3 ms·

Why is there a need for human touch for high-quality products ? Machines can make perfectly fine products, and if they fail, you usually see it right after pur

by petra 10y ago

Why is there a need for human touch for high-quality products ? Machines can make perfectly fine products, and if they fail, you usually see it right after purchase while the warranty is on. The more annoying issue is of shitty design, sometime to save a few cents(shitty motherboard capacitors, shitty earphone hinge), sometimes intentionally - like toyota seeing some model getting to a 300K-1M miles lifetime - and changing a chain to make it 100K, i think. >> no-one's got the time to figure out how to evaluate quality in more than a small fraction of what they buy Why should that be hard ? why can't i go to some e-commerce site, and see a reliable evaluation of the lifetime of a product ? of the quality of the main parameters ? With some option to comparison shop on those ?

ashark 10y ago
You have to know which parameters are meaningful, any tricks that could be used in presenting them, the degree to which the person/entity reporting them can trusted for accuracy, anything that's changed about any of that stuff since the last time you checked, and probably more I'm forgetting about. Being even halfway informed about a majority of the products one might purchase is a time-consuming PITA that too often results in the discovery of the bathtub quality graph and the realization that all you can afford is cheap crap and more expensive but barely better rip-off crap, because that's all that exists short of the ZOMGWTF high end (or, possibly, becoming way more informed and spending even more time shopping for quality used products). If you do find someone serving up quality mid-priced stuff, they'll probably be disproportionally expensive for what they are (if not as high as the luxury market, assuming there is one for that product) for reasons of low scale and the tiny market of informed consumers providing less support for competition. It's not that no-one ever becomes an informed consumer of any product—it's that so few do that it's hard to sustain oneself selling real quality to bargain-seeking informed consumers, and when a company manages to they have trouble scaling to a point that they can lower prices and capture more market share. There's also less room for competition to survive, so there goes another price-lowering mechanism. And good luck getting distribution when retailers make a better margin selling faux-quality at the same price. It's not that you can't ever possibly succeed doing that, it's that it tends to be much harder, resulting in the observed crap/ripoff/luxury (luxury category not always existing for all products) categories of so many goods in practice. Incidentally, agreed about good machine-made things being possible. Maybe small scale manufacturing/fabrication will get really cheap and break us out of this mess. As it is, they don't usually design the robots to make good stuff (if you can point me to machine-made knotted wool rugs that'll last 100 years at a substantial discount from the hand-knotted variety, ideally without my having to become a rug expert to verify that they really are similarly durable, please do)
- petra 10y ago
  You are right about the situation today. But the question is - how do we change this situation? Because there must be a way, since there are a lot of tools that can be combined for solution -crowdsourcing, including crowdsourcing engineers analysis, the easiness which one can create a niche retailer, the rich chinese manufacturing ecosystem(where there are even small companies making electric cars), the ability to order customer parts to replace the weak link in a product before breakage or just do preventive strengthening with some glue(I.e. earphone hinges) , etc...

by petra 10y ago

ashark 10y ago

You have to know which parameters are meaningful, any tricks that could be used in presenting them, the degree to which the person/entity reporting them can trusted for accuracy, anything that's changed about any of that stuff since the last time you checked, and probably more I'm forgetting about. Being even halfway informed about a majority of the products one might purchase is a time-consuming PITA that too often results in the discovery of the bathtub quality graph and the realization that all you can afford is cheap crap and more expensive but barely better rip-off crap, because that's all that exists short of the ZOMGWTF high end (or, possibly, becoming way more informed and spending even more time shopping for quality used products). If you do find someone serving up quality mid-priced stuff, they'll probably be disproportionally expensive for what they are (if not as high as the luxury market, assuming there is one for that product) for reasons of low scale and the tiny market of informed consumers providing less support for competition. It's not that no-one ever becomes an informed consumer of any product—it's that so few do that it's hard to sustain oneself selling real quality to bargain-seeking informed consumers, and when a company manages to they have trouble scaling to a point that they can lower prices and capture more market share. There's also less room for competition to survive, so there goes another price-lowering mechanism. And good luck getting distribution when retailers make a better margin selling faux-quality at the same price. It's not that you can't ever possibly succeed doing that, it's that it tends to be much harder, resulting in the observed crap/ripoff/luxury (luxury category not always existing for all products) categories of so many goods in practice. Incidentally, agreed about good machine-made things being possible. Maybe small scale manufacturing/fabrication will get really cheap and break us out of this mess. As it is, they don't usually design the robots to make good stuff (if you can point me to machine-made knotted wool rugs that'll last 100 years at a substantial discount from the hand-knotted variety, ideally without my having to become a rug expert to verify that they really are similarly durable, please do)

petra 10y ago
You are right about the situation today. But the question is - how do we change this situation? Because there must be a way, since there are a lot of tools that can be combined for solution -crowdsourcing, including crowdsourcing engineers analysis, the easiness which one can create a niche retailer, the rich chinese manufacturing ecosystem(where there are even small companies making electric cars), the ability to order customer parts to replace the weak link in a product before breakage or just do preventive strengthening with some glue(I.e. earphone hinges) , etc...