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I think it's that you don't notice things that work well. House foundations, light switches, filesystems, silicon manufacturing, water delivery, grocery store l

• Gigachad 5y ago
  As usual its just how much money you put in to it. We spend a lot of money making sure building foundations and silicon manufacturing works because failing is expensive and dangerous. I don't want to pay double/triple price for a toaster to slightly reduce its risk of failing because I'm happy to accept that on average it lasts a long time but there is some chance it fails sooner. If I'm in charge of buying a $100M building, you bet I want to pay extra to assure it will not fall over.
  • massysett 5y ago
    There’s a lot of stuff that works remarkably well even though it’s cheap. I just came from a supermarket. It’s filled with items from around the world, of which most are very inexpensive. The consistent quality of these products is astounding—a bag of potato chips or a box of crackers tastes exactly the same, anywhere in the country where I buy it, year-round. A can of Coca-Cola tastes exactly the same even though they’re bottled in different facilities with different owners. These things did cost a lot to develop, but for the consumer it’s quite inexpensive. As GP said, we just take these things for granted and don’t notice them.
    • hodgesrm 5y ago
      Conversely there are lot of things that are expensive and work very badly. "Designer anything" as for example, designer light fixtures. I've had terrible experiences with these.
      • fendy3002 5y ago
        It happens to almost anything creative products, stylish, custom made, and services. I guess because there isn't enough time and money to assess the quality and optimize them.
        • CRConrad 5y ago
          I think it's more that you just simply can get away with it: Artsy-fartsy types that care more about design care less about function and quality, so don't question and check them enough for manufacturers to have to keep high standards in those areas.
    • jules 5y ago
      The coke bottles themselves are amazing too. I used to go to school with a reusable bottle filled with milk. Those cylindrical lunch bottles for kids were absolutely horrible. They leaked half the time, spoiling my bag and notebook. If you dropped them they would break because they were hard plastic. The rubber ring that was supposed to stop it from leaking would degrade quickly and start to smell funny. Those things cost as much as 20 bottles of coke, and an empty coke bottle is a vastly superior product in almost every way!
    • samgtx 5y ago
      A bit of a woo-woo aside but I've been trying to practice more gratitude thinking in my daily life and the grocery store is an easy place to be reminded of how good we have it.
      • Aunche 5y ago
        Relevant video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BNpk_OGEGlA https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BNpk_OGEGlA Grocery stores are a marvel for sure. It's a miracle that we can get a season fruit like grapes 365 days a year.
        • mint2 5y ago
          It may be a miracle of logistics when ignoring negative externalities like carbon cost vs not shipping it halfway across the globe. Why can’t we eat seasonally? It usually tastes better and makes things less monotonous
      • AnonC 5y ago
        > A bit of woo woo aside but I’ve been trying to practice more gratitude… No woo woo necessary. You may be interested in checking this (and related citations) about research on gratitude and psychological well being: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude#Psychological_interventions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratitude#Psychological_interv...
        • JohnBooty 5y ago
          Practicing gratitude is probably the single easiest way to increase one's happiness, and yet it's so easy to forget to do it even if you know that. At least for me. One thing we can do is keep a gratitude journal where we write down things we're grateful for. Can literally be grateful for the sun shining, or not experiencing an earthquake, for having the ability to write in a journal in the first place, etc. It's so, so powerful.
      • Psyladine 5y ago
        I'm a believer that the largest part of what led Yeltsin to fundamentally change what it was, and thus cause the dissolution of the USSR, was his impromptu grocery store visit in the US.
    • fendy3002 5y ago
      Exactly. I can't imagine how expensive a computer chip should be if the process isn't optimized / streamlined. And for kitchenware and dinningware, we still get decent quality for a still rather cheap price. Of course as the article stated it's not easy to determine which one with decent quality, however if customers only aim for the cheapest one of course it won't be good.
    • WWLink 5y ago
      > There’s a lot of stuff that works remarkably well even though it’s cheap. Even light switches are pretty cheap. You can get a basic single light switch for around $2. Sure there's decora switches, dimmer switches, and all kinds of other great things for $50+ but the basic $2 ones will still last decades.
      • NavinF 5y ago
        If you replaced the contacts with a triac and replaced the switch mechanism with a thick bistable flexure, it would likely last centuries and have a BoM cost around $2. I’ve had 2 switches fail over the last 2 years out of the ~40 switches installed in the house. One failed by welding itself closed and another failed by caving into the electrical box when I hit it too hard. Even though the 40 year life expectancy of a single switch sounds good, the reality is that one fails catastrophically every year. I’d love to get more reliable switches that last well over a century, but I’m not aware of anyone that measures this sort of thing.
    • TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
      Coke and potato chips are not at all inexpensive if you include the health costs. They're pretty good examples of things that are cheap and don't work very well, if your goal is health and not distraction/entertainment.
      • CRConrad 5y ago
        But health isn't the goal when people consume Coke and potato chips, and conversely if health is your goal you don't consume Coke and potato chips.
  • et-al 5y ago
    I beg to differ, many of these large household companies are shells of their former selves as they've been bought, bankrupted, and traded around. What's left is just a name with no solid product line backing it anymore. E.g. Sunbeam was a solid household appliance name, and now it's a crap. Same with Braun. The easy industrial design exercise seems to be luxurious looking materials paired with cheap electronics. Amazon is full of this. Oddly, the thing I end up trusting these days are in-house brands because the store has some responsibility to make sure their own brand's reputation doesn't get too tarnished.
    • NickNameNick 5y ago
      I imagine that makes the slow Denise of Sears/Craftsman particularly unfortunate then.
      • ncmncm 5y ago
        What?
        • JoachimSchipper 5y ago
          Your parent comment has an autocorrect error, and meant to write demise (death).
    • ncmncm 5y ago
      I don't even know how I would identify a good toaster to buy, nowadays. Electric kettles are a problem, too.
      • chronogram 5y ago
        I bought a store brand 9A kettle and it's fine [1]. They're simple products and shouldn't break unless you have very hard water, in which case a round of vinegar should clean that. What are you running into? 1: https://www.blokker.nl/blokker-waterkoker-bl-10202---rvs---1-7-liter/1799791.html https://www.blokker.nl/blokker-waterkoker-bl-10202---rvs---1...
• Swizec 5y ago
  Look up "Things seen this week during structural inspections!" on imgur. Some truly horrifying stuff from that person. For some of these foundations to still be standing and building occupants not to notice anything's wrong ... I can't even imagine how much safety factor is built-in. If we built software with those margins, nothing would ever ship. Here's a few: https://imgur.com/gallery/Ko2jo4j https://imgur.com/gallery/Ko2jo4j https://imgur.com/gallery/fD4jCdc https://imgur.com/gallery/fD4jCdc https://imgur.com/gallery/0JyOXy0 https://imgur.com/gallery/0JyOXy0 Sometimes they share pictures of foundations completely detached from anything. And it keeps working!
  • ______-_-______ 5y ago
    I'm planning to buy a house in the next year or two. I would 100% hire this guy as the inspector if I knew who he was. Those photos are more effective than any marketing.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      You’ll love https://structuretech.com/category/newconstruction/ https://structuretech.com/category/newconstruction/ them where issues are found at new construction.
    • ryanchants 5y ago
      The imgur account name is the business name, Alpha Structural: https://www.yelp.com/biz/alpha-structural-los-angeles-8 https://www.yelp.com/biz/alpha-structural-los-angeles-8
      • ______-_-______ 5y ago
        For some reason I thought it was a throwaway account name. Thanks for pointing out the obvious!
• giantg2 5y ago
  Many of those things mentioned have changed very little in decades. Some have also been under continuous improvement for hundreds or thousands of years.
  • emodendroket 5y ago
    Which?
    • throwaway111023 5y ago
      house foundations, water delivery off the top of my head, logistics in general possibly if I'm wanting to stretch the term.
      • kortilla 5y ago
        Foundations change (tensioned slab, etc) and water inside of houses (copper vs pvc vs PEX vs lead). Electrical is even in frequent flux under those timescales. Insulation as well. Very little stays consistent…
        • giantg2 5y ago
          But the concept of water being fed through pipe, from a reservoir, chlorination, etc have been around a long time. Sure implementation details change, but they and the concepts they build off of have been around. You mention pvc, copper, and pex (lead is over 50 years old and many have been replaced). Those are just materials. How do they affect end user on a daily basis? How long has electrical be 120v AC? How long has auto voltage been 12v vs 5v? Details, materials, and implementation change (building off of prior versions), concepts and overarching system designs are slow to change.
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          • emodendroket 5y ago
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• analog31 5y ago
  House foundations, light switches, and water delivery, along with the professions that install them, are all regulated and licensed. There is somewhat of a trend for the quality of those things to have regional variation, e.g., lower quality in places that have historically had weak code enforcement and weak unions. And yes, the regulation probably did make those things more expensive.
  • roland35 5y ago
    Maybe more expensive up front but probably cheaper in the long run!
    • swagasaurus-rex 5y ago
      If I could buy products that just work and don’t break, even if they cost 3x as much, they would pay for themselves with longer lifespans and less wasted productivity.
      • andi999 5y ago
        Historically you shd buy Miele then.
        • Schiendelman 5y ago
          For some products. Even they have some crap (in-wall espresso…)
        • Tor3 5y ago
          I replaced my 21 year old Miele washing machine recently. The solenoid-driven water intake valve broke. It wasn't a part of the machine itself, it was on the water intake tube. But the replacement part was nearly half the price of the brand new replacement Miele washing machine I ended up buying instead. The new one is slightly larger and has higher capacity, and doesn't suffer from a little design problem the original had, so I was ok with getting a new one. But yes, the original washing machine worked exactly as when it was brand new - it was just that intake valve on the tube.
• onion2k 5y ago
  These are all things that most people never notice because they just work. Taking the example of grocery store logistics, the number of times products are unavailable in my local store makes me thing that's a thing that doesn't "just work". It's something that breaks down regularly, and possibly has lots of people working hard to keep it from breaking even more often. The same is true for lots of things. Stuff like water delivery and silicon manufacturing doesn't break all the time because lots of people are fighting to make it work, and are actively maintaining it all the time. I think it's possible that most things don't "just work", and we're just fortunate that there are teams of people out there stopping us seeing the effects of all the failures.
  • orzig 5y ago
    Are those people optimizing for having every product available at every time? They have to balance against the very real cost of spoilage, so I don’t think they consider the occasional out–of–stock as the system breaking
    • lozenge 5y ago
      Yes they are. Product availability is the most important factor in choosing a grocery store, as unavailability makes people need to visit additional stores or change recipes/plans on the fly. Some spoilage is factored in and is just a minor bit of negative PR. However, the supply chain disruptions since 2020 are too big for any grocery chain to "solve". https://hbr.org/2004/05/stock-outs-cause-walkouts https://hbr.org/2004/05/stock-outs-cause-walkouts
      • ghaff 5y ago
        >Product availability is the most important factor in choosing a grocery store For many people, price is almost certainly at least as big a factor. Many, perhaps even most, people are willing to accept things being out of stock now and then for 10% lower prices.
      • michaelt 5y ago
        The answer is actually "It depends" For some products like pasta and canned tomatoes, you can hold enough stock to deal with a 99th-percentile day without any wastage at all; if it doesn't sell today, it'll sell tomorrow. But for those little packaged sushi snacks with a one-day shelf life? Any overstock is going in the trash at the end of the day. And sushi snacks mostly sell to workers on their lunch breaks. You'll see big fluctuations in demand if a nearby office changes their work-from-home policy, or has a big all-hands meeting that gets everyone in. Even the greatest demand modelling can't predict such things, as nearby office meetings aren't available as a model input. Some products are also easily more easily substitutable than others: If the 1kg pack of mid-priced spaghetti is out of stock, maybe I buy the low-priced brand, the premium brand, the 500g packet, the wholewheat version and so on.
• hutrdvnj 5y ago
  To be precise, that depends on the actual filesystem. But ext4 works really well.
• isolli 5y ago
  It reminds me of this anecdote (probably a joke): After the fall of the Soviet Union, UK experts flew in to help with the transition, and one of the apparatchiks asked: "We are eager to try this capitalism thing; now tell us: who is in charge of the daily delivery of bread to London?"
• Ekaros 5y ago
  Or they just take longish time to fail and then cause lot of issues. Foundations are such, 70s-80s had certain style which now has been found to lead to issues like mold if done even slightly imperfectly. Or water pipes from certain age that have already in 20-30s have started to leak, these being copper pipes...
• Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  There's counterexamples for each of those though; just thinking of Flint, Michigan, or the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of 2020. Also I had to replace a light switch in my shed the other day.
• mdp2021 5y ago
  Check the deltas, the derivative. There exist long lists from personal experiences of things that worked very well and now are of comparatively terrible quality. The issue is then not just with the item, but with societies that are increasingly accepting low quality: this is a horrible trend, and one side of decadence. You get both, flanked: low quality here for the occasion and decadence around for the trend. The idea you say of some "distracted" ones "not realizing the failure potential" has a legitimate justification, beyond the simple inattentive, in those (inexperienced) that assume, for a number of reasons (especially including an internal healthy "mindset" of good standards), things are done properly. There is a line in a script for Scorsese that goes like: «I'm the guy doing my job, you must be the other one».
  • IshKebab 5y ago
    Society has always been accepting of low quality cheap stuff. It's just that there's a ton more of it available now.
    • mdp2021 5y ago
      No, it's not a matter of «low-quality cheap»: things that twenty, ten, five years ago were of high quality - same brand, update of same model - now you buy at a comparatively abysmal quality for a very similar price. It is today easy to find products which are cheap in manufacturing and expensive as a price tag. This means that, in some way, people in some/many societies are tolerating quality degradation. And a decrease of alternatives is contributing. That, in some areas, it was once not necessary to spend time investigating which product was high or just decent quality (already the price could have been a good indicator), while now it is part of your task, shows that tolerance for low quality has increased. That is not for the 1 dollar item, but for whole range up to many figures. And, a staggeringly increased inability to perceive degradation in general is evident today visiting some territories (and see what is tolerated now and was not before).
• markus_zhang 5y ago
  I think you put too much confidence in other engineering fields. They go wrong all the time (you might notice some when purchasing a house) and changes are extremely slow and expensive.
• servytor 5y ago
  I read somewhere, and this guy was talking about how if you want your house to sell for more, invest in everything you physically touch. High quality doorknobs, faucets, and light switches have a marked impact on our unconscious valuation of a house.
• blablabla123 5y ago
  Just to give one example, CI pipelines seem to fail all the time. For closed source and open source project. Just like this, it worked in the last commit and in the new commit it fails despite the test suite passing. The ultimate reason is routine tasks pulling in a ton of complexity of which only a tiny fraction is being used. At workplaces this creates a lot of absurd situations that eat up insane amounts of productivity. Or another example, it's pretty common that water pipes don't work as expected. (Congestion, low pressure, undesired backflow, tricky to get water at body temperature...) Nobody really complains, everybody lives with it and learns to completely ignore it. I'm not saying these problems occur everywhere 100% of the time but often enough to show there's something structurally not working
  • darkarmani 5y ago
    > just to give one example, CI pipelines seem to fail all the time. Really? I've not seen this to be the case unless they are never maintained (ie: a year goes by and ignored dependencies change)
• Volrath89 5y ago
  As someone who writes software for a big grocery store chain in Germany I'm surprised the logistics work at all. It's a s*show inside once you know the details, but somehow, yes it kind of works well enough as for the customers to not even realize is there.
• lupire 5y ago
  Cue the ZFS people, homeowners with cracked concrete, and flickery electricity .