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> Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality impro

> Many comments here are arguing that quality has actually gone up over the past decades. Yes, many people confuse technological development with quality improvements. Technology can improve quality, but it can also be used in other ways. My personal view is the west, especially North America, never recovered from the oil crisis of the early 1970s. Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable, at least compared with today, with the result that all sorts of objects were radically heavier than their newer equivalents. You take away the need for handling such enormous weights for everything everywhere and it becomes possible to replace almost our entire infrastructure with things that are simply much flimsier. It is that combined with the culture of low expectations that puts up with the results.

SweetLlamaMyth 1y ago
It seems strange to me to attribute this to the 70s oil crisis vs factors like expectations of unceasing profit growth leading looking for any and all efficiencies, or globalization making extra translate into increased shipping costs from the other side of world.
- fidotron 1y ago
  What is efficient varies based on changes in the prices of different elements of the process. Energy, materials, logistics, labor, these all vary over time, with the oil crisis being a huge step change both in costs to businesses and consumer behavior.
- kmeisthax 1y ago
  [dead]
randallsquared 1y ago
The curves largely break about 1971 across a wide set of areas, but the energy connection is interesting. J Storrs Hall argues in "Where is My Flying Car?" that the proximate cause is breaking the increasing availability of energy per person, which could only have been continued with very widespread nuclear, and that the turn from nuclear was a symptom of a culture of increasing regulation and excess caution, such that the only major industry that escaped the trap in the 70s and continued existing growth curves was computing. Now that computing has advanced sufficiently and is being applied to everything else, we're finally getting sudden, major advances again in other areas (electric and autonomous cars, drones, reusable rockets, pharma...), but computing is in the race against smothering that most industries lost in the 20th, and it remains to be seen whether stagnation or abundance will win. A side note is the resurgence of nuclear, and supersonic flight, etc, which suggests that maybe the problem was more about post-war culture than a systemic turn away from growth and prosperity... we'll see!
- immibis 1y ago
  Am I the only one annoyed by the continual low-level background radiation (heh) of pro-nuclear propaganda? It's just another fossil fuel. Sure, it doesn't emit CO2, but the sustainability problem is still there. I'll support nuclear expansion when I see a credible plan to complete the transition to actual renewables within 30 years, using nuclear as a stopgap. We have less than 100 years of known uranium reserves if we use it to power everything. It'll be coal and oil all over again. And now we don't need one because solar is already here.
  - randallsquared 1y ago
    We have less than 100 years of uranium assuming we use enriched uranium once, don't reprocess the "spent" fuel, don't use breeder reactors to make plutonium for further energy production (going from 100 to thousands of years at current usage rates), and don't use breeder reactors to produce U233 from thorium, which is so much more abundant and available than uranium that it would extend current use by another 100-270 times, meaning current usage at hundreds of thousands of years, with already known deposits of nuclear fuel. These aren't breakthrough technologies, but just engineering, because we already know how to do this. Electricity was forecast in the 1950s to be too cheap to meter within a few decades of building reactors, and that future was completely practical. We just chose (at least temporary) stagnation, instead. Solar is definitely cheaper than current nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly, while battery cost is also improving apace. In the short term, solar can meet most of our needs and let us turn off more coal and oil, and that's certainly useful! In the medium term, though, we can't get back on the Henry Adams curve without denser sources than sunlight, which takes up quite a bit of real estate even if we move most capture to space.
    - immibis 1y ago
      I don't know how you can say with a straight face that solar power is a stopgap and nuclear power is a long-term sustainable solution. I cannot rightly comprehend the confusion of ideas that would provoke such a statement.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
an0malous 1y ago
https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
teiferer 1y ago
> Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable Turns out that from an environmental perspective, that view was bad anyway and I'm glad it's gone for good (even if the AI hype almost makes us forget that again). I don't fully see how that implies everything having to be crap now. Lighter doesn't mean worse quality.
- swiftcoder 1y ago
  > Lighter doesn't mean worse quality For a number of product categories it means replacing solid metal parts with inferior materials, and that pretty explicitly does mean worse quality. Have you used a 1960s KitchenAid mixer? They look almost identical to models that followed - but in the 1970s KitchenAid replaced the metal drive gear with one made of nylon on the consumer-focussed models, and now if you use one heavily, you'll have to replace that gear more or less annually.
  - bigstrat2003 1y ago
    The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking? It's not inherently bad to have wear parts in a device, after all. Shear pins are a great example where you need to replace them, but something more important would break if it wasn't the shear pin, so it's worth it. IDK the design of the mixers well enough to know if that's true for them, but I do wonder if that is the case.
    - bsder 1y ago
      > The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking? That doesn't matter if it means, for example, that my new mixer can't actually mix bread dough on a higher speed anymore (citing this as it's actually a failure mode on newer (like 1970s forward) KitchenAid mixers to the point that the manual mentions it). That is an objective decrease in quality and fitness for purpose.
    - swiftcoder 1y ago
      > The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking? That is the stated justification, yes. However, in practice pre-1970s models will happily knead bread dough for years on end, and more recent models tend to explode within the first few times you attempt to make a loaf of bread (leading home bread makers to have to spend more on an expensive commercial model...)
PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago
> with the result that all sorts of objects were radically heavier than their newer equivalents except for the most energy consuming and oil dependent objects of all: cars. curious, eh?

SweetLlamaMyth 1y ago

It seems strange to me to attribute this to the 70s oil crisis vs factors like expectations of unceasing profit growth leading looking for any and all efficiencies, or globalization making extra translate into increased shipping costs from the other side of world.

fidotron 1y ago
What is efficient varies based on changes in the prices of different elements of the process. Energy, materials, logistics, labor, these all vary over time, with the oil crisis being a huge step change both in costs to businesses and consumer behavior.
kmeisthax 1y ago
[dead]

randallsquared 1y ago

The curves largely break about 1971 across a wide set of areas, but the energy connection is interesting. J Storrs Hall argues in "Where is My Flying Car?" that the proximate cause is breaking the increasing availability of energy per person, which could only have been continued with very widespread nuclear, and that the turn from nuclear was a symptom of a culture of increasing regulation and excess caution, such that the only major industry that escaped the trap in the 70s and continued existing growth curves was computing. Now that computing has advanced sufficiently and is being applied to everything else, we're finally getting sudden, major advances again in other areas (electric and autonomous cars, drones, reusable rockets, pharma...), but computing is in the race against smothering that most industries lost in the 20th, and it remains to be seen whether stagnation or abundance will win. A side note is the resurgence of nuclear, and supersonic flight, etc, which suggests that maybe the problem was more about post-war culture than a systemic turn away from growth and prosperity... we'll see!

immibis 1y ago
Am I the only one annoyed by the continual low-level background radiation (heh) of pro-nuclear propaganda? It's just another fossil fuel. Sure, it doesn't emit CO2, but the sustainability problem is still there. I'll support nuclear expansion when I see a credible plan to complete the transition to actual renewables within 30 years, using nuclear as a stopgap. We have less than 100 years of known uranium reserves if we use it to power everything. It'll be coal and oil all over again. And now we don't need one because solar is already here.
- randallsquared 1y ago
  We have less than 100 years of uranium assuming we use enriched uranium once, don't reprocess the "spent" fuel, don't use breeder reactors to make plutonium for further energy production (going from 100 to thousands of years at current usage rates), and don't use breeder reactors to produce U233 from thorium, which is so much more abundant and available than uranium that it would extend current use by another 100-270 times, meaning current usage at hundreds of thousands of years, with already known deposits of nuclear fuel. These aren't breakthrough technologies, but just engineering, because we already know how to do this. Electricity was forecast in the 1950s to be too cheap to meter within a few decades of building reactors, and that future was completely practical. We just chose (at least temporary) stagnation, instead. Solar is definitely cheaper than current nuclear, and continuing to fall rapidly, while battery cost is also improving apace. In the short term, solar can meet most of our needs and let us turn off more coal and oil, and that's certainly useful! In the medium term, though, we can't get back on the Henry Adams curve without denser sources than sunlight, which takes up quite a bit of real estate even if we move most capture to space.
  - immibis 1y ago
    I don't know how you can say with a straight face that solar power is a stopgap and nuclear power is a long-term sustainable solution. I cannot rightly comprehend the confusion of ideas that would provoke such a statement.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

an0malous 1y ago

https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/ https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/

teiferer 1y ago

> Prior to that energy was almost seen as disposable Turns out that from an environmental perspective, that view was bad anyway and I'm glad it's gone for good (even if the AI hype almost makes us forget that again). I don't fully see how that implies everything having to be crap now. Lighter doesn't mean worse quality.

swiftcoder 1y ago
> Lighter doesn't mean worse quality For a number of product categories it means replacing solid metal parts with inferior materials, and that pretty explicitly does mean worse quality. Have you used a 1960s KitchenAid mixer? They look almost identical to models that followed - but in the 1970s KitchenAid replaced the metal drive gear with one made of nylon on the consumer-focussed models, and now if you use one heavily, you'll have to replace that gear more or less annually.
- bigstrat2003 1y ago
  The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking? It's not inherently bad to have wear parts in a device, after all. Shear pins are a great example where you need to replace them, but something more important would break if it wasn't the shear pin, so it's worth it. IDK the design of the mixers well enough to know if that's true for them, but I do wonder if that is the case.
  - bsder 1y ago
    > The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking? That doesn't matter if it means, for example, that my new mixer can't actually mix bread dough on a higher speed anymore (citing this as it's actually a failure mode on newer (like 1970s forward) KitchenAid mixers to the point that the manual mentions it). That is an objective decrease in quality and fitness for purpose.
  - swiftcoder 1y ago
    > The question is, does that prevent something worse from breaking? That is the stated justification, yes. However, in practice pre-1970s models will happily knead bread dough for years on end, and more recent models tend to explode within the first few times you attempt to make a loaf of bread (leading home bread makers to have to spend more on an expensive commercial model...)

PaulDavisThe1st 1y ago

> with the result that all sorts of objects were radically heavier than their newer equivalents except for the most energy consuming and oil dependent objects of all: cars. curious, eh?