My partner recently picked up some fine crochet bedspreads. These intricate bedspreads each must have consumed multiple weeks of labour. I understand this is also true of hand crafted Chinese and Afghan rugs - around a month per square metre for an Afghan.
In contrast, those basketball shoes you collect are mass produced and apparently consume around 3 hours of direct labour. You could have many tens or even hundreds of those basketball shoes for the labour value of a moderately size Afghan rug.
Hand-woven rugs, on the other hand, are largely unique in design and created by a single person.
The innovation in the design is almost icing to the cake, in terms of labor overhead.
Otherwise, it's more of a strategy to set a higher price tag, and the reseller and all the middleman taking all the extra revenues.
Irrespective of price, the inherent value of the rug is much greater - it still takes over 100x the labour to produce.
That it still costs less than 100x basketball shoes to purchase is more circumstantial, yet further demonstrates the fallacy of the argument.
At a certain point, most things can be boiled down something some philosopher has covered (and that's just through their specific lens). So the ideas are rehashed in this sense, though it'll be new to some people, and the perspective could help the concept to "connect" for someone else
Rugs were prized in nomadic and semi-nomadic cultures like Iran, where all your valuables had to be mobile. Traditional rugs require many, many hours of craftsmanship and are indeed works of art with deep cultural resonance. Turkmenistan even features a rug on its national flag.
Sadly, also a dying art despite its millennia of history as most rug weavers in Iran or Turkey have better options in factories or jobs. For the moment dirt-poor areas of Afghanistan, Pakistan or Tibet still weave, but the future is machine-woven rugs from China, possibly with machines deliberately designed to mimic the imperfections of hand-woven ones.
There’s a market for these types of businesses. In my area there’s a dude with a company that sells and maintains $50-150k+ Christmas light and decoration displays. He has ~100 customers. The men’s clothing place I go to is a group of guys hanging out having a good time - it doesn’t look busy, but their 4-5 customers a day are dropping $3-10k/visit.
Stores like that are “laundering” money like the rest of the commercial real estate world… by playing games with various (legal) tax schemes. They are no more illegal than a Hampton Inn or AirBnb guy.
Real money laundering places are restaurant/bar, laundromats, arcades, and low income residential.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2012/03/21/silic...
I can't understand how heirloom quality is abstract any more than say color scheme.
How is valuing a sneaker collection more abstract than valuing, say, minimalism or utilitarianism?
I've re-read the post multiple times, but I'm clearly missing something basic to allow comprehension.
- $50 - Something rug-shaped exists
- $100 - Durability
- $200 - Materials
- $500 - Comfort and design
- $1000 - Basic craftsmanship
- $2000 - Refinement of craft
- $5000 - Artistry & identity
- $10000 - Tradition
- $20000 - Mastery
- $50000 - Rarity/historical importance
- $100000+ - ?
Because most people don't cross-shop $20k rugs and $200 rugs, most people are focused on one or two aspects around their personal budget. The essayist mentioned being amazing by the craftsmanship and artistry (see scale above). A broke college student might just want something that holds up in their dorm room and see what materials it's made out of and comfort as meaningless and abstract. And a billionaire shopping for a rug for their office might take everything other than rarity/historical importance as a given and just be thinking about that.
I think there is a large cognitive bias to consider everything you can easily afford "tangible and important improvements" and everything you can't as "abstract"!
Basically, if you want to create a successful product, you have to offer some kind of relatable and attractive story for people to buy. And it is not the same thing as producing a good product per se. I’m struggling with that. And see great many people around struggling too.
And because of that, I started building this website https://provenancevault.com/treasures/discover (it's probably not ready to introduce widely yet, but relevant to this conversation)
Palo Alto may buy a lot of rugs, but it seems like one shop should be sufficient to supply the entire city.
Though now I am imagining Palo Alto rolling out its new, grand vision for commerce: to become the Rug Shop Capital of the Greater Bay Area. In cooperation with Stanford Business School's new program in Rug Store Management, and the department of Rug and Textile Studies.
Rug stores also seem to be perpetually "going out of business", but I don't know if this is actually the case and why.
His money doesn't come from the rug shops. He sells rugs, but the rug shop was where he used to meet investors and founders and make investments. I assume the rug shop in Menlo Park has a similar background.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/victoriabarret/2012/03/21/silic...
1. https://www.luxxu.net/blog/top-10-most-expensive-rugs-in-the...
I inherited my grandparent's 40-year-old Tibetan silk rug about 4x6m with a crazy dense weave. It's in storage, lol, because using it would wear it too much and sending it for cleaning it is a PITA. It's basically a white elephant item. I wished I had walls tall and long enough, because I'd consider framing it like a tapestry if direct sun wouldn't hit it.
So my advice is to take the pictures of book covers you have to get rid of. And organize them be it by the time period you have read them, topic or something else. One day you may be able to fish out memories you didn't think exist anymore.
ericpan64•5mo ago
smitty1e•5mo ago
Value is such a subjective concept. You finally get down to "We all need things transcending pure utility, connecting us to stories bigger than ourselves." at the end of the post.
Even if "bigger than ourselves" takes on some explicit religious angle--thinking the Amish here--there is still copious room to dislike the fact that the Amish are rolling around in "them new-fangled buggies" instead of being on foot like they were in the Good Book.
pixl97•5mo ago
Some people think Amish don't use electricity, but that's not true. You'll find quite a few of them with things like solar panels and LED lights. These things tend to have very long lifespans and no grid connections limiting needs from outsiders.
smitty1e•5mo ago
I guess if the unit of group analysis stays small enough, they can avoid the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons .
michaelmrose•5mo ago
The inherent built-in futility limits the virtue of this approach.
smitty1e•5mo ago
Indeed, the smaller "tribal-esque" approach of the Amish may be considered similar to that of the Native American tribes, and American History seen as a natural experiment of how the Amish would fare if government security were to vanish.
spondylosaurus•5mo ago
sandspar•5mo ago
smohare•5mo ago
Lettuce is one of the least appealing things I can imagine adding to a half decent burger. I’ve also never once cooked a burger I’d describe as “slimy”.
Obviously it’s all subjective at the end of the day.
ericpan64•5mo ago
mlpinit•5mo ago
So in the spirit of this blog post what kind of rug did you make and where would you guess the audience/audience distribution falls on the graph?
ericpan64•5mo ago
For me, writing this up was like finally laying-out and using some "fancy rug" ideas and admitting to myself they're nice though not necessarily practical nor particularly special. Though they're special to me and that's something I've come to appreciate for what it is.
I hope this was a "sweet deal" read for a good amount of people! And seems likely mostly somewhere in the middle, though confident that most people can take something interesting back with them