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

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

#321

Post by nommm-nommm »

david-given wrote: post #202
Grishnakh wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>A alternative approach could be taxing garbage. Ok, how do you keep people from dumping their garbage in someone else's garbage bin, or in some public place in the middle of the night? This also doesn't really deal with the fact that different garbage has very different effects on the environment and society, and very different mass. "E-waste" frequently doesn't weigh that much, but has a lot of both valuable metals…

I live in Zürich. Here, you can only throw things away if they're in the proper bags, which cost about two francs for a 35 litre bag. But taking stuff to the recycling centre is free, and there's usually one within five minutes walk of any given house. The end result is that waste is basically self managed --- people are incentivised to recycle as much as possible and reduce waste. I remember hearing that disposal la…

Many municipals in the US have similar policies with garbage, either pay for the special bags or pay per bin. Even at a small cost this often leads to dumping. I saw someone had dumped their trash in a cemetery. :(

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

#322

Post by nommm-nommm »

protomok wrote: post #229
ryandrake wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you don't have a top of the range, almost new fridge or TV, even phone, repair will almost always come close to replacement cost. I tend to repair everything, and let me say that's not true for the vast majority of my possessions, including cars, appliances, electronics, etc. It highly depends on the nature of the failure, but generally parts are cheaper than replacement. Here are a list of things I've recently…

A big pain for DIY repairs (at least here in Canada) is part prices and shipping costs. I often see a 2-4x spread in prices when checking Amazon.ca and Amazon.com (often will not even ship to Canada). It's still cheaper (and more satisfying) to DIY but it really hurts when you're paying $40 for a $10 garage door opener part!

Maybe you'd have better luck with eBay?

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

#323

Post by ab5tract »

jcranmer wrote: post #149
ab5tract wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That lawsuit would be in a civil court, with civil lawyers and actual judges. Not a room full of round-robin corporate laywers. My comment was not about whether it would be successful. My question was whether it provided the means to initiate a lawsuit.

So you'd rather the case be decided by a single lawyer^H^H^H^H^H^H judge than a panel of lawyers. Even in common law jurisdictions, most of these sorts of cases tend to focus on disputes over issues of law (hence tried by a judge), not issues of fact (which are the only issues which proceed to a jury trial). Judges are usually lawyers before becoming judges--that's not terribly surprising, considering that judges are…

You have thrown up a false equivalency and are pursuing it in an odd manner.

What I would prefer is that there is absolutely zero mechanisms for a corporation to sue a government over "potential lost profits".

This is just not at all the same as discussing a potential lawsuit over defamation / libel / whatever "you" would be suing me over a comment for. And, yes, in that case I would still prefer to go through the normal court system with laws written by my legislature rather than a room full of mega corps and trade representatives.

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

#324

Post by ab5tract »

celticninja wrote: post #264
s_kilk wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But any one company could claim to have been affected, and produce the paperwork/numbers to back it up.

it would fail on the public good criteria, that is the law is aimed at improving recycling rates not harming companies bottom line. If there was some protectionism going on it would be different. It should have the effect of making companies improve repairability (is that a word?) to make themselves more attractive to buyers.

I'm sorry, but how do you develop a worldview where "public good" is determined via corporate lawsuits? Is it simply in the intention of the law? Because from what I can see of the history of ISDS, harming a companies bottom line is the exact criteria by which these cases are judged. Outside of the tobacco labelling suit, I am hard pressed to find a case where ISDS did not result in a ruling against a government.

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

#325

Post by Gravityloss »

Basic income + no minimum wage would make it much more attractive to do local repairs instead of manufacturing stuff far away where wages are lower or labor and environmental regulation much more lax.

In my country, youth unemployment is around 20%.

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

#326

Post by Gravityloss »

ska wrote: post #218
CPLX wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't detect any complaining in my post. Just noting the (considerable) irony in Sweden leading the charge against "disposable culture", as did the article's writer.

Perhaps I read more into it than you meant - fair enough. You are still conflating Sweden and IKEA, which is just silly. Also IKEA's m.o. is more cheap and cheerful than disposable, so what irony there is, is a bit weak.

Have you tried moving Ikea stuff? A lot of it is unlikely to stay in one piece. And I don't mean it can be disassembled and reassembled. Even their chipboard is of lower strength than ordinary, quite an achievement.

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

#328

Post by Grishnakh »

logfromblammo wrote: post #293
Grishnakh wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ATX standard is the reason why no one bothers buying desktop computers any more except extremists and gamers. These computers are way too large and inefficient and ridiculously noisy too, because they aren't properly engineered for sound and ventilation (because they're held back by the 90s-era ATX standard). Everyone's just given up on it altogether and now they use laptops, or worse, tablets. Even corporate des…

I am moving from a laptop as my at-home computer to a quiet-build mini-ITX system literally this week, after the last parts arrive from Newegg. 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 e…

I did something of the opposite: I used to have a big desktop. I got a laptop later so I could do stuff at coffee shops and elsewhere. But I eventually got tired of the size and noise of the desktop (even though it was loaded with big, slow 120mm fans), and of the syncing issues with the laptop. I had wanted to build a quiet miniITX system, but finally gave up on that idea because of everything I've seen with "standard" ATX and ITX cases: they just are not engineered for quietness. The best you can do is go to water cooling, and I find it ridiculous that I'd have to go to those lengths for some quiet.

So instead I've just gone the laptop route. I can buy a Dell enterprise-level Latitude laptop on Ebay for $150 easily, that's only a few years old, and it's portable and quiet and reliable. It even comes with a magnesium chassis. And if it breaks, I can buy a new one for $150 and resell the old broken one on Ebay to someone who wants the parts. These laptops are extremely ubiquitous (because they're used by so many businesses), so the parts are readily available if I want to just repair it, plus they're built to be fairly easily serviced (the older E6400 and E6410 had only one screw on the back panel). If you were buying consumer laptops, that was your problem: those things are crap and not made for easy servicing. You complain about "if the part had even been in stock": on my Dells, I can easily buy any part I want on Ebay: a new screen, a new motherboard, a new keyboard, a bare back panel, a speaker grill, anything. Everything is in stock.

You don't need to build a laptop yourself to get decent repairability; you just need to get a decent laptop and not a consumer-grade POS.

Then, so I can have a nice workstation, I got a docking station that supports dual DVI/DisplapyPort monitors, USB3, etc. These docking stations are standardized for Dell business laptops, so I can plug a huge range of them into it.

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

#329

Post by thrownblown »

marcosdumay wrote: post #290
thrownblown wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't we about to be abounding with mechanical inclined labor? Like aren't all truck drivers and car drivers about to be automated? This seems like a nobrainer. Relocating that labor surplus towards supporting a repairable mechanical/technological industry and commercial future seems really plausible. That sounds like a decent job, troubleshooting and repairing the machines, designing machines to be repaired. Better…

How much is is worth? Assuming every "fixer" is competing with some industry robots somewhere, what is the ceiling on the fixer salary?

I was assuming in our little hypothetical utopia that most consumer goods are designed once again to be repaired and upgraded.

I was also imagining a bunch of truck drivers looking for jobs, since the robots took them all.

Further along in my thought experiment, I imagined that if I owned a sizable fleet of robot cars I'd rather repair and upgraded than replace them.

So I figured if you're into trucks, have basic the mechanical skills required to drive a truck (tire chains, flat tires, oil change, spark plug change) that a new job maintenaning, repairing and upgrading the new fleets of robot taxis and trucks might be right up your alley.

For some reason self repairing robots seem a bit further off.

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

#330

Post by nommm-nommm »

hlandau wrote: post #112

This is a very nice move to see. Other people have discussed washing machines below, but there's even more to say on them. Washing machines used to have long warranty periods. Nowadays they tend to be sold with a 2 year warranty, which I believe in the EU is the required minimum. And these manufacturers (Bosch, for example) even have the gall to claim that their products are high quality and that this warranty period…

>There are numerous stories of hypoallergenic people who find that their new washing machine leaves significant detergent in clothing. Some people have even tracked down old (and for that matter better made) washing machines just to get one which will rinse properly.

They most likely need to just use less detergent. You actually need a very small fraction of the detergent most people use and over soaping is a big problem. It's a combo of more concentrated detergent mixed with machines that require less detergent.

Previous models were more tolerant of over soaping.

It still feels weird to me to use so little detergent.

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