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Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

> Many blamed these problems on the government. They believed it had crippled certain products (major home appliances, especially)

This is a claim that was already present in Death of a Salesman. Here's the quote:

> I am always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they're used up.

The play came out in... 1949.

It's not been my experience that everything is crap nowadays. But of course one needs to shop wisely.

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The difficulty is that the abundance of cheap crap often makes finding the good stuff like finding a needle in a haystack. Yes, price is the first indicator, but there are plenty of chancers who are quite happy to sell the cheap crap at the premium price point.

Yes that is exactly the problem. Especially with cheap as garbage direct sales from China and internet shopping being the norm, your chances of finding legitimate high quality sellers on amazon or else are practically zero. Even worse, nowadays on amazon you find the exact same product in all the price ranges sold by "different" sellers.

There's a need for legislation here IMO.

Trademarks identify the origin of goods that a business wishes a consumer to believe. We need to expand that law to also indicate _actual_ origin.

For example, this DVD player came from this manufacturer and then got badged as Alpha Inc, but this other DVD had the same technical origin (despite the different case) and got badged as Beta Inc ... consumers should get that information. Capitalism relies on such things so that the best products can be chosen.

Instead, we get things like companies selling the same product code from different factories with wildly different quality. Or, far more egregious companies sending a product to reviewers and early adopters, then making a worse product and passing it off to consumers as the same.

There's much more to do (I should be able to see exactly what a product had done to acquire it's 'country of origin' - another area companies deceive consumers), but this would be a start.

I am surprised that nobody pointed out the obvious : avoid items with the minimum legal manufacturer warranty.

Though this too can become hard in categories dominated by cartels : warranties for (magnetic) hard drives have been going down (not to mention the recent frauds by Western Digital, how they have fallen, sigh...), or, for (non-related) reasons, boycotting Intel and Ryzen CPUs (or Android an iOS smartphones) doesn't leave you many options, though RISC-V (and "real" Linux) have been making great strides in the recent years.

> I am surprised that nobody pointed out the obvious : avoid items with the minimum legal manufacturer warranty.

I have to admit that particular strategy hadn't occurred to me - but it's a good idea. Of course, it has to be an actual part-of-the-standard-deal warranty, not the hard-sell extended warranty that's really just an add-on insurance policy...

(Wondering where I find a box of staples warranted to pierce more than five sheets...)

Unless the company goes out of business, or as may happen more often today, just dissolve the company and re-brand/re-incorporate.

Also the expensive stuff is often built to last a few years instead of decades.

Carefully buy b2b and you can still get to decades of service life for many types of equipment. It is also much more expensive than the most expensive "prosumer" grade offerings you see. But for some of this type of equipment, that's because they staff competent technicians supporting 24x7x365 service calls coming in from shops hiring certified technicians rolling repair trucks any time of the day or night for the right fee.

For what it's worth, some things in my lifetime have seemed to get much better, and cars and refrigerators happen to be in that class.

Many other things seem to have gotten worse though, like clothes and linens. I suspect there's some pattern to those things that have improved and those that have declined, and everything in between, but I couldn't explain it.

watching many youtube mechanic channels, i get the sense that they seem to think that 2000 era cars were better than today's car. The common missive is that they now have really cheap parts, and the cars are over controlled by computer systems making them brittle and expensive to repair.

>cars are over controlled by computer systems making them brittle and expensive to repair

I've heard this many times while at auto body shops. It seems that it's not the electronic parts cost that is expensive but you have to dissemble much of the car to replace the parts.

and impossible to replace with the same part from a scrapped car due to the module being paired to the specific car and the reuirement for the dealer to install it. All car parts should become open source 10 years after the last one was produced to prevent them just getting scrapped.

2000 era cars were the sweet spot of good enough power and efficiency vs complexity.

Current cars get more power and fuel efficiency, but its at the cost of complexity like high pressure direct injection, stop/start, variable length intakes, cam phasers, etc.

Its nothing to do with computer control making them brittle, more that there's just so many extra components to fail that just didn't exist on older cars and the techs need training on how they operate and troubleshoot.

Regulations. Also probably how cars and refrigerators need energy to work ?

The downside is that cars especially have not gotten cheaper. (This is starting to change, sadly by necessity rather than choice, ~ton personal vehicles will soon be the thing of the past even in rich countries.)

> soon personal vehicles will soon be the thing of the past even in rich countries.

https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-car-sa...

That's not what I said, and I don't know what your argument is ?

I have some anecdotal evidence to the contrary on refrigerators. I want a fridge to do one thing. Keep food cold. No ice maker, no water, no godforsaken app, or camera on the inside. Make a robust, reliable cooling system that's built to last. That's the only thing I want to pay for.

Check out the history of light bulbs, an actual amazing conspiracy few people know about :)

One perhaps continued to this day, if maybe in a different way (we'll know in a few decades) : toxic fluorescents and most diode bulbs not having separated transformers (they are DC !)

Though my LED lights do last a lot longer and cost way less to operate overall, so that is nice.

I’ve been singularly unimpressed with the rate my LED bulbs are failing.

Definitely not even close to 10-15 years I was promised.

And this is why warranties are pointless. How am I supposed to get one of these bulbs from a four-pack replaced by the manufacturer two years after I bought it?

Yeah, nowhere near as long as they should last, but better than it was.

Yep, bulbs are now all complete crap - they used to last decades.

Was having my house painted a few years back, I have a triple set of spots near the very top of the roof (so about 30 feet in the air) - painter helpfully suggests - do you want me to replace those bulbs up there while I have my ladder up there? I agreed.

Big mistake, the bulbs their were still working 17 years after I moved in - now I have to replace them about every 18 months with the cheap crap the government only allows to be sold.

Not sure how replacing bulbs and throwing them in the landfill every 1-2 years is doing anything good for the environment.

Your anecdata is bad. Even after the conspiracy was discovered, incandescent bulbs still had a much lower life expectancy than LED lights.

It's simple physics :-)

The LEDs themselves are very robust, solid-state semiconductors that will function for a very long time, but they need additional electronics to function in a 110/220V socket, and those electronics seem to be crummier than the old incandescent filaments.

Yep - I've done a post mortem on a few LED bulbs that failed and each time the LEDs were fine but the driver failed.

This is anecdotal, but I had a bunch of bulbs of the same brand that started to fail, on the remaining bulbs I drilled a few air vent holes into them as they are used indoors only, and since then haven't had another failure.

I'm suspecting most LED bulbs fail from thermal stress on the driver circuitry.

perhaps in theory - not in real life.

What kind of bulbs are you using? LED bulbs should last a decade.

my led bulbs in the house are burning out every 18 months or so - no way they last 10 years - not even close.

Not a good example that everything turned to crap right this decade...

Might be worth mentioning the name of the conspiracy: the Phoebus Cartel.

It sounds cartoonishly evil, but "cartel" is just an economic term for a market where a small number of participants collude to control supply and pricing. Like OPEC.

https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-l-e-d-quanda...

IMHO, we should be more aggressive about converting industries which gravitate towards cartels into regulated natural monopolies, like power/water supplies. Some kinds of markets really are more efficient with fewer participants, and we should find ways to encourage that efficiency without letting the lucky winners indefinitely dictate the terms of the market.

In contemporary America, cartels are euphemized as "trade associations" and they dominate Washington DC (and our national consciousness) with their collective lobbying and PR resources.

Yes, I was going to mention that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoebus_cartel

It's a matter of shopping wisely and, at least sometimes, of spending more money up front. People always reach for the smelling salts when I tell them how much my (hand) coffee grinder cost, but that thing is almost certain to outlast me.

I've got my selling salts, please tell me which coffee grinder you own?

And by the way, since the topic of "where do I find the good stuff" keeps coming up, why is there no site that is your one-stop recommendation destination for finding quality appliances, tools? We all know we can no longer trust Amazon reviews.

Consumer Reports has been around for ages but I don't feel they've kept in lockstep with the changing times. Maybe the Cool Tools site? But it seems a little too casual and not as rigorous as CR, too eager to direct you to Amazon as well. I don't know really. Just spitballing.

https://eightouncecoffee.ca/collections/hand-grinders/produc...

And yeah for products like these you really need to search prosumer forums for the specific area in question, Consumer Reports would be useless.

This has two problems:

1. The prosumers can get detached from the needs of ordinary consumers (see: audiophiles)

2. Some products just don't generate enthusiasts. I recently had to buy a washing machine. All the reviews are sponsored and slightly suspicious crap because nobody cares enough to be the Tom Laundry Tips of the world

I feel like there’s a great opportunity for a founder to start a new eCommerce site with supply chain verification to weed out fakes, and who would do their own testing a la Consumer Reports in addition to customer reviews.

/r/buyitforlife is a decent start if you don't mind Reddit.

I also would like to know what hand grinder you have!

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