741–750 of 824 posts
> Many products are hard to compare due to the enormous price difference Well that explains a lot, doesn't it? The article is right overall but occasionally glances over the importance of the "quality/price" ratio. As the price went down, buying habits changed, and by extension the manufacturing habits. When things are cheap nobody wants to keep them forever, they get exchanged sooner to "keep up with the times". My…
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> 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 inva…
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> Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also be used in other ways. My personal view is the west, especially North America, never recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared…
The curves largely break about 1971 across a wide set of areas, but the energy connection is interesting. J Storrs Hall argues in "Where is My Flying Car?" that the proximate cause is breaking the increasing availability of energy per person, which could only have been continued with very widespread nuclear, and that the turn from nuclear was a symptom of a culture of increasing regulation and excess caution, such th…
It's just another fossil fuel. Sure, it doesn't emit CO2, but the sustainability problem is still there. I'll support nuclear expansion when I see a credible plan to complete the transition to actual renewables within 30 years, using nuclear as a stopgap. We have less than 100 years of known uranium reserves if we use it to power everything. It'll be coal and oil all over again.
And now we don't need one because solar is already here.
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> Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable Turns out that from an environmental perspective, that view was bad anyway and I'm glad it's gone for good (even if the AI hype almost makes us forget that again). I don't fully see how that implies everything having to be crap now. Lighter doesn't mean worse quality.
> Lighter doesn't mean worse quality For a number of product categories it means replacing solid metal parts with inferior materials, and that pretty explicitly does mean worse quality. Have you used a 1960s KitchenAid mixer? They look almost identical to models that followed - but in the 1970s KitchenAid replaced the metal drive gear with one made of nylon on the consumer-focussed models, and now if you use one heav…
I am on my 6th smartphone, it is the first phone of which the screen accumulates scratches. Google Pixel 9. None of my previous phones needed a screen protector.
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The curves largely break about 1971 across a wide set of areas, but the energy connection is interesting. J Storrs Hall argues in "Where is My Flying Car?" that the proximate cause is breaking the increasing availability of energy per person, which could only have been continued with very widespread nuclear, and that the turn from nuclear was a symptom of a culture of increasing regulation and excess caution, such th…
Am I the only one annoyed by the continual low-level background radiation (heh) of pro-nuclear propaganda? It's just another fossil fuel. Sure, it doesn't emit CO2, but the sustainability problem is still there. I'll support nuclear expansion when I see a credible plan to complete the transition to actual renewables within 30 years, using nuclear as a stopgap. We have less than 100 years of known uranium reserves if…
Solar is definitely cheaper than current nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly, while battery cost is also improving apace. In the short term, solar can meet most of our needs and let us turn off more coal and oil, and that's certainly useful! In the medium term, though, we can't get back on the Henry Adams curve without denser sources than sunlight, which takes up quite a bit of real estate even if we move most capture to space.
Begs an interesting question : some people can still afford quality items that last (namely, the people that sell throwaway shit to everyone else ; or, more precisely, the people who earn rents from companies that sell throwaway shit etc...) Are things getting shittier for them, too ? Are luxury brands immune to "energy is getting expensive, and corporate needs to buy shares back and increase dividend, so we have to…
No one wants to pay for them. The $20 screwdriver is the same or better quality than the one 50 years ago. People would now have the option to buy the $1 screwdriver and then complain it doesn't last.
The result is that even when you're willing to pay for quality, you can't-- you can just overpay for junk. Might as well just buy 20 of the $1 screwdrivers instead-- they'll still last much less long than the proper $20 one, but finding the good one is too difficult amid the overpriced crap.
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You are pointing directly at the philosophical bedrock of western civilization, something which most white collar elites implicitly believe but don't state outright. It shows up right away in the article: > ... quality is an inherently subjective concept, as it depends on the preferences of each consumer. For most of history, people believed the opposite. For thousands of years, people in every major civilization bel…
I don't agree with a lot of what you're writing here, but reading through the lines I think maybe there's some common ground. There is a philosophy that value (including reality) is subjective and that all that matters is making people act. That's quite explicitly the philosophy of Marx. It's in strong contrast to the "philosophical bedrock of western civilization", which is the search for objective truth and objecti…
Those are ideas are much more popular on, say, Harvard's campus and among its professoriate, than are the ideas that some things are objectively better than others, and that searching for truth is more important than social justice or people's feelings or racial equality or ending the patriarchy or reducing global warming etc etc. Witness, e.g. the uproar over anyone saying "men and women are different and those differences lead to different preferences which then affect the distribution of genders in different career tracks." That is a claim about objective reality, rooted in biology, measurable. It is, if you care about evidence more than feelings - most likely true. And yet it's deeply offensive to most people who work in an office. It doesn't matter whether or not it _might_ be true - what matters is how people feel about it. That's what i'm referring to as the bedrock.
The bedrock you're referring to _was_ the bedrock, of an older civilization that shared the same name as our own. Western civilization, today, is a distant relative of what it used to be 100 years ago. The bedrock I'm referring to was laid at the start of the 20th century, by the managerial class of the time, who wanted more power and authority, as elites always do. Our civilization today is as alien to that of the late 19th century americans as, say, the ancient romans were to the late-stage byzantines. There's a lineage relationship, for sure - but the mores, values, and guiding concepts are so radically different that it's properly conceptualized as a fundamentally different civilization, even if they both called themselves 'romans'.
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> What you want is a digital video standard that simply pushes an A/V stream over the wire HDMI is just that - it's the direct evolution of VGA signaling, with each color channel pushing pixels left-to-right top-to-bottom, it even has blanking periods (periods where there's no pixel info transmitted, used to steer back the electron beam on CRTs to the start of the row/column), same EDID format negotiation over I2C, t…
Yeah I get that in theory, but then my 10x more expensive pro stuff works worse than the cheap stuff. Sure, because they follow the spec etc. But then it turns out that even name brand laptops (or their GPUs) do it wrong. My point was that the standard is crap. It is way too complicated, wants to be too many things to too many people (most of which are trying to sell stuff to consumers). HDMI tries to be a video link…
Recently I dusted off this project and bought myself a new FPGA board, with a HDMI output. Getting that thing to work was a nightmare. Not only did I have to configure the HDMI transciever, I had to build proper EDID support, and get I2C to cooperate, and get the timing of the signals exactly right. And even then, out of the 5 screens I could get my hands on, only 2 worked, one of which would inexplicably go to sleep despite displaying video on the screen.
Getting HDMI working was more painful and took about 10x as long as the rest of the original project did, and even then, it was a partial success.
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Yeah I get that in theory, but then my 10x more expensive pro stuff works worse than the cheap stuff. Sure, because they follow the spec etc. But then it turns out that even name brand laptops (or their GPUs) do it wrong. My point was that the standard is crap. It is way too complicated, wants to be too many things to too many people (most of which are trying to sell stuff to consumers). HDMI tries to be a video link…
I kinda get what you're coming from - back in college i had a lab where we had to make a NES-style game console from scratch on an FPGA - including peripherals and video output - which used VGA, that's how I got to familiarize myself with the technology. It was super simple, you just output the correct voltages to the RGB pins and sent the proper HSYNC and VSYNC signals, and that was it, worked like a charm as long a…