We will never get anything like that here. It would be too much along the lines of “government interference with business,” that people vote for (via their representatives). Look at the difficulty we had getting a Consumer Finance Protection Board (thank you, Elizabeth Warren). Ana it’s constantly under constant threat of being eliminated.
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One exception: I have never found a sofabed worth the price. Within a few years, the bed folding components all start breaking down if you use them at all, rendering both the bed and the couch uncomfortable. If you don’t use the hideabed, the couch is unnecessarily heavy and difficult to move, and you have spend money for a feature you don’t use.
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Jerker desk. Come on!
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In Finland its original name was MÄSTURBATØR but they went with more subtlety for the USA.
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My Laz Z Boy couch is still running strong after 20+ years+. Best $700 ever spent.–
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I actually found a hide-a-bed that was worth the price - on Amazon!
If I remember correctly, I paid about $750 for something similar to what I’d find at Ashley furniture (I went to the showroom) without the bed and for around $1200.
Of course, I had to consider a two day delivery window, meet the truck, and bring the crate up from the street and then uncrate it myself.
Still, it was as comfortable as my family’s hide-a-bed we’d had since I was a child, with plenty of room to sleep unopened, too.
Long story short, it was easier to let it go than to move it across the country, so…bummer.
Here in Tijuana, I have at least two upholstery shops in my neighborhood that seem to do good work. I’m seriously thinking about keeping my eye out for a curb alert in San Diego for a hide-a-bed with good a foundation, and carting it down here to get it redone.
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My favorite chair was scored from a yard sale for $5. It must have been from the 60s, because it was sturdy, smelled like smoke and was ugly af.
After having it covered with a blanket for a long time, I had it reupholstered and painted. It cost me $400 for that and to have a matching ottoman (with storage) built. It was absolutely worth it.
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What age human being?
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So the safe’s off the market then?
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Maybe I have a picture of this somewhere, but I had a nice sofa that I had recovered in a really cool red and green tapestry print. It was quite an expensive fabric that I bought at a fabric clearance store.
Anyhow, maybe a year later I go to Goodwill and find this epic comfy upholstered rocking chair - more like a recliner in form - upholstered in the exact same colors as the couch BUT this one had freakin’ American eagles all over it. It was super comfy. With the couch, it looked like the coolest set of furniture ever. 70’s era Americana perfection comfy rocking chair + high class tapestry couch.
Unfortunately, I ended up moving briefly to a townhouse where we had a neighbor cat that would absolutely terrorize my cats by hissing and yowling at them through the porch window. One cat kept marking the rocking chair to the point that I had to toss it out.
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Stuff like this makes me think very fondly of Christopher Schwartz’ views on sustainability and furniture. He’s a bit heavyhanded to some degree but it’s definitely an interesting and laudable worldview.
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I’m not quite sure whether I loath the ‘-ly’ infestation or the ‘-able’ plague more. Unfortunately, the sheer number of twee tech startup names makes it sort of a N-body problem of pure hatred.
I thought it just meant that the domain was hosted in Libya. Could be I was misinformed.
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Now, now… Edsels were well-appointed and reasonably well-made (well, they had lots of problems their first year), a legitimate step up from your garden variety Ford.
They were just ugly as sin.
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Even back when Libya wasn’t a chaotic warzone, I don’t think that it was a terribly popular hosting spot(gets brutally toasty during the summer, which is bad for A/C costs; and it is rather weakly connected, which makes it uncompetitive against either hosting in close proximity to major network infrastructure and user population centers, if latency is your prime concern, or locations that are out in the sticks, not too hot, and close to cheap power, if it’s mostly a cost thing); but using a .ly domain does put you at the mercy of the terms of service of a Libyan registrar.
Since your site is almost certainly hosted elsewhere, the actual site isn’t going offline; and your odds of getting extradited or something are minimal; but having your domain name nuked without notice is eminently possible. Happened to bit.ly a while back. Maybe my hatred of URL shorteners is clouding my judgement; but I found the amount of slightly-petulant surprise that Mr. Metcalfe mustered upon realizing that just because the customer service reps speak English and payment in USD is accepted; doing business in Libya still subjects your business there to local norms you may not like rather hilarious. Sort of like the vein of humor that is westerners-over-their-heads-in-Dubai.
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Yeah. What the fungus said. 
I was thinking “registered” rather than “hosted” for the very reasons you name, but as it’s not my field, I was needlessly inaccurate. Thanks for clarifying!
So, I’m still curious: did the .ly thing follow from some fashionable craze for registering in Libya, or did people just want that suffix 'cause it sounded catchy and memorable?
I think that the driving force was a desire for very short domain names that worked with the *-ly naming convention; combined with the ongoing shortage of snappy and not already taken names in .com/.net/other domains that don’t sound sleazier than downmarket ‘70s Miami strip joint(lookin’ at you, ‘.biz’); with the Libyan registrars willing to take advantage of the business; but not driving the trend.
Since this predated the still-unfolding nightmare of vanity GTLDs; the various country-code TLDs were what people had to work with, and Libya’s happened to overlap with the fondness for ‘-ly’ names; and even if you could get whateverly.com; whatever.ly was deemed shorter, catchier, more mobile/twitter friendly, etc.
I really don’t know what the backstory is behind the takedown incident. Libya was defiintely more open and accessable(at least in customer service terms, not in what-the-actual-terms-of-service-say terms) than some of the national TLDs(requiring residency and/or local business presence isn’t terribly uncommon); but they didn’t go quite as far as some of the small-pacific-island nations that, with effectively zero domestic demand for domain names, operated their registrars more or less entirely as cash cows.
I don’t know if they just hit the wrong rules lawyer on the wrong day; if there was a broader policy shift away from selling vanity domains to American startups; or what; but country code TLDs, by design, are administered by an entity in the jurisdiction of that country(where political reality allows, I think that there may be one or two that don’t actually have a state attached anymore); so going for a cute domain name in one of them always means adding another jurisdiction to worry about.
Sometimes this is an advantage(the pirate bay has very strong recognition of their domain name and has burned through about a zillion suffixes); other times, less so; like the .ly cases. I get the impression that a lot of the people involved just didn’t think about it: everything seemed frictionless enough; it was all ‘on the internet’, they didn’t need to hire a shady fixer/translator to hand off a suitcase full of cash, so it must follow basically the rules we assume that stuff on the internet follows, right? Not.So.Much.
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I would own a sofa bed if I could find one like this: http://www.campaignfurniture.com/archivesdetailspage.asp?stockNo=80921&imgNo=2&archive=1
I’ve figured out the folding seat cushion (tri-fold mattresses made from 4" laminated foam) and the folding mechanism. The hard part is the legs and the fittings, which are not actually that difficult, just rare now. If this could be built in 1805 for use during war, there’s no reason we can’t be making the same thing now.
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Jolie laide.
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The couch stuck in the stairway hall in Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency?
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