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>And my time I suppose maintaining the razor which isn’t much at all. Definitely not the case for me. As someone whose been recently exploring properly sharpen

>And my time I suppose maintaining the razor which isn’t much at all. Definitely not the case for me. As someone whose been recently exploring properly sharpening some high quality kitchen knives at home, there's a cost in time for sure to do things correclty both learning and executing. Once you learn, it's not too bad but there's a learning curve and time factor that's difficult to ignore. I need to set aside a good hour or 1.5 hours on a given weekend to sharpen my knives (find and soak my soap stone, gather my knives, get back my angles and motions down pat). I'm still a novice for sure and an expert may be able to sharpen quickly but that's a big difference from just grabbing a new disposable product ready to use. With a straight razor a certain amount of care also needs to be taken when shaving to reduce cuts -- safety razors aren't a bad invention overall. I suspect if you do a lot of regular shaving (e.g. body hair that's not just your face), it might become time consuming. I'm not saying reuse and repair are bad investments, I'm a huge fan of these ideals, but the time involved can't be entirely ignored for some consumer products. In many (perhaps most) cases, I agree with the thesis of the article that modern business practices are becoming increasingly misaligned from consumers and societies interests and becoming nothing but wealth extraction optimization factories in various forms. But, I think not all products are so clear cut and some legitimate progresses are not reasonable tradeoffs for everyone, like a safety razor (maybe not cartridge based but similar to the one described in this article). Now a safety razor for a cartridge is a pretty close set of advantages/disadvantages with clear cost savings.

agentultra 4y ago
Sure, learning how to sharpen is non-negligible. Like most skills it takes time to gain proficiency at first and pays off later. I only have to sharpen my straight razor maybe twice a year at most. Kitchen knives depends on use but a typical sharpening is 15 minutes maybe? I might do this 3 - 4 times a year. I do woodworking with hand tools which need to be sharpened far more often and that is fairly time consuming... but so is making wood projects from hand tools. I consider it part of the process. If we get to fully economic decision making the case can be made to prefer convenience over all else because of paperclip maximization. Instead of buying organic clothes made by hand and spending the time to maintain and repair them we prefer fast-fashion. It's cheaper in time and money to simply buy a brand new shirt. Along with the many other benefits it entails. But that has a cost too, doesn't it? Landfills chock full of disposed-of clothes, beaches covered in cables of clothes that have washed up on shore, and they're mostly made of oil-based products and will take centuries to degrade. People with families and children literally starving and wrecking their bodies in sweat shops to produce these throw-away, convenient, cheap clothes. Some times taking time to do things the slow, inconvenient way has a lot of benefits too that are not immediately obvious until we take a step back and stop trying to be in such a rush.
- newaccount2021 4y ago

agentultra 4y ago

Sure, learning how to sharpen is non-negligible. Like most skills it takes time to gain proficiency at first and pays off later. I only have to sharpen my straight razor maybe twice a year at most. Kitchen knives depends on use but a typical sharpening is 15 minutes maybe? I might do this 3 - 4 times a year. I do woodworking with hand tools which need to be sharpened far more often and that is fairly time consuming... but so is making wood projects from hand tools. I consider it part of the process. If we get to fully economic decision making the case can be made to prefer convenience over all else because of paperclip maximization. Instead of buying organic clothes made by hand and spending the time to maintain and repair them we prefer fast-fashion. It's cheaper in time and money to simply buy a brand new shirt. Along with the many other benefits it entails. But that has a cost too, doesn't it? Landfills chock full of disposed-of clothes, beaches covered in cables of clothes that have washed up on shore, and they're mostly made of oil-based products and will take centuries to degrade. People with families and children literally starving and wrecking their bodies in sweat shops to produce these throw-away, convenient, cheap clothes. Some times taking time to do things the slow, inconvenient way has a lot of benefits too that are not immediately obvious until we take a step back and stop trying to be in such a rush.

newaccount2021 4y ago