The first repairabilty key is the standardization of parts, witch exists but only limited to VERY common parts, another is the availability of spare parts.
But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage.
Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear.
Personally, for standards:
- anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc;
- all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale, no restriction on buyers, no need to be "certified" by the company etc. Spare parts MIGHT have a mark to avoid warranty issues but nothing else;
- ALL software MUST BE open sourced, no restriction allowed, no bullshits on IP and so one, any black box can't be on sale in 5 years (to give time to adapt) and the code must be practically readable and usable by anyone;
- anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try.
> anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc;
This is a huge one for things that aren't phones and laptops - parts should be as "loosely" coupled as they can be, so that similar but not identical parts can be used. This may involve slightly more complicated designs (think: wash machine that has a pump AND a flow valve or switches in the drum to measure how full it is vs just "run this pump for X minutes and it will be full) but allows for much more durability/long lasting.
However, an additional thing should be done to encourage these repairs - make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free. Once the financial incentives are lined up, people will be begging for dead items they can fix and resell.
> make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free
Customer goes to appliance store. Breaks a $5 part. Store repairs it, and now the customer gets to buy the appliance without VAT plus $5 for the repair?
If the goal is to reduce people’s consumption and incentivize them reuse, then simply increase taxes on newly manufactured goods. It will also incentivize people to buy more repairable goods, and hence incentivize manufacturers to make and sell them.
Oh, I see. Still seems like more labor required to verify and audit warranty status. Seems simpler to enforce an excise tax on the manufacturer/importer.
Plastic gears that break can be intentional, good design for better repairability.
If a mechanism jams, something has to give. This may be the motor, which may survive being jammed indefinitely, or it could burn up, causing a more expensive problem. In a mixer, the motor is probably decently powerful and doesn't tolerate being jammed.
If there's enough gear reduction, then a jam can develop enough force to bend shafts or break mountings and other components. That can make the product impossible to repair, if some injection molded bit that was supposed to hold stuff in place was broken.
A well placed plastic gear that breaks and saves the rest of the mechanism can make repair far easier and cheaper. And gears are very standard components that are far easier to find replacements for than some weird injection molded thing being made for one specific model of mixer.
Great example of why "planned obsolescence" isn't always bad. In this
case the weak gear acts alike a kind of mechanical fuse. So long as
it's within a context of easy replacement.
But then it isn’t planned obsolescence. It is planned obsolescence if the plastic gear wears and breaks down without a jam occurring. In your model it is a fail safe or circuit breaker. In the GP it a part designed to fail sooner (in wall clock time) to make sure you buy a new product.
But that's the crux of engineering: these two things are in tension – the part which is designed to fail safely if a jam occurs will, by its very nature, also be subject to wearing down sooner than if it were made of cast iron and caused the entire mixer to fail catastrophically during a jam.
In reality, nothing is so simple as waving your hands and declaring "no plastic 'planned obsolescence' parts!". Everything is a trade-off. A more effective way of pushing companies to position the trade-off in a way that rewards long-term durability would probably be to mandate longer warranty periods, rather than try to dictate what gears ought to be made out of in a vacuum divorced from the tradeoffs involved.
There are overload protection mechanisms without sacrificial parts, e.g. ball detents. They don't inherently have to wear down faster. Plastic gears are likely cheaper and lighter, though.
The key would seem to be if the part that fails is easily replaceable, then. If I make a design that has a part meant to fail-safe in a situation that would otherwise be dangerous to the other devices (I'm an EE rather than an ME, so we'll call it a "fuse"), the good-faith repairability practice is to put the part in an accessible location and make it a part that is readily available. If I wanted to encourage replacement of the whole device, maybe I make it a soldered-on part in the potted section of the PCB.
But taken to an extreme each car would look like a military truck (because each component could have been made stronger) - to prove planned obsolescence you'd have to show that the rest of the device will last longer than the part and there's a comparable part that would work better.
For example timing chains vs timing belts, apparently there are reasons they choose one over the other, but maintenance is part of keeping them operational.
>Plastic gears that break can be intentional, good design for better repairability.
If it was a planned safety features then spare gears could be included or easy to find and buy for cheap(a device I bought had a safety fuse and it comed with 3 extra ones , also it was designed to be simple to replace it, no screws or "genius" needed. On the other hand a laptop of mine got destroyed by a high power voltage, but not destroyed at once, made me spent some more money on repairs until it finally died, all because some cheap safety feature was not included (even if hard to replace))
There are other (better) but more expensive ways to prevent damage to the motor. The plastic gear in a mixer is the cheapest way to solve the problem while also ensuring the device wears out fairly quick compared to a better built unit. It’s a win win for the manufacture while a total loss for the consumer (and environment)
One of the replies is a truly frightening story about people who broke the sacrificial gear in the tailgate window mechanism of their Toyota Landcruiser and machined a new one out of brass!
Frictions are not a new thing: for a simple mixer you just need a friction coupling with two sandpaper-like washers, Not only it's safer than a braking gear who can spill debris around blocking something else, but it demand essentially no repair...
On our blender, which has a fairly powerful motor, that’s the exact design. There’s a plastic drive coupling that does eventually wear our, but serves primarily as a one-way shear coupling if the blender gets jammed with ice or whatever mechanical stresses a blender is bound to experience.
A 5 pack of the replacement parts plus the tool to hold the shaft still while installing costs $10+tax delivered from Amazon (ASIN B07Y7S33RF).
The trick is, someone has to think to and then want to repair it. When that coupler first wore out, many would assume “oh, the mixer wore out; we have to buy a new one” rather than “a replaceable part wore out; we have to buy and install a new one”.
A few weeks ago, a friend came over with a cracked phone screen and mentioned they were going to buy a new phone the next day. “Why not replace the screen? I did mine last month.” “You can do that?!”
Some ambitious targets there, but I support your general attitude.
> sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break
after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a
progressive tax
A poor quality tax, like a sugar tax, seems interesting. Don't sell
crap. Measurement and enforcement isn't so easy. Quality of design
isn't trivial to assess. Maybe simple MTBF of finished product. Punish
excessive returns.
> Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified
technicians'"
I see that in the US outfits like Tesla and John Deere hide behind
"safety" as a shield. "Right to repair" needs to kerb-stomp that whole
conceit. Prove that only a highly skilled technician could possibly
perform the repair and that otherwise the consequences are extremely
likely to be lethal.
> must be made of standard parts
Mechanical interoperability and "class" part tolerances aren't so
unreasonable. The entire electronics industry is built on standard
component pitches and package layouts with equivalent component
classes published in most cases. Take the 741 op-amp package and
you'll find hundreds of pin-compatible devices in any catalogue. We
totally can do that for electro-mechanical assemblies.
> all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price
No. I don't like the idea of compelled sales. I don't like compelled
anything. How about a law that says if you refuse to manufacture and
sell parts at a reasonable price you simply lose your patent/trademark
and cannot stop any other business making the part for which there is
demand?
> ALL software MUST BE open sourced
Gets my vote! :)
> anyone who can prove planned obsolescence
Not sure. Planned obsolescence isn't always a bad thing. It can be a
good design trade-off. Comes back to the quality expectations thing.
But remote kill switches and "updates of death" should be punished
mercilessly.
How do you know MTBF for recent (new) products? If they get a waiver, why wouldn't manufacturers make every product model-year-specific to avoid such a requirement?
True, that's why we need such extreme and exaggerate sanction that the other side know it's a large net fishing so most fishes pass through but only one caught is so expensive to being not worth the risk. That's the most classic strategies we have seen few times in the past, and back than it works...
> I see that in the US
It happen also in EU, for instance in France it's mandatory to provide washing machines spare parts for 5-7 years (I do not remember exactly the terms) BUT such parts are only sold to "certified repair centers" witch are generic repair shops who have paid "specific training" on yearly basis and so are "eligible as certified repair shop for $YouNameItBrand", they do not even use much excuses, the laws allow them to restrict part supply...
> No. I don't like the idea of compelled sales
Consider a thing: spare parts in many cases are not profitable to be sold directly to customers. For instance a pump manufacturer for dishwashers might have some private agreement with some top brands that they buy it's pumps only if they are not on sale abroad. If you mandate "sell disassembled and assembled anything" any OEM are trapped: they can't made cartels, because parts prices must sum up not too much more than the complete device with the sole exception of reasonable packaging/shipping fees. If you leave a formally open market for some parts you'll have it, for others no.
> Not sure. Planned obsolescence isn't always a bad thing.
It's not IF you can recycle, like there is no issue in planning a car for just two years of good quality service if the used car can be disassembled and recycled, otherwise the trade off between the initial lower costs and the obsolescence to push innovation vanish in waste as we see today... It's not wrong saying "since thing improve more or less regularly it's a good thing pushing new one even if they are only a bit better, not enough to convince most customers to made the switch, but it's good only if you have solved the circularity of the supply chain issue IMVHO.
Like some here say: "the plastic gear is a sacrificial part" a cheap one, perhaps easy to replace, who happen to avoid bigger damage, sure it can be. But hey we know better safety. For instance in my country we have dropped cheap fuses for AC home electricity for far more expensive thermal and differential switches just because they last decades and you can re-switch them as you wish while fuses might last equally ONLY if no overpower/short happen. Such switches can be recycled not fully but "a bit". The game is the same. If my mixer can last 10+ years, I can change blades as needed, there is no need for sacrificial parts, it's better produce far less, having them more expensive and keep them for a decade. In 10 years they have not improved much, there is no benefit in a quicker market since there is no circularity.
Don't some countries in Europe already have this? Minimum warranties because the product must work for X number of years no matter what?
A sliding tax that got larger the shorter the warranty was would be interesting, perhaps avoidable if you showed a certain amount of repairability (or longevity of product model; a device that has been made for five years is going to be more repairable than one that changes every year, if everything else is the same).
> But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage.
So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone?
> Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear.
Thanks to the internet, this problem tends to solve itself. The factory in China will generally happily sell you some.
> anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try.
The problem is what's the bar for proving it? Every design has a component that will wear out first.
> > But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage.
> So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone?
Is it better to have an invisible "poor tax" that makes your single mother spend 2-3x the price of the cheap one over 10 years since it breaks so much faster instead of having to save up longer initially for the one that probably won't break in ten years?
Could do an escrow/deposit style thing so you can get your money back if your cheap shit actually doesn't break faster. So there's an incentive to make things cheaper only if you are confident in your long-term business model and reliability.
> Is it better to have an invisible "poor tax" that makes your single mother spend 2-3x the price of the cheap one over 10 years since it breaks so much faster instead of having to save up longer initially for the one that probably won't break in ten years?
"stop whining about gas prices and just buy a Tesla. It's way cheaper in the long run"
> Could do an escrow/deposit style thing so you can get your money back if your cheap shit actually doesn't break faster. So there's an incentive to make things cheaper only if you are confident in your long-term business model and reliability.
The capital requirements to implement that would be absolutely out of this world.
Cheap crap that constantly breaks is a poor tax. The difference between luxury prices and cheap prices are not driven by that single crucial worm gear that in plastic costs a penny and in steel costs a dollar. They still would have put in the plastic one if the prices had been reversed.
If people were offered the chance to buy something that would last for a 25-50% premium over the stuff that won't, they'll jump for it. Instead they're offered a choice between crap and heavily marketed luxury items which could also be crap, because their premium is not proportional to the quality of the materials or engineering.
> "stop whining about gas prices and just buy a Tesla. It's way cheaper in the long run"
It would have been better to choose an example that was true.
Poor quality products are typically cheap. Such a tax will hurt poor people, those who most of all need lower priced products. Poor people will need support in buying high quality products.
> at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale
I get what you’re trying to accomplish here, but as stated, this seems ridiculous. A washing machine may have 75+ part numbers (with many of those having multiples [like screws and panel clips]).
Asking a manufacturer to stock and handle each of them individually for service parts at a loss seems unreasonable. If you bought every part individually to assemble a $25K Toyota, I bet you’d spend over $100K in parts. Why? Because it costs more money to box, label, ship, inventory, pick, and pack a washing machine or a car a part at a time than to load a cardboard box with a whole machine inside with a fork truck or drive a car off a hauler.
- 55% of all people buying a device were aware of this resource
- 76% of those people that in 2021 purchased a new device and
indicated to have noticed the index, found the index to be helpful
for orienting their final purchase choice
- French authorities hope that the repairability index will
contribute to reaching a repair rate of 60% until 2025
I think people naturally, instinctively want to repair things, and
expect them to be fixable. A disposable culture of sealed, one-use
products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted. I hope we
can get this level of awareness and action in the UK.
> A disposable culture of sealed, one-use products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted
I'm convinced this is only very temporary as we're living in an era of abundant resources. Recycling and fixing things will be the norm in the near future.
I wish I could buy things that are expected to last a lifetime. The only things I've purchased in recent months that fall into that category are my cast iron pan and some hardcover books.
There are a lot of things but they are always very very expensive. It’s almost not worth it when functionally many times they perform about as well as something a tenth of its price.
10 years ago you could buy a core i5 2500 for ~$200. Quad core, 3.7GHz max. Seem to be half the perf of a current i5 on 4threads benchmarks. Of course phones have progressed faster but will they for the next 10 years? Probably not in terms of utility.
Just so you know, the glue used in most hard- and soft- cover books since the 1970's is more worm-resistant but less time-resistant than earlier organic formulations. You'll find books bound in the 18th century that can still have the pages turned today, but thirty- or forty- year old books typically fall apart, especially in dry conditions.
I do not know if there is an economical way to repair them, I'd never thought about it until now.
What kind of books are we talking here? Could be survivorship bias, but my experience (in Europe) is nothing like this, plenty of old books in every household and second hand shops are buying them en masse as well.
I actually happen to work in a printing house, but what I stated is something that was explained to me years ago. I'm in the software development department, but I'll ask around in the printing department and see if I can get any clarification. I do wonder if that information is local to our country, or to specific books, it was explained to me in the context of a hardcopy of Journey to the Center of the Earth falling apart. The book was likely printed locally as it is in our local language, not French.
To extend further, very few items will run flawlessly for decades or more without some kind of maintenance.
Durable doesn't necessarily mean the product will last eternally as built.
Books usually need to be re-bound and re-covered, pieces of furniture need to be repainted/revarnished, Electronic appliances may need component replacement (capacitors, belts, etc), etc
Yes,this represent some efforts and still have some ecological impact, but being able to maintain an item that, at its core, is still original is a far cry from producing a brand new one.
But to do so, the product needs to be designed as maintainable and reparable, preferably even beyond the manufacturer support period (by using generic and easily obtainable components for example).
I have become more and more convinced that recycling is overhyped. Not that we shouldn't do it (except in the documented cases where it's actually not accomplishing anything), but there's a reason it's at the end of Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.
Hoping we can push more and more towards reduce and reuse.
Recycling is a big lie, and I don't understand why we still validate this concept. Most things can be recycled only once (paper and glass being the exception), and eventually they go to trash.
Also, the resources used to recycle are important, and recycling can have damaging effect on nature.
Metals are also recyclable as many times as you want.
Recycling is not perfect but I don’t understand the negativity. Do you really think it would be preferable to just send everything straight to landfills instead of trying to recycle what we can, even if only once?
No, I'm saying recycling gives a false sense of security, when in reality it's a very very imperfect system with flaws people are not aware of
Nothing should be sent to trash
When creating a new thing, vendors should make an end-of-life impact study, with the aim of 0% waste, ie make the thing with non polluting materials (wood?) and infinitely recyclable materials
I do believe that culture might even have started before ww2 when engineers produced too long lasting ladies stockings for the management and were asked to go back to the drawing board with stockings that did last forever (I do not have a source for that story but I've heard it multiple times from different groups of friends).
Lawn mowers made from plastic parts can get ratings ~9 out of 10. Interesting because plastic wheels and plastic cowlings etcetera get broken, there is a commitment to replacements but how long before they disappear. . . The index doesn’t seem to contain any metrics for: hardiness, fault tolerance, reliability, toughness, or general ability to avoid breakage in the first place.
For foreigners: French numbers 7,1 means 7.1
Here’s a translation of some of the ratings - I think it is out of date - unfortunately most of the docs I Googled were PDF and I couldn’t be arsed dealing with PDF.
Criterion 1: Documentation
Sub-criterion 1.1: Availability of documentation
Sub-criterion 1.2: Instructions for use of product maintenance and updating tips
Criterion 2: Disassembly and reassembly
Sub-criterion 2.1: Ease of disassembly and reassembly (breakdown/breakage parts)
Sub-criterion 2.2: Tools required (breakdown/breakage parts)
Criterion 3: Availability of spare parts
Sub-criterion 3.1.1: Commitment to the duration of availability (breakdown/breakage parts)
Sub-criterion 3.1.2: Commitment to availability (functional parts)
Sub-criterion 3.2.1: Commitment over the delivery period (breakdown/breakage parts)
Sub-criterion 3.2.2: Commitment over the delivery period (functional parts)
Criterion 4: Price
Ratio/price of the most expensive part (breakdown/breakage parts) to the price of the new product
Criterion 5: Specific criterion
Durability is much harder to rate, and use of plastic doesn't imply lower durability.
Go look at a car with fenders that are rusting away. My car is one of them. Inside of the wheel well there is a fender liner made of plastic. That thing takes 10x the abuse of the fender and is still in good condition unless its mounting points have rusted away.
I wish that they had made my fenders from plastic. My car would be in much better shape if they had.
Afaik its all self reported - you as a manufacturer pick the numbers and nobody verifies anything. Apple gave itself high numbers because everything can be "fixed" with apple care.
That already exists - there are already open, modular phone and laptop chassis standards. The market largely doesn't want that.
Standardized components tend to be significantly larger than an integrated solution can deliver. A lot of the standards also end up being pretty bad - like I'm curious, why do you point to ATX and its derivatives (ITX) as being a good thing?
Some quick examples - ATX is a relic of the days when we all had a full tower with a 5.25" floppy drive (or later optical) and maybe a 5.25" hard drive, a 3.5" floppy drive, and the GPU and CPU were an afterthought. It has no officially specified location or keepout for the CPU and memory making cooler standardization impossible. It devotes a huge amount of airspace to the CPU while leaving the GPU (with a TDP multiple times higher) with a cooler that faces the wrong direction for convection to work and an add-in-card format that makes it impossible to support the modern coolers. It has tons of power rails that are essentially vestigial because the things they used to power no longer exist (5V is only used for USB and SSDs, 3v is a leftover from the floppy drive days, etc). And all the attempts to rectify these weaknesses have been quashed and become niche unsupported standards of their own.
In the ITX space, even within homebuilder PCs, only the very smallest "standardized" SFF builds can compete with garden-variety mini-PCs, and those builds are extremely fraught with compatibility issues. A board that moves the cpu socket a half inch one way or the other might blow compatibility with popular coolers, because people have to optimize their builds to that level to make it work. And none of them reach the form factors that are possible with "slim" console-style builds utilizing a fully integrated design. Engineered solutions are simply smaller and usually cooler while doing it, because they are thoughtfully planned in a thermal and layout sense rather than having to work around layout decisions that were made literally in the 1970s by IBM.
For all these reasons, the ATX standard and its derivatives (ITX) is extremely unpopular outside the home-builder market, virtually nobody actually implements it. For example the 12VO standard is an attempt to standardize what OEMs are already doing - everyone else has already given up on ATX PSUs and gone to 12VO independently, so now there are a bunch of incompatible implementations. Things like motherboard size and screw placement vary hugely, because the market doesn't want giant full-tower cases for the computer in mom's den.
We also tried a lot of these concepts with the laptop MXM graphics card factor... but it turns out the mezzanine format adds a lot of thickness, cost, etc, for really not a whole lot of benefit. Laptops are inherently such specialized things that you end up with problems with chip placement, memory placement, cooling, power delivery, etc... and in particular it was basically never possible to swap between brands, because these factors meant the laptop just couldn't fit the GPU and actually power/cool it. It's just easier and better to design a solution that sits on the board. Socketed CPU/GPU in laptops are done, BGA is the future.
Every new standard just leads to yet another thing to be abandoned. Thin-ITX tried to fix the socket placement issue, for example. Dead. 12VO is trying to fix the power issue... dead. NVIDIA has been trying to fix the PSU power cable issue... people hated it.
It would be great if we had one standard that covered everybody's use-case, but that leads to an overcomplicated standard with a lot of nuance and boilerplate, and some things inevitably still fall through the cracks. For USB-C, that overhead is a huge amount of extra expense in the cables, devices, chargers, etc, for cases the overhead will be wasted space and weight. The market does not want to go back to phones that are as thick as chocolate-bar phones were.
The data is handled by a startup, so I’d expect it to be out of the open data initiative at this stage. You should contact them if you have a specific use case in mind.
I find this statement hard to believe: "76% of those people that in 2021 purchased a new device and indicated to have noticed the index." It just doesn't jive with the real world understanding most people have of their technology devices.
I think this law is a net positive, but I can't tell from this document if it really made a measurable impact in year 1.
I think you are misreading the sentence. It doesn't say how many people noticed the index. It says how many of the people _who noticed the index_ found it helpful. (See nonrandomstring's comment.)
I'm not sure if it's actually required by law, but usual retailers have been communicating a lot on this in the last year. Most of them display a sticker in their stores, but the score is also prominently shown on their websites[0][1]. I'm really not surprised that a lot of people willing to buy something noticed the repairability score, because it's near impossible to miss it.
Yep, it is required by law to have the repairability index score posted prominently near the price tag of the product, whether online or in physical retail. It’s a super effective approach (as noted in the linked study).
> It just doesn't jive with the real world understanding most people have of their technology devices.
Obviously the French are quite a lot poorer than the US, if that's where you're coming from, so values for things like repairability are going to be different.
No, I definitely wasn't saying that. My point is that people are generally pretty oblivious of the vast majority of facts and features of their electronics devices.
You might want to actually read that Wikipedia page; those figures are very very heavily massaged in multiple ways, and not everyone would necessarily agree with how they are massaged. Suffice it to say, there's a large fudge factor here, much larger than the difference you are trying to point out.
Yeah, I think when you start trying to cram that much stuff into a single number it will end up misrepresenting reality.
People like the simplicity of single numbers for comparison, but it is about as sensible as describing a personality by a single number.
I think I would rather show the median value for a variety of variables. Not everything makes sense to turn into dollars. How do you turn health care into dollars? What you pay for it is not a true reflection of the quality.
US tends to look good when things are turned into dollars and a lot worse when real world metrics and outcomes are measured such as health, happiness, safety, stress, life expectancy, leisure time etc.
So 50% more in one direction, 33% less in the other. This is the eternal question of percentages misunderstandings between peoples. But this doesn't feel "quite a lot poorer" to me, just less rich that the number one.
Most of the difference is explained by the numbers of hours worked, since the GDP in purchase parity per hours worked is within 10 % between US and countries like France or Germany: see e.g. https://data.oecd.org/lprdty/gdp-per-hour-worked.htm.
So those countries, implicitly or explicitly, made the choice so substitute income for more leisure. Whether that makes them richer/poorer depends on your perspective.
Nothing is that simple.
If you look at poverty rate, there are more poor people in the united states.
And if you look at purchasing power, some numbers will give you that the cost of a basket of good in comparison with income is exactly the same: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purchasing_power_parity and some numbers will differ.
My point was that, people in France have a really similar lifestyle than in the US (removing the cultural differences) and saying that people are looking at things that can be fixed because they are poor is just not true.
The French actually are not "obviously" "quite a lot poorer", actually. Income is better distributed there and there are fewer criminal enterprises accumulating vast wealth.
The median income in the US is barely higher than that of France.
>so values for things like repairability are going to be different
every time someone refers to these gdp statistics I want to remind them that London and Paris (not the respective countries, the capitals!) are apparently poorer than Montana or South Dakota overall. I don't know who comes up with these numbers but if you've ever been in these places and think your average Parisian is in more need of repair and self-reliance than your average resident of Montana I'd be very surprised
In fact the repair debate itself shows how silly this argument is, given that self-repair, involving no or little economic activity, renders you poorer by the accounting logic of our economic system.
It can be a bit hard to find reliable/repairable electronics.
I'm a person who tries to only replace their stuff when it breaks, because buying and configuring new all the time is just too much mental overhead. But when I do, I research my options for quite a while.
I had to stop using my Galaxy S2 because Google Maps became too slow to be usable on it (note that I'm not saying the phone became too slow. The phone didn't change.).
Now I've been using a Galaxy S5 for probably 7 years. I had to fix some things - like the power button - but you can find third party repair instructions and parts online easily. All I needed was a few minutes, some glue, and a screwdriver.
Obviously both phones run Cyanogenmod/Lineageos.
To be fair I already tried upgrading again, but so far I haven't found a likely candidate. There's some brands that market themselves as repairable, but I don't trust them to be around in six years and don't believe they have a community that would support the device independently with third-party spare parts.
For e-readers I'm using Kobo devices for now. Their plastic shells aren't particularly repair friendly, but their internals are (they use actual micro SD cards in a slot on their board for "internal" storage, with some Linux OS on it.).
My Thinkpad is 8 years old, so are my Dell screens. Both are still adequate by modern standards. In fact my old hardware keeps me honest in my everyday work as a software developer, by not allowing me to write software that is ridiculously slow and power hungry. Most of the world cannot necessarily afford hardware that is much faster than that (did you know Twitch is close to unusable on the vast majority of hardware in use today, while YouTube is perfectly fine? Stuff like this matters if you care about more than just the western market.)
The only electronics I keep "up to date" is a gaming computer. Depending on the titles you want to play, there's really no way around this. But at least desktop computers are somewhat modular.
Once you've used a Samsung Note for a few weeks, you'll never go back to a phone without a built in stylus. The boost in productivity far outweighs the drawbacks of stock firmware.
If you know of another phone with a built-in stylus, or any third-party firmware for a Note 10 Lite, I'm all ears.
I'm still rocking an Apple Watch series 3. I know a couple people rocking old iPhones, and just doing battery swaps every once in a while.
It's not necessarily the best option but god do they feel like devices that last long (especially compared to the "barely usable on arrival" that is most mid-tier android).
I must say I am extremely disappointed by my FairPhone 3+.
I have had mine now for about two years, and on the hardware-side it's okay. The camera is garbage, even on the model with the better camera (3+). The build quality is okay. I like the ease of ordering new parts, and it disassembles relatively easily (especially compared to all other flagship phones I am aware of).
The thing that makes is borderline unusable for me is the software.
A software update broke caller identification in LTE networks. All incoming calls would be marked as "Unknown number". This is worse than it sounds, as you can not call back if you missed a call, as you don't know who called. The support said it was aware of this issue, and that a patch was "on the way". In the mean time we should just disable LTE. Well, since the 3G network is dead, the only other option is Edge, which is utter garbage. They fixed it after three months(!).
A while later, the automatic display brightness adjustment just broke, randomly going to the lowest brightness setting, and then recovering a couple of seconds/minutes later.
My Fairphone got the android 11 update a month ago (better late then never), but that just broke more things. YouTube playback of anything more than 720p is unwatchable at 10-15fps. I get regular messages that something crashed due to being out of memory (nothing I was doing crashed). I sometimes cannot open the android dropdown menu, I have to really exaggerate the gesture to get any response.
I am seriously considering flashing a custom rom, as I have had less pain and problems with LineageOS in the past.
The films "Kinky boots" comes to mind. Something broke inside me when my manufacturing materials lecturer stated "we do not always needs products to last forever so we have the ability to design materials that wear and tear within a defined envelope of usages and time" Looking at my iPhone cable I'm so glad I failed that course.
> It's pointless to design a component to outlast a device's useful lifespan by a decade.
No it is not because it can be reused in the assembly of another device. This is not commercially incentivizing though. Think of a car, if EV motors are build to last 100 years then it would make sense for the manufacturer to buy back used EVs and reuse the component, no? Even if it would be commercially more expensive it should make sense because otherwise those components go to the landfill.
> anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes a good engineer to design a bridge that barely stands
This analogy does not fit the current climate of consumables because bridges are built to survive a long time, they are not built for 5 years. The "bridge that barely stands" emphasizes the minimum amount of materials to use to achieve the goal - to make sure it stands for a long time. Consumer items do that already, use the minimum amount of materials but do not make sure their creations live for more than a couple of years - inverse to the analogy.
I hope they apply this to childrens toys as well as high value consumer electronics.
Everyone likes to crap on the consumer electronics sector but I have seen with my own eyes literally skips full of plastic trash which barely lasted one use before being disposed of because they were broken or single use.
In the category of laptops I thought I'd see the Frame.work in the first place (as it has the best iFixIt index), but instead the place is taken by the P775DM3-G, a Clevo laptop, a brand I had never heard of (the brand is listed as a "Why" but that's an error, this is the reseller's name).
the two "why" laptops before the frame.work laptop are ranked 97.6 which is rounded to 98 and then 9,8 as score; the frame.work is ranked 97.0 without rounding so it ends being 9,7 .
the frame.work gets a higher score on the ease of disassembly and the tools you need to disassemble, but it gets a lower score on the documentation ( <flame> maybe documentation is not in french </flame> ) and on the price ratio for the component; probably frame.work parts are a bit more expensive in comparison with the price of the laptop.
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[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadBut the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage.
Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear.
Personally, for standards:
- anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc;
- all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale, no restriction on buyers, no need to be "certified" by the company etc. Spare parts MIGHT have a mark to avoid warranty issues but nothing else;
- ALL software MUST BE open sourced, no restriction allowed, no bullshits on IP and so one, any black box can't be on sale in 5 years (to give time to adapt) and the code must be practically readable and usable by anyone;
- anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try.
This is a huge one for things that aren't phones and laptops - parts should be as "loosely" coupled as they can be, so that similar but not identical parts can be used. This may involve slightly more complicated designs (think: wash machine that has a pump AND a flow valve or switches in the drum to measure how full it is vs just "run this pump for X minutes and it will be full) but allows for much more durability/long lasting.
However, an additional thing should be done to encourage these repairs - make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free. Once the financial incentives are lined up, people will be begging for dead items they can fix and resell.
Customer goes to appliance store. Breaks a $5 part. Store repairs it, and now the customer gets to buy the appliance without VAT plus $5 for the repair?
If the goal is to reduce people’s consumption and incentivize them reuse, then simply increase taxes on newly manufactured goods. It will also incentivize people to buy more repairable goods, and hence incentivize manufacturers to make and sell them.
If a mechanism jams, something has to give. This may be the motor, which may survive being jammed indefinitely, or it could burn up, causing a more expensive problem. In a mixer, the motor is probably decently powerful and doesn't tolerate being jammed.
If there's enough gear reduction, then a jam can develop enough force to bend shafts or break mountings and other components. That can make the product impossible to repair, if some injection molded bit that was supposed to hold stuff in place was broken.
A well placed plastic gear that breaks and saves the rest of the mechanism can make repair far easier and cheaper. And gears are very standard components that are far easier to find replacements for than some weird injection molded thing being made for one specific model of mixer.
In reality, nothing is so simple as waving your hands and declaring "no plastic 'planned obsolescence' parts!". Everything is a trade-off. A more effective way of pushing companies to position the trade-off in a way that rewards long-term durability would probably be to mandate longer warranty periods, rather than try to dictate what gears ought to be made out of in a vacuum divorced from the tradeoffs involved.
For example timing chains vs timing belts, apparently there are reasons they choose one over the other, but maintenance is part of keeping them operational.
If it was a planned safety features then spare gears could be included or easy to find and buy for cheap(a device I bought had a safety fuse and it comed with 3 extra ones , also it was designed to be simple to replace it, no screws or "genius" needed. On the other hand a laptop of mine got destroyed by a high power voltage, but not destroyed at once, made me spent some more money on repairs until it finally died, all because some cheap safety feature was not included (even if hard to replace))
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27018629
One of the replies is a truly frightening story about people who broke the sacrificial gear in the tailgate window mechanism of their Toyota Landcruiser and machined a new one out of brass!
A 5 pack of the replacement parts plus the tool to hold the shaft still while installing costs $10+tax delivered from Amazon (ASIN B07Y7S33RF).
The trick is, someone has to think to and then want to repair it. When that coupler first wore out, many would assume “oh, the mixer wore out; we have to buy a new one” rather than “a replaceable part wore out; we have to buy and install a new one”.
A few weeks ago, a friend came over with a cracked phone screen and mentioned they were going to buy a new phone the next day. “Why not replace the screen? I did mine last month.” “You can do that?!”
People are in a default buy-again mindset.
> sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax
A poor quality tax, like a sugar tax, seems interesting. Don't sell crap. Measurement and enforcement isn't so easy. Quality of design isn't trivial to assess. Maybe simple MTBF of finished product. Punish excessive returns.
> Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'"
I see that in the US outfits like Tesla and John Deere hide behind "safety" as a shield. "Right to repair" needs to kerb-stomp that whole conceit. Prove that only a highly skilled technician could possibly perform the repair and that otherwise the consequences are extremely likely to be lethal.
> must be made of standard parts
Mechanical interoperability and "class" part tolerances aren't so unreasonable. The entire electronics industry is built on standard component pitches and package layouts with equivalent component classes published in most cases. Take the 741 op-amp package and you'll find hundreds of pin-compatible devices in any catalogue. We totally can do that for electro-mechanical assemblies.
> all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price
No. I don't like the idea of compelled sales. I don't like compelled anything. How about a law that says if you refuse to manufacture and sell parts at a reasonable price you simply lose your patent/trademark and cannot stop any other business making the part for which there is demand?
> ALL software MUST BE open sourced
Gets my vote! :)
> anyone who can prove planned obsolescence
Not sure. Planned obsolescence isn't always a bad thing. It can be a good design trade-off. Comes back to the quality expectations thing. But remote kill switches and "updates of death" should be punished mercilessly.
This kind of tax already exists for recycling programs, so it has to be at least somewhat possible.
True, that's why we need such extreme and exaggerate sanction that the other side know it's a large net fishing so most fishes pass through but only one caught is so expensive to being not worth the risk. That's the most classic strategies we have seen few times in the past, and back than it works...
> I see that in the US
It happen also in EU, for instance in France it's mandatory to provide washing machines spare parts for 5-7 years (I do not remember exactly the terms) BUT such parts are only sold to "certified repair centers" witch are generic repair shops who have paid "specific training" on yearly basis and so are "eligible as certified repair shop for $YouNameItBrand", they do not even use much excuses, the laws allow them to restrict part supply...
> No. I don't like the idea of compelled sales
Consider a thing: spare parts in many cases are not profitable to be sold directly to customers. For instance a pump manufacturer for dishwashers might have some private agreement with some top brands that they buy it's pumps only if they are not on sale abroad. If you mandate "sell disassembled and assembled anything" any OEM are trapped: they can't made cartels, because parts prices must sum up not too much more than the complete device with the sole exception of reasonable packaging/shipping fees. If you leave a formally open market for some parts you'll have it, for others no.
> Not sure. Planned obsolescence isn't always a bad thing.
It's not IF you can recycle, like there is no issue in planning a car for just two years of good quality service if the used car can be disassembled and recycled, otherwise the trade off between the initial lower costs and the obsolescence to push innovation vanish in waste as we see today... It's not wrong saying "since thing improve more or less regularly it's a good thing pushing new one even if they are only a bit better, not enough to convince most customers to made the switch, but it's good only if you have solved the circularity of the supply chain issue IMVHO.
Like some here say: "the plastic gear is a sacrificial part" a cheap one, perhaps easy to replace, who happen to avoid bigger damage, sure it can be. But hey we know better safety. For instance in my country we have dropped cheap fuses for AC home electricity for far more expensive thermal and differential switches just because they last decades and you can re-switch them as you wish while fuses might last equally ONLY if no overpower/short happen. Such switches can be recycled not fully but "a bit". The game is the same. If my mixer can last 10+ years, I can change blades as needed, there is no need for sacrificial parts, it's better produce far less, having them more expensive and keep them for a decade. In 10 years they have not improved much, there is no benefit in a quicker market since there is no circularity.
A sliding tax that got larger the shorter the warranty was would be interesting, perhaps avoidable if you showed a certain amount of repairability (or longevity of product model; a device that has been made for five years is going to be more repairable than one that changes every year, if everything else is the same).
So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone?
> Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear.
Thanks to the internet, this problem tends to solve itself. The factory in China will generally happily sell you some.
> anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try.
The problem is what's the bar for proving it? Every design has a component that will wear out first.
> So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone?
Is it better to have an invisible "poor tax" that makes your single mother spend 2-3x the price of the cheap one over 10 years since it breaks so much faster instead of having to save up longer initially for the one that probably won't break in ten years?
Could do an escrow/deposit style thing so you can get your money back if your cheap shit actually doesn't break faster. So there's an incentive to make things cheaper only if you are confident in your long-term business model and reliability.
"stop whining about gas prices and just buy a Tesla. It's way cheaper in the long run"
> Could do an escrow/deposit style thing so you can get your money back if your cheap shit actually doesn't break faster. So there's an incentive to make things cheaper only if you are confident in your long-term business model and reliability.
The capital requirements to implement that would be absolutely out of this world.
If people were offered the chance to buy something that would last for a 25-50% premium over the stuff that won't, they'll jump for it. Instead they're offered a choice between crap and heavily marketed luxury items which could also be crap, because their premium is not proportional to the quality of the materials or engineering.
> "stop whining about gas prices and just buy a Tesla. It's way cheaper in the long run"
It would have been better to choose an example that was true.
I get what you’re trying to accomplish here, but as stated, this seems ridiculous. A washing machine may have 75+ part numbers (with many of those having multiples [like screws and panel clips]).
Asking a manufacturer to stock and handle each of them individually for service parts at a loss seems unreasonable. If you bought every part individually to assemble a $25K Toyota, I bet you’d spend over $100K in parts. Why? Because it costs more money to box, label, ship, inventory, pick, and pack a washing machine or a car a part at a time than to load a cardboard box with a whole machine inside with a fork truck or drive a car off a hauler.
It blows my mind that some vehicle repair manuals are basically impossible to find.
- 55% of all people buying a device were aware of this resource
- 76% of those people that in 2021 purchased a new device and indicated to have noticed the index, found the index to be helpful for orienting their final purchase choice
- French authorities hope that the repairability index will contribute to reaching a repair rate of 60% until 2025
I think people naturally, instinctively want to repair things, and expect them to be fixable. A disposable culture of sealed, one-use products is very recent, skin deep, and largely unwanted. I hope we can get this level of awareness and action in the UK.
I'm convinced this is only very temporary as we're living in an era of abundant resources. Recycling and fixing things will be the norm in the near future.
It’s not about one single synthetic benchmark.
A 10 year old system is going to be much worse - slower RAM, worse GPU, much slower disks (and almost certainly disks, not SSD)
I do not know if there is an economical way to repair them, I'd never thought about it until now.
I actually happen to work in a printing house, but what I stated is something that was explained to me years ago. I'm in the software development department, but I'll ask around in the printing department and see if I can get any clarification. I do wonder if that information is local to our country, or to specific books, it was explained to me in the context of a hardcopy of Journey to the Center of the Earth falling apart. The book was likely printed locally as it is in our local language, not French.
Durable doesn't necessarily mean the product will last eternally as built.
Books usually need to be re-bound and re-covered, pieces of furniture need to be repainted/revarnished, Electronic appliances may need component replacement (capacitors, belts, etc), etc
Yes,this represent some efforts and still have some ecological impact, but being able to maintain an item that, at its core, is still original is a far cry from producing a brand new one.
But to do so, the product needs to be designed as maintainable and reparable, preferably even beyond the manufacturer support period (by using generic and easily obtainable components for example).
Hoping we can push more and more towards reduce and reuse.
Also, the resources used to recycle are important, and recycling can have damaging effect on nature.
Recycling is not perfect but I don’t understand the negativity. Do you really think it would be preferable to just send everything straight to landfills instead of trying to recycle what we can, even if only once?
Nothing should be sent to trash When creating a new thing, vendors should make an end-of-life impact study, with the aim of 0% waste, ie make the thing with non polluting materials (wood?) and infinitely recyclable materials
But you can see the pretty pictures and the numbers.
Lawn mowers made from plastic parts can get ratings ~9 out of 10. Interesting because plastic wheels and plastic cowlings etcetera get broken, there is a commitment to replacements but how long before they disappear. . . The index doesn’t seem to contain any metrics for: hardiness, fault tolerance, reliability, toughness, or general ability to avoid breakage in the first place.
For foreigners: French numbers 7,1 means 7.1
Here’s a translation of some of the ratings - I think it is out of date - unfortunately most of the docs I Googled were PDF and I couldn’t be arsed dealing with PDF.
In French (pardon the fucking image, sorry, WTF is going on with unpardonable French results? Fuck accessibility huh?): https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/produit/tondeuse-a-gazon-s...Go look at a car with fenders that are rusting away. My car is one of them. Inside of the wheel well there is a fender liner made of plastic. That thing takes 10x the abuse of the fender and is still in good condition unless its mounting points have rusted away.
I wish that they had made my fenders from plastic. My car would be in much better shape if they had.
Is precisely the question they answer:
> 3.1.1: Commitment to the duration of availability (breakdown/breakage parts)
So to have perfect grades, components must be estimated to be available for at least 9 years.
Imagine a similar itx like standard for phones M-ITX with standard batteries and displays.
Standardized components tend to be significantly larger than an integrated solution can deliver. A lot of the standards also end up being pretty bad - like I'm curious, why do you point to ATX and its derivatives (ITX) as being a good thing?
Some quick examples - ATX is a relic of the days when we all had a full tower with a 5.25" floppy drive (or later optical) and maybe a 5.25" hard drive, a 3.5" floppy drive, and the GPU and CPU were an afterthought. It has no officially specified location or keepout for the CPU and memory making cooler standardization impossible. It devotes a huge amount of airspace to the CPU while leaving the GPU (with a TDP multiple times higher) with a cooler that faces the wrong direction for convection to work and an add-in-card format that makes it impossible to support the modern coolers. It has tons of power rails that are essentially vestigial because the things they used to power no longer exist (5V is only used for USB and SSDs, 3v is a leftover from the floppy drive days, etc). And all the attempts to rectify these weaknesses have been quashed and become niche unsupported standards of their own.
In the ITX space, even within homebuilder PCs, only the very smallest "standardized" SFF builds can compete with garden-variety mini-PCs, and those builds are extremely fraught with compatibility issues. A board that moves the cpu socket a half inch one way or the other might blow compatibility with popular coolers, because people have to optimize their builds to that level to make it work. And none of them reach the form factors that are possible with "slim" console-style builds utilizing a fully integrated design. Engineered solutions are simply smaller and usually cooler while doing it, because they are thoughtfully planned in a thermal and layout sense rather than having to work around layout decisions that were made literally in the 1970s by IBM.
For all these reasons, the ATX standard and its derivatives (ITX) is extremely unpopular outside the home-builder market, virtually nobody actually implements it. For example the 12VO standard is an attempt to standardize what OEMs are already doing - everyone else has already given up on ATX PSUs and gone to 12VO independently, so now there are a bunch of incompatible implementations. Things like motherboard size and screw placement vary hugely, because the market doesn't want giant full-tower cases for the computer in mom's den.
We also tried a lot of these concepts with the laptop MXM graphics card factor... but it turns out the mezzanine format adds a lot of thickness, cost, etc, for really not a whole lot of benefit. Laptops are inherently such specialized things that you end up with problems with chip placement, memory placement, cooling, power delivery, etc... and in particular it was basically never possible to swap between brands, because these factors meant the laptop just couldn't fit the GPU and actually power/cool it. It's just easier and better to design a solution that sits on the board. Socketed CPU/GPU in laptops are done, BGA is the future.
Every new standard just leads to yet another thing to be abandoned. Thin-ITX tried to fix the socket placement issue, for example. Dead. 12VO is trying to fix the power issue... dead. NVIDIA has been trying to fix the PSU power cable issue... people hated it.
It would be great if we had one standard that covered everybody's use-case, but that leads to an overcomplicated standard with a lot of nuance and boilerplate, and some things inevitably still fall through the cracks. For USB-C, that overhead is a huge amount of extra expense in the cables, devices, chargers, etc, for cases the overhead will be wasted space and weight. The market does not want to go back to phones that are as thick as chocolate-bar phones were.
Again, yo...
I think this law is a net positive, but I can't tell from this document if it really made a measurable impact in year 1.
My conclusion from the report is that it is still too early to determine the impact of the program.
[0]: Some examples on two of the biggest appliance/electronics retailers: https://www.boulanger.com/ref/1157777, https://www.darty.com/nav/achat/gros_electromenager/lavage_s...
[1]: One last example on the Orange (mobile services provider) shop: https://boutique.orange.fr/mobile/details/oneplus-9-pro-5g-n...
Obviously the French are quite a lot poorer than the US, if that's where you're coming from, so values for things like repairability are going to be different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
Eh? 42800 / 28571 = 1.498
> significantly different tax rates and social contributions
Eh? "includes all forms of income as well as taxes and transfers in kind from governments for benefits such as healthcare and education"
One person complains they don't account for taxes and benefits, and another complains they do!
People like the simplicity of single numbers for comparison, but it is about as sensible as describing a personality by a single number.
I think I would rather show the median value for a variety of variables. Not everything makes sense to turn into dollars. How do you turn health care into dollars? What you pay for it is not a true reflection of the quality.
US tends to look good when things are turned into dollars and a lot worse when real world metrics and outcomes are measured such as health, happiness, safety, stress, life expectancy, leisure time etc.
I calculated percent difference.
> Eh? "includes all forms of income as well as taxes and transfers in kind from governments for benefits such as healthcare and education"
You're right, thanks. I was reading off my phone and missed that.
But the difference is 14229, which is 33% of US income, or 50% of France income.
I was taught to use an average of the values in the denominator in a case like this to avoid the confusion @Rexxar pointed out.
https://www.calculatorsoup.com/calculators/algebra/percent-d...
So those countries, implicitly or explicitly, made the choice so substitute income for more leisure. Whether that makes them richer/poorer depends on your perspective.
My point was that, people in France have a really similar lifestyle than in the US (removing the cultural differences) and saying that people are looking at things that can be fixed because they are poor is just not true.
But those numbers already account for purchasing power.
The median income in the US is barely higher than that of France.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/median-in...
every time someone refers to these gdp statistics I want to remind them that London and Paris (not the respective countries, the capitals!) are apparently poorer than Montana or South Dakota overall. I don't know who comes up with these numbers but if you've ever been in these places and think your average Parisian is in more need of repair and self-reliance than your average resident of Montana I'd be very surprised
In fact the repair debate itself shows how silly this argument is, given that self-repair, involving no or little economic activity, renders you poorer by the accounting logic of our economic system.
I'm a person who tries to only replace their stuff when it breaks, because buying and configuring new all the time is just too much mental overhead. But when I do, I research my options for quite a while.
I had to stop using my Galaxy S2 because Google Maps became too slow to be usable on it (note that I'm not saying the phone became too slow. The phone didn't change.).
Now I've been using a Galaxy S5 for probably 7 years. I had to fix some things - like the power button - but you can find third party repair instructions and parts online easily. All I needed was a few minutes, some glue, and a screwdriver.
Obviously both phones run Cyanogenmod/Lineageos.
To be fair I already tried upgrading again, but so far I haven't found a likely candidate. There's some brands that market themselves as repairable, but I don't trust them to be around in six years and don't believe they have a community that would support the device independently with third-party spare parts.
For e-readers I'm using Kobo devices for now. Their plastic shells aren't particularly repair friendly, but their internals are (they use actual micro SD cards in a slot on their board for "internal" storage, with some Linux OS on it.).
My Thinkpad is 8 years old, so are my Dell screens. Both are still adequate by modern standards. In fact my old hardware keeps me honest in my everyday work as a software developer, by not allowing me to write software that is ridiculously slow and power hungry. Most of the world cannot necessarily afford hardware that is much faster than that (did you know Twitch is close to unusable on the vast majority of hardware in use today, while YouTube is perfectly fine? Stuff like this matters if you care about more than just the western market.)
The only electronics I keep "up to date" is a gaming computer. Depending on the titles you want to play, there's really no way around this. But at least desktop computers are somewhat modular.
For smart watches, just dont. Unless it's Joey Castillos sensor watch or something
If you know of another phone with a built-in stylus, or any third-party firmware for a Note 10 Lite, I'm all ears.
It's not necessarily the best option but god do they feel like devices that last long (especially compared to the "barely usable on arrival" that is most mid-tier android).
I have had mine now for about two years, and on the hardware-side it's okay. The camera is garbage, even on the model with the better camera (3+). The build quality is okay. I like the ease of ordering new parts, and it disassembles relatively easily (especially compared to all other flagship phones I am aware of).
The thing that makes is borderline unusable for me is the software.
A software update broke caller identification in LTE networks. All incoming calls would be marked as "Unknown number". This is worse than it sounds, as you can not call back if you missed a call, as you don't know who called. The support said it was aware of this issue, and that a patch was "on the way". In the mean time we should just disable LTE. Well, since the 3G network is dead, the only other option is Edge, which is utter garbage. They fixed it after three months(!).
A while later, the automatic display brightness adjustment just broke, randomly going to the lowest brightness setting, and then recovering a couple of seconds/minutes later.
My Fairphone got the android 11 update a month ago (better late then never), but that just broke more things. YouTube playback of anything more than 720p is unwatchable at 10-15fps. I get regular messages that something crashed due to being out of memory (nothing I was doing crashed). I sometimes cannot open the android dropdown menu, I have to really exaggerate the gesture to get any response.
I am seriously considering flashing a custom rom, as I have had less pain and problems with LineageOS in the past.
I've heard it phrased differently: anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes a good engineer to design a bridge that barely stands.
No it is not because it can be reused in the assembly of another device. This is not commercially incentivizing though. Think of a car, if EV motors are build to last 100 years then it would make sense for the manufacturer to buy back used EVs and reuse the component, no? Even if it would be commercially more expensive it should make sense because otherwise those components go to the landfill.
> anyone can build a bridge that stands, but it takes a good engineer to design a bridge that barely stands
This analogy does not fit the current climate of consumables because bridges are built to survive a long time, they are not built for 5 years. The "bridge that barely stands" emphasizes the minimum amount of materials to use to achieve the goal - to make sure it stands for a long time. Consumer items do that already, use the minimum amount of materials but do not make sure their creations live for more than a couple of years - inverse to the analogy.
Everyone likes to crap on the consumer electronics sector but I have seen with my own eyes literally skips full of plastic trash which barely lasted one use before being disposed of because they were broken or single use.
I'm french and I was reassured of my choice to buy a fairphone when I saw its indice de réparabilité is 9.3/10
https://www.indicereparabilite.fr/appareils/multimedia/ordin...
the frame.work gets a higher score on the ease of disassembly and the tools you need to disassemble, but it gets a lower score on the documentation ( <flame> maybe documentation is not in french </flame> ) and on the price ratio for the component; probably frame.work parts are a bit more expensive in comparison with the price of the laptop.
It is not the parts that seem to be expensive, it's that they are more expensive bought separately than bought inside a new laptop.
Also the availability duration for the parts. Maybe the uncertainty stemming from that Frame.work is a recently created startup?