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EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

eubusiness.com

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Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#211

Post by ptaipale »

freehunter wrote: post #165
ptaipale wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you get with your wages has changed. Real estate is more expensive; you get less of that with your wages. Mass-produced electronics and other consumer goods is much, much cheaper; you get more of that with your wages.

But in the 50s you weren't buying a new iPhone every few years, or a desktop/laptop computer or a tablet, or multiple TVs, or a cell phone contract, or an Internet contract, or cable TV, or Netflix. 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.

Purchasing power for what?

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.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#212

Post by Silhouette »

pizzetta wrote: post #170
Silhouette wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK, but why should we consider the economic concept of money changing hands more rapidly to be an inherently good thing? 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…

I think they have to be considered with respect to people's relative purchasing power. Ensure that if the velocity of money goes down that people's relative purchasing power remains equivalent. 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 .5hr…

But this is make-work. It's a polite fiction, designed to support an economic framework that is looking less relevant as technology and automation play an increasing role in our industry. Our current economic system may even become obsolete within our lifetimes, hence the recent interest in alternative models like universal basic incomes.

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.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#213

Post by NTDF9 »

The solution is metered trash/pollution for everyone.

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.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#214

Post by lliamander »

adamsea wrote: post #207
lliamander wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've made some thoughtful points, but I'm not sure I agree with your conclusion. 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...R…

> 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)? If someone has gone to the effort to buy responsibly sourced paper towels, I think they would also own responsibly sourcfed and envir…

> If someone has gone to the effort to buy responsibly sourced paper towels

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

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#215

Post by lend000 »

sly010 wrote: post #142
cwyers wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Which can increase the original cost of the good.

> Which can increase the original cost of the good. ... to better reflect it's real cost by including all the otherwise externalized costs.

> all the otherwise externalized costs.

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).

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#216

Post by zanny »

bashinator wrote: post #209
anigbrowl wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you're assuming the regulation is an end in itself and coming to a tautological. Regulation is essentially saying 'wait, let's factor in these unaccounted-for-but-predictable costs (like repairability)' and you're saying 'but what about the costs of assessing the costs?!'. 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…

A lot of people use their computer keyboard more than any other single object they don't sleep on. There's finally (thank you Cherry MX) a supply meeting the presumably pent-up demand for decent keyboards. I hated those membrane things, and you could get them for under $10 as far back as 2003. These days you can get a perfectly good _repairable_ mechanical switch keyboard for about $35.

Don't give Cherry switches that much credit - they have been on the market for a very long time. They kept their keyswitches expensive to reap healthy margins, albeit from a limited market and thus they had limited economies of scale.

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.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#217

Post by photojosh »

CalRobert wrote: post #194
mark-r wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if energy regulations make it hard for mechanical products since they don't have the flexibility of electronic components.

That's certainly possible. Same goes for water - I note that Bosch dishwasher have some sort of system that analyzes the water to see if it's still clean enough to use before using more. Clever, and a savings for water, but one more complicated thing to break. 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 wo…

I design embedded products for industry and usually prototype with Arduino and Pi-alikes before designing the final board.

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.

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#218

Post by photojosh »

baq wrote: post #146
kyriakos wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mandatory warranty of 2 years seems to be doing fine

It should be at least 5 years for large home appliances like washing machines, refrigerators, TVs, etc. Cars too.

I think this is absolutely the only way we're ever going to get better repairability and manufacturers who make products to last that length of time.

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...

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#219

Post by closeparen »

oever wrote: post #112
Areading314 wrote: post #26

Manufacturers should be made responsible for disposal. This would provide an incentive to make products last and be repairable.

A better incentive would be to require manufacturers to sell unlimited (yearly) warranty for their products. When you buy a product, you'll get the option to pay a yearly renewable sum that guarantees that any failings from normal use will be repaired. 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 consume…

Almost no consumer could afford to purchase a lifetime supply of cars or even computers upfront. Hopefully the credit market would lend it to the common man, otherwise he would simply not have these things (at least until very late in life after decades of savings accumulation, at which point lifetime replacements aren't worth much).

Re: EU Parliament calls for longer lifetime for products

#220

Post by guimarin »

simion314 wrote: post #181
guimarin wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Textbooks? Seriously though I think there is a movement among the rich in America/world to buy products that are simple to use, high quality, and durable. The problem in my view is not that these products don't exist but that it's very hard to find them and verify quality in production over time.

I am not impressed by the "expensive" products, as an example I own a Nexus 7 tablet, touch input stopped working reliably, I searched and found many similar issue, the solution is to open it and plug back a connector that got lose and maybe add some paper to have the thing pressed on it's place, so this is not a cheap, no name product, the problem could have been avoided maybe with a few more cents investment per pr…

for the most part, I don't consider commodity equipment to be 'expensive' even if the price point is expensive. I've observed that there are usually two classes of products in any market, the commodity bottom 80% and then the premium top 20%. My comment is about products that inhabit this 20%. To date, and from my point of view, there is no product running android which falls in this premium category. With the Nexus 7 tablet specifically, I see a commodity android tablet with slightly better build quality and some more expensive components. Not a premium product like the iPad Pro.
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