Hacker News Reader

Comment by GuB-42 | Hacker News Reader

> Also it is a somewhat bogus comparison: Mostly nobody complains that their car / laptop / smartphone comes from a factory, but for farming there is this strange preference for something of 50-100years past.

It is not specific to farming. Handmade, artisan stuff sells well, even when it is objectively worse. And in general, people are more sympathetic to small businesses than big, faceless corporations. We value the human element I guess.

As for food, we tend to equate big farms with everything bad with current agriculture, even if it doesn't have to do with it: crops bred for yield instead of taste/nutrition, monoculture with pesticides/herbicides, ... It is partly true because small, traditional farms then to focus on quality and ethics/sustainability/... rather than price, because they can't compete on price.

View on HN

I think this is because when an artisan makes something, usually you know he tried hard, even if it ends being crap because subpar skills.

With industrialized products you know they want it cheap, resulting in crap product that didn't need to be crap.

For example once I had to repair my Electrolux fridge, when I opened it up I saw two very nasty things: 1. the holes between parts were all misaligned, to the point it was impossible to insert the screws intended to go in them. 2. it was then glued with a ton of glue spread "randomly" all over the place, it was obviously shoddy.

And the issue I had to fix in that fridge? They used the cheapest "defrost" button they could, one that notoriously got stuck often, so your fridge would stay in "defrost" mode forever and stop working, the solution was disassemble it, force the button back with a screwdriver, assemble it again... every time you used the button.

Somewhat related, but the glue situation reminded me of the time I realized I'm going to need to hire a woodworker if I ever want quality cabinets in my kitchen. I was doing delivery for one of the big home improvement stores and got asked to stay late and run some cabinets to a customer. Light crap on overtime? I'm there.

I'm looking at these cabinets in the stock room and they're crap. No joinery, no screws, just flat pieces of cheap wood glued together. So I go to joke with the woman who works in that department about how cheaply they were constructed. She looked me dead in the eye and told me, oh no, these were the nicest cabinets we sold in the store. Top of the line. They even use extra glue to make them sturdier.

Who's we?

I know a guy who can't go through a drive through without lecturing everyone in the car about how being able to get 400kcal for a buck and a half is an amazing feat of societal progress. But he's old and emigrated from Poland so...

My example may be an outlier but there's plenty of people who are happy to get Chilean produce in January and don't care how much methane their 75/25 beef emitted. HN has the spare cash and brain cycles to care about a lot of things that normal people don't even think about.

For comparison: A regular buck (the animal) may have something around the 160000 kcal.

As to distrusting large companies, I think that is an intuitive understanding we have that in any organization larger than 100 people, it is likely led by a sociopath. They gravitate towards positions of power, they have superficial charm that hold in large groups where you don't get to know people well, and they occur at about 1 in 100.

Even ignoring leaders, once you get beyond 100-200 people responsibility is necessarily divided up such that people stop being responsible for the organization and start being responsible to the organization. And then the organization does sociopathic things things whether people want to or not. Even an organization's leaders are subject to this. After all 100s of people's paychecks depend on their decisions. The more people you add, the more you divide up responsibility, the more you remove the leaders from the customers, the worse it gets.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com