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Comment by spicyjpeg | Hacker News Reader

This is all part of a larger phenomenon I like to call the "Amazon syndrome".

The quality standard for products seems to be incredibly low nowadays. I see people happily buying whatever cheap Chinese junk Amazon dropshippers sell, for a "low" price that's usually 4-5x the price of the exact same item on AliExpress. Reviews are overwhelmingly positive because most people don't care about actual specs or functionality and give 5 stars as long as it's cheap and it works, even when the product is marked up by the dropshipper and leaves a lot to be desired.

Reputable brands that used to make quality products now need to compete on price in a sea of "good enough" garbage, and many of them choose to do so by outsourcing manufacturing to the same Chinese factories that make the no-name stuff. Midrange products disappeared entirely and now the choice is between disposable landfill and ridiculously expensive high-end items.

As someonce in a Reddit thread (?) once said: "The product that retails for $500 costs $5 more to manufacture than the low-end equivalent that sells for $20. If you try to find a middle ground and spend $100, you end up with the $20 product in a nice box."

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> Reputable brands that used to make quality products now need to compete on price

I don't think it's just that. Many people (like myself) stopped buying "reputable" brands because they have betrayed their reputation. Nowadays when buying electromechanic devices even when putting 10x the price i have no clue if it's going to last more than 2 years (minimum warranty in EU) and that's a fucking awful problem.

In my view, we need 20+ years warranty (minimum, i personally would argue for 50+) on all products mandated by law, then we can start to see some improvement. This is a public policy problem and as much as i hate the EU institutions they are the only entity i know doing anything about this very serious problem creating tons of waste/pollution.

I’ve lost faith in the concept of brands. They’ve almost all been MBA’ed.

Hopefully the wheel will turn soon and product people will rule the roost once again. We need some MBA types as well, but there needs to be balance in the force.

> I’ve lost faith in the concept of brands. They’ve almost all been MBA’ed.

This is the first time that I've seen the term "MBA" being verbed (at least with that meaning) and yet I understand exactly what you mean and I fully agree with you. Congratulations if you coined this usage, it's a great way of expressing something for which I was missing a word.

It’s one of the popular tropes that’s repeated here and people use it as a lazy way of assigning blame for a phenomenon they do not understand whatsoever. Something bad happened? Couldn’t have possibly had a good reason for it, must be those MBA types. When Apple (as an example) turns around and produces groundbreaking chips and fantastic computers at an affordable price nobody gives Mr. MBA (Fuqua) Tim Cook credit for business decisions and leadership that enable this.

I’d recommend avoiding this lazy intellectual path because it’s not only incorrect in this context, it perverts your thinking in other contexts as well.

I would not be so quick to regard this as lazy thinking. It's merely shorthand for this idea: product people produce value, "MBA's" turn value into money. Obviously we need both sides.

Tim Cook is an Industrial Engineer with an MBA - a perfect combination. Apple is actually a great example of a company that produces a lot of value and also captures it in the form of dollars.

From this point of view, to be "MBA'ed" is to focus on profit while forgetting about producing value. This then waters down brands that were established on the bedrock of value produced by product people.

I don’t think there’s a “both sides”.

The reason this is lazy thinking in my view is because usually it’s not associated with the good (Apple example, nobody goes “dang they really MBA’d the price on that MacBook Pro that I love) and because when something “bad” occurs there’s no understanding or analysis of the situation that lead to the current state. Just a bunch of “that’s bad, must be MBAs screwing me”. You find similar issues with “those Silicon Valley engineers all screwing us and stealing our attention” and other common phrases. The MBA one I think is even less nuanced than the contrived Silicon Valley one.

If we go back to the MBA thing. Well. I have one. I don’t like fast fashion. I wouldn’t want to support it even if it made more money. The degree doesn’t make you do anything, your incentives and who you are as a person are much more powerful. There’s no class on fast fashion (or similar) where MBA students are trained to maximize profit at all costs or not think about sociological impact. At least at Ohio State (Fisher) that was the case in all classes I attended. We spent a lot more time learning about not doing such things and how they are bad for business and society in the long run. My classmates had a lot of empathy. Maybe it’s because like me they were/are regular people just trying to do better.

So I really hate seeing this. To the extent it can happen on an internet board I find it a little offensive and disrespectful. Not a big deal or something just saying if you joined some forum and everybody said all the bad decisions were because of software engineers, well you’d probably at least get tired of hearing about it. Especially when you’re a regular person trying to be nice and do good, value-add work. Idk. Thanks for your comment.

Perhaps you are taking it personally because you have an MBA. It's not meant as a personal attack on literal MBA's. I use the term as shorthand for the people who do the vital work of making a business run efficiently and profitably. When companies focus on that to the exclusion of the actual value-creating, bad things happen. The opposite case is when a startup does not find a market and only focuses on making a product. This, too, fails.

As an investor, I look for companies that do well on both ends of the spectrum.

No, I wouldn’t say I’m taking it personally. My self-worth exists independent of a degree, of which is obtainable by many. What I find disrespectful* is lumping large groups of people in together based on a degree, and then saying “that group is responsible for all the bad decisions”. I have to imagine you can see why this is simply lazy thinking.

Let me give you another contrived example:

“Social media co is found to have withheld information that lead to bad social thing”

“This is what happens when companies become Software Engineered. They lose all focus on the customer and society just to create better algorithms”.

You don’t think that if we just constantly repeated something like this that would be a bad thing and might alienate people? Especially when it’s not true and ignores good things that people have done as well?

What I’ll say is this. It’ll stop being lazy and disrespectful when large groups here also give credit where credit is due instead of only blame without evidence.

* Note that I don’t actually care, I’m never at home offended by something, I’m just commenting on the nature of the action, which I would classify as disrespectful.

The problem with your counter example is that it doesn't recognize prevailing power dynamics. In the vast majority of cases, software engineers, designers, product managers, and other people hands-on in the business of creating commercial software products, are outranked and have less authority than MBAs within their sphere of interaction. Many of us have been forced to be party to terrible decisions made by someone who has focused on an executive career path with no skill-based qualifications, and a deficient moral compass. Very often, these type of individuals happen to have an MBA, and so the stereotype was born. While it certainly isn't fair to tar all individuals with that brush, the short-hand has been earned by the actions of many MBAs over the decades. Whether you agree with that or not, the bottom line is you're simply not going to get much sympathy around here for the plight of the poor maligned MBA.

You are just doubling down on intellectual laziness and stereotypes which I thought we were supposed to disregard.

I guess those Silicon Valley software engineers have earned the title of bad actors with all the addicting software they write! There isn’t much sympathy around here for the plight of the poor maligned Software Engineer. After all you make a killing ruining people’s lives and destroying their ability to interact with their community with your addicting algorithms and your advertisements. You wait until a company relies on your cloud software or tools and then you raise the price just to squeeze every last drop of revenue. You have no moral compass and if you did, you wouldn’t build this stuff. I mean all you care about is career advancement. Build and ship a product and then move on before it gets shut down for not being viable. Skills? Hardly. You run easy pipelines and use software tools only you can afford to invest in to make you feel super productive while you ruin people’s lives. All in the name of getting enough “I shipped that” to put you on the executive CTO track before you dump dog shit companies on public equity markets. *

Same song different dance. Not buying it.

* I don’t actually believe this, nor do I believe similar lazy comments about any degree or profession because they are dumb and lazy intellectual positions.

> I guess those Silicon Valley software engineers have earned the title of bad actors with all the addicting software they write

You know, as someone supposed to be targeted here, I would agree, we need to take more personal and collective responsibility in what work we accept to do. This is a problem of culture. It's fair to point us out as a group when it's this systemic. Even if it's a small portion of people who are actually part of the problematic situations, the majority still accepts it for what it is, seniors will happily hire engineers without moral compass, FB and Palantir engineers working on destructive stuff still have a lot of street cred.

Of course it's frustrating being lumped together with the bad ones. And there's little you can do as an individual when you're outnumbered or outpowered. But those who can should do what they can to do good and not participate in the bad.

That aside, would it be fair to say you have an issue with that they scope the tribe/group they're accusing completely wrong? That MBAs are just a caricature if the people they're actually talking about, some of whom don't have an MBA and many MBAs are not those people? If so, agreed, it's a lazy and unfair one.

> That aside, would it be fair to say you have an issue with that they scope the tribe/group they're accusing completely wrong? That MBAs are just a caricature if the people they're actually talking about, some of whom don't have an MBA and many MBAs are not those people? If so, agreed, it's a lazy and unfair one.

Yes, generally speaking, I’d agree with that. I simply take issue with that actual espoused sentiment that “if something bad happens it must be an MBA type” and if at the same company something good happens said MBA type couldn’t possibly deserve credit.

> You know, as someone supposed to be targeted here, I would agree, we need to take more personal and collective responsibility in what work we accept to do.

I agree too. But I would also say in a similar vein it wouldn’t be fair to go around and say “those software engineering types” as a response ya know?

> “This is what happens when companies become Software Engineered"

But... people do use a very similar term, overengineered. Quite appropriately. You are absolutely allowed, encouraged, to call out someone specifying a product to the nines because they can. See Juicero, I'd argue Peloton, a.. decent proportion of products that involve Heroku or Kubernetes.

But so are engineers allowed to call out someone playing financial find-the-lady to obscure what they're really doing: using trust relationships built over decades, if not centuries, to fuck over customers.

> At least at Ohio State (Fisher) that was the case in all classes I attended. We spent a lot more time learning about not doing such things and how they are bad for business and society in the long run.

Well that's good that you were in a humane class ; from the people i know in France who received "MBA"-like education, it sounds like the exception, though. Are you familiar with critiques of neoliberal micromanagement, or as David Graeber's put it manageurial feudalism? How else would you explain the rise of bureaucracy ruling even non-profits (!) and ruining everything for everyone who cares about what they do?

> My classmates had a lot of empathy. Maybe it’s because like me they were/are regular people just trying to do better.

Cool, but how can you change the system by following its own rules? Do you feel that as an MBA working in a company you can go against the stream of anti-social control-based measures? I know as a random worker it doesn't work (which is why we have unions and cooperatives) but maybe you have a different perspective to share.

> Not a big deal or something just saying if you joined some forum and everybody said all the bad decisions were because of software engineers, well you’d probably at least get tired of hearing about it.

Well, the thing is as a class both we software people and you business people are ruining the lives of literally billions of people. So we're bound to get some resentment. Still, as Nabil Hassein points out in his talk "Computing, Climate Change, and All our Relationships", it's very mild. (paraphrasing) Given the evil we do to society as a whole, and the fate that's usually reserved to collaborators of oppressive regimes, angry messages on forums and stoning Silicon Valley buses is just the beginning and we should be very careful whose side of the barricade we are on when the revolution does come. I strongly recommend to watch the rest of the talk :)

Would another spin on this be: if the connotation of MBA includes "bad" in it, then applying this label to bad stuff is tautological and doesn't add information?

Here's another example: made in China has a connotation of cheap and low quality, despite the fact that the iPhone and all the other high quality electronic products are made in China too. But if someone says "made in china" we know they're referring to the cheap stuff.

Yea I’d say that’s a nice and concise way to summarize a lot of the issues here.

Isn't it ironic that this comment thread was originally about devices not lasting long enough and you bring up Apple, who purposefully crippled old phones and created AirPods to generate enormous amounts of e-waste, as an example of MBA types doing a good thing?

Have you actually looked at the competition and see how long android phones last and/are maintained?

Apple also has a pretty accessible recycling program but more importantly Apple products hold their value more, leading to a pretty good used market. No doubt this is bolstered by Apple’s fairly generous global warranty policy that is also transferrable.

Btw the “crippling” you referred to was apple throttling phones so weakened batteries were able to supply enough voltage to prevent the phone from randomly shutting off. It was not some secret attempt to blanket slow down old phones. If you replaced old batteries the problem would not happened. It was just bad communication and built up sentiment that old phones kept getting slower with each new update.

> Have you actually looked at the competition and see how long android phones last and/are maintained?

Yes the Fairphone are doing well thank you. Very easy to tear apart, setup the system of your choice, and find replacement parts for.

> Apple products hold their value more, leading to a pretty good used market.

What does that mean? Money is just imaginary numbers. A phone is a phone: either it works good or it doesn't, how much and why it's valued by people brainwashed into a commercial cult [0] matters little in the equation.

> No doubt this is bolstered by Apple’s fairly generous global warranty policy that is also transferrable.

Kudos for them to respect the law. Although i must point out that for some years, at least in France, they were obviously breaking EU laws by saying their phones had only 1y warranty (2y minimum by law) and selling people "upgrades" to get the 2 years.

> It was not some secret attempt to blanket slow down old phones. If you replaced old batteries the problem would not happened.

Do you have a source for this? It's the first time i hear that explanation, and it certainly was not put forward by Apple in their update log at the time (suggesting malice). Also worth noting that Apple makes it harder than it should to crack your phone open to replace the battery, so i don't think that's a strong argument in their defense.

[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/43884-neurologists-apple-is-li...

The first sentence of the wikipedia article explaining the debacle: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate

Transferrable warranties are very much not the law in the US. This, along with a healthy used/refurbished market mean that old devices stay in use longer. The saying is reduce, reuse, and THEN recycle. But the impact in reduce and reuse is much better than recycling.

I’m not sure what you mean “a phone just works or it doesn’t.” I’ve never heard of the Fairphone but I’m sure if it has good usability it would be catching on. I had in fact switched to Android for a year before and went back to iPhone after countless both hardware and software based quality issues.

Apple is not a religion, at least it does not affect me in that way. While I use a macbook and iPhone, I am fairly against their other products (like unnecessary icloud usage, apple watch).

If anything it sounds more like users of esoteric android feature phones (where the feature is some arbitrary definition of sustainability) is under some cult or religion.

The Fairphone you mentioned has lukewarm reviews, is objectively an inferior phone aside from its more sustainable materials. https://www.theverge.com/22716194/fairphone-4-review

If you look at mass market phones with actual market share, Apple does way better on the sustainability side by simply *keeping old phones usable.” If you want to be sustainable reduce first. Then reuse. An old iphone being resold or handed down is by definition made out of 100% recycled parts.

Does Apple do any good things?

They had some interesting UX in early apps like Hypercard. Too bad none of it was free software so it's lost in this day and age.

I’ve heard it used in conversation previously, fwiw.

Ad-hoc verbing of nouns is a normal feature of the English language (at least in casual usage), it doesn’t necessarily mean that a term is being coined or has been coined.

Maybe I’m weird but I never had faith in them.

I don’t know when I learned it, but I’ve looked it up a few times to be sure I’m not day dreaming; after the WW2, declassified propaganda research became the basis for ad and marketing programs in university.

It’s always been about establishing a mood and inserting a meme to go with it. Maybe that’s “gotten worse” as we whittle stats looking for growth. I think people are just aware of what’s always been true.

Somewhere along the way it became blind allegiance to a certain kind of agency, like a religion. We’re all busy FOMOing, being ourselves, like the Sprite commercials told us, we miss that we’re just shuffling along the same old routine as dad and grandpa, feeling too unique to be required to grow a potato or sew a pillow.

You might have learned it from here or similar to: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

I want to say it was during college years which for me was mid 90s. My focus latched onto anything I could apply elastic structures to; advertising/marketing and it’s effects on economics.

Circling high minded wisdom isn’t new. Tribal chieftains, god kings, preachers, now the nerds promising human longevity and prosperity for all-time to come… if we all just follow this model, it’s ours for the taking! Not so new.

I’m still waiting to be impressed.

Onward with the next generation rug pull. They got pensions in the 80-90s. It was reported Trump and co were looking into leveraging 401ks for gambling, but they used covid to hand over stacks of cash without question to leverage the average workers debtors prison they find themselves in.

It’s the circle of life, Simba.

There's already a law that covers it. IANAL but my here's my understanding of things:

When you buy something in the UK/Europe, anything really, it needs to meet 3 criteria[0]:

1. Fit for purpose: i.e. if it says "running shoes", then shoes should be suitable for running. If you use them to hammer nails, then it's on you.

2. As described: match the description, model number, etc

3. Satisfactory quality: this is the key ... and it depends on the product, but generally it relies on common sense. i.e. if you bought a washing machine for 2000EUR, you can expect it to last, let's say, 20 years of regular family use... If you bought a 2nd hand washing machine for 50EUR, probably can't expect it to last more than a year...

The problem is not with the law, but generally speaking, companies don't give a toss. Nobody's going to fine them... And worse, consumers are easily misled by warranty periods and just don't expect the protection. Even if they paid 2000EUR for a washing machine and it failed after 2 years, they are more likely to just get a new one. Even if legally they can require the retailer (not even the manufacturer) to replace or repair it because the product wasn't of sufficient quality. The burden of proof is usually on the consumer though, which kinda makes it harder though.

[0] https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/getting-help-and-advice/co...

Quebec, a province in Canada, passed a law a few years back. Essentially, the language states that the product must last "a reasonable period of time" for its usage case. This is the new province wide, legislated warranty.

Buy a washer, are a single man, use it once a week? It breaks in 15 years? Covered.

Are a family of 8, wash 2x daily, it breaks after manufacture's stated warranty? Probably, not covered.

This helps, because it stops parts that are designed to fail due to time, instead of usage, from destroying the product.

There are a few government agencies which will help you with this too, instead of going to court, by merely a form to fill out.

> Are a family of 8, wash 2x daily, it breaks after manufacture's stated warranty? Probably, not covered.

That sounds fair, until it's not. It's perfectly normal that a washer as a whole fails after 15 years: the thing is the belt is the only part that should fail and it should be easy to replace. Like with IT parts, manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure parts are incompatible with one another and hard to replace.

Most electro-mechanic devices i've seen fail in the past two/three decades were due to electronics: heater thermostat (not the IoT kind, the dumb kind), washing machine program selector (also dumb kind), etc. Likewise in auto industry it was reported that most vehicles being recalled in the past years in USA were due to electronics failing, not mechanics.

I personally find that outrageous and bet everyone would be better off if consumer products had standard bodies mandating use of specific interchangeable parts (like we have for electric/USB sockets or lightbulbs), and if it was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart).

Mandating a >20y warranty and duty of available spare parts is in my view the path of least effort for regulators: it will significantly raise the overall price of pushing out new incompatible models. Manufacturers would only release a device once every decade once they have achieved some significant efficiency/usability gains, instead of releasing parts-incompatible new designs for bad products every month just to profit. If you add in some standards regulations dictating interoperable formats for specific parts, that would start to look like an eco-friendly user-benefiting regulation.

Of course amateur industry like Pine64 needs to be exempt from such regulations to allow for innovation, but customer devices are a currently a nightmare destroying our planets and ruining our lives and wallets. I applaud Quebec for taking those steps, but they simply won't cut it.

PS: How is IoT even legal? In 99% of cases, it introduces unnecessary complexity and fragility, and in most cases has glaring security concerns.

"It was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart)."

To please the 'mah free market' types, we shouldn't make it illegal - we should ship broken good back to the manufacturer and have them disasemble the device into pristine materials for perfect recylcing. Breach of recycling laws shiould be a criminal offence - if I litter on the streets, I can literally go to jail, so why is a company above the law in this regard? (and so many others)

It will be so expensive to do, the effect will be the same

As long as everyone is arrested for not recycling I am pleased. So if anyone puts one of these products into the trash rather than mailing them back to the original manufacturer they should be jailed.

Right after we execute whoever invented resign codes, so that I have to check which part of plastic packaging from the super market uses which exact type of plastic, and have to cross-refrence if that plastic is reprocessed by my particular local authority.

After that we have to get the people that get government subsidied for reprocessing, but their reprosessing is to ship our plastic illegally to poor nations where they are dumpled in the ocean

I say we nuke the whole industry from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

For most consumer appliances, it’s vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten. That’s true for cars, refrigerators, washing machines, and obviously IT.

That’s because energy efficiency does tend to improve.

The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade.

It’s improvements in precision and knowledge of materials that tightened down the variability for individual components, making it possible to construct something that is likely to survive the decade, then see everything failing at around the same time. Cutting down on over-provisioning in this manner obviously saves resources and costs, as well.

> For most consumer appliances, it’s vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten.

That might be true in terms of CO2 and energy efficiency, although the only sources i've found on the topic gave very opposite results. But no study that i know of accounts for pollution (waste water and polluted surroundings of extraction sites, refinement sites, assembly sites, and "recycling" sites) so i'm tempted to argue that anything we don't manufacture is better for the environment than better efficiency.

> The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade.

I strongly disagree with this interpretation. First, because industry routinely employs bad parts and bad design on purpose (planned obsolescence, eg. televisions placing heat-sensitive capacitors near heat sources). But also because an individual part failing is in my view OK as long as this part is standard and easy to source.

There are some environmental/logistic concerns if you want to repair old devices given the gazillion incompatible spare parts they each use. But if they all used standard parts, we could and should have repair shops run as a free public service to avoid throwing stuff away. This in itself would do more for the environment than any "green new deal" would ever do.

The mechanism I described isn't one to disagree or agree with. It's math: For <x> even parts with chance of failure on any given day <y> (including some variability <z>), the expected first failure is at some point long before <y>, because

    P(no parts fail within the first two years) = 
        1 - P(<y>)^((number of parts) * (number of days))

Improvements in <z> have a huge impact here, quite obviously.

What you provided isn't (just) maths, it's a modelling assertion: that failures are independent from part to part, and independent from day to day.

I'm skeptical about your first assertion -- think of the effect of a power surge. I don't agree with your second assertion at all, from my experience of cheap devices that fail not long after their warranty expires.

> The mechanism I described isn't one to disagree or agree with.

And yet you failed to account for the embodied energy in building the product and the fact that maintaining any appliance or equipment requires repairs. So there is quite a bit to disagree with.

It is much more wasteful to build a product with no methods of repair, noting that a large number of components will statistically fail due to variability of tolerances or usage patterns.

A 50 yr product requires maintenance, replaceable parts and access to documentation. All of these are lacking in our modern consumer environment. You can blame this on complexity, or designs towards sleekness or what not but the truth is that product failure after a short amount of time (planned obsolescence) creates a reoccurring customer base, and the ability to pass off cheaper parts that don't need to be able to handle removal (glue vs. screws, etc.).

Sure but its fine for individual parts to fail if the manufacturer will repair/replace that part. Spares of easily user-replaceable parts can even be included with the product, like spare fuses often were.

It's not necessary to achieve zero failures, but it creates incentives for manufactures to use higher quality parts.

I am supportive of setting minimum lifespans for certain classes of products and to expwct manufacturers to be liable for that performance.

it is not the main point but requiring the manufacturers to repair an item after 50 years cannot be done.

the factory that built that refrigerator heat pump from the 70' is unlikely to still be making it.

as of today it would be already a big improvement if the was a law saying: "if a part is no longer produced or sold by the IP owner then it is legal to recreate and sell clones of that part"

> the factory that built that refrigerator heat pump from the 70' is unlikely to still be making it.

Yes but why? Why do we have 400 different models of heat pump for every fridge out there? I can understand that once every decade or so a new tech comes out that's worthy of developing parts from. But even then the new parts could be retrofitted into existing designs.

> "if a part is no longer produced or sold by the IP owner then it is legal to recreate and sell clones of that part"

That would be a huge improvement. What would be an even better improvement would be to abolish so-called IP entirely and to mandate actual durability for all parts sold. Think about lightbulbs: the parts/socket are standard (no IP involved), every factory can produce them, and yet we still have crazy bad durability.

> it’s vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten

I am very skeptical: Washing machine has two functions: Spinning and heating water. heating is 99% efficient, and electric motors are like 95% efficient - where is the improvement coming from? Is is smart features? What do they do, instead of spinning left it spins right?

What about an oven or a kettle, there is no possible improvement, and I bet the shoddily made ones are actualyl less efficient and worse insulated.

Washing machines continue to evolve—they're gentler on clothes and more efficient than ever, and they use 70 percent less energy than they did in 1990

The most water-efficient models in our ratings use an average of 10 gallons of water, 75 percent less than older models.

https://www.consumerreports.org/washing-machines/best-eco-fr...

This is just the amount of power the washing machine uses while it is on. You need to know the energy required to manufacture all of the components and the duty cycle, to know if it makes sense to replace an appliance for a more efficient one or not.

For example even if my phone charger were to get twice as efficient, it’s drawing very little power, given that it spends most of its time unplugged: it uses a fraction of a watt. That means that I would have to use it for an extremely long time to get near to the amount of energy used to manufacture a new one.

Washing machines pull considerable power and the power scales with the water usage: They use warm water, either from a tap or using a heating element. Heating water is energy intensive, and the hot water quite literally goes down the drain. Current machines use about 50liter per cycle, heating that from 10 to 30 degrees consumes around 1.2kWh, to 60 it’s ~3 kWh. Doubling the amount of water obviously doubles the energy needed. A machine for a small family may see around 100 cycles per year, so the savings are substantial.

This doesn’t take into account the savings in drinkable water which has most likely been through an energy-intensive process as well.

Yet your washing machine does not need drinkable water specifically (can use rainwater), and your stats do not mention the energy/resource cost of manufacturing and shipping a new washing machine.

If you have collective washing machines as a public service running 24/7, the tradeoff may be worth it, but as a general rule it's certainly not the case. Extracting and refining materials for industrial processes consumes millions and millions of m³ of water and a lot of energy.

Our perception as consumers is skewed because the price we pay for electricity/water makes it economically more affordable to us to get newer devices, but from a resource usage perspective, that's certainly not a good deal for the planet. If we paid water/electricity the price that big industries do, we wouldn't even think getting a new device was a reasonable choice.

Washing machines consist mainly of materials that are easily recycled and very economical to do so. Metals, mainly, in a large package. Pure copper in the motor. All of which can be recycled to build a new washing machine.

What stops a washing machine made in year 2010 from using same amount of water as one made in 2025? Was that water never needed at all?

Did we discover new phisics of washing? Do we have any reason to believe further improvement is possible?

This is a physical process, you can't have infinite improvement - there is a certain minimum amount of water required to dissolve detergent, and it can be easilly calculated.

They don't do much, does anyone have a real explanation without any handwaving?

I replaced my washing machine and dryer a year or two ago. I was pretty skeptical that a new set would make any difference, so I held off until it broke.

The new machines are better. I'm not an expert, but I think the biggest differences are: sensors to stop adding water when it isn't necessary, a really powerful spinner in the washer that dries the clothes better, powerful spinner in the dryer. Btw, my washing machine is top load, fwiw.

Oh, and to answer a different question: why didn't we have this stuff years ago? I think, no one cared enough to do it.

Have you watched the cycle of a modern front loader versus an old top loader?

The old top loader basically filled up a big tub with hot water and sloshed it around a bit.

Modern front loaders just incrementally add the amount of water needed as determined by weight. Presumably wouldn’t have worked nearly as well with the available detergents of 50 years ago.

First, we should be talking about the next 20 years - after all we are talking about a law we will introduce today, not in the past, and noone it talking about appliances lasting a century.

Secondly, while I never used a top loader, from everything I've read, they are worse in every dimention, so the comparison seems inappropriate - you are introducing extra variables.

Also I am not clear why 'incrementally adding water' was not possible previously, People built a 'smart' toaster 70 years ago, that could sence how cooked your bread is, and it was purely mechanical:

https://www.theverge.com/22801890/sunbeam-radiant-control-to...

Top loaders are basically an automated version of doing laundry but by hand. A 40-50 year old top loader which is probably what mine would have been today if it had kept working is much much simpler in many respects than a modern front loader. The spin cycle and it’s control is very different. I doubt you could build a modern washing machine with 1970 technology even if you knew what the end goal should be. And you need the right detergent too.

Added: And toasters still do a crap job of figuring out done-ness.

These are generally firmware updates, no? One could imagine the same chassis, hardware and drive system with only a few modifications to sensors and the control hardware (perhaps even just an update to the microcontroller's firmware) achieving the same output.

And front loaders at least spin out more water so drying is more efficient. I suspect there’s less of a difference with dryers.

Previous improvements are brushless DC motors with VFD, and using less water thus less heat required. Although one can argue that water usage has been similarly MBAified, either across the board, or at least for many crappy models that fail to get the job done.

A possible future improvement could be delayed start that communicates with time of use metering or something, although this would have to be implemented in such a way that the software itself wouldn't turn the machine into a piece of junk in 3 short years (eg libre software).

I suspect there are also many sensor-based improvements that could give machines more intelligent processing, but anyone who has repaired appliances knows that BOM cost rules all. So those would seemingly rely on less time-based manifest-destiny "innovation" and more on designing machines with more value in the first place.

Of course more sensors also equals more parts equals more complexity equals more failure modes. My furnace went mostly out this winter because of what turned out to be an outside temperature sensor which it used to optimize boiler temperature.

Most of this can be tamed with competent software, which libre software can converge on in a way that throwaway proprietary embedded stuff generally does not. For example, failure of your outside temperature sensor should have just resulted in your furnace acting like it was very cold, using a bit more energy and creating a bit larger temperature swing. Furthermore, an alert of the failure through open protocols would allow for lightweight notifications through software you already use, as contrasted with the currently common commercial surveillance rigmarole.

Except the outside sensor was reporting that it was something like 75 degrees F rather than the 20 degrees F it actually was. And the microcontroller was basically going “Why doesn’t the idiot just open a window?” Not sure what the failure mode of a completely dead sensor would be.

Certainly there not necessarily anything wrong with open source controller software but it’s no Panacea either.

And what surveillance? My heating system isn’t networked at all.

The firmware could see that the value was stuck at a constant, compare your outside temp to a local forecast, see that your internal temp continued to drop, or employ other strategies for determining bad sensor data. There's little incentive for Honeywell to add such functionality (cf the paradigm where you just call a professional who diagnoses your problem), but with libre software it might just scratch someone's itch at which point the functionality would be available to all. Libre software certainly isn't a panacea, but rather seemingly a necessary condition for embedded devices to not get stuck at whatever simplistic version of zip-source-control crapware they're shipped with.

By surveillance I'm referring to what would pass for "remote notifications" of system status (after the possible bad sensor was detected). The IoTrash solution would be to backhaul your system's data to a surveillance cloud, require you to sign up for email spam, install a bespoke app that would spam you with useless notifications, faux-consent to a ridiculous anti-privacy contract, etc. Whereas in the libre world, user-focused incentives are allowed to define functionality and that notification could be a simple single email.

Making the point in general, in order for complex software to not be some terrible black box, it needs to expose its internal state to users who want to see it. Libre software tends to do that (as many users are developers), while non-libre software tends to lock all that up and thus severely limits reliability xor complexity.

I do not want my furnace second guessing the outside temperature based on a potentially unreliable local weather forecast. Yes I would generally prefer to trust verified industrial controller code from the manufacturer that trained service people are familiar with for what’s a critical system in many parts of the world.

Individuals are of course welcome to hack together what they want using Arduinos or whatever.

Again I very deliberately do not have a smart thermostat or other network connections to my heating so no surveillance is going on. I do have network-connected temperature sensor but it’s purely passive.

That's not really addressing the core of my point. Sure, you personally can choose to be conservative and not adopt something promising the world based on "libre". And you probably shouldn't unless you want to tinker. But if it becomes common and shows to be more flexible and reliable, perhaps you will change your view.

I too critically rely on heating. As system complexity increases with things like outside temperature sensors, I would much rather have visibility into their workings than not. In the middle of the night, that could be the difference between a quick ten minute diagnose and override, or waiting some hours for an emergency service call.

Suppose the furnace gets the temperature wrong, what's the worst outcome? Surely the furmware should not allow absurd values like -100 or over 100?

I honestly don’t know. And honestly for 99% of people being able to look at the code to examine what would happen is irrelevant. In this case the false reading was within basically normal parameters. It was just about 50 degrees too high which meant the house was barely being heated (was about 45 degrees inside) on a very cold day.

The function of the external temperature sensor is so that the furnace can put out a lower amount of (instantaneous) heat when it's less cold out, so that it can operate more efficiently. On cold days, it puts out a larger amount of heat to keep up with the larger heat loss requirements.

I had a similar failure with my hot water boiler, where an older solid state control failed such that when the circulator would kick on the burner would shut off. This allowed it to limp along heating, until a day when it was too cold out and I realized it wasn't keeping up.

re: libre software, my point isn't really about being able to audit the code, but rather about having a cross-device software-maintainer-maintained codebase that users choose to use.

FWIW another, probably better, way to mitigate this particular external temperature sensor failure mode would be a second larger control loop. When the indoor temperature is more than a few degrees below the setpoint (not as a result of a scheduled change), the furnace should be less-efficiently creating a larger amount of heat to get back up to the setpoint quicker. Which is funnily enough how people think most thermostats work when they ineffectively turn it up higher to get things warmer faster.

While I don't know of any washers/dryers with them, heat pumps can be more than 200% efficient, so there's still potential for improvements there in theory.

Though to be honest I agree with your point. A lot of the low hanging fruit for massive gains in efficiency are gone. It's like cars, going from 10 mpg to 20 mpg is a huge difference. Going from 50 mpg to 60 mpg is a much smaller difference.

"While I don't know of any washers/dryers with them, heat pumps can be more than 200% efficient"

But then the washer is stealing heat from your house? That seems questionable?

Seems like the right way to solve the problem is to provide hot water inlet, and that should provide it is whatever most efficient way you can?

Heat pump dryers don't exhaust air to the outside, which saves a lot of energy relative to what is pulled from the house.

(The water is either collected in a container or goes down a drain)

For modern top loading washers, the final temperature of the water is restricted by limiting the hot water let in, they don't have a heater.

Heat pump dryers are common in some places. Don't believe heart pumps are ever used in washers though.

> vastly more wasteful and energy intensive to run them for 20 years than to replace them at ten

I recently bought a new washing machine. It is twice as efficient as the old one that broke down irreparably after 12 years.

I chose it by summing machines' cost, and the projected cost of each one's electricity needs going 10 years in the future, if prices go up by 10% per year, and picking the cheapest total one.

The cost of the machine itself ended up being 1149 RON, and the cost of the electricity would be 938 RON, which is almost the cost of the machine entirely.

So it is indeed important to consider efficiency and updating an old machine, and compare with what you have.

As long as the improvement in power efficiency keeps up, it will not make sense to keep an appliance for 50 years. But once that improvement stops, so does the reason for replacing them.

Yes and no. Random pick - we have Braun kitchen blender that is running for 15 years, we use it daily, looks like new apart from few small scratches on plastics.

I see no reason to replace it, new stuff doesn't look better, doesn't work better and doesn't last more (probably the opposite). Tons of things are like that. Yes new fridge will save a bit more electricity (compared to already savvy one from 15 years ago) but the amount of energy and material that go into creating new one, and the amount of waste it produces when disposed of, are non-trivial and not handled well even in richest western societies.

I don't agree with 20 years warranty, many things like batteries and capacitors just don't last that long. But some form of longer warranty would definitely motivate manufacturers to focus more on quality.

> I don't agree with 20 years warranty, many things like batteries and capacitors just don't last that long

Some capacitors can last just as long depending on their specs. For batteries, it's more complicated but longer warranty would probably incentivize R&D for durable batteries instead of smaller/stronger batteries, which would be a great win for the environment (see also: supercapacitors).

But the point is most devices are designed to be thrown away, not repaired. If your devices had apparent screws, and easy-to-replace parts, it could be repaired very easily by any skilled laborer (preferably as a public service, but it could also come from a local private workshop). Unfortunately, i don't know a single way to incentivize manufacturers to produce easy-to-repair products apart from extending warranty significantly: when they hold the responsibility to do repair on 100% of units not just the 0.1% people actually care to return (which will likely be replaced not repaired), they may be interested to make stuff easier to repair for everyone else.

Is this true? Manufacturing a new washing machine sounds resource intensive.

It probably is, but diminishing returns could make the difference negligible in the future. I expect cars to be a good example of that, the difference between a 2012 car and a 2022 car emission wise will not be that great.

For gas-only cars this is mostly true, but what if that 2012 car is gas powered and the 2022 is an electric or hybrid? (And compare the efficiency of electric or hybrid cars in 2012 vs in 2022)

Well, there was a revolution in electric cars in that time, so may e not the best pair of dates.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Of course I am talking about cars that use the same fuel type.

Right. More than ever you’re just paying for the brand, the quality is just as bad (or inconsistent) as the equivalent H&M selection.

They also need to start mandating transferrable warranties. There’s no sensible reason to block transfers except to suppress the used market.

I'm not a lawyer, but is non-transferrable warranties even a thing? I've never had a single product where they asked me for identity to use the warranty. At worst, they asked for a proof of purchase, which some second-hand sellers are happy to provide when they still have it.

Also worth noting: hardware manufacturers have found a better option to suppress the second hand market. Hardware locking (iCloud/Knox lock) is terribly efficient at this, essentially turning perfectly good devices into bricks. It's even "better" because they can advertise it as a security feature for gullible users who don't realize Apple/Samsung still has the master key and there's an entire corrupt grey market of company workers getting money under the table to defeat the lock in almost every phone store across the planet...

Yes, many product segments have non-transferrable warranties. NVIDIA warranties are non-transferrable, as are Herman Miller warranties. That being said, you can have the original purchaser make the claim for you or you can pose as the original purchaser/doctor the receipts, but it creates a big hurdle for secondary markets.

I don't understand what you mean by iCloud/Knox lock. As far as iCloud lock is concerned, it is only for stolen devices in which the owner did not deactivate their own icloud account. Where are your sources for gray market of company workers defeating the lock? I'd imagine if an Apple activation lock is bypassed it would have to do with resetting the password on the iCloud account.

One of the big issues in clothing and related is mostly market dynamics. The market used to be full of relatively niche brands (and stores) that sold genuinely differentiated, often higher quality, and typically somewhat more expensive clothing etc.

Over time, a lot of those companies got bought out by conglomerates and started selling the same Asian-made stuff as everyone else (for the most part; there can still be differences. Premium brands often manufacture in Asia as well).

It’s harder to charge a big premium for random clothing and soft goods. To pick a random example Lands’ End is a case in point.

Yup. Why spend 2x more for a washer when it will crap out at the same rate?

What you are describing is what has happend to almost all markets which are primarily price sensitive over time; you end up with a bifurcation of quality such that there isn't a "middle" anomoyre. Another example is groceries (specifically, meat). You used to have almost an even distribution of meat quality, from the cheapest garbage, to fairly affordable and quality, up to the extremely high quality pampered stuff. You used to have independent butcher shops all over the place who could survive in the middle. Then, people got price concious and super markets sprang up, putting huge price pressure. Ultimately, in many areas you now only have one option, which is the cheapest possible meat produced in the worst possible conditions (slaughtered in the US, shipped to China for processing, shipped back. Really.), and maybe if you're lucky, you have access to extremely expensive gourmet meats costing 20X+ as much, with nearly nothing in-between.

Adding an example to this after reading down the front page more: Smart TVs are the same; you either get garbage which shows you ads, or you have to pay 10x more for a normal panel.

> This is all part of a larger phenomenon I like to call the "Amazon syndrome".

Say what you like about Amazon, but their no-quibble returns policy is second to none, even in places like Europe that have high-levels of consumer protection enshrined in law.

From my own personal experience:

Amazon: Bought an IT component on Amazon (sold by third-party, not "sold by Amazon"). Item that arrived was not as described (lower spec than promised). Filed a return on Amazon, Amazon paid for the return shipment and refunded me as soon as the courier scanned the collection barcode.

Third-party: Bought a new PC from a reputable reseller (with whom I'd dealt with before occasionally over the years). PC arrived, hardware was OK but the BIOS was completely FUBAR (corrupted beyond salvage). Requested a return and a refund. Despite consumer law being strong in my country, the seller made it so painful and was dragging out the process so much (no doubt so they could push me past the consumer law deadline) that I gave up. I now have an expensive doorstop that is completely unusable.

I still buy from third-parties, but generally only low-risk stuff or higher-risk if I've got recent prior really good experience (or if there's no choice, e.g. things that have to be bought from "authorised resellers"). Otherwise for random stuff, if Amazon stock it and its not outrageously above the going price, I'll just buy it on Amazon for the peace of mind.

Amazon judges how quickly/whether to issue a return based on an algorithm weighted by your lifetime total value. If you shop a lot on Amazon, occasionally returning an item will be 0 hassle for you. If you don't shop on Amazon that often and get unlucky, they will hassle you about the return (you can google this for confirmation). Prime customers are also generally treated much better, obviously because they have a much higher LTV. That third-party seller probably gave you so much grief about the return because their sales volume is much lower, so individual returns cost them a much more significant % of their revenue.

Also, easy returns doesn't mean the items are being reused/the process is good for the environment. Industry surveys show around 25% of returns wind up in a landfill, and this number varies greatly based on what the item is - clothes are thrown away much more often.

Basically, Amazon and other high-volume low-quality retailers simply sell so many products at so high a markup that they can absorb the cost of throwing away some XX% of the products that get returned as a cost of doing business.

Buy from large EU eshops like Alza (if it operates wherever you are, or the local alternative) - much better experience even than Amazon, in all things considered.

They aren't quite dropshippers. Aliexpress has something like 9 weeks wait for shipping.

I happily pay 4-5x the price for a $1 part because I'll actually have it in hand this week rather than 2 months from now.

They will ship much faster if you pay for e.g. DHL but this is cost prohibitive for most people unless ordering in bulk. But yes, it’s totally rational to pay a premium to get parts in 2 days versus 5 weeks.

What products are you talking about?

From my experience over the past 15 years, most electronics that were high quality and high price remained the same, however the cheaper alternatives have gone up in quality by a lot.

Imo, the midrange is still there. However the number of manufacturers have gone way up and it's really hard to find something that's quality.

You can't just look at the brand name, which seems to have become a worthless concept, companies will sell their name (and long term reputation) for pennies.

You need to look at the hardware itself and know some basics about what makes it good and what not. The vast majority of people can't do that.

Over time I found myself thinking "I gotta get a new one" more often than "I need to fix it" because there's an abundance of stuff.

One of the tricky things is that the best of those low and midrange suppliers, particularly in the electronics space, are selling things that look visually similar to the cheap stuff. They're just better.

For example, if you go to buy a microphone arm, you're going to see three segments. There's the bottom tier of exposed hinges and tension springs, then there's the two-bar articulating models, and then at the top there's the unibody hinged ones from Blue, Rode, etc. which are surely nice but also a lot more expensive for not much more. Companies like Samson and Neewer sell into the bottom two categories. But even if you buy the bottom-tier mic arms, if you buy one from Neewer and buy one from another brand you'll immediately see that they look the same but the Neewer one works a lot better: better tension to hold the mic in place, ever-so-slightly better (and more pleasant to use) tightening knobs, that sort of thing. They can't be spending more than an extra fifty cents on the product but it works so much better that I preferentially buy from those brands even though it's still "cheap". And then you get into those midrange models, which for my money compete very favorably with the expensive stuff while being half the cost.

Neewer also sells camera type stuff and I'd agree with your overall assessment. It looks like the really cheap stuff but tends to be 'not bad' as far as fit/finish (as you point out, it's the knobs! Amazing what a (possibly metaphorical) extra decimal point of precision can get you.

Yeah, totally. Half my C-stands are Neewer, they're indistinguishable from more expensive. GVM is another example--they seem to pull nearly the same designs for their lights as Neewer.

> This is all part of a larger phenomenon I like to call the "Amazon syndrome".

You can validly blame Amazon for a lot of things, but the embrace of Chinese Chabuduo culture isn’t one of them. That is an international trade issue, which is to say a political responsibility of the federal government in the USA and evidently the EU in Europe.

To be fair, at least in EU, there are many cases from my experience when buying the same item from Amazon was actually cheaper than on Aliexpress. Plus 1-2 days shipping. It's always worth to check the item in several places.

What's an example of something on Amazon that's 4-5x cheaper shipped on Aliexpress?

https://www.amazon.com/BAIMEI-Massage-Relaxing-Stimulating-W...

https://www.amazon.com/BAIMEI-Roller-Massager-Treatment-Rout...

https://de.aliexpress.com/item/1005002433548378.html?spm=a2g...

https://de.aliexpress.com/item/4000252753301.html?spm=a2g0o....

https://www.amazon.com/haixclvyE-Face-Lifting-Device-Anti-Ag...

I needed a way to charge multiple Nintendo Switch Joycons for the kids. On Amazon the charger was around $20. On AliExpress the same exact charger was $3. I wasn’t in a rush so I paid the $3 and it arrived in a little over a month.

Pretty much everything sold on amazon, which isn't name brand.

(Chinese products with made up brand names don't count.)

Show me a single example. Not to mention aliexpress shipping usually takes about 6-8 weeks.

There are no items where it’s 5 times as much for the same item with the same speed to your door.

I buy things in aliexpress all the time. You’re paying in unavailability. Much of the time orders are actually batched

Not quite 5x, but if you try to buy a HDMI cable off aliexpress, it takes about 2 months to get here. It's about half the price of similar length cable on amazon.

I was trying to buy a Flexi brand dog lead on Amazon yesterday, and despite my search including the brand name, and me filtering the results by brand "Flexi", more than half the results were sponsored listings for Chinese knockoffs that people are drop-shipping from Ali. I gave up and went to a shop.

If it can deliver in 2 days, it's not "drop shipping".

How do you know they were dropshipped from alirxpress

The last thing I bought that fits this description was a new pair of ski goggles. The cheap $20 Chinese ones work great as far as I can tell. The local stores start at around $150. Am I missing something? I had a lot of fun with the $130 of easy money.

How do you know the Chinese ones provide you with UV protection? Eyewear is one of the things I won't buy online because I don't trust the online stores to check that their stock meets regulations.

There's some things that the $150 goggles might have that the cheap ones don't (anti-fogging, UV protection, durability etc). Or they're just marked up, who knows.

Presumably the brand name goggles are made by the same brands that sell $150 sunglasses. Are there differences? Probably. But they’ll probably also still fog at least based on my past experience. Maybe they’re better these days.

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