Category: Consumerism

“Why It’s Easier to Find Expensive Appliances Than Cheaper Ones” (WSJ):

Whirlpool, GM and other companies are prioritizing higher-price products as they try to offset supply-chain snarls

“There was a day when a customer could walk in the door and buy a secondary piece or a landlord special and have 100 options to choose from,” said Mr. Coughlin, a co-owner of All Shore Appliance in Port Washington, N.Y. “Now it’s more along the lines of, we explain to the customer what we have.”

As the global supply-chain crisis snarls production and bloats manufacturing and shipping costs, companies that make products from lawn mowers to barbecue grills are prioritizing higher-priced models, in some cases making cheaper alternatives harder or impossible to find, company executives, retailers and analysts say.

Some are pushing upscale products in an effort to make up for added labor, shipping and manufacturing costs. Whirlpool Corp., maker of washing machines, KitchenAid mixers and other home appliances, said in July it would shift toward higher-price products as part of a plan to help cover rising costs.

General Motors … stopped making the Chevrolet Malibu midsize sedan for more than six months, but has kept all shifts running at a factory that makes its most expensive SUVs. The average new vehicle in September sold for a record $42,800, up nearly 19% from a year earlier, according to research firm J.D. Power.

Televisions are among items for which cheaper models are becoming scarcer, said Mike Abt, co-president of Chicago appliance seller Abt Electronics. He said the price he pays for appliances is rising and he expects that to continue next year. For the first time he can remember, the price of televisions has actually increased—they typically get cheaper every year.

A tough time to be setting up a new household as a refugee, but perhaps the U.S. Treasury has enough cash to buy the high-end LG front-loaders?

Related:

• for those of us already sick with envy, some additional motivation to support President Biden’s Tax the Rich proposals… “Gulfstream Adds Two Models To Its Large-Cabin Line of Business Jets” (AVweb): The $71.5 million G800 adds 500 nautical miles of range (8,000 NM) to that of its 10-foot-longer, larger-cabin G700 sibling, the in-development $75 million flagship of the Gulfstream fleet scheduled to enter service next year. … At the other end of the scale, the $34.5 million G400 updates the “entry level” of the large-cabin line (the smaller-cabin G280 is classed as super-midsize). The 4,200-NM-range G400 is slated to make its first flight in early 2023.

A couple of months ago: Has anyone tried a book scanning service for Kondoization or pre-move preparation?

I’ve got the first batch of results from 1DollarScan now and the scanned pages are in paper recycling Heaven. This is a review of their cheapest possible service: $1/100 pages and no OCR, no enhancement, and no naming of the files. Mailing books to San Jose via USPS Media Mail costs roughly $1 per book. Once the scans come back, you start with a page like this:

I downloaded them, opened each up to see what it was, and then renamed the file using Windows File Explorer. I then let my state-of-the-art PC (circa 2015) do a batch OCR via Adobe Acrobat Pro (a few clicks and then 4 hours of runtime for 28 books). Maybe due to watermarking, the files are epic in size, 70-100 MB for a regular book-type book and 200-300 MB for the technical manuals and cookbooks. A couple of the books hit 400 MB, but were reduced in size somewhat after the OCR process. (If you want to preserve the original quality from 1dollarscan, use the “Searchable Image (Exact)” setting for OCR in Acrobat; that leaves the scans unmolested and just builds the OCR database in a separate data structure behind it.) The Acrobat Pro Preflight tool says that the images within the PDFs are “300 ppi”.

How do the scans look? Here’s a book on bicycle maintenance that I thought would be tricky:

A cheaply printed book with 40 years of acid destroying the pages (how to slice a banana without peeling using needle and thread):

A book where the color is not from the acid:

A Wall Street Journal book on estate planning (timely topic now that the Democrats say they are working to change all of the rules!) in which color is used as a sidenote background:

(If your child lives in Massachusetts, a family court predator can easily take all of the trust assets via child support (over the 23-year period during which child support is ordered, not all in one lump). A parent creating a trust in Nevada or South Dakota cannot necessarily undo the child’s mistake of being exposed to the family courts in other states. Your child can simply be put in prison by the judge (“contempt of court”) unless the amount ordered is paid, either by the child or by the trust and therefore it may not matter, from a practical point of view, what the trust documents say.)

Perhaps the toughest challenge of all, some handwritten bound journals from the late 1980s. Some notes on a finite-state machine implemented in Programmable Array Logic (PALs). I think this is for reading the bits from and syncing the clock to a digital audio output of a CD player.

There wasn’t much they could do about my handwriting, but the scans are sharp and zooming in from the PDF should be just as good for deciphering as having the physical page (not that I have the physical page anymore).

So far, I would say that this service delivered everything promised.

More:

• 1DollarScan.com

I stopped by Goodwin’s High End, an audio store that has been going reasonably strong since 1977. Coronapanic has been great for business. Governors helpfully locked people into their homes where they had little else to do other than seek maximum sound quality. “We have customers in all 50 states now,” said Alan Goodwin.

What’s state of the art in turntables these days? A $120,000 Basis:

What if you want to listen to digital? You download, maybe from hdtracks.com, to a local specialized server and connect that to a microwave-sized D/A converter:

Streaming is generally best for browsing rather than critical listening, but if you must stream, Tidal and Qobuz are reasonable options.

Electrostatic speakers are no longer in. It is all about dynamic speakers, individually priced only slightly more than a new car.