Quote:
Originally Posted by PKFFW
I think it is just as likely to be a case of selective memory. It is a fact of life that humans tend to remember "bad" things much more readily than positive things. We will naturally pay attention to and get emotional about something that fails just outside of warranty. This attention and emotion will serve to make us remember this incident clearly. On the other hand we will pay little attention to, and feel no great emotional reaction to, items that last well past their warranty period. Hence when thinking about this issue these items will be less likely to be remembered.
PKFFW
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I'm not entirely convinced by this hypothesis because of the example of my freezer.
In the late 1980s I bought a cheap second-hand freezer, whose label proudly proclaimed that it was "Made in the GDR." This triumph of socialist technology is still working today, and has long outlived the republic that gave it birth.
Visitors look at it with fascination. Visiting Germans tell me Honecker stories. I'm actually quite fond of the appliance, though every now and then I wonder whether it would be more ecological to replace it with a more energy-efficient freezer, or whether I should wait until it breaks down, so as to defer creating landfill.