Nothing bewildering. There is simple explanation. Your country's economy going downhill. You are no longer prosperous country you once was.
Which country?
The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
81–90 of 824 posts
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#82It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable". Publicly traded companies are driven by quarterly earnings and increasing net margins. You do that by selling products at the lowest cost possible where buyers will still buy it. A bigger decline is coming if we let "vibe coding" and what we call AI replace human workers at scale. The technology isn't there yet for full automation but everything is blindly surging ahe…
> It's called "lowest cost technically acceptable". I like this wording better than "programmed obsolescence". I don't really believe that "programmed obsolescence" is common. If anyone in a company leaked that the company actively designs the product to stop working after some time, it would make the news. I call it "premature obsolescence", which sounds more passive to me: the product doesn't last as long as it cou…
Lowest cost possible is often fun optimization problem engineers enjoy. Save a fraction of cent here and there and there too. And in some ways it is good for consumer getting cheaper products.
On the other end you have something like Juicero. Massively and wastefully overengineered piece of crap. To do not that useful task. While being extremely expensive. And probably not actually last that long.
Maybe one day if far future we end up with some mature balance between two. But I doubt it...
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#83Most 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 used to prices from Zara/Lidl.
Some things have truly declined because the demand collapsed so much that they basically got discontinued in the 1st world (that tailored shirt is coming from Ceylon) but others have improved tremendously by soaking up that drive for quality (check any independent coffee shop).
Not to mention the true pinnacles of modern manufacturing. Because for the price of a decent camera my father could get, I have a 100x zoom camera in my pocket, with a 7" touch screen, and 5g connectivity, also somehow all the books I could have ever read.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#84I'm not sure if this is quite related, but I can't help but feel that a lot of the ills of society that we're witnessing is simply coming down to the fact that we're living a lot longer as people. I feel like knowing that we might live well-beyond our working age has caused all sorts of odd/irrational behaviours in the way we approach life. I think for example, having to save for retirement makes us rethink how we sp…
Have you considered that it's not that we are spending money on cheap stuff, it's that even expensive stuff is built to not last with the incentive you come back for more? You do realize there are whole R&D departments working on planned obsolescence. - Apple's planned obsolescence on batteries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batterygate - Window's 10 to 11 garbage hardware requirements: https://www.euroconsumers.org/…
I'm not sure if those examples are really applicable when there are perfectly fine alternatives i.e. linux, desktops etc. that don't have those issues. Ultimately it's a choice to be part of those eco-systems, at least from a consumer point of view.
With that said, I'm not sure why both our arguments have to be mutually exclusive? Why can't it be that things are being planned for obsolescence + we're living too long?
Regarding your last point, let's say that you did know you were going to live to 100, I think you'd be hard pressed to be able to afford a lot of that nice stuff which would serve you in the long run without working into retirement age (unless if you just happen to very wealthy).
I earn a relatively high salary and even if I was making the most of my retirement contributions and considering compounding, it would still only last me by 90 without requiring state assistance. And most importantly, that's if I were to maintain my current lifestyle, which includes buying the cheap shit I can afford (in part so I can keep up with funding retirement).
I couldn't imagine how much harder it would be for those on an average salary.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#85> is that the great promise of capitalism — if you work, you can have a decent life, buy a house, and go on vacation — is no longer being fulfilled;
I'd just like to comment on this line in particular. The promise of capitalism isn't this, but, rather, if you own capital (i.e. are a capitalist), you explicitly do not have to work. There is no promise made to the workers, except that in some way they are compensated for their work.
There are other systems wherein if you don't work (and aren't retired/disabled), you don't get paid. But capitalism is one of them in which non-workers get paid, and usually with a disgusting disparity between the rate of the two classes.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nonsense. If you want really nice, high quality furniture then you can just pay a local craftsman to make it for you. This is always an option regardless and some of us are not easily manipulated by ads. Of course good furniture will be expensive.
The mass production discount must not be overlooked, whatever most people want becomes the most cost effective, and it appears that most people want cheap, and so anything beyond the absolute minimum costs a lot more relative to the quality.
I don't believe the "people want cheap" spiel. Sure, they want affordable.
As consumers can not tell the quality of products beforehand, and price is certainly no guarantee of quality, the only logical choice is to buy cheap.
I wish there was a sort of rating of product quality [1], so I can choose the optimum price/quality for a product.
[1] Reviews suck for this purpose. Half of them say things like "Fast shipping, five stars!". By the time defects show up months later and the one-star reviews arrive, the product is discontinued anyway.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#87Quality has improved across many dimensions in nearly every domain I’m familiar with. In fact, I’d argue there are very few products or services that couldn’t be made today to a higher standard than at any point in the past, if we chose to prioritize that. But what’s often mistaken for a decline in quality is really a shift in priorities: toward affordability, efficiency, and accessibility. And that’s fantastic. Prod…
I'm not convinced the widening access to American consumerism is a moral win. The amount of fossil fuels we're dependent on as a species is obscene. I worry for our children. There is no offramp, only growth.
This is one of these philosophies that I hate more then almost any other.
The idea that is bad that poor Indian and Chinese people now have access to anything from clean water to planes is absurd. You can sit there in your luxury house and cry about consumer culture but for millions of people its basic stuff that they have access to for the first time.
And in Europe, despite increasing quality of live, both total energy consumption and fossil fuel consumption is going down.
Now part of this is export of emissions to China but China own growth explains the majority of it.
Continued growth is good, and only continued growth and better technology will get humanity off fossil fuels.
Fossil fuels have been a net good for society and still are!
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#88> For some consumers — although we know there won’t be many — the Nokia’s extreme durability may be more valuable than the iPhone’s technological innovations I still use a phone of the generation after Nokia - it must be 20 years old now. The thing is, for everyday use voicemail and SMS are enough for me. I don't need more technology. And certainly not the kind of technology that make people walk like zombies on the…
That's great for your use but meanwhile my phone has now better eyesight than I do (and I'm 20/20), carries all my notes and photos, answers random questions about prions, and offers fully e2e encrypted instant communication with virtually anyone across the world.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm surprised. What is the objective aspect of quality? Can you have quality without a human-intended purpose?
It’s worth noting that the author of Zen and the Art literally went crazy in pursuit of this. I don’t mean this to say “you have asked a bad question”, but rather to say, “you have asked so large a question that a man once went insane in trying to answer it.”
I asked the question because i thought it was good manners to do so. Actually I'm strongly convinced that quality describes how a thing fits the preconceptions about that thing.
As testable example, I'm largely unable to tell the quality of beer as i never enjoyed any of it, and thus could not have developed a preconception of how a good beer is supposed to taste.
Re: The bewildering phenomenon of declining quality
#90Anyone else starting to see this as an unconscious but inevitable outcome of the world’s tail-end stage of becoming developed?
Moore’s law has ended. The LHC found nothing of note. Childhood mortality and Polio have been defeated. The periodic table is effectively complete. R&D is having limited returns. This AI capex spend is just hardware and data catching up to R&D from the 1980s.
We were born thinking the curve from the 1950s onwards was a god-given eternal exponential. But since about the early 2000s we’ve quietly known the curve was logistic, and not god-given.
Economists and the well-off are in denial about exponential growth. We’ve hit the current carrying capacity for an economy of n-billion silicon-flinging apes on a globe with a limited number of resources.
Businesses are still in high gear expecting growth eternal. This puts a chain of pressure down from CEO through every decision maker in the organisation: “at the end of the day, this number has to go up and this number go down”.
Businesses used to make the lives of their customers a little better through their products or services. The only model left, now that all the large pile of low-hanging fruit of innovation are gone, is to aggressively extract money from customers.
Perhaps this is all just stemming from business assumptions of exponential growth being flawed. Should we require MBAs to know what a logistic curve is?
I don’t know a lot, but I know that the current business paradigm and the products and services I interact with everyday are very optimised. But not optimised for me. They’re optimised for businesses maligned to my goals, but the only businesses left offering anything.