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Make product worse, get money

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Re: Make product worse, get money

#111

Post by tonyedgecombe »

pil0u wrote: post #79
vkou wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them. It's also not a cost-effective plan for most shoppers who have enough other expenses in their lives that they can't afford their food doubling in price. Most of us are stuck in globally-horrible local maximums, and we aren't going to get out of them without some external push.

In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved. I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has. I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget.

>I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has.

I bet the least healthy options in people's shopping trolleys are some of the most expensive items. Cakes, biscuits, chocolate, ice creams, alcohol, pre-prepared meals, etc.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#112

Post by tonyedgecombe »

pil0u wrote: post #88
vkou wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved. Sure. But 50 years ago, healthcare and education didn't cost an arm and both legs. In those 5 decades, every single rent-seeker that you need to engage with to live has dipped his hand deeper into our pockets. > I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is acce…

I live in a part of the world where the healthcare system is also spread across the society in a more equalitarian way than what you describe. I don't understand your second point. One of my close friends is a farmer, they mostly grow organic apples. They work (insanely hard) across the whole year to prepare the crop and take care of the trees. They are not rich, but it starts to be sustainable. Locally, it's having…

Apples are an exception to the rule as they can be stored for a long time (up to a year for some varieties) under the correct conditions.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#113

Post by norenh »

GOD_Over_Djinn wrote: post #77
snozolli wrote: post #50

Regarding dating apps, anyone participating should look up the old OKCupid blog posts. The guys who launched OKCupid were data nerds and they published some scathing conclusions. Oddly enough, those posts were taken down right after Match.com bought them. I've read that Japanese companies focus on making great products and diversifying in order to expand. This is why Yamaha, for example, makes pianos and motorcycles.…

Interesting. Where can these old blog posts be found?

[dead]

Re: Make product worse, get money

#114

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

pil0u wrote: post #79
vkou wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Healthy food, grown naturally, not sprayed with chemicals, harvested in the last week, is just not a cost-effective plan for them. It's also not a cost-effective plan for most shoppers who have enough other expenses in their lives that they can't afford their food doubling in price. Most of us are stuck in globally-horrible local maximums, and we aren't going to get out of them without some external push.

In 50 years, the proportion of the budget allocated to food, halved. I'm not saying everyone can have the choice to eat healthy, but probably a small majority has. I live in an area where small, local, sometimes organic producers are gathered to sell their product to the community in a way it is accessible to every budget.

There are very few areas where it's physically possible to live like that.

And even in those areas many staples will be industrially farmed and imported from other countries, or at least shipped from far away within the same country.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#115

Post by sdenton4 »

cenamus wrote: post #108
LMSolar wrote: post #80

The article mentions light bulb durability. There was a cartel, the awesomely-named Phoebus Cartel [1] that encouraged its members to reduce the typical operating life of bulbs from 2500 hours to 1000 hours to increase bulb sales. So the author's list of 'Why Stuff is Bad' should * certainly * include 'lack of anti-trust laws and enforcement'. Rent-seeking, anti-trust, regulatory capture should all be mentioned in th…

Bulbs with a shorter lifetime are also a lot more efficient, because they run hotter. That's why that one bulb that's been burning for a 100 years in a firestation somewhere is only just glowing.

Heat is literally inefficient by definition - it's spent energy which hasn't been converted to visible light.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#116

Post by trollbridge »

ianferrel wrote: post #24
starkparker wrote: post #17

> Why is food so expensive at sporting events? ... why don’t venues sell water for $2 and raise ticket prices instead? I don’t know. Probably something complicated, like that expensive food allows you to extract extra money from rich people without losing business from non-rich people. Because there's at least two additional parties to concession revenues beyond the venue operator: the home team, who often takes up t…

>Everyone benefits from it except the consumer, who's the only party who can't choose. But of course they can choose. They can choose to not go to those events and venues and do other things with their time. And I expect that pro sports will look back on these moves and realize that they cannibalized their future fan growth for higher revenues today. I go to fewer pro sports games than I might otherwise both because…

I stopped caring about my favourite sports teams approximately 10 years ago, and now that I have kids, I probably won't ever take them to a pro game, and they'll probably grow up barely knowing what they are. They're completely cannibalised any kind of future for themselves, because I'm not the only person I know who's done this.

My friend who were big time fans of a certain Southern California team also completely abandoned an interest in sports when the team moved to LA. I asked one buddy what he did with his season tickets. "Burned 'em." He also used to put $1,000 every year on the team winning the Super Bowl. My other buddy threw all his fan stuff like a jersey in the rubbish.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#117

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

thewebguyd wrote: post #25
byronic wrote: post #15

What a dumb article. My favorite part was 'people are incentivized to make unsafe cars' and comparing that to pizza

And the "people actually want worse, cheaper products." iPhone sales numbers, as an example, say otherwise. If it was universally true that people just want cheap crap, everyone would rush to get whatever $200 budget motorola android the carrier is hawking for "free." I could seen an argument that people want cheaper products, but certainly not worse. Airlines aren't the best example because margins are pretty low, b…

There's a separate Veblen positioning, and Apple own it.

Same with personal matchmakers for high net worth individuals. They charge tens, even hundreds of thousands of dollars.

They're not necessarily any better at match making. But the users are paying a lot of money to reassure themselves of their superior status. And to filter out some of the more obvious riffraff.

In fact, a huge driver of practical pricing is narcissism. You're either selling it as a service ("luxury branding") or using it as lever to cynically extract money from those you consider inferiors. (Most corporates.)

Or both.

"More for less" and enshittification are both driven by narcissistic greed and devaluation of customers.

Some businesses start out like this. Some start out with good intentions. But generally once you get past a certain size many businesses become a competitive sociopath farm, with more and more sociopathy the higher you go.

Most internal and external interactions becomes an expression of dysfunctional values where the object of the exercise is to assert superior status and power and to deny quality service.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#118

Post by tonyedgecombe »

hamdingers wrote: post #42
catigula wrote: post #5

>Cars: “The thing about automakers is that making cars safe is expensive. So they have an incentive to make unsafe cars.” It took a lot of wrangling to get them to be safe. They were coffins on wheels for decades.

And yet, car companies are still incentivized to make unsafe cars, at least in the US. Bigger vehicles are more profitable, easier to advertise (for features and/or as a status symbol), suffer less emissions regulation. They also are more likely to kill pedestrians or occupants of other cars, and do significantly more damage to anything else they hit.

They aren't even that safe for the occupants, they are much more likely to turn over in an accident.

Re: Make product worse, get money

#119

Post by hmry »

sdenton4 wrote: post #115
cenamus wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bulbs with a shorter lifetime are also a lot more efficient, because they run hotter. That's why that one bulb that's been burning for a 100 years in a firestation somewhere is only just glowing.

Heat is literally inefficient by definition - it's spent energy which hasn't been converted to visible light.

And hotter light bulbs produce proportionally more visible light (higher luminous efficacy) than cooler ones.

An electric heater at 100C is an incandescent light source with 0% luminous efficacy :)

Re: Make product worse, get money

#120

Post by yen223 »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #32
tikhonj wrote: post #16

All of the pizza examples are about reducing cost . The argument about dating apps is about increasing retention . The dynamics are qualitatively different. The argument with pizza is more like "people like salty, fatty food, so pizza places are incentivized to make their pizza less healthy so that people come back more often"... which is exactly what happens! So why doesn't a legitimately healthy restaurant come alo…

> Tinder competes with Tiktok more than it competes with other dating apps. is a crazy remark, but I think you're right. We're living in weird time!

This is a restating of an older idea that fancy restaurants aren't competing against other restaurants, they are competing against movie theatres. Because they are in the date entertainment market
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