The fact people today build inexpensive plastic Thermae as a novelty object, reflects how thoroughly we've solved all the *actually hard* problems of water infrastructure. The formerly expensive parts are now unimaginably cheap, so, we're exploring new places to cut costs that we previously wouldn't think of.
(It's akin to how computer keyboards are now 10x cheaper and junkier than they were in the 1960's–1980's (?), because, the other problems having been solved, that became a new focus of economization. No one would think twice about paying (the modern equivalent of) $100 for a well-engineered mechanical keyboard, in an era when the corresponding PC went for $5,000. The expensive object reflects an economic difficulty elsewhere; and the expensive Roman stonework baths perhaps reflected the costliness of water in general).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_aqueduct#Distribution
As a generally smart person with disposable income, I am unable to figure out how to find/purchase higher quality products that are not optimized for obsolescence. Increasingly it seems that _everything_ is as cheap as possible: expensive products are not higher quality, but are instead designed to appeal to the premium market segment.
I've bought a ton of old stuff off eBay and similar sites and antique stores especially with this mentality. I can likely toss a grenade into my living room and most of my stuff will survive. I know my WWII sonar recorder will survive.
I bought a BMW 325is from 1988 and I've put well over 150k miles on it since I bought it a few years ago. Nothing leaks, nothing breaks, nothing squeaks, and it still gets 7.5L/100KM. A 36 year old car I got for $7k. One weekend, a Bentley manual, and youtube, and I was able to fix up the throttle body, replace ball joints, update my steering rack, and offset my wheels how I wanted. (On the flip side if I get into a crash I am insta-dead).
Like I wanted good outerwear but as you said, it's all premium market segment stuff without the quality. So I asked my friend who does bike-packing year round and lives outside what he wears and he gave me an entire notebook of gear, prices, longevity, and especially weights. I've had that jacket for 16 years now.
Same with laptops. Cheap modern $500 laptop, or ancient Thinkpad I can upgrade in an evening for $250, that will last me 10x longer? Infinite examples of this.
> I can likely toss a grenade into my living room and most of my stuff will survive
Especially if it is a used grenade bought off eBay :-p
Paraphrased statement was something like "The company that makes these tools could make a high quality product that was rust, corrosion, and abrasion resistant. Except they don't. They make me a cheap wrench, that's planned for obsolescence, and rusts after a few months on the job. The company I work for could buy me a high quality set of tools. Except they don't. They buy me whatever's cheap and don't especially care that they have to buy it again in a year. And then they expect me to go to your house and care."
#ExperienceAzerbaijan
What I’ve found works is to locate special interest forums where experts talk about the best products, and to look for “whole products”. What I mean by that is to find products with as few “processed” or mass manufactured components as possible. Certainly there are exceptions to this, but as an example compare the copper pots and pans made by https://duparquet.com/ with the “ingredients” used on a typical pan you’d find at Wal-Mart.
The 3mm copper pan costs quite a bit but is made with real materials and skilled human labor. (No affiliation)
The Wal-Mart pan is the cheapest “metal” possible sprayed with a chemical coating and some generic styling and branding Homesense or something.
Certainly you can find some more affordable pots and pans with similar features as the website I shared, but you have to be careful.
Almost all electronics will by definition be planned obsolescence. A pan to cook meals? Like cities and good architecture we figured out how to make great pots and pans, knives, and more a long time ago and there isn’t a whole lot left to do.
Unfortunately population growth has led to a need for cheaper and crappier products especially in the west to maintain a perceived level of lifestyle.
Because in a general way you can't say "I want X that will work perfectly until time Y". Instead, Xs are made my a process. That process can cost more or less: more meaning better quality ingredients, higher quality processing, tighter quality controls, whatever. This all yields end results are on a spectrum of quality - a likelihood that the item will last Y time within Z margin of error.
As chain is only as good as its weakest link - many systems will fail with a single broken element. And every time one of those elements breaks, I have a new problem with which to deal. Spend my precious free time figuring out how to do it myself? Try finding someone who will fix it for me, and hope they aren't going to just rip me off?
The example of a home lasting long is especially wild to me. In the US at least, the home is one of the major mechanisms of increasing wealth over lifetime and inter-generational wealth. People frequently buy homes in order to build equity. Having homes that only last a few decades means that they are worth significantly less, and/or require significant repairs and remodels after relatively short time. I know that when I bought my home, which was made circa 1920, I was really happy that, while old, I could be fairly confident it wasn't about to fall over.
I just don't buy that. Most people who do that seem to ignore the heavy costs of owning a house in the meantime: taxes, repairs, maintenance, insurance, commissions, upgrades, lawn care, pest control, utilities, alarm systems, etc.
I've serially owned houses over the decades. Sometimes I'll look at what I sold them for, when, and compare with their current zillow value. The return on every one is less than if I'd invested the money in the stock market, and that's NOT counting all those major ongoing costs I listed. It's just on the price.
Keep in mind that if your house burns down, your generational equity goes up in flames.
The point is that your question should not be "have I made a profit on these houses relative to an index fund" like a speculator.
Your question should be "would I have made a profit on these houses relative to an index fund if I had kept them rented out to tenants 100% of the time at market rates?".
The core to living in a residence you own shouldn't be the asset value, it should be the living. If you're neglecting the market rate for that quality of life in favor of focusing on asset appreciation, you're approaching homeownership in a backwards manner that is ultimately destructive.
I pay less for my mortgage than I did for my apartment, probably approximately 85%. That was last in 2016; in general, I understand that locally rent prices have gone up since then. Of course my mortgage hasn’t, but let’s set that aside. Also, my house is much better than my apartments were, so.
Anyway, the issue is that you have to live somewhere, rent vs mortgage. That’s the difference to consider.
I just had to fork out a big chunk for a new roof, and another large expense removing a very large tree that decided to lean towards the neighbor's house.
That's mostly because of land values, not building values. And it's largely not a natural occurrence, but it's due to NIMBYism and property tax regimes designed so that young people will pay for all the services used by retirees.
I’m sure you have reasons for believing this, but I cannot fathom it.
Put another way, look at what empty lots sell for, and compare that to what a similar lot with a (not dilapidated) house sells for, in areas where the land values would be similar.
The only exceptions I could imagine perhaps being the places with crazy property values. But, the US is large (so, not just San Francisco)
We picked up a house that needed updates. A few miles from work (were I to drive in) and on a lake. When we looked at the house, it showed terribly. We had replaced our bathrooms and a few other 'major' things in our previous house, so what might scare some folks is a few hundred to a few thousand at home depot and some possibly long weekends. Chunk by chunk, we've been making the house the way we want it.
I should be doing some drywall this long weekend. Way to dang cold to go out and pick up supplies.
> Put another way, look at what empty lots sell for, and compare that to what a similar lot with a (not dilapidated) house sells for, in areas where the land values would be similar.
In Japan the first one sells for more.
The one factor I could imagine is if cost of land is so expensive that anyone who could afford it is going to be wanting to do a ton of customization anyway.
Are you talking about rural Japan, not just e.g. Tokyo? What systems exist in Japan that make the building worthless?
Retirees have assets but not income (or they have low income). Younger people are the other way round. So depending on how governments use income taxes vs sales taxes vs property taxes it changes who pays for things.
California is the worst about this because of Prop 13, which basically means if you don't move then your property tax is much lower than it should be and newer residents pay for you.
Most of their assets are paper value, because they are located in stocks, their only home (and they have to live somewhere), etc… that if sold en masse would simply get pennies on the dollar or require expenditures elsewhere.
Is the concept of saving and then drawing down your savings to pay you living expenses unknown to you?
Given that I myself bought a house built in 1900 with original wood floors and loved it, I don't think it's unrealistic for someone thirty years from now to want the same. Our needs are unlikely to have changed much... if they don't want it, they can sell it or tear it down. That's up to them!
The double pane ones, however, leak after a decade or so. Then the interior of the window fogs up, and you're looking at a major cost to replace them.
Almost nobody has been installing single-pane windows around here since early 00s. Double pane is the default. Location is Eastern Europe, if that matters.
There were a lot of mosaics that were preserved too.
I saw marble in the temples, a bath house, and in the cemetery.
The roads still had ruts carved into the stone from all the carts that had run over them.
All modern buildings are compliant with building codes and there is very little room for creativity. If you don't like the building then you don't like the code.
Wouldn't concrete be harder to make additions to?
Most of Europe builds primary residence houses out of concrete air bricks of some kind or just plain bricks. Wood is used mostly for roof support. Wooden houses are usually built for vacation places.
There is something to be said about price reductions, but at some point the quality lowers to a point where it has become a waste of resources as the product you bought will seize working within a short time frame.
I've always made this unfortunate experience with shoes. With good care, 100 Euro sneakers would last me about 2 years. A pair of handcrafted leather shoes I bought 12 years ago are still going strong. While the leather shoes were almost 4 times the price, they've paid for themselves at this point.
Tangentially related on the bigger picture: https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1280581-the-state-of-t... "Money is a sign of poverty. (Iain M. Banks)"
Thank you for posting it.
It's worth pointing out that even in the US, the richest nation on Earth, millions of Americans don't have access to clean, safe. drinkable water. We still have a lot of hard problems in water infrastructure that need to be solved. It's not only problems in the engineering of those systems, but also in the management of those systems as much of our existing infrastructure is both inadequate in terms of meeting our current and projected needs and literally falling apart and at risk of failure.
We're way ahead of Rome in a ton of areas, but we're still nowhere near where should be. Look at our grades:
Dams: D
Drinking water: C-
Inland waterways: D+
Levees: D
Stormwater: D
Wastewater: D+
https://infrastructurereportcard.org/infrastructure-categori...
Could it have been a case of survivorship bias? I.e., perhaps jankier facilities have been built at Pompeii but simply did not make it at all or were not prioritized for excavation?
Things took much longer to build and were much more expensive, but they were very durable as an effect.
There were no plastic hot tubs in Pompeii that burned when the pyroclastic flow swept past.
- "...This water is boiled with an equal quantity of pure water, and is then poured into large wooden reservoirs [original: "piscinas ligneas"]. Across these reservoirs there are a number of immovable beams, to which cords are fastened, and then sunk into the water beneath by means of stones; upon which, a slimy..."
https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/62704/pg62704-images.ht... ("Chalcanthum, or shoemakers’ black: sixteen remedies" (77))
https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...
It is exactly the bias that was pointed out by the commentor.
You can still spend massive piles of money on long-lasting stuff.
This hot tub cost was likely higher than lifetime earnings of average citizen.
Also, its cost was likely greater than what would cost to buy several slaves. And likely was in fact built by slaves.
Of all things I see nothing to be depressed about here given our situation.
Makes sense they built stuff to last in such an environment.
Nothing of that applies to Pompeii, as it was buried by a volcano, and everyone and everything that wasn't taken as the people were runnung away stayed as it was. It's basically the Pripyat of Classical Antiquity
Today a hot tub can be had by millions.
He can have a hot tub that could survive a volcanic eruption, he just has to to pay for it. Is your friend willing to allocate the resources, or is he happy with 'good enough'?
In your defense, I still think your friend could do better than a three-year outdoor hot tub, but that was them being unnecessarily cheap.
Funny to see that some things never change. You're about to get vaporized by a pyroclastic avalanche and your first thought is to grab your bling.
The modern form of banking is rooted in 14th century Italy (Medici and so on) [1].
"italia-south-1 was hit by a volcano yesterday, we are failing over to dalmatia-west-1 until issues are resolved. There may be some latency with obtaining coins today."
We underestimate just how much of a burden on arithmetics the previous systems were. Too unwieldy.
On a similar note, I believe that for the same reason, the Chinese language will never achieve mass adoption in the rest of the world. The script is too complicated and reaching effective literacy takes much longer than with Latin characters.
It is a difference similar to the one between a horse and a car.
So they did not really have place value system. Or at least logical leap from abacus to place value. Instead they had 1, 5, 10, 50, 100, 500, 1000 and summed or deducted these. Sometimes in stylistic ways.
The Roman empire was thoroughly monetized.
The relevant event took place in 79 AD, long after the end of the Bronze Age in the Mediterranean.
You can definitely have organized society without banking, but AFAIK there was no organized society without some form of taxation, and few organized societies without long-distance trade (only in isolated places).
From the Code of Hammurabi (~1750BCE):
> If a man rents a boat of 60-[kur] capacity, he shall give one-sixth [of a shekel] of silver per day as its hire.
At this point, a shekel is a unit of weight, not a coin, but is already being used as, effectively, money. Coins were initially more a convenience thing than anything else.
Primitive banking-type activity is also showing up in this time period; institutions, mostly temples, taking deposits and lending with interest. And really, for most of the world (Ancient India did have some _slightly_ more sophisticated bank-like behaviour), that’s more or less where it stayed til the 17th century or so.
Bronze age civilizations had money. Coins as we think of them became widespread in the iron age. Shekels, for instance, go back much further.
There is ample written evidence that Bronze Age civilizations had money and here's just one example.
Ea-nāṣir!!!!!
https://www.archaeform.de/wordpress/blog/2016/03/30/worlds-o...
There is simply nothing among the finds that could be money, and contracts seem to be in the form of I gave you 18 measures of wheat for three fat sheep. You gave me 7 jugs of oil, and I will make you 8 pairs of sandals" (all numbers and everything made up right now)
He asserts multiple times the existence of banks, money lenders, and multiple written records of persons demanding payment of money in his book Letters from Mesopotamia, Official, Business, and Private Letters on Clay Tablets from Two Millennia: https://isac.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/uploads/shared...
Do you have an alternate translation?
If I ever die, I hope it's after I'm long gone...
However, even in the modern era, somebody with a "bug out bag" or a "Wake Up, Stuffs Happening (WUSH) bag" still includes "cash" as one of the main includes in the top priorities [1]
[1] Basic 72-Hour Bug Out Bag List, https://www.bugoutbagbuilder.com/learning-tutorials/bug-out-...
May have been that way for the poor, or the less status enabled, like many commenters have noticed. Yet it's still a dissonance that such high quality piping, boiler rooms, insulated engineered waterworks, and other similar ideas were available. Even if in limited quantities.
What's that meant to imply? The people starving today certainly aren't better off than those wealthy Romans were. Not in any way other then a theoretical "if they stopped being poor" sense.
Essentially this Roman luxury mansion has an indoor replica of a typical communal Roman bath place.
Communal Roman bath normally has three section hot, warm and cold, and the latter so called frigidarium normally come with a pool [1].
The ancient Egyption, is as ancient to Roman, as to our modern world to Roman, and the rich ancient Egyptions typically have pool inside their luxury mansions.
Fun facts early ancient Egyptions didn't call their kings Pharaoh only the later ancient Egyption kings are called Pharaoh literally meaning "Great House" that almost certainly has pool inside their mansion or palace since swimming is one of their favorite free time or sport activities [2].
As for the modern world, when my friends and relatives who're recently retiring with excess money to spend, the first thing they did are installing permanent private pools inside their new renovated retirement houses.
It seems in house pools are human innate luxury craving items that common across time and culture.
[1] Frigidarium:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frigidarium
[2] Ancient Egyptian Sport:
In modern societies such super rich people flock to major cities, but in pre-industrial societies relocating would leave familial assets under-attended. Accordingly a well adjusted wealthy person would arrange for an excellent standard of living adjacently to their possessions
Also Roman economics were not really very local. The Romans had a large road network and were very mobile and traded even farther. You have for example Pelagius, a figure in church history, who was born in Britain and died in Egypt.
Even if you compare homes of ultrawealthy then and now I expect that most would take homes of XXI century.