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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

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Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#661

Post by swed420 »

walleeee wrote: post #651
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?

> 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…

> Given Marx was famously "not a Marxist"

Misrepresenting words out of context to make a point isn't a great approach.

http://isocracy.org/content/karl-marx-i-am-not-marxist

https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings-and-interpret...

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#662

Post by tmnvix »

My own theory is that we used to make the trade off between quality and cost.

Now we make a trade off between quality, cost, and convenience - with convenience being heavily weighted.

Consider the rise of bottled water, or Apple (it just works...)

People have shown that they will pay a huge premium for convenience. That premium might be paid in the form of sacrificed quality or it might be paid in dollars.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#663

Post by _DeadFred_ »

ericmay wrote: post #588
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Churchill's democracy in Britain has social housing and social healthcare. Glad to know you'll take it though, because it looks like lot's of Americans are 'taking it', in a pretty brutal and ugly way.

FYI American police kill more people than any other country at 1100 people a year. Guess that's also 'democracy' and not, you know, just America:

https://www.prisonpolicy.org/blog/2020/06/05/policekillings/

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#664

Post by comfysocks »

klik99 wrote: post #534
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…

This is exactly what I came to say - growth as the primary goal DOES create innovation, until innovation in that field yields diminishing returns or bottoms out completely, then it creates shittier and shittier product. The entire American version of capitalism is built around growth as the primary goal, which did great things, but now (unequally, some sectors are still innovating) is creating more and more shitty th…

I agree with a lot of what you are bringing up, but I don’t think of these things as synonymous with American capitalism as a whole. I think of them more as a failure mode.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#665

Post by LorenPechtel »

atoav wrote: post #637
SpaceNugget wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Last time I plugged in an HDMI source and the darn "smart" television showed the image for 0.5 seconds before displaying a menu that asks me to press a button on the remote to show the image. That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard. I would think as a plug and play standard for A/V stuff, HDMI is one of the farthest along the…

> That's entirely the fault of your crappy smart display with some crappy OS and has entirely nothing to do with HDMI as a standard. Sure yeah, but I don't buy it. If you create a standard that is too complicated or too feature-creeped to be implemented fully and that lack of full implementation means the fundamental role of the standard breaks down, that standard might be part of the problem. I too could envision a…

I think an awful lot of this could be solved by requiring the ports to export the information they get to the device, and requiring that if the devices can reasonably be able to display the information that they do so. PCs, phones, tablets would all tell you about the cable and the connection. Things without screens and interfaces would not be required to add them, though.

It's not that the cables support varying specs (which I actually have no problem with--you shouldn't have to pay for features you don't need, and some features trade off vs cable length), but that we have no easy way to find them out or test them.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#666

Post by walleeee »

swed420 wrote: post #661
walleeee wrote: post #651

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Given Marx was famously "not a Marxist" Misrepresenting words out of context to make a point isn't a great approach. http://isocracy.org/content/karl-marx-i-am-not-marxist https://www.socratic-method.com/quote-meanings-and-interpret...

Friend, if you're trying to convert people to your point of view, neither is yours. Cheers from someone with at least a few somewhat similar political sympathies.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#667

Post by nicoburns »

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?

The product people really want often isn't on the market at all. I speak of a product that is:

- Mass produced at scale

- High quality and will "last a lifetime" (a long time)

- Repairable when it breaks down

I believe that many people would happily pay a 20%, 50% or even 100% markup for such a product, but often often all of the available mass produced options are shitty quality (and the choice is between a bargain option or a "premium" option that is just as crappy quality but costs more because of the brand name). There might be a "boutique" hand-crafted alternative, but it will cost 5-10x more.

The other problem is imperfect access to information. Even where there is superior alternative on the market, it is often very difficult for consumers to determine which one it is. Which means they can't choose it. Which further means, there is no incentive for manufacturers to produce it.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#668

Post by LorenPechtel »

ainiriand wrote: post #365
layer8 wrote: 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.

Actually, they seem to have gotten their act together.

I love their trackballs. They dropped the warranty to 1 year--and even then every one failed within warranty. Disgusted but buying one every year was better than using an inferior product. But my latest has been sitting here for years, no erratic clicks.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#669

Post by yodelshady »

esperent wrote: post #4

> clothes are unrecognizable after the second wash What clothes are these? I don't buy any kind of expensive brands. I don't take any care when washing. I don't own a lot of clothes so I wear each item weekly. And my clothes last me for several years at least. The dyes have gotten noticeably better than when I was a child - when was the last time you had colors run in the wash?

I'll name and shame - Fruit of the Loom.

They may never have been amazing, but that's the point - they were a representative, middle-of-road brand and you could just assume their clothes would last. I've got a >10 year old shirt that's still fine and a new one that's holed after a single wash. It's not a QA fail, the loss of quality is very clearly deliberate.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#670

Post by LorenPechtel »

AznHisoka wrote: post #263
layer8 wrote: 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…

Its this way for me, with restaurants, especially those that have expanded a lot. A good example of this for me is the restaurant Dig Inn. It used to be one single place and was called “The Pump Energy Food” and used to my goto place for lunch. Then it changed names and expanded to 2-3 other locations and was still relatively good. It then started expanding a lot more and now the food absolutely sucks

Yeah. You do not want my wife to like your restaurant. Every single restaurant she has ever liked has within a few years it's either gone or she no longer likes it because of price increases or quality decreases (usually associated with a change in ownership.)
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