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Parable of the Sofa

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Re: Parable of the Sofa

#331

Post by 20after4 »

hansvm wrote: post #297
wanderingstan wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a key factor: businesses have learned to “optimize” by cutting corners wherever people can’t perceive the deficit. The product just has to last long enough.

In the off-chance this is a good place to ask, how does a consumer (or, ideally, the existing governing body) fight back? I'll briefly walk through a hypothetical scenario to have something concrete to talk about, then ask about the normal alternatives? Say you have an IoT device. It's marketed as a device capable of doing a task (e.g., scanning car OBD codes). That task can be done offline. The device initially does…

It seems hopeless to me. Clearly the company restructuring to separate assets from liabilities should be criminalized and corporate directors / executives should be subjected to criminal prosecutions but that very rarely happens.

The entire concept of corporations as a shield from liability is actually really dubious in my opinion.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#332

Post by ajkjk »

blfr wrote: post #242
ajkjk wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people genuinely prefer new, crappier stuff to classier, old items > Virtually every time a consumer is confronted with a lousier but easily available option and a vastly superior one but requiring some mental, or occasionally physical, effort, they choose the former. No they don't. There's a bunch of information asymmetries and missing choices that make the equilibrium warped and bizarre, rather than revealing any…

> There's a bunch of information asymmetries This is what I meant by mental effort. With the advent of the Internet, most of these asymmetries are gated by at most a couple of hours of online research.

No there are a lot of asymmetries still. Knowing something is bad easy. Actually having access to something good, and knowing how to shop for it and acquire it and get it an affordable price, is hard. As is knowing, for the producers, that people want certain things and will pay for them, or would pay for them if marketed to correctly.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#333

Post by 20after4 »

The enshittification of Google Search and Social Network sites has made it much more difficult to find the local, high-quality option. It's hard to identify them among a sea of scams and low-quality China imports with a million different brand names.

I will say that the China imports have drastically improved in quality while the alternatives have consistently deteriorated or disappeared.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#334

Post by sandos »

Our 20~ year old sofa was much cheaper than this (considering intial purchase+repair), but also not leather. Its not really showing any signs of age, after some fixing from cat damage. Does it contain cheap sawdust-formed-into-wood? Probably. Do I care? No.

I would never pay 5 figures for a sofa. Our sofa was around 1000$, this talk about 3000$ for fixing cushions feels a bit off to me. Yes, yes I am part of the problem: I would rather buy a new sofa than fix a sofa for more money than a new one which is likely to hold up for the rest of my life would cost.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#335

Post by gershy »

wholinator2 wrote: post #262
ghaff wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I must have hallucinated that I went to an auto dealer for warranty service last week. Enterprise software companies have consulting and support services. At the consumer level though, most people aren't willing to pay for the cost of the manufacturer or retailer repairing clothing and other relatively low cost items. As in this article, there are local businesses that do such things but it can be really hard to just…

While i do take your point, i think a big problem with discussions about "big businesses" is that they are completely different most of the time. A sofa =/= a car =/= enterprise software. But then how do discussions happen? A sofa is just a thing to sit on at home, you undoubtedly have other things to sit on. Needing to repair a sofa is not catastrophic to survival. Needing to repair a family car can be catastrophic…

I think there's some argument that at scale, the mass decision to replace rather than repair furniture is catastrophic.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#336

Post by whiterace1488 »

sandos wrote: post #334

Our 20~ year old sofa was much cheaper than this (considering intial purchase+repair), but also not leather. Its not really showing any signs of age, after some fixing from cat damage. Does it contain cheap sawdust-formed-into-wood? Probably. Do I care? No. I would never pay 5 figures for a sofa. Our sofa was around 1000$, this talk about 3000$ for fixing cushions feels a bit off to me. Yes, yes I am part of the prob…

[dead]

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#337

Post by FeepingCreature »

immibis wrote: post #107
FeepingCreature wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The twenty-first century did not invent cheap goods of dubious quality.

That's correct. It invented expensive goods of dubious quality. If you want a cheap good and you buy a cheap good and it's cheap, that's all fine. More power to you. Problems come when the quality level you want is possible to manufacture, even profitably, but isn't manufactured because market said no.

I think you underestimate how expensive goods of good quality used to be. I have no good source for that though; just an impression that things used to be pricier.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#338

Post by EchoReflection »

"Which is something that modern capitalism is trying to make impossible". Absurd. Modern capitalism? As compared to...classical capitalism, or ancient capitalism? Capitalism doesn't "try" to do anything, capitalism is a system by which goods and services are exchanged at market-determined values. Those values can be/are altered by things like taxes and government subsidies, of course, but saying capitalism "tries" to do [X] is like saying gravity "tries" to make objects fall down.

"Basic Economics" and "Economic Facts and Fallacies" by Thomas Sowell are two books that do a pretty good job of clarifying how and why economies work (or fail to work) in the ways that they do.

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/basic-econom...

https://www.betterworldbooks.com/product/detail/economic-fac...

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#339

Post by PaulHoule »

jprete wrote: post #154
PaulHoule wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lately I’ve been a bit depressed by startups I respect going down, most of all post.news which was a refined product developed in one and a half years by a moderate-sized team and funded by Scott Galloway and Andreessen Horowitz. The official statement was that it was not growing fast enough to make it as a consumer product: https://techcrunch.com/2024/04/19/post-news-the-a16z-funded-... Though I think there could be…

It occurs to me that one reason we have such a winner-take-all tech economy might be that VCs don't want anything else to exist.

I think of the $15 billion sale of WhatsApp to Facebook.

On one hand that seems like a great outcome to founders and VCs, but from the viewpoint of Facebook it is like extortion. I suspect Facebook uses every kind of influence it has to suppress the next WhatsApp because they don’t want to be doing that every two years or so, particularly when prices for things like that go up over time and not down.

Re: Parable of the Sofa

#340

Post by ghaff »

m463 wrote: post #328
II2II wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to go the conspiratorial route to realize that repair doesn't make sense to big businesses. The cost of diagnosing the problem, performing the repair, and validating the repair is fairly high. It is also difficult to ensure consistency in the quality of repairs. Then you have to consider that they think about things on a large scale, while repair is an individualized thing. Just look at how comput…

I think it depends on the business. Maybe fixing 20 year old electronics might be hard, but it still work for (overengineered? underchanged?) herman miller aeron chairs.

Though even Aeron chairs, I had one fixed under warranty after 12 or so years. Then it pretty much fell apart after another 12 or so years. It might have been fixable again but it didn't seem worthwhile to faff around especially mid-COVID and I'm glad I just got a new one which was rock solid. (At the time I wished I could try a couple other models but I ended up being very happy just getting a direct replacement.)
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