[HN Gopher] The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
Author : geox
Score : 361 points
Date : 2025-07-20 08:10 UTC (14 hours ago)
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| phtrivier wrote:
| Begs an interesting question : some people can still afford
| quality items that last (namely, the people that sell throwaway
| shit to everyone else ; or, more precisely, the people who earn
| rents from companies that sell throwaway shit etc...)
|
| Are things getting shittier for them, too ? Are luxury brands
| immune to "energy is getting expensive, and corporate needs to
| buy shares back and increase dividend, so we have to cut costs
| everywhere" ?
|
| In other words, are growing inequality going to end up having
| billionaires who functionally live the same quality of life as
| upper-middle-class from the end of 90s ?
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| It definitely takes more effort to identify non-shit products
| than it used to, but I would assume said billionaires have
| delegated that to someone else so won't notice.
| frereubu wrote:
| This is a great thread about wealth and craftsmanship. Wealthy
| people used to appreciate craft, which has morphed into
| spending lots of money on a brand rather than an understanding
| of what it is that they're buying:
| https://bsky.app/profile/dieworkwear.bsky.social/post/3lswmj...
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Excellent thread, nicely juxtaposed to this utterly insane
| sentence:
|
| > One is that attributes like durability -- which used to be
| a major factor in how people judged a product's quality --
| have lost relevance.
|
| I've noticed this in clothing and vehicles. If you want to
| own a durable car, you need to get an old one. Mid 1990s
| seems optimal for most manufacturers, some skew earlier (e.g.
| Mercedes-Benz which peaked about half a decade earlier). If
| you want durable shoes, it's very hard to beat a set of
| custom Limmers which are made pretty much the same way they
| were in the 1950s. Neither option is cheap, but you get
| something for it--knowing your car won't strand you with some
| bewildering array of christmas tree lights on the dashboard,
| and that your feet will be fine if you have an unplanned 20mi
| hike.
| nradov wrote:
| The actual wealthy people still appreciate craft, at least
| for certain things. It's mainly the socially insecure
| _nouveau riche_ who buy brands as a signaling mechanism.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Go and learn about the 1700 century and how people spent all
| their money on spices because it was trendy with other
| nobles. Why did they build certain buildings? Because nobles
| in other places built those buildings.
|
| The idea that people in the past where more sophisticated,
| and more intelligent is simply not true.
| ck45 wrote:
| I guess it depends. There are items for which there's just no
| margin for cutting quality. Take for example a Hermes bag.
| While some buyers would probably settle for less quality, the
| brand depends on the image of a high quality product, thus the
| bags have increased in price by 5%+x annually for the past 20
| years. That's a rate which is unsustainable for non-luxury
| items. Another example is Miele washing machines, which most
| likely deserve to be considered top notch and high quality. The
| prices have barely increased in the same timespan, which
| technically means they are 25%-30% less expensive after
| inflation. It's hard to imagine that the production process was
| improved by that much.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| I'm not sure the billionaire ever cared about the durability of
| things. Pretty sure most of them have people managing their
| things, who will throw anything to the bin at the first sign of
| degradation.
|
| Here's an anecdote:
|
| As a student, I visited one Hermes (French luxury brand)
| manufacture in Paris. They showed us how crocodile skin was
| worked with to make hand bags and showed us the finished
| products. They had two finishes for the bags: - with protective
| coating (brilliant) - without (mate)
|
| Without coating the crocodile skin was very fragile they told
| us, and even water droplets would stain the skin. We were quite
| surprised that anyone would spend a five figures amount of
| money in a bag that will get stained by anything, but the guy
| guiding us told us that their customers simply considered their
| products to be disposable item that would quickly be thrown
| away anyway.
| bradley13 wrote:
| Somewhat related: I have an acquaintance who maintains the IT
| infrastructure for a rich guy's house. Lots of smart TVs.
| Lots of cameras, with local data storage. Lots of IoT.
|
| At a guess, it's a 20% to 25% gig. Something is always
| breaking or misbehaving. The rich guy probably notices almost
| none of the problems. If he had to maintain it himself, he
| would insist on simplifying things.
| rr808 wrote:
| No one wants to pay for them. The $20 screwdriver is the same
| or better quality than the one 50 years ago. People would now
| have the option to buy the $1 screwdriver and then complain it
| doesn't last.
| esperent wrote:
| > clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash
|
| What clothes are these? I don't buy any kind of expensive brands.
| I don't take any care when washing. I don't own a lot of clothes
| so I wear each item weekly. And my clothes last me for several
| years at least. The dyes have gotten noticeably better than when
| I was a child - when was the last time you had colors run in the
| wash?
| Ccecil wrote:
| Costco garbage don't bleed :)
|
| Seriously though...
| jabjq wrote:
| I bought some dark blue trousers at C&A and after a dozen
| washes they are noticeably losing their colouring.
|
| Yes, I know, Cheap&Awful. I'm poor.
| rambambram wrote:
| Wearing the same now, can agree.
| sgt101 wrote:
| I bought some wrangler jeans, because I remembered that I had a
| pair years ago that fit me better than levis, the levis were
| quite expensive and the wranglers cheap.
|
| They were ok for the first wear - but not great to be honest.
|
| Then I washed them and they were unwearable.
|
| Didn't do anything fancy, just a cool wash, dried them on the
| line.
|
| They turned to cardboard.
| drdec wrote:
| That's kind of what happens to denim when you air dry it.
| They are fine. Wear them a bit and you won't notice. If it
| bothers you next time tumble dry them on low.
| amluto wrote:
| Having recently compared one tumble dryer to another, "low"
| covers an exceedingly wide range, from genuinely lukewarm
| to "damage my clothing please". Oddly, both machines I
| compared were LG and were not especially old. "Low" is a
| relative term.
| heartbreak wrote:
| Then beat them on the clothes line with a stick. Denim
| always gets stiff when it's dried like that.
| uxp100 wrote:
| Yeah, I like that about new denim. After 6 months of wear
| it won't do that so much and you'll miss it. Maybe the
| poster is used to denims that are not 100% cotton.
| subscribed wrote:
| Interesting, my experience with Levi's and Wrangler is
| equally the opposite, and to the larger extent - 501's, 510's
| would barely survive 6-9 months of wearing, while Wranglers
| (mostly Arizona And Texas) happily roll into... <checks
| purchase date> third year.
|
| Washing in 30 degrees, always tumble drying on low (dryer has
| a humidity sensor and stops when it's dry, doesn't overdo).
| mrweasel wrote:
| Levis quality has gone done and their pants doesn't last
| long, but neither does most Wrangler. However, Wrangler
| does have a line of pants made from 100% cotton, not added
| elastic materials. I have yet to test, but my theory is
| that the people who have long lasting Wrangler may have
| purchased the 100% cotton variant, but remind unaware of
| that fact.
| CarRamrod wrote:
| The last two times I purchased men's socks off the shelf at a
| big box store, they looked like fishnets after I put them on.
| Perfectly normal looking, brand name crew socks.
| Rotundo wrote:
| I've got a pack of seemingly nice quality t-shirts that got a
| lot shorter and wider after first wash. I tried stretching them
| back to their original form but that doesn't work.
|
| Used to be the cheap "three pairs for 10 euro" socks lasted a
| couple of years. Now I get, maybe, a year out of them before
| the holes get too obvious.
|
| And price is not a reliable indicator of quality. Buying
| expensive can be just as much as a gamble as buying the cheap
| stuff.
| throwaway2037 wrote:
| Do you have Uniqlo where you live? Cost performance is
| excellent.
| l0b0 wrote:
| "May shrink on first washing" or something like it seems to
| be pretty common; you might've accidentally tried something
| on which had that labelling (or didn't, which would suck).
| jmrm wrote:
| It happens the same to me. Probably we don't experience that
| because we don't either buy any cheap garments from Shein or
| similar Chinese stores.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| Shein crap falls apart in the first wash
| ginko wrote:
| I tried to get all kinds of expensive tshirts but I have yet to
| find a brand that won't develop holes around the seams after a
| year of weekly wear.
| phil21 wrote:
| It does seem to take some more effort these days to find
| quality, but it's mostly out there - even for clothing.
|
| For jeans I've settled on Duluth Trading for the time being,
| found a style and size that fits well and is easily cared for.
| Many washes later and they are just fine!
|
| Levi's still seems fine to me as well, but you have to get them
| from their "high end" retail channel - such as their own
| storefronts. I've definitely noticed a wide difference between
| that channel and the "low end" retail channels like Amazon and
| mass market retailers. Seems many brands are doing this weird
| "channel segmentation" thing recently.
|
| That said, you're not gonna find a decent pair of jeans for
| less than around $80 today, unless you get rather lucky with a
| clearance sale. This makes sense to me, despite my formative
| years price anchoring being 20 years ago and the initial
| sticker shock.
|
| I've found decent clothing for all my needs really - the most
| annoying thing is a brand discontinuing and item I started to
| rely on being there.
| yodelshady wrote:
| I'll name and shame - Fruit of the Loom.
|
| They may never have been amazing, but that's the point - they
| were a representative, middle-of-road brand and you could just
| _assume_ their clothes would last. I 've got a >10 year old
| shirt that's still fine and a new one that's holed after a
| single wash. It's not a QA fail, the loss of quality is very
| clearly deliberate.
| anarticle wrote:
| This article is really trying to gaslight us into believing it is
| only pessimism, when decline in quality is very real. The best
| example is that ikea no longer sells solid wood tables, they are
| particle board with wood grain stickers. The exciting part is
| they are more expensive than the original hardwood versions.
| jabjq wrote:
| I have a solid wood table that I bought at Ikea a few years
| ago. I think it's made of bamboo. Isn't that hardwood? Even if
| it's compressed I don't think it's made of grain. It definitely
| doesn't have stickers.
| ck45 wrote:
| Bamboo is not solid wood, it's bamboo stems glued together.
| noinsight wrote:
| Bamboo isn't even wood, it's grass.
| TrueTom wrote:
| Particle boards with wood grain stickers are the actual good
| stuff now. Ikea is literally selling cardboard with woodgrain
| stickers (that's not a joke).
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| It seems to support your point if you go through the whole
| article. It goes over both perspectives.
| frereubu wrote:
| That's what Ikea furniture has been made of for as long as I
| can remember (a few decades).
| Macha wrote:
| Ikea has had a few tiers of furniture. You could always get
| chipboard etc. stuff at the cheaper ranges but they used to
| have more better choices on their higher ranges.
| ncruces wrote:
| Is solid hardwood production better for the environment than
| particle board, at the societal level (i.e. over the average
| societal lifespan of the finished products)?
| jakubmazanec wrote:
| My experience is different (and I doubt that Ikea ever sold
| anything that wasn't made of particle boards). For example in
| Czechia, I bought the same bed in Ikea in 2010 and in 2021, and
| the price was nominally the same, so because of inflation, it
| is actually cheaper. But the quality went down and it's really
| bad.
| HPsquared wrote:
| A lot of that quality decline of the same product is called
| "value engineering". Companies are always looking for tiny
| ways to save money.
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > ikea no longer sells solid wood tables,
|
| A quick look at IKEA's web pages shows that this is simply
| untrue.
| anarticle wrote:
| Let me put it this way: in my area, the vast majority are
| veneers or what looks like a vinyl sticker. This is an
| inversion of what it used to be, which was the majority were
| hardwood. The market in every geo is different, but I am in a
| top 10 major city in US. I don't buy from Ikea online, so
| maybe that is possible! It doesn't change my experience
| though.
|
| This is the crux of my argument against these types of
| articles, they try to retcon "you are the one who is crazy!
| it's always been like that". I was searching at an autistic
| level for a dinner table for the last five years from IKEA
| until I just gave up and bought a vintage thing made of real
| teak, made by a craftsperson for less than a mid range
| sticker and mechanically separated wood table from IKEA.
| navane wrote:
| It's called inflation guys. Most innovation is selling an
| inferior product for a lower price. Most of us can only afford
| that. It's the same old inflation, but repackeged to keep the
| official inflation number down.
| ath3nd wrote:
| This is not inflation, it's divorced from all factors, these
| companies are raking in record profits, and they still squeeze
| out price increases, smaller seats, worse customer service,
| just because you have no alternative, you gotta take it.
|
| It's called "Enshittification":
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification. It's just the
| free market and the corporations giving a big middle finger to
| its clients. It's the same reason Microsoft can do all of the
| above:
|
| - "The company reported better-than-expected results, with
| $25.8 billion in quarterly net income, and an upbeat forecast
| in late April"
|
| - "Microsoft on Tuesday said that it's laying off 3% of
| employees across all levels, teams and geographies, affecting
| about 6,000 people."
|
| - "These new job cuts are not related to performance, the
| spokesperson said."
|
| Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/13/microsoft-is-
| cutting-3percen...
|
| If you are thinking this is in any way tied to inflation, it's
| not. It's just greed and the absence of laws to curb that
| greed. So you are gonna get less and worse for more money, and
| like it, because the monopolies are lobbying the governments
| and can do literally what they want to do in countries
| susceptible to it.
|
| When Broadcom tried these kinds of stunts in civilized
| countries, they quickly got shown their place:
|
| - https://www.networkworld.com/article/4015489/dutch-court-
| for...
|
| - https://licenseware.io/broadcom-faces-eu-scrutiny-over-
| contr...
|
| Does 800% and 1500% price increase sound to you like related to
| inflation? Enshittification is not out of our hands if we elect
| governments that have our interest in mind.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| On one side you have companies that are working hard 24/7 to
| have more money at any cost. On the other side you have
| average Joe who can barely work, have time for family and
| have time for relaxing.
|
| Also it is expected for the company to have absolutely no
| care for ethics unless it affects their bottom line. And
| there are many blockers for the average Joe like ethics,
| feeling guilt etc. etc.
|
| It is only natural that companies are pushing more and more
| as time goes on. And there is no reason it should stop other
| than companies messing it up?
|
| Maybe if gains were huge, the regular people would get some
| benefits but it seems like the gains are just not enough for
| that to happen anymore?
| ath3nd wrote:
| > On one side you have companies that are working hard 24/7
| to have more money at any cost. On the other side you have
| average Joe who can barely work, have time for family and
| have time for relaxing.
|
| You are taking that as a natural state of things, a law
| that can't be broken, while this is just the end effect of
| living under capitalism. It's not set in stone and can be
| changed. We just need to change the incentives:
|
| > It is only natural that companies are pushing more and
| more as time goes on. And there is no reason it should stop
| other than companies messing it up?
|
| Jail time for executives, breaking down monopolies, and
| enforcing of antitrust laws come to mind as an effective
| way that's worked in the past. Also unionizing and strikes
| for the workers for fair pay. State intervention and re-
| nationalization of companies that misbehave, especially
| water, utilities, transport and agriculture. Also
| progressive wealth tax up to 70%-99%, so there is less
| incentives to be greedy (if you think that's too
| much...well, that already happened in 50's USA).
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| > these companies are raking in record profits.
|
| Only the Mag7 are raking in projects. The rest have gone
| nowhere.
|
| https://x.com/pmarca/status/1946500584674324842
| carlosjobim wrote:
| Just because it's got a Wikipedia entry doesn't mean that
| it's the correct term for anything. Outside of the most navel
| gazing hacker communities you won't find anybody taking you
| seriously with that language. You sound like some kind of
| pervert.
| ath3nd wrote:
| Thanks for the input, very constructive. You sound like you
| really know what you are talking about, with all the
| counterexamples and links you gave to support your thesis
| that I am a "pervert".
|
| That's powerful debate skills, you really showed me!
| jabjq wrote:
| Maybe you shouldn't elect politicians who increase your public
| debt perennially by printing money like there's no tomorrow.
| Perhaps that way the money you earn would be worth something and
| you would be able to afford quality products. It's hard, I know.
| dazc wrote:
| I think it's inevitable that businesses will optimise for profit
| at the expense of quality as far as they are able without
| tarnishing their brand. Sports shoe companies, for example, have
| proven that you can take this to extremes so long as your brand
| is well-established.
| vdupras wrote:
| In inflation calculation, is quality taken into account? I guess
| not, given the inherent problem stated in the article.
|
| If that's the case, even if it's true that we can say "sure,
| quality is declining, but it's fine, just fine", it would follow
| that inflation is actually much higher than reported.
|
| When you buy a fridge today, it buys you the "fridge service" for
| a much shorter time span, forcing you to invest a lot more money
| into that service over a given time span. That's a steep
| inflation of fridge price that isn't counted in official
| statistics.
|
| This should be taken into account in inflation calculation. If
| this was, it would give a much fairer view of the decline in
| purchasing power.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| It is, in theory (hedonic price adjustment can go both ways),
| but I don't know how accurate their measurement is.
|
| Edit, now that I checked it looks like hedonic price adjustment
| measurements are performed on only 7.5%[1]of the goods in the
| CPI basket, and the main goal seems to be to avoid
| overestimating inflation by tracking quality improvements
| better.
|
| [1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/20239/correcting-quality-
| change-...
| vdupras wrote:
| The examples that the article give are "memory size and CPU
| speed for computers or horsepower and miles per gallon for
| cars", that is, technological improvements that would be a
| reason to adjust inflation value further _down_ because
| "quality" went up. Without, of course, taking overall
| lifetime of the product.
|
| So this would in fact make the inflation misreporting problem
| even worse.
| zer00eyz wrote:
| > According to a 2024 report by the software company Salesforce,
| 62% of these services in Spain are already automated. Today, it's
| easier to converse with a machine than with a real person.
|
| Whats adorable is that the author thinks this has anything to do
| with AI. Shitty AI is an excuse to get rid of customer service.
| It's a move that most of tech made a long time ago.
|
| How many times BEFORE AI have you heard the lament from someone
| that "Thank fully I am internet famous, or blew up on social
| media. because other wise google/etsy/ebay/Facebook would never
| have fixed their automated decision to pull the rug out from
| under me"
|
| > The conclusion is clear: society isn't adapting to the pace of
| technological advancement.
|
| Uhhh, the change already happened, in the attention economy the
| only thing that matters is your social clout (credit?).
|
| > packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients.
|
| Heirloom tomatoes in the grocery store. Avocado year round,
| Brussel sprouts that dont taste like ass. Whole Foods, and other
| more 'local' choices.
|
| > According to the expert, the main factor driving this criticism
| is that the great promise of capitalism -- if you work
|
| The problem is that there are lots of people all over the globe
| who are willing to do MORE for LESS and we are in a global
| marketplace. Adapt or die.
|
| > buy a house
|
| Except you can have all this. Plenty of people do: "buying a
| house" is very literally the same as it ever was:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
|
| > The real problem isn't buying pants that don't last or
| traveling in an uncomfortable plane. The real problem is that,
| with each purchase, we support two of the most polluting
| industries on the planet.
|
| The author could have done a far better job in highlighting all
| the waste that goes into a pair of pants. Oil for synthetics,
| Waste from fabric making and dying. Scraps from the cutting
| process only to have them thrown away after a year to make
| another pair. Instead we got a bunch of "feel good" talking
| points that you can nod along to even if they are misinformed.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > Whole Foods, and other more 'local' choices.
|
| Whole Foods used to be the place to go for quality throughout
| the store. It seems to me that now you can still get plenty of
| quality, but it's not guaranteed if you just go and grab
| something off the shelf. Instead, you have to know what's worth
| buying and what's not.
|
| (I can't back this up with examples, because exactly this
| phenomenon means that I don't shop at Whole Foods as much. I
| could be wrong.)
| petesergeant wrote:
| As you point out, speaking to a human rather than AI is no
| worse than speaking to a human who isn't empowered to do
| anything. Certainly ten years ago in the UK, if you called a
| customer service number and ended up speaking to someone with a
| thick Indian accent, it was unlikely -- through no fault of
| their own -- that they were empowered to do anything to solve
| your problem.
| i5heu wrote:
| So the health service did not get worse but there are now more
| elderly which have an effect...
|
| And this does not result in the health service having lower
| quality for the individual?
|
| This is a very funky way to frame this.
| dmezzetti wrote:
| It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable". Publicly traded
| companies are driven by quarterly earnings and increasing net
| margins. You do that by selling products at the lowest cost
| possible where buyers will still buy it.
|
| A bigger decline is coming if we let "vibe coding" and what we
| call AI replace human workers at scale. The technology isn't
| there yet for full automation but everything is blindly surging
| ahead due to the allure of it and the same reason as the first
| paragraph above.
| palata wrote:
| > It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable".
|
| I like this wording better than "programmed obsolescence". I
| don't really believe that "programmed obsolescence" is common.
| If anyone in a company leaked that the company _actively
| designs_ the product to stop working after some time, it would
| make the news.
|
| I call it "premature obsolescence", which sounds more passive
| to me: the product doesn't last as long as it could because the
| company doesn't actively work on making it last as long.
| Because it's cheaper of course. Hence "lowest cost technically
| acceptable".
|
| "It's not that we make a bad product, but rather that we don't
| make a good product", in a way. There is no need, consumers buy
| it even if it's not good.
| qwery wrote:
| Planned obsolescence is very much an actively employed,
| functional, business strategy.
|
| I think you're only considering one aspect of planned
| obsolescence -- where the product is designed to have a short
| lifetime. I don't know why you would believe that that isn't
| part of "business as usual", but there's more than one way to
| make a product obsolete. The typical case is when a company
| releases yearly model refreshes for a product with an
| operational life far in excess of 12 months. This stategy is
| most common in markets with a monopoly or oligopoly, in
| saturated product segments.
|
| Have you ever heard the phrase "last year's model"?
| palata wrote:
| Not sure I like the tone. Yes, I have heard the phrase
| "last year's model".
|
| Say you buy a smartphone, and you want it to last for 7
| years. If you buy the model from 2025, the manufacturer
| commits to supporting it until 2032 (it already exists).
| Now if you buy the 2025 model in 2029, it will still last
| until 2032, so in 2029 it actually makes sense to not buy
| the model from 2025. But I would say that it's pretty great
| that the manufacturer commits to supporting the devices for
| 7 years.
|
| Planned obsolescence suggests that the company has been
| actively investing resources into it. "This lightbulb lasts
| for 4 years, have our engineers find a way to make it die
| after 1 year" is the typical example of that.
|
| Now of course, as a customer, you can buy the 2025 model,
| and throw it away in 2026 to buy the new model.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Lowest cost possible is often fun optimization problem
| engineers enjoy. Save a fraction of cent here and there and
| there too. And in some ways it is good for consumer getting
| cheaper products.
|
| On the other end you have something like Juicero. Massively
| and wastefully overengineered piece of crap. To do not that
| useful task. While being extremely expensive. And probably
| not actually last that long.
|
| Maybe one day if far future we end up with some mature
| balance between two. But I doubt it...
| palata wrote:
| I don't think that engineers think "okay, so if I use this
| chip, the product will last 4 years, so I can use this
| other chip that will last only 2 years because it's a few
| cents cheaper".
|
| If you want it to last longer, it's a lot of work: you have
| to somehow test the components you buy (or get those who
| produce them to do it) and then you have to test whatever
| you build with them. So you have to invest in it, it's not
| just a design decision.
|
| Same for waterproofness: it's not that you actively drill
| holes in your device to make sure that it won't be
| waterproof. It's just that if you actually want it
| waterproof, you have to design for it, then you have to
| test, and iterate a few times. If your consumers still buy
| your device if it's not waterproof, then there is no need
| to invest in waterproofness. But it's not "planned un-
| waterproofness".
| booleandilemma wrote:
| You don't get ahead by focusing on quality and caring about your
| customers. The guy who cuts corners gets ahead.
|
| Maybe someone will respond "why should a business care about
| you?" and that just proves my point. We've created a zero
| empathy, greed-driven society and then we wonder why quality is
| declining.
| dottjt wrote:
| I'm not sure if this is quite related, but I can't help but feel
| that a lot of the ills of society that we're witnessing is simply
| coming down to the fact that we're living a lot longer as people.
|
| I feel like knowing that we might live well-beyond our working
| age has caused all sorts of odd/irrational behaviours in the way
| we approach life. I think for example, having to save for
| retirement makes us rethink how we spend our money. Which then
| means people are ultimately spending less on other things i.e.
| clothing. Then it becomes a kind of vicious cycle of hoarding
| wealth, but then expecting everything else to be cheap (at any
| cost).
|
| Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your
| 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff
| that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost, cause
| you're still working and able to service that lifestyle.
| ath3nd wrote:
| Have you considered that it's not that we are spending money on
| cheap stuff, it's that even expensive stuff is built to not
| last with the incentive you come back for more? You do realize
| there are whole R&D departments working on planned
| obsolescence.
|
| - Apple's planned obsolescence on batteries:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
|
| - Window's 10 to 11 garbage hardware requirements:
| https://www.euroconsumers.org/microsoft-security-windows-10-...
| If an OS's new version is supposedly...faster and better
| written, why does it require newer hardware?
|
| - Apple's right to repair fight:
| https://sustainablebrands.com/read/apple-support-right-to-re...
| and then, when they saw they can't support this position
| anymore, suddenly becoming a champion of sustainability
|
| - Apple's refusal to change their idiotic charging cables to a
| standard one, so they can sell you crap that works on no other
| device. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66778528
|
| I know Apple are mentioned a lot here, but they are a perfect
| example of what happens when nobody calls out a monopoly on
| their shady practices.
|
| > but I can't help but feel that a lot of the ills of society
| that we're witnessing is simply coming down to the fact that
| we're living a lot longer as people.
|
| Ah yes blame it on the consumer, who dares to live longer.
|
| > Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your
| 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff
| that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost,
| cause you're still working and able to service that lifestyle.
|
| I don't get the logic here. If I knew I would live to 100,
| would it not make sense to buy stuff that serves me well over
| the long run (i.e more expensive)?
| dottjt wrote:
| I'm not sure if those examples are really applicable when
| there are perfectly fine alternatives i.e. linux, desktops
| etc. that don't have those issues. Ultimately it's a choice
| to be part of those eco-systems, at least from a consumer
| point of view.
|
| With that said, I'm not sure why both our arguments have to
| be mutually exclusive? Why can't it be that things are being
| planned for obsolescence + we're living too long?
|
| Regarding your last point, let's say that you did know you
| were going to live to 100, I think you'd be hard pressed to
| be able to afford a lot of that nice stuff which would serve
| you in the long run without working into retirement age
| (unless if you just happen to very wealthy).
|
| I earn a relatively high salary and even if I was making the
| most of my retirement contributions and considering
| compounding, it would still only last me by 90 without
| requiring state assistance. And most importantly, that's if I
| were to maintain my current lifestyle, which includes buying
| the cheap shit I can afford (in part so I can keep up with
| funding retirement).
|
| I couldn't imagine how much harder it would be for those on
| an average salary.
| brucehoult wrote:
| [flagged]
| ath3nd wrote:
| > Apple's slowing down the clock speed allows people to use
| a phone with an old and dying battery for longer before
| they need to replace either the device or the battery.
|
| That's laughable. Apple before 2023 didn't even allow you
| to replace yourself unless you had their crappy plan.
|
| https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8306588?sortBy=rank
|
| https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253345955?sortBy=rank
|
| https://www.wired.com/story/iphone-16-battery-is-easier-
| to-r...
|
| And their lightning adapters were a deliberate strategy so
| they keep you on their system and sell you commodity
| hardware at a premium pricing.
|
| Until the EU forced them to use standard chargers to reduce
| the mountain of e-waste that's directly tied to Apple's
| shady practices.
|
| > Lightning cables are superior to the "standard" USB-C.
| It's a travesty against freedom of choice that the EU has
| legislated against them.
|
| You have the freedom of choice to use an old IPhone with an
| old Lightning cable, since they are "superior" to USB-C,
| and old IPhones are apparently of such high quality.
|
| OR you can go with the far worse (according to you) USB-c
| standard which allows charging, video and data transfer and
| internet connectivity.
|
| > 2018 and 2021 and still I think look the same as new.
| Colours haven't faded
|
| Wow, a shirt lasting 4 years, impressive!
|
| > I don't find the complaints valid about anything else
| either. The tshirts in my weekly rotation were bought -- I
| just checked my emails ....In short: yes, there is plenty
| of cheap crap around -- I actually think this is a good
| thing for people who will not be using it heavily.
|
| "who will not be using it heavily" is a reference to the
| fact that sometimes cheap nowadays crap is poisonous and
| you might not live to see another day?
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/20/eu-
| commissi...
| nicole_express wrote:
| > You have the freedom of choice to use an old IPhone
| with an old Lightning cable, since they are "superior" to
| USB-C, and old IPhones are apparently of such high
| quality.
|
| It's so bizarre to act like this is a crazy thing to do,
| like, yeah, my iPhone does have Lightning, I haven't
| upgraded since they switched to USB-C and have felt no
| need to? Like that was pretty recent? It's not like the
| Dock Connector where the only iPhones that support it use
| wireless networks that are being actively dismantled?
| ath3nd wrote:
| > I haven't upgraded since they switched to USB-C and
| have felt no need to?
|
| I'd have done the same if I had an IPhone. As a matter of
| fact, that's commendable.
| bitter_michael wrote:
| This article's thesis is all over the place, but the discussion
| here brings up an interesting topic: the decline in quality is
| relative to your evaluation function.
|
| If you want long lasting products, then maybe the cheaper
| furniture is of lower quality. If you want something light weight
| and affordable, then ikea is higher quality.
|
| Assuming there is a uniform product evaluation function seems
| like lazy journalism. The addition of AI was also odd
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| But we are not in control of the evaluation function.
|
| It is heavily manipulated by ads and other patterns.
|
| You can control your own evaluation if you are actively working
| on it but market moves based on majority so it doesn't matter
| nradov wrote:
| Nonsense. If you want really nice, high quality furniture
| then you can just pay a local craftsman to make it for you.
| This is always an option regardless and some of us are not
| easily manipulated by ads. Of course good furniture will be
| expensive.
| omeid2 wrote:
| The mass production discount must not be overlooked,
| whatever most people want becomes the most cost effective,
| and it appears that most people want cheap, and so anything
| beyond the absolute minimum costs a lot more relative to
| the quality.
| Rotundo wrote:
| I don't believe the "people want cheap" spiel. Sure, they
| want _affordable_.
|
| As consumers can not tell the quality of products
| beforehand, and price is certainly no guarantee of
| quality, the only logical choice is to buy cheap.
|
| I wish there was a sort of rating of product quality [1],
| so I can choose the optimum price/quality for a product.
|
| [1] Reviews suck for this purpose. Half of them say
| things like "Fast shipping, five stars!". By the time
| defects show up months later and the one-star reviews
| arrive, the product is discontinued anyway.
| cherryteastain wrote:
| Last time I wanted to do this for a desk which perfectly
| fits a particular nook in my home, the local craftsmen
| quoted 20x the price of Ikea and an 8 month lead time.
|
| Needless to say, I got an Ikea desk delivered 3 days later.
| blfr wrote:
| Yeah, you prioritized price and availability over sheer
| product quality. Millions upon millions of people made
| the same choice.
| XorNot wrote:
| I mean I bought an Ikea desk like, 15 years ago and have
| moved it through multiple home offices in that time and
| it's holding up fine. I also bought it because it was
| cheap enough I wouldn't worry about taking a jigsaw to it
| to get it customized just right for me (which was mostly
| cutting a hole for my tower computer case to sit just
| right in).
|
| The problem with "you want _real quality_ " people is
| they mostly seem to advocate buying expensive
| demonstrative items, rather then properly evaluating what
| they need.
|
| If a desk has successful held my things and enabled me to
| work at it for over a decade, what exactly is "quality"
| meant to be and be bought for?
| blfr wrote:
| That's true: millions of people bought a desk right for
| their needs but we are comparing it to some super
| expensive (in real terms) item from 80 years ago.
| ozgrakkurt wrote:
| You can't do this for a washing machine of a tv or a phone.
|
| Even if you can now, it is getting more difficult.
|
| And there doesn't seem to be any way to avoid it as every
| washing machine is becoming "smart", worse at actually
| washing clothes and using internet to send your data so it
| can be sold for more profit.
| nradov wrote:
| You can buy a dumb washing machine on the commercial
| market.
|
| https://speedqueencommercial.com/en-us/products/top-load-
| was...
| markovs_gun wrote:
| Idk. I feel like at some point we have to blame society as a
| whole for things or things will never get changed. Social
| change in the past has been hard fought to get public
| perception to change. When my grandparents were kids, for
| example, black people were not allowed to use the same
| facilities as white people and a majority of people supported
| this. Sure powerful interests in the media promoted this
| view, but ultimately the majority was wrong and had to
| change.
| AngryData wrote:
| Blaming society seems like a pointless exercise to me. It
| doesn't help solve any problems, and even could make some
| people give up on trying to do better. Society can change
| pretty quickly if people make an actual effort to do so and
| education people to new ideas and realizations.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Except of course we are in fact in control of the evaluation
| function. Hence, lots of people do not buy into mainstream
| for each thing. The thing about capitalism is that each
| person still spends their money according to their evaluation
| function. Ads might tell me I should discard close as soon as
| possible, sorry but I don't. Ads also tell me I should buy a
| new computer, and I might. Now have I been manipulated by ads
| or not?
|
| If there are ads and manipulation for every possible thing,
| then what you end up buying still depends on your personal
| tastes and preferences.
|
| At the end of the day, ever living creatures depends on its
| extend environment to some extent. The idea that this ever
| could be different is not realistic. Even if you band all
| ads, other things would simply take its place as the
| environment your exposed to.
|
| That said, I'm not against limit some kinds of ads and
| specially in some places. But we should just outright claim
| people are not capable of making their own decisions, that's
| a bad road to go down.
|
| > market moves based on majority so it doesn't matter
|
| Except it does matter because we do not live in a state
| controlled system where if 51% people believe pants should be
| green, 100% of people wear green pants. Even a small number
| of people can be enough to create a small market for
| something. Go look into retro computers. The majority clearly
| doesn't care about old Amiga hardware and software, but yet
| you can buy it in various forms. There are countless
| examples.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| Ads can be sometimes good, I got recommended the ad for Zeiss
| SmartLife lenses. Then I did my own research on youtube and I
| took the shot. I must say I am liking my pricey purchase.
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > If you want something light weight and affordable,
|
| Affordability has nothing to do in the quality evaluation, it
| is already taken into account in the quality/cost ratio.
|
| Also, where did you get this idea that particle board furniture
| were particularly lightweight?
| ArtTimeInvestor wrote:
| And somehow we still see great reviews about everything.
|
| I looked at this hotel made from containers recently:
|
| https://www.booking.com/hotel/de/tin-inn-montabaur.html
|
| I thought it is an interesting concept. And it has a rating of
| 8.5 out of 10 on booking.com, which means "Very good".
|
| But then I read through the details and the reviews (sorted by
| new) and see:
|
| You can hear your neighbors.
|
| You cannot open the windows.
|
| Staff enters the room before your checkout time.
|
| The rooms and the stuff inside the rooms are dirty.
|
| Lots of broken amenities, including the air condition.
|
| For check-in you have to enter your passport-id (where does it
| end up?).
|
| And on and on an on ...
|
| How is that "Very good"?
|
| What threshold should one assign to book something on booking.com
| these days? 9.9/10?
| user____name wrote:
| Online reviews follow an inverted gaussian distribution it
| seems like, the majority of users never bother, it's either the
| fans/bots or the angry ones.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Grade inflation seems like another facet of the same economic
| problem.
| KoolKat23 wrote:
| Barriers to entry keep going up, access to capital is going down
| and required return on capital is high.
|
| People are going to maximize short term profits.
| topspin wrote:
| As part of that, there is a strong trend toward consolidation,
| and little competition emerging to challenge the oligopolies
| that have formed.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| Quality has improved across many dimensions in nearly every
| domain I'm familiar with. In fact, I'd argue there are very few
| products or services that couldn't be made today to a higher
| standard than at any point in the past, if we chose to prioritize
| that.
|
| But what's often mistaken for a decline in quality is really a
| shift in priorities: toward affordability, efficiency, and
| accessibility. And that's fantastic. Products that were once
| expensive and exclusive are now available, at good-enough
| quality, to billions more people around the world.
|
| Yes, that trade-off can mean shorter lifespans or less
| repairability. But on balance, widening access is a moral win,
| and one made possible by the very progress the article seems to
| mourn.
| djfivyvusn wrote:
| I'm not convinced the widening access to American consumerism
| is a moral win. The amount of fossil fuels we're dependent on
| as a species is obscene. I worry for our children. There is no
| offramp, only growth.
| panick21_ wrote:
| This is one of these philosophies that I hate more then
| almost any other.
|
| The idea that is bad that poor Indian and Chinese people now
| have access to anything from clean water to planes is absurd.
| You can sit there in your luxury house and cry about consumer
| culture but for millions of people its basic stuff that they
| have access to for the first time.
|
| And in Europe, despite increasing quality of live, both total
| energy consumption and fossil fuel consumption is going down.
|
| Now part of this is export of emissions to China but China
| own growth explains the majority of it.
|
| Continued growth is good, and only continued growth and
| better technology will get humanity off fossil fuels.
|
| Fossil fuels have been a net good for society and still are!
| myaccountonhn wrote:
| The reason it's seen as bad is because there are not enough
| natural resources to sustain such a consumption, and many
| of these countries (esp India) will practically become
| unhabitable if global warming continues like it does. There
| are very few signs that technology will be able to fix
| this.
|
| No one is against clean access to water...
| pas wrote:
| there are of course more than enough "natural resources"
| to sustain such consumption, the problem is paradoxically
| the opposite, too much easy to extract shit that we then
| emit into our own environment
|
| the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air,
| remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.)
|
| the costs are high though, but not that high, compared to
| - for example - the famines of past
|
| but as population will peak - at least for now - and as
| we continue to ramp up renewable energy generation these
| problems are not insurmountable in any sense
|
| ...
|
| places affected by storms and extreme heat/cold days need
| better infrastructure, but since urbanization continues
| to drive people to cities (as it did for the last few
| hundreds of years) these places need new and better
| infrastructure anyway!
| simgt wrote:
| > the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the
| air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle,
| etc.)
|
| Are you abstracting away the technical complexity when
| stating that it's not complicated? GHG removal tech that
| would scale simply doesn't exist if we intend to have
| some energy left to do anything else, as for removing
| pfas and microplastics from the environment, we are at
| the stage of running experiments in petri dishes.
|
| And even if we abstract away the technical complexity,
| good luck convincing anyone to stop burning the free fuel
| we have lying around doing nothing now that we have
| everything-nuclear-solar and GHG removal at scale. We can
| barely convince our councils to build cycle lanes in
| dense areas if that removes any space for SUVs.
|
| I wish I'd share the blind optimism of people like you,
| it seems pleasant to live in your heads...
| amelius wrote:
| The real villain here is advertising, which pushes us to
| always want more than we need.
| anthk wrote:
| Fossil fuels will crumble down when the ITER gets working
| well. China already did some experiments on salts based
| nuclear plants, but no fusion jet.
|
| Still, the days for the uber-polluted Beijing are numbered.
| It will change drastically.
| mandmandam wrote:
| You're giving a very poor reading of OP's argument, first
| of all. Jumping to the conclusion that they don't want
| Chinese people to have clean water is downright bad faith.
|
| Second, "continued growth is good" is a hell of a thing to
| say on a planet with finite resources. There's a limit! And
| if you expand your worldview to include other life on this
| planet and not just society then we've pushed far beyond
| what's wise already.
| rizs12 wrote:
| China is a developed country! This dialogue about Chinese
| people and clean water is bizarre
| mandmandam wrote:
| Fair point, I ought have made that clear. There are many
| ways in which Chinese people have it better than
| Americans these days, if my eyes are to be believed.
| rizs12 wrote:
| Lmao how can you say 'poor Indian and Chinese people' in
| the same sentence? China is a first world country
| jmrm wrote:
| I would add that sometimes when people usually say that rancid
| phrase of "they don't make it as they used to", they are
| comparing expensive products in the past with cheap ones in the
| present.
|
| Most of those "good 'ol" goods exist, but probably are
| pretty/too expensive for what we are used to pay.
| mihaic wrote:
| While that's sometimes the case, those expensive products
| were the norm, and now no longer exist as an accessible
| option.
|
| For many products, the market went with cheap and crappy, and
| quality became a niche that is no longer available in the
| general economy, and can only be found with great cost and
| effort.
| mayas_ wrote:
| Not quite sure about the affordability part.
|
| Cars are becoming prohibitively expensive. Housing is becoming
| a luxury.
|
| Even consumer products are becoming increasingly expensive.
|
| Safety largely improved but not craftsmanship.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| That is uniquely american or first world experience. I won't
| comment on the mechanisms of wealth transfer from rest of the
| world to first world. The rest of the world has been very
| hardworking and trying to make it one day at a time. Here's
| an example.
|
| A Day in Life of Africa's Wooden Scooter Crew
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzL3vZ6jDSk
| lioeters wrote:
| Great recommendation, I'm watching it now. It reminds me of
| another documentary about a festival with hand-built
| vehicles made of recycled Vespas that are extremely
| customized.
|
| Indonesia's Tricked Out Vespas
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVeVZ-Iugkg
| jstummbillig wrote:
| > Cars are becoming prohibitively expensive.
|
| Adjusted for inflation, car prices are actually lower now
| than decades ago, especially factoring in huge safety and
| tech improvements. Entry-level models remain affordable,
| while buyers voluntarily pay more for SUVs and tech-heavy
| EVs.
|
| > Housing is becoming a luxury.
|
| Rising housing prices are mostly driven by land scarcity and
| zoning. The actual cost per square meter of construction
| (build quality) has improved and remains stable.
|
| > Even consumer products are becoming increasingly expensive.
|
| Nope. Electronics, clothing, and appliances have become
| dramatically cheaper. Quality-adjusted prices for TVs and
| computers have plummeted.
|
| > Safety largely improved but not craftsmanship.
|
| Craftsmanship is alive and well, if you are willing to pay
| for it. Which most consumers are not; they prefer being able
| to afford more things at lower prices and quicker tech
| cycles.
| amluto wrote:
| > The actual cost per square meter of construction (build
| quality) has improved and remains stable.
|
| Do you have a source? And are you considering expensive
| markets (cough, Los Angeles)?
| ghaff wrote:
| Generally agree.
|
| In snowbelt (and even somewhat sub-snowbelt) regions, cars
| would pretty much rust out at 50K miles and starting when
| conditions were wet or cold could be an adventure.
|
| And, while I have the option of buying an expensive
| "handmade" (with the aid of expensive CNC equipment) dining
| room table--which I have done--I also have the option of
| buying a sturdy and nice-looking mail-order bed for $300
| that I assemble.
|
| Housing is the main thing but, as you say, that's mostly a
| matter of location. There are a ton of cheaper locations
| but many don't want to live there--even if they're fairly
| accessible to a major city.
| carlosjobim wrote:
| > Adjusted for inflation, car prices are actually lower now
| than decades ago
|
| And so are salaries. Just compare what kind of job you
| needed to be able to afford a car 40 years ago to today.
|
| Reality is still reality, people live in it and face it
| everyday.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Disagree. Real wages are ahead of all market sectors
| except medical and rent. People are making a bad
| comparison--they look at what they have vs what their
| parents have and see their parents doing better. Yeah, 20
| or 30 years later in their career, plus a lot of time
| building up assets, that's actually to be expected. The
| proper comparison is between cohorts, but that can only
| be done by digging into the data, not by experience.
|
| Wealth inequality? The majority is from comparing those
| starting out to those at retirement. Likewise, the
| majority of income inequality is hours worked. (Not to
| say that there aren't other factors, but in both cases
| when you compare apples to apples it explains more than
| half the range.)
| carlosjobim wrote:
| But their parents didn't need 20 or 30 years to build up
| their assets, or did they? They could purchase a new car
| when they were in their prime at 20-30 years old. Real
| estate they already had before buying the car. People who
| are in their prime today have to wait to be 50+ to have
| real estate, and if they want to have a new car they have
| to forgo that.
| jltsiren wrote:
| Cost per square meter is a misleading measure. A model that
| assigns a fixed price to a 0 m2 home and an additional
| price for each square meter is a better match for both
| construction costs and subjective utility.
|
| Or maybe the additional price should be based on the number
| of rooms instead. Adding empty space by making the rooms
| bigger is cheap, but extra rooms are usually more valuable
| to those on a limited budget.
|
| Where I live in California, construction itself has become
| unaffordable. Even if the land were free, construction and
| permits are now so expensive that it's impossible to build
| affordable housing without subsidies.
| itfossil wrote:
| Adjusted for inflation? Who cares? People's compensation
| haven't risen enough to even account for inflation so how
| is that helpful?
|
| It's not. Saying something isn't expensive because its the
| same price after adjusting for inflation is a slap to the
| face of millions, perhaps even billions who are effectively
| making less now than they were ten or twenty years ago
| after they adjust for inflation.
|
| That phrase is not the silver bullet you seem to think it
| is.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Yes it has
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N
| jcgrillo wrote:
| > factoring in huge safety and tech improvements
|
| safety... maybe. tech? no. Having to plug in an expensive
| proprietary diagnostic device to diagnose problems, dozens
| of computers, hundreds of sensors many of which can render
| the vehicle bricked and inoperable if they're not working
| correctly.. None of this is better.
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| Cars are becoming prohibitively expensive because they get
| more and more stuff included. I owned cars in the 90's and
| cars from 2015, the newer one came in the basic trim with
| stuff that adds to complexity and cost, from AC and electric
| windows to dozen aibags, sensors and driving aids.
|
| For housing, there are 2 things that happened: regulations
| made houses more expensive to build (I personally built 3
| houses in the past 35 years, I saw the increase in cost) and
| second thing is house prices are totally disconnected to
| cost, my current home is evaluated (for tax purpose) about 3
| times the real cost to build it. Except the buyers, everyone
| is happy to have a huge increase in housing cost, builders
| make more money, local governments raise more taxes, buyers
| are screwed from all sides and not many people go build their
| own, even if it many places is still possible (I currently
| planning to build a house for some friends).
|
| But in a way building a house is cheaper: tools, technology
| and new materials make it faster and cheaper to build. It
| should make houses more affordable, if the other factors
| would not completely eat this saving.
| SapporoChris wrote:
| BYD launches new 2025 Dolphin EV with the same $14K price tag
| and more range.
|
| https://electrek.co/2024/07/08/byd-launches-2025-dolphin-
| ev-...
|
| The problems you mentioned are a local problem, not a global
| problem.
| whoisyc wrote:
| Car prices are affected by ease of financing and a huge
| second hand market. The former make it easier to "afford" a
| fancy vehicle (whether or not you actually afford it is
| another question) and the later means fierce competition in
| the lower parts of the market making cheap cars less
| profitable.
| terminalshort wrote:
| No they aren't https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1KJks
| dahart wrote:
| > Cars are becoming prohibitively expensive
|
| This isn't true. There are dozens of car models near $20k
| today, and most of the base model inexpensive cars in the US
| have always cost around today's $20k-$30k in adjusted
| dollars. Even the Ford model T:
| https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0512/how-
| inflati...
|
| Quality of cars today is unquestionably better, and the
| number of features and conveniences is unquestionably higher.
| Cars last longer than they used to, a lot longer _on
| average_. There's ample stats on this.
|
| The average price of cars has gone up slowly relative to
| inflation because there are now better cars to choose from,
| and people choose to pay more. But you can't even buy
| something as bad as a 1930s or 1950s or 1980s car today, and
| you can get a much better car now for less money than you
| could then.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| Thos who think quality has decreased should watch this youtube
| shorts channel.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/LqnWuMD6DU8
| koliber wrote:
| You are highlighting the difference between theory and
| practice.
|
| In theory we can make higher quality things, but in practice we
| are not doing it.
|
| Quality has gone down.
| raspasov wrote:
| "Following his reasoning, it cannot be stated in absolute terms
| that an iPhone 15 is of "better quality" than a 2003 Nokia."
|
| This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-
| tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most
| pejorative sense.
|
| I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900,
| which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can
| confidently state that current iPhones are _way_ better than that
| phone. On paper, the N900 phone was amazing: it had GPS, Wi-Fi,
| multitasking, a camera, a touchscreen, and (!) a hardware
| keyboard, and more. It had a desktop-class browser, on paper. But
| nothing quite worked well. It was far too bloated for the
| hardware capabilities of the time. When you came home, it never
| damn switched properly to WiFi, or it took forever. The same
| applies to switching off WiFi and switching to cellular when you
| leave home. The GPS always took minutes to establish a location
| and easily lost connection due to small obstructions. I recall
| that I compared it to a friend's iPhone at the time; the N900's
| GPS was embarrassingly bad and slow.
|
| I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even
| Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in
| every way possible.
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| This author doesn't really understand quality and starts out by
| defining it purelt in subjective terms. Then makes the mistake
| in the rest of the article by following this subjective
| reasoning by talking about perceptions of quality as a stand in
| for actual quality.
|
| Go read Zen anf the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a decent,
| if not weird, introduction to thinking about quality. Quality
| is both subjective and objective and therein lies the rub. This
| author does not understand that.
| blueflow wrote:
| I'm surprised. What is the objective aspect of quality? Can
| you have quality without a human-intended purpose?
| RangerScience wrote:
| It's worth noting that the author of Zen and the Art
| literally went crazy in pursuit of this.
|
| I don't mean this to say "you have asked a bad question",
| but rather to say, "you have asked so large a question that
| a man once went insane in trying to answer it."
| blueflow wrote:
| I asked the question because i thought it was good
| manners to do so. Actually I'm strongly convinced that
| quality describes how a thing fits the preconceptions
| about that thing.
|
| As testable example, I'm largely unable to tell the
| quality of beer as i never enjoyed any of it, and thus
| could not have developed a preconception of how a good
| beer is supposed to taste.
| nativeit wrote:
| Trappist quad ales feature a high alcohol content, which
| makes them sweet but somehow not cloyingly so. Robust
| Belgian yeasts generate a surprising amount of
| effervescence, which keeps things light despite the heavy
| doses of malted barley, and produce esters that generate
| flavors of banana bread and dark stone fruits that
| compliment latent notes of burnt sugars and caramel.
|
| That's a pretty standard description of some of the best
| ales on the planet (produced by monks in Belgium), if
| anyone's curious.
| dahart wrote:
| That description has no comparisons and no baseline
| definition of beer quality. Why do those things make them
| better than other ales, especially when most of that is
| subjective? For some people, high alcohol content,
| sweetness, effervescence, and heavy doses of malted
| barley are bad things when it comes to beers. All beers
| have flavor notes, though flavor notes are notoriously
| ephemeral and suggestible.
|
| I'm familiar with Belgian Ales, I used to like Chimay,
| and have sampled many others (though not Westvleteren
| yet). These days I prefer something less strong. The
| story about Trappist monks is intriguing, but what does
| it actually mean? Obviously Chimay and several other
| Belgian Trappist ales are enormous commercial productions
| that ship beer globally. They are just beer factories
| doing a huge volume of beer business. The narrative about
| monks is intended to give people the perception of
| quality, but it doesn't actually demonstrate anything,
| it's just a narrative.
| Xmd5a wrote:
| >Pirsig had a mental breakdown and spent time in and out
| of psychiatric hospitals between 1961 and 1963. He was
| diagnosed with schizophrenia and treated with
| electroconvulsive therapy on numerous occasions
|
| >Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry
| into Values is a book by Robert M. Pirsig first published
| in 1974.
|
| I'm afraid you're romanticizing the relationship between
| Pirsig's books and his life. That someone is losing touch
| with reality doesn't warrant anyone to deconstruct their
| biography at will and reconstruct it to suit their own
| narrative.
| danaris wrote:
| While it _may_ be true that Pirsig 's mental breakdown
| had nothing to do with what went into the book, the facts
| you have presented here do not particularly support that
| conclusion.
|
| If his mental breakdowns had been, say, in 1976 and 1978,
| that would have supported it much better. But someone
| working on the philosophical underpinnings of a book for
| over a decade before the book is published is not at all
| unreasonable.
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| My primary memory of the book is that the author
| specifically ties together the quest for meaning and the
| loss of mental health, even within the book itself.
| GoblinSlayer wrote:
| That's why it's a bad idea to read too much into the myth
| of objective meaning. No meaning - no problem.
| raspasov wrote:
| How about empirical instead of objective? I think objective
| vs subjective can be a false dichotomy in terms of quality.
|
| For example, when my phone connects to WiFi as soon as I
| get home every time, correctly, for the last many years,
| that's very strong empirical evidence of quality.
| ZiiS wrote:
| 'Correctly' being dropping IP bound VPNs so they can be
| reestabilished on the cheaper network, or transfring with
| no distruption even if it incurres cost?
| weinzierl wrote:
| According to the Kano model what is perceived as quality
| changes over time for a product category.
|
| Ten years ago your phone reliably connecting to WiFi was
| a _" Delighter"_ over the course of time it turned over a
| _" Want"_ into a _" Must Have"_.
|
| I'd say empirical evidence of quality is strongest in the
| _" Want"_ phase but if something is considered a given
| and ubiquitously fulfilled, can it still function as a
| strong empirical indicator of quality?
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| I disagree that objective vs subjective is a false
| dichotomy with regards to quality. Not because I believe
| it is false, mind you, but because I don't believe they
| are a _dichotomy_ ; they are actually two essential axes
| when perceiving and discussing quality. And each of those
| two axes are _measured empirically_ and _valued ethically
| and aesthetically_.
|
| The subjective axis of quality concerns values. What do
| _you_ value the most in a mobile phone? Is it battery
| life? Is it photo quality? Is it durability? Is it
| features? Is it security? Is it screen size? Is it
| repairability? Is it social approval? Is it free software
| support? Is it less effort due to habit?
|
| The objective axis of each of those values (and their
| subvalues) can be empirically measured. Some of them
| trivially, such as screen size or battery life. Some are
| harder to measure but still quite easily, such as
| features, photo quality, or repairabilty. Others may end
| up in a quagmire of subvalues, some of them subconscious,
| but could ultimately be measured empirically with great
| effort (social approval, security, habit...)
|
| What often happens is that, when debating quality, people
| make the mistake of using empirical arguments about
| objective characteristics without realising that they are
| disagreeing on their ultimate subjective preferences.
| Subjective values can of course be debated, sometimes
| successfully. However, I am never going to convince an
| average middle-class American teenager to prefer a
| Fairphone over an iPhone empirically proving its
| repairability and support for FOSS Android alternatives,
| and they are never going to convince me to prefer an
| iPhone because it's cooler and it takes awesome photos.
|
| Going back to the main topic of the article, I believe
| that ultimately the problem is that the market has over-
| fitted and heavily optimised for specific axes of
| subjective preference, due to their alignment with
| profitability and ease of development, together with an
| inefficient feedback loop, to the detriment of large
| numbers of consumers such as myself who value less
| intrinsically profitable characteristics.
| mrweasel wrote:
| Yes, there is a number of models for quality. If you read:
| "What Does Product Quality Really Mean?" by David A.
| Garvin, you'll find that intended purpose is only one of a
| number of quality metrics you could concern yourself with.
|
| In the less obvious cases quality can be something you
| can't really explain, but you'll recognize it. There's also
| the option of viewing it from the manufacturers view, and
| forgo the user-centric view altogether. In that case we
| view the quality as "How well do we make the product",
| according to standard and specifications. So you could have
| a product that's absolute trash, but it follows specs
| precisely and you have zero manufacturing defects.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I read the _"Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"_ many years ago.
| What I remember and took away from it is a lot about mental
| health and about being different and trying or not trying to
| fit in.
|
| The quality idea in the book sadly never clicked. To my
| defense I have to say I was young and had no philosophical
| background whatsoever, but maybe I am ready now.
|
| I should really re-read the book but maybe you could
| summarize your take away about quality from the book.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Agree, the quality part of the book is hard to grasp. I get
| that some written works are good and some are bad, that it
| is hard to qualify why yet there is a general consensus
| around it but I haven't been able to distill any deeper
| meaning than that.
|
| However, the discussions regarding "gumption" and
| separating abstractions from reality when needed (i.e. "the
| carburetor set screw") as well as several other great
| lessons from the book have really helped me fine-tune my
| thinking. I think reading this a few times in your 20s is a
| fantastic time investment.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| Memory loss and survivor bias.
|
| There was mountains of tacky, throwaway crap produced in the
| 80s. Guess what, we've thrown it all away. Quality lasts.
|
| And don't even get me started on the food. A lot of tin cans.
| Desserts that you reconstituted from powder in a packet. The
| list goes on.
| leoedin wrote:
| Food is way better now than it was in the 90s. Every
| supermarket has refrigerated ready meals which are actually
| pretty healthy. Here in the UK, the quality of food in cafes
| (at least in the major cities) is far better than it was when
| I was a kid.
| Earw0rm wrote:
| This. Every once in a while I end up somewhere that the
| revolution in food has somehow bypassed, and what would
| have been acceptable standard in the 90s is just _bad_ now.
| MrGilbert wrote:
| Same. We had that phase were every manufacturer build their own
| tiny OS around 2007/2008. I had an LG KS360 and a Sony W200i.
| The LG would crash regularly. The W200i would work fine, but of
| course had all the proprietary Sony connectors. The W350i on
| the other hand was a catastrophic phone, that I had replaced
| twice, as evident in my Amazon account.
| blub wrote:
| 2003 was Symbian time. The OS was built around cell network
| reliability and low power. The N900 was the promising side-show
| getting few resources and attention.
|
| Compared to the iPhone or any modern phone, it did a lot more
| with a lot less battery. The networking on my iPhones is not
| great, but it's hard to compare.
|
| In the end modern smartphones couldn't win at that game, but
| the game has changed. Lately, through addiction and almost
| omnipresent surveillance for the worst.
|
| In that sense, the smartphones of old with some multimedia and
| internet would be a welcome change.
| pas wrote:
| people are addicted to features though
|
| that's why these pure/fair/libre phones were failing to reach
| any market share and even sustainability.
|
| but things are slowly getting better, projects underway to
| get smoother better performance on every platform, taking
| better care of the battery (limit charge to some percentage),
| use more efficient stack - from network to graphics,
| Bluetooth and WiFi and of course all the other radios.
|
| ...
|
| sure, most of this is unfortunately unnoticeable compared to
| the billions of people glued to the absolutely TikTokified
| Internet :/
|
| (well, hopefully we'll get through this phase of developing
| social immune system for a new medium faster than we did
| after the printing press, after the radio, and after TV)
| jabjq wrote:
| I googled the author's name and from a cursory look at his
| linkedin he was a toddler in 2003. It's therefore reasonable to
| conclude that he has no idea how a phone from 2003 worked. I
| mean, he could've used one for a bit, but definitely not as a
| daily driver.
| blub wrote:
| As late as 2011 Nokias like the N8 or N9 were competitive
| with the iPhones of that time i.e. the iPhone 4. That iPhone
| is the famous "holding it wrong" phone.
|
| Then Nokia admitted defeat and switched to Windows which
| failed badly. Symbian was too hard and expensive to maintain
| and their Linux OS strategy was to redo the OS three times
| instead of incrementally developing it.
| ozim wrote:
| If he wasn't born yet in 2003 then yeah.
|
| I was born in 1980's and for me what we have currently feels
| exactly like I live in the future.
|
| Personal computers from 2003 sucked and now I have much more
| reliable and powerful personal computers in my pocket - as
| much as I have fond memories of Windows XP I also remember
| offhand serial key because I was reinstalling it loads of
| times for friends family and myself. Nowadays I don't
| remember having to reinstall an operating system for at least
| last 10 years or more.
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| I owned a Nokia in 2003. The battery lasted a week and they
| were virtually indestructible. The phone never crashed or
| reset, the keys were so reliable and well placed that I could
| text without looking at the screen. The phone did not get
| slower with age. None of these things can be said about my
| current smart phone. Granted it does a lot more, but the
| quality of the things it does do is much worse.
| gilfoy wrote:
| > virtually indestructible
|
| Owned a Nokia in 2003 as well and it was destructed by some
| water. It had no Nokia Care and my grandma refused to buy me
| a new one.
|
| > text without looking at the screen
|
| I do it all the time by dictating.
| forgotusername6 wrote:
| Try doing that in class. I could message my friends without
| a teacher spotting it.
| kovac wrote:
| I bought my dad a Nokia phone in 2008. A dumb phone, with
| just texting and calling features. It continues to work to
| this day, so, 17 years (the markings on the buttons are fully
| erased now, other than that it works). It outlived him. I
| don't know how they managed to build stuff like that. I would
| expect some electronic part to fail sometime along the way.
| dijit wrote:
| Well, I can tell you how: rigorous testing.
|
| I worked for Nokia (briefly, just before Eloppification)
| and I remember being told that when the iPhone launched
| everyone laughed because there was no way that the battery
| could last more than a day, there was no app store back
| then, no flash, no high-speed data (2G) and it failed every
| single one of the internal tests that Nokia had.
|
| Yet, people didn't care, obviously - and the iPhone is the
| model for nearly all phones today.
|
| I get bent out of shape about this, the same way I get bent
| out of shape about the death of small phones and modular
| laptops; but people vote with their wallets and if the
| market was large enough for both to exist then there would
| be better options; yet it seems like there's not.
|
| People seem to care much more about capacitive touch
| screens, large displays, hungry CPUs, incredible post-
| processing of cameras (and great camera sensors) than they
| do about being drop proof, having stable software or
| battery life.
|
| Features > Stability ; to most people. (and, how do you put
| stability on a spec sheet for tech youtubers to care about
| or savvy consumers trying to buy the best "value" they can;
| build quality doesn't fit onto a spec sheet).
| smokel wrote:
| _> People seem to care much more about..._
|
| One cannot conclude this from what the market does.
| Single individuals might want wildly different things
| than what the combined economy serves them.
|
| See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecological_fallacy
| kookamamie wrote:
| I was there, too. Not at Nokia, but in the ecosystem of
| these companies.
|
| People wanted iPhone over Nokia, not due to its specs but
| due to its usability and presentation.
|
| Let's be honest, both Symbian and Maemo/Meego were abject
| messes in both of these categories.
| dijit wrote:
| They were really trying with MeeGo, we used to joke that
| we had the most expensive clock app in the world because
| it had been remade so many times. People forget that R&D
| can be super expensive. Apple definitely cooked there.
|
| Symbian though, I mean, considering the hardware
| constraints was _crazy_!
|
| The smartphone variant of Symbian needed 2MiB of Memory
| and supported Qt... madness.
| walterbell wrote:
| We need a Symbian/Nokia movie to accompany the _"
| Blackberry"_ movie,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXL_HDzBQsM
| Mike, are you familiar with the saying, "Perfect is the
| enemy of Good"? Well, "good enough" is the
| enemy of humanity.
| blub wrote:
| Meego's N9 had in some areas better usability than the
| iPhone and was overall competitive.
|
| Tap to wake, slide to homescreen, the control center were
| introduced by the N9.
| interloxia wrote:
| having stable software - yeah that wasn't my experience.
| I used early and late Series 40 phones and they had
| plenty of problems. Mostly minor but not clearly getting
| better. And then it got worse. My N97 mini was a good
| phone with pretty terrible software. It was bad. And then
| it didn't matter anymore.
|
| I'm not excited about the current duopoly, but a decent
| mid-range phone from either is better now that in was
| five years ago.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I once supported an expensive application for Symbian OS
| and the customers had plenty of problems with Nokia
| smartphones. Not dumb phones, but smartphones. HW keyboards
| failed constantly, wi-fi quality fluctuated randomly from
| piece to piece, displays developed weird errors,
| loudspeakers developed tin sound etc.
|
| Oh, and my favorite, problems with microUSB charging ports
| were eternal.
| pas wrote:
| my nothing phone (1) full of very ugly scratches (and one
| especially ugly testament on a corner to me dropping it one
| too many time) was stolen a few months ago while I was in a
| house of worship (I was introducing my favorite girlfriend to
| the forbidden pleasure of dipping fries into mcfreeze ice
| cream with caramel - and while in this trance state...)
|
| anyway, the new Nothing phone (3a) is amazing batterywise!
| cung wrote:
| Is this written by AI or why does this make no sense to me?
| kalleboo wrote:
| If you limit your smartphone usage to the capabilities of a
| 2003 Nokia (turn off data and wifi, only use calls and SMS)
| the battery will last 2 weeks and never crash or reset.
| Before I got a phone with dual SIM capability I used to bring
| an old spare phone to keep my home SIM in with data off only
| to be able to not miss calls/SMS. They'd typically last the
| whole trip without charging when they're not keeping
| connections alive for email, push etc.
|
| Before I got a smartphone I used a j2me IRC client to keep
| connected with my friends, and I had to carry 3 batteries to
| swap throughout the day for it to last, the battery life was
| horrible if you actually did anything on it.
| baxtr wrote:
| In 2003 I almost never touched my phone, because you couldn't
| do much on that tiny display other than actually calling
| people.
|
| Maybe that's the reason the battery lasted a week.
| lwkl wrote:
| Phones of the past also died when exposed to a little bit of
| water. Back then it was common to hear someone say their
| phone died because of water damage but it has been years
| since I've heard that about a smartphone.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I have a 1960s western electric phone on my desk. Between
| calls it could be used to smash your Nokia into powder.
|
| Does it matter? No. Those phones were built to purpose for
| their time. Sonim made/makes an Android phone that is
| approximately as durable as a Motorola radio for police. I
| used one for a bit, the speakerphone worked submerged, and it
| fell off a two story building when on a video call.
|
| But it turns out nobody really wants that. When the
| technology for smartphone chips and displays matures, my
| guess is, like the tank Nokia, the iPhone Kevlar Edition will
| be the Nokia of 2035.
| PJDK wrote:
| On the battery front that really is just a function of your
| use. I've got a smart phone I use purely for work, which in
| reality means sending a handful of messages in a day. That
| battery lasts 5 days or so.
|
| Also my first phone, a "bomb proof" Nokia died when it fell
| out of my pocket into a shallow pond. Most modern phones
| would survive that no problem!
| 0x1ceb00da wrote:
| Smartphones are pretty durable
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2xGzHjYCcY
|
| Note to mention they're waterproof.
| vel0city wrote:
| My Nokia in 2003 didn't last a week. As a teenager I was on
| AIM on that thing constantly. The battery lasted maybe a day
| or two when I was actually using it a good bit.
|
| The battery lasted a week when a week's worth of usage was a
| dozen messages and an hour of call time with the rest the
| phone is locked and dark.
| Habgdnv wrote:
| I owned a 3310. I remember going into the mountains for a
| week and didn't even charge the phone beforehand, because the
| battery would last anyway. Back then I used to climb, and I
| remember how it fell out of my pocket from around 30m (100
| feet). When I got down, I just picked it up from the ground
| and put the back panel back on. The phone worked perfectly
| for at years after that.
| ReptileMan wrote:
| When we talk nokia we mean 3310 ... and that bastard was
| indestructible, the battery lasted forever and you had snake
| and a phone book.
| raincole wrote:
| It feels like when people watch the video of a 70s car crashes
| into a modern car and leaves in one piece.
|
| "Wow, old car was much more solid! The modern car got
| destroyed!"
|
| Until you realize that the old car utilizes the driver seat as
| the crumple zone.
| hopelite wrote:
| Your are now carrying around a mobile, personal telescreen
| called a "smart"phone. The telescreen was also the height of
| technology.
| shelsilverstein wrote:
| This is missing the point of the post.
|
| New iPhones and Android phones eventually have to be replaced
| because the software is no longer supported. Flip phones
| continue to be supported, if we would just use them to call
| people, which would use up less of our lifespan than
| smartphones, playing games and using social media. Note: I
| personally wouldn't suggest flip phones for everyone, because
| smartphones are expected for some types of MFA now.
|
| The post also says that a lot more clothing is produced and
| sold that is cheap quality, resulting in more waste. Fast-
| fashion is also popular, which results in more low-quality
| material being thrown away than the previous slower release of
| new styles.
|
| imo the way to help would be to:
|
| - Save enough money to buy higher quality used appliances,
| clothing, furniture, etc. and stop funding the companies that
| do this.
|
| - Don't use social media or websites/apps that promote (through
| ads or just photos/video) purchase and consumption of low
| quality goods. Buy used products instead.
|
| I think there's an opportunity here for everyone to get
| involved. You can still purchase high quality products, because
| the point is to increase product quality for future
| generations.
| pxoe wrote:
| When compared on exact same use cases, smartphones don't have
| to be replaced either if they're used to just call people and
| receive messages. If it's just for calls, why would software
| support matter? People keep comparing smartphones to
| dumbphones, while not actually comparing them on that limited
| set of dumbphone functionality. Does that not seem silly, if
| not just fallacious?
| otabdeveloper4 wrote:
| > I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even
| Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in
| every way possible.
|
| Having owned both, no. The N900 was programmable, none of the
| current crop of phones are.
| brewdad wrote:
| Features are not the same thing as quality.
| bluedino wrote:
| My Palm Treo 700W was straight garbage. Battery lasted hours,
| terrible OS, Windows Mobile...
| bluescrn wrote:
| > I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even
| Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in
| every way possible.
|
| Until you need to replace the battery.
|
| Battery replacement has been intentionally made not just a
| pain, but actually dangerous, by using excessive amounts of
| adhesive to hold in batteries that may spontaneously combust if
| physically damaged while trying to remove them.
|
| Replaced a battery in a Nintendo Switch not too long ago, and
| what an absolute fucking pain that was to get the old battery
| out, IPA, dental floss (to try and get under the battery and
| cut through the glue), and still needed a worrying amount of
| levering out.
|
| (It's not as if these batteries have any significant space in
| which to move around, why do they need adhesive at all, and not
| just some foam/rubber pads to hold them in place?)
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Disagree.
|
| You want them rigidly held in place as *any* flex in their
| mounting will add up to fatigue failures over enough time.
| Realistically, that means glue or a screw-down anchor that
| exerts tension--and if you have such an anchor you need to
| beef up the substrate also to avoid it deforming the case
| over time. Glue is thinner and lighter, thus it wins in the
| market. Likewise, cases are glued because providing
| waterproofing via glue is thinner and more reliable than
| providing it by gaskets and screw-down anchors.
|
| Simple observation: I have a chest strap heart rate monitor,
| uses a coin battery and is rated for swimming. What's the
| biggest failure mode? Imperfect seal of the gasket against
| the stuff around it permitting water intrusion. (There is a
| redesign that is supposed to be more reliable but since mine
| never gets submerged it's still working despite once I found
| the gasket was clearly not properly seated.)
| JansjoFromIkea wrote:
| The gap between 2025 and 2009 is massive for smartphones but
| I'd say it gets drastically smaller around the midpoint.
|
| If it wasn't for it no longer being supported by iOS I'd still
| be using a 2016 SE and the only things I'd seriously miss are
| an OLED screen (so good for using the phone in dark spaces) and
| wireless charging (basically for peace of mind if the charging
| port ever breaks)
| uecker wrote:
| I had an N9 once and it was certainly much better than the
| Android I replaced it with years later.
| joegibbs wrote:
| For public services, every year people get older, more of the
| economy has to be reallocated towards looking after them. More
| spending on pensions rather than education, more old people using
| all the health services (since they use up so much more than
| young people).
|
| The upper-middle class in the US is also bigger than ever, and
| all those upper-middle interests are getting saturated: AMEX
| lounges, expensive resorts. Air travel is also a lot more
| affordable for the common person than back in the golden age.
| haunter wrote:
| >clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash
|
| Or maybe just don't buy cheap thrash?
|
| I bought some T-shirts while in Covid from a sports brand and 5
| years later they are still as if they were new :shrug:
|
| Of course price =/= quality, but when almost everyone is ordering
| their new clothes from Shein then what do you really expect?
| SwordAndCitadel wrote:
| Capitalism is the reason for declining quality. The incentive
| isn't to make quality products and services - the incentive is to
| monopolize an industry, and then squeeze every last cent from the
| captured consumers. Line must go up!
| panick21_ wrote:
| And yet almost no industry is actually a monopoly, funny how
| that works. Even even if it is, most of the time its only in
| certain region. And even then, often the pricing power of those
| 'monopolies' is not very strong.
|
| In fact, historically most monopolies were state sanctioned,
| and that is still mostly true.
|
| Literally non of the things mentioned in the article are
| monopolies. Cloths, absolutely not even close to a monopoly.
| AI, nope. Flying, nope. Maybe airplanes is duopoly for certain
| kinds of planes and that is one of the closest things to a
| monopoly. And yet despite that, prices for actually flying
| between places are incredibly low, the expect opposite of what
| you expect to happen in a typical monopoly.
|
| Food industry, no monopoly. Computer, no monopoly. Hotels, no
| monopoly. Property, no monopoly.
|
| In fact the largest global industries (just google list):
|
| Global Life & Health Insurance Carriers
|
| Global Car & Automobile Sales
|
| Global Commercial Real Estate
|
| Global Pension Funds
|
| Global Oil & Gas Exploration & Production
|
| Global Car & Automobile Manufacturing
|
| Global Direct General Insurance Carriers
|
| Global Auto Parts & Accessories Manufacturing
|
| Global Engineering Services
|
| Global Wireless Telecommunications Carriers
|
| Not a single monopoly in the list.
|
| So please tell me what you are talking about. Maybe some Health
| insurance have some limited monopoly in some place.
|
| Please post here, from your monthly budget, how much of that
| budget goes to what you would call monopolies?
| bornfreddy wrote:
| > ...that the great promise of capitalism -- if you work, you can
| have a decent life, buy a house, and go on vacation -- is no
| longer being fulfilled;...
|
| That's... not capitalism at all? Socialism maybe, but absolutely
| not capitalism. In average, those that work will have a good life
| (or at least, in average, better life than those who don't), but
| there is no guarantee on a single case, or even that this life
| will be good enough.
| raspasov wrote:
| So many concepts conflated in that article, I start to wonder
| if an LLM genius was involved in its creation.
| buran77 wrote:
| > Many products are hard to compare due to the enormous price
| difference
|
| Well that explains a lot, doesn't it? The article is right
| overall but occasionally glances over the importance of the
| "quality/price" ratio. As the price went down, buying habits
| changed, and by extension the manufacturing habits. When things
| are cheap nobody wants to keep them forever, they get exchanged
| sooner to "keep up with the times".
|
| My anecdote, when I bought my first fridge (a tiny 70-100l I
| think) it cost 2.5x the average net salary in my country, and it
| still broke down often, but it could be repaired so it lasted 20+
| years. I think today a fridge costing 2.5x the average salary -
| for the US this would be a ~$10-12k fridge - will be more
| reliable but unrepairable so when it's done, it's done.
| 0wis wrote:
| Not that sure. I know Bosch, Liebherr and Samsung fridges
| bought in the 2000's that lasted 10+ years, some of them that
| keeps running even after being used heavily (being moved, used
| by families of 5...etc). They are repairable and some got
| repaired. They are 2-3000EUR+. Which is 2-3x the average
| monthly salary.
|
| An other thing to account for is the price of repairs. If your
| appliances costs less than one hour of a mid-skill technician,
| it's hard to justify the spending. Same for doing it yourself
| if you're time is worth a lot. The only solution is to by high
| end, which is always risky and more cash intensive. Most people
| will prefer buying cheap and change to new if required
| buran77 wrote:
| You start by saying "not that sure" but then continue to
| support my point. So now I'm also not that sure what you
| mean.
|
| 3000EUR+ in the early 2000s is easily 5000EUR today
| accounting for inflation. Even if you mean they are 3000EUR
| today, at that price point the market is needle thin. The
| best selling fridges on Amazon.de right now are in the 300EUR
| region, maybe 500-600EUR if you want to go "premium". So
| you're saying a fridge that's 10-15 times more expensive than
| the cheap best sellers is also better.
|
| This is exactly the quality/price trap. People remember the
| quality from "way back when" but forget the price. We mostly
| just traded quality/longevity for cheaper and faster
| replacement. Quality didn't necessarily go down, it's just
| people target cheaper products today.
| layer8 wrote:
| I use a 35 year old German-brand fridge that still works
| perfectly. I wouldn't necessarily expect a modern fridge to
| last that long.
| bluecheese452 wrote:
| Average salary over what time period? A week, a month, a year?
| Tractor8626 wrote:
| Nothing bewildering. There is simple explanation. Your country's
| economy going downhill. You are no longer prosperous country you
| once was.
| luibelgo wrote:
| Which country?
| Tractor8626 wrote:
| Whatever country you see declining quality in.
| astrobe_ wrote:
| > For some consumers -- although we know there won't be many --
| the Nokia's extreme durability may be more valuable than the
| iPhone's technological innovations
|
| I still use a phone of the generation after Nokia - it must be 20
| years old now. The thing is, for everyday use voicemail and SMS
| are enough for me. I don't need more technology. And certainly
| not the kind of technology that make people walk like zombies on
| the street. If you remember the old Youtube video about viewers
| not noticing a gorilla in the middle of basketball players
| because viewers were instructed to count something, this is
| exactly that.
|
| > there's another, lesser-known but even more effective method:
| convincing consumers that a product is outdated for aesthetic or
| symbolic reasons, even if it still works.
|
| Long story short, durability is the greatest enemy for
| businesses. They have decades of experience of fighting against
| it. IIRC Europe introduced laws against planned obsolescence, but
| businesses probably did start to switch to "perceived
| obsolescence" when consumers proved the existence of planned
| obsolescence.
|
| It's not even something evil to do for some categories of
| products. Good household appliances use less energy, even good
| ICE cars probably are more efficient than they used to be, etc.
| It seems that it defines a different metric for product quality,
| total cost of ownership.
|
| > However, Rodriguez argues that, generally speaking, automation
| does improve customer service. [...] The initial investment in
| technology is extremely high, and the benefits remain practically
| the same. We have not detected any job losses in the sector
| either.
|
| If companies really are investing in order to improve their
| customer service, that's big news.
| blfr wrote:
| That's great for your use but meanwhile my phone has now better
| eyesight than I do (and I'm 20/20), carries all my notes and
| photos, answers random questions about prions, and offers fully
| e2e encrypted instant communication with virtually anyone
| across the world.
| blfr wrote:
| Most things are still available at the same quality your parents
| remember, thanks to ecommerce much more avilable, but sadly also
| at a similar real price your parents remember which we find
| extortionary by comparison to all the cheap crap flooding the
| market.
|
| You can have a tailored suit/shirt, hardwood furniture, grass-fed
| beef, vacuum to last decades, etc, but it will cost around the
| same in real terms and you're used to prices from Zara/Lidl.
|
| Some things have truly declined because the demand collapsed so
| much that they basically got discontinued in the 1st world (that
| tailored shirt is coming from Ceylon) but others have improved
| tremendously by soaking up that drive for quality (check any
| independent coffee shop).
|
| Not to mention the true pinnacles of modern manufacturing.
| Because for the price of a decent camera my father could get, I
| have a 100x zoom camera in my pocket, with a 7" touch screen, and
| 5g connectivity, also somehow all the books I could have ever
| read.
| klabb3 wrote:
| > Most things are still available at the same quality your
| parents remember
|
| Just no. The old reputable brands are enshittifying the same
| way. I've multiple times seen it first hand, with brands like
| Levi's and Fjallraven. One year of wear is enough to disform
| the textile entirely. The fabric from those older clothes are
| still sturdy and whole, with only discoloration at the folding
| spots. No holes either from decades of use.
|
| I magically found a sturdy canvas backpack 10 years ago and
| went back to the store recently to check what they had: same
| brand, but now all polyester.
|
| The difference in quality is immense. Especially textile:
| clothes and shoes. I don't expect the same prices, I'm happy to
| pay more for quality. But the brand alone often means nothing.
| walterbell wrote:
| Uniqlo has a vertically integrated Japanese supply chain,
| including custom textiles. Their clothing has been relatively
| consistent.
| mitthrowaway2 wrote:
| Japanese companies have largely bucked the trend of
| declining quality, at least within their domestic market.
| I'm not sure if it's related to decades of Japanese
| deflation or just because of a more discerning quality-
| conscious consumer base. Uniqlo has done a decent job of
| carrying that quality consciousness over to the rest of the
| world.
| blfr wrote:
| Yes, you can't get the very same product (Levi's 501s) but
| you can absolutely get the same thing (straight cut jeans). I
| don't wear jeans or workwear but heard good things about
| Bronson Mfg and Red Tornado from enthusiasts.
|
| The price is also quite reasonable (~100 USD) thanks to
| workwear revival and you can get them in heavier weights (15
| oz).
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| The polyester will sell better because it's lighter and
| resists water penetration better. Some time back I went
| through an old box of outdoor stuff from my childhood. Dumped
| most of it because between a choice of the old free (as I
| already owned it) gear or buying modern I would buy modern if
| I hadn't already done so.
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| This is intuitive but the problem with expensive things is you
| can't know who's legit, and who's pulling a fast one.
| Everything is a lemon market.
|
| The strategy I'm adopting for this is a total ban on any brand
| or mark that appears on slop. BMW and JBL were the first on my
| list.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah, looking back to my father's SLR. Incredible lens, went
| all the way up to 100mm! He'd probably faint (can't, he's long
| gone) if I showed him my DSLR with a 28-300 lens on it that
| takes far better pictures than his could. And the wastefulness
| of setting the default on my camera to be a 7-shot bracket??? 5
| actual shots per roll??? You measure your shooting capacity in
| batteries rather than film??? You can put 10,000 rolls of film
| in that little case that would survive if a truck ran over
| it???
| michaelsshaw wrote:
| > is that the great promise of capitalism -- if you work, you can
| have a decent life, buy a house, and go on vacation -- is no
| longer being fulfilled;
|
| I'd just like to comment on this line in particular. The promise
| of capitalism isn't this, but, rather, if you own capital (i.e.
| are a capitalist), you explicitly do not have to work. There is
| no promise made to the workers, except that in some way they are
| compensated for their work.
|
| There are other systems wherein if you don't work (and aren't
| retired/disabled), you don't get paid. But capitalism is one of
| them in which non-workers get paid, and usually with a disgusting
| disparity between the rate of the two classes.
| lmpdev wrote:
| Anyone else starting to see this as an unconscious but inevitable
| outcome of the world's tail-end stage of becoming developed?
|
| Moore's law has ended. The LHC found nothing of note. Childhood
| mortality and Polio have been defeated. The periodic table is
| effectively complete. R&D is having limited returns. This AI
| capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the
| 1980s.
|
| We were born thinking the curve from the 1950s onwards was a god-
| given eternal exponential. But since about the early 2000s we've
| quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given.
|
| Economists and the well-off are in denial about exponential
| growth. We've hit the current carrying capacity for an economy of
| n-billion silicon-flinging apes on a globe with a limited number
| of resources.
|
| Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal. This
| puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every decision
| maker in the organisation: "at the end of the day, this number
| has to go up and this number go down".
|
| Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little
| better through their products or services. The only model left,
| now that all the large pile of low-hanging fruit of innovation
| are gone, is to aggressively extract money from customers.
|
| Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of
| exponential growth being flawed. Should we require MBAs to know
| what a logistic curve is?
|
| I don't know a lot, but I know that the current business paradigm
| and the products and services I interact with everyday are very
| optimised. But not optimised for me. They're optimised for
| businesses maligned to my goals, but the only businesses left
| offering anything.
| panick21_ wrote:
| Moore's law might have ended but Wright's law didn't, and even
| if it did, it would still be progress, we don't have
| exponential development in everything. Continues improvement is
| still continuous.
|
| > The LHC found nothing of note.
|
| That's just wrong.
|
| > Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated.
|
| Childhood mortality has not been defeated. And while Polio has
| been, many other things haven't.
|
| > The periodic table is effectively complete.
|
| People in the next 100 years will add more. And even so, there
| is so much about materials we don't understand its actually
| insane. There are many things we learn about materials that is
| just as or more relevant then discovering a new element.
|
| > R&D is having limited returns.
|
| It has always had limited returns. And in some ways it has huge
| returns. Making an airlplane 1% more efficient today has a much
| larger overall impact then making a plane 10% more efficient 50
| years ago.
|
| > This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to
| R&D from the 1980s.
|
| That's just dismissive of 30+ years of research and work. You
| might as well argue that its just 200 years of catching up to
| the vision of Ada.
|
| > But since about the early 2000s we've quietly known the curve
| was logistic, and not god-given.
|
| From a global perspective there is no slowdown, its only
| relative to US experience.
|
| > Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal.
| This puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every
| decision maker in the organisation: "at the end of the day,
| this number has to go up and this number go down".
|
| This has literally been every business for 5000 years.
|
| > Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little
| better through their products or services.
|
| And they still do.
|
| > The only model left, now that all the large pile of low-
| hanging fruit of innovation are gone, is to aggressively
| extract money from customers.
|
| That's just not accurate. Go look up how much investment in
| next generation notes cost TSMC and then tell me all they do is
| extract money from consumers. Tell me that the restaurant down
| the street who works hard creating incredibly food is just
| extracting money from consumers in some kind of aggressive way.
|
| When SpaceX deployed a whole new infrastructure around the
| globe, was that just extracting money because innovation is
| impossible, or was it massive innovation and massive
| infrastructure spending?
|
| This is just a cynical world-view glorifying the past. When in
| effect, innovation wasn't easy. Go look up how many people died
| in air accidents, or car accidents. Go look up how many
| mainframe and minicomputer companies came and went, trying to
| invent the future. If anything the length companies now-days go
| to, to prevent a single death is actually kind of crazy.
|
| > Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions
| of exponential growth being flawed.
|
| There are tons of business that don't expect exponential
| growth. There are even many that expect to shrink. And tons of
| business who do expect it don't get it. And yet the world keeps
| turning for those business too.
|
| Capitalism can work perfectly fine in situation of now growth,
| plenty of countries have seen little growth for decades. And
| yet food still gets delivered to stores. Trains and cars keep
| going around. And so on and so on. But even in those places,
| companies don't stop trying to grow.
|
| Maybe we will live in a world where no company will ever grow
| and wont for decades, even in that world, MBA and everybody
| else will still try to grow companies. Even if the world
| experienced a 50 year decline, that wouldn't change anything.
| Teach them about logistic curves all you like.
|
| > But not optimised for me.
|
| The world doesn't evolve around you. Shocking that you had to
| realize that like this.
| lmpdev wrote:
| Your response leans on pedantic literalism and techno-
| optimism.
|
| Yes, continuous improvement is still happening - but that's
| exactly the point. We're now largely in the slow, incremental
| phase of a logistic curve, not the wild exponential boom of
| mid-century.
|
| Declaring "Wright's law didn't end" doesn't magically revive
| Moore's Law or deliver another physics revolution. It just
| means costs fall gradually - a far cry from the paradigm-
| shifting breakthroughs we once took for granted. Take your
| example of airplane efficiency: you argue that a 1%
| improvement today has more total impact than a 10%
| improvement 50 years ago. Precisely - because we've already
| squeezed out the big gains. We're fighting over the last few
| percent now. That's diminishing returns in a nutshell.
|
| Claiming "the LHC found nothing of note" is "just wrong"
| without elaboration is not a rebuttal - it's empty hand-
| waving. In truth, the LHC confirmed the Higgs (important, but
| expected) and thus far hasn't found new physics beyond the
| Standard Model. In other words, no earth-shaking discovery to
| mark on the timeline.
|
| Similarly, quibbling that "the periodic table isn't complete
| because we might add element 119+" is technically true yet
| profoundly trivial. Synthesizing a superheavy element that
| decays in microseconds won't herald a new era of materials
| (you brought up material science, not me); it only
| underscores that we're tinkering at the margins of what we
| already know.
|
| The original point - that the big foundational discoveries
| (DNA, the atom, electromagnetism, etc.) have been made -
| still stands. And yes, childhood mortality isn't zero and new
| diseases appear - but pretending the original claim was that
| "everything is 100% solved" is a straw man. Polio has been
| virtually eradicated worldwide; childhood mortality is down
| to a fraction of historic levels. These are monumental
| victories. Dismissing them because "many other things haven't
| been defeated" is like shrugging off the moon landing because
| we haven't colonized Mars. It's disingenuous nitpicking that
| ignores the broader truth: the low-hanging fruit has been
| plucked. Progress now tends to be harder-fought and
| incremental, exactly as a logistic curve (or plain old
| reality) predicts.
|
| You insist "business has always been this way" - growth-
| obsessed and optimizing numbers - as if 5,000 years of
| merchants hustling invalidates any concern about today. This
| is a false equivalence. For most of history, economic growth
| was glacial and businesses were limited by local markets and
| resources. The modern era's exponential growth expectations
| are a relatively recent phenomenon fueled by
| industrialisation and cheap energy. Now we're hitting
| planetary and societal limits, something those ancient
| businesses never had to grapple with on a global scale.
| Pointing out that reality has a carrying capacity isn't
| "denial" - it's maths. We live on a finite planet. Endless
| exponential GDP growth in a closed system is fantasy. By
| slyly conceding that some companies "even expect to shrink"
| or that "plenty of countries have seen little growth for
| decades", you're actually reinforcing the original argument:
| perpetual growth is not guaranteed. Yet in the same breath
| you acknowledge businesses will "still try to grow" even in a
| no-growth world - which is exactly the problem being
| highlighted!
|
| An economic paradigm built on eternal growth starts to
| cannibalise itself when growth dries up. Debt-fueled bubbles,
| resource depletion, and exploitative practices aren't signs
| of a healthy status quo - they're symptoms of chasing an
| impossible target. Teaching MBAs about logistic curves and
| limits to growth isn't frivolous; it's an attempt to inject
| reality into boardroom delusions. Dismissing that as
| irrelevant is just embracing willful ignorance.
|
| And no, global progress isn't all wine and roses just because
| some developing countries are catching up. Your "from a
| global perspective there is no slowdown" line ignores that
| much of global GDP growth in recent decades came from
| population increase and China/India's rapid development -
| one-time events that don't prove infinite growth is
| sustainable. Meanwhile, frontier innovation and productivity
| in mature economies have slowed, a fact noted by plenty of
| economists. Simply put, we're coasting on momentum. Pointing
| that out isn't "glorifying the past," it's cautioning that
| the frenetic growth phase is leveling off - and our economic
| mindset needs to catch up.
|
| You object to the statement that the only model left is
| "aggressively extracting money from customers," by rattling
| off examples of ongoing innovation. Sure, TSMC pours billions
| into next-gen chip nodes - but that actually supports the
| point about diminishing returns (each shrink is exorbitantly
| expensive and yields smaller gains). Yes, SpaceX built a new
| rocket infrastructure - an impressive outlier that everyone
| admires precisely because true game-changing innovation is so
| rare these days. Citing a local restaurant making "incredible
| food" or a rocket company revolutionising launch doesn't
| magically erase the countless counter-examples of businesses
| optimizing for profit at the expense of customer benefit.
|
| Look around: software shifting to subscription models for
| basic features, appliances designed to break faster or use
| proprietary consumables, games riddled with predatory
| microtransactions, tech ecosystems that lock you in and
| harvest your data, airlines nickel-and-diming passengers for
| things that used to be free. These are all optimizations for
| revenue extraction, not for making your life better. My
| frustration was about this very shift - that many products
| and services nowadays feel like they exist to trap users in a
| maze of monetisation, rather than to deliver clear value.
|
| Your response that "businesses still make lives better" reads
| like a blanket corporate press release, not an engagement
| with reality. Nobody said innovation has literally ceased. My
| claim was that the "large pile of low-hanging fruit" is gone
| - and you haven't actually refuted that. Incremental
| improvements and isolated leaps forward (like reusable
| rockets) happen, but they're increasingly hard-won.
| Meanwhile, companies flush with MBAs and pressured by
| investors turn to easier plays: locking in customers,
| eliminating competition, and squeezing every penny. When you
| counter with "but look at this new chip/rocket/restaurant,"
| you're cherry-picking exceptions to downplay a broad trend
| that every consumer can feel.
|
| The weakest part of your rebuttal is how it mischaracterises
| my original arguments and occasionally even undermines your
| own. You spend a lot of energy torching straw men. Nowhere
| did I claim "the world should revolve around me" - that's
| your invented absurdity. Complaining that products are not
| optimized for users (but for profit metrics) is not the same
| as expecting a personal utopia tailored to each individual.
| It's pointing out a systemic misalignment between what
| customers want and what companies prioritise.
|
| The irony is that in your rush to refute every point, you
| often validate them. You argue "R&D has always had limited
| returns", which doesn't rebut the idea that current R&D is
| yielding less bang for the buck - it reinforces it. You point
| out how much harder it is now to get small improvements
| (exactly the complaint!). You deride the notion of a logistic
| curve, yet your own examples (small incremental gains, global
| catch-up growth slowing as it matures, etc.) paint a textbook
| logistic scenario. Your unwavering faith that "everything's
| fine, progress is progress" blinds you to the qualitative
| difference between transformative growth and grinding
| optimization.
|
| It's like responding to someone worried about crop yields
| plateauing by saying "nonsense, we're still growing some corn
| every year." Totally misses the point. Finally, your tone
| doesn't do you any favors. Dismissing valid concerns as
| "cynical world-view" or implying anyone who disagrees just
| doesn't understand that "the world doesn't revolve around
| them" is more insulting than illuminating. It's possible to
| appreciate past innovation and be concerned about current
| trends - that doesn't make one a nostalgia-blinded cynic.
| Throwing out patronising asides might feel like scoring
| points, but it only highlights the emptiness of the rebuttal.
| When substance is lacking, sneering condescension fills the
| void.
|
| Your response really tries to read like a thoughtful counter-
| argument and yet comes off as a knee-jerk denial of anything
| remotely critical of the status quo. Nobody is saying human
| progress stopped or that businesses overnight turned into
| pure evil. The argument is that we're entering a new phase:
| slower growth, harder innovation, and yes, a desperate push
| by many companies to maintain profits now that the easy
| growth is gone. You haven't disproven that; in fact, you've
| indirectly affirmed many aspects of it while arguing past the
| point.
|
| To address this because it seems to be a repeated thought
| pattern underlying a lot of your responses lately: _labeling
| every concern "wrong" or "cynical" doesn't make it go away_.
| Sometimes metrics do plateau, sometimes the next big thing
| doesn't pan out (ask the LHC physicists hoping for new
| particles), and sometimes companies really do put profits
| over people in ways that hurt quality and trust.
| Acknowledging these realities isn't about glorifying the past
| - it's about not deluding ourselves regarding the present.
| _No_ , the world doesn't revolve around any of us. But it's
| _not supposed to revolve around corporate KPIs_ or your
| _personal techno-optimism either_. Progress isn 't a given,
| and pretending otherwise is as misguided as assuming we were
| on an endless exponential.
|
| A little less hubris and a little more humility about these
| limits would go a long way - especially before dismissing
| others as simply "wrong" without having the muscle to back it
| up.
| TomMasz wrote:
| Couldn't help noticing they reference the now-shuttered FakeSpot
| for detecting AI-written product reviews.
| drdec wrote:
| Most of the people on this board are upper middle to lower upper
| class (thinking American, apologies to my non US friends). Such
| people can afford products outside the grasp of most Americans.
|
| What naturally happens to such products is that the manufacturers
| find a way to broaden their customer base. They find ways to
| bring the price point down so they can sell more.
|
| For most people this is a boon. They can afford a luxury or
| convenience they otherwise wouldn't be able to. Overall most
| people are better off when this happens.
|
| For the first group of people however, they are worse off. They
| cannot get the same product as before. Such is life.
| Arn_Thor wrote:
| The parable of boots seems apt here. In the extreme, expensive
| pair can last for a decade while people who can only afford the
| cheap pair will have to keep buying a new one every year.
|
| Yes, the fact that any family can afford a new shelving unit is
| great! But the fact that it'll last them just a few years is
| not good; they'll spend more in the long run
| Pingk wrote:
| Except it's getting so difficult to find the companies
| producing the more durable alternative, so everyone is forced
| to buy the flimsy piece that falls apart
| AdrianB1 wrote:
| It is not that hard, if you do the minimum effort to
| educate yourself. For example 20 years ago I struggled to
| find motorcycle gear in Eastern Europe, it was very hard
| and stuff was extremely expensive for the salaries in this
| region. I bought initially cheap stuff that broke fast,
| then the next generation I knew what to buy and I have now
| equipment that is over 10 years old that I am using with
| great pleasure. It is similar in most cases I have to buy
| something, but it takes some effort to look for options.
| Ray20 wrote:
| Only the parable does not work. Objectively. The fact that
| the poor are forced to spend more because they cannot afford
| something is complete bs. I can't imagine any area (maybe
| except perhaps interaction with government bureaucracy) where
| the parable would be relevant.
|
| Shoes that last a decade are cost a lot more than five pairs
| of cheap shoes that last two years. And the same with
| furniture and everything else.
|
| "Pay less in the long run" is a pure marketing ploy for dumb
| pompous people with money to make them pay more.
| bluedino wrote:
| $35 for the cheapest thinnest plastic shelving you can buy.
| The entire HDX line is the lowest quality stuff known to man.
|
| https://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-4-Tier-Easy-Assembly-
| Scratch...
| bo1024 wrote:
| Your parents, lower middle class in the 80s, could afford a
| washing machine that lasts 40 years.
|
| You, lower middle class in the 2020s, can afford with the same
| resources a washing machine that lasts 5 years and is no more
| effective than your parents' (but has an app).
|
| In the sense of the parent comment, you are fortunate that the
| magic of capitalism currently produces such cheap washing
| machines that even people as poor as you can afford them. But
| from another angle, the purchasing power of the lower middle
| class has sunk over time, and quality has degraded to match
| because durable products have now become "outside the grasp of
| most Americans".
| evan_ wrote:
| It lasted 40 years because when it broke they called the
| repairman. Now when stuff breaks people just buy a new one
| and complain that it doesn't last as long.
| DangitBobby wrote:
| The repairman charges $150 labor and offers to fix it by
| replacing a single part that costs half the purchase price
| of the machine. Seems likely you'd be better off buying the
| new machine.
| anovikov wrote:
| Some counterpoints: Apple devices of today are of near perfect
| quality with almost no mechanical, electronic, or software
| quirks. Gone are the days of keyboards that got stuck after a
| month of use, cables that wore down in a month too, phones you
| had to hold in a particular way or they lost signal, useless Maps
| app forced upon you, phones that bent in the pocket, exploding
| batteries, endless shit like that. Sure we continued loving Apple
| through all this, but by about 2020 or so, everyone who wasn't an
| Apple fan started to kinda see us like we all see Trump's fans,
| sorta... It was hard to justify for any person outside of the
| Apple bubble.
|
| Another counterpoint: hotel quality has arguably improved a great
| lot in the last 10 year or so. Especially, after Covid. That's
| rather perplexing, especially since airlines are going in the
| opposite direction while they two are usually a part of the same
| purchase by the same people and logically i'd expect their
| trajectories to be similar.
|
| Bigger counterpoint: cars. 10-year old electric cars today drive
| like new because well, there's nothing to wear out there. Our
| kids will see lots of 40-50 year old cars on roads, with
| completely worn out interiors but still driving just fine.
| Probably with batteries replaced once or twice thus driving a lot
| better than when they were new because 2035 batteries will have a
| lot higher density, C-ratings, and will heat less than 2015
| batteries, and replacement will cost less than replacement of a
| gearbox on a 2015 Volvo goofed up by incompetent servicemen.
| fym wrote:
| The author is romanticizing a past that never was. A deep sense
| of melancholy clouds his writing. I always find it puzzling how
| some pathologies manage to disguise themselves as wisdom.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| Southpark is always prescient in this regard. Memberberries has
| been a meme on reddit for ages. Maybe the author should immerse
| himself in popular culture so that the same objections that are
| commonly made could be avoided.
| zkmon wrote:
| I live in a developed country. People buy a new home here, and
| find the kitchen counter top surface bulges up easily when a hot
| plate is placed on it. Turns out that the surface is a laminate
| that is not heat resistant.
|
| Family business houses used to invest in long-term success
| through brand, reputation and durability. Startups or hired CEOs
| focus on short-term goals and invest in creating superficial
| perceptions that can help the sale.
| nradov wrote:
| They don't have granite counter tops in your country?
| sgt wrote:
| They probably went for the laminated granite...
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| He didn't pick the tops.
|
| We got to spec this place from the builder's options. Granite
| would have been a few percent of the total price of the house
| and granite comes with the problem that it's somewhat porous.
|
| We decided on Corian countertops--it's basically a plastic
| resin, a bit scratchable (but on the flip side it's full
| depth material so you can buff out some damage), but totally
| waterproof and no grout lines. Now there's a version that
| uses quartz in the resin, much tougher but otherwise similar.
| rr808 wrote:
| > kitchen counter top surface bulges up easily when a hot plate
| is placed on it
|
| This is pretty normal when I was growing up. You should never
| put a hot anything on a countertop.
| zkmon wrote:
| You hardly ever see any real stone, real wood, real brick, or
| real walls. Also, floor tiles are not glued or cemented to
| floor. They are just a floating layer of plastic (in case of
| laminate).
| singingwolfboy wrote:
| https://archive.is/7BmHJ
| casey2 wrote:
| True, software used to mean something and never crash (if it did
| we wouldn't use it, we had standards back then after all) 9 nines
| and all that.
|
| Nowadays people just want what aint good for em
| anthk wrote:
| The original article in Spanish:
|
| https://elpais.com/ideas/2025-07-13/el-asombroso-fenomeno-de...
| TrackerFF wrote:
| At least when it comes to musical instruments, cheap instruments
| today are astronomically better than the cheap instruments I grew
| up with - and they are cheaper. The manufacturing process has
| become so good that what you get for $350 today, is about the
| same standard as what you'd pay $500-$800 for 30 years ago (which
| is probably closer to $1000-$1500 today).
|
| As far as clothes go - I the cheap junk back in the day didn't
| last too long, either. Cheap supermarket jeans would last me
| maybe 1 season, before something ripped. Granted they probably
| only cost $20 back then - but the quality isn't too different
| from the H&M you purchase today for $50.
| dijit wrote:
| Counter-anecdote. I bought some Jeans from ASDA (owned by
| Walmart now, not sure about then) for 5GBP in 2005..
|
| FIVE, POUNDS.
|
| Crazy cheap by any measure; they were extremely thick, to the
| point where you could stand them up with no person inside them.
| They lasted me for over 10 years.
|
| New jeans (at any price point) seem to wear out in the inner
| thigh inside of a year, and I am not as active as I was back
| then due to age. I also haven't gained a significant amount of
| weight to account for this. I thought it could be caused by
| cycling, but I stopped cycling and the wear outs still happen.
| I thought it could be the quality of what I was buying so I
| bought more and more expensive jeans, alas, the same was true.
|
| The best Jeans I ever owned are simultaneously the cheapest.
|
| (side note; I also noticed that nearly all Jeans these days
| contain "elastane" which is basically plastic, which probably
| contributes to the degradation - Elastane didn't exist for
| jeans in 2005, they were mostly still 100% cotton until the
| legging jeans fad and then it started making its way into
| normal jeans).
| tonyedgecombe wrote:
| > ASDA (owned by Walmart now, not sure about then)
|
| Not any more, they got bought by two rather dodgy petrol
| station owners.
| rizs12 wrote:
| you mean two owners of a massive petrol station chain.
| What's dodgy about them?
| toolslive wrote:
| another counter example: Tomatoes. The price evolution:
| https://www.in2013dollars.com/Tomatoes/price-inflation/1953-...
|
| They used to have taste. Now it's gone.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| I was going to write something like this at one time, only mine
| would be better because it would make frequent mentions of The
| Space Merchants.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
|
| >Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into
| thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products
| placed on the market.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| Yes, consumerism makes us throw out and replace perfectly working
| things. That doesn't mean there's not a decline in quality _as
| well_.
|
| > One is that attributes like durability -- which used to be a
| major factor in how people judged a product's quality -- have
| lost relevance.
|
| > some companies design certain products -- especially household
| appliances -- stop working after a certain period of time. This
| isn't a conspiracy theory, but a proven fact.
|
| So, in many cases we no longer factor in durability because we
| know that consumer products don't offer that quality _by design_.
|
| > healthcare services may not be worse than they were a few years
| ago. "The big problem is that they haven't adapted to the pace of
| social change. They haven't evolved enough to serve the entire
| elderly population, whose demographic size is increasing every
| year"
|
| But then they are, in fact, of worse quality for a large group of
| the population.
|
| > five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants. The
| conclusion is clear: society isn't adapting to the pace of
| technological advancement.
|
| No, that's not a clear conclusion. Another conclusion that could
| be drawn is that the adaptation of AI technology in customer
| service has lowered the quality to a point customers don't even
| care to bother with. I.E., the pace of technological advancement,
| in this case, isn't ready for the demands of society.
|
| > It's difficult to prove that today's products are worse than
| those of 20 years ago.
|
| No, it's not. Some products and consumption patterns may be
| harder to compare. In other cases, we have clear examples of
| engineered decline in quality. One example: soap companies
| changing not just the size of the soap (shrinkflation) but also
| altering the ingredients to make the bar of soap last about half
| as long as before. Ever look under the bed at a hotel? After the
| pandemic, the quality of cleaning has declined substantially, at
| least in my country. My previous landlord lowered the indoor
| temperature and raised the rent, all in the same year. House
| prices keep going up, but building standards are lowered.
|
| In short: there are very real and measurable declines in quality
| because economies are tanking and, as the article correctly
| states, "the promise of capitalism" is no longer being fulfilled.
| thatjoeoverthr wrote:
| I've noticed a significant drop even recently, having recently
| bought the single worst pair of shoes at a brand name store. They
| basically dissolved like tissue paper within a week. I've never
| seen anything like it.
|
| My working assumption right now is this two phenomena together.
|
| One, a sneakier kind of "shrinkflation". You can make a can of
| coke smaller but you can't do this with shoes. But you can swap
| out materials or hire more careless manufacturers.
|
| Two, the breakdown of communication caused by AI, earlier fake
| reviewers and the death of the media at the hands of the web.
| Taken together, you can get away with a lot more without
| liquidating your brand simply because word won't spread.
| ralfd wrote:
| > simply because word won't spread
|
| Shame the shoe brand!
| gotoeleven wrote:
| According to the amazon page, TOTOFOYAGOO has been a trusted
| brand since June 11th 2025.
| simianparrot wrote:
| Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class, even
| adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent service
| and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just have the
| choice of paying very little for very low quality because there's
| more flights and more planes.
|
| https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/even-with-fees-the-miracle-of...
|
| Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I'm not
| saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that
| the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big
| name brands. There's now cheap and expensive Nike ranges, for
| example, where there used to be only the quality expensive tier.
|
| But if you look at the cost of, say, quality furniture today and
| adjust for inflation, it's going to be around the same as quality
| furniture 50 years ago. We just have the choice to pay a lot less
| for much worse now.
| elaus wrote:
| > Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes.
|
| I wish that were my experience as well. However, I've found
| that most brands simply add a huge markup for their name while
| investing very little into quality. As a result, you end up
| paying three times the price for just 20% better quality.
|
| When it comes to electronics, I feel like I can judge that for
| myself, and my gut feeling about clothing was confirmed after
| falling down a YouTube rabbit hole of "clothing teardowns."
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| I don't disagree with your point, but I suppose my wish then is
| that there were _not_ low-quality (low-cost) everything in the
| world right now.
|
| <ramble>
|
| I'm not unsympathetic regarding the poor, I grew up poor
| myself. And my single working mother raising two kids got by on
| hand-me-down furniture from her mother (probably, as you and
| the article suggest, of decent quality though).
|
| Having the option for (new) inexpensive everything allows us to
| accept low-quality; even encourages it (as has been pointed
| out, there's a Dopamine hit from purchasing a new thing ... I
| don't know if the same rush comes from purchasing a used piece
| of furniture from a Goodwill -- I suspect though it does
| somewhat). And, as we know, the landfills, oceans, become the
| destination for all this consumption.
|
| I admit that I am surprised that I am finding myself wishing
| that we, the Western world, were poorer again. It seems though
| that manufacturing has caught up to (down to?) the ability to
| provide new crap for us even if we were poorer.
|
| One wonders what the Great Depression would resemble in the
| 21st Century. Would we still have the latest, but crappy,
| gadgets and such? I sure can't imagine new car sales would not
| be seriously impacted.
|
| </ramble>
| nradov wrote:
| It's great having the option for cheap, low-quality stuff. If
| I need some oddball tool for a home improvement project then
| I can just buy the crap at Harbor Freight. If it breaks after
| a few uses then so what, I won't need it again anyway.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Yeah, fuck the externalities
| nradov wrote:
| What are you proposing as an alternative? Spend a fortune
| on a high quality tool, and then either have it sitting
| in my garage unused for years or waste a bunch of time
| trying to sell it online?
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| Tool rental is a thing (I don't imagine many people own
| their own cement mixer for example.)
|
| I recall my grandfather having (decent) tools sitting in
| his garage. Neighbors/relatives often borrowed tools in
| those days.
|
| To be a little more nuanced though, some tools don't
| benefit from "quality" versions. Perhaps an angle grinder
| is a good example. (The consumable grinding disk is
| probably the place not to cheap-out.) Maybe the cheap one
| is fine.
|
| But other tools, like a wood plane, you're going to have
| a bad time if you cheap out on those and wind up with
| steel that doesn't hold an edge for example.
|
| (Though I kind of wouldn't want to loan out a nice hand
| plane of mine to someone that might not worry as much as
| me about hitting a nail in a board they're planing.)
| nradov wrote:
| Tool rental is barely a thing. And then only for larger
| tools. I've done that before for larger items like
| extension ladders and air compressors but for smaller
| stuff no one actually rents those. If I need to plane one
| piece of wood then I'll buy the cheap tool. Good enough.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Borrow, rent, pay someone else to do it, or throw your
| hands up in the air when you've tried nothing, are all
| out of ideas, and fuck the externalities.
| nradov wrote:
| [flagged]
| brewdad wrote:
| Exactly. I needed an angle grinder for one specific use. I
| bought the cheapest model from HF and then threw it in my
| garage to sit. 15 years later I needed it again. It did the
| job. No reason to buy the higher end model.
|
| I did spend the extra to buy better quality wheels though.
| RandomBacon wrote:
| I wouldn't knock Harbor Freight.
|
| I bought a screwdriver at Home Depot, and screw stripped
| the screwdriver! I returned it and bought the same type of
| screwdriver at Harbor Freight and it's been great.
|
| The only product in Harbor Freight that I haven't liked so
| far, was their moving blankets - very thin.
| whoisyc wrote:
| > I admit that I am surprised that I am finding myself
| wishing that we, the Western world, were poorer again.
|
| Luxury belief.
|
| Doesn't it feel a little suspicious that the only people to
| ever say "we should become poorer" are people from rich
| countries where even the poor can afford cars and gadgets? Go
| to the countries actually manufacturing your goods and ask
| the average factory worker if he wants to be poor and prepare
| to get flipped off.
| koliber wrote:
| Poorer than average American != poor in 3rd world country.
|
| These words sound similar but mean vastly different things.
| Poor people in 3rd world countries need more income, not a
| larger quantity of cheap T shirts.
| JKCalhoun wrote:
| > Luxury belief.
|
| Sure.
|
| But I've lived on both sides though and think we've gone
| too far to the other end of the spectrum.
| shortrounddev2 wrote:
| On a gdp scale, basically every country on earth is
| "poorer" than the united states. As you point out, even the
| poor in America can own cars and tvs and smartphones.
|
| But if you visit any of these other countries you can often
| be shocked by how much they accomplish with so little.
| Vastly better standards of customer service, much higher
| quality public transportation systems, and they often have
| cheap quality goods and services which compromise in the
| right areas instead of being so crappy as to basically be a
| scam
| Spooky23 wrote:
| > One wonders what the Great Depression would resemble in the
| 21st Century. Would we still have the latest, but crappy,
| gadgets and such
|
| Think Star Wars. Live in a hovel, but have some magic
| gadgets.
| brewdad wrote:
| Much of the third world lives this way today. Atrocious
| living conditions but society runs on their personal cell
| phones. A cell phone can be more important in poorer parts
| of Asia than it is in the US.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| I think that if we fully incorporate all the environmental
| costs of production into the end prices of customer goods, we
| will become poorer, at least in the short run.
|
| In the long run, that could actually spur some development re
| cheap and safe energy etc.
| koliber wrote:
| Poorer in terms of $ accounting. Perhaps richer in terms of
| health, happiness, and the environment.
|
| Given how much money people are spending on the latter
| things I think becoming $ poorer might be the cheapest way
| of getting healthier and happier.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Possibly. Human happiness is complicated and rarely
| conforms to what it theoretically _ought_ to.
| nfriedly wrote:
| > _I 'm not saying that a high price label guarantees high
| quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has
| broadened, even within big name brands._
|
| I think this needs to be repeated. People tend to think more
| expensive equals higher quality (I _want_ this to be true!),
| and I think brands frequently take advantage of that to
| increase margins without significantly increasing quality.
|
| For example: I've been through three or four pairs of my $180
| Sony link buds hitting various issues before giving up on them
| entirely. Meanwhile, my $5 Auki bluetooth earbuds keep on
| chugging.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Along that line of thought I've noticed this recently:
|
| I can buy an expensive tool for say $200 that will last me 10
| years. Or I can buy a cheap tool that costs $20 but will only
| last me two years. But if I want to use that tool for the
| duration of 10 years it then makes more sense to buy five of
| the cheap tool and save half in costs. Which one is really
| providing more quality over time?
|
| For some things this doesn't hold at all, the cheap entry
| level offerings just don't get the job done or break
| relatively immediately, but for others the premium offer
| doesn't really improve a whole lot over the cheapest.
| ptsneves wrote:
| Very good perspective but I think that there is also a cost
| or loss of value in the inconvenience of a tool of good
| stopping its function at the wrong time. The opposite can
| also be true, that it is sometimes convenient that
| something breaks down because I actually wanted this new
| model anyway but could not justify throwing away a
| perfectly fine good.
| Matumio wrote:
| That, and the cognitive load. You need to buy the right
| amount, remember where you stored the $5 replacements, or
| else spend $100 worth of your time to figure out where
| you ordered from five years ago. And if they are no
| longer available you need time to figure out which of the
| replacements isn't total crap.
| mgfist wrote:
| This is true, and in general people are usually financially
| better of getting cheap stuff and replacing it. But a lot
| of us like getting hobbyist stuff just because it's more
| fun. I have an expensive espresso machine because it's more
| fun than a standard breville machine or just making a pot
| of coffee. It's certainly not more economical, even though
| coffee nerds will try to convince (rather gaslight)
| themselves into thinking so.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| Does the tool degrade gradually over time or is it sudden?
| If the former, you're much better off over the 10 year span
| with the high quality tool, because the time you spend
| dealing with its degraded performance is much less. IME
| it's almost always better to go for a high quality, old,
| used tool than to buy a low quality new one. Usually the
| wear parts are replaceable or rebuildable as well.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Your comment is just nit picking. Point was there's a lot
| of situations where the math hugely favors the cheap
| tool.
|
| Used tools of the brands that anyone screeching about
| nice tools would consider to be of repute are going to
| generally be priced at equivalent to new tools of unknown
| brand. Specialty tools frequently aren't available on the
| used market.
|
| Anything that spins or plugs into the wall tends to be
| finicky after decades of prior owner abuse and if you're
| not in a commercial setting (and even a lot of times if
| you are) it makes more sense to just buy new cheap stuff
| because then using your tools won't be a project by
| itself.
|
| I've got like three people's worth of used tools from
| various sources because you can never have too many and I
| never throw stuff out but they are not the outstanding
| value the Garage Journal forum or Reddit type "polish my
| wrenches more than I use them" crowd makes them out to
| be.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I can't think of a single case where it has actually been
| true that the cheaper tool was better somehow apart from
| jackstands. I got some pretty decent 6 ton jackstands
| from harbor freight. Don't know that i'd actually trust
| them to hold 6 tons though. Shop press? Not really. Had
| to put a bunch of time and money into it to make it
| halfway decent. Should have just gotten a good one. For
| power hand tools I have all Makita stuff either bought
| new or remanufactured, wouldn't go near harbor freight
| for that stuff. My welder is a Miller, wouldn't dream of
| going with off brand stuff there. Torches however are
| northern tool (i think?) victor knockoffs which are ok
| apart from the orings, hoses, and regulators... should
| have just gone for the quality tool to start would have
| been cheaper in the long run. My machine tools are all
| antiques and work outstandingly well. Literally
| irreplaceable--could not buy something new that does the
| same job.
|
| I guess all that is to say in my experience the cheap
| crap breaks and ends up being more expensive either in
| opportunity cost or cost of replacement/modification.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Depends on the failure mode I guess (if it explodes and
| hurts you, that could get expensive). Plus, you have to
| factor in 5 more trips to the store.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Even if it simply damages your work that's a considerable
| downside.
|
| I do not buy cheap tools unless they are for a dedicated,
| simple purpose. (Such as the sockets that live in the car
| to permit me to install a battery.)
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Some tools are much easier to use if you spend more money,
| I've compared a Harbor Freight oscillating multi-tool
| against a Fein and the Fein is so much more usable due to
| less vibration in the tool body that the Harbor Freight
| version is almost useless in comparison.
|
| Air compressors are another one where spending money vastly
| improves usability, the more you spend the quieter the
| compressor pump motor is.
|
| Makita's portaband only lasts ~10 cuts before the blade
| falls off, Milwaukee's portaband blades don't fall off
| ever. I run electrical work and my guys cost $100-130/hr,
| I'd rather have them spend time cutting conduit and strut
| with a functional tool than replacing blades on a cheaper
| version.
|
| I'll grant that professional tool and homeowner tool usage
| patterns differ greatly, but sometimes it is worth spending
| the extra money.
| corimaith wrote:
| Expensive does mean higher quality if you know the right
| brands to pick*. Case in point, $180 for Sony Link Buds is
| pretty bad deal! There are much better options at the same
| price range like Apple Airpods, Samsung's AKG tuned Galaxy
| Buds or the higher end Sony XM4s or XM5.
|
| Obviously there are many companies that do rely on branding
| to jack up prices like Beats or Marshal. But there are also
| companies that do no to little marketing and instead focus on
| craftsmanship where the majority of the cost is going into
| higher quality experience. And in those segments there isn't
| really some magical way to reduce costs. Akko is getting
| pretty popular, but their high-end IEMs like the Obsidian are
| still going to be in the same price-range as Sennheisers or
| AKG.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >Expensive does mean higher quality if you know the right
| brands to pick
|
| <laughs in Toyota turbo-4cyl that can't stay together for a
| laundry list of reasons>
|
| You can't base decision on brand, no matter ho much a bunch
| of screeching morons on the internet tell you you can. You
| have to also consider how much the company cares about the
| product line, how core the product line is to the company,
| where in the lifecycle it is, etc, etc. The brands that
| people herald as good are very capable of phoning it in or
| whoring themselves around. Kitchen-aid slaps their name on
| all sorts of garbage outside the core products they built
| their name on, to pick one example of the latter. And the
| brands that people herald as bad are very capable of
| producing very good stuff when the incentives align.
| croisillon wrote:
| same here, i have been through several EUR50 Braun stabmixers
| which kept dying on me, the EUR8 no name one has now been
| working for over 10 years
| bee_rider wrote:
| Bluetooth doesn't follow the typical quality curve anyway, it
| is just random whether or not your devices like each other.
|
| I bet the sound quality on the Sony buds was better.
| brewdad wrote:
| Depending on your use case, sound quality may be way down
| the line in importance. The earbuds I use on the subway
| don't need to be high quality. Anything better than AM
| radio will do the job.
| bmicraft wrote:
| Anything without ANC is basically unusable, and better
| ANC (which usually correlates with good sound quality)
| pretty noticeably improves your experience on the subway.
| nfriedly wrote:
| Yeah, probably. At least until the Sony's break down and
| start sounding like trash.
|
| But, to be honest, I do more audiobooks and podcasts than I
| do music, so the audio quality was not the top reason I
| picked them. The link buds have a fairly unique design with
| a 2~3 mm hole in the middle of the earbuds that lets
| outside sound in. I like it a lot better than any active
| transparency mode I've ever tried. They also have much
| better controls than any other earbuds I've tried.
|
| The problem with the Sony's is that they either get
| something messed up inside the speaker and start sounding
| like crap at medium to high volume, or the case's
| open/closed sensor breaks and they wake up and start
| discharging in the case, and then they're dead by the time
| I try to use them.
|
| I occasionally try watching videos on my phone, but the
| latency that Bluetooth adds throws me off, so I don't
| really enjoy anything with dialogue because the lips are
| moving out of sync with the words. I've tried lots of
| different Bluetooth earbuds - from Sony, Aukey, Jlab, even
| the "gamer" ones from razr - and all of them seem to have
| noticeable amounts of latency.
|
| I'm not sure if I'm more sensitive to it than most people
| or they're just all shit, but the latency is the big reason
| that I'm annoyed that nearly all the manufacturers removed
| headphones jacks from flagship phones. (Sony actually
| deserves some credit here, I think their flagship Xperia
| phone still include a headphone jack and a MicroSD slot!)
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| I haven't specifically tested it, but my $50 "Backbay
| Tempo" earbuds have a low-latency "Movie Mode" that
| sacrifices range to I think buffer sound for ~0 latency.
| kevincox wrote:
| The main problem is that the average person has no way to
| evaluate quality. The closest most people get is heaver ==
| built better (which is probably a correlation overall, but
| not that accurate for any two random products). At the
| extreme end of this you have companies putting little steel
| plates into things they want to appear higher quality.
|
| How can consumers evaluate how robustly some Bluetooth
| firmware is written, if the product is actually durable or if
| some USB charger actually accurately follows the
| specification? For most cases there is no way to know. The
| best route for the average consumer is to find a review by
| and expert, but these are very rare (experts with the
| required skills can often find better jobs than reviewing)
| and they are more likely to find paid marketing which just
| misleads.
|
| So we do end up the case that the only real metrics the user
| has is price and brand. Many formerly reputable brands have
| also started rebadging cheep crap so that works less often
| then you would hope. And while good products often can't be
| cheep, it is now common to see cheep crap sold at higher
| prices to seem premium.
|
| So at the end of the day the consumer has really no way to
| judge product quality. So the market has very little
| incentive to actually provide quality.
| nfriedly wrote:
| That reminds me a bit of The Market for Lemons.
| csomar wrote:
| This is true but flawed. Think about the iPhone. If you wanted
| the model of today but 5 years ago, it would have cost you
| millions? If that's even possible.
|
| What you are saying will be correct if we had no technological
| advancement whatsoever. But we had significant advancement.
| Everything should, must, be better if we applied the same cost.
| But while that's the case in some things, lots of things have
| degraded in different ways.
| shakna wrote:
| > Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class,
| even adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent
| service and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just
| have the choice of paying very little for very low quality
| because there's more flights and more planes.
|
| I don't think you actually can get the same quality, today.
| Even if you are paying more. The spacing of seats has changed.
| [0] You can pay more and get something more than you had by
| going up classes, but the same experience no longer exists.
|
| [0] https://www.seattletimes.com/life/travel/airline-seats-
| are-t...
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| I think it might in other countries. JAL is an example where
| I felt they had a great economy class experience. Excellent
| food and service. Great legroom. I am average height male and
| can fully stretch out my legs.
| fastball wrote:
| Yes, basically nothing stays the _exact same_ quality over
| time. But if you can get better quality and worse quality
| that kinda obviates the OP 's point.
| fragmede wrote:
| http://jsx.com is a tiny carrier flying out of only a handful
| of cities in the US, but it's basically a quarter step
| towards during private. They have their own terminals and all
| of their planes are smaller but the seats themselves are
| bigger.
| terminalshort wrote:
| But I don't want the equivalent service. I want the cheapest
| ticket possible to get me from A to B. And apparently most
| people agree with me, or that's not what they would be selling.
| This is the opposite of a problem.
| simianparrot wrote:
| That's why there's now a broader quality spectrum of plane
| tickets.
|
| I travel seldomly, but when I do I tend to buy business
| class, because I value the comfort of the journey more than
| the frequency of journeys. But most other people, including
| you, have other priorities. Which is why at least in this
| example I think it's a market working well based on supply
| and demand.
| terminalshort wrote:
| Yeah, I agree, but what's the difference between that and
| any other product?
| bravesoul2 wrote:
| Key point is for many their real wages have decreased, adjusted
| for inflation.
| jorams wrote:
| > I'm not saying that a high price label guarantees high
| quality
|
| I think that hints at part of the real problem: humans have
| very little ability to judge the quality of products. Marketing
| departments are very good at cosplaying quality. "Awards" on
| things like wine only tell you the manufacturer paid the owner
| of the trademark some money. Reviews are often fake or at least
| paid for by the manufacturer.
|
| With price also not being a meaningful quality signal you're
| left with a choice: Buy the expensive product hoping the
| quality reflects the price, or buy the cheap product knowing
| the quality is probably not great, but at least you didn't
| spend a lot of money on something that isn't worth it.
| simianparrot wrote:
| I've just learned to discern quality better. For clothes, I
| learned from a friend who designs them how to tell fabric
| quality and seam quality. But there's online resources to
| learn that as well. For electronics it can be hard but if I
| can't tell from first principles and my knowledge of
| electronics design I'll research brands via online reviews
| and tear-downs. Eventually you get a pretty good "instinct"
| that makes it less tedious.
| lll-o-lll wrote:
| > Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I'm
| not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality,
| just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even
| within big name brands.
|
| Electric Kettles - Microwaves. The components that make up the
| actual boiling of water are now standard and all come from the
| same chinese manufacturer. You can pay $20 to $1000 for the
| same thing. The expensive one will _look_ much better.
| Microwaves are the same - large numbers of manufacturers to all
| the same guts just different skins.
|
| Retail clothing is the most obvious example. There used to be
| mid market clothing manufacturers that would produce clothing
| locally and try to compete on quality. That's _almost_ gone
| now. There's just not enough demand.
| simianparrot wrote:
| My electric kettle may use the same basic heating components
| as most cheaper ones, but I paid extra to get one where the
| entire container is one piece metal -- practically a tall
| cooking pot with a heater element built in under it, a water
| safe connector to a base station that's connected to power,
| and a handle and lid.
|
| It's easier to clean, has no plastic in contact with the
| water, and has so far lasted me 14 years. It cost 800 NOK
| instead of the ~400 for a typical plastic one. But due to my
| experience with those in the past, I'd say absolutely worth
| it.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Disagree. Panasonic's Inverter technology is definitely
| superior in my book. Everybody else's units only operate at
| full power no matter what you select--20% power is really
| 100% power with a 20% duty cycle. This can produce uneven
| heat for short runs and means that the load on the circuit is
| the full draw of the machine--doesn't share a circuit with
| other power-hungry devices very well. But at low power the
| Panasonic is much more friendly with other devices.
| weinzierl wrote:
| People fall largely in two categories: Those who condemn the past
| and those who glorify it.
|
| Of course the reality is between. Whenever something experiences
| mass adoption, of course quality will decline, e. g. airplane
| seats with mass adoption of flying.
|
| But so, so many things improved dramatically in quality. I could
| give you endless examples but just think about cars.
|
| Despite anecdata to the contrary the reliability of cars
| increased over the decades.
|
| Most 60s cars had rust problems after a couple of years. By the
| 80s this was largely solved.
|
| Most 70s cars had all kinds of mechanical problems but by the 90s
| this was largely solved.
|
| Most 80s cars had lots of electronics problems but by the 2000s
| this was largely solved.
|
| Sure we still have software issues and the whole transition to
| EV's makes has us deal with new problems, but do I want any of my
| old cars back? Hell no!
| deadbabe wrote:
| Most 2020s cars are completely unaffordable or overpriced and
| over engineered but maybe by 2040s this will be largely solved.
|
| The 2010s was peak car.
| hnhg wrote:
| Don't forget the planned obsolescence in 2020s cars.
| deadbabe wrote:
| Yup. In the future, you're probably better off buying a
| used 2010s model than anything else.
| weinzierl wrote:
| I grew up in Germany and as a kid I always thought when I
| grow up I will drive a Mercedes. Why? Because taxis were 100%
| Mercedes back then and if a car is good enough to be a taxi
| it will be good enough for me.
|
| Of course I never got a Mercedes because it always was way to
| expensive.
|
| Nowadays every Uber driver seems to drive a BYD Dolphin. They
| are nice cars and obviously good enough as "taxis". The BYD
| Dolphin Surf costs 8000 EUR in China (called Seagull there)
| and between 13000 EUR and 20000 EUR in most other places
| where it is available.
| joenot443 wrote:
| Since 2018 every new car needs a rearview backup camera.
| Since 2022, AEB's been included, too. Fuel economy and
| emissions standards are also considerably stricter than they
| were 10 years ago. The list goes on, and on, and on.
|
| I think it's completely fair to say we haven't gotten worse
| at making cheap cars, we've just legislated them out of
| existence.
| hollerith wrote:
| AEB == Autonomous Emergency Braking
| deadbabe wrote:
| exactly, the list just goes on and on and on
| bluedino wrote:
| Cars still rust what was solved?
|
| These days the bigger problem with cars is one piece breaks and
| it isn't made anymore so you total it when 90% of the rest of
| the car is still good.
|
| https://youtu.be/e7c2_JMxR0s?si=diMVZ_YBXtW48LOy
| weinzierl wrote:
| Galvanized steel and zinc coated steel were only used from
| the 80s on in cars. Electrophoretic plating was mass adopted
| only in the late 80s. Before that the slightest scratch meant
| you could literally watch the rust build up.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| > People fall largely in two categories: Those who condemn the
| past and those who glorify it. Of course the reality is
| between.
|
| https://existentialcomics.com/comic/550
|
| Panel 1 is a depiction of Neanderthals in the Shanidar Cave, in
| particular the "Shanidar 1" specimen, which showed a large
| number of old injuries and disabilities in the individual. The
| fact that they had lived for so long showed that the
| Neanderthal community cared for their members even when they
| were no longer "useful" physically to society.
|
| It's kind of hard to imagine going back and showing the
| Shanidar Neanderthals all the gains we've made as a society to
| produce enough food for everyone, and yet people still go
| hungry. Then again, imagine showing him Nintendo Switch. I bet
| he'd love Nintendo Switch, so it's really a wash.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Cars are enshitification example in a different area of the
| society - they are not scalable so you might as well be stuck
| in traffic for days.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| One word: MBAs
| Workaccount2 wrote:
| Two things:
|
| 1. Quality has been dieing mainly because people are addicted to
| cheap shit. The cheaper things are, the more they can buy. The
| amount of personal possessions people have nowadays is totally
| insane and unsurprisingly lots of cheap stuff.
|
| 2. Planned obsolescence is not a thing. Maybe it's happened a few
| times with a few products. But it certainly doesn't deserve a
| name. I have been on the engineering side of many business and
| consumer products and swam in waters of the industry for years.
|
| _No one_ has ever used that term. There is no engineering
| associated with it. No books or talks or specialists.
|
| It's purely a function of point #1. People want the lowest cost
| above all else, so lower quality parts get used. Warranty
| durations are pretty standard too, 1 year 2 year 5 year. You
| never see a 566 day warranty like you would expect from a
| calculated failure model.
|
| Also, the best way for 25 years now to make a product fail just
| after warranty is to program it in software. Everything has a
| microcontroller nowadays. How many devs here have written that
| code?
| rimeice wrote:
| Shame. This is a poorly made case for an important phenomenon.
|
| > "the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity."
|
| This is table stakes now for cars so it would be weird for a car
| company to highlight it. So in the case for cars the baseline
| quality expectation has significantly increased.
|
| The case is much easier to make for fashionable items like
| clothes and interiors.
| layer8 wrote:
| Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up
| over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is
| that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and
| now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product
| has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time
| finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old
| version. It's a regularly reoccurring frustration.
|
| My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but
| reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting
| some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow decline in
| quality over the years.
| xattt wrote:
| E.g. the race to the bottom of the Billy bookcase. In the last
| 5 years, IKEA has started using plastic fasteners to secure the
| backing.
| bamboozled wrote:
| I break this promise from time to time, but every time I buy
| an IKEA product lately, I vow never to do it again.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Interesting. I rarely have problems with IKEA products, but
| I had quite many problems with bespoke wooden pieces of
| furniture.
| nubinetwork wrote:
| I find it depends on what you buy... my couch and table
| are fine, my bed wobbles and squeaks a fair bit... /shrug
| bee_rider wrote:
| > my bed wobbles and squeaks a fair bit...
|
| Well, that isn't necessarily a bad sign I guess.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Well, you are right, my only IKEA bed was bad and I spent
| over USD 1500 (in CZK) for a solid hand made bed, which
| will likely outlast me.
| brewdad wrote:
| I've found many beds ship with the minimum viable
| hardware to hold them together. You might see if you can
| find better screws/bolts/etc and replace the cheap ones
| that come with your frame.
| baq wrote:
| IKEA has some of the best quality cheap furniture. To get
| something noticeably better you need to spend at least 2x
| for any given item; 3-5x is common for not at all fancy
| stuff.
| theptip wrote:
| It's true, but they used to have some of the best quality
| cheap-mid priced furniture.
|
| They changed their target market segment to lean into the
| "discards their furniture in less than 5 years" ICP, and
| they also heavily optimized for shipping (eg their
| bottom-end Kallax is now actually made of corrugated
| cardboard instead of plyboard, strength-to-weight is
| amazing, but still less durable).
|
| So both are true, that they still represent "good value"
| in a dollar-per-value sense, but also lowered their
| absolute quality. (This is the exact point OP is making.)
| brewdad wrote:
| I'm glad IKEA exists but it really only serves very
| specific use cases these days. They are great for the
| moves apartments every 12 months crowd and the needs a
| piece for the spare bedroom that will rarely get used
| crowd. They are also great for young kids furniture that
| will get trashed no matter what quality you buy.
|
| I appreciate it for what it is but consumers really need
| to understand what they are buying.
| maxglute wrote:
| OP is flat out wrong. Some SKUs got value engineered to
| be less durable over time to keep up with inflation (or
| material costs, i.e. solid wood is just more expensive
| now), i.e. expedite->kallax, billy. But new SKU enabled
| by new tech/manufacturing processes like their power
| coated steel / stamped metal pieces are absurd dollar per
| quality relative to engineered or even solid wood. Of
| course it's not to everyone's taste, but fundamental
| reality if ones taste is solid wood, that material is no
| longer abundant/cheap/affordable, like how we use to feed
| lobsters to prisoners. A $90 heavy duty BROR shelf is
| ~$30 IN 1990 DOLLARS, about a cost of a Billy back then,
| except it's larger and much stronger.
| xattt wrote:
| BILLY quietly slid from mid-tier to cheap tier in order
| to keep the nostalgic momentum. The twist is that there
| are certain products that people use as benchmarks of
| quality (like Arizona iced tea).
|
| If the tier changes without some sort of inflection, you
| perceive it as degradation of quality.
| eps wrote:
| > _benchmarks of quality (like Arizona iced tea)_
|
| Not a good example. Arizona tea is held in high esteem
| only because it never went up in price. The beverage
| itself has always been of a clearly dubious quality.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| Do you have suggestions on where to buy high quality
| furniture? My local furniture stores seems to sell 20%
| better pieces at 100% more cost.
| ChiefNotAClue wrote:
| Ikea has products at just about every price category. The
| cheap stuff is cheap, the more expensive stuff is nicer.
| There's something for everyone.
| ThatMedicIsASpy wrote:
| The buy for life alternative is only ever an option if you
| are a home owner. I would not want to move with the massive
| furniture of my parents.
| delfinom wrote:
| Those plastic clips work better than the traditional backing
| nails they used to use. Those nails couldn't hold back shit
| in the presses wood they used.
| xp84 wrote:
| I have to agree, I just bought these and was at first
| skeptical, but they seem like a much better engineered
| solution. The two-part clip expands in the hole, greatly
| increasing friction to keep it in vs a static (and smooth!)
| nail, and their heads are also bigger than those little
| tacks reducing chances of the hole in the backboard
| failing.
| wazoox wrote:
| Ah ah I have several white "Billy", the oldest dating back to
| the late 80s. The shelves are _painted solid wood planks_.
| The latest one has shelves made of beehive cardboard.
| moffkalast wrote:
| It's possible for that to be true while also there being
| competitors that are just making a name or themselves and
| aren't cutting corners. Incumbents in areas of low competition
| always get complacent and attempt to maximize profits without
| any further investment. Quality really only depends on the
| competition, since it removes those who lack it.
| layer8 wrote:
| True, but as I said I often fail to find a good replacement
| when surveying the market for alternatives. Sometimes
| everyone copied the product but didn't copy the original
| quality.
| moffkalast wrote:
| In that case it might've been that the original product
| wasn't cost effective to produce in the first place, or
| that most people buying it don't really care much about
| quality but just about the price, so that's what each
| provider optimizes for instead?
| layer8 wrote:
| One recent example is a sturdy fold-out clothes drying
| rack I owned. All reviews praised its quality. My unit
| unfortunately got damaged in a heavy storm when I left it
| outside by mistake. The manufacturer got bought up in the
| meantime, and the product now is more flimsy and
| unstable, metal axes have been replaced by plastic ones.
| And I haven't found any other model comparable to the old
| one on the market. I'd be willing to pay double or triple
| the price because of how good it was, and it wasn't
| particularly inexpensive to start with.
|
| I very much doubt that such a product can't be
| manufactured sustainably in robust quality.
| Xcelerate wrote:
| It's gotten absurd. I'll easily pay 10x the regular price
| of some object if I'm confident it will last a very long
| time and I won't have to think about it anymore. I've
| replaced all the crappy LED bulbs in my house with Yuji
| Sunwave brand. I've not had a single bulb flicker or go
| out in years now, and the quality of the light is superb
| (i.e. more akin to what everyone _used_ to have with
| incandescent bulbs). I bought a Control Freak induction
| cooktop in 2018. The whole family uses it far more than
| the cheap gas range that came with the house and is a
| pain to clean. Similarly, I replaced all the Food Network
| brand pots and pans I had in college that were chipping
| paint and rusting with Demeyere versions. Not a single
| problem since.
|
| And to your point, I've probably gone through six clothes
| drying racks by now that all break down after a short
| time. I have yet to find a high-quality one.
|
| It sounds expensive, but I suspect that in the long-term,
| the approach of buying higher quality up front ultimately
| ends up cheaper in terms of time and replacement costs.
| I've debated replacing some home appliances with
| commercial or restaurant versions, but there are some
| notable tradeoffs with that unfortunately, as the purpose
| of the appliance becomes somewhat different than a home
| use case.
|
| Of course this strategy is all well and good if you can
| foot the initial high cost of the products, which many
| people cannot on the typical family income. There's been
| a lot written about how those of lower income are often
| taken advantage of in this way--they end up paying a
| higher "lifetime cost" for lower quality products and
| service, because the system attempts to produce the
| minimum viable affordable product, which then sets the
| bar for the "new normal".
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Whenever I'm in this kind of pickle I add "amish" to my
| search query. sustainable, robust, yes - cheap, no. These
| drying racks look sturdy af tho:
| https://www.pennsylvania-
| woodworks.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoq3iYcE...
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's also interesting, as you said, that everyone seems to want
| to defend crap. It's like corporations keep spreading the idea
| that you're always getting more for your money and everyone
| just seems to parrot that verbatim.
|
| My life is a constant struggle when it comes to finding nice
| things.
| AndrewDavis wrote:
| I gave up and started buying $4 rshirts. Why? Because each
| year the clothes I'd buy were were on quality than my
| previous clothes.
|
| When buying a $4 shirt I know the price:quality ratio, it's
| cheap:crap. Whereas majority of the time buying more
| expensive it might be slightly better, but it's still
| expensive:crap.
| Gigachad wrote:
| Try Uniqlo. Their $20 shirts have lasted me years. I
| haven't thrown a single one out yet and I just have got
| around 90 uses out of some of the older ones so far.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Huh, that's a funny number. I guess since we cycle
| through our laundry, that's a couple years of use?
| II2II wrote:
| I remember a number of years back when people were equating
| the feeling of sturdy and heft with quality. Just feelings.
| No actual metrics. I would constantly look down at my
| beaten up plastic junk and shake my head. At least my junk
| still worked. Everyone else seemed to be replacing their
| stuff all the time because their favourite products were
| only designed to give the illusion of quality. In reality,
| the very things that gave those products the illusion of
| quality were diminishing the longevity of the product or
| ensuring that it could not withstand any abuse.
| IronyMan100 wrote:
| I had the same impression when buying clothes. I often buy the
| Shirts Form H&M. I have some old Shirts and the quality IS a
| Lot better. No loose Threads, the colors did Not wash out for
| and after washing they stayed how they are. Today all of that
| is not the Case anymore.
| trial3 wrote:
| exactly! i came to this thread to smugly type "capitalism" in a
| comment. but i'd like to, less smugily, posit that it's really
| just enshittification. MBA-driven physical-goods
| enshittification. It's cheaper to use cheaper glues. To
| slightly change the fabric blend towards polyester. Thinner
| gauge wiring.
|
| There are tradeoffs towards more complex devices being made,
| sure, but that's not exactly what "quality" is, to me. There's
| an extensive discussion about the iphone vs a snake-era nokia,
| which i feel like misses the point entirely
| bsenftner wrote:
| I think the "MBA-driven physical-goods enshittification" is a
| simplification and a cop-out because this is not just MBA-
| driven. This is across the board in all of society, and I
| believe the reason being that people, in general and enmass,
| are not being taught how to live with active critical
| analysis, and as a result when they choose an
| enshittificating decision, they do not realize it. They are
| not connecting the ramifications beyond their own mini-
| benefit. This is with the entire general population.
| ARob109 wrote:
| Making physical goods low quality, cheap, and therefore
| disposable is the equivalent of rent seeking.
|
| Instead of growth and innovation, it's how can the Company
| get recurring revenue after first sale.
|
| The balance for the Company is finding a quality to price
| point ratio where either 1) the customer doesn't care if it
| breaks because it was cheap and they know it's cheap or 2)
| it's cheap and breaks but the utility of it to the customer
| warrants (or with some goods, necessitates) them buying a
| replacement.
|
| In the second case, the trade off would also include brand
| risk, but in the world of Amazon and TEMU, you can just
| sell the same thing under a new random name, there is no
| brand identity.
| bsenftner wrote:
| You make my comment's point without realizing,
| emphasizing my point.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You're getting downvoted because a huge chunk of HN spends
| their 9-5 making things worse with a fuggit attitude
| because that's what their KPIs incentivize.
|
| Those MBAs didn't come out of nowhere. They answer to C
| suites who answer to boards. They have to weigh their
| decisions against the cost of customer attitudes and
| employee morale. The fact that we get the outcomes we do
| indicate this is a top to bottom societal problem.
| trial3 wrote:
| > a simplification and a cop-out
|
| a simplification and a cop-out of what? blake, i am writing
| a hn comment and not an academic textbook
|
| > This is across the board in all of society
|
| ok but the article is largely about physical goods, that's
| what we're talking about
|
| > I believe the reason being that people, in general and
| enmass, are not being taught how to live with active
| critical analysis
|
| lmao i clicked on your bio and just knew i'd see MBA in
| there. maybe there's something that has happened to
| institutions that do this teaching. maybe it's because
| they, too, have mastered business administration
| bsenftner wrote:
| I've got multiple degrees, and the presence of an MBA
| invalidates my opinion?
|
| I'm serious when I say this is not just "MBA think", this
| is everywhere. People are being short sighted. People are
| not thinking things logically through, and this is
| widespread.
|
| Yes, we're talking physical goods. Items where short
| sighted thinking destroys brands, exactly what the
| original post discusses. It's too easy to just blame the
| MBAs. This is a widespread issue that is not just in
| physical goods, it is at the core of what is required to
| sustain democracy - a critical thinking population. We've
| educationally failed the population en mass by not having
| education verticals that stress perspective. We only
| teach short term perspectives as meaningful and worth
| action, and all this is coming home, today.
|
| Those that should be able to talk sense in the critically
| short sighted decision makers have not been taught how to
| make their points and be understood. That is real, and
| widespread. Continue to label the cliche and get no
| where. We need to recognize this critical failure,
| because it is destroying one hell of a lot of foundation
| we need.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Do you not think it's capitalism driving enshittification?
| It's captialism that's the driving force pushing companies to
| reduce costs or be outcompeted. It's captialism that means
| that "it's cheaper" (in the short term) is what ends up
| driving decision making.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I agree too. And originally the company had multiple
| motivations to produce high quality. For pride reason (express
| your skills, new challenger mindset) and to gain brand
| recognition. Once that's settled, this forces get replaced by
| profit/ growth mindset.
|
| A subtle variant of this is incorrect metrics. In 2000s, full
| featured audio chipsets started to show up, all in one chip
| 24bit audio. Soon everything used these, the 24bit resolution
| wasn't enough to make a good audio interface... (I think it was
| noisier) But it was too late, most devices used this and old
| audio cards were priced out.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Isn't this all just Late Stage Calitalsm?
|
| I don't think it's 'efficiency' in the same way spaceX is run.
| Yeah they cut costs, but they got better quality results.
|
| With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our
| expense - while the companies doing it make more money than
| ever.
| ericmay wrote:
| No - the term Late Stage Capitalism gets thrown around a
| bunch as a scarecrow for anything seemingly bad going on, but
| in this case it's more likely a symptom of lack of education
| of materials and/or people not caring, and resource
| depletion/competition due to overpopulation and rise in
| living standards across the world.
|
| > With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at
| our expense - while the companies doing it make more money
| than ever.
|
| Specifically this is an issue of government failure and
| cultural malaise - food quality anyone? We need to vote
| better, and vote with our dollar better. Stop buying dumb DJI
| drones to race around and buy a nice sweater instead.
| wiz21c wrote:
| > resource depletion/competition due to overpopulation and
| rise in living standards across the world.
|
| Interesting take. Any source ?
| ericmay wrote:
| Nope just personal observation. There are only so many
| lobsters and marble quarries, and we can only raise so
| many sheep for high quality wool. Most of the hardwood
| trees are gone too. That's why we have switched to
| plastic and other industrial materials to keep building
| suburban houses and we spend all day on Netflix.
| jfengel wrote:
| Capitalism gives the market what it demands. You can't tell
| consumers what they should want.
|
| Government failure an cultural malaise are what "late stage
| capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a collapse of the
| whole thing under its own weight.
|
| It doesn't, however, give any pointers on where to go from
| there.
| ericmay wrote:
| > You can't tell consumers what they should want.
|
| Why does marketing and advertising exist then?
|
| > Government failure and cultural malaise are what "late
| stage capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a collapse
| of the whole thing under its own weight.
|
| If capitalism gives what the market demands, then you are
| suggesting that The People want government failure and
| malaise.
|
| Either your premise is wrong or Late Stage Capitalism is
| wrong. Likely both.
|
| Terms like Late Stage Capitalism are just there to give
| you something nice to hold on to and use as your
| scarecrow for anything bad you see in the world. An
| intellectual crutch, a helping hand into the graveyard.
| Car recall? Late Stage Capitalism! Forest fire? Climate
| change - late stage capitalism. Teeth fell out? Late
| Stage Capitalism. Covid-19 vaccines or a cure for cancer?
| Hmm somehow still Late Stage Capitalism.
|
| And now you have your answer to why the world sucks and
| even better, Late Stage Capitalism says nothing about
| what comes next! No reason to _do anything_ about it,
| like support the arts or educate a child, because it's
| just Late Stage Capitalism after all.
|
| Hopeless and failed ideologies (Communism/Socialism) love
| to generate destructive and useless distractions and
| slogans. Reject them!
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| _> > Government failure and cultural malaise are what
| "late stage capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a
| collapse of the whole thing under its own weight._
|
| _> If capitalism gives what the market demands, then you
| are suggesting that The People want government failure
| and malaise_
|
| You are both correct here. Obviously people don't want
| malaise directly, but some directly seek government
| failure, and the rest vote for things that _result_ in
| malaise and government failure, wittingly or otherwise.
| Often such voters do so because they think it will get
| them more money, which is a reasonable desire under
| capitalism.
|
| _> Hopeless and failed ideologies (Communism
| /Socialism)_
|
| Oh, I didn't realize till the end that you were treating
| this discussion as a team thing, and capitalism is "your
| team", so you must attack "the other team", even though
| nobody else mentioned it. Maybe instead of treating "the
| other team" as something nice to hold on to and use as
| your scarecrow for anything bad you see in the world, you
| can keep discussing the substance of things? You did a
| good job of this for a bit.
| ericmay wrote:
| > Oh, I didn't realize till the end that you were
| treating this as a team thing, and capitalism is "your
| team", so you must attack "the other team". Do you think
| that attitude affected the rest of your response, too?
|
| It's just empirical. Both Communism and Socialism are
| failed ideologies. Millions dead. Millions more starved.
| It's like when Libertarians want to bring about their
| ideology and people tell them to move to Sudan and
| experience it.
|
| The term "Late Stage Capitalism" is a communist slogan.
| What's insidious about it is that it tricks you into
| believing we can't make things better or right wrongs,
| and that progress can't be made. It has entered the
| American and Western social discourse as yet another
| instrument to sow distrust, fighting, and hatred. If/when
| I see the Right Wing Nazi equivalents of those slogans I
| call them out too.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| I noticed you excluded my entire post except for the
| parts about communism, which nobody brought up except
| you.
|
| I'm not interested in rehashing the team game of
| "capitalism vs communism vs whatever" for the millionth
| time here, and nobody but you brought up the latter, so
| you might safely conclude nobody else is, either.
|
| Do you think you can take off your team hat and have a
| discussion about what we were talking about? Hint: it was
| capitalism (specifically late stage capitalism). Try
| responding on the topic without any distractions (like
| mentioning _the other team_ as you might consider it).
|
| After all, sports teams don't get better by pointing
| fingers at all the other teams, they get better by
| looking inward and finding what they should change.
| Here's an example:
|
| _> What's insidious about [the term late-stage
| capitalism] is that it tricks you into believing we can't
| make things better_
|
| The term absolutely doesn't do that, because it's 2
| words, one meaning capitalism, the other meaning "a later
| stage of". You're free to suggest ways to motivate
| companies to stop enshitifying things for profit within
| the confines of late-stage capitalism, without resorting
| to one of your dreaded ideologies. But you'll have to
| actually do that. So let's look inward: how can we fix
| that?
| teiferer wrote:
| > Both Communism and Socialism are failed ideologies.
| Millions dead.
|
| Geez, seriously? The most successful societies in the
| world and human history have combined aspects of
| capitalism and socialism. A market based economy with
| social constructs that just provide better lives for
| people than pure capitalism would. Examples are not just
| the often-cited nordic countries. Germany, France, even
| the U.S. in its not-so-distant history have embraced that
| to great success. "Millions dead" is just as much
| populistic nonsense as the equally misguided doomsday
| scenarios painted by hardcore haters of capitalism.
| ericmay wrote:
| The Nordics are highly capitalist economies with mostly
| private ownership of the means of production. The usage
| of "socialism" here is misguided. Public programs
| including healthcare != Socialism or Communism.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 50,000 people died by suicide in the USA in 2023. 12.8
| million thought about it. 3.7 made a plan for it. 1.5
| million attempted it.
| https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html
|
| 105,000 people died by overdose in the USA in 2023.
| https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-
| statistics/overd...
|
| In 2023 the average daily incarceration population in the
| USA was 664,000.
| https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-
| inmates-2023-s...
|
| Average daily homeless population for the USA in 2023 was
| 653,000. https://nlihc.org/resource/hud-
| releases-2023-annual-homeless...
|
| In 2023 only 86% of US households were food secure.
| https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-
| assistance/fo...
|
| The majority of US bankruptcies (58.5%) "very much" or
| "somewhat" agreed that medical expenses contributed, and
| 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at
| least one of these two medical contributors--equivalent
| to about 530,000 medical bankruptcies annually.
| https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/
|
| It doesn't look like the USA has a healthy ideology to
| me. It just spreads it out to 'death by 1000 cuts' and
| makes everyone's' suffering invisible.
| ericmay wrote:
| What did Churchill say about Democracy? It's the worst
| except all the others? Yea. I'll take all this government
| mismanagement and markets over Communism and Socialism.
| The State is never good at managing the means of
| production.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Churchill's democracy in Britain has social housing and
| social healthcare. Glad to know you'll take it though,
| because it looks like lot's of Americans are 'taking it',
| in a pretty brutal and ugly way.
|
| FYI American police kill more people than any other
| country at 1100 people a year. Guess that's also
| 'democracy' and not, you know, just America:
|
| https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillin
| gs/
| ericmay wrote:
| Yea still better than Communism or Socialism.
|
| I don't care about criticisms about America. They're not
| interesting or relevant. Democracy and markets are
| superior to state owned means of production.
|
| > Churchill's democracy in Britain has social housing and
| social healthcare.
|
| Well it had those but in the case of housing it was
| primarily private (as it should be) and in the case of
| healthcare running a healthcare system is not Communism
| or Socialism any more than roads are.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > Isn't this all just Late Stage Calitalsm?
|
| If that were the explanation then you'd need _another_
| explanation for declining quality issues in communist
| countries.
|
| A test claim that some problem caused by "capitalism" should
| always backed up by a proof that the problem doesn't exist in
| the many other economic systems the world has tried. If only
| because this forces people to actually think about the
| economics instead of just using words to evoke an emotional
| reaction.
| jfengel wrote:
| There really isn't anybody with state ownership of the
| means of production. It's hard to find anything to make a
| comparison to.
|
| Communism would have its own reasons for declining quality:
| the lack of an individual profit motive. The hope would be
| that you would no longer be alienated from the products of
| your work, but that never came close to happening.
|
| So if you were referring to China... they are the world's
| foremost capitalists right now. Their products get worse
| because that's what the market tells them.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Communism has been tried many times always with severe
| quality issues. But my point isn't just about communism.
| You have to run a different argument for mercantilism,
| command economies, mixed economies, barter economies,
| etc.
|
| The fact that people have historically tried devaluing
| currency for as long as they've had currency suggests
| that there's a force that favors attempting to sell
| inferior goods without decreasing price and that this
| force predates the industrial revolution.
|
| > So if you were referring to China... they are the
| world's foremost capitalists right now.
|
| This is the same logic by which communists called
| socialists who believed in democracy "fascists". It's
| just an attempt to excommunicate people from the church
| if their interpretation is different from yours.
| monocasa wrote:
| > This is the same logic by which communists called
| socialists who believed in democracy "fascists". It's
| just an attempt to excommunicate people from the church
| if their interpretation is different from yours.
|
| I mean, China is second only to to the US in minting new
| billionaires. Sure, gatekeeping and no true Scotsman are
| real things, but at the end of the day so are
| definitions. I don't see any definition of communism that
| allows for the private acquisition of billions of dollars
| of private capital.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Cuba, the Indian state of Karelia (and I think one
| other), and North Korea would like a word with you re: no
| state run enterprises. That means your back goes against
| the wall...
| rapnie wrote:
| Processed foods is another example. Reconstructing well-known
| food products with cheapest materials. If it still tastes and
| looks somewhat familiar, its a go.
| nico wrote:
| A couple of days ago on Reddit, there was a thread about
| "company secrets". A guy that did food tasting for some
| cookies company said that most people, when doing the
| tastings, think they are trying different brands and that
| the company is trying to get their preference. But what
| they are really doing, is testing the same cookie, each
| with one different (cheaper) ingredient than the current
| recipe in the market. The company is looking for the
| cheapest new recipe that people will still eat (buy)
| SideburnsOfDoom wrote:
| Yes. To be more specific, look for the point where a Private
| Equity firm gets involved. Whose aim is extractive and often
| bankrupts the host company - to cut costs, send production
| somewhere cheaper, and in general use up the value in the
| good name that the product has.
|
| This is what happened to Dr. Martens (footwear)
|
| to Instant pot (cookware)
|
| to Red Lobster (restaurants)
| walterbell wrote:
| _> whose aim is extractive_
|
| Endorsed by legislative policy, e.g. tax-deductible
| interest payments on PE-induced debt.
| jcynix wrote:
| Good example. Add
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bending_Spoons which acquired
| various popular apps (Evernote, Filmic, ...), fired most
| developers, and now exploits these apps to death.
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Oh they bought meetup. No wonder it's so shit now.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Evernote still has maintained a lot of its old UI and
| features. Maybe it too will degrade eventally but its
| still very good
| an0malous wrote:
| PE is the corporate equivalent of cutting the crack with
| baking soda
| moomoo11 wrote:
| Their goal is to make money but they need a few to die
| because that means their meth(ods) is good.
|
| Jeez. I can see it. Omg.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| Are there good arguments against outlawing those type of PE
| acquisitions?
| boomlinde wrote:
| I'd argue that they both represent a kind of efficiency. If
| your product or service has an unacceptable quality, demand
| will decrease and you will lose money that way. On the other
| hand, if in the pursuit of higher quality your production
| costs become too high, profit will decrease and you will lose
| money that way. Somewhere between these is a sweet spot where
| the level of quality and demand are in balance so as to
| maximize profit.
|
| The difference between cheap rocket launches and cheap
| clothes in those terms is just where this sweet spot is:
| there may not be a high demand at all for more failure prone
| rocket launches, while poorly constructed clothes and
| appliances have evidently come to seem perfectly acceptable
| to a lot of consumers.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| In theory quality gets balanced with price, but it's too
| hard to measure the difference in quality between different
| products. "perfectly acceptable" often means being tricked.
| And some people will say it was an intentional choice to go
| with the cheap appliance instead of the industrial one that
| costs 3x as much, but all they really needed was one that
| had fewer corners cut and cost 15% more to build. When
| designs are falling into the quality hole, the percent
| increase in lifetime per percent increase in build cost is
| _really good_ but good luck figuring out which companies
| built better and which companies increased the price for
| nothing.
| xp84 wrote:
| > If your product or service has an unacceptable quality,
| demand will decrease and you will lose money
|
| I challenge that assumption. If whole markets are dominated
| by companies who have downgraded quality to the minimum,
| then customers have no choice but to keep buying from you
| or someone else doing the same thing. If they don't buy
| from you because of their most recent bad experience,
| someone else (who bought their jeans that ripped in a month
| from someone else) will. The only alternatives would be to
| make your own clothes or to seek out very specific high-
| quality artisanal sources. Both options are out of the
| reach of at least 75% of the market.
| boomlinde wrote:
| I don't agree that this is a challenge my assumption. You
| are talking about the lack of information and of
| alternatives; factors in how the demand for poor quality
| products can exist. That naturally affects where the
| balance point is, but I don't think that rebuts or even
| addresses my fundamental assumption. In my view there is
| such a balance point regardless of how the demand has
| come to exist.
|
| A market without perfect information and where
| consumption isn't necessarily driven by rational needs is
| ripe for exploitation. Why should a business create
| higher quality clothes if they can instead manipulate
| consumers into thinking they're losers for not replacing
| their wardrobes every year, flood the market with
| thousands of labels to create brand uncertainty and pay
| people to "review" them favorably to further make it hard
| to be an informed consumre? They can can condition
| consumers into believing that poor quality is acceptable,
| so why shouldn't they if it ultimately results in higher
| profits?
| xp84 wrote:
| Let me be clear, I didn't mean I disagree with the rest
| of your comment in general or to disprove you somehow
| with my comment. Even with perfect information though
| most people have to purchase crap, because good stuff is
| so rare and expensive (though not all expensive stuff is
| even any good, _most_ actually good stuff is expensive).
|
| It's interesting when you think of clothes vs appliances
| though. I don't think anyone wants to replace their
| washer every 5 years for fashion, but it's nearly
| required. You're right with clothes though, fashion is
| geared to promote discarding. I wonder though, wasn't
| fashion also a thing in the 1940s? Yet then, clothes
| still lasted longer.
| boomlinde wrote:
| _> Even with perfect information though most people have
| to purchase crap, because good stuff is so rare and
| expensive (though not all expensive stuff is even any
| good, most actually good stuff is expensive)._
|
| I'm talking about "perfect information" in the ideal,
| economic sense: in this case knowledge of every piece of
| information that could affect a consumption choice. With
| perfect information you would of course know which brands
| gave the best value for the money. All brands would
| necessarily compete by being the brand that gave the most
| value for the money for different segments of consumers
| with different ideas of what exactly "the most value"
| entails. A company that could produce equivalent goods
| and sell at lower prices would leave competitors in the
| dust, because you would know about it and have no reason
| to consider other options.
|
| Of course, the $100 dress that lasts for 10 years might
| still be less valuable than a $9 dress of similar
| appearance that lasts for one year in those terms,
| depending on how much of a cost there is to making the
| purchase in itself and disposing of the broken dresses.
|
| _> I wonder though, wasn't fashion also a thing in the
| 1940s? Yet then, clothes still lasted longer._
|
| There certainly was a fashion industry and an awareness
| of ongoing trends, but I don't think the pace of
| dissemination and proliferation of new trends was nearly
| as high then as it is now. I don't know, but I'm betting
| that the pace picked up when television became a
| commonplace household item and then again with the advent
| of social media.
|
| I also don't think they could have produced a $9 1/10
| durability alternative to the $100 dress. The difference
| in production cost between shoddy products and high
| quality products may have been smaller with the state of
| the art of the 1940s in terms of production chains,
| alternative materials, labor, time.
| somenameforme wrote:
| I think it's more of late stage consumerism.
|
| Why do middle class people spend $1000 on a phone that's, for
| every single purpose they use it for, basically identical to
| a phone that would cost a fraction as much? Why do low class
| urban people buy sneakers for hundreds of dollars that,
| again, for every single purpose they use them for - are
| essentially identical to some no brand sneakers that would
| cost a tenth as much? Somehow, at some point, being overtly
| ripped off became a way of signaling 'class', which is just
| about the most idiotic thing imaginable. In 'better times'
| people would look at somebody with a $1000 phone or $300
| sneakers as a gullible idiot, and that seems correct to me.
|
| The way people spend money creates a major incentive for
| companies to rip them off. Our economic system isn't forcing
| people to behave this way, although mass advertising is
| probably playing a huge role in maintaining it.
| teiferer wrote:
| > Why do low class urban people buy sneakers for hundreds
| of dollars that, again, for every single purpose they use
| them for - are essentially identical to some no brand
| sneakers that would cost a tenth as much?
|
| I just made the mistake of buying cheapo flipflops a few
| weeks ago. One stroll through the park and they are full of
| gravel stuck in the sole that left holes when I removed it.
| A few a days I replaced them with 7x as expensive ones.
| Already walked around 10x as far distance, no sign of
| issues. A reminder that buying cheap ends up more
| expensive. I don't need crap in my life and maybe that
| holds too for the folks you are thinking of?
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| The problem is there's plenty of crap masquerading as the
| good stuff, at the higher price point, and telling the
| difference is not easy. (At least pre-purchase!)
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| When you learn about clothes and fashion, it's quite easy
| to tell the difference.
|
| HN is full of computer nerds who can't fanthom that
| computers are as mysterious to normies as sneakers are to
| the nerds of HN. A lot of people know how to tell apart
| good and bad footwear - it just isn't you or your crowd!
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| Shoe culture places very little emphasis on the actual
| quality of the product. Brand and exclusivity is far more
| important.
| everdrive wrote:
| "Shoe culture" might be one the dumbest trends in the
| market today.
| somenameforme wrote:
| You can buy garbage for high prices. You can buy great
| stuff for low prices. And you can buy great stuff for
| high prices.
|
| For a market to function properly people need to hone in
| on the great stuff for low prices quadrant, but that is,
| increasingly frequently, not what's happening. And it's
| not like some esoteric art - just check reviews. It's not
| too hard to ignore fake reviews.
| kps wrote:
| The purpose is signalling that you can afford to waste
| money (and this is not at all new).
| an0malous wrote:
| Yes, capitalism requires perpetual growth. When the
| opportunities for growth through innovation dry up,
| businesses resort to cutting costs which usually involves
| cutting quality and hoping most consumers won't notice.
|
| Incidentally, this is the exact strategy that VC and Private
| Equity use. They know how the game is played.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
| imtringued wrote:
| This is correct. Capitalism requires perpetual growth
| because capitalist logic does not apply in saturated
| markets with excess capital.
|
| Anyone who believes in capitalism must by necessity believe
| thatcapital produces part capital and part consumer goods
| and that the rate of capital production must exceed the
| rate of capital depreciation. But in the face of stagnating
| population growth this logic must by necessity result in
| excess capital, threatening investor profit, to which they
| respond with drastic anti consumer measures.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| "Late Stage" as a term means "right before it fails."
|
| People have been calling capitalism "Late Stage" for decades.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > Isn't this all just Late Stage Calitalsm?
|
| You know this phrase originated in the 1930s or early 1940s,
| yes?
| swed420 wrote:
| > Isn't this all just Late Stage Calitalsm?
|
| Yes, just as Marx predicted with his law of the tendency of
| the rate of profit to fall (LTRPF):
|
| https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-
| ra...
| microflash wrote:
| This has been especially pronounced in medical equipments where
| there's this unnecessary race to introduce "digital
| experiences". An example is hearing aids. A few years ago, it
| was relatively easy to get an analog model with dedicated
| volume buttons and off switch. Now, most of the models come
| without off switch and need Bluetooth pairing with an app
| installed on your phone. What used to be plug and play is now a
| clunky mess of hand offs between brittle components.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| More failure points means more people throwing up their hands
| and buying a new one
| atoav wrote:
| I run a media-lab at a art university and both HDMI and USB-C
| is flaming garbage. What you want is a digital video standard
| that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire and negotiates
| the acceptable resolution on the fly. What you get is
| something that does too much, doesn't work half the time and
| does things nobody cares about. Last time I plugged in an
| HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image
| for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to
| press a button on the remote to show the image. And don't get
| me started on DRM/HDCP..
|
| The number of broken HDMI cables (as fraction of cables
| rented out) is way bigger than for any other connector,
| suggesting it is completely unsuitable and a broken design.
|
| Whenever I can I go for SDI video, I do. You plug it in and
| it works. Why "consumer" techology has to be so much more
| pain than pro stuff makes me wonder.
| SpaceNugget wrote:
| > Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn
| "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before
| displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the
| remote to show the image.
|
| That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with
| some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as
| a standard.
|
| I would think as a plug and play standard for A/V stuff,
| HDMI is one of the farthest along the "just works" spectrum
| for the vast majority of people. Occasionally I see a
| device where there's something stupid like switching to a
| different HDMI source doesn't switch the audio source and
| you have to use some dumb OSD menu with many nested levels
| to get to the audio sources, but again, that's not HDMI's
| fault.
|
| I have had quite a few broken HDMI cables in lecture halls
| at uni and in meeting rooms at various work places, but I
| think that's the reality of any connector that gets plugged
| and unplugged tens of times per day (especially by people
| who don't care and don't have to pay for them when they
| break). They just need to replace the cables more often.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| > _HDMI is one of the farthest along the "just works"
| spectrum for the vast majority of people_
|
| Could I interest you in all the new features you could
| enable by instead tunneling video over HDMI Ethernet
| Channel?
| hedora wrote:
| Also, why does my 4k display run at 30hz when plugged
| into my mac?
|
| I ruled out the cable, display and laptop by swapping
| components one at a time.
| atoav wrote:
| > That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display
| with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with
| HDMI as a standard.
|
| Sure yeah, but I don't buy it. If you create a standard
| that is too complicated or too feature-creeped to be
| implemented fully and that lack of full implementation
| means the _fundamental_ role of the standard breaks down,
| that standard might be part of the problem.
|
| I too could envision a solution that theoretically works
| perfectly, and all people are doing it wrong if it
| doesn't. But such standards have to be made with reality
| in mind. USB-C is another one of those. Cool - now I have
| a ton of USB-C cables none of which tell me on the cable
| what capabilities they have. One can't support USB-power
| delivery, the other doesn't work with video up to certain
| resolutions, etc.
|
| I _get_ that more data means higher frequency and that
| this directly translates to more problems, but _nobody_
| (at least no consumer) asked for the complexity of the
| HDMI spec. We want to connect a cable and see the picture
| in 99.99% of the cases. If that doesn 't work 100% of the
| times the standard is at fault. The base functionality of
| the thing needs to be so dumb and so clear that it just
| works, even if the other side doesn't even know what an
| EDID is. That was the task and the result is catastrophic
| failure.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I think an awful lot of this could be solved by requiring
| the ports to export the information they get to the
| device, and requiring that if the devices can reasonably
| be able to display the information that they do so. PCs,
| phones, tablets would all tell you about the cable and
| the connection. Things without screens and interfaces
| would not be required to add them, though.
|
| It's not that the cables support varying specs (which I
| actually have no problem with--you shouldn't have to pay
| for features you don't need, and some features trade off
| vs cable length), but that we have no easy way to find
| them out or test them.
| jpalawaga wrote:
| The duty cycle on hdmi connector is like 10k. I imagine
| probably some of your cables in a lab would actually
| plausibly hit that without too much issue (then apply
| standard deviation: some will have broken much earlier, and
| some won't quit)
| atoav wrote:
| You don't want to know what my headphone extensions (TRSm
| 3.5 -> TRSf 3.5mm) or my XLR3 cables go through. That is
| way, _way_ worse than anything the HDMI cables
| experience, based purey on the look of the cables
| returned.
|
| I get that HDMI is higher frequency and smaller faults
| show earlier, but the plug is just inadequate. The plugs
| are levered off by the stiff cable, the thickness of the
| cables would require at least something like a Neutrik-D-
| norm connector, but they do as if something smaller is
| ok. By this point I am just glad that the receiving side
| seems to be sturdier 90% of the times, but by this point
| I also wonder why the heck we don't just use BNC
| connectors and coaxial cables..
| specialist wrote:
| I feel ya. The inability to diagnose cables drives me nuts.
| Some kind of reportable POST (power-on, self test) should
| be the norm. On both ends.
|
| Grrr...
| fragmede wrote:
| If that's a problem you repeatedly run into
| professionally, you want something like https://www.bhpho
| tovideo.com/c/product/1721377-REG/vanco_hd4... for hdmi
| or something like https://a.co/d/igcKyM2 for usb-c
| marcosdumay wrote:
| HDMI is a piece of shit designed to keep device owners
| hostage of the spec consortium and manufacturers, and USB-C
| is a badly brand collection of specs with infinite
| diversity that shouldn't even work but somehow some times
| does.
|
| But there is a reason nobody puts analogical signals in
| cables anymore. Beyond some bandwidth, the only way to keep
| cables reasonably priced and thin is to have software error
| correction.
| torginus wrote:
| > What you want is a digital video standard that simply
| pushes an A/V stream over the wire
|
| HDMI is just that - it's the direct evolution of VGA
| signaling, with each color channel pushing pixels left-to-
| right top-to-bottom, it even has blanking periods (periods
| where there's no pixel info transmitted, used to steer back
| the electron beam on CRTs to the start of the row/column),
| same EDID format negotiation over I2C, the works.
|
| What makes it crap is the absolute flood of cheap garbage
| HDMI cables/repeaters/KVMs which barely work even at the
| best of times and shouldn't be even allowed to be solved,
| as they are out of spec, but online vendors have flooded
| their stores with this cheap no-name garbage for some
| reason.
|
| Unfortunately, the apparent build quality of the cable, or
| the price mean nothing when trying to get a working one.
| atoav wrote:
| Yeah I get that in theory, but then my 10x more expensive
| pro stuff works _worse_ than the cheap stuff. Sure,
| because they follow the spec etc. But then it turns out
| that even name brand laptops (or their GPUs) do it wrong.
| My point was that the standard is crap. It is way too
| complicated, wants to be too many things to too many
| people (most of which are trying to sell stuff to
| consumers).
|
| HDMI tries to be a video link, an audio hub, a remote-
| control bus, and a content-police checkpoint all at once.
| Strip out the DRM, kill the optional-but-mandatory
| feature soup, and let the cable do its one job: move bits
| from A to B. I had Apple laptops not working with 3-digit
| Pro A/V gear from reputable vendors because HDCP. This is
| fucking bullshit. By this point I am starting to consider
| analog video superior to whatever this is supposed to be.
| bsder wrote:
| > Strip out the DRM
|
| Um, you just hit why HDMI sucks. You have a "default
| broken" state that is required _by the standard_.
|
| Look, _every single interface_ could have been an
| evolution of Ethernet (and mostly _ARE_ --HDMI and USB-C
| are basically enshittified Ethernet). But they weren't
| because everybody wants to put their fingers in the pie
| and take out a chunk for profit by being a rent-seeking
| middleman.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I also thought that HDMI has many problems, like you
| have, too. My idea is: video and audio and other stuff
| are separate cables. The video cable will only be sending
| the digital RGB video data, with the wires for the pixel
| data and pixel clock, as well as power and ground and
| vsync. I think it is helpful for the video signal to be
| digital, but it does not need to be as complicated as
| HDMI. (The audio cable can be balanced analog audio
| signal.)
|
| It is not only HDMI; many other common things are too
| complicated (than they should be) and often have other
| problems too (you mention some of them, such as HDCP, but
| there is many more problem than that).
| torginus wrote:
| My favourite example of this was the digital pregnancy test -
| which instead of having a test strip that changes color based
| on a chemical reaction, had the same test strip surrounded by
| a photodiode and a LED, which detected the color change and
| displayed the results on the screen.
|
| People still buy it because it's digital so it must be
| better.
| montjoy wrote:
| Also, when testing for pregnancy you want to be as "sure"
| as possible and price is assumed to be an indicator of
| quality.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| It very well might be superior.
|
| I have dealt with a pregnancy test only once in my life,
| and that was in acting as an interpreter (me: English,
| wife: Chinese and some English, couple: Chinese, very
| little English. Not easy!) Reading the instructions is one
| thing, but figuring out whether the result was positive was
| another matter. (Although I suspect it was an edge case--
| the woman's period showed up soon thereafter, I suspect
| reality was a very early miscarriage and the result was
| about at the dividing line.)
| ludicrousdispla wrote:
| I used to be a loyal buyer of a specific Eddie Bauer T-Shirt
| over at least a decade, until I bought four of them online a
| few years ago from their website. Despite my ordering all the
| same size and style, each shirt is a different length (varying
| by as much as two inches) and fabric weight. Haven't bought one
| since and won't do so again.
| cptaj wrote:
| I've come to accept that, at least in latam, shirt sizes no
| longer have any real meaning.
|
| Every manufacturer in the world has a different opinion as to
| what those letters mean.
| brewdad wrote:
| There is truth to this and it has certainly been true of
| women's sizing for many years where everyone wants to be a
| size 2 (or whatever your number is) but no size 2 is the
| same across brands.
|
| It's an entirely different problem when I buy two pairs of
| presumably the same pair of jeans in the same style and
| size yet one can barely be buttoned up and the other
| requires a belt at all times.
| heisenbit wrote:
| And then there is the adventure of asymmetric cuts.
| Quality control has been outsourced to the customer. The
| return rates have increased a lot, some of it going
| straight into the bin.
| specialist wrote:
| Do you think maybe clothing is size now inferred from an
| item's weight? Cut close enough and then bin by weight...?
|
| Finding knit caps for my pumpkin sized head is challenging.
| I'd find a good fit but then couldn't reorder the same
| item.
|
| I stumbled onto the notion of selecting by weight instead
| of the declared size. Success!
|
| More recently, there was a HN thread about buying good
| jeans. I then noticed the better quality mfgs also include
| the fabric's weight in the item's blurb. Which I then used
| to inform my foraging.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| This is far more prominent in women's clothing. My wife always
| says how buying from the same brands over the years that
| materials get thinner and thinner, as well as becoming more and
| more synthetic blend %s until it's practically disposable.
| Gigachad wrote:
| I have noticed that woman's clothing seems incredibly poor
| quality a lot of the time. Incredibly thin, and just looking
| at stuff on the racks and stores it was extremely common to
| find minor defects and loose threads.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Part of it may be matching to the use case.
|
| Men will buy a shirt and wear it until its seams break in
| 2-10 years.
|
| Women will buy blouses or dresses with cuts/colors that
| only work in certain seasons to be worn for a specific
| occasion that won't come to pass again soon.
|
| Now where women have more trouble is just in the utility
| work wear shopping space because that clothing is utilized
| frequently and until it fails.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| So many people of HN need to google the terms "raw denim"
| and "selvedge denim". Companies like naked and famous
| make high quality BIFL tier work wear clothes aimed at
| women.
|
| Normies just don't know about it cus denim heads are
| autistic.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| I think even normies know about the selvedge denim. But
| where are the quality tee shirt, Oxford, polo, etc pieces
| that don't fall apart in 2 years?
| __turbobrew__ wrote:
| LuLuLemon is guilty of this. Their quality was pretty good
| about 10 years ago, but since then all the materials have
| gotten thinner and less durable. I have some LuLuLemon
| clothes from 10+ years ago which outlasted things I bought 3
| years ago.
|
| Now the quality is objectively bad and things get holes right
| away or are not even tailored correctly, but hey $7 billion
| wasn't enough for Chip Wilson so he is going to keep sucking
| the brand dry.
| steveBK123 wrote:
| Lulu also fell prey to a typical pattern of building a
| brand on quality, at a higher price point for higher income
| consumer. Then as they grew and targeted the broader
| market, getting copied by low cost competitors and then
| trying to pivot to compete with them.
|
| You see similar in NYC with fast casual / quick service
| type places that scale from 2-3 locations into a national
| chain. Stuff becomes less handmade, less fresh, ingredient
| quality goes down, all the care&attention gets optimized
| away into a sad bowl of slop.
| theptip wrote:
| It's a great point.
|
| I sometimes wonder how long it is before open-source
| manufacturing can fill the gap.
|
| For a long time it's been the case that it's prohibitively
| expensive to do bespoke manufacturing using eg 3D printing and
| CAD lathes, vs. the cost attainable using mass manufacturing.
|
| But perhaps a "made in America" option that can only compete on
| quality, not on price, could focus on "bring your own design"
| and fabricating nice, durable, repairable designs that
| apparently can't be found elsewhere.
|
| I guess the problem is that modern products need quite complex
| integrated electronics which are hard to build in an OSS
| paradigm.
| yard2010 wrote:
| Razer deathadder is a great example. I didn't want to "upgrade"
| to the new model until I didn't have the choice and I'm stuck
| with enshitified, plastic version of what used to be a nice
| piece of hardware.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| I think there is something to it. My favorite analogy for this
| is the car. I had a 2003 Acura TL once. By far, the best car I
| owned between the value, comfort and its specs. Compared to
| today's version, I can't help but notice that 2003 TL was one
| of company's initial foray's into US market so they had to
| offer something decent, useful or at least something that stood
| out.
| AznHisoka wrote:
| Its this way for me, with restaurants, especially those that
| have expanded a lot. A good example of this for me is the
| restaurant Dig Inn. It used to be one single place and was
| called "The Pump Energy Food" and used to my goto place for
| lunch. Then it changed names and expanded to 2-3 other
| locations and was still relatively good. It then started
| expanding a lot more and now the food absolutely sucks
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yeah. You do not want my wife to like your restaurant. Every
| single restaurant she has ever liked has within a few years
| it's either gone or she no longer likes it because of price
| increases or quality decreases (usually associated with a
| change in ownership.)
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| When I worked at a big tech company, the life quality of
| software engineers was undergoing what old timers perceived as
| a significant decline.
|
| The official response of the CFO was that the quality can't be
| declining that much because people aren't quitting an an
| accelerating rate.
|
| This is the same phenomenon as your suspicion. There's some
| metric (e.g. people keep buying our widgets) and you stress
| test demand for it by making it cheaper to produce. If demand
| holds up there's no problem from the company's perspective.
|
| From the consumer's perspective, every project is doing this
| and the entire world is declining in quality but prices aren't
| going down.
| MarkPNeyer wrote:
| You are pointing directly at the philosophical bedrock of
| western civilization, something which most white collar
| elites implicitly believe but don't state outright. It shows
| up right away in the article:
|
| > ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it
| depends on the preferences of each consumer.
|
| For most of history, people believed the opposite. For
| thousands of years, people in every major civilization
| believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality (i.e.
| value). The idea that these things are purely subjective is a
| very recent concept in human history.
|
| In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come
| to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead,
| about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings,
| just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is
| a very different belief from "people prefer some things over
| others". In a world that only recognizes what it can measure,
| the idea that value is subjective reduces to "people do some
| things and not other things", and _any_ action which can
| reliably be motivated - whether that's having babies or
| getting divorced, losing weight or watching porn, eating
| healthy or eating junk food - _all_ that our economy cares
| about is, "can you reliably produce that outcome at scale."
| This is all a natural consequence of the idea that value
| isn't real. People can't be wrong in what they want, and what
| they want is revealed in what they do. Therefore, literally
| all that matters is, can you motivate some kind of action -
| whatever that action is? If you can, you're 'adding value.'
| Motivating people to go out and commit crimes could itself,
| be valuable - if you were, say, the operator of a private
| prison. As long as your motivational technique isn't too
| direct and obvious, it's profitable for you. You're creating
| demand for business!
|
| What would the world look like if value were _real_, we could
| sense it intuitively, but we could not measure it, and had
| persuaded ourselves it were entirely subjective? I think it
| would look exactly as it does now: a prevailing sense that
| quality is declining. We would observe drops in numerous
| large-scale metrics like "does humanity value life enough to
| create more humanity", while metrics like "time people spend
| doing measurable things" would go way up, along with a
| creeping sense that something was deeply wrong.
|
| If value _were_ purely subjective, I would have expected that
| we'd have locked into some functioning propaganda loop by
| now. If value is purely subject, and there's no hardwired
| human nature to value some outcomes over others, What would
| be better for the economy than convincing everyone that
| EVERYTHING IS AWESOME all the time?
| nehal3m wrote:
| I think this is a great insight. Also, from a personal
| perspective, one of the problems I regularly experience as
| a consumer of goods is that it is very difficult for me to
| judge quality, meaning I can explicitly not intuit value.
| For example, two years ago I bought 3 identical pairs of
| Levi's jeans at considerable cost. Granted, they're all I
| wear, but given that I follow the washing instructions and
| don't put undue stress on them I'd expect them to last 5
| years. Two are busted already. I am looking for
| replacements and apparently buying from what I considered
| to be a reputable brand at a high price (which I foolishly
| believed to be an indicator of quality which it no longer
| is) is not a viable strategy anymore.
|
| I am faced with a choice, do I join the problem and go for
| fast fashion crap or do I risk being burned again? Who do I
| believe when I'm researching quality? Google and Reddit
| have long since been astroturfed and small scale forums are
| dead.
| walterbell wrote:
| The search term BIFL (Buy It For Life) helps with some
| products. With ongoing supply chain, currency and trade
| variables, it's worth buying spares of proven products,
| which may later disappear from the market.
|
| As for reputable brands, we may soon need version numbers
| for both products and companies, based on factors like
| supply chains, regulation, trade policy, corporate
| management, leadership or ownership (e.g. PE) changes.
| 2019 jeans from "Acme Corp v10" may be quite different
| from 2026 jeans from "Acme Corp v12".
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Buy the cheapest version that works for your needs. Or
| lower your expectations.
|
| For example, I buy at Costco first, and if that doesn't
| work, I seek higher quality. But I also don't expect
| clothes to last many, many years.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| lol jeans. Just got into selvedge denim, go buy from a
| company like brave star denim, and don't buy anything
| less than 15 oz.
|
| I can find a literal 21 oz unrippable insane heavy weight
| selvedge denim pants for less than 200, and it'll be made
| in America of Japanese materials.
|
| Most Americans are simply stupid when they buy clothes.
| They don't do research and they make extremely suboptimal
| purchases by trusting big brands.
|
| Just checked:
| https://bravestarselvage.com/collections/heavyweight-
| selvage...
|
| 168 USD for jeans so strong and thick they feel like
| armor. You will never wear out of these jeans or rip
| them.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Jeans at old navy or costco or next are $20 to $30. And I
| can wash them on "normal" cycle every time I wear them,
| and dry them on normal and never have to worry about
| taking care of them.
|
| They still last me at least a couple years. And I don't
| have to trust that the manufacturer made them well enough
| to last 7+ years for me to break even.
| hilux wrote:
| Check out shopgoodwill.com. I get everything there.
|
| Most clothes are incredible value, and even with a few
| duds in the mix, it's way better (for my wallet, and the
| environment) than buying new at retail.
| gtowey wrote:
| It's not just being stupid, it's that the information
| space is overflowing with marketing and BS. It's a
| mammoth task to parse through it all and not be suckered
| in by a slick advertisement that says the product you're
| looking at has everything you want. Amazon is absolutely
| the worst for false advertising, garbage masquerading as
| top of the line. And the usual alternative, using Google
| to search for companies directly, has turned into a
| largely futile experience as their search results are
| absolutely terrible, showing almost only the "top"
| retailers which are the same purveyors of cheap crap.
|
| I have spent a considerable amount of time researching
| better, more durable pants and this is the first time
| I've heard about this company. So thank you for that!
| trod1234 wrote:
| The noise is so loud, you can't find any signal.
| Shannon's Limit has been reached.
|
| Also, the knowledge needed to differentiate has been lost
| by many, and suppressed given the economic disadvantage
| of quality vs cheap in a money-printing economy.
|
| Unless you have a fairly good knowledge of sewing,
| construction, chemicals/materials, you end up getting
| things that look the same but aren't the same.
|
| With Jeans, most of the durability came from the weave
| with extra strength from rivets at the stress points in
| the fabric and the properly locked-off stitching, at the
| seams; which a lot of industrial machining can't
| duplicate at the same cost (that's why you get the
| unraveling with those stitches using 4 threads at once).
| Then there is the synthetic fibers that are mixed in for
| flexibility/comfort that become stressed or dissolve upon
| exposure to detergents, and the use of low-quality cotton
| thread, or full synthetics and sometimes just glue to
| bind the seams instead of nylon/silk (both extremely
| strong).
|
| You won't find any company offering Jeans that last more
| than a year or so, and any fraying near the belt loops,
| or main seam lines is a sign of poor worksmanship. I've
| had Walmart jeans, both the offbrand, and triple price
| regular brand rip, belt loops break, seams show signs of
| unraveling within 20 minutes of first use (brand new).
| rixed wrote:
| There is only one reliable way to tell that a product can
| stand the test of time: how old is it already?
|
| You can't buy anything second hand, but jeans you can.
| hedora wrote:
| The only solution I know of is just not buying stuff from
| brands Walmart (and, increasingly, Home Depot, amazon,
| etc) carries.
|
| A new pair of Levi's are $20 at walmart and $80
| everywhere else (before recent inflation).
|
| In theory, the $80 pair matches their previous quality,
| but in practice, they were forced to chase profitability
| with high-volume $20 jeans, so it's all outsourced to the
| same overseas factories. The $80 pair are also crap being
| produced for sustenance wages, but with slightly thicker
| denim.
|
| This is absolutely intentional, and is the cornerstone of
| modern retail in the US. Monopoly retailers drove prices
| below production wages or environmental impact, and their
| profit is driven by by the frequency with which stuff
| breaks and is replaced.
|
| It all relies on information asymmetry. Look at the
| market for grifters discussion on HN yesterday. It talks
| about the economics of targeted advertising, but similar
| games are played by name brands. For instance most
| appliance manufacturers own many brands, and rotate which
| brand is garbage in a given year. That constantly tricks
| people into buying garbage from a "reputable" brand.
|
| https://reclaimdemocracy.org/walmart-product-quality-
| durabil...
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| I've always viewed it as less a discussion about any sort
| of real defined "quality metric" and more companies asking
| "what is the least amount of time, money, and effort we can
| put in before people stop buying it?"
|
| Even more simply put: what is the worst version of the
| product that people are willing to buy?
| xp84 wrote:
| Yes! And because all competitors besides niche artisanal
| players are simultaneously playing that same exact game
| (or in many cases, there are 10 brands all made by 3
| conglomerates), people have little chance of _actually_
| stopping buying the product even when its quality level
| dips to absurdity. People will "stop buying" one brand
| and buy another, but the root of their frustrations is
| identical across brands and manufacturers.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| Yeah for a lot of stuff every vendor is making basically
| the same thing the same way.
| ungreased0675 wrote:
| There is some logic to not over-engineering a product or
| using more materials than necessary to produce something.
| I wonder why that seems to have manifested in an anti-
| consumer application some places.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| $$$
| gtowey wrote:
| I think it has to do with having no limits on executive
| compensation.
|
| There is no incentive to create long-term value when you
| can cost-optimize your brand into the garbage while
| creating large short term profits from which they can pay
| themselves outrageous bonuses. It's an easy playbook and
| there is no shortage of people willing to trade their
| reputation for a few hundred million.
|
| Our economy has become almost entirely a race to the
| bottom.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Many products come in 3 levels of quality:
|
| 1. the stripper, designed for a minimum price that will
| draw people into the showroom
|
| 2. the luxe, which has every feature, designed for the
| people who don't care about the price
|
| 3. the midrange, which is what most people wind up buying
|
| This strategy maximizes the profit that can be made.
| You'll see it from refrigerators to cars.
| gtowey wrote:
| The problem I see is that main difference between those
| options is not quality, but features.
|
| For example with refrigerators you see integrated touch
| screen, viewing windows, and all kinds of esoteric
| features.
|
| But the core of the product, the compressor and overall
| cooling system is not actually any better. In fact,
| looking at reviews shows that those parts are often
| garbage quality too.
|
| So it fails at the core job of keeping your food cold,
| and the added features are just more things to fail as
| well meaning that buying the more expensive products are
| generally a lose-lose situation.
| hedora wrote:
| Concretely, don't buy anything made by Samsung. Here's a
| $3000 washer / dryer with a 90 day [x] warranty:
|
| https://www.samsung.com/us/home-appliances/all-in-one-
| washer...
|
| [x] I got tired of following footnote disclaimers. Note
| the headline 20-year warranty and $2,200 price tags are
| blatant lies. The two year warranty below that claim has
| footnotes that references more off page disclaimers. When
| we had a samsung appliance die, we found the actual
| warranty was only 90 days.
|
| Even worse, there are zero repair companies willing to
| touch samsung garbage in our area because it's impossible
| to debug issues. So, even with their samsung care
| package, you're still throwing this thing out in a few
| years.
|
| I've also attempted to call their customer support. It
| makes the IRS call center seem prompt.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| > For most of history, people believed the opposite. For
| thousands of years, people in every major civilization
| believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality
| (i.e. value). The idea that these things are purely
| subjective is a very recent concept in human history.
|
| Value has always been subjective, people in previous eras
| simply didn't have the tools or technology to figure it out
| as quickly as today.
|
| For example, IKEA furniture does 99% of the job for 90% of
| the people at less than 50% of the price of what was
| previously known as "quality" furniture.
|
| The amount of money IKEA has saved me afforded multiple
| vacations, plus it is easier to move. So is it lower
| "value"?
|
| Lots of people like to gripe about lower quality houses
| today. But I don't want a house that lasts 500 years. I
| want a house that I can easily modify or repair that lets
| wireless signals through the wall, with drywall, wood
| studs, PEX piping, etc. And it will be a lot cheaper than a
| house built with masonry.
| blub wrote:
| Yes it is lower quality: doesn't look as good as massive
| wood or other quality wood, less stable, breaks or
| loosens up after moves, so light that it easily falls
| over and must be anchored, etc.
|
| What you're saying is that low quality furniture is worth
| it to you for various reasons.
| lumb63 wrote:
| You and parent comment are not going to see eye to eye
| because of different definitions of "quality". They are
| using the term synonymously with the economic idea of
| "utility". To them, a higher-quality item is that which
| provides them the most value.
|
| To the contrary, you are using "quality" to mean
| something else; maybe you could elaborate on what
| "quality" is to you, what characteristics make something
| "high quality", and why the categories you've used to
| measure quality are the "right ones".
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I don't agree with a lot of what you're writing here, but
| reading through the lines I think maybe there's some common
| ground.
|
| There is a philosophy that value (including reality) is
| subjective and that all that matters is making people act.
| That's quite explicitly the philosophy of Marx. It's in
| strong contrast to the "philosophical bedrock of western
| civilization", which is the search for objective truth and
| objective reality. Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that
| objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think
| people would agree that those ideas are associated with the
| elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.
|
| I think what you're ultimately referring to is the use of
| ordinal utility functions by economists. It's not clear how
| to write equations in economics where each person's
| preferences are accurately expressed in well-behaved value-
| agnostic units. You could try using money, but not everyone
| values having a lot of money. And even if they did, which
| currency? Dollars? Euros? Gold? Bitcoin?
|
| Because utility functions are hard to get right
| theoretically, Paul Samuelson proposed trying to measure
| them empirically by revealed preference. There are lots of
| things wrong with this from an academic perspective and
| it's reasonable to have concerns about the long-term
| effects if this is adopted for entire economies. But it
| didn't start until 1938 and it's certainly not a
| philosophical bedrock of Western civilization. More like a
| desperate hack.
|
| > we can't measure feelings
|
| We have several ways of measuring feelings, and we use them
| regularly. But you can't build a utility theory based
| literally on current feelings. Otherwise opium would have
| nearly infinite objective value. You want to use something
| that integrates over time, like life satisfaction. Or
| something that measures the current feeling, change in
| feeling, and integral over feeling like a PID controller.
| But even if you could get the measurements right, doing all
| the measurements for all 8.2 billion people in real time
| would be impossible right now. So it's not clear what the
| right theory is.
| walleeee wrote:
| Where in Marx do you find claims like reality is a
| middle-class fiction or all value is subjective? The
| labor theory of value is premised on an idea of surplus
| value as a very real thing. Substituting subjective
| theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?
|
| I'm perhaps willing to grant "all that matters is making
| people act" in the sense that he was far more thoroughly
| a revolutionist than a scientist.
|
| But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western
| thought" misses the many strands which make up the
| latter, as well as the fact that he was no island: he was
| steeped (and elements of his thought remain visible) in a
| diverse intellectual tradition which is by no means a
| monolith.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > The labor theory of value
|
| This is value in the sense of "price". The labor theory
| of value was from Adam Smith and Ricardo rather than
| something Marx contributed.
|
| > Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of
| the analysis, doesn't it?
|
| You're right that this is an apparent contradiction.
| Technically, Marx was making a prophecy about an upcoming
| revolution as being a historical inevitability. And when
| he was being more rigorous he was careful to clarify that
| this was a statement about historical inevitability (like
| manifest destiny) rather than something he thought was
| "good".
|
| But many people have taken this to be a contradiction.
| Here's an essay from Michael Rosen defending the claim
| that his critique of morality isn't inconsistent with his
| condemnation of people's behaviors [0].
|
| Marx's attitude toward morality is discussed on page 7.
| The basic gist is that morality claims to be objective,
| but it's really, to quote Rosen, "particular and relative
| to the society in question".
|
| Nowadays people sympathetic to his approach paraphrase
| these ideas by saying that reality and morality are
| "socially constructed."
|
| > But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western
| thought" misses the many strands which make up the
| latter, as well as the fact that he was no island
|
| This is a reasonable claim and one that has also been
| well-discussed. My personal take is that Marx critiqued
| and rejected the Enlightenment, which he saw as serving
| the interests of the middle class.
|
| I group him with Rousseau and many German philosophers of
| his time as being overly influenced by the Romantic
| movement and longing for a return to a primitive way of
| life.
|
| Western thought has been firmly in the direction of the
| Enlightenment, engineering, and science. And the
| romantics have generally been a conservative counter
| culture wanting to return to a simpler time.
|
| [0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/michaelrosen/files/
| the_mar...
| walleeee wrote:
| I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social
| construction in his worldview, especially construction of
| reality at large (morality it is easier to see the
| argument) but I admit it has been years since my reading.
| I agree with you that there is a strand in Western
| thought which is infatuated with science/engineering to a
| historically novel degree but I am not so sure that
| enlightenment ideals fit so neatly in the same box, or
| that statements like "Western thought is firmly X" can be
| meaningfully interpreted. In any case thanks for your
| response and for the link, I look forward to reading and
| learning from it.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| > I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social
| construction in his worldview, especially construction of
| reality at large
|
| The most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach.
| Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially
| naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.
|
| His basic argument is that it doesn't make sense to talk
| about an objective materialist universe. That point of
| view leads to middle class society. His own point of view
| isn't really coherent, but it's essentially that humans
| create the objective world and truth through interacting
| with it.
|
| To me it feels like what he's trying to do is try to take
| German idealism and apply it to groups of people rather
| than single people. Conceptually you get a sort of
| Cartesian solipsism at the social scale. But you can read
| it and you may get a different take away from it.
| swed420 wrote:
| > he most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach.
| Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially
| naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.
|
| One must have a very warped understanding of Marx to
| claim he didn't advocate for materialism. Are you
| unfamiliar with his dialectical/historical materialism?
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Of course I'm familiar with it. But beyond an unfortunate
| name clash the ideas aren't very related.
|
| Materialism is the view that everything is fundamentally
| matter. Historical materialism is almost the opposite.
| It's the idea that there's some supernatural force
| guiding human history.
|
| To quote Bertrand Russell:
|
| > His belief that there is a cosmic force called
| Dialectical Materialism which governs human history
| independently of human volitions, is mere mythology.
| swed420 wrote:
| You argue like a true capitalist whose underlying
| assumption is that free will isn't mostly illusory.
|
| Modern science disagrees:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83817782-determined
|
| Warning: ego might get bruised
| walleeee wrote:
| I am glad for our (rather dismissive) interlocutor's
| comment, because I can now ask you: do you see this in
| any tension with Marx as an early constructivist? Social
| construction as I think of it is hardly compatible with a
| teleological cosmology. What am I missing?
|
| Another quibble: I don't think Marx thought of it as
| supernatural in our sense of the latter; rather his sense
| of the natural (like that of many of his contemporaries)
| had an element of what we might call the supernatural,
| located in a certain directedness or inevitability.
|
| I guess where you see Marx as an early advocate of modern
| relativisms, I read him as deeply bound up in positivisms
| pervasive at the time. Maybe these are not contradictory
| positions. Curious to hear your thoughts.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Marx in general wasn't self-consistent. That's part of
| why he wasn't taken seriously as a philosopher or
| economist until the Soviets evangelized for him as a sort
| of patron saint.
|
| But you're right to raise the question. A closely related
| question is: "If Marx thought the revolution was
| inevitable, then why did he feel the need to advocate for
| it?". You can also ask this about any sort of prophecy:
| manifest destiny, the second coming of Jesus, the
| singularity, etc. There's of course a literature on this,
| e.g. [0].
|
| But people do in fact hold both views simultaneously. A
| famous example is Karl Rove, unintentionally echoing
| Marx's ideas:
|
| > We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own
| reality. And while you're studying that reality --
| judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating
| other new realities, which you can study too, and that's
| how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . .
| and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we
| do.
|
| In other words, we construct reality and it's inevitable
| that we construct reality. Both historical inevitability
| and social construction in the same thought.
|
| > I don't think Marx thought of it as supernatural in our
| sense of the latter
|
| I doubt he did either, but it's supernatural in the
| literal sense. It's not entailed by the collection of
| physical laws. In fact his theory is empirically false,
| but even if it wasn't, the existence of a causal force in
| history requires an additional assumption outside of
| natural science. Whereas other authors had previously
| talked metaphorically of a spirit of force in history
| (e.g. the invisible hand) Marx tried to turn it into a
| real force the way the ancients thought of gods
| intervening in human affairs.
|
| [0] "Historical inevitability and human agency in
| Marxism" https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.10
| 98/rspa.1986...
| walleeee wrote:
| > One must have a very warped understanding of Marx
|
| Materialism is an extraordinarily overloaded
| word/concept.
|
| OP's proposing an idiosyncratic take on Marx's reading of
| one of his main influences seems rather more in the
| dialectical spirit than a no true Scotsman (no true
| Marxist? ;) flung without substantiation. No offense.
|
| Given Marx was famously "not a Marxist", and given the
| laboriousness/verbosity of his writing, and his tendency
| to change his mind over time, you could argue he had
| merely the first in a long lineage of warped
| understandings of himself.
| swed420 wrote:
| > Given Marx was famously "not a Marxist"
|
| Misrepresenting words out of context to make a point
| isn't a great approach.
|
| http://isocracy.org/content/karl-marx-i-am-not-marxist
|
| https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings-and-
| interpret...
| walleeee wrote:
| Friend, if you're trying to convert people to your point
| of view, neither is yours. Cheers from someone with at
| least a few somewhat similar political sympathies.
| dennis_jeeves2 wrote:
| Good analysis...
|
| (Side note: I was looking at your comment history and it
| appears that most of your comments are down-voted, somebody
| has an axe to grind)
| Razengan wrote:
| This "grudge downvoting" shit has been a thing on HN for
| years, with Dang etc refusing to acknowledge it. Might as
| well join in on it yourself till they notice :)
| WalterBright wrote:
| It happens to me, sometimes. It doesn't work very well
| because I couldn't care less about my karma points.
| Razengan wrote:
| It makes your comment [nearly] invisible to others,
| unless they have showdead. It can also limit the rate at
| which you can post. It achieves what spam-downvoters
| want, without any downsides to them.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I should probably post less often, so not a problem :-)
| WarOnPrivacy wrote:
| > most of your comments are down-voted, somebody has an
| axe to grind
|
| Parent's comments are months apart. What sort of somebody
| did you have in mind?
|
| Of note, parent's tag is "ask me anything and i will
| probably give you something new to think about." This is
| a bold promise.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Subjective things are real and some times even measurable
| too.
|
| The problem with objective theories of value is that they
| are demonstrably wrong. If you rent a small apartment and
| have two washing machines, one of them has negative value
| to you, people often give those away; try explaining that
| with objective value.
|
| And yes, people's values do align to a very large extent.
| MostlyStable wrote:
| I read that portion not as arguing that every possible
| metric is completely subjective, such that some people will
| actively prefer, for example, a version that doesn't last
| as long, or costs more for no additional benefit, but
| rather that quality has a lot of different axes, some of
| which are mutually exclusive or in active tension, and the
| relative weighting of different axes _is_ purely
| subjective. There is no way that one can argue that it is
| "correct" to value durability over cost. Or aesthetic
| appeal over simplicity.
|
| Basically, when there are many axes of quality, the pareto
| frontier gets very large and very complex and no one
| position on it is inherently better than another, even if
| everyone universally agrees which direction is "better" on
| every individual axis.
| trod1234 wrote:
| You are talking in circles while missing the point, and
| ignoring quite a lot of established literature on
| economics.
|
| I'd suggest if you are limited on time that you read
| Hazlitt. Economics in One Lesson. You seem to conflate need
| for demand in your examples. The two are not the same.
|
| Need includes anyone who could benefit/find valuable from
| the use of something, the value being derived from
| productive human action.
|
| Demand in reality includes only the people who would make
| an actual exchange at a specific price point. The former is
| a superset of the latter.
|
| You end up misleading others, and going into delusional
| territory when you ignore this nuance.
| danaris wrote:
| Your former CFO needs to read about the Trust Thermocline.
|
| https://therightstuff.medium.com/the-trust-thermocline-
| expla...
| VonTum wrote:
| https://archive.is/hVTit
| trod1234 wrote:
| There's a simple answer in established literature.
|
| There is an objective perspective. You might want to read
| Hazlitt, Economics in one lesson.
| wwfn wrote:
| I think that's a good take. Market pressure for durability
| decreases with brand awareness. Though I think the article
| argues there's little market pressure regardless.
|
| I'm also worried it's all survivorship bias. If you acquired
| 100 items in 2010 and 5 of them lasted until 2025, it's hard to
| say if the 5 surviving would be the same 5 from another
| household or if the items you still have were all on the
| hardier end of that particular items quality distribution.
| Another house with 100 items from 2010 will have a different 5
| remaining in 2025. If that's the case, the chance you'd buy
| those 5 again and even have 3 with the same 15 year life span
| is (1/20)^3 (I think. is that math right?)
| layer8 wrote:
| I wouldn't mind that much if switching to another brand/model
| would solve the problem. But sometimes I order half a dozen
| of the most well-reviewed alternatives, and they are all
| worse in some way in comparison.
| wwfn wrote:
| I feel that pain!
|
| This comes up for me most often with running shoes. By the
| time the model shoe I've loved wears out, it'll be out of
| production and the n+1 iteration re-balanced whatever
| decisions to make the shoe a worse-for-me fit.
|
| (It's tempting to think the big-sneaker cabal conspires to
| ensure consumers are perceptually exploring options)
| derbOac wrote:
| Survivorship bias is an important thing to consider, but the
| weird thing about it is that although sometimes (usually?)
| people have a blind spot for it, other times I think it gets
| used as a kind of "just so" explanation for degradation in
| quality because it's hard to refute.
|
| My experience with clothing kind of suggests it's not just
| survivorship bias. I once had a pair of pants that lasted
| maybe 10 years or so with regular washing, each use (yes I
| know, not ideal, I don't do that anymore), and I had to
| replace them. When I ordered a new pair, from the same
| company, same model, I noticed the new ones didn't last
| nearly as long, maybe 2 years, and seemed thinner. I emailed
| the company about this, and they acknowledged that they had
| made the fabric thinner, and even gave me the old and new
| fabric densities. I think clothing is one area where new
| brands have come in to partially move the needle back toward
| quality a teeny weeny bit, but experiences like that,
| tracking the actual material quality of the same products
| over time, leads me to conclude it's not always just random
| survivorship bias.
| chung8123 wrote:
| The distribution of peoples needs even out. The quality settles
| where the "good enough" is. That could be super high quality or
| just mediocre. Once that settles the super high quality has a
| new price point (economies of scale are no longer being
| subsidized by the people that need less). If that price point
| is too much for the people of quality to pay the product
| disappears.
| chrsw wrote:
| In my first job out of engineering school 15 years ago I was
| working on a project to give people something they never had
| before.
|
| Today most of my work goes towards making something that
| already exists cheaper. Not to pass on the savings to the
| customer of course, but to make the company's books look better
| and to make investors happier.
| maxglute wrote:
| Same popular product gets value engineered over iterations to
| be worse. At same time, most category of products likely has
| competitors that have cropped up over last 20 years that has
| much better quality to price ratio.
| calrain wrote:
| Everyone has their own way of measuring quality.
|
| Mine is that a Billy bookcase that I bought from Ikea 25 years
| ago is must stronger and more stable than a Billy bookcase I
| bought from Ikea 5 years ago.
|
| And, when looking at what Ikea is selling in 2025 as a Billy
| bookcase, it's worse yet again.
|
| But, with the cost of living increasing, companies have to cut
| corners to keep pricing down.
|
| I wonder where the inflection point is where used items become
| more valuable than the new items being made at current quality
| levels, including degradation due to age.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| It's ironic to use Ikea as an example.
|
| When Ikea first expanded beyond Scandinavia, it was the 'fast
| fashion' of furniture: beautiful design, but sometimes made
| of particleboard or polyurethane foam.
|
| There's nothing unusual about that today.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| You could have bought a Besta or Hemmes bookshelf, accounting
| for inflation it would be closer in price to the Billy you
| bought 25 years ago.
|
| Assuming a product introduced 25 years ago has exactly the
| same role in the lineup today sounds crazy to me TBH.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| Isn't that the point though?
|
| Quality of the basic model Maytag washer I bought 25 years
| ago versus one today. Quality of a Reese's cup I bought 25
| years ago versus one today. Quality of Levi's I bought 25
| years ago versus a pair today. Quality of the Billy that I
| bought 25 years ago versus today.
|
| Quality of the Billy HAS declined.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| That's fair if we only care about the Billy line and it's
| history.
|
| From there we can't generalize that to any other product
| without acknowledging IKEA's internal decision process or
| their vision for Billy across the years.
|
| To parent's point
|
| > where the inflection point is where used items become
| more valuable than the new items being made at current
| quality levels, including degradation due to age.
|
| Buying the actual equivalent of what Billy was 25 years
| ago answers is an answer to that.
| divan wrote:
| I was searching recommendations at r/BuyItForLife the other day
| and saw a pattern of used-to-be-known-for-quality manufacturers
| scaled up and moved production abroad, which resulted in drop
| in quality.
| layer8 wrote:
| Yes. Recommendations like that are not reliable, because the
| fact that a product has proven to hold up well for 10 or 20
| years doesn't at all imply that it's current incarnation will
| as well. The general trend is that it won't.
| hliyan wrote:
| Here's how I see it: in the absence of growth in market share
| or cost-reducing innovation, the only remaining strategy for
| profit maximization is the delivering of progressively lower
| quality products for progressively higher prices. This
| obviously destroys the brand over time, but brands can be
| recycled/reinvented.
|
| A purely rational and self-interested (i.e. unencumbered by
| moral sentiment or empathy) economic agent would, in this case,
| calculate the longest time period a brand could be sustained at
| the highest price and the lowest production cost, before the
| brand is lost. If the ROI during that period justifies the
| investment, such an agent would execute the strategy.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Then from a purely rational and self-interested citizenry
| would hold any economic agents on the hook for future
| cleanups of land, water or air.
| rcbdev wrote:
| Thankfully, the citizenry is irrational and self-
| interested, which enables an entire cottage industry of
| sheisters, marketers and psychologists, which then engineer
| our attention spans and purchasing decisions.
| bradly wrote:
| Turns out a large enough number of humans can be controlled
| by ads that cost less money than the money they generate by
| controlling these humans.
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Theyd also nationalize certain products to minimize
| unnecessary waste and churn.
| hilux wrote:
| I like the idea, but "purely rational citizenry" is a
| theoretical construct.
|
| And even if they/we were purely rational, there's the
| intractable problem of measuring the cost of future
| cleanups stretching into forever.
|
| Plus the danger (certainty) of corporations paying out
| their current executives and then declaring bankruptcy.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| > but "purely rational citizenry" is a theoretical
| construct.
|
| So is a "purely rational economic agent". Nothing about
| it is real. It's a model.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| That's pretty much the game plan for every private equity
| acquisition: exchange brand goodwill (and all other sources
| of value) for profits, pocket the profits, leave the empty
| husk behind.
| fnordlord wrote:
| This is mostly how I see it too. I've wondered recently if
| it was possible to plot that curve and use it to show which
| companies are still on the quality portion of the arc and
| which are on the downturn.
| cgannett wrote:
| Also almost everyone who works at that company gets laid
| off and the few remaining have the worst job ever now. LINE
| GO UP THO!!
| cyanydeez wrote:
| You need to factor in planned obsolescence. The fundamentals
| of the market simply does not make sense when your product is
| cheap and lifecycle is long.
|
| Think of the LED bulb. It would make more sense for the
| government to manage the few resources needed and for them to
| maximize the lifecycle of a lightbulb.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| A lightbulb is a fascinating example, because there's an
| argument to be made that a "minimum government
| specification" lightbulb would be superior to what the
| market provides (read: under-spec'd cheap caps that die due
| to heat https://www.edn.com/ensure-long-lifetimes-from-
| electrolytic-... ).
| 0xabe wrote:
| I'm tired of having to replace whole LED light fixtures
| instead of being able to replace a bulb. I am currently
| waiting on a special order to arrive with 2 fluorescent
| light fixtures. I refuse to put up more LED fixtures that
| will go bad in another 2 years.
| etbebl wrote:
| It seems to me that for products that in general are cheap
| to buy as well as produce, companies would want to make
| these products somewhat longer-lasting to gain a better
| reputation and then make more sales and larger profits on
| more expensive items.
|
| I think the fundamental problem here is that nobody trusts
| brands anymore because we have been trained by strategies
| like market segmentation and private equity cost cutting
| that the vast majority of brands don't consistently
| indicate quality. That product A could be fine and a very
| similar-looking product B could be horrible, and any
| company or even product could become shit at any moment.
| Breyers in the US is a great example - they sell real
| (though still watery) ice cream in the cartons that say
| "naturals," and all the other very similar looking cartons
| are full of crap artificial frozen dairy dessert. They had
| a very strong brand, and they decided it was time to cash
| out that brand goodwill by cheaping out, but deceptively so
| they could ride it out for a few decades, at which point
| who cares?
|
| This has led to a situation where companies don't make any
| attempt anymore to gain a reputation for the quality of
| their products, because it's futile to convince the public
| that they can trust you. And also, they have to compete
| much more equally with alphabet soup brands on Amazon
| making the absolute cheapest version of products at the
| lowest margins (and labor costs). So why would anyone make
| a better lightbulb that no one will buy because it's $2
| more expensive?
| figassis wrote:
| I would absolutely buy the $2 bulb. Problem is all the
| cheap brands also start marketing theirs as best quality
| and sell for $2.
| trod1234 wrote:
| Uhh, you are aware that planned obsolescence is only
| incentivized in fiat markets based in money-printing which
| aren't real markets.
|
| Absent boom-bust, and the related fraud/true-up that
| happens cyclically, you have sustained growth mirroring
| population growth, without the chaotic whipsaw, as well as
| other factors of general wear and tear that make sustain
| demand.
|
| Less cost, and cost that follows real stable value without
| distortion, leads to more production over time, not less.
| Boom bust dynamics cause a slight move forward, followed my
| two steps back; repeatedly, until your out of steps.
|
| In such older economies, you don't lose out such monumental
| opportunity cost and related resources to fraud or people
| who sit on their hands. Opportunity cost is immeasurable
| without a reference, so you don't know what you lose, or
| what could have been.
|
| > Think of the LED bulb. It would make more sense for the
| government to manage the few resources needed...
|
| Honestly, seeing this rhetoric makes you sound like a shill
| peddling propaganda towards centralization as a solution,
| which includes both fascism and communism (statism for
| both), while ignoring the established failures of such
| systems.
|
| I don't mean to be critical of what you have to say, but
| you come off as really ignorant, or deliberately
| misleading.
|
| If you can only run on the same path on a circle, do you
| really think you'll eventually get to where you want to go
| when that point is not on the circle?
| hinkley wrote:
| That's not the only one it's just the easier one.
|
| When people tear down new models of gaming systems they find
| fewer chips on the boards because they've found some chip
| that does two things for less than the price of both - below
| a certain point it's financially infeasible to make simple
| parts because the capacity they consume makes a chip that
| does half as much only 15% cheaper. See also when people
| started putting Linux rescue disks into the EEPROM, because
| appropriately sized ROMs no longer existed.
|
| You can find better equipment and processes that get you more
| product per hour out the door without necessarily making the
| product shittier.
| klik99 wrote:
| Parent comment explicitly says this happens when a sector
| runs out of things to innovate on. Chips are still
| innovating like crazy which is why we're seeing some
| amazing processing/CPU/GPU/DSP chips/etc. If we ever hit on
| the limits of moores law, watch those CPUs become shittier
| and shittier over a 10 year period.
|
| I think this point is the key and kind of subtle point -
| "growth at any cost" does actually rise the tide and bring
| up all boats when there is a lot of room for innovation. It
| just starts harming when a sector has diminishing returns
| on innovation. So you'll be able to come up with plenty of
| counter examples where growth mindset is really beneficial
| because it's very context sensitive.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Yup, the thing is the price difference between the
| humongous flash (do they even do EEPROM anymore?) and the
| "appropriate" one is less than the overhead of
| designing/making/handling different sizes. And the bigger
| the chip the more sectors for wear leveling and you can
| tolerate lower total write counts on the chip.
|
| Thus we end up with circuits designed to feed the
| reinforced concrete outhouse in the center. And they're
| unrepairable because the troubleshooting cost is more than
| the replacement cost.
| klik99 wrote:
| This is exactly what I came to say - growth as the primary
| goal DOES create innovation, until innovation in that field
| yields diminishing returns or bottoms out completely, then it
| creates shittier and shittier product.
|
| The entire American version of capitalism is built around
| growth as the primary goal, which did great things, but now
| (unequally, some sectors are still innovating) is creating
| more and more shitty things.
|
| It's so hard for anyone to acknowledge this because everyone
| wants to take a "side", pro- or anti-capitalism, without
| being realistic that there are different implementations of
| capitalism and there is no system that universally works, it
| really depends on the situation. Right now we need to make
| "lifestyle company" not a bad word in investment circles,
| focus on dividends/revenue sharing over stock growth, create
| incentives around steady, well run companies, and not
| companies that outspend and destroy competition and then make
| their product shittier and/or more expensive.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Do socialist economies produce superior products?
| nicoburns wrote:
| If by "socialism" you mean the majority of economic
| activity being state-run, then probably not.
|
| If by "socialism" you mean things like worker-owned
| corporations, strong anti-competition laws, high levels
| of consumer regulation, then absolutely.
| WalterBright wrote:
| If worker-owned collectives produce superior products,
| why aren't they everywhere? It's not illegal to form one.
| brendoelfrendo wrote:
| Because capital doesn't like to fund them. Being worker-
| owned limits the potential upside for investors so a
| collective or co-op needs to be able to bootstrap itself
| to success, at which point capital will just fund a
| competitor that allows them to extract their desired
| rents.
| nicoburns wrote:
| Because our economic structure doesn't reward superior
| products, it rewards cheaper products. So such
| organisations get outcompeted.
| WalterBright wrote:
| But people here say they want superior products. So why
| do they buy the cheapest, instead?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| 1. "People here" are a very small fraction of the
| economy. They may in fact buy superior products over
| cheap ones, but their numbers are too small to matter
| much.
|
| 2. People don't always do what they say. They want
| superior quality, but they _also_ want it at the same
| price as the inferior alternative. When push comes to
| shove, which will they choose? Not all will choose
| quality over cheapness. That doesn 't mean they didn't
| want quality. It just means they didn't want it as much
| as they say they did.
| ramses0 wrote:
| Also "market for lemons"- a friend told me she used to go
| to Macys/Dillards to buy $50 bath towels b/c they were
| better, nicer, more durable than the $20 ones from
| Walmart.
|
| Now she goes and still pays $50 for them, but they have
| been stealthily replaced by the equivalent of the
| inferior $20 ones.
|
| It becomes a market for lemons: you can't trust that
| paying more for a product gets you a better product so
| game theory says you have to pursue price minimization at
| all costs.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| You've forgotten your Pratchett. Quoth _Men at Arms_ :
|
| > The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned,
| was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots,
| for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus
| allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost
| fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which
| were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like
| hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars.
| Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and
| wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell
| where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel
| of the cobbles.
|
| > But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and
| years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of
| boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years'
| time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap
| boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the
| same time and _would still have wet feet_.
|
| > This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of
| socio-economic unfairness.
| nicoburns wrote:
| The product people really want often isn't on the market
| at all. I speak of a product that is:
|
| - Mass produced at scale
|
| - High quality and will "last a lifetime" (a long time)
|
| - Repairable when it breaks down
|
| I believe that many people would happily pay a 20%, 50%
| or even 100% markup for such a product, but often often
| _all_ of the available mass produced options are shitty
| quality (and the choice is between a bargain option or a
| "premium" option that is just as crappy quality but costs
| more because of the brand name). There might be a
| "boutique" hand-crafted alternative, but it will cost
| 5-10x more.
|
| The other problem is imperfect access to information.
| Even where there is superior alternative on the market,
| it is often very difficult for consumers to determine
| which one it is. Which means they can't choose it. Which
| further means, there is no incentive for manufacturers to
| produce it.
| pachorizons wrote:
| Because they were violently suppressed by the interests
| of the capital class over multiple generations.
| breppp wrote:
| i'll try mine
|
| because they are a fantasy of people who have never once
| in their life seen what happens to a company with a
| strong union or excessive worker power, they become
| repressive towards newer employees among other things
| hylaride wrote:
| I'll half-disagree. There are situations where "workers"
| having a seat at the table can produce favourable
| outcomes. Some German companies have union representation
| on the board and it results in workers sometimes willing
| to make sacrifices for the greater good, so long as they
| also then benefit if an upside materializes. It can also
| benefit the company as the top-down decisions can also
| receive comments and concerns from a different viewpoint
| within the company.
|
| But it's also very much a cultural thing. The anglosphere
| tends to treat CEOs and corporate leaders as the smart
| drivers of corporate success, where as Germany and other
| European companies are more comfortable with some
| collective ways of working.
|
| There's benefits to both models, but there's no arguing
| against the fact that the "anglo" way does seem much more
| successful at the entrepreneurial stages, especially with
| new ideas and industries.
|
| I myself prefer the anglo-model, but I try my best to
| find places that appreciate and trust their workers. I
| also find myself appreciating goods that last a lifetime
| from "boring, but stable" companies. People like Jack
| Welch and his acolytes ruin companies.
| VirusNewbie wrote:
| Well, certainly a "hybrid" form of worker owned
| collectives are doing well: my company pays over 24
| billion in stock to employees annually.
| cgannett wrote:
| Publix has a model similar to this and it seems to work
| well for them both as a former employee and a customer.
| Their stores and products are always nice and they pay
| above average for their sector. They are on the expensive
| side but also they have good deals when you look for them
| especially the BOGOs. I definitely had a better time
| working for them than I did when I worked for Sprouts
| which is publicly traded and aiming at a similar market
| segment. I think if we are going to stick with some
| capitalism we need to switch to models like Publix and
| away from models like Sprouts and Walmart.
|
| People on both sides of the capitalism/socialism divide
| also always conflate "Current Way Stock Markets Work"
| with capitalism. We do alot of extra damage to the
| average person's health and well being with the WAY we do
| capitalism. The plutocrats use the heavily propagandized
| stick of "SCARY SOCIALISM" to give you a more shriveled
| carrot year after year and tell you you should be
| thankful you dont get beat with the "SCARY SOCIALISM"
| stick while they still hit you with the "NO HOUSE, NO
| FOOD, NO HEALTHCARE" stick if you can't sell your bodily
| capital for enough value to please them.
|
| The extra damage is all this profit over anything else no
| matter the circumstance. Look at United Healthcare
| getting sued because the new CEO, even if it was purely
| out of self preservation, decides they are going to
| actually give people some of the coverage they paid for
| and not do quite as many dirty tricks to skim as many
| denials off the top as they possibly can. MANY SUCH CASES
| lenkite wrote:
| They don't do well in the US due to ideological aversion,
| no policy incentives and lack of funding platforms like
| community investment trusts.
|
| But they are quite successful in other nations. Amul in
| India for example.
| WalterBright wrote:
| > due to ideological aversion
|
| Nobody cares if they're buying from a collective or a
| conventional business.
|
| > no policy incentives
|
| Are you saying they should get special government
| incentives not available to businesses?
|
| > lack of funding platforms
|
| Nobody is stopping anyone from funding a collective. The
| reason they don't is they won't get ownership shares in
| return. That's one of the problems with a collective.
| klik99 wrote:
| No, and that's not what I said. In fact I said being
| blindly pro or anti capitalism blinds people to things
| that could be fixed. Growth helps innovate and create
| great products up to point of innovation creating
| diminishing returns.
|
| There's a huge difference between capitalism and a
| specific implementation of capitalism.
| cgannett wrote:
| literally proving his point with this question
| comfysocks wrote:
| It's hard to compare. Almost everything at a mass market
| price point is made in China. From luxury iPhones to
| cheap commodity crap. With the exception of maybe cars,
| made in USA, Europe or Japan tends to be niche or
| specialty.
| comfysocks wrote:
| I agree with a lot of what you are bringing up, but I don't
| think of these things as synonymous with American
| capitalism as a whole. I think of them more as a failure
| mode.
| klik99 wrote:
| I think it's very human to keep doing what once helped us
| when even when it starts harming us. Like an alcoholic
| who started to help get over social anxiety and saw
| positive results early on but then starts seeing drink as
| what makes them happy rather than the social connection
| it helped facilitate. Yes I'm saying America is addicted
| to growth.
|
| (I agree it's more nuanced than that and it's both
| succeeded and failed in other ways, and US isn't the only
| one - but this a major feature of American capitalism)
| WalterBright wrote:
| It boils down to what people are willing to pay for. How many
| of us go to buy something on Amazon, and buy the cheapest
| one? And if your product isn't the cheapest one, what are you
| going to do about it?
| fragmede wrote:
| Buy the Dyson version at 4x the price, avoid thinking about
| the money and concentrate on the fact that it's not crap
| (yet). We can expect the Dyson brand to go through the same
| quality arc in twenty years, but for now, I'm happy with
| the times I have splurged for their products.
|
| The problem is naked capitalism doesn't have a meaningful
| reward function for quality products. If I buy a product
| and am happy with it in three years, or I buy a product and
| it's trash and unsuitable for its purpose, the company
| still already has my money. I have to care enough about the
| purchase to spend time and effort into writing a review
| online about the product, and the brand, which will go into
| the circular filing cabinet. For a $20 thermometer, I'm not
| even going to bother.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Dyson is shit now though. Maybe it used to be good but
| like many other established names they are squandering
| their good name for more profits by cutting quality.
|
| I think GP is right. We buy stuff online now. You can't
| see, touch, or evaluate anything. Reviews are all fake.
| Brand names are comingled with counterfeits. The only
| signal left is price. So knowing it's likely going to be
| crap, why pay more than you have to.
| danieldk wrote:
| Dyson only has the appearance of quality. Both Dysons
| that we had had broken accessories (though they happily
| replaced them). The first Dyson broke down in three years
| or so.
|
| We also have a Miele vacuum cleaner. It's less glamorous,
| but it is, as Germans say, unkaputtbar (and also a very
| pleasant device to work with).
| WalterBright wrote:
| > doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality
| products
|
| I.e. people aren't willing to pony up the money to buy
| them.
|
| BTW, when I buy tools, I look at what tradesmen use and
| buy the tools they buy. Hasn't let me down yet.
|
| If you want good kitchen appliances, buy them from a
| restaurant supply business.
|
| If you want good tools for working on your car, look at
| what racing teams use.
|
| Of course, you're going to pay much more for that
| quality, and the only people willing to pay are the
| people whose livelihoods depend on them.
| hilux wrote:
| My first reaction: beautifully thought through and expressed!
|
| Upon reflection: as products become commodities, isn't the
| brand the most valuable thing, and the most expensive to
| reproduce?
| grafmax wrote:
| Increased financialization of the economy plays a role as well.
| It tends to consolidate market players though M&A. That in turn
| that allows firms to similarly profit from rent-seeking in
| captured and semi-captured markets, leading not just to lower
| quality but higher prices as well. Rising corporate profit
| margins have been a major contributor to the inflation of the
| past few years.
| fidotron wrote:
| > Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone
| up over the past decades.
|
| Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality
| improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also
| be used in other ways.
|
| My personal view is the west, especially North America, never
| recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that
| energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared with
| today, with the result that all sorts of objects were radically
| heavier than their newer equivalents. You take away the need
| for handling such enormous weights for everything everywhere
| and it becomes possible to replace almost our entire
| infrastructure with things that are simply much flimsier.
|
| It is that combined with the culture of low expectations that
| puts up with the results.
| SweetLlamaMyth wrote:
| It seems strange to me to attribute this to the 70s oil
| crisis vs factors like expectations of unceasing profit
| growth leading looking for any and all efficiencies, or
| globalization making extra translate into increased shipping
| costs from the other side of world.
| fidotron wrote:
| What is efficient varies based on changes in the prices of
| different elements of the process.
|
| Energy, materials, logistics, labor, these all vary over
| time, with the oil crisis being a huge step change both in
| costs to businesses and consumer behavior.
| randallsquared wrote:
| The curves largely break about 1971 across a wide set of
| areas, but the energy connection is interesting. J Storrs
| Hall argues in "Where is My Flying Car?" that the proximate
| cause is breaking the increasing availability of energy per
| person, which could only have been continued with very
| widespread nuclear, and that the turn from nuclear was a
| symptom of a culture of increasing regulation and excess
| caution, such that the only major industry that escaped the
| trap in the 70s and continued existing growth curves was
| computing.
|
| Now that computing has advanced sufficiently and is being
| applied to everything else, we're finally getting sudden,
| major advances again in other areas (electric and autonomous
| cars, drones, reusable rockets, pharma...), but computing is
| in the race against smothering that most industries lost in
| the 20th, and it remains to be seen whether stagnation or
| abundance will win.
|
| A side note is the resurgence of nuclear, and supersonic
| flight, etc, which suggests that maybe the problem was more
| about post-war culture than a systemic turn away from growth
| and prosperity... we'll see!
| an0malous wrote:
| https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
| teiferer wrote:
| > Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable
|
| Turns out that from an environmental perspective, that view
| was bad anyway and I'm glad it's gone for good (even if the
| AI hype almost makes us forget that again). I don't fully see
| how that implies everything having to be crap now. Lighter
| doesn't mean worse quality.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| > Lighter doesn't mean worse quality
|
| For a number of product categories it means replacing solid
| metal parts with inferior materials, and that pretty
| explicitly does mean worse quality.
|
| Have you used a 1960s KitchenAid mixer? They look almost
| identical to models that followed - but in the 1970s
| KitchenAid replaced the metal drive gear with one made of
| nylon on the consumer-focussed models, and now if you use
| one heavily, you'll have to replace that gear more or less
| annually.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| The question is, does that prevent something worse from
| breaking? It's not inherently bad to have wear parts in a
| device, after all. Shear pins are a great example where
| you need to replace them, but something more important
| would break if it wasn't the shear pin, so it's worth it.
|
| IDK the design of the mixers well enough to know if
| that's true for them, but I do wonder if that is the
| case.
| bsder wrote:
| > The question is, does that prevent something worse from
| breaking?
|
| That doesn't matter if it means, for example, that my new
| mixer can't actually mix bread dough on a higher speed
| anymore (citing this as it's actually a failure mode on
| newer (like 1970s forward) KitchenAid mixers to the point
| that the manual mentions it).
|
| That is an _objective_ decrease in quality and fitness
| for purpose.
| fragmede wrote:
| > Lighter doesn't mean worse quality.
|
| It doesn't, but heft of a product is used as a proxy for
| quality, to the point that electronics will sometimes have
| a weight glued inside to pretend the item is heavier than
| it is, in order to seem of higher quality.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > with the result that all sorts of objects were radically
| heavier than their newer equivalents
|
| except for the most energy consuming and oil dependent
| objects of all: cars. curious, eh?
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| As long as there are customers who will pay for low quality,
| and there is no external _[read: "regulatory"]_ goad, there
| will be vendors that will sell it.
|
| Basic human (and capitalist) nature. Not good, but not evil,
| either. It's just the scorpion and the frog story.
|
| It sucks, trying to actually create things with higher levels
| of Quality. It's a _lot_ more expensive to add even rather
| incremental levels of Quality, and companies that try, usually
| (but not always) get ground into the dirt.
|
| If we deliberately create substandard quality, it can really
| eat at our souls. I think many folks are able to work out a
| deal with their conscience, but I was never able to do that, so
| I worked for most of my career at a company that was all about
| Quality.
|
| This whole thing brings to mind the Vimes Boots Theory:
| https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| That boots model is fascinating compared the the actual boot
| market in the USA. I can get an excellent pair of made in
| America, vibrax/goodyear welted extremely sturdy boots for
| 200 USD - maybe less. Redwing, danger, etc other PNW brands
| all exist and sell at this price point.
|
| Compare to popular fashion boots like timberlands which are
| also 200 USD and reasonably sturdy but no Goodyear welt or
| proper sole so they fail in 5 years or less of regular wear.
| BolexNOLA wrote:
| My favorite example is the GoPro Hero 4 Black, which I still
| have and regularly use.
| ainiriand wrote:
| That situation happened to me with Logitech mice, they were
| really great some years ago. Now they are not the long lasting
| products they were.
| contingencies wrote:
| Enjoying M240 at the moment. No issues as yet.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| Actually, they seem to have gotten their act together.
|
| I love their trackballs. They dropped the warranty to 1 year
| --and even then every one failed within warranty. Disgusted
| but buying one every year was better than using an inferior
| product. But my latest has been sitting here for years, no
| erratic clicks.
| mountainb wrote:
| It is often easier to make another sale of a downgraded product
| using earned customer goodwill than it is to continuously
| innovate, delight existing customers, and win new ones based on
| quality. It's less risky just to run a brand into the dirt, get
| paid, and screw any shareholders remaining.
|
| Also many of these kinds of activities are illegal, but people
| do it anyway on the reasonable calculation that they won't be
| sued and that the government won't investigate them.
| azlev wrote:
| I bought the same Ray-Ban sunglasses model 15 years ago and 2
| years ago. The older one is way better.
|
| Cellphone is the opposite: the new one is way better.
|
| So all in all, it's just capitalism: if quality sells more,
| people buy quality (whatever quality means). If cheaper sells
| more, companies cut costs.
|
| I think the answer change from time to time.
| atoav wrote:
| I design and repair electronics for the past decade and quality
| _has_ gone down, significantly so. A part of this is increased
| complexity introducing more failure modes, but the main reason
| is bean counters trying to reduce the BOM cost as far as they
| can get away with. This naturally means the perfect product
| (from a bean-counter-perspective) uses the cheapest components
| and fails reliably one day after the warranty has run out.
|
| They even have succeeded in selling people bean counting
| solutions as "design". So instead of a satisfying 1.50 EUR
| power switch and a 2.50EUR rotary switch you get a SMD push
| button for 0.05 EUR and have to memorize multiple gestures for
| that button. Long press means off or something among those
| lines.
|
| People hate it, but it is cheap.
| jjav wrote:
| > However, a common experience for me is that I own something
| of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the
| successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten
| worse, being cheaper made.
|
| Yes, absolutely. Quality has gone down across the board in
| nearly everything. What has gone up is more features. So at a
| high level comparison it seems like the newer thing does a lot
| more than the older same thing. Which is true, but that is not
| a measure of quality. Many of the added features are gimmicks
| that provide no meaningful value and at the same time the
| product is far more brittle and built much cheaper, so the
| overall quality is far lower.
| danaris wrote:
| Like with much in the political situation, I think it's sort of
| a polarization.
|
| The quality of some things _has_ gone up significantly. This is
| going to be the things where improvements in technologies have
| made improved quality easier and cheaper (and that 's not just
| electronics--materials technology, better manufacturing, etc
| can do this). It's also in products where other technological
| improvements have made it viable for there to be independent
| and artisanal (or similarly small-batch high-quality)
| production of them.
|
| The quality of other things has declined precipitously. These
| are more likely to be commodities where improving quality still
| costs more, and the "innovation" they've done is in finding
| ways to make it cheaper and worse without it just always
| failing immediately (clothing is a prime example here).
|
| Overall, I think that if you look into any given case of a
| product's quality getting better _or_ worse over the past
| couple of decades, you 'll almost invariably find that either
| way it's because that's how the manufacturers can make more
| money.
| teiferer wrote:
| > My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature
| but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to
| cutting some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow
| decline in quality over the years.
|
| I'm sure that's one component. I can also imagine that another
| component is that in order to broaden the customer base, there
| is cost pressure as well as the pressure to appeal to more
| people. The initial market may have consisted of more quality
| focused nerds who were ok with spending a little more to get a
| robust thing with more knobs to tune behavior, while the mass
| market is fine with buying new stuff all the time, given that
| it's cheaper, and they don't care about fine tuning things,
| just want it to work out of the box, until they anyway buy a
| new thing in a year or two.
| n_e wrote:
| I've been surprised to see that several cycling products have
| gotten better over time.
|
| For example I have bought these bottles
| https://www.zefal.com/en/bottles/545-magnum.html three times
| over ten years:
|
| - the first time, the mouthpiece was attached by two plastic
| prongs. The prongs eventually failed
|
| - The second time I bought them, the mouthpiece was attached by
| four prongs
|
| - The last time I bought them, the hard plastic mouthpiece was
| replaced by a more comfortable plastic mouthpiece.
|
| I also bought these pedals three times
| https://www.lookcycle.com/fr-en/products/pedals/road/race/ke...
| :
|
| - With the first version, small rocks got stuck between the
| carbon spring and the body of the pedal, making it impossible
| to clip in and eventually dislodging the spring
|
| - The second version fixed that by adding a plastic cover over
| the spring, and also improved the bearing seals (which was also
| a problem with the first version)
|
| - The third version made the angles on the outside of the pedal
| less acute, making it harder to damage the pedals in a fall
| makeitdouble wrote:
| > buy the successor model from the same brand
|
| This might be the key issue. Let's say you bought a Roomba 10
| years ago, and now go buy the successor model. Will it be any
| good ? probably not. At least not as good as the competition
| who got better than iRobot.
|
| It will be the same for cars. If you bought a Nissan 10 years
| ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the successor isn't as good.
| Same for cameras, computers, bikes etc.
|
| More than ever blind brand loyalty isn't paying off and even
| with brands staying at the top of their game the "successor" or
| best buying strategy might not be obvious.
|
| Some see the world as having become more complex, I'd argue
| having stagnating signals was worse.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| The state of modern cars is scary.
| Zambyte wrote:
| The state of modern personal electric vehicles (PEVs) is
| outstanding though; good enough to replace owning a car for
| most people! I personally have been riding an electric
| scooter this summer, and paired with a nice backpack, it has
| comfortably replaced all of my regular driving. For people
| who want to carry more than me, an e-bike with panniers or a
| cargo e-bike would likely meet your needs. Electric
| longboards and electric unicycles are also worth considering,
| and I have seen a couple of those around my city, but the
| e-scooters and e-bikes have dominated due to their capacities
| and how easy they are to ride.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| I have two problems with EVs:
|
| - I believe they're more immoral than ICE vehicles. They're
| existence displaces batteries for hybrids (yes I did the
| math)
|
| - They're not practical for _me_ for my use scenario. I
| have kids.
| mrgoldenbrown wrote:
| The math on advertising and brand loyalty has changed. There
| was an article posted to HN this week that explained it pretty
| well I think. It's easy to start a new brand now, so it's OK to
| risk ruining your current brand. The decline in quality isn't
| bewildering, it's exactly what our form of capitalism
| encourages.
|
| https://www.gojiberries.io/advertising-without-signal-whe-am...
| api wrote:
| Your suspicion makes total sense.
|
| A major problem with the whole model of production is that if
| you make a good product and saturate the market you die. It's
| not the result of some conspiracy to make shit products. It's a
| simple outcome from the fact that purchases are one time while
| businesses are ongoing, combined with shareholder demands to
| boost growth. Those demands in turn come from things like
| pension funds that have promised a return to _their_ customers.
|
| One "solution" is to build subscriptions into everything but
| there's already a customer revolt against that for obvious
| reasons. It's obnoxious.
|
| I think the best solution is to decouple and unbundle
| production. Have small design houses (or even individuals) that
| design products and have low ongoing costs and big
| manufacturing concerns that make things. Something always needs
| to be made so they always have business. Design products around
| commodity parts as much as possible to make retooling
| affordable.
|
| This kind of already exists in the form of boutiques with
| kickstarter and Etsy products, or at least those folks have
| trailblazed this model.
| _DeadFred_ wrote:
| 'big manufacturing concerns that make things'
|
| Don't we already have this, isn't this called 'China' for
| most American businesses that no longer make things in the
| USA/in-house?
| dspillett wrote:
| _> My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature
| but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to
| cutting some corners on every iteration,_
|
| I'm sure that is certainly part of it, especially when multiple
| players are competing at least partly on price or apparent
| value. One consideration once price based competition is
| significant is that absolute quality may drop while measures of
| quality/price value improve1.
|
| Another issue is that when something is new, to the company or
| the buying audience, it is often a flagship product/service so
| gets a lot more attention. As things become something the
| company rattles off as a matter of course and we consumers
| interact with them daily, that level of attention per
| production unit diminishes considerably.
|
| As well as playing directly into this, possibly leading to an
| _actual_ drop in quality, mass production has a less obvious
| effect on the _perception_ of quality. If you are making
| hundreds or less and a couple fail, they are probably noticed
| before leaving the factory and if not the consumer gets a
| relatively personal service with fixing /replacing the item. If
| you are making hundreds of thousands many more bad units get
| into circulation (the absolute failure rate increasing even if
| the failure ratio drops) and processing returns is less
| logistically easy. That perception problem has become more
| significant in the last couple of decades as unhappy voices
| always tended to be louder and social media can act as a
| megaphone for both happy and unhappy voices.
|
| This is a complex area with many things feeding into actual
| quality issues, the perception of them, and sometimes the
| perception of the matter being worse than it really is overall.
|
| --------
|
| [1] for instance, maybe in a made up example quality goes down
| by 5% when cuts or mass production bring the price down by more
| than 10%, so buyers get better for the same money but worse
| absolutely
| jvanderbot wrote:
| On reflection (being an engineer) it makes sense this would
| happen even without malice. Engineering teams on existing
| products are incentivized to keep innovating. It's ideal if you
| can reinvent a part of a product or process while maintaining
| functionality but often it's easier to get an 80/20. So, a
| large number of small corner cuts reduce overall quality and
| costs. If in fact you try to increase functionality, that's
| actually a new product. The inevitable S curve of profits from
| any given product means businesses are incentivized to move
| improvements to new products, leaving old ones to be cut to
| death.
| epolanski wrote:
| Levis and Nike are common offenders here.
|
| Quality has dropped insanely low.
|
| Fast fashion brought down most of the fashion industry up to
| luxury level.
| brookst wrote:
| Perhaps something to that, but there is also consumer pressure
| to not raise prices. Think of those things you bought 5 / 10 /
| 15 years ago and adjust pricing for inflation... would you pay
| that much now?
|
| We have become addicted to cheap. Same phenomenon with
| airlines: everyone bemoans how awful the experience is, and
| virtually everyone buys the cheapest possible ticket.
| klik99 wrote:
| People buy cheap because they don't have an option. People
| are "addicted to cheap" because of growing wealth inequality.
| beaugunderson wrote:
| > However, a common experience for me is that I own something
| of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the
| successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten
| worse, being cheaper made.
|
| My most recent experience with this was a Fjallraven 30L
| backpack. I'd had it for years, loved it to death but it was
| getting a bit ripped up. Went into the store, bought the exact
| same model, went out to the RV where I had my current one and
| did a comparison. I was shocked. No padding on the straps, nice
| padding on the back replaced with hard foam, many of the nicely
| designed little details gone. I went back in and returned it
| and just opted to repair my old one a bit (replaced a broken
| buckle and sewed up some holes).
| x0x0 wrote:
| And that's not exactly a bargain brand, either. Wild.
| trod1234 wrote:
| The economics are simple when you know and understand the main
| driver, but its inconvenient, and there are entities that want
| it hidden, because you have bad people doing bad things, and
| wanting to hide those things, and historically leftist leaning
| places/people do all of the above to a greater or lesser degree
| rather then engaging in actual truth telling.
|
| The simple fact, that will probably get your post downvoted to
| remove from view, is this reduction of quality is driven by
| fiat money-printing.
|
| It may be non-reserve issued debt (Basel3), or government
| subsidy, or contract. There are many sources, laundered, and
| the economy for the most part today has been silently
| nationalized, which is why it fails. Bailout is required to
| overcome the end of the boom/bust cycle and continue forward
| for a time thereafter, it happens cyclically (a true-up, the
| difference between actual production and fraud/loss) and it
| requires exponential amounts each time which are taken from
| every person holding money. There have been at least 4
| instances that I can see where this has happened since the
| 1970s changeover to fiat (de-peg from gold/petrodollar).
|
| The inflation/debasement in purchasing power causes companies
| to debase their product, to keep up with the escalator of
| inflation to continue on moving forward. This is worsened when
| you have foreign entities using slave labor through controlling
| their own currency, to destroy domestic business; such as
| manufacturing over a long period of time.
|
| There is obviously an objective point where eventually that
| can't continue, because the economics of money-printing fail,
| but that point is what many leftists knowingly or unknowingly
| aim for; the ones that know just don't want others to know the
| emperor has new clothes because knowing and communication of
| that knowledge allows reaction and adaption, and there are some
| people who believe if an individual can't express words, or
| convey meaning, then that negative behavior associated with
| that conveyance (in their deeply flawed perspective) doesn't
| exist, and they can make people better that way.
|
| The strategy for doing this is through sieving and
| concentration of resources into fewer and fewer hands, while
| retaining control of such resources. The lead market players
| today based in money-printing can control and continue
| operating because of their preferential banking ties, while
| competitors cannot enter or compete in the market because the
| market no longer meets the conditions of a market. Namely
| adversarial price discovery which requires visibility, and non-
| cooperation. Money-printing/banking isn't given for free, it
| forces many entities to cooperate; and adversarial independent
| decisionmaking is needed for economic calculation. Mises wrote
| about this extensively in broad strokes. There are quite a
| large number of impossible hysteresis problems that mark the
| system the boomer's pivoted to as unsustainable, hyperbolic,
| and inevitably fails to impossible to solve hysteresis problems
| (where knowledge of a state needed to react doesn't provide
| sufficient time to change course because the effects precede
| that knowledge).
|
| Artificial distortions, trending towards chaos will grow and
| self-sustain, eventually causing whipsaws that cause it to
| fail, but that takes time since the point of failure is stage 3
| ponzi, where monetary properties lose all value seemingly
| overnight. Where objectively, outflows exceed inflows.
|
| This is what also drives enshitiffication, why the business
| growth curve is an S adoption curve (following ponzi), and the
| inevitability of consolidation/hostile takeover.
|
| The leftist connection is the strategy of sieving, you have to
| concentrate wealth in few hands first before you can seize it
| from those hands, and this is what the Fed has been doing. A
| gradual fabian-based induction to non-market socialism, while
| ensuring the political power base remains through bad actors
| that call out other bad actors decrying the public, and others
| in the group instigating and inducing bad actions while
| undermining, subverting, and making the resilient system
| brittle, at every point. Destroying the rule of law through
| shock doctrine and demoralization up to just prior to bringing
| it to crisis for the seizure, and re-normalization where either
| a socialist/communist takeover occurs, or when that fails; a
| rise of fascism to power. The same regime-change plan that all
| governments use (give or take). Also, the same driving dynamics
| that led to Hitler's rise to power.
|
| Jamming communications so people don't catch on and can't react
| is part of that plan, which is why you have so many bots
| running around, and the platforms are complicit with the same
| people as those who want to enable this. Jamming doesn't work
| without the plausible deniability of karma systems that allow
| the platforms to grant moderator powers to a large group of
| sockpuppet accounts (sybil attacks), controlled by a
| surreptitious moderator. Who may also utilizes many
| psychological blindspots we all have to manipulate, and damage
| readers through structured distortion of reflected appraisal
| (or narrative control, memetics, or belief contagion to the
| layman, which includes Le Bon's works as a basis).
|
| People are easily manipulated when they don't know the
| mechanism behind the how. Cialdini in his book Influence touch
| on the foundations, except reflected appraisal, but to
| understand distorted reflected appraisal you have to understand
| how torture works, and what it is really, and if you knew you
| would see it in almost everything today.
|
| Torture is the structured imposition of psychological stress in
| sufficient exposure to cause involuntary hypnosis.
|
| Your stated suspicion is a well crafted induction of a common
| lie that's been repeated so many times, many believe its truth,
| but it fails under close objective examination.
|
| If the lie were true, you would have competitors coming into
| the market, and staying in the market; but its not because of
| the asymmetrical connection to a money printer; directly or
| indirectly.
|
| Lowering prices below market value to drive competitor
| companies out of business has occurred in many places where a
| leveraged buyout or hostile takeover wasn't possible.
|
| You need to operate on debt to compete, but in so doing you
| become food for takeover, until the parasitic nature has
| nothing left to eat. That hasn't happened yet, but its probably
| going to happen in our lifetime. These dynamics in the historic
| lifecycle is what is driving the adoption towards BRICS, and
| the chaos we see everywhere.
|
| Eventually you get to a point where everything breaks, and
| you've been trapped by decisions your parents or grandparents
| generation chose through aggregate.
|
| Decisions that result in worsening conditions, and your and
| your family; and their children's futures, being collapse into
| violent law of nature, or submission to enslavement and a life
| of suffering before death.
|
| Either result in a loss of control from the choice upfront,
| that decreases until a point of no return, after which the
| dynamics cannot be stopped, but you can get out of the way, it
| just requires a ruthlessness, education, and knowledge that has
| been deprived from nearly everyone raised in recent generations
| today. Lone wolves die because they are weak, the movies
| promoting this concept are (5GW).
| deanmoriarty wrote:
| I totally agree! Philips diamondclean toothbrush anyone?
|
| The first one lasted literally 10 years, it was one of the best
| consumer purchases I ever made.
|
| Ever since then each replacement has crapped out within a year
| or two, despite same usage pattern. I bought one at Costco on
| sale and after returning it broken after just six months, a
| record for a $100+ device, the clerk at the return counter said
| they have piles of those. Crazy.
| mihaic wrote:
| While it's something with a myriad of causes, the main one to me
| is the decrease of real wages for the middle class, not just
| consumer culture.
|
| Some products and services managed to decrease in price to match
| this, and but the culture of craftsmanship had to be sacrificed
| to match lower purchasing parity.
|
| Product culture ends up being the culture in which the middle
| class are engaged in.
| rob_c wrote:
| >declining quality
|
| Just like this article I'm afraid.
|
| If it's making a point it's lost by meandering to too long.
|
| If it's point it's simply longevity then it's missed the point
| about how LLM are simply here to stay, the genie is out of the
| bottle with regards to that tool.
|
| If the point is some anti hyper-capitalist rant then it's a
| thinly veiled option piece.
|
| If the point is the breakdown of the social contract/elevator.
| Then why when you're interviewing experts who study this aren't
| you asking poignant questions like "when do you think this
| happened?" or "can this be fixed?". Rather than ranting about the
| dreams of the nuclear (pub intended) family to China and "AI".
|
| If it that if you're not chasing these answers you're either
| afraid to admit you know them or are scared of them?
| koolba wrote:
| > "Perhaps the best-known example of buying for convenience is
| paying around EUR75 per kilo for coffee just because it comes in
| capsules," says Vinyals.
|
| Maybe not the best example. If there's ever a product where
| timeliness is a feature, it's the morning coffee. A $.70
| Nespresso pod may not match a freshly ground light roast pour
| over, but to the dreary eyed wage slave just rising to seize the
| day, the taste consistency and convenience are distinct features.
|
| > Today, it's easier to converse with a machine than with a real
| person. The problem is that no one likes these systems: according
| to a study by the Cetelem Observatory published last October,
| five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants.
|
| People fail to realize the cost of interactions too. With minimum
| wage at nearly $20/hour, a six (6) minute phone call costs $2
| more than the $0 marginal cost of an automated phone system.
| Would you pay a $2 human-interaction-surcharge to order a pizza?
| kkfx wrote:
| It's a scale problem and a targets one: we are damn many, if we
| all want a fillet a day we haven't enough cows to satisfy such
| demand, and that's valid for essentially anything. So far we
| prove to be very skilled in doing identical stuff on scale, which
| enable industry hyper-growth but we can't feed production lines
| with enough raw materials, we can't produce most things in
| circular manner and even some production naturally renewable
| can't be completely renewable due to the scale of the demand. In
| an ideal world we cultivate and farm in proportions where the
| guano and manure from the species we raise provide enough
| fertiliser for what we grow. But there are many of us, and to
| feed everyone, this balance is impossible, so we must crush rocks
| to nourish plants sufficiently, which is obviously not
| renewable... We know how to makes wood-frame homes and trees grow
| up again, but again the demand much surpass the capacity of trees
| to grow up again and so on.
|
| The result it's finding new way to do more with less, and finding
| them quickly. Some do works well, some do works a bit, many gives
| only the illusion to work enough and people buy them anyway
| because an illusion it's still something more than nothing.
|
| The target issue is the model, capitalism, issue, in the past we
| have used money as a means to barter things counter something we
| all accept. Nowadays we use money to makes more money, so goods
| are just a mean not a target, and the result is that we do not
| care about quality, being just a mean if we can sell them it's
| enough to milk money. To solve this we need to makes money
| public, creating by governments without fractionary reserves and
| public debt mechanism, taxed to keep the supply limited enough
| following the availability of any specific resources, so
| essentially like Swiss we need to tax just VAT with continuously
| variables rates following nature and tech, while taxing local
| properties just to assure local consumption does not exceed a
| sustainable threshold of resources usage.
| kakadu wrote:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tendency_of_the_rate_of_prof...
|
| This one seems to tick all the boxes
| TheJCDenton wrote:
| The main metric has always been care.
|
| Care beat quality as a metric, because care is very inefficient
| to fake and very powerful when genuine.
|
| How does the company providing the physical product or the
| service care ?
|
| Most companies right now care about AI. Some integration are
| impressive. But where's real care about users ? It seems it's not
| the subject anymore. We may have tricked ourselves into beveling
| technology will resolve in itself all problems, and it's at its
| peak with AI. As engineers we can forget sometimes that
| technology is just a tool and its fine, but as a society it may
| leads us all in a bad direction.
| paulnpace wrote:
| This article is absolutely terrible.
|
| > There's one conclusion that comes up repeatedly throughout this
| report: the perception that everything is of lower quality is
| more pronounced among older people. The reasons are varied. One
| is that attributes like durability -- which used to be a major
| factor in how people judged a product's quality -- have lost
| relevance.
|
| Well, wouldn't older people have more perspective from a greater
| amount of lived experience? Then, in the next sentence, the
| article assumes away a reason to throw their conclusions out.
|
| > Jose Francisco Rodriguez, president of the Spanish Association
| of Customer Relations Experts, admits that a lack of digital
| skills can be particularly frustrating for older adults, who
| perceive that the quality of customer service has deteriorated
| due to automation. However, Rodriguez argues that, generally
| speaking, automation does improve customer service.
|
| When the automation on the other end can't understand my problem
| and I can't talk to a human, then I cannot solve my problem. This
| is definitively a regression and is occurring more than ever
| before. I have a problem with getting paid from a large company,
| and there is no reasonable way outside of hiring a lawyer for me
| to resolve the problem, and the dollar amount is so low the
| company knows full well that I will not hire a lawyer to resolve
| the problem, and it is automation that makes this possible, more
| than ever. But I'm sure the back-end metrics look great to
| management and the experts in this article.
|
| > It's difficult to prove that today's products are worse than
| those of 20 years ago.
|
| Why is "20 years ago" the baseline? And that word "prove"
| establishes an unattainable bar within such a subjective field of
| study.
| LastTrain wrote:
| That page design is a case in point.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Do not discuss "content" of this article, discuss the reasoning
| behind and the effect of this article. The author many not even
| realize this is a propaganda article, using a well known
| mechanism of "spray to dismay and therefore cripple". This
| article is a coordinated series of arguments that sum to the
| statement "you are powerless."
| rob_c wrote:
| Not far off.
|
| The author either submitted to the inevitable. Or, decided that
| they don't want to make change.
|
| Hate the cheap fashion, make a choice, buy proper products they
| just cost more and require the slightest of effort to care for.
|
| Hate bad writing, move on read something else.
|
| Dislike the quality of product X buy Y.
|
| Frankly if you had told me the quality of product you would be
| and to buy for example in the MacBook air for <<$1k a few years
| ago I'd have laughed. There are food brands which are still
| going that make the same quality products and don't sacrifice,
| but they now cost more than the competitors because they don't
| compromise.
|
| And that's just the beginning. The moaning about China, AI,
| people is just the same "I can't do anything to improve my lot
| in life" you see too much online.
|
| Stop reacting to things happening to you and start doing
| things.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| The "power" of your consumer choice is a consolation within a
| life of servitude anyway though right?
|
| Like even if the author is totally wrong, that "actually all
| our products are actually much better thank you, good thing we
| don't live 50 years ago!" Is that something we can truly be
| happy about? Is that winning? You too, im sure, feel that itchy
| emptiness when you have received all your products, when all
| the plastics has been peeled off and the software has been
| updated.
|
| This is not a battle you even want to win! The power you are
| defending is already second-hand, is just a sedative. You can
| want more.
| cardanome wrote:
| Objectively as individuals we are absolutely powerless. Nothing
| we do or don't do makes any difference in the grand scheme of
| things. Anyone telling us otherwise is selling us snake oil.
|
| We as part of a collective are incredibly powerful beyond
| imagination. When our concerns and our world start to become
| bigger than just our individual needs, we find strength in
| numbers. Only then can our individuality truly shine.
|
| Seeing us as part of a group, a class and building that sense
| of community and collective action is long and difficult work.
| markx2 wrote:
| January this year a water pipe burst in the kitchen directly over
| a Belling Range cooker (some 13+ years old). Switched it off at
| the mains and awaited a visit from an electrician once the place
| had dried out. The sparky that arrived had worked for Belling,
| was very familiar with their products. He checked it over,
| tested, declared it safe. He then added that if something had
| been wrong I would have been better to get parts replaced rather
| than a complete new oven - because Belling products these days
| are much less reliable. I have no data on that, but I can't but
| believe someone in the industry.
| ta8645 wrote:
| Had almost the exact same thing happened here with our clothes
| dryer. Tech said it was worth replacing the motor on our
| 20-year-old model, even though it was 70% the price of a new
| dryer. Said the new ones just aren't built to last, and our
| restored one would last another 20 years.
|
| We also still use the same 40 year old Coleman camping stove
| every summer, while other campers only get a few years out of
| much newer models.
|
| But recently we found a happy exception, when we replaced our
| Contigo spill-proof coffee mugs (with a button you press to
| drink). They were always prone to the mechanism getting gross
| with milk scum, and were very hard to clean. The new models
| have an updated design that encloses the mechanism and keeps it
| much easier to keep clean. The metal seems heavier and high-
| quality, and the top lip has been folded over so it's not sharp
| like the old model. They've actually improved them a fair bit,
| for about the same price as the older ones.
| ysofunny wrote:
| commodities are a lie.
|
| quality is real, commodity markets have been historically abused
| to "steal through quality"
|
| for example, all the best fruits from the global south are not
| consumed in the countries they grew, but exported for "better
| profits". this has gone on too long.
| willguest wrote:
| Is it not a little ironic that, in order to read this article
| without a subscription, I must agree to share my browser data
| with 920 interested parties?
|
| Needless to say, I declined this unfair trade, but didn't hold
| out the greatest hopes for this being a particularly enlightening
| or profound piece.
| devnullbrain wrote:
| It's all just Baumol's cost disease.
|
| Sectors like ours becoming more productive drags up the cost of
| labour everywhere else. In manufacturing, that increases the
| incentive to skip any step that needs human input (e.g.
| increasing the stitch pitch and avoiding saddle stitching in
| leather). In services, it's your main input cost.
|
| We can increase the efficiency of huge swathes of the economy,
| but eventually humans become a hard bottleneck. It takes a huge
| technological leap to overcome that.
| hshshshshsh wrote:
| Just for the west I think. Quality is actually sky rocketing in
| Asian countries compared to past for example. My best bet is
| resources were over allocated to West prior because of
| colonization and it's getting reversed to mean at a rapid pace.
| aiisahik wrote:
| Quality comes at a cost. That cost has gone down for some types
| of products (iPhones, TVs) but gone up for other types of
| products (housing).
|
| Clothing cost after accounting for inflation has actually not
| increased. There are many of high quality textiles companies that
| only produce hand made organic cotton sourced from sustainable
| farms etc. Some of them are actually not too expensive - check
| out Isto from Portugal. Yes, i'm willing to pay $50 for a tshirt
| instead of the usual $25 from Uniqlo or Zara but most people are
| not.
|
| The article is from Spain - the birthplace of Zara, Inditex and
| fast fashion. Spain is also known for sitting on cheap plastic
| chairs outside drinking cheap beer for hours. The quality of
| housing interiors is pretty poor - despite wood parquet flooring
| being no more expensive than in other parts of the world, almost
| every house here (even after renovation) has laminate, concrete
| or ceramic flooring. Yet plenty of people here have the top of
| the latest Playstation or iPhone.
|
| Which we all get - if housing start costing close to 40% of your
| paycheck which is typical for a young person in Spain, is that
| $50 high quality tshirt or $80 / sqm parquet really what you
| should logically do with your left over money?
|
| High quality items has traditionally been a luxury good - one
| reserved for the rich. Back then we simply did not have the
| choice to buy low quality items which allowed us to shift more
| spending on things that we actually cared more about. The real
| lament is that most of us actually care less about the quality of
| clothing and furniture than we would like to believe.
| Koffiepoeder wrote:
| To websites that talk about declining quality and then return a
| 403 for tor users: sweep your own front door first please! I have
| the luck to be able to circumvent via a residential IP, but users
| from oppressive regimes may be less fortunate.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| The argument that customers are demanding lower quality products
| only makes sense if they have a choice. That isn't really the
| case (not without a lot of rhetorical contortions, anyhow).
|
| When the iPod first appeared, customers did not see its enclosed
| battery as desirable. They put up with it. Soon enough, no
| batteries are replaceable.
|
| Few car buyers wanted touch screen controls, but the entire auto
| industry transitioned to them, almost at once. Customers put up
| with them.
|
| The problem is not that companies focus on customers and
| reluctantly provide crappy products. The problem is that customer
| focus died shortly after the year 2000.
| kerkeslager wrote:
| This is only bewildering to people who refuse to admit the
| problems of our current economic system because our current
| economic system benefits them.
|
| Advertising needs to go. Advertising is why worse products at
| higher prices beat out better products at lower prices.
| Advertising isn't information, it's lies: nobody tells you the
| problems with their product or things their competitor does
| better. We don't need advertising to find out about products:
| word of mouth, experts, and independent review sites are much
| better sources of information already. And it's a huge drain on
| our economy: once you let one company advertise, then advertising
| is no longer optional for all their competitors.
|
| Advertisers of HN will surely refuse to admit these pretty basic,
| obvious facts, use their advertising platforms to make sure pro-
| advertising talking points are louder than reason, and the
| enshittification of everything will continue.
| felineflock wrote:
| Seems related to this other submission:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44609969
| romaaeterna wrote:
| Off-shoring much of the manufacturing of American consumer goods
| to an overseas competitor known for quality issues, and the
| growth of online retailers that do not police for quality or
| counterfeits, may have something to do with the overall trend.
| benrutter wrote:
| From the intro:
|
| > Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller, clothes are
| unrecognizable after the second wash, and machines now answer our
| calls.
|
| The author talks about a range of motivations behind these, but
| it seems like there's an obvious one we're missing. All these
| changes make products more profitable.
|
| I would love to live in a society that prioritises sustainability
| and quality of life for its citizens. We currently only achieve
| those things if they're a byproduct of profit for coorporations.
|
| Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I definitely don't see these
| changes as bewildering. Quality has been intentionally lowered
| when it conflicts with profit since at least the Phoebus
| cartel[0]
|
| [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel
| ryukoposting wrote:
| Have you ever actually used a long-life incandescent lightbulb?
| They suck. It's like your bedroom is lit by the miserable
| little lamp in your oven. That's because Tungsten lighting has
| inherent tradeoffs between life span, and every other desirable
| characteristic. Brightness, spectral quality, and energy
| efficiency all improve as you make the filament thinner, and
| thus less durable.
|
| The Phoebus cartel is an example of planned obsolescence, but
| it's a bad example for your argument because it made lightbulbs
| much, much better at their intended purpose. Consumer number-
| gawking incentivized manufacturers to make their product
| objectively worse, and the cartel solved that problem.
| benrutter wrote:
| No I haven't - has anyone? It sounds like you have, so I
| won't argue. I am no expert on what the actual consumer
| impact of the Phoebus Cartel was, maybe it wasn't a great
| choie of example. Wikipedia doesn't make it sound positive
| for consumers overall:
|
| > Regulators in the UK and some independent engineers have
| noted that there are benefits to shorter bulb lifespans, as
| shorter-life bulbs can be brighter for the same wattage.
| Nevertheless, both internal comments from cartel executives
| and later findings by a US court suggest that the cartel's
| direct motivation for the change was to increase profits by
| forcing customers to buy bulbs more frequently.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| The lack of local purchasing is driving some of this. Whenever I
| buy t-shirts from Amazon, they are always very thin. You can't
| feel the quality via the web page, so why make it anything better
| than 'acceptable'?
| chadcmulligan wrote:
| Shirts are one of those things that are difficult to buy
| something of quality for some reason, even the same brands
| differ batch to batch.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I think I should probably stick to buying clothes from local
| shops.
| skc wrote:
| This is a feeling that definitely becomes more acute the older
| one gets.
|
| Try shopping for toys for your kids today. Every time I'm with my
| 7 year old browsing the toy aisles I fondly remember my Tonka
| truck from when I was his age.
|
| I outgrew it and it was still in perfect condition. My sons toys
| barely last a month.
| tiffanyh wrote:
| People love inexpensive goods.
|
| Inexpensive goods leads to reduced quality (to a point it's
| acceptable).
| gttalbot wrote:
| Quality has not gone up. Products are deliberately made to fail
| sooner by Chinese manufacturers who are reducing costs on super
| tiny margins.
|
| The mantra that "consumers get lower prices and everything is
| better as a result" deliberately elides any discussion of quality
| and reliability.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| My biggest worry is what AI is going to do to software
| development, I fear that we will soon be submerged in a sea of
| low(human)-effort, low quality software. As an Indie product
| developer, I plan to keep developing software the 'old fashioned'
| way, with a focus on quality.
| hermitcrab wrote:
| I'm still wearing stuff I bought 20 or 30 years ago. It appals me
| that someone would wear something a few times and then discard
| it. If you are doing that just because you worry what other
| people think, then you must have a very weak personality.
| CommenterPerson wrote:
| Few observations over the past few decades (my paycheck went up
| by slightly less than the US inflation rate during this time):
|
| Air travel is much more affordable to me. It has become
| psychologically nasty which makes the overall deal feel worse,
| while it is actually better in $ terms.
|
| Housing build quality is worse, things need more frequent
| repairs, cost is higher probably due to increase in land value.
|
| Much more trashy food in the grocery store aisles, one needs to
| be aware and shop carefully.
|
| Politics especially in the US has gotten FAR worse.
|
| The internet after the early promise has gotten FAR worse (better
| in bandwidth and far worse via enshittification).
|
| Cars improved till around 2010 and now worse for the dollar (too
| much electronics, and repairs are prohibitively expensive).
| mensetmanusman wrote:
| This is what record high corporate profits feels like.
| sgt wrote:
| > Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller,
|
| This is infuriating. Due to better nutrition, we all got bigger.
| Our parents were smaller in comparison, and our grandparents seem
| tiny. I'm 6'6" and I'm on the tall end, but I see more and more
| giants roaming the Earth (and they do seem like giants if you're
| used to be the tallest in the room).
|
| Yet they make airplane seats smaller. I have to pay hundreds of
| dollars extra just to buy extra leg room and all that crap. It's
| frustrating.
| joduplessis wrote:
| This is one of the reasons I do like Apple products. I've owned
| many PC's/Android phones/etc. - none of them come even close the
| longevity of Apple hardware (the exceptions are real, for sure).
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| My atari STE (4mb upgrade) is still going strong, and is stll
| rock (and roll) steady for music.
| Meneth wrote:
| Quality is being sacrificed on the altar of Moloch [1].
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20140730043944/http://slatestarc...
| high_byte wrote:
| very insightful to read the comments here.
|
| it seems quality isn't universally declining, but the variance in
| quality is increasing, and finding good quality is nearly
| impossible in the influx of product offers. reviews are fake, to
| most short term profit margins are more important than
| reputation.
| neogodless wrote:
| Can we discuss food packaging a bit?
|
| What's better -- often food packaging has clever ways to be
| resealable so you can use it without letting your food get stale.
|
| What's worse -- the above is combined with "make it as thin as
| possible to not fall apart before it gets home. Quite
| frequently... I try to carefully open a resealable package, and
| completely shred it ruining the part that is supposed to reseal.
|
| I imagine this is regional, but our local deli meat bags... well
| this adds a second issue... the bags are _super_ thin, but then
| they put strong stickers folded across the resealable portion. It
| 's nigh impossible to get the sticker lifted without ripping a
| hole in the bag and again, ruining the "resealable" feature.
| rob_c wrote:
| Here's a dirty little secret.
|
| These companies are so fine tuned that they notice a 0.05% drop
| in revenue. Don't like what they do. Don't buy it and see if
| they change.
|
| If they change something and you vote with your cash they
| notice. The biggest lie is that you don't matter because you're
| statistically insignificant. If you believe that they lose
| 0.005% vs 0.05%.
|
| For better or worse look at Bud Light. The customer is always
| the opinion they listen to. 50% loss in profits or 0.5% this
| gets blamed on someone ultimately and they tend to revert
| unpopular decisions when they're not related to regulatory
| changes.
| l0b0 wrote:
| No mention of _value engineering?_ Isn 't that what every big
| company does to a successful product? Barely-noticeable quality
| decreases compound over years, and more noticeable ones are
| rationalized away as necessary for survival. It doesn't take a
| genius to see where that leads.
|
| Also _enshittification,_ the more general trend where an initial
| offering is excellent, maybe even provided at a loss, to spread
| the word and provide great feedback, and then more and more money
| is squeezed out of it while riding consumer satisfaction lag,
| until the offering is taken behind the shed and mercy killed.
| efitz wrote:
| I think one of the indicators of of declining quality is the
| unwillingness to support products (beyond initial installation
| support), and that the unwillingness to make products
| supportable.
|
| Did it break after two years? Make it so inconvenient that
| they'll just buy a new one.
|
| Failure is seen as an upgrade opportunity, and repair is seen as
| a captive revenue stream rather than an opportunity for other
| businesses or DIYers.
|
| If you can tolerate or enjoy the style, Louis Rossmann is a great
| watch on YouTube.
| mousethatroared wrote:
| "Psychologist Albert Vinyals, author of El consumidor tarado (The
| Disordered Consumer) "
|
| Well that's one way to translate "tarado". Moron would be the
| correct way though.
| specialp wrote:
| One factor around this is private equity buyouts. PE has been
| snapping up a lot of well established smaller companies and
| squeezing more profits out of them. Part of this is value
| engineering the products and offerings. These companies have
| built up names over a long time based on good products so you can
| ride the name and existing customers for a bit and maximize
| profits. By the time people get fed up the investment has paid
| off.
| next_xibalba wrote:
| This is very simple. Growth has declined. When growth declines,
| you can't rely on scale economies to expand your margins. So you
| have to take cost out of your product or service. And if you do
| that long enough, you start cutting not just fat but then muscle,
| then bone.
| AngryData wrote:
| This has been a problem since industrialization and I think is
| inherent in capitalist systems which strive towards maximum
| profit margins over every other factor. Where ever a corner can
| be cut it will be in the name of profit, reputation be damned
| because they can just use advertising, marketing, and marketplace
| dominance to suppress concerns over quality as they boil the
| frog.
|
| Declining product quality was even one of the major complaints
| luddites had over factory looms, it wasn't just that they were
| being replaced with lesser skilled workers and their wages cut,
| but the quality of fabric from the factory looms they built just
| got worse and worse over time so they couldn't even claim their
| loss of wages was worth having better clothes, they got worse
| wages and worse clothes.
|
| Everyone likes to hem and haw over free market supposedly fixing
| such problems, but completely ignores the huge amount of friction
| in moving markets that require massive tons of capital to even
| challenge to the smallest degree. And even if you get the overall
| established market to change practices for a small time span it
| is only through essentially open war with one another as the
| companies battle it out; and as soon as there is either a clear
| dominating winner, or a few of the larger companies essentially
| decide peace is better and stop truly challenging each other for
| dominance, everything goes right back to reducing quality and
| increasing profit margins. The big companies know being at
| perpetual war in the market, which is what would be best for
| consumers in providing the best prices and products, makes their
| position less stable and leaves them vulnerable to new
| challengers, and instead tend to default towards unspoken
| collusion with other big established companies in order to not
| rock the boat. It makes the companies more stable and profitable,
| but is worse for consumers, and gets even worse for consumers
| when those companies start looking at other ways to entrench
| their position through politics and law.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Perhaps the author should take a look in the mirror. The article
| sounds suspiciously LLM like on a site filled with garbage ads.
| scotty79 wrote:
| Free market is a volume increase and cost reduction device.
| There's only so much cost you can reduce without affecting
| quality. And the reduction doesn't ever stop.
| trentnix wrote:
| Creativity and competence have become a commodity in the eyes of
| the modern management. Employees are headcount and customers are
| blood bags to bleed until there's nothing left. Each and every
| one is an economic unit to mobilize and squeeze.
|
| And when creativity and competence are commodities, companies
| expect they can replace creativity and competence with another
| SaaS platform or another vendor who'll do the dirty work.
| Companies don't dare hire new graduates and train them. They
| don't try to educate them on how to build and maintain things
| while preserving the fresh thinking that comes with youth and
| inexperience. Those days are gone because the MBA wizards have
| decided long term investment, investment into an industry or
| one's community, is bad business.
|
| The pied pipers of modern business thinking openly encourage
| "minimum viable" as the secret to success. "Minimum viable" is
| only a a fly's eyelash from "not viable". That results in "nearly
| not viable" schlock filling the shelves anywhere things are sold.
|
| Modern business philosophy is literally that, for years, we've
| made things too good. That thinking infects every level of
| business, from development to manufacturing to service and
| support. Companies instruct their teams and vendors to fly as
| close to the sun as possible. They use words like "agile" and
| "lean" and "efficient", when in most cases they are just using
| those words to wallpaper over shoddy work.
|
| And because the way we used to do things is always wrong,
| companies hire one "consultant" after another poisoning the well
| with this garbage. The need for "consultant" help never ends, as
| the real money in consulting is in prolonging problems.
|
| When all of that outsourcing, outsourcing of thinking and
| outsourcing of actual production, doesn't adequately insulate the
| decision makers from accountability, companies embrace "big data"
| and decision committees and auditors and anything else that
| shields the org chart from real scrutiny. Companies refuse to
| trust anyone who actually has their ear to the ground in favor of
| some artificial signal discerned from the mountain of white noise
| collected from inconsistent and uneven sources. Nobody trusts the
| prophet in their own hometown, but the prophet from the next town
| is an oracle.
|
| All of that, coupled with a consumer market that is neither
| educated nor savvy enough to discern quality and unwilling to pay
| for what quality actually costs, results in the sorry state we
| are experiencing. This can't sustain.
| anovikov wrote:
| Or actually, just simply remember computers of 15-20 years ago.
| How many times per day you had to press "Ctrl-Alt-Del" or even
| "Reset", to reboot a stuck one? When was the last time you had to
| do it these days?
| baxuz wrote:
| Quality has become something reserved for the rich. To get a
| garment or an item of the same quality that was available 20-30
| years ago, I'd have to pay 10-100x the price. And I wouldn't even
| know where to start looking or how to get them.
|
| You can by a "professional" set of Zwilling or Fissler cookware
| from Germany, which is actually made outside of Germany, and
| corrodes and warps way worse than a set of pots from the 1990s.
| Pitting from dishwashers, bad welds, delamination that occurs
| when using the boost function on the induction hob... The quality
| that was present in those pots from the 90s are now reserved for
| actual professional cookware sets not found in regular
| catalogues, which costs upwards of 300EUR per pot.
|
| Same goes for garments. If you want cotton spun from high-quality
| yarn that won't pill or fray within 1 year, the only place you
| will find it is by the yard at the tailor's, or in brands you
| don't even know the name of. Meanwhile, I am still rocking the
| same T-shirt that I wore in elementary school 30 years ago.
|
| Office chairs -- I have an Italian one from early 2000s and it's
| a beast. Both the mechanism and the upholstery. Today's "best"
| office chair -- the SteelCase Leap is a rickety piece of trash by
| comparison. You can see the same decline in materials if you
| compare a Herman Miller Aeron from the early 2000s and ones built
| today.
|
| Look at the Kitchen Aid stand mixer. The old ones had metal
| internals, and powerful, reliable motors. The new ones are much
| weaker, have nylon load bearing parts, and have a life span of 5
| years tops.
|
| Cutlery, tools... Everything has become worse, and there is a new
| category of "premium" items which are anything but.
|
| And the biggest problem is that people's standards have been
| lowered to incredibly low levels. It's like they don't even
| understand how bad the things they are using actually are.
| like_any_other wrote:
| > One is that attributes like durability -- which used to be a
| major factor in how people judged a product's quality -- have
| lost relevance. [..] Now, no one knows what their pants are made
| of. Why would they? In a year, we'll stop wearing them because
| they'll no longer be fashionable.
|
| Is this describing aliens? Because of all the people in my social
| circle, _maybe_ one is like this.
| lycopodiopsida wrote:
| It is quite ironic that this article is littered with ads for
| temu...
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| This article manages to undermine itself with ridiculous quotes:
|
| "There is no attachment, respect, or emotional journey with a
| garment you spend less than 20 years with."
|
| "we spend $3 on a carton of juice instead of squeezing oranges"
|
| Perhaps by including words of wisdom like these they hope to
| demonstrate that their thesis of a decline in quality extends to
| journalism?
| disambiguation wrote:
| Settling for less can be economically optimal; planned
| obsolescence for producers (securing revenue), riding the bus for
| consumers (affordability).
| PaulHoule wrote:
| This was a big theme in the 1970s, one book that captures that
| Zeitgiest is this
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145212225-by-marvin-harr...
|
| and there were a lot of books offering answers such as
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Quality-Free-Certain-Becomes-Business...
|
| There are two theories of quality: (1) quality is conformance to
| a specification and (2) quality is conformance to customer
| requirements.
|
| The answer to type (1) quality is to reduce variance. One
| response to type (1) quality is to say something like "you can't
| get good help today", e.g. blame the worker, which has elements
| such as "they come to the factory drunk somedays", "they are
| smoking pot all the time", "they don't care". Crosby says
| management should take responsibility because management hires
| the workers, trains the workers, supervises the workers, designs
| the work process, fires the workers, etc.
|
| There's a dark side to type (1) quality thinking in that reducing
| variance lets you reduce the mean. For instance, a metal pail
| needs a certain thickness of metal on the bottom, if you go under
| a threshold the bottom fails. Because of variance you can't make
| a pail with exactly that thickness, you have to be several
| standard deviations above the threshold. Get that variation down
| and you can reduce the mean, use less metal. (Saves money at the
| factory, costs less to ship, less global warming, etc.) Now you
| have a system with less reserve, if a new source of variation
| shows up you are making crap pails again.
|
| Thinking about type (2) quality involves a conversation with
| customers to understand what their requirements are. The Toyota
| Corolla and Cadillac Escalade are both excellent vehicles from
| the perspective of customers who have different values. If
| customers aren't being heard, you have problems in the type (2)
| department -- in Doctorow's "enshittification" scenario the voice
| of neither end users nor advertisers or vendors are being heard.
| In cases such as Meta, even ordinary shareholders are unheard and
| the inevitable consequence of that is "it sucks." See also
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I grew up in the 1970s. I remember my dad having to regularly
| lube the joints of his truck, crawling under it with a grease gun
| to reach the Zerk fittings. I remember vehicles needing a tuneup
| every 3000 miles, and reaching 100,000 was an achievement.
|
| Cars today? First tuneup at 100,000 miles.
|
| You can say that cars are a lot more fragile today - get in a
| crash and they fall apart. That's true, but it's deliberate, and
| it's not deliberate so that they can make them cheap. It's
| deliberate so that _fewer people die._
| Animats wrote:
| Meanwhile, in China, there's a push from the top to improve
| quality.[1] Government policy previously favored production
| quantity and increased market share. Mission accomplished. Now
| there's overcapacity in many areas. So the new policy push is to
| increase quality to add value. The government is willing to let
| low-quality companies go out of business.
|
| This is very obvious in China's electric vehicles. There used to
| be several hundred manufacturers, most producing really crappy
| cars. Now, there are fewer manufacturers, and the cars are much
| better. Ford's CEO on the BYD Shark: "It's a great product. It's
| sold well. They're trying to sell in high volume in Mexico, but
| it's also being localized in Thailand. If we want to be a global
| player in pickups, like we are now, we have to compete."
|
| Tools from China used to be total crap, and now they are at least
| OK.
|
| There's a strong trend towards branded products from China,
| rather than white-label production. Brand reputation starts to
| matter.
|
| [1] https://qualityinspection.org/cheap-and-crappy-to-
| excellent-...
| knallfrosch wrote:
| Furniture really is the prime example. I've heard endless
| complaints about IKEA, along the lines of "I move two times and
| it's broken."
|
| You ask people whether they have a sturdy childhood wardrobe that
| they could use. The idea seems disgusting. You ask them what
| other options they considered. The comment appears to be
| offensive. How many people have researched and considered a
| company's service hotline quality before deciding to buy? Noone.
|
| People love to hate "evil" companies and expect laudations for
| knowing the concept of "planned obsolence" (they heard it once.)
| It's easy, it's someone else's fault.
|
| But mention their own responsibility as capitalist consumers and
| they'll quickly leave the discussion.
| antithesizer wrote:
| Reading through this comment section of people whose 'big brains'
| won't even allow them to come to the correct conclusion about
| whether or not products have declined in quality over time, I am
| awestruck by the fact that knowledge of anything is ever possible
| under any circumstances.
|
| Truly, human beings deserve no respect. Only pity.
| kldg wrote:
| just gonna throw this out there: I started a garden plot this
| year, all dug up by hand with a mattock, and harvested my first
| bush beans today; hecking great.
|
| I got components in yday for a variable DC-DC power supply
| (though I can't seem to find the DACs I know I have because I
| have everything inventoried -- but I'll find them). Will give me
| wireless control and read of test routines for products I review
| (funnily enough, given point about reviews in article) via an
| ESP32. China takes my eCAD design and ships me PCBs I've had no
| issue with, and at less than $1/board (granted, it takes them a
| couple weeks, but I'm in no rush).
|
| if you don't like what society's offering up, DIY. nothing wrong
| with being a little antisocial sometimes, even if only for
| exercise; "what would Terry do?" hoist the bird, fly the flag,
| and reject glowies.
| mark-r wrote:
| I have a picture from a vacation I took in 2003, and the shirt I
| was wearing still hangs in my closet. I don't know if that will
| be the case for anything I buy today because I don't expect to
| live another 22 years.
| tmnvix wrote:
| My own theory is that we used to make the trade off between
| quality and cost.
|
| Now we make a trade off between quality, cost, and convenience -
| with convenience being heavily weighted.
|
| Consider the rise of bottled water, or Apple (it just works...)
|
| People have shown that they will pay a huge premium for
| convenience. That premium might be paid in the form of sacrificed
| quality or it might be paid in dollars.
| southernplaces7 wrote:
| The article itself easily gives light to what drives certain
| declines in longevity (if that's your only measure of quality,
| since there are others too):
|
| "Psychologist Albert Vinyals, author of El consumidor tarado (The
| Disordered Consumer) (2019), recalls that years ago, the first
| thing car ads highlighted was their longevity. "Now we don't even
| consider it," he notes over the phone. "My grandmother, when she
| went to buy clothes, looked at the type of fabric they were made
| of. Now, no one knows what their pants are made of. Why would
| they? In a year, we'll stop wearing them because they'll no
| longer be fashionable.""
|
| People don't care. As sheer product diversity and sourcing
| increased across the last several decades, so many products have
| become so much cheaper as a percentage of disposable income that
| people just stopped caring about how durable they are. The logic
| is sound from the standpoint of a consumer for most products for
| which durability isn't an absolute must: Just accept a cheaper
| thing because it's not too cumbersome to replace it sooner rather
| than later.
|
| This has slowly worn down a general tendency towards careful
| thriftiness that previous generations had internalized and made
| the latest generations internalize that durability doesn't matter
| as much.
|
| That many products marketed as high quality and sold at such
| prices also end up being poorly made doesn't help either: If you
| can't even trust the outcome when you make an effort to be
| careful, why bother?
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| I think at least part of the problem is that we very often can't
| determine quality very well. And that which can't be measured
| gets corners cut on it.
|
| For many products I believe we could address this fairly well
| with a simple consumer protection law: Products must state an
| estimated mean time to failure, workmanship must be fully
| warrantied to at least 1/2 of this time.
| sp_c wrote:
| We get the leftovers from the ultra rich. Quality can still be
| found but the cost is crazy. Vs 'back in the day' when quality
| products were more affordable and available to more people.
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