The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality • Hacker News Board

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#781

Post by int_19h » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 4:17 AM UTC

zzo38computer wrote: post #695

atoav wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 also thought that HDMI has many problems, like you have, too. My idea is: video and audio and other stuff are separate cables. The video cable will only be sending the digital RGB video data, with the wires for the pixel data and pixel clock, as well as power and ground and vsync. I think it is helpful for the video signal to be digital, but it does not need to be as complicated as HDMI. (The audio cable can be bal…

Why two cables if it can be done with one?

From the consumer perspective, two cables are more complicated.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#782

Post by Der_Einzige » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 4:51 AM UTC

trod1234 wrote: post #769

Der_Einzige wrote: post #731

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You won't find any company offering Jeans that last more than a year or so I literally just linked to a pair of jeans that you will try and fail to kill over a lifetime of use for most people. If you still need bigger, Naked and Famous make 32 oz and 40oz, but the heavy denim crowd has bought them all and it's hard to find them right now. Trying to teach HN how to buy high quality clothes is like talking to a brick…

The link isn't something people buying work pants would buy. 22oz Selvedge has its issues, and under heavy use would last 4 or 5 years given societal constraints (i.e. you don't walk around in stinky clothes multiple days in a row). At ~$124 + tariff, we're looking at significantly more for a five year period or a comparable minimum of $40/yr replacement. Comparable products can be found with a replacement every year…

Nice ChatGPT response.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#783

Post by int_19h » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 4:53 AM UTC

ludicrousdispla wrote: post #244

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…

I used to be a loyal buyer of a specific Eddie Bauer T-Shirt over at least a decade, until I bought four of them online a few years ago from their website. Despite my ordering all the same size and style, each shirt is a different length (varying by as much as two inches) and fabric weight. Haven't bought one since and won't do so again.

On the other hand, I bought a pair of hiking boots back in 2011 that are still going strong. So much so that I got another pair of boots by the same company a couple of years ago - same exact model, same size etc - solely as a spare in case they stop making them. Fits like a glove.

The trick? The company in question is Belleville, and they make boots for the US military; they just also happen to be good hiking boots. I suspect that people in charge of logistics as DoD don't like it when things suddenly change, which would explain why they still have the same model still going for 25+ years, and why the sizes and everything else stays the same.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#784

Post by int_19h » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 5:05 AM UTC

ungreased0675 wrote: post #524

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. To be more specific, look for the point where a Private Equity firm gets involved. Whose aim is extractive and often bankrupts the host company - to cut costs, send production somewhere cheaper, and in general use up the value in the good name that the product has. This is what happened to Dr. Martens (footwear) to Instant pot (cookware) to Red Lobster (restaurants)

Are there good arguments against outlawing those type of PE acquisitions?

How would you define "those type" (unambiguously enough to work as a law), as opposed to all others?

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#785

Post by int_19h » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 5:08 AM UTC

BobaFloutist wrote: post #495

jonplackett wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this all just Late Stage Calitalsm? I don’t think it’s ‘efficiency’ in the same way spaceX is run. Yeah they cut costs, but they got better quality results. With clothes / appliances etc we have reduced quality at our expense - while the companies doing it make more money than ever.

"Late Stage" as a term means "right before it fails." People have been calling capitalism "Late Stage" for decades.

The distinct term "late stage capitalism" is exactly 100 years old, in fact.

Given that the entire history of capitalism spans several centuries, I don't think the term is even necessarily wrong. But it certainly has nothing to do with declining standards of quality - that is a much more recent phenomenon.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#786

Post by GoblinSlayer » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 6:56 AM UTC

swed420 wrote: post #776

GoblinSlayer wrote: post #727

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's well sourced. The people who seem to hate/misrepresent him tend to be capitalists, philosophers, religious types, and generally egotistical "individualist" types.

What is his source for the definition of free will? Fairy tales?

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#787

Post by simgt » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 7:26 AM UTC

pas wrote: post #764

simgt wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fix is also not complicated (remove GHG from the air, remove endocrine disruptors from the food cycle, etc.) Are you abstracting away the technical complexity when stating that it's not complicated? GHG removal tech that would scale simply doesn't exist if we intend to have some energy left to do anything else, as for removing pfas and microplastics from the environment, we are at the stage of running experimen…

ah, sorry, I am not optimistic, I just accepted that it's not a technical, logistical, or "resource constraints" problem it's a coordination problem as you mentioned based on this I moved to a place where I think things are a bit less crazy with regards to that (well, famous last comments ...eheh)

Ha, that was really not obvious in your initial comment, thanks for clarifying!

> based on this I moved to a place where I think things are a bit less crazy with regards to that (well, famous last comments ...eheh)

Mind telling us pessimists where that might be? ;)

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#788

Post by immibis » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 10:18 AM UTC

randallsquared wrote: post #775

immibis wrote: post #771

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how you can say with a straight face that solar power is a stopgap and nuclear power is a long-term sustainable solution. I cannot rightly comprehend the confusion of ideas that would provoke such a statement.

Well, I said “medium” term. But ultimately if we stayed on the curve (that is, longer term), humanity would be using the entire output of the sun in less than 2000 years, requiring a Dyson sphere or something. Solar power can’t keep up with human flourishing. We’ll have to have something that is denser and more distributed. :)

Where do you propose to get enough uranium and thorium to match the power output of the entire sun for longer than five milliseconds?

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#789

Post by otabdeveloper4 » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 12:54 PM UTC

brewdad wrote: post #387

otabdeveloper4 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can confidently say that today's flagship iPhones (or even Androids) are significantly better quality than the N900, in every way possible. Having owned both, no. The N900 was programmable, none of the current crop of phones are.

Features are not the same thing as quality.

Not actually owning your phone is part of quality.

Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality

#790

Post by randallsquared » Tue, Jul 22, 2025, 1:14 PM UTC

immibis wrote: post #788

randallsquared wrote: post #775

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I said “medium” term. But ultimately if we stayed on the curve (that is, longer term), humanity would be using the entire output of the sun in less than 2000 years, requiring a Dyson sphere or something. Solar power can’t keep up with human flourishing. We’ll have to have something that is denser and more distributed. :)

Where do you propose to get enough uranium and thorium to match the power output of the entire sun for longer than five milliseconds?

I feel like we're talking past each other. If we are to get back on a steady growth rate in energy/person, solar on earth is a great short-term part of that, fission is required for continuing it in the medium term until we figure out something else (fusion, but then whatever we might unlock down the road).

You're globalizing what I said about having enough uranium and thorium in known deposits and at current power usage, but obviously we would outgrow that as we expand into the rest of the solar system.

My point is not that we should stop or slow investment in solar (we shouldn't!), just that we'd all have been much, much better off if nuclear had continued to be adopted at speed in the last 50-60 years rather than being demonized, and for high density or unlit areas, it's still a great option and has no risk of running out of available fuel in the next hundred years.