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Comment by jonahss | Hacker News Reader

Ok no.

First of all: survivorship bias. All of the old appliances that still work are only the ones which still work. This goes for the author's juicer.

Second: things which have investment attention now are excellent quality and things which are waning towards the end of their lifecycle are having the last few corners cut before the Private Equity firm that now owns them throws in the towel, throughly wrung dry. Author's examples: staples - the age of paper documents is over. matches - the Bic lighter is a modern marvel. plastic grocery bags - banned in more places every year. pens - same as staples.

But now, turn your eye to products being actively invested in now? Some may be at their peak this very moment.

And if you want something quality, go spend for it. I've got an industrial stapler like you wouldn't believe, 50 sheets of paper easy.

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> pens - same as staples.

I focused in on pens as I was reading the piece because I'm something of a pen snob, something I realized when I was at a job fair one day in college and I had a brief feeling of aversion when a recruiter offered me a shitty free pen.

It's not hard to get good pens, and they're not particularly expensive. $1-2/pen will get you very solid ball-point pens that write smoothly and reliably. Some of them can be refilled to save more money and reduce waste. There are wide varieties of styles, color, and point fineness to choose from.

If you usually buy shitty pens for $0.10 each or whatever that may seem like a lot, but unless you go through multiple pens a day or something it's really not. The $10/year or so I spend on slightly nicer pens is well worth it to me.

I suspect there are probably also similar quality options available for things like staples and matches, but I'm not familiar with those.

I agree. I feel like the author is upset at pens given out at banks and restaurants to sign stuff. As cheap as possible, Minimum Viable Pen for sure.

I buy a few packs of my favorite uniball pens every year and sprinkle them around the house and in all my bags. Very happy with them.

Seconded, though I'd add that with the current concerns about climate change and resource utilization, we need to think a bit more about product lifecycle and this is a reasonable way of illustrating that.

If the embodied environmental impact of a product increases 10% to make it last 100% longer then we need to think about making that change rather than producing twice as many to replace the broken ones.

one thing about some of the shitty products out there today is we got MUCH better at making things out of less material. So they break easier and wear out faster, but we've been able to reduce material usage along with price.

If you're a person who loses pens or holds onto them so long the ink dries up, it'd be better to waste an object made as cheaply as possible than one made to last.

This is a balance to play as well.

Absolutely, it's a complex game.

The easiest way to clean it up significantly is to better tax industry such that energy, resource usage, and transportation are all represented in the price such that the economy actually reflects the environmental impact of production rather than just the business costs of the moment.

Indeed, and I think we should be thinking about pricing the recycling or disposal costs too (even if that's difficult or inherently imprecise), as well as giving incentives for products with effective recycling supply chains (or simply low disposal rates! i.e. longlasting products). I think it's worth not being too heavy-handed about this, because low income people would be hit the hardest most likely, but I think something like this would help significantly.

I don't buy the survivorship bias thing for the most part. My mother has her original dryer, washer, deep freezer, and refrigerator all running at her house. These are all 40+ years old except for the washer which is probably 30ish years old. Also her furnace + water heater are 40 years old. If it was survivorship bias some of these appliances would've died.

I mean, what did your mother pay at that time?, because there was plenty of appliances from back then that were total crap too.

They're name brand appliances, kenmore and whirlpool while the deep freezer is a revco. They don't look like top of the line models, probably just whatever was mid grade at the time. I thought about telling her to throw them away due to power usage but used a kill-a-watt to determine it wasn't worth it. I think the fridge and freezer each cost around $25/year to run.

n = 1 is not a great sample size for analyzing long-term trends with multiple factors (purchase price, maintenance/treatment of applicances, environment, etc)

Are you saying that none of their original appliances have died?

If not, do you realize that you claiming " If it was survivorship bias some of these appliances would've died." When "these" refers exclusively to those who haven't died is the very definition of survivorship bias?

I think he's saying Mom would have definitely remembered if she had had to replace every darn appliance in her house every 2-5 years, the way we do now, before eventually lucking out to find the one good washer, dryer, dishwasher, etc. made in their respective years.

I think a washer died around 35 years ago and her current washer is 35 years old. It seems improbable that so many 40+ year old appliances survived in one home if reliability rates or ease of repair were not significantly better in the past.

You're completely right. Things also usually had a warranty longer than the nearly-universal 365-day warranty they have now. It's utterly disgusting to me that you can purchase a refrigerator -- an item which weighs like 800 pounds, has a huge amount of metal in it, and which everyone would agree would be insane to be a yearly purchase, and yet if it needs even an average repair 13 months from purchase, it can easily cost more to fix than the replacement cost and thus be totaled.

In my opinion, any device whose manufacture requires an amount of resources approaching "large appliance" levels should be required to have a 10-year parts and labor warranty. I don't care if that makes them cost more. I hope it makes them cost more. It's insane the way it is.

Your second point is great. But your first:

It's not (or at least, mostly not) survivorship bias. We aren't only talking about "Walk around a thrift store or grandma's house and grab a handful of appliances" because yup, they'll all still be working. But we can also ask our parents (or if we're over 30 ask ourselves) how many washers or dryers or mixers or blenders or televisions or whatever were required to be replaced after 6-48 months due to them spontaneously dying irreparably. Many such things did end up in the landfill then -- but mainly because people were eager to trade up to new shiny ones with better performance or features because consumer goods were improving every year back then.

(Compared to now when the main "advancements" happening to most household goods, if any, is the replacement of buttons with touchscreens and unreplaceable circuit boards, adding a wi-fi module and companion "App," and addition of subscription services.)

There's another important element: the ability to judge quality.

Many people (especially baby boomers) learned a shortcut, by using brand name as a proxy for quality of goods. The problem with this is that all those brands eventually outsourced and sold themselves and cashed in on the old brand quality association. Cheapening and cheapening as the producers realized that people still bought their product no matter what the quality was. Also, people equate flair and style of product with the quality, because they aren't actually good judges of quality. You can find many cheap junk products today that retain a poor skeuomorphic shadow of their former glory. At some point consumers learned "well if it has the shiny chrome it's a good one" and producers learned they could add a chunk of shiny plastic and people would prefer their product.

Brand names are worthless now, for the most part, and if you're not good at judging quality yourself, it can be a difficult consumer landscape to navigate.

> First of all: survivorship bias

So let's take all the things that I had in the 90s that I had to replace because they broke:

- ...

You can say I'm only remembering the positives, honestly, I can not think of a single thing I _had_ to replace. I remember buying new things, but it was always because I wanted the new-shiny, not because I had to.

Survivorship bias isn't "only being able to remember the positives", it's _concentrating_ on the positives and neglecting to take into account the negatives.

Everyone is saying "survivorship bias" but I don't think its that easy. How is survivorship biased by reparability? Is the widget still considered more durable if it breaks but can be fixed? I would say so.

There is some correlation here. If something 'never' breaks its not very likely to be repairable since no one will make spare parts for it. At the other side if something always breaks but is cheap in total cost, parts are commonly unavailable too, as people replace the entire item.

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