> Is this not what the likes of Consumer Reports is for?
It's a stop-gap solution, yes. Unfortunately, AFAIK there's nothing like this in my country, at least not trustworthy. For general electronics, I trust WireCutter and have never been anything but completely happy by just buying one of their top recommendations in a given category.
The question is, is the complexity of our lives all necessary, or is most of it incidental? And regardless, the point is: existence of this complexity makes the market mechanisms of ranking of products and services quite weak.
> The question is, is the complexity of our lives all necessary, or is most of it incidental?
So this is a separate question entirely. And it's not a bad question -- why is there so little true scarcity of necessities but so much scarcity of time? There is actually quite a lot of artificial scarcity keeping everybody running on a treadmill. Like, how many hours are you working just to pay for the increase in housing costs caused by restrictive zoning rules? How many hours are you working just to pay off student loans from artificially inflated college tuition costs?
It's quite important that we address these things but it's kind of a different problem domain than consumer router security.
> And regardless, the point is: existence of this complexity makes the market mechanisms of ranking of products and services quite weak.
I would think it would be the opposite. If people have lots of free time and resources to read specifications and understand the inner workings of what they're buying then you don't need to pay someone to do it for you because you can do it yourself. It's when everybody is busy that someone trustworthy can make money by selling or identifying products of a given minimum quality, because people find their time more scarce than money and are willing to pay somebody so they don't have to do it themselves.
But in that case you would tend to have more dissatisfaction and buyer's remorse, because general purpose recommendations and minimum quality standards don't yield as good a result as you making an informed choice yourself. "One size fits all" is never really as good as choosing the right size for you. But government regulations can't fix that any better than consumer product ratings because they have the same problem -- a minimum standard still doesn't help you choose between a zillion different products that all meet the minimum standard, even though some of them are significantly better in your specific circumstances. The best product for some people may even be one which is below the so-called minimum standards, because they have atypical requirements.
Which I guess brings us back to your original point. Maybe we should do something about everybody being completely swamped for time.
It's a stop-gap solution, yes. Unfortunately, AFAIK there's nothing like this in my country, at least not trustworthy. For general electronics, I trust WireCutter and have never been anything but completely happy by just buying one of their top recommendations in a given category.
The question is, is the complexity of our lives all necessary, or is most of it incidental? And regardless, the point is: existence of this complexity makes the market mechanisms of ranking of products and services quite weak.