5 ms·

And yet it's socialism that has a reputation for shoddy products. How many people want to buy a Lada?

by WalterBright 24d ago

tristor 24d ago
[flagged]
- tomhow 24d ago
  We've asked you before not to post slurs against groups of people on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. Please stop. We have to ban accounts that do this habitually. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - deleted 24d ago
    [deleted]
Xirdus 24d ago
Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is guaranteed to last you years.
- WalterBright 24d ago
  I lived through the 60s and know what the goods were. TVs, for example. They had tubes then, and crummy B+W pictures. They were constantly going on the fritz, to the point that drugstores had tube testing stations. You'd bring in the tubes from the TV and test them in this device that looked like an arcade game, and buy replacements. Cars then required a lot more maintenance then. And I mean a lot. I've owned and repaired them. I can go on, but the point is made.
  - Xirdus 24d ago
    I'm sorry but I will need a second opinion. I just don't believe there was not a single brand of TV that was reliably good the way some brands of clothes, furniture, power tools, phones, spices, perfume, refrigerators, light fixtures, record players, guitars, lawn mowers, and basically all non-perishable goods on the market were. You could get the cheap stuff, or you could get the quality stuff, and you knew which is which. Neither of these is true nowadays.
    - dghlsakjg 24d ago
      What they're describing is that TVs had consumable items in the circuitry. It isn't possible to have had a TV without tubes. Tubes were basically really fancy lightbulbs and had a finite life. No amount of quality could make consumables not necessary. TVs needed maintenance and manual back then. They sucked. It's like saying that buying a higher quality car means you don't need to buy tires. The broader point is that we think that things lasted longer back then because of survivorship bias, but on the whole they really didn't. The incredible old fridge in grandpas garage is incredible because it was an exception. 100k miles used to be a car that was ready for the wrecker. You used to have to get tune-ups several times per year where points, timing, carburetors, spark plugs, and other things needed replacing or adjusting. That's why every gas station had a mechanic. Now, half those things have been replaced by more reliable longer lasting mechanisms that adjust themselves, and the stuff that still exists like spark plugs last for years instead of months. The highest quality stuff from back then doesn't really stack up to many modern things, especially if you pay the same inflation adjusted price. From your list: clothes: higher quality, several times more expensive (inflation adjusted. Levis 501 were $90 adjusted in 1975, Amazon has them for $45) furniture: cheap shit and expensive stuff was available, just like now power tools: almost universally, I would trade old corded, brushed tools for new cordless brushless. Old machine tools are the exception where old is as good as new. phones: you didn't have a choice, the phone company gave you whatever they had in stock and charged you a monthly fee for the privilege. spices: less variety and freshness. Good luck getting spices that weren't part of your local cuisine. perfume: no idea refrigerators: incredibly inefficient, harmful chemicals, and today you can still buy a VERY nice fridge if you are willing to pay what a shitty fridge from 1975 would have cost ($2,200 inflation adjusted for the cheapest one from sears). light fixtures: same as furniture, you get what you pay for then and now record players: see furniture guitars: see furniture lawn mower: see furniture The enshitiffication of known brands is a real problem today, but that doesn't mean that everything was perfect and known back then.
saturn8601 24d ago
Everyday I am reminded about these brain dead arguments in my local town by people who can't think one step ahead. You made this generalized statement probably from some propaganda you've read or some trauma you've experienced growing up. Yet, if you look at the current state of the situation its in clear decline. The only ways forward are to accelerate the decline and live with the consequences (ie. doing nothing) or to consider moving in the other direction(ie. leftist things). In the US I think there are two sources of this mentality: 50% of the population don't have a passport so they have never seen how people in say Europe/Canada deal with this, EU/Canada/AUS/UK have higher standards and don't tolerate this kind of crap as much Example: Hyundai removed immobilizers in their cars...but only in the US because Canada/EU had regulations requiring an immobilizer. End result: Someone on TikTok discovered that you could steal cars with a screwdriver and a USB cable. This resulted in insurance costs shooting up, people stuck without cars due to lengthy repair times and overall lower quality of lives. The braindead response that comes from people with OP's mentality would be "you should have researched the car better beforehand its all your fault". Yea ok people with limited budgets and time looked at which cars had good reviews and Kia/Hyundai were winning many of those (likely BS ) awards like "North American Car of the year". People are already stressed for time trying to survive in this jungle and now the "free market" played games with them and anyone suffering from this might be having a worse life now because of this mess. Why are they having to spend all their miniscule free time just to not be screwed? Wouldn't it have been better if we had European style regulations that would have established a minimum standard that all cars in this era should have? NO! We can't have things like that because people like OP (and a lot of conservatives) have these imprinted beliefs from a lifetime of fear mongering, or trauma if they immigrated from some garbage country with poor institutions(ex. Cuban immigrants opposed to Universal healthcare or eastern european immigrants opposed to anything with the word [commun/social]ist) I've volunteered in the past for Progressive candidates that have a #1 criteria for not taking any corporate money. It is so much of a time sacrifice to get an AOC or Bernie type candidate only to have that progress stymied by endless amount of money pouring in on the other side. Why are we even doing it when day after day people like OP crop up with this nonsense? Whats the point of constantly fighting to enlighten person after person who starts off their beliefs with these 1-dimensional arguments? Its makes me want to just watch it all burn down just as long as people with your mentality go down with the ship. I get why a lot of wealthier people are just leaving the country. The fix requires decades of effort and will just break many people that try to go down that path. If you are wealthy and you have this one and only life, is it really worth it to have to deal with people like OP? Or is it better to just leave and let them wallow in their ignorance. I guess it depends on how important the country is to you. Even that concept of loyalty to a country seems to be eroding in this era of passport wealth.

And yet it's socialism that has a reputation for shoddy products. How many people want to buy a Lada?

tristor 24d ago

[flagged]

tomhow 24d ago
We've asked you before not to post slurs against groups of people on HN. The guidelines make it clear we're trying for something better here. Please stop. We have to ban accounts that do this habitually. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- deleted 24d ago
  [deleted]

Xirdus 24d ago

Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is guaranteed to last you years.

WalterBright 24d ago
I lived through the 60s and know what the goods were. TVs, for example. They had tubes then, and crummy B+W pictures. They were constantly going on the fritz, to the point that drugstores had tube testing stations. You'd bring in the tubes from the TV and test them in this device that looked like an arcade game, and buy replacements. Cars then required a lot more maintenance then. And I mean a lot. I've owned and repaired them. I can go on, but the point is made.
- Xirdus 24d ago
  I'm sorry but I will need a second opinion. I just don't believe there was not a single brand of TV that was reliably good the way some brands of clothes, furniture, power tools, phones, spices, perfume, refrigerators, light fixtures, record players, guitars, lawn mowers, and basically all non-perishable goods on the market were. You could get the cheap stuff, or you could get the quality stuff, and you knew which is which. Neither of these is true nowadays.
  - dghlsakjg 24d ago
    What they're describing is that TVs had consumable items in the circuitry. It isn't possible to have had a TV without tubes. Tubes were basically really fancy lightbulbs and had a finite life. No amount of quality could make consumables not necessary. TVs needed maintenance and manual back then. They sucked. It's like saying that buying a higher quality car means you don't need to buy tires. The broader point is that we think that things lasted longer back then because of survivorship bias, but on the whole they really didn't. The incredible old fridge in grandpas garage is incredible because it was an exception. 100k miles used to be a car that was ready for the wrecker. You used to have to get tune-ups several times per year where points, timing, carburetors, spark plugs, and other things needed replacing or adjusting. That's why every gas station had a mechanic. Now, half those things have been replaced by more reliable longer lasting mechanisms that adjust themselves, and the stuff that still exists like spark plugs last for years instead of months. The highest quality stuff from back then doesn't really stack up to many modern things, especially if you pay the same inflation adjusted price. From your list: clothes: higher quality, several times more expensive (inflation adjusted. Levis 501 were $90 adjusted in 1975, Amazon has them for $45) furniture: cheap shit and expensive stuff was available, just like now power tools: almost universally, I would trade old corded, brushed tools for new cordless brushless. Old machine tools are the exception where old is as good as new. phones: you didn't have a choice, the phone company gave you whatever they had in stock and charged you a monthly fee for the privilege. spices: less variety and freshness. Good luck getting spices that weren't part of your local cuisine. perfume: no idea refrigerators: incredibly inefficient, harmful chemicals, and today you can still buy a VERY nice fridge if you are willing to pay what a shitty fridge from 1975 would have cost ($2,200 inflation adjusted for the cheapest one from sears). light fixtures: same as furniture, you get what you pay for then and now record players: see furniture guitars: see furniture lawn mower: see furniture The enshitiffication of known brands is a real problem today, but that doesn't mean that everything was perfect and known back then.

saturn8601 24d ago

Everyday I am reminded about these brain dead arguments in my local town by people who can't think one step ahead. You made this generalized statement probably from some propaganda you've read or some trauma you've experienced growing up. Yet, if you look at the current state of the situation its in clear decline. The only ways forward are to accelerate the decline and live with the consequences (ie. doing nothing) or to consider moving in the other direction(ie. leftist things). In the US I think there are two sources of this mentality: 50% of the population don't have a passport so they have never seen how people in say Europe/Canada deal with this, EU/Canada/AUS/UK have higher standards and don't tolerate this kind of crap as much Example: Hyundai removed immobilizers in their cars...but only in the US because Canada/EU had regulations requiring an immobilizer. End result: Someone on TikTok discovered that you could steal cars with a screwdriver and a USB cable. This resulted in insurance costs shooting up, people stuck without cars due to lengthy repair times and overall lower quality of lives. The braindead response that comes from people with OP's mentality would be "you should have researched the car better beforehand its all your fault". Yea ok people with limited budgets and time looked at which cars had good reviews and Kia/Hyundai were winning many of those (likely BS ) awards like "North American Car of the year". People are already stressed for time trying to survive in this jungle and now the "free market" played games with them and anyone suffering from this might be having a worse life now because of this mess. Why are they having to spend all their miniscule free time just to not be screwed? Wouldn't it have been better if we had European style regulations that would have established a minimum standard that all cars in this era should have? NO! We can't have things like that because people like OP (and a lot of conservatives) have these imprinted beliefs from a lifetime of fear mongering, or trauma if they immigrated from some garbage country with poor institutions(ex. Cuban immigrants opposed to Universal healthcare or eastern european immigrants opposed to anything with the word [commun/social]ist) I've volunteered in the past for Progressive candidates that have a #1 criteria for not taking any corporate money. It is so much of a time sacrifice to get an AOC or Bernie type candidate only to have that progress stymied by endless amount of money pouring in on the other side. Why are we even doing it when day after day people like OP crop up with this nonsense? Whats the point of constantly fighting to enlighten person after person who starts off their beliefs with these 1-dimensional arguments? Its makes me want to just watch it all burn down just as long as people with your mentality go down with the ship. I get why a lot of wealthier people are just leaving the country. The fix requires decades of effort and will just break many people that try to go down that path. If you are wealthy and you have this one and only life, is it really worth it to have to deal with people like OP? Or is it better to just leave and let them wallow in their ignorance. I guess it depends on how important the country is to you. Even that concept of loyalty to a country seems to be eroding in this era of passport wealth.