4 ms·

This is always an important point that seldom gets brought up these days when people are complaining about "they don't make things like they used to." Of cours

This is always an important point that seldom gets brought up these days when people are complaining about "they don't make things like they used to." Of course they don't, and we're generally better off as a result.

ghaff 4y ago
And it's not like everything was made to last longer in the "good old days." If you lived somewhere with snow, you were lucky to get a car through 5 years and 50,000 miles--and it probably needed fairly regular tune-ups etc. to keep running.
- rebuilder 4y ago
  Where / when was this? Living in Scandinavia, this was not my experience at all - as a kid we went through a number of used cars - Lada, Mazda, even a VW Beetle - and while the Beetle was definitely more of a summer car (heating would have been nice!), I never heard of a car being terribly worse off because of snow.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    70s in the US--typically European cars. Even in the last 20 years I had a Ford Explorer that I ultimately got rid of because everything underneath in the vehicle was rusting out at about 100,000 miles.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    US states with snow typically salt their roads in the winter, in an attempt to melt it down to the bare road, and it is very corrosive. Not sure about where you lived, but some other places use other strategies, often: requiring vehicles to have snow tires.
    - rebuilder 4y ago
      Salt is used here as well. Maybe they use less, because while it definitely causes corrosion, 50 k miles seems incredibly short-lived.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        Well, before galvanization (and more modern coatings), cars were pretty junky. https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/galvanization-sensation-how-automakers-fought-off-the-scourge-of-rust/ https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/galvanizati... My first car, built in 1987, was partially galvanized (I know because the sales brochure was proud of this fact), but had rust streaks down the doors at 50k miles and the frame rusted completely through at 80k miles. The improvements in automotive coatings in the 90s and 00s have been immense.
      - ghaff 4y ago
        Yes, today 50K miles would be very short-lived. In my more recent experience, getting to 100K miles and ten years or more is pretty easy. Cars have gotten a lot more reliable both in terms of not rusting out and mechanical reliability generally.
  - wil421 4y ago
    It’s not the snow it’s the salt that’s sprayed on the roads in the colder states. I’m down South and only see small amounts of snow every couple years or so. Our cars do not have this problem. I think the 70s were more notorious for cars rusting out. It’s still a slight concern for older cars coming from colder states. I watch two people on YouTube who specialize in 90s and 00s Mercedes and BMWs. Many times they are looking in specific spots for rust on older cars.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > If you lived somewhere with snow, you were lucky to get a car through 5 years and 50,000 miles--and it probably needed fairly regular tune-ups etc. to keep running. And farmers and other rural people all knew how to do this, had welders and other power tools and access to spare parts (or at least a junkyard). The frame parts themselves were made with enough slack that even if you had a crash with something, it needed to be a fairly serious collision to cause damage beyond the frame. Hell, even a 1994 VW T4 could collide with the rear end of a traffic jam, be 10cm shorter than before and it would still run (I speak from experience on that one). Today, most cars are locked down so hard you need specialized software from the manufacturer to swap a fucking stereo, and the frame is packed with bits and pieces so even a tiny ding on a parking lot can end up with a five figure repair bill.
  - giobox 4y ago
    > The frame parts themselves were made with enough slack that even if you had a crash with something, it needed to be a fairly serious collision to cause damage beyond the frame. Hell, even a 1994 VW T4 could collide with the rear end of a traffic jam, be 10cm shorter than before and it would still run (I speak from experience on that one). A return to this would likely require unwinding decades of global crash and pedestrian safety legislation - it's this more than anything else that has made cars less resilient to small knocks, especially the pedestrian safety rules found in many markets. Yes old cars were easier to fix, but survivability for occupants and anyone else involved in your accident was significantly worse. Personally, I'll take the safety features of 2022 over 1994 - the changes are massive.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Bumpers used to actually be bumpers or, as someone once quipped, braille devices to help you park. Now they're fairly fragile containers for all manner of sensors.
      - kube-system 4y ago
        A cars' bumper is still there, it's still steel (save for a few exceptions), and still intended to take the impact from another vehicle. The fragile container for sensors is technically the bumper cover.
hjgjhyuhy 4y ago
Environment would be better off if it was much cheaper to repair things instead of just buying new.
- kube-system 4y ago
  This implies that the prices of goods would be higher relative to wages. From an environmental perspective it is a reasonable position. But a democracy is never going to support any such transformation. “Make appliances more expensive so that I cannot afford new ones easily” said nobody.
  - HWR_14 4y ago
    If appliances break less frequently or are repairable more easily they will last longer. That means you can spread the higher cost over a longer period of time.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Appliances generally are quite reliable today, and most failures aren't particularly difficult or expensive to fix compared to appliances in the past. But there are also some limiting factors to spreading appliance cost over a long period of time. People may have limited funds (whether cash or credit) to purchase appliances, and if they can, they prefer to have them all up front. While in the past, it may have been reasonable to save up for years to buy a refrigerator, and use a root cellar in the meantime, that isn't socially acceptable today (nor is it a remotely viable expectation for a business to make of their customers). Also, people in the US move relatively often, and so it makes little sense to buy an appliance for the sole purpose of someone else's benefit.
MBCook 4y ago
One of the last times something like this came up I went and looked up the cheapest desk fan in an old Sears catalog. Maybe the ‘60s or so. It was priced at like $15, about the same as today. But if you did the math for inflation, it would cost like $120. So of course they lasted forever. And they were made of metal and designed to be workhorses. They cost $120! When you make a plastic desk fan for $15, even with razor thin profits for everyone involved there just isn’t much money left to put into lasting quality parts.
- ghaff 4y ago
  And the plastic desk fan probably lasts for years anyway. A lot of us have way too much disposable odds and ends--I don't even want to tell you how much tech logo clothing I've ended up with over the years. But not everything needs to be pass down to your grandchildren quality.
  - heather45879 4y ago
    And just think when you got the tech logo clothing you become a walking billboard. Are you getting paid to wear it? But yeah most grandchildren auction off their parents belongings anyway. That’s why birds make nests and then they go somewhere else and maybe return, make a new nest. People are fixated on permanence—perhaps that’s another way to build housing: design it so it is sustainable, then tear it down and recycle the materials every 10 years.
- bluedino 4y ago
  Part of that $15 also paid a wage to the guy who built the fans, who worked in the fan plant in some town that closed up 40 years ago.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  About a decade ago we got a Lasko box fan that was all-metal. About $100 versus maybe $25 for the plastic ones (back then—I'm sure both would be worse now, thanks inflation). It's amazing, and unlike the plastic ones didn't die in 2-3 years. Way more powerful (the "low" setting is somewhere between "medium" and "high" on the plastic fans we've owned), cord's thicker and heavier, whole case and the screens are heavy metal so they're difficult to break and I could probably repair them somehow, if they did. Unfortunately, last I checked nobody makes anything like it now. Guess we'll have to look for some kind of shop-fan if this one ever dies and can't be fixed, assuming those haven't been shittified by then.
mitchdoogle 4y ago
One of the first people I've seen suggest that planned obsolescence is a good thing for consumers. Let me guess, you are somehow financially motivated to see people buying more stuff more frequently?
- kelnos 4y ago
  I think the point being made is that if all you have available is $120 fans, there is going to be a good number of people who can't afford them at all. Cheap goods make things more accessible to more people. Planned (or even unplanned) obsolescence is an unfortunate side effect. Re: planned vs. unplanned: I don't think the cheap fan manufacturer really builds it that way so you keep having to come back when yours breaks. At least, I don't think that's the primary motivator. More likely, their goal is just to sell more units in the first place, and lower prices are usually a good way to do that. (Meanwhile, companies like Apple have found the holy grail: an expensive, high-margin, premium product that's difficult to repair.)
- kube-system 4y ago
  Yes, most consumers prefer a $15 fan that lasts 10 years to a $150 fan that lasts 40 years. Especially the people that have $50 in their pocket.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    And there's no real guarantee the $150 fan will last 40 years anyway. A few years ago I bought an unreasonably expensive toaster and it broke after less than 2 years.
    - pinusc 4y ago
      I think this is the real issue. A lot of premium priced stuff today is not built to match the quality the price suggests. If you did spend $150 on a fan today, it would probably last just as long as a $15 one. Emphasis on probably, there are good quality items... just not a lot. TVs are a great example: a $900 Sony smart TV I got 5ish years ago lasted barely longer than its 3 year warranty (before a hardware-related bootloop). A crappier cheaper TV would have lasted the same. Seems to be the trend when introducing smarter software features. Near every appliance I had to replace in the last decade died because of "the motherboard" (according to several technicians), which was coincidentally about 50% the price of the appliance. I guess manufacturers like to cheap out on embedded hardware components?
heather45879 4y ago
Sure some things are better—but you won’t find half-decent workmanship in the majority of products—just walk through Home Depot and take a look at anything “Husky”. And regardless, modern features are pretty much frivolous crap anyway. I mean, a smart refrigerator? A smart oven? Please. Older ovens are designed to bake—not sell ads. When my TV just magically started showing ads I decided it’s time I go to the library and read more books. Books were designed to better humanity.
- kube-system 4y ago
  I'll take a set of Husky wrenches over any early 20th century hand tools, any day. Sure, many of those wrenches are still around, but they're awful to actually use.
- Aunche 4y ago
  >just walk through Home Depot and take a look at anything “Husky" For the average person who has one or two projects every year, Husky or Harbor Freight is more than enough.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  > When my TV just magically started showing ads I decided it’s time I go to the library and read more books. Books were designed to better humanity. Not a fan of mid-century sci-fi mass-market paperbacks, I take it? :-) (they often have some glossy ad pages stuck in the middle, typically at least one of them for cigarettes)
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
Instead people buy lots of cheaper junk every year and pile the garbage higher.

ghaff 4y ago

And it's not like everything was made to last longer in the "good old days." If you lived somewhere with snow, you were lucky to get a car through 5 years and 50,000 miles--and it probably needed fairly regular tune-ups etc. to keep running.

rebuilder 4y ago
Where / when was this? Living in Scandinavia, this was not my experience at all - as a kid we went through a number of used cars - Lada, Mazda, even a VW Beetle - and while the Beetle was definitely more of a summer car (heating would have been nice!), I never heard of a car being terribly worse off because of snow.
- ghaff 4y ago
  70s in the US--typically European cars. Even in the last 20 years I had a Ford Explorer that I ultimately got rid of because everything underneath in the vehicle was rusting out at about 100,000 miles.
- kube-system 4y ago
  US states with snow typically salt their roads in the winter, in an attempt to melt it down to the bare road, and it is very corrosive. Not sure about where you lived, but some other places use other strategies, often: requiring vehicles to have snow tires.
  - rebuilder 4y ago
    Salt is used here as well. Maybe they use less, because while it definitely causes corrosion, 50 k miles seems incredibly short-lived.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      Well, before galvanization (and more modern coatings), cars were pretty junky. https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/galvanization-sensation-how-automakers-fought-off-the-scourge-of-rust/ https://www.hagerty.com/media/automotive-history/galvanizati... My first car, built in 1987, was partially galvanized (I know because the sales brochure was proud of this fact), but had rust streaks down the doors at 50k miles and the frame rusted completely through at 80k miles. The improvements in automotive coatings in the 90s and 00s have been immense.
    - ghaff 4y ago
      Yes, today 50K miles would be very short-lived. In my more recent experience, getting to 100K miles and ten years or more is pretty easy. Cars have gotten a lot more reliable both in terms of not rusting out and mechanical reliability generally.
- wil421 4y ago
  It’s not the snow it’s the salt that’s sprayed on the roads in the colder states. I’m down South and only see small amounts of snow every couple years or so. Our cars do not have this problem. I think the 70s were more notorious for cars rusting out. It’s still a slight concern for older cars coming from colder states. I watch two people on YouTube who specialize in 90s and 00s Mercedes and BMWs. Many times they are looking in specific spots for rust on older cars.
mschuster91 4y ago
> If you lived somewhere with snow, you were lucky to get a car through 5 years and 50,000 miles--and it probably needed fairly regular tune-ups etc. to keep running. And farmers and other rural people all knew how to do this, had welders and other power tools and access to spare parts (or at least a junkyard). The frame parts themselves were made with enough slack that even if you had a crash with something, it needed to be a fairly serious collision to cause damage beyond the frame. Hell, even a 1994 VW T4 could collide with the rear end of a traffic jam, be 10cm shorter than before and it would still run (I speak from experience on that one). Today, most cars are locked down so hard you need specialized software from the manufacturer to swap a fucking stereo, and the frame is packed with bits and pieces so even a tiny ding on a parking lot can end up with a five figure repair bill.
- giobox 4y ago
  > The frame parts themselves were made with enough slack that even if you had a crash with something, it needed to be a fairly serious collision to cause damage beyond the frame. Hell, even a 1994 VW T4 could collide with the rear end of a traffic jam, be 10cm shorter than before and it would still run (I speak from experience on that one). A return to this would likely require unwinding decades of global crash and pedestrian safety legislation - it's this more than anything else that has made cars less resilient to small knocks, especially the pedestrian safety rules found in many markets. Yes old cars were easier to fix, but survivability for occupants and anyone else involved in your accident was significantly worse. Personally, I'll take the safety features of 2022 over 1994 - the changes are massive.
  - ghaff 4y ago
    Bumpers used to actually be bumpers or, as someone once quipped, braille devices to help you park. Now they're fairly fragile containers for all manner of sensors.
    - kube-system 4y ago
      A cars' bumper is still there, it's still steel (save for a few exceptions), and still intended to take the impact from another vehicle. The fragile container for sensors is technically the bumper cover.

hjgjhyuhy 4y ago

Environment would be better off if it was much cheaper to repair things instead of just buying new.

kube-system 4y ago
This implies that the prices of goods would be higher relative to wages. From an environmental perspective it is a reasonable position. But a democracy is never going to support any such transformation. “Make appliances more expensive so that I cannot afford new ones easily” said nobody.
- HWR_14 4y ago
  If appliances break less frequently or are repairable more easily they will last longer. That means you can spread the higher cost over a longer period of time.
  - kube-system 4y ago
    Appliances generally are quite reliable today, and most failures aren't particularly difficult or expensive to fix compared to appliances in the past. But there are also some limiting factors to spreading appliance cost over a long period of time. People may have limited funds (whether cash or credit) to purchase appliances, and if they can, they prefer to have them all up front. While in the past, it may have been reasonable to save up for years to buy a refrigerator, and use a root cellar in the meantime, that isn't socially acceptable today (nor is it a remotely viable expectation for a business to make of their customers). Also, people in the US move relatively often, and so it makes little sense to buy an appliance for the sole purpose of someone else's benefit.

MBCook 4y ago

One of the last times something like this came up I went and looked up the cheapest desk fan in an old Sears catalog. Maybe the ‘60s or so. It was priced at like $15, about the same as today. But if you did the math for inflation, it would cost like $120. So of course they lasted forever. And they were made of metal and designed to be workhorses. They cost $120! When you make a plastic desk fan for $15, even with razor thin profits for everyone involved there just isn’t much money left to put into lasting quality parts.

ghaff 4y ago
And the plastic desk fan probably lasts for years anyway. A lot of us have way too much disposable odds and ends--I don't even want to tell you how much tech logo clothing I've ended up with over the years. But not everything needs to be pass down to your grandchildren quality.
- heather45879 4y ago
  And just think when you got the tech logo clothing you become a walking billboard. Are you getting paid to wear it? But yeah most grandchildren auction off their parents belongings anyway. That’s why birds make nests and then they go somewhere else and maybe return, make a new nest. People are fixated on permanence—perhaps that’s another way to build housing: design it so it is sustainable, then tear it down and recycle the materials every 10 years.
bluedino 4y ago
Part of that $15 also paid a wage to the guy who built the fans, who worked in the fan plant in some town that closed up 40 years ago.
yamtaddle 4y ago
About a decade ago we got a Lasko box fan that was all-metal. About $100 versus maybe $25 for the plastic ones (back then—I'm sure both would be worse now, thanks inflation). It's amazing, and unlike the plastic ones didn't die in 2-3 years. Way more powerful (the "low" setting is somewhere between "medium" and "high" on the plastic fans we've owned), cord's thicker and heavier, whole case and the screens are heavy metal so they're difficult to break and I could probably repair them somehow, if they did. Unfortunately, last I checked nobody makes anything like it now. Guess we'll have to look for some kind of shop-fan if this one ever dies and can't be fixed, assuming those haven't been shittified by then.

mitchdoogle 4y ago

One of the first people I've seen suggest that planned obsolescence is a good thing for consumers. Let me guess, you are somehow financially motivated to see people buying more stuff more frequently?

kelnos 4y ago
I think the point being made is that if all you have available is $120 fans, there is going to be a good number of people who can't afford them at all. Cheap goods make things more accessible to more people. Planned (or even unplanned) obsolescence is an unfortunate side effect. Re: planned vs. unplanned: I don't think the cheap fan manufacturer really builds it that way so you keep having to come back when yours breaks. At least, I don't think that's the primary motivator. More likely, their goal is just to sell more units in the first place, and lower prices are usually a good way to do that. (Meanwhile, companies like Apple have found the holy grail: an expensive, high-margin, premium product that's difficult to repair.)
kube-system 4y ago
Yes, most consumers prefer a $15 fan that lasts 10 years to a $150 fan that lasts 40 years. Especially the people that have $50 in their pocket.
- ghaff 4y ago
  And there's no real guarantee the $150 fan will last 40 years anyway. A few years ago I bought an unreasonably expensive toaster and it broke after less than 2 years.
  - pinusc 4y ago
    I think this is the real issue. A lot of premium priced stuff today is not built to match the quality the price suggests. If you did spend $150 on a fan today, it would probably last just as long as a $15 one. Emphasis on probably, there are good quality items... just not a lot. TVs are a great example: a $900 Sony smart TV I got 5ish years ago lasted barely longer than its 3 year warranty (before a hardware-related bootloop). A crappier cheaper TV would have lasted the same. Seems to be the trend when introducing smarter software features. Near every appliance I had to replace in the last decade died because of "the motherboard" (according to several technicians), which was coincidentally about 50% the price of the appliance. I guess manufacturers like to cheap out on embedded hardware components?

heather45879 4y ago

Sure some things are better—but you won’t find half-decent workmanship in the majority of products—just walk through Home Depot and take a look at anything “Husky”. And regardless, modern features are pretty much frivolous crap anyway. I mean, a smart refrigerator? A smart oven? Please. Older ovens are designed to bake—not sell ads. When my TV just magically started showing ads I decided it’s time I go to the library and read more books. Books were designed to better humanity.

kube-system 4y ago
I'll take a set of Husky wrenches over any early 20th century hand tools, any day. Sure, many of those wrenches are still around, but they're awful to actually use.
Aunche 4y ago
>just walk through Home Depot and take a look at anything “Husky" For the average person who has one or two projects every year, Husky or Harbor Freight is more than enough.
yamtaddle 4y ago
> When my TV just magically started showing ads I decided it’s time I go to the library and read more books. Books were designed to better humanity. Not a fan of mid-century sci-fi mass-market paperbacks, I take it? :-) (they often have some glossy ad pages stuck in the middle, typically at least one of them for cigarettes)

2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago

Instead people buy lots of cheaper junk every year and pile the garbage higher.