1970s refrigerator: I will use four times as much electricity
1970s refrigerator: I will emit a gas that will give you dementia
“they don’t make em like they used to!”
Good. “They” used asbestos for insulation and put lead in gasoline
We are swimming in renewable electricity. Who cares? Making the appliance consumes resources and energy.
What kind of argument is this lol
Until renewables hit continually provide 100% of your needs…everyone should care
Ping me on lemmy when we’re done burning fossil fuels for good and I’ll buy a 1970s fridge the same day
Repairable and reliable is often counter to efficiency. The tradeoff is very hard. A car that is less efficient is much more convenient than an efficient car that regularly gets maintened.
On the other hand the 1970s car was a giant hunk of shit that went to the crusher decades ago and the 2020s appliance is using 1/4th the electricity and 1/2 the water of something built in the 2000s.
I’m old enough to remember the 1970s cars and with some exceptions they sucked.; they were slow, heavy, smelly, and dangerous. I also have a 2 year old combo laundry machine (Washer + Dryer) with a built in heat pump that is freaking amazing.
Both nostalgia and survivorship biases are real.
Not really in my experience. Modern car electrics, as complex as they are, have been way more reliable than the nightmares in older vehicles I have dealt with. Engines too are a lot more predictable nowadays, and won’t have the random weird quirks older engines do. They obviously develop faults too, but they are usually easier to deal with rather than strange faults on older vehicles. However, I do think serviceability has sometimes taken a step back, as there’s a concerning number of cars that need you to take out the engine for certain servicing tasks that you are expected to do over the life of the car.
It’s okay, we’ve all been gotten by this too. It’s easy to look at an older piece of technology that has survived, and ascribe that to ‘things used to be better’ while ignoring the materials advances or better engineering that doesn’t require massive buttresses to stop building falling over, or why using MIM instead of forging is better for 95% of use cases, or how wastefully overbuilt things were in the past because they didn’t know how to build efficiently.
There is a flipside of planned obsolescence and value engineering something to death where the wrong material/spec is decided for profit reasons… but that is not a new phenomenon
This is mostly value engineering and added complexity, not survivorship bias.
People learn a single concept and think it’s the one and only. Suddenly robustness and complexity don’t exist.
So you’re saying that survivorship bias also applies to survivorship bias?
