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Is that necessarily a bad thing? What if high quality isn't required to do the thing you wanted to accomplish? Many other mass produced products we buy today a
by andersa 3y ago
Is that necessarily a bad thing? What if high quality isn't required to do the thing you wanted to accomplish?
Many other mass produced products we buy today are clearly lower quality than ones crafted by artisans 50 years ago, and yet they do what we need them to do at a fraction of the cost.
- yoyohello13 3y agoThese cheaper products are also far more wasteful and taxing on natural resources. This is the “growth at any cost” mindset. It’s been great for us in the last 100 years, but I’m not convinced it’s actually sustainable in the long run.
- jwells89 3y agoI think that regardless of category, we should strive for making quality easier and cheaper to achieve and sustain. Unfortunately financial incentives favor velocity and volume at the cost of all else and so instead we’re increasingly pumping out vast amounts of garbage.
- staunton 3y ago> regardless of category I think that's a sweeping generalization. For example, it's much better to have a bunch of food that's mostly garbage than to have a famine where all food is super high quality. There were points in history where this choice was made (obviously unconsciously because the choice is too obvious to even think about). Other examples abound. Technology often makes things much cheaper while reducing quality. Sometimes that's bad, sometimes it's great.
- Attummm 3y agoThere is a threshold of quality; once it goes below, it's a broken product. Personally, I'd rather have a high-quality product crafted by artisans than mass-produced ones, similar to preferring a dinner at a restaurant made by a chef over fast food. However, in engineering, every choice involves tradeoffs.