Seems like many companies product quality has plummeted over the last few years. For example, Google (despite its flaws), used to have good products and services. Now they are virtually unusable.
My doctor sent me forms to my Gmail and I never got them. I looked it up and apparently Gmail has the document provider blocked so you literally cannot get medical forms. Stuff like this happens all the time now! Their search engine is nothing but sponsored ads now.
This is just the tip of the iceberg. I just think it’s funny that capitalism ends up making much much worse products over time.
This is a good place to refer people to my Lemmygrad post and community:
I, as a digital privacy and FOSS advocate, approve this post.
Pro tip: buy your consumer electronic products from aliexpress. At this point, you can find products with nearly identical quality but 10 times cheaper. I bought airpods clone for 20 bucks, they’re literally the same product. Also a lot of brands nowadays are literally just dropshipping off aliexpress, don’t give em a single cent of your money.
My buddy has used dh gate. He said the same thing. You just buy from the manufacturer and skip the process of jacking up the price by like 300% for no reason.
DHGate is great, i buy my sports jerseys from there at 15 bucks lmao. They even come up with patches like World Series champions, all star game, postseason, etc… Meanwhile in the “original” store they’re up to a 150 bucks.
I’ll have to try. I was under the impression it was Wish.
i think Wish is based on america.
They had basically the same things but ALi have like 20 times more of them and better prices.
Can confirm a lot of products on Amazon (and even brick and mortar shops) are just generic Aliexpress stuff branded and overpriced
The only problem is that I am unfortunately in the US, so it takes ages to get here and shipping costs are really high.
shouldn’t have let amz and other US based groups defund your post office 🤷♂️
most colonized countries have a postal system that is nothing but an artificial barrier for the common person to import tools and goods.
I’d rather have slow delivery times and healthy drivers than fast delivery time and broken drivers.
You won’t buy new products if your existing products don’t break.
right, where’s the mArKEt INceNtivE to make things good?
I’d say this process started (or at least seriously escalated) in the 70s-90s when companies realised they could build their brands completely independently of what their actual products are, where they’re made, what’s in them.
Naomi Klein has some terrible shitty takes sometimes but her book No Logo is a great explanation of the transformation from companies to Brands™® https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Logo
There aren’t even new products
What!? The iPhone with the longer screen and rearranged camera lenses isn’t a feat of engineering compared to the iPhone with the slightly smaller screen?! But the shiny commercials said it was!
Never mind Apple implementing features 2 years after every other major manufacturer already did, and also a bit worse. Bruh why do Americans like those shits, is it really just status?
It very much is status. Every time I visit bourgeois liberal cities, its iphones and teslas everywhere. They sell identities to rich liberals who have none of their own.
Most of the people I know with are just still with them because at this point, they’re around the same price as other phones, and they’re used to how iPhones work. There used to be a huge brand loyalty thing. It was weird. It got enough people used to them that they just don’t wanna relearn another system.
they’re around the same price as other phones
Oh that’s true, Xiaomi is banned in the US or something
Huawei is banned. Xiaomi won’t sell here because the only way to get any market share is through the carriers, and they don’t want to partner with the carriers. Understandable. Most people here don’t want to partner with the carriers, either.
That’s strange, Mexican carriers have carried them for a few years now (at a slightly inflated price, though)
I’m in the US and have a Xiaomi, but you’re right, the carriers here don’t carry them, you have to order them from China or an ebay reseller and hope your carrier lets you bring on the phone. Still worth it, its a more reliable samsung that costs hundreds less.
Is there any research you did to give you certainty that the phone model you chose would work on your carrier? Assuming technical compatibility, is a CN phone guaranteed to work on your network? Or are u.s. carriers playing games like banning MACs (or equivalent) of certain manufacturer’s devices?
Thanks!
I’m so sick of Apple’s constant bugs that I contemplated going to Android. I briefly got on my moms Android phone and it was full of junk! Love how there is just a choice between two bad products and you can’t even use a Huwai phone in the US.
They also have an incentive to innovate or at least to provide a quality service while they’re growing.
But once they have a monopoly?
Why bother with the expense. If anyone comes up with a better alternative, the monopoly can buy the new technology / product / etc and shelve it, or just crush the new competitor.
That’s if crushing is even necessary. No competitor can get anywhere without capital: old capital is not always keen on investing in new industries; and new capital is not going to invest in the competition. There are some exceptions, but it depends on the market.
This is exactly what google does now. They buy up all competition and either shelve it completely, change it to extract as much profit as possible (usually ruining it), or never update it.
That doesn’t surprise me at all. I bet they bleed universities / colleges for new research that never makes it to the public.
There are lots of fairly good google services that just become unusable over time, like blogger. Never updated. Never replaced.
Google also shelves many of its own products, including some that are actually useful.
There’s a lightbulb invented in 1901 that has been running continuously since then.
Woah. Simply… woah.
I broke my shoes after one year by just walking. There’s definitely something going on with product quality.
I got some crappy shoes from target a few years ago and they broke within the month
Even cheap shoes should last more than a month. But these were Nike shoes, it’s ridiculous.
Yah best to move away. Waze, protein mail or petalmail, brave, physical storage.
Waze used to be an Israeli company and is now owned by Google. If you want to move away from Google, there aren’t many options. The only ones that work well are Microsoft’s and Apple’s. If I had to choose between the two, I’d go with Apple’s because Microsoft.
The best option is OpenStreetMap, which is open source, but it doesn’t have nearly the amount of places as the others, since no one tries to add their business to it.
OpenStreetMap is at the “painful, but ultimately usable” stage for me.
I use the OsmAnd+ app along with RHVoice for text-to-speech. The built-in search feature sucks. You’ll have to do your initial search via Kagi or DuckDuckGo or Google or Bing or whatever. But once you plug in the actual address, OsmAnd+ will get you there without trouble 90+ percent of the time (and, anecdotally, when OsmAnd+ has struggled, so too have the more dominant players, like Google Maps and Apple Maps).
Yeah, the main issue is the search. The reason it sucks is that no one adds their businesses to it since it’s not very commonly used.
The fucking Google suite. I just can’t. Everything is poorly thought, lacks so much features and has debilitating bugs. Libre Office is indefinitely better. Also the bare Windows OS became more and more rigid and anti-user. I briefly thought it became as shit as Mac OS, until I touched a Mac and realized they are even more unusable
I had heard from people my whole life that Macs were great. I ended up buying a MacBook. I’ve had it for almost 2 years and I still hate the OS. It’s literally not user friendly in any way, and Apple fanatics will insist that it is.
Right?? They built a reputation of “intuitive” design, but doing anything other than double clicking on your desktop is totally counterintuitive. From installing apps to checking how much space you still have, if you want to be using your computer it’s never easy or logical
If you’re still looking for a decent OS that actually makes the Computer yours, I suggest a GNU/Linux distro.
Linux Mint for example is a great “just works” distro that comes with a familiar user interface. Also there are no ads anywhere, everything is open source and you can customize basically everything.
Usually I would also suggest Ubuntu, but the people behind that distro are corporate shits. It once was really nice but now it’s a pain in the butt. Canonical is the Micro$oft of the Linux world.
Yeah I like Linux, but compatibility with games is limited for now so I’m going to wait a little bit before abandoning Windows
I didn’t know for Ubuntu actually so thanks for telling me!
compatibility with games is limited
Actually great feature
/s
Lmao
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The empire’s slo-mo death in real time! It sucks to live through it, but hey, at least with things getting shittier and shittier people will maybe be capable of waking up!
i’ve noticed my spronges for dishwashing have less antibacterial stuff in them, so they get mildewy like, 5-10x faster now. i think it’s part of the shrinkflation we’ve all been experiencing in the west: not only have prices been getting higher, but amounts and quality have been going down.
It’s not just the west, for the record
Dish washing protip: get one of those stainless sponge cages that suction cups to the inside of ur kitchen sink. I use the same shitty store brand sponges for months with no mildew bc they always have a chance to drain and dry.
thank you for the tip!!! i will definitely try that, having stinky sponges kind of defeats the purpose lol
