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Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

danluu.com

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Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#231

Post by kingcharles »

ncmncm wrote: post #216

When I interview, I like to look around and see how many short people work there. A place that picks up the short people other companies don't must be recognizing their value. I would like to favor places with more women in tech jobs, but generally just don't find any at all, anywhere. Everywhere I have worked they were always trying to hire more women but never got any applicants, or couldn't hire the ones they foun…

Huh, interesting. I would second MtF transgender. I've worked at places that will interview so they can appear what you might now call "woke", but then not hire based on their dislike, not skills or personality.

And there are so many MtFs in tech. I'd love to see statistics, but it feels skewed.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#232

Post by ncmncm »

et-al wrote: post #72
Gigachad wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As usual its just how much money you put in to it. We spend a lot of money making sure building foundations and silicon manufacturing works because failing is expensive and dangerous. I don't want to pay double/triple price for a toaster to slightly reduce its risk of failing because I'm happy to accept that on average it lasts a long time but there is some chance it fails sooner. If I'm in charge of buying a $100M b…

I beg to differ, many of these large household companies are shells of their former selves as they've been bought, bankrupted, and traded around. What's left is just a name with no solid product line backing it anymore. E.g. Sunbeam was a solid household appliance name, and now it's a crap. Same with Braun. The easy industrial design exercise seems to be luxurious looking materials paired with cheap electronics. Amaz…

I don't even know how I would identify a good toaster to buy, nowadays. Electric kettles are a problem, too.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#233

Post by solveit »

DannyBee wrote: post #110

The problem here is actually very basic - markets do not enforce efficiency. Period. The efficient market hypothesis is simply wrong. Strong form efficiency was already formally disproven quite a while ago. Weak form efficiency has been show to only true if P=NP. There is not really a strong need to go into why inefficiencies can persist, etc, because at a baseline, it turns out there is no provable theory that marke…

Sure, sure, you can encode difficult computational problems into markets in convoluted ways, but this is uninteresting unless you're into that kind of thing.

When people usually say that markets aren't efficient, they don't mean that optimal resource allocation is a computationally intractable problem. They're saying that they see, clear as day, obvious inefficiencies that aren't being corrected. They're saying that there are easily noticeable inefficiencies that aren't being corrected. And finding easily noticeable inefficiencies isn't NP-hard, by definition of easily noticeable.

A better version of the efficient market hypothesis would be that markets are inexploitable. There is no easy action I can take that corrects a market inefficiency and makes me money. This is the version that comes up in cocktail party conversations and it's also the one that Dan Luu is talking about. "If XXX is systemically undervalued by the market, why can't I start a company that specialises in using XXX?" The discussion following this question is much more relevant and interesting than encoding 3SAT into economic models.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#234

Post by arc-in-space »

mitchdoogle wrote: post #226
jader201 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. I’ve said this before on other threads, and it seems to resonate with others, so I’ll say it here too: I personally don’t care near as much about a single person’s opinion of a particular topic, as much as I care about the discussion of many people around a particular topic. And by “topic”,…

I have to strongly disagree. The lengthy article has much more thought put into it. It's almost always better researched and the author usually has relevant experience or expertise, and those are usually at least known to the reader in some way or easily discovered. I have seen many, many cases where a big portion of the top comments are either saying something similar to what the author of the article said, or they…

A part of the problem here is distinguishing which articles are worth reading. I may know that a Dan post is probably good, but if I saw this exact same headline taking me to a long article on , I'd probably skip it and skim the comments instead, since chances are the article itself is near worthless.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#235

Post by jader201 »

franzb wrote: post #220
jader201 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. I’ve said this before on other threads, and it seems to resonate with others, so I’ll say it here too: I personally don’t care near as much about a single person’s opinion of a particular topic, as much as I care about the discussion of many people around a particular topic. And by “topic”,…

Sure, but then we’re discussing the topic as set by the post’s title, not the actual topic(s) addressed by the post’s content, which are quite a bit more complex and nuanced than a title of a few characters could ever convey. What if we want to hold a conversation about the actual post content? Should we add a tag such as [please read]?

Why not both? There is good discussion being held on both topics in this thread.

That’s the benefit of nested comments, to allow different top-level discussions where others can discuss what is being shared by top-level commenters.

My original point was to not be “depressed” by others choosing to not take the time to read the article, and have a discussion on the topic rather than the subject.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#236

Post by mitchdoogle »

Mountain_Skies wrote: post #59

Looking through old Sears catalogs and seeing the prizes on older game shows, I think some of our memory is selective. Even in photos and SD video you can see the terrible build quality on many consumer products from those earlier times. This seems to be especially true for furniture and exercise equipment. When you convert into current dollars, this low quality junk often is more expensive than what is available tod…

The idea behind the article is not that everyone is making junk these days. The idea is that we often have no way to find out which products and services are junk and which are good quality. How are you going to find a contractor to remodel your bathroom? How will you even know if they did a good job?

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#237

Post by ncmncm »

angarg12 wrote: post #107

I just moved to the USA from the UK (having lived in Germany before) and the quality of the services I'm experiencing here is appalling. To get concrete, we submitted an application for an apartment let. After not hearing back for 4 days we reached out and it looks like somehow they misplaced our application. By then the unit we wanted was gone so they asked us to pay a holding fee to ensure they would keep another u…

Yes, quality is going to hell in the US. It usually helps to book help from people who are from other countries, even places that don't have a good reputation. They left, right? And, managed to come here. However bad it is here, it is anyway hard to get and stay here.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#238

Post by mitchdoogle »

mpalczewski wrote: post #96
fouc wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Thus, the Lindy effect proposes the longer a period something has survived to exist or be used in the present, it is also likely to have a longer remaining life expectancy. Makes sense! I was also thinking there's a related rule - something worth buying used has proven itself to not be crap.

Another way to look for non crap, is to check the used value of something. E.g. check swappa. If people are still paying a lot for an item after it is used, usually a good sign. If they are not and you still want it, get it used and save a ton. Another good way, check how much insurance costs. e.g. How much is that extended warranty going to cost on one car vs another. How much is home owners insurance in one neighbo…

Price is not a very good indicator of quality

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#239

Post by silisili »

solveit wrote: post #222
dreeple15 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[dead]

Not sure how I feel about an anon account presumably created for the sole purpose of denigrating someone's ability.

A kid showing their age.

When I started at a company, I listened to stand-ups of 'yeah 4 weeks' and whined I could do it -today-. And I could. I was a rockstar, everyone else was an old lump.

FF to today and I realize how much I didn't know. Mostly business relations, relations with product, proper testing and pipeline integration, and honestly...just thinking. I used to be prolific and just write and write. Today I think way more than I write, and accomplish more.

Re: Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

#240

Post by fallingfrog »

hyperpallium2 wrote: post #192

The bit about being unable assess expertise reminds me of Dunning-Kruger, and also The Prince: > A prince who is not wise can never get good counsel, unless he puts himself completely in the hands of a wise man; but such a man will soon take over his state. What do you do? Become expert at everything? Form a coalition of experts, who share their assessments? Or... somehow... acquire the ability to assess "expertise"…

I think Elon Musk's big advantage over his competitors is that he has a high enough level of engineering skill to identify talent. Elon himself isn't the best engineer ever born, but he's good enough to know when someone's ideas or designs or plans make plausible sense. Most CEO's of large corporations, even engineering companies, can't do this, and it shows. So they run the company on the basis of making numbers bigger, and making sure that they cut costs enough to turn a profit each quarter, which eventually runs the company into the ground. They don't pay attention to the ground reality of what the company is actually doing, and only govern on the basis of what the stock price is doing, because the ground level reality is inscrutable and meaningless to them.
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