The wonderful thing about capitalism

[Richard_Kirk]

I can see why they made it like that. I am sure it was designed on a
computer, and the screenshots looked great. You get some wriggle-room if
you have a non-standard toilet where the holes have a different spacing.
The actual holes are in a big piece of fired ceramic, so they are much
larger than the bit of threaded rod, but the ends of the hole are
unlikely to be parallel-sided after firing. So, when you tighten the
thing you can shear off the top end if you buy the really cheap plastic
ones…

It could be worse. UK electrical fittings are all enormous, ugly, made
out of the same brittle white plastic with brass screws, and never
enough room unless you cut the cable to just the right length; and they
have been the same for 50 years.

Grrr.

[danimagoo]

I’m an engineer, and I’ve actually had good experiences with the marketing people I worked with. It’s the sales managers that always drove me nuts.

[muser]

Whooosh… (right over your head)
Did you even look at the picture?

[dan_smooth]

How frustrating. It looks like Mr. Beam isn’t coming back, and here you have completely solved his problem for him.

[Jorpho]

It’s the Central Services Showroom!

[anon50609448]

@Bozobub

I’m pretty sure communism, libertarianism, and general non-violence are things our species simply is not able to accomplish, in our present form. Hoarding things (violently) in small groups is how we do things, throughout history, since before history.

Yes, but also throughout history and before history this was the only way we could organize ourselves. There wasn’t enough food, we weren’t safe. We are currently in a very difficult adjustment period where people are trying to justify a system where we are violent and callous as either natural or morally right. There’s nothing “natural” about it, it’s just a response to a certain kind of environment.

@cepheus42

Capitalism is great at selling things everyone wants. Toilet seats, sneakers, cars, jock straps, printers, jackets, bricks, and on, and on, and on.

Is it? I mean, maybe it is. But in capitalism we define being great at selling those things as having the outcome that capitalism has. The market is assumed to produce the best result, therefore whatever happens is the best thing that could happen, therefore capitalism does a great job. The best!

People were making shoes long before we had anything like what we would call capitalism today. Those shoes weren’t great, but they were largely the shoes that people needed from among those options that local technology would allow. That was true in hunter gatherer societies, under kings and under emperors, when people were allowed to own land and when they were serfs and when they were slaves. Capitalism can’t take credit for people making or seeking out shoes. It sure can take credit for a homeless person who can’t get shoes despite living in an alley next to a store where a thousand pairs of shoes are going unworn.

What Capitalism’s defenders want to sell is that it is responsible for the technological advances that got us to this point. I genuinely can’t think of any reason to believe that.

[Enkita]

@Richard_Kirk

It could be worse. UK electrical fittings are all enormous, ugly, made
out of the same brittle white plastic with brass screws, and never
enough room unless you cut the cable to just the right length; and they
have been the same for 50 years.

It never helps to post that when there is someone else posting on BoingBoing who was for a time on the relevant BSi and industry committee.

The present system (BS1363) has been around since 1947 - this year is its 70th anniversary.

There is an amazing amount of design goes into those plugs and sockets. You probably wouldn’t believe how much. In 1947 the problem was to find an insulator which could stand the heat of the fuse when 13A was going through it, and which did not soften. That explained the nature of the plastic; it is rigid thermoset which, with the technology of the day, was hard to make non-brittle. A more expensive plug made of vulcanised rubber was designed to deal with industrial applications, and that is pretty drop proof. The included fuse and the ring main design means that the British system needs fewer RCBOs at the consumer unit and the safety pretty much takes care of itself.
During the 1990s MK* took on an industrial polymer chemist who was a bit of a genius and designed the first co-moulded plug that met all the relevant safety standards. Since then plugs have got smaller, as co-moulding the plug onto the lead has meant a relaxation from designing for a full 13A.
If you buy the cheapest, and possibly noncompliant, plugs from a shed that’s your problem. But in any case many other systems don’t allow you to replace your own plugs, or if they do it tends to be with some Chinese or Mexican piece of tat that is a real safety hazard.
I’ve heard people from UL agree that our system is the safest in the world, but nobody else is going to convert to it because of cost.

*I did not work for MK, this is not a puff piece.

[wait_really]

The unnatural thing of Capitalism is expecting it to last forever.

The organic-ness of capitalism is analogous to a virus. If we don’t vaccinate, it will consume until the host is exhausted of resources.

[Bozobub]

Once again, if you think I’m defending capitalism, you’re deluded.

What’s “natural” is how we, as a species, have acted since the dawn of history, especially before organized agriculture, and that was as tribal/clan-based groups, which has persisted to this day. Even later, with the rise of kingdoms/nations, those large entities are simply extensions of the “tribe”/“clan”, although our basic nature causes frays and cracks at the edges, when we do so.

“Capitalism” is, in some form, probably inevitable for a very long time, since we really don’t know how to “do” an economy that doesn’t involve capital in some form at a large scale. At the tribal level, yes, “pure” communism works just fine both in theory and in actual example, throughout history to the present. But attempting to generalize the tribal level to governing an entire nation simply doesn’t work very well, as history (and sociology) also shows us.

Don’t agree? Fine. But please do explain how we’re going to run a national economy without money, the essential root of capitalism. Then, how you’re going to “govern” a country with zero centralized power (communism), or how you’re going to regulate UNregulated markets (no, the “magic hand of Adam Smith” is not sufficient), without generating a ruling mafia class (libertarianism) and creating a kleptocracy (see also this Google search re: Russia’s perfect example). Good luck; no one has managed, to this day.

It’s an old saw, but apropos: Just about everything Marx said about communism, he got wrong. Just about everything he said about capitalism, however, is spot-on.

Note: We also need to realize that capitalism IS NOT directly contradictory to any other governing “-ism” because, unlike the rest, it isn’t a form of government; rather, it’s purely an economic system.

[anon50609448]

@Bozobub

That’s called “natural”, silly. It’s literally a direct part of how we evolved to what we are now.

I felt like you were arguing that that how things are (or how they have been) is how they always will be. If they were capable of such things, I’m the single celled organisms would have argued that multi-celled ones would never succeed because it was in the nature of organisms to eat one another. We behave differently when raised in one environment than in another. Environments change. The idea that we are just limited by a script built to deal with small communities of hunter/gatherers is silly.

[ddmone]

?

[anon61221983]

Freedom smells like shit and gunpowder?

[kwhitefoot]

That looks more like where I bought our last one (Jula, Mjondalen, Norway). I got a nice black one with a life size picture of a skull in flames.

[Bozobub]

Sounds cooler than that…err…toilet seat?

Edit -> What, is that a rifle with a toilet-seat stock, or a toilet seat w/ rifle attachment…? I honestly can’t decide o.O’ . Is that stock somehow more comfortable/accurate/whatever, or is it as silly as it looks?

[Medievalist]

@lolipop_jones

Wouldn’t life be more rational, more efficient…aw heck, more joyful…if some wonk in a windowless office had the job of deciding which one or two variants of each we were allowed to buy?

The problem is that’s already happened, and they decided on 500 pieces of junk, perhaps because that’s what they could produce in 3rd world sweatshops without functional labor or environmental protections at the highest level of untaxed profit.

When I look carefully at the toilet seats in Rob’s photo and then in some of the other photos here, I can see that they are junk, functionally inferior to older models that sported a chromed brass bar across the back to prevent the hinge attachment points from racking. And this one, on Amazon? Well, you’ll have to replace the bumpers with fabricated ones, because they are the wrong height.

@Enkita

People you never get to see determine what products are advertised to you. The biggest phone company in the world restricts the number of models as much as it can while trying to lock you in via services. An apparent huge choice of models worldwide turns into a very restricted choice in the US because those “wonks” want to steer you in the direction of the product with the biggest margins.

Boom! There it is. It hardly matters whether the “office wonk in a windowless office” was employed by a government or a corporation if the outcome is exactly the same, does it? And the outcome is the illusion of choice between poor quality items…

[wait_really]

Woah now, hold your horses! I was just weighing in on the naturalism argument, not making any claims regarding your feelings on the subject from an epistemic perspective. As mentioned, I agree that capitalism is natural, in so far as it represents an evolutionary stage in human economic activity.

That said, there’s a lot for me to unpack in your response. I feel like you’ve given it a lot of thought, so in order to respond, I’ll need a bit more time so that I can give you as considerate an effort. Consider this a marker for my future reply.

[Daedalus]

@anon50609448

What Capitalism’s defenders want to sell is that it is responsible for the technological advances that got us to this point. I genuinely can’t think of any reason to believe that.

In fact, there’s a good case to be made that most of the technological advances of the last 50 years or so were born out of public spending by government institutions.

@Bozobub

What’s “natural” is how we, as a species, have acted since the dawn of history, especially before organized agriculture, and that was as tribal/clan-based groups, which has persisted to this day.

By a broad enough definition of “natural,” every human activity is included.

I think the issue arises when we substitute “natural” for “desirable” or “morally good” or even just “inevitable.” Capitalism is a human activity, but it is not necessarily desirable, morally good, or inevitable. “Natural” suggests those things.

@Bozobub

We also need to realize that capitalism IS NOT directly contradictory to any other governing “-ism” because, unlike the rest, it isn’t a form of government; rather, it’s purely an economic system.

I think you’d find more than a few people who believe that capitalism is a form of government, or who at least believe that it is a set of principles according to which humans should be governed.

Capitalism is a tool, and a useful one in a lot of ways. But we should be careful confuse a useful tool with “human nature.” Capitalism isn’t human nature any more than fields of corn are human nature or oil drilling is human nature or the concept of money is human nature. These are useful tools, but the moment humanity is serving these things rather than the other way around, we’ve got some issues.

Capitalism is a wrench that lords and emperors and economists have put on a pedestal, so that it can be worshiped as the Only True Wrench.

[Medievalist]

@Daedalus

Capitalism is a human activity, but it is not necessarily desirable, morally good, or inevitable. “Natural” suggests those things.

Says you! God loves the digger wasp and the candiru fish just as much as she loves anyone else!

[anon50609448]

@Daedalus

In fact, there’s a good case to be made that most of the technological advances of the last 50 years or so were born out of public spending by government institutions.

I read Steven Johnson’s Where Good Ideas Come From a couple of years ago. Near the end he has a chart listing a very large number of inventions from the past few hundred years and categorizing their invention stories into four quadrants one two axis: market-driven or not and private or public. Private and market-driven is a very lonely box, while public and not market-driven contained the bulk.

I don’t think this was scientific or rigorous, but I also don’t think it was dishonest.

[vrplumber]

It’s the thought that counts