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Generation Junk

walterkirn.substack.com

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Re: Generation Junk

#261

Post by a_t48 »

Baeocystin wrote: post #226
lawgimenez wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who drives an “old” Honda 2006, I’m surprised that this machine is still running very good. I could just take it to my local shop and had it fixed in 1-2 days. Based on my logs, I took the car for repair on average of 3-4 times a year. I am looking to purchase a new family vehicle in the future but with all the softwares, screens, and fancy stuffs I am not sure if I liked it. Anyone feels this way?

I really wish there was a new car that I wanted to buy, because my 1998 Jeep isn't getting any younger. But holy crap is the modern car a dumpster fire of shit from a UI perspective. Although it looks like at least some manufacturers are starting to take note: https://futurism.com/the-byte/car-touchscreens-buttons-back

My car has physical buttons for climate control, volume, lights, etc but also a nice sized touch screen for CarPlay. I got the last year before VW took away the steering wheel buttons with capacitive replacements, though it sounds like they too are waking that back.

Re: Generation Junk

#262

Post by nazgulnarsil »

it's partially driven by scale. Take a good product and have it get accolades on the review sites and on reddit. The flood of sales triggers the manufacturer to find ways to cut costs. Saving ten cents doesn't matter when you sell ten thousand of something. But when you sell ten million, well you can hire people whose whole job it is to find ten cent cuts. Each cut itself isn't really noticeable, but eventually they add up. I learned about this from running a food company. Our competitors make their protein bars for, I'm told by a long time industry insider, 17 cents in ingredients.

Re: Generation Junk

#263

Post by m0llusk »

mikewarot wrote: post #130

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! --- In the world of industrial machine tools, like lathes, etc. it is…

Car headlight and taillight assemblies are kind of a special case. In the late 80s and early 90s it became common to use a lot of computer assisted design to make multiply layered constructions with lenses and diffusers and so on built in. Given the amount of engineering going into these a complete replacement is going to be expensive and even getting at them to replace primary bulbs ends up being a chore.

Re: Generation Junk

#264

Post by alexey-salmin »

CobaltFire wrote: post #197
LiquidPolymer wrote: post #106

We have friends that just laid out $3000 for a new washer drier set and washer is already leaking from the front door. Pursuing warranty repair has been a major hassle. My wife and I use a washer and drier set from the late 90's that are nothing to look at but work really well. They appear to be designed with service in mind and changing components is usually extremely easy - something I have done infrequently. These…

There are brands built to super high standards, but no-one wants to pay for them or deal with their compromises. We have been buying Miele appliances, and have nothing but excellent experiences. They aren't cheap, but the general opinion I've seen online is that they are one of the few brands that build quality modern appliances. My experiences would tend to back that up. Specific to the Miele washer and dryer, we ha…

> There are brands built to super high standards, but no-one wants to pay for them or deal with their compromises

I'm willing to pay. The money is not the only problem though.

1) These brands are hard to find. I've never heard of Miele until I rented an apartment that had one. The owner built the place for himself but then had to put it for rent.

2) Most of the brands that pretend to be high-quality are the same crap but shiny and expensive. You don't know that until you buy them. Makes the point about "hard to find" even worse.

3) Some of the reliable brands sometimes experience the change in strategy (probably caused by change in ownership) and start to produce crap while maintaining the same outlook. The most disturbing betrayal.

As a result out of hundreds of appliances I use I was only able to find quality staff in a handful of categories. The rest is either cheap crap or expensive crap. Maybe I lack some generational knowledge on the topic.

Re: Generation Junk

#265

Post by ahf8Aithaex7Nai »

woopwoop wrote: post #12

So 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…

Of course, cars and engines in particular are more durable today. This is due to technological progress. Cars weren't designed to be unreliable back then, they were unreliable because they couldn't do any better. Two or three years ago, I bought a pair of headphones for 200 euros that looked pretty high quality. They're now so broken that I have to hold them together with gaffer tape. Soon they'll be rotting (or not rotting) in some landfill. It's common knowledge that everyday objects are now deliberately produced in such a way that they don't last long. That's not a conspiracy theory.

Re: Generation Junk

#267

Post by CaptainZapp »

hooby wrote: post #245
mijamo wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not know where you are from but the description of the plugs basically match the ones still installed in France (although many don't require screws because they have built it fixations that just "click"), and I have never seen one that requires glue or soldering. Appliance life expectancy has also gone way up statistically, just like cars, although people often complain about the complexity of both. Most washing…

Not the sockets - I'm talking of the plugs that you put into the sockets. I haven't seen a plug with screws in ages. They all are a single molded piece now, aren't they? See: https://www.kulthifi.de/WebRoot/Store19/Shops/80012341/5E84/... for example.

Yes, they usually are.

But you can - if you're so inclined - buy plugs with screws and replace the molded ones by cutting the cable.

Re: Generation Junk

#268

Post by volkl48 »

xp84 wrote: post #175
shepherdjerred wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a mind-boggling anecdote. As an example, Crate and Barrel are known to make good, high-quality couches, and many of them are far less than $5000

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…

Bedbugs had been suppressed to the point that you were very unlikely to ever encounter them 30-50 years ago. That's no longer the case.

I wouldn't even consider a piece of used upholstered furniture today, regardless of price or product quality.

That used sofa today represents a large risk to my wallet, property and health that it mostly didn't in the peak pesticide era.

Poor people are aware of the same - and if possible they too will opt for the shit-tier couch they can afford vs running that risk with a nice used one that would have been valued the same 30 years ago.

Re: Generation Junk

#269

Post by Freak_NL »

10729287 wrote: post #239
pixl97 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean for myself buying a cheap burr grinder is probably all I'd ever need, that said I've never chased quality coffee and don't care about it much. For myself I do the 'harbor freight' tool buying method. I buy a cheap whatever first, and if it's something I find useful and demand higher quality then I more research into what quality is with at least some experience. This said, I've also had a lot of cheap tools th…

Lidl/Parkside here in Europe seems to be the perfect example. Never been disapointed by one of their cheap products. They're always performing and seems built to last. My little Parkside vacuum cleaner is still doing strong 10 years after I bought it while my 5yo expensive as hell Dyson operates intermittently now and is just screaming for a new battery every time I launch it. More expensive products are also prone t…

Well… It depends. Lidl launched a range of good quality cordless tools under the Parkside Performance moniker last year. The 20V screwdriver and drill seem like solid pieces of work, and are holding up well in my tiny shop. Those are good, and I recommend these to anyone.

But many of the plain Parkside branded tools are utter crap. The oscillating sander with exchangeable triangular, rectangular, and circular attachments I got was made of way to little material to be useful. The plastic struts for the attachments (the process of swapping those being horribly inefficient) partly melted with use.

The Parkside drill press I have isn't too bad, but I had to fix a mechanical failure where the part which connects the manual up-down thingy to its gear just sheared off because it was a tiny rolled piece of metal sheet instead of a solid piece of 4mm diameter steel. I fixed that (replacing that bit with part of a bolt tapped into the axle) and it is doing fine now, but still.

Re: Generation Junk

#270

Post by [deleted] »

gocartStatue wrote: post #235
YouWhy wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would not expect RR to be particularly high quality, due to: 1. Small production batches, 2. Low typical usage - most RR owners do not use it to commute on a daily basis, hence do not face high reliability requirements, 3. The ability of the typical buyer to overspend on maintenance, whether preemptively or on-demand.

Small production batches are absolutely required for high quality (see Toyota, TQM)

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