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The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

english.elpais.com

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Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#721
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…

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?

> How many of us go to buy something on Amazon, and buy the cheapest one?

An outfit like Amazon is in a position to make reviews work better. And when I buy on Amazon, I do pay attention to reviews. Of all kinds, text, photos, videos, plus other cues such as quantity sold and what other things do the sellers sell, quality of the description. Amazon could do better. Will Amazon improve the review mechanisms to fight abuse and garbage? I don't know. It seems to me that they have won the race, as it is, and they are now in a position where it's their choice to lose it again to the up and comers or to let us better figure out the tradeoff price-quality and keep their lead.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dyson only has the appearance of quality. Both Dysons that we had had broken accessories (though they happily replaced them). The first Dyson broke down in three years or so. We also have a Miele vacuum cleaner. It's less glamorous, but it is, as Germans say, unkaputtbar (and also a very pleasant device to work with).

Miele is one brand that seems to show that it's still possible (to build lasting and repairable). But it's expensive, very expensive, and repairs themselves are not cheap. I would say, too expensive overall to become a default choice.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#723
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…

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?

Prices are so gamed though, they are basically drawn by salesmen, marketers, VCs, 200% profit CEOs and what not. Recent fad is to provide no description of the product, even on the vendor site, to reduce your ability to choose based on features, so you choose completely at random or based on price alone. You can buy anything and have no idea what it's made of.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#724
It's fascinating to me that people find there's no noticable quality decline. It might be the case for US, as the quality of food and textile wasn't great in 90s or 2000s. It's very noticable in Europe though, especially in southern Europe. You could buy local food for so cheap, same for textile.

I remember the first time my parents bought big-farm grown chicken at a local shop in 1997. I was fascinated and so happy because they also had chicken burgers (instead of buying a whole chicken at the butcher). Then came big dairy made yogurt and cheese, around 2000. There was even a failed experiment with factory made packaged bread, but nobody buys stale bread here, so that didn't work out. Now nobody remembers the taste of free range chicken from the villages, or any small scale farm for that matter.

Change in textile is a bit more complicated and quality decline has hit only in the last 10 years or so but to an even larger scale. I have tshirts I bought 15 years ago for 1-2 Euros looking almost new, but now tshirts in any proce range don't last a year most of the time. I only buy 100% cotton but somehow the fabric quality is so low.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#725

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh, you are aware that planned obsolescence is only incentivized in fiat markets based in money-printing which aren't real markets. Absent boom-bust, and the related fraud/true-up that happens cyclically, you have sustained growth mirroring population growth, without the chaotic whipsaw, as well as other factors of general wear and tear that make sustain demand. Less cost, and cost that follows real stable value wit…

> Uhh, you are aware that planned obsolescence is only incentivized in fiat markets based in money-printing which aren't real markets. I have no idea why you're claiming that. What should I read? But you're not going to get rid of business cycles by not having 2% inflation or whatever, and those cycles don't seem strong enough to impact product lifetimes all that much. "chaotic whipsaw" is a big exaggeration.

To start, you need to have a correct grasp of economics.

Hazlitt (Economics in 1 lesson), Mises (Human Action/Money and the Theory of Credit), Austrian Business Cycle Theory, Thomas Jefferson's letters to Thomas Cooper, Carl Menger (SVT) to start.

Adam Smith provides the requirements for factors and producers to operate in a market, also describing markets pre-fiat in a five volume set. The observations made are invaluable when comparing against the non-reserve modern monetary mechanics where they departed from fractional reserve in 2020 under Basel3.

In terms of actual monetary debasement/inflation, going back to the unobscured calculations before manipulations began occuring, its been much higher than 2% YOY, and the interest rates have been manipulated to a point where the delayed dynamics are in full swing and can't be prevented. Big Debt Crises by Ray Dalio/Bridgewater Associates provides useful data, but his conclusions are rose-tinted.

The objective point of failure to non-market socialism from money-printing is where national outflows exceed inflows in debt growth to gdp, and in the private debt market that's likely already occurred we have a few years yet before another true-up. It gets to that point through concentration of business which concentrates bad decisions, and legitimate entities can't compete with slave labor, eventually leading to hyper-inflation then to deflation, or directly to deflation. Damned on both sides, with the safe shifting path dependent on lagging indicators amid chaos.

Each boom bust cycle started small on adoption to fiat, but has increased exponentially every 10 years where the banks are forced to crisis from bad investments, and seeking bailout during a true-up. Penn Station Bailout (1970s), Savings & Loan Crisis (1980s), Dotcom Bust (2000), Lehman CDOs 2008, the next will be the CDO equivalent for business (but that bubble hasn't burst yet) QE 2010-2022? (pure money printing to those banks), etc.

There is a third-party in the economic process, the money-lenders friend who receives preferential rates, allowing them to lower prices below cost to drive businesses out of business where leveraged buyouts aren't an option.

You are right 2% isn't sufficient by itself to cause whipsaws. Its not just business in isolation, its the entire monetary cycle in aggregate.

What about the petrodollar abandonment, and the loss of foreign demand for a pool of money we printed up to meet that demand over 50 years. Where's it go? What about paper warrants of commodities, where the ratio is now greater than 300 non-existent paper: 1 physical, where everyone starts requiring physical delivery (taking it out of the vault). Synthetic shares through options contracts.

The deficit spending of the government, or unfunded liabilities (social security), where the debt on that to pass the budget must be almost completely borrowed (and the associated interest rate risk).

Lets not forget the swap lines between other central banks and ours, and the carry trades happening, or the preferential swaps of existing already purchased treasuries for existing current rate treasuries 1:1 (no discount); blackrock and others.

One thing, would slow it down, but the magnitude of each of these things fuels it moving forward chaotically as it unwinds; and people don't have the capital to draw from anymore because its been systematically debased for decades.

Keynes has historically failed to properly account for the business cycle under fiat; a notable recent example being the housing crisis.

Real markets require money meeting 3 properties (stable store of value...), adversarial independent decision-making based on a cost constraint, and working visible price discovery to function (aka economic calculation), with little regulation/interference.

When these can't happen with money-printing, distortions naturally occur chaotically starting with the first rung of spending from that bank as a small blip, and growing to tsunami heights. Lets not forget what that AI may zero out most white-collar jobs, already having profound disruption in the factor markets, which whipsaw to the producer markets in a spiral.

You may want to also read about the economic history of Argentina and how Milei turned everything around with almost 100 years of poverty caused by the same policies we have been doing, and how he made such giant strides to fixing it within 1 year; by firing the parasites, removing the regulations, and letting the market do its thing.

State-controlled entities cooperate because they depend on the debt for continued existence, however indirect/laundered it came to them it originated in money-printing, and its not given to them for free; coercion and malign influence is well documented in many areas related to this. (i.e. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, which may or may not be fictional; but the details match up, some of which weren't validated until recent releases.

I'd say you have quite a bit of reading ahead of you.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#726

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…

Historical materialism is an idea that social constructs are formed by (obviously) material factors like economics and technology as opposed to historical voluntarism. The dialectical part is that economics and technology in their turn are created by society on the previous iteration of the historical process, but this part isn't much of a discovery. As a result everything is fundamentally matter.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#727

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…

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

That's not science, just Sapolsky having no idea what he's talking about.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#729
post #722

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dyson only has the appearance of quality. Both Dysons that we had had broken accessories (though they happily replaced them). The first Dyson broke down in three years or so. We also have a Miele vacuum cleaner. It's less glamorous, but it is, as Germans say, unkaputtbar (and also a very pleasant device to work with).

Miele is one brand that seems to show that it's still possible (to build lasting and repairable). But it's expensive, very expensive, and repairs themselves are not cheap. I would say, too expensive overall to become a default choice.

Parts are another story. I have miele Washing Machine. It has brushed motor so after ~8 years I need to replace brushes. Miele ones cost 60$. That's 20% price of cheapest washing machine I found on market. Im' sure 40$ of that is handling those spare parts across many years. Other, more complicated components cost more than cheap, other vendor washing machine.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#730
post #626
post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem I see is that main difference between those options is not quality, but features. For example with refrigerators you see integrated touch screen, viewing windows, and all kinds of esoteric features. But the core of the product, the compressor and overall cooling system is not actually any better. In fact, looking at reviews shows that those parts are often garbage quality too. So it fails at the core job…

Concretely, don’t buy anything made by Samsung. Here’s a $3000 washer / dryer with a 90 day [x] warranty: https://www.samsung.com/us/home-appliances/all-in-one-washer... [x] I got tired of following footnote disclaimers. Note the headline 20-year warranty and $2,200 price tags are blatant lies. The two year warranty below that claim has footnotes that references more off page disclaimers. When we had a samsung applia…

Why on earth you choose product so expensive where dryer is basically fan with heater ? With that price range you can buy Miele hardware with heat pump dryer that is basically non-breakable and an order of magnitude more energy efficient.

Really - I would like to know how you came to purchase decision :)

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