EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products(eubusiness.com) |
EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products(eubusiness.com) |
But it's shocking to see their lack of insight:
> software should be easier to repair and update
ROFL!
Much of what the EU does is to make buying from another EU country within the EU a seamless experience. They just prohibited phone roaming charges within the EU, for example. This is the "single European market" concept.
Directive 1999/44/EC says all EU countries have to ensure a retailer could be held liable for all "non-conformities" which manifest within two years from delivery.
https://www.theguardian.com/money/2011/feb/05/how-long-elect...
If something is going to get updates for twelve years, there's no problem with people continuing to use it.
..I guess that was trite. The EU parliament is in a constitutional limbo state. It doesn’t have real power or a predefined legislative jurisdiction, so voters don’t take it seriously. They elect quirky, fring-ey members they wouldn’t elect to their own national parties.
I’m in favour of durable products, but I don’t see how this is en route to policies that affect this.
With regards to products like cars where the makeup can come from hundreds of manufactures who decides what needs to adhere to the rules and what doesn't? Someone posted about a cracked screen on a radio, how far down the component tree do we go before we stop?
I do like one section, no software should enable the fixing of a user owned product. The exception would be software that locks out repairs that might allow for unauthorized access; what I mean is that this could be an end run to making touch id easily hacked by government by forcing it to be serviced by third parties.
https://www.ifixit.com/tablet-repairability
It looks about the same as any other tablet, but with non-fragile latches holding it shut and no glue anywhere.
> If a battery in a laptop last four years for a nominal charge is that sufficient?
No, the consumer should be able to replace the battery every few years and keep using it for over a decade, assuming a typical situation where nothing else breaks.
Maybe because you are unfamiliar with other companies that do the same?
Recently the little magnet on my 5-6 year old iPad that holds the case has become weak. The ipad itself, works great. Its already out of warranty and it doesn't take a genius to popup open a case and put a new magnet in (instructions to do so are already on ifixit). But the supply of parts is intentionally prohibited by Apple, making such simple repairs impossible. While this regulation is addressing a different issue, citizens should be doing much more to penalize such anti-consumer behavior.
First I am a voter and I do take the EU parliament seriously. I also consider what the groups and candidates voted in the past before giving them my vote - especially on topics like world trade giant agreements (TTIP, TATFA, CETA... - yes they also vote on that and it is very meaningful for our future).
You may also read some documentation on the powers and functions of the EU Parliament: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Parliament#Powers_and...
You may also just read the news:
-> UK just voted to get out of EU to escape EU funding and regulations - so probably those regulations do exist at a significant extend.
-> A recent example: the GSM roaming (a former giant cash machine against consumers) just got extinguished within EU countries by EU regulation.
So probably - yes - they can set rules on repairability and durability.
Wasn't that the European Commission (and not Parliament) though? They seem to be significantly more powerful.
The wiki page you link to does say that.
Voters have been figuring it out. Turnout for EP elections has been falling steadily since the institution was first created:
http://www.ukpolitical.info/european-parliament-election-tur...
From 62% to around 40% on average. People don't bother voting because the EP can't/won't actually do much except cheerlead for the EU itself and demand it does more.
This sort of story appears from time to time. The EP calls for this, it calls for that. Nobody pays much attention because these "calls" don't matter. The EU's laws can only be changed by the Commission, and EU law is made entirely in secret (unlike every other legislature in the world save North Korea). So there's little point trying to get involved or care what they do - EU law just "appears" fully formed and gets implemented without debate.
I think this has been beneficial not only to European citizens but also to the US where there isn't a minimum warranty by default. Businesses who sell products on both sides of the Atlantic seem to have mirrored the imposed warranty of the EU in the US.
I am in favor of extending the minimum warranty.
PS: isn't there also some regulation that a business should provide pieces for repair for a period of 10 years? I seem to recall something like that.
The complexity stems from the legal status where the EU is in some respects a confederation of sovereign states, where the governments of the member states need to represent their respective nations, and in some respects a union of people. The gradual shift of power towards the Parliament represents attempts to shift it towards the latter, while the Commission and Council represents the treat realities where delegating more power to Parliament would require constitutional changes in a number of member states to cede the sovereignty (currently this is worked around by having the treaties bind the respective governments to take make the required decision - it's exploiting the wide latitude most governments have in exercising treating rights and obligations.
If it's increased, manufacturers will just increase their EU prices so that their costs will be covered.
In the US they advertise the price excluding tax, in the EU we advertise the price including tax.
When counting taxes, there isn't a big difference.
The EP can't initiate new law, but they can still vote on law proposed by the Commission, which does give them a certain amount of power. Your second link mentions MEPs doing back-room deals with the Commission and European diplomats, which they certainly couldn't do if they were entirely powerless.
I'm also skeptical on your claim that North Korea is the only other legislature where this secret law-making happens. Other autocracies aside, in any system with political parties, proposed legislation will most likely be circulated within the party for some time; then discussed informally with leaders of other parties that might be necessary for a majority, before it is first presented at a public hearing.
So, while it might not have the jure initiative power, it does de facto.
If the EP had made any serious attempt to prevent Brexit, for example by proposing to the Commission to let member states have more control over immigration, they'd simply have been ignored and thus they never both making proposals that they know would get rejected.
I don't buy the argument that costs will skyrocket. Most manufacturers, won't give a lot of thought to making their products more durable while keeping the costs down, unless pressured, either by consumers, or the government. They're more focused on making money (rightfully so). The incentive to keep making money because their products break often causing people to re-buy, must be removed IMHO.
This is about addressing the fundamental problem.
Cost to replace touch screen module: more than the entire value of the car! That is insane. Effectively, if I want to claim from insurance - crack the touch screen (it is a replaceable module) and have to scrap the entire car.
In this case, I managed to get a replacement (fitted) from a scrapped car for 1/10 of the price the Ford dealer was quoting me.
A large part of the discrepancy is not automation, but cheap labour in the East where many of our products are made. Regulation can help redress than inequality.
Repair is so expensive because it's made to be. It shouldn't take several hours of skilled labour to replace an easily broken component like a touchscreen - it should be snap-in. Regulation can address that by mandating reparability.
It's also worth thinking about why we consider replacement being cheaper than repair to be a problem at all - if you trust the market, what's so horrible about that? Real time saver right?
Answer: the price of new goods does not reflect their full environmental and social cost. The switch in your toaster breaks - you buy a new one for a fiver instead of repairing the switch. The old one goes in a landfill. A quantity of non-renewable resources like oil and metal are used up; a the increased demand for these things contributes to the deaths of miners, and people who live near the factories and refineries. Fuel is burned to deliver the new toaster to you, and the Earth's temperature goes up a teeny-tiny fraction. None of these things are included in the price. Regulation can help that too.
The GP's issue isn't that he needed a technician to take apart the radio and install a new screen, he just needed a new radio. Which was his eventual solution.
> robust, easily repairable and good quality products: "minimum resistance criteria" to be established for each product category from the design stage
My console was not "easily repairable".
As it was we committed the control locations to muscle memory and just had dark controls at night until it died several years later. The fact that replacing a simple LED is so horrendously complicated is laughable.
I don't understand how LEDs can blow out, they're solid state and should last nearly forever.
If build quality and price go up, you can revert to an economy where you would fix your broken appliance once or twice before you replacing it.
But what's the incentive for the manufacturers?
Also, I try to buy things which are durable, but a lot of times it is hard to tell what will be durable so I go with the pricier option hoping it will last longer. This is not always true, especially for shoes and clothing, but in electronics too. The problem is when someone looks for reviews, they only find reviews of new models, but there's no website which would say this product can be used for X years without breaking. Do you guys know about such a site? Or something similar? I am always thinking about starting such website, which would provide reviews for older things, so there would be chronological ratings and we would see which brands make quality products and which of them not. ...but that would need a lot of input data to be useful and I am not sure how could this be started. Or even if this would be useful for others or only I am concerned with this.
What do you guys think about this?
The problem is the X years.
For electronics that website would be almost useless. I could tell you about the failure modes of my past laptops and phones but would you buy a discontinued product? At best you could hope that newer products of the same brand fixed some of the problems of the past ones and didn't add new issues.
The same applies to most goods because they are replaced by new models yearly or faster.
The solution is, of course, to put more people in a position where they can afford to buy the more expensive boots and see the value in doing so.
Because I also think this is a great idea too, but everything else being the same, the general insanity being the same, something else will probably give. On the other hand, if we did have this hypothetical more flexible economic system, making things well instead of hustling and externalizing costs might come as a lasting side effect of that.
We can have an economy that is stable and fair for everyone with no winners or losers. But people have been trained against socialism and communism for so many years, it'd be a very tough sell. The only way to have an economy flex responsively is if the government is a central planning agency for businesses.
I think there's a possibility for communism 2.0 where planning is distributed rather than being centralized or wholly reactive. We've built a great deal of the logistical infrastructure for this already, but our social and economic technology has fallen behind our physical capabilities.
If the EU is really interested in increasing the lifetime of products, it's simple, just increase the mandatory warranty from 2 to 5 (or some other appropriate number) years.
That would right away, increase the lifetime of the products, but would also, put a strain on the manufacturers to make it easier to repair (after all, if you have to increase the number of repairs to your products, you are going to make it cheaper to repair it in order to save money).
there's no guarantee of that. the manufacturers could just charge X times more, and expect on average to send 1.5 replacements out.
(or less, most likely. folks who wouldn't bother to ask for warranty service, or lose the device first, or otherwise fail to satisfy the requirements of the warranty.)
The battery is glued to the case and the wires are soldered to the board. The display is also glued to the case (I had to break the original display into bits in order to take it out).
The whole thing was designed to be disposable. This just seems wrong. It's unfair to the customer and bad for the environment.
With phones running $800+ nowadays, i would expect it to last longer (3yrs min.) like a laptop.
Battery life is not awesome but still lasts a full day with light 4G usage. I don't get software updates anymore, but that isn't an issue for me.
I know that when the battery dies for good, or if the display shatters, I probably won't have a way to repair it, and that is bad because I really don't need a new phone.
Availability and cost of spare parts, and ease of repair should be major decision factors for people buying electronics. It already is the case for cars.
This is most likely a misleading stat. You can repair most things if you're willing to spend the money or time to do it. Many consumer goods cost more to repair than it's worth. No one is going to do that.
My parents had 2 washing machines in their whole life, in contrast...
These things exist but they cost more. Consumers need to be willing to put money where their mouth is.
"Reputation" for quality won't ensure you anything and noone gives out warranty over mandatory minimum enforced by law.
The best form of recycling is of course repairing, you only throw away (and need to dispose of) a tiny piece of (metal, plastic, etc.) instead of having to dispose kilograms or tons of the same stuff (the whole whatever).
But the point is "who is gonna pay for disposal?" a part of the WEEE directives (related to solar panels) goes into the right direction but still, see the previous thread here:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13250584
The manufacturer saves today but will (maybe) pay tomorrow.
The only way (unfortunately not very practical) is to have manufacturers deposit today (in some sort of fund) the sum that will be needed tomorrow for disposals, with some sort of scale so that longer lasting products will need less money to be deposited or maybe allowing the withdrawal of a quote of the deposit after some lasting performance has been measured, that would make them think about the opportunity of making shorter or longer lasting (or non-repairable vs. repairable) devices.
I had my very first anxiety thrill ungluing an iPad window to replace the broken microphone; and I look with anxiety at my S7, thinking of when the battery starts aging.
In theory, they even give a way to price out the effective longevity of comparable devices by looking at the prices of the warranties.
In the end, my understanding is that customers do not assign a lot of value to that lifetime extension, and as a result the extended warranties are generally not purchased.
If the EU enacts measures to enforce product longevity, they force customers to buy something that they have already chosen not to buy.
A few weeks ago, I repaired an eltronical appliance and was surprised to see that all screws were screwed into plastic. As I unscrewed them to access the inside of the device, the plastic around the screw broke.
I think there should be laws that prevent screwing into plastic. That just makes no sense appart from upfront cost. Once the plastic is broken, there is no way but to throw the broken device away. Unless you can somehow glue everything back together, but that seems unpractical.
It's like devices are not even planned to be repaired. They are designed to be sold and then abandoned. That's the real issue. Not cost of repair.
Now lamps have a limited lifespan because of the manufacturers, so they have more sales.
I think this was the article: http://spectrum.ieee.org/geek-life/history/the-great-lightbu...
Industrial products are different. There's a class of product that must be designed for easy maintenance. Not so in consumer-land. For example, to replace some of the lights on a BMW you have to remove the front bumper. Crazy.
I don't expect good things to happen, but one way or another it would be instructive.
[1]: http://europa.eu/youreurope/citizens/consumers/shopping/guar...
The more you throw away, the more you pay. The more waste you produce, the more you pay. The more you harm the environment, the more you pay.
This will incentivize individuals to throw less away, hence buy less and seek more durable products.
Uh, no. That will insure that repairs always take 29 days, except in february where they will take 27 daze.
Simply always extend the guarantee by the amount of any repair time.
If followed up, this could end up the same as with lead-free soldering. There weren't good incentives for manufacturers to remove lead from soldering until the EU passed the RoHS directive (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Restriction_of_Hazardous_Subst...) and, subsequently, laws were introduced to implement it throughout the EU.
Possibly reducing the companies' environmental footprint on the world.
Instead of cheap devices being scrapped every two years and sent to the landfill, consumers could instead hold on to the companies' products for much much longer. If products have comparatively more time and quality parts, the cost will indeed go up--both for manufacturing and retail price.
My grandmother had the same bread mixer the whole time I was growing up. And I know she had it long before I was born. It was built to last and she took care of it. My mother, on the other hand, went through at least six different plastic, Made in China bread mixers over the course of my childhood.
Where's the corporate responsibility for all the waste that is generated by crappy products?
If you were KitchenAid or another brand, wouldn't you want to set yourself apart from the others as a company who cares about the environment by making products that will last for years to come and acknowledging that in advertising? Products that can also be repaired if there is an issue, as opposed to chucked aside for a new one because of their lack of value?
I'd consider such a company the "Whole Foods" of appliances. Citizens who share similar conservation values will likely pay more for that product, just as those who opt for solar/wind energy over coal.
One way of doing it would be to charge companies up-front for the cost of handling the waste for the eventual disposal of the product. That directly disincetivizes companies from make it poorly, pile it high, sell it cheap business models.
So yeah, you're completely right. If people didn't own their own hardware, if it was owned by the company and leased, we'd likely see more incentive to make sure they lasted.
Then again, companies discovered that you can lease something to someone and then charge them full price if/when they break it, so maybe not.
I once work on an embedded computer where we decided that the user would wear out one USB port before it would reach our longevity goals. We put two USB ports on it to get over that limit. The alternative was a maintenance schedule to replace the port. Either meat our longevity goals, but only one was also repairable.
They get to continue to sell their products. Internalizing externalities and all that jazz.
To add, It doesn't seem like we could go on indefinitely with ephemeral product cycles consuming increasing amounts of natural resources considering the increasing purchasing power of emerging economies.
The shrinking of the number of models and manufactures relative to the size of the market is already to blame for this. Maybe there would be more designers because now when you put out a product it needs to work for a long time, not until you can just tweak next years model?
There are some anecdotal examples of people with Miele washing machines that have lasted for decades etc (... as an aside I guess we wont know about today's Miele washing machines for several more years at least ...), but in my experience paying a premium for a product more often than not just gives you an as-cheaply-made product but with a brand name you've heard of. I am very happy to pay for decent stuff, but I am not prepared to pay extra for the same quality stuff just to get a brand name.
What seems to be the biggest problem these days for me is not mechanical failures, but what can only be assumed to be software failures - things just going haywire or flashing an LED/error code and not doing what they should.
Perhaps there is some cheap capacitor that has blown somewhere, but it is often a waffly explanation along the lines of "logic board has failed" (and they are always super-expensive to replace due to it being 10 years old and not made/stocked any more etc etc). It is usually more sensible to replace a 5-15 year old appliance with a new one, rather than buying a spare part that costs 50% of an entire new appliance, (plus then you usually get the benefits of improved energy efficiency)
Quality is available, people just don't want to pay for it. Those washing machines that lasted for 15 years? Back then, they cost one or two months' wages. Try to get anyone to pay $2500 for a washing machine today.
I stopped buying ultra cheap clothing as it rarely lasts 5 laundry cycles and sometimes starts to visibly fail on the first cycle. I realize that it's a viable niche for people with giant piles of clothing they rarely use. But, the jump from 4>40 is reasonable the jump from 40+ stops being economic.
Since I live in an apartment and wanted a small one anyway, I ended up with a portable one (oneConcept DB004 - odd name) that uses mechanical timers for the stages (you can hear them ticking!). It hasn't arrived yet but I am hopeful that when it inevitably breaks I can fix it.
I want to get a dishwasher next and sadly don't know if I can find something equivalent.
On the other hand, if the scale in the marketplace was in durable boots, then companies would be able to optimize for that, and the price would almost certainly come down. There would be a shift away from fashion design, and marketing, towards product engineering to be able to produce that product at a price that most people could afford.
It does all the time, no? At least here, town halls give stupid jobs to people when unemployment is too high. Obviously, the results are catastrofic.
Such a requirement will make the seller optimize the product for affordable longevity and make it cheap and easy to repair the product.
A significant number of consumers will appreciate the predictable cost for the use of the product and take out such a warranty.
Wouldn't you much rather have a lease with option to purchase?
> The directive imposes the responsibility for the disposal of waste electrical and electronic equipment on the manufacturers or distributors of such equipment.[3] It requires that those companies establish an infrastructure for collecting WEEE, in such a way that "Users of electrical and electronic equipment from private households should have the possibility of returning WEEE at least free of charge".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electroni...
Pretty sure there are laws like this in lots of other places, and it in no way appears to encourage repair. In fact, you could make an argument that it discourages repair: since repairable machines are typically heavier, it is cheaper for the manufacturer to pay the deposit on a lighter machine which is not repairable. You can't really get the bureaucracy to determine how repairable your product is either. If you do, the rules will ultimately be just as arbitrary as weight, and not thorough enough to generate the intended effect. In addition to being useless, these regulations also increase the cost of goods, congratulations.
So anyway, that's a reason why people's revealed preference for extended warranties might not correspond with their true preference for longevity in consumer products.
It's also the case that if you can afford to insure yourself against something (like a consumer good breaking down), and average the costs across all such things, then generally you'll save money by doing so — especially if you reckon, as I do in this case, that you take better-than-average care of your consumer goods. In that case, the price of the extended warranty is a signal of expected longevity, and features in your purchase decision (lower = better), even if you don't buy it. So again, revealed preference for warranties may not equal true preference for longevity.
Finally, we're collectively using and disposing of too much stuff, and one of the reasons for this is that externalities such as waste and resource depletion are not fully internalised. So even if people are not buying extended warranties, and that truly reflects an indifference to product lifespan, there may well be an argument that by "forcing them to buy an extended warranty" — which also forces the manufacturer to take responsibility for the product over a longer period, and thus pay more attention to how long it generally lasts — you get higher social welfare, despite some constraint on individual consumer freedom.
Finally, people are hyperbolic discounters, they are myopic in a way that hurts their happiness, so a regulation that encourages longer-term thinking may help them in the long run.
TL;DR: I think this measure has potential to be a really good thing all round.
> Finally, people are hyperbolic discounters, they are myopic in a way that hurts their happiness, so a regulation that encourages longer-term thinking may help them in the long run.
Here it may just be my Yankee self-reliance talking, but this smacks of the worst sort of paternalism. Arguing slippery slope arguments is in itself a slippery slope, but why stop here? If buying a bigger TV is not going to make me happy (or make me unhappier) then surely a regulation should exist to prevent me from buying it.
When there are significant externalities (like leaded gasoline) then government regulation is easy to justify. When the externalities are second-hand (the reduction in demand for product longevity causes reparability to become a secondary concern for manufacturers) then I'm more inclined to err on the side of "let the customer set the price of their own risk", rather than "let's just increase costs for everyone because it may or may not have a net societal benefit".
I don't trust that regulatory authorities are above the myopia and are truly able to see long-term more than anyone else.
US-centric pro-corporatist thinking doesn't always apply to the rest of the world.
This is my favorite bit of legalease:
https://www.apple.com/au/legal/statutory-warranty/
That page has become more friendly over time, but when they first put it up it was amazingly passive aggressive.
I have no problem, for example, with common-law tenants of implied warranties, and in general, the right of customers to demand redress for obvious failures to meet expectations or deception on the part of companies (be the corporations or otherwise).
I believe, though, that the consumer has a right to set a price on their own preference for risk, in general. In specific cases, especially where there are externalities involved, then it's reasonable to limit it (leaded gasoline, for example, or healthcare, for a more controversial (in the US) one), but I feel the starting point should be to let the consumer decide for themselves.
I've only had a couple of "extended warranties", and they were worded in such a way that they were useless. "This warranty does not cover normal wear and tear on $common_failing_part..." and the like.
If they were useful, I'd buy them all the time.
I guess a middle ground could be to force (through regulation) the companies to offer a manufacturer's warranty, but I'm not sure that this approach is any better than the recommendations that the EU is calling for.
It's a race to the bottom without standards enforcement.
Also Market for Lemons: good product is driven out.
I used to work at best buy and our "extended warranty" was basically us floating you a new unit while we RMA'd the broken one.
That would discourage copious amounts or glue and still let the engineers use the methods they want.
Absolutely. Smartphones are the best example, the software makes the hardware unusable or insecure because of the lack of updates pretty quickly.
Or, alternatively, the (practically) mandatory updates make the previously perfectly fine phone slow to the point of being unusable.
I'm saying that the updates are practically mandatory because if you don't apply them, your apps gradually stop working (as they cannot talk to their respective server backends, which are being updated without maintaining backcompat) - and of course, the current version of the app requires the current(ish) version of iOS. This all amounts to an engineered obsolescence of millions of perfectly good phones.
Manufacturers design for a minimum lifetime as cheaply as possible. "It must last 2 years. How can we save money?" Virtually nobody is going "It must break after 2 years." Except in a very small number of cases that is conspiracy theory nonsense.
And the beauty of glue would be everywhere. Glue is such a great engineering tool, easy to apply and no need to worry about repairs ever.
I like repairing my stuff...
If you want a device without plastic screw holes, pay more money and find one or make one yourself, market it and sell it to other like-minded people.
If I have a toaster that breaks, the time it would take me to go to a repair shop is more valuable to me than the cost of a new toaster – not to mention the cost of the repair itself.
In China, you often do get smaller appliances repaired because the labor cost is so low. So it makes economic sense to get those kinds of items repaired.
But in France, if I want to get a microwave fixed, the item is either still under warranty or the depreciated value is less than the repair cost. Perhaps if government lowered taxes and relaxed the labor code, then repair shops could charge less and it would incentivize people to get repairs on smaller ticket items rather than buying replacements. But I certainly am not going to spend €65 getting a €150 microwave repaired when the microwave is already several years old. I migh spend €20 for that repair if I really liked the microwave.
I certainly wouldn’t be happy if I had to pay several hundred euros more for a microwave because of a law mandating the type of screw holes that must be used. The increase cost wouldn’t even be in materials as much as the buereaucratic cost of implementing such requirements.
Health and safety regulations – of course. Regulations because you’re unhappy with screw holes? Not a chance.
Otherwise there is no feasible way to know what's the build quality before opening it yourself.
It's hard to measure, like a lot of things, but we should not throw away a microwave because a single transistor broke. We should get someone to repair it. We would collectively save money (instead of paying people with the RSA doing nothing, we should get some of them to learn how to repair stuff) and save the environment.
As for the tone, you might want to be a little more respectful than to simplify other people's thoughts down to "regulations because you're unhappy with screw holes". It does not help you in any way.
Oh, Brian, we meet again, and we disagree once again. Taxes and the labor code are not what is making things expensive.
- The labor code is not even close to being the one reason companies do not hire : https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/2871900?sommaire=287202...
- Countless fiscal advantages have already been given and tried, effectively the same thing as lowering taxes on companies. That includes the CIE, CICE, CIR, the reduction of TVA in restaurants, fiscal benefits for life insurance holders, lowering the ISS to 34.6%, removing taxes on plus-value, the globalised worldwide profits regime, and the countless things that can be listed here : https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niche_fiscale
All of these happened, and the costs have not changed. Some of them were given in exchange of promise of jobs (the change of TVA in restaurants being one of the most notable), and none happened. Profits went up, though.
I would rather have microwave repair costs go up to 80€ than lower our living standards.
>I certainly wouldn’t be happy if I had to pay several hundred euros more for a microwave because of a law mandating the type of screw holes that must be used.
hyperbole.txt
The article makes some good points that lifespan was controlled, but not as drastically as you imply. They were talking about losing a third of the lifespan. While yes, they were clearly aiming to reduce the lifespan of bulbs, they did so by making the bulbs better (brighter) in a way that made consumers want those bulbs.
If you could do both brighter and longer lifespan, I'm sure someone would have (it's not like that cartel is still going - 1940 was a long time ago) - I don't think what they did was that dissimilar to desktop software moving to subscription models to increase profit - as long as they introduce value from that change to justify it, then it's not wrong.
The century-old bulb is an extreme outlier and there was never an expectation for anything to last that long. Trying to imply that modern bulbs are handicapped intentionally to such an extreme is just misleading.
It's hardly a conspiracy. You can keep an old car running forever, but I want a car with air conditioning, power locks, Bluetooth, ABS, power steering, variable valve timing, and good gas milage. All of those things are complicated systems that are expensive to repair and break easily. Doesn't mean the older car is better or newer cars are a rip off.
No, they did, that's what is called a halogen lamp, quite a bit more efficient, lasts about twice as long.
Brighter and more efficient.
No, because it is (well, was, before CFLs and LEDs for lighting) actually more economical for the customer. At least in recent times, the largest chunk of the costs of owning and using a light bulb was the energy used over its lifetime, not the price to buy one. A typical 60 Watt ligh bulb cost 0.50 to maybe 1 dollar, the electricity to make it produce light for 1000 hours about 7 to 15 dollars.
The tradeoff was simply between making it more efficient at converting electricity into light, which requires running it at higher temperatures, which reduces the lifespan, or making it last longer, at the cost of making it less efficient and thus more expensive to use.
In Australia, we have the traditional warranty by law, but we also have a law that requires appliances to last as long as would be reasonably expected to by a consumer. [1] And they must meet any extra claims. Of course, this is an absolute pain to then try to get the manufacturer to uphold, and you may have to threaten legal action.
We did this with an Apple Watch that broke when dropped onto concrete. My argument was that the watch was repeatedly marketed as a "sports watch", and such a device should be able to withstand a small fall without being destroyed. Took a few months, but we got a replacement. Have had friends with good experiences with large appliances, but you certainly have to be prepared to fight.
[1] http://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-06-07/broken-but-out-of-warr...
[0] https://www.miele.co.uk/domestic/10-year-parts-and-labour-wa...
Let's use the same example of a hypothetical simple toaster -like device, and assume that you have a specific breakage where fixing it takes 20% of the effort required to make the device in the first place.
I'd say it's feasible that massproduction and automation brings up the efficiency so that this already means that producing the item takes less human hours than fixing the item even if it's easily openable and servicable.
Furthermore, even if you have a scenario where fixing an item takes 20% of the hours to build the item, it's feasible that the local repairperson in a first wold country costs more than 5 times per hour than the cheapest possible place in the world where the item was manufactured.
It is quite realistic that the efficiencies of the global mass production toolchain mean that repairing many types of items doesn't make practical sense no matter how serviceable they are.
A person manually soldering a single capacitor can reasonably cost more than the manufacturing of the entire circuit board and its components - and that's not caused by faulty design, but by the effect of scale and automation; it's not that repair is expensive but that replacements are dirt cheap.
After all, they built the widget! The vast logistical network of freight, retailers, consumers, and waste disposal services merely transported the widget to a landfill.
But there are difficulties with this viewpoint. How does the disposal obligation work in horizontally-integrated industries (e.g. car manufacturing)? How does it work with globalization (import taxes?)? Is there any viable way to account for the waste (core samples into landfills?) or will the cost be a guess subject to lobbyists?
One approach might be to require the manufacturer or importer to rent space in a network of landfills by tonnage. Call it "waste disposal insurance".
EDIT: A random idea would incorporate a blockchain containing transactions identifying the serial numbers of the products or components. That way, assemblages could be formally shown to be composed of properly insured components, even requiring the final serial number to be the hash of its components. The tokens could be traded between manufacturers and landfills directly, closing the loop on the product lifecycle. Compliance audits would simply compare sales records to the public chain.
On the landfill side, tokens operate as space reservations by tonnage, and can be efficiently traded to balance loads without requiring products to be taken to specific landfills.
On your big TV example, you probably shouldn't be prevented from buying it, but other measures to discourage you from buying it could in theory be welfare-improving on a societal level, and if they were then that would constitute part of a case for imposing them.
It's not like Soviet Russia where the government can open a new plant and put people to work there producing private-market goods and then shut it down when supply gets too big.
AIUI, for products marketed in the US there are often internal photographs & other documentation (e.g, a totally random example product I found with one of the FCC ID search engines: https://fccid.io/2AMOCKST-900)
Having some semi-standardised set of robustness and repairability criteria and requiring that businesses publish an evaluation of their products against the criteria would at least allow people to get some idea of the 'build quality' or other potential decisionmaking info before buying.
Of course, it would be easy for unscrupulous product manufacturers to find ways to game the evaluations, or just outright lie, so you need some teeth to the rules if caught.
And on the other hand, you're imposing further regulatory burdens on those producing new products, increasing costs and maybe time to market. So there are definitely downsides.
Balancing everything and making it useful without being burdensome is the real problem.
As an afterthought, even if you look inside one instance of a product, there isn't any degree of certainty that if you buy an (externally) identical, matching model number/SKU, it will be the same.
Some regulatory system that actually required version-numbering, or different model-numbering on non-trivial changes would be useful, especially if combined with some obligation to record/announce those version releases, maybe even with some actual change notes.
Some computer graphic card manufactures have a system like this. If the card fails in it's lifetime warranty they will replace the card with an equivalent or better model. One of my friends had their RMAed EVGA card upgraded even though it was 5 years old, and it wasn't to just the current performance equivalent, their $300 5 year old card was replaced with a $300 new card.
And also, obviously not hotter, how could they be more efficient at producing light, and still be hotter? Yes, the filament in halogen lamps is running hotter, that's why they are more efficient (and the halogen process is what keeps the filament intact despite the high temperature), but they're also more compact--the total amount of thermal power produced by a halogen lamp of equal light output as a regular incandescent bulb is lower, and thus, if you put it into the same form factor and under the same cooling conditions, it's actually going to be cooler at the surface.
You might be able to purchase software and hardware at the same time, but there should be a choice of software and the price of the software should be listed separately on the bill.
The prevalent software business model of lock-in has infected hardware. This has disastrous consequences for the environment. Just because some software is unsupported, expensive hardware is bricked.
The parliament recommendation has this to say about this problem: "software solutions which prevent repairs from being performed, other than by approved firms or bodies, should be discouraged".
If you do it yourself, it's cheaper, but the insurance company won't pay for it.
It's very easy to add together a few repairs which sum to more than the value of the car. If you wanted to get a new car from scratch by ordering the individual components and having your dealership put them together, it would have to be at least 10x more expensive than buying one produced at scale.
> If you do it yourself, it's cheaper, but the insurance company won't pay for it.
On the one hand, you have the value of your time in your skill area, versus mucking about with a radio. On the other, you have the overhead and inefficiency of a huge dealer/insurance system. Somewhere in the middle is your local mechanic :) Find a good one and make friends - you don't have to go to the dealership!
He quit that job.
There are both environmental and quality of life issues with the way our culture has evolved recently, particularly around advancing consumer technologies, which aren't (directly) financial in nature but are definitely things we could change for the better. Meanwhile, the increases in money moving around on paper are mostly in the direction of manufacturers taking advantage of consumers one way or another, and I don't have a problem with damaging that effect in favour of the others.
In other words, if making things more durable results in people working fewer hours, then we need to know whether that results in negative income repercussions for workers.
A rudimentary example:
1x disposable widget took .5hrs to mfg. market price =$10 and lasts 1yr. CO = $10/yr
1x durable widget takes .6 hrs to mfg. market price =$50 and lasts 10 yrs. CO = $5/yr
And you extrapolate that...
So, yes, your costs go down over time, but so do your wages, so the deflation has to be measured so that earnings don't go down quicker than cost of living/cost of goods and services. Commensurate.
Of course, I fail to see why most modern consumer products can't just be driven with a Raspberry pi or arduino. Using off-the-shelf parts like that would do wonders for serviceability.
A custom board assembly is much cheaper to manufacture. For instance, for a recent design, the only chip used off a full Arduino board was the microcontroller itself (and then in a different, smaller package).
Physical and electrical constraints are often significant. And that's before getting into all the issues involved with firmware and IP.
I love the idea of open-source (hardware and software) consumer appliances, but everything is stacked against it. Primarily economies of scale.
When my Frigidaire washer finally dies that's what I'm getting. I already injured myself replacing the pump once. And now that I've seen the cheap plastic parts used I don't have confidence it's going to last.
[1]https://www.nec-display-solutions.com/p/uk/en/products/choic...
Back then people could afford to spend two months wages on a product like that. That people today don't reflects just as much (if not more) on their ability to do so as it does on their willingness.
In terms of real productivity, a durable widget that has a 20% overhead to manufacture but lasts 10x as long is far more useful, and in terms of quality of life, people needing to spend fewer hours of their lives doing mundane work is a desirable goal in itself.
In the long term, it seems likely that either people will find new ways to make a living, just as they did on countless past occasions when technology rendered a particular vocation obsolete, or we will move towards a different economic arrangement where people don't have to work full-time to earn a decent living, or quite possibly we will see some sort of hybrid with aspects of both newer types of work and reduced working hours.
Further more, standard high volume stuff usually sees much more competition and investment by chip companies, who are really the ones doing the deep r&d in this industry.
Which can increase the original cost of the good.
... to better reflect it's real cost by including all the otherwise externalized costs.
I'm not saying that it's a net loss, nor that even if a net loss that it isn't worth it. But there is a cost there, and you are shoving it away on your quest to regulation instead of looking at it and deciding its worth.
What is the externality here? Trash left over when the product is discarded?
Regulating the manufacturer is a classic progressive roundabout way of not regulating the externality directly. Instead, perhaps a better solution would be regulating the amount of wasted resources / complexity to recycling, such that the consumer is made very aware of the environmental impact of a product that is no longer in use.
And if the consumer was truly bearing a non-environmental burden for cheap stuff that is hard to fix and breaks easily, they would keep name-brand businesses with durable products in business (and indeed, they do).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g
The '59 Chevy gets 13.5 miles per gallon. [1] The '09 Chevy gets 25. [2]
Yes, modern cars are more difficult to maintain than older cars -- they require more specialized equipment to maintain, parts are more difficult to replace, so on and so forth. Modern cars are also incredibly more fuel efficient and safer to ride in, and much of that is enabled by the same engineering efforts that make cars more difficult to maintain.
1) http://www.automobile-catalog.com/make/chevrolet_usa/full-si...
In short, repairability is too nebulous of a target for effective regulation. I think the appropriate angle for government intervention is to protect a "right to repair".
> A large part of the discrepancy is not automation, but cheap labour in the East where many of our products are made. Regulation can help redress than inequality...Regulation can address that by mandating reparability.
There are a number of ways to tackle this issue:
* reduce the regulatory and tax burden faced by small repair shops. Increased competition and lower overhead costs will drive down prices.
* reduce the regulations that impact the product design. Engineering is the result of navigating difficult trade-offs; the more aspects of a design we try to "fix", especially through political processes, the more complex the end result will be.
* broaden access to repair knowledge and tools. You don't even need regulatory changes for this one; It's an excellent opportunity for entrepreneurs. Part of the reason older cars are so easy to repair is that the tools and knowledge have become widespread thanks to third-party businesses that have found a way to supply those things cheaply and profitably. YouTube is a DIYer's dream.
> It's also worth thinking about why we consider replacement being cheaper than repair to be a problem at all - if you trust the market, what's so horrible about that? Real time saver right?
Sometimes it's not a problem. Is it better to use a paper towel is biodegradable and produced through sustainable tree-farming, or use a reusable cloth towel that increases demand for environmentally unfriendly washing machines and laundry detergent (and spend money on sewing machines and thread to repair holes)?
> the price of new goods does not reflect their full environmental and social cost
Nor would they with heavy regulation, because the "full environmental and social cost" is incalculable. Furthermore, there is no attempt to measure the costs imposed by the regulations and the net benefits provided (if any).
If someone has gone to the effort to buy responsibly sourced paper towels, I think they would also own responsibly sourcfed and environmentally friendly detergent. And of course the cloth would usually be washed with other items, and so not that much more water would be used. And, is thread really a cost here for home repairs?
I think the more realistic version of your scenario is:
"Is it better to use a non-biodegradable paper towel which was not sustainably produced, or to use a resusable cloth which needs to be thrown in with the other laundry occasionally, and which after many months of use may be relegated to a toolkit grease-towel, or thrown out and replaced?"
Lastly -- the OP may have been over-specific in talking about "full environmental and social cost", but there is plenty of room to move from where we are now to "enough social costs so that poor people don't leave near factories which give them asthma and lower their life expectancy, and to mitigate the effects of human-caused global warming."
All paper is sustainably harvested from tree-farms where the trees are grown specifically for making paper, rather than e.g. old-growth forests. It's also all (to my knowledge) biodegradable.
I'm not saying that paper towels are always the better choice. You can also look at other factors such as manufacturing costs, etc. My point was that disposability can be a positive trait.
With regard to externalities, my point is that regulations have them too. Yes, you can impose (costly) requirements on industry, but do we ask what the cost is in terms of economic growth (which is lifting many third-world people out of extreme poverty) and technological innovation (which creates greater efficiency)?
I don't wish to sound partisan. I think that dealing with externalities is tricky, and it's worth having a discussion about. However, I think regulations to deal with them are often zero-sum solutions. It's worth asking whether:
a) there is a positive-sum (generally market-based) solution
b) the conditions that created the externality are transient and will resolve in time
I think manufacturer hostility to third party repairers is a much bigger burden than state-imposed overhead. It's not like all manufacturers are super-open and eager to share the schematics of their products with hackers, is it?
I think an aspect of this "right to repair" would be the ability to seek legal action against manufacturers who deliberately interfere with this right.
However, the relationship between repair shops and manufacturers need not be hostile. I don't know the stats for this, but would it not be reasonable to think that many people purchase cars based on the recommendation of a trusted mechanic? I certainly do. Mechanics are generally going to recommend vehicles that are either easy to work on or aren't in the shop often (or both).
Productivity has risen in manufacturing, tech, and automation. This provides a moderate wage increase in those jobs, but a sharp drop in employment as well. Meanwhile, you also get a similar competitive wage increase in essential service industries (health care, education, construction), but because those sectors have experienced no increase in productivity, this is reflected in the price others pay for those goods, not in the employment figures for them. The drop in employment in high-productivity sectors then forces laid off workers into marginal service-sector employment.
Because of Simpson's Paradox [1], this results in flat or declining wage statistics across the whole economy, but the statistics obscure a lot of detail. Nurses, therapists, teachers, et al are doing okay; they're not going to get rich, and the rising cost of housing in some metro areas means that if they don't already own their house they may need to move far away, but their relative wages are keeping pace. Same with the few remaining union jobs: unionized longshoremen at the Port of Oakland make mid six-figures, as much as a software engineer at a startup. But employment in those fields is dropping, because of productivity increases, and everyone who is displaced out of them needs to find employment in the undifferentiated service sector, usually at much lower wages. And the people who actually provide the automation support that's driving this productivity growth are making out like bandits: that's where you see all the new millionaires being minted.
This'll continue until either society breaks down and goes to war or a bunch of new industries spring up and absorb all the new workers, who then differentiate their skillsets and bargain for higher pay. Both of these happened last time this occurred, in the early 1900s; the world wars were the springboard that drove adoption of new technologies like automobiles and airplanes. We see some possible beginnings of this with things like ridesharing and delivery startups, but it seems unlikely these are the big industries of the 21st century. More likely, they're transient uses for large crowds of unemployed people, and the real 21st century industries will be the micromarket: individual entrepreneurs that are each specialized in reaching & designing for a small group of customers, using home manufacturing & automated shipping tools that are in their infancy now.
Not so for rent, food etc. as far as I know.
Purchasing power for subsistence goods would't go up due to the malthusian trap.
The same way you have induced demand from wider roads to have more cars.
Mass-produced electronics and other consumer goods is much, much cheaper; you get more of that with your wages.
https://www.yahoo.com/amphtml/news/blogs/lookout/fed-officia...
As far as I can know, food prices in America have gone down a little bit in the long term in comparison to general price index; 1982 food price index was 100 and now it is 90. Where I live (north Europe), the price drop has been more substantial.
The biggest health problem that poor people face in the U.S. is obesity.
But even if food is not problem, the real issues are housing and health care costs.
As our purchasing power has decreased and inflation has increased, we've also invented a lot more expensive stuff to spend our fewer and fewer dollars on.
As said, real estate prices have gone up. But in early 1970's, Americans used 20 % of their inćome on food. Now it's somewhere around 6-7 %. So, for this most basic of commodities, the purchasing power has increased substantially.
It is remarkable how the prices of maybe three out of four items has doubled in the last four years.
Maybe the market has simply bifurcated.
>Which is done because solder is thinner/lighter than sockets, and therefore you can get a thinner/lighter laptop.
So let them figure out another way to make it thinner/lighter. I don't want them to do it at the expense of upgrading common parts. We're not asking for every single chip to be replaceable. Just the obvious parts that have an established 10+ year history of being serviceable. I bet welding every single part on a car makes it lighter too, but I don't think people want to replace the entire car if their fuel pump breaks.
>There are real engineering tradeoffs all over the place here that are being elided
Huh? You switched from purely cosmetic factors - thinner/lighter, to engineering. You will have to explain that one to me...
Yeah, incorporating some product standards is going to raise the cost of all units sold, which represents a loss to the buyer who hoped to get the product at the cheapest possible price and was either willing to take perfect care of it or tolerate it not being fully repairable if it were broken. But that's OK, because when regulating something the most important person to consider is the median user, noth the clumsiest/unluckiest nor the most skilled/luckiest.
If the median user buys a car expecting to drive it for 5 years, and there's a >50% chance that it will suffer some damage to some major functional component during that time, it would be pretty inefficient for said damage to cost more to fix than the cost of replacing the whole car, unless cars were to become so cheap that it was actually cheaper and better to scrap them - perhaps thanks to some breakthrough in large-scale 3d printing technology or so.
That's what happened with computer keyboards; it used to be that they were fairly expensive and if someone spilled coffee into one it was worth dismantling, cleaning, and re-assembling, but then cheap membrane keyboards assembled with increasing levels of automation brought the price down faster and faster, and today you can get a PC keyboard for something ridiculous like $10. A few fetishists still pay out for old-style IBM Model M, but most people will just replace a damaged keyboard.
But while cars remain relatively expensive and hard to dispose of, it makes sense to minimize the economic losses stemming for a lack of modularity and repairability across the market as a whole, rather than seeking to minimize the costs for the stingiest buyer.
What if the chance is actually 1%? What if the cost of repairing it is bigger than a new car? What if, as you said, cars got cheaper, but not so cheap to be disposable? What if making if repairable has the side effect of making it less durable?
Just nobody upthread is asking any of those questions. It's not circular, it's a plain old and boring cost vs. benefit assessment to be done over government intervention.
Competition from non-Cherry keyswitches have forced Cherry to drop prices, such that nearly identical keyboards from 2008 now cost a quarter as much. Cherry was valuable for proving the technology in the premium market, and Cherry's competitors were valuable in bringing the prices down and driving economies of scale to make mechanical keyboards basically a "no brainer" purchase now.
User-serviceable parts are better, all things being equal. But all things aren't equal. You're trying to mandate tradeoffs for everyone else, and I don't think you understand everyone else's tradeoffs well enough to do that.
And "acceptable compromise" -- acceptable to who? Because the current compromise is acceptable to people who buy these laptops with soldered-on RAM. And it's not acceptable to those who buy other laptops that don't have soldered RAM. The compromise has been accepted by the market. "Well, the market got it wrong and should do it better," you might think. Sure, okay, but history is rife with examples of people telling markets to do things better and things not getting better, and it's helpful to think about why markets haven't gotten to better on their own.
>And "acceptable compromise" -- acceptable to who?
To me, and anyone else who shares my values.
>Because the current compromise is acceptable to people who buy these laptops with soldered-on RAM.
Seems like you can layer-on any argument you want simply by citing sales. I suppose people think Windows security is the best since they overwhelmingly choose to buy Windows machines over Apple or Linux desktops. But that is a false statement, because not everyone is aware of the intricacies of operating system design or that different options exist, or how they differ etc etc. Extrapolating _just_ from commercial success to use as data in an argument is a fools errand because of the thousands of variables involved in a large diverse group making a purchasing decision.
>Sure, okay, but history is rife with examples of people telling markets to do things better and things not getting better,
Hmm I'm curious.. can you provide a sampling of those incidents that apply to our discussion here?
>and it's helpful to think about why markets haven't gotten to better on their own.
They almost never do. Systems typically evolve to coalesce around a local maxima. All around the world (in democracies anyway), citizens have always installed regulations to make the market serve us, rather than the other way around. For e.g. in the US - child labor, minimum wage, consumer product safety, etc, antitrust laws, etc etc. Before each of those laws got passed, I'm sure people made arguments against it with "well the market has accepted it". (You seem like a decent bloke, so I'm not suggesting that you personally would be against those regulations, just making a general point)
