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Comment by trgn | Hacker News Reader

> Vote with your feet, and your wallet. Companies build what sells.

This is the defeatist attitude that largely explains why we're stuck in this race to the bottom.

A lot of the mass produced stuff we surround and find ourselves surrounded with has gotten worse. This is not because people want worse things. It is because of hidden and opaque incentive structures that are completely misdirected. By leaving it to the market with such a pithy attitude, we divest collective responsibility and instead assign it to some mystical process.

Coffee makers are the least of it. Our material surroundings absolutely suck. Like, in america, it's absolutely degrading how the wealthiest society ever on this planet is basically made real in plastic, disposable, malfunctioning shit. For my own sanity, I have to reject that this state of affairs is the expression of our collective wishes through the workings of the market.

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Oh, I'm not being defeatist about it, just trying to offer the best practical advice I have.

> Like, in america, it's absolutely degrading how the wealthiest society ever on this planet is basically made real in plastic, disposable, malfunctioning shit. For my own sanity, I have to reject that this state of affairs is the expression of our collective wishes through the workings of the market.

I agree with you. People in this society are making the best choices they can from a selection of poor or harmful options. We're programmed from birth to place value on things that have no inherent value. Our society in the USA is rich but ungenerous, which is awfully strange. The country as a whole generates vastly more resources than necessary to keep everyone in it safe, healthy, and fed, and yet we allocate those resources towards other things (e.g., entertainment, over-consumption, concentration of resources in the hands of a few).

That's all a much bigger problem than coffee makers, but they're inextricably tied. Personally I don't think we can solve the coffee maker problem without solving the legalized political bribery / "campaign finance" problem first; that blocks progress on many obviously humane ideas.

> just trying to offer the best practical advice I have

It's good advice. But imho it doesn't scale in the way it should, in the way the "invisible hand" should work.

The main thing is that imho consumers have too little leverage to really make meaningful impact.

e.g. I have a microwave form '82 that still works flawlessly. That was a bargain model at the time. More recent "luxury" appliances have broken within 10 years of ownership on me. How can a consumer, today, possibly be certain they're getting the high quality thing that will last decades? It's absolutely impossible, standing in a store, choosing a thing based on price/feature-set to get the durable vs disposable. That trade-off just cannot be made for the majority of material things in stores.

The same with feature-less vs feature-full. Once you go feature-less, options completely dwindle. That's the curse. If the market does work, it flattens everything not to best-of-breed or bang-for-buck but instead to lowest-common-denominator, sub-optimal.

> Our society in the USA is rich but ungenerous, which is awfully strange.

100%

> I don't think we can solve the coffee maker problem without solving the legalized political bribery

also, 100%

>It is because of hidden and opaque incentive structures that are completely misdirected.

While this is true, the parent is still true too. The issue is that companies make these cheap, easily broken devices and consumers keep buying them because the alternative is living with the inconvenience of not having that class of product. It's not a defeatist attitude, it's the truth. Unless people stop buying Keurig coffee-makers with dual functions, the data these companies are using for marketing and development show that that's what people buy.

The choice here is: If I don't want to support these cheap Keurig junk machines, do I just buy another cheap junk machine from someone else or do I buy a French Press and make my coffee the old-fashioned way in the morning? I'm trading convenience for quality. Despite what you think, that's still a choice that consumers make that fuels the race to the bottom.

> The issue is that companies make these cheap, easily broken devices and consumers keep buying them because the alternative is living with the inconvenience of not having that class of product.

"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 a 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 socioeconomic unfairness."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory

I'm familiar with the Boots theory but that's not really what I meant. Boots are a necessity. Coffee makers are a luxury.

those old porcelain hand cranked grinders offer just the right amount of exercise for the morning, you put it in a glass filter like professional coffee tasters use. Or at least, those are my thoughts/memories every day while I stand there waiting in front of my fully automatic machine that resembles an alien space ship.

Lots of people genuinely do prefer the cheaper (and thus lower quality) product. There isn’t always such a trade off, and there are other reasons to buys things. But low price is commonly a dominant factor.

No, Americans have seen their real take home pay stagnate for fifty years while the major costs of being alive have significantly increased, and thus are stuck using the same pile of money to attempt to pay for and obtain necessary and desirable things for less than they would have previously.

They don't prefer cheaper, they can't afford not cheaper

"They don't make it like they used to" is like a society wide exclamation that you can't buy high quality stuff anymore because nobody can afford to buy high quality stuff so nobody can afford to make high quality stuff.

This lower basket of income also means americans can't afford to pay the going rates for labor to fix their stuff, meaning something being repairable isn't useful or beneficial in any way, so everything becomes disposable.

Small towns used to have niche repair businesses, but who can afford to spend $100 on getting a boot repaired, especially when a new boot is $80 at walmart. So now the cobbler has to shutter his business and he can't afford good stuff anymore either, so now if you DO buy the expensive boots and need them repaired to make them worth their price, you have to seek out a much more expensive specialist or do it yourself which most people cannot do. Money was basically shipped out of local economies into giant megacorps.

A lot of stuff isn't even significantly less repairable then it used to be. Flatscreen TVs are super reliable now that they are solid state, with the one exception of the AC power circuitry. Anyone with $20 and a multimeter and youtube and a little confidence can watch tutorials to debug and fix a blown cap on the power supply, but nobody could really run a business on charging $100 to repair $200 flat panel TVs because people can't afford that.

Meanwhile "Electronics repair" used to be a common small town business.

> By leaving it to the market with such a pithy attitude, we divest collective responsibility and instead assign it to some mystical process.

I think of it the other way around. If you do not vote with your wallet/feet, then you are avoiding taking responsibility for your personal decisions. The act of purchasing something creates a very small signal, but a signal all the same. It's not unlike civic duty and how a single vote is virtually meaningless but in aggregate is powerful.

> The act of purchasing something creates a very small signal, but a signal all the same.

I agree with that certainly. Change starts individually. It really does, I mean that genuinely. As persons, as actual men and women in this world, we need to internalize the values we like to see flourish in the world. We just must. It would not be honorable if we did not.

> but in aggregate is powerful

The sleight of hand though is that this individual action, in and of itself, can always bring about meaningful change in every situation. It cannot. This disconnect between individual action and aggregate outcome is the main characteristic of a tragedy of the commons. To go back to the coffee maker example, the fact that our world is, well, quite literally, trash is such a tragedy. These traps never resolve solely bottom-up, without coordination.

> It's not unlike civic duty and how a single vote

Voting is a good example really. A vote is the lowest, least effective way to perform our civic duty. To see the change we like to see in the world, to do our civic duty, we must advocate, picket, canvas, stand on soapboxes, fraternize, run for office, assemble, cajole, badger, pick up arms, ... That is what it means to participate in civic society. A vote, that single small signal, means nothing, if we do not actively shape what we vote for.

fwiw - I really don't think we disagree. Just wanted to expand on that train of thought a little.

Thanks for expanding on that train of thought. Your elaboration with civic duty is apt.

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