Ricky Martin: Living la vida loca.

Kid rock: Living la vida coke-a.

Have you seen this show? It’s like 10 years of that.

The problem here is the for-profit model that drives mass (over-)production and planned obsolescence.

We can do away with this if a company embraces a completely different model. Instead of doing the usual thing, go 100% on-demand with pre-orders, and only build what people want to buy. Then, keep moving horizontally into other product lines, following the demand and manufacturing need. Once pre-orders hit a given theshold, manufacturing starts for a given product. This eliminates all kinds of overhead and allows the company to survive by investing in multiple revenue streams. As a bonus: it’s a lot less wasteful since you never make more units than you can sell.

Subscriptions are like insurance and gym memberships. They’re profitable only if they represent value that is never fully realized by the consumer. They’re a really bad tax, and people dislike them for good reason. I want to buy a thing from a company, and that’s all; it’s not my responsibility to keep them afloat after that transaction.

If you take inflation into consideration, high quality products still exist at about the same price.

There’s another side to all this. We used to have appliance and, specifically, vacuum repair shops. Sometimes, the latter were franchise operations by manufacturer/brand. Electrolux and Oreck had stores that also did repairs, to name two. The business model had a lot in common with the auto industry at the time. To me, that stands as a cautionary tale of how things can get twisted around to cost the consumer more money in the long run, not less. I think it’s an important consideration, as old designs/patents were from and for a market serviced on all sides by this business model. But we can do better. If such products were designed to be user-servicable, there wouldn’t be a strong need/want to capture breakage as another revenue center.

So, we can absolutely bootstrap a new “buy for life” economy, but I think the downstream user hassle, repair, and secondary costs are crucial to consider.

Its just that there are now MUCH cheaper options now.

This is the part people keep ignoring. I keep calling it “realizing the actual cost of things.” Nowadays, you can buy cheap, but you’re going to get something fragile and packed-to-the-gills with surveillance and advertising. To get what grandma had (e.g. a refrigerator that runs for 50 years and just keeps food cold), anything cheaper than the inflation-adjusted equivalent costs you in other ways.

Meanwhile, over in the hobbyist and professional tool world, we’ve been saying “buy nice or buy twice” for a long time now.

or my son.

I kid you not, when the realtor showed the house they brought their rambunctious 7-year-old with them. Kiddo wasted zero time and did a running full-gainer into the conversation pit, tucked into a roll on landing, and sprawled out flat to stop in the middle of the room. Realtor/mom was NOT amused. Frankly, I was impressed but also relieved that there was no staged furniture in that particular room.

I hosted a few house-parties over the years and always had to keep a watchful eye on guest’s alcohol intake and all the steps and railings. It was kind of exhausting.

It needs to happen. We’re in a situation right now where media is captive by the same forces driving EVERYTHING right now. Re-establishing a free and honest press is pretty much required at this point.

I had a house with something like the first one, although it had a railing installed.

At first I hated the railing and considered removing it. Then I slipped on the hardwood steps on my way down into the pit. A whole 20 inches doesn’t seem like a lot, but let me tell you that hitting my ass halfway down was enough to make me re-think all of it.

Aesthetically, conversation pits are amazing. That said, they are absolutely built to fuck up someone’s day the very moment they’re not being careful.