Backpacks got worse on purpose

Its got this ... cadence:

> Same earnings call. Same margin targets. Same quarterly pressure. The sense that you were choosing between competitors was a fiction that VF Corp had no incentive to correct.

> That threat disciplined every material choice, every stitch count, every zipper spec. Once they all report to the same parent, the discipline evaporates. Nobody needs to outbuild anybody. The only pressure left is the one coming from above

> None of this shows up on the shelf. The colors are right. The logos are crisp. The product photography is excellent. You discover what you actually bought three months in, when the stitching pulls apart at every stress point.

Its thing X. Its thing Y. Its thing Z. And now I'm going to tell you about thing Q in a longer sentence.

LLMs really like the "it's not this, it's that" framing. The short punchy lists/sequences also feel off to me.

I think it's also the reuse of the same strategy repeatedly throughout the article. I think most human writers often feel put off if they use the same literary device too much.

Akerlof famously wrote about this in 'The Market for Lemons'.

"Suppose buyers cannot distinguish between a high-quality car (a "peach") and a low-quality car (a "lemon"). Then they are only willing to pay a fixed price for a car that averages the value of a "peach" and "lemon" together (pavg). But sellers know whether they hold a peach or a lemon. Given the fixed price at which buyers will buy, sellers will sell only when they hold "lemons" (since plemon pavg). Eventually, as enough sellers of "peaches" leave the market, the average willingness-to-pay of buyers will decrease (since the average quality of cars on the market decreased), leading to even more sellers of high-quality cars to leave the market through a positive feedback loop. Thus the uninformed buyer's price creates an adverse selection problem that drives the high-quality cars from the market. Adverse selection is a market mechanism that can lead to a market collapse."

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Market_for_Lemons

Chicago School assholes backed by the conservative/"pro-business" think tanks that boomed in the post-war era managed to place some judges and influence some lawmakers to completely break our anti-trust enforcement in the '70s, by shifting from a standard of "enormous corporations may be assumed harmful" to "specific harm that's very expensive to prove must be demonstrated", all but entirely eliminating anti-trust action.

I don’t see why that would be proof of being written by a LLM.

It quite well can be (and I think it is) stylistic writing, hammering the message home by repetition of blows.