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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

english.elpais.com

361–370 of 824 posts

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No - the term Late Stage Capitalism gets thrown around a bunch as a scarecrow for anything seemingly bad going on, but in this case it’s more likely a symptom of lack of education of materials and/or people not caring, and resource depletion/competition due to overpopulation and rise in living standards across the world. > With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our expense - while the companies doin…

Capitalism gives the market what it demands. You can't tell consumers what they should want. Government failure an cultural malaise are what "late stage capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a collapse of the whole thing under its own weight. It doesn't, however, give any pointers on where to go from there.

> You can't tell consumers what they should want.

Why does marketing and advertising exist then?

> Government failure and cultural malaise are what "late stage capitalism" predicts. It then predicts a collapse of the whole thing under its own weight.

If capitalism gives what the market demands, then you are suggesting that The People want government failure and malaise.

Either your premise is wrong or Late Stage Capitalism is wrong. Likely both.

Terms like Late Stage Capitalism are just there to give you something nice to hold on to and use as your scarecrow for anything bad you see in the world. An intellectual crutch, a helping hand into the graveyard. Car recall? Late Stage Capitalism! Forest fire? Climate change - late stage capitalism. Teeth fell out? Late Stage Capitalism. Covid-19 vaccines or a cure for cancer? Hmm somehow still Late Stage Capitalism.

And now you have your answer to why the world sucks and even better, Late Stage Capitalism says nothing about what comes next! No reason to do anything about it, like support the arts or educate a child, because it’s just Late Stage Capitalism after all.

Hopeless and failed ideologies (Communism/Socialism) love to generate destructive and useless distractions and slogans. Reject them!

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#362
post #176

Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustra…

This has been especially pronounced in medical equipments where there’s this unnecessary race to introduce “digital experiences”. An example is hearing aids. A few years ago, it was relatively easy to get an analog model with dedicated volume buttons and off switch. Now, most of the models come without off switch and need Bluetooth pairing with an app installed on your phone. What used to be plug and play is now a cl…

More failure points means more people throwing up their hands and buying a new one

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#363
post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason it's seen as bad is because there are not enough natural resources to sustain such a consumption, and many of these countries (esp India) will practically become unhabitable if global warming continues like it does. There are very few signs that technology will be able to fix this. No one is against clean access to water...

there are of course more than enough "natural resources" to sustain such consumption, the problem is paradoxically the opposite, too much easy to extract shit that we then emit into our own environment the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.) the costs are high though, but not that high, compared to - for example - the famines of past but as popu…

> the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.)

Are you abstracting away the technical complexity when stating that it's not complicated? GHG removal tech that would scale simply doesn't exist if we intend to have some energy left to do anything else, as for removing pfas and microplastics from the environment, we are at the stage of running experiments in petri dishes.

And even if we abstract away the technical complexity, good luck convincing anyone to stop burning the free fuel we have lying around doing nothing now that we have everything-nuclear-solar and GHG removal at scale. We can barely convince our councils to build cycle lanes in dense areas if that removes any space for SUVs.

I wish I'd share the blind optimism of people like you, it seems pleasant to live in your heads...

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#364

The lack of local purchasing is driving some of this. Whenever I buy t-shirts from Amazon, they are always very thin. You can't feel the quality via the web page, so why make it anything better than 'acceptable'?

Shirts are one of those things that are difficult to buy something of quality for some reason, even the same brands differ batch to batch.

I think I should probably stick to buying clothes from local shops.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#365
post #176

Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustra…

That situation happened to me with Logitech mice, they were really great some years ago. Now they are not the long lasting products they were.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#366
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In that case it might've been that the original product wasn't cost effective to produce in the first place, or that most people buying it don't really care much about quality but just about the price, so that's what each provider optimizes for instead?

One recent example is a sturdy fold-out clothes drying rack I owned. All reviews praised its quality. My unit unfortunately got damaged in a heavy storm when I left it outside by mistake. The manufacturer got bought up in the meantime, and the product now is more flimsy and unstable, metal axes have been replaced by plastic ones. And I haven’t found any other model comparable to the old one on the market. I’d be will…

Whenever I'm in this kind of pickle I add "amish" to my search query. sustainable, robust, yes - cheap, no. These drying racks look sturdy af tho: https://www.pennsylvania-woodworks.com/?srsltid=AfmBOoq3iYcE...

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#367

From the intro: > Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller, clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash, and machines now answer our calls. The author talks about a range of motivations behind these, but it seems like there's an obvious one we're missing. All these changes make products more profitable. I would love to live in a society that prioritises sustainability and quality of life for its citizens.…

Have you ever actually used a long-life incandescent lightbulb? They suck. It's like your bedroom is lit by the miserable little lamp in your oven. That's because Tungsten lighting has inherent tradeoffs between life span, and every other desirable characteristic. Brightness, spectral quality, and energy efficiency all improve as you make the filament thinner, and thus less durable.

The Phoebus cartel is an example of planned obsolescence, but it's a bad example for your argument because it made lightbulbs much, much better at their intended purpose. Consumer number-gawking incentivized manufacturers to make their product objectively worse, and the cartel solved that problem.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#368
post #316
post #176

Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. However, a common experience for me is that I own something of good quality from 5/10/15 years ago and now buy the successor model from the same brand, but the product has gotten worse, being cheaper made. And I have a hard time finding a replacement that matches the quality of the old version. It’s a regularly reoccurring frustra…

Here's how I see it: in the absence of growth in market share or cost-reducing innovation, the only remaining strategy for profit maximization is the delivering of progressively lower quality products for progressively higher prices. This obviously destroys the brand over time, but brands can be recycled/reinvented. A purely rational and self-interested (i.e. unencumbered by moral sentiment or empathy) economic agent…

Then from a purely rational and self-interested citizenry would hold any economic agents on the hook for future cleanups of land, water or air.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#369
post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with your point, but I suppose my wish then is that there were not low-quality (low-cost) everything in the world right now. I'm not unsympathetic regarding the poor, I grew up poor myself. And my single working mother raising two kids got by on hand-me-down furniture from her mother (probably, as you and the article suggest, of decent quality though). Having the option for (new) inexpensive everythi…

It's great having the option for cheap, low-quality stuff. If I need some oddball tool for a home improvement project then I can just buy the crap at Harbor Freight. If it breaks after a few uses then so what, I won't need it again anyway.

Exactly. I needed an angle grinder for one specific use. I bought the cheapest model from HF and then threw it in my garage to sit. 15 years later I needed it again. It did the job. No reason to buy the higher end model.

I did spend the extra to buy better quality wheels though.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#370
> Airplane seats are getting smaller and smaller,

This is infuriating. Due to better nutrition, we all got bigger. Our parents were smaller in comparison, and our grandparents seem tiny. I'm 6'6" and I'm on the tall end, but I see more and more giants roaming the Earth (and they do seem like giants if you're used to be the tallest in the room).

Yet they make airplane seats smaller. I have to pay hundreds of dollars extra just to buy extra leg room and all that crap. It's frustrating.

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