The Unspeakable National Security Threat: Plasticwares as the New Industrial Standard
Made to last or made to be as cheap as possible? Meritocracy seems dead. Mediocrity or industrial rat races are everywhere now.
The likes of old IBM and Boeing* are big brands, but the quality of their products sinks rapidly and people are noticing**. Many of their suppliers (for components that they integrate) aren't so reliable or consistent, either. When they use words like "efficiency" they don't mean lifetime or longevity (or low energy); they mean cost, as their sole goal is to make the current quarter seem better than 12 months ago (even at the expense of future quarters).
In the mid 90s, my grandmother bought me an alarm clock as a gift. It's still in use. My wife uses it. My own radio alarm is also from the 90s and it has been used for about 25 years (it's actually older than this). How come electronics made about 30 years ago still work and appliances made just a decade (10 years) ago are sold with the expectation or promise they should last about 2-3 years, maybe 5? Or why are things falling apart so quickly with little prospect of redemption through repair? A lot of that has to do with the materials that make up components. When you buy cheap things you pay for cheap materials. You will pay more (or over and over again) in the long run.
One need not theorise that there is some conspiracy or secretive cabal plotting to make things this bad. The simplest explanations are usually the correct ones. The consumers, who got poorer and poorer in recent decades (purchasing power lessened quite rapidly as wages didn't keep up with inflation), demanded very cheap products or left aside - e.g. on the shelves - the more "premium" (or "deluxe" or "industrial grade") brands, which in turn adapted by misusing their old brand and turning it into plasticwares (higher prices, still the same lousy quality and sometimes the same factories as the "generic" brands).
It's getting harder to find good products. More expensive does not correlate with real quality. There's no linear relation.
This is what we get for re-purposing oil residue as if it's some desirable material. We get LEGO toys inside real appliances.
As products are made to meet lower standards we're to expect science and technology as a whole to deteriorate - be it in space missions or some mission-critical operations. That right there is a National Security threat.
We don't need some fictional "Hey Hi arms race" (slop, even worse). We need a race to improve manufacturing, including domestic production of high-quality products, made to last decades, not months or years. █
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* See "Boeing Likely To Cut Around 17,000 Jobs Globally Amid Ongoing Strike, Production Delay". It's already happening, as expected.
** Consider this comment from 7 hours ago: "Whenever you get a chance to put the boot to IBM's collective executive backside by ignoring their bids for contracts or using products, you should do it. After all, they treated you like garbage, it is time to return the favor, and send then into the dumpster of he-l. They will go under after all the evil that they have done to honest and hardworking employees from Gerstner to Alvind. There is no getting around this - word gets around very quickly particularly about IBM junk products like Apptio and associated trash. What goes around, comes around - it's karma, and no one who participates in evil escapes, especially IBM managers and executives. Yes Alvind, you can run but you and your evil managers cannot hide."
"One thing is IBM doesn't have to list all the contractors laid off since they aren't IBM employees," a newer comment said. It's a lot worse than IBM signals to shareholders in media that it's paying to relay fantasy.