Both historical socialism and current-stage capitalism suffer from the exact same problem - lack of competition and limited access to information. They arrived there in vastly different ways but in both cases it's very hard both to know how to obtain higher quality goods, and to actually obtain them once you know how. Compare to 1960s USA where it was quite easy to know which car/drill/grill/TV/pants/table/etc. is guaranteed to last you years.

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WalterBright 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I lived through the 60s and know what the goods were.

TVs, for example. They had tubes then, and crummy B+W pictures. They were constantly going on the fritz, to the point that drugstores had tube testing stations. You'd bring in the tubes from the TV and test them in this device that looked like an arcade game, and buy replacements.

Cars then required a lot more maintenance then. And I mean a lot. I've owned and repaired them.

I can go on, but the point is made.

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Xirdus 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I'm sorry but I will need a second opinion. I just don't believe there was not a single brand of TV that was reliably good the way some brands of clothes, furniture, power tools, phones, spices, perfume, refrigerators, light fixtures, record players, guitars, lawn mowers, and basically all non-perishable goods on the market were.

You could get the cheap stuff, or you could get the quality stuff, and you knew which is which. Neither of these is true nowadays.

	▲	WalterBright an hour ago \| parent [-]
		My dad had a Mercedes in the 1960s. It was not a very reliable car. He later bought a Chevy which was much more reliable. I bought a 1963 230SL Mercedes as a young man. It was such a beauty! But it was a terrible car. As an engineer, I could see that it was a patchwork of brilliant design and stupid design. The latter caused lots of problems. Sadly, I gave up on it. Stupidly, I bought a Mercedes wagon some years later, and it, too, suffered from the patchwork of stupidity. Got rid of it. My 1967 Mustang was much better engineered. Ford gets a lot of guff, but their cars are inexpensive and easy to repair, which I appreciated. It had a sad end being crushed on the highway by a truck. I had a 1989 Bronco II and drove it for 20 years. A friend of mine is restoring an old Mercedes, and he (also an engineer) discovered the Mercedes patchwork of stupidity. One of the problems is the radiator is undersized, making the car prone to overheating. He's engineering a fix for that.