One of my big pet peeves is when people say "people used to ..." and they describe something well-off or only wealthy people did in the past.
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For example I recently encountered a rant about the terrible quality of Temu furniture.
"Furniture used to be a family heirloom... but now it's disposable" --this isn't a statment without merit, but low quality items that didn't last may not be documented because they didn't last.
The selection bias of it all annoys me a little.
2/2
@futurebird A lot of even cheap "poor people" furniture was very very much better made than today and would last a very long time at least in the UK. Stuff was also of necessity designed to be repaired and repaired.
Bigger problem is there are loads of things everyone poor or employee of the rich knew how to do that were long term sustainable and few know now. Just look at modern paints on timber, non permeable renders and the use of aircon to replace good building design.
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For example I recently encountered a rant about the terrible quality of Temu furniture.
"Furniture used to be a family heirloom... but now it's disposable" --this isn't a statment without merit, but low quality items that didn't last may not be documented because they didn't last.
The selection bias of it all annoys me a little.
2/2
Yeah I remember the ‘heirloom’ cinderblock and wood plank shelves my parents had when I was a kid and the ‘couch’ which was an unpainted plywood box with a used mattress covered with a slip cover mom made on top.
I recall many injuries from knocking into the cinder blocks or stubbing toes on them, and splinters from sliding off the couch wrong.
Cheap furniture today looks nicer and is less likely to injure clumsy kids.
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One of my big pet peeves is when people say "people used to ..." and they describe something well-off or only wealthy people did in the past. "but nowadays people just..." and they describe something poor and broke people do today.
We don't have as much documentation of how poor people lived in the past... so in a way we don't know how poor people lived as clearly.
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@futurebird Maybe this is similar. I remembered this morning that there was a time in which I would listen to people like Sam Harris, Yuval Hararri or Stephen Pinker that would all draw a clear line of progress and how horrible our human tribal time was. One argument in this story that sounds so neat is how we overcame the horrible child mortality from the early industrialization. Only thing is, the horrible child mortality that was observed there, was not in a tribal society. So basically to come back to your pet peeve: People used to die so early most often in child bed is true for a societal model they champion, but they attribute it to a societal model they despise.
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@futurebird This is also true when people talk about sexual or racial diversity in the past, or disability. It is like they think elite straight able-bodied white men were the only ones who existed in the past, just because they wrote most of the books and laws that people know about now. The same people who hate being erased and oppressed now have always hated it! They even wrote and said a lot about it! But the books that get reprinted and read reflect elite viewpoints.
@carrideen @futurebird Oh the gnashing of teeth when a period drama dares to put a person of colour in costume on screen... There may not have been *many* non-whites in Ye Olde Englande, but there have been sailors, merchants and slaves moving around between Asia, North Africa and Europe since forever...
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One of my big pet peeves is when people say "people used to ..." and they describe something well-off or only wealthy people did in the past. "but nowadays people just..." and they describe something poor and broke people do today.
We don't have as much documentation of how poor people lived in the past... so in a way we don't know how poor people lived as clearly.
1/
@futurebird
These temporal biases exist in other forms too.For instance, there is a problem with racists and xenophobes pointing to old stock footage to highlight the massive differences from then and now.
For instance, there is enough historical data to show the diversity within London many decades ago.
Whether through ignorance or willful conflation, there is an emphasis on the whiteness of affluent areas in old recordings of Piccadilly.
Eschewing the fact that minorities may not have had the time and money to be hanging around there, it could even be that racists and xenophobes from back then may have actively avoided capturing them if they could have been within shot. -
For example I recently encountered a rant about the terrible quality of Temu furniture.
"Furniture used to be a family heirloom... but now it's disposable" --this isn't a statment without merit, but low quality items that didn't last may not be documented because they didn't last.
The selection bias of it all annoys me a little.
2/2
@futurebird Wallace Stevens' 1926 poem 'The Emperor of Ice Cream' describes a scene of folks who are less than wealthy, and makes note of the cheapness of the furniture:
"...
Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
..."
"Deal" here is a word that means a type of cheap pine or fir wood; the glass knobs are mentioned as a contrast to more expensive alternatives...
The poem is talking about a wake or funeral for a woman; the dresser was unlikely to be an heirloom piece, and this was the point... -
One of my big pet peeves is when people say "people used to ..." and they describe something well-off or only wealthy people did in the past. "but nowadays people just..." and they describe something poor and broke people do today.
We don't have as much documentation of how poor people lived in the past... so in a way we don't know how poor people lived as clearly.
1/
@futurebird It’s right up there with cis-white-straight people saying, “it was better back then” (gestures towards the ‘50s).
We all know what you mean.
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@mansr @futurebird Plywood is 1850s, some of the crappier ones like chipboard are WW2 though.
There certainly were cheap products, poorly made products in existence as well and plenty of them. There's a second level of skew in the data there because bad ancient furniture is long lost.
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@futurebird this ikea desk has been in our family for years (/joke)
@hi_cial @futurebird @ehproque Well, actually... (sorry to be that guy)
We have an Ikea desk, filing cabinet, and hutch cabinet in our family room that've been in our family for years. They have moved 15 times (at last count) to homes in three states. The holes where a keyboard drawer was mounted show it's definitely the fancy cardboard type of construction...nothing solid there.
The cheapo Sauder kit furniture my parents built for my childhood bedroom is planned to be used in our kids' bedrooms, so it will also be intergenerational "heirloom" furniture that has already been used across five decades.
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@futurebird Furniture has been a choice for at least my lifetime (for those who can afford it) - you can buy something disposable or you can buy something you'll never have to replace, the latter obviously costing more.
You can also buy stuff in the middle, that'll last for quite a while and then go tatty and need replacement. I tend to avoid this stuff and buy at one extreme or the other depending on use case.
I've always been a fan of buying disposable crap that fits the need (when it's something relatively urgent like storage for stuff that's in the way) and then looking for a better one to replace it with at leisure now that there is no time pressure
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I've always been a fan of buying disposable crap that fits the need (when it's something relatively urgent like storage for stuff that's in the way) and then looking for a better one to replace it with at leisure now that there is no time pressure
@gbargoud @futurebird Like, we found a freezer for something like £49.99 to keep stuff in for a few days until the repairman could turn up and fix our real one.
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@futurebird the
most annoying generalised-from-rich-people idea is that women used to stay at home while the men worked. Poor women have always worked - and usually ran the home too.(But on the disposable nature of things, have you read about why historical examples of shoes in museums tend to be tiny? I can't find the article I read about it now but it's survival bias again - the shoes that someone outgrew survived to be put into a museum, while the ones that fit got worn out.)
@louisa_ @futurebird THIIIIIIS! this is the one.
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For example I recently encountered a rant about the terrible quality of Temu furniture.
"Furniture used to be a family heirloom... but now it's disposable" --this isn't a statment without merit, but low quality items that didn't last may not be documented because they didn't last.
The selection bias of it all annoys me a little.
2/2
@futurebird reminds me of Frasier talking about "antiquing"
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@futurebird This is also true when people talk about sexual or racial diversity in the past, or disability. It is like they think elite straight able-bodied white men were the only ones who existed in the past, just because they wrote most of the books and laws that people know about now. The same people who hate being erased and oppressed now have always hated it! They even wrote and said a lot about it! But the books that get reprinted and read reflect elite viewpoints.
@carrideen @futurebird as documented (for sexism if not racism or ableism, tho these can all be opposed in a unified fashion as historically specific examples of "might makes right" ) by Joanna Russ: one of the first tactics of the pro-oppression structure is to make each generation of protest feel like the first generation of protest.
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For example I recently encountered a rant about the terrible quality of Temu furniture.
"Furniture used to be a family heirloom... but now it's disposable" --this isn't a statment without merit, but low quality items that didn't last may not be documented because they didn't last.
The selection bias of it all annoys me a little.
2/2
My dad was a great woodworker, but I only have a couple of small things because he died just when COVID hit and I had to leave in a hurry without time to choose and ship something bigger,, across the Atlantic.
OTOH, I am a poor woodworker but we have a couple of small cabinets I made with my son to teach him how to do it.
But he's followed the family tradition of being even less skilled than me.
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For example I recently encountered a rant about the terrible quality of Temu furniture.
"Furniture used to be a family heirloom... but now it's disposable" --this isn't a statment without merit, but low quality items that didn't last may not be documented because they didn't last.
The selection bias of it all annoys me a little.
2/2
@futurebird In the distant past, before mass production, it was probably the wealthy people who had less durable furniture: delicate details, refined finishes, upholstery that could wear out, and fashions that changed and made old stuff obsolete. With that stuff, there’s a survivorship bias too: it’s preserved through association with the wealthy and powerful and as a showcase for period craftsmanship.
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@becomethewaifu @futurebird it's particularly bad in the UK as we never really designed for heat but to stay warm and keep water out. Even our old buildings often have just enough loft ventilation to stop rot and you won't find cupolas, or any kind of vertical airflows, shading of windows from high sun etc. And almost nobody in the UK even knows about things like sheet cotton attached to the roof timbers so that radiant heat never impacts on the loft floor and thus room ceilings
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One of my big pet peeves is when people say "people used to ..." and they describe something well-off or only wealthy people did in the past. "but nowadays people just..." and they describe something poor and broke people do today.
We don't have as much documentation of how poor people lived in the past... so in a way we don't know how poor people lived as clearly.
1/
@futurebird It seems to me that learning from elder poor people in rural areas might help. I know my own family, subsistence farmers out of Wexford, Ireland, who landed in Pennsylvania and basically never left. I have furniture from them, including a cheap trunk brought over from the old country, and even that trunk has craftsmanship and care in it. I also have a kitchen table, and a desk, built by my great-grand and grandfather in their barn for their daughters. Plain but solid.
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@maswan @futurebird
Yes! I remember stories like this about houses built in the us (early days like 1600-1700) often times they would burn the house down and go through the ashes to save the nails and hinges. Much faster than taking a crowbar and hammer to it
and the nails would be intact. There wasn’t a “housing market” per-se at the time in the “wilderness” (which again is a terrible term from colonialism 
) and the conception was (at the time) that there were too many trees 
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For example I recently encountered a rant about the terrible quality of Temu furniture.
"Furniture used to be a family heirloom... but now it's disposable" --this isn't a statment without merit, but low quality items that didn't last may not be documented because they didn't last.
The selection bias of it all annoys me a little.
2/2
@futurebird Agreed! Furniture for poor people used to be boxes made of scrap wood or cardboard. Either that or throw-a-ways found on the street or at the town dump.
