Cheap stuff that used to be wood or metal and last for 100 years has turned into plastic cheap stuff that you write a nyt column about if it manages to survive the demands of regular expected usage for 1 year.

The wood or metal stuff was not cheap, by and large. It was the cheapest available at the time, but still very expensive by current standards.

Yeah, but I have tools from my grandfather that are 100 years old. 3 generations of use should be an excellent value

They'd pay some people like my immigrant grand parents from europe like a few dollars a day and give them no benefits to stamp out ten thousand can openers out of some sheet metal that was probably formed into a roll locally from the steelworks up the river using regionally sourced coal and iron. How can that not be cheap?

I don't have any plastic stuff that breaks. My supposedly bad Ikea furniture has all survived 3 moves, none of my kitchen tools break, car's about to last 10+ years. I think my worst problem with something I own is my PC fans are too loud.

Really? That's surprising. I look at something wrong and the plastic part snaps in half. It's even worse if you have some plastic piece that sees regular usage in direct sunlight. The UV will make it brittle.

Presuming it's a desktop, and you haven't done so already - try replacing the fans with some noctua ones

It turns out anytime you update the Gigabyte BIOS it loses all its settings including the custom fan curves/undervolting I built from the advice on random reddit posts.

Do need to replace the fans and maybe PSU though.

I think there are plenty of good things made out of plastic. Legos never break, for example.

Particle board furniture is annoying. You scuff off the veneer, and the item is essentially ruined. Wood is "self healing" in the sense that scratching it exposes more wood, so it doesn't look as terrible.

Personally, I've found software to be the worst thing about modern devices. A long time ago, I bought a terrible Tiertime 3D printer. It doesn't accept gcode from the computer, so you have to slice models using their proprietary app, and it's absolutely horrible. Requires registration before use, doesn't work at all. I used it once, was disgusted with the software (being unable to slice a model more complicated than a cube), and put the thing in the box with the goal to return it. For various reasons that never happened. Three years later, I decided I was tired of looking at the box and can always use another 3D printer, so I did a "brain transplant". I replaced their proprietary logic board with an open source one (Duet 3 Mini 5+). Now the printer works great. (Before the project was done and I was getting my bearings on the internals, I was appalled at the shortcuts they took. Sheet metal instead of extrusions. Heated bed connected to the power supply with flatflex cable, hotend connected with a ribbon cable, 19V power supply instead of 24V just for a tiny bit of extra savings on inductors. But honestly, the design is fine, it was just their software that made it unusable. I learned a lot about cost reduction by taking that thing apart, and I'm impressed how good of a job they did making it cheap without actually making it work badly. The ABS enclosure is also top notch, some of the best injection molding I've ever seen on a $300 product. No way you could make something that good yourself for the price of the whole machine.)

I've also had some good repair experience on modern, cheap, made-in-China electronics. I have a Siglent oscilloscope, and one day, one of the knobs locked up. I resigned myself to just never using that channel again, but on a 2 channel oscilloscope there aren't really channels to spare. Knowing I wasn't going to find $10,000 laying around for a proper instrument that would have good encoders, I begrudgingly opened it up. Everything was held together with screws, and I had the front I/O board out in a half hour. Desoldered the broken encoder, soldered on a random encoder from my parts bin, put everything back together, and ... perfectly working oscilloscope. It wasn't unrepairable, it was merely uneconomical to repair. If I was writing software instead of repairing the 'scope, I could have just bought a new one. But it was some Saturday night at 3AM when I was too tired to do anything except watch crappy YouTube videos, which nobody will pay me hundreds of dollars to do. So it ended up being quite economical.

I forgot where I was going with this, but basically if you can open something up, today's manufacturing is as good as any manufacturing in the past. Someone that wants to repair or mod, can. (Until you run into glue. Oh how I hate glue.)

"erosion of real wages" isn't actually calculable since the price of your house doesn't really have anything to do with how many electronics you can own, but it's most likely not true - houses are much bigger and higher quality than 1970, cars are incredibly safer, you can buy infinitely more computing power, most importantly you don't have lead poisoning now.

Economists (imperfectly) take this into account when calculating inflation. In cars, for example, economists estimate the price of individual features (e.g. a power steering wheel, ABS, a cup holder) so that they can accurately account for increases in quality.

Those calculations are the ones that make it look like American factory workers were automated out of their jobs, because a 2010 computer is a zillion times faster than a 1970 computer, therefore each factory worker is now producing a zillion times as many computers.

Basically, it works better a year at a time.

The jobs were mostly shipped over seas. The ones that were left had to compete with the lower prices that were the product of third world cost of living/labor. Management took advantage of the fact that most of their workers don't understand/pay attention to inflation.

Liz Warren and Andrew Yang both used these numbers to run campaigns about specifically automation taking away everyone’s jobs. I do think they know how outsourcing works, but the automation thing turned out to not be real.