O Holy Crap
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O Holy Crap
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Re: O Holy Crap
#2[flagged]
Re: O Holy Crap
#3Part of the reason we equate "old" with "good" like that 70 year old juicer is survivor bias. We don't dig through the landfill to find out how many broken 70 year old juicers are buried there.
That said, I suspect that in another 70 years, Walter's juicer will still work, but you won't find any working examples of juicers from 2022.
It should be obvious to most people at this point that any appliance with the word "smart" in its marketing really means "smarter than you, sucker".
Re: O Holy Crap
#4Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items. The single juicer that lasts 70 years may be the only one of its kind to last that long, the others from the same production year being left to rot and rust in a landfill.
That being said, I definitely believe that planned obsolesence and unintentional bad quality is a plague on modern consumer items. I am lucky enough to have the time, knowledge, persistence and money to research and buy long lasting goods. For example, I have bought kitchen knives made out of a single piece of metal, which are therefore less prone to breaking than the run-off-the-mill ones. My jeans are from a Swedish jeans company that offer in-store repairs as long as it's practical. This is saving me money and effort in the long run. However, I do not believe in such individual solutions to what is essentially a systemic problem; people should expect good consumer items without researching beforehand like it was their hobby.
I'm glad that the EU is working hard on right-to-repair laws.
Re: O Holy Crap
#5[flagged]
Where, pray tell, is one supposed to shop in order to find real products that will last?
And I’ll go further. Is there a single brand you can recommend that will last, regardless of where I’m supposed to purchase it?
Re: O Holy Crap
#6Products with guarantees are for a replacement with the same short-lasting product, not a guarantee on the one physical item you originally purchased. It's cheaper for manufacturer's to send you another POS than to spend the time and charging a bit more for a product that will last. People have been conditioned to follow the percolator-drip-French press-espresso machine-Keurig cycle! I keep a steel cone sieve and buy beans I have the store grind for me. I too have gone through 3 or 4 coffee grinders. I just got back from Saudi after working there for 6 months, and being sober for years, I found it a land of coffee shops vs. pubs and bars. Most people had a simple, traditional Arabic (now rebranded "Saudi") coffee setup, or a Keurig or Nespresso machine in their home or Bedouin tent. My Mom and Dad had the same percolator for over 18 years. Maybe not a coffee connoisseur's preference, but it always worked if the gas bill was paid!
Re: O Holy Crap
#7My $4000 GE refrigerator has broken twice now in the five years we have owned it, both times in the exact same way. The way the fridge works seems simple: the cold freezer is on the bottom, and then a fan blows air up through a shaft to the relatively warmer refrigerator as needed to keep it just above freezing.
Instead, the failure state is that the fan that handles this broke with no warning. I lost a bunch of groceries, but luckily managed to figure out the issue and replace the part myself.
Then a few months ago I heard a clack clack like a fan was about to fail, so this time I replaced the fan after only about two days of no refrigerator.
I don’t understand how such an expensive device can have such a terrible failure mode that ruins basically everything inside my fridge, twice now (the freezer is fine though, it just gets colder).
Before this fridge my wife and I were totally broke and just had a $400 hand me down fridge that we literally never had any problems with. I don’t really know why modern stuff seems so bad.
I know I know, survivorship bias and whatnot, I don’t see all the broken refrigerators in the landfill, but even if that’s the case why not fire half your design engineers just trot out those old 1945 GE Ultracool (or whatever) designs and sell those?
Re: O Holy Crap
#8> Many blamed these problems on the government. They believed it had crippled certain products (major home appliances, especially)
This is a claim that was already present in Death of a Salesman. Here's the quote:
> I am always in a race with the junkyard! I just finished paying for the car and it's on its last legs. The refrigerator consumes belts like a goddam maniac. They time those things. They time them so when you finally paid for them, they're used up.
The play came out in... 1949.
It's not been my experience that everything is crap nowadays. But of course one needs to shop wisely.
Re: O Holy Crap
#9[flagged]
What's the alternative in modern society? The village craftsman building single-source hand-forged juicers no longer exists.
Re: O Holy Crap
#10Who needs most of this crap?
I have a knife. It is a simple piece of metal that peels carrots, apples, and many other things with great reliability. It also performs other functions that a "carrot peeler" could not. It has done so for 20 years and can be expected to remain functional for several more decades.
"Coffee grinder"? how many iterations of the idea of the blender does one kitchen need? (I count a half dozen in my kitchen without trying. 4 more if you add in the lab gear)