I reworked that one for a developer talk at a Sun user's conference and told folks that SunOS would take $100 worth of disk drive space :-) Interesting both your version and mine have since been rendered invalid. As an ounce of gold is around $1200 and a really nice Glock 21 is only about $600. And a $100 of disk is like over 2TB these days.

There are a number of economics papers which evaluate economies in non-currency units, like hours of labor or commodity prices like gold or oil. It can illuminate strengthening or weakening efficiencies that a strict price analysis can miss.

Use SSDs and the SunOS one works okay.

SunOS takes about 240 GB?

okay, off by a factor of 60 still.

Same goes for a good men's suit.

Is there a secondary market for suits that I'm not aware of that isn't Goodwill? Clothing depreciation after purchase is almost as bad as cars, doesn't matter the quality.

It's a bit thin on the ground in the US. In the UK at least, the "charity shop" is an important part of the circulation of used clothes (and to a lesser extent books and ornaments). They are small and common rather than large and rare like Goodwill (I live in a medium-sized market town, population ~50,000, and there are dozens of them) and are usually run directly by charities with specific goals. It's a standard part of the culture to donate unwanted clothes, and the volume of donations is such that they usually only sell undamaged clothes. It's perfectly possible to only buy charity shop clothes, and because they're so cheap (price of a beer or two) one's wardrobe tends to grow quickly - until you run out of space and have to donate stuff to make room.

So it's a nice system. It's a shame that the US hasn't adopted it.

Used clothing markets in the US are so well supplied that donations are often packed into gigantic bales and shipped to Africa as mivumba, where they are recut into sizes more suitable for the local buyers. There is some debate as to whether the secondhand clothing trade to Africa helps or hurts the African economy, but I'm inclined to believe the former.

News and entertainment media will sometimes find an article of clothing with identifying marks in Africa and trace it back to the original owner as an anecdote for a story about some aspect of the industry.

But that aspect aside, there are slim pickings with respect to less casual attire in charity resale shops, especially if you stray too far from median sizes. Your best bet at finding a suit that you might actually want to wear is at estate sales for the recently deceased, or stores supplied by the unclaimed airline baggage clearinghouse in Alabama. The higher the value of the clothing, the less likely the owner is to give it up willingly.

We have plenty here in the US. I live in a town of population 70K and we have at least a dozen charity shops and probably as many consignment stores. Any place in the US I've spent significant time I've found at least one nearby charity shop for the rare occasions I needed a suit or peice of furniture.

I don't know who told you we haven't adopted that system. Tell them to look for a Salvation Army, they're like the Star Buck's of charity shops around here, there's one on every corner.

Thanks for the correction. My opinion came from my own experience living in the US nearly a decade ago. In my entire 20 years there I saw a single Goodwill and no Salvation Army shops (though I'm sure they existed). Perhaps I was unlucky, or unobservant, or things have changed, but at any rate from that environment the UK was a revelation.

Secondhand or secondary?

Secondhand - Thredup and sites like it.

Marshall's, TJ Maxx, Men's Warehouse, etc. You can also travel to Hong Kong, Beijing, or one of many other cities in Asia and have them tailored for much less than retail department store prices.

I wonder why the cost didn't go down. Are they still hand-made like 120 years ago?

Good question, I'd like to see the answer from more knowledgeable firearms enthusiasts.

Likely because partly what is considered a "good" handgun advances with the state of the art, partly modern insurance and regulatory requirements drive up modern manufacturing costs, and partly because of market dynamics for the use cases a handgun is put to. If you were mass manufacturing a mid-19th century handgun, with no improvements in its tech or metallurgy, without having to pay for the operational insurance and regulatory overhead costs, and it was accepted by the firearms-purchasing public in the same per capita adoption rates as back when it was originally produced, I can easily see it being a lot less expensive. But the purchasing public seems to seek specific characteristics in modern firearms, these characteristics don't appear to align with "use old tech", and this tends to set a floor price from what I can tell as a casual user.

Interestingly, replica mid- to late-19th century handguns sell for around the $600+ USD mark in the US, for the enthusiast market. Well-cared for, lightly-used firearms are reasonably close to quality as new for most non-enthusiast level users, and even many enthusiast users. So if inexpensive is what you are looking for, a used firearm from a trusted user goes for roughly half to 2/3 of new prices these days.

I think it definitely depends, the firearms purchasing public is as diverse as most other groups.

As someone who collects both, I find it amusingly similar to camera gear. Nikon vs. Canon, Glock vs. Sig, 9mm vs .45 or was it APS-C vs. Full-Frame? In both cases there exists the mass-produced item most analogous to the "tree find". Glocks and DSLRs found at big box stores. Then there are collectibles such as Leica or something from the Springfield Custom shop, or Les Baer. I could go on.

At any rate, I think some things haven't changed, craftsmanship is still valued and prized, but the common purchase is definitely of the more affordable items such as the mentioned $600 price point.

Firearms (along with sewing machines) were one of the earliest products to be mass produced with interchangeable parts. There wasn't a modern assembly line yet, but firearms weren't hand-made in the sense they were during the 1700s, where one gunsmith would forge every part down to the screws. That is probably one of the major causes of the declining prices noted in the article.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interchangeable_parts#Late_19t...

Winchester primarily sells to the upmarket sector these days: rather than "everyman" rifles, they sell to nostalgic or well-off collectors and hunters who want to have high-quality polished walnut stocks, beautiful blueing of the metal, and even engravings on some models.

Somewhat like how muscle cars from the 60s have in some cases appreciated due to baby boomers.

For contrast, Marlin sells a rifle functionally similar to the one discovered, also of vintage design (1894), for $729: http://www.galleryofguns.com/genie/default.aspx?item=1894

Winchester still makes that 1882 .44-40 rifle, albeit indeed as a nostalgic collector's item. If they made it for the "everyman" market - not unreasonable as many similar guns are - the price would drop to about $600 (between scale of production and elimination of premium finishing).

Eli Whitney introduced (if a bit dishonestly) the notion of building firearms from interchangeable parts in 1801. So 120 years ago was almost a century after that, so the item in question certainly wasn't hand-made.

Unlike most other products, there is really no room for cost-cutting of parts on a firearm. A dishwasher or vacuum cleaner may be cheaply made and still satisfy use for upwards of a decade until it breaks and the owner, with only mild annoyance, replaces it (speaking from personal experience of late); solid steel components both durable and replaceable progressively give way to breakable & irreplaceable parts, tolerated by society because prices drop. A firearm, however, has serious demands for durability and safety (breakage can gravely harm the user, directly or indirectly), necessitating solid steel parts meticulously milled (or comparably advanced polymers molded to likewise high standards); it still takes about the same amount of work to make one today as 120 years ago, with little room for cost-cutting. That durability also means they don't really wear out (taking decades/centuries instead of months or years), so older items retain their value and stabilize the price of new ones. Ergo, the cost - relative to other invariant standards like mundane labor or precious metals - has remained largely unchanged.

A lot of firearm prices are driven by "willingness to pay". I can't find the source as it was a long time ago, but I remember reading that Glock can manufacture a handgun for under $200 (they sell for $600).

If you think about it, a gun is nothing more than a collection of milled (or cast) metal parts. A certain level of precision is required, but the material and manufacturing costs (with automated CNC) are pretty small.