[zaphod12]

Overall this is a cool project. Not personally my favorite aesthetic, but super cool work.

I take issue with his characterization of japanese vs. western homes, though. Western homes are typically expected to be renovated over and over and last many many decades. Though the most modern ones may not last you 100, ask any buyer and they'll say they expect it to appreciate in value, be renovated and resold to someone else with no clear end date.

Most homes in japan depreciate and are torn down in 20-30 years. Buyers want new homes. https://www.archdaily.com/980830/built-to-not-last-the-japan...

yeah it doesn't jibe with a lot of folk's expectations...

[khazhoux]

It’s japanese fetishism, whereby the Japanese are an enlightened and graceful species, compared to the brutish and primitive American.

[suprjami]

Japan likewise has German fetishism.

[imwithstoopid]

This stereotype is partly due to the efforts of the US advertising industry which worked with the military to rehabilitate Japan's image after WW2, given that the US intended to turn a bitter enemy into an ally.

American ad man transformed the image of a nation-sized race cult into a quaint provincial island of passive nobility.

[adrianmonk]

I have two reactions to that, neither of which I love that I'm having:

(1) It's a very interesting idea, and I'm not 100% sure if I believe it, but it definitely doesn't sound unbelievable either.

(2) Can we do it again with North Korea? Maybe there's a path forward after all.

[vasco]

Last time "doing it" involved lots of fire bombing and two nuclear explosions, so I'm not sure.

[adrianmonk]

Yeah, I don't want that part for sure. I could have been clearer, but what I meant is that the idea has been put forward that the people of North Korea have the Juche ideology so deeply ingrained in them that, if the regime were gone (hopefully through peaceful means), the country would struggle to put something better in its place.

Right now, things are pretty bad. People are starving, there are human rights abuses, etc. If you want to change the course of a country, you have to remove the old order and (the part everyone forgets about far too easily) fill the void by somehow creating a new order that is stable and effective. This second part fails really often in history. I think it might be a huge challenge for North Korea if they ever get to that step.

[red-iron-pine]

And no worries about the working, actually-pretty-nice, other part of Korea

[syntheweave]

There are plenty of fallacies present in article. Appealing to the stuff that lasted a long time is the bullet-hole/armor meme. Modern Japan has plenty of examples of disposable consumerism. Invoking Blow and Muratori's names doesn't directly lead to "and therefore I will make a computer that does very little". Selling a good with less function as a luxury heirloom is just a common sales tactic.

A beautiful computer, to me, is a saddle to ride on - neither too cheap to respect, nor too expensive to use. That is, it's something akin to a Framework laptop with some nice peripherals and desk accessories, or FPGA recreations of old hardware. The mechanical keyboard market gets this - and it deserves further equivalents in other aspects of I/O, in the circuit designs and software stack.

Who will make the first heirloom printer/scanner?

[AstralStorm]

"User" serviceable mechanical devices like these do exist, that said they're expensive enterprise ones.

Some of the old laser printers in enterprises already border on heirlooms, having seen multiple companies...

[yetanotherloss]

The weak construction of US homes honestly should depreciate too, it's a cultural lie that we tell ourselves about how something built as cheaply as possible to 1970s codes by suburban land developers with asbestos and aluminum wiring is somehow appreciating versus the land it is sitting on.

I'd totally have torn down and replaced my house if that was something the homebuilding sector optimized for.

[Gigachad]

I wonder how this trend extends to the cities. You obviously can't build a highrise expecting to knock it down 30 years later. Do they just accept preowned apartments?

[nagonago]

Some highrises are advertised as long-lasting, for example with "200 year concrete" and so on.[0] However, I think this is mostly marketing fluff -- if a company thinks they can make more money by tearing down a highrise and building a new one, they will not hesitate to do so, and often do. It seems that historically most highrises don't last longer than ~50 years. With new construction techniques and materials, maybe that will change.

Smaller apartments are even more ephemeral. The official service life for apartments according to the tax code[1] is only 20-40 years, depending on the construction material.

[0] https://hamatawa.com/lifespan/

[1] https://www.keisan.nta.go.jp/h30yokuaru/aoiroshinkoku/hitsuy...