I’m thinking even for cases of like shrinkflation.

I saw an article about potentially cheaper RAM here, so it got me curious if things ever really get better on occasion.

  • DickFiasco@sh.itjust.works
    261·
    11 hours ago

    I’d say American car companies. Due to market consolidation and car brands being a symbol of national pride, they were able to enshitify in the 1970’s and 80’s, producing low-quality expensive cars. Competition from Japan in the late 80’s and 90’s forced them to improve. American cars still trail behind Japanese cars in quality, but they’ve gotten much better.

    Free and fair competition is essential to any economy. The gutting of antitrust laws in the USA is partly to blame for whatever you call this system we have now (I can’t confidently say it’s capitalism anymore).

    • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      6·
      5 hours ago

      Hard disagree lol, the American OEM standard is a bar so far down you can see the sparks of hell. The improvement was just their initial attempt to catch up before they gave up.

      They nuked the EPA regulations which is why everything in the US is an SUV now and they bypassed competition with Japenese OEMs by lobbying congress to make anti import laws (exactly like what they are doing right now for Chinese EVs) which is how we got all these hodpe podge 90s era hybrid deal brands like diamond star or mazda & ford.

      By the time those brands finally entered the US market with local production in full, they had already learned the gg ez system from their American counterparts and began to follow the same crappy practices of reducing cost and quality on every possible corner.

      I wouldn’t buy a Ford vehicle of this decade even if it ends up being cheaper because the thing is made of ABS plastic and Chinese aluminum glued together with the freshly harvested tears of their yearly department layoffs.

    • sorghum@sh.itjust.works
      8·
      7 hours ago

      I’d argue that the big 3 2 never recovered. Car design peaked in the 1920s and never recovered when the larger corps lobbied/wrote safety and fuel standards to force the mass consolidation of companies down to 3. Innovation slowed down so much and it is why China is going to eat our lunch through the transition to BEVs.

      Cronyism is the system we have