The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
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My suspicion is that when products are successful and mature but reach market saturation, profit growth pressure leads to cutting some corners on every iteration, and hence to a slow decline in quality over the years.
Well, that isn’t necessarily a bad sign I guess.
They changed their target market segment to lean into the “discards their furniture in less than 5 years” ICP, and they also heavily optimized for shipping (eg their bottom-end Kallax is now actually made of corrugated cardboard instead of plyboard, strength-to-weight is amazing, but still less durable).
So both are true, that they still represent “good value” in a dollar-per-value sense, but also lowered their absolute quality. (This is the exact point OP is making.)
I appreciate it for what it is but consumers really need to understand what they are buying.
If the tier changes without some sort of inflection, you perceive it as degradation of quality.
Not a good example. Arizona tea is held in high esteem only because it never went up in price. The beverage itself has always been of a clearly dubious quality.
I ended up going to a local store, finding an unfinished bookshelf that was able to paint to my liking. It was absolutely a BIFL find. Another I bought at a close-out sale.
There is no one suggestion, but rather piece things together. This was about a decade and a half ago, and it seems that everyone is hustling so good deals are hard to find.
I very much doubt that such a product can’t be manufactured sustainably in robust quality.
And to your point, I’ve probably gone through six clothes drying racks by now that all break down after a short time. I have yet to find a high-quality one.
It sounds expensive, but I suspect that in the long-term, the approach of buying higher quality up front ultimately ends up cheaper in terms of time and replacement costs. I’ve debated replacing some home appliances with commercial or restaurant versions, but there are some notable tradeoffs with that unfortunately, as the purpose of the appliance becomes somewhat different than a home use case.
Of course this strategy is all well and good if you can foot the initial high cost of the products, which many people cannot on the typical family income. There’s been a lot written about how those of lower income are often taken advantage of in this way—they end up paying a higher “lifetime cost” for lower quality products and service, because the system attempts to produce the minimum viable affordable product, which then sets the bar for the “new normal”.
My life is a constant struggle when it comes to finding nice things.
When buying a $4 shirt I know the price:quality ratio, it's cheap:crap. Whereas majority of the time buying more expensive it might be slightly better, but it's still expensive:crap.
There are tradeoffs towards more complex devices being made, sure, but that’s not exactly what “quality” is, to me. There’s an extensive discussion about the iphone vs a snake-era nokia, which i feel like misses the point entirely
Instead of growth and innovation, it’s how can the Company get recurring revenue after first sale.
The balance for the Company is finding a quality to price point ratio where either 1) the customer doesn’t care if it breaks because it was cheap and they know it’s cheap or 2) it’s cheap and breaks but the utility of it to the customer warrants (or with some goods, necessitates) them buying a replacement.
In the second case, the trade off would also include brand risk, but in the world of Amazon and TEMU, you can just sell the same thing under a new random name, there is no brand identity.
Those MBAs didn't come out of nowhere. They answer to C suites who answer to boards. They have to weigh their decisions against the cost of customer attitudes and employee morale. The fact that we get the outcomes we do indicate this is a top to bottom societal problem.
a simplification and a cop-out of what? blake, i am writing a hn comment and not an academic textbook
> This is across the board in all of society
ok but the article is largely about physical goods, that's what we're talking about
> I believe the reason being that people, in general and enmass, are not being taught how to live with active critical analysis
lmao i clicked on your bio and just knew i'd see MBA in there. maybe there's something that has happened to institutions that do this teaching. maybe it's because they, too, have mastered business administration
I'm serious when I say this is not just "MBA think", this is everywhere. People are being short sighted. People are not thinking things logically through, and this is widespread.
Yes, we're talking physical goods. Items where short sighted thinking destroys brands, exactly what the original post discusses. It's too easy to just blame the MBAs. This is a widespread issue that is not just in physical goods, it is at the core of what is required to sustain democracy - a critical thinking population. We've educationally failed the population en mass by not having education verticals that stress perspective. We only teach short term perspectives as meaningful and worth action, and all this is coming home, today.
Those that should be able to talk sense in the critically short sighted decision makers have not been taught how to make their points and be understood. That is real, and widespread. Continue to label the cliche and get no where. We need to recognize this critical failure, because it is destroying one hell of a lot of foundation we need.
A subtle variant of this is incorrect metrics. In 2000s, full featured audio chipsets started to show up, all in one chip 24bit audio. Soon everything used these, the 24bit resolution wasn't enough to make a good audio interface... (I think it was noisier) But it was too late, most devices used this and old audio cards were priced out.
I don’t think it’s ‘efficiency’ in the same way spaceX is run. Yeah they cut costs, but they got better quality results.
With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our expense - while the companies doing it make more money than ever.
> With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our expense - while the companies doing it make more money than ever.
Specifically this is an issue of government failure and cultural malaise - food quality anyone? We need to vote better, and vote with our dollar better. Stop buying dumb DJI drones to race around and buy a nice sweater instead.
Interesting take. Any source ?
Government failure an cultural malaise are what "late stage capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a collapse of the whole thing under its own weight.
It doesn't, however, give any pointers on where to go from there.
Why does marketing and advertising exist then?
> Government failure and cultural malaise are what "late stage capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a collapse of the whole thing under its own weight.
If capitalism gives what the market demands, then you are suggesting that The People want government failure and malaise.
Either your premise is wrong or Late Stage Capitalism is wrong. Likely both.
Terms like Late Stage Capitalism are just there to give you something nice to hold on to and use as your scarecrow for anything bad you see in the world. An intellectual crutch, a helping hand into the graveyard. Car recall? Late Stage Capitalism! Forest fire? Climate change - late stage capitalism. Teeth fell out? Late Stage Capitalism. Covid-19 vaccines or a cure for cancer? Hmm somehow still Late Stage Capitalism.
And now you have your answer to why the world sucks and even better, Late Stage Capitalism says nothing about what comes next! No reason to do anything about it, like support the arts or educate a child, because it’s just Late Stage Capitalism after all.
Hopeless and failed ideologies (Communism/Socialism) love to generate destructive and useless distractions and slogans. Reject them!
> If capitalism gives what the market demands, then you are suggesting that The People want government failure and malaise
You are both correct here. Obviously people don't want malaise directly, but some directly seek government failure, and the rest vote for things that result in malaise and government failure, wittingly or otherwise. Often such voters do so because they think it will get them more money, which is a reasonable desire under capitalism.
> Hopeless and failed ideologies (Communism/Socialism)
Oh, I didn't realize till the end that you were treating this discussion as a team thing, and capitalism is "your team", so you must attack "the other team", even though nobody else mentioned it. Maybe instead of treating "the other team" as something nice to hold on to and use as your scarecrow for anything bad you see in the world, you can keep discussing the substance of things? You did a good job of this for a bit.
It’s just empirical. Both Communism and Socialism are failed ideologies. Millions dead. Millions more starved. It’s like when Libertarians want to bring about their ideology and people tell them to move to Sudan and experience it.
The term “Late Stage Capitalism” is a communist slogan. What’s insidious about it is that it tricks you into believing we can’t make things better or right wrongs, and that progress can’t be made. It has entered the American and Western social discourse as yet another instrument to sow distrust, fighting, and hatred. If/when I see the Right Wing Nazi equivalents of those slogans I call them out too.
I'm not interested in rehashing the team game of "capitalism vs communism vs whatever" for the millionth time here, and nobody but you brought up the latter, so you might safely conclude nobody else is, either.
Do you think you can take off your team hat and have a discussion about what we were talking about? Hint: it was capitalism (specifically late stage capitalism). Try responding on the topic without any distractions (like mentioning the other team as you might consider it).
After all, sports teams don't get better by pointing fingers at all the other teams, they get better by looking inward and finding what they should change. Here's an example:
> What’s insidious about [the term late-stage capitalism] is that it tricks you into believing we can’t make things better
The term absolutely doesn't do that, because it's 2 words, one meaning capitalism, the other meaning "a later stage of". You're free to suggest ways to motivate companies to stop enshitifying things for profit within the confines of late-stage capitalism, without resorting to one of your dreaded ideologies. But you'll have to actually do that. So let's look inward: how can we fix that?
Geez, seriously? The most successful societies in the world and human history have combined aspects of capitalism and socialism. A market based economy with social constructs that just provide better lives for people than pure capitalism would. Examples are not just the often-cited nordic countries. Germany, France, even the U.S. in its not-so-distant history have embraced that to great success. "Millions dead" is just as much populistic nonsense as the equally misguided doomsday scenarios painted by hardcore haters of capitalism.
105,000 people died by overdose in the USA in 2023. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...
In 2023 the average daily incarceration population in the USA was 664,000. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-2023-s...
Average daily homeless population for the USA in 2023 was 653,000. https://nlihc.org/resource/hud-releases-2023-annual-homeless...
In 2023 only 86% of US households were food secure. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...
The majority of US bankruptcies (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530,000 medical bankruptcies annually. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/
It doesn't look like the USA has a healthy ideology to me. It just spreads it out to 'death by 1000 cuts' and makes everyone's' suffering invisible.
FYI American police kill more people than any other country at 1100 people a year. Guess that's also 'democracy' and not, you know, just America:
https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/
I don't care about criticisms about America. They're not interesting or relevant. Democracy and markets are superior to state owned means of production.
> Churchill's democracy in Britain has social housing and social healthcare.
Well it had those but in the case of housing it was primarily private (as it should be) and in the case of healthcare running a healthcare system is not Communism or Socialism any more than roads are.
"state owned is not communism or socialism"
Ok then.
" I'll take all this government mismanagement and markets over Communism and Socialism."
That's the great thing about Democracy. You can do things like found a socialist business model and have it compete in the market and you can respect the rights of others to not do so. If your model is better, or if it works well for you and like-minded folks, then all is well.
If they're just lazy bums siphoning away their fat paycheck, surely your method will be better and you will show the other workers a better way and you can all unite and create similar collective ownership models.
There are significant barriers to that, not least of which is access to capital.
But that's also not socialism, socialism is the economic system where that is true across the whole economy.
> That's the great thing about Democracy. You can do things like found a socialist business model and have it compete in the market and you can respect the rights of others to not do so.
Aside from misunderstanding aocialism as a business model and not an economic system, what you describe (where you are superficially free to do this but obstructed by structural barriers and a politico-economic system geared to favor a different model) has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with capitalism, an economic system that,because political and economic power are fungible and capitalism is centered around around concentrating the latter in a narrow class, is in constant tension with and undermines political democracy.
That's a barrier to start any business. Life is tough. I'm not sympathetic.
> But that's also not socialism, socialism is the economic system where that is true across the whole economy.
> Aside from misunderstanding aocialism as a business model and not an economic system, what you describe (where you are superficially free to do this but obstructed by structural barriers and a politico-economic system geared to favor a different model) has nothing to do with democracy and everything to do with capitalism, an economic system that,because political and economic power are fungible and capitalism is centered around around concentrating the latter in a narrow class, is in constant tension with and undermines political democracy.
Just because it has various definitions and subcategories, can you just explain what Socialism means to you?
What I'm hearing is you want to abolish capitalism and replace it with workers (not the government) owning the means of production. Is that right/fair?
And then Communism we'd define as the government actually owning the means of production. Is that right/fair?
Its an additional barrier in a capitalist economy to starting an equal-ownership labor coop, because the people who do control capital prefer that businesses they fund be owned by the suppliers of capital.
> Life is tough.
And capitalism is organized around making it tougher for the vast majority so that it can be easier for an elite minority.
> I'm not sympathetic.
Clearly, though I’m not sure why you are so proud of that.
> Just because it has various definitions and subcategories, can you just explain what Socialism means to you?
Socialism means that the workers (which is equivalent to the people at large, since without private ownership of the means of production, the capitalist classes do not exist) owning the means of production and exercising control democratically. There are a large numbers of particular eays that this can be structured.
> What I'm hearing is you want to abolish capitalism and replace it with workers (not the government) owning the means of production. Is that right/fair?
The government is a means by which the workers can exercise some part of their control of the means of production, and in any practical socialist system a robustly democratic government will play some role (possibly not much more or much different in broad shape, outside of specifically rules on ownership of particular assets, than in the modern mixed economies that have replaced capitalism in the strict sense in most of the developed world since the mid-20th century, but also possibly significantly more in some areas.)
But I’m personally an incrementalist and not a radical revolutionary, so while “abolish capitalism” is in a sense technically correct, what I’d mostly prefer is continued incremental steps to reduce the structural favoritism granted to the capitalist class and to distribute increasing power to the working class (either directly as such or by democratically empowering the people without regard to class).
> And then Communism we'd define as the government actually owning the means of production. Is that right/fair?
“Communism” is a proposed utopian end state beyond socialism that some socialists (who are also known as “Communists” for this reason) believe is the ultimate goal, and also a name for the set of socialists who believe in one of the various schools of thought that have that as their end goal.
What you are describing as “Communism” is, ideally, state socialism, wherein the people at large control the means of production through robustly democratic state institutions. In practice, though, attempts to implement an economic system around it have actually ended up being, and mostly getting stuck in state capitalism [0], wherein a narrow and self-perpetuating elite controls both the state and, through the state, the means of production and society more generally.
The extent to which this is an inherent failure of state socialism versus a failure of the particular adaptations of Marxism made in Leninism to bypass (private) capitalism and the frequently associated development of democratic norms to attempt to implement state socialism in environments that are pre- or early-capitalist is a matter of some debate among the socialists outside of the schools that are willfully blind to the problem.
It is popularly associated with “Communism” because movements that have been successulf in taking control of regimes and which call themselves Communist have invariably been from Leninism or one of its derivatives which favor this model, but it isn't centrally what distinguished Communist schools of thought from other socialist ones, nor is it inherent in Communism at all; the relationship is incidental.
[0] there are some cases, like the PRC, that have “escaped” simple state capitalism for something more like fascist corporatism, but whether that's an improvement over being stuck in state capitalism is debatable. It is certainly better from the point of view of private capitalists, but...
How easy is it to start a business in America (or pick another capitalist economy like Denmark or the UK or Japan or something) versus any communist state that has existed?
We could compare over any given time period the number of businesses started in a capitalist country and compare that with Communist or Socialist states that have existed. To better drive the point home we could compare first-time business owners.
> Socialism means that the workers (which is equivalent to the people at large, since without private ownership of the means of production, the capitalist classes do not exist) owning the means of production and exercising control democratically. There are a large numbers of particular ways that this can be structured.
Ok but since you also live in a democracy you have to live with people like, say, me who prefer a different arrangement. Right?
Democracy and even capitalism allows you without any additional barriers to create the business ownership model that you want. Today, you and 50 people can start a new business and you can all share in the ownership of the means of production. You can grow that business and hire 50 more people and give them an equal share too. 100 people, 1% each.
In fact, we've seen co-ops, public benefit corporations, and other models come into existence and thrive!
> What you are describing as “Communism” is, ideally, state socialism, wherein the people at large control the means of production through robustly democratic state institutions. In practice, though, attempts to implement an economic system around it have actually ended up being, and mostly getting stuck in state capitalism [0], wherein a narrow and self-perpetuating elite controls both the state and, through the state, the means of production and society more generally.
Seems to me that it's possible that "getting stuck in state capitalism" is just the actual end result of the implementation of Communist ideology within the nation state framework. Empirically that's what we've seen so far, and Communists seem to recognize this too and they break down the existing nation state (regardless of form, monarchy or democracy), but people don't want to get rid of all of their stuff (airlines, nice watches, whiskey, you name it) and we just wind up with wars and millions dead.
And in the case of most of the Communist nations that have existed that has been what we have seen. You'd have to forgive one for reading a bit about history, and then looking around a country like Sweden or Australia and saying you know this capitalism and free markets thing isn't so bad. Sent from my iPhone
Its possibly (and my opinion is that this is likely the case) the unavoidable result of attempting to implement nearly pure state socialism.
There is no real reason to think that other approaches to socialism have this problem, and, again, “Communist” denotes a distinction within socialism that is orthogonal to the form of socialism sought but related to utopian end-goal past socialism, and there's even less reason to think that has any bearing on the outcome being discussed.
> And in the case of most of the Communist nations that have existed that has been what we have seen.
Every “Communist” nation has been an attempt to implement Leninism or one of its derivatives (e.g., Maoism) in a state without developed capitalism, notionally attempting to implement state socialism and often overtly accepting state capitalism as an interim measure (the name “state capitalism” literally comes from the USSR’s own description of what it presented as a temporary measure.)
> You'd have to forgive one for reading a bit about history
Yeah, a lot of ignorance is grounded in reading only a little bit of history and mistaking modern mixed economies (an actual application of a mix of market and state socialist ideas to a mature capitalist starting point, largely through the efforts of socialists including Communists, and which has largely displaced the system originally named “capitalism" by its socialist critics) as defining “capitalism" and the failure mode of state capitalism in Lenninist-derived regimes as the sole form of “socialism" or “Communism”, and drawing conclusions about the relative merit of socialism and capitalism from that mistaken set of premises.
The solution to that problem is to read more than a little bit of history.
> There is no real reason to think that other approaches to socialism have this problem, and, again, “Communist” denotes a distinction within socialism that is orthogonal to the form of socialism sought but related to utopian end-goal past socialism, and there's even less reason to think that has any bearing on the outcome being discussed.
But we also have to deal with the world as-is for any ideology being implemented or tried. I'm not sure how you move away from state socialism as you have defined it without destroying the state and existing government first.
As you noted already, attempts to implement Communist ideology or Socialist offshoots regardless of flavor have resulted in the state continuing to exist but a narrow and self-perpetuating elite continues to control both the state and, through the state, the means of production and society more generally.
We've already seen this play out. Equally there's no reason to think that other approaches to socialism, regardless of flavor, will play out any differently unless you're also going to advocate for overthrowing the government and destroying the nation state first. Nobody is going to give up their airlines and watches and whatever other things, so you're going to have to seize those.
> mistaking modern mixed economies... mature capitalist starting point, largely through the efforts of socialists including Communists,
You're just doing the same thing so it's only fair.
> The solution to that problem is to read more than a little bit of history.
Back at you.
No, that's exactly not what I said.
What I said was that regimes that are identified as Communist have done that, but that they have also all been one particular flavor (Leninism and its derivatives, which explicitly and centrally focus on extreme and pure form of state socialism -- there are other common factors in Leninism and its descendants, like vanguardism, that have some relevance here, too, but I didn't mention them before and won't go into them in detail now, because its a bit afield.)
I also mentioned that the modern mixed economy that has displaced capitalism stricto sensu throughout the developed world itself is also a (more incremental, and less narrowly focussed on a particular pole of socialist systemic theory) implementation of socialist (incl. Communist) ideals, but with elements of both market socialism and state socialism, implemented largely in places that (in line with Marxist theories of the prerequisites for moving on to the socialist phase) had mature capitalist systems, democratic institutions, and working class consciousness, and that continuing to incrementally build on the progress already made in the modern mixed economy was the best road forward.
> Equally there's no reason to think that other approaches to socialism, regardless of flavor, will play out any differently
Sure there is, because there are other approaches to socialism playing out differently today. That's a pretty good reason to think that other approaches to socialism play out differently than Leninism and its descendants.
Ah right, we just haven't tried the right style of Communism yet. Fascism works too, we just have to try the right flavor. Benevolent dictators are a thing. I'm not going to give Communism a pass here unless you're willing to also embrace that other ideologies get to have their "we haven't tried the right one yet" examples too.
Instead I think it makes more sense to use empirical evidence.
When Communist systems are implemented, they by and large fail, except China, and to the extent China hasn't failed - the Chinese Miracle [1] the progress that was made to improve the quality of life of the Chinese people stems not from CCP policies and their implementation of Communism (regardless of minor differences around philosophy) but instead from their embrace of capitalism and markets.
> I also mentioned that the modern mixed economy that has displaced capitalism stricto sensu throughout the developed world itself is also a (more incremental, and less narrowly focussed on a particular pole of socialist systemic theory) implementation of socialist (incl. Communist) ideals, but with elements of both market socialism and state socialism, implemented largely in places that (in line with Marxist theories of the prerequisites for moving on to the socialist phase) had mature capitalist systems, democratic institutions, and working class consciousness, and that continuing to incrementally build on the progress already made in the modern mixed economy was the best road forward.
You're just hand-waving the things you agree with or good as being socialist or communist and the things you disagree with as being functions of capitalism. Of course capitalist economies can adopt programs and policies that are run by the government - that doesn't necessarily make them "socialist". Of course, when we spend a few minutes continuing our examination we find that part of the reason that capitalism and markets are so successful is because they are able to embrace policies and procedures that work regardless of whether they adhere to any specific ideology, other than free trade (obviously this is a loaded term, but I mean it in the most basic sense). Capitalist economies allow communist businesses. You can start one today. In a Communist country I can't own the means of production. One is tolerant of new and different ideas (Capitalism), another is not (Communism).
The intolerance and violence of Communist ideology and Socialism to the extent they overlap, is one of the reasons it fails. People are required to adhere to the ideology, whereas in Capitalist systems the best business, the best ideas, the best ideologies tend to win out. Though of course like any system you can get stuck in a local minimum.
When you think back to China this is precisely what we see happen. The Chinese Communist Party, and they are Communists by any definition, cannot allow business owners or political dissidents who speak out to "gain power" and they operate various spy apparatus and other control mechanisms because they can't permit ideology that threatens the existence of the CCP.
Why is that?
You would probably argue that it's because they are implementing state capitalism. Horse shit.
China wasn't a developed capitalist country when the Communists took over [2]. And as I mentioned previously, any attempt at implementing Communism that we have observed requires seizure of the means of production that exist in the real world today: airliners, factories, financial systems - so either you destroy those things to avoid "state capitalism", or the inevitable result of the implementation of Communism on the nation state, as we have observed, is just state fascism or Communism (not capitalism as you attempt to misdirect blame toward) or it requires a destruction of the nation state and the very means of production else they be seized.
In the real world you are stuck in a loop. You can't implement whatever flavor of Communism you'd like to, because it requires people giving up their stuff to the State and nobody wants to do that. You can implement it politically, but then you just end up with state fascism/Communism (honestly they are really two sides of the same coin in practice and we should oppose authoritarian regimes regardless of whether they are fascist or communist or otherwise) because the State has to seize all this stuff from people. But once they seize it, as we have seen, they just keep it for themselves while everyone else has to work without real ownership.
> Sure there is, because there are other approaches to socialism playing out differently today. That's a pretty good reason to think that other approaches to socialism play out differently than Leninism and its descendants.
Is there a socialist country in existence you would point to that we can examine and compare it with, say, Sweden or the United Kingdom or other developed capitalist countries?
[1] We're strangely quick to give the CCP credit for the miracle, which was opening of their markets, but we're blind to the fact that the poverty and mass death that occurred in China was precisely because of the same group. So it's fair to not really give the CCP any credit here.
[2] You said: "Every “Communist” nation has been an attempt to implement Leninism or one of its derivatives (e.g., Maoism) in a state without developed capitalism, notionally attempting to implement state socialism and often overtly accepting state capitalism as an interim measure (the name “state capitalism” literally comes from the USSR’s own description of what it presented as a temporary measure.)"
That's not true - the main one is paying rent. You have to keep selling labor to capitalists in exchange for non-robbery vouchers, which you give right back to capitalists so they won't burgle you and throw you out of your home.
If that were the explanation then you'd need another explanation for declining quality issues in communist countries.
A test claim that some problem caused by "capitalism" should always backed up by a proof that the problem doesn't exist in the many other economic systems the world has tried. If only because this forces people to actually think about the economics instead of just using words to evoke an emotional reaction.
Communism would have its own reasons for declining quality: the lack of an individual profit motive. The hope would be that you would no longer be alienated from the products of your work, but that never came close to happening.
So if you were referring to China... they are the world's foremost capitalists right now. Their products get worse because that's what the market tells them.
The fact that people have historically tried devaluing currency for as long as they've had currency suggests that there's a force that favors attempting to sell inferior goods without decreasing price and that this force predates the industrial revolution.
> So if you were referring to China... they are the world's foremost capitalists right now.
This is the same logic by which communists called socialists who believed in democracy "fascists". It's just an attempt to excommunicate people from the church if their interpretation is different from yours.
I mean, China is second only to to the US in minting new billionaires. Sure, gatekeeping and no true Scotsman are real things, but at the end of the day so are definitions. I don't see any definition of communism that allows for the private acquisition of billions of dollars of private capital.
This is what happened to Dr. Martens (footwear)
to Instant pot (cookware)
to Red Lobster (restaurants)
Endorsed by legislative policy, e.g. tax-deductible interest payments on PE-induced debt.
Jeez. I can see it. Omg.
The difference between cheap rocket launches and cheap clothes in those terms is just where this sweet spot is: there may not be a high demand at all for more failure prone rocket launches, while poorly constructed clothes and appliances have evidently come to seem perfectly acceptable to a lot of consumers.
I challenge that assumption. If whole markets are dominated by companies who have downgraded quality to the minimum, then customers have no choice but to keep buying from you or someone else doing the same thing. If they don’t buy from you because of their most recent bad experience, someone else (who bought their jeans that ripped in a month from someone else) will. The only alternatives would be to make your own clothes or to seek out very specific high-quality artisanal sources. Both options are out of the reach of at least 75% of the market.
A market without perfect information and where consumption isn't necessarily driven by rational needs is ripe for exploitation. Why should a business create higher quality clothes if they can instead manipulate consumers into thinking they're losers for not replacing their wardrobes every year, flood the market with thousands of labels to create brand uncertainty and pay people to "review" them favorably to further make it hard to be an informed consumre? They can can condition consumers into believing that poor quality is acceptable, so why shouldn't they if it ultimately results in higher profits?
It’s interesting when you think of clothes vs appliances though. I don’t think anyone wants to replace their washer every 5 years for fashion, but it’s nearly required. You’re right with clothes though, fashion is geared to promote discarding. I wonder though, wasn’t fashion also a thing in the 1940s? Yet then, clothes still lasted longer.
I'm talking about "perfect information" in the ideal, economic sense: in this case knowledge of every piece of information that could affect a consumption choice. With perfect information you would of course know which brands gave the best value for the money. All brands would necessarily compete by being the brand that gave the most value for the money for different segments of consumers with different ideas of what exactly "the most value" entails. A company that could produce equivalent goods and sell at lower prices would leave competitors in the dust, because you would know about it and have no reason to consider other options.
Of course, the $100 dress that lasts for 10 years might still be less valuable than a $9 dress of similar appearance that lasts for one year in those terms, depending on how much of a cost there is to making the purchase in itself and disposing of the broken dresses.
> I wonder though, wasn’t fashion also a thing in the 1940s? Yet then, clothes still lasted longer.
There certainly was a fashion industry and an awareness of ongoing trends, but I don't think the pace of dissemination and proliferation of new trends was nearly as high then as it is now. I don't know, but I'm betting that the pace picked up when television became a commonplace household item and then again with the advent of social media.
I also don't think they could have produced a $9 1/10 durability alternative to the $100 dress. The difference in production cost between shoddy products and high quality products may have been smaller with the state of the art of the 1940s in terms of production chains, alternative materials, labor, time.
Why do middle class people spend $1000 on a phone that's, for every single purpose they use it for, basically identical to a phone that would cost a fraction as much? Why do low class urban people buy sneakers for hundreds of dollars that, again, for every single purpose they use them for - are essentially identical to some no brand sneakers that would cost a tenth as much? Somehow, at some point, being overtly ripped off became a way of signaling 'class', which is just about the most idiotic thing imaginable. In 'better times' people would look at somebody with a $1000 phone or $300 sneakers as a gullible idiot, and that seems correct to me.
The way people spend money creates a major incentive for companies to rip them off. Our economic system isn't forcing people to behave this way, although mass advertising is probably playing a huge role in maintaining it.
I just made the mistake of buying cheapo flipflops a few weeks ago. One stroll through the park and they are full of gravel stuck in the sole that left holes when I removed it. A few a days I replaced them with 7x as expensive ones. Already walked around 10x as far distance, no sign of issues. A reminder that buying cheap ends up more expensive. I don't need crap in my life and maybe that holds too for the folks you are thinking of?
HN is full of computer nerds who can’t fanthom that computers are as mysterious to normies as sneakers are to the nerds of HN. A lot of people know how to tell apart good and bad footwear - it just isn’t you or your crowd!
Sneaker heads are all about the new nike x yeezy "mchitler edition" collab air joran X's
high end foot wear crowd will drop 700$ on aldens and almost 1000$ on a pair of boots from whites or nicks which will outlive you and your parents.
It's not the same crowd.
For a market to function properly people need to hone in on the great stuff for low prices quadrant, but that is, increasingly frequently, not what's happening. And it's not like some esoteric art - just check reviews. It's not too hard to ignore fake reviews.
Incidentally, this is the exact strategy that VC and Private Equity use. They know how the game is played.
Anyone who believes in capitalism must by necessity believe thatcapital produces part capital and part consumer goods and that the rate of capital production must exceed the rate of capital depreciation. But in the face of stagnating population growth this logic must by necessity result in excess capital, threatening investor profit, to which they respond with drastic anti consumer measures.
People have been calling capitalism "Late Stage" for decades.
Given that the entire history of capitalism spans several centuries, I don't think the term is even necessarily wrong. But it certainly has nothing to do with declining standards of quality - that is a much more recent phenomenon.
You know this phrase originated in the 1930s or early 1940s, yes?
Yes, just as Marx predicted with his law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall (LTRPF):
https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2022/01/22/a-world-ra...
The number of broken HDMI cables (as fraction of cables rented out) is way bigger than for any other connector, suggesting it is completely unsuitable and a broken design.
Whenever I can I go for SDI video, I do. You plug it in and it works. Why "consumer" techology has to be so much more pain than pro stuff makes me wonder.
That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard.
I would think as a plug and play standard for A/V stuff, HDMI is one of the farthest along the "just works" spectrum for the vast majority of people. Occasionally I see a device where there's something stupid like switching to a different HDMI source doesn't switch the audio source and you have to use some dumb OSD menu with many nested levels to get to the audio sources, but again, that's not HDMI's fault.
I have had quite a few broken HDMI cables in lecture halls at uni and in meeting rooms at various work places, but I think that's the reality of any connector that gets plugged and unplugged tens of times per day (especially by people who don't care and don't have to pay for them when they break). They just need to replace the cables more often.
Could I interest you in all the new features you could enable by instead tunneling video over HDMI Ethernet Channel?
I ruled out the cable, display and laptop by swapping components one at a time.
Sure yeah, but I don't buy it. If you create a standard that is too complicated or too feature-creeped to be implemented fully and that lack of full implementation means the fundamental role of the standard breaks down, that standard might be part of the problem.
I too could envision a solution that theoretically works perfectly, and all people are doing it wrong if it doesn't. But such standards have to be made with reality in mind. USB-C is another one of those. Cool – now I have a ton of USB-C cables none of which tell me on the cable what capabilities they have. One can't support USB-power delivery, the other doesn't work with video up to certain resolutions, etc.
I get that more data means higher frequency and that this directly translates to more problems, but nobody (at least no consumer) asked for the complexity of the HDMI spec. We want to connect a cable and see the picture in 99.99% of the cases. If that doesn't work 100% of the times the standard is at fault. The base functionality of the thing needs to be so dumb and so clear that it just works, even if the other side doesn't even know what an EDID is. That was the task and the result is catastrophic failure.
It's not that the cables support varying specs (which I actually have no problem with--you shouldn't have to pay for features you don't need, and some features trade off vs cable length), but that we have no easy way to find them out or test them.
I get that HDMI is higher frequency and smaller faults show earlier, but the plug is just inadequate. The plugs are levered off by the stiff cable, the thickness of the cables would require at least something like a Neutrik-D-norm connector, but they do as if something smaller is ok. By this point I am just glad that the receiving side seems to be sturdier 90% of the times, but by this point I also wonder why the heck we don't just use BNC connectors and coaxial cables..
Grrr...
But there is a reason nobody puts analogical signals in cables anymore. Beyond some bandwidth, the only way to keep cables reasonably priced and thin is to have software error correction.
HDMI is just that - it's the direct evolution of VGA signaling, with each color channel pushing pixels left-to-right top-to-bottom, it even has blanking periods (periods where there's no pixel info transmitted, used to steer back the electron beam on CRTs to the start of the row/column), same EDID format negotiation over I2C, the works.
What makes it crap is the absolute flood of cheap garbage HDMI cables/repeaters/KVMs which barely work even at the best of times and shouldn't be even allowed to be solved, as they are out of spec, but online vendors have flooded their stores with this cheap no-name garbage for some reason.
Unfortunately, the apparent build quality of the cable, or the price mean nothing when trying to get a working one.
HDMI tries to be a video link, an audio hub, a remote‑control bus, and a content‑police checkpoint all at once. Strip out the DRM, kill the optional‑but‑mandatory feature soup, and let the cable do its one job: move bits from A to B. I had Apple laptops not working with 3-digit Pro A/V gear from reputable vendors because HDCP. This is fucking bullshit. By this point I am starting to consider analog video superior to whatever this is supposed to be.
Um, you just hit why HDMI sucks. You have a "default broken" state that is required by the standard.
Look, every single interface could have been an evolution of Ethernet (and mostly ARE--HDMI and USB-C are basically enshittified Ethernet). But they weren't because everybody wants to put their fingers in the pie and take out a chunk for profit by being a rent-seeking middleman.
It is not only HDMI; many other common things are too complicated (than they should be) and often have other problems too (you mention some of them, such as HDCP, but there is many more problem than that).
(Someone else wrote: "The sad fact of the matter is that people play politics with standards to gain commercial advantage, and the result is that end users suffer the consequences. This is the case with character encoding for computer systems, and it is even more the case with HDTV.")
From the consumer perspective, two cables are more complicated.
Recently I dusted off this project and bought myself a new FPGA board, with a HDMI output. Getting that thing to work was a nightmare. Not only did I have to configure the HDMI transciever, I had to build proper EDID support, and get I2C to cooperate, and get the timing of the signals exactly right. And even then, out of the 5 screens I could get my hands on, only 2 worked, one of which would inexplicably go to sleep despite displaying video on the screen.
Getting HDMI working was more painful and took about 10x as long as the rest of the original project did, and even then, it was a partial success.
The interesting thing about it was that we had very little RAM but the FPGA was quite fast, meaning instead of a framebuffer we scanned out tiles and sprites to the scanline at realtime, at a relatively high resolution (1024x768).
This combined with the low color depth (the 'DAC' was a resistor ladder per color channel, giving us 2 bits per channel, or 6 bits in total), meant we had that dithered, Transport Tycoon-y look, with tilemaps and animaton, so it looked quite okay by the standards of 2d games.
I think even that is more than it should be. I had made up my own kind of video connection (which is not implemented yet), which only has video (the audio is a separate cable, with balanced analog audio, although the standard arrangement of the connectors is supposed to be defined so that you can clip them together when wanted and unclip them if you want to move them separately), and does not negotiate the resolution (for several reasons).
> Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image.
At least a part of that is a problem with the smart TV (which has many other problems, too) rather than with HDMI itself, although HDMI also has many problems.
SDI is better in some ways, but it is not good enough either, I think.
People still buy it because it's digital so it must be better.
I have dealt with a pregnancy test only once in my life, and that was in acting as an interpreter (me: English, wife: Chinese and some English, couple: Chinese, very little English. Not easy!) Reading the instructions is one thing, but figuring out whether the result was positive was another matter. (Although I suspect it was an edge case--the woman's period showed up soon thereafter, I suspect reality was a very early miscarriage and the result was about at the dividing line.)
Every manufacturer in the world has a different opinion as to what those letters mean.
It’s an entirely different problem when I buy two pairs of presumably the same pair of jeans in the same style and size yet one can barely be buttoned up and the other requires a belt at all times.
Finding knit caps for my pumpkin sized head is challenging. I'd find a good fit but then couldn't reorder the same item.
I stumbled onto the notion of selecting by weight instead of the declared size. Success!
More recently, there was a HN thread about buying good jeans. I then noticed the better quality mfgs also include the fabric's weight in the item's blurb. Which I then used to inform my foraging.
The trick? The company in question is Belleville, and they make boots for the US military; they just also happen to be good hiking boots. I suspect that people in charge of logistics as DoD don't like it when things suddenly change, which would explain why they still have the same model still going for 25+ years, and why the sizes and everything else stays the same.
Men will buy a shirt and wear it until its seams break in 2-10 years.
Women will buy blouses or dresses with cuts/colors that only work in certain seasons to be worn for a specific occasion that won’t come to pass again soon.
Now where women have more trouble is just in the utility work wear shopping space because that clothing is utilized frequently and until it fails.
Normies just don’t know about it cus denim heads are autistic.
Normies do NOT know about selvedge/raw denim at all.
Now the quality is objectively bad and things get holes right away or are not even tailored correctly, but hey $7 billion wasn’t enough for Chip Wilson so he is going to keep sucking the brand dry.
You see similar in NYC with fast casual / quick service type places that scale from 2-3 locations into a national chain. Stuff becomes less handmade, less fresh, ingredient quality goes down, all the care&attention gets optimized away into a sad bowl of slop.
I sometimes wonder how long it is before open-source manufacturing can fill the gap.
For a long time it’s been the case that it’s prohibitively expensive to do bespoke manufacturing using eg 3D printing and CAD lathes, vs. the cost attainable using mass manufacturing.
But perhaps a “made in America” option that can only compete on quality, not on price, could focus on “bring your own design” and fabricating nice, durable, repairable designs that apparently can’t be found elsewhere.
I guess the problem is that modern products need quite complex integrated electronics which are hard to build in an OSS paradigm.
The official response of the CFO was that the quality can't be declining that much because people aren't quitting an an accelerating rate.
This is the same phenomenon as your suspicion. There's some metric (e.g. people keep buying our widgets) and you stress test demand for it by making it cheaper to produce. If demand holds up there's no problem from the company's perspective.
From the consumer's perspective, every project is doing this and the entire world is declining in quality but prices aren't going down.
> ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it depends on the preferences of each consumer.
For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization believed that there WAS an objective notion of quality (i.e. value). The idea that these things are purely subjective is a very recent concept in human history.
In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead, about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings, just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is a very different belief from "people prefer some things over others". In a world that only recognizes what it can measure, the idea that value is subjective reduces to "people do some things and not other things", and _any_ action which can reliably be motivated - whether that's having babies or getting divorced, losing weight or watching porn, eating healthy or eating junk food - _all_ that our economy cares about is, "can you reliably produce that outcome at scale." This is all a natural consequence of the idea that value isn't real. People can't be wrong in what they want, and what they want is revealed in what they do. Therefore, literally all that matters is, can you motivate some kind of action - whatever that action is? If you can, you're 'adding value.' Motivating people to go out and commit crimes could itself, be valuable - if you were, say, the operator of a private prison. As long as your motivational technique isn't too direct and obvious, it's profitable for you. You're creating demand for business!
What would the world look like if value were _real_, we could sense it intuitively, but we could not measure it, and had persuaded ourselves it were entirely subjective? I think it would look exactly as it does now: a prevailing sense that quality is declining. We would observe drops in numerous large-scale metrics like "does humanity value life enough to create more humanity", while metrics like "time people spend doing measurable things" would go way up, along with a creeping sense that something was deeply wrong.
If value _were_ purely subjective, I would have expected that we'd have locked into some functioning propaganda loop by now. If value is purely subject, and there's no hardwired human nature to value some outcomes over others, What would be better for the economy than convincing everyone that EVERYTHING IS AWESOME all the time?
I am faced with a choice, do I join the problem and go for fast fashion crap or do I risk being burned again? Who do I believe when I’m researching quality? Google and Reddit have long since been astroturfed and small scale forums are dead.
As for reputable brands, we may soon need version numbers for both products and companies, based on factors like supply chains, regulation, trade policy, corporate management, leadership or ownership (e.g. PE) changes. 2019 jeans from "Acme Corp v10" may be quite different from 2026 jeans from "Acme Corp v12".
For example, I buy at Costco first, and if that doesn’t work, I seek higher quality. But I also don’t expect clothes to last many, many years.
I can find a literal 21 oz unrippable insane heavy weight selvedge denim pants for less than 200, and it’ll be made in America of Japanese materials.
Most Americans are simply stupid when they buy clothes. They don’t do research and they make extremely suboptimal purchases by trusting big brands.
Just checked: https://bravestarselvage.com/collections/heavyweight-selvage...
168 USD for jeans so strong and thick they feel like armor. You will never wear out of these jeans or rip them.
They still last me at least a couple years. And I don’t have to trust that the manufacturer made them well enough to last 7+ years for me to break even.
Most clothes are incredible value, and even with a few duds in the mix, it's way better (for my wallet, and the environment) than buying new at retail.
You need to trust that the manufacturer didn't cheap out in ways that could negatively impact your health.
From https://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/fashion-beauty/article/319092...
"Experts said Shein is not a unique case. Clothes from many large clothing brands like Lululemon, Old Navy, and REI have been found to contain toxic chemicals."
Selvedge Denim from made in america/japan brands (i.e. brave star, gustin, naked and famous, iron heart, etc) is made using 1940s machines/techniques using (usually) 100% cotton denim. No toxic chemicals.
My jeans are better than yours.
I have spent a considerable amount of time researching better, more durable pants and this is the first time I've heard about this company. So thank you for that!
Also, the knowledge needed to differentiate has been lost by many, and suppressed given the economic disadvantage of quality vs cheap in a money-printing economy.
Unless you have a fairly good knowledge of sewing, construction, chemicals/materials, you end up getting things that look the same but aren't the same.
With Jeans, most of the durability came from the weave with extra strength from rivets at the stress points in the fabric and the properly locked-off stitching, at the seams; which a lot of industrial machining can't duplicate at the same cost (that's why you get the unraveling with those stitches using 4 threads at once). Then there is the synthetic fibers that are mixed in for flexibility/comfort that become stressed or dissolve upon exposure to detergents, and the use of low-quality cotton thread, or full synthetics and sometimes just glue to bind the seams instead of nylon/silk (both extremely strong).
You won't find any company offering Jeans that last more than a year or so, and any fraying near the belt loops, or main seam lines is a sign of poor worksmanship. I've had Walmart jeans, both the offbrand, and triple price regular brand rip, belt loops break, seams show signs of unraveling within 20 minutes of first use (brand new).
I literally just linked to a pair of jeans that you will try and fail to kill over a lifetime of use for most people.
If you still need bigger, Naked and Famous make 32 oz and 40oz, but the heavy denim crowd has bought them all and it's hard to find them right now.
Trying to teach HN how to buy high quality clothes is like talking to a brick wall.
This is 25 oz from the same brand: https://bravestarselvage.com/collections/heavyweight-selvage...
Quoting their description: "Selvage denim of this weight and caliber are rare, expensive and very difficult to manufacture here in USA due to the sheer weight, thickness of the yarn and time factor involved in slowing down the production line.
Each sewing operation has to be considered and necessary adjustments need to be made to accommodate the weight. Our sewing operators are required to wear safety goggles during the sewing process due the frequent exploding needles which can be quite dangerous. Needless to say it's extremely time consuming due to the half speed at which the operations can be accomplished which makes it a very labor intensive production process. "
I'd like to see you kill that in a year, or 10.
I found some 22 oz from some Indonesian selvedge company for 124 USD: https://wingmandenim.com/product/zero-zeke-22oz/
Japanese materials.
You just don't know how to buy jeans.
22oz Selvedge has its issues, and under heavy use would last 4 or 5 years given societal constraints (i.e. you don't walk around in stinky clothes multiple days in a row).
At ~$124 + tariff, we're looking at significantly more for a five year period or a comparable minimum of $40/yr replacement.
Comparable products can be found with a replacement every year for that price, often better than that price, if one knows where to look. Its not just the material that is important, its the aggregate of many factors.
Most people don't buy quality for quality's sake.
The value of quality is derived by the benefit to human action, at least in a functioning market where no money-lenders without reserve have caused havoc; and when compared against similar alternative opportunities.
You generally don't buy work pants and care about the country of origin insofar as the functional quality remains the same.
You care about the effective use, and the cost in exchange. Demand isn't need, its the subset of need, who have the money and are willing to make the exchange and buy this over other comparable products at a specific price.
Given alternatives all things being equal with regard to effective use during a period of time, demand goes to the lower priced item or inferior good which serves the need at the lowest cost. (https://austrianeconomics.substack.com/p/the-subjective-theo...)
You don't seem to understand how economics works. I can understand the increased labor requirements, and the love of a craft, but it needs to make economic sense when you talk about buyers and sellers. Anything else is just branding/hype/marketing meant to mislead from the underlying important factors.
> You just don't know how to buy jeans.
I do, and in doing so it must make real economic sense (rationally), not following blindly to the mistakes of Keynes and other misleading variants or factors.
Sigh. Unfortunately, this has become the de-facto response to intelligent debate and conversation, where the person who says it, was being disingenuous from the start and where they can poke no holes in what was being said.
Its a capitulation and worse instead of saying "I disagree", and walking away in good faith, the person refuses to recognize the other person's humanity, and uses this more like an invective under social coercion and mental compulsion, in other words a false accusation with no proof, as a bully; and you won't find proof because what I said is organic, and the reasoning is sound.
I'm a person, and your absurd reality is not my monkey or circus.
That behavior is at the level of a toddler throwing a tantrum when play-acting fails. Overall, its quite a twisted and evil thing to do when you are not a toddler.
Personally, I don't get the impetus to do this because it doesn't matter that you are wrong in a conversation, or hold a different opinion; the simple saying speaks volumes about the person saying it.
You should be aware that making the choice and taking the action, towards willful blindness of evil acts, is how people become evil people.
They self-violate themselves repeatedly through fallacy (wrath), and other deadly sins (sloth=complacency ...), eventually accepting evil into their hearts themselves, where they no longer resist such choices and repeat such actions until someone stops them.
Denial of existence is an evil thing to do. Its what gaslighters, psychopaths, and worse engage in regularly, and they victimize others through such bullying/coercion. When you do such things, you communicate to everyone "I'm part of that group".
Ultimately, it shows a core weakness of a destructive person, just waiting for the right opportunity and circumstance to harm others, with the convenient willful lie "oh I didn't know", you didn't bother to know; and lip service matters not.
Its sad when people do this, because they don't realize what they are actually communicating by doing it; the accusation is easily proven false, because chain of reasoning isn't good enough, and any middle school student can understand reading comprehension, and quirks of writing competently, enough to see the human reasoning followed consistently.
Something AI doesn't "delve" to do. /s
I would say/warn that you might consider the specific things that action says about you, and where your behavior leads you; hopefully before the next time you think about throwing that around as an invective, but I doubt you will, if your previous pattern of behavior is an indicator.
Objective measure trumps subjective every time a conflict arises, and you seem to have lost yourself in subjective experience, which coupled with AI use leads to dangerous delusion given the right time, and circumstance.
As an important parallel, you might consider why doctor's or psychiatrists ask certain questions like what year is it, who is the president etc, and what it means when your answer doesn't match objective reality in such cases.
The professionals do this to check your mental status, when they suspect dementia, alzheimers, schizophrenia and other cognitive limiting issues may be present.
If you use AI regularly, you might want to think about dialing it back. Its cooking your brain.
If you told those professional's in response, "Nice chat-GPT response", the assumption would be they commit you to a facility or hold for observation.
Who would be around to listen, or want to listen to what someone who needs to be at those places has to say. Not the general public certainly, the people who are in those places don't have a firm grip on reality.
The phrase speaks most about the person saying it when it is false, and it is false here, and the fact that you don't have sufficient reading comprehension, or have conflated good writing skills to AI, enough to realize that, is why experts on AI worry about people using and being exposed to AI.
You might find the follow of value, especially the discussion about AI and reality in the latter.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/ai-therapy-bots-fuel-delu...
You can't buy anything second hand, but jeans you can.
A new pair of Levi’s are $20 at walmart and $80 everywhere else (before recent inflation).
In theory, the $80 pair matches their previous quality, but in practice, they were forced to chase profitability with high-volume $20 jeans, so it’s all outsourced to the same overseas factories. The $80 pair are also crap being produced for sustenance wages, but with slightly thicker denim.
This is absolutely intentional, and is the cornerstone of modern retail in the US. Monopoly retailers drove prices below production wages or environmental impact, and their profit is driven by by the frequency with which stuff breaks and is replaced.
It all relies on information asymmetry. Look at the market for grifters discussion on HN yesterday. It talks about the economics of targeted advertising, but similar games are played by name brands. For instance most appliance manufacturers own many brands, and rotate which brand is garbage in a given year. That constantly tricks people into buying garbage from a “reputable” brand.
https://reclaimdemocracy.org/walmart-product-quality-durabil...
Even more simply put: what is the worst version of the product that people are willing to buy?
There is no incentive to create long-term value when you can cost-optimize your brand into the garbage while creating large short term profits from which they can pay themselves outrageous bonuses. It's an easy playbook and there is no shortage of people willing to trade their reputation for a few hundred million.
Our economy has become almost entirely a race to the bottom.
1. the stripper, designed for a minimum price that will draw people into the showroom
2. the luxe, which has every feature, designed for the people who don't care about the price
3. the midrange, which is what most people wind up buying
This strategy maximizes the profit that can be made. You'll see it from refrigerators to cars.
For example with refrigerators you see integrated touch screen, viewing windows, and all kinds of esoteric features.
But the core of the product, the compressor and overall cooling system is not actually any better. In fact, looking at reviews shows that those parts are often garbage quality too.
So it fails at the core job of keeping your food cold, and the added features are just more things to fail as well meaning that buying the more expensive products are generally a lose-lose situation.
https://www.samsung.com/us/home-appliances/all-in-one-washer...
[x] I got tired of following footnote disclaimers. Note the headline 20-year warranty and $2,200 price tags are blatant lies. The two year warranty below that claim has footnotes that references more off page disclaimers. When we had a samsung appliance die, we found the actual warranty was only 90 days.
Even worse, there are zero repair companies willing to touch samsung garbage in our area because it’s impossible to debug issues. So, even with their samsung care package, you’re still throwing this thing out in a few years.
I’ve also attempted to call their customer support. It makes the IRS call center seem prompt.
Really - I would like to know how you came to purchase decision :)
I have the cheapest Costco drier. It’s fine, but I do have to keep an eye on it.
Value has always been subjective, people in previous eras simply didn’t have the tools or technology to figure it out as quickly as today.
For example, IKEA furniture does 99% of the job for 90% of the people at less than 50% of the price of what was previously known as “quality” furniture.
The amount of money IKEA has saved me afforded multiple vacations, plus it is easier to move. So is it lower “value”?
Lots of people like to gripe about lower quality houses today. But I don’t want a house that lasts 500 years. I want a house that I can easily modify or repair that lets wireless signals through the wall, with drywall, wood studs, PEX piping, etc. And it will be a lot cheaper than a house built with masonry.
What you’re saying is that low quality furniture is worth it to you for various reasons.
To the contrary, you are using “quality” to mean something else; maybe you could elaborate on what “quality” is to you, what characteristics make something “high quality”, and why the categories you’ve used to measure quality are the “right ones”.
There is a philosophy that value (including reality) is subjective and that all that matters is making people act. That's quite explicitly the philosophy of Marx. It's in strong contrast to the "philosophical bedrock of western civilization", which is the search for objective truth and objective reality. Whatever one thinks of Marx's idea that objective reality is a middle class fiction, I don't think people would agree that those ideas are associated with the elite of Western civilization. Quite the opposite.
I think what you're ultimately referring to is the use of ordinal utility functions by economists. It's not clear how to write equations in economics where each person's preferences are accurately expressed in well-behaved value-agnostic units. You could try using money, but not everyone values having a lot of money. And even if they did, which currency? Dollars? Euros? Gold? Bitcoin?
Because utility functions are hard to get right theoretically, Paul Samuelson proposed trying to measure them empirically by revealed preference. There are lots of things wrong with this from an academic perspective and it's reasonable to have concerns about the long-term effects if this is adopted for entire economies. But it didn't start until 1938 and it's certainly not a philosophical bedrock of Western civilization. More like a desperate hack.
> we can't measure feelings
We have several ways of measuring feelings, and we use them regularly. But you can't build a utility theory based literally on current feelings. Otherwise opium would have nearly infinite objective value. You want to use something that integrates over time, like life satisfaction. Or something that measures the current feeling, change in feeling, and integral over feeling like a PID controller. But even if you could get the measurements right, doing all the measurements for all 8.2 billion people in real time would be impossible right now. So it's not clear what the right theory is.
I'm perhaps willing to grant "all that matters is making people act" in the sense that he was far more thoroughly a revolutionist than a scientist.
But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island: he was steeped (and elements of his thought remain visible) in a diverse intellectual tradition which is by no means a monolith.
This is value in the sense of "price". The labor theory of value was from Adam Smith and Ricardo rather than something Marx contributed.
> Substituting subjective theories takes the air out of the analysis, doesn't it?
You're right that this is an apparent contradiction. Technically, Marx was making a prophecy about an upcoming revolution as being a historical inevitability. And when he was being more rigorous he was careful to clarify that this was a statement about historical inevitability (like manifest destiny) rather than something he thought was "good".
But many people have taken this to be a contradiction. Here's an essay from Michael Rosen defending the claim that his critique of morality isn't inconsistent with his condemnation of people's behaviors [0].
Marx's attitude toward morality is discussed on page 7. The basic gist is that morality claims to be objective, but it's really, to quote Rosen, "particular and relative to the society in question".
Nowadays people sympathetic to his approach paraphrase these ideas by saying that reality and morality are "socially constructed."
> But your antipodal impression of Marx and "Western thought" misses the many strands which make up the latter, as well as the fact that he was no island
This is a reasonable claim and one that has also been well-discussed. My personal take is that Marx critiqued and rejected the Enlightenment, which he saw as serving the interests of the middle class.
I group him with Rousseau and many German philosophers of his time as being overly influenced by the Romantic movement and longing for a return to a primitive way of life.
Western thought has been firmly in the direction of the Enlightenment, engineering, and science. And the romantics have generally been a conservative counter culture wanting to return to a simpler time.
[0] https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/michaelrosen/files/the_mar...
The most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected.
His basic argument is that it doesn't make sense to talk about an objective materialist universe. That point of view leads to middle class society. His own point of view isn't really coherent, but it's essentially that humans create the objective world and truth through interacting with it.
To me it feels like what he's trying to do is try to take German idealism and apply it to groups of people rather than single people. Conceptually you get a sort of Cartesian solipsism at the social scale. But you can read it and you may get a different take away from it.
One must have a very warped understanding of Marx to claim he didn't advocate for materialism. Are you unfamiliar with his dialectical/historical materialism?
Materialism is the view that everything is fundamentally matter. Historical materialism is almost the opposite. It's the idea that there's some supernatural force guiding human history.
To quote Bertrand Russell:
> His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history independently of human volitions, is mere mythology.
Modern science disagrees:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83817782-determined
Warning: ego might get bruised
The people who seem to hate/misrepresent him tend to be capitalists, philosophers, religious types, and generally egotistical "individualist" types.
Another quibble: I don't think Marx thought of it as supernatural in our sense of the latter; rather his sense of the natural (like that of many of his contemporaries) had an element of what we might call the supernatural, located in a certain directedness or inevitability.
I guess where you see Marx as an early advocate of modern relativisms, I read him as deeply bound up in positivisms pervasive at the time. Maybe these are not contradictory positions. Curious to hear your thoughts.
But you're right to raise the question. A closely related question is: "If Marx thought the revolution was inevitable, then why did he feel the need to advocate for it?". You can also ask this about any sort of prophecy: manifest destiny, the second coming of Jesus, the singularity, etc. There's of course a literature on this, e.g. [0].
But people do in fact hold both views simultaneously. A famous example is Karl Rove, unintentionally echoing Marx's ideas:
> We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
In other words, we construct reality and it's inevitable that we construct reality. Both historical inevitability and social construction in the same thought.
> I don't think Marx thought of it as supernatural in our sense of the latter
I doubt he did either, but it's supernatural in the literal sense. It's not entailed by the collection of physical laws. In fact his theory is empirically false, but even if it wasn't, the existence of a causal force in history requires an additional assumption outside of natural science. Whereas other authors had previously talked metaphorically of a spirit of force in history (e.g. the invisible hand) Marx tried to turn it into a real force the way the ancients thought of gods intervening in human affairs.
[0] "Historical inevitability and human agency in Marxism" https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspa.1986...
Materialism is an extraordinarily overloaded word/concept.
OP's proposing an idiosyncratic take on Marx's reading of one of his main influences seems rather more in the dialectical spirit than a no true Scotsman (no true Marxist? ;) flung without substantiation. No offense.
Given Marx was famously "not a Marxist", and given the laboriousness/verbosity of his writing, and his tendency to change his mind over time, you could argue he had merely the first in a long lineage of warped understandings of himself.
Misrepresenting words out of context to make a point isn't a great approach.
http://isocracy.org/content/karl-marx-i-am-not-marxist
https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings-and-interpret...
Those are ideas are much more popular on, say, Harvard's campus and among its professoriate, than are the ideas that some things are objectively better than others, and that searching for truth is more important than social justice or people's feelings or racial equality or ending the patriarchy or reducing global warming etc etc. Witness, e.g. the uproar over anyone saying "men and women are different and those differences lead to different preferences which then affect the distribution of genders in different career tracks." That is a claim about objective reality, rooted in biology, measurable. It is, if you care about evidence more than feelings - most likely true. And yet it's deeply offensive to most people who work in an office. It doesn't matter whether or not it _might_ be true - what matters is how people feel about it. That's what i'm referring to as the bedrock.
The bedrock you're referring to _was_ the bedrock, of an older civilization that shared the same name as our own. Western civilization, today, is a distant relative of what it used to be 100 years ago. The bedrock I'm referring to was laid at the start of the 20th century, by the managerial class of the time, who wanted more power and authority, as elites always do. Our civilization today is as alien to that of the late 19th century americans as, say, the ancient romans were to the late-stage byzantines. There's a lineage relationship, for sure - but the mores, values, and guiding concepts are so radically different that it's properly conceptualized as a fundamentally different civilization, even if they both called themselves 'romans'.
(Side note: I was looking at your comment history and it appears that most of your comments are down-voted, somebody has an axe to grind)
Parent's comments are months apart. What sort of somebody did you have in mind?
Of note, parent's tag is "ask me anything and i will probably give you something new to think about." This is a bold promise.
The problem with objective theories of value is that they are demonstrably wrong. If you rent a small apartment and have two washing machines, one of them has negative value to you, people often give those away; try explaining that with objective value.
And yes, people's values do align to a very large extent.
Basically, when there are many axes of quality, the pareto frontier gets very large and very complex and no one position on it is inherently better than another, even if everyone universally agrees which direction is "better" on every individual axis.
I'd suggest if you are limited on time that you read Hazlitt. Economics in One Lesson. You seem to conflate need for demand in your examples. The two are not the same.
Need includes anyone who could benefit/find valuable from the use of something, the value being derived from productive human action.
Demand in reality includes only the people who would make an actual exchange at a specific price point. The former is a superset of the latter.
You end up misleading others, and going into delusional territory when you ignore this nuance.
> ...In the west, and places influenced by it - most elites come to believe that value is purely subjective. We talk, instead, about people's _preferences_ - but we can't measure feelings, just actions. "Some things are more valuable than others" is a very different belief from "people prefer some things over others".
When it comes to functionnal products, my take is this is the rational we give because it is impossible to take down. What I think it really mean is "This is not me who wants it, it's them". It is the same argument as "I do it because if I don't do it, someone else will" when doing something illegal or immoral.
This is why I'm inclined to believe when your argument is this empty you know what you are doing. This is how you end up inventing "customer personas" and asking your consumer themselves why they buy your product.
https://therightstuff.medium.com/the-trust-thermocline-expla...
There is an objective perspective. You might want to read Hazlitt, Economics in one lesson.
I'm also worried it's all survivorship bias. If you acquired 100 items in 2010 and 5 of them lasted until 2025, it's hard to say if the 5 surviving would be the same 5 from another household or if the items you still have were all on the hardier end of that particular items quality distribution. Another house with 100 items from 2010 will have a different 5 remaining in 2025. If that's the case, the chance you'd buy those 5 again and even have 3 with the same 15 year life span is (1/20)^3 (I think. is that math right?)
This comes up for me most often with running shoes. By the time the model shoe I've loved wears out, it'll be out of production and the n+1 iteration re-balanced whatever decisions to make the shoe a worse-for-me fit.
(It's tempting to think the big-sneaker cabal conspires to ensure consumers are perceptually exploring options)
My experience with clothing kind of suggests it's not just survivorship bias. I once had a pair of pants that lasted maybe 10 years or so with regular washing, each use (yes I know, not ideal, I don't do that anymore), and I had to replace them. When I ordered a new pair, from the same company, same model, I noticed the new ones didn't last nearly as long, maybe 2 years, and seemed thinner. I emailed the company about this, and they acknowledged that they had made the fabric thinner, and even gave me the old and new fabric densities. I think clothing is one area where new brands have come in to partially move the needle back toward quality a teeny weeny bit, but experiences like that, tracking the actual material quality of the same products over time, leads me to conclude it's not always just random survivorship bias.
Today most of my work goes towards making something that already exists cheaper. Not to pass on the savings to the customer of course, but to make the company's books look better and to make investors happier.
Mine is that a Billy bookcase that I bought from Ikea 25 years ago is must stronger and more stable than a Billy bookcase I bought from Ikea 5 years ago.
And, when looking at what Ikea is selling in 2025 as a Billy bookcase, it's worse yet again.
But, with the cost of living increasing, companies have to cut corners to keep pricing down.
I wonder where the inflection point is where used items become more valuable than the new items being made at current quality levels, including degradation due to age.
When Ikea first expanded beyond Scandinavia, it was the 'fast fashion' of furniture: beautiful design, but sometimes made of particleboard or polyurethane foam.
There's nothing unusual about that today.
Assuming a product introduced 25 years ago has exactly the same role in the lineup today sounds crazy to me TBH.
Quality of the basic model Maytag washer I bought 25 years ago versus one today. Quality of a Reese's cup I bought 25 years ago versus one today. Quality of Levi's I bought 25 years ago versus a pair today. Quality of the Billy that I bought 25 years ago versus today.
Quality of the Billy HAS declined.
From there we can't generalize to any other product without acknowledging IKEA's internal decision process or their vision for Billy across the years.
To parent's point
> where the inflection point is where used items become more valuable than the new items being made at current quality levels, including degradation due to age.
Buying the actual modern equivalent of what Billy was 25 years ago answers that question.
A purely rational and self-interested (i.e. unencumbered by moral sentiment or empathy) economic agent would, in this case, calculate the longest time period a brand could be sustained at the highest price and the lowest production cost, before the brand is lost. If the ROI during that period justifies the investment, such an agent would execute the strategy.
And even if they/we were purely rational, there's the intractable problem of measuring the cost of future cleanups stretching into forever.
Plus the danger (certainty) of corporations paying out their current executives and then declaring bankruptcy.
So is a "purely rational economic agent". Nothing about it is real. It's a model.
Think of the LED bulb. It would make more sense for the government to manage the few resources needed and for them to maximize the lifecycle of a lightbulb.
I think the fundamental problem here is that nobody trusts brands anymore because we have been trained by strategies like market segmentation and private equity cost cutting that the vast majority of brands don't consistently indicate quality. That product A could be fine and a very similar-looking product B could be horrible, and any company or even product could become shit at any moment. Breyers in the US is a great example - they sell real (though still watery) ice cream in the cartons that say "naturals," and all the other very similar looking cartons are full of crap artificial frozen dairy dessert. They had a very strong brand, and they decided it was time to cash out that brand goodwill by cheaping out, but deceptively so they could ride it out for a few decades, at which point who cares?
This has led to a situation where companies don't make any attempt anymore to gain a reputation for the quality of their products, because it's futile to convince the public that they can trust you. And also, they have to compete much more equally with alphabet soup brands on Amazon making the absolute cheapest version of products at the lowest margins (and labor costs). So why would anyone make a better lightbulb that no one will buy because it's $2 more expensive?
Absent boom-bust, and the related fraud/true-up that happens cyclically, you have sustained growth mirroring population growth, without the chaotic whipsaw, as well as other factors of general wear and tear that make sustain demand.
Less cost, and cost that follows real stable value without distortion, leads to more production over time, not less. Boom bust dynamics cause a slight move forward, followed my two steps back; repeatedly, until your out of steps.
In such older economies, you don't lose out such monumental opportunity cost and related resources to fraud or people who sit on their hands. Opportunity cost is immeasurable without a reference, so you don't know what you lose, or what could have been.
> Think of the LED bulb. It would make more sense for the government to manage the few resources needed...
Honestly, seeing this rhetoric makes you sound like a shill peddling propaganda towards centralization as a solution, which includes both fascism and communism (statism for both), while ignoring the established failures of such systems.
I don't mean to be critical of what you have to say, but you come off as really ignorant, or deliberately misleading.
If you can only run on the same path on a circle, do you really think you'll eventually get to where you want to go when that point is not on the circle?
I have no idea why you're claiming that. What should I read?
But you're not going to get rid of business cycles by not having 2% inflation or whatever, and those cycles don't seem strong enough to impact product lifetimes all that much. "chaotic whipsaw" is a big exaggeration.
Hazlitt (Economics in 1 lesson), Mises (Human Action/Money and the Theory of Credit), Austrian Business Cycle Theory, Thomas Jefferson's letters to Thomas Cooper, Carl Menger (SVT) to start.
Adam Smith provides the requirements for factors and producers to operate in a market, also describing markets pre-fiat in a five volume set. The observations made are invaluable when comparing against the non-reserve modern monetary mechanics where they departed from fractional reserve in 2020 under Basel3.
In terms of actual monetary debasement/inflation, going back to the unobscured calculations before manipulations began occuring, its been much higher than 2% YOY, and the interest rates have been manipulated to a point where the delayed dynamics are in full swing and can't be prevented. Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio/Bridgewater Associates provides useful data, but his conclusions are rose-tinted.
The objective point of failure to non-market socialism from money-printing is where national outflows exceed inflows in debt growth to gdp, and in the private debt market that's likely already occurred we have a few years yet before another true-up. It gets to that point through concentration of business which concentrates bad decisions, and legitimate entities can't compete with slave labor, eventually leading to hyper-inflation then to deflation, or directly to deflation. Damned on both sides, with the safe shifting path dependent on lagging indicators amid chaos.
Each boom bust cycle started small on adoption to fiat, but has increased exponentially every 10 years where the banks are forced to crisis from bad investments, and seeking bailout during a true-up. Penn Station Bailout (1970s), Savings & Loan Crisis (1980s), Dotcom Bust (2000), Lehman CDOs 2008, the next will be the CDO equivalent for business (but that bubble hasn't burst yet) QE 2010-2022? (pure money printing to those banks), etc.
There is a third-party in the economic process, the money-lenders friend who receives preferential rates, allowing them to lower prices below cost to drive businesses out of business where leveraged buyouts aren't an option.
You are right 2% isn't sufficient by itself to cause whipsaws. Its not just business in isolation, its the entire monetary cycle in aggregate.
What about the petrodollar abandonment, and the loss of foreign demand for a pool of money we printed up to meet that demand over 50 years. Where's it go? What about paper warrants of commodities, where the ratio is now greater than 300 non-existent paper: 1 physical, where everyone starts requiring physical delivery (taking it out of the vault). Synthetic shares through options contracts.
The deficit spending of the government, or unfunded liabilities (social security), where the debt on that to pass the budget must be almost completely borrowed (and the associated interest rate risk).
Lets not forget the swap lines between other central banks and ours, and the carry trades happening, or the preferential swaps of existing already purchased treasuries for existing current rate treasuries 1:1 (no discount); blackrock and others.
One thing, would slow it down, but the magnitude of each of these things fuels it moving forward chaotically as it unwinds; and people don't have the capital to draw from anymore because its been systematically debased for decades.
Keynes has historically failed to properly account for the business cycle under fiat; a notable recent example being the housing crisis.
Real markets require money meeting 3 properties (stable store of value...), adversarial independent decision-making based on a cost constraint, and working visible price discovery to function (aka economic calculation), with little regulation/interference.
When these can't happen with money-printing, distortions naturally occur chaotically starting with the first rung of spending from that bank as a small blip, and growing to tsunami heights. Lets not forget what that AI may zero out most white-collar jobs, already having profound disruption in the factor markets, which whipsaw to the producer markets in a spiral.
You may want to also read about the economic history of Argentina and how Milei turned everything around with almost 100 years of poverty caused by the same policies we have been doing, and how he made such giant strides to fixing it within 1 year; by firing the parasites, removing the regulations, and letting the market do its thing.
State-controlled entities cooperate because they depend on the debt for continued existence, however indirect/laundered it came to them it originated in money-printing, and its not given to them for free; coercion and malign influence is well documented in many areas related to this. (i.e. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which may or may not be fictional; but the details match up, some of which weren't validated until recent releases.
I'd say you have quite a bit of reading ahead of you.
The modern understanding of the boom bust bailout cycle is included in modern definitions, but this only occurred once non-reserve fiat was adopted; even back in Thomas Jefferson's day; the failures occurred when more was printed than was actually there and distortions aggregated until crisis. We're specifically talking about the over-subscription, mania, and bust that follows all money printing.
Its impossible to rationally differentiate without having a good detailed reference which is why Adam Smith's 5 volume set (most sets ignore volume 5 but they shouldn't), and Thomas Jefferson's/Coopers related letters are also useful.
Non-reserve fiat leads to collapse from a market economy to non-market socialism, through the assymetric feed from the money-printer driving state-apparatus (unconstrained) to run legitimate producers out of business (profit constrained), sieving resources into few hands. This has been happening since the 1970s, with additional bites at the apple taken during crisis when the banks hold everyone hostage facing systemic contagion from failures they created (perverse incentives).
The connection to socialism/communism is that the plan of concentrating resources has been written about by such groups quite publicly, as the first step prior to crisis engineering and seizing the means of production. While some of these words I use are more modern terms, the meaning remained the same, back then.
The first surviving reference I've found is the paper magazine published ~1895 by the Fabian's under the name "The American Fabian", in one of the first five publications they promote this plan with regards to the NYC real estate market coupled with rent-seeking behavior to create self-sustaining income until all real-estate over time would become under their control and 'could be passed into the common good', so it says,and their membership was tailored towards influential bankers and politicians at that time.
Within a few years (at that time, 1900s) several things occurred, the adoption of the prussian model of centralized schooling, the backroom deals following Jekyl Island leading to the creation of the Fed, and the landmark decision to treat Federal Law as separate to common/state laws with regards to predence (Erie Railroad, 1930s-1940s). One of the historic copies of this magazine I had a chance to examine had writing mentioning the same group influencing the decision towards centralizing authority via the UCC (which first came out around 1870s-1880s iirc. It seemed to be written about the time of publication, but providence is unknown. A good knowledge of detailed history really comes in handy.
The group itself ceased public publication in 1907, with splintering special interest groups forming under varying names since, continually change such names obscuring their origins like what we understand today as cells. 1917 (iirc) also had Lenin proclaiming the best way to destroy the West was through debasement of the currency.
With regards to debasement, it doesn't matter how many entities it passes through, the debasement hits a point where oversubscription of the resources cause the bust cycle failures (which lag), opportunity costs become untethered, and personal property of the individual is stolen through such mechanisms. Demoralizing, Destabilizing, and Crisis, where a new normalization must be found regardless of the cost ("Its the end of the world" - Big Short).
> Crooked handouts don't need fiat printing. A Crooked handout is fundamentally limited by the reserve of the stable store of value it has access to, when fiat printing is not available it has no rope in the economy to distort it beyond the initial value. You can't take what's not there, and you don't build things in places that will regularly be destroyed.
The government does the money-printing, the crooked handouts induce growing amounts of money-printing, inflation rises. The lagging indicator of disruption leads to chaotic hysteresis requiring perfect-futuresight to plot a safe path forward as you end up being on a cliff where you can only step forward, and on each side you have cascading failure (hyper-inflation->deflation, or direct deflation). The bill always comes due.
This issue is called the Economic Calculation Problem. Mathematical chaos is special, because it can't be predicted ahead of time, small changes dramatically affect the outcomes, and thus no wayfinding a safe path forward can occur since these aren't based on directly measurable indicators in realtime; the survival of those on your boat (which is everyone in the sphere of influence of said currency), depends on random chance heavily skewed against survival as the number of factors involved increase asymmetrically toward failure, similar to falsehoods vs. truth if one were to graph that.
Corruption of those administrating inflationary monetary policy which grows with time, leads to collapse, always, and the scale of that collapse is determined by the underlying amount of resources involved, and the distortions created.
Positive feedback systems are prone to run away with no warning about when that point of no return is. You have exponentially less control to resolve issues the longer you let it run. The baby boomers started this runaway experiment in the 70s.
You can't borrow to spend dollars without any fiat and printing, non-fiat currency has implicit value unlike fiat and you don't see people borrowing gold/silver these days. You'll find proper definitions of the types of money in Mises Theory of Money and Credit (money/money-substitutes). At its core any ambiguous indirection must be followed back to its underlying base or identity that is one or the other; which some people are bad at.
Inflation doesn't improve governmental debt, it creates slow moving distortions that accumulate over time culminating in a tsunami/crisis. Debt is borrowing against the future, or stealing from the future if you go the route of financial dominance. Eventually people will have no purchasing power to feed themselves, and stop having children.
"Socialism", is formally defined by structure in Mises book on Socialism. That book is a worthwhile read, its a professional failure domain map for every way mainstream forms, and variants inevitably fail, even with employ owned/run companies (syndicalism). The mismatch that one often has to come to grips with is the word ownership has been misused in contradictory ways, so much that its lost meaning.
If you've done an in-depth critical study of Communism and its history you'd recognize a number of common tactics used as well, such as the purposeful misuse of language corruption (orwellian doublespeak) which weaponize rhetoric and leverages psychological blindspots but ultimately fail rational/objective comparisons. In other words, the convincing lie.
"If one cannot speak the word, one cannot convey the idea, and thus the idea based in harmful behavior doesn't exist. It is through making people better and more virtuous that the common good can be attained." - Who decides harmful behavior, and to whom, no one can do this objectively and thus *cough bullshit*.
Needless to say, when talking of such things one does need to have a well rounded/working knowledge of the type of people involved to be able to come to sound conclusions.
A lot of the articles are a quagmire of propaganda. If your looking for a good starting point historically on the Communist perspective, reading about the Stasi and then moving backwards from there might be beneficial. Markus Wolfe from the Communist Side (Man without a Face), and John O. Koehler on the American Side as a useful comparison.
When people tear down new models of gaming systems they find fewer chips on the boards because they’ve found some chip that does two things for less than the price of both - below a certain point it’s financially infeasible to make simple parts because the capacity they consume makes a chip that does half as much only 15% cheaper. See also when people started putting Linux rescue disks into the EEPROM, because appropriately sized ROMs no longer existed.
You can find better equipment and processes that get you more product per hour out the door without necessarily making the product shittier.
I think this point is the key and kind of subtle point - "growth at any cost" does actually rise the tide and bring up all boats when there is a lot of room for innovation. It just starts harming when a sector has diminishing returns on innovation. So you'll be able to come up with plenty of counter examples where growth mindset is really beneficial because it's very context sensitive.
I suspect you know better than this. Failure of imagination does not mean lack of options. People in our industry reach for next steps that cut off other options in the process, all the time. To assume manufacturing doesn’t have the same problem is questionable.
I think the solution is to make "loss of good will" valued higher, right now it's valued very low by investors since people want to hold investments a short time and exit quickly. CEOs elected by boards controlled by shareholders are the same way. Short term growth is incentivized and that undervalues long term retention of customers, which makes it more likely "manufacture a worse product" a better option than "innovate and make a better product that more people will want".
Thus we end up with circuits designed to feed the reinforced concrete outhouse in the center. And they're unrepairable because the troubleshooting cost is more than the replacement cost.
The entire American version of capitalism is built around growth as the primary goal, which did great things, but now (unequally, some sectors are still innovating) is creating more and more shitty things.
It's so hard for anyone to acknowledge this because everyone wants to take a "side", pro- or anti-capitalism, without being realistic that there are different implementations of capitalism and there is no system that universally works, it really depends on the situation. Right now we need to make "lifestyle company" not a bad word in investment circles, focus on dividends/revenue sharing over stock growth, create incentives around steady, well run companies, and not companies that outspend and destroy competition and then make their product shittier and/or more expensive.
If by "socialism" you mean things like worker-owned corporations, strong anti-competition laws, high levels of consumer regulation, then absolutely.
2. People don't always do what they say. They want superior quality, but they also want it at the same price as the inferior alternative. When push comes to shove, which will they choose? Not all will choose quality over cheapness. That doesn't mean they didn't want quality. It just means they didn't want it as much as they say they did.
Now she goes and still pays $50 for them, but they have been stealthily replaced by the equivalent of the inferior $20 ones.
It becomes a market for lemons: you can't trust that paying more for a product gets you a better product so game theory says you have to pursue price minimization at all costs.
> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.
- Mass produced at scale
- High quality and will "last a lifetime" (a long time)
- Repairable when it breaks down
I believe that many people would happily pay a 20%, 50% or even 100% markup for such a product, but often often all of the available mass produced options are shitty quality (and the choice is between a bargain option or a "premium" option that is just as crappy quality but costs more because of the brand name). There might be a "boutique" hand-crafted alternative, but it will cost 5-10x more.
The other problem is imperfect access to information. Even where there is superior alternative on the market, it is often very difficult for consumers to determine which one it is. Which means they can't choose it. Which further means, there is no incentive for manufacturers to produce it.
I don't know that this is realistic. Like you recognize, there ARE usually boutique higher quality products - at significantly higher prices. There are also nearly always product management-based, "higher end" product lines. And the quality of these is only sometimes better. And they are not often repairable probably.
I think there is a significant issue with achieving "Mass produced at scale" together with "lifetime and repairable (ie, parts available and easy to replace)". Without people going out of their way to be evil, see lightbulb lifetime mgt, it's easy to be too expensive to miss the "mass produced" window, and your price might be much higher. Not just 20% higher.
Chinese companies built massive factories to corner the market on specific products. Years ago, see the halogen torchiere market. Suddenly the world was flooded with torchiere halogen lamps for an insanely low price. ... a price so low that nobody could really complain that spare parts were not available. These stunts must have been very expensive. An all or nothing bet on a market.
Nowadays, you get factories that make ALL the models of, say, steam irons for basically ALL the brands. These factories take care of some of the issue of quantity-related low price, by sharing parts and processes between all these brands. But could they be competitive in price on smaller runs of steam irons with replaceable parts? Plus the cost of stocking and distributing these parts? I don't know.
because they are a fantasy of people who have never once in their life seen what happens to a company with a strong union or excessive worker power, they become repressive towards newer employees among other things
But it's also very much a cultural thing. The anglosphere tends to treat CEOs and corporate leaders as the smart drivers of corporate success, where as Germany and other European companies are more comfortable with some collective ways of working.
There's benefits to both models, but there's no arguing against the fact that the "anglo" way does seem much more successful at the entrepreneurial stages, especially with new ideas and industries.
I myself prefer the anglo-model, but I try my best to find places that appreciate and trust their workers. I also find myself appreciating goods that last a lifetime from "boring, but stable" companies. People like Jack Welch and his acolytes ruin companies.
Financially? Of course, in the narrow stonks-go-up sense. But not so much in the kind of wealth distribution that accelerates inventiveness and creativity of all kinds at all wealth levels.
The kinds of products that are developed tend to be packaged digital (re)intermediations, fintech, and ad tech, all of which are more likely to be hype-boosted corporate slop with toxic consequences than a genuine boon to the culture around them.
It's a model that's more likely to create the next Theranos than the next Jonas Salk.
People on both sides of the capitalism/socialism divide also always conflate "Current Way Stock Markets Work" with capitalism. We do alot of extra damage to the average person's health and well being with the WAY we do capitalism. The plutocrats use the heavily propagandized stick of "SCARY SOCIALISM" to give you a more shriveled carrot year after year and tell you you should be thankful you dont get beat with the "SCARY SOCIALISM" stick while they still hit you with the "NO HOUSE, NO FOOD, NO HEALTHCARE" stick if you can't sell your bodily capital for enough value to please them.
The extra damage is all this profit over anything else no matter the circumstance. Look at United Healthcare getting sued because the new CEO, even if it was purely out of self preservation, decides they are going to actually give people some of the coverage they paid for and not do quite as many dirty tricks to skim as many denials off the top as they possibly can. MANY SUCH CASES
But they are quite successful in other nations. Amul in India for example.
Nobody cares if they're buying from a collective or a conventional business.
> no policy incentives
Are you saying they should get special government incentives not available to businesses?
> lack of funding platforms
Nobody is stopping anyone from funding a collective. The reason they don't is they won't get ownership shares in return. That's one of the problems with a collective.
Coops are fairly common in Europe, mostly in agro-food and related areas.
They're actually better at innovation for their market segments, because they can make long-term plans for expansion instead of being hamstrung by the demands of ridiculous short-term marketing-driven hype bubbles.
But if you want to profit from frothy get-rich-quick hype and don't care if this year's unicorn is next year's "Our incredible adventure comes to an end", they're definitely not for you.
Before buying, you need to startup and produce.
> Are you saying they should get special government incentives not available to businesses?
Its the other way around. They are not eligible for incentives that are available to traditional corporations. They cannot issue traditional equity. There are also no equivalent cooperative-friendly structure like a Delaware C corporation which allows for friendly taxation and non-liability for the debts and legal obligations of the corporation. Difficult to apply R&D Tax Credit like corporations since it cannot carry forward credits due to legal constraints. Cannot claim Payroll Offset like startups do, etc.
The system in the US simply does not give incentives to cooperatives to the same extent that it facilitates corporations.
There’s a huge difference between capitalism and a specific implementation of capitalism.
(I agree it’s more nuanced than that and it’s both succeeded and failed in other ways, and US isn’t the only one - but this a major feature of American capitalism)
The problem is naked capitalism doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality products. If I buy a product and am happy with it in three years, or I buy a product and it's trash and unsuitable for its purpose, the company still already has my money. I have to care enough about the purchase to spend time and effort into writing a review online about the product, and the brand, which will go into the circular filing cabinet. For a $20 thermometer, I'm not even going to bother.
I think GP is right. We buy stuff online now. You can't see, touch, or evaluate anything. Reviews are all fake. Brand names are comingled with counterfeits. The only signal left is price. So knowing it's likely going to be crap, why pay more than you have to.
We also have a Miele vacuum cleaner. It's less glamorous, but it is, as Germans say, unkaputtbar (and also a very pleasant device to work with).
I.e. people aren't willing to pony up the money to buy them.
BTW, when I buy tools, I look at what tradesmen use and buy the tools they buy. Hasn't let me down yet.
If you want good kitchen appliances, buy them from a restaurant supply business.
If you want good tools for working on your car, look at what racing teams use.
Of course, you're going to pay much more for that quality, and the only people willing to pay are the people whose livelihoods depend on them.
The actual quality is debatable and varies.
Do not get any of their fans. They are designed to fail.
They use a wimpy brushless motor mounted vertically and then shove a impeller on the top of it to move air. The problem is, they don't balance the impeller. And when I saw the motor is wimpy, I mean it's shaft is barely a 1/4". The motor shaft ends up destroying the bearings within a year or two due to the unbalanced impeller load. You will be annoyed to fuck by the high pitched noises it starts making from shot bearings.the bearings are integrated into the motor assembly so you can't just replace them. You have to replace the entire motor and do this basically every year or two because it's not a motor defect, it's a design defect.
An outfit like Amazon is in a position to make reviews work better. And when I buy on Amazon, I do pay attention to reviews. Of all kinds, text, photos, videos, plus other cues such as quantity sold and what other things do the sellers sell, quality of the description. Amazon could do better. Will Amazon improve the review mechanisms to fight abuse and garbage? I don't know. It seems to me that they have won the race, as it is, and they are now in a position where it's their choice to lose it again to the up and comers or to let us better figure out the tradeoff price-quality and keep their lead.
Upon reflection: as products become commodities, isn't the brand the most valuable thing, and the most expensive to reproduce?
Apple had a top brand, yet most consumers are aware that now Apple Stores are overcrowded messes and the iPhone 16 doesn't offer anything meaningfully different than iPhone 13.
Netflix replaced AAA TV series licensed from other networks with in-house material, the overwhelming majority most of which is cheaply produced shovelware that doesn't make it to Season 2.
That's just not true. Look around you right now. If you're American, almost everything you own is branded. Your phone, your laptop, TV, clothes you're wearing, shoes, books, food in your pantry, transportation.
There is almost always a cheaper non-branded choice. If you are like 99.99% of Americans, you didn't make that choice in almost every case.
Tellingly, you gave the example of Apple. Whether it's an iPhone 16 or an iPhone 13, more people than ever buy the Apple brand. I know I do.
What makes these quality brands sell out? I suspect when they become a target of the bigger company, there is a combination of carrot and stick - with the stick having a significant component of the larger company using it's channel dominance to exert pressure.
Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also be used in other ways.
My personal view is the west, especially North America, never recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared with today, with the result that all sorts of objects were radically heavier than their newer equivalents. You take away the need for handling such enormous weights for everything everywhere and it becomes possible to replace almost our entire infrastructure with things that are simply much flimsier.
It is that combined with the culture of low expectations that puts up with the results.
Energy, materials, logistics, labor, these all vary over time, with the oil crisis being a huge step change both in costs to businesses and consumer behavior.
Now that computing has advanced sufficiently and is being applied to everything else, we're finally getting sudden, major advances again in other areas (electric and autonomous cars, drones, reusable rockets, pharma...), but computing is in the race against smothering that most industries lost in the 20th, and it remains to be seen whether stagnation or abundance will win.
A side note is the resurgence of nuclear, and supersonic flight, etc, which suggests that maybe the problem was more about post-war culture than a systemic turn away from growth and prosperity... we'll see!
It's just another fossil fuel. Sure, it doesn't emit CO2, but the sustainability problem is still there. I'll support nuclear expansion when I see a credible plan to complete the transition to actual renewables within 30 years, using nuclear as a stopgap. We have less than 100 years of known uranium reserves if we use it to power everything. It'll be coal and oil all over again.
And now we don't need one because solar is already here.
Solar is definitely cheaper than current nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly, while battery cost is also improving apace. In the short term, solar can meet most of our needs and let us turn off more coal and oil, and that's certainly useful! In the medium term, though, we can't get back on the Henry Adams curve without denser sources than sunlight, which takes up quite a bit of real estate even if we move most capture to space.
You're globalizing what I said about having enough uranium and thorium in known deposits and at current power usage, but obviously we would outgrow that as we expand into the rest of the solar system.
My point is not that we should stop or slow investment in solar (we shouldn't!), just that we'd all have been much, much better off if nuclear had continued to be adopted at speed in the last 50-60 years rather than being demonized, and for high density or unlit areas, it's still a great option and has no risk of running out of available fuel in the next hundred years.
We've actually seen a decline in energy-per-utility ratios. We've got a lot more people and (apparently) a lot more utility per person, so we're still using more energy in total, but if we held those constant for the past several decades we'd actually be using a lot less energy per person and in total. It's not at all inevitable that energy/person/time only goes up. The Jevons paradox eventually maxxes out - if we could teleport anywhere instantly for free, we'd still only be making a finite number of teleportation trips each day. The crew of the Enterprise replicate a finite amount of food, and so on.
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Possibly, nuclear could have been a better intermediate energy source for the past 50-60 years than the fossil fuels we did use. In countries that did adopt nuclear energy (like France) it did seem to work out that way.
Now, in the present, which is when we are making decisions, it's time to go all in on renewables (and long-term infrastructure, much more generally). This brings some challenges, but not insurmountable ones. We'll probably need more load shifting, more cross-border power trading, and more batteries. (Hydropower is also renewable and works at all times of day, but it's not available in all locations, which brings us back to cross-border trading).
I don't see why you'd need nuclear power for high-density areas, or "unlit areas". High-density areas are full of all sorts of stuff, including power cables which can import power from the surrounding countryside - there is absolutely no need to build a fleet of nuclear reactors in the middle of New York City. Even with the substantially-lower-than-Chernobyl risk levels assumed by nuclear proponents, I think the idea of building a fleet of them in the middle of NYC should still be concerning to them. And for "unlit areas" - I assume this means extremely rural villages or whatever - you know a medium-size solar farm, a couple of wind turbines, or even a small diesel plant, takes a shitload less maintenance than a nuclear reactor, right? You're not importing nuclear technicians to permanently work in the middle of the Sahara or the Amazon - you're either connecting them to the grid properly, or you're giving them something set-and-forget that can hum away in the corner for years on end.
Big batteries coupled to diesel generators will remain a great local backup source for critical systems for the foreseeable future - if I was world dictator, I wouldn't ban them outright. Somewhat interestingly, the opposite is already also true: battery-buffered solar power is used in remote sites where you might expect to need the reliability a diesel generator, because a small chance of the thing being down outweighs having to keep it refueled.
Turns out that from an environmental perspective, that view was bad anyway and I'm glad it's gone for good (even if the AI hype almost makes us forget that again). I don't fully see how that implies everything having to be crap now. Lighter doesn't mean worse quality.
For a number of product categories it means replacing solid metal parts with inferior materials, and that pretty explicitly does mean worse quality.
Have you used a 1960s KitchenAid mixer? They look almost identical to models that followed - but in the 1970s KitchenAid replaced the metal drive gear with one made of nylon on the consumer-focussed models, and now if you use one heavily, you'll have to replace that gear more or less annually.
IDK the design of the mixers well enough to know if that's true for them, but I do wonder if that is the case.
That doesn't matter if it means, for example, that my new mixer can't actually mix bread dough on a higher speed anymore (citing this as it's actually a failure mode on newer (like 1970s forward) KitchenAid mixers to the point that the manual mentions it).
That is an objective decrease in quality and fitness for purpose.
That is the stated justification, yes. However, in practice pre-1970s models will happily knead bread dough for years on end, and more recent models tend to explode within the first few times you attempt to make a loaf of bread (leading home bread makers to have to spend more on an expensive commercial model...)
It doesn't, but heft of a product is used as a proxy for quality, to the point that electronics will sometimes have a weight glued inside to pretend the item is heavier than it is, in order to seem of higher quality.
except for the most energy consuming and oil dependent objects of all: cars. curious, eh?
Basic human (and capitalist) nature. Not good, but not evil, either. It's just the scorpion and the frog story.
It sucks, trying to actually create things with higher levels of Quality. It's a lot more expensive to add even rather incremental levels of Quality, and companies that try, usually (but not always) get ground into the dirt.
If we deliberately create substandard quality, it can really eat at our souls. I think many folks are able to work out a deal with their conscience, but I was never able to do that, so I worked for most of my career at a company that was all about Quality.
This whole thing brings to mind the Vimes Boots Theory: https://terrypratchett.com/explore-discworld/sam-vimes-boots...
Compare to popular fashion boots like timberlands which are also 200 USD and reasonably sturdy but no Goodyear welt or proper sole so they fail in 5 years or less of regular wear.
I love their trackballs. They dropped the warranty to 1 year--and even then every one failed within warranty. Disgusted but buying one every year was better than using an inferior product. But my latest has been sitting here for years, no erratic clicks.
Also many of these kinds of activities are illegal, but people do it anyway on the reasonable calculation that they won't be sued and that the government won't investigate them.
Cellphone is the opposite: the new one is way better.
So all in all, it's just capitalism: if quality sells more, people buy quality (whatever quality means). If cheaper sells more, companies cut costs.
I think the answer change from time to time.
They even have succeeded in selling people bean counting solutions as "design". So instead of a satisfying 1.50 € power switch and a 2.50€ rotary switch you get a SMD push button for 0.05 € and have to memorize multiple gestures for that button. Long press means off or something among those lines.
People hate it, but it is cheap.
Yes, absolutely. Quality has gone down across the board in nearly everything. What has gone up is more features. So at a high level comparison it seems like the newer thing does a lot more than the older same thing. Which is true, but that is not a measure of quality. Many of the added features are gimmicks that provide no meaningful value and at the same time the product is far more brittle and built much cheaper, so the overall quality is far lower.
The quality of some things has gone up significantly. This is going to be the things where improvements in technologies have made improved quality easier and cheaper (and that's not just electronics—materials technology, better manufacturing, etc can do this). It's also in products where other technological improvements have made it viable for there to be independent and artisanal (or similarly small-batch high-quality) production of them.
The quality of other things has declined precipitously. These are more likely to be commodities where improving quality still costs more, and the "innovation" they've done is in finding ways to make it cheaper and worse without it just always failing immediately (clothing is a prime example here).
Overall, I think that if you look into any given case of a product's quality getting better or worse over the past couple of decades, you'll almost invariably find that either way it's because that's how the manufacturers can make more money.
I'm sure that's one component. I can also imagine that another component is that in order to broaden the customer base, there is cost pressure as well as the pressure to appeal to more people. The initial market may have consisted of more quality focused nerds who were ok with spending a little more to get a robust thing with more knobs to tune behavior, while the mass market is fine with buying new stuff all the time, given that it's cheaper, and they don't care about fine tuning things, just want it to work out of the box, until they anyway buy a new thing in a year or two.
For example I have bought these bottles https://www.zefal.com/en/bottles/545-magnum.html three times over ten years:
- the first time, the mouthpiece was attached by two plastic prongs. The prongs eventually failed
- The second time I bought them, the mouthpiece was attached by four prongs
- The last time I bought them, the hard plastic mouthpiece was replaced by a more comfortable plastic mouthpiece.
I also bought these pedals three times https://www.lookcycle.com/fr-en/products/pedals/road/race/ke... :
- With the first version, small rocks got stuck between the carbon spring and the body of the pedal, making it impossible to clip in and eventually dislodging the spring
- The second version fixed that by adding a plastic cover over the spring, and also improved the bearing seals (which was also a problem with the first version)
- The third version made the angles on the outside of the pedal less acute, making it harder to damage the pedals in a fall
This might be the key issue. Let's say you bought a Roomba 10 years ago, and now go buy the successor model. Will it be any good ? probably not. At least not as good as the competition who got better than iRobot.
It will be the same for cars. If you bought a Nissan 10 years ago, I wouldn't be surprised if the successor isn't as good. Same for cameras, computers, bikes etc.
More than ever blind brand loyalty isn't paying off and even with brands staying at the top of their game the "successor" or best buying strategy might not be obvious.
Some see the world as having become more complex, I'd argue having stagnating signals was worse.
- I believe they're more immoral than ICE vehicles. They're existence displaces batteries for hybrids (yes I did the math)
- They're not practical for me for my use scenario. I have kids.
Also I don't see your point about kids.
https://www.gojiberries.io/advertising-without-signal-whe-am...
A major problem with the whole model of production is that if you make a good product and saturate the market you die. It’s not the result of some conspiracy to make shit products. It’s a simple outcome from the fact that purchases are one time while businesses are ongoing, combined with shareholder demands to boost growth. Those demands in turn come from things like pension funds that have promised a return to their customers.
One “solution” is to build subscriptions into everything but there’s already a customer revolt against that for obvious reasons. It’s obnoxious.
I think the best solution is to decouple and unbundle production. Have small design houses (or even individuals) that design products and have low ongoing costs and big manufacturing concerns that make things. Something always needs to be made so they always have business. Design products around commodity parts as much as possible to make retooling affordable.
This kind of already exists in the form of boutiques with kickstarter and Etsy products, or at least those folks have trailblazed this model.
Don't we already have this, isn't this called 'China' for most American businesses that no longer make things in the USA/in-house?
I'm sure that is certainly part of it, especially when multiple players are competing at least partly on price or apparent value. One consideration once price based competition is significant is that absolute quality may drop while measures of quality/price value improve¹.
Another issue is that when something is new, to the company or the buying audience, it is often a flagship product/service so gets a lot more attention. As things become something the company rattles off as a matter of course and we consumers interact with them daily, that level of attention per production unit diminishes considerably.
As well as playing directly into this, possibly leading to an actual drop in quality, mass production has a less obvious effect on the perception of quality. If you are making hundreds or less and a couple fail, they are probably noticed before leaving the factory and if not the consumer gets a relatively personal service with fixing/replacing the item. If you are making hundreds of thousands many more bad units get into circulation (the absolute failure rate increasing even if the failure ratio drops) and processing returns is less logistically easy. That perception problem has become more significant in the last couple of decades as unhappy voices always tended to be louder and social media can act as a megaphone for both happy and unhappy voices.
This is a complex area with many things feeding into actual quality issues, the perception of them, and sometimes the perception of the matter being worse than it really is overall.
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[1] for instance, maybe in a made up example quality goes down by 5% when cuts or mass production bring the price down by more than 10%, so buyers get better for the same money but worse absolutely
Quality has dropped insanely low.
Fast fashion brought down most of the fashion industry up to luxury level.
We have become addicted to cheap. Same phenomenon with airlines: everyone bemoans how awful the experience is, and virtually everyone buys the cheapest possible ticket.
My most recent experience with this was a Fjällräven 30L backpack. I'd had it for years, loved it to death but it was getting a bit ripped up. Went into the store, bought the exact same model, went out to the RV where I had my current one and did a comparison. I was shocked. No padding on the straps, nice padding on the back replaced with hard foam, many of the nicely designed little details gone. I went back in and returned it and just opted to repair my old one a bit (replaced a broken buckle and sewed up some holes).
The simple fact, that will probably get your post downvoted to remove from view, is this reduction of quality is driven by fiat money-printing.
It may be non-reserve issued debt (Basel3), or government subsidy, or contract. There are many sources, laundered, and the economy for the most part today has been silently nationalized, which is why it fails. Bailout is required to overcome the end of the boom/bust cycle and continue forward for a time thereafter, it happens cyclically (a true-up, the difference between actual production and fraud/loss) and it requires exponential amounts each time which are taken from every person holding money. There have been at least 4 instances that I can see where this has happened since the 1970s changeover to fiat (de-peg from gold/petrodollar).
The inflation/debasement in purchasing power causes companies to debase their product, to keep up with the escalator of inflation to continue on moving forward. This is worsened when you have foreign entities using slave labor through controlling their own currency, to destroy domestic business; such as manufacturing over a long period of time.
There is obviously an objective point where eventually that can't continue, because the economics of money-printing fail, but that point is what many leftists knowingly or unknowingly aim for; the ones that know just don't want others to know the emperor has new clothes because knowing and communication of that knowledge allows reaction and adaption, and there are some people who believe if an individual can't express words, or convey meaning, then that negative behavior associated with that conveyance (in their deeply flawed perspective) doesn't exist, and they can make people better that way.
The strategy for doing this is through sieving and concentration of resources into fewer and fewer hands, while retaining control of such resources. The lead market players today based in money-printing can control and continue operating because of their preferential banking ties, while competitors cannot enter or compete in the market because the market no longer meets the conditions of a market. Namely adversarial price discovery which requires visibility, and non-cooperation. Money-printing/banking isn't given for free, it forces many entities to cooperate; and adversarial independent decisionmaking is needed for economic calculation. Mises wrote about this extensively in broad strokes. There are quite a large number of impossible hysteresis problems that mark the system the boomer's pivoted to as unsustainable, hyperbolic, and inevitably fails to impossible to solve hysteresis problems (where knowledge of a state needed to react doesn't provide sufficient time to change course because the effects precede that knowledge).
Artificial distortions, trending towards chaos will grow and self-sustain, eventually causing whipsaws that cause it to fail, but that takes time since the point of failure is stage 3 ponzi, where monetary properties lose all value seemingly overnight. Where objectively, outflows exceed inflows.
This is what also drives enshitiffication, why the business growth curve is an S adoption curve (following ponzi), and the inevitability of consolidation/hostile takeover.
The leftist connection is the strategy of sieving, you have to concentrate wealth in few hands first before you can seize it from those hands, and this is what the Fed has been doing. A gradual fabian-based induction to non-market socialism, while ensuring the political power base remains through bad actors that call out other bad actors decrying the public, and others in the group instigating and inducing bad actions while undermining, subverting, and making the resilient system brittle, at every point. Destroying the rule of law through shock doctrine and demoralization up to just prior to bringing it to crisis for the seizure, and re-normalization where either a socialist/communist takeover occurs, or when that fails; a rise of fascism to power. The same regime-change plan that all governments use (give or take). Also, the same driving dynamics that led to Hitler's rise to power.
Jamming communications so people don't catch on and can't react is part of that plan, which is why you have so many bots running around, and the platforms are complicit with the same people as those who want to enable this. Jamming doesn't work without the plausible deniability of karma systems that allow the platforms to grant moderator powers to a large group of sockpuppet accounts (sybil attacks), controlled by a surreptitious moderator. Who may also utilizes many psychological blindspots we all have to manipulate, and damage readers through structured distortion of reflected appraisal (or narrative control, memetics, or belief contagion to the layman, which includes Le Bon's works as a basis).
People are easily manipulated when they don't know the mechanism behind the how. Cialdini in his book Influence touch on the foundations, except reflected appraisal, but to understand distorted reflected appraisal you have to understand how torture works, and what it is really, and if you knew you would see it in almost everything today.
Torture is the structured imposition of psychological stress in sufficient exposure to cause involuntary hypnosis.
Your stated suspicion is a well crafted induction of a common lie that's been repeated so many times, many believe its truth, but it fails under close objective examination.
If the lie were true, you would have competitors coming into the market, and staying in the market; but its not because of the asymmetrical connection to a money printer; directly or indirectly.
Lowering prices below market value to drive competitor companies out of business has occurred in many places where a leveraged buyout or hostile takeover wasn't possible.
You need to operate on debt to compete, but in so doing you become food for takeover, until the parasitic nature has nothing left to eat. That hasn't happened yet, but its probably going to happen in our lifetime. These dynamics in the historic lifecycle is what is driving the adoption towards BRICS, and the chaos we see everywhere.
Eventually you get to a point where everything breaks, and you've been trapped by decisions your parents or grandparents generation chose through aggregate.
Decisions that result in worsening conditions, and your and your family; and their children's futures, being collapse into violent law of nature, or submission to enslavement and a life of suffering before death.
Either result in a loss of control from the choice upfront, that decreases until a point of no return, after which the dynamics cannot be stopped, but you can get out of the way, it just requires a ruthlessness, education, and knowledge that has been deprived from nearly everyone raised in recent generations today. Lone wolves die because they are weak, the movies promoting this concept are (5GW).
The first one lasted literally 10 years, it was one of the best consumer purchases I ever made.
Ever since then each replacement has crapped out within a year or two, despite same usage pattern. I bought one at Costco on sale and after returning it broken after just six months, a record for a $100+ device, the clerk at the return counter said they have piles of those. Crazy.
I have clothing that I bought shortly after high school, and it's now more than 25 years old and still good. It's tougher and thicker cotton than anything I seem to be able to buy now. Aside from clothing getting worse (made overseas, made cheaply, or from poor materials), the textiles themselves have gotten worse. Cotton crops have yielded fibers of very low quality in recent years, especially post-pandemic. Once-dependable brands no longer make clothing that lasts. Brooks Brothers used to be the last hold out for high quality clothing in the U.S., and they sold their brand and turned to crap even before the pandemic.
Appliances are another thing. Washing machines routinely lasted more than twenty years. Same for refrigerators. The microwave my parents got as a wedding gift didn't have a lot of features, but it kept on heating for 30 years. Now, it's difficult to find machines that don't need replacing in 5 years, and microwaves are almost exclusively made in China. The good stuff that you used to be able to get just isn't made by manufacturers that attempt to make durable items. They're made to shave margins and turn to junk in a few years.
The third thing extends to all manner of consumer goods, and it is actually a materials and chemicals issue. So many of the things that worked really well, were made from materials that turned out to be actively harmful. Harmful plastics, harmful coatings on non-stick pans, and while I can still go out and purchase those things if I wanted, we've had to eliminate or replace them with worse alternatives.
Tea, when brewed from loose leaf in a pot and strained through a metal strainer instead of plasticized tea bags (they're not actually paper) means you need actual high-quality tea instead of the junk that's on grocery store shelves. It turns out that's actually difficult to come by. Porcelain and glass not made in China (China's porcelain and glass all--all--have unsafe lead levels) is also difficult to find. There very few safe sources: France and Turkey for porcelain, and Italy for glass.
There are a whole series of reasons, but consumer goods, are, in fact, worse than they used to be. It's not just fuzzy nostalgia.
What's the point of building for durability if there's no demand for it?
Moreover, if you look at expensive cars or furniture, the markup on them has to be higher than cheap stuff. Honda Fit is like 20% of the price of a BMW, but I bet doesn't cost 20% to manufacture... So if people wanted quality it would be better for companies to produce more of the expensive option. Either companies are dumb or people don't want quality.
I just recently got a coffee grinder that costs 3 times as much as my old one and it's actually better across multiple dimensions, including material e.g. metal vs plastic . But how many units do you think the plastic junk at 0.33x the price sells vs mine?
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/even-with-fees-the-miracle-of...
Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands. There’s now cheap and expensive Nike ranges, for example, where there used to be only the quality expensive tier.
But if you look at the cost of, say, quality furniture today and adjust for inflation, it’s going to be around the same as quality furniture 50 years ago. We just have the choice to pay a lot less for much worse now.
I wish that were my experience as well. However, I've found that most brands simply add a huge markup for their name while investing very little into quality. As a result, you end up paying three times the price for just 20% better quality.
When it comes to electronics, I feel like I can judge that for myself, and my gut feeling about clothing was confirmed after falling down a YouTube rabbit hole of "clothing teardowns."
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I'm not unsympathetic regarding the poor, I grew up poor myself. And my single working mother raising two kids got by on hand-me-down furniture from her mother (probably, as you and the article suggest, of decent quality though).
Having the option for (new) inexpensive everything allows us to accept low-quality; even encourages it (as has been pointed out, there's a Dopamine hit from purchasing a new thing … I don't know if the same rush comes from purchasing a used piece of furniture from a Goodwill — I suspect though it does somewhat). And, as we know, the landfills, oceans, become the destination for all this consumption.
I admit that I am surprised that I am finding myself wishing that we, the Western world, were poorer again. It seems though that manufacturing has caught up to (down to?) the ability to provide new crap for us even if we were poorer.
One wonders what the Great Depression would resemble in the 21st Century. Would we still have the latest, but crappy, gadgets and such? I sure can't imagine new car sales would not be seriously impacted.
</ramble>
I recall my grandfather having (decent) tools sitting in his garage. Neighbors/relatives often borrowed tools in those days.
To be a little more nuanced though, some tools don't benefit from "quality" versions. Perhaps an angle grinder is a good example. (The consumable grinding disk is probably the place not to cheap-out.) Maybe the cheap one is fine.
But other tools, like a wood plane, you're going to have a bad time if you cheap out on those and wind up with steel that doesn't hold an edge for example.
(Though I kind of wouldn't want to loan out a nice hand plane of mine to someone that might not worry as much as me about hitting a nail in a board they're planing.)
I did spend the extra to buy better quality wheels though.
I bought a screwdriver at Home Depot, and screw stripped the screwdriver! I returned it and bought the same type of screwdriver at Harbor Freight and it's been great.
The only product in Harbor Freight that I haven't liked so far, was their moving blankets - very thin.
Luxury belief.
Doesn’t it feel a little suspicious that the only people to ever say “we should become poorer” are people from rich countries where even the poor can afford cars and gadgets? Go to the countries actually manufacturing your goods and ask the average factory worker if he wants to be poor and prepare to get flipped off.
These words sound similar but mean vastly different things. Poor people in 3rd world countries need more income, not a larger quantity of cheap T shirts.
Sure.
But I've lived on both sides though and think we've gone too far to the other end of the spectrum.
But if you visit any of these other countries you can often be shocked by how much they accomplish with so little. Vastly better standards of customer service, much higher quality public transportation systems, and they often have cheap quality goods and services which compromise in the right areas instead of being so crappy as to basically be a scam
Think Star Wars. Live in a hovel, but have some magic gadgets.
In the long run, that could actually spur some development re cheap and safe energy etc.
Given how much money people are spending on the latter things I think becoming $ poorer might be the cheapest way of getting healthier and happier.
I think this needs to be repeated. People tend to think more expensive equals higher quality (I want this to be true!), and I think brands frequently take advantage of that to increase margins without significantly increasing quality.
For example: I've been through three or four pairs of my $180 Sony link buds hitting various issues before giving up on them entirely. Meanwhile, my $5 Auki bluetooth earbuds keep on chugging.
I can buy an expensive tool for say $200 that will last me 10 years. Or I can buy a cheap tool that costs $20 but will only last me two years. But if I want to use that tool for the duration of 10 years it then makes more sense to buy five of the cheap tool and save half in costs. Which one is really providing more quality over time?
For some things this doesn't hold at all, the cheap entry level offerings just don't get the job done or break relatively immediately, but for others the premium offer doesn't really improve a whole lot over the cheapest.
Used tools of the brands that anyone screeching about nice tools would consider to be of repute are going to generally be priced at equivalent to new tools of unknown brand. Specialty tools frequently aren't available on the used market.
Anything that spins or plugs into the wall tends to be finicky after decades of prior owner abuse and if you're not in a commercial setting (and even a lot of times if you are) it makes more sense to just buy new cheap stuff because then using your tools won't be a project by itself.
I've got like three people's worth of used tools from various sources because you can never have too many and I never throw stuff out but they are not the outstanding value the Garage Journal forum or Reddit type "polish my wrenches more than I use them" crowd makes them out to be.
I guess all that is to say in my experience the cheap crap breaks and ends up being more expensive either in opportunity cost or cost of replacement/modification.
I do not buy cheap tools unless they are for a dedicated, simple purpose. (Such as the sockets that live in the car to permit me to install a battery.)
Air compressors are another one where spending money vastly improves usability, the more you spend the quieter the compressor pump motor is.
Makita’s portaband only lasts ~10 cuts before the blade falls off, Milwaukee’s portaband blades don’t fall off ever. I run electrical work and my guys cost $100-130/hr, I’d rather have them spend time cutting conduit and strut with a functional tool than replacing blades on a cheaper version.
I’ll grant that professional tool and homeowner tool usage patterns differ greatly, but sometimes it is worth spending the extra money.
Obviously there are many companies that do rely on branding to jack up prices like Beats or Marshal. But there are also companies that do no to little marketing and instead focus on craftsmanship where the majority of the cost is going into higher quality experience. And in those segments there isn't really some magical way to reduce costs. Akko is getting pretty popular, but their high-end IEMs like the Obsidian are still going to be in the same price-range as Sennheisers or AKG.
<laughs in Toyota turbo-4cyl that can't stay together for a laundry list of reasons>
You can't base decision on brand, no matter ho much a bunch of screeching morons on the internet tell you you can. You have to also consider how much the company cares about the product line, how core the product line is to the company, where in the lifecycle it is, etc, etc. The brands that people herald as good are very capable of phoning it in or whoring themselves around. Kitchen-aid slaps their name on all sorts of garbage outside the core products they built their name on, to pick one example of the latter. And the brands that people herald as bad are very capable of producing very good stuff when the incentives align.
I bet the sound quality on the Sony buds was better.
But, to be honest, I do more audiobooks and podcasts than I do music, so the audio quality was not the top reason I picked them. The link buds have a fairly unique design with a 2~3 mm hole in the middle of the earbuds that lets outside sound in. I like it a lot better than any active transparency mode I've ever tried. They also have much better controls than any other earbuds I've tried.
The problem with the Sony's is that they either get something messed up inside the speaker and start sounding like crap at medium to high volume, or the case's open/closed sensor breaks and they wake up and start discharging in the case, and then they're dead by the time I try to use them.
I occasionally try watching videos on my phone, but the latency that Bluetooth adds throws me off, so I don't really enjoy anything with dialogue because the lips are moving out of sync with the words. I've tried lots of different Bluetooth earbuds - from Sony, Aukey, Jlab, even the "gamer" ones from razr - and all of them seem to have noticeable amounts of latency.
I'm not sure if I'm more sensitive to it than most people or they're just all shit, but the latency is the big reason that I'm annoyed that nearly all the manufacturers removed headphones jacks from flagship phones. (Sony actually deserves some credit here, I think their flagship Xperia phone still include a headphone jack and a MicroSD slot!)
How can consumers evaluate how robustly some Bluetooth firmware is written, if the product is actually durable or if some USB charger actually accurately follows the specification? For most cases there is no way to know. The best route for the average consumer is to find a review by and expert, but these are very rare (experts with the required skills can often find better jobs than reviewing) and they are more likely to find paid marketing which just misleads.
So we do end up the case that the only real metrics the user has is price and brand. Many formerly reputable brands have also started rebadging cheep crap so that works less often then you would hope. And while good products often can't be cheep, it is now common to see cheep crap sold at higher prices to seem premium.
So at the end of the day the consumer has really no way to judge product quality. So the market has very little incentive to actually provide quality.
What you are saying will be correct if we had no technological advancement whatsoever. But we had significant advancement. Everything should, must, be better if we applied the same cost. But while that’s the case in some things, lots of things have degraded in different ways.
I don't think you actually can get the same quality, today. Even if you are paying more. The spacing of seats has changed. [0] You can pay more and get something more than you had by going up classes, but the same experience no longer exists.
[0] https://www.seattletimes.com/life/travel/airline-seats-are-t...
I travel seldomly, but when I do I tend to buy business class, because I value the comfort of the journey more than the frequency of journeys. But most other people, including you, have other priorities. Which is why at least in this example I think it’s a market working well based on supply and demand.
I think that hints at part of the real problem: humans have very little ability to judge the quality of products. Marketing departments are very good at cosplaying quality. "Awards" on things like wine only tell you the manufacturer paid the owner of the trademark some money. Reviews are often fake or at least paid for by the manufacturer.
With price also not being a meaningful quality signal you're left with a choice: Buy the expensive product hoping the quality reflects the price, or buy the cheap product knowing the quality is probably not great, but at least you didn't spend a lot of money on something that isn't worth it.
Electric Kettles - Microwaves. The components that make up the actual boiling of water are now standard and all come from the same chinese manufacturer. You can pay $20 to $1000 for the same thing. The expensive one will look much better. Microwaves are the same - large numbers of manufacturers to all the same guts just different skins.
Retail clothing is the most obvious example. There used to be mid market clothing manufacturers that would produce clothing locally and try to compete on quality. That’s almost gone now. There’s just not enough demand.
It’s easier to clean, has no plastic in contact with the water, and has so far lasted me 14 years. It cost 800 NOK instead of the ~400 for a typical plastic one. But due to my experience with those in the past, I’d say absolutely worth it.
This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most pejorative sense.
I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900, which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can confidently state that current iPhones are _way_ better than that phone. On paper, the N900 phone was amazing: it had GPS, Wi-Fi, multitasking, a camera, a touchscreen, and (!) a hardware keyboard, and more. It had a desktop-class browser, on paper. But nothing quite worked well. It was far too bloated for the hardware capabilities of the time. When you came home, it never damn switched properly to WiFi, or it took forever. The same applies to switching off WiFi and switching to cellular when you leave home. The GPS always took minutes to establish a location and easily lost connection due to small obstructions. I recall that I compared it to a friend's iPhone at the time; the N900's GPS was embarrassingly bad and slow.
I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible.
Go read Zen anf the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for a decent, if not weird, introduction to thinking about quality. Quality is both subjective and objective and therein lies the rub. This author does not understand that.
I don’t mean this to say “you have asked a bad question”, but rather to say, “you have asked so large a question that a man once went insane in trying to answer it.”
As testable example, I'm largely unable to tell the quality of beer as i never enjoyed any of it, and thus could not have developed a preconception of how a good beer is supposed to taste.
That’s a pretty standard description of some of the best ales on the planet (produced by monks in Belgium), if anyone’s curious.
I’m familiar with Belgian Ales, I used to like Chimay, and have sampled many others (though not Westvleteren yet). These days I prefer something less strong. The story about Trappist monks is intriguing, but what does it actually mean? Obviously Chimay and several other Belgian Trappist ales are enormous commercial productions that ship beer globally. They are just beer factories doing a huge volume of beer business. The narrative about monks is intended to give people the perception of quality, but it doesn’t actually demonstrate anything, it’s just a narrative.
>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values is a book by Robert M. Pirsig first published in 1974.
I'm afraid you're romanticizing the relationship between Pirsig's books and his life. That someone is losing touch with reality doesn't warrant anyone to deconstruct their biography at will and reconstruct it to suit their own narrative.
If his mental breakdowns had been, say, in 1976 and 1978, that would have supported it much better. But someone working on the philosophical underpinnings of a book for over a decade before the book is published is not at all unreasonable.
For example, when my phone connects to WiFi as soon as I get home every time, correctly, for the last many years, that's very strong empirical evidence of quality.
Ten years ago your phone reliably connecting to WiFi was a "Delighter" over the course of time it turned over a "Want" into a "Must Have".
I'd say empirical evidence of quality is strongest in the "Want" phase but if something is considered a given and ubiquitously fulfilled, can it still function as a strong empirical indicator of quality?
The subjective axis of quality concerns values. What do you value the most in a mobile phone? Is it battery life? Is it photo quality? Is it durability? Is it features? Is it security? Is it screen size? Is it repairability? Is it social approval? Is it free software support? Is it less effort due to habit?
The objective axis of each of those values (and their subvalues) can be empirically measured. Some of them trivially, such as screen size or battery life. Some are harder to measure but still quite easily, such as features, photo quality, or repairabilty. Others may end up in a quagmire of subvalues, some of them subconscious, but could ultimately be measured empirically with great effort (social approval, security, habit...)
What often happens is that, when debating quality, people make the mistake of using empirical arguments about objective characteristics without realising that they are disagreeing on their ultimate subjective preferences. Subjective values can of course be debated, sometimes successfully. However, I am never going to convince an average middle-class American teenager to prefer a Fairphone over an iPhone empirically proving its repairability and support for FOSS Android alternatives, and they are never going to convince me to prefer an iPhone because it's cooler and it takes awesome photos.
Going back to the main topic of the article, I believe that ultimately the problem is that the market has over-fitted and heavily optimised for specific axes of subjective preference, due to their alignment with profitability and ease of development, together with an inefficient feedback loop, to the detriment of large numbers of consumers such as myself who value less intrinsically profitable characteristics.
In the less obvious cases quality can be something you can't really explain, but you'll recognize it. There's also the option of viewing it from the manufacturers view, and forgo the user-centric view altogether. In that case we view the quality as "How well do we make the product", according to standard and specifications. So you could have a product that's absolute trash, but it follows specs precisely and you have zero manufacturing defects.
The quality idea in the book sadly never clicked. To my defense I have to say I was young and had no philosophical background whatsoever, but maybe I am ready now.
I should really re-read the book but maybe you could summarize your take away about quality from the book.
However, the discussions regarding "gumption" and separating abstractions from reality when needed (i.e. "the carburetor set screw") as well as several other great lessons from the book have really helped me fine-tune my thinking. I think reading this a few times in your 20s is a fantastic time investment.
There was mountains of tacky, throwaway crap produced in the 80s. Guess what, we've thrown it all away. Quality lasts.
And don't even get me started on the food. A lot of tin cans. Desserts that you reconstituted from powder in a packet. The list goes on.
Compared to the iPhone or any modern phone, it did a lot more with a lot less battery. The networking on my iPhones is not great, but it’s hard to compare.
In the end modern smartphones couldn’t win at that game, but the game has changed. Lately, through addiction and almost omnipresent surveillance for the worst.
In that sense, the smartphones of old with some multimedia and internet would be a welcome change.
that's why these pure/fair/libre phones were failing to reach any market share and even sustainability.
but things are slowly getting better, projects underway to get smoother better performance on every platform, taking better care of the battery (limit charge to some percentage), use more efficient stack - from network to graphics, Bluetooth and WiFi and of course all the other radios.
...
sure, most of this is unfortunately unnoticeable compared to the billions of people glued to the absolutely TikTokified Internet :/
(well, hopefully we'll get through this phase of developing social immune system for a new medium faster than we did after the printing press, after the radio, and after TV)
Then Nokia admitted defeat and switched to Windows which failed badly. Symbian was too hard and expensive to maintain and their Linux OS strategy was to redo the OS three times instead of incrementally developing it.
I was born in 1980’s and for me what we have currently feels exactly like I live in the future.
Personal computers from 2003 sucked and now I have much more reliable and powerful personal computers in my pocket - as much as I have fond memories of Windows XP I also remember offhand serial key because I was reinstalling it loads of times for friends family and myself. Nowadays I don’t remember having to reinstall an operating system for at least last 10 years or more.
Owned a Nokia in 2003 as well and it was destructed by some water. It had no Nokia Care and my grandma refused to buy me a new one.
> text without looking at the screen
I do it all the time by dictating.
I worked for Nokia (briefly, just before Eloppification) and I remember being told that when the iPhone launched everyone laughed because there was no way that the battery could last more than a day, there was no app store back then, no flash, no high-speed data (2G) and it failed every single one of the internal tests that Nokia had.
Yet, people didn’t care, obviously - and the iPhone is the model for nearly all phones today.
I get bent out of shape about this, the same way I get bent out of shape about the death of small phones and modular laptops; but people vote with their wallets and if the market was large enough for both to exist then there would be better options; yet it seems like there’s not.
People seem to care much more about capacitive touch screens, large displays, hungry CPUs, incredible post-processing of cameras (and great camera sensors) than they do about being drop proof, having stable software or battery life.
Features > Stability ; to most people. (and, how do you put stability on a spec sheet for tech youtubers to care about or savvy consumers trying to buy the best “value” they can; build quality doesn’t fit onto a spec sheet).
One cannot conclude this from what the market does. Single individuals might want wildly different things than what the combined economy serves them.
People wanted iPhone over Nokia, not due to its specs but due to its usability and presentation.
Let's be honest, both Symbian and Maemo/Meego were abject messes in both of these categories.
Symbian though, I mean, considering the hardware constraints was crazy!
The smartphone variant of Symbian needed 2MiB of Memory and supported Qt... madness.
Mike, are you familiar with the saying, "Perfect is the enemy of Good"?
Well, "good enough" is the enemy of humanity.Tap to wake, slide to homescreen, the control center were introduced by the N9.
I'm not excited about the current duopoly, but a decent mid-range phone from either is better now that in was five years ago.
Oh, and my favorite, problems with microUSB charging ports were eternal.
anyway, the new Nothing phone (3a) is amazing batterywise!
Before I got a smartphone I used a j2me IRC client to keep connected with my friends, and I had to carry 3 batteries to swap throughout the day for it to last, the battery life was horrible if you actually did anything on it.
Maybe that’s the reason the battery lasted a week.
Does it matter? No. Those phones were built to purpose for their time. Sonim made/makes an Android phone that is approximately as durable as a Motorola radio for police. I used one for a bit, the speakerphone worked submerged, and it fell off a two story building when on a video call.
But it turns out nobody really wants that. When the technology for smartphone chips and displays matures, my guess is, like the tank Nokia, the iPhone Kevlar Edition will be the Nokia of 2035.
Also my first phone, a "bomb proof" Nokia died when it fell out of my pocket into a shallow pond. Most modern phones would survive that no problem!
Note to mention they're waterproof.
The battery lasted a week when a week's worth of usage was a dozen messages and an hour of call time with the rest the phone is locked and dark.
"Wow, old car was much more solid! The modern car got destroyed!"
Until you realize that the old car utilizes the driver seat as the crumple zone.
New iPhones and Android phones eventually have to be replaced because the software is no longer supported. Flip phones continue to be supported, if we would just use them to call people, which would use up less of our lifespan than smartphones, playing games and using social media. Note: I personally wouldn’t suggest flip phones for everyone, because smartphones are expected for some types of MFA now.
The post also says that a lot more clothing is produced and sold that is cheap quality, resulting in more waste. Fast-fashion is also popular, which results in more low-quality material being thrown away than the previous slower release of new styles.
imo the way to help would be to:
- Save enough money to buy higher quality used appliances, clothing, furniture, etc. and stop funding the companies that do this.
- Don’t use social media or websites/apps that promote (through ads or just photos/video) purchase and consumption of low quality goods. Buy used products instead.
I think there’s an opportunity here for everyone to get involved. You can still purchase high quality products, because the point is to increase product quality for future generations.
Having owned both, no. The N900 was programmable, none of the current crop of phones are.
Until you need to replace the battery.
Battery replacement has been intentionally made not just a pain, but actually dangerous, by using excessive amounts of adhesive to hold in batteries that may spontaneously combust if physically damaged while trying to remove them.
Replaced a battery in a Nintendo Switch not too long ago, and what an absolute fucking pain that was to get the old battery out, IPA, dental floss (to try and get under the battery and cut through the glue), and still needed a worrying amount of levering out.
(It's not as if these batteries have any significant space in which to move around, why do they need adhesive at all, and not just some foam/rubber pads to hold them in place?)
You want them rigidly held in place as *any* flex in their mounting will add up to fatigue failures over enough time. Realistically, that means glue or a screw-down anchor that exerts tension--and if you have such an anchor you need to beef up the substrate also to avoid it deforming the case over time. Glue is thinner and lighter, thus it wins in the market. Likewise, cases are glued because providing waterproofing via glue is thinner and more reliable than providing it by gaskets and screw-down anchors.
Simple observation: I have a chest strap heart rate monitor, uses a coin battery and is rated for swimming. What's the biggest failure mode? Imperfect seal of the gasket against the stuff around it permitting water intrusion. (There is a redesign that is supposed to be more reliable but since mine never gets submerged it's still working despite once I found the gasket was clearly not properly seated.)
If it wasn't for it no longer being supported by iOS I'd still be using a 2016 SE and the only things I'd seriously miss are an OLED screen (so good for using the phone in dark spaces) and wireless charging (basically for peace of mind if the charging port ever breaks)
There is a fetishistic cult surrounding the N900.
Mainly comprised of people who were too young or broke to own one.
I am an old man who owned an N900.
Simply and concisely: the N900 was a half-baked, poorly thought out, frustrating piece of "exercise in box-ticking" junk.
But what’s often mistaken for a decline in quality is really a shift in priorities: toward affordability, efficiency, and accessibility. And that’s fantastic. Products that were once expensive and exclusive are now available, at good-enough quality, to billions more people around the world.
Yes, that trade-off can mean shorter lifespans or less repairability. But on balance, widening access is a moral win, and one made possible by the very progress the article seems to mourn.
The idea that is bad that poor Indian and Chinese people now have access to anything from clean water to planes is absurd. You can sit there in your luxury house and cry about consumer culture but for millions of people its basic stuff that they have access to for the first time.
And in Europe, despite increasing quality of live, both total energy consumption and fossil fuel consumption is going down.
Now part of this is export of emissions to China but China own growth explains the majority of it.
Continued growth is good, and only continued growth and better technology will get humanity off fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels have been a net good for society and still are!
No one is against clean access to water...
the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.)
the costs are high though, but not that high, compared to - for example - the famines of past
but as population will peak - at least for now - and as we continue to ramp up renewable energy generation these problems are not insurmountable in any sense
...
places affected by storms and extreme heat/cold days need better infrastructure, but since urbanization continues to drive people to cities (as it did for the last few hundreds of years) these places need new and better infrastructure anyway!
Are you abstracting away the technical complexity when stating that it's not complicated? GHG removal tech that would scale simply doesn't exist if we intend to have some energy left to do anything else, as for removing pfas and microplastics from the environment, we are at the stage of running experiments in petri dishes.
And even if we abstract away the technical complexity, good luck convincing anyone to stop burning the free fuel we have lying around doing nothing now that we have everything-nuclear-solar and GHG removal at scale. We can barely convince our councils to build cycle lanes in dense areas if that removes any space for SUVs.
I wish I'd share the blind optimism of people like you, it seems pleasant to live in your heads...
it's a coordination problem as you mentioned
based on this I moved to a place where I think things are a bit less crazy with regards to that (well, famous last comments ...eheh)
> based on this I moved to a place where I think things are a bit less crazy with regards to that (well, famous last comments ...eheh)
Mind telling us pessimists where that might be? ;)
Still, the days for the uber-polluted Beijing are numbered. It will change drastically.
Second, "continued growth is good" is a hell of a thing to say on a planet with finite resources. There's a limit! And if you expand your worldview to include other life on this planet and not just society then we've pushed far beyond what's wise already.
But still, I'll bite - how so? Because I see videos like this:
https://x.com/Zlatti_71/status/1947556095779610961
or this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiNrcHhDTsI
And I compare them to, say, any American city.
You can't watch those and seriously believe that there couldn't possibly be any aspects of Chinese life which are superior, and further, to think that's "insane".
Those aren't cherry-picked videos. There are thousands out there, if you care to look; watch xiaomanyc's videos and there's simply no denying your eyes. Their cars are better, their night life is better, their food is better, their housing is better, their daily lives are better, in many, many ways. Not every way, but in many ways - which is what I said.
You've been propagandized your whole life to think America is number one, but that was only even remotely true before 'we' pissed away our future on genocidal forever wars to make the 0.1% a little wealthier. Now most people see America negatively. Literally the vast majority of countries have an overall negative opinion of America; and we're seen as the number one threat to peace and stability.
Chinese people used to think they're hearing propaganda when they hear American's stories about health insurance, or the political scene - because to them, that's impossible to believe. Yet what you find impossible to believe is that they might have it better in some ways. I hope you have a good long think about that.
Most of those "good 'ol" goods exist, but probably are pretty/too expensive for what we are used to pay.
For many products, the market went with cheap and crappy, and quality became a niche that is no longer available in the general economy, and can only be found with great cost and effort.
Cars are becoming prohibitively expensive. Housing is becoming a luxury.
Even consumer products are becoming increasingly expensive.
Safety largely improved but not craftsmanship.
A Day in Life of Africa’s Wooden Scooter Crew
Indonesia’s Tricked Out Vespas
Adjusted for inflation, car prices are actually lower now than decades ago, especially factoring in huge safety and tech improvements. Entry-level models remain affordable, while buyers voluntarily pay more for SUVs and tech-heavy EVs.
> Housing is becoming a luxury.
Rising housing prices are mostly driven by land scarcity and zoning. The actual cost per square meter of construction (build quality) has improved and remains stable.
> Even consumer products are becoming increasingly expensive.
Nope. Electronics, clothing, and appliances have become dramatically cheaper. Quality-adjusted prices for TVs and computers have plummeted.
> Safety largely improved but not craftsmanship.
Craftsmanship is alive and well, if you are willing to pay for it. Which most consumers are not; they prefer being able to afford more things at lower prices and quicker tech cycles.
Do you have a source? And are you considering expensive markets (cough, Los Angeles)?
In snowbelt (and even somewhat sub-snowbelt) regions, cars would pretty much rust out at 50K miles and starting when conditions were wet or cold could be an adventure.
And, while I have the option of buying an expensive "handmade" (with the aid of expensive CNC equipment) dining room table--which I have done--I also have the option of buying a sturdy and nice-looking mail-order bed for $300 that I assemble.
Housing is the main thing but, as you say, that's mostly a matter of location. There are a ton of cheaper locations but many don't want to live there--even if they're fairly accessible to a major city.
And so are salaries. Just compare what kind of job you needed to be able to afford a car 40 years ago to today.
Reality is still reality, people live in it and face it everyday.
Wealth inequality? The majority is from comparing those starting out to those at retirement. Likewise, the majority of income inequality is hours worked. (Not to say that there aren't other factors, but in both cases when you compare apples to apples it explains more than half the range.)
My parents, both PhD's. AFIAK first car (they had lived where they didn't have as much need of one) was in their 40s. First house in their 50s. We bought our first house (bigger and better than anything my parents ever owned) when I was still in my 20s. (She's older but did not come with any assets beyond her education.)
Or maybe the additional price should be based on the number of rooms instead. Adding empty space by making the rooms bigger is cheap, but extra rooms are usually more valuable to those on a limited budget.
Where I live in California, construction itself has become unaffordable. Even if the land were free, construction and permits are now so expensive that it's impossible to build affordable housing without subsidies.
It's not. Saying something isn't expensive because its the same price after adjusting for inflation is a slap to the face of millions, perhaps even billions who are effectively making less now than they were ten or twenty years ago after they adjust for inflation.
That phrase is not the silver bullet you seem to think it is.
safety... maybe. tech? no. Having to plug in an expensive proprietary diagnostic device to diagnose problems, dozens of computers, hundreds of sensors many of which can render the vehicle bricked and inoperable if they're not working correctly.. None of this is better.
For housing, there are 2 things that happened: regulations made houses more expensive to build (I personally built 3 houses in the past 35 years, I saw the increase in cost) and second thing is house prices are totally disconnected to cost, my current home is evaluated (for tax purpose) about 3 times the real cost to build it. Except the buyers, everyone is happy to have a huge increase in housing cost, builders make more money, local governments raise more taxes, buyers are screwed from all sides and not many people go build their own, even if it many places is still possible (I currently planning to build a house for some friends).
But in a way building a house is cheaper: tools, technology and new materials make it faster and cheaper to build. It should make houses more affordable, if the other factors would not completely eat this saving.
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-makes-housing-so...
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/why-are-homes-in-west...
https://electrek.co/2024/07/08/byd-launches-2025-dolphin-ev-...
The problems you mentioned are a local problem, not a global problem.
This isn’t true. There are dozens of car models near $20k today, and most of the base model inexpensive cars in the US have always cost around today’s $20k-$30k in adjusted dollars. Even the Ford model T: https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0512/how-inflati...
Quality of cars today is unquestionably better, and the number of features and conveniences is unquestionably higher. Cars last longer than they used to, a lot longer on average. There’s ample stats on this.
The average price of cars has gone up slowly relative to inflation because there are now better cars to choose from, and people choose to pay more. But you can’t even buy something as bad as a 1930s or 1950s or 1980s car today, and you can get a much better car now for less money than you could then.
In theory we can make higher quality things, but in practice we are not doing it.
Quality has gone down.
You can have a tailored suit/shirt, hardwood furniture, grass-fed beef, vacuum to last decades, etc, but it will cost around the same in real terms and you're used to prices from Zara/Lidl.
Some things have truly declined because the demand collapsed so much that they basically got discontinued in the 1st world (that tailored shirt is coming from Ceylon) but others have improved tremendously by soaking up that drive for quality (check any independent coffee shop).
Not to mention the true pinnacles of modern manufacturing. Because for the price of a decent camera my father could get, I have a 100x zoom camera in my pocket, with a 7" touch screen, and 5g connectivity, also somehow all the books I could have ever read.
Just no. The old reputable brands are enshittifying the same way. I’ve multiple times seen it first hand, with brands like Levi’s and Fjällräven. One year of wear is enough to disform the textile entirely. The fabric from those older clothes are still sturdy and whole, with only discoloration at the folding spots. No holes either from decades of use.
I magically found a sturdy canvas backpack 10 years ago and went back to the store recently to check what they had: same brand, but now all polyester.
The difference in quality is immense. Especially textile: clothes and shoes. I don’t expect the same prices, I’m happy to pay more for quality. But the brand alone often means nothing.
The price is also quite reasonable (~100 USD) thanks to workwear revival and you can get them in heavier weights (15 oz).
The strategy I’m adopting for this is a total ban on any brand or mark that appears on slop. BMW and JBL were the first on my list.
What clothes are these? I don't buy any kind of expensive brands. I don't take any care when washing. I don't own a lot of clothes so I wear each item weekly. And my clothes last me for several years at least. The dyes have gotten noticeably better than when I was a child - when was the last time you had colors run in the wash?
Seriously though...
Yes, I know, Cheap&Awful. I’m poor.
They were ok for the first wear - but not great to be honest.
Then I washed them and they were unwearable.
Didn't do anything fancy, just a cool wash, dried them on the line.
They turned to cardboard.
Washing in 30 degrees, always tumble drying on low (dryer has a humidity sensor and stops when it's dry, doesn't overdo).
Used to be the cheap "three pairs for 10 euro" socks lasted a couple of years. Now I get, maybe, a year out of them before the holes get too obvious.
And price is not a reliable indicator of quality. Buying expensive can be just as much as a gamble as buying the cheap stuff.
For jeans I’ve settled on Duluth Trading for the time being, found a style and size that fits well and is easily cared for. Many washes later and they are just fine!
Levi’s still seems fine to me as well, but you have to get them from their “high end” retail channel - such as their own storefronts. I’ve definitely noticed a wide difference between that channel and the “low end” retail channels like Amazon and mass market retailers. Seems many brands are doing this weird “channel segmentation” thing recently.
That said, you’re not gonna find a decent pair of jeans for less than around $80 today, unless you get rather lucky with a clearance sale. This makes sense to me, despite my formative years price anchoring being 20 years ago and the initial sticker shock.
I’ve found decent clothing for all my needs really - the most annoying thing is a brand discontinuing and item I started to rely on being there.
They may never have been amazing, but that's the point - they were a representative, middle-of-road brand and you could just assume their clothes would last. I've got a >10 year old shirt that's still fine and a new one that's holed after a single wash. It's not a QA fail, the loss of quality is very clearly deliberate.
If you want long lasting products, then maybe the cheaper furniture is of lower quality. If you want something light weight and affordable, then ikea is higher quality.
Assuming there is a uniform product evaluation function seems like lazy journalism. The addition of AI was also odd
It is heavily manipulated by ads and other patterns.
You can control your own evaluation if you are actively working on it but market moves based on majority so it doesn’t matter
As consumers can not tell the quality of products beforehand, and price is certainly no guarantee of quality, the only logical choice is to buy cheap.
I wish there was a sort of rating of product quality [1], so I can choose the optimum price/quality for a product.
[1] Reviews suck for this purpose. Half of them say things like "Fast shipping, five stars!". By the time defects show up months later and the one-star reviews arrive, the product is discontinued anyway.
Needless to say, I got an Ikea desk delivered 3 days later.
The problem with "you want real quality" people is they mostly seem to advocate buying expensive demonstrative items, rather then properly evaluating what they need.
If a desk has successful held my things and enabled me to work at it for over a decade, what exactly is "quality" meant to be and be bought for?
Even if you can now, it is getting more difficult.
And there doesn’t seem to be any way to avoid it as every washing machine is becoming “smart”, worse at actually washing clothes and using internet to send your data so it can be sold for more profit.
https://speedqueencommercial.com/en-us/products/top-load-was...
If there are ads and manipulation for every possible thing, then what you end up buying still depends on your personal tastes and preferences.
At the end of the day, ever living creatures depends on its extend environment to some extent. The idea that this ever could be different is not realistic. Even if you band all ads, other things would simply take its place as the environment your exposed to.
That said, I'm not against limit some kinds of ads and specially in some places. But we should just outright claim people are not capable of making their own decisions, that's a bad road to go down.
> market moves based on majority so it doesn’t matter
Except it does matter because we do not live in a state controlled system where if 51% people believe pants should be green, 100% of people wear green pants. Even a small number of people can be enough to create a small market for something. Go look into retro computers. The majority clearly doesn't care about old Amiga hardware and software, but yet you can buy it in various forms. There are countless examples.
Affordability has nothing to do in the quality evaluation, it is already taken into account in the quality/cost ratio.
Also, where did you get this idea that particle board furniture were particularly lightweight?
Of course the reality is between. Whenever something experiences mass adoption, of course quality will decline, e. g. airplane seats with mass adoption of flying.
But so, so many things improved dramatically in quality. I could give you endless examples but just think about cars.
Despite anecdata to the contrary the reliability of cars increased over the decades.
Most 60s cars had rust problems after a couple of years. By the 80s this was largely solved.
Most 70s cars had all kinds of mechanical problems but by the 90s this was largely solved.
Most 80s cars had lots of electronics problems but by the 2000s this was largely solved.
Sure we still have software issues and the whole transition to EV's makes has us deal with new problems, but do I want any of my old cars back? Hell no!
The 2010s was peak car.
Of course I never got a Mercedes because it always was way to expensive.
Nowadays every Uber driver seems to drive a BYD Dolphin. They are nice cars and obviously good enough as "taxis". The BYD Dolphin Surf costs 8000 EUR in China (called Seagull there) and between 13000 EUR and 20000 EUR in most other places where it is available.
I think it's completely fair to say we haven't gotten worse at making cheap cars, we've just legislated them out of existence.
These days the bigger problem with cars is one piece breaks and it isn't made anymore so you total it when 90% of the rest of the car is still good.
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/550
Panel 1 is a depiction of Neanderthals in the Shanidar Cave, in particular the "Shanidar 1" specimen, which showed a large number of old injuries and disabilities in the individual. The fact that they had lived for so long showed that the Neanderthal community cared for their members even when they were no longer "useful" physically to society.
It's kind of hard to imagine going back and showing the Shanidar Neanderthals all the gains we've made as a society to produce enough food for everyone, and yet people still go hungry. Then again, imagine showing him Nintendo Switch. I bet he'd love Nintendo Switch, so it's really a wash.
I looked at this hotel made from containers recently:
https://www.booking.com/hotel/de/tin-inn-montabaur.html
I thought it is an interesting concept. And it has a rating of 8.5 out of 10 on booking.com, which means "Very good".
But then I read through the details and the reviews (sorted by new) and see:
You can hear your neighbors.
You cannot open the windows.
Staff enters the room before your checkout time.
The rooms and the stuff inside the rooms are dirty.
Lots of broken amenities, including the air condition.
For check-in you have to enter your passport-id (where does it end up?).
And on and on an on ...
How is that "Very good"?
What threshold should one assign to book something on booking.com these days? 9.9/10?
My working assumption right now is this two phenomena together.
One, a sneakier kind of “shrinkflation”. You can make a can of coke smaller but you can’t do this with shoes. But you can swap out materials or hire more careless manufacturers.
Two, the breakdown of communication caused by AI, earlier fake reviewers and the death of the media at the hands of the web. Taken together, you can get away with a lot more without liquidating your brand simply because word won’t spread.
Shame the shoe brand!
I still use a phone of the generation after Nokia - it must be 20 years old now. The thing is, for everyday use voicemail and SMS are enough for me. I don't need more technology. And certainly not the kind of technology that make people walk like zombies on the street. If you remember the old Youtube video about viewers not noticing a gorilla in the middle of basketball players because viewers were instructed to count something, this is exactly that.
> there’s another, lesser-known but even more effective method: convincing consumers that a product is outdated for aesthetic or symbolic reasons, even if it still works.
Long story short, durability is the greatest enemy for businesses. They have decades of experience of fighting against it. IIRC Europe introduced laws against planned obsolescence, but businesses probably did start to switch to "perceived obsolescence" when consumers proved the existence of planned obsolescence.
It's not even something evil to do for some categories of products. Good household appliances use less energy, even good ICE cars probably are more efficient than they used to be, etc. It seems that it defines a different metric for product quality, total cost of ownership.
> However, Rodríguez argues that, generally speaking, automation does improve customer service. [...] The initial investment in technology is extremely high, and the benefits remain practically the same. We have not detected any job losses in the sector either.
If companies really are investing in order to improve their customer service, that's big news.
Family business houses used to invest in long-term success through brand, reputation and durability. Startups or hired CEOs focus on short-term goals and invest in creating superficial perceptions that can help the sale.
We got to spec this place from the builder's options. Granite would have been a few percent of the total price of the house and granite comes with the problem that it's somewhat porous.
We decided on Corian countertops--it's basically a plastic resin, a bit scratchable (but on the flip side it's full depth material so you can buff out some damage), but totally waterproof and no grout lines. Now there's a version that uses quartz in the resin, much tougher but otherwise similar.
This is pretty normal when I was growing up. You should never put a hot anything on a countertop.
What naturally happens to such products is that the manufacturers find a way to broaden their customer base. They find ways to bring the price point down so they can sell more.
For most people this is a boon. They can afford a luxury or convenience they otherwise wouldn't be able to. Overall most people are better off when this happens.
For the first group of people however, they are worse off. They cannot get the same product as before. Such is life.
Yes, the fact that any family can afford a new shelving unit is great! But the fact that it’ll last them just a few years is not good; they’ll spend more in the long run
Shoes that last a decade are cost a lot more than five pairs of cheap shoes that last two years. And the same with furniture and everything else.
"Pay less in the long run" is a pure marketing ploy for dumb pompous people with money to make them pay more.
https://www.homedepot.com/p/HDX-4-Tier-Easy-Assembly-Scratch...
You, lower middle class in the 2020s, can afford with the same resources a washing machine that lasts 5 years and is no more effective than your parents' (but has an app).
In the sense of the parent comment, you are fortunate that the magic of capitalism currently produces such cheap washing machines that even people as poor as you can afford them. But from another angle, the purchasing power of the lower middle class has sunk over time, and quality has degraded to match because durable products have now become "outside the grasp of most Americans".
When I asked movers to replace existing LG with my speed queen, they asked why - LG looks so much better.
It's what consumer wants, others go a-11.
"There is no attachment, respect, or emotional journey with a garment you spend less than 20 years with.”
"we spend $3 on a carton of juice instead of squeezing oranges"
Perhaps by including words of wisdom like these they hope to demonstrate that their thesis of a decline in quality extends to journalism?
As far as clothes go - I the cheap junk back in the day didn't last too long, either. Cheap supermarket jeans would last me maybe 1 season, before something ripped. Granted they probably only cost $20 back then - but the quality isn't too different from the H&M you purchase today for $50.
FIVE, POUNDS.
Crazy cheap by any measure; they were extremely thick, to the point where you could stand them up with no person inside them. They lasted me for over 10 years.
New jeans (at any price point) seem to wear out in the inner thigh inside of a year, and I am not as active as I was back then due to age. I also haven’t gained a significant amount of weight to account for this. I thought it could be caused by cycling, but I stopped cycling and the wear outs still happen. I thought it could be the quality of what I was buying so I bought more and more expensive jeans, alas, the same was true.
The best Jeans I ever owned are simultaneously the cheapest.
(side note; I also noticed that nearly all Jeans these days contain “elastane” which is basically plastic, which probably contributes to the degradation - Elastane didn’t exist for jeans in 2005, they were mostly still 100% cotton until the legging jeans fad and then it started making its way into normal jeans).
Not any more, they got bought by two rather dodgy petrol station owners.
They used to have taste. Now it's gone.
Well that explains a lot, doesn't it? The article is right overall but occasionally glances over the importance of the "quality/price" ratio. As the price went down, buying habits changed, and by extension the manufacturing habits. When things are cheap nobody wants to keep them forever, they get exchanged sooner to "keep up with the times".
My anecdote, when I bought my first fridge (a tiny 70-100l I think) it cost 2.5x the average net salary in my country, and it still broke down often, but it could be repaired so it lasted 20+ years. I think today a fridge costing 2.5x the average salary - for the US this would be a ~$10-12k fridge - will be more reliable but unrepairable so when it's done, it's done.
An other thing to account for is the price of repairs. If your appliances costs less than one hour of a mid-skill technician, it’s hard to justify the spending. Same for doing it yourself if you’re time is worth a lot. The only solution is to by high end, which is always risky and more cash intensive. Most people will prefer buying cheap and change to new if required
3000€+ in the early 2000s is easily 5000€ today accounting for inflation. Even if you mean they are 3000€ today, at that price point the market is needle thin. The best selling fridges on Amazon.de right now are in the 300€ region, maybe 500-600€ if you want to go "premium". So you're saying a fridge that's 10-15 times more expensive than the cheap best sellers is also better.
This is exactly the quality/price trap. People remember the quality from "way back when" but forget the price. We mostly just traded quality/longevity for cheaper and faster replacement. Quality didn't necessarily go down, it's just people target cheaper products today.
The author either submitted to the inevitable. Or, decided that they don't want to make change.
Hate the cheap fashion, make a choice, buy proper products they just cost more and require the slightest of effort to care for.
Hate bad writing, move on read something else.
Dislike the quality of product X buy Y.
Frankly if you had told me the quality of product you would be and to buy for example in the MacBook air for <<$1k a few years ago I'd have laughed. There are food brands which are still going that make the same quality products and don't sacrifice, but they now cost more than the competitors because they don't compromise.
And that's just the beginning. The moaning about China, AI, people is just the same "I can't do anything to improve my lot in life" you see too much online.
Stop reacting to things happening to you and start doing things.
Like even if the author is totally wrong, that "actually all our products are actually much better thank you, good thing we don't live 50 years ago!" Is that something we can truly be happy about? Is that winning? You too, im sure, feel that itchy emptiness when you have received all your products, when all the plastics has been peeled off and the software has been updated.
This is not a battle you even want to win! The power you are defending is already second-hand, is just a sedative. You can want more.
We as part of a collective are incredibly powerful beyond imagination. When our concerns and our world start to become bigger than just our individual needs, we find strength in numbers. Only then can our individuality truly shine.
Seeing us as part of a group, a class and building that sense of community and collective action is long and difficult work.
What's better -- often food packaging has clever ways to be resealable so you can use it without letting your food get stale.
What's worse -- the above is combined with "make it as thin as possible to not fall apart before it gets home. Quite frequently... I try to carefully open a resealable package, and completely shred it ruining the part that is supposed to reseal.
I imagine this is regional, but our local deli meat bags... well this adds a second issue... the bags are super thin, but then they put strong stickers folded across the resealable portion. It's nigh impossible to get the sticker lifted without ripping a hole in the bag and again, ruining the "resealable" feature.
These companies are so fine tuned that they notice a 0.05% drop in revenue. Don't like what they do. Don't buy it and see if they change.
If they change something and you vote with your cash they notice. The biggest lie is that you don't matter because you're statistically insignificant. If you believe that they lose 0.005% vs 0.05%.
For better or worse look at Bud Light. The customer is always the opinion they listen to. 50% loss in profits or 0.5% this gets blamed on someone ultimately and they tend to revert unpopular decisions when they're not related to regulatory changes.
Needless to say, I declined this unfair trade, but didn't hold out the greatest hopes for this being a particularly enlightening or profound piece.
The upper-middle class in the US is also bigger than ever, and all those upper-middle interests are getting saturated: AMEX lounges, expensive resorts. Air travel is also a lot more affordable for the common person than back in the golden age.
It's called "Enshittification": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification. It's just the free market and the corporations giving a big middle finger to its clients. It's the same reason Microsoft can do all of the above:
- "The company reported better-than-expected results, with $25.8 billion in quarterly net income, and an upbeat forecast in late April"
- "Microsoft on Tuesday said that it’s laying off 3% of employees across all levels, teams and geographies, affecting about 6,000 people."
- "These new job cuts are not related to performance, the spokesperson said."
Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/05/13/microsoft-is-cutting-3percen...
If you are thinking this is in any way tied to inflation, it's not. It's just greed and the absence of laws to curb that greed. So you are gonna get less and worse for more money, and like it, because the monopolies are lobbying the governments and can do literally what they want to do in countries susceptible to it.
When Broadcom tried these kinds of stunts in civilized countries, they quickly got shown their place:
- https://www.networkworld.com/article/4015489/dutch-court-for...
- https://licenseware.io/broadcom-faces-eu-scrutiny-over-contr...
Does 800% and 1500% price increase sound to you like related to inflation? Enshittification is not out of our hands if we elect governments that have our interest in mind.
Also it is expected for the company to have absolutely no care for ethics unless it affects their bottom line. And there are many blockers for the average Joe like ethics, feeling guilt etc. etc.
It is only natural that companies are pushing more and more as time goes on. And there is no reason it should stop other than companies messing it up?
Maybe if gains were huge, the regular people would get some benefits but it seems like the gains are just not enough for that to happen anymore?
You are taking that as a natural state of things, a law that can't be broken, while this is just the end effect of living under capitalism. It's not set in stone and can be changed. We just need to change the incentives:
> It is only natural that companies are pushing more and more as time goes on. And there is no reason it should stop other than companies messing it up?
Jail time for executives, breaking down monopolies, and enforcing of antitrust laws come to mind as an effective way that's worked in the past. Also unionizing and strikes for the workers for fair pay. State intervention and re-nationalization of companies that misbehave, especially water, utilities, transport and agriculture. Also progressive wealth tax up to 70%-99%, so there is less incentives to be greedy (if you think that's too much...well, that already happened in 50's USA).
Only the Mag7 are raking in projects. The rest have gone nowhere.
That's powerful debate skills, you really showed me!
A bigger decline is coming if we let "vibe coding" and what we call AI replace human workers at scale. The technology isn't there yet for full automation but everything is blindly surging ahead due to the allure of it and the same reason as the first paragraph above.
I like this wording better than "programmed obsolescence". I don't really believe that "programmed obsolescence" is common. If anyone in a company leaked that the company actively designs the product to stop working after some time, it would make the news.
I call it "premature obsolescence", which sounds more passive to me: the product doesn't last as long as it could because the company doesn't actively work on making it last as long. Because it's cheaper of course. Hence "lowest cost technically acceptable".
"It's not that we make a bad product, but rather that we don't make a good product", in a way. There is no need, consumers buy it even if it's not good.
I think you're only considering one aspect of planned obsolescence -- where the product is designed to have a short lifetime. I don't know why you would believe that that isn't part of "business as usual", but there's more than one way to make a product obsolete. The typical case is when a company releases yearly model refreshes for a product with an operational life far in excess of 12 months. This stategy is most common in markets with a monopoly or oligopoly, in saturated product segments.
Have you ever heard the phrase "last year's model"?
Say you buy a smartphone, and you want it to last for 7 years. If you buy the model from 2025, the manufacturer commits to supporting it until 2032 (it already exists). Now if you buy the 2025 model in 2029, it will still last until 2032, so in 2029 it actually makes sense to not buy the model from 2025. But I would say that it's pretty great that the manufacturer commits to supporting the devices for 7 years.
Planned obsolescence suggests that the company has been actively investing resources into it. "This lightbulb lasts for 4 years, have our engineers find a way to make it die after 1 year" is the typical example of that.
Now of course, as a customer, you can buy the 2025 model, and throw it away in 2026 to buy the new model.
> I would say that it's pretty great that the manufacturer commits to supporting the devices for 7 years.
Sure. Your scenario is describing planned obsolescence, though. As I understand it, you're saying that the device will be practically unusable when the support period ends in 2032. It doesn't matter if it's 7 years or 7 months, that's something that came about because of a decision made by the company -- it was planned. Further, the company releases a new version of the product in 2026. The older model still works, but it has nevertheless been rendered obsolete, by an (arbitrary) action of the company that produced it.
It's just that in my mind, there is a difference between "I put efforts into making sure that it won't last longer than what I plan" and "I don't put efforts into making it last longer than what I plan".
- Actively making the product worse is an arsehole move. The way to prevent that is to make it illegal to do it.
- Not actively keeping it alive is actually rational if it is less profitable. We do agree that it is premature for a smartphone to be unusable after 2 weeks. We probably do agree that it is not reasonable to expect a smartphone to last for 10 000 years. So we need regulations that enforces something reasonable upon company. Then it becomes rational for the company to apply it, because if they don't they will get fines and it will be more costly.
I see the first one as "planned obsolescence". The second as "premature obsolescence". For the former, I think we should be extremely severe with companies (the CEO who clearly asks for that should go to prison, if it's at the scale of smarphones). But the latter comes from a lack of regulations.
On the other end you have something like Juicero. Massively and wastefully overengineered piece of crap. To do not that useful task. While being extremely expensive. And probably not actually last that long.
Maybe one day if far future we end up with some mature balance between two. But I doubt it...
If you want it to last longer, it's a lot of work: you have to somehow test the components you buy (or get those who produce them to do it) and then you have to test whatever you build with them. So you have to invest in it, it's not just a design decision.
Same for waterproofness: it's not that you actively drill holes in your device to make sure that it won't be waterproof. It's just that if you actually want it waterproof, you have to design for it, then you have to test, and iterate a few times. If your consumers still buy your device if it's not waterproof, then there is no need to invest in waterproofness. But it's not "planned un-waterproofness".
And this does not result in the health service having lower quality for the individual?
This is a very funky way to frame this.
Clothing cost after accounting for inflation has actually not increased. There are many of high quality textiles companies that only produce hand made organic cotton sourced from sustainable farms etc. Some of them are actually not too expensive - check out Isto from Portugal. Yes, i'm willing to pay $50 for a tshirt instead of the usual $25 from Uniqlo or Zara but most people are not.
The article is from Spain - the birthplace of Zara, Inditex and fast fashion. Spain is also known for sitting on cheap plastic chairs outside drinking cheap beer for hours. The quality of housing interiors is pretty poor - despite wood parquet flooring being no more expensive than in other parts of the world, almost every house here (even after renovation) has laminate, concrete or ceramic flooring. Yet plenty of people here have the top of the latest Playstation or iPhone.
Which we all get - if housing start costing close to 40% of your paycheck which is typical for a young person in Spain, is that $50 high quality tshirt or $80 / sqm parquet really what you should logically do with your left over money?
High quality items has traditionally been a luxury good - one reserved for the rich. Back then we simply did not have the choice to buy low quality items which allowed us to shift more spending on things that we actually cared more about. The real lament is that most of us actually care less about the quality of clothing and furniture than we would like to believe.
Some products and services managed to decrease in price to match this, and but the culture of craftsmanship had to be sacrificed to match lower purchasing parity.
Product culture ends up being the culture in which the middle class are engaged in.
That is why quality has declined.
> Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller, clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash, and machines now answer our calls.
The author talks about a range of motivations behind these, but it seems like there's an obvious one we're missing. All these changes make products more profitable.
I would love to live in a society that prioritises sustainability and quality of life for its citizens. We currently only achieve those things if they're a byproduct of profit for coorporations.
Maybe I'm being overly cynical, but I definitely don't see these changes as bewildering. Quality has been intentionally lowered when it conflicts with profit since at least the Phoebus cartel[0]
The Phoebus cartel is an example of planned obsolescence, but it's a bad example for your argument because it made lightbulbs much, much better at their intended purpose. Consumer number-gawking incentivized manufacturers to make their product objectively worse, and the cartel solved that problem.
> Regulators in the UK and some independent engineers have noted that there are benefits to shorter bulb lifespans, as shorter-life bulbs can be brighter for the same wattage. Nevertheless, both internal comments from cartel executives and later findings by a US court suggest that the cartel's direct motivation for the change was to increase profits by forcing customers to buy bulbs more frequently.
Or maybe just don't buy cheap thrash?
I bought some T-shirts while in Covid from a sports brand and 5 years later they are still as if they were new :shrug:
Of course price =/= quality, but when almost everyone is ordering their new clothes from Shein then what do you really expect?
Moore’s law has ended. The LHC found nothing of note. Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated. The periodic table is effectively complete. R&D is having limited returns. This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the 1980s.
We were born thinking the curve from the 1950s onwards was a god-given eternal exponential. But since about the early 2000s we’ve quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given.
Economists and the well-off are in denial about exponential growth. We’ve hit the current carrying capacity for an economy of n-billion silicon-flinging apes on a globe with a limited number of resources.
Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal. This puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every decision maker in the organisation: “at the end of the day, this number has to go up and this number go down”.
Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little better through their products or services. The only model left, now that all the large pile of low-hanging fruit of innovation are gone, is to aggressively extract money from customers.
Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of exponential growth being flawed. Should we require MBAs to know what a logistic curve is?
I don’t know a lot, but I know that the current business paradigm and the products and services I interact with everyday are very optimised. But not optimised for me. They’re optimised for businesses maligned to my goals, but the only businesses left offering anything.
> The LHC found nothing of note.
That's just wrong.
> Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated.
Childhood mortality has not been defeated. And while Polio has been, many other things haven't.
> The periodic table is effectively complete.
People in the next 100 years will add more. And even so, there is so much about materials we don't understand its actually insane. There are many things we learn about materials that is just as or more relevant then discovering a new element.
> R&D is having limited returns.
It has always had limited returns. And in some ways it has huge returns. Making an airlplane 1% more efficient today has a much larger overall impact then making a plane 10% more efficient 50 years ago.
> This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the 1980s.
That's just dismissive of 30+ years of research and work. You might as well argue that its just 200 years of catching up to the vision of Ada.
> But since about the early 2000s we’ve quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given.
From a global perspective there is no slowdown, its only relative to US experience.
> Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal. This puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every decision maker in the organisation: “at the end of the day, this number has to go up and this number go down”.
This has literally been every business for 5000 years.
> Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little better through their products or services.
And they still do.
> The only model left, now that all the large pile of low-hanging fruit of innovation are gone, is to aggressively extract money from customers.
That's just not accurate. Go look up how much investment in next generation notes cost TSMC and then tell me all they do is extract money from consumers. Tell me that the restaurant down the street who works hard creating incredibly food is just extracting money from consumers in some kind of aggressive way.
When SpaceX deployed a whole new infrastructure around the globe, was that just extracting money because innovation is impossible, or was it massive innovation and massive infrastructure spending?
This is just a cynical world-view glorifying the past. When in effect, innovation wasn't easy. Go look up how many people died in air accidents, or car accidents. Go look up how many mainframe and minicomputer companies came and went, trying to invent the future. If anything the length companies now-days go to, to prevent a single death is actually kind of crazy.
> Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of exponential growth being flawed.
There are tons of business that don't expect exponential growth. There are even many that expect to shrink. And tons of business who do expect it don't get it. And yet the world keeps turning for those business too.
Capitalism can work perfectly fine in situation of now growth, plenty of countries have seen little growth for decades. And yet food still gets delivered to stores. Trains and cars keep going around. And so on and so on. But even in those places, companies don't stop trying to grow.
Maybe we will live in a world where no company will ever grow and wont for decades, even in that world, MBA and everybody else will still try to grow companies. Even if the world experienced a 50 year decline, that wouldn't change anything. Teach them about logistic curves all you like.
> But not optimised for me.
The world doesn't evolve around you. Shocking that you had to realize that like this.
Yes, continuous improvement is still happening – but that's exactly the point. We're now largely in the slow, incremental phase of a logistic curve, not the wild exponential boom of mid-century.
Declaring "Wright's law didn't end" doesn't magically revive Moore's Law or deliver another physics revolution. It just means costs fall gradually – a far cry from the paradigm-shifting breakthroughs we once took for granted. Take your example of airplane efficiency: you argue that a 1% improvement today has more total impact than a 10% improvement 50 years ago. Precisely – because we've already squeezed out the big gains. We're fighting over the last few percent now. That's diminishing returns in a nutshell.
Claiming "the LHC found nothing of note" is "just wrong" without elaboration is not a rebuttal – it's empty hand-waving. In truth, the LHC confirmed the Higgs (important, but expected) and thus far hasn't found new physics beyond the Standard Model. In other words, no earth-shaking discovery to mark on the timeline.
Similarly, quibbling that "the periodic table isn't complete because we might add element 119+" is technically true yet profoundly trivial. Synthesizing a superheavy element that decays in microseconds won't herald a new era of materials (you brought up material science, not me); it only underscores that we're tinkering at the margins of what we already know.
The original point – that the big foundational discoveries (DNA, the atom, electromagnetism, etc.) have been made – still stands. And yes, childhood mortality isn't zero and new diseases appear – but pretending the original claim was that "everything is 100% solved" is a straw man. Polio has been virtually eradicated worldwide; childhood mortality is down to a fraction of historic levels. These are monumental victories. Dismissing them because "many other things haven't been defeated" is like shrugging off the moon landing because we haven't colonized Mars. It's disingenuous nitpicking that ignores the broader truth: the low-hanging fruit has been plucked. Progress now tends to be harder-fought and incremental, exactly as a logistic curve (or plain old reality) predicts.
You insist "business has always been this way" – growth-obsessed and optimizing numbers – as if 5,000 years of merchants hustling invalidates any concern about today. This is a false equivalence. For most of history, economic growth was glacial and businesses were limited by local markets and resources. The modern era's exponential growth expectations are a relatively recent phenomenon fueled by industrialisation and cheap energy. Now we're hitting planetary and societal limits, something those ancient businesses never had to grapple with on a global scale. Pointing out that reality has a carrying capacity isn't "denial" – it's maths. We live on a finite planet. Endless exponential GDP growth in a closed system is fantasy. By slyly conceding that some companies "even expect to shrink" or that "plenty of countries have seen little growth for decades", you're actually reinforcing the original argument: perpetual growth is not guaranteed. Yet in the same breath you acknowledge businesses will "still try to grow" even in a no-growth world – which is exactly the problem being highlighted!
An economic paradigm built on eternal growth starts to cannibalise itself when growth dries up. Debt-fueled bubbles, resource depletion, and exploitative practices aren't signs of a healthy status quo – they're symptoms of chasing an impossible target. Teaching MBAs about logistic curves and limits to growth isn't frivolous; it's an attempt to inject reality into boardroom delusions. Dismissing that as irrelevant is just embracing willful ignorance.
And no, global progress isn't all wine and roses just because some developing countries are catching up. Your "from a global perspective there is no slowdown" line ignores that much of global GDP growth in recent decades came from population increase and China/India's rapid development – one-time events that don't prove infinite growth is sustainable. Meanwhile, frontier innovation and productivity in mature economies have slowed, a fact noted by plenty of economists. Simply put, we're coasting on momentum. Pointing that out isn't "glorifying the past," it's cautioning that the frenetic growth phase is leveling off – and our economic mindset needs to catch up.
You object to the statement that the only model left is "aggressively extracting money from customers," by rattling off examples of ongoing innovation. Sure, TSMC pours billions into next-gen chip nodes – but that actually supports the point about diminishing returns (each shrink is exorbitantly expensive and yields smaller gains). Yes, SpaceX built a new rocket infrastructure – an impressive outlier that everyone admires precisely because true game-changing innovation is so rare these days. Citing a local restaurant making "incredible food" or a rocket company revolutionising launch doesn't magically erase the countless counter-examples of businesses optimizing for profit at the expense of customer benefit.
Look around: software shifting to subscription models for basic features, appliances designed to break faster or use proprietary consumables, games riddled with predatory microtransactions, tech ecosystems that lock you in and harvest your data, airlines nickel-and-diming passengers for things that used to be free. These are all optimizations for revenue extraction, not for making your life better. My frustration was about this very shift – that many products and services nowadays feel like they exist to trap users in a maze of monetisation, rather than to deliver clear value.
Your response that "businesses still make lives better" reads like a blanket corporate press release, not an engagement with reality. Nobody said innovation has literally ceased. My claim was that the "large pile of low-hanging fruit" is gone – and you haven't actually refuted that. Incremental improvements and isolated leaps forward (like reusable rockets) happen, but they're increasingly hard-won. Meanwhile, companies flush with MBAs and pressured by investors turn to easier plays: locking in customers, eliminating competition, and squeezing every penny. When you counter with "but look at this new chip/rocket/restaurant," you're cherry-picking exceptions to downplay a broad trend that every consumer can feel.
The weakest part of your rebuttal is how it mischaracterises my original arguments and occasionally even undermines your own. You spend a lot of energy torching straw men. Nowhere did I claim "the world should revolve around me" – that's your invented absurdity. Complaining that products are not optimized for users (but for profit metrics) is not the same as expecting a personal utopia tailored to each individual. It's pointing out a systemic misalignment between what customers want and what companies prioritise.
The irony is that in your rush to refute every point, you often validate them. You argue "R&D has always had limited returns", which doesn't rebut the idea that current R&D is yielding less bang for the buck – it reinforces it. You point out how much harder it is now to get small improvements (exactly the complaint!). You deride the notion of a logistic curve, yet your own examples (small incremental gains, global catch-up growth slowing as it matures, etc.) paint a textbook logistic scenario. Your unwavering faith that "everything's fine, progress is progress" blinds you to the qualitative difference between transformative growth and grinding optimization.
It's like responding to someone worried about crop yields plateauing by saying "nonsense, we're still growing some corn every year." Totally misses the point. Finally, your tone doesn't do you any favors. Dismissing valid concerns as "cynical world-view" or implying anyone who disagrees just doesn't understand that "the world doesn't revolve around them" is more insulting than illuminating. It's possible to appreciate past innovation and be concerned about current trends – that doesn't make one a nostalgia-blinded cynic. Throwing out patronising asides might feel like scoring points, but it only highlights the emptiness of the rebuttal. When substance is lacking, sneering condescension fills the void.
Your response really tries to read like a thoughtful counter-argument and yet comes off as a knee-jerk denial of anything remotely critical of the status quo. Nobody is saying human progress stopped or that businesses overnight turned into pure evil. The argument is that we're entering a new phase: slower growth, harder innovation, and yes, a desperate push by many companies to maintain profits now that the easy growth is gone. You haven't disproven that; in fact, you've indirectly affirmed many aspects of it while arguing past the point.
To address this because it seems to be a repeated thought pattern underlying a lot of your responses lately: labeling every concern "wrong" or "cynical" doesn't make it go away. Sometimes metrics do plateau, sometimes the next big thing doesn't pan out (ask the LHC physicists hoping for new particles), and sometimes companies really do put profits over people in ways that hurt quality and trust. Acknowledging these realities isn't about glorifying the past – it's about not deluding ourselves regarding the present. No, the world doesn't revolve around any of us. But it's not supposed to revolve around corporate KPIs or your personal techno-optimism either. Progress isn't a given, and pretending otherwise is as misguided as assuming we were on an endless exponential.
A little less hubris and a little more humility about these limits would go a long way – especially before dismissing others as simply "wrong" without having the muscle to back it up.
"Psychologist Albert Vinyals, author of El consumidor tarado (The Disordered Consumer) (2019), recalls that years ago, the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity. “Now we don’t even consider it,” he notes over the phone. “My grandmother, when she went to buy clothes, looked at the type of fabric they were made of. Now, no one knows what their pants are made of. Why would they? In a year, we’ll stop wearing them because they’ll no longer be fashionable.”"
People don't care. As sheer product diversity and sourcing increased across the last several decades, so many products have become so much cheaper as a percentage of disposable income that people just stopped caring about how durable they are. The logic is sound from the standpoint of a consumer for most products for which durability isn't an absolute must: Just accept a cheaper thing because it's not too cumbersome to replace it sooner rather than later.
This has slowly worn down a general tendency towards careful thriftiness that previous generations had internalized and made the latest generations internalize that durability doesn't matter as much.
That many products marketed as high quality and sold at such prices also end up being poorly made doesn't help either: If you can't even trust the outcome when you make an effort to be careful, why bother?
Cars today? First tuneup at 100,000 miles.
You can say that cars are a lot more fragile today - get in a crash and they fall apart. That's true, but it's deliberate, and it's not deliberate so that they can make them cheap. It's deliberate so that fewer people die.
This is very obvious in China's electric vehicles. There used to be several hundred manufacturers, most producing really crappy cars. Now, there are fewer manufacturers, and the cars are much better. Ford's CEO on the BYD Shark: “It’s a great product. It’s sold well. They’re trying to sell in high volume in Mexico, but it’s also being localized in Thailand. If we want to be a global player in pickups, like we are now, we have to compete.”
Tools from China used to be total crap, and now they are at least OK.
There's a strong trend towards branded products from China, rather than white-label production. Brand reputation starts to matter.
[1] https://qualityinspection.org/cheap-and-crappy-to-excellent-...
I remember the first time my parents bought big-farm grown chicken at a local shop in 1997. I was fascinated and so happy because they also had chicken burgers (instead of buying a whole chicken at the butcher). Then came big dairy made yogurt and cheese, around 2000. There was even a failed experiment with factory made packaged bread, but nobody buys stale bread here, so that didn't work out. Now nobody remembers the taste of free range chicken from the villages, or any small scale farm for that matter.
Change in textile is a bit more complicated and quality decline has hit only in the last 10 years or so but to an even larger scale. I have tshirts I bought 15 years ago for 1-2 Euros looking almost new, but now tshirts in any proce range don't last a year most of the time. I only buy 100% cotton but somehow the fabric quality is so low.
> There’s one conclusion that comes up repeatedly throughout this report: the perception that everything is of lower quality is more pronounced among older people. The reasons are varied. One is that attributes like durability — which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product’s quality — have lost relevance.
Well, wouldn't older people have more perspective from a greater amount of lived experience? Then, in the next sentence, the article assumes away a reason to throw their conclusions out.
> José Francisco Rodríguez, president of the Spanish Association of Customer Relations Experts, admits that a lack of digital skills can be particularly frustrating for older adults, who perceive that the quality of customer service has deteriorated due to automation. However, Rodríguez argues that, generally speaking, automation does improve customer service.
When the automation on the other end can't understand my problem and I can't talk to a human, then I cannot solve my problem. This is definitively a regression and is occurring more than ever before. I have a problem with getting paid from a large company, and there is no reasonable way outside of hiring a lawyer for me to resolve the problem, and the dollar amount is so low the company knows full well that I will not hire a lawyer to resolve the problem, and it is automation that makes this possible, more than ever. But I'm sure the back-end metrics look great to management and the experts in this article.
> It’s difficult to prove that today’s products are worse than those of 20 years ago.
Why is "20 years ago" the baseline? And that word "prove" establishes an unattainable bar within such a subjective field of study.
1. Quality has been dieing mainly because people are addicted to cheap shit. The cheaper things are, the more they can buy. The amount of personal possessions people have nowadays is totally insane and unsurprisingly lots of cheap stuff.
2. Planned obsolescence is not a thing. Maybe it's happened a few times with a few products. But it certainly doesn't deserve a name. I have been on the engineering side of many business and consumer products and swam in waters of the industry for years.
No one has ever used that term. There is no engineering associated with it. No books or talks or specialists.
It's purely a function of point #1. People want the lowest cost above all else, so lower quality parts get used. Warranty durations are pretty standard too, 1 year 2 year 5 year. You never see a 566 day warranty like you would expect from a calculated failure model.
Also, the best way for 25 years now to make a product fail just after warranty is to program it in software. Everything has a microcontroller nowadays. How many devs here have written that code?
Anyway, I think nobody in the industry needs to be aware of that term, and it can still be in play. Nobody in media really talks about Chomsky media filters, yet they arguably exist. As you mention, all that is needed for planned obsolence is if engineers only consider parts with expected percentile failure after the warranty, and then go by other criteria, e.g. cheapness. This will easily result in a situation where a product that would otherwise last relies on a cheap part that prematurely failed.
For example, I had a monitor where the "on" button failed after couple years. I replaced the failed plastic hinge with a piece of cardboard and the monitor still works, good 15 years later.
Now we make a trade off between quality, cost, and convenience - with convenience being heavily weighted.
Consider the rise of bottled water, or Apple (it just works...)
People have shown that they will pay a huge premium for convenience. That premium might be paid in the form of sacrificed quality or it might be paid in dollars.
And when creativity and competence are commodities, companies expect they can replace creativity and competence with another SaaS platform or another vendor who'll do the dirty work. Companies don’t dare hire new graduates and train them. They don't try to educate them on how to build and maintain things while preserving the fresh thinking that comes with youth and inexperience. Those days are gone because the MBA wizards have decided long term investment, investment into an industry or one's community, is bad business.
The pied pipers of modern business thinking openly encourage “minimum viable” as the secret to success. “Minimum viable” is only a a fly’s eyelash from “not viable”. That results in “nearly not viable” schlock filling the shelves anywhere things are sold.
Modern business philosophy is literally that, for years, we’ve made things too good. That thinking infects every level of business, from development to manufacturing to service and support. Companies instruct their teams and vendors to fly as close to the sun as possible. They use words like “agile” and “lean” and “efficient”, when in most cases they are just using those words to wallpaper over shoddy work.
And because the way we used to do things is always wrong, companies hire one “consultant” after another poisoning the well with this garbage. The need for “consultant” help never ends, as the real money in consulting is in prolonging problems.
When all of that outsourcing, outsourcing of thinking and outsourcing of actual production, doesn’t adequately insulate the decision makers from accountability, companies embrace “big data” and decision committees and auditors and anything else that shields the org chart from real scrutiny. Companies refuse to trust anyone who actually has their ear to the ground in favor of some artificial signal discerned from the mountain of white noise collected from inconsistent and uneven sources. Nobody trusts the prophet in their own hometown, but the prophet from the next town is an oracle.
All of that, coupled with a consumer market that is neither educated nor savvy enough to discern quality and unwilling to pay for what quality actually costs, results in the sorry state we are experiencing. This can't sustain.
Maybe not the best example. If there’s ever a product where timeliness is a feature, it’s the morning coffee. A $.70 Nespresso pod may not match a freshly ground light roast pour over, but to the dreary eyed wage slave just rising to seize the day, the taste consistency and convenience are distinct features.
> Today, it’s easier to converse with a machine than with a real person. The problem is that no one likes these systems: according to a study by the Cetelem Observatory published last October, five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants.
People fail to realize the cost of interactions too. With minimum wage at nearly $20/hour, a six (6) minute phone call costs $2 more than the $0 marginal cost of an automated phone system. Would you pay a $2 human-interaction-surcharge to order a pizza?
Try shopping for toys for your kids today. Every time I'm with my 7 year old browsing the toy aisles I fondly remember my Tonka truck from when I was his age.
I outgrew it and it was still in perfect condition. My sons toys barely last a month.
Being at home used to mean being able to shut off browsing, buying, and consuming and to shut out the people and companies that want us to think about purchasing this or that.
I've stopped doing this. I now avoid every part of the Internet and every electronic practice that subjects me to this awful facet of our culture. My life has improved, and I'm certain my brain has benefited.
If that's the case, even if it's true that we can say "sure, quality is declining, but it's fine, just fine", it would follow that inflation is actually much higher than reported.
When you buy a fridge today, it buys you the "fridge service" for a much shorter time span, forcing you to invest a lot more money into that service over a given time span. That's a steep inflation of fridge price that isn't counted in official statistics.
This should be taken into account in inflation calculation. If this was, it would give a much fairer view of the decline in purchasing power.
Edit, now that I checked it looks like hedonic price adjustment measurements are performed on only 7.5%[1]of the goods in the CPI basket, and the main goal seems to be to avoid overestimating inflation by tracking quality improvements better.
[1]: https://www.nber.org/digest/20239/correcting-quality-change-...
So this would in fact make the inflation misreporting problem even worse.
We also still use the same 40 year old Coleman camping stove every summer, while other campers only get a few years out of much newer models.
But recently we found a happy exception, when we replaced our Contigo spill-proof coffee mugs (with a button you press to drink). They were always prone to the mechanism getting gross with milk scum, and were very hard to clean. The new models have an updated design that encloses the mechanism and keeps it much easier to keep clean. The metal seems heavier and high-quality, and the top lip has been folded over so it's not sharp like the old model. They've actually improved them a fair bit, for about the same price as the older ones.
Are things getting shittier for them, too ? Are luxury brands immune to "energy is getting expensive, and corporate needs to buy shares back and increase dividend, so we have to cut costs everywhere" ?
In other words, are growing inequality going to end up having billionaires who functionally live the same quality of life as upper-middle-class from the end of 90s ?
> One is that attributes like durability — which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product’s quality — have lost relevance.
I've noticed this in clothing and vehicles. If you want to own a durable car, you need to get an old one. Mid 1990s seems optimal for most manufacturers, some skew earlier (e.g. Mercedes-Benz which peaked about half a decade earlier). If you want durable shoes, it's very hard to beat a set of custom Limmers which are made pretty much the same way they were in the 1950s. Neither option is cheap, but you get something for it--knowing your car won't strand you with some bewildering array of christmas tree lights on the dashboard, and that your feet will be fine if you have an unplanned 20mi hike.
The idea that people in the past where more sophisticated, and more intelligent is simply not true.
Here's an anecdote:
As a student, I visited one Hermes (French luxury brand) manufacture in Paris. They showed us how crocodile skin was worked with to make hand bags and showed us the finished products. They had two finishes for the bags: - with protective coating (brilliant) - without (mate)
Without coating the crocodile skin was very fragile they told us, and even water droplets would stain the skin. We were quite surprised that anyone would spend a five figures amount of money in a bag that will get stained by anything, but the guy guiding us told us that their customers simply considered their products to be disposable item that would quickly be thrown away anyway.
At a guess, it's a 20% to 25% gig. Something is always breaking or misbehaving. The rich guy probably notices almost none of the problems. If he had to maintain it himself, he would insist on simplifying things.
The result is that even when you're willing to pay for quality, you can't-- you can just overpay for junk. Might as well just buy 20 of the $1 screwdrivers instead-- they'll still last much less long than the proper $20 one, but finding the good one is too difficult amid the overpriced crap.
A quick look at IKEA's web pages shows that this is simply untrue.
This is the crux of my argument against these types of articles, they try to retcon “you are the one who is crazy! it’s always been like that”. I was searching at an autistic level for a dinner table for the last five years from IKEA until I just gave up and bought a vintage thing made of real teak, made by a craftsperson for less than a mid range sticker and mechanically separated wood table from IKEA.
Well that's one way to translate "tarado". Moron would be the correct way though.
Sectors like ours becoming more productive drags up the cost of labour everywhere else. In manufacturing, that increases the incentive to skip any step that needs human input (e.g. increasing the stitch pitch and avoiding saddle stitching in leather). In services, it's your main input cost.
We can increase the efficiency of huge swathes of the economy, but eventually humans become a hard bottleneck. It takes a huge technological leap to overcome that.
Did it break after two years? Make it so inconvenient that they’ll just buy a new one.
Failure is seen as an upgrade opportunity, and repair is seen as a captive revenue stream rather than an opportunity for other businesses or DIYers.
If you can tolerate or enjoy the style, Louis Rossmann is a great watch on YouTube.
I have 2022 Toyota 4runner. The frame is already getting surface rust. I have been noticing new Toyotas have been needing new engines, other major problems. even Toyota is riding hi on a reputation from the past.
When that happens, you should take your dollars elsewhere, so I bought another car.
For many products I believe we could address this fairly well with a simple consumer protection law: Products must state an estimated mean time to failure, workmanship must be fully warrantied to at least 1/2 of this time.
Is this describing aliens? Because of all the people in my social circle, maybe one is like this.
People are going to maximize short term profits.
Truly, human beings deserve no respect. Only pity.
> “the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity.“
This is table stakes now for cars so it would be weird for a car company to highlight it. So in the case for cars the baseline quality expectation has significantly increased.
The case is much easier to make for fashionable items like clothes and interiors.
I got components in yday for a variable DC-DC power supply (though I can't seem to find the DACs I know I have because I have everything inventoried -- but I'll find them). Will give me wireless control and read of test routines for products I review (funnily enough, given point about reviews in article) via an ESP32. China takes my eCAD design and ships me PCBs I've had no issue with, and at less than $1/board (granted, it takes them a couple weeks, but I'm in no rush).
if you don't like what society's offering up, DIY. nothing wrong with being a little antisocial sometimes, even if only for exercise; "what would Terry do?" hoist the bird, fly the flag, and reject glowies.
it seems quality isn't universally declining, but the variance in quality is increasing, and finding good quality is nearly impossible in the influx of product offers. reviews are fake, to most short term profit margins are more important than reputation.
The only way to achieve this, reliably, is to squeeze your cash cow until it bleeds. Reduce BOM, introduce more ads, lock down repairs, introduce an annual subscription for a crucial function etc
https://elpais.com/ideas/2025-07-13/el-asombroso-fenomeno-de...
I feel like knowing that we might live well-beyond our working age has caused all sorts of odd/irrational behaviours in the way we approach life. I think for example, having to save for retirement makes us rethink how we spend our money. Which then means people are ultimately spending less on other things i.e. clothing. Then it becomes a kind of vicious cycle of hoarding wealth, but then expecting everything else to be cheap (at any cost).
Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost, cause you're still working and able to service that lifestyle.
- Apple's planned obsolescence on batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate
- Window's 10 to 11 garbage hardware requirements: https://www.euroconsumers.org/microsoft-security-windows-10-... If an OS's new version is supposedly...faster and better written, why does it require newer hardware?
- Apple's right to repair fight: https://sustainablebrands.com/read/apple-support-right-to-re... and then, when they saw they can't support this position anymore, suddenly becoming a champion of sustainability
- Apple's refusal to change their idiotic charging cables to a standard one, so they can sell you crap that works on no other device. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66778528
I know Apple are mentioned a lot here, but they are a perfect example of what happens when nobody calls out a monopoly on their shady practices.
> but I can't help but feel that a lot of the ills of society that we're witnessing is simply coming down to the fact that we're living a lot longer as people.
Ah yes blame it on the consumer, who dares to live longer.
> Whereas it's like, if you expected that you would die in your 50s/60s you'd probably be happier spending your money on stuff that you felt served you better, irrespective of the cost, cause you're still working and able to service that lifestyle.
I don't get the logic here. If I knew I would live to 100, would it not make sense to buy stuff that serves me well over the long run (i.e more expensive)?
With that said, I'm not sure why both our arguments have to be mutually exclusive? Why can't it be that things are being planned for obsolescence + we're living too long?
Regarding your last point, let's say that you did know you were going to live to 100, I think you'd be hard pressed to be able to afford a lot of that nice stuff which would serve you in the long run without working into retirement age (unless if you just happen to very wealthy).
I earn a relatively high salary and even if I was making the most of my retirement contributions and considering compounding, it would still only last me by 90 without requiring state assistance. And most importantly, that's if I were to maintain my current lifestyle, which includes buying the cheap shit I can afford (in part so I can keep up with funding retirement).
I couldn't imagine how much harder it would be for those on an average salary.
That's laughable. Apple before 2023 didn't even allow you to replace yourself unless you had their crappy plan.
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/8306588?sortBy=rank
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/253345955?sortBy=rank
https://www.wired.com/story/iphone-16-battery-is-easier-to-r...
And their lightning adapters were a deliberate strategy so they keep you on their system and sell you commodity hardware at a premium pricing.
Until the EU forced them to use standard chargers to reduce the mountain of e-waste that's directly tied to Apple's shady practices.
> Lightning cables are superior to the "standard" USB-C. It's a travesty against freedom of choice that the EU has legislated against them.
You have the freedom of choice to use an old IPhone with an old Lightning cable, since they are "superior" to USB-C, and old IPhones are apparently of such high quality.
OR you can go with the far worse (according to you) USB-c standard which allows charging, video and data transfer and internet connectivity.
> 2018 and 2021 and still I think look the same as new. Colours haven't faded
Wow, a shirt lasting 4 years, impressive!
> I don't find the complaints valid about anything else either. The tshirts in my weekly rotation were bought -- I just checked my emails ....In short: yes, there is plenty of cheap crap around -- I actually think this is a good thing for people who will not be using it heavily.
"who will not be using it heavily" is a reference to the fact that sometimes cheap nowadays crap is poisonous and you might not live to see another day?
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/jul/20/eu-commissi...
It's so bizarre to act like this is a crazy thing to do, like, yeah, my iPhone does have Lightning, I haven't upgraded since they switched to USB-C and have felt no need to? Like that was pretty recent? It's not like the Dock Connector where the only iPhones that support it use wireless networks that are being actively dismantled?
I'd have done the same if I had an IPhone. As a matter of fact, that's commendable.
This one seems to tick all the boxes
I am on my 6th smartphone, it is the first phone of which the screen accumulates scratches. Google Pixel 9. None of my previous phones needed a screen protector.
Nowadays people just want what aint good for em
When the iPod first appeared, customers did not see its enclosed battery as desirable. They put up with it. Soon enough, no batteries are replaceable.
Few car buyers wanted touch screen controls, but the entire auto industry transitioned to them, almost at once. Customers put up with them.
The problem is not that companies focus on customers and reluctantly provide crappy products. The problem is that customer focus died shortly after the year 2000.
Advertising needs to go. Advertising is why worse products at higher prices beat out better products at lower prices. Advertising isn't information, it's lies: nobody tells you the problems with their product or things their competitor does better. We don't need advertising to find out about products: word of mouth, experts, and independent review sites are much better sources of information already. And it's a huge drain on our economy: once you let one company advertise, then advertising is no longer optional for all their competitors.
Advertisers of HN will surely refuse to admit these pretty basic, obvious facts, use their advertising platforms to make sure pro-advertising talking points are louder than reason, and the enshittification of everything will continue.
Maybe someone will respond "why should a business care about you?" and that just proves my point. We've created a zero empathy, greed-driven society and then we wonder why quality is declining.
In fact, historically most monopolies were state sanctioned, and that is still mostly true.
Literally non of the things mentioned in the article are monopolies. Cloths, absolutely not even close to a monopoly. AI, nope. Flying, nope. Maybe airplanes is duopoly for certain kinds of planes and that is one of the closest things to a monopoly. And yet despite that, prices for actually flying between places are incredibly low, the expect opposite of what you expect to happen in a typical monopoly.
Food industry, no monopoly. Computer, no monopoly. Hotels, no monopoly. Property, no monopoly.
In fact the largest global industries (just google list):
Global Life & Health Insurance Carriers
Global Car & Automobile Sales
Global Commercial Real Estate
Global Pension Funds
Global Oil & Gas Exploration & Production
Global Car & Automobile Manufacturing
Global Direct General Insurance Carriers
Global Auto Parts & Accessories Manufacturing
Global Engineering Services
Global Wireless Telecommunications Carriers
Not a single monopoly in the list.
So please tell me what you are talking about. Maybe some Health insurance have some limited monopoly in some place.
Please post here, from your monthly budget, how much of that budget goes to what you would call monopolies?
Think of the biggest players in each industry, and search to determine who owns the most stock in those companies. You will find the same organizations over and over again - Blackrock, Citadel, States Street, etc.
And when people think of large industries the look at the large players and ignore the much larger market behind that. And industries that are very distributed, generally are not perceived as large industries, despite them being very large, like hotels or food.
Also Blackrock for example is 170 billion, that's about half a % of US GDP and like 0.1% of global GDP. so if after 200 years Blackrock is the best example you can come up with, I'm not convinced.
And the companies Blackrock are owning a stake in, are still competing with each other, because companies like Blackrock can't control all those companies.
Another counterpoint: hotel quality has arguably improved a great lot in the last 10 year or so. Especially, after Covid. That's rather perplexing, especially since airlines are going in the opposite direction while they two are usually a part of the same purchase by the same people and logically i'd expect their trajectories to be similar.
Bigger counterpoint: cars. 10-year old electric cars today drive like new because well, there's nothing to wear out there. Our kids will see lots of 40-50 year old cars on roads, with completely worn out interiors but still driving just fine. Probably with batteries replaced once or twice thus driving a lot better than when they were new because 2035 batteries will have a lot higher density, C-ratings, and will heat less than 2015 batteries, and replacement will cost less than replacement of a gearbox on a 2015 Volvo goofed up by incompetent servicemen.
Also enshittification, the more general trend where an initial offering is excellent, maybe even provided at a loss, to spread the word and provide great feedback, and then more and more money is squeezed out of it while riding consumer satisfaction lag, until the offering is taken behind the shed and mercy killed.
quality is real, commodity markets have been historically abused to "steal through quality"
for example, all the best fruits from the global south are not consumed in the countries they grew, but exported for "better profits". this has gone on too long.
That's... not capitalism at all? Socialism maybe, but absolutely not capitalism. In average, those that work will have a good life (or at least, in average, better life than those who don't), but there is no guarantee on a single case, or even that this life will be good enough.
My parents have a fridge that has been running consistently without issue for 40 years. It is a quality fridge.
What fraction of the fridges made at the same time by the same company are also still running? I can't say for certain but I certainly haven't encountered one since my childhood. They may have been capable of high quality, but not consistently high quality. My parents just lucked out.
The fridge lacks most features of more modern fridges like water filtration or an ice maker, and the design of its shelves weren't particularly ergonomic. A similar fridge would be much cheaper today, at least adjusted for inflation. Put another way, a modern fridge of the same price point would be more valuable.
But the fridge has spent the past 25 years as a backup fridge mostly for longer term storage of bulk items, so the lack of features have not really impacted its utility. Keeping things cold is the primary purpose of a fridge, everything else is a gimmick.
Things have across the board gotten more consistent and cheaper for a given value. A lot of products have suffered feature bloat which detracts from their utility. I don't believe there has been any meaningful shift in quality in the past few decades - for the most part its just people misremembering the past, cherry picking anecdotes, or being deliberately obtuse about how they actually use products and services. Some specific industries may have seen changes, but there is not a bewildering phenomenon across the board.
Inexpensive goods leads to reduced quality (to a point it’s acceptable).
Declining product quality was even one of the major complaints luddites had over factory looms, it wasn't just that they were being replaced with lesser skilled workers and their wages cut, but the quality of fabric from the factory looms they built just got worse and worse over time so they couldn't even claim their loss of wages was worth having better clothes, they got worse wages and worse clothes.
Everyone likes to hem and haw over free market supposedly fixing such problems, but completely ignores the huge amount of friction in moving markets that require massive tons of capital to even challenge to the smallest degree. And even if you get the overall established market to change practices for a small time span it is only through essentially open war with one another as the companies battle it out; and as soon as there is either a clear dominating winner, or a few of the larger companies essentially decide peace is better and stop truly challenging each other for dominance, everything goes right back to reducing quality and increasing profit margins. The big companies know being at perpetual war in the market, which is what would be best for consumers in providing the best prices and products, makes their position less stable and leaves them vulnerable to new challengers, and instead tend to default towards unspoken collusion with other big established companies in order to not rock the boat. It makes the companies more stable and profitable, but is worse for consumers, and gets even worse for consumers when those companies start looking at other ways to entrench their position through politics and law.
The result it's finding new way to do more with less, and finding them quickly. Some do works well, some do works a bit, many gives only the illusion to work enough and people buy them anyway because an illusion it's still something more than nothing.
The target issue is the model, capitalism, issue, in the past we have used money as a means to barter things counter something we all accept. Nowadays we use money to makes more money, so goods are just a mean not a target, and the result is that we do not care about quality, being just a mean if we can sell them it's enough to milk money. To solve this we need to makes money public, creating by governments without fractionary reserves and public debt mechanism, taxed to keep the supply limited enough following the availability of any specific resources, so essentially like Swiss we need to tax just VAT with continuously variables rates following nature and tech, while taxing local properties just to assure local consumption does not exceed a sustainable threshold of resources usage.
The only issue with it was that the door didn't close too well. My more conscientious family would bend down to push it gently, whereas I would just kick it. It took me less time to quit smoking than to quit kicking fridges every time I close the door. I think I was still kicking fridges in the US in 2010 after last seeing that one in 2000. It was also small and didn't have any features other than producing some amount of cold air. But it worked! It still works for all I know.
If most hand wringing in this thread is to be taken at face value this is what we should pivot to :)
Air travel is much more affordable to me. It has become psychologically nasty which makes the overall deal feel worse, while it is actually better in $ terms.
Housing build quality is worse, things need more frequent repairs, cost is higher probably due to increase in land value.
Much more trashy food in the grocery store aisles, one needs to be aware and shop carefully.
Politics especially in the US has gotten FAR worse.
The internet after the early promise has gotten FAR worse (better in bandwidth and far worse via enshittification).
Cars improved till around 2010 and now worse for the dollar (too much electronics, and repairs are prohibitively expensive).
Care beat quality as a metric, because care is very inefficient to fake and very powerful when genuine.
How does the company providing the physical product or the service care ?
Most companies right now care about AI. Some integration are impressive. But where's real care about users ? It seems it's not the subject anymore. We may have tricked ourselves into beveling technology will resolve in itself all problems, and it's at its peak with AI. As engineers we can forget sometimes that technology is just a tool and its fine, but as a society it may leads us all in a bad direction.
This is infuriating. Due to better nutrition, we all got bigger. Our parents were smaller in comparison, and our grandparents seem tiny. I'm 6'6" and I'm on the tall end, but I see more and more giants roaming the Earth (and they do seem like giants if you're used to be the tallest in the room).
Yet they make airplane seats smaller. I have to pay hundreds of dollars extra just to buy extra leg room and all that crap. It's frustrating.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants
>Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that the quality of life is improved by all the products placed on the market.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140730043944/http://slatestarc...
The mantra that "consumers get lower prices and everything is better as a result" deliberately elides any discussion of quality and reliability.
I'd just like to comment on this line in particular. The promise of capitalism isn't this, but, rather, if you own capital (i.e. are a capitalist), you explicitly do not have to work. There is no promise made to the workers, except that in some way they are compensated for their work.
There are other systems wherein if you don't work (and aren't retired/disabled), you don't get paid. But capitalism is one of them in which non-workers get paid, and usually with a disgusting disparity between the rate of the two classes.
Whats adorable is that the author thinks this has anything to do with AI. Shitty AI is an excuse to get rid of customer service. It's a move that most of tech made a long time ago.
How many times BEFORE AI have you heard the lament from someone that "Thank fully I am internet famous, or blew up on social media. because other wise google/etsy/ebay/Facebook would never have fixed their automated decision to pull the rug out from under me"
> The conclusion is clear: society isn’t adapting to the pace of technological advancement.
Uhhh, the change already happened, in the attention economy the only thing that matters is your social clout (credit?).
> packaged foods with more preservatives than ingredients.
Heirloom tomatoes in the grocery store. Avocado year round, Brussel sprouts that dont taste like ass. Whole Foods, and other more 'local' choices.
> According to the expert, the main factor driving this criticism is that the great promise of capitalism — if you work
The problem is that there are lots of people all over the globe who are willing to do MORE for LESS and we are in a global marketplace. Adapt or die.
> buy a house
Except you can have all this. Plenty of people do: "buying a house" is very literally the same as it ever was: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N
> The real problem isn’t buying pants that don’t last or traveling in an uncomfortable plane. The real problem is that, with each purchase, we support two of the most polluting industries on the planet.
The author could have done a far better job in highlighting all the waste that goes into a pair of pants. Oil for synthetics, Waste from fabric making and dying. Scraps from the cutting process only to have them thrown away after a year to make another pair. Instead we got a bunch of "feel good" talking points that you can nod along to even if they are misinformed.
Whole Foods used to be the place to go for quality throughout the store. It seems to me that now you can still get plenty of quality, but it's not guaranteed if you just go and grab something off the shelf. Instead, you have to know what's worth buying and what's not.
(I can't back this up with examples, because exactly this phenomenon means that I don't shop at Whole Foods as much. I could be wrong.)
> One is that attributes like durability -- which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product's quality -- have lost relevance.
> some companies design certain products -- especially household appliances -- stop working after a certain period of time. This isn't a conspiracy theory, but a proven fact.
So, in many cases we no longer factor in durability because we know that consumer products don't offer that quality _by design_.
> healthcare services may not be worse than they were a few years ago. "The big problem is that they haven't adapted to the pace of social change. They haven't evolved enough to serve the entire elderly population, whose demographic size is increasing every year"
But then they are, in fact, of worse quality for a large group of the population.
> five out of 10 consumers openly reject virtual assistants. The conclusion is clear: society isn't adapting to the pace of technological advancement.
No, that's not a clear conclusion. Another conclusion that could be drawn is that the adaptation of AI technology in customer service has lowered the quality to a point customers don't even care to bother with. I.E., the pace of technological advancement, in this case, isn't ready for the demands of society.
> It's difficult to prove that today's products are worse than those of 20 years ago.
No, it's not. Some products and consumption patterns may be harder to compare. In other cases, we have clear examples of engineered decline in quality. One example: soap companies changing not just the size of the soap (shrinkflation) but also altering the ingredients to make the bar of soap last about half as long as before. Ever look under the bed at a hotel? After the pandemic, the quality of cleaning has declined substantially, at least in my country. My previous landlord lowered the indoor temperature and raised the rent, all in the same year. House prices keep going up, but building standards are lowered.
In short: there are very real and measurable declines in quality because economies are tanking and, as the article correctly states, "the promise of capitalism" is no longer being fulfilled.
Just like this article I'm afraid.
If it's making a point it's lost by meandering to too long.
If it's point it's simply longevity then it's missed the point about how LLM are simply here to stay, the genie is out of the bottle with regards to that tool.
If the point is some anti hyper-capitalist rant then it's a thinly veiled option piece.
If the point is the breakdown of the social contract/elevator. Then why when you're interviewing experts who study this aren't you asking poignant questions like "when do you think this happened?" or "can this be fixed?". Rather than ranting about the dreams of the nuclear (pub intended) family to China and "AI".
If it that if you're not chasing these answers you're either afraid to admit you know them or are scared of them?
You ask people whether they have a sturdy childhood wardrobe that they could use. The idea seems disgusting. You ask them what other options they considered. The comment appears to be offensive. How many people have researched and considered a company's service hotline quality before deciding to buy? Noone.
People love to hate "evil" companies and expect laudations for knowing the concept of "planned obsolence" (they heard it once.) It's easy, it's someone else's fault.
But mention their own responsibility as capitalist consumers and they'll quickly leave the discussion.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/145212225-by-marvin-harr...
and there were a lot of books offering answers such as
https://www.amazon.com/Quality-Free-Certain-Becomes-Business...
There are two theories of quality: (1) quality is conformance to a specification and (2) quality is conformance to customer requirements.
The answer to type (1) quality is to reduce variance. One response to type (1) quality is to say something like "you can't get good help today", e.g. blame the worker, which has elements such as "they come to the factory drunk somedays", "they are smoking pot all the time", "they don't care". Crosby says management should take responsibility because management hires the workers, trains the workers, supervises the workers, designs the work process, fires the workers, etc.
There's a dark side to type (1) quality thinking in that reducing variance lets you reduce the mean. For instance, a metal pail needs a certain thickness of metal on the bottom, if you go under a threshold the bottom fails. Because of variance you can't make a pail with exactly that thickness, you have to be several standard deviations above the threshold. Get that variation down and you can reduce the mean, use less metal. (Saves money at the factory, costs less to ship, less global warming, etc.) Now you have a system with less reserve, if a new source of variation shows up you are making crap pails again.
Thinking about type (2) quality involves a conversation with customers to understand what their requirements are. The Toyota Corolla and Cadillac Escalade are both excellent vehicles from the perspective of customers who have different values. If customers aren't being heard, you have problems in the type (2) department -- in Doctorow's "enshittification" scenario the voice of neither end users nor advertisers or vendors are being heard. In cases such as Meta, even ordinary shareholders are unheard and the inevitable consequence of that is "it sucks." See also
You can by a "professional" set of Zwilling or Fissler cookware from Germany, which is actually made outside of Germany, and corrodes and warps way worse than a set of pots from the 1990s. Pitting from dishwashers, bad welds, delamination that occurs when using the boost function on the induction hob... The quality that was present in those pots from the 90s are now reserved for actual professional cookware sets not found in regular catalogues, which costs upwards of 300€ per pot.
Same goes for garments. If you want cotton spun from high-quality yarn that won't pill or fray within 1 year, the only place you will find it is by the yard at the tailor's, or in brands you don't even know the name of. Meanwhile, I am still rocking the same T-shirt that I wore in elementary school 30 years ago.
Office chairs — I have an Italian one from early 2000s and it's a beast. Both the mechanism and the upholstery. Today's "best" office chair — the SteelCase Leap is a rickety piece of trash by comparison. You can see the same decline in materials if you compare a Herman Miller Aeron from the early 2000s and ones built today.
Look at the Kitchen Aid stand mixer. The old ones had metal internals, and powerful, reliable motors. The new ones are much weaker, have nylon load bearing parts, and have a life span of 5 years tops.
Cutlery, tools... Everything has become worse, and there is a new category of "premium" items which are anything but.
And the biggest problem is that people's standards have been lowered to incredibly low levels. It's like they don't even understand how bad the things they are using actually are.