Earlier quoted context omitted.
> after repeated failures? Failure to do what?
Failure to address the problems they are causing. Eg near me is a nice park. Every single evening the car park gets a dump of McDonalds and Wendy’s rubbish. Yes, it’s their customers and not them, but if those companies addressed their waste by creating less, making more efficient packaging or finding other ways to improve the situation, they would make way more difference than any customer could.
Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
251–260 of 366 posts
Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
#252I kind of wonder if we're looking at solving this the wrong way. Instead of mandating that manufacturers take specific steps to fix the waste problem, maybe it would be better to tag items at manufacture and charge device makers a percentage based on how long before it enters the waste stream. Manufacturers could solve this by either: - Making their things easy to repair - Creating in house recycling programs - Makin…
Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very hard to know what people, including yourself, really want. So best we can do is observing "revealed preferences", which is what Economists call "what people actually choose".
And "revealed preferences" are mostly bunk, because of what GP alludes to. It's evaluating people's choices out of options available on the market, not what they would buy if they could freely optimize the feature/price matrix. Another way to put it: "revealed preference" is just what one considers the least bad of the bad choices available.
Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Making the producers responsible for the disposal might be the best way. I don't exactly know how it would be implemented but I'd like to see it for packaging too. Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Make them responsible for its disposal. Then they will be incentivised to reduce the amount of packaging that they produce.
Germany has had this for years. Producers have to pay a recycling fee covering the disposal of the packaging they use. The yellow garbage can for recyclables is paid for by that fee. Also, merchants have to take back and dispose of any packaging they sell or use to ship. Hasn't really helped, amount of packaging is still increasing.
Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
I live in the EU and have never encountered a carrier locked phone. It's quite an amusing concept, and the first carrier to come up with it must truly have been evil.
I live in the EU and I've avoided carrier locked phone for my entire life. I know many who can't do math and paid twice the value of the phone for a locked device and some plan they never really used fully.
That has not been the case for a long time. The last phone I had on contract was an iPhone 4.
Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
#256I kind of wonder if we're looking at solving this the wrong way. Instead of mandating that manufacturers take specific steps to fix the waste problem, maybe it would be better to tag items at manufacture and charge device makers a percentage based on how long before it enters the waste stream. Manufacturers could solve this by either: - Making their things easy to repair - Creating in house recycling programs - Makin…
> 1) Making their things easy to repair. 2) Creating in house recycling programs. 3) Making equipment more durable and longer lasting The first and third should not be on equal footing with the second. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle is meant to be applied in that order. Many environmental crimes can be hidden in a recycling program. Many products are not truly recyclable, but tell consumers they are. Sometimes they are only…
Yep
But by the same token, many materials in consumer electronics are mined unethically and/ or end up causing toxic pollution. If companies can effectively recycle these products without, a great amount of environmental (and human) damage can be avoided.
I would argue that having a responsible battery reclamation process is more important that having questionably repairable devices.
Also, while we're being cynical here. If we make a device "Repairable" that doesn't mean it's going to ever actually get repaired. If it doesn't make economic sense from the end user perspective, repairable products end up in the trash. This is particularly true in this world where manufacturers stop releasing software for old hardware. (Or worse, remotely brick old hardware)
Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Local authorities should be able to collect up all Mcdonalds packaging and hand it back to them. Absolutely! It is far too easy to create disposable crap that ends up dumped all over the planet. I get so frustrated seeing garbage all over the place in natural places. I do think its a lot easier to focus on the higher ticket items first.
You guys are forgetting another part of the chain, which can make decisions - consumers. If cost of throwing something away increases - may be that will make consumers choose something more reliable and serviceable. As if right now residential trash pickup service probably covers just the labor and machinery to get trash to the landfill
Bad idea. The market is supposed to process information for us. Consumers are just individuals who know what they need and what they want, but not much else. The market (if we are to believe the hype) can process enough information to make selfish actors in aggregate cooperate. So why not let the market solve it?
Consumer-responsibility is pure propaganda: in the same way “we” (collectively) drop plastic into the middle of the ocean, “we” (chiefly the corporations and their marketing departments) drop the symbolic responsibility on consumers.
Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
And "revealed preferences" are mostly bunk, because of what GP alludes to. It's evaluating people's choices out of options available on the market, not what they would buy if they could freely optimize the feature/price matrix. Another way to put it: "revealed preference" is just what one considers the least bad of the bad choices available.
Perhaps but that should be an unstable equilibrium, i.e. temporary. As long as real competition exist, if it is possible to deliver what consumers really want then sooner or later someone will discover it, make a killing and prompt everyone in the market to follow suit or die. It's easy to blame corporations but in fine I believe that the current situation has been driven by the choices of the consumers, i.e. all of…
To use two relevant examples:
Audio jack on phones: a lot of people want one, but companies seem to - one by one - eschew including it, and gain on the BOM savings and getting customers to purchase additional dongles/adapters. Phones are something you don't pick based on one particular feature. A new competitor that'd like to offer a good smartphone with an audio jack will have to first match many other features of competing smartphones. They won't be able to do all that and achieve similar price point, as incumbents benefit both from established supply chains and scale. Therefore, a new offering is going to be significantly worse in terms of features or price (or both), way beyond what established companies have saved on removing the jack.
Reliability of fridges: the three most important parameters that matter for customers are internal volume, price point, and overall aesthetics. The consumers would prefer a fridge that lasts a decade over one that last three years, but such decision is somewhat beyond the calculation horizon of most people (the reasoning is instead, "if and when it breaks, we'll deal with it") - and even if it was, it's very hard to verify. A company selling reliable fridges would have to first be able to reliably signal their reliability, which is hard to do. You could try offering very long (or lifetime) warranties, but unless you're an established brand, people ain't gonna believe it.
Then there's the general aspect of customer irrationality[0] wrt. price. People without much spending money prefer cheap products. There's a phenomenon in markets that probably has a name, where a market for a product bifurcates into race-to-the-bottom low-quality but cheap products, and high-end products (often for professional users) with low sales volume and high markup. The middle - quality products at moderate prices - disappears entirely. A new competitor, wanting to target the middle in such a market, will find themselves losing to both cheap and expensive ends.
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[0] - Though I'm becoming less certain that this is truly irrational. The other day I saw some article highlighting that humans like to optimize for maximizing available options, in a way that comes close to mathematical optimum. Since in money-based economies money is, quite literally, unit of options available, this would suggest that this behavioral heuristic applies.
Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
#259I kind of wonder if we're looking at solving this the wrong way. Instead of mandating that manufacturers take specific steps to fix the waste problem, maybe it would be better to tag items at manufacture and charge device makers a percentage based on how long before it enters the waste stream. Manufacturers could solve this by either: - Making their things easy to repair - Creating in house recycling programs - Makin…
I'd also like to see a rebate program at recyclers for big-box goods. People are more likely to do the right thing if there's an incentive. Probably paid for by a fee on sale, but again scaled based on recyclability (and possibly repairability / waste from repairs)
Re: Europe Is Guaranteeing Citizens the Right to Repair
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
And "revealed preferences" are mostly bunk, because of what GP alludes to. It's evaluating people's choices out of options available on the market, not what they would buy if they could freely optimize the feature/price matrix. Another way to put it: "revealed preference" is just what one considers the least bad of the bad choices available.
But in the context of this thread it seems that they do have (long lasting, repairable) Miele appliances available and they choose to buy other ones.
I for one "know" this by weighing HN anecdotes I've seen over the years - couple dozen saying that they sell solid stuff, and one or two saying that they used to sell solid stuff, but are now following the trend of replacing metal components with cheap plastics. How do I evaluate that? Brand trust isn't that strong a signal.