7 ms·

The Vimes Boots Theory: Further Reflections

60 points by panic 8y ago

Jaruzel 8y ago
Off topic, but is dreamwidth.org a Livejournal clone?
- Avshalom 8y ago
  Sort of, it's started from a fork of LJ code and has been developed since. I can't remember why exactly the fork was made though because LJ has shot itself in the foot basically every two years since it started.
  - cowpewter 8y ago
    IIRC, Dreamwidth was forked off LJ after one of LJ's great fandom purges (probably either Strikethrough or Boldthrough). Basically, they cracked down on ton of fandom communities for adult content, and the fandom communities said, fine, we'll just make our own then, and did.
Alan_Dillman 8y ago
The thing I don't like about Vime's theory is that it postulates only two price points. That being said, I buy 200 dollar boots.
- n4r9 8y ago
  I don't think it postulates two price points, it just uses two for the sake of argumentation.
  - Alan_Dillman 8y ago
    The essayist doesn't but Vimes world character arc requires that he see the issue in black and white, top and bottom. I'm sure that was an allusion by Prachett: you're not supposed to think like Vimes. His books always have layers of meaning.
    - hyperman1 8y ago
      Leave of the white. I'd say he sees issues in black. He's a stark cynical copper who has seen anything. A lot of his internal monologue talks about how he wants to unleash 'the beast' but can't because his inner watchmen won't let him.
losvedir 8y ago
Heh, last year I bought expensive boots explicitly because of the Vimes' theory, but I have to say in my case it didn't work out. Maybe this comes from what the post says about "knowing what to buy", but I bought boots made by a 2nd generation shoemaker constructed out of leather carefully prepared here in Chicago. They're recraftable so I figured after the bottoms wore out I could fix them. But here I am a year later and the inside sole is coming up and squeaks with every step. I'm going to have to take it in to get it repaired, for probably $15-$20. From a consumer waste and natural resources perspective, I'm still happy with my purchase, but I'm pretty convinced that shopping every year or two at Walmart would leave the average person ahead, cost-wise. More generally, I wonder to what extent the Vimes theory is true. Richer people buy higher quality items and generally have a more luxurious life, but I'm not sure that it's cheaper overall. Or at least, there's a point where it's obviously the case (c.f. the T ticket vs Charlie card point in the post), but I think it happens pretty early on in wealth. Case in point, I bought a nice 2 year old Chevy from a dealer with low miles for $12,000 a few years ago and haven't had a problem with it. I can imagine that paying itself off quite easily vs. making do with a $3,000 beater that keeps falling apart and needing service. But from a purely cost perspective (not luxury), I don't think beyond maybe $15k or so, more money in a car will save you in the long run. So, I still kind of get Vimes' theory, but I only think it applies from, say, poverty to lower middle class level. Beyond that, I think upper class people spend more money on stuff, and get a sweet life because of it, but not as a cost saving measure.
- cco 8y ago
  I think you got some bad boots. To your example of cars, you've proved the theory; you bought a car at four times the price of the beater and it will last far longer than 4X and will do so more cheaply and reliably.
  - wycs 8y ago
    The general rule of cars is buy used, buy cheap and buy Japanese. A 6000 used Honda Fit will run forever with cheap maintenance. Spending more than 10000 really is not needed if you don’t care about impressing people. Though impressing people is often important and not necessarily a vice. Once Honda and Toyota go electric, those things will last a century.
mrdoops 8y ago
Taken further we find the problem of bottlenecked economic throughput or market participation due to the poor's access to capital. Markets thrive on distributed inputs to arrive at a consensus on value - the more participants participating, the more throughput of information being supplied to our markets. More participants is more information which allows healthier markets which provides more opportunities for growth. So what's the cost of a loan or other financial products? Of course there's utility in providing upfront capital in exchange for time-spread payments and interest (buy the $200 boots today), but what of the macro-cost of decreased market participation for the duration of the payments? The loan payments with interest is money that could've been used by an individual participating in the market that is instead piped to the financing provider who, by definition, is already richer. Given the rich, or a rich organization, has different buying habits and participation in the markets (different perspective = different information), how much economic flow, throughput, and growth are we losing from financial mechanisms which go from poor -> rich? In this sense wealth concentration is a problem of bottle-necking economic potential by depriving our markets of participants and diverse perspectives.
Androider 8y ago
Louis CK has a fantastic bit about this: "When you're broke, the bank starts charging you money... for not having enough money. If you have a lot of money, they give you money. Because you have a lot of money! You have so much money that we should give you some! Because you have a lot, you should have more! Here, take more money! Take this guy’s $15, fuck him, you should have it!" Like the article says, class boundaries are also knowledge boundaries. Because you don't know of any alternatives, you bank at the local BoA and get taken advantage of to the tune of $15/month in perpetuity with a low balance, or even pay a percentage at the corner check cashing place. Or you can get free banking and around 3% APY today if you have savings, know how and where to bank and how to structure a 12-month CD ladder. It's expensive to be poor!
- kwhitefoot 8y ago
  I have never paid for banking in my life. I lived for thirty years in England and then moved to Norway where I have been for 32 years and have had accounts with several different banks. The only charges I have ever had to pay are in Norway where I have to pay an annual fee for a credit card from my bank (I have several other credit cards that cost me nothing). As far as I know this is normal in the UK and Scandinavia, not sure about the rest of Europe though. So how do US banks justify USD 15 a month?
  - pm215 8y ago
    Note that since banks have to make a profit, if they're not doing it via an annual current account fee then they're doing it via setting interest rates and one-off charges for things like going overdrawn. What consumers will put up with can vary between markets (eg UK personal banking is generally fee-free, but a current account for a small business usually has monthly and/or per-transaction fees). It's as much about what the bulk of users are used to and thus what the bank can get away with as anything else.
    - roywiggins 8y ago
      And of course overdraft fees only apply to people who can't afford to keep a decent balance in the account- specifically the people who can't afford to pay overdraft fees.
CM30 8y ago
I suspect the accuracy of this theory is very, very market/area dependent. Sometimes paying more will get you a better product sure, but sometimes you'll have markets where the free/cheap solutions are better or where prices are mostly the same for the same quality products across audiences. Software is the obvious example of the former (with open source software often being as good or better than paid alternatives), but information/journalism/research/whatever could count to some degree too. If you know where to look, there's free content on par with some of the best newspapers and journals, especially now with the internet and passion projects/people using Patreon or donations to fund their work. They're the channels I feature in some of my underrated channels lists. For fields where you can't really pay more for a better service, well entertainment usually comes under that. That CD or DVD or video game or book will cost roughly the same regardless of who buys it and what shop they get it from. The idea works pretty well for clothing and appliances, struggles when it comes to software and is virtually irrelevant for movies or games. Then again, I guess you could say software is a field where at a certain level, the only thing that even remain are opportunity costs. Get skilled enough, and every buying decision becomes a question of whether you want to buy/download to save time or rebuild it yourself over the next few weekends or so.
darawk 8y ago
This is a pretty incomplete metaphor. If the rich person bought the cheap boots, they could invest the remainder of their capital in the market at say, a 7% annual return, over the long period they're not actually saving money by buying the more expensive stuff, most of the time.
golem14 8y ago
Since neither the OP, nor the comments give them, I'd like to have a few examples of high quality expensive shoes ... If anyone has suggestions, please enlighten us.
- veddox 8y ago
  I bought a set of Lowa Renegade boots 1.5y ago: https://www.lowaboots.com/mens/hiking/renegade-gtx-mid-sepia-sepia https://www.lowaboots.com/mens/hiking/renegade-gtx-mid-sepia... Originally for hiking, but they have also seen daily service as winter boots. Been very pleased with them for both purposes, and they're still as good as new. (As a student, this was a pretty big investment for me, but I'd definitely do it again!)
- Fins 8y ago
  I have some Y-3 fashion sneakers that I've been wearing pretty often for 5+ years and they are still in good condition (when I bother to clean them, anyway). Maurizi or Rossetti shoes seem to be holding up pretty well, too. On the other hand, originally expensive and equally Italian Malo shoes (granted, I got them at Filene's Basement for pennies on the dollar) seem to be designed purely to look at, but not to actually wear outside.
- ryanlol 8y ago
  How much are you willing to spend and what are you looking for? Viberg for example makes some very nice boots. If you were looking for sneakers, perhaps you’d be interested in MMM or Rick Owens.
l0b0 8y ago
Related is something which bug me about online ratings: there is just no way to know which of the people who voted on a category of products have anything like the same idea of "quality" as you do. I've certainly bought absolutely awful stuff online which had a 90%+ positive or better than 4/5 star rating. What ends up happening is that analysing the ratings of hundreds of thousands of customers is very often less valuable than chatting to a single person who has had a good experience with a single product. This is how flawed online ratings are.
- Fins 8y ago
  There's also the selection bias -- people who think the product is OK, but nothing special probably will not spend too much effort posting a review. But of course even if they do bother posting a review, ratings often do not have anything to do with the quality of the product.
- SAI_Peregrinus 8y ago
  Durability is almost never a part of online ratings. Who goes back and rates an item after a year?
hyperman1 8y ago
My personal shoes where €40 models that would last a few months at most. I bought more expensive ones, and they would also last a few months at most. Both me and my mom are known in the family for being total shoe disaster zones. So I'd given up that particular fight. Then one day my wife and me ended up in a small, local shoe shop. No customers there, just the owner. We weren't even looking for shoes. The owner was getting pension-aged and would close his shop in a few months. He told about how some company would make great but expensive shoes, and build a name for quality. After a few years, a big company would buy the brand, raise the price, lower the quality, and coast on the perception for a few years. He told this cycle goes on and on. He stopped selling the shoes as soon as he know the quality went down. Shoe salesman kept trying talking him into selling these shoes as it was easy money, and he kept throwing them out of the shop. He was getting very pissed off at this point. He talked me into buying a pair for about €160, which isn't the most I've paid for shoes, but more than I would give for that specific pair - they looked like my normal €40 models. Now these shoes lasted for about 7 years, which basically obliterated any personal record. Unfortunately, the shop is gone now, and the only shoe shops left are the big chains. I am still willing to spend the money, but I have no idea what I should buy.

60 points by panic 8y ago

Jaruzel 8y ago

Off topic, but is dreamwidth.org a Livejournal clone?

Avshalom 8y ago
Sort of, it's started from a fork of LJ code and has been developed since. I can't remember why exactly the fork was made though because LJ has shot itself in the foot basically every two years since it started.
- cowpewter 8y ago
  IIRC, Dreamwidth was forked off LJ after one of LJ's great fandom purges (probably either Strikethrough or Boldthrough). Basically, they cracked down on ton of fandom communities for adult content, and the fandom communities said, fine, we'll just make our own then, and did.

Alan_Dillman 8y ago

The thing I don't like about Vime's theory is that it postulates only two price points. That being said, I buy 200 dollar boots.

n4r9 8y ago
I don't think it postulates two price points, it just uses two for the sake of argumentation.
- Alan_Dillman 8y ago
  The essayist doesn't but Vimes world character arc requires that he see the issue in black and white, top and bottom. I'm sure that was an allusion by Prachett: you're not supposed to think like Vimes. His books always have layers of meaning.
  - hyperman1 8y ago
    Leave of the white. I'd say he sees issues in black. He's a stark cynical copper who has seen anything. A lot of his internal monologue talks about how he wants to unleash 'the beast' but can't because his inner watchmen won't let him.

losvedir 8y ago

Heh, last year I bought expensive boots explicitly because of the Vimes' theory, but I have to say in my case it didn't work out. Maybe this comes from what the post says about "knowing what to buy", but I bought boots made by a 2nd generation shoemaker constructed out of leather carefully prepared here in Chicago. They're recraftable so I figured after the bottoms wore out I could fix them. But here I am a year later and the inside sole is coming up and squeaks with every step. I'm going to have to take it in to get it repaired, for probably $15-$20. From a consumer waste and natural resources perspective, I'm still happy with my purchase, but I'm pretty convinced that shopping every year or two at Walmart would leave the average person ahead, cost-wise. More generally, I wonder to what extent the Vimes theory is true. Richer people buy higher quality items and generally have a more luxurious life, but I'm not sure that it's cheaper overall. Or at least, there's a point where it's obviously the case (c.f. the T ticket vs Charlie card point in the post), but I think it happens pretty early on in wealth. Case in point, I bought a nice 2 year old Chevy from a dealer with low miles for $12,000 a few years ago and haven't had a problem with it. I can imagine that paying itself off quite easily vs. making do with a $3,000 beater that keeps falling apart and needing service. But from a purely cost perspective (not luxury), I don't think beyond maybe $15k or so, more money in a car will save you in the long run. So, I still kind of get Vimes' theory, but I only think it applies from, say, poverty to lower middle class level. Beyond that, I think upper class people spend more money on stuff, and get a sweet life because of it, but not as a cost saving measure.

cco 8y ago
I think you got some bad boots. To your example of cars, you've proved the theory; you bought a car at four times the price of the beater and it will last far longer than 4X and will do so more cheaply and reliably.
- wycs 8y ago
  The general rule of cars is buy used, buy cheap and buy Japanese. A 6000 used Honda Fit will run forever with cheap maintenance. Spending more than 10000 really is not needed if you don’t care about impressing people. Though impressing people is often important and not necessarily a vice. Once Honda and Toyota go electric, those things will last a century.

mrdoops 8y ago

Taken further we find the problem of bottlenecked economic throughput or market participation due to the poor's access to capital. Markets thrive on distributed inputs to arrive at a consensus on value - the more participants participating, the more throughput of information being supplied to our markets. More participants is more information which allows healthier markets which provides more opportunities for growth. So what's the cost of a loan or other financial products? Of course there's utility in providing upfront capital in exchange for time-spread payments and interest (buy the $200 boots today), but what of the macro-cost of decreased market participation for the duration of the payments? The loan payments with interest is money that could've been used by an individual participating in the market that is instead piped to the financing provider who, by definition, is already richer. Given the rich, or a rich organization, has different buying habits and participation in the markets (different perspective = different information), how much economic flow, throughput, and growth are we losing from financial mechanisms which go from poor -> rich? In this sense wealth concentration is a problem of bottle-necking economic potential by depriving our markets of participants and diverse perspectives.

Androider 8y ago

Louis CK has a fantastic bit about this: "When you're broke, the bank starts charging you money... for not having enough money. If you have a lot of money, they give you money. Because you have a lot of money! You have so much money that we should give you some! Because you have a lot, you should have more! Here, take more money! Take this guy’s $15, fuck him, you should have it!" Like the article says, class boundaries are also knowledge boundaries. Because you don't know of any alternatives, you bank at the local BoA and get taken advantage of to the tune of $15/month in perpetuity with a low balance, or even pay a percentage at the corner check cashing place. Or you can get free banking and around 3% APY today if you have savings, know how and where to bank and how to structure a 12-month CD ladder. It's expensive to be poor!

kwhitefoot 8y ago
I have never paid for banking in my life. I lived for thirty years in England and then moved to Norway where I have been for 32 years and have had accounts with several different banks. The only charges I have ever had to pay are in Norway where I have to pay an annual fee for a credit card from my bank (I have several other credit cards that cost me nothing). As far as I know this is normal in the UK and Scandinavia, not sure about the rest of Europe though. So how do US banks justify USD 15 a month?
- pm215 8y ago
  Note that since banks have to make a profit, if they're not doing it via an annual current account fee then they're doing it via setting interest rates and one-off charges for things like going overdrawn. What consumers will put up with can vary between markets (eg UK personal banking is generally fee-free, but a current account for a small business usually has monthly and/or per-transaction fees). It's as much about what the bulk of users are used to and thus what the bank can get away with as anything else.
  - roywiggins 8y ago
    And of course overdraft fees only apply to people who can't afford to keep a decent balance in the account- specifically the people who can't afford to pay overdraft fees.

CM30 8y ago

I suspect the accuracy of this theory is very, very market/area dependent. Sometimes paying more will get you a better product sure, but sometimes you'll have markets where the free/cheap solutions are better or where prices are mostly the same for the same quality products across audiences. Software is the obvious example of the former (with open source software often being as good or better than paid alternatives), but information/journalism/research/whatever could count to some degree too. If you know where to look, there's free content on par with some of the best newspapers and journals, especially now with the internet and passion projects/people using Patreon or donations to fund their work. They're the channels I feature in some of my underrated channels lists. For fields where you can't really pay more for a better service, well entertainment usually comes under that. That CD or DVD or video game or book will cost roughly the same regardless of who buys it and what shop they get it from. The idea works pretty well for clothing and appliances, struggles when it comes to software and is virtually irrelevant for movies or games. Then again, I guess you could say software is a field where at a certain level, the only thing that even remain are opportunity costs. Get skilled enough, and every buying decision becomes a question of whether you want to buy/download to save time or rebuild it yourself over the next few weekends or so.

darawk 8y ago

This is a pretty incomplete metaphor. If the rich person bought the cheap boots, they could invest the remainder of their capital in the market at say, a 7% annual return, over the long period they're not actually saving money by buying the more expensive stuff, most of the time.

golem14 8y ago

Since neither the OP, nor the comments give them, I'd like to have a few examples of high quality expensive shoes ... If anyone has suggestions, please enlighten us.

veddox 8y ago
I bought a set of Lowa Renegade boots 1.5y ago: https://www.lowaboots.com/mens/hiking/renegade-gtx-mid-sepia-sepia https://www.lowaboots.com/mens/hiking/renegade-gtx-mid-sepia... Originally for hiking, but they have also seen daily service as winter boots. Been very pleased with them for both purposes, and they're still as good as new. (As a student, this was a pretty big investment for me, but I'd definitely do it again!)
Fins 8y ago
I have some Y-3 fashion sneakers that I've been wearing pretty often for 5+ years and they are still in good condition (when I bother to clean them, anyway). Maurizi or Rossetti shoes seem to be holding up pretty well, too. On the other hand, originally expensive and equally Italian Malo shoes (granted, I got them at Filene's Basement for pennies on the dollar) seem to be designed purely to look at, but not to actually wear outside.
ryanlol 8y ago
How much are you willing to spend and what are you looking for? Viberg for example makes some very nice boots. If you were looking for sneakers, perhaps you’d be interested in MMM or Rick Owens.

l0b0 8y ago

Related is something which bug me about online ratings: there is just no way to know which of the people who voted on a category of products have anything like the same idea of "quality" as you do. I've certainly bought absolutely awful stuff online which had a 90%+ positive or better than 4/5 star rating. What ends up happening is that analysing the ratings of hundreds of thousands of customers is very often less valuable than chatting to a single person who has had a good experience with a single product. This is how flawed online ratings are.

Fins 8y ago
There's also the selection bias -- people who think the product is OK, but nothing special probably will not spend too much effort posting a review. But of course even if they do bother posting a review, ratings often do not have anything to do with the quality of the product.
SAI_Peregrinus 8y ago
Durability is almost never a part of online ratings. Who goes back and rates an item after a year?

hyperman1 8y ago

My personal shoes where €40 models that would last a few months at most. I bought more expensive ones, and they would also last a few months at most. Both me and my mom are known in the family for being total shoe disaster zones. So I'd given up that particular fight. Then one day my wife and me ended up in a small, local shoe shop. No customers there, just the owner. We weren't even looking for shoes. The owner was getting pension-aged and would close his shop in a few months. He told about how some company would make great but expensive shoes, and build a name for quality. After a few years, a big company would buy the brand, raise the price, lower the quality, and coast on the perception for a few years. He told this cycle goes on and on. He stopped selling the shoes as soon as he know the quality went down. Shoe salesman kept trying talking him into selling these shoes as it was easy money, and he kept throwing them out of the shop. He was getting very pissed off at this point. He talked me into buying a pair for about €160, which isn't the most I've paid for shoes, but more than I would give for that specific pair - they looked like my normal €40 models. Now these shoes lasted for about 7 years, which basically obliterated any personal record. Unfortunately, the shop is gone now, and the only shoe shops left are the big chains. I am still willing to spend the money, but I have no idea what I should buy.