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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

english.elpais.com

581–590 of 824 posts

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve always viewed it as less a discussion about any sort of real defined “quality metric” and more companies asking “what is the least amount of time, money, and effort we can put in before people stop buying it?” Even more simply put: what is the worst version of the product that people are willing to buy?

There is some logic to not over-engineering a product or using more materials than necessary to produce something. I wonder why that seems to have manifested in an anti-consumer application some places.

I think it has to do with having no limits on executive compensation.

There is no incentive to create long-term value when you can cost-optimize your brand into the garbage while creating large short term profits from which they can pay themselves outrageous bonuses. It's an easy playbook and there is no shortage of people willing to trade their reputation for a few hundred million.

Our economy has become almost entirely a race to the bottom.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#582
post #83

Most things are still available at the same quality your parents remember, thanks to ecommerce much more avilable, but sadly also at a similar real price your parents remember which we find extortionary by comparison to all the cheap crap flooding the market. You can have a tailored suit/shirt, hardwood furniture, grass-fed beef, vacuum to last decades, etc, but it will cost around the same in real terms and you're u…

This is intuitive but the problem with expensive things is you can’t know who’s legit, and who’s pulling a fast one. Everything is a lemon market.

The strategy I’m adopting for this is a total ban on any brand or mark that appears on slop. BMW and JBL were the first on my list.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#583
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…

> 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.

My most recent experience with this was a Fjällräven 30L backpack. I'd had it for years, loved it to death but it was getting a bit ripped up. Went into the store, bought the exact same model, went out to the RV where I had my current one and did a comparison. I was shocked. No padding on the straps, nice padding on the back replaced with hard foam, many of the nicely designed little details gone. I went back in and returned it and just opted to repair my old one a bit (replaced a broken buckle and sewed up some holes).

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 You are both correct here. Obviously people don't want malaise directly, but some directly seek government failure, and the rest vote for thin…

> Oh, I didn't realize till the end that you were treating this as a team thing, and capitalism is "your team", so you must attack "the other team". Do you think that attitude affected the rest of your response, too? It’s just empirical. Both Communism and Socialism are failed ideologies. Millions dead. Millions more starved. It’s like when Libertarians want to bring about their ideology and people tell them to move…

50,000 people died by suicide in the USA in 2023. 12.8 million thought about it. 3.7 made a plan for it. 1.5 million attempted it. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html

105,000 people died by overdose in the USA in 2023. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd...

In 2023 the average daily incarceration population in the USA was 664,000. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-2023-s...

Average daily homeless population for the USA in 2023 was 653,000. https://nlihc.org/resource/hud-releases-2023-annual-homeless...

In 2023 only 86% of US households were food secure. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/fo...

The majority of US bankruptcies (58.5%) “very much” or “somewhat” agreed that medical expenses contributed, and 44.3% cited illness-related work loss; 66.5% cited at least one of these two medical contributors—equivalent to about 530,000 medical bankruptcies annually. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6366487/

It doesn't look like the USA has a healthy ideology to me. It just spreads it out to 'death by 1000 cuts' and makes everyone's' suffering invisible.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not convinced the widening access to American consumerism is a moral win. The amount of fossil fuels we're dependent on as a species is obscene. I worry for our children. There is no offramp, only growth.

This is one of these philosophies that I hate more then almost any other. The idea that is bad that poor Indian and Chinese people now have access to anything from clean water to planes is absurd. You can sit there in your luxury house and cry about consumer culture but for millions of people its basic stuff that they have access to for the first time. And in Europe, despite increasing quality of live, both total ene…

You're giving a very poor reading of OP's argument, first of all. Jumping to the conclusion that they don't want Chinese people to have clean water is downright bad faith.

Second, "continued growth is good" is a hell of a thing to say on a planet with finite resources. There's a limit! And if you expand your worldview to include other life on this planet and not just society then we've pushed far beyond what's wise already.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "socialism" you mean the majority of economic activity being state-run, then probably not. If by "socialism" you mean things like worker-owned corporations, strong anti-competition laws, high levels of consumer regulation, then absolutely.

If worker-owned collectives produce superior products, why aren't they everywhere? It's not illegal to form one.

i'll try mine

because they are a fantasy of people who have never once in their life seen what happens to a company with a strong union or excessive worker power, they become repressive towards newer employees among other things

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#587
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…

The economics are simple when you know and understand the main driver, but its inconvenient, and there are entities that want it hidden, because you have bad people doing bad things, and wanting to hide those things, and historically leftist leaning places/people do all of the above to a greater or lesser degree rather then engaging in actual truth telling.

The simple fact, that will probably get your post downvoted to remove from view, is this reduction of quality is driven by fiat money-printing.

It may be non-reserve issued debt (Basel3), or government subsidy, or contract. There are many sources, laundered, and the economy for the most part today has been silently nationalized, which is why it fails. Bailout is required to overcome the end of the boom/bust cycle and continue forward for a time thereafter, it happens cyclically (a true-up, the difference between actual production and fraud/loss) and it requires exponential amounts each time which are taken from every person holding money. There have been at least 4 instances that I can see where this has happened since the 1970s changeover to fiat (de-peg from gold/petrodollar).

The inflation/debasement in purchasing power causes companies to debase their product, to keep up with the escalator of inflation to continue on moving forward. This is worsened when you have foreign entities using slave labor through controlling their own currency, to destroy domestic business; such as manufacturing over a long period of time.

There is obviously an objective point where eventually that can't continue, because the economics of money-printing fail, but that point is what many leftists knowingly or unknowingly aim for; the ones that know just don't want others to know the emperor has new clothes because knowing and communication of that knowledge allows reaction and adaption, and there are some people who believe if an individual can't express words, or convey meaning, then that negative behavior associated with that conveyance (in their deeply flawed perspective) doesn't exist, and they can make people better that way.

The strategy for doing this is through sieving and concentration of resources into fewer and fewer hands, while retaining control of such resources. The lead market players today based in money-printing can control and continue operating because of their preferential banking ties, while competitors cannot enter or compete in the market because the market no longer meets the conditions of a market. Namely adversarial price discovery which requires visibility, and non-cooperation. Money-printing/banking isn't given for free, it forces many entities to cooperate; and adversarial independent decisionmaking is needed for economic calculation. Mises wrote about this extensively in broad strokes. There are quite a large number of impossible hysteresis problems that mark the system the boomer's pivoted to as unsustainable, hyperbolic, and inevitably fails to impossible to solve hysteresis problems (where knowledge of a state needed to react doesn't provide sufficient time to change course because the effects precede that knowledge).

Artificial distortions, trending towards chaos will grow and self-sustain, eventually causing whipsaws that cause it to fail, but that takes time since the point of failure is stage 3 ponzi, where monetary properties lose all value seemingly overnight. Where objectively, outflows exceed inflows.

This is what also drives enshitiffication, why the business growth curve is an S adoption curve (following ponzi), and the inevitability of consolidation/hostile takeover.

The leftist connection is the strategy of sieving, you have to concentrate wealth in few hands first before you can seize it from those hands, and this is what the Fed has been doing. A gradual fabian-based induction to non-market socialism, while ensuring the political power base remains through bad actors that call out other bad actors decrying the public, and others in the group instigating and inducing bad actions while undermining, subverting, and making the resilient system brittle, at every point. Destroying the rule of law through shock doctrine and demoralization up to just prior to bringing it to crisis for the seizure, and re-normalization where either a socialist/communist takeover occurs, or when that fails; a rise of fascism to power. The same regime-change plan that all governments use (give or take). Also, the same driving dynamics that led to Hitler's rise to power.

Jamming communications so people don't catch on and can't react is part of that plan, which is why you have so many bots running around, and the platforms are complicit with the same people as those who want to enable this. Jamming doesn't work without the plausible deniability of karma systems that allow the platforms to grant moderator powers to a large group of sockpuppet accounts (sybil attacks), controlled by a surreptitious moderator. Who may also utilizes many psychological blindspots we all have to manipulate, and damage readers through structured distortion of reflected appraisal (or narrative control, memetics, or belief contagion to the layman, which includes Le Bon's works as a basis).

People are easily manipulated when they don't know the mechanism behind the how. Cialdini in his book Influence touch on the foundations, except reflected appraisal, but to understand distorted reflected appraisal you have to understand how torture works, and what it is really, and if you knew you would see it in almost everything today.

Torture is the structured imposition of psychological stress in sufficient exposure to cause involuntary hypnosis.

Your stated suspicion is a well crafted induction of a common lie that's been repeated so many times, many believe its truth, but it fails under close objective examination.

If the lie were true, you would have competitors coming into the market, and staying in the market; but its not because of the asymmetrical connection to a money printer; directly or indirectly.

Lowering prices below market value to drive competitor companies out of business has occurred in many places where a leveraged buyout or hostile takeover wasn't possible.

You need to operate on debt to compete, but in so doing you become food for takeover, until the parasitic nature has nothing left to eat. That hasn't happened yet, but its probably going to happen in our lifetime. These dynamics in the historic lifecycle is what is driving the adoption towards BRICS, and the chaos we see everywhere.

Eventually you get to a point where everything breaks, and you've been trapped by decisions your parents or grandparents generation chose through aggregate.

Decisions that result in worsening conditions, and your and your family; and their children's futures, being collapse into violent law of nature, or submission to enslavement and a life of suffering before death.

Either result in a loss of control from the choice upfront, that decreases until a point of no return, after which the dynamics cannot be stopped, but you can get out of the way, it just requires a ruthlessness, education, and knowledge that has been deprived from nearly everyone raised in recent generations today. Lone wolves die because they are weak, the movies promoting this concept are (5GW).

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Oh, I didn't realize till the end that you were treating this as a team thing, and capitalism is "your team", so you must attack "the other team". Do you think that attitude affected the rest of your response, too? It’s just empirical. Both Communism and Socialism are failed ideologies. Millions dead. Millions more starved. It’s like when Libertarians want to bring about their ideology and people tell them to move…

50,000 people died by suicide in the USA in 2023. 12.8 million thought about it. 3.7 made a plan for it. 1.5 million attempted it. https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/facts/data.html 105,000 people died by overdose in the USA in 2023. https://nida.nih.gov/research-topics/trends-statistics/overd... In 2023 the average daily incarceration population in the USA was 664,000. https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-…

What did Churchill say about Democracy? It's the worst except all the others? Yea. I'll take all this government mismanagement and markets over Communism and Socialism. The State is never good at managing the means of production.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#589

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "socialism" you mean the majority of economic activity being state-run, then probably not. If by "socialism" you mean things like worker-owned corporations, strong anti-competition laws, high levels of consumer regulation, then absolutely.

If worker-owned collectives produce superior products, why aren't they everywhere? It's not illegal to form one.

Well, certainly a “hybrid” form of worker owned collectives are doing well: my company pays over 24 billion in stock to employees annually.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it may be true that Pirsig's mental breakdown had nothing to do with what went into the book, the facts you have presented here do not particularly support that conclusion. If his mental breakdowns had been, say, in 1976 and 1978, that would have supported it much better. But someone working on the philosophical underpinnings of a book for over a decade before the book is published is not at all unreasonable.

My primary memory of the book is that the author specifically ties together the quest for meaning and the loss of mental health, even within the book itself.

That's why it's a bad idea to read too much into the myth of objective meaning. No meaning - no problem.
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