An example: Dr. Phil's mansion is the opposite of minimalist.
What the real estate listing euphemistically describes as “eclectic finishes” inside truly do not disappoint.
⚒️🧪 Serendipity! How a 2.4 billion year-old rock “picked up by chance” turned out to contain surprisingly complex microfossils from the time of the Great Oxidation Event. https://news.unsw.edu.au/en/erica-picked-up-a-rock-10-years-ago-it-might-hold-the-oldest-form-of-complex-life-on-earth
I think the freaking out has lowered the bar. Trump would have had to soil himself to lose the 1st one because no one expects coherence from him. On the other hand, Biden's path to victory next time is "having a normal one." Pretty sure this was even a West Wing subplot at one point.
Yesterday, I shared this same Canada Day thread on Bluesky, Threads, and X. Here's what I found. 🧵
“Canada is such a northern country, don’t we want a little global warming?” I often hear. In a nutshell, NO. We’re warming 2x faster than the rest of the world, driving extreme heat, flood, and sea level rise we are not prepared for. The wildfire season started in Feb this year. Feb! #canadaday
The term itself hasn't changed it's just being used for marketing purposes out of band. I worked on a number of 8-figure houses and there are indeed a lot of crazy appointments. I had a client put in a suede floor, for example. Yes, it was awful. So were they.
There's a lot of survivorship bias here- a poorly built house from 1880 fell over before 1950 while a cathedral from 1500 is effectively immortal. There are houses being built now that will last 100 years but they aren't being built by Toll Bros.
More expensive marques have been emphasizing physical controls. The high end ones emphasize hand-polished physical controls.
A quibble: you're comparing a bespoke mansion to spec mansions. The 1886 reflected the tastes of the owner, the 2024 monstrosities are designed to appeal to those with no taste. The luxury you seek, by your definition, is not advertised to prospective buyers as it has already been bought & paid for.
An acquired taste that few people acquire
The Austrian economists are more than that- they were shamed out of Europe for revanchist elitism but pushed hard by American business interests to roll back the New Deal. And they've run the American economy since Nixon.