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This kind of article depress me to the highest point. I'm not a "consumer" with "expensive taste", nor someone who put a brake on innovation. I want a house bu

• cies 5y ago
  > I'm not a "consumer" with "expensive taste" Saying so does not make it true. If you want to live in a house, your a consumer of house. If you like a nicer than most basic/economic house because "I'm going to live there for the next half century, it better be a place I love"; voila there come the expensive taste. Author explained where and where not the scale-upping worked in construction. It seems author was on point, even in your case. To author does not shove anything down our reader throats by saying how it is. You link to capitalism is pretty far of: the scale-upping worked really well in socialist places as well, in fact Marx himself obsessed over industrial scale-upping. You seem to be misguided over what capitalism actually means (spoiler alert: a system of law/govt that protects a person's hoarded wealth ad infinitum).
• jessaustin 5y ago
  You don't have to let the capitalists build your house. All building trades of today and (especially) yesterday are accessible to capable people. First, however, you're going to have to come to terms with the fact that "professional" is a capitalist word.
  • readflaggedcomm 5y ago
    Capitalists build for ourselves as amateurs, hobbyists, or artisans, too. Do we offend you as much as dog whistles do?
    • jessaustin 5y ago
      Who is offended? Building for yourself is great, but it is not an activity that is approved by the capitalists. If you didn't know that, you might not be a capitalist.
  • macinjosh 5y ago
    Oh no Capitalism, how scary! It has only brought us most every modern convenience including smartphones, this website, the COVID 19 vaccines, etc. Why so much disdain for something that has brought such good to everyday people? I didn’t even mention the number of people it has brought out of poverty across the world.
    • jessaustin 5y ago
      Capitalism taking credit for all of this is like a child taking credit for climbing a mountain when he spent the whole time in a backpack carried by a parent. Humans did all of those things. Capitalism was a method for robbing them as they worked.
• deleted 5y ago
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• WJW 5y ago
  > I'm not a "consumer" with "expensive taste", But also > I want a house built to last, by a skilled professional, > only locally sourced materials Pick one or the other mate, those points don't mix well.
  • alkonaut 5y ago
    Having natural materials instead of vinyl isn’t exactly extravagant… Did that article suggest vinyl siding, as in the exterior of a building using plastic?
    • Kalium 5y ago
      It specifically mentions vinyl siding as a cheap option that better-off consumers spend money to avoid in favor of more expensive wood or brick. Extravagance is perhaps, at times, a matter of perspective and opinion. Some might consider consciously choosing more costly materials, even if they happen to be natural materials, to be matters of aesthetic choice that increase cost. Or even expensive tastes.
      • alkonaut 5y ago
        I think in any scenario I’d rather refurbish half as often or build half the size and use “better” materials. Same as buying “good” meat at 2x (better cuts, organic, etc) isn’t a costly extravagance if you simply buy half as much by eating less of it each time or having meat less often. If there is one thing you immediately notice when you visit the US for example is you often see homes that are of quite shoddy quality but might be 2500sq ft or even 3000. I’d trade 500sq ft for a decent countertop alone…
        • Kalium 5y ago
          That's an excellent point! It also provides a handy analytical framework. I'm going to try apply it to siding. The cost differential between brick and vinyl siding can easily be a factor of five, and wood vs vinyl a factor of six (stone is more like 25). At this point you're trading 2400-2500 sqft of that 3000 sqft house to use "better" materials, assuming shapes that scale surface area directly with flooring size. I expect this resulting cottage will be of wonderfully high-quality materials, but you may run into a few limits on how many people you can have comfortably living there compared to the original 3000 sqft building. I imagine you might want to be somewhere in between, at which point your choice of "better" materials may become an extravagance in the eyes of some.
• deleted 5y ago
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• tootie 5y ago
  I feel like that's based on some naturalism fallacies. Durable plastic is more efficient to produce that growing a tree. And sourcing thingy locally isn't always practical. You want the best lumber for the job that will last and that's usually cultivated at scale. You can chop down trees from your backyard or you'll destroy your neighborhood.
  • PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    There's almost no such thing as durable plastic when you're talking about the lifetimes of traditional building material. As a result, without a genuine recyling process for plastic (rather than just "down cycling"), even if there was nothing wrong with it during its normal lifetime, it just becomes more trash at the end. Quite different for wood (stone, glass, adobe, even concrete).