Absolutely not surprised.
There is no pride in product or craftsmanship, today. You see it in the sullen, surly service-help in what used to be good restaurants. You see it in the garbage food offered by fast-food outlets...McDonalds was bland, but beef is (or used to be) beef, and tasty. Fried potatoes, maybe not good in the quantities we started to eat them, at least were pleasant. Modern comfort food.
Not today, where everything is fake-and-gay. Tasteless, bland, dubiously outsourced product...and laden with additives.
Cars. Henry Ford showed us that cars could be manufactured cheaply, using economies of scale. Fiat/Stellantis (and Billy Ford) are showing us how those same huge operations can hide incredibly-shoddy engineering when management goes rogue. Stuff that goes beyond bad engineering - that is, almost criminally exploitative. Like oil pumps, driven by rubber belts, also immersed in oil W-T-F!
Home construction is another matter. Unlike commercial-structure building, which typically involves a steel-girder interior structure, home construction is by stick. The home I grew up in, which was four years old when my father bought it, was built by the guy next door - a builder with five employees, who purchased an abandoned apple orchard and developed it. It wasn't especially well done, but the homes all stand to this day. Four basic blueprints, 150 homes.
These mega-builders are another matter. Borrowed money, weekly Zoom conferences, schedules, limits on wages, heavy hands used on underlings, hatred percolating up...anywhere you can shortcut. The skilled framers and drywall hangers won't work for their wages, but Mohammed and Fariq will. Galvanized nails cost too much. So does inspection of Mohammed's work...he did okay his first day, so just let him go to it.
We ain't got time for more checks. We're too busy getting zonings changed, so we can shrink the size of new lots for Tiny Homes. ONLY $399,000!
This is what comes of it. It's not that business is bad or that corporate structure is bad. What is bad is a complete moral nihilism within the nation's business (and political) leaders, leading to corporate behavior like this. And TOLERANCE, by government, of behavior like this.
There is no pride in product or craftsmanship, today. You see it in the sullen, surly service-help in what used to be good restaurants. You see it in the garbage food offered by fast-food outlets...McDonalds was bland, but beef is (or used to be) beef, and tasty. Fried potatoes, maybe not good in the quantities we started to eat them, at least were pleasant. Modern comfort food.
Not today, where everything is fake-and-gay. Tasteless, bland, dubiously outsourced product...and laden with additives.
Cars. Henry Ford showed us that cars could be manufactured cheaply, using economies of scale. Fiat/Stellantis (and Billy Ford) are showing us how those same huge operations can hide incredibly-shoddy engineering when management goes rogue. Stuff that goes beyond bad engineering - that is, almost criminally exploitative. Like oil pumps, driven by rubber belts, also immersed in oil W-T-F!
Home construction is another matter. Unlike commercial-structure building, which typically involves a steel-girder interior structure, home construction is by stick. The home I grew up in, which was four years old when my father bought it, was built by the guy next door - a builder with five employees, who purchased an abandoned apple orchard and developed it. It wasn't especially well done, but the homes all stand to this day. Four basic blueprints, 150 homes.
These mega-builders are another matter. Borrowed money, weekly Zoom conferences, schedules, limits on wages, heavy hands used on underlings, hatred percolating up...anywhere you can shortcut. The skilled framers and drywall hangers won't work for their wages, but Mohammed and Fariq will. Galvanized nails cost too much. So does inspection of Mohammed's work...he did okay his first day, so just let him go to it.
We ain't got time for more checks. We're too busy getting zonings changed, so we can shrink the size of new lots for Tiny Homes. ONLY $399,000!
This is what comes of it. It's not that business is bad or that corporate structure is bad. What is bad is a complete moral nihilism within the nation's business (and political) leaders, leading to corporate behavior like this. And TOLERANCE, by government, of behavior like this.