I cook my own meals because restaurant food is expensive. But there are many activities I would prefer to cheap versions independent of price.
I Like
I Don’t Like
bicycles
cars
entrepreneurship
jobs
solo adventure
guides
barbells
exercise machines
meditation
psychoactive drugs
Linux, LineageOS
Windows, Mac, iPhone
i3, CLI
GUI, IDE, desktop metaphor
autodidacting
school, tutors
From the perspective of someone with unusually high intelligence, activities involving skill tend to be cheap because our civilization has adequate material capital, The limiting factor of our industrial economy is intelligence.
I have to manually override my instinctual feeling that civilization is materially limited. It is true there aren’t enough spaceships and private airplanes to go around. Otherwise, we have plenty of material goods. Many people own too much stuff.
Since the limiting factor on wealth is humans’ inadequate cognitive ability to utilize our stuff, companies often create value by making things easier to use.
If the process ended here then we would live in utopia. But when a company provides the service of making something easier to use, it takes effective control of the distribution channel. Centralized control of distribution channels inhibits competition. Weaker competition gives companies leverage over consumers. The Invisible Hand compels companies to extract maximum profit from whatever leverage they have.
A prepackaged commercial product designed to make things easier for consumers tends to contain anti-features. Vehicles require special tools to interface with their computers. Apple employs pentalobe security screws. Universities charge fees for services you don’t use and require you to take classes you’re not interested in. Android distributors often won’t let you root your phone.
Expending effort to worsen a product is productively inefficient. An efficient market is a market that does not do inefficient things. Anti-features are market inefficiencies because anti-features deliberately make a product worse. Anti-features are negative sum.
Rational negative sum activities are often coercive. When coercive behavior goes one direction it indicates an exploitative relationship. Anti-features are the most flagrant signal that an organization is exploiting you.
Even touching a product with anti-features makes me feel unclean. Like many moral principles, this one has tremendous long-term advantages. My life is cheaper. I am exposed to less advertising. I have gears-level models of all sorts of things.
Transparent Technologies
I cook my own meals because restaurant food is expensive. But there are many activities I would prefer to cheap versions independent of price.
From the perspective of someone with unusually high intelligence, activities involving skill tend to be cheap because our civilization has adequate material capital, The limiting factor of our industrial economy is intelligence.
I have to manually override my instinctual feeling that civilization is materially limited. It is true there aren’t enough spaceships and private airplanes to go around. Otherwise, we have plenty of material goods. Many people own too much stuff.
Since the limiting factor on wealth is humans’ inadequate cognitive ability to utilize our stuff, companies often create value by making things easier to use.
If the process ended here then we would live in utopia. But when a company provides the service of making something easier to use, it takes effective control of the distribution channel. Centralized control of distribution channels inhibits competition. Weaker competition gives companies leverage over consumers. The Invisible Hand compels companies to extract maximum profit from whatever leverage they have.
A prepackaged commercial product designed to make things easier for consumers tends to contain anti-features. Vehicles require special tools to interface with their computers. Apple employs pentalobe security screws. Universities charge fees for services you don’t use and require you to take classes you’re not interested in. Android distributors often won’t let you root your phone.
Expending effort to worsen a product is productively inefficient. An efficient market is a market that does not do inefficient things. Anti-features are market inefficiencies because anti-features deliberately make a product worse. Anti-features are negative sum.
Rational negative sum activities are often coercive. When coercive behavior goes one direction it indicates an exploitative relationship. Anti-features are the most flagrant signal that an organization is exploiting you.
Even touching a product with anti-features makes me feel unclean. Like many moral principles, this one has tremendous long-term advantages. My life is cheaper. I am exposed to less advertising. I have gears-level models of all sorts of things.