Sweden Wants to Fight Disposable Culture with Tax Breaks for Repairing Old Stuff

I'm all for repairability, and even better, building things that will last 25 years, not 25 months. But that will come at a different price than perhaps many expect, and in some cases, it actually won't make sense.

Money is how we measure and gate access to scarce resources. If it costs more to build repairable items, and then repair them, then it is likely the case that those repairs actually waste more resources! However, insofaras the resource being wasted is human work time, there is of course a trade-off to be made.

I think the ongoing market fragmentation resulting from the incompatible proprietary laptop form factors is pushing the whole industry towards consolidation and mergers, and will result in less consumer choice in the long run. I have been privately railing against this crap ever since Dell started shipping not-ATX-but-looks-like-it-at-first-glance power supplies in late 1990s. And Apple has always almost gratuitously used proprietary connectors and form factors, even when a perfectly usable standard already existed. They can all go to a Hell where nothing can interoperate without at least two adapters, and you never have both.

I was driven to the custom build when the headphone jack on my laptop broke. I opened up the case and desoldered the broken one, and the microphone jack, and resoldered the unbroken jack into the headphone jack's place. That worked for a while. Then the laptop keyboard stopped responding to about 5 keys--all of them rather indispensable for typing words. So I replaced the keyboard, and the replacement is just a millimeter too small, so it constantly pops out of its recess whenever it shifts and the plastic clips disengage. Then the headphone-jack-formerly-microphone-jack broke like its predecessor. I already knew the component itself was impossible to find to replace it, so I looked to replace the motherboard. That would cost more than a newer, more capable laptop, if the part had even been in stock.

So I'm building a system such that if anything breaks, I can just replace that one part. I can't get decent repairability without building it myself, and I can't build it myself if there aren't any rassafrassin' standards! I would have built my own clamshell computer (not even necessarily a "laptop"), but no one mass-produces an empty clamshell case for consumer sales, because there is no laptop-standard form factor. Replacement parts for laptops are always expensive, and frequently out of stock.

Globalisation means consuming cheap stuff made in a low cost country that does usually not last that long and transported over long distances.

Built to consume in cellphones are integrated batteries and cheap components that by design fail after three years so we buy a new phone. Integrated storage of a limited size that you cannot expand. Making things that does not last is more profitable than making things that last long why is that?

How 16 container ships pollute more than all the cars in the world. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1229857/How-1...

On one hand economists wants us to blindly consume as much stuff as possible since that is good for the economy. The other hand says we pollute the earth and use to much energy which means we need to consume more durable goods which lasts longer.

How do we integrate the environment in the economy?

There's that, and the belief that environmentalism is a communist plot, and that aluminum grows on trees.

If they wanted compost pickup, there'd be no reason why they couldn't have it. When you've solved curb-side garbage pickup, you've also solved curb-side recycling pickup, and curb-side compost pickup.

Comcast is a publicly traded firm.

"Look, a $20 bill!", says the student. "Someone must have dropped it."

"Nonsense!", replies the economics professor. "If there were a $20 on the ground, someone would have picked it up!"