Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

english.elpais.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

681–690 of 824 posts

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#681

Post by LorenPechtel »

klabb3 wrote: post #297
blfr wrote: post #83

Most things are still available at the same quality your parents remember, thanks to ecommerce much more avilable, but sadly also at a similar real price your parents remember which we find extortionary by comparison to all the cheap crap flooding the market. 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 u…

> Most things are still available at the same quality your parents remember 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…

The polyester will sell better because it's lighter and resists water penetration better. Some time back I went through an old box of outdoor stuff from my childhood. Dumped most of it because between a choice of the old free (as I already owned it) gear or buying modern I would buy modern if I hadn't already done so.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#682

Post by bmicraft »

brewdad wrote: post #350
bee_rider wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth doesn’t follow the typical quality curve anyway, it is just random whether or not your devices like each other. I bet the sound quality on the Sony buds was better.

Depending on your use case, sound quality may be way down the line in importance. The earbuds I use on the subway don’t need to be high quality. Anything better than AM radio will do the job.

Anything without ANC is basically unusable, and better ANC (which usually correlates with good sound quality) pretty noticeably improves your experience on the subway.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#683

Post by LorenPechtel »

nradov wrote: post #219
zkmon wrote: post #112

I live in a developed country. People buy a new home here, and find the kitchen counter top surface bulges up easily when a hot plate is placed on it. Turns out that the surface is a laminate that is not heat resistant. 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 tha…

They don't have granite counter tops in your country?

He didn't pick the tops.

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.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#684

Post by ericmay »

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #663
ericmay wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What did Churchill say about Democracy? It's the worst except all the others? Yea. I'll take all this government mismanagement and markets over Communism and Socialism. The State is never good at managing the means of production.

Churchill's democracy in Britain has social housing and social healthcare. Glad to know you'll take it though, because it looks like lot's of Americans are 'taking it', in a pretty brutal and ugly way. 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/

Yea still better than Communism or Socialism.

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.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#685

Post by LorenPechtel »

I think at least part of the problem is that we very often can't determine quality very well. And that which can't be measured gets corners cut on it.

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.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#686

Post by Ygg2 »

hilux wrote: post #600
Ygg2 wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then from a purely rational and self-interested citizenry would hold any economic agents on the hook for future cleanups of land, water or air.

I like the idea, but "purely rational citizenry" is a theoretical construct. 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.

> but "purely rational citizenry" is a theoretical construct.

So is a "purely rational economic agent". Nothing about it is real. It's a model.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#688

Post by carlosjobim »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #676
carlosjobim wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adjusted for inflation, car prices are actually lower now than decades ago 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.

Disagree. Real wages are ahead of all market sectors except medical and rent. People are making a bad comparison--they look at what they have vs what their parents have and see their parents doing better. Yeah, 20 or 30 years later in their career, plus a lot of time building up assets, that's actually to be expected. The proper comparison is between cohorts, but that can only be done by digging into the data, not by…

But their parents didn't need 20 or 30 years to build up their assets, or did they? They could purchase a new car when they were in their prime at 20-30 years old. Real estate they already had before buying the car. People who are in their prime today have to wait to be 50+ to have real estate, and if they want to have a new car they have to forgo that.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#689

Post by ath3nd »

carlosjobim wrote: post #418
ath3nd wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not inflation, it's divorced from all factors, these companies are raking in record profits, and they still squeeze out price increases, smaller seats, worse customer service, just because you have no alternative, you gotta take it. 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…

Just because it's got a Wikipedia entry doesn't mean that it's the correct term for anything. Outside of the most navel gazing hacker communities you won't find anybody taking you seriously with that language. You sound like some kind of pervert.

Thanks for the input, very constructive. You sound like you really know what you are talking about, with all the counterexamples and links you gave to support your thesis that I am a "pervert".

That's powerful debate skills, you really showed me!

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#690

Post by bsder »

atoav wrote: post #639
torginus wrote: post #552

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire 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, t…

Yeah I get that in theory, but then my 10x more expensive pro stuff works worse than the cheap stuff. Sure, because they follow the spec etc. But then it turns out that even name brand laptops (or their GPUs) do it wrong. My point was that the standard is crap. It is way too complicated, wants to be too many things to too many people (most of which are trying to sell stuff to consumers). HDMI tries to be a video link…

> Strip out the DRM

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.

Post reply on HN