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Comment by jfoutz | Hacker News Reader

Pop culture disagrees. 22 years ago, Dark Helmet: Out of order? FUCK! Even in the future, nothing works!

I'd bet when you think of old stuff, you think of a singer sewing machine or a '57 chevy, stuff that withstood the test of time. well the world was full of crap then too, most of it broke and got thrown away. My toys are more than 20 years old. they are cheap plastic. they aren't even painted, just a few sucky stickers. Our microwave when i was a kid would make parts of food smoke while leaving other parts frozen solid. Consumer electronics? i think timex made it's reputation by being a slightly less crappy watch.

You name it. You can certainly find 1 example of a stellar product that lasts for years and years. There are hundreds of that products peers in the landfill.

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Indeed. It's easy to think that things were manufactured better in the good old days (whenever that was) when anything that didn't survive is out of sight and therefore out of mind.

While it's quite possible that several specific things were manufactured objectively better at some point in the past, basing judgments about the past solely on nostalgia and the few pieces that are still holding up well is not the foundation of a strong argument.

Small problem with this logic: twenty-two years ago was 1987. It's not as if we weren't importing cheap crap from China by the truckload in the 1980s.

If you want to make a valid comparison, the "good old days", for the purposes of this question, are probably before the 1960s. I'm not saying that there isn't some confirmation bias going on in the OP, but it's wrong to say that products were bad in 1987, and that therefore products aren't getting worse over a longer window of time.

> It's not as if we weren't importing cheap crap from China by the truckload in the 1980s.

It was a lot less so than it is today.

My parents had a textile factory till the mid 90's - and that was still a relatively thriving industry at the 80's - as were a lot of other types of manufacturing.

For example, a lot of computers were made in western countries where as today there is probably not much in your computer that wasn't made in south east Asia, and I can say that without knowing which computer brand you are using.

"It was a lot less so than it is today."

So? That doesn't make the argument any less fallacious. Maybe products are a lot worse today than they were in 1989.

My point is that there's no clear and necessary reason that a comparison of 1987 product quality to 2009 product quality is a valid counterargument to the OP's assertion. The only way it works is if you intend to argue that product quality has risen (or at least stayed constant), while the percentage produced domestically has fallen. And if you're trying to argue that point, you've got to provide some evidence (something more than a quote from Spaceballs, anyway), or you're just begging the question.

My Atari ST still works. Never needed a repair. Its Syquest harddrive still works.

The WD harddrive I bought last year crashed... My 3 year old mac needed a repair.

Yes, things run hotter, and faster, and are smaller, and whatever. But they are less reliable.

How many other things did you have that broke? Oh, you probably don't remember them because they weren't around very long and don't evoke strong happy memories.

You can't rebut an argument about lack of data and selective memory with anecdotes.

Nope. I have kept every computer I've owned ever since the ZX81. And none of them has broken. Perhaps I'm lucky... But chips used to be rated to last 25 years, and by the time I left the semiconductor industry it was down to 5. Why? Yield. But I'm sure you've worked on chip design and have more experience on this topic than I do...

I'm not saying things 10-20 years ago were great. I'm just saying the plastic feels thinner and flimsier lately.

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