EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

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.

[1] https://www.ifixit.com/smartphone-repairability

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.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson%27s_paradox

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

Which can increase the original cost of the good.