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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?

#501

Post by dotancohen »

thaeli wrote: post #450
dotancohen wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pic…

  > 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.
The Ferrari gets the cheap stuff, the Kia gets the good stuff. I love how some things are so unintuitive.

I just ordered an oil testing kit from Blackstone. Thank you for the idea.

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

#502

Post by dotancohen »

kube-system wrote: post #405
dotancohen wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not in the US, but I have lived there and I did learn that frequency there. Like I mentioned in another thread, I worked as a service technician at Ford and that was the recommendation then (1990s). As for the Model S fluid change, thank you for mentioning it, I did not know that. I believe that there is no fluid change interval defined on the Model 3, which I just recently bought.

There are many gasoline vehicles that specify no fluid changes for certain parts, infamously, transmissions. Longer lasting synthetic fluids allow them to advertise lower maintenance costs, but they still do wear out. They’d rather the transmission wears out after 150k miles anyway.

Don't get me started on transmissions! A failing transmission the month after a Model 3 test drive / joy ride is what really pushed me into making the jump to electric.

Thank you for the advice, I will research the service intervals on the Tesla.

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

#503

Post by namdnay »

oblio wrote: post #410
Retric wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The i10 is a rather low end car, but the upgrade could be worth it. Finland gas prices are 8.464 USD/gallon right now. That’s unusually high but assuming 200k miles at say 35 mpg that adds up to 48,000 USD in gas over the lifetime of the vehicle. Not that electricity is free or that we have long term cost data, but I suspect the EV / plug in hybrid premium is a very easy choice in Finland.

I was curious so I did some math about this. The average car life in Finland seems to be 15.6 years (let's round that to 16, helping the case for EVs). The average distance traveled by Finnish cars, based on 2018 data, is about 13600km per year (let's make that 14000km per year, also helping the case for EVs). That works out to 224k km over the lifetime of a car. That's only 140k miles. Regarding your 35mpg (was 30mp…

> There's no comparable EV in the i10 price range

there is now! I'm seeing the Dacia Spring appear everywhere - probably because it starts at only 13k in France including the ecobonus (I think base price is 16-17k). This is an absolute game-changer

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

#504

Post by franga2000 »

Scoundreller wrote: post #423
pclmulqdq wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of outsourcing decisions seem to be made on the premise of "what if it breaks?" It's a terrible fallacy. Your wafer saw (or server) that is utilized 1% of the time is going to need a lot less maintenance than a shared wafer saw that is used 16 hours a day. You will actually experience a lot less downtime by investing in your own wafer saw (or your own servers) rather than outsourcing (to a foundry or a cloud pr…

At work, I wanted to use google sheets for our schedule because it just works: can have view only links, and it handles multiple editors at the same time gracefully. Got asked “well what if google goes down?”, so back to our problematic system of excel sheets it is :(

As much as GSheets is great software in theory, "just works" is something I'd never use to describe it. Google is the absolute worst when it comes to keeping stuff working outside of Gmail, Search and obviously Ads. They will silently drop functionality and randomly break things without any recourse.

Just a week or so ago, the IMPORTHTML/XML and related functions in GSheets just...stopped working. There are Reddit and Google Helpdesk threads about it so it's clearly a global issue. As far as I know, no fix has landed yet.

I had to spend a weekend writing a bunch of scripts to reimplement importing functionality so an international competition hosting more than 600 people from 28 countries wouldn't collapse on the spot. Everyone on the team, including me, was initially glad we were using GSheets as it made our work much easier - until it suddenly made it much, much harder.

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

#505

Post by mint2 »

Aunche wrote: post #90
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.

Relevant video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BNpk_OGEGlA Grocery stores are a marvel for sure. It's a miracle that we can get a season fruit like grapes 365 days a year.

It may be a miracle of logistics when ignoring negative externalities like carbon cost vs not shipping it halfway across the globe. Why can’t we eat seasonally? It usually tastes better and makes things less monotonous

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

#506

Post by oblio »

namdnay wrote: post #503
oblio wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was curious so I did some math about this. The average car life in Finland seems to be 15.6 years (let's round that to 16, helping the case for EVs). The average distance traveled by Finnish cars, based on 2018 data, is about 13600km per year (let's make that 14000km per year, also helping the case for EVs). That works out to 224k km over the lifetime of a car. That's only 140k miles. Regarding your 35mpg (was 30mp…

> There's no comparable EV in the i10 price range there is now! I'm seeing the Dacia Spring appear everywhere - probably because it starts at only 13k in France including the ecobonus (I think base price is 16-17k). This is an absolute game-changer

I'm curious about it, but let's see how far the uptake goes.

Where are you located?

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

#507

Post by lupire »

pclmulqdq wrote: post #407
ownagefool wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if the saw breaks, what if the person who knows how to use the saw leaves? There are good answers to these problems, but I find folks who find comfort in outsourcing assume it's easier for the downstream org solve them. Personal experience suggests it's often a false sense of security, and you often have to have your own experts anyway. Saw the same in software. We won't get budget to patch so let's outsource. T…

A lot of outsourcing decisions seem to be made on the premise of "what if it breaks?" It's a terrible fallacy. Your wafer saw (or server) that is utilized 1% of the time is going to need a lot less maintenance than a shared wafer saw that is used 16 hours a day. You will actually experience a lot less downtime by investing in your own wafer saw (or your own servers) rather than outsourcing (to a foundry or a cloud pr…

Rarely using a tool risks it rusting/rotting/obsoleting on the shelf, and if it is expensive you are paying a lot of depreciation. You buy a chraler consumer version that breaks, or an expensive professional model that depreciates. The time share model makes sense.

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

#508

Post by lupire »

CapmCrackaWaka wrote: post #400
dspillett wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In this particular example idling 99% of the time is cheaper, but even if idling 99% of the time is slightly expensive, it might still be a good idea not to outsource due to resilience. Or in some cases it might make sense to become an outsourcing destination. Your otherwise idle equipment & skills become a revenue stream rather than a cost when your need it low, your local equipment and skills are tested & re-enfo…

If you go through all this trouble, you have essentially added another business line to your company. This may or may not be where a company wants to spend their resources. Rolling your own XYZ will always be cheaper than paying a 3rd party vendor, _if_ you have the time, experience, money, and competitive advantage to do it correctly, which are pretty big iffs.

Productizing every operation is critical to how Amazon became a $trillion company.

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

#509

Post by lupire »

yrral wrote: post #16

I think it's that you don't notice things that work well. House foundations, light switches, filesystems, silicon manufacturing, water delivery, grocery store logistics, etc etc etc. These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. It doesn't even occur to people day-to-day that these things can fail.

Cue the ZFS people, homeowners with cracked concrete, and flickery electricity .

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

#510

Post by lupire »

lozenge wrote: post #321
orzig wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are those people optimizing for having every product available at every time? They have to balance against the very real cost of spoilage, so I don’t think they consider the occasional out–of–stock as the system breaking

Yes they are. Product availability is the most important factor in choosing a grocery store, as unavailability makes people need to visit additional stores or change recipes/plans on the fly. Some spoilage is factored in and is just a minor bit of negative PR. However, the supply chain disruptions since 2020 are too big for any grocery chain to "solve". https://hbr.org/2004/05/stock-outs-cause-walkouts

Spoilage is more an issue of waste than accidentally selling a spoiled product.
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