Todays appliances are built, by design, to break fast these days. So whether old (operating costs) or new (foreshortened lifespan) your appliances cost you more.
There are still some repairable brands. GE'a basic appliances (and their budget subbrands like Hotpoint) are a standout with excellent availability of parts and service data. A hotpoint electric range can be fixed by any homeowner with a screwdriver.
As I recall GE is also one of the few/only brands that operates its own service business.
I will also point out that the way inflation has tended to work is that you can still buy high quality appliances and other consumer products (e.g., tailored clothes and built-to-last leather shoes), but when you do the inflation math you have to spend a lot to get the equivalent product from decades ago.
In other words, the same quality products generally still exist, the real issue is that a bunch of low price products that didn’t used to exist now do, and average people didn’t own as much stuff as they do now.
If you buy a $2500 Speed Queen or a $10,000 Sub-Zero you’re getting the kind of quality and repairability that used to exist in more appliances.
But when it comes to a $500 washing machine or dryer, when you adjust for inflation that product did not exist 40 years ago.
The other thing I’ve heard about this issue is that the mid-range consumer luxury type stuff is the segment to avoid: built cheaply but with a lot of features that fail and a high cost. E.g., Samsung refrigerators with touch screens on them. You’ll notice that most true luxury built-in brands don’t have a laundry list of gimmick features.
I bought more or less the same dryer as the one from 1997 that it replaced. There's cost reductions in some of the parts, but the overall design is more or less the same (for example, the timer is a cheaper design, there's no little door on the lint catcher, the adjustable feet are plastic instead of metal). I expect many parts are directly interchangeable.
I guess I'm not sure what the 1997 price was, so can't really make a comparison.
Fun story with the plastic feet, the delivery drivers either didn't know that they screwed into the dryer or pretended not to know. They left them barely inserted into the bottom and then put a shim under one of them to level it. I was standing there and kind of mumbled "can't you screw the others in" but dropped it and did it myself after they left.
> but when you do the inflation math you have to spend a lot to get the equivalent product from decades ago.
But this is usually deceptively explained as being because they are far more expensive to make, when it is really 1) because of economies of scale when they are made in smaller runs often by smaller companies, or 2) intentionally segmented at that price by the same companies that sell the disposable stuff as a high-margin luxury option.
If large companies were forced into a traditional quality standard, the cost increase wouldn't be 5x, it would be more like 1.5x. It might creep up after a while, as the runs became shorter because the products weren't built to fail anymore.
Yes GE is owned by Haier, which worried me when I was researching fridges a couple years ago. But apparently most of the GE appliances are still manufactured in the U.S. and haven’t really changed much despite the change in ownership.
My GE fridge has been a disappointment. It is OK at its main function: cooling. However I've had to replace the main control board and the freezer defrost heater. The built-in water dispenser never really worked because the water line is routed too close to the freezer compartment and it freezes up. The ice maker is disconnected because its water line developed a leak and damaged my laminate floor before I noticed it. I don't think I'll be buying GE again.
The trick with fridges: Don't but ones with ice makers or water dispensers built in. There's a reason the rich install dedicated ice makers and filtered sinks.
Well, they do that because they have so much square footage that it makes sense. You need physical space to have your fridge and freezer and ice machine and cold/sparkling/filtered water dispenser separate. And of course money for lots of appliances.
I would say that it’s best to get a fridge that has a simple ice maker that’s in the freezer and water dispenser that is in the fridge interior with no weird rerouting like having the ice/water dispensed from the door (which also reduces efficiency because there’s essentially a hole in your fridge).
As an example the Sub-Zero refrigerator lineup has a simple ice maker in the freezer and then the water dispenser is optional, and it’s accessed from inside the refrigerator.
Was not immediately apparent in article but I did not read the whole thing. Beyond general repairability the other issue to me is the cost of labor. In Vietnam I can get near anything repaired because the cost of labor is so darn cheap. In America it makes no sense to be paying $100/hour usually minimum two hour repair plus the cost of the part.
I am ok with generally with having less ability to repair but I do wish more cities and companies and trade in programs for proper recycling.
Neither the article nor the linked sources even attempt to prove that modern appliances are less durable or having more issues than old appliances.
It seems to be just complaining about "computer circuit boards" in appliances, much the way people did about electronic ignition in cars, despite actually resulting in a huge increase in engine reliability because solid state has so very little to fail.
I mean, maybe people throw out a perfectly working toaster when it can't connect to Wi-Fi anymore, (or take their car to the dealer when their entertainment system acts-up) but that's not an actual reliability issue, IMHO.
Tokenization doesn't explain this kind of a mistake. If you ask about "djsjc" you would get the proper answer of 5. The claim that this is performance trade-off does not hold.
I cannot edit the question, but would like to say that I'm extremely impressed by ChatGTP and entire question was an honest curiosity about the limitations of it. It is strange that many responses are about blaming my question and example as just wrong and not about the limitations of the ChatGPT model (admirable anyway).
Our company tracks all the laptops and mobile phones. On onboarding we send them to the programmer and during offboarding we collect them back. Shipping label are always generated by us. At the end of life we sometimes give away devices to their users after resetting them. In case of laptops we mostly have a second life for them as long as they are fully functional - they are used by administration, as a second device for projects as needed, etc. But we do not plan to wind down anytime soon, so this might be a different story with a startup going bankrupt. In particular once the person responsible for administration is no longer with the company ;)
This article doesn't touch much about why plumbing is hard. I'm from Poland so I'm not only IT but also a plumber ;)
Plumbing is hard because it is not forgiving. It's as binary as IT except you can learn the outcome with some delay, once you learnt about a damage caused by a leak. Either you do a pressure tests right or repair can be expensive. And bugfixing is always tricky.
Water also goes down whether you like it or not. Think about all possible leaks inside the shower cabin. Or what is even more impressive that under a pressure the water goes everywhere possible.
Plumbing is similar to electrical engineering, except it usually doesn't kill immidiately (though working with gas is tricky anyway) but requires similar strict mental model to do right.
And when you see a plumber it seems like this person is just a physical worker. So work status misconception must be leveled with money...
I had a funny experience a week ago. One night working on a hobby web project it took me three or four hours to debug something, I finally got to bed around midnight thinking "boy, programming is hard".
The next day at work we had to find a broken heat wire in a tiled bathroom floor, running 1000 volts through the wires to try to fuse the broken wire, then heating the floor up and searching with heat-sensitive paper overlays for the likely broken spot, then breaking the tile with a hammer and digging the wire out of the mortar bed. After we found it I thought, "I'd rather hunt software bugs".
I once had to jackhammer a 4 foot wide, 26 foot long, 4 foot deep trench in my basement to replace the sanitary sewer in my house. It was old terracotta pipe and had tree roots growing into it and eventually blocked the flow. It was doing that that helped me be so thankful to have an office job. I also had to lug all the rubble upstairs in 5 gallon buckets.
I didn't. It's not good practice to fill in the trench with rubble (rubble is the big chunks of concrete with re-bar still in it, not the dirt). I left the dirt down there, along with any smaller chunks of concrete, anything smaller than a golf ball or so. Good practice states that you should fill the trench directly around the pipe with gravel which i brought down fresh, compact that and then fill dirt on top of that, which I had left down there, and then finally with newly poured concrete and re-bar. Filling in the trench with the rubble would potentially damage the new pipe I just put in. It actually wasn't bad bringing in the new gravel and sacks of concrete because gravity does the work for you. We just opened one of the windows and put two 2x4 boards to make a ramp and slid the bags down that. Just had to carry it from the truck to the window.
Good question, I don't know. The technician on site didn't have one. I guessing the camera would be faster, but the result image about the same. The nice thing about the paper is you easily can check multiple spots at once, so it's faster to divide down to the problem area.
Very cool! The tech did have some device that could measure the distance to the fault when tied into wire upstream, but I'm not sure if it was a TDR, I think he was making more rule of thumb calculations based on the characteristics of the wire. I would say though that between his voltage box, amp box, and general test tools he had the coolest tech on the jobsite in general.
My complaint is that plumbers frequently do poor work for the money.
We had some come and install an instant water heater and they cut an ugly hole in the side of the house without much thought.
At one office I worked in they called Roto-Rooter (a non-union franchise that is likely to wreck your pipes and require a call to the union plumbers afterwards) who claimed that we'd flushed a condom down the drain (very hard to believe) and wrecked the pipes so we had to call the union plumber.
Another time the sink wasn't running so we called the union plumbers, they unscrewed the aerator from the faucet, saw some crud come out and the water run and left in triumph, sure of their ability to outthink a group of mere computer nerds.
Us computer nerds were sitting at the faucet immediately after that, running it and talking about it. The now aerator free faucet clogged up again within 2 minutes of the plumbers leaving.
> My complaint is that plumbers frequently do poor work for the money.
Considering the quality of many expensive website and software implementations I've been required to use throughout the years at various jobs, this problem is not unique to plumbers.
I live in Poland. We are recently being recognized as a developed economy most often. Still, we earn 1/3 in dollar terms per Capita compared to the US or Germany.
I think 4 days week would result in people having two jobs regularly. I wonder if the situation is simalar with basic job workers in more advanced economies.
One interesing point is that people in my IT company were willing to put 5-10% of their income in exchange for work from home. But this is IT.
I think that the right way to go is not to reduce the number of hours but just allow people to work 4 days per week with hourly rate intact. This might be a very welcomed option by many people.
Also - signing up for this in the high inflation time might work well instead of raising compensations. So this is a good time to carry such experiments.
I am also from Poland and I would be willing to sacrifice 20% of my salary for 1 extra day off per week. I would certainly not look for another job. Also in my employment agreement there is a rule stating that I need my current employer approval before I get a side gig.
I even expect that this would have a rather minor impact on my work (like 10% decrease). I think for jobs like writing CRUD screens for entire week the productivity drop may be more significant.
Actually this inspires me to ask my employer this January for such offer.
Disclaimer: Single person, no children or other commitments.
> Also in my employment agreement there is a rule stating that I need my current employer approval before I get a side gig.
I do not think this is lawful. In our agreements we only prohibit doing a work for our competitors or directly competitive work. If you like your employer then do not come up with this with them, but stay informed of your rights.
> were willing to put 5-10% of their income in exchange for work from home.
Why? The company is going to use your home as an office and they should be paying that 5-10% extra.
Why business paying corporate landlord for office space is okay, but when Joe Public offers his own lowly place then it's a no no?
When people don't recognise their value, they are prime for being exploited.
We did the experiment to check if people are serious about WFH. There is a lot of work to make it happen inside a company. In particular to treat remote people as first class citizens. WFH was also a choice after covid and not necessity.
With a pay cut we are sure people are serious about WFH and not only demanding.
>Still, we earn 1/3 in dollar terms per Capita compared to the US or Germany.
It's not a meaningful comparison without cost of living adjustment. You're not paying 3000 dollars for a one bedroom apartment either. In fact last time I visited Poland I think a place in central Warsaw was like 600 bucks. Poland is exceptionally affordable.
For those on tech wages, which have reached near parity with the west, or work remotely for western companies, yes. But not everyone in Poland earns tech wages.
Congratulations for your contribution to PM, creating and sharing your toolbox. I wish I will be able to accomplish releasing such work for my process as well at some point in time.
Building a team is always a turn-key project. Tools are a part of it.
Time will tell if this is going to be a widely adopted framework or you are able to inspire several people with your ideas and some of them get adopted in other tools. Even if it only allowed you to better understand your ideas it is worth it. Once again - congratulations and continue inspiring others!
Reed-Solomon is the foundation of today's computing. It is used in data storage (hdd, ssd) and in data transfer protocols. It allows for building of a reliable system on top of an unreliable real life fenomens with desired level of certainty. This is so incredible tech that once implemented we can just forget about it in the higher level abstractions.
My story about ipv6 is from a travel. I connected to a friend's wifi. It worked for some time and then a strange thing happened. I was able to google but I was not able to connect to my company's services. I debugged the cause and it looked like the router received ipv6 address but not an ipv4. There was some tornado going around that might something to it.
This was the first time I felt like being on the ipv6 network. I also wonder why I was not able to access to ipv4 servers, I assume that in India people have no problem accessing ipv4 only networks.
Anyway - this was the first time I had to deal with ipv6 :)
On the business side. One ipv4 costs us $3/mo. We never had any problem with this, didn't feel any business reason to upgrade and in particular we (as most of the companies) do not have any permanent test of ipv6 connectivity going on. So even if this had been setup at some point, we would never notice a regression here.
So - unless our customers started asking for ipv6, government pushed some regulation or the address' prise would go up - I do not think we will do anything about ipv6, like most other companies.
The $3 are an early warning signal. You can start upgrading slowly on the cheap when you have all the time in the world, or you can do it for much more money and higher risks come crunch time, when you "see a business reason."
I don't have an axe to grind with IPv6 in particular, but I wish managers who consistently make short-sighted management decisions when the writing is so obviously on the wall, would face unemployment.
Generally, IPv6-first networks use shared IPv4 addresses for connectivity to legacy servers. Think CG-NAT but slightly more optimised.
I don't know why a tornado would only knock out IPv4, seems to me that the prefix administration for IPv6 should run on the same location as the DHCP administration for IPv4.
I would've switched most of my systems over to IPv6 by now if it wasn't for my workplace using Ubiquity hardware that still lacks IPv6 hardware acceleration, forcing the admins to disable it or face unnecessary network slowdowns. I like to be able to use my password manager and such on their WiFi just in case.
Indian regulation forcing IPv6 availability may lead to limited IPv4 availability in one of the biggest developing economies in the world, which may lead to business reasons for switching over. I can only hope, we've been stuck with IPv4 for way too long.
Sweden is going to join NATO soon. So do not expect VPNs operating from their teritory and under their law to be any different then the rest of Europe, as it was before.
Meh, I generally agree with the laws of my country and of the EU, so I don’t really care if they can obtain a warrant to wiretap me. I prefer to live in a society where law enforcement can be effective (with checks!) than one where bad things can happen with zero negative consequences.
