Comment by noduerme 3 months ago
It's amazing what people built 2000 years ago, and sort of depressing too. I went over to a friend's house recently who had gotten a new outdoor hot tub. That thing isn't going to last 3 winters let alone a volcanic eruption.
My former house was built in 1927 - it had every modern convenience and was 100% better constructed than the terrible house we live in now that was built 2 years ago that was thrown together in the cheapest ways possible but still cost multiples of the inflation adjusted price of out former home when new.
I think this is the key.
As a generally smart person with disposable income, I am unable to figure out how to find/purchase higher quality products that are not optimized for obsolescence. Increasingly it seems that _everything_ is as cheap as possible: expensive products are not higher quality, but are instead designed to appeal to the premium market segment.
Largely everything has been solved so instead of some ultra expensive coffee maker just buy a Moka pot, and buy old/used stuff. Every 'scene' alive has associated gear, and of that gear, a small fraction is revered by the ultra-nerds. Find the ultra-nerds and follow them. They really don't like when their stuff breaks.
I've bought a ton of old stuff off eBay and similar sites and antique stores especially with this mentality. I can likely toss a grenade into my living room and most of my stuff will survive. I know my WWII sonar recorder will survive.
I bought a BMW 325is from 1988 and I've put well over 150k miles on it since I bought it a few years ago. Nothing leaks, nothing breaks, nothing squeaks, and it still gets 7.5L/100KM. A 36 year old car I got for $7k. One weekend, a Bentley manual, and youtube, and I was able to fix up the throttle body, replace ball joints, update my steering rack, and offset my wheels how I wanted. (On the flip side if I get into a crash I am insta-dead).
Like I wanted good outerwear but as you said, it's all premium market segment stuff without the quality. So I asked my friend who does bike-packing year round and lives outside what he wears and he gave me an entire notebook of gear, prices, longevity, and especially weights. I've had that jacket for 16 years now.
Same with laptops. Cheap modern $500 laptop, or ancient Thinkpad I can upgrade in an evening for $250, that will last me 10x longer? Infinite examples of this.
Had a very similar conversation with a plumber last winter. Pipes exploded because of the cold and flooded the basement. Plumber came over to fix the issue and we talked about the tools while working.
Paraphrased statement was something like "The company that makes these tools could make a high quality product that was rust, corrosion, and abrasion resistant. Except they don't. They make me a cheap wrench, that's planned for obsolescence, and rusts after a few months on the job. The company I work for could buy me a high quality set of tools. Except they don't. They buy me whatever's cheap and don't especially care that they have to buy it again in a year. And then they expect me to go to your house and care."
Joel - it really is a challenge to find high quality products even at high prices. Moreso at high and reasonable prices. I.E. getting your money’s worth. I hate being ripped off and have spent a lot of time researching producers and manufacturers to identify high quality products.
What I’ve found works is to locate special interest forums where experts talk about the best products, and to look for “whole products”. What I mean by that is to find products with as few “processed” or mass manufactured components as possible. Certainly there are exceptions to this, but as an example compare the copper pots and pans made by https://duparquet.com/ with the “ingredients” used on a typical pan you’d find at Wal-Mart.
The 3mm copper pan costs quite a bit but is made with real materials and skilled human labor. (No affiliation)
The Wal-Mart pan is the cheapest “metal” possible sprayed with a chemical coating and some generic styling and branding Homesense or something.
Certainly you can find some more affordable pots and pans with similar features as the website I shared, but you have to be careful.
Almost all electronics will by definition be planned obsolescence. A pan to cook meals? Like cities and good architecture we figured out how to make great pots and pans, knives, and more a long time ago and there isn’t a whole lot left to do.
Unfortunately population growth has led to a need for cheaper and crappier products especially in the west to maintain a perceived level of lifestyle.
Why would you want a house to last so long? Are you expecting your children and your grandchildren to keep living there after you die?
New homes are a bit of unique version of the "built to last" theme. Most of the individual components are some of the best we've ever had, while some of them are the worst. Modern windows are amazing. Modern insulation is amazing. Insulation is so good, you need less of it in appliances so you gain space inside fridges/ovens even though the unit itself is the same physical size. If you built the house out of something besides #2 pine, homes could be amazing. On top of that, you have nail guns where the builder doesn't even notice (or care) if the nail misses or not. People just don't care about the attention to detail during construction. It's not like they're building their own home.
Services become expensive when the servicepeople have better/more productive things to do, because you need to pay them more to keep them in the industry.
> Modern windows are amazing
The double pane ones, however, leak after a decade or so. Then the interior of the window fogs up, and you're looking at a major cost to replace them.
I have triple-pane windows since 2014. No leaks, no fog. Superb comfort. Same with countless friends, colleagues and neighbors.
Almost nobody has been installing single-pane windows around here since early 00s. Double pane is the default. Location is Eastern Europe, if that matters.
Currently living in an 1800's converted church. It's ridiculously well insulated and solid. It's -15 outside but with a little fireplace, and $50 in oak slabwood per month, I'm solid in the winter. The upstairs stays 22 and only drops 2 degrees at night. Meanwhile my old condo had a 4 foot "cold front" in front of the floor to ceiling windows.
I think what you are describing is what the central bank calls hedonics. They substitute one good for another in the basket of goods used to calculate inflation. Otherwise the inflation figure would be much higher than it is. So instead of solid 2x6 studs in the floor, we use engineered struts. I visited Pompeii, I was amazed at how well preserved all the marble was.
Prior to the industrial revolution most people did not live in stone palaces, and I doubt Pompeii was any exception. The population of Pompeii was 10k-20k people and they were probably supported by one or two orders of magnitude more subsistence farmers living in homes that mostly don't exist today.
I was surprised to see what looked like restaurants. It seemed like they served food to people walking by. They had a counter facing the road with a hole in it. I could imagine a fire inside the hole, with presumably a pot with food above it.
There were a lot of mosaics that were preserved too.
I saw marble in the temples, a bath house, and in the cemetery.
The roads still had ruts carved into the stone from all the carts that had run over them.
If it has modern conveniences and is even vaguely up to modern electrical code, that means someone renovated it at one point.
All modern buildings are compliant with building codes and there is very little room for creativity. If you don't like the building then you don't like the code.
You can build better than the code allows would be the point. Code cares about minimum levels of safety, not planned obsolescence or market segmentation. E.g. why not build homes out of concrete instead of wood? Why not use better roofing material than asphalt shingles? Etc.
Don't forget to adjust for survivor bias. You don't see all the terrible houses that they built in the 1920's because, well, they didn't last. But you better believe that then just like now plenty of people were throwing together houses in the cheapest way possible.
I'm pretty sure that labor is the most expensive part of building a house.
I mean, the insulation of a modern house is clearly better than your house stuffed with horse hair in the 20s, also using 10 times the wood to build a house I suppose is better…
I don't think they are lamenting the fact that these things have reduced in price but rather significantly in quality as well.
There is something to be said about price reductions, but at some point the quality lowers to a point where it has become a waste of resources as the product you bought will seize working within a short time frame.
I've always made this unfortunate experience with shoes. With good care, 100 Euro sneakers would last me about 2 years. A pair of handcrafted leather shoes I bought 12 years ago are still going strong. While the leather shoes were almost 4 times the price, they've paid for themselves at this point.
Obligatory mention: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory "The Sam Vimes "Boots" theory of socioeconomic unfairness, often called simply the boots theory, is an economic theory that people in poverty have to buy cheap and subpar products that need to be replaced repeatedly, proving more expensive in the long run than more expensive items. The term was coined by English fantasy writer Sir Terry Pratchett in his 1993 Discworld novel Men at Arms. In the novel, Sam Vimes, the captain of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, illustrates the concept with the example of boots. The theory has been cited with regard to analyses of the prices of boots, fuel prices, and economic conditions in the United Kingdom."
Tangentially related on the bigger picture: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1280581-the-state-of-t... "Money is a sign of poverty. (Iain M. Banks)"
> Every single house in the modern world has running water...reflects how thoroughly we've solved all the actually hard problems of water infrastructure.
It's worth pointing out that even in the US, the richest nation on Earth, millions of Americans don't have access to clean, safe. drinkable water. We still have a lot of hard problems in water infrastructure that need to be solved. It's not only problems in the engineering of those systems, but also in the management of those systems as much of our existing infrastructure is both inadequate in terms of meeting our current and projected needs and literally falling apart and at risk of failure.
We're way ahead of Rome in a ton of areas, but we're still nowhere near where should be. Look at our grades:
Dams: D
Drinking water: C-
Inland waterways: D+
Levees: D
Stormwater: D
Wastewater: D+
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/infrastructure-categori...
People are downvoting you because it is simply due to the different materials and building methodologies of the past.
Things took much longer to build and were much more expensive, but they were very durable as an effect.
There were no plastic hot tubs in Pompeii that burned when the pyroclastic flow swept past.
There were no plastic ones but there were very probably some wooden ones, or other luxurious wooden items which were destroyed without a trace and we'd never know
I mean, they certainly knew how to make wooden water containers: they wrote it down. This context is dye-making rather than baths,
- "...This water is boiled with an equal quantity of pure water, and is then poured into large wooden reservoirs [original: "piscinas ligneas"]. Across these reservoirs there are a number of immovable beams, to which cords are fastened, and then sunk into the water beneath by means of stones; upon which, a slimy..."
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/62704/pg62704-images.ht... ("Chalcanthum, or shoemakers’ black: sixteen remedies" (77))
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
“People” often fancy themselves to be smarter than they are and capable of judging others wrong based on their limited information and passing knowledge, as well as what they have decided to be true rather than what is fact. Things like “because things were made of stone, all things were made of stone”, or “because some things survived the tests of time, all things were built better”.
It is exactly the bias that was pointed out by the commentor.
I highly, highly doubt that the ratio of durable to perishable baths, spas and jacuzzis is now higher or even similar to what it was back then. Will we ever know for sure ? No, of course not.
Ability to buy cheap stuff, accessible to regular people and not ultra-wealthy is new.
You can still spend massive piles of money on long-lasting stuff.
This hot tub cost was likely higher than lifetime earnings of average citizen.
Also, its cost was likely greater than what would cost to buy several slaves. And likely was in fact built by slaves.
Of all things I see nothing to be depressed about here given our situation.
Wealthy Romans had a bit of a culture-boner for leaving a lasting legacy, maintaining the dynasty, and that sort of thing, and conversely often relied on ancestral clout to borrow credibility from. I don't think anyone today would try to base their credibility on being the distant relative of Ben Franklin in the way an upstart roman might invoke their familiar relationship with Scipio Africanus.
Makes sense they built stuff to last in such an environment.
Survivorship bias. The only artifacts we see are the ones that were meant to last. Those Romans who did not build for eternity have not been remembered, which distorts our view of thier society. It is akin to classic car enthusiasts who think cars were made better way back when. They think that because they only see the survivors. They do not see all the junk that history has rightly forgotten.
The city was buried in two days, if anything we may not see the most valuable possessions.
Something like 90% of romans did not live in cities. Survivorship bias again. We judge them buy the solid cities, or lord's manor houses. We have lost the mud/brick/wood farms where the vast majority lived.
I'm sorry, but you're getting into "I'm smart and want to argue a point" territory.
Nothing of that applies to Pompeii, as it was buried by a volcano, and everyone and everything that wasn't taken as the people were runnung away stayed as it was. It's basically the Pripyat of Classical Antiquity
> In some accounts of the Roman triumph, a companion or public slave would stand behind or near the triumphant general during the procession and remind him from time to time of his own mortality
It was also impossible to make things out of fiberglass, but hand-carved stone was actually available.
So was non-permanent building materials such as wood, to be fair.
Not really, that's the resource that disappeared faster than anything, being the simplest to get. Mediterranean forests have never been particularly dense, already the Greeks were moving lots of wood on the sea from the best locations. Stone was easier to get from the areas around Rome.
> That thing isn't going to last 3 winters let alone a volcanic eruption.
He can have a hot tub that could survive a volcanic eruption, he just has to to pay for it. Is your friend willing to allocate the resources, or is he happy with 'good enough'?
Nothing stops any modern person from building in this long-lasting style if they want to; except for the incredible expense, that is.
In your defense, I still think your friend could do better than a three-year outdoor hot tub, but that was them being unnecessarily cheap.
Isn't it the exact opposite? Every single house in the modern world has running water—it wouldn't be code-compliant, in any functioning country, to not have that. That was a high-status luxury in Rome. (It was even a largesse of the Emperor to be gifted[0] the right to have a private plumbing connection to an aqueduct—something considered highly desirable in that world).
The fact people today build inexpensive plastic Thermae as a novelty object, reflects how thoroughly we've solved all the *actually hard* problems of water infrastructure. The formerly expensive parts are now unimaginably cheap, so, we're exploring new places to cut costs that we previously wouldn't think of.
(It's akin to how computer keyboards are now 10x cheaper and junkier than they were in the 1960's–1980's (?), because, the other problems having been solved, that became a new focus of economization. No one would think twice about paying (the modern equivalent of) $100 for a well-engineered mechanical keyboard, in an era when the corresponding PC went for $5,000. The expensive object reflects an economic difficulty elsewhere; and the expensive Roman stonework baths perhaps reflected the costliness of water in general).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct#Distribution