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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

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Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#671

Post by ramses0 »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #655
WalterBright wrote: post #653

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 di…

Also "market for lemons"- a friend told me she used to go to Macys/Dillards to buy $50 bath towels b/c they were better, nicer, more durable than the $20 ones from Walmart.

Now she goes and still pays $50 for them, but they have been stealthily replaced by the equivalent of the inferior $20 ones.

It becomes a market for lemons: you can't trust that paying more for a product gets you a better product so game theory says you have to pursue price minimization at all costs.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#672

Post by LorenPechtel »

bee_rider wrote: post #314
moffkalast wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Along that line of thought I've noticed this recently: I can buy an expensive tool for say $200 that will last me 10 years. Or I can buy a cheap tool that costs $20 but will only last me two years. But if I want to use that tool for the duration of 10 years it then makes more sense to buy five of the cheap tool and save half in costs. Which one is really providing more quality over time? For some things this doesn't…

Depends on the failure mode I guess (if it explodes and hurts you, that could get expensive). Plus, you have to factor in 5 more trips to the store.

Even if it simply damages your work that's a considerable downside.

I do not buy cheap tools unless they are for a dedicated, simple purpose. (Such as the sockets that live in the car to permit me to install a battery.)

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#673

Post by LorenPechtel »

lll-o-lll wrote: post #475
simianparrot wrote: post #149

Airplane tickets used to cost a lot more for economy class, even adjusted for inflation and fees. To get the equivalent service and quality today you simply have to pay more, you just have the choice of paying very little for very low quality because there’s more flights and more planes. https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/even-with-fees-the-miracle-of... Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not say…

> Same can be said for most electronics and even clothes. I’m not saying that a high price label guarantees high quality, just that the spectrum of cost vs quality has broadened, even within big name brands. Electric Kettles - Microwaves. The components that make up the actual boiling of water are now standard and all come from the same chinese manufacturer. You can pay $20 to $1000 for the same thing. The expensive…

Disagree. Panasonic's Inverter technology is definitely superior in my book. Everybody else's units only operate at full power no matter what you select--20% power is really 100% power with a 20% duty cycle. This can produce uneven heat for short runs and means that the load on the circuit is the full draw of the machine--doesn't share a circuit with other power-hungry devices very well. But at low power the Panasonic is much more friendly with other devices.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#674

Post by ants_everywhere »

walleeee wrote: post #659
ants_everywhere wrote: post #650

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Marx in general wasn't self-consistent. That's part of why he wasn't taken seriously as a philosopher or economist until the Soviets evangelized for him as a sort of patron saint.

But you're right to raise the question. A closely related question is: "If Marx thought the revolution was inevitable, then why did he feel the need to advocate for it?". You can also ask this about any sort of prophecy: manifest destiny, the second coming of Jesus, the singularity, etc. There's of course a literature on this, e.g. [0].

But people do in fact hold both views simultaneously. A famous example is Karl Rove, unintentionally echoing Marx's ideas:

> We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

In other words, we construct reality and it's inevitable that we construct reality. Both historical inevitability and social construction in the same thought.

> I don't think Marx thought of it as supernatural in our sense of the latter

I doubt he did either, but it's supernatural in the literal sense. It's not entailed by the collection of physical laws. In fact his theory is empirically false, but even if it wasn't, the existence of a causal force in history requires an additional assumption outside of natural science. Whereas other authors had previously talked metaphorically of a spirit of force in history (e.g. the invisible hand) Marx tried to turn it into a real force the way the ancients thought of gods intervening in human affairs.

[0] "Historical inevitability and human agency in Marxism" https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/abs/10.1098/rspa.1986...

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#675

Post by southernplaces7 »

The article itself easily gives light to what drives certain declines in longevity (if that's your only measure of quality, since there are others too):

"Psychologist Albert Vinyals, author of El consumidor tarado (The Disordered Consumer) (2019), recalls that years ago, the first thing car ads highlighted was their longevity. “Now we don’t even consider it,” he notes over the phone. “My grandmother, when she went to buy clothes, looked at the type of fabric they were made of. Now, no one knows what their pants are made of. Why would they? In a year, we’ll stop wearing them because they’ll no longer be fashionable.”"

People don't care. As sheer product diversity and sourcing increased across the last several decades, so many products have become so much cheaper as a percentage of disposable income that people just stopped caring about how durable they are. The logic is sound from the standpoint of a consumer for most products for which durability isn't an absolute must: Just accept a cheaper thing because it's not too cumbersome to replace it sooner rather than later.

This has slowly worn down a general tendency towards careful thriftiness that previous generations had internalized and made the latest generations internalize that durability doesn't matter as much.

That many products marketed as high quality and sold at such prices also end up being poorly made doesn't help either: If you can't even trust the outcome when you make an effort to be careful, why bother?

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#676

Post by LorenPechtel »

carlosjobim wrote: post #152
jstummbillig wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Cars are becoming prohibitively expensive. Adjusted for inflation, car prices are actually lower now than decades ago, especially factoring in huge safety and tech improvements. Entry-level models remain affordable, while buyers voluntarily pay more for SUVs and tech-heavy EVs. > Housing is becoming a luxury. Rising housing prices are mostly driven by land scarcity and zoning. The actual cost per square meter of co…

> Adjusted for inflation, car prices are actually lower now than decades ago And so are salaries. Just compare what kind of job you needed to be able to afford a car 40 years ago to today. Reality is still reality, people live in it and face it everyday.

Disagree. Real wages are ahead of all market sectors except medical and rent. People are making a bad comparison--they look at what they have vs what their parents have and see their parents doing better. Yeah, 20 or 30 years later in their career, plus a lot of time building up assets, that's actually to be expected. The proper comparison is between cohorts, but that can only be done by digging into the data, not by experience.

Wealth inequality? The majority is from comparing those starting out to those at retirement. Likewise, the majority of income inequality is hours worked. (Not to say that there aren't other factors, but in both cases when you compare apples to apples it explains more than half the range.)

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#677

Post by bsenftner »

trial3 wrote: post #578
bsenftner wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the "MBA-driven physical-goods enshittification" is a simplification and a cop-out because this is not just MBA-driven. This is across the board in all of society, and I believe the reason being that people, in general and enmass, are not being taught how to live with active critical analysis, and as a result when they choose an enshittificating decision, they do not realize it. They are not connecting the ra…

> a simplification and a cop-out a simplification and a cop-out of what? blake, i am writing a hn comment and not an academic textbook > This is across the board in all of society ok but the article is largely about physical goods, that's what we're talking about > I believe the reason being that people, in general and enmass, are not being taught how to live with active critical analysis lmao i clicked on your bio a…

I've got multiple degrees, and the presence of an MBA invalidates my opinion?

I'm serious when I say this is not just "MBA think", this is everywhere. People are being short sighted. People are not thinking things logically through, and this is widespread.

Yes, we're talking physical goods. Items where short sighted thinking destroys brands, exactly what the original post discusses. It's too easy to just blame the MBAs. This is a widespread issue that is not just in physical goods, it is at the core of what is required to sustain democracy - a critical thinking population. We've educationally failed the population en mass by not having education verticals that stress perspective. We only teach short term perspectives as meaningful and worth action, and all this is coming home, today.

Those that should be able to talk sense in the critically short sighted decision makers have not been taught how to make their points and be understood. That is real, and widespread. Continue to label the cliche and get no where. We need to recognize this critical failure, because it is destroying one hell of a lot of foundation we need.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#678

Post by LorenPechtel »

bluescrn wrote: post #211
raspasov wrote: post #43

"Following his reasoning, it cannot be stated in absolute terms that an iPhone 15 is of “better quality” than a 2003 Nokia." This statement suffers from either viewing the past through rose-tinted glasses or from total cultural relativism in the most pejorative sense. I'm not sure about 2003, but around 2009, I owned a Nokia N900, which was arguably the flagship Nokia phone at the time. I can confidently state that c…

> I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible. Until you need to replace the battery. Battery replacement has been intentionally made not just a pain, but actually dangerous, by using excessive amounts of adhesive to hold in batteries that may spontaneously combust if physically damaged while trying to remove them. Replac…

Disagree.

You want them rigidly held in place as *any* flex in their mounting will add up to fatigue failures over enough time. Realistically, that means glue or a screw-down anchor that exerts tension--and if you have such an anchor you need to beef up the substrate also to avoid it deforming the case over time. Glue is thinner and lighter, thus it wins in the market. Likewise, cases are glued because providing waterproofing via glue is thinner and more reliable than providing it by gaskets and screw-down anchors.

Simple observation: I have a chest strap heart rate monitor, uses a coin battery and is rated for swimming. What's the biggest failure mode? Imperfect seal of the gasket against the stuff around it permitting water intrusion. (There is a redesign that is supposed to be more reliable but since mine never gets submerged it's still working despite once I found the gasket was clearly not properly seated.)

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#679

Post by anarticle »

ninalanyon wrote: post #441
anarticle wrote: post #5

This article is really trying to gaslight us into believing it is only pessimism, when decline in quality is very real. The best example is that ikea no longer sells solid wood tables, they are particle board with wood grain stickers. The exciting part is they are more expensive than the original hardwood versions.

> ikea no longer sells solid wood tables, A quick look at IKEA's web pages shows that this is simply untrue.

Let me put it this way: in my area, the vast majority are veneers or what looks like a vinyl sticker. This is an inversion of what it used to be, which was the majority were hardwood. The market in every geo is different, but I am in a top 10 major city in US. I don’t buy from Ikea online, so maybe that is possible! It doesn’t change my experience though.

This is the crux of my argument against these types of articles, they try to retcon “you are the one who is crazy! it’s always been like that”. I was searching at an autistic level for a dinner table for the last five years from IKEA until I just gave up and bought a vintage thing made of real teak, made by a craftsperson for less than a mid range sticker and mechanically separated wood table from IKEA.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#680

Post by LorenPechtel »

blfr wrote: 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…

Yeah, looking back to my father's SLR. Incredible lens, went all the way up to 100mm! He'd probably faint (can't, he's long gone) if I showed him my DSLR with a 28-300 lens on it that takes far better pictures than his could. And the wastefulness of setting the default on my camera to be a 7-shot bracket??? 5 actual shots per roll??? You measure your shooting capacity in batteries rather than film??? You can put 10,000 rolls of film in that little case that would survive if a truck ran over it???
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