.
Corelle is also a product brand owned by said holding company and their still massively available primary products use their Vitrelle hardened glass material.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corelle
not
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corelle_Brands
GM's bankruptcy was very similar to Instant Brands', and they haven't gone anywhere.
Likely there's a very mundane reason it hasn't replaced all standard glassware, such as being slightly more expensive or having limited design shapes/forms (thinking of the plates). This doesn't exactly strike me as "evil capitalism," just "throwaway culture". The difference is the consumer makes that choice when both options are available, but one is cheaper.
https://www.toyo.sasaki.co.jp/e/brand/fine-crystal/
Nude Glass’s Stem Zero and Ghost Zero line of glassware is made of this stuff.
https://eu.nudeglass.com/pages/introducing-ghost-zero
https://eu.nudeglass.com/pages/introducing-stem-zero
Ion-strengthened glassware is manufactured in at least Turkey (Nude glass), France (Duralex) and Portugal (closed the tab and don't remember).
There doesn't appear to be a US brand making glassware with the process, which is a shame. But the US is the leading manufacturer of ion-strengthened glass for technical products, supplying Asian brands. You probably have a piece of it in your pocket.
I think it's still possible to source this kind of glass as sheets – https://www.delphiglass.com/oceanside-compatible-glass-96-co... seems to come pretty close in appearance – but I can't seem to find anyone selling consumer products made out of it. (Unless they make replicas and sell them as "authentic Jugendstil ca. 1908")
This must be a pretty old article, as Fotoimpex have renovated and frustratingly removed almost their entire storefront - you can't really browse their merchandise anymore. I've found I have to order through their website despite the store being 30 mins away.
https://www.ancient-origins.net/artifacts-ancient-technology...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duralex
Here in the UK (and I believe in the US) there was a peculiar fad in the 1970s for gas stations to give away a free glass with the purchase of a tank of fuel. Such profligacy would be unimaginable under communism, not for any philosophical reason, but simply because they lacked the productive capacity.
Or waiting 5 years for the option to buy a car (of course no say in the color or equipment, take it or leave). Or 2 years for sofa FFS, who cares you don't like the shape, color or material. If you think this is funny, I gave examples from my own childhood, and could go on for a very long time.
Centrally planned economies really don't work well. On top of clusterfuck that communism consistently was by itself.
My entire family to this day is compelled to load up on whatever discounted-because-of-oversupply items when shopping, on the premise that they will not be available in the future due to asinine production planning.
For some reason that reminds me of that arch-capitalist, Henry Ford.
I remember in which direction people were trying to escape across the iron curtain.
From countries that used secret service against it's own citizens to countries that used it to assassinate inconvenient democratically elected leaders of other countries?
And now, with the threat of "communism" (no, it wasn't one, because communism would have meant giving up state power), capitalism is slowly getting just as awful to the people in the core as it was to the people on the periphery.
The progress you so enjoy is the product of trade, truly. Across thousands of years. But best trade is free trade. One where nobody is coerced by police NOR implicitly by having choices stripped away from them by the capitalist ruling class that just wants to maintain it's position. People deep in debt, living from paycheck to paycheck, cannot make their choices freely.
Imagine running away from USSR only to have to send you kid there:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/11/business/child-labor-meat...
"Not real communism"
If it's only viable in theory, as shown by many practical failures, it's not worth discussing at all.
> The progress you so enjoy is the product of trade, truly. Across thousands of years. But best trade is free trade. One where nobody is coerced by police NOR implicitly by having choices stripped away from them by the capitalist ruling class that just wants to maintain it's position. People deep in debt, living from paycheck to paycheck, cannot make their choices freely.
This sounds like you'd like welfare capitalism. Bur your comment conflates and gish-gallops so many things that it's impossible to have a conversation with you.
Because the term has been perverted by both anti and pro crowds.
Capitalism isn't equal to free market (arguably Adam Smith was first to give scathing rejection of capitalism)
Communism isn't equal with state control and planned economy, no matter how much Imperial Russian traumatised politicians insisted on everyone.
Nevertheless, the reasons were because people hated being forced to do and to say things that they did not want to do and to say, and because there were many categories of things that they were completely forbidden to own.
On the other hand, among the few categories of things that they could have, many were quite nice things in comparison with what is available today everywhere.
For instance the quality of clothes and of food has been lowered dramatically after the communists lost the power, the internal market was opened to global commerce and the local factories had been destroyed by their managers (who had stolen all their assets in order to transform themselves from communist bureaucrats into capitalist businessmen).
I grew up in a capitalist country. Being poor doesn’t give you access to things just the same.
Then it came capitalism. For the first time in history, a country eliminated famines just by adopting the new of organizing production. They were still poor people who lacked things, but they lived in the only part of the world where at least they could count on not starving to death.
Then some countries organized as socialism, and they caused huge famines, that in a rare historical event, were not caused by climate or a natural catastrophe, but by wrong resource allocation.
You can criticize capitalism, but not on terms of producing what people want. In that field we don't know any other system that does it better. Capitalism is bad at distributing the wealth equally to everyone, causing that some people cannot have some things, but also we don't know a better model that does it while keeping poverty away.
If people today doesn't have unbreakable glassware (it exists!) is just because they prefer cheaper and fancier glasses from Ikea. When I need a truly unbreakable "glass" I buy a titanium made camping glass. In general we don't want all products to last a long time: we want to change our car to get the newest fancy things, we want a bigger and faster phone. We don't want a single pair of shoes that last forever, but lots of shoes to match with lots of clothes. There are long lasting shoes, but they don't sell well (i.e. people don't want them, even if they say so).
People in the west have no grasp at the level of abject poverty that communism creates.
It's always rich kids that benefited from capitalism their entire life that seem to fetishize communism the way that video does.
When you have that level of information asymmetry, people might value qualities like durability but can't guide their purchasing decisions with it because they don't know what ion exchanged glass is and why they should be looking for it. Not everyone is an engineer/scientist.
Neither of which fit your example which is search cost. Not everyone knows a lot of things, it is impossible to know everything. Therefore tradeoffs are made. Which is rational.
I've got a big house with a lot of can lights, and it's not really possible to buy for durability. Obviously, incandescents are out, but if I buy a batch for a room to see if a model is durable, by the time I have a good idea, I can't actually get that model anymore, so it's not super helpful. And I'm not a monster, so I don't use multiple models in one room, so it's better to buy several at once. Different brand incandescents are fine together, but LEDs outputs vary and their startup and shutoff delays vary, and their response to dimming varies, and their failure modes vary... So yeah.
Well, there’s your problem.
These things are just not a good idea; the heat has to go somewhere.
Eight years ago, I bought a bunch of Ikea GU-10 LED bulbs, I believe 6EUR for two; I think roughly a quarter have since died. But they’re exposed spotlight fittings rather than recessed. Never heard of those lasting particularly long.
It’s naive to believe only buyer behavior drives what products are available, when the market is fixed to limit offer. You’re probably confused between the meaning of capitalism and free market.
It's easier to sell long-life lamps than high-efficiency lamps (bulb failures are obvious, but few people had the test equipment to measure efficiency of individual bulbs). The cartel avoided competition on lifespan that would have wasted a lot of electricity.
But you're claiming something different. What's an example of a "nice thing" we'd enjoy today except for those evil capitalists blocking the path?
E.g. do you think Apple could have released the iPhone 15, 14, 13, etc. in 2007, but held back because Steve Jobs was counting his billions?
Also, maybe you intended "every other year" as a figure of speech, but I buy an iPhone only every four or five years, and my last one was free (to me) with a "commitment" to the very affordable carrier plan I already had. I do occasionally need to replace the battery, but if better battery tech exists, I have not heard about it. Are the Chinese and Koreans complicit in this gatekeeping?
Last but not least, do you work in the tech industry? I used to work for a well-known chip manufacturer, and if we were gatekeeping our chip releases to increase future profits, I certainly didn't hear about it. That reminds me - a key feature of capitalism is COMPETITION. If someone is holding back on building magic devices, the field is open for someone else, maybe you, to profitably build them.
Are you suggesting that Arm and AMD and Apple and Huawei and Intel and Nvidia and Samsung are all colluding to stay at roughly the same level of chip technology - when they could easily be generations ahead?
Microsoft's OEM agreement, which came to light in 1998, was that a manufacturer, say Dell, had to pay Microsoft for every computer they sold, regardless of if it had Windows on it or not. This means, that if Dell sold a computer with BeOS on it, they still had to pay for a Microsoft Windows license for that box! From a business perspective, that means Dell doesn't need to bother selling BeOS. Business hasn't changed, so even though Arm and AMD and Apple and Huawei and Intel and Nvidia and Samsung haven't been taken to court on an antitrust case, there's all sorts of anti-competitive behavior going on.
I can't buy a Samsung phone with an Apple A17 chip as the CPU.
I think if the market were better regulated, I would be able to, but because we don't prohibit that kind of vertical integration, the result is an anti competitive market, and that's holding us back. We couldn't easily be generations ahead, because it's a lot of hard work, fighting lots of powerful people, but we could be.
As for the rest of it, you think that forcing arch rivals to collaborate on their key products, in other words, reducing competition, is the best way to help the consumer?
Good luck in your Marxist-Leninist fantasy world.
Increasing competition is the best way to help the consumer. I think leveling the playing field increases competition and is the best way to help the consumer. I don't know why you think I'm a communist simply because I think there's anticompetitive behavior going on.
Take CPUs. Between AMD and Intel, I have to pick a motherboard that supports one or the other. This fantasy world I'm pushing would say hey you two, make a standard that both of you can agree on, so that one motherboard can have either an AMD or Intel CPU. I don't know what's communist about that. That then lets Transmeta and other players actually compete, reduces e-waste, and lets consumers decide for themselves. In my mind, setting and enforcing standards and limiting the amount of vertical monopolizing that can happen increases competition, and doesn't put you on a train to Siberia.
Why were Oracle (I used to work there) and Sun even competitors? They're both so monstrously big that they had overlap, and so they were, but Oracle is known for its database software, and Sun is known for its hardware. In my fantasy world, Sun would never have competed with Oracle. Oracle would have competed with Sybase to see who could write better database software, and Sun would have competed with HP and Dell to see who could make better hardware. IBM would be split into a bunch of smaller companies that competed in each area, instead of being the monstrosity that it was and is today.
Still don't see how that makes me a communist.
What exactly is unhealthy or unnecessary about running shoes?
It's impossible to reconcile my experience, and the experience of so many other barefoot (and minimalist - although I don't recommend it) runners, with the advertising from Hoka and from podiatrists.
So I certainly would not think of telling others they must be minimalistic, too. And if I would run in the cities on concrete, I would get myself good running shoes, too.
I understand your skepticism, since I used to be the same way. What I've learned is this: good running form isn't "pogo stick," it's "unicycle." But if what you're doing is working for you, no reason to change.
That STILL doesn't excuse the cost of running shoes. For public shoe companies, just take a look at their financials, how much money goes to "R&D" versus "sales and marketing."
I don't know much about running shoes, but about trekking shoes. And there I can attest, that higher quality exists and indeed costs more and is worth it. I assume the same to be true for running shoes, no matter that they have a big marketing budget, that should rather be R&D. (All marketing should be.)
https://jacobin.com/2024/03/energy-charter-treaty-climate-ch...
Now, like everyone, it’s routine today for the Autumn sky to darken as pumpkin season begins and we get everything pumpkin from cereal to coffee to toothpaste and motor oil.
However, Paneras pumpkin muffin was not seasonal, but a staple. And now it’s gone.
I’m betting the mustache twisting, stove piped hat capitalists in the smoke filled room of leather chairs and warmed snifters didn’t decide to stop making the muffins in order to lose money.
And they were REALLY GOOD pumpkin muffins.
You might know the meme. This is you enacting it.