Gleaming the cube
I
remember my fifth grade geography textbook saying that the concepts of
human rights and freedoms are interpreted differently in the Soviet
Union than in the West. Well, I guess that is one way to put it.
Another sentence that I remember was that whereas we might wonder why
Russians want to live in their system, similarly a Russian might find
it silly that someone would pay more for a shirt becase it has a small
alligator logo in it.
All humour aside, that last sentence actually has a pinch of truth in it: we should have a healthy skeptical attitude to question how much better name brands are to no-name brands. They probably are, but the consumers should keep the name brand manufacturers in their toes. One particular line of products where I can't see much difference are sunglasses. Since I am an average straight man with not much sense of fashion, I can't really tell at all whether a random person that I see on the street is wearing $300 or $10 sunglasses. If any of my readers has such a skill, please elaborate further in the comments. All brands look all pretty much the same to me, and I can't tell much difference in the sunglasses store either.
As a technological optimist who believes the future is so bright that we have to wear shades, I would actually be surprised if a $10 pair of sunglasses sold today at Wal-Mart was in any objective sense worse than any $300 pair of sunglasses ten years ago. (Few things are as utterly idiotic as first stating how much faster computers have got and then wondering why other products have not improved the same way, so I am not going to go on that path here. But this comparison I think is OK.)
Today's expensive brands are of course better, but it's hard for me to see exactly why. Both manufacturers use the same plastics and metals as their raw materials, and once you have a mechanism to mass manufacture certain shapes of frames and lenses, why couldn't the cheap brand manufacturer program this mechanism to produce glasses that have the exact same shape that an expensive brand manufacturer uses? It's not like the cheap manufacturer couldn't just purchase an expensive pair, measure it and then start pumping out copies.
All humour aside, that last sentence actually has a pinch of truth in it: we should have a healthy skeptical attitude to question how much better name brands are to no-name brands. They probably are, but the consumers should keep the name brand manufacturers in their toes. One particular line of products where I can't see much difference are sunglasses. Since I am an average straight man with not much sense of fashion, I can't really tell at all whether a random person that I see on the street is wearing $300 or $10 sunglasses. If any of my readers has such a skill, please elaborate further in the comments. All brands look all pretty much the same to me, and I can't tell much difference in the sunglasses store either.
As a technological optimist who believes the future is so bright that we have to wear shades, I would actually be surprised if a $10 pair of sunglasses sold today at Wal-Mart was in any objective sense worse than any $300 pair of sunglasses ten years ago. (Few things are as utterly idiotic as first stating how much faster computers have got and then wondering why other products have not improved the same way, so I am not going to go on that path here. But this comparison I think is OK.)
Today's expensive brands are of course better, but it's hard for me to see exactly why. Both manufacturers use the same plastics and metals as their raw materials, and once you have a mechanism to mass manufacture certain shapes of frames and lenses, why couldn't the cheap brand manufacturer program this mechanism to produce glasses that have the exact same shape that an expensive brand manufacturer uses? It's not like the cheap manufacturer couldn't just purchase an expensive pair, measure it and then start pumping out copies.
One thing is that intellectual property "rights" propably protect the shape and design of the shades.
Another thing might be that the $10 glasses are indeed made of inferior type of plastic (I can surely tell my cheap sunglasses mostly get broken rather quickly) or other materials.
And what about the UV-light protection, I guess a cheapy pair of sun glasses hardly has any?
Posted by jl | 5:59 AM