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Fixers Know What 'Repairable' Means—Now There's A Standard For It - Ifixit:
[Earlier this year], three years of arguing with industry finally paid off, as the European standard EN45554 was published. This official document with an unexciting name details "general methods for the assessment of the ability to repair, reuse and upgrade energy-related products." In plain English, it's a standard for measuring how easy it is to repair stuff. It's also a huge milestone for the fight for fair repair.
We want to repair the stuff we own, so we can use it for longer. This is not only important because we want our money's worth out of the things we paid for, but because manufacturing new products is a huge and underestimated driver of climate change. So if we want to avoid cooking our planet, we need to stop churning out disposable electronics and start repairing more. Like, right now.
The problem is, industry won't do this by itself. Managers get ahead by showing quarterly sales growth, not increased product lifespans. Hence we need the government to step in, banning unrepairable products and helping consumers—that's you!—to identify the most durable products out there, so as to empower them to make better purchasing decisions. And in the EU, our political leaders are getting ready to do so.
But here's the rub: those leaders don't know what a repairable product is. If you ask manufacturers, they will all tell you their products are repairable. If you ask us, some devices clearly are more repairable than others, and some are frankly just not repairable at all.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday July 06 2020, @11:35AM (24 children)
Here, if you want stuff that you can repair, then buy stuff that you can repair. Having people, who "don't know what a repairable product is" decide what a standard for a repairable product should be, is an exercise in futility.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @12:17PM (2 children)
No problem? Your anti-government glasses need cleaning.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @01:09PM
His glasses are of a special type that resists cleaning. It's much more cost-effective for the manufacturer if he just bought new ones.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:20PM
And the author exaggerates the importance of stuff that's not repairable to "climate change".
Finally, somehow a bureaucracy churning out a completely undiscussed standard of repairableness delivers us from that? Has the author even taken a look at this standard? I haven't been able to. Nor has anyone come up with regulations yet that use this standard, even if we were to suppose that it's a good idea to do so.
No problem and no solution. But the author is in ecstasy that something is being done. Let's consider an analogy.
I want a vast rollback of censorship on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. Trump passes some executive order that orders in some nebulous way that bureaucracies of the US look at ways to impose free speech on these platforms. It may eventually have teeth or not. So something is being done. That's good, right? We're solving the problem, right? We needed the government to step in and well, here they are.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Thexalon on Monday July 06 2020, @01:26PM (20 children)
The problem is that manufacturers are anti-competitively preventing people from fixing things they in theory own. In some cases, they're using government regulations like copyright law to make it illegal for you to tinker with your own thing, and fixing that is something I'd think you'd be able to get behind as a libertarian sort.
And your argument of "buy stuff that you can repair" doesn't work when every seller in the market in question is employing these tactics, and your options are "buy something you can't repair, or do without the thing in question, and doing without the thing in question isn't really a viable option".
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 06 2020, @02:17PM
Right, I've managed to live without an un-fixable cell phone (except for a couple of weeks--that one didn't work right and I returned it...to Radio Shack if you even remember that chain store).
Quite a few other things I don't really need either, so I do without and avoid the hassle/hustle.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @01:09AM (10 children)
Absolutely agree. "Economic theory" wants us to believe someone will fill the market need for repairable things. Reality is:
Microsoft: You no longer own Microsoft Office; you now make ongoing payments to lease the use of the software.
John Deere, keeping up with the Joneses: You no longer own that tractor that you think you bought because it contains our software that it needs to run, so you're paying us to lease the use of the software and therefore the use of the tractor.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07 2020, @12:22PM (9 children)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday July 07 2020, @02:55PM (8 children)
I never said they were.
And yet, lots and lots of people still do.
IMHO, if economics worked as advertised (cough cough), companies like MS and Deere would have gone out of business years ago. There are too many other factors at work and simple economic theory is almost useless, certainly useless on its own in the real world.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07 2020, @11:25PM (7 children)
Why would those companies go out of business? I'm not seeing what's supposed to support your argument.
I'm pretty sure that, under simple economic theory, lots and lots of people buying a product is a typical reason for a business to stay in business.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday July 08 2020, @01:45AM (6 children)
Sorry, perhaps you hadn't heard the backstory. You have to understand farmers and the John Deere situation. Farmers are usually extremely resourceful. They'll fix anything anytime. Youtube is full of great videos of farmers fixing all kinds of stuff. Well. If they're in the middle of a huge harvest, they must harvest within a narrow time window.
Scenario: So they're running their $400,000 Deere harvester, it breaks, and they're not allowed to fix it. If they do, its computer will brick it. They have to somehow tow it, sometimes literally hundreds of miles to a dealer, or somehow get a dealer authorized mechanic to come out and fix it at huge cost when the farmer could have done it him or herself. Oh, and the grain is trash by the time it gets fixed.
If the farmers knew this problem was coming, they would never have bought a John Deere in the first place. If nobody buys Deere's crap, Deere goes out of business.
What's not to understand now?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:14AM (5 children)
The part where you ignore that this is a one-time thing. Now that farmers have had this happen to them, they no longer belong to the class of people who didn't know this was coming.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday July 08 2020, @02:30AM (4 children)
But time? This wastes people's time. Are you a Time Lord? Us mortals have only so many years. And did you forget the costs I mentioned?
Ever hear of "bait and switch"?? Ever hear of "undisclosed costs"?? I guarantee that no salesperson told the farmer what was coming. Would you want to go through that?
Methinks you just like being argumentative, when everyone else gets the thing. Sad you can't put all that crap negativity toward something helpful and constructive.
I have no ill-will toward you at all, but I'm weary of trying to explain it to you. I have to wonder who you really are, or what your motivations are. Maybe you're a wealthy stock-holder and think the plebs are there to prop you up? Have some heart for the average folks.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:49AM (3 children)
So what? You already noted actions that are legally actionable - that is, can be sued in court. So why are we to go through a greater waste of time and resources to fight lesser wastes of time and resources?
Well, why don't you try for starters? First, we have an European body defining to a ridiculous degree of detail some idea of repairability. Then we're going to pass laws that mandate some sort of repairability from this dubious foundation. Assuming generously that this doesn't lead to dysfunctions like suitcase sized cell phones or a protectionism exercise like the usual standards generation from that part of the world, we still have that the scheme forces vast numbers of people to buy and make stuff a certain way just because you want something.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday July 08 2020, @06:06AM (2 children)
Sorry, but I truly have and am worn out. I had started a lengthy and growing reply, but I'm struggling to understand your position. Your points have merit, but are all negations and stop-actions.
I'm trying to be proactive, and I'm just glad to see someone doing something about a problem that I feel fairly strongly about. I'm about action. But also an ongoing process of learning and correcting laws, much like agile software development, and lawmakers fall on their faces in that department.
Why don't you just come out and state what the heck you think should happen, instead of this constant stupid game of cat and mouse? Seriously, I'm genuinely curious what you would do.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @11:26AM (1 child)
Needless to say, I don't agree that you have so tried.
At the government level? Nothing.
The demand that government fix this problem is of the same nature as what's causing these problems in the first place. People don't wish to expend their own time and energy to get better, more repairable products with better customer service. So they go for the magic solution, and use the power of government get those things. Well, the government with these increased powers is also managed by voters, leaders, and bureaucracies with the same attitude. It's just making the basic problem worse - a society that is a poor fit for us. There is a horrible futility to this whole exercise.
As a final remark, one of the more unrecognized powers of a democracy is that you have considerable power to solve your own problems. I grant it's not enough to solve every problem. But I certainly would be more conducive to supporting (or at least not opposing as strongly) things like repairability, if people were actually trying to get more repairable products. My take is that if you don't want to expend your own time and effort to get better quality of things, then you don't really want that better quality in the first place. And I won't support using government power to deliver things you don't want.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday July 08 2020, @03:41PM
I'm in a rush and will write a real response later but I want to thank you for what you've written and all you contribute here. I think you're (obviously) brilliant and want to inspire people, for many reasons, but in general to make the world a better place. I'm inspired, and as such have to pursue some job openings, and get to a place where I do gig work. Thanks!!
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday July 07 2020, @04:09AM (7 children)
You only perceive it as a problem because it is something you want. It wouldn't have come to this if a lot of people agreed with you. But like a lot of rights, you can voluntarily waive them and most of the world chose to do so. I see nothing that needs fixing.
And I certainly don't see anything that needs the gentle steel gauntlet of government force to regulate and control. Much less some dumbass effort to define repairability of products eventually for the purpose of said control.
I see it a lot like censorship in privately owned public forums. The owners have a great deal of control over what they allow. Rather than trying to use government to force them to allow what you think they should allow, it's better to look at existing tools. Forum owners and manufacturers still aren't allowed to commit fraud or make promises that they don't deliver on, for an important example. They also can be manipulated via boycotts, bad press, etc.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday July 08 2020, @06:16AM (6 children)
Again with time. You don't seem to see trends. You seem to look at everything as a freeze-frame. I coined the term "snapshot thinking". Not sure your background but in engineering and science we have to learn a lot about analyzing things that change over time, so maybe I'm more keen to it.
The point is: there's a growing number of people who do agree that the situation has gotten out of hand. Governments (which are largely supposed to work for the people) have allowed manufacturers a lot of latitude in this whole topic, and corporations have done exactly what I would have predicted: pushed and pushed and pushed because greed. Study economic history. Study the industrial revolution, robber barons, carpet baggers, monopolies, how Carnegie treated his workers, etc.
Again, point is: corporations went too far, pissed too many people off, and govt. finally took notice and action.
(for the record, I advocate for a much finer-grained corrective system, rather than waiting waiting waiting then "steel gauntlet" boom.)
Again, you're very oppositional / contrarian. Maybe state what you think should be done.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Wednesday July 08 2020, @11:42AM (5 children)
Well, why aren't you pushing back?
And yet, here we are with a vastly different world despite that government action. Those interests above weren't and still aren't the only ones in the world. What's missing from your analysis is that power shifted to labor during that period. It's that power, not government action, that resulted in the trends during this period. Similarly, when developed world labor had to compete with developing world labor, there was a modest shift back towards the employer - often despite consider shifts in government policy to favor labor! One doesn't need to invoke greed cooties to explain this, but rather basic economics.
One reason I'm not too concerned about all this is that it's temporary. We've already seen a half century trend towards greater demand for labor world-wide. The shift in power is moving back towards labor because the world isn't that big a place. We're already running low on dirt cheap labor. My take is that in a few decades, those trends will have shifted substantially towards labor again, and government's feeble actions will no doubt be blamed for it, if only to excuse future abuses of power.
Here. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Thursday July 09 2020, @04:05PM (4 children)
Hey, I'm not forgetting nor ignoring you. You're someone I'd love to meet and talk in person. You've got great insight. Right now I'm in scramble mode- too much to explain but I just literally don't have time nor spare brain cells to enter into deep discussion. I see your points, well, but the older I get, the more I see and learn, the more complex and deep I realize life and society are. One of the problems I have with philosophical discussions is that most people's assertions / points are based on a limited and contrived set of circumstances- unlike real life. I see too many people being hurt, suffering needless loss, getting caught up in situations they could not foresee. I have a huge heart for the innocent, vulnerable, etc.
I would love to live in a libertarian society where everyone "did the right thing" but reality is: people don't, and some people are really really horribly bad. That's when people collaborate, form a govt., set rules, punishments, etc., as has been done throughout history. So far obvious and I know you agree. We just don't agree on where to draw the line for those rules. I literally have no more time. Take care and I'll check back, sometime...
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday July 11 2020, @04:28PM (3 children)
It's not the really horribly bad people that are a problem in the hypothetical libertarian society. They'd run afoul of other people in a libertarian society (because one can't be really horribly bad in isolation) and eventually some posse would deal with them. It's their extremely non-libertarianfollowers. It's the widespread human tendency to follow leaders no matter how really horribly bad they are that is the real obstacle to a libertarian society.
When we revisit this conversation, there are a few things I'd like for you to consider. First, why did wages and related statistics (like union membership) decline over the past century despite the greatest degree of protection of labor in US law in history? Are we in a position where we have to worry about where to draw the line at rules and such, when we presently are adding rules faster than anyone can read them? And are those rules which are being created now protect us from the really horribly bad, or the other way around?
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday July 11 2020, @05:38PM (2 children)
Agreed, but I'll continue to say that you're more of a philosopher than realist. I so wish things could be more like you pose, but reality is different.
You ask good questions, and believe it or not I'm quite intelligent, so much so that I realize there is SO much I don't know and probably can NEVER know.
Again, I fully agree and I think you're overly pushing your points. What bugs me the most about people and life: most people know this stuff is going on, and far far more, and we're powerless. It's simple psychology- take people's power away and they become passive, often to the point of unintended subconscious denial. It's a defense mechanism we all have. Well, there are a few who don't.
I'm a descendant of the American Revolution, so I know a little bit about saying enough is enough. But 244 years ago they could do something about it. We now have a huge huge machine that includes military power that we the people can't overpower. These marches and riots show that some people are really fed up. But the big machine is just going to appease them, and the political fighting and the news media just keeps parts of the machine going.
Why union wages have gone down? I don't agree with your premise- some union workers make huge $/hour. But many don't, and many jobs are "outsourced" which breaks up the labor market- kind of lets them know they have no power in the long run.
Listen, I comprehend everything you're saying but again, 1) there's so much that we don't know, and 2) people are overwhelmed by the machine and have given up.
The most power we the people have is voting, which happens very seldom compared to the rate of societal change. Politicians don't usually do what they promised before the election, and don't do the will of the people no matter what.
20+ years ago (literally) I was where you're at. We the people have no power anymore, at all.
If you have ideas of how to fix it, please stop ranting about the obvious and suggest something we can all do.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday July 12 2020, @04:30AM (1 child)
The people of that time had their own huge, huge machine to contend with. The UK empire had tremendous resources as well. It got overpowered just the same.
You just described that competition with developing world labor that I spoke of. In the long run, it won't matter what message is supposedly being sent now. Labor will become more in demand globally (I think mirroring how US labor power grew over the late 19th and early 20th centuries) and the pendulum will swing back. It doesn't mean the US will return to former prosperity because there are plenty of opportunities for mistakes and bad decisions in that.
Not at all, we act in many other ways. For example, merely acting on our own is an exercise of power. Economically, this becomes the choices we make there. Recall, that the story was about businesses compromising their products. The obvious way to resist that remains by our choices.
As I already noted here [soylentnews.org], the government shouldn't be so deeply involved in voluntary transactions. It seems to me that if you're complaining about a huge, huge machine, making it even huger isn't positive change.
Well, am I realist enough? I guess we'll see.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday July 12 2020, @11:36AM
You just love being argumentative, no matter how much I try to agree with you!
When I try to buy a quality product from my local store, oh wait, my local store is GONE because WALMART. I went out of my way (literally) to AVOID Walmarts for the past 25 years. But 99% of the herd goes to Walmart, and the other stores are OUT OF BUSINESS. Gone. Not there anymore. I've tried to fight the crowds and tides. At at some point, brother, you are "preaching to the choir." Stop wasting your time writing to me here. Put your efforts into something and someone where you might have a chance to make a difference. Write to your congressman/woman. I already hear your response "who says I don't". Nobody! Just stop badgering me. I'm on your side, I just see the deeper reality. You keep writing about the obvious- look deeper!