Made in China
Space
seems to be getting more expensive (they don't make it any more, as
they famous expression goes), but as we chug along the way towards
Singularity, all stuff keeps getting better and cheaper. For example,
consider the three most recent pairs of shoes that I have bought at
Wal-Mart. (Shopping for clothes has always been really simple for me.)
Each one of these three pairs has been more stylish, more comfortable
and just plain better in every sense than any
pair of shoes that I ever bought while I was living in Finland, paying
back then prices that were about five-six times as high as what I would
pay here. And with these new shoes, I haven't had any of the usual
new-shoe problems such as my heel becoming so sore that I can barely
walk.
Since a perfectly good pair of loafers that I could wear to work can now be bought for about $10, I have to wonder how much even the designer clothes really have to cost and how much they have just plain old stupidity tax included in their price. First add up how much the raw material costs and how much the hourly wage of a seamstress or whatever machine it is that cuts and puts the garment together, plus the transportation and storage costs along the way. Even if some master designer gets paid $100K to design a new shirt, this would only add a dollar to the price of a single shirt if you manufacture 100,000 of them, making that particular piece of clothing still quite rare in the market that has over 300 million people. I would be surprised if even a brand name designer shirt would end up costing much more than $5 or at most $10 after such calculation. Anything you pay on top of that is, by definition, a stupidity tax that free market competition ought to quickly squeeze out of existence.
Of course, money spent this way can be blown on other stuff, such as trips to Vegas. We reserved our plane tickets and hotel rooms for our vacations. When I had typed in my credit card number to the wide textfield reserved for this, with spaces to keep track of the number that I am writing, and pressed the button to move to the next step, and the page gave me an angry error about the credit card number being bad. When I looked at it, the number that I had typed in had been truncated to 16 characters, including the spaces that I had typed in, so the last three digits had been chopped off. So here are three words for whoever wrote this system: stupid, stupid, stupid. In any programming language that I can imagine the ticket sales application having been written with, allowing the credit card number to contain spaces and then removing them internally before passing this number for verification would take about one more line of code. (Programming exercise: implement this line using your favourite programming language.) But let's you save me some work, the operating principle seems to be around here. I god damn swear that I will never even begin to understand programmers who, in all apparent seriousness, still believe that present-day computers are just as slow and have as little memory as the computers in the year 1970, and write their programs accordingly as if memory and processor power were some kind of scarce resource.
Even worse, my wife's full last name didn't fit in the textfield for this purpose, even though the visible textfield certainly was wide enough for this, and her name isn't even that long so that this would be a rare incident for the travel agency. So the end result was that we had to add her name inside the "special requests" box, so that an agent just called me and explained the extra bureaucratic hoops that we have to go through because of this. Fred Reed would probably get a laugh from this, as is evident from his column "Then And Now". And you know what, based on everything that I have read and heard so far, I can hardly wait getting to meet the American immigration officials and security personnel for the first time after 9/11, oh joy! I bet that there is some Ikhan Ibn-Qoqqari somewhere in the computerized government watchlist and this story ends up with me finding myself stuck in the airport or ending up in Gitmo.
But it's not just web programmers who are guilty of these idiocies, as the designers of simple paper forms have had a much longer time to improve their act but they don't. Several times when I have filled out all kinds of paper forms, I have been frustrated about their inconsistency, confusion and general stupidity. For starters, I have lost count of how many times I have written something in wrong place, for the simple reason that the form doesn't have its fields in a commonsense order. It is an especially handy trick to ask for DOB and today's date inconsistently, to ensure the maximum probability of error. Next, when a field asks for the street address and I write it there in full, in the ample space available for it, and then move on to look at the next fields that ask for "type" (street, drive, road, crescent etc.), "direction" (N, W, S, E) and "apt no" which I already wrote inside the street address field just like the vast majority of forms ask for, I always get a strong desire to strangle the bureaucrat who designed that particular form.
Many times the space allocated for a field is ridiculously different from the width of the values that you might expect that field to have. I have seen forms that had a small space for the last name, and then later had a huge space for province (which needs two letters). I am sure that it is great fun for the form designer to write the field names inside to fill most of the space in the field, just to make the writing even more cramped. Last, when it comes the time to sign the form, the space allocated for your signature should be especially small and as tightly surrounded by other fields as possible.
And Jesus, don't even get me started with the tax forms and their less-than-helpful instructions. I have a Ph.D. and despite this, I am simply unable to comprehend them. Good thing that there is a computer program that fills them out. You know, a program where you can just type in one box how much your income was, and this box is simply labelled "income". Good luck trying to find that particular place in the dead tree tax form.
Since a perfectly good pair of loafers that I could wear to work can now be bought for about $10, I have to wonder how much even the designer clothes really have to cost and how much they have just plain old stupidity tax included in their price. First add up how much the raw material costs and how much the hourly wage of a seamstress or whatever machine it is that cuts and puts the garment together, plus the transportation and storage costs along the way. Even if some master designer gets paid $100K to design a new shirt, this would only add a dollar to the price of a single shirt if you manufacture 100,000 of them, making that particular piece of clothing still quite rare in the market that has over 300 million people. I would be surprised if even a brand name designer shirt would end up costing much more than $5 or at most $10 after such calculation. Anything you pay on top of that is, by definition, a stupidity tax that free market competition ought to quickly squeeze out of existence.
Of course, money spent this way can be blown on other stuff, such as trips to Vegas. We reserved our plane tickets and hotel rooms for our vacations. When I had typed in my credit card number to the wide textfield reserved for this, with spaces to keep track of the number that I am writing, and pressed the button to move to the next step, and the page gave me an angry error about the credit card number being bad. When I looked at it, the number that I had typed in had been truncated to 16 characters, including the spaces that I had typed in, so the last three digits had been chopped off. So here are three words for whoever wrote this system: stupid, stupid, stupid. In any programming language that I can imagine the ticket sales application having been written with, allowing the credit card number to contain spaces and then removing them internally before passing this number for verification would take about one more line of code. (Programming exercise: implement this line using your favourite programming language.) But let's you save me some work, the operating principle seems to be around here. I god damn swear that I will never even begin to understand programmers who, in all apparent seriousness, still believe that present-day computers are just as slow and have as little memory as the computers in the year 1970, and write their programs accordingly as if memory and processor power were some kind of scarce resource.
Even worse, my wife's full last name didn't fit in the textfield for this purpose, even though the visible textfield certainly was wide enough for this, and her name isn't even that long so that this would be a rare incident for the travel agency. So the end result was that we had to add her name inside the "special requests" box, so that an agent just called me and explained the extra bureaucratic hoops that we have to go through because of this. Fred Reed would probably get a laugh from this, as is evident from his column "Then And Now". And you know what, based on everything that I have read and heard so far, I can hardly wait getting to meet the American immigration officials and security personnel for the first time after 9/11, oh joy! I bet that there is some Ikhan Ibn-Qoqqari somewhere in the computerized government watchlist and this story ends up with me finding myself stuck in the airport or ending up in Gitmo.
But it's not just web programmers who are guilty of these idiocies, as the designers of simple paper forms have had a much longer time to improve their act but they don't. Several times when I have filled out all kinds of paper forms, I have been frustrated about their inconsistency, confusion and general stupidity. For starters, I have lost count of how many times I have written something in wrong place, for the simple reason that the form doesn't have its fields in a commonsense order. It is an especially handy trick to ask for DOB and today's date inconsistently, to ensure the maximum probability of error. Next, when a field asks for the street address and I write it there in full, in the ample space available for it, and then move on to look at the next fields that ask for "type" (street, drive, road, crescent etc.), "direction" (N, W, S, E) and "apt no" which I already wrote inside the street address field just like the vast majority of forms ask for, I always get a strong desire to strangle the bureaucrat who designed that particular form.
Many times the space allocated for a field is ridiculously different from the width of the values that you might expect that field to have. I have seen forms that had a small space for the last name, and then later had a huge space for province (which needs two letters). I am sure that it is great fun for the form designer to write the field names inside to fill most of the space in the field, just to make the writing even more cramped. Last, when it comes the time to sign the form, the space allocated for your signature should be especially small and as tightly surrounded by other fields as possible.
And Jesus, don't even get me started with the tax forms and their less-than-helpful instructions. I have a Ph.D. and despite this, I am simply unable to comprehend them. Good thing that there is a computer program that fills them out. You know, a program where you can just type in one box how much your income was, and this box is simply labelled "income". Good luck trying to find that particular place in the dead tree tax form.
The premium price of brand name clothes, shoes, etc. serves a signaling (as in economics) function. Wearing recognizably expensive clothes signals other people (like members of opposite sex, prospective employers, clients, customers) that you're financially healthy. This is often a good investment.
I'm sure you're familiar with the sociobiological explanation for the signaling function of the peacock's tail. Same thing here.
Posted by Anonymous | 4:49 PM
Designer and quality clothes (not necessarily the same) cost more than Wal-Mart clothes exactly because of the free market, not despite it. A $200 shirt is not 20 times better than a $10 shirt, but even if it was 1,1 times better the expense would be justified if the buyer can afford the increased cost. You spend so much time discussing the dating scene and alpha-males etc that you should understand the difference that the stylish quality clothing can make in regard to getting some.
Posted by Anonymous | 4:50 PM
I pay some of my bills online, and what drives me nuts is that each of the six companies (electricity, cell phone, landline phone, car loan, and two parental student loans) with which I have a payment account has different password standards. Anywhere from six to ten characters is required. Some require a combination of letters and numbers, some allow just one type. Some are case-sensitive, others are not. It's most frustrating.
Peter
Iron Rails & Iron Weights
Posted by Anonymous | 9:49 PM
When you're talking about mass-produced clothes, today, "designer" clothes are a scam. There's offbrand stuff of equivalent or even better quality that is available much much much cheaper, because there it's all manufactured using the same techniques. There are a very very few exceptions to this - there are still some garment factories in the US and Europe that produce things that will last longer for various reasons - but anything that's made outside those places is equivalent to anything else, and you're just paying for the prestige of the brand.
However, bespoke is very different. Designer brands try to associate themselves with the quality of bespoke, which is insane, but has worked for generations now. Things that are made by hand, by skilled craftsmen, to your individual measurements, are superior both in how they look and how they wear. However, most people don't consider the increased quality to be worth the much much higher price, particularly in an age when cheap massproduced clothing is perfectly adequate.
Posted by Anonymous | 6:07 PM