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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

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Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#651

Post by walleeee »

swed420 wrote: post #620
ants_everywhere wrote: post #576

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can't easily recognize (post-)modern social construction in his worldview, especially construction of reality at large The most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected. His basic argument is that it doesn't make sense to talk about an objective materialist universe. That point of view leads to middle cla…

> he most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected. One must have a very warped understanding of Marx to claim he didn't advocate for materialism. Are you unfamiliar with his dialectical/historical materialism?

> One must have a very warped understanding of Marx

Materialism is an extraordinarily overloaded word/concept.

OP's proposing an idiosyncratic take on Marx's reading of one of his main influences seems rather more in the dialectical spirit than a no true Scotsman (no true Marxist? ;) flung without substantiation. No offense.

Given Marx was famously "not a Marxist", and given the laboriousness/verbosity of his writing, and his tendency to change his mind over time, you could argue he had merely the first in a long lineage of warped understandings of himself.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#652

Post by WalterBright »

lenkite wrote: post #613
WalterBright wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They don't do well in the US due to ideological aversion, no policy incentives and lack of funding platforms like community investment trusts. But they are quite successful in other nations. Amul in India for example.

> due to ideological aversion

Nobody cares if they're buying from a collective or a conventional business.

> no policy incentives

Are you saying they should get special government incentives not available to businesses?

> lack of funding platforms

Nobody is stopping anyone from funding a collective. The reason they don't is they won't get ownership shares in return. That's one of the problems with a collective.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#653

Post by WalterBright »

nicoburns wrote: post #562
WalterBright wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because our economic structure doesn't reward superior products, it rewards cheaper products. So such organisations get outcompeted.

But people here say they want superior products. So why do they buy the cheapest, instead?

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#654

Post by WalterBright »

fragmede wrote: post #568
WalterBright wrote: post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It boils down to what people are willing to pay for. How many of us go to buy something on Amazon, and buy the cheapest one? And if your product isn't the cheapest one, what are you going to do about it?

Buy the Dyson version at 4x the price, avoid thinking about the money and concentrate on the fact that it's not crap (yet). We can expect the Dyson brand to go through the same quality arc in twenty years, but for now, I'm happy with the times I have splurged for their products. The problem is naked capitalism doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality products. If I buy a product and am happy with it in t…

> doesn't have a meaningful reward function for quality products

I.e. people aren't willing to pony up the money to buy them.

BTW, when I buy tools, I look at what tradesmen use and buy the tools they buy. Hasn't let me down yet.

If you want good kitchen appliances, buy them from a restaurant supply business.

If you want good tools for working on your car, look at what racing teams use.

Of course, you're going to pay much more for that quality, and the only people willing to pay are the people whose livelihoods depend on them.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#655

Post by AnimalMuppet »

WalterBright wrote: post #653
nicoburns wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because our economic structure doesn't reward superior products, it rewards cheaper products. So such organisations get outcompeted.

But people here say they want superior products. So why do they buy the cheapest, instead?

1. "People here" are a very small fraction of the economy. They may in fact buy superior products over cheap ones, but their numbers are too small to matter much.

2. People don't always do what they say. They want superior quality, but they also want it at the same price as the inferior alternative. When push comes to shove, which will they choose? Not all will choose quality over cheapness. That doesn't mean they didn't want quality. It just means they didn't want it as much as they say they did.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#656

Post by LorenPechtel »

hinkley wrote: post #529
hliyan wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That’s not the only one it’s just the easier one. When people tear down new models of gaming systems they find fewer chips on the boards because they’ve found some chip that does two things for less than the price of both - below a certain point it’s financially infeasible to make simple parts because the capacity they consume makes a chip that does half as much only 15% cheaper. See also when people started putting…

Yup, the thing is the price difference between the humongous flash (do they even do EEPROM anymore?) and the "appropriate" one is less than the overhead of designing/making/handling different sizes. And the bigger the chip the more sectors for wear leveling and you can tolerate lower total write counts on the chip.

Thus we end up with circuits designed to feed the reinforced concrete outhouse in the center. And they're unrepairable because the troubleshooting cost is more than the replacement cost.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#657

Post by wizzwizz4 »

WalterBright wrote: post #653
nicoburns wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because our economic structure doesn't reward superior products, it rewards cheaper products. So such organisations get outcompeted.

But people here say they want superior products. So why do they buy the cheapest, instead?

You've forgotten your Pratchett. Quoth Men at Arms:

> The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

> But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

> This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#658

Post by swed420 »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #650
swed420 wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected. One must have a very warped understanding of Marx to claim he didn't advocate for materialism. Are you unfamiliar with his dialectical/historical materialism?

Of course I'm familiar with it. But beyond an unfortunate name clash the ideas aren't very related. Materialism is the view that everything is fundamentally matter. Historical materialism is almost the opposite. It's the idea that there's some supernatural force guiding human history. To quote Bertrand Russell: > His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history indepe…

You argue like a true capitalist whose underlying assumption is that free will isn't mostly illusory.

Modern science disagrees:

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/83817782-determined

Warning: ego might get bruised

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#659

Post by walleeee »

ants_everywhere wrote: post #650
swed420 wrote: post #620

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> he most relevant piece is probably Theses on Feuerbach. Feuerbach advocated a materialist (e.g. essentially naturalistic) point of view to which Marx objected. One must have a very warped understanding of Marx to claim he didn't advocate for materialism. Are you unfamiliar with his dialectical/historical materialism?

Of course I'm familiar with it. But beyond an unfortunate name clash the ideas aren't very related. Materialism is the view that everything is fundamentally matter. Historical materialism is almost the opposite. It's the idea that there's some supernatural force guiding human history. To quote Bertrand Russell: > His belief that there is a cosmic force called Dialectical Materialism which governs human history indepe…

I am glad for our (rather dismissive) interlocutor's comment, because I can now ask you: do you see this in any tension with Marx as an early constructivist? Social construction as I think of it is hardly compatible with a teleological cosmology. What am I missing?

Another quibble: I don't think Marx thought of it as supernatural in our sense of the latter; rather his sense of the natural (like that of many of his contemporaries) had an element of what we might call the supernatural, located in a certain directedness or inevitability.

I guess where you see Marx as an early advocate of modern relativisms, I read him as deeply bound up in positivisms pervasive at the time. Maybe these are not contradictory positions. Curious to hear your thoughts.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#660

Post by LorenPechtel »

torginus wrote: post #548
microflash wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

My favourite example of this was the digital pregnancy test - which instead of having a test strip that changes color based on a chemical reaction, had the same test strip surrounded by a photodiode and a LED, which detected the color change and displayed the results on the screen. People still buy it because it's digital so it must be better.

It very well might be superior.

I have dealt with a pregnancy test only once in my life, and that was in acting as an interpreter (me: English, wife: Chinese and some English, couple: Chinese, very little English. Not easy!) Reading the instructions is one thing, but figuring out whether the result was positive was another matter. (Although I suspect it was an edge case--the woman's period showed up soon thereafter, I suspect reality was a very early miscarriage and the result was about at the dividing line.)

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