Social Red Youth Dynasty Brigade Distortion

“it’s chosen from a list of available tubes” and where do you think those tubes came from? The tube tree? Do you think the press to cut the metal is a natural occurring formation? That the company that made the wood that was bought bu this other company that was bought by the other company just appeared out of thin air without having to be grown, and all the processes that entails (like legal issues mentioned in the comic.) that glasses are shaped that way by coincidence and not literally centuries of trial and error testing to figure out the best vessel shape?

Because yes, maybe your glass from walmart didn’t redo all the testing and planning from scratch, but someone did it at some point. It didn’t appear in the air from nowhere.

Like, the thing is, those dumb design decisions actually do involve a lot of work that nobody ever thinks about and is completely invisible. We know about mining and logging and manufacturing, we don't know about the hours twenty people spent in multiple meetings making a tiny decision. I've been in those meetings! I've been in the meetings where people spend an hour discussing one sentence in a two hundred page document. The meetings are so tedious and the people involved care about the details so much. Just because you haven't seen the meeting doesn't mean it didn't happen.

And it's really important to think about that. When us consumers have a product with something that seems like a really dumb choice, we can assume everyone involved was an idiot and we'd do it better, or we can think about how maybe the manufacturer they sourced from didn't have the correct size available and it'd be three times as expensive to go elsewhere, or if they made the choice we wanted it would have caused other issues. We spend our lives thinking that we could do things better than an expert, because we don't take expertise seriously. But sourcing lumber is really fucking hard! Making sure products follow safety requirements is hard!