Hopefully the wheel will turn soon and product people will rule the roost once again. We need some MBA types as well, but there needs to be balance in the force.
This is the first time that I've seen the term "MBA" being verbed (at least with that meaning) and yet I understand exactly what you mean and I fully agree with you. Congratulations if you coined this usage, it's a great way of expressing something for which I was missing a word.
I’d recommend avoiding this lazy intellectual path because it’s not only incorrect in this context, it perverts your thinking in other contexts as well.
Tim Cook is an Industrial Engineer with an MBA - a perfect combination. Apple is actually a great example of a company that produces a lot of value and also captures it in the form of dollars.
From this point of view, to be "MBA'ed" is to focus on profit while forgetting about producing value. This then waters down brands that were established on the bedrock of value produced by product people.
The reason this is lazy thinking in my view is because usually it’s not associated with the good (Apple example, nobody goes “dang they really MBA’d the price on that MacBook Pro that I love) and because when something “bad” occurs there’s no understanding or analysis of the situation that lead to the current state. Just a bunch of “that’s bad, must be MBAs screwing me”. You find similar issues with “those Silicon Valley engineers all screwing us and stealing our attention” and other common phrases. The MBA one I think is even less nuanced than the contrived Silicon Valley one.
If we go back to the MBA thing. Well. I have one. I don’t like fast fashion. I wouldn’t want to support it even if it made more money. The degree doesn’t make you do anything, your incentives and who you are as a person are much more powerful. There’s no class on fast fashion (or similar) where MBA students are trained to maximize profit at all costs or not think about sociological impact. At least at Ohio State (Fisher) that was the case in all classes I attended. We spent a lot more time learning about not doing such things and how they are bad for business and society in the long run. My classmates had a lot of empathy. Maybe it’s because like me they were/are regular people just trying to do better.
So I really hate seeing this. To the extent it can happen on an internet board I find it a little offensive and disrespectful. Not a big deal or something just saying if you joined some forum and everybody said all the bad decisions were because of software engineers, well you’d probably at least get tired of hearing about it. Especially when you’re a regular person trying to be nice and do good, value-add work. Idk. Thanks for your comment.
As an investor, I look for companies that do well on both ends of the spectrum.
Let me give you another contrived example:
“Social media co is found to have withheld information that lead to bad social thing”
“This is what happens when companies become Software Engineered. They lose all focus on the customer and society just to create better algorithms”.
You don’t think that if we just constantly repeated something like this that would be a bad thing and might alienate people? Especially when it’s not true and ignores good things that people have done as well?
What I’ll say is this. It’ll stop being lazy and disrespectful when large groups here also give credit where credit is due instead of only blame without evidence.
* Note that I don’t actually care, I’m never at home offended by something, I’m just commenting on the nature of the action, which I would classify as disrespectful.
I guess those Silicon Valley software engineers have earned the title of bad actors with all the addicting software they write! There isn’t much sympathy around here for the plight of the poor maligned Software Engineer. After all you make a killing ruining people’s lives and destroying their ability to interact with their community with your addicting algorithms and your advertisements. You wait until a company relies on your cloud software or tools and then you raise the price just to squeeze every last drop of revenue. You have no moral compass and if you did, you wouldn’t build this stuff. I mean all you care about is career advancement. Build and ship a product and then move on before it gets shut down for not being viable. Skills? Hardly. You run easy pipelines and use software tools only you can afford to invest in to make you feel super productive while you ruin people’s lives. All in the name of getting enough “I shipped that” to put you on the executive CTO track before you dump dog shit companies on public equity markets. *
Same song different dance. Not buying it.
* I don’t actually believe this, nor do I believe similar lazy comments about any degree or profession because they are dumb and lazy intellectual positions.
You know, as someone supposed to be targeted here, I would agree, we need to take more personal and collective responsibility in what work we accept to do. This is a problem of culture. It's fair to point us out as a group when it's this systemic. Even if it's a small portion of people who are actually part of the problematic situations, the majority still accepts it for what it is, seniors will happily hire engineers without moral compass, FB and Palantir engineers working on destructive stuff still have a lot of street cred.
Of course it's frustrating being lumped together with the bad ones. And there's little you can do as an individual when you're outnumbered or outpowered. But those who can should do what they can to do good and not participate in the bad.
That aside, would it be fair to say you have an issue with that they scope the tribe/group they're accusing completely wrong? That MBAs are just a caricature if the people they're actually talking about, some of whom don't have an MBA and many MBAs are not those people? If so, agreed, it's a lazy and unfair one.
Yes, generally speaking, I’d agree with that. I simply take issue with that actual espoused sentiment that “if something bad happens it must be an MBA type” and if at the same company something good happens said MBA type couldn’t possibly deserve credit.
> You know, as someone supposed to be targeted here, I would agree, we need to take more personal and collective responsibility in what work we accept to do.
I agree too. But I would also say in a similar vein it wouldn’t be fair to go around and say “those software engineering types” as a response ya know?
But... people do use a very similar term, overengineered. Quite appropriately. You are absolutely allowed, encouraged, to call out someone specifying a product to the nines because they can. See Juicero, I'd argue Peloton, a.. decent proportion of products that involve Heroku or Kubernetes.
But so are engineers allowed to call out someone playing financial find-the-lady to obscure what they're really doing: using trust relationships built over decades, if not centuries, to fuck over customers.
Well that's good that you were in a humane class ; from the people i know in France who received "MBA"-like education, it sounds like the exception, though. Are you familiar with critiques of neoliberal micromanagement, or as David Graeber's put it manageurial feudalism? How else would you explain the rise of bureaucracy ruling even non-profits (!) and ruining everything for everyone who cares about what they do?
> My classmates had a lot of empathy. Maybe it’s because like me they were/are regular people just trying to do better.
Cool, but how can you change the system by following its own rules? Do you feel that as an MBA working in a company you can go against the stream of anti-social control-based measures? I know as a random worker it doesn't work (which is why we have unions and cooperatives) but maybe you have a different perspective to share.
> Not a big deal or something just saying if you joined some forum and everybody said all the bad decisions were because of software engineers, well you’d probably at least get tired of hearing about it.
Well, the thing is as a class both we software people and you business people are ruining the lives of literally billions of people. So we're bound to get some resentment. Still, as Nabil Hassein points out in his talk "Computing, Climate Change, and All our Relationships", it's very mild. (paraphrasing) Given the evil we do to society as a whole, and the fate that's usually reserved to collaborators of oppressive regimes, angry messages on forums and stoning Silicon Valley buses is just the beginning and we should be very careful whose side of the barricade we are on when the revolution does come. I strongly recommend to watch the rest of the talk :)
Here's another example: made in China has a connotation of cheap and low quality, despite the fact that the iPhone and all the other high quality electronic products are made in China too. But if someone says "made in china" we know they're referring to the cheap stuff.
Apple also has a pretty accessible recycling program but more importantly Apple products hold their value more, leading to a pretty good used market. No doubt this is bolstered by Apple’s fairly generous global warranty policy that is also transferrable.
Btw the “crippling” you referred to was apple throttling phones so weakened batteries were able to supply enough voltage to prevent the phone from randomly shutting off. It was not some secret attempt to blanket slow down old phones. If you replaced old batteries the problem would not happened. It was just bad communication and built up sentiment that old phones kept getting slower with each new update.
Yes the Fairphone are doing well thank you. Very easy to tear apart, setup the system of your choice, and find replacement parts for.
> Apple products hold their value more, leading to a pretty good used market.
What does that mean? Money is just imaginary numbers. A phone is a phone: either it works good or it doesn't, how much and why it's valued by people brainwashed into a commercial cult [0] matters little in the equation.
> No doubt this is bolstered by Apple’s fairly generous global warranty policy that is also transferrable.
Kudos for them to respect the law. Although i must point out that for some years, at least in France, they were obviously breaking EU laws by saying their phones had only 1y warranty (2y minimum by law) and selling people "upgrades" to get the 2 years.
> It was not some secret attempt to blanket slow down old phones. If you replaced old batteries the problem would not happened.
Do you have a source for this? It's the first time i hear that explanation, and it certainly was not put forward by Apple in their update log at the time (suggesting malice). Also worth noting that Apple makes it harder than it should to crack your phone open to replace the battery, so i don't think that's a strong argument in their defense.
[0] https://www.techspot.com/news/43884-neurologists-apple-is-li...
Transferrable warranties are very much not the law in the US. This, along with a healthy used/refurbished market mean that old devices stay in use longer. The saying is reduce, reuse, and THEN recycle. But the impact in reduce and reuse is much better than recycling.
I’m not sure what you mean “a phone just works or it doesn’t.” I’ve never heard of the Fairphone but I’m sure if it has good usability it would be catching on. I had in fact switched to Android for a year before and went back to iPhone after countless both hardware and software based quality issues.
Apple is not a religion, at least it does not affect me in that way. While I use a macbook and iPhone, I am fairly against their other products (like unnecessary icloud usage, apple watch).
If anything it sounds more like users of esoteric android feature phones (where the feature is some arbitrary definition of sustainability) is under some cult or religion.
The Fairphone you mentioned has lukewarm reviews, is objectively an inferior phone aside from its more sustainable materials. https://www.theverge.com/22716194/fairphone-4-review
If you look at mass market phones with actual market share, Apple does way better on the sustainability side by simply *keeping old phones usable.” If you want to be sustainable reduce first. Then reuse. An old iphone being resold or handed down is by definition made out of 100% recycled parts.
I don’t know when I learned it, but I’ve looked it up a few times to be sure I’m not day dreaming; after the WW2, declassified propaganda research became the basis for ad and marketing programs in university.
It’s always been about establishing a mood and inserting a meme to go with it. Maybe that’s “gotten worse” as we whittle stats looking for growth. I think people are just aware of what’s always been true.
Somewhere along the way it became blind allegiance to a certain kind of agency, like a religion. We’re all busy FOMOing, being ourselves, like the Sprite commercials told us, we miss that we’re just shuffling along the same old routine as dad and grandpa, feeling too unique to be required to grow a potato or sew a pillow.
Circling high minded wisdom isn’t new. Tribal chieftains, god kings, preachers, now the nerds promising human longevity and prosperity for all-time to come… if we all just follow this model, it’s ours for the taking! Not so new.
I’m still waiting to be impressed.
Onward with the next generation rug pull. They got pensions in the 80-90s. It was reported Trump and co were looking into leveraging 401ks for gambling, but they used covid to hand over stacks of cash without question to leverage the average workers debtors prison they find themselves in.
It’s the circle of life, Simba.
When you buy something in the UK/Europe, anything really, it needs to meet 3 criteria[0]:
1. Fit for purpose: i.e. if it says "running shoes", then shoes should be suitable for running. If you use them to hammer nails, then it's on you.
2. As described: match the description, model number, etc
3. Satisfactory quality: this is the key ... and it depends on the product, but generally it relies on common sense. i.e. if you bought a washing machine for 2000EUR, you can expect it to last, let's say, 20 years of regular family use... If you bought a 2nd hand washing machine for 50EUR, probably can't expect it to last more than a year...
The problem is not with the law, but generally speaking, companies don't give a toss. Nobody's going to fine them... And worse, consumers are easily misled by warranty periods and just don't expect the protection. Even if they paid 2000EUR for a washing machine and it failed after 2 years, they are more likely to just get a new one. Even if legally they can require the retailer (not even the manufacturer) to replace or repair it because the product wasn't of sufficient quality. The burden of proof is usually on the consumer though, which kinda makes it harder though.
[0] https://www.moneyhelper.org.uk/en/getting-help-and-advice/co...
Buy a washer, are a single man, use it once a week? It breaks in 15 years? Covered.
Are a family of 8, wash 2x daily, it breaks after manufacture's stated warranty? Probably, not covered.
This helps, because it stops parts that are designed to fail due to time, instead of usage, from destroying the product.
There are a few government agencies which will help you with this too, instead of going to court, by merely a form to fill out.
That sounds fair, until it's not. It's perfectly normal that a washer as a whole fails after 15 years: the thing is the belt is the only part that should fail and it should be easy to replace. Like with IT parts, manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure parts are incompatible with one another and hard to replace.
Most electro-mechanic devices i've seen fail in the past two/three decades were due to electronics: heater thermostat (not the IoT kind, the dumb kind), washing machine program selector (also dumb kind), etc. Likewise in auto industry it was reported that most vehicles being recalled in the past years in USA were due to electronics failing, not mechanics.
I personally find that outrageous and bet everyone would be better off if consumer products had standard bodies mandating use of specific interchangeable parts (like we have for electric/USB sockets or lightbulbs), and if it was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart).
Mandating a >20y warranty and duty of available spare parts is in my view the path of least effort for regulators: it will significantly raise the overall price of pushing out new incompatible models. Manufacturers would only release a device once every decade once they have achieved some significant efficiency/usability gains, instead of releasing parts-incompatible new designs for bad products every month just to profit. If you add in some standards regulations dictating interoperable formats for specific parts, that would start to look like an eco-friendly user-benefiting regulation.
Of course amateur industry like Pine64 needs to be exempt from such regulations to allow for innovation, but customer devices are a currently a nightmare destroying our planets and ruining our lives and wallets. I applaud Quebec for taking those steps, but they simply won't cut it.
PS: How is IoT even legal? In 99% of cases, it introduces unnecessary complexity and fragility, and in most cases has glaring security concerns.
To please the 'mah free market' types, we shouldn't make it illegal - we should ship broken good back to the manufacturer and have them disasemble the device into pristine materials for perfect recylcing. Breach of recycling laws shiould be a criminal offence - if I litter on the streets, I can literally go to jail, so why is a company above the law in this regard? (and so many others)
It will be so expensive to do, the effect will be the same
After that we have to get the people that get government subsidied for reprocessing, but their reprosessing is to ship our plastic illegally to poor nations where they are dumpled in the ocean
That’s because energy efficiency does tend to improve.
The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade.
It’s improvements in precision and knowledge of materials that tightened down the variability for individual components, making it possible to construct something that is likely to survive the decade, then see everything failing at around the same time. Cutting down on over-provisioning in this manner obviously saves resources and costs, as well.
That might be true in terms of CO2 and energy efficiency, although the only sources i've found on the topic gave very opposite results. But no study that i know of accounts for pollution (waste water and polluted surroundings of extraction sites, refinement sites, assembly sites, and "recycling" sites) so i'm tempted to argue that anything we don't manufacture is better for the environment than better efficiency.
> The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade.
I strongly disagree with this interpretation. First, because industry routinely employs bad parts and bad design on purpose (planned obsolescence, eg. televisions placing heat-sensitive capacitors near heat sources). But also because an individual part failing is in my view OK as long as this part is standard and easy to source.
There are some environmental/logistic concerns if you want to repair old devices given the gazillion incompatible spare parts they each use. But if they all used standard parts, we could and should have repair shops run as a free public service to avoid throwing stuff away. This in itself would do more for the environment than any "green new deal" would ever do.
P(no parts fail within the first two years) =
1 - P(<y>)^((number of parts) * (number of days))
I'm skeptical about your first assertion -- think of the effect of a power surge. I don't agree with your second assertion at all, from my experience of cheap devices that fail not long after their warranty expires.
And yet you failed to account for the embodied energy in building the product and the fact that maintaining any appliance or equipment requires repairs. So there is quite a bit to disagree with.
It is much more wasteful to build a product with no methods of repair, noting that a large number of components will statistically fail due to variability of tolerances or usage patterns.
A 50 yr product requires maintenance, replaceable parts and access to documentation. All of these are lacking in our modern consumer environment. You can blame this on complexity, or designs towards sleekness or what not but the truth is that product failure after a short amount of time (planned obsolescence) creates a reoccurring customer base, and the ability to pass off cheaper parts that don't need to be able to handle removal (glue vs. screws, etc.).
It's not necessary to achieve zero failures, but it creates incentives for manufactures to use higher quality parts.
I am supportive of setting minimum lifespans for certain classes of products and to expwct manufacturers to be liable for that performance.
the factory that built that refrigerator heat pump from the 70' is unlikely to still be making it.
as of today it would be already a big improvement if the was a law saying: "if a part is no longer produced or sold by the IP owner then it is legal to recreate and sell clones of that part"
Yes but why? Why do we have 400 different models of heat pump for every fridge out there? I can understand that once every decade or so a new tech comes out that's worthy of developing parts from. But even then the new parts could be retrofitted into existing designs.
> "if a part is no longer produced or sold by the IP owner then it is legal to recreate and sell clones of that part"
That would be a huge improvement. What would be an even better improvement would be to abolish so-called IP entirely and to mandate actual durability for all parts sold. Think about lightbulbs: the parts/socket are standard (no IP involved), every factory can produce them, and yet we still have crazy bad durability.
I am very skeptical: Washing machine has two functions: Spinning and heating water. heating is 99% efficient, and electric motors are like 95% efficient - where is the improvement coming from? Is is smart features? What do they do, instead of spinning left it spins right?
What about an oven or a kettle, there is no possible improvement, and I bet the shoddily made ones are actualyl less efficient and worse insulated.
The most water-efficient models in our ratings use an average of 10 gallons of water, 75 percent less than older models.
https://www.consumerreports.org/washing-machines/best-eco-fr...
For example even if my phone charger were to get twice as efficient, it’s drawing very little power, given that it spends most of its time unplugged: it uses a fraction of a watt. That means that I would have to use it for an extremely long time to get near to the amount of energy used to manufacture a new one.
This doesn’t take into account the savings in drinkable water which has most likely been through an energy-intensive process as well.
If you have collective washing machines as a public service running 24/7, the tradeoff may be worth it, but as a general rule it's certainly not the case. Extracting and refining materials for industrial processes consumes millions and millions of m³ of water and a lot of energy.
Our perception as consumers is skewed because the price we pay for electricity/water makes it economically more affordable to us to get newer devices, but from a resource usage perspective, that's certainly not a good deal for the planet. If we paid water/electricity the price that big industries do, we wouldn't even think getting a new device was a reasonable choice.
Did we discover new phisics of washing? Do we have any reason to believe further improvement is possible?
This is a physical process, you can't have infinite improvement - there is a certain minimum amount of water required to dissolve detergent, and it can be easilly calculated.
They don't do much, does anyone have a real explanation without any handwaving?
The new machines are better. I'm not an expert, but I think the biggest differences are: sensors to stop adding water when it isn't necessary, a really powerful spinner in the washer that dries the clothes better, powerful spinner in the dryer. Btw, my washing machine is top load, fwiw.
Oh, and to answer a different question: why didn't we have this stuff years ago? I think, no one cared enough to do it.
The old top loader basically filled up a big tub with hot water and sloshed it around a bit.
Modern front loaders just incrementally add the amount of water needed as determined by weight. Presumably wouldn’t have worked nearly as well with the available detergents of 50 years ago.
Secondly, while I never used a top loader, from everything I've read, they are worse in every dimention, so the comparison seems inappropriate - you are introducing extra variables.
Also I am not clear why 'incrementally adding water' was not possible previously, People built a 'smart' toaster 70 years ago, that could sence how cooked your bread is, and it was purely mechanical:
https://www.theverge.com/22801890/sunbeam-radiant-control-to...
Added: And toasters still do a crap job of figuring out done-ness.
A possible future improvement could be delayed start that communicates with time of use metering or something, although this would have to be implemented in such a way that the software itself wouldn't turn the machine into a piece of junk in 3 short years (eg libre software).
I suspect there are also many sensor-based improvements that could give machines more intelligent processing, but anyone who has repaired appliances knows that BOM cost rules all. So those would seemingly rely on less time-based manifest-destiny "innovation" and more on designing machines with more value in the first place.
Certainly there not necessarily anything wrong with open source controller software but it’s no Panacea either.
And what surveillance? My heating system isn’t networked at all.
By surveillance I'm referring to what would pass for "remote notifications" of system status (after the possible bad sensor was detected). The IoTrash solution would be to backhaul your system's data to a surveillance cloud, require you to sign up for email spam, install a bespoke app that would spam you with useless notifications, faux-consent to a ridiculous anti-privacy contract, etc. Whereas in the libre world, user-focused incentives are allowed to define functionality and that notification could be a simple single email.
Making the point in general, in order for complex software to not be some terrible black box, it needs to expose its internal state to users who want to see it. Libre software tends to do that (as many users are developers), while non-libre software tends to lock all that up and thus severely limits reliability xor complexity.
Individuals are of course welcome to hack together what they want using Arduinos or whatever.
Again I very deliberately do not have a smart thermostat or other network connections to my heating so no surveillance is going on. I do have network-connected temperature sensor but it’s purely passive.
I too critically rely on heating. As system complexity increases with things like outside temperature sensors, I would much rather have visibility into their workings than not. In the middle of the night, that could be the difference between a quick ten minute diagnose and override, or waiting some hours for an emergency service call.
I had a similar failure with my hot water boiler, where an older solid state control failed such that when the circulator would kick on the burner would shut off. This allowed it to limp along heating, until a day when it was too cold out and I realized it wasn't keeping up.
re: libre software, my point isn't really about being able to audit the code, but rather about having a cross-device software-maintainer-maintained codebase that users choose to use.
FWIW another, probably better, way to mitigate this particular external temperature sensor failure mode would be a second larger control loop. When the indoor temperature is more than a few degrees below the setpoint (not as a result of a scheduled change), the furnace should be less-efficiently creating a larger amount of heat to get back up to the setpoint quicker. Which is funnily enough how people think most thermostats work when they ineffectively turn it up higher to get things warmer faster.
Though to be honest I agree with your point. A lot of the low hanging fruit for massive gains in efficiency are gone. It's like cars, going from 10 mpg to 20 mpg is a huge difference. Going from 50 mpg to 60 mpg is a much smaller difference.
But then the washer is stealing heat from your house? That seems questionable?
Seems like the right way to solve the problem is to provide hot water inlet, and that should provide it is whatever most efficient way you can?
(The water is either collected in a container or goes down a drain)
For modern top loading washers, the final temperature of the water is restricted by limiting the hot water let in, they don't have a heater.
I recently bought a new washing machine. It is twice as efficient as the old one that broke down irreparably after 12 years.
I chose it by summing machines' cost, and the projected cost of each one's electricity needs going 10 years in the future, if prices go up by 10% per year, and picking the cheapest total one.
The cost of the machine itself ended up being 1149 RON, and the cost of the electricity would be 938 RON, which is almost the cost of the machine entirely.
So it is indeed important to consider efficiency and updating an old machine, and compare with what you have.
As long as the improvement in power efficiency keeps up, it will not make sense to keep an appliance for 50 years. But once that improvement stops, so does the reason for replacing them.
I see no reason to replace it, new stuff doesn't look better, doesn't work better and doesn't last more (probably the opposite). Tons of things are like that. Yes new fridge will save a bit more electricity (compared to already savvy one from 15 years ago) but the amount of energy and material that go into creating new one, and the amount of waste it produces when disposed of, are non-trivial and not handled well even in richest western societies.
I don't agree with 20 years warranty, many things like batteries and capacitors just don't last that long. But some form of longer warranty would definitely motivate manufacturers to focus more on quality.
Some capacitors can last just as long depending on their specs. For batteries, it's more complicated but longer warranty would probably incentivize R&D for durable batteries instead of smaller/stronger batteries, which would be a great win for the environment (see also: supercapacitors).
But the point is most devices are designed to be thrown away, not repaired. If your devices had apparent screws, and easy-to-replace parts, it could be repaired very easily by any skilled laborer (preferably as a public service, but it could also come from a local private workshop). Unfortunately, i don't know a single way to incentivize manufacturers to produce easy-to-repair products apart from extending warranty significantly: when they hold the responsibility to do repair on 100% of units not just the 0.1% people actually care to return (which will likely be replaced not repaired), they may be interested to make stuff easier to repair for everyone else.
Of course I am talking about cars that use the same fuel type.
Also worth noting: hardware manufacturers have found a better option to suppress the second hand market. Hardware locking (iCloud/Knox lock) is terribly efficient at this, essentially turning perfectly good devices into bricks. It's even "better" because they can advertise it as a security feature for gullible users who don't realize Apple/Samsung still has the master key and there's an entire corrupt grey market of company workers getting money under the table to defeat the lock in almost every phone store across the planet...
I don't understand what you mean by iCloud/Knox lock. As far as iCloud lock is concerned, it is only for stolen devices in which the owner did not deactivate their own icloud account. Where are your sources for gray market of company workers defeating the lock? I'd imagine if an Apple activation lock is bypassed it would have to do with resetting the password on the iCloud account.
Over time, a lot of those companies got bought out by conglomerates and started selling the same Asian-made stuff as everyone else (for the most part; there can still be differences. Premium brands often manufacture in Asia as well).
It’s harder to charge a big premium for random clothing and soft goods. To pick a random example Lands’ End is a case in point.
I don't think it's just that. Many people (like myself) stopped buying "reputable" brands because they have betrayed their reputation. Nowadays when buying electromechanic devices even when putting 10x the price i have no clue if it's going to last more than 2 years (minimum warranty in EU) and that's a fucking awful problem.
In my view, we need 20+ years warranty (minimum, i personally would argue for 50+) on all products mandated by law, then we can start to see some improvement. This is a public policy problem and as much as i hate the EU institutions they are the only entity i know doing anything about this very serious problem creating tons of waste/pollution.