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 I remember when you could get a dresser made of heavy cardboard.
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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 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.
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@futurebird I remember when you could get a dresser made of heavy cardboard.
@ClimateJenny @futurebird you still can! have you ever taken a hacksaw to IKEA stuff?
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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 this ikea desk has been in our family for years (/joke)
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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 the old old old heirloom furniture my family DOES have from the working class end?
called a 5 plank bench. a very rough hewn wooden bench woodworkers can slap together on a job either to sit or lay tools on- whatev. my grandmother either found or made it, my dad still keeps it around as he was a woodworker himself
he grew up w her seating neighborhood kids at it for a meal and i grew up sitting on it w my cousins for meals when we visited
but its not "pretty" so unless youre woodworkers who find it charming, it wouldnt be passed down!!
pictured- not our bench but one like it. ours has quite a few more nicks, bumps and scratches from age
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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 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.
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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
It was only the other day I heard about this snobby put down
https://libquotes.com/michael-jopling/quote/lbq3b1l -
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 exactly - you can still buy heirloom quality furniture today. Its just expensive.
I've seen a lot of the inverse too, which bugs me even more more, personally - "back in the day everyone was poor as dirt and we just had beans and cornbread, when we were lucky. Now we can eat whatever we want 3 meals a day and people still complain about being poor"
Sir, you came up, not everyone did.
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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 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.)
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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.
1/
@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.
