Rising cost of materials.

And from a retailer POV, it's much better for them to sell me a crappy bookcase every year than to sell me a really good bookcase once.

Why do materials cost more? Why do things cost more? Aren't we theoretically getting more efficient at making things, what with all the industrial age automation and cheap out of country labor and such?

Overconsumption?

Plei! The politician man-love is gaining a following!! Stalin is no Henry Kissinger, but, it's a start.

Awesome!

Yeah, this is the bit that's upsetting. I just wonder how much of our disposable culture is vendor driven rather than genuinely demand driven. Like planned obsolescense software, but with far worse environmental consequences.

And from a retailer POV, it's much better for them to sell me a crappy bookcase every year than to sell me a really good bookcase once.

Yeah, I think the producers realized that it was a business-model mistake to sell things that last forever and that the average person can afford.

Well, we're getting more efficient at strip-harvesting old-growth, or even secondary-growth diverse forests and feeding the trees to chip mills that employ (a handful) of local people, then trucking the tons of chips to a port and loading them on a ship and sending them to Japan, where they employ thousands to make chipboard, and fashion Sauer and O'Sullivan "furniture" kits and load them on a boat and ship them back to the US, where they're sold to us in Walmart and KMart. And then the US Forestry Service reforests with fast-growing pine, which doesn't support the variety of dependent wildlife, either plant or animal, but it can be harvested pretty quickly to perpetuate the system in place.

I think the West Elm stuff looks way better than IKEA, but that's just from pictures. As noted, I still haven't been in.

My beds are futons (non-folding) with really great thick mattresses. In fact, the single bed's mattress is better than the one I sleep on every night. I like them much better than boxsprings.

We had those for a while. We really liked them, too, although we did break the frame in an incident that shall remain unspoken.

We used to have traditional Japanese futons, too, which are super thin, but still somehow very comfortable. Bonus feature, they rolled up and stored on a shelf during the day so we could repurpose our tiny bedroom.

I wonder if its not really that the materials are more expensive but that the workmanship is -who the hell knows how to woodwork anymore except in the high-end? Now you either get a hand made wood masterpiece or something press board spit out by a machine whereas before, maybe, there were a range of well-made (if not elaborate on the low end) wooden things.

Well. I have a gigantor pile of work piled on my desk, and my boss took today off. Normally I'd be flipping out like a mammal, but instead, I'm wondering if I can get away with playing Solitaire on my iPod.