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Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

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Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#461

Post by buescher »

ownagefool wrote: post #318
kccqzy wrote: post #242

> An example from another industry: when I worked at a small chip startup, we had in-house capability to do end-to-end chip processing (with the exception of having its own fabs), which is unusual for a small chip startup. When the first wafer of a new design came off of a fab, we'd have the wafer flown to us on a commercial flight, at which point someone would use a wafer saw to cut the wafer into individual chips s…

What if the saw breaks, what if the person who knows how to use the saw leaves? There are good answers to these problems, but I find folks who find comfort in outsourcing assume it's easier for the downstream org solve them. Personal experience suggests it's often a false sense of security, and you often have to have your own experts anyway. Saw the same in software. We won't get budget to patch so let's outsource. T…

Then you go out of house until the saw can be repaired or you can recruit a new employee to run it. If it's really to your advantage to have the capability in-house, no one will bat an eye.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#462

Post by Volrath89 »

yrral wrote: post #16

I think it's that you don't notice things that work well. House foundations, light switches, filesystems, silicon manufacturing, water delivery, grocery store logistics, etc etc etc. These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. It doesn't even occur to people day-to-day that these things can fail.

As someone who writes software for a big grocery store chain in Germany I'm surprised the logistics work at all. It's a s*show inside once you know the details, but somehow, yes it kind of works well enough as for the customers to not even realize is there.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#463

Post by ephbit »

snarf21 wrote: post #429
ephbit wrote: post #421

Just picking a passage from the top of the article: > There's a vague plausibility to that kind of statement, which is why it's a debate I've often heard come up in casual conversation, where one person will point out some obvious company inefficiency or product error and someone else will respond that, if it's so obvious, someone at the company would have fixed the issue or another company would've come along and wo…

I think complexity is definitely part of it but it is also mis-aligned incentives. The person running an assembly line has a vested interest in changing nothing . Everyone knows how it works and consistency sometimes is more important than raw efficiency. If they change something and if breaks the machine or they have a month of lower productivity, they don't get a promotion and/or bonus. Why would they risk it? Plus…

> I think complexity is definitely part of it but it is also mis-aligned incentives. The person running an assembly line has a vested interest in changing nothing.

Is this really a case of mis-aligned incentives though?

The person running the assembly line has an interest in the business model of the company not being destroyed, because their salary depends upon it working. So they'll try to prevent the worst (to the business model) from happening. Risking to break some important production process for a lousy low percentage potential gain in efficiency sure doesn't seem to be in the interest of neither the individual person, nor the company, nor the customer.

As you write: the risks and benefits need to be carefully weighed perpetually .. simply an ongoing optimisation.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#464

Post by darkarmani »

blablabla123 wrote: post #456
yrral wrote: post #16

I think it's that you don't notice things that work well. House foundations, light switches, filesystems, silicon manufacturing, water delivery, grocery store logistics, etc etc etc. These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. It doesn't even occur to people day-to-day that these things can fail.

Just to give one example, CI pipelines seem to fail all the time. For closed source and open source project. Just like this, it worked in the last commit and in the new commit it fails despite the test suite passing. The ultimate reason is routine tasks pulling in a ton of complexity of which only a tiny fraction is being used. At workplaces this creates a lot of absurd situations that eat up insane amounts of produc…

> just to give one example, CI pipelines seem to fail all the time.

Really? I've not seen this to be the case unless they are never maintained (ie: a year goes by and ignored dependencies change)

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#465

Post by lepton »

Tor3 wrote: post #386
kidsil wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived in Germany, I must say the quality of customer service there is the worst I have ever seen. + A fridge I purchased was delivered with a 2 weeks delay, at 10:30PM (!!) on a Saturday (only because I kept calling every other day). + I've ordered a new broadband connection for an apartment I was renting. After several months (!) of waiting and calls, I found out that the former tenant had unpaid bills with t…

The shop guy was right though, even if he expressed it bluntly. How could anyone come up with a useful answer to that question? It's actually worse than the headache question. And yes there's not much of beating around the bush in Germany, which can be somewhat shocking to those not used to it.

But the question was "how does the pricing work in this situation?" and I would expect a repair shop to know how their pricing works.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#466

Post by munificent »

solveit wrote: post #233
DannyBee wrote: post #110

The problem here is actually very basic - markets do not enforce efficiency. Period. The efficient market hypothesis is simply wrong. Strong form efficiency was already formally disproven quite a while ago. Weak form efficiency has been show to only true if P=NP. There is not really a strong need to go into why inefficiencies can persist, etc, because at a baseline, it turns out there is no provable theory that marke…

Sure, sure, you can encode difficult computational problems into markets in convoluted ways, but this is uninteresting unless you're into that kind of thing. When people usually say that markets aren't efficient, they don't mean that optimal resource allocation is a computationally intractable problem. They're saying that they see, clear as day, obvious inefficiencies that aren't being corrected. They're saying that…

> A better version of the efficient market hypothesis would be that markets are inexploitable.

No, that's absolutely not true and relies on what I think is the most perniciously false assumption behind market economics: that all market participants only make moves within the market itself.

If you're trying to win at chess then learning to master the rules and strategy of chess is where you focus your attention. But if you're trying to defeat your opponent (or not get defeated by them), you'll probably do better to bring a gun and/or body armor. If you focus 100% of your attention on the chessboard, you are completely opening yourself up for exploitation by an opponent who is willing to play the metagame.

And, indeed, in market economics, actors invariably do play the metagame. This is why we get cabals, trusts, rent seeking, regulatory capture, monopolies, price fixing, price dumping, lobbying, etc.

The ultimate goal of market actors is not to be maximally efficient. It's not even to win the market game. It's to make the most money. And often the best way to make the most money is to rig the game, cheat, or get the rules changed in your favor.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#467

Post by emodendroket »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #270
emodendroket wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were you expecting? They can't fundamentally change what happens when you leave things wet for hours.

My teakettle is moist for hours, some of my dishes are moist for hours, they don't smell like mildew. I'm in the bone dry south bay in a warm house My guess is water is getting trapped somewhere in the device's Chinesium crevices, or maybe they found a way to make plastic cheaper by making it susceptible to mold.

Every cool-mist humidifier has this problem. Use one of the Vicks vaporizers that boils the water if you don't want to deal with it.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#468

Post by travisjungroth »

Tor3 wrote: post #386
kidsil wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having lived in Germany, I must say the quality of customer service there is the worst I have ever seen. + A fridge I purchased was delivered with a 2 weeks delay, at 10:30PM (!!) on a Saturday (only because I kept calling every other day). + I've ordered a new broadband connection for an apartment I was renting. After several months (!) of waiting and calls, I found out that the former tenant had unpaid bills with t…

The shop guy was right though, even if he expressed it bluntly. How could anyone come up with a useful answer to that question? It's actually worse than the headache question. And yes there's not much of beating around the bush in Germany, which can be somewhat shocking to those not used to it.

We charge N/hr, plus parts. Or, we charge N for an initial diagnosis.

My uncle runs a computer repair business and is doing very well because he works late hours, is in a college town, and has flat pricing when possible. This means he spends Sunday night reinstalling OSes on student’s laptops at $75/each.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#469

Post by jotm »

elil17 wrote: post #184
jotm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Boil water on a stove - boom, humidity increased!

Unless you have a gas stove, in which case prolonged boiling could lead to indoor air quality issues (unless you turn your fan on - but then you're drawing in cold air. If you have an electric stove, boiling water will be less efficient than evaporating water and letting your heating system make up for the loss in sensible heat unless you have an electric furnace.

Yes, obviously. I'm just surprised that OP had trouble getting a good humidifier given the simple process. Though maybe they went for a Dyson model.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#470

Post by lanstin »

klodolph wrote: post #156
randallsquared wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure "efficient" is the word you're looking for here. For a given post, there's only one of the poster, and presumably many readers...

You’re going to have to explain more of the argument, because I don’t follow. It sounds like you are arguing that writers should spend more time spelling things out for readers which aren’t very good at reading comprehension. That doesn’t seem very efficient—it wastes most people’s time, since the writer is spending more time spelling things out explicitly and avoiding ambiguity, all of the readers with decent readin…

I think the additional clarity benefits smart people too. And fast readers can read faster over text with redundancy than maximally cryptic prose.

The sweet spot of course is a short, clear and correct explanation, but finding that can take a lot of effort.

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