81–90 of 323 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out the history of light bulbs, an actual amazing conspiracy few people know about :)
One perhaps continued to this day, if maybe in a different way (we'll know in a few decades) : toxic fluorescents and most diode bulbs not having separated transformers (they are DC !)
> Recently, my wife needed a carrot peeler. She needed one rather quickly. Off to Target. The one she bought (the only one on sale)...
I stopped at the phrase "the only one on sale". Inevitably the next part reads:
> looked handsome enough, and the brand was one she recognized, but it failed in the useful department, miserably. It wasn’t sharp enough to peel a carrot.
Is this deliberate, or did the author not notice a core problem right there, in their own shopping behavior?
As for coffee grinders, I've got a Eureka Mignon and machines like that are expected to last a few decades easily, with a little bit of maintenance. If you buy the $99 stuff, well...
Especially in the kitchen some good stuff still exists. It's expensive, heavy - and lasts. Unfortunately you won't find those in many of the regular shops. In my city - Nuremberg, Germany - I only see that kind of (expensive) quality in a single specialized store (Kitchen Loesch, https://www.kuechen-loesch.de/). I myself was not aware of the kinds of good appliances that are still made until I went through the lower levels of that store for the first time. I too only knew the stuff most people know, which does not last long, visible at first glance already, with all the cheap plastics it's made of. Much of the better stuff is heavy and mostly made of metal. Even the hand blenders there almost all cost above 100 Euros, far more than I was used to seeing. On the other hand, those devices looked like they would last for a very long time, not like that shitty plastics Philipps model I own. Unfortunately it's not nearly the same to see pictures online, having the actual appliance right in front of you is very different as far as I can tell after that experience of actually seeing them there. The impression of solidity just does not transmit via some online shopping website picture.
Would suspcription based applicances be better? Softwar supscription definitely did lead to a quality decline in software, as there is always a channel to fix even the sloppiest of implementations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The difficulty is that the abundance of cheap crap often makes finding the good stuff like finding a needle in a haystack. Yes, price is the first indicator, but there are plenty of chancers who are quite happy to sell the cheap crap at the premium price point.
Yes that is exactly the problem. Especially with cheap as garbage direct sales from China and internet shopping being the norm, your chances of finding legitimate high quality sellers on amazon or else are practically zero. Even worse, nowadays on amazon you find the exact same product in all the price ranges sold by "different" sellers.
Trademarks identify the origin of goods that a business wishes a consumer to believe. We need to expand that law to also indicate _actual_ origin.
For example, this DVD player came from this manufacturer and then got badged as Alpha Inc, but this other DVD had the same technical origin (despite the different case) and got badged as Beta Inc ... consumers should get that information. Capitalism relies on such things so that the best products can be chosen.
Instead, we get things like companies selling the same product code from different factories with wildly different quality. Or, far more egregious companies sending a product to reviewers and early adopters, then making a worse product and passing it off to consumers as the same.
There's much more to do (I should be able to see exactly what a product had done to acquire it's 'country of origin' - another area companies deceive consumers), but this would be a start.
I echo the sentiment of this article. Im nearly 40 and for most of my adult life I’ve found that most things are frustrating to use, have unnecessary tech bolted on (and that’s coming from a technologist), and in many ways barely work. My fancy Bosch dishwasher can’t clean a dish if there’s a tiny bit of food on it. My GE dryer takes two cycles and at least 1.5 hrs to dry some cotton clothes. Don’t get me started on…
Modern dishwashers should be able to clean basically anything, most often when they don’t perform well, something got stuck in the water dispensers and there is just not enough water reaching the dishes (this will rarely create an error code). At least that’s my experience and I abuse those machines quite a bit in terms of what I put in there.
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> Metal, vs plastic gears. Sintered metal gears, last only a little longer than plastic and then fail catastrophically destroying half of the device so that you can't repair it. But at least they are much cheaper than proper machined gears.
My KitchenAid mixer ate a gear many years ago. They would lead you to believe they are a high quality brand, no? After disassembly, it turned out to be perhaps the only plastic gear in the thing. It occurred to me that it was perhaps designed to fail rather than the mixer continuing to break the bones of the person who got their hand caught in the paddle. So, I throw the engineer a bone for that one. I was bummed tho…
Would suspcription based applicances be better? Softwar supscription definitely did lead to a quality decline in software, as there is always a channel to fix even the sloppiest of implementations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
For what it's worth, some things in my lifetime have seemed to get much better, and cars and refrigerators happen to be in that class. Many other things seem to have gotten worse though, like clothes and linens. I suspect there's some pattern to those things that have improved and those that have declined, and everything in between, but I couldn't explain it.
watching many youtube mechanic channels, i get the sense that they seem to think that 2000 era cars were better than today's car. The common missive is that they now have really cheap parts, and the cars are over controlled by computer systems making them brittle and expensive to repair.
I've heard this many times while at auto body shops. It seems that it's not the electronic parts cost that is expensive but you have to dissemble much of the car to replace the parts.