except at least the commie blocks were affordable lol

"cheap to build" meant "cheap to rent", not "our housing company is making record-breaking profits! 😃"

Except with supposed technological advancement and bigger efficiency it's supposed to become more affordable on a competitive market, yet it doesn't. It just becomes cheaper for the construction companies.

Soviet serial housing was better planned. There were intended green spaces and microdistricts (those didn't turn out very well, it became apparent that they are convenient to small crime).

It's not really "capitalism", it's an oligarchic system where everybody having power feels that it's very good for them. Ask Sergey Brin if he wants to change anything. It's the same in construction and everywhere, because why wouldn't it be - an oligarchization of one sphere of economy leads to the same in others.

At the same time the ideas of authority and law in the Soviet space were kinda similar to what your "land of the free" is developing now. Easy to forget that in USSR your boss knew all your history of past employment, and when you'd be leaving could write something so nasty there that you'd never work anything better than janitor after them. Or that a kid living with their family in one small room of a communal apartment in a Khruschev-era serial building could go as guest to a kid living with their family in a three-room apartment in a Stalin-era special building, both given by the state, see and eat something there that they would never at home, and that was the normal degree of inequality in the USSR.

BTW, yeah, I've gotten a taste of mentioning the Soviet elites the justice against whom still hasn't been restored in any way, - so my family lived in a two room apartment in a Stalin-era building (my grand-grandfather was a railways analog of an infantry general, and my grandmother is one of the architects of the Boguchan hydroelectric station), and judging from Wikipedia, Sergey Brin's family lived in a three room apartment in such (it's also there who his parents were). That's about who those immigrants were who could afford to be otkazniks for a few months\years before leaving for the USA. Jackson-Vanik was basically targeted at a small subset of the Soviet elite with Jewish ancestry. Soviet antisemitism was sort of a Soviet version of "first world problems". Again, my grandmother's sister's family also emigrated then.

And in western stereotypical portrayals of "how people live in (ex-)USSR" of late 80s and early 90s they too often show such living places. As if that were normal.

Yet the absolute majority didn't.

So, one of the reasons Putin could do what he did, - the absolute majority saw how people who didn't live too badly in the first place got an opportunity to be "liberated" and play "discount USA", while their own workplaces which would feed them somehow stopped doing that.

It's a very particular feeling of collective injustice when those who benefited most from a system dismantle it and blame it on those who benefited less.

So, getting back to Soviet bloc housing, interpeted as Khruschev-era. It wasn't so bad, considering the green around and the fact that people would move there from actual wooden barracks. And Stalin-era housing wasn't bad at all and still isn't.

Soviet Bloc Block Housing

Yep, 35 storeys and 400 units of plain beige whatever.

But you're missing the value of the modern mixed-use building. They just finished one nearby and it's insane:
- ground-floor light commercial - a pizza place, a daycare and I think a pet store in there so far
- parking is secure and underground, with a loading bay,
- 2 floors of professional - physios and notaries and some ad-hoc wework space
- 30 floors of apartments
- an entire floor of guest space - airBnB units, essentially - and common play-space.

All these pictures are accurate as I remember from the tour:

The units will look more familiar if you've been to Northern Europe, but a bit bigger. We looked at a 1150sqft 3bd unit with huge triple-pane windows and - 2024 building code - A/C built-in. If you don't count a garage - underground parking - the bigger ones are like small ranchers stacked on one another -- in concrete, so you don't notice you have neighbours.

They're not Bloc blocks; they put a few of these together and they have a small city.

Those phones were really convenient, taking just as much place in your pocket as needed, screen covered from being scratched by keys and other items.

Actually convenient keyboards.

It's just that why make ergonomic, optimized for the task, price-efficient things when a piece of useless crap called iPhone makes you more.

I swear, for market economies to work you need to outlaw advertising.

Smartphone where almost a solved problem til LG stopped making the V20 and made the next one with a sealed battery.

Combine the hardware features of an LG V20 and grapheme is, and you might have a phone actually fucking worth using. I want my DAC and 16 screw disassembly back, fuckers.

I have two laptops with broken hinges right now. Metal and other materials help with hinge support. plastic and constant use will break most hinges.

I used to do laptop repair, its a pretty common thing to replace.

Yeah, and personally, I don't feel any wish to go back to skeuomorphism. It is funny to look back to and feel some nostalgia, but I think it would look cheap now if they did it like 15 years ago. Maybe iOS' glassy-ui will create some elements that people like about it, but they luckily did not move back to busy ui element backgrounds.

I do partially agree with his buttons and app-points. I dislike how we are forced to download apps for everything, including the questionable tracking software.