I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding about both evolution and markets, which is that either one "optimizes" something. Neither needs to create a perfect outcome. An organism doesn't have to be the best, most efficient possible at getting food, it only has to be good enough to survive long enough to reproduce. A cheetah does not need to be the fastest cheetah on the plains to survive, it only has to be faster than the slowest antelope. A company does not need to make a perfect product, it only has to be just good enough to turn a profit, any profit, in order to survive.

Once you realize this everything starts to make sense. Why can accountant have errors? Because they aren't bad enough to lose customers. Why can a product be made shoddily? Because it isn't quite shoddy enough that people stop buying it. Indeed, the most optimal thing for a company, profit-wise, is to be just as shitty as possible without going out of business. Any additional resources spent on increasing quality that is not demanded by the market are, in a sense, wasted.

This hurts from an engineering perspective because we want to make things that are good, but too often customers don't actually care about how good it is, just that it is cheap and just barely good enough to be worth purchasing.

> For example, in my social circles, there have been two waves of people migrating from iPhones to Android phones over the past few years. Both waves happened due to Apple PR snafus which caused a lot of people to think that iPhones were terrible at something when, in fact, they were better at that thing than Android phones. Luckily, iPhones aren't strictly superior to Android phones and many people who switched got a device that was better for them because they were previously using an iPhone due to good Apple PR, causing their errors to cancel out.

Uncomfortably reminiscent of politics.

Shopping without researching goes hand in hand with a fool and his money. For the typical consumer, visiting consumerreports.com and picking one of their top recommendations would solve a majority of these problems.

> where the notice falsely indicates that the person wasn't home and correctly indicates that, to get the package, the person has to go to some pick-up location to get the package.

Didn't know this was a universal experience with package delivery and the post office. I always thought it was just my national postal service that does this.

A massive unmentioned bullet point in this rant is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

Stuff is literally designed to stop working while also being financially unrealistic to even salvage and sell for parts.

Can-openers. 99% of them are utter trash. The one that works is a copy of a 60 year old model.

I swear a lot of people buy the cheapest thing knowing it won't last because they are addicted to shopping

And here I thought here would take about how new models come out so frequently that any information about long-term quality is long obsolete.

Quality is multidimensional. Local maxima exist in any non-trivial optimization process.