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Why is it hard to buy things that work well?

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

#441

Post by JohnBooty »

AnonC wrote: post #163
samgtx wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bit of a woo-woo aside but I've been trying to practice more gratitude thinking in my daily life and the grocery store is an easy place to be reminded of how good we have it.

> A bit of woo woo aside but I’ve been trying to practice more gratitude… No woo woo necessary. You may be interested in checking this (and related citations) about research on gratitude and psychological well being: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude#Psychological_interv...

Practicing gratitude is probably the single easiest way to increase one's happiness, and yet it's so easy to forget to do it even if you know that. At least for me.

One thing we can do is keep a gratitude journal where we write down things we're grateful for. Can literally be grateful for the sun shining, or not experiencing an earthquake, for having the ability to write in a journal in the first place, etc.

It's so, so powerful.

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

#442

Post by BongoMcCat »

jader201 wrote: post #215
Strilanc wrote: post #88

It's pretty depressing how many of the comments are purely answering the title and not discussing the content of the article. In particular, the comments seem mostly focused on consumer product build quality whereas the article is more focused on e.g. businesses trying to outsource something (like same day delivery) and getting a worse result even when they pay more than doing it internally. And the cultural obstacle…

> 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 agree about the comments here often being the most interesting part.

But I think that the best way to start the conversation is usually with a well-written article.

If there would only be a title and no article, I'm pretty sure that I would find the comments to be less interesting.

But maybe I'm wrong, and since my argument is based on the original article being well-written, maybe it isn't true for most posts.

But I still think that I would rather try to find the posts with good articles, and just ignore the rest, and hopefully, that is what the ranking system does (at least help with).

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

#443

Post by JohnBooty »

WrtCdEvrydy wrote: post #390
bgentry wrote: post #382

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After purchasing the top two Wirecutter picks for electric kettles (Cuisinart and some gooseneck kettle) both died within a year. The gooseneck one was rusted on arrival, clearly awful build quality. I decided to try paying much more for a Fellow Stagg EKG, and it was a great decision. It’s lasted over 3 years and has been an absolute joy to use compared to the prior mass market garbage. I often wish for a Wirecutter…

Honestly, I had spent 20 years in the US and we consistently bought the cheapest appliances ever. When I bought my house I finally said "screw it, let's see what decent appliances look like". Japanese rice cooker set me back $95 and I thought I would never hear the end of it, and after 4 years, it had already paid itself off (we were doing $14 rice cookers every 6 months). Air fryer was $70 but the previous $40 only…

There's also just a... man, I don't know how to describe it. Kind of a mental benefit to using slightly nicer things.

When I was young, almost everything I owned was the cheapest possible version of that thing. Everything just kind of sucked, brutally cost-optimized to the point of being somewhat nasty to use and barely functional.

I was still very fortunate: I had food to eat, clothes, etc. A lot of kids in the world would have traded places with me.

Now that I'm older, I have no interest in "luxury" goods, but there's that subtle intangible benefit to using e.g. the $95 rice cooker vs. the $14 rice cooker. You feel like somebody who's worth more than the cheapest possible piece of disposable shit, I guess. Or at least I do.

It makes better rice, too, of course. And there's the ecological benefit of not tossing a $14 rice cooker into the landfill every couple of months. But there's also a bit of self worth involved, or something.

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

#444

Post by BongoMcCat »

watwut wrote: post #267
Moru wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But on Hackernews those one-off comments can come from years of studying the same topic. Sometimes even explaining why the long well researched opinion missed something so important that the whole article is wrong.

No, they dont. Which is pretty clear everytime something you do know a lot about pops up. Majority of it is just people shooting their opinions over coffee break. Which is fine, we go here to relax and slack, but does not produce super educated opinions.

I guess it depends on the topic.

If the topic is some change in the latest release of a programming language, I usually find the comments here to be helpful.

But if the topic is global politics or economy, then sure, the quality here isn't much better than some other random social media site.

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

#445

Post by michaelt »

kasey_junk wrote: post #366
pmyteh wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Commercial toasters (and, I imagine, commercial electric kettles) are 'good' in the sense of being well-built and long-lasting. I've got a 1980s Dualit toaster which is essentially bomb-proof (the clockwork timer will eventually stop working but is easily replaced; even the elements can be readily changed out if they get damaged). Of course, the downside is that new ones start at £150 or so. So it's difficult to make…

The problem with ‘commercial’ kitchen equipment is that most of it is just up branded domestic equipment. When you do buy ‘commercial’ kitchen equipment you’ll notice lots of things that are just downright worse. Energy efficiency, safety features, and noise reduction are all things that are _way_ worse than with their domestic counterparts.

"Real" commercial kitchen equipment is often totally different.

Commercial fridges will stay cool even if their door is opened 20 times an hour. Commercial glass washers take a tenth of the time a home dishwasher takes. And if they're noisy, ugly and they need to be cleaned every day without fail, that's just normal commercial equipment.

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

#446

Post by banannaise »

cosmojg wrote: post #438
impalallama wrote: post #419

> [It] involve companies being efficient and/or products being basically as good as possible because, if it were possible for them to be better, someone would've outcompeted them and done it already. Must be a generational thing but I don't think anyone i know (ie under 30) genuinely believes this anymore.

I think the more correct statement is that products are as good as profitably possible and no better. If the margins on a better product aren't large enough to justify spinning up a new business just to sell it, the existing product will remain as it is indefinitely. To top it all off, consumer expectations can be surprisingly low. It's often the case that no one even wants or knows to want a better product, let alon…

And then the operative problem there is that there are entire industries devoted to creating knock-offs that are slightly cheaper, much better marketed, and don't work, which end up replacing the good-as-profitably-possible product because they're more profitable and marketing subsumes consumer feedback.

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

#448

Post by Mezzie »

klodolph wrote: post #167
jseliger wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like most people don't read carefully or for comprehension: https://jakeseliger.com/2022/01/31/most-people-dont-read-car... (A few of the replies I've gotten purely answered the title and didn't discuss the content.)

Most people can’t. “Read carefully or for comprehension” would probably translate to level 4/5 prose literacy skills in the NCES NAAL (National Center for Education Statistics National Assessment of Adult Literacy). Recent survey puts this group (level 4/5) at 12% of the adult population. Levels 4 and 5 are no longer separated because of the small percentage of people that fall into group 5. Level 4 tasks require you…

In Marketing/Outreach, we're encouraged to write at a 9-10 year old reading level.

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

#449

Post by The-Bus »

PinguTS wrote: post #310
dijit wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is this not the very definition of survivorship bias though? I have things from the 80s that, obviously, have lasted a long time. But I have owned things from that era that have failed and been forgotten about. Incidentally I bought some boots this year that are expected to last (at a minimum) 10 years, and I suspect they would, but I can't know that until 10 years from now. Heirloom quality is probably still a thing…

The above author mentions that these machines are from Eastern Germany. As I am from Eastern Germany myself, I can tell you that we had regulations in place, that machines had to last and had to be repairable. Those regulations came into place, because we had heavily resource problems. Funfact: Those type of regulations are heavily discussed even these times again, when I look at EU right to be repair, or the discuss…

A nice trivia fact I learned is that East Germany made the world's best selling digger. There's a fun documentary (in German) that covers this. The machine from the DDR is discussed starting at 27:53

Link = https://youtu.be/4TqJu0RS32w?t=1674

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

#450

Post by thaeli »

dotancohen wrote: post #304
namdnay wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many miles are you putting on that i10?! An oil change is every 2 years or 15k km. I think it’s a bad example btw, it’s a famously reliable car (the taxi of choice in Bogota fwiw)

Thanks, I updated the post. I had no idea that oil changes are now once every two years. On the wife's Subaru I still change the oil every six months, and I remember when the standard was actually every three months. She puts about 10 km on the car during those six months, we live in a hilltop village half an hour drive from a city.

Time based oil changes (as a backup to mileage) in gasoline vehicles are mostly to address oil contamination from the engine not getting hot enough to boil off fuel and combustion byproducts in the oil. It's a rough heuristic for drive type - more advanced oil life monitors know the actual drive cycles an engine is seeing and will adjust appropriately, but for a basic time-and/or-mileage schedule, it's more about picking some interval that gets the oil changed before the additive package is destroyed by combustion acids. If the car is driven only short distances and never gets a chance to fully warm up, six months is probably a reasonable interval. If it gets a monthly spin on the highway for an hour, two years is probably fine. Ideally, you'd be measuring total base and total acid levels and calculating change points based on that; this is common practice for large truck engines but for a gasoline car engine, an oil change can be cheaper than the lab tests. (I'm still in favor of having oil testing done on at least some changes, it's basically "routine bloodwork" for your car and can detect many problems early.)

Another upshot of this is that with rarely driven vehicles, you might as well use the cheapest oil which meets appropriate specs, because your oil changes are driven by additive depletion and oil contamination rather than breakdown of the oil itself.

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