This is a great thread about wealth and craftsmanship. Wealthy people used to appreciate craft, which has morphed into spending lots of money on a brand rather than an understanding of what it is that they're buying: https://bsky.app/profile/dieworkwear.bsky.social/post/3lswmj...

Excellent thread, nicely juxtaposed to this utterly insane sentence:

> One is that attributes like durability — which used to be a major factor in how people judged a product’s quality — have lost relevance.

I've noticed this in clothing and vehicles. If you want to own a durable car, you need to get an old one. Mid 1990s seems optimal for most manufacturers, some skew earlier (e.g. Mercedes-Benz which peaked about half a decade earlier). If you want durable shoes, it's very hard to beat a set of custom Limmers which are made pretty much the same way they were in the 1950s. Neither option is cheap, but you get something for it--knowing your car won't strand you with some bewildering array of christmas tree lights on the dashboard, and that your feet will be fine if you have an unplanned 20mi hike.

The actual wealthy people still appreciate craft, at least for certain things. It's mainly the socially insecure nouveau riche who buy brands as a signaling mechanism.

Go and learn about the 1700 century and how people spent all their money on spices because it was trendy with other nobles. Why did they build certain buildings? Because nobles in other places built those buildings.

The idea that people in the past where more sophisticated, and more intelligent is simply not true.

I guess it depends. There are items for which there's just no margin for cutting quality. Take for example a Hermes bag. While some buyers would probably settle for less quality, the brand depends on the image of a high quality product, thus the bags have increased in price by 5%+x annually for the past 20 years. That's a rate which is unsustainable for non-luxury items. Another example is Miele washing machines, which most likely deserve to be considered top notch and high quality. The prices have barely increased in the same timespan, which technically means they are 25%-30% less expensive after inflation. It's hard to imagine that the production process was improved by that much.

No one wants to pay for them. The $20 screwdriver is the same or better quality than the one 50 years ago. People would now have the option to buy the $1 screwdriver and then complain it doesn't last.

Plenty of companies buy the $1 screwdrivers, put them in nicer packaging and sell them for $20. ... including many of the brands formerly known for making good screwdrivers.

The result is that even when you're willing to pay for quality, you can't-- you can just overpay for junk. Might as well just buy 20 of the $1 screwdrivers instead-- they'll still last much less long than the proper $20 one, but finding the good one is too difficult amid the overpriced crap.

I'm not sure the billionaire ever cared about the durability of things. Pretty sure most of them have people managing their things, who will throw anything to the bin at the first sign of degradation.

Here's an anecdote:

As a student, I visited one Hermes (French luxury brand) manufacture in Paris. They showed us how crocodile skin was worked with to make hand bags and showed us the finished products. They had two finishes for the bags: - with protective coating (brilliant) - without (mate)

Without coating the crocodile skin was very fragile they told us, and even water droplets would stain the skin. We were quite surprised that anyone would spend a five figures amount of money in a bag that will get stained by anything, but the guy guiding us told us that their customers simply considered their products to be disposable item that would quickly be thrown away anyway.

Somewhat related: I have an acquaintance who maintains the IT infrastructure for a rich guy's house. Lots of smart TVs. Lots of cameras, with local data storage. Lots of IoT.

At a guess, it's a 20% to 25% gig. Something is always breaking or misbehaving. The rich guy probably notices almost none of the problems. If he had to maintain it himself, he would insist on simplifying things.

It definitely takes more effort to identify non-shit products than it used to, but I would assume said billionaires have delegated that to someone else so won't notice.