I wish Inflation made everything more expensive!
143 sats \ 15 comments \ @tomlaies 25 May 2022 bitcoin
Instead often quality of things gets worse! And it's fucking annoying.
I hate low quality products. I hate things are made out of plastics. I hat that things are not made to last. Less and less from stainless steel or wooden - let's not talk about hair ornaments made out of horn (presents for my gf a few years ago ... almost not buyable anymore) or clothes from linen etc.
Inflation not only robbed me from what should be my property, posessions, ownership. It made life PERMANENTLY worse - and it fucking annoys me that corporations get away with it because people are not demanding it. Why aren't people furious?
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260 sats \ 1 reply \ @nerd2ninja 25 May 2022
You're not the only one who feels this way man. I strongly believe that partly because someone has to go out of their way to buy Bitcoin in a world paid in dollars, that Bitcoin businesses have to be higher quality to incentivize the "hassle" of using Bitcoin instead of a credit card.
Take the product whose quality has the largest impact in your daily life (so not a one time purchase probably) and sell that for Bitcoin and only Bitcoin. Make a business of it. I just got some quality coffee from El Salvador because of this for example.
And you know what, hell this is great market research. Make a list of things that maybe you don't know how to make in order of impact of quality has on daily life for you. Perhaps several Bitcoin businesses could be sprung from a single post.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @tomlaies OP 25 May 2022
Thank you for saying that. It's genuinely relieving to not be alone about these small things.
Idk about starting a business right now. Might think about it in the future.
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34 sats \ 0 replies \ @Brunswick 25 May 2022
I believe you are mixing the effect of innovation that causes everything to become cheaper, and inflation that causes everything to cost more in currency. It appears that inflation is reducing quality, when what is happening is inflation outpaces the deflationary pressure caused by innovation.
Innovation generally has the connotation of improvement, but it can also be used to reduce costs and increase profits without necessarily improving quality of the individual unit of a good.
For example, look at the price of potato chips. The quality of the chips continue to decline by using cheap seed oils and pesticide infused potatoes. Indeed the price continues to go up, the quality an quantity goes down, but the innovation is in reducing cost to hold the price steady or minimize the rate of increase in price. True, inflation adds to the pressure to innovate in these ways, but the underlying problem isn't that companies are making these changes, it's that the average consumer isn't aware or concerned enough that this is happening and they continue to purchase these products. This lack of awareness by the consumer combined by the seemingly coordinated race to the bottom aggravated by market consolidation to the food behemoths yields an end-product that is on the verge of poisonous.
I don't see how bitcoin fixes this other than reducing the opportunity for consolidating buyouts, to wit anticompetitive monopolization, by the means of cheap corporate debt from the government monopoly over the interest rate and over-investment in dividend yielding securities as a result of tax deferred benefit programs.
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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @k00b 25 May 2022
I think the title would be better written as "I wish inflation only made everything more expensive."
While I'm sad about things becoming lower quality, it's also fair to be sad about rising prices. Dalio quipped on Twitter that those of us complaining about prices are at least still able to acquire what we want, albeit at a higher price. The fact is that inflation will entirely outbid some people from things they desperately need like food.
That said, I agree and would like more high quality things to be attainable, but also acknowledge that cheaply made things let us scale the trappings of society to more people who might otherwise be priced out of having things at all.
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10 sats \ 0 replies \ @tomlaies OP 26 May 2022
I think the title would be better written as "I wish inflation only made everything more expensive."
but then less people would click on it ;)
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15 sats \ 1 reply \ @TheBTCManual 25 May 2022
Dude I feel you on a spiritual level my normie job is in marketing and it makes me sick to have to do this forced embellishment of absolute trash as people are desperately chasing nominal gains not realising they are long since unprofitable, the products don't matter it's all just about moving money around to create taxable income for the government.
We've lost sight of why we trade, it's such a sick game and because the game is more important than the underlying, the underlying (products and services) just shrinks and decays into an empty husk
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1 sat \ 0 replies \ @tomlaies OP 26 May 2022
Yeah, same. I work in software and I could beg my boss to give me more time to produce higher quality software. UI could look nicer, smart algos can be less resource intensive, parallelization could make things faster, more reliable and stable and faster software, more tests, less bugs etc.
But no, everything must be minimum viable product and cash has to get rotated from customer to corporation to salaries and dividends asap. No appreciation for high quality craftsmanship anymore.
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14 sats \ 2 replies \ @Jon_Hodl 25 May 2022
100% agree with you, man.
"Shrinkflation" is very real and is even more subtle and covert that price increases.
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1 sat \ 1 reply \ @tomlaies OP 25 May 2022
Yeah, shrinkflation kind of describes the reduction in quality.
Although shrinkflation also doubles the packaging with a doubling of price every few decades after they have shrunk it year after year after year. My gripe with reducedqualityflation is that it is completely permanent! The gardening buckets from stainless steel instead of plastic are not coming back, the hair ornaments made from irish horn too - not buyable anymore. Like at all completely - The shrunken Oreo packages can be replace by buying 2 of them - reduced quality is not so easy to fix.
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5 sats \ 0 replies \ @Jon_Hodl 26 May 2022
Well said. I think there will be a rebirth of quality artisan products as bitcoin grows in popularity because most bitcoiners aren't going to part with their sats for cheap high-time preference crap.
Maybe bitcoiners needs to shop more on Etsy and less at local retailers until they stop buying cheap shit from China.
The only way I will be spending my sats on things is if I feel that the quality of the product is going to last well into the future.
Quality craftsman still exist. We need to find them and support them in any way we can.
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5 sats \ 0 replies \ @premitive1 26 May 2022
we will get quality again, but we have to work for it.
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3 sats \ 1 reply \ @beb0 25 May 2022
A bitcoin standard will fix this. Don't give up hope. People will not part with their hard earned hard money for cheap crap. Demand will change. Everything you've described is a product of 50 years of fiat.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @tomlaies OP 25 May 2022
A bitcoin standard will fix this.
Yes it def. will!
But unfortunately it will take time until people actually relearn what is high quality. And infrastructure and production chains (e.g. the hair ornaments made from horn I mentioned...) will have to get rebuild - and maybe humanity even lost know-how about some techniques
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3 sats \ 0 replies \ @JustDavids 25 May 2022
Cool.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Ge 25 May 2022
because they do not know or they choose not to know...like cypher in the matrix he knows he's not really eating steak....like him most people want security shelter stability..even if the system is against them they still love that comfort because its all they know. " the people don't drink the sand because they are thirsty they drink the sand because they don't know the difference"
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