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A “right to repair” movement tools up

economist.com

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Re: A “right to repair” movement tools up

#311

Post by stefkors »

stefco_ wrote: post #6

I hope at some point we'll start including recycling/disassembly and replacement externalities into price somehow. I don't know how you would do that in a fair way, but it is frustrating that there aren't a ton of corrective market forces to encourage manufacturers to make highly reusable, repairable, recyclable devices. All of this electronics churn is environmentally terrible, and it's frustrating that, as with car…

In the Netherlands there is a extra cost for certain products because of the pollution / disassembly costs. Its called the disposal fee, https://www.milieucentraal.nl/energie-besparen/apparaten-en-...

Re: A “right to repair” movement tools up

#312

Post by closeparen »

jdavis703 wrote: post #167
dclowd9901 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax on gasoline like that would only affect the poorest of citizens. Charge it on shares of gasoline producing companies and car companies so their share holders scream at them to move to less carbon-y energy creation mechanisms.

The poorest citizens don't own cars.

The poorest citizens certainly don't own the most extravagant of all luxury items, homes near (decent) transit.

A metro's most car-dependent are its working poor, who need to live the furthest away from the downtown core to afford housing.

Re: A “right to repair” movement tools up

#313

Post by Chiba-City »

These are complex consumer taxing drip feeds of information, upgrades, service faults, repair services and so forth. It seems to mostly feed dumps.

Slightly industrial grade hardware is often field repairable. I go for new or refurbed durable low depreciation tools worth mastering. Emacs, weather sealed camera gear or even cookware are examples.

Otherwise I use low power almost disposable Chromebook, Chromecast and Moto-G away from a Linux box with cheap reasonable dumb screens and bluetooth speakers.

The haptics of consumer tools are churned far too easily for business models. Windows XP showed how too slowly depreciating good enough assets in the field upset vendors. Constant maintenance and futzing are taxes outside actually advancing any state of the art. I don't drive living in a midstory DC building together saving about +50% of typical American transport and HVAC power budgets. And I don't sport shop or even eat energy intensive packaged food mysteries.

Good and operationally efficient habits can go well enough with software and city living.

Re: A “right to repair” movement tools up

#314

Post by kqr »

iicc wrote: post #245
pawelk wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Poland, and I believe it's an EU regulation, every seller is obligated to take your old appliances when you buy new ones in the same category. For example when you buy a freezer you can drop your old one for recycling free of charge (so the cost is included in the retail price). Sometimes it's even used in marketing ("bring your old TV, get new one 10% cheaper"), maybe because they need to meet some quotas so they…

> I believe it's an EU regulation Yep. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electroni...

Nope. A directive is not a regulation. A directive means the member states must implement into their own law a comparable version of the directive. A regulation is when the countries must enforce the EU regulation as if it were their own law.

(The difference is marked in the case of the General Data Protection Regulation, which will become enforceable in a few months. There is no wiggleroom in interpreting it, compared to its predecessor, the Data Protection Directive, where each member state has implemented their own version, with varying levels of data protection.)

Re: A “right to repair” movement tools up

#315

Post by Silhouette »

opencl wrote: post #216
kuschku wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really, we have exactly those gasoline prices in Germany and Denmark, and it's actually quite okay. The poor just take transit or bike.

The problem with the US is that outside of a handful of the biggest cities, transit is extremely lacking and the roads aren't bike-friendly at all. It's very difficult to hold down a job without access to a car, especially low wage jobs like retail that change the schedule around on short notice all the time and are often outside the operating hours of transit. You can also get a used car for around $1000, insurance…

While everything you wrote may be true, the US still seems to be exceptionally bad by international standards. We have a lot of rural communities here in the UK as well, where people also need private transport because the public alternatives are lacking. But our vehicles are a fraction of the size (and have a fraction of the fuel consumption) of some of the giant monstrosities that seems to be much more common in the US, and so even though our fuel prices are much higher (almost entirely due to higher taxes), people living in rural communities still manage to get around. The same is true across much of Europe.

While running a car may be cheap in financial terms in the US, environmentally and in terms of scarce natural resources it is anything but, and at some point the US is going to have to deal with the social acceptability of one person driving an enormous vehicle for long distances many times per week or within our lifetimes there are going to be serious problems.

Re: A “right to repair” movement tools up

#316

Post by Silhouette »

wiz21c wrote: post #207
cnorthwood wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The UK has this law, and I believe it's standardised across the EU.

In Europe I think it's 2 years, which is quite low.

The main EU rule is that you have to have a minimum 2 year warranty. A number of electronics vendors, famously including Apple, had to up their game as a result of this.

However, that is in addition to various other statutory consumer rights about fitness for purpose and being of appropriate quality, which EU member states might have in their national laws as well. Here in the UK, for example, those obligations can run for many years beyond the initial warranty, and can result in repair, replacement or (full or partial) refund for faulty products depending on the circumstances.

In most cases, it's the vendor who took your money who is on the hook legally for these kinds of responsibilities, though in practice of course manufacturers often offer their own warranties to the final customers and/or make supporting arrangements with vendors selling their products.

Unfortunately at present most of these rules only apply to private individuals, and with business purchases caveat emptor and expensive service contracts are often the norm even if a purchase is being made by a small business with no more real leverage against a vendor or manufacturer than a private individual. When it comes to electronic devices like phones and laptops, this is potentially quite a big stumbling block in terms of forcing up standards of maintainability and promoting a "right to repair" to reduce waste.

Re: A “right to repair” movement tools up

#317

Post by m0llusk »

benevol wrote: post #184
stefco_ wrote: post #6

I hope at some point we'll start including recycling/disassembly and replacement externalities into price somehow. I don't know how you would do that in a fair way, but it is frustrating that there aren't a ton of corrective market forces to encourage manufacturers to make highly reusable, repairable, recyclable devices. All of this electronics churn is environmentally terrible, and it's frustrating that, as with car…

The main issue is this: We need to reduce consumption overall! It is well known that Americans consume far more natural resources and live much less sustainably than people from any other large country of the world. “A child born in the United States will create thirteen times as much ecological damage over the course of his or her lifetime than a child born in Brazil,” reports the Sierra Club’s Dave Tilford, adding…

Make trees drop fewer leaves for the environment!

Re: A “right to repair” movement tools up

#318

Post by fragmede »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #243
thechao wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always thought that a regulation along the lines of "if you sell it, you must give the customer the ability to dispose of it" would be nice. And, yes, I do think that means Amazon would have to have some sort of bricks-and-mortar operation: at minimum there must be a shop owned by someone , which Amazon has a deal with, that you'd be able to drop your discarded Amajunk off at. Also, I also think we should have a ca…

> Also, I also think we should have a carbon recapture tax added to gasoline That can't work for any country that has "country". In the US, the vast majority of goods are delivered using trucks that burn diesel. You can't have a gas tax without a diesel tax. Everyone would just switch over. If you tax gas, you effectively tax everything , and that's not okay for any economy.

"If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

-Thirty Ninth President of the United States of America Ronald Reagan.

Re: A “right to repair” movement tools up

#319

Post by wiz21c »

icebraining wrote: post #230
wiz21c wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely off-topic but you sure don't want to work for free (hint: the problem with that has nothing to do with the money)

I've heard that before, but I'm not convinced. Supposedly clients treat you better if they're paying, but in my experience, the correlation doesn't hold. At least by not charging I feel freer to walk away when I'm not being respected.

My specific problem was : client claiming intellectual property over my work. If I work for free, my work is my work but somehow the claim was made.

Then you have bugs, months after delivering, and you can't say "no I won't fix it". So although you don't want to work anymore, you still have to.

Then you have new functionalities. You are burned out with the project but there is this little thing that your friend/customer really needs. And you don't want to do it, and since you've never been paid, you'll do it for free again and you'll get burned out some more... So no compensation.

Now you can argue that the problem here is not the money, but the lack for a proper contract, that'd be right. But the money question automatically brings the contract question. That's why I say : don't work for free, ever.

Re: A “right to repair” movement tools up

#320

Post by fapjacks »

david-cako wrote: post #279
KozmoNau7 wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you agree with a simplistic "taxes bad, equality bad, free markets good" philosophy. I find it rather tiresome and not very thoughtful.

I'm neutral on his political stances. I think either a strong shift towards extremely free markets (i.e., healthcare and education highly privatized and non-subsidized), or towards highly regulated markets (i.e., healthcare and education fully publicized and price-regulated) would both be a step in the right direction. Either case seems like it lends towards cheaper services. There's something to be said for age old…

Right. His philosophy is "anti-regulatory capture" which is a great philosophy all around.
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