Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some plastic parts are intentional / sacrificial. Even so, the old mixers were definitely built to last.
Plastic gears have lower friction and don't require greasing. They aren't really bad on their own. The problem is you can't find replacement parts when they break.
Generation Junk
201–210 of 471 posts
Re: Generation Junk
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It’s the old fuel injection vs carburetor debate. Do you want something that usually runs for 200k miles without a single problem, but takes a fancy shop to fix? Or do you want something that needs a complete rebuild every three months and needs to be retuned for your ski trip, but can be repaired by a high school boy with a tongue depressor, a q-tip, and a hammer? The rapid exodus of carburetors shocked and dismayed…
I think you can have it both ways honestly. A TBI setup with a wasted spark ignition is at least as easy to work on a carburetor, with little or no extra complexity and way less headaches, while removing a lot of the problems older stuff had (no points, condensers and caps going bad, no need to mess with the jets, etc.). You can have it both ways, the manufacturers and consumers just have to give a shit.
Re: Generation Junk
#203I feel arguments like this always ignore the fact that buying a toaster in 1950 was a major investment for a family, and if you want to spend $2000 on a high-end toaster in 2023, which is probably equivalent in inflation-adjusted price to the 1950s toaster, it will probably also be very nice.
A toaster in 1950 would probably be closer to $250. Also, I don't like this counterargument because it holds that we should expect to be no better at creating high quality appliances today than in 1950 despite 73 years of advances in engineering and technology.
A Kenmore toaster in 1951 was $21 new, or $253 now.
And if you go buy a commercial toaster it will (likely) last as long as one of those old toasters on average.
This said those old appliances could be fixed, but today the labor costs of having someone else do it would be astronomical for most people. A significant portion of the total cost.
Re: Generation Junk
#204Ok 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…
I don't buy the survivorship bias thing for the most part. My mother has her original dryer, washer, deep freezer, and refrigerator all running at her house. These are all 40+ years old except for the washer which is probably 30ish years old. Also her furnace + water heater are 40 years old. If it was survivorship bias some of these appliances would've died.
Are you saying that none of their original appliances have died?
If not, do you realize that you claiming " If it was survivorship bias some of these appliances would've died." When "these" refers exclusively to those who haven't died is the very definition of survivorship bias?
Re: Generation Junk
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some plastic parts are intentional / sacrificial. Even so, the old mixers were definitely built to last.
Plastic gears have lower friction and don't require greasing. They aren't really bad on their own. The problem is you can't find replacement parts when they break.
If these things break all the time why isn't someone producing them and selling them?
Re: Generation Junk
#206So this article implies that a number of things that we buy previously were built to last longer, and indeed did last longer. The first few examples are kitchen appliances. In this case I don't really know, but I'm at least willing to listen. Ultimately the evidence is people responding to a thread on Twitter where he solicited complaints. Not so compelling. But then he mentions a "hybrid sedan". Here I'm aware of th…
Totally irrelevant links — the assertion was about hybrid cars, those links speak to cars overall. The Toyota Prius debuted in the US in 2000. I’d argue 23 years is simply not sufficient to make an argument about long term reliability—particularly given that sales took a while to ramp, and any issues in, say, the first 10 years are likely to be dismissed as teething problems.
> Toyota Prius > argument about long term reliability
But you can tell a bit about their long term reliability by looking at heavy users like Taxis and Ubers.
The Prius is used because it is cheap, cheap to run, and cheap to maintain -- even by outlier users like Uber drivers (also note drivers are usually buying consumer versions).
Arguing about 23 years is a strawman - which would mean you could never buy anything new because new models haven't yet had even a few years of usage prediction.
Re: Generation Junk
#207Ok 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…
I don't buy the survivorship bias thing for the most part. My mother has her original dryer, washer, deep freezer, and refrigerator all running at her house. These are all 40+ years old except for the washer which is probably 30ish years old. Also her furnace + water heater are 40 years old. If it was survivorship bias some of these appliances would've died.
You're completely right. Things also usually had a warranty longer than the nearly-universal 365-day warranty they have now. It's utterly disgusting to me that you can purchase a refrigerator -- an item which weighs like 800 pounds, has a huge amount of metal in it, and which everyone would agree would be insane to be a yearly purchase, and yet if it needs even an average repair 13 months from purchase, it can easily cost more to fix than the replacement cost and thus be totaled.
In my opinion, any device whose manufacture requires an amount of resources approaching "large appliance" levels should be required to have a 10-year parts and labor warranty. I don't care if that makes them cost more. I hope it makes them cost more. It's insane the way it is.
Re: Generation Junk
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't buy the survivorship bias thing for the most part. My mother has her original dryer, washer, deep freezer, and refrigerator all running at her house. These are all 40+ years old except for the washer which is probably 30ish years old. Also her furnace + water heater are 40 years old. If it was survivorship bias some of these appliances would've died.
Are you saying that none of their original appliances have died? If not, do you realize that you claiming " If it was survivorship bias some of these appliances would've died." When "these" refers exclusively to those who haven't died is the very definition of survivorship bias?
I think he's saying Mom would have definitely remembered if she had had to replace every darn appliance in her house every 2-5 years, the way we do now, before eventually lucking out to find the one good washer, dryer, dishwasher, etc. made in their respective years.
Re: Generation Junk
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
Toasters are an interesting case study. I went on a tear last year after being fed up with every toaster doing the same bad job. I thought maybe someone made a proper toaster. What I found is that when you pay more the coat of paint gets nicer and maybe there's an MCU+LCD, but the guts and logic are identical. There is no good commercially available toaster today. It's sending a very loud message about how markets op…
Either I'm having insanely good luck or I have extremely low expectations of a toaster, but I genuinely don't understand how a toaster does "bad job". What were the issues you were having?
My biggest issue is with the lever. I have to push it down between 5 and 10 times before it will trigger, without fail. I've had this across most all toasters I've owned.
My second biggest issue is related to the same mechanism: the "pop" is impotent and does nothing to eject what's being toasted. The most I can hope for is that I can manually push the lever up.
The next biggest issue is with heating element distance. If there's anything that is wider than a slice of wonder bread it's going to get sizzled by the heating element. In the worst cases it causes smoke to be emitted for several runs afterwards.
Re: Generation Junk
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
I went to try to see conclusively if you were correct. A pretty basic sofa at C&B is $1,800 - $2,000. In 1990 you could buy a basic Bassett sofa at J.C. Penney for $599 [1] -- $1407 in 2023 dollars. Furniture from Sears and Penney's (regardless of whether it was fashionable) was of fine quality, in that it held up for decades. I know because we had furniture like this in our home at the time. So this tells me that th…
My only point was that today you don't need to spend $5000 for a "good" couch. I don't know about the historical context.
To be clear, I wasn't refuting you -- you were correct.