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 family heirloom? Cheap things were made of poplar and pine with enough paint to keep everything together and hiding the different bits of wood recuperated from something else. In Flemish there is a word for poplar "konijnenkotelaar" which means bad wood, just good enough to make rabbit boxes.
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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 
@em_and_future_cats
In this case it was in the early 1900s, and the farm was bought out by the forestry agency because growing lumber was seen as a better use of land in northern Sweden than farming or something (I'm not 100% on the motivation, just know who forced a sale).
@futurebird -
@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.
@HappytoBe @futurebird Or liberated from a company dumpster.
I remember friends visiting and asking me why the carpet in my bedroom didn't reach the walls at either end, why I had a chair that looked like it belonged in a factory, and why the kitchen table looked like pieces of old doors.
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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 can be expensive. A decently sized table made of actual wood by an artisan can cost you a few *thousand* €/$. Of course people don't even consider that and complain about modern furniture that is made of composite and is ten times cheaper. Works about the same but I guess it's not an heirloom.
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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 What do people expect from Temu products? I'm always pleasantly surprised if it survives being shipped nevermind being usable for more than a few hours
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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/
With a few exceptions, thankfully.
Thanks to Henry Mayhew, for instance, and his 'London Labour and the London Poor', it's possible to get some idea just how many impoverished and homeless people there were in 19th century London and how they lived. I've only read excerpts from it but it is astonishing.
There used to be establishments which charged homeless people a penny a night for room where they could sleep sitting up and roped into pew-like benches, to have some shelter.
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@vfrmedia @gbargoud @futurebird My grandfather was a proper cabinet maker. I've still got some of his stuff. It shows no signs of getting old or worn out.
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@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.
@DanielMReck @hi_cial @futurebird so, even better, you can have cardboard heirloom furniture!
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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
Survivorship bias is definitely a factor in this perception.But there is a kernel of truth in that sturdy, solid wood furniture has become much more expensive (demand being higher and trees not more numerous).
The gap is filled with cheaper, less durable furniture. So what we mainly notice is the declining quality of what we can afford.
Another bias is that we expect to spend more on personal electronics, computers, and other things that didn't exist decades ago. A person in the 1920s expected to spend more of their income on clothes and furnishings than we do.
Does that make us richer or poorer?
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100% We are currently saving up for a single Ikea cabinet for our kitchen. $400 is like a month of groceries.
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@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
@hi_cial @futurebird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands_(TV_series) You might be interested in this.
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@hi_cial @futurebird https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hands_(TV_series) You might be interested in this.
@hi_cial @futurebird https://www.castleleslie.com/home/historical-castle-ireland/ https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/colourful-collection-from-castle-leslie-1.299280 There is a story that discarded furniture thrown into a flooded summer house over decades paid for the renovation of a castle, don't know if it's true.
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@ClimateJenny @futurebird you still can! have you ever taken a hacksaw to IKEA stuff?
@ehproque @ClimateJenny @futurebird
Actually, no. The dressers were cardboard. Ikea stuff is a hundred times better.
As a disabled person, I've held back tears hundreds of times over the furniture that hurts my hands horribly to use, knowing now I could've got Ikea for the same price. Each year, I can replace one or two things.
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@temporal_spider @futurebird i wonder if our eating or moving habits have changed too - or the average quality of fibers in our clothing
like i'm actually pretty secure now but even now i look at some of the fancy stuff i could theoretically get and my brain just nopes out and i look for something thin and flimsy and cheap and most importantly **lightweight that i can move with one hand while i've got the vacuum in the other**... -
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
"where's the romance of travel" in first class, where it always has been -
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 All our heirlooms look a little bit like this
Edit: Dang it Suzanne, you got there before me. -
@stellarsarah @louisa_ @futurebird that’s a great point, basically they are PA, housekeeper and and events manager rolled into one but also ‘not working’ hmm
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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 read Lark Rise to Candleford last year and even back in the 19th century there was talk about how shoddy all the new furniture was compared to the good old 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
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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 Also annoying: the idea that "work" and "home" were/are two separate concepts, as though a person's work somehow isn't real if it's done under their own roof.
