Comment by passwordoops | Hacker News Reader

Comment by passwordoops | Hacker News Reader

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I had an experience in another industry similar to what printers are doing. We used to use standard, easy-to-source-from-3rd-party 6-port valves on one of our instruments. Customers loved it, since the valve would need servicing now and then with replacement parts but the company president only saw lost recurring service and support revenue. To complement that perception, the VP Engineering decided "our systems should use our parts". So we embarked on "designing" our own new 6-port valves... Which consisted of putting the original 6-port in a welded box with a manifold and calling it our own. Since it was "new" we charged more, while paying less, and obviously telling people that to not use the new system was to void the warranty, and oh by the way, only we can service it. Naturally it came with a firmware that would be recognized as "official". When one of the clients discovered the truth, and provided our support team with evidence proving the new, more expensive valve system gave a slightly poorer performance, management's answer was to threaten to sue. They sold their instrument and went to the competition.

So yeah, it's an anecdotal n of 1, but I would say mostly perceived loss of income, publicly justified as better design

So many people willing working jobs that explicitly make the world a worse place to live and we wonder why everything is going to shit.

For the record I disagreed with the decision, and eventually left them shortly after (not just over this) but you're putting a very unfair statement out there. First, it's basically every company that's doing this, and it's the logical next step when growth is the target. Even at the time, they used Apple as an example to be emulated with their anti-consumer practices.

Which feeds the next point: the problem ultimately is shaping laws to protect business models rather than consumer rights. The only reason lawyers were able to threaten that client to remain silent was because the law in his jurisdiction was on my companies' side.

As an employee, when a big decision maker makes such a decision, uses the beacon of tech as an example, and has the law on his side, what do you do? Majority of people can't just up and quit. And even if they do, odds are extraordinarily high that the next job will present the same enshittification.

So no, I disagree that is the "willing employees" causing everything to go to shit but the corporate and governing leadership that have worked together to enshrine the protection of predatory business models over consumer rights, which itself is rooted in the Greed is Good dogma that's ruled since 1980

>it's basically every company that's doing this

It's useful to distinguish between ideas, decisions, and actions. Every idea, no matter how good/bad, far-fetched, that would make your company money has been considered. It doesn't matter which company. When a company decides what to do, they reject most ideas for a variety of context dependent reasons. Reputation is one of those reasons. Unfortunately the meaning and importance of reputation itself has been undermined by enormous reflowing of attention by screens and the remarkable credulity of people.

>Which feeds the next point: the problem ultimately is shaping laws to protect business models rather than consumer rights.

Greed is unbounded, restrained first by character, then by law. This basic assumption is part of the fabric of the US, itself based in part on the analysis Adam Smith. There has always been tension between greed and character+law, and modern fashion has weakened the meaning and importance of character to almost 0, so greed feels ascendant. But I propose that greed is the same, only the countervailing forces are weaker.

This might seem like splitting hairs. The value in the distinction is that you can let go of worrying about intrinsic human qualities like greed getting worse. If that were true, it would be unsolvable. You can instead worry about a fixable problem, like how "character" itself can rise back to prominence, and how the public's BS meters can be improved.

(Getting a big population to a reasonable standard is a lot of work, so any help appreciated.)

If you're legitimately going to be on the street if you don't work this job, that's what malicious compliance is for. Sabotage this bullshit, if you can. Put in a backdoor and release the details online. If you can't, well, that's a tough place to be and I won't judge, but the majority of the time people in a position to make the world worse aren't.

Your reasoning illustrates the problem of "no individual snowflake is responsible for the avalanche". When you're making fat stacks it is a very convenient narrative to tell yourself and perpetuates the status-quo of suck.

We don't have to keep going along with this shit.

I totally get what you're saying, and you're right on how individual choices add up, (concentration camp guards were also just following orders after all) and tbh younger me would be like "let's blow some shit up!"... But I have a mortgage and kids to support, and this shittification hasn't reached the point where guerilla subterfuge makes it on my to do list.

Having said that, I do try to fight back in whatever capacity I can by not supporting those decisions at work, and as a consumer by avoiding crap, DIYing and repairing as much as I can, and "fuck your new streaming plan, I know how to download shit" while making sure my kids also know how and why dad does it this way

prisoner's dilemma

How can it be the exact same valve, and yet also be cheaper, and yet also perform worse?

Not op but I imagine:

Increase tolerances to reduce cost at scale, sometimes doesn't fit perfectly or requires a little jiggling to line up right.

But now you can't do the jiggle or try to manually quickly realign it, instead you need to call a tech to do it for X bucks and a wait time of longer than a few seconds.

Fair question given a lack of details.

Cheaper: we got rid of the supplier mounting, so even counting the BOM of the new box and manifold, we saved about 5-10%

Worse performance: The extra connectors on the manifold increased the total volume the sample passed through, which gave a lower resolution (this was a chromatography system). Nothing that wouldn't pass spec, but visibly degraded compared to the original system. There's also more potential for minor leaks because with the manifold you now have an additional 12 connection points to worry about

But they did not raise a stink on teh interwebz ? Bummer.

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