Hacker News Reader

Comment by BMc2020 | Hacker News Reader

BMc2020

as this fantastic video about the popcorn button explains. Our economic race to the bottom has been sabotaging almost every aspect of engineering in our society. To save a few cents per microwave, the cheap microwaves don’t include a humidity sensor and then lie about having a popcorn button when it can’t actually work properly, which leads to everyone saying “don’t use the popcorn button” and now nobody uses the popcorn buttons even on microwaves that actually have a humidity sensor and a working popcorn button.

View on HN

That's pretty silly.

The 'economic race to the bottom' is exactly how we can all afford microwave ovens in the first place.

Of course, you can make a special case for microwave ovens, and we could afford them to be slightly more expensive. But we need the general cost cutting and optimization in the economy to drive progress.

Yes, but then we get useless microwaves and in the end dangerous microwaves.

Who buys those useless microwaves?

Most gadgets I ever bought were far above legally required minimum requirements. Ie those minimum requirements were not a binding constraint. Why would that suddenly change?

Who said useless?

Just not as useful as it used to be.

> Who said useless?

You did?

> Yes, but then we get useless microwaves and in the end dangerous microwaves.

Good point, meant to write less useful. Seems my brain merged less useful to useless.

Yes, the problem here is that capitalism is good at some things (making microwaves cheap) and not others (dealing with externalities). We’ve let it be the dominant force shaping “progress” for quite some time, so we’ve made progress on a lot is things capitalism is good at solving. In the meantime we’re also backsliding or stagnant on various issues that capitalism can’t address alone.

The pro- and anti-capitalist sides both have a point.

If you are worried about externalities, either look into Coasian bargaining or slap the obvious Pigovian tax on (or do a cap-and-trade scheme).

The latter has worked really well against acid rain. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid_Rain_Program

No need to intervene further to prevent some 'evil' race to the bottom. Just narrowly address exactly the externality in question, and stop there. Compare https://openborders.info/keyhole-solutions/

Technology Connections just did a thing about this.

I can confirm that some KitchenAid microwaves use a sound sensor instead of humidity.

Who did you think the quote was from?

That’s the video mentioned in the quote:

“What's the deal with the popcorn button?” https://youtu.be/Limpr1L8Pss

Great video and channel, good stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com