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Generation Junk

walterkirn.substack.com

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Re: Generation Junk

#121

Post by MichaelZuo »

edrxty wrote: post #88
woopwoop wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They were simpler and easier to repair, but they absolutely did not last longer.

On average they didn't (oh no, that repair costs more than the "car is worth" as if that's a metric that actually means anything) but it was far easier to keep one running indefinitely. You could take an engine to a small machine shop and get the head and block resurfaced, valves reamed and cylinders lapped. Without any electronics to fail it was just a block of metal that was slowly losing material and a quick hit w…

You can have that level of quality and care for the entire car, not just limited to the drivetrain and electronics, and it's probably even in a showroom right now waiting for buyers, just at your nearest Rolls Royce dealership.

Re: Generation Junk

#122

Post by samtho »

wredcoll wrote: post #20
upon_drumhead wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our few year old kitchen aid has been a nightmare of broken plastic internal parts. I will weep when my mother passes, but I will be taking her mixer and ditching mine.

The irony of course is that they deliberately make some parts out of plastic so they break before the rest of the machine does when you're misstreating it.

They’re built out of plastic because it’s $0.02 cheaper than a metal part and 99.9% of them last through the warranty period.

It’s not deliberate that they make stuff that fails, they build stuff that lasts only as long as it needs.

Re: Generation Junk

#123

Post by jonahss »

jonahss wrote: post #49

Ok no. First of all: survivorship bias. All of the old appliances that still work are only the ones which still work. This goes for the author's juicer. Second: things which have investment attention now are excellent quality and things which are waning towards the end of their lifecycle are having the last few corners cut before the Private Equity firm that now owns them throws in the towel, throughly wrung dry. Aut…

There's another important element: the ability to judge quality.

Many people (especially baby boomers) learned a shortcut, by using brand name as a proxy for quality of goods. The problem with this is that all those brands eventually outsourced and sold themselves and cashed in on the old brand quality association. Cheapening and cheapening as the producers realized that people still bought their product no matter what the quality was. Also, people equate flair and style of product with the quality, because they aren't actually good judges of quality. You can find many cheap junk products today that retain a poor skeuomorphic shadow of their former glory. At some point consumers learned "well if it has the shiny chrome it's a good one" and producers learned they could add a chunk of shiny plastic and people would prefer their product.

Brand names are worthless now, for the most part, and if you're not good at judging quality yourself, it can be a difficult consumer landscape to navigate.

Re: Generation Junk

#124

Post by TheCleric »

EnigmaFlare wrote: post #72
marginalia_nu wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of the high end stuff is crap too. You get a toaster with wifi and a touch screen and an app instead of something that works.

You can buy commercial versions of most machines which will be much better quality and without the stupid touch-screen gimmicks. They might cost 10x as much but that's also how much more domestic ones used to cost back in the day.

Yeah, restaurant supply stores are pretty good for utilitarian stuff.

Re: Generation Junk

#125

Post by c22 »

wredcoll wrote: post #20
upon_drumhead wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our few year old kitchen aid has been a nightmare of broken plastic internal parts. I will weep when my mother passes, but I will be taking her mixer and ditching mine.

The irony of course is that they deliberately make some parts out of plastic so they break before the rest of the machine does when you're misstreating it.

In this case, I think it's so they break before the bones in your hand do.

Re: Generation Junk

#126

Post by [deleted] »

jonahss wrote: post #105
edrxty wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seconded, though I'd add that with the current concerns about climate change and resource utilization, we need to think a bit more about product lifecycle and this is a reasonable way of illustrating that. If the embodied environmental impact of a product increases 10% to make it last 100% longer then we need to think about making that change rather than producing twice as many to replace the broken ones.

one thing about some of the shitty products out there today is we got MUCH better at making things out of less material. So they break easier and wear out faster, but we've been able to reduce material usage along with price. If you're a person who loses pens or holds onto them so long the ink dries up, it'd be better to waste an object made as cheaply as possible than one made to last. This is a balance to play as w…

[deleted]

Re: Generation Junk

#127

Post by ctoth »

vinnymac wrote: post #109
fullstop wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A toaster in 1951 was $21, which is about $250 today. I would argue that a $250 toaster today is still not a "buy it for life" item, but it would certainly have a lot of bells and whistles and almost no user-serviceable parts.

We don’t even call them toasters anymore in my household. Our Cosori air fryer has a toast setting that works beautifully. It cost less than $250. It warms, bakes, roasts, dehydrates, as well as 10 other settings. It has 3 different racks, so I can toast 3-4x as much bread than I could in a regular toaster. I’ve only had it for 6 years, but it has held up nicely, no issues whatsoever. I guess what I am trying to say,…

> Our Cosori air fryer has a toast setting that works beautifully.

If you're not aware, they had a recall on a bunch of models recently, you should check to see if yours was one of them!

Re: Generation Junk

#128

Post by conk »

yesbut wrote: post #107
woopwoop wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article was about consumer goods in general, so data about cars overall is more relevant than a single brand. Nonetheless, the Toyota Prius is, by reputation, a very reliable car. Here a used car website used it's data to estimate car model's lifespan, finding that a Toyota Prius has a potential lifespan of 250000 miles, much greater than anything from the 1980s. https://www.thestreet.com/personal-finance/cars-th…

Not to get too deep into this, in the 80s cars were crap. That is based only on my own personal experience. But I have no idea how reliable cars made 70 years ago were (like the kitchen appliance mentioned in the article). I've seen really old cars still on the road, but those are probably owned by collectors / people that take effort to preserve those types of cars.

Cars made in the 40s and 50s were very unreliable, required significantly more maintenance than modern cars. You had to service things like breaker points, batteries and carburetors every few thousand miles. Most modern cars can go 10,000 miles between checkups and major components can go 100k+ miles with no work needed.

Re: Generation Junk

#129

Post by chubot »

I need a new washer-dryer, and now I'm scared to buy one. (The one from 2007 seems to eat clothes now... not sure if these things can even be repaired)

Many years ago I came across https://old.reddit.com/r/BuyItForLife/ -- anyone have good stories from recommendations there?

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I generally agree with the premise of this article. Here are my experiences with some things that work and don't fall apart:

- Zojirushi rice cooker and toaster oven. They are more expensive than the typical stuff, but better. I bought a horrible cheap rice cooker at first, and also a toaster oven from Amazon that died after 3-4 months. The Zojirushi ones have a better design and are more sturdy.

- Brompton Folding Bike. It's obvious that they have tested this design under a wide range of conditions -- and importantly have kept it pretty stable for decades, not messing it up for marketing purposes / trends.

I had a Montague Folding Bike prior to this, which had all this "military grade" advertising, and it was a piece of shit. I got stranded in the middle of a ride with an unusable bike because some dinky steel part bent in half. The Brompton parts are solid and well-designed.

Again the Brompton costs more, but it's better. The Brompton bag is very good too.

- Triangle Borea Speakers. I don't know about durability, but they're part of what I see as a small segment of the audio market moving against the trend of audio getting worse since the 70's. This segment seems to have almost zero advertising.

Speakers driven by amps seem to be incredibly niche now, since that everyone has music on their devices. I think these were ~ $600 range and worth every penny. You can easily pay $1000 or even $5000 for something like this, since the audio market is weird.

- Kinesis Freestyle keyboard. I hesitate to include this, because weirdly I had TWO keyboards die right around their warranty time?? But I actually called the company and they repaired the keyboards! (I rarely send anything back) I think that was almost 10 years ago, and I've been using the repaired keyboard since then !!! So in total I've been using these keyboards for over a decade, and I've gotten much more than my money's worth.

- Ikea stuff under $100 can be very well designed and functional. It seems like they know if they're going to sell a zillion copies of something, and they take the time to optimize the design. Flat packing adds a design constraint that encourages creativity.

OTOH, the furniture in the $500-$1000 range is very hit and miss.

- Sharp kitchen knife from Amazon with a sheath. I use the same knife every day now for almost everything... and bought a second one for when I'm away from home. I think it's actually better than knives 20 or 30 years ago, and it was under $20.

- I got a 42" Plasma TV from Amazon in 2007 or so, and used it for 14 years (I still have it, but it's in storage). People who saw it liked the quality more than the LCD TVs they had. I think they stopped making Plasmas for some reason

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Some things that don't work:

- Flash thumb drives from Amazon. I guess I should go pay more at a "local computer shop" ?

- Random toaster ovens from Amazon, rice cookers from target (mentioned above). Actually now I remember that I used the same toaster oven for almost 20 years, and when it came time to replace it, got TWO complete duds from Amazon/Target.

- Air beds from Amazon that develop holes in a matter of months, and one which broke down after a single use. A big waste.

Re: Generation Junk

#130

Post by mikewarot »

I live in the Chicago suburbs, car bodies have vastly improved in durability and resistance to road salt in the past few decades. It used to be that most cars were rusted through in less than a decade. Now you almost never see a rusted out car.

On the other hand, it's a $300 repair job to replace my niece's Headlight on her Ford Focus. That's nuts!

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In the world of industrial machine tools, like lathes, etc. it is generally accepted that 1940-1960 American Cast Iron machines are the best machines available, after rebuilding. The quality of the materials has not been matched since then.

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