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"a burger and fries was $17"? That doesn't seem right.

https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/mcdonalds-old-photos/ shows a menu at McDonalds from the early 1970s. A hamburger and fries was $0.63 or (assuming 1970 and adjusting for inflation) $5.36 now. A quarter pounder and fries was $1.27, or $10.81 now. Add $0.15 or $0.20 for a soda ($1.28 or $1.70).

That's a lot less than $17. Add $1.28

To double check, in 1983 a hamburger and fries was $1.82 - https://archive.org/details/ucladailybruin92losa/page/n542/m... .

That corresponds to $6.03 now.

What sort of hamburger places were you thinking of that charged 3x the price of McDonald's, and do they only charge $17 now?

Read More: https://www.tastingtable.com/1817109/big-mac-price-compariso...


Like at a diner, not at the cheapest possible place that existed.

You'll need to give more details.

Diners like the one portrayed in The Olympia Restaurant sketches on SNL were cheap. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=puJePACBoIo

Others now are far more than $18.


There are a lot of products which are nowhere near my Pareto frontier, but for the most part I lack the information needed to make that judgement.

The result is that I, like others, spend too much on crappy products.


If other companies come along to fill the niche then how is it that the likes of Eastpak and whatnot have not died?

They are - the article finishes with them being for sale because they no longer generate money. They are not dead yet, but they are clearly out.

I give a more complete followup at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47779948 .

The article hints that they are dying - the holding company is looking to offload them because profits are down.

I did not explain myself well enough.

The essay show the timescale for "getting bought out, for their products to be reamed out, for the brand to be discarded" is 20 years or more, dating from the Eagle Creek purchase to the current "potentially up for sale."

That's a long time.

That means Theodores is also okay with the same decades-long process happening to "your power tools, your boots, your sunglasses, and about a dozen other product categories where a company you trusted quietly got absorbed by a corporation you've never heard of."

And after a new company X gains market share for its quality, we should expect the vulture capitalists to come swooping by again.

On the environmental side, every one of these packs is plastic waste after 18 months rather than 10 years.

It also means the methods people use to assess quality, despite omnipresent supercomputer phones and video-quality wireless networking, is ineffective, and manufacturers worsen their products knowing that. Why hasn't it gotten better?

So no, I don't see how Theodores comment about the chain of events should make anyone else also feel okay with it.


The "simple" answer is "markets aren't like textbooks".

Consumers are lazy and greedy.

The side effect of which is not-strict-enough regulation of negative externalities. In a perfect world, people would care about the downstream environment impact at least as much as they do about their time/money. But, they don't.


Yes, there is an entire narrative that first there was chaos, then there was waterfall, and then there was agile.

For example, https://www.infoworld.com/article/2334751/a-brief-history-of...

It's as if people believed that all the microcomputing software of the 1970s and 1980s, from VisiCalc to Zork to the Macintosh, was done by waterfall design.


Right, some people believe that. But did any of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto?

Oh, absolutely not.

The descendants of the Muslim colonists were defeated by the descendants of the Roman colonists, fighting under the banner of the Roman Church, and not by the native and indigenous people of the Iberian peninsula.

The native and indigenous people of the Iberian peninsula would be the Celtic, Iberian, Celtiberian and Aquitanian tribes conquered, colonized, and assimilated by the Roman Republic. The land was later occupied by the Germanic peoples before entering Muslim rule.


Uber was considered a startup:

"Uber: The history of the ride-hailing app, from start to IPO" https://www.businessinsider.com/ubers-history

"[Uber] quickly became the world's most valuable startup, "disrupted" personal transportation and food delivery, and became an emblem of the arrival of the gig economy" https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/11101...

"Kalanick tried to recruit him to join the startup, but at the time Uber looked like a luxury town-car service, not a worldwide transportation juggernaut." - https://techcrunch.com/2017/02/07/the-inside-story-of-the-ri...

Ditto Airbnb:

"Reservation-booking app Resy just got a massive investment from Airbnb, one of the most valuable startups in the world" https://www.businessinsider.com/resy-airbnb-investment-2017-...

Airbnb is one "of the top Travel, Leisure and Tourism startups funded by Y Combinator" https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/industry/travel-leisur...


> The 400,000 dead soldiers died mostly to disease.

I believe that in every major war of the 1800s, more soldiers died from disease than from combat.

Consider the War of 1812. "fully three-quarters of the war deaths resulted from disease, most commonly typhoid fever, pneumonia, malaria, measles, typhus, smallpox and diarrhea" - https://www.nps.gov/articles/military-medicine.htm

Consider the Crimean War. "death by disease exceeded the sum of "killed in action" or "died of wounds"" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crimean_War

Consider the US Civil War. "Of the nearly 700,000 soldiers who died in the Civil War, nearly two thirds or 467,000 died from sickness and disease." - https://www.nps.gov/gett/learn/education/a-nation-at-war-tra...

Oh, hey - in the Franco-Prussian War more soldiers died of combat than from disease (for the Germans, 28,000 battle deaths vs 12,000 by disease, and for the French, 77,000 battle deaths vs 45,000 by disease) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco-Prussian_War , so I was wrong! Though those numbers exclude "162,000 German[ civilian deaths] in a smallpox epidemic spread by French POWs" and "450,000 French civilians dead from war-related famine and disease".


You are completely right. Disease has been the major killer in most military campaigns of history. The original post stated that 400,000 soldiers died "mostly from starvation and exposure", which isn't correct. However, loosing over a third of an army to disease in 52 days, before any major battle solely to disease (Allen, B. M., https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA398046.pdf), is unusually high.

Starvation became a major problem later as supply chains broke down, and exposure became a major problem on the retreat. Though the retreat from Moscow included only about 100,000 people.


What other campaigns had a 52 day march or longer before the first major battle?

Perhaps the Siege of Baghdad, or some other Mongolian campaign? Or Hannibal's route to Italy?

I can't think of a comparable from the 1800s.


The characters in the movie and TV series MAS*H included unwilling civilian draftees who were doctors drafted to serve in the Korean War.

Doctors need to pass a lot of exams.


You can draft a doctor, from pool of doctors. You can't draft ATC, because there is no pool of spare ATCs. It would be like drafting air defense operators - there is no pool of them outside military.

I'm pretty sure some of the air traffic controllers for military airfields in WWII were draftees, just like many air defense operators were draftees before the military became an all-volunteer force in 1973.

We know from the PATCO strike there is a pool of spare ATCs, including "military controllers, and retired personnel who temporarily returned to service". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1981_Professional_Air_Traffic_...

Thus, retired civilian personnel is a possible draft pool for a skilled job like ATC which require passing a lot of exams.

That pool is small, certainly, but it was enough to break PATCO.


If the recent news about moving lots of soldiers from EU Nato installations back home is true, they'll have a ton of trained active military ATC's available to use in the US soon.

The situation is hardly comparable.

The French and Dutch were members of the Allies, with Charles de Gaulle as leader of the Free-French forces and Queen Wilhelmina the head of the Dutch government-in-exile, both in London. Both wanted the allies to get the Germans out of their countries.

There is no government-in-exile calling for the bombing of Iran as a method for liberation.

Just as Laos did not call for the US to drop some 2 million tons on that country - more than were dropped on Japan, Germany and Britain during World War II - resulting in the deaths of over 200,000 people, as part of the US's ineffective attempt to "liberate" North Vietnam.


The 1970s energy crisis as a result of issues in Israel and Iran did indeed help improve cars.

We had this thing called a 'library', with 'books', which helped me learn things outside my circle. Our schools even had a full-time librarian to help us with the technology. Even our church had a library, with a bunch of Tom Swift books.

We didn't live in the boonies like you did. On VHF we had 3 commercial network TV stations, an independent station, and PBS. On UHF there were more, including another PBS station, another independent station, and a commercial station in the Spanish International Network (SIN).

My parents could afford to buy a home and raise a family on a single income from my high school educated father. He died 10 years ago. My mother still gets benefits from his pension plan.

It's also true that cheap ass nylon tents are better than the canvas tents we used to camp in. While we metaphorically drown in plastic as the anthropogenic global warming predicted by the 1970s tightens its grip ever more.


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