Do not buy an HP. They are well known to intentionally cripple their products to disable functionality, require an account, and lock out third party components. Definitely not BIFL. Stivk with a Brother laser printer.

My wife is 5ft and great friends with her tailor. As long as you don't need elastic cuff bottoms it seems really straightforward to modify, or at least it was cheap to do. And they work well skiing for her. She has a Columbia bib pair that were comically long before the hemming.

Exactly, and just as with survivorship bias that's what skews the bias of "good" to smaller companies sometimes. Sometimes they truly are better but sometimes it's also because they didn't have the large resources to perform the value engineering analysis to perform the cost reduction so had to overbuild. Nowadays the bar to entry is so low that anyone can do it. So the often-smaller quality driven companies really stand out. Those are the modern ones we see for sale today though sadly they're few and far between.

Absolutely. There's also the fact that back in the day things were intentionally overbuilt prior to the introduction of finite element analysis and CAD design. And engineers had to intentionally make things overbuilt in order to make sure they were sufficiently strong enough. Sometimes that meant it was adequate, other times it meant that it was so overbuilt that was impossible to break. Value engineering for many common products didn't exist 50 years ago because it wasn't possible.

That's exactly it, plastics nowadays can be and are value engineered and have the potential of being far better but most often aren't. There's a lot of survivorship bias here too. Because all of the cheap stuff from 50 years ago has long been sitting in the landfill. You can absolutely buy good stuff today but it'll cost a lot more

Plastic stuff is nothing like it used to be. It was nice, durable, thick, and flexible. Now it's all just very brittle with barely enough plasticizers to make it last a little while. Plastic bins are constantly broken on store shelves because they're so fragile

Carhartt, Duluth, Bass Pro, r/frugalmalefashion