61–70 of 241 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Purchasing power for many non-subsistence goods has gone up. Not so for rent, food etc. as far as I know. Purchasing power for subsistence goods would't go up due to the malthusian trap. The same way you have induced demand from wider roads to have more cars.
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I totally support this. I accidentally cracked the touch screen of my car radio console. The car is nothing special, a Ford Mondeo that is a few years old. Cost to replace touch screen module: more than the entire value of the car! That is insane. Effectively, if I want to claim from insurance - crack the touch screen (it is a replaceable module) and have to scrap the entire car. In this case, I managed to get a repl…
How does regulation solve the issue that replacing e.g. the touch screen may take many man hours of labor, whereas making the car itself took proportionally less, thus making replacements more expensive? Your experience is a symptom of a high degree of automation in one area (car manufacturing) and the absence in another (repairs), and regulation does not change that.
I totally support this. I accidentally cracked the touch screen of my car radio console. The car is nothing special, a Ford Mondeo that is a few years old. Cost to replace touch screen module: more than the entire value of the car! That is insane. Effectively, if I want to claim from insurance - crack the touch screen (it is a replaceable module) and have to scrap the entire car. In this case, I managed to get a repl…
How does regulation solve the issue that replacing e.g. the touch screen may take many man hours of labor, whereas making the car itself took proportionally less, thus making replacements more expensive? Your experience is a symptom of a high degree of automation in one area (car manufacturing) and the absence in another (repairs), and regulation does not change that.
> robust, easily repairable and good quality products: "minimum resistance criteria" to be established for each product category from the design stage
My console was not "easily repairable".
I totally support this. I accidentally cracked the touch screen of my car radio console. The car is nothing special, a Ford Mondeo that is a few years old. Cost to replace touch screen module: more than the entire value of the car! That is insane. Effectively, if I want to claim from insurance - crack the touch screen (it is a replaceable module) and have to scrap the entire car. In this case, I managed to get a repl…
How does regulation solve the issue that replacing e.g. the touch screen may take many man hours of labor, whereas making the car itself took proportionally less, thus making replacements more expensive? Your experience is a symptom of a high degree of automation in one area (car manufacturing) and the absence in another (repairs), and regulation does not change that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extending the minimum warranty can help to make more durable products.
I don't want to have to pay more for durable products. Please let me choose whether I want to buy extended warranty -- many manufacturers already offer it, but I'm not interested it in.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Extending the minimum warranty can help to make more durable products.
I don't want to have to pay more for durable products. Please let me choose whether I want to buy extended warranty -- many manufacturers already offer it, but I'm not interested it in.
Manufacturers should be made responsible for disposal. This would provide an incentive to make products last and be repairable.
Pretty sure there are laws like this in lots of other places, and it in no way appears to encourage repair. In fact, you could make an argument that it discourages repair: since repairable machines are typically heavier, it is cheaper for the manufacturer to pay the deposit on a lighter machine which is not repairable. You can't really get the bureaucracy to determine how repairable your product is either. If you do, the rules will ultimately be just as arbitrary as weight, and not thorough enough to generate the intended effect. In addition to being useless, these regulations also increase the cost of goods, congratulations.
I totally support this. I accidentally cracked the touch screen of my car radio console. The car is nothing special, a Ford Mondeo that is a few years old. Cost to replace touch screen module: more than the entire value of the car! That is insane. Effectively, if I want to claim from insurance - crack the touch screen (it is a replaceable module) and have to scrap the entire car. In this case, I managed to get a repl…
How does regulation solve the issue that replacing e.g. the touch screen may take many man hours of labor, whereas making the car itself took proportionally less, thus making replacements more expensive? Your experience is a symptom of a high degree of automation in one area (car manufacturing) and the absence in another (repairs), and regulation does not change that.
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.
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.
It's also worth thinking about why we consider replacement being cheaper than repair to be a problem at all - if you trust the market, what's so horrible about that? Real time saver right?
Answer: the price of new goods does not reflect their full environmental and social cost. The switch in your toaster breaks - you buy a new one for a fiver instead of repairing the switch. The old one goes in a landfill. A quantity of non-renewable resources like oil and metal are used up; a the increased demand for these things contributes to the deaths of miners, and people who live near the factories and refineries. Fuel is burned to deliver the new toaster to you, and the Earth's temperature goes up a teeny-tiny fraction. None of these things are included in the price. Regulation can help that too.