ThazzarBaal
Registered Senior Member
Alas, to be shewed away. Value is funny like that. Have a nice day.
Is a decrease in product quality beneficial or harmful?
- Thread starter Olga
- Start date
Alas, to be shewed away. Value is funny like that. Have a nice day.
If you buy good tools and appliances ANYWHERE you can get ones that will last a long time. 90% of my purchases of new tools and appliances has been because we moved, or I lost the old one. I've had to fix my dishwasher, but it's designed to be fairly easy to fix and it took all of five minutes. (Then an hour to disconnect the water and drain, drag it out, then push it back in and reconnect it.) I replaced our TV just because I wanted a bigger one, not because the old one stopped working. And the old one is now in someone else's house still working fine.
Cars last far longer today than they did 30 years ago. In the 1970's the average age of cars on US roads was 6.1 years. Now it's 12.6. (That's an average, which means you have lots of cars lasting 25 years, and some lasting far longer.)
Again, depends on what you buy. I have plenty of clothing that's 40 years old. My wife keeps bugging me to throw them all out because, well, they look like they are 40 year old.
Having that choice is a good thing. The massive amount of waste isn't. That's what we have to solve.
Planned obsolescence is obviously deemed beneficial for industry -- by industry itself. And surely by many futurophiles (lovers of the future), because it accelerates technological progress.
But if you could take a "moral temperature" -- the average of that for every other sector in general (consumers, climate change, the judgments and wrath of anti-capitalists, etc) it would register on the "harmful" range of the virtue measuring device, due to the different standards employed for the latter.
An area where "social justice paradise" got it right. But in the rest of the world, durable products were likewise made in the earlier 20th-century, so it's not really an inherent feature or consequence of pre-revisionist left utopianism. The Soviet regime had plenty of environmental pollution and little ability (or interest?) to clean it up.
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Автомобили сейчас служат дольше? Вы это серьёзно? Китайские, например, вообще одноразовые. Они и ремонту чаще всего не подлежат - 150 000 км. пробега - и до свидания. То же самое и с большинством остальной их продукции. Если вы покупаете европейские, южнокорейские, или японские бренды - я согласна, они служат долго. Но китайский ширпотреб всё больше теснит их на рынке.
Yes, here in reality.
"The average car or light truck on the road in 2022 in the U.S. was more than 12 years old. That’s the highest it has ever been. In 1970, the average car was only 6.1 years old and the average light truck was 7.3 years old. As the quality of new cars and trucks increased and as consumers’ expectations for vehicle longevity changed, drivers have kept them in operation for more years." - www.signalgarage.com
"Cars of 50 years ago would rust within months of being out of the showroom (even if the dealership applied its aftermarket “rustproofing” service). Overworked engines would misfire if not “tuned up” by a mechanic regularly, and mineral oil-based lubricants would fail if not changed habitually. . . . But today’s cars are vastly superior to their predecessors — they will likely be on the road for upwards of 250,000 miles before they are crushed for recycling." - www.forbes.com
"Over the decades, cars have become less vulnerable to rust and corrosion. Parts are now machined with greater precision and lubricants are more durable, reducing wear and tear. Even exterior paint fades less, interior fabrics and materials better withstand normal use, and headlights last longer. Manufacturers are so confident in the durability of critical components in vehicles that they now offer longer warranties than they did in the past. As a result, the average age of cars and light trucks on the road has increased dramatically." - www.frontiergroup.org
Chinese cars generally rank the lowest in overall reliabilty. However, they still last far longer than US cars did 30 years ago.
I think TheVat mentioned "fast fashion" above. I get the impression that a lot of younger folks nowadays won't wear an article of clothing with even a single tiny blemish on it of any sort. I get that there are times when a person wants to "look their best", whatever that means, and certain situations perhaps warrant such fastidiousness, but... It just seems ridiculous. I wear clothing til they're literally disintegrating--they still work (up to that point)! I mean, they serve their purpose of clothing one's body.
As a general rule, I hate procuring new stuff--with the exception of books and records. (And I like making stuff, I just don't like buying stuff.) I expect pretty much everything to last 70 years at a bare minimum.
Yeah my clothing goes through phases.
1) Wear it out to dinner, to movies, to work etc
2) Wear it when doing ordinary things (working around the house, dropping kids off etc)
3) Sleep in it
Those phases seem to last a long time for me.
I think often about that brilliant but sinister marketing ploy wherein every single garment--from footwear to coats and jackets--has to be specially catered to every single scenario imaginable. Some of the innovations are great, like heavy winter coats that have zippers under the armpit area, because it's cold when you go out, but if you're doing something quite active, you're apt to get hot real quick. But others... not so much, or not at all. Different footwear for every single activity seems a bit much, and I think this bears out in the increasing prevalence of ailments of a podiatric nature. There is such a thing as too much arch support or ankle support
Examples, please??
And what are you classifying as "slum"?
Maybe you're thinking of Victorian terraced housing, the stock that was built quickly during the 19th century in cities due to the industrial boom? They were certainly durable, but to last "hundreds of years"? No. You would be mistaken. Many of them are still around, though, so they're doing well, but you're talking about being deliberately built to last that long. Are you going to offer evidence to support your assertion?
Maybe you're thinking that post-war housing was designed to last "hundreds of years"? If so, you're mistaken. Maybe 50-100 years, but they were basically built to solve an urgent housing need due to many cities having the proverbial bombed out of them during that little kerfuffle with the Germans.
Maybe you're thinking about post-1950s housing stock? If so, again you're mistaken, as they were built for may 30-80 years. If renovated they may last longer, but they were not "built to last hundreds of years".
Now, there's certainly some buildings in the UK built to last centuries, but they tend to be the grand buildings. Stately homes, monuments, abbeys, churches, etc.
And, sure, there are run-down areas in the UK. Slums, if you will. At one point there was a street in Liverpool (iirc) where you could buy a house for next to nothing. Some estate agents were offering a "buy 2 get 1 free", because the area was so run-down. But the buildings themselves were still there (minus the glass in the windows). They would certainly have needed renovating to bring them up to modern standards, redecorating etc, but the issue wasn't, and rarely is, the housing/building stock itself, but the wider economic situation of the area. Deprivation, lack of investment in infrastructure, lack of employment etc.
So what, exactly, are you referring to? An example would certainly help clarify.
Seattle saw Threads once upon a time.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
The general complaint it that houses in the US aren't build to last like the British houses.
Countless volumes attempt to tackle the subject of when "we" (the "we" here being the US, I guess) stopped abiding the "built to last" model, but really this varies considerably from industry to industry. When I think about the things that I'm interested in or that I most care about, we largely haven't stopped building durable goods. But those things are arguably "niche" industries, and the companies making them don't tend to be of the Fortune 500 variety--I'm thinking musical instruments, audio processing gear and recording equipment, bicycles and other "outdoor activity" products, even power tools, and so forth. And sure, there are plenty of crap guitars and poorly built synths and the like out there, but if you stick with certain companies that make better stuff, they really do make better stuff that'll last for decades and decades. I've got (or had--I tend to unload surplus with borderline distressing frequency) organs, synths, pianos and e. pianos that are every bit as good now as they were when they were made sometime between the 1940s and 1970s. Same goes for the other categories which I care most about. ("Vinyl", as in records, produced in the 80s are crap, but that's largely to do with a shortage of proper materials--good vinyl bounced right back by the 90s.)
That said, I find most other things, which I care a whole lot less about but which are in some respects perhaps essential for living maybe?, to overwhelmingly be garbage these days.
I dunno. Clearly Bob Moog, Alan R Pearlman and Don Buchla did not have a head for business, but it seems like very few of their mates did either. These guys could not turn a decent profit even were they to have someone like... Patrick Bet David on their case 24/7. Of course, I'm not sure how those industries could translate into MLM schemes in the first place. But point being: even when you discard all of the ethical concerns, capitalism simply blows!
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
How are you defining capitalism and what blows? In other words are you using a concise definition of capitalism or are you simply calling capitalism anything that you don't like. Efficient markets blow? Central planning is great?
What has that got to do with your assertion in this thread regarding houses in the UK???
If you want to dispute other people's assertions about US housing in another thread, do that where they made those assertions. What you have said here remains an unsupported assertion. And if all you have in its favour is the irrelevancy of you being somehow butthurt about people slagging off US housing then, well, it's nothing but trolling, is it. But, hey, whatever.
Seattle
Valued Senior Member
Maybe request that this be split into a different thread?
Wizard of Whatever
Registered Senior Member
When seriously considering the worth of a product, you should consider cost vs expected lifetime.
exchemist
Valued Senior Member
I would extend your category 3 to include wearing old clothes when painting or gardening - or messy activities like picking blackberries. I sleep in old T shirts, mainly from rowing days.
Это потому что американские автомобили никогда и раньше не отличались качеством. Хуже них только китайские. У меня был когда то Гранд Чероки Лимитед, мне не понравилось. Я разговаривала с механиком на станции техобслуживания, и он рассказывал, что американские запчасти в три раза меньше служат, чем немецкие, и в пять раз меньше, чем японские. Для примера, металл на подшипниках сверху хороший, а внутри чуть ли не из глины сделан. Рассчитан на то, чтобы через определённый срок вы его поменяли. На запчастях производители тоже деньги зарабатывают.
У меня есть ретроавтомобиль, ему почти 70 лет. На нём нет ржавчины от слова совсем. Кузов лужёный, не ржавеет, и даже резина и приёмник стоят родные, и до сих пор всё работает. Никелированные детали такие, как будто их вчера сделали. Но это конечно же не американец.
There wouldn't be eight billion of us without it !