this post was submitted on 20 Feb 2025
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In general, I wish more things would have a common design that manufacturers get to reuse and incrementally improve upon. Take, for example, plastic chairs and office chairs. There's probably a million variations in existence and someone had to model, prototype, and make tooling for each and every one of them. Sure, there's varying price points, design languages, and use cases. But even for the same price point there's at least several thousand chairs with the same overall look and feel. All of that duplicated work and effort, only to make several thousand variations, none of which have a distinct advantage, and each with their own completely solvable problems. Why don't they just pool their efforts and design one example with as few flaws as possible for that overall design and price?
I agree with you, but I'm not sure how great it would actually be.
I don't know much about it and I suspect others will be along to correct me in a moment, but wasn't this a feature of soviet era communism?
As in, capitalists all compete in a free market to produce the best chair for the lowest price. Communism is more efficient because we just direct a factory to make 2 types of chair, standard and deluxe.
Capitalists compete to make the most money by convincing customers to pay as much as possible for a product that's as cheap as possible to make. The competition argument works in areas that are white-hot with innovation but can anyone honestly say the office chair of 2025 shows thirty years of innovation over the ones from 1995?
I was going to bring up the Herman miller Arron, but that released in 1994!
I'm not going to engage in a silly argument about the merits of communism as opposed to capitalism.
Then why bring it up and say someone will correct you if you're wrong?
Old mate didn't provide any fascinating insights into the manufacturing practices of soviet era communism, they just trotted out some meme-level anti-capitalist vibe-based hyperbole.