This touches on something that I've been puzzling out for a while now. Kahneman, Tversky and Ariely have all outlined the tyranny of choice: the more options you have, the harder a time you have with choosing and the less you like your eventual choice. Meanwhile, the model of the Internet is "all the choices" - Jeff Bezos has long bragged his ultimate goal is to have at least one of every product on the planet available on Amazon.

The more seriously I look at the problem, the more I realize that it's not just that we don't like to have a lot of options, it's that the mechanisms we have to cope with choice and selection are completely broken by the Internet. More than that, breaking our coping mechanisms is very much the business model of the modern tech company:

I have a headlight out right now. Normally this would involve buying a bulb and slotting it in the socket but of course I have $1200 robotic Litronic xenon headlamps which require HID ballasts and after half a day of futzing around, it's the ballast.

My car uses a common-as-dirt Hella HID ballast that was used for about ten years by every other Volkswagen, BMW, Audi and Porsche. Yet I'm on my third attempt at replacing it because (A) it's a product nobody sees (B) it's a product that was originally surprisingly expensive ($400) (C) it's a product easily counterfeited (D) it's a product that VAG has kept within their dealer network.

So I can buy one from the dealer. It'll be new-old-stock from 2003 and will now cost me $600. Or I can buy a dozen indistinguishably similar "replacements" on Amazon for anywhere between $30 and $120. They are all Chinese, they are all terrible quality, and they are all predicated on the business model that if you sell it for enough less than the thing its' replacing, the number of people returning it because it's broken and worthless won't push your profit below breakeven.

Amazon provides me no method to distinguish the good ones from the bad ones as they delete their products too quickly for meaningful reviews to accrue. Meanwhile, the tuners are selling the exact same products as Amazon: I bought a pair for $150 from a warehouse in Nevada with plenty of excellent copy and graphics only to end up with a tracking number that ends in "CN." If I want to be sure to end up with an actual Hella part I have to lean on the entity that is known for carrying good parts and they charge for the privilege. Do I want to spend $30 on a part that might work or $600 on a part that should work? That $570 is the dividend of trustworthiness and for most people driving $90,000 cars, they'll pay it.

Fundamentally, we've spent ten thousand years figuring out how to get through society and fundamentally, the past twenty years have been about preying on people who can't adapt to the constantly-shifting choice matrix Amazon, eBay and Google are using to extract value from people who aren't paying them. I'm left - again - without a reasonable parts source because reasonability is not within Amazon's business model.