I don’t share the scepticism shared by other commenters. No matter how you look at this it’s a step in the right direction. We have needed this legislation for at least ten years now. Hopefully it will be iterated on and improved if manufacturers try to find ways around it. The EU has shown it’s willing to legislate in many areas for the better (and worse).
This might be a personal impression, but there seems to be a reflexive (negative) response from many posters here regarding any new regulation that the EU produces.
I've been trying to wrap my head about whether that's different than the negative response about any regulation in general (including the US one), and I feel like it is more negative; as for why, I would only be speculating.
I have noticed this as well. Hacker News generally considers itself liberal but actually holds very conservative views (see any thread on gender equality). The EU is being positioned as a liberal organisation (whether it truly is or not) so in every EU related thread the free speech / anti regulation commentators come out in force
Alas when society feels fit to label things one way or another , they overlook the actual action and detail and with that, if it is something good (like this) they are sceptical and focus upon bad aspects and ignore the whole.
But when politics drives and runs with left/right mentality, they end up disenfranchising common sense more often than not and you end up politically with a seesaw effect - you get a controlling party that is one way, then after a while you end up with a party the other way to restore balance.
This is one of those wonderful moments in which the result is common sense on so many levels that we should (sure many do) see it for what it is - something wonderful.
But everybody has a bad day, political things of any form can bring out the worst in all of us, but decorum upon this forum, does a better job than most in regulating those aspects. For that, let us be thankful as I can only imagine the Twitter flavours of this very subject being played out and shudder.
But credit when it is due - thank you EU for this.
>Hacker News generally considers itself liberal but actually holds very conservative views...
I'm not sure that's entirely true. We're(1) a bunch of programmers. We are very sensitive to unintended consequences in complex systems. I think we just tend to be a little more careful with feel-good regulations that might produce these, along with being more evidence based in judging success.
(1) With all of the usual caveats about the monolithic "us".
I don't think it is about being cautious of unintended consequences in general. It is about being cautious of some unintended consequences and not caring about other unintended consequences.
The choice of which of these matters decides the politics.
If you realize that the null policy is also a policy, then there is no reason to be a priori more critical of active policies compared to the null policy.
The null policy always has more empirical validation because society clearly hasn't collapsed under it. This fact might be the essence of conservatism.
Even if the right to repair were a bad policy, it certainly wouldn't cause society to collapse. Nor would it destroy democracy or cause any other irreparable damage.
Implementing it merely risks a minor decrease in economic efficiency for a few years. The potential reward can last for an unlimited time. And there's a guaranteed reward too: Gaining knowledge on what policies work. We should do it even if we expected it to fail (see also VCs).
I know what you're getting at, and there is something there. However this argument is unfalsifiable.
No society ever collapsed due to policy on repairing washing machines. One could survive indefinitely in a sub-optimal policy regime on a topic of limited importance without collapsing.
If Hitler had not done anything, i.e. implemented the so-called null policy, nothing bad would have happened. Feel free to substitute with any other dictator if you want to avoid Godwin's law.
True, but what about intended consequences my friend. Companies obviously have a vested interest in getting us to buy new products, rather than have us repair the older ones. So, I guess a little regulation will be ok.
Every company wants to manufacture a washing machine once and then keep selling spare parts with 100% margin. No RnD expenses, no assembly line, no demo stands - pure profit!
That's like free printers with expensive ink cartridges.
I think that's generous. Yesterday several people were fervently arguing that discriminating in job advertisements against protected classes should be fine because it may be "more efficient". Talk about unintended consequences...
But maybe that's also what it feels like to become as relevant int he tech world as the US. There is no shortage of US-bashing in international tech discussions. As long as it stays good spirited, I don't mind.
HN seems to be pretty centric to me, but yes, by IT crowd standards it's probably as right as one can get.
"Very conservative views" on gender equality would ask for a niqab, female education ban and a mandatory dowry. I doubt you'll find here a lot of people sharing these views.
HN is generally liberal, with some conservative and libertarian elements. You're confusing liberal with accepting a particular set of theories (critical theory, post-structuralist/post-modernist value structures) that primarily belong to subgroups, one I'll term as "ultra progressive".
ultra progressives tend to believe the Government is the only force who can safeguard workers. Many other forms of liberal believe that while the Government has a role to play in setting boundaries for capitalism and engaging in non-capitalist activity (welfare, public education, etc) that it does not always act in the interest of the people.
This is likely part of what you see as "HN being conservative on gender equality" (paraphrasing). Most HNers seem to hold belief in equality of opportunity (classical liberal) vs equality of outcome (ultra progressive). In other words, the debate can be seen as whether it's necessary to have 50% of a given field be women and 50% be men, or simply for there to be an absence of a gender based discrimination. (And ultra progressives would likely respond that anything can be gender based discrimination, whereas a classic liberal would be looking for intent)
(Leaving my attempts at a neutral point of view and going into my own beliefs) One of the flaws in ultra progressiveism is that it's reductionist (a person is defined as a mix of attributes such as political affiliation, gender or lack thereof, social class, etc) which encourages an "us vs them" mentality. The issue ultra progressives face is that "us" is becoming an ever shrinking circle which now excludes most of their other liberal allies.
> ultra progressives tend to believe the Government is the only force who can safeguard workers.
My impression is that workers are pretty much the only disadvantaged group that ultra progressives do not care about. Apart from that, you're on point.
I think it stems from the fear of this representing a missed opportunity for them to make it, closed by regulators.
I believed that once, but companies show over and over again that the lack of regulation comes at a greater cost than their gains, and the gains for the society - and I, as a tax payer, am not willing to see the shit I help to pay for getting abused.
For example, Peter Thiel idea for the monopoly argument makes sense, but he doesn't account for (or doesn't want to): government pressure and greed.
The idea that the monopoly is the dream for tech development keeps showing it's no dream at all in the end, it's a nightmare with massive costs: mental health, international policy, environment, cultural, etc.
>but there seems to be a reflexive (negative) response from many posters here regarding any new regulation that the EU produces.
it's the audience of the website. Even though most people here seem to fall into the American liberal camp due to the fact that it's a tech site there's a strong "regulation=bad" undercurrent in the posting that's also been prevalent in the industry, in particular in SV for the last few decades.
I think that applies to American in a more general sense too. There's a real culture that regulation is bad for business and capitalism should trump all over priorities.
The fact the US is a pretty dysfunctional state by first world standards is also a factor. But you shouldn't oppose EU regulations because you don't trust the US government, that's just silly.
That's fine but I don't think it's a trust issue though (like you originally stated). I think it's usually more a case of freedom. Americans see regulation as oppression even when those regulations are in the consumers best interest. It's not that they don't trust their government (though I'm sure many don't), it's far more symbolic than that.
Take gun control for example, fire arms wouldn't get you far if you're taking on the government (which was the original purpose of America's gun laws). However many individuals will use every excuse under the sun to argue that gun control encroaches their basic freedoms despite all the evidence suggesting gun control would benefit society greatly.
It's a bit like how the UK's referendum was decided on a matter of "sovereignty" with many UK citizens believing leaving the EU gave them their sovereignty back. It makes very little since when you actually break down what "sovereignty" actually means, the actual relationship the UK has with the EU and even the terms of which the UK prospered when it was considered a "great nation" (namely the exploitation of developing countries). Yet many "Brits" still believe independence is the way forward because they don't identify themselves as being European.
I'm a big fan of regulation to maintain good markets / good practices.
I'm very sympathetic to the spirit of a lot of EU policies, but the actual laws seem a lot like "old man who doesn't understand internet writes law" and at best whiff entirely at the point.
Example, I think it is terribly misguided to think people care / read cookie banners and they're not helping / educating anyone.
I don't doubt there are a lot of conservative POVs regarding regulation on HN, but I propose that just as often folks are running into a sort of "narcissism of small differences" where I share a lot of the values those laws have .... but man it irks me to see them swing and miss so badly.
> Example, I think it is terribly misguided to think people care / read cookie banners and they're not helping / educating anyone.
But there have also been other events and developments that did (and do) help / educate people, and now the cookie banners help those people realise how utterly widespread the problem actually is.
It's slow, but awareness is growing, and even the ridiculous cookie banners play some part in it. Also, being ridiculous on the internet is not a failure state, there's quite a tradition of it.
If it was voluntary opt in then then you'd just click away once and that would be the sign that you didn't voluntarily opt in.
Voluntary opt in can work together with targeted ads:
- the customer can opt in to receive more relevant ads (hopefully). A note on the page with an explanation and a way to actively choose targeted would probably be OK with me and I guess some people would choose it.
- or the customer ignores the notice and get general or hopefully contextual ads
The current in-your-face-and-defaults-to-track-if-you-follow -the-defaults system however is not voluntary and not opt in IMO.
My guess is: They are not happy. They accept it because a lot of effort is put in dark patterns to make it seem unavoidable.
Also a lot of effort seems to have been put into making the opt-in alternative the default - to the point where I'm not comfortable calling it opt-in any more.
Recently there has been a backlash against "regulation" and I can only assume it's because people associate it with "over-regulation" or are simply not aware what its purpose is. It seems to be the kind of hot word that triggers mostly negative feelings so people don't care to hear the rest.
But I have yet to see a person demanding less regulation for something who didn't change their mind when faced with a problem with that something which could have been solved by (some) regulation.
There is regulation and there is regulation. I am full in for consumer protection type of regulation, especially the parts that helps the consumer against huge companies that one person cannot influence, but the government can.
In the same time there are lots of weird regulations, for example in some US states you need to have a training and a professional license to be a florist. In my country I had to take a 1.5 year training for something that can be learned in 3 weeks; I also had to take 9 exams every 2 years just to extend my pilot license, something that does not happen in other EU countries. Or taking a training (classroom and flight time) to be allowed to fly with a passenger in a 2 seater plane, and only if you have at least 150 hours a Pilot In Command. There is nothing like this anywhere else, it's just typical stupid regulation.
Another weird regulation is flying in Bulgarian airspace, where the class G (free airspace below flight level 105) is anything but free.
the only real negative is that it restricts who can perform the repair, namely "professionals". Will this lead to manufacturers using a certification system to limit who is a professional and who is not? Who determines who is a professional, how is that defined? Is there a limit on how much parts can cost? Won't do much good as in some appliances single assemblies can cost nearly as much as the new appliance
Excellent points and indeed, may open up an avenue that sure - you get the right to repair but the parts cost more than buying a new with the guarantee/warranty aspect etc etc.
But let's see how it pans out. A good step in the right direction, not the goal everybody wants, but a good first step at least.
Which is pretty crazy. My experience as someone from the UK is EU regulation has consistently made my life better.
The big thing that sticks out for me is mobile phones: before EU regs, every manufacturer and phone variant had a different charging cable and roaming charges were insane.
Likewise, for all the hate it got here, GDPR has been amazing from my perspective. It was rare before to have a website that actually let you delete anything, it was just "deactivate your account" where they kept all your data. Now most sites offer true deletion.
Meanwhile, the public got sold on Brexit with a consistent diet of rubbish articles from the Mail and friends about bent bananas being banned.
EU regulations cut both ways, but so many are good:
- EU phone roaming makes travel much less stressful, independent of the cost factor, which at $0 is also great.
- EU immigration rules for 3rd country partners means it only requires about 3 or 4 hours work and 51 euros in total and only proof of 6 months co-habitation.
- EU mandated ESC and TPMS in cars means my bottom of the range Kia Rio had two really valuable features while maintaining a really low price.
On the other hand:
- I can't get a mortgage because my income is not denominated in euros because others have been burnt by cross currency loans
> - I can't get a mortgage because my income is not denominated in euros because others have been burnt by cross currency loans
this isn't the correct thread to discuss this but i'll bite - it isn't that others were burnt, it's that the banks were stupid enough to actually loan out as much money in a currency that people hadn't had income in and when the inevitable came, it was the banks that had bigger problems. i don't want the bank to lose my money if you and a few thousand others suddenly default on their mortgage at the same time.
The problem was roaming charges in Europe weren't always cheap, often required separate SIM cards and it was a pain to do. Doubly so when you consider how the different countries in mainland Europe are effectively borderless.
The EU only steps in when corporations have already failed to regulate themselves.
Corporations don't regulate themself. Why would they choose to regulate themself if that means higher cost or less margin or less business opportunities (like selling assault weapons to civilian population) ?
Market can bring prices down if competing corporations in the same sector don't agree to set prices for the same range of services of products. That's it.
Self-regulation _can_ work... if the state is standing there with a big stick willing to use it if the market doesn't regulate itself well.
As a case study, take advertising in the UK.
The Advertising Standards Authority is a Big Deal. It can ban advertising on TV, in print, on billboards and online. Its decisions regularly make the headlines.[0]
It also has no statutory basis, it's a private limited liability company, and they receive no money from government.[1]
In the general sense you're right however I think you're drifting into a philosophical point. Normally it makes more sense to let businesses have a certain amount of freedom to operate and only step in when necessary. The hard part is agreeing where "necessary" is. For example EU tends to have a different perspective to the US on when industries should be regulated.
US telecoms costs are insane though. Paying less than $50 is basically impossible for a decent amount of data (5+GB). Google Fi for example is $70 + tax
In the UK, it's hard to spend more than £20/month (for sim only at least)
Mint [1], is $20/mo for unlimited data (throttled after 8GB), using the T-Mobile network. You get a discount for committing to a time period such as 1 year.
Visible [2] is $40/mo for "unlimited everything" (data, calls, text). This is Verizon's low-cost product on their own network.
Simple [3] is $40/mo for 15 GB, also using T-Mobile. You're throttled to 2G after that, though.
These are MVNOs, which are resellers that don't own their own networks. Traffic is deprioritized compared to the parent network's "native" customers. In practice, you might not notice at all, depending on how you use it. Deprioritization really only happens during congestion. During rush hour on the NYC subway might be a time you'd be affected, for example.
I don't think lower population density explains it fully, for example Australia has extremely reasonable phone plans - you can get 15GB data/unlimited talk/unlimited text for AUD$55/month (USD$37/month) [1], and it gets even cheaper if you get 12 months up front [2].
There’s a huge, well-funded industry pushing skepticism of regulation in most of the English-speaking world. In both the US and UK, those journalists and lobbyists use EU as their default example of excess with all sorts of exaggeration and misrepresentation[1]. We like to tell ourselves that we’re not so easily influenced but, as the comments here regularly demonstrate, those companies pay for these efforts because they are influential.
It's because there is a strong tendency for EU overregulation. This one sounds good to me in principle (I don't know about the implementation).
Recent examples: it will be illegal to have voluntary firefighters. In the Netherlands, 80% of firefighers are volunteers. The current system works very well, and this is new regulation is likely to cause massive problems. It will be impossible the maintain current quality, because it is impossible to maintain a huge paid workforce just for occasional large incidents. For example, in a recent large fire there were over a hundred firefighters active, most of them volunteers. Moreover many volunteers do it for fun, or to contribute something to society, and do not want to be a paid firefighter, or would not be able to because of their main job. Thanks, EU.
Another one: EU wants to register every single chicken. Not just commercial chicken farms, every single chicken would have to be registered, even for hobbyists having a few chickens running around in their back yard.
A quick Google search tells me that the "new regulation" re firefighters you're talking about is a recent court ruling about the working time directive from 2003. Volunteer firefighters are a huge part of the firefighter workforce in many EU countries including Germany (97%) and France (78%) so I highly doubt what you're insinuating will happen.
I read about it in Dutch news, which also mentioned that other countries also have volunteer firefighting forces, but I didn't look up their numbers. Various officials here said it would have big implications and keeping the system as it is would be impossible. So some law or regulation would have to change. Incidentally this is a good example of why EU regulations can be so problematic: if this example is fixed, it will be because many countries have large volunteer forces so the problem cannot be ignored. But if the regulation happens to affect just one or a few smaller countries you might be out of luck. Not everything can be regulated centrally without unintended consequences.
Read the replies to your original post, there was no new regulation, whatever you read in the news was made up. In the british press there is a constant stream of fabricated stories about EU "regulations" that take a cursory google to disprove.
It's so bad in the UK that some years ago the EU set up a "British Euromyths" blog, to highlight all the Daily Mail type "EU about to ban breathing!" stories. The pieces are mainly from the expected suspects.
It's so bad that the majority of people from deprived areas of the UK, places neglected by their own national government but do receive millions in EU funding still believed they would be better off leaving the EU. It's total madness.
There's plenty of generalizations and simplifications of issues, and in a few newspapers the tone is generally more critical of the EU. But most mainstream newspapers are actually quite pro-EU in general.
2. I was mainly talking about about (the effect of) overregulation in general, I did not say there is a specific regulation re volunteer firefighters. But if the implied problems become reality, it would be because of interpretation of laws and regulations.
Yes, there was a lawsuit in Belgium. And no, that's not the main issue that was reported here. Lawyers conducted a study of the practice of Dutch firefighting on behalve of the Ministry of Justice and Security, and concluded that the way our system is set up contradicts EU law. The main issue is that volunteer firefighters do almost exactly the same work as paid firefighers.
3. That's point 1.
4. This is exactly my more general concern about the EU: unintended consequences are inevitable when you are centralizing laws and regulations to the most detailed levels for over two dozen countries with very different contexts. There are plenty of EU laws and regulations for which I think the intent is very sensible, but where implementation can be problematic, or problematic for specific subsets of the regulation, or specific countries/regions.
5. I never said they happened, I said "will". Perhaps I should have said "may" since the problem might still be addressed somehow. But even if it is adressed, in the case of the Netherlands a massive change would be necessary. According to lawyers and law professors who have studied the problem in the Dutch context.
So no, not misinformation. I just worded it somewhat imprecise.
But there is no issue really, just a case where the states didn't respect EU laws that they themselves wanted.
The EU law states no worker can work more than X hours a week, for the health benefit of the citizens. A court ruled that the volunteer firefighters time counts as working time. So now we need to include that in how we make them work when we need.
Knowing my country (France), I'm sure it will be some sort of "the hours worked as voluntary firefighter are not due to their other employer, but will still be paid probably by the state or by the employer but with according tax deduction", something like this.
So now comes a choice; either we think it's unhealthy for people to work more than 42 hours a week (and we did since we voted this in), and then it makes sense. Or we don't, and then we're free to change the regulation. Or we think some form or work shouldn't count against that limit (such as public work for emergency services) and we can update the regulation.
Saying we shouldn't make regulation because sometime we may have to redefine more precisely some of its details when the situation arise makes very little sense to me.
But that's not quite the problem we appear to have here in NL. There's a law whose basic intent is that you cannot use volunteer workers for what should actually be paid work. Here volunteers do almost exactly the same work as professional firefighters and therefore they should be paid employees under this law. Applying this to volunteer firefighters is an unintended consequence, but it's obligatory.
> Saying we shouldn't make regulation because sometime we may have to redefine more precisely some of its details when the situation arise makes very little sense to me.
My concern is both practical and philosophical: our firefighting system will very likely be reorganized; this is going to cost a lot of money and time, volunteers are likely to quit if things are no longer easily combined with their job, quality would almost certainly drop (since it's already high), and then, hopefully, in the end we still have a functioning firefighting service. But all that work will not actually solve any problem, it's just for complying with regulations.
On the philosphical end: the complexity and the number of laws and regulations keeps growing, and so does the scale at which they're applied. I think such unintended consequences will keep coming up at the local level, far from where they originated centrally, and in the long run it will be increasingly difficult to solve these problems.
But the political/legal situation is still the same really.
We have this law to avoid abusing "free" people as volunteer, which eg in France is important against lots of things like illegal immigrant ("I don't pay you but you can sleep there !"), and to ensure egality (in France we have an even stricter law which is basically "for the same work, same salary", to avoid discrimination against various ethnics, gender, age ... difference).
If you / the NL people are saying this cause an issue, and the law should be changed to, for exemple, not include free work done for emergency public services, then it simply means we need to add a precision to the law to cover that specific case.
And if it isn't done, then it means "all those affected countries" either didn't push for it or failed to convince the whole of the EU to change the regulation.
EU regulation are done by EU MPs all coming from their respective EU countries to improve the situation there, they don't implement things randomly in a vacuum. If the regulation needs to be adapted, it's easy, given those who want it can make a case for it.
My fundamental concern is the scale mismatch. If you notice the problem locally, it can be very hard and potentially impossible to address it locally, because EU-wide regulations increasingly take precedence.
That is one of the reasons for the EU being so complicated. To counter the effect there is not only the Parliament which has to approve a new rule, but also the EU Council, the later in some areas even unanimously.
There are different blockers in the system so that a (slim) majority can't simply overrule a minority.
According to [1], what happened was that volunteers were recognised as workers by ECJ and as such their time on call at home can count towards their weekly worked time. An older directive (2003) sets out a maximum working time which I am sure nobody is complaining about, and if anything in many member states people claim to be working to many hours. Individuals can and could previously opt-out of these limits. Nothing new under the sun here.
It is also clear that no "regultation" is being planned.
> it will be illegal to have voluntary firefighters
Nope. Not even close. A firefighter in Belgium sued because he said that on-call time is work, and the court decided in his favour. This caused concern that generalising this could cause problems. However, the EU was aware of these concerns and apparently this case cannot be generalised in this way:
I don't know how it works in Belgium, but in Germany, the voluntary firefighters (which is almost all of them), simply continue to be paid by their main employers when active. The employer can then recover this from the responsible government organisation.
For this, the application of the working time directive changes...nothing. Also for standby times during working hours, for which the employee is working for his main employer, so again no change. I am guessing (but not sure) that the issue is on-call time when the employee is not working for his main employer.
People have raised concerns that this might have the potential to negatively affect volunteer firefighting. But as far as I know, nothing has actually happened, and apparently nothing will.
So as so often, almost complete misinformation:
1. The EU will not make it "illegal" to have volunteer firefighters.
2. It was actually a lawsuit, not a regulation.
3. It was about working time, not about making volunteer firefighters illegal.
4. So at most it would have been an unintended consequence of a good and necessary regulation.
5. However, these unintended consequences were only imaginary, they never happened.
6. The EU bodies were fully aware of the importance of volunteer firefighters.
7. Had there been unintended consequences, they would have mostly been of the formal variety that affect local authorities.
> every single chicken [..] registered, even for hobbyists having a few chickens
There is a statement that there should be exceptions for pet animals, but these exceptions did not make it into the regulation for chickens. The Netherlands argued for this but did not find support, and is currently trying to arrange for exceptions. It is not fake news.
There's nothing in this that requires pet keepers to register their animals. There's no specific mention of chickens (a few mention of "chicks or hatchlings of other species")
If for some reason you believe "obligation of operators to register establishments" would apply to individual pet owners (I don't believe it does, as earlier in the document "pet keepers" are separate from "operators") - there's a clause to allow exceptions: "Member States may exempt from the registration requirement certain categories of establishments posing an insignificant risk"
The only thing in the entire document that applies to "pet keepers" is ... [to] be responsible for:
(i) the health of kept animals;
(ii) prudent and responsible use of veterinary medicines, without prejudice to the role and responsibility of veterinarians,
(iii) minimising the risk of the spread of diseases;
(iv) good animal husbandry;
There are some further restrictions to do with moving pet animals between member states
"For example, holders who only have a few pieces of poultry must also comply with requirements for I&R and there will also be obligations for holders of animal species for which no requirements currently exist, such as bees, bumble bees and camel-like animals. The Netherlands has argued against these requirements when drafting these new regulations, but received little support from other member states and the EC. The EC indicated that it can allow Member States to grant exceptions to these obligations."
So it's up to member states if they want to require owners of pet chickens to register them
That's exactly what I was saying with "and is currently trying to arrange for exceptions." The EC could allow exceptions, but they haven't yet actually allowed for them.
OK, so what's the problem? After all, this won't come into effect until about a year and a half from now and it seems that there is agreement that there should be exceptions.
Given that, what makes you certain that there won't be exceptions?
> is currently trying to arrange for exceptions
You seem to be certain that this will not succeed. Why?
> It is not fake news.
Hmm...it's not in effect, there seems to be some agreement that there should be exceptions and exceptions are being worked on. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
The problem is that this exception is not currently in place, and that it is still uncertain if it will be possible to implement. The fact that the European Commission has previously disregarded this specific concern despite attempts to have it addressed does not inspire confidence.
I don't know what will happen, but this situation is concerning to many people. Also consider that the news plays a role in policy making (for better or worse), i.e. some added pressure from advocates may help to get the needed exceptions in place.
2. I was mainly talking about about (the effect of) overregulation in general, I did not say there is a specific regulation re volunteer firefighters. But if the implied problems become reality, it would be because of interpretation of laws and regulations.
Yes, there was a lawsuit in Belgium. And no, that's not the main issue that was reported here. Lawyers conducted a study of the practice of Dutch firefighting on behalve of the Ministry of Justice and Security, and concluded that the way our system is set up contradicts EU law. The main issue is that volunteer firefighters do almost exactly the same work as paid firefighers.
3. That's point 1.
4. This is exactly my more general concern about the EU: unintended consequences are inevitable when you are centralizing laws and regulations to the most detailed levels for over two dozen countries with very different contexts. There are plenty of EU laws and regulations for which I think the intent is very sensible, but where implementation can be problematic, or problematic for specific subsets of the regulation, or specific countries/regions.
5. I never said they happened, I said "will". Perhaps I should have said "may" since the problem might still be addressed somehow. But even if it is adressed, in the case of the Netherlands a massive change would be necessary. According to lawyers and law professors who have studied the problem in the Dutch context.
So no, not misinformation. I just worded it somewhat imprecise.
> I should have said "impossible" rather than illegal
And that would have been still wrong, though with less hyperbole.
> So no, not misinformation. I just worded it somewhat imprecise.
From: there was an isolated case that, had it been generalisable, had the potential for making some aspects of voluntary fire brigades trickier if not addressed, but that actually wasn't generalisable and there was actually no problem at all to "it will be illegal to have voluntary firefighters" is not "somewhat imprecise", it is complete misinformation.
Pretty much the definition of misinformation, in fact.
Because this is exactly how a lot of the misinformation regarding the EU works: you take something highly technical, localised and actually benign, then take 2nd hand reports of people who misunderstood the implications/consequences, take those misunderstandings as fact, extrapolate from them and then ratchet up the hyperbole to 11.
And no, the fact that lawyers did a study doesn't really change any of this. The EU is a political body, and the largest member states have large or almost exclusively voluntary fire-departments. So even if the interpretation were correct, which from all I have seen it is absolutely not, it would simply (a) not be applied and/or (b) changed.
In particular: the working time directive is, as the name says, a directive. This means it just specifies some goal(s) to accomplish, and it is up to the member states to implement national legislation to accomplish those goals. So if they need to carve out exceptions for volunteer fire departments, they can do that.
So yes: "it will be illegal to have voluntary firefighters" is just wrong and not just a slight imprecision, but pure misinformation.
> From: there was an isolated case that, had it been generalisable [...]
I reiterate that the isolated case you're referring to was not the motivation of experts saying the Dutch system will have to be reorganized. Why don't you acknowledge that maybe there is an actual problem here, which perhaps doesn't apply in other contexts? I.e. maybe the German and French volunteer firefighters are organized in such a way that there is no problem?
The original claim was "it will be illegal to have voluntary firefighters."
> maybe the German and French volunteer firefighters are organized in such a way that there is no problem?
I sincerely doubt it. Particularly because those concerns apparently were raised in both France and Germany. Anyway, if you can find some evidence that this is the case, please feel free to share.
The chicken thing sounds like over-regulation, but it's already reality for ungulates, and I suspect it's tied into disease control. We really don't want a situation where the national chicken industry is wrecked by an outbreak of bird flu that can't be controlled because we don't know where the chickens are.
On the other hand, one thing the EU is genuinely bad at is the "small operator" exemptions which UK law is generally good at. They very rarely exist in EU law.
The chicken thing can be a large human health issue. It might not seem like they are a heath hazard, but many extremely deadly flu viruses make the chicken human jump.
Those criticisms are really only informative if you'd also give the purported reasons for implementing those regulations, otherwise we can't weigh them.
The shortcoming is that governments are not nimble enough to revise regulations as often as needed. Laws may need years to formulate, but regulations/quantified guidelines should be updated more regularly.
>Current regulations are seen to be outdated, with more than 55% of washing machines sold in the EU ranked A+++ on the label.
The regulations are stupid in the first place. Instead of energy rating why not just have energy use directly?! Similar to how refrigerators have noise levels directly in dB, not in some imaginary regulatory unit.
In addition, many people hate highly-energy-efficient washing machines, as the washing cycles takes hours... efficient in energy, but inefficient in human life.
> In addition, many people hate highly-energy-efficient washing machines, as the washing cycles takes hours... efficient in energy, but inefficient in human life.
That's literally the reason for governments to regulate this kind of thing, though. When everyone looks at things through the lens of their own personal life... what's the big deal? Just one person using more energy. But when every person does it, it is a big deal. So government acts to force a level playing field for all. Everyone ignores the cumulative good and instead focuses on the inconvenience to their personal life.
That's obviously the wrong solution. The correct solution is to price things correctly. If energy is precious, increase energy prices. Some people will choose to fly, others will choose to have faster washing cycles...
> Some people will choose to fly, others will choose to have faster washing cycles...
And all will damage the climate? "Increase energy prices" just means that rich people will be able to continue to engage in undesirable behaviour while the poor will not. Why is that a desirable income? Why should a poor person have to pay more to heat their home in winter so that a rich person can wash their clothes more quickly? Not all energy use is equal.
Sure, there are solutions for this. Luxury taxes, tiered use (first 4L of water per day free!), properly priced externalities (e.g. a Corvette is taxed more than a Peugeot because there's more CO2 exhaust, cow meat is taxed more than chicken because of CH4... companies will adjust, new tech will be developed), ... but yeah, unless you straight hate the rich, then the rich will be able to do more things than the poor - that's kind of the point of being rich (and unless you ban all "undesirable" behaviour, that also means the rich will be able to do more of that than the poor).
I'm mainly just against the idea that shorter wash cycles are less desirable than airplane rides.
But it doesn't solve the pollution problem. Why should a person be allowed to pollute more just because they have more money? Why is their convenience more important than everyone else's well being?
Why should a person be allowed to pollute more just because they have more money?
As long as we make them pay a significantly large enough multiple of the externality costs they're inflicting I'm OK with that, especially if that money then gets reinvested into further solving the problem.
And some people value healthcare better than others...
So let's price healthcare the right price for those who value good healthcare, like in the US, where the average Joe avoid going to the doctor, even when he is insured, or go bankrupt when he have to go to ER for a simple broken leg or die from diabetes because he can't pay the monthly 1300$ for medication and save on insuline shots.
I never said "price regulation". The government should take steps to ensure things are priced fairly and (even more important) transparently. That will look different for different markets, products, market structures (sometimes the government needs to break up the monopoly), ... The situation in healthcare is very complicated and has a lot of moving parts, but the situation in energy less so (AFAIK), it's just that some externalities are not accounted for at all. Opposing that you have lobbyists (e.g. oil) and ideologically-driven players (e.g. some people want to ban meat).
> In addition, many people hate highly-energy-efficient washing machines, as the washing cycles takes hours... efficient in energy, but inefficient in human life.
Actually this can be a feature. Often enough I fill the machine in the morning, set it up to start in 3 or 4 or even 6 hours, go to work and when I come home the machine has just finished and I'm ready to put the clothes up for drying.
It's more a question of planning than anything else.
Ah, interesting idea, saves you the calculations in the morning. ;-)
My baking oven has something like this, too. I still wonder how that is supposed to work, though: I have to dial in temperature etc. before, then set it to finish at a specific time. Seems impractical for rolls oder pizza, but maybe I'm missing something on that feature.
I don't know where you live, but beware: if the washing machine broke in this situation and flooded the apartment, you may be found negligent and denied insurance coverage.
I don't know how common this is, but I've been taught to use dishwasher and washing machine only when I'm home myself.
> Instead of energy rating why not just have energy use directly?!
My guess is they probably ran a study and found that the majority of people were better steered towards energy efficient appliances by a big A or A+ rating than they would have been by comparing kWh.
The other shortcoming is that the way that washing machine manufacturers have achieved those energy ratings is by making their wash cycles longer and slower, effectively making them less useful to consumers.
Long cycles are great for getting stuff out. It's the lukewarm "hot" water that people take issue with.
Energy ratings for washing machines are kind of stupid in the first place since they depend so strongly on how you use the machine and the efficiency of your hot water supply. The electricity used on the motor is fairly negligible.
That's one of the other side effects of the energy ratings - pretty much no washing machine in Europe these days has a hot fill inlet anymore, so any hot water used by the machine is produced internally using the electric heating element.
The energy rating problem could have been easily avoided by giving out labels according to consumption percentiles. The top 10% of the models on the market get an A, etc. But I assume that manufacturers wouldn't be happy about that.
These ratings would change over time, so an A+ rating in 2017 would not be the same as an A+ rating in 2019. I think that is very confusing. Is a second hand A rated model better than a new D rated one? Who knows.
I find that perfectly fine. Why should an old model retain its A rating when in fact it consumes a lot of energy compared to a newer model? Just print the actual consumption on the sticker to make comparisons between older stickers and newer stickers possible.
That means energy efficiency rating will change by date, A rated product of last year could be different (could be better or worse) by this year's A rated product. Can't we just use "numbers" instead?
That would encourage manufacturers to lower the efficiency of non flagship models. How about just regrading every few years? Potentially add a number to the start.
That's a good point. You could avoid that problem by giving grades relative to the best product on the market, e.g. anything that doesn't use more than 10% more than the most efficient model on the market gets an A.
Regrading every year seems to be about the same as what I propose. I guess the actual numbers used for the current rating are based on actual efficiencies of the models on the market when the regulation was introduced.
Only if consumers pay any attention to energy efficiency labels. I strongly suspect that with washing machines and dryers, they simply ignore them and look instead at the other features (particularly load size and cycle timing) and the price.
I have said that at every step in these regulations: even a law that can't easily be applied and that has loopholes is a progress as it gives judges, engineers, decisions makers and users a notion of what is wrong and what is right.
Want to make a startup whose business model relies on the impossibility to repair? Have found a loophole that makes it possible? Well investors may evaluate the risk this loophole gets fixed and will not see the plan as particularly safe.
It is not just about changing the rules, it is about changing the ethics around them.
IANAL as always, but in my understanding loopholes are less effective in civil law systems (that is, all continental Europe) as the intent of the law is what matters, not the exact wording that created a loophole.
Agreed, whatever your political posture, it's nowt to do with this.
This is a good thing, and however you wish to view things - this is what is right, fair and it's core is to bring fairness to consumers - even if they don't want to liveridge this avenue now open too them. At least they have the choice and it is their choice.
So Bravo for this, it is something that needs to be done globally. The whole artificially obsoleting consumer products has and will be a serious concern as it drives waste, and waste is and never has been, good for the environment upon any level, whatever your perspective is upon that matter.
Let us not forget, many initiatives get driven by standards from one area and they can and do transpose upon other area in the end for the better of everybody. Let's see this for what it is - something wonderful and long overdue.
I will also add, a few decades back, self repair was far more accessible and less needed as appliances lasted, you could get spares, get them fixed. Yet the market and drive towards mass consumerism and product churn has created a monster, one in which we are going to be paying for as all that environmental credit debt we have built up, well, nature's debt collectors are a calling.
Consumers don't want to spend more for appliances. They want cheap. That's why manufacturers build the way they do (if you want quality over 20 years you're already free to buy a Miele)
It is rare for an appliance to break down when just out of warranty, and in any case it is not possible to completely avoid.
I am glad that the new rules do not go farther then they do because I don't think there is an issue that warrant drastic action and widespread price increases.
There are plenty of ways to source spare parts and individuals are simply not able to repair themselves in most cases (and let's not forget health & Safety regulations).
Edit: Thank you guys for killing off any discussion...
The environmental aspect plays a big part in these things. These days it's popular to point out that the major polluters are not the individual consumers but the factories owned by the industrialists however these factories are not busy producing jewellery for the rich but stuff for the millions of consumers.
Europe is very densely populated and well developed with much less developed neighbours which makes Europe very suspectable to environmental issues. If something bad happens in or nearby the continent, people in Paris or Rome can feel it through rent increase, a saturation of health services, an influx of people who somehow should be dealt with. If bombs go off in Syria things happen in Hungary. The place is very interconnected.
EU has to deal with the protection of the environment just like any other issue that can cause large migrant movemenets. Throwing away things when you don't have to, inefficient appliances etc. are all stuff that must be addressed to preserve the peace in the continent. Europe's contemporary way of life is quite fragile.
There's not just "building cheap", there is "building specifically to make things expensive to repair".
Three years ago the main bearing in my washing machine broke down. Found a detailed video on Youtube for repairing the exact same machine, started disassembly. 45 minutes in, I discovered that in my machine that was a couple years newer than the tutorial, Bosch had plastic welded shut the drum, so you had to replace the entire thing. Replacement part cost went from $20 to $180 IIRC.
Adding insult to injury, the flange in question had the bolt holes and locating features for the gasket still present.
> the flange in question had the bolt holes and locating features for the gasket still present.
That sounds like classic cost-savings methodology. They found a cheaper way to attach two parts while keeping the same tooling and reducing parts-count.
What would have been suspicious is if they had kept the expensive features and welded it shut.
Cheap is often not maintainable as a side-effect. That doesn't mean it was the primary goal.
Some of those changes are note very expensive. often times reliability is compromised for minor savings.
The question is that of marketing.
Can we make a marketing page that shows an easy to repair washing machine - and shows us that over 10 years, if we do the repairs ourselves - we'll save some money ? And the hassle of replacing to a new machine often ?
At least some segment of the population, the DIY'ers may buy such machines.
I've repaired my then seven year old LG washing machine as well two years ago. The rear drum support had apparently developed a fault, and was nearly torn in two by the time the funny noises came and hinted at the need for repairs.
The Youtube videos were a great help, but even though the part I needed was available, all the steps along the way to getting the part and fixing the machine made it clear that this was not a process aimed at consumers with the ability to repair such a machine. The manufacturer chose representatives in each country it sold machines in were you had to buy the part (at €100 with shipping not cheap, but acceptable), but the serial numbers never really matched exactly, and the model I had always had one extra letter left unexplained, making buying the part a gamble.
The part fitted and the repair did work perfectly, even though I had to order the stainless bolts I needed to replace the worn originals from somewhere else (a web shop with a sensible interface).
This device was seemingly designed to be repaired (or at least not prevent it), but documentation and lack of sensible part numbers made it harder then it needed to be. Interesting experience though, it feels good to extend the life of the machine by a few years this way.
Sometimes it's more like $300 (dies after 10) and $400 (dies after 4). Why? The marketing trick to price a product higher to look like a premium compared to competition.
It's hard to disprove that it is sometimes like that, but I would be extremely sceptical towards any claim that it is generally like that. I think it is safe to assume that price and quality are correlated in most cases.
Apparently not, at least in the world of dishwashers and washing machines. The expensive model is often exactly the same as the cheaper one, but with extra buttons, cycles and so on. Prices for white goods seem to be based on what the market will bear, not on the cost of production.
When I was born, my parents had a hoover twin-tub. It was still working 20 years later when I left home.
The first washing machine I bought lasted twelve years (the control panel had to be replaced once). I think I eventually replaced it because I had moved house, and it didn't fir in the new kitchen. Nowadays it doesn't seem to be possible to buy dishwashers and washing machines that last longer than 4 years. I threw out my "old" dishwasher after just one year; it had broken down 5 times since I bought it brand-new, each time for the same reason: failed heater. Each time I had to wait several weeks for the mechanic to show (manufacturer's warranty, contracted out to a service company). Each time, I asked the mechanic if he could recommend a make/model that would be more reliable. And each time I was told that I might as well buy a cheap one, they all break down as quickly as one another.
These mechanics are seeing what I am seeing: machines that break down much sooner than they used to 15 years ago. Well, that's a market failure; it's what government regulation was invented for.
Expensive models are made on the same production line, usually owned by the same group multinational that makes the cheap and mid-range brands. The factory, knowledge and workers who made the premium one when it was independent are now gone. It's exactly as you say. Even the vanishingly few properly independent premium brands have come markedly downmarket quality wise, by using the same techniques.
In the 80s and 90s the distinction and spread across the market was real. The buyouts and takeovers hadn't consolidated into just a few mega groups. The expensive fridge or washing machine was built, and lasted very differently.
Now we have Samsung et al building £1,500 premium fridge freezers and £800 washing machines that are just as unrepairable as the cheap crap.
Between anecdotal evidence from your mechanic(s) as recounted by you and this article[1] which contains actual hard numbers, I find the latter to be the most convincing. Which is not to say I doubt that what you recount has been yours or your mechanics' experience, but simply to say that there are all kinds of reasons why those experiences might not signify the true state of affairs.
If I were you, I would rely less on my mechanic to recommend me a product, and more on something like Consumer Report, which has a much more methodical and rigorous approach to assessing and comparing the quality of the products they test.
Washing machines have an extra cheap line too (the bottom model of a make), which is tooled even cheaper than standard line (whereas regular stock uses 10k RPM four-pole induction or 1500 RPM four-pole synchronous motors, 600 RPM spin model of the same brand uses 3600 RPM six-pole asynchronous motors). Dishwashers have no such extra-cheap lines.
Only anecdotal evidence but in my experience price and quality (as in lasting) are only very weakly correlated. In the past I tended to buy expensive (in expectation of lasting). The older I get the less I tend to do so even though I have now more money at my disposal. You're getting crap all the time independent of the brand.
Try flipping it around. If I presented an product to you and were able to convince you that it was of significantly better quality (more durable, fewer bad surprises etc) than other products in the same category, would you be most surprised to learn that it was also more expensive or that it was less expensive than these other products?
While it might be true that a higher price doesn't necessarily entail higher quality, it seems to me that higher quality almost always entails a higher price.
There are certainly a lot of cheaply/poorly build appliances covered in some shiny stainless or whatever the fashionable appliance sheathing of the moment is. New luxury developments have been pretty notorious for doing that sort of thing with the household appliances.
I've noticed quality of ordinary things has been declining for a long time now. Some things are better due to new technologies. Lot of stuff has just regressed.
Don't know why you were downvoted; new technologies should make things both cheaper and more reliable, but it doesn't seem to be working, at least not for white goods.
It's probably the opposite in many cases - new technologies allow to build things that are significantly cheaper, but also less durable. For example, thanks to precise numerical simulations, you can be much more precise in designing the elements so that they are as thin/light and use as little materials as possible. Before the CAD era, you just did it "by feel" and, to be safe, made things much more sturdier (and more expensive).
I have an example of that. In the late 1980's early 90's read an fluff piece in Product Design News or some such about a team of engineers at GE that got an award for designing a washing machine tilt sensor. The article then gushed that the reason this was wonderful was the tilt sensor would allow GE to replace expensive metal washing machine drum bearings with inexpensive plastic ones.
Without a tilt sensor they needed to use metal bearing because an out of balance load would break plastic bearings. But now with the tilt sensor plastic ones could be used.
New technologies add complexity. That always decreases reliability. Replace a robust button or mechanical timer mechanism with a touchscreen and now you have dozens of new components that can cause a failure.
Yep. I'm fairly certain that companies change their SKUs all the time because they know that whatever they make will get a bad reputation (or neutral at best).
Arguable. Nothing prevents manufacturers from offering 10 or even 20 years of warranty, except of course the market reality that few people would buy it when such a wareanty's costs are priced in.
And then that manufacturer declares bankruptcy after 3. Limited liability makes it impossible for corporations to offer a credible 10 or 20 year warranty.
When was the last time an appliance manufacturer went bankrupt? I can't think of any. There are some that aren't around any more, but it's because they were purchased by or merged with competitors (hence, in America, Whirlpool, Roper, Maytag, Frigidaire, etc., are all the same company now).
MFI's bankruptcy was just over 10 years ago. Hotpoint are now owned by Indesit who won't honour a warranty from ~8 years ago. And those are just the ones I've experienced myself.
An insurance company could offer it, however. They'd want to make sure the produce is of sufficient quality, and if it breaks, they'll provide replacements/repairs until the end of the warranty period.
They could contractually state a non-monetary compensation, i.e. fixing/replacing the broken appliance. Similar to a B2B service contract, where you pay a monthly rate in exchange for updates or even hardware fixes.
Insurance company would not have sufficient means to provide repair if no one is willing. Replacement might be possible, but is always costlier than repayment as you have to test the replacement product, too.
That's kind of the point. The consumer doesn't just get his money back, he gets what he ordered. Maybe allow a lump sum payout that's like 5x what they consumer payed just to cap the losses the insurer could incur, while keeping a strong incentive to repair/replace as that's less hassle for the consumer and thus his preferred option. It saves time otherwise spend on shopping for a replacement as well as getting accustomed to said replacement.
Further complicated because whilst there are companies that build reputations on quality, that reputation can stick around long after the quality has gone down, so there's a constant temptation to cheap out for short term profits.
I suppose the classic example of this is Mercedes Benz in the 90s.
Also, the consumer usually thinks that $399 is closer to $300 than to $400, which is the exact reason why prices ending by 9 are used. The first step toward consumer friendly marketing should be abandoning such ignoble psychological tricks.
If someone can't do simple subtraction, especially with computers in their pockets, then either they need a 1st grade education, or they don't care about that amount of money. Either way, there is no need to put any restrictions on a clearly transparent price.
I can't classify pricing with 9s to be a "trick". No one is being tricked, the price is right there.
I have a 3 year old Miele oven which needed one repair within the warranty period and another one just outside it. I am afraid Miele goes down the way of all the other manufacturers as the reason where parts which where shielded insufficiently from heat and moisture.
In Germany, legislation has been proposed that manufacturers must label the expected lifetime. I am opposed to this as it may lead to stuff breaking down shortly thereafter. On the other side I would be fond of two things: All parts must be serviceable and a minimum period of spare part availability.
>manufacturers must label expected lifetime ... I am opposed
Everything is already value engineered, designed for a specified lifetime, that's how we get those low prices and low material use. Labeling would just make it explicit. I work in an oil pipeline design group and even these things have expected lifetimes (30 years). So even megaprojects like bridges, skyscrappers, aircraft carriers, everything designed has an expected lifetime.
ooh yeah. so the expected lifetime of my computer is ... 1 year. sorry that's ridicolous as assuming that a household appliance should live only 3 years? (I'm quite sure a lot of consumers are not prepared to buy everything anew every 3years, because it's so cheap)
I always assume that such a short warranty period is for catching manufacturing defects and shipping damage and not amortization from normal use. Essentially a 1 year warranty is not much better than a 1 month or a 1 week warranty for a laptop.
A warranty isn't the same as a life expectancy, but it is a signal to consumers about life expectancy. As a general rule, a product with a longer warranty will have a longer life expectancy.
Warranty and expected lifetime are different concepts. The first is just a service that offers free repair/replace within a period of time. The second is how long you can expect the product to be in use, with or without repairs, until it reaches the end of its life. This can be either due to catastrophic malfunction, no available servicing parts or skills, or obsolescence.
Think of a car that may have 3 years warranty but a service life of maybe 10 or more years.
A warranty is a signal to the consumer about expected lifetime. And different manufacturers offer different warranties. For example, Kia/Hyundai offer 10 year, 100k mile warranties.
Correct. So in some cases the warranty can be the same as the expected service life but that is a choice the manufacturer makes to send a message to potential buyers. The legal warranty is just a minimum duration imposed by law, while the service life changes from product to product.
In some EU countries the law mandates that manufacturers clearly state the warranty period and the average service life (where you can use the product reasonably within the original parameters). So the manufacturer must be able to fix/replace (not necessarily for free) the product if hidden flaws caused it to fail within the average lifetime period. This means only manufacturers who are certain their product is up to the task will declare a longer life and charge a premium but also guarantee that period of support.
Most products have warranties that are far shorter than their expected service life. Clothes may have as little as 30 days warranty but the reasonable expectation is for a far longer expected lifetime.
What should we as consumers expect the practical difference to be?
If my kettle has a warranty and breaks down, it's on the manufacturer. If it's only within the design lifetime? What if 10% don't last the design lifetime, wheres the cut off if relevant? If I buy a kettle that lasts the design lifetime, but is deemed not to for the purposes of the law, do I get compensated?
These are genuine questions, I am in favour of publishing this kind of information, it occurs to me that poorly thought out rules would be useless though.
Depending on the law some EU countries already expect the manufacturer to be able to fix or replace products that failed due to hidden defects within the average service life. So a manufacturer has a vested interest in declaring realistic figures because they are expected to support them. The "1000 year kettle" would have to have spare parts available for the period.
But my point is, what is lying? If a kettle is designed to last 10 years, it's reasonable to expect that 100% won't last that long, so what percentage should we reasonably allow to break in that time, 10%? 20%? 50%?. If the manufacturer was found to be lying, do I with my still working kettle get compensated?
And your answer raises other concerns, who is this consumer advocacy group that's going to lead this? Is it reasonable to assume some proportion of people are going to direct their complaints there? This to me doesn't seem like an easy thing to police at all.
the company is dissolved, when it lies. bad for shareholder value, and a very good incentive to be honest, but this doesn't seem to fit too well into todays corporate scheme.
If there's reasonable doubt (ie a large number of complaints about the kettle failing), the manufacturer has to provide sales statistics and test results and will be judged accordingly. As for the consumer advocacy groups: it's pretty standard in Europe to have these (and they are the only ones to initiate something like class-action). As for the metrics: everything is measured, I'm sure, we can come up with a sensible metric?!
That doesn't hold up, when you think about it. Most companies don't offer any warranty outside of what is required by the law, which is usually between 0 and 2 years for consumer products, depending on where you live. By your argument that is how long we should expect most products to live.
Most companies don't offer any warranty outside of what is required by the law
And parallel to that there are also companies adverting their 10,15 or 25 year warranty[1]. Now you can choose who you want to give your money to.
That being said I have no problem per se with forcing companies to offer long warranties.
[1] a further thing to look at is of course what these warranties actually cover and how likely you are to actually get help when your appliance breaks 17 years after you buy it. A 25 year warranty is useless (and should probably be illegal to advertise) if it's so full of loopholes and caveats that no one can practically make any claims against it.
That's a different point than the one I was addressing, which was that warranties can be taken as indicators of how long products can be expected to last.
What products that have extended warranties usually have in common is that they are expensive and represent significant investments for the average buyer. If you buy a car, a fridge, a washing machines, etc, you want a guarantee that you will be able to amortise that investment over as long a time as possible.
It absolutely holds up, I'm not sure why Consultant32452 is being downvoted.
No one stops a manufacturer from offering a product with a 5 year warranty, and in fact they do. Shop for products made for businesses and you will find 5 year warranties. However, they cost much more, and consumers are choosing not to pay more for the products with 5 year warranties, and instead choosing to go with the 1 year warranty.
Miele was known for making very durable products, however, even they over the years had to acknowledge that consumers were opting to purchase cheaper products from competitors, so they had to do the same to stay in business.
I think you have cause and effect reversed. Extended warranties are offered, when the product is expensive, not the other way around. Extending warranties can be thought of as a kind of insurance. If a product is inexpensive to replace, it does not make economic sense to insure it.[1]
[1] Unless you have some reason to believe the insurance is priced too low.
Warranty is another word for insurance. I'm not sure what you mean by cause and effect. If you are claiming that a product being expensive is what causes a manufacturer to offer longer warranties, I guess that's true, but I would say it is because the product is of higher quality.
Insurance is usually provided by a regulated entity and implicitly backed by the government in the even that the insurer fails. Their regulators also provide redress for consumers against unfair treatment without the need to resort to the courts and the terms usually have to be fair too.
Warranties are typically provided by the vendor who may well be financially unsound and willing to treat a customer less fairly, contain significant legal loopholes and require redress through the courts or perhaps a binding arbitration tribunal.
Is this a very recent U-turn from miele? I'm sure I saw something only in the last couple of years that top tier quality was still their primary business model. As an aside with a point of anecdata, our bosch washing machine which was sold with a 2-year warranty (thoguh actually upgraded to 4 by a special anniversary offer) and bought having just discovered that the entire washing machine industry was turning out minimum warranty-able products including formerly ultra reliable (or at least percieved to be...) Bosch, and it's just about 8 years old, with heavy use and the only maintenance it's needed has been to remove a fiver stuck in its drainage sump... but i guess we've just been lucky and should be preparing for the worst.
They might still be good quality, but from anecdotal evidence, not as good as before.
And most machines probably do work for many years, just not sufficiently enough to offer a longer warranty. Which is fine for most homes, since you're not running a mission critical operation and a few days to pick out a new washer isn't going to kill you. A business that needs machines to work might find it worth shelling out more for a quality product that rarely quits or can be fixed on site.
To be fair the Miele the warranty repair is them standing by their product, which should be applauded, ideally we'd have 10+ year warranties to encourage good design. Faults do tend to have a bathtub curve to them, so I'm not sure its reasonable to expect 100% reliability.
Did you contact Miele about your just out of warranty breakage? Their reaction to that would be interesting.
Yes I did. I got a reduction on the repair costs (which where initially at a point warranting buying a new appliance instead of a repair; spare parts alone where several hundred Euros).
But for Miele prices I don't want to be at their mercy. I want a lasting product. When waiting for the repair I looked around. Many competitors have similar offerings (functionality) with a 5 year warranty at 2/3 of the price point (or even less).
That's good? As far as it goes, it's a good smell at least.
I'm not of a view that a warranty guarantees no faults. To my mind it is the manufacturer saying they will stand by their product for the warranty period, that they expect no faults, and putting their money on the line to prove it. So I'm not particularly in favour of castigating companies for any unreliability, if they handle it correctly.
Having said all this, I did just check what Miele's warranty is, I was expecting 5+ years, but it's only 2 years, so your point about competitors is a good one.
I suppose it highlights a good point about what we as consumers should do. Should we go with Miele that everyone knows is good quality, but only offers a 2 year warranty. Or should we go with the competitor with the 5 year warranty? I suspect most of us would take the first option, when we should really be taking the 2nd.
As I said: I don't want to be at their mercy even if they handled my case well. What especially bothered me is the fact that among the parts changed was an item (the controller) which had 250€ on the price list. It apparently had not been sealed water tight although construction wise it could be exposed to hot vapour. For that price point I expect everything being IP67, parts and connectors. It's not exactly hard, I've done this myself. The parts are only protected by a cooling fan designed to keep also the moisture away. For some reason, the fan did not work at one cycle. There is no detection in place to detect this, leading to a bricked oven. In my book this is engineering fail on many levels.
Edited to add: Miele offers a 10 year warranty extension, at roughly 20% of the original price. It is left as an exercise for the reader what such a premium means for the expected failure rate...
It's not obvious to me that current appliances are not lasting (and/or not repairable) and it's not obvious to me either that longer lasting appliances are necessarily better.
Where are the end to end stats that show that this is better than recycling an old appliance to replace it with a new one that is more energy and water efficient?
Where are the actual stats that show that breaking down just out of warranty with no parts available is a real issue?
Also, there are no "other people" we all are consumers of these appliances.
Mine did. One of the PCBs was designed in a way that when the fridge light breaks it causes the whole pcb to fry and the fridge stops functioning. Thankfully we were able to get a replacement pcb because the manufacturer still supplied it.
Bad example, it is actually better to replace older fridges (older than 10 years though) with modern low energy designs, obviously with the expectation that they'd last longer than 3 years.
Fridges and Freezers are the only appliances I'm aware of where it works out like that though.
Edit:
Here's a case study for those that don't believe me.
That's just savings in end-user monetary expenses, which is a proxy for energy use, but not necessarily a good one.
I wonder whether this calculation holds once you account for the energy used to develop, construct, market and transport the new fridges that replace the older-but-working fridges. It's a genuine question - I haven't seen such calculation done. My current intuition is that the extra marginal energy used in manufacturing a new fridge dwarfs the energy savings of replacing the old one before it dies.
If the current appliances are already set to last and be reparable, then the regulation is a NOOP as far as business is concerned. So there's an insignificant cost to the business, and the consumer's get some reassurance. Seems like there's no need to argue against the regs, then.
You argue as if protecting the environment was optional. And you start your argument with the hidden assumption that what consumers want should trump all other concerns.
I don't necessarily agree with downvoting your post, but your argument _is_ poorly constructed. It seems to come from a place of reflexively opposing regulation, rather than thinking about whether this makes sense. In other words, I think people downvote because it doesn't seem to be in good faith, but ideologically driven.
No, I argue that protecting the environment should be based on facts and actual data, instead of being ideologically driven and that people's actual behaviour should not be ignored.
My argument isn't poorly constructed, I commented to promote discussion not to be lynched. You are trying to second guess what I wrote too much. It seems very common here for people to try to see implied meaning everywhere instead of reading what is actually written.
The sad reality is that it is not possible to think critically and to dissent on many topics these days. It is already decided what the correct opinion is, facts are irrelevant. Look at my comments in this thread: There are no reasoned replies to any of them...
You pretend like you made an argument that due to peoples behaviour, the regulation will be counterproductive. That is not what you argued or wrote in the post I replied to.
If that is what you meant to write then your argument was indeed _very_ poorly constructed. It's certainly more flimsy than many replies you received.
This is a fact, isn't it? Try to think by yourself. The comment you're quoting from also contained 10 lines of arguments that you are ignoring, and instead you picked up that that line as if it was blasphemy. QED.
wait what? I (not OP mind you) have been concerned with the environment since before Greta was even born. You just got a convenient face that happened to be at the right time in the right place to blame now.
Surely it's completely uncontroversial that producing longer-lasting, repairable goods is more efficient than regularly throwing away almost-but-not-quite-working goods because of perverse economic incentives put on the manufacturers of those goods?
Sure doesn't look like it. I can't even tell what your argument is supposed to be other than "nuh uh".
It's easy to stomp into a discussion and demand "stats", and then accuse people of irrational thinking when they don't immediately produce them. I'm sure someone has put together some statistics about repair costs, but I'd have no idea how to find them. The companies have no interest in helping compile numbers on their own service and parts, so good luck.
What I do have is lots of experience. As a property manager I've dealt with a hundred appliances. I work with a dozen dealers and repair people. I can get my old washers and fridges fixed easily; parts are everywhere, and every repairman knows how to change out a compressor on an old whirlpool compressor, or the tensioner on an old Maytag washer.
In contrast, my 15 year old Dacor range is a prime target for right-to-repair laws. It's built to last forever, but Dacor doesn't sell parts, and only makes schematics and repair manuals available to "certified" repair shops. There is only one in my city, and they wanted $500 dollars to replace my control board. Luckily I managed to find a used control board on ebay for $80 and did it myself. Took me a couple hours to do a job that would have taken minutes if only I'd had the manual. Easy stuff, should be totally accessible to owners and every repair shop, but Dacor likes to restrict the manuals to dealers so they can try to sell you a new one.
Then consider the nightmare of LG fridges. When the compressor went bad on my 2012 LG fridge, the cheapest repair estimate I could find was over a thousand dollars. There are only a few companies in my city who will do warranty repairs on LG fridges with linear compressors. There are a couple others who will no non-warranty work, but the repair won't be under warranty so if the new compressor goes bad (which is not unlikely on these new fridges), you're SOL. I have yet to find a used appliance reseller that sells refurbished LG fridges; when they haul away LG fridges, they are always scrapped. So what I have is a four thousand dollar fridge that lasted seven years. This is a common problem with LG fridges.
Washing machines are another whole world of pain.
So yes, I'll definitely be voting for every right-to-repair initiative that comes my way.
You know, you could easily read online about this stuff if you want. Try Yale Appliance's blog for a start. But then again, your comments make it seem like you didn't come here because you're curious.
Honestly I don't think you gain more then a few dollars when you make the components a few mm thinner.
I don't think the customers are a big force here, from my experience is the same part that breaks first but is there a strong enough incentive for the producer to investigate the issue and make that part stronger? If the customer will buy a new product or a new part that is extremely expensive then the producer is encouraged to engineer that part to break exactly when the warranty is over.
I have a question, maybe someone here knows the answer, why are everyone make a new model each year that most of the time seems to be a redesign that brings nothing new, As an example I use same keyboard model and each time I buy a replacement it has changed a bit in design and internals, making them almost incompatible for salvaging components from one and fixing other)
> I don't think the customers are a big force here
Of course they are. Customers are not stupid, they know what they are doing. They know that a cheap appliance will last long enough and that "in 10 years I'll want to buy a new one anyway".
> why are everyone make a new model each year that most of the time seems to be a redesign that brings nothing new
Because that's what sells. You need 'new' to convince people to buy it, certainly to buy it at the same price it was last year.
I disagree with you, let me give some examples that are not phones or computers where you can have maybe a different reason to buy a new model.
I like the microsoft natural 2000 keyboard, it has a soft rest place that it scratches and in max 2 years it gets destroyed and the cable where it enters the case gets bent and used. So I now have 3 or 4 models that I bought over the years, there is no actual improvement, all the complaints in the reviews like noisy space bar were not addressed, just some small visual changes. So I am wondering why they did a new design,it probably costs a lot, did they found a way to gut 1$ worth of plastic?
If we think at the environment and not at profits for the keyboard case there are 2 imediate things you could do:
- sell the soft rest parts, there are easy to change if compatibility is not broken (i done it myself no special tools were needed but I transplanted them from a different one)
- make the cable easy to replace (like you have with HDMI screens) so if I destroy the cable I can buy and just replace it rather then open the keyboard and find a different keyboard and grab the cable from that.
IF the above would be costly to implement then maybe they can address the problem and make an improved design.
Other example, I have a water pump, it has inside it a plastic/rubber balloon thing. This balloon will break every few months. I am wondering that they could make it 2 times more expensive and last 2 times more and it would be great because of the time and comfort lost when you have to replace it. But my waster time and confort plust he fact the old plastic thing goes into garbage is not factored in the producer calculations. So after this thing broke for the n-the time on me I would pay 10 times more and have it last 10 times more, I don't want cheap and bad but I do not have a choice.
I admit there is a small chance that it is impossible to make this component stronger but this change is extremely small, probably the current one is the perfect balance for the producers and is at the threshold where the users won't give up and buy a new pump(you have no idea if a different model does not have same issue)
I want to buy Miele, or any other quality brand, but if anything breaks (which we know will happen), the service technician has a two hours drive to get to my place, which I have to pay. IOW, the top quality brands mostly offer service in densely populated areas (and it makes businesses sense for them)...
The safety reduction was mostly due to changing from non-flammable but o-zone depleting CFCs to highly flammable but non o-zone depleting refrigerants.
Sorry, but that's just not true. If someone's spending 5000-10000€ on a kitchen renovation, then it's quite worth it to spend a couple of hundred more on appliances that will last as long as the rest of the kitchen. With modern built-in appliances then you need to take that into account, unless you want to install new cupboards every 5 years because your dishwasher died.
They’re standard sizes and the mechanism to attach the built in doors to the appliances (where relevant) is also standardised. I’ve replaced built in fridges, washing machines, dishwashers, ovens and hobs in my own homes over the years without needing to redo anything else.
What does annoy me though is that you have to pay a premium for appliances which are ‘built in’ over the equivalent model which is not built in, despite the built in version being less complicated (no door handles, for example).
> individuals are simply not able to repair themselves in most cases
This is the problem that needs to be addressed. The right to repair is not only about quality, price or durability. It is also a philosophical and strategic standpoint?
The right to repair isn't really about every individual repairing their own stuff themselves. It's about those individuals being able to ask their friends for help, or to bring the broken device to a local repair shop. That is, a manufacturer-unaffiliated repair shop. In this way, it's a fight for a more competitive, more free, and more distributed market.
If politicians didn't regulate businesses, we'd still be working 100 hours a week for 1€/hour.
So yeah, politicians try to defend the general interest best they can. Sometimes they make mistakes of course.
Countries with strong regulations can thrive. I live in France. People like to bash on our social system and on our strong regulations, but we are still one of the worlds greatest economic powers. Same goes with Germany.
> If politicians didn't regulate businesses, we'd still be working 100 hours a week for 1€/hour.
That's not true. All it needs is for one business among hundreds to require working 90 hours a week. Then all employees would want to work 90 hours a week instead of 100 hours. Then automatically lots of people would want to work in this company instead of all the others.
The other companies in order to keep workers in their companies would also want to lower the bar to 90 hours. And if everyone would require 90 hours a week, then when 1 company would lower the bar to 80 hours a week... etc.
When labour is scarce and desired, this is true. People who are in-demand right now can indeed set their terms (buddy of mine at a place with "unlimited vacation" took 2-3 months off a year because he knew they desperately needed him).
For everyone else, though, this works the other way too. All you need is for one person who's facing foreclosure to put in 110 hour weeks before it becomes the norm.
Hell, how many people here are on Slack at the weekend because their colleagues are and they fear looking lazy, and not because they're "passionate" (or whatever BS word we're using to describe abuse)
This is why we need less regulations so that there will be more alternatives to choose from. More employers = more chance there will be an employer that will not raise the bar of how many hours a worker needs to work in a week.
By introducing more and more regulations, it's more complicated to run the business. Less people are creating businesses, because it's so complicated to run it, and regulations change from year to year. So, the only real beneficiary of regulations are businesses established 100 years ago, where there were not much regulations, and they had their 'hothouse' conditions allowing them to grow without much competition.
In my country in small towns there are i.e. 3 companies to choose from when a person is trying to find a low-tech job. The owner of the first company is a good buddy with the mayor, the second company has a big legal department and is able to pull lots of million of PLNs from EU's dotations, and the third one will probably end their life in few next years, because it's too hard to compete with the previous two. So, in this context, it is possible that the previous 2 will just raise the work time bar and nobody will shed a tear about anyone.
The idea is nice but we've tried this, and it got us hellish levels of inequality (gilded age, etc.).
I do see what you're saying, for instance setting a maximum interest rate on payday loans caused lenders to shift to that maximum (even those which were below before), and having rules about what's part-time or full-time work does tend to solidify jobs around those points (get as much work out of them as you can without providing health insurance, etc.) but the alternative doesn't seem to work.
It sounds as if inequality in the gilded age was mostly caused by masses of immigrants entering the country, hoping for a share of the high wages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
If that is the case, it seems unwarranted to present it as an example of failure. Poor people were attracted by the success, and accommodating them was not seamless. But how could it be - no system can be prepared for that.
The parent's comment was overly simplistic but yours is even more so.
What you describe works if companies struggle to hire people and need to compete with each-other for workforce. Nowadays in many sectors throughout the world (and often for less educated workforce) it's the other way around: there are more people looking for a job than there are vacancies.
Clearly in this situation it works the other way around: the worker who's ready to work longer for cheaper will be hired over the others. Then it's a race to the bottom.
Of course the comment was simplistic. How much information on such complicated topic can be stuffed into a few sentences? The point of the comment was to point out the parent was wrong, and provide an example where it's wrong, not to describe how the world works.
And I was merely providing an example where your comment was wrong. Nuance is important if we want to have a constructive political discussion.
Beyond that, I often feel like most people on HN are hugely privileged when it comes to job hunting and working conditions and it shows in the discussions. It's easy to lose track of the difficulties the majority of people experience when it comes to finding a job when you have half a dozen recruiters fighting over how much money they're going to throw at your face at any given moment.
"I wish those recruiters would stop spamming my inbox" is not a problem the average human being has ever (and probably will ever) experience.
>I don't think recruiters work the way you've described.
Why not?
>I also don't think a sane person would like to stop receiving messages from recruiters.
If you're not looking for a new job it's a useless distraction. Emails aren't too bad, phone calls are more annoying.
>I'm also not sure I understand what you have in mind when you write "privilege".
Then try re-reading my comment with a less adversarial attitude, I think it's fairly transparent. You seem more interested in winning the argument than engaging in constructive discussion, but maybe it's just one of these situations where the text medium fails to convey enough nuance and context cues to judge a person's intentions.
No, if a company would not be able to produce anything, it ceases to exist. So there is a minimum number of hours of work every week. A company will not be able to get lower than its minimum. How much is that depends on the work itself, the efficiency of work, and the efficiency of management.
Why would a company keep spare parts around when it can sell a new device or only allow "certified" maintanance? Where is the incentive in letting a customer spend less money on parts and labour?
How exactly can the market be doing good work here? And why didn't this work with cars, where the hobbyist can no longer service 99% of their newly bought car?
Simple: if people would want devices they could repair, they would prefer the products of companies offering such devices over the products of companies not offering such devices.
The problem here is that people don't really want these devices. Maybe they think they want them, but in reality the effort to have them repaired would be too much to them. As others have pointed out, wages are the real issue, not cost of spare parts.
> Simple: if people would want devices they could repair, they would prefer the products of companies offering such devices over the products of companies not offering such devices.
Except when no one provides such products, or the only ones fitting that goal require very large sacrifices elsewhere.
Look at mobile phones and tablets before the EU rules. Finding one that charged off a standard USB socket was near impossible.
Again with mobile phones, since there is no right to actually own and control your device, finding a phone that allows you to root it constrains your choices in just about every other way, including ways that have nothing to do with being able to root the phone, such as being a second class citizen from your carriers point of view (e.g. Verizon refused to enable international calling for my phone because it wasn't an "approved", aka Verizon branded, phone.)
So, right to repair regulations mean that I wouldn't have to decide between being environmentally conscious (if that open is even available) and having a product that works.
> wages are the real issue, not cost of spare parts.
I can and do perform many repairs myself when the device allows a repair to be done (even sometimes when it doesn't).
Not sure what EU rules you are referring to. All the phones I had were chargeable by standard USB socket and rootable, afaik.
You have things like fairphone where you can exchange and upgrade parts. In general, the magic of capitalism is that if people want something, somebody will eventually make it.
I also wonder how much of companies trying to prevent repairs is actually BECAUSE of regulations. Like they could be liable if something goes wrong. What if somebody tries to repair a phone, does it wrong, and the battery explodes. Who would be liable?
Your final point, with you being able to do a lot of repairs: you are not normal in that respect. Most people could not do that.
And even the hourly rate of most people would probably make it ineffective for them to do it, even if they could.
Since it is inefficient, I question the assumption that repairs are automatically good for the environment. Maybe buying a newer, more energy efficient machine every couple of years is better in some cases, especially if the old machine is recycled properly.
I would be much more in favor of regulations with respect to recycling. This "repairing is better" is mostly ideology and virtue signalling.
A lot of corporations will gladly destroy the environment, the fabric of society and human happiness just to turn a profit. The government will try to regulate business but often ignorantly and inefficiently.
As usually, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
I think what the EU is trying to do is to force both companies and consumers to think about the consequences of mindless mass consumption and obsolescence. Beyond petty laws and regulations, the EU sometimes does have a noble fundamental concept behind their policies; it remains to be seen if the resulting policies are effective in practice.
If you don't want pollution, regulate pollution. But this "everything should be repaired and the world would be better" is pure ideology. They think they can achieve less pollution by enforcing repairs. They are not businessmen. They don't know the actual problems with production and repairs. They should let businesses figure out how to reduce waste and pollution, not tell them what to do.
I'm sure the experts that wrote this legislation never considered this problem that you just came up with in 5 seconds. /s
We have regulation that makes machines safer. This is regulation that makes machines safer for the environment. If the regulation turns out to be counterproductive it can be adapted later...
I am looking forward to fix the warranty system: if some products are expected to have a long life, spare parts are part of the problem, warranty is another one. If a fridge is expected to work for 15 years, mandate by law the minimum warranty to 12 years for home users, not 2 years. The manufacturers will be forced to design the products to last at least 12 years or to be very cheap to maintain, whatever makes more sense. The 2 year warranty in EU is insignificant in these situations where you have products like fridges, washing machines or TV sets that you can use for 20 years.
I had from the same company several appliances. The fridge is about 20 years old and still running. The washing machine broke after 15 years and I had to replace it due to lack of spare parts. The new washing machine is 5 years old, full of rust and I already replaced the main motor, that costed 1/3 of the full price of the machine. The technician that replaced it told me it is routine now to replace the Chinese motors after 3 to 5 years, a very high number of these washing machines break now in the first 5 years, but after the 2 years of warranty. They are a multi-brand service, when I asked what brand he recommends he said he cannot recommend one as they all have problems lately.
I can't speak for the EU in general, but in the UK, we get the minimum EU 2 years, plus up to six years from purchase to make a claim if the product is faulty according to market expectations of the lifetime of the product. If your fridge breaks after five years, and it's regular market expectation that your fridge, given what you paid for it[1], is expected to last longer, then the seller is in breach of contract.
Retailers try very hard to pretend that the law doesn't exist and that their obligation to you ends after a two year warranty period. This is false.
[1] Market expectation is adjusted according to the advertised price. For example if you buy a pair of shoes for £5, then you cannot expect it to last six years, of course. If a sale advertises an original and a discounted price, then it is the advertised original price that matters.
Yes, but that doesn't mean they'll actually fit in a standard residential kitchen space.
In the US, kitchens normally have a very standardized space for the stove/oven. It's a particular width (I don't know it offhand), and if it's outfitted for electric, it has a standardized 240V outlet. You can't just put anything there: it has to be the correct width and height, and have the correct power cord. There are fancier kitchens with separate ovens and ranges, but you can't just put those units into an existing kitchen; you'd have to redo all the cabinetry, which is very expensive.
Also, commercial kitchens generally use gas ovens/ranges. Not all residences have this available, in fact many just don't. If your area doesn't have natgas, then you have to have propane installed, and that's expensive to do, and may not be allowed where you live.
These things are extremely easy to reconfigure, and no cabinetry is not very expensive. Even utilising just standard residential ovens, they come in 600, 750, and 900 widths, and a variety of heights. There are plenty of commercial electric ovens available, I assure you.
>>Owners are usually unable to repair the machines themselves - or find anyone else to do it at a decent price
That's just a result of high labour cost in western countries though. Parts for appliances are usually pretty cheap, it's getting a specialist to come out that costs an arm and a leg. A heating element for an oven will be like £40, but good luck finding someone to come out and fit it for less than £80-100. Considering you can buy a brand new oven for as little as £200(with free delivery) the option to replace something instead of repairing it is unsurprisingly tempting. The further East you go the cheaper the labour gets, so it's normal that a repair that's completely unreasonable in the UK is actually pretty reasonable in Poland or Slovakia - the same part fitting would cost you maybe 50-100PLN(£10-20)? So actually the parts are almost always more expansive than labour.
Indeed. We recently replaced our 5 year old fridge. The compressor was running very frequent and hard, and it produced a lot of condensation, to the point that the evaporation bucket on the back overflowed.
I'm guessing it could have been repaired (gas leak?), but the absolute minimum for a tech to come out and try to fix it would have been 150-200 EUR (driving + 1 hour labor), plus parts/gas.
Part of the problem with repairs is that you often don't know what the final price will be. Sure you might get a quote based on a most likely scenario, but if that isn't the problem you just wasted all that money. And due to cost of labor, spending a lot of time troubleshooting isn't viable either.
We just got a new fridge instead, 400 EUR delivered at the door.
It sounds like someone needs to make a business getting broken appliances from rich western nations, then shipping them to underdeveloped nations where they can be repaired cheaply, then resold locally.
Around here that happens with cars: old Toyotas are (were, I'm not receiving updates from that market anymore?) bought to be shipped off to Africa and competition seemed crazy (multiple buyers calling immediately if you posted certain models for sale, some going as far as being threatening IIRC.)
Source: two close friends of mine sold their HiAces.
It's the reason #16238 for instituting a carbon tax, and all those reasons are essentially the same: internalizing externalities. If, after accounting for full environmental impact, it turns out that replacing is still cheaper than repairing, then all is fine because the price correctly signals that it is better. In reality though, I'd expect that under carbon taxing, repair would be the better choice.
I mean, washing machines probably aren't worth it because they weigh a lot, but I know as a fact that if you need to get your OnePlus phone repaired it will be shipped by next day courier to a repair centre in Warsaw, then shipped back(I rang them up on Monday, phone was collected on Tuesday, delivered and repaired on Wednesday, shipped back on Thursday, I got it back on Friday - it was incredible). I have also done this with a speaker that broke - a local electronics repair shop wanted £60 just to diagnose the issue, I was driving over to Poland for summer anyway so I took it with me, a local shop there charged me an absolutely ridiculous for Poland 2x50PLN/hour(£10/hour) to fix it + £20 for parts = £40 total. Obviously that completely ignores the cost of driving over, but I was doing it anyway.
I'm just trying to point out that it's not some grand conspiracy to stop people from repairing stuff - here in the West labour is just very very expensive(which means our wages are also very high, so it's hard to complain). In countries where labour is cheap the same repair suddenly makes sense.
And to add to that, when I've been in Shenzhen, China, I saw lots of recycling of smartphone parts. I've managed to replace my cracked S4 screen and a broken camera for a small fraction of the part price, on the spot in 10 minutes, on the condition that they get to keep the broken part - because what they're doing is taking the part further apart, repairing or replacing the broken component, and then using it to repair someone else's phone.
Items being sent from the UK to Warsaw will have to run through customs twice, attracting very large tarrifs - at least in the "UK->Poland" direction. That's assuming the airplanes are allowed to fly, and the customs clearence delays will be measured in days.
HP used to do that, and probably still does, with their business laptops/computers. Had an Elitebook under warranty in Germany, the graphics card burned out, requested an RMA, they sent a box to pack it in via UPS, it was shipped to Poland, fixed and returned via UPS.
In my case it was. The washing machine died, the repairman said the circuit board died, a new one is say 120, plus 80 for his work (all numbers approximate). His recommendation was to buy a new one.
I found somebody on ebay that repairs the boards for 35 (same developed country), popped the hood, took the cables off and sent the small plastic enclosing by post. They probably just replaced a capacitor or so, sent it back to me and voila.
So I don't think the legislation is perfect, but I'm happy there's some movement in the right direction. I think it's obscene to throw away the whole thing because of a tiny repair. Everything still depends on having people skilled to do repairs, but that's maybe also part of the problem. Why is a repair person's job these days to take a manufacturer's part in a plastic enclosing and connect the cables? I can do that myself. If it was some advanced technology fine, but it isn't for a lot of things.
Repair technicians who show up at peoples' homes aren't highly skilled electronics technicians. If they were, they wouldn't be working as appliance repair people and driving to peoples' homes. So those repairs just entail swapping out entire circuit boards or assemblies, because that's all those repair people can handle (and all the repair companies or manufacturers are willing to warranty).
The guy on Ebay is someone with electronics skills who discovered that that particular machine had a very common problem with that board, and offered a service to fix that one thing.
It's too bad that can't be done more. It is done some: smartphone makers frequently will repair their devices, usually by having you ship the phone to a repair center. But an appliance is harder since you still have to have the on-site technician take the machine apart and get the board out for shipping, since you can't rely on consumers to do that. It's too bad consumers aren't smart enough to use a screwdriver and take simple things apart, but that's just how it is.
If you take the huge concrete brick (some use water as ballast) out of a washing machine, they’re not that heavy. It shouldn’t be a great surprise that a washing machine without clothes or water inside has a lot of empty space in it.
They are don't like that unqualified people play with gas or electricity, so they certainly don't try to make it easy for people to be able to repair themselves.
What do you mean? The repair in Poland would also be done by a qualified electrician or a gas technician . It's not the qualification requirement that is pushing the cost up, it's simply that the wages are so much higher. A very very basic £10/hour in the UK is absolutely astronomical for Poland(50PLN/hour is maybe what a senior programmer would make, not an electrician).
I know I'm overly optimistic, but every time I see anything regarding legislation and "repair" keyword, i silently hope for a price limit on spare parts... and am always disappointed not to see one.
If a new (whole) car(tv,washing machine,...) costs 20k (...) ($,€,..doesn't matter), and you want to replace some parts, the cost of just a few parts quickly becomes higher than a whole new unit. In a modern car, just replacing a few parts costs more than a whole car (both front lights ~1k(eur), rear ones 500eur, ac compressor 500eur(+), radio/navigation unit 1k, foldable mirrors 500eur, 'smart' rearview mirror up to 1k, etc...).
If the sum of costs of all parts to assemble a car is above 2x the price of the car, someone is getting ripped off, and we all know who that is.
Same with laptops... lcd assembly on a shitty 600eur laptop was quoted as 400eur+tax here (luckily ebay exists) - and that's without labour.
For car parts, where are you getting your prices? Here in the US, there's usually online sellers of OEM parts that sell for much less than dealerships.
Of course, even these can be pretty high, depending on the part in question. A lot of the parts you listed are things that should not ever be replaced, unless you have a wreck. If that happens, then part cost shouldn't be your concern, because insurance is covering it (hopefully, the other party's insurance).
And finally, the used parts market is alive and well. Any of those parts can be easily found on Ebay for a fraction of the new OEM price.
And on top of that, many of those parts have Chinese-made aftermarket replacements, which cost much less, and may be acceptable quality.
As for the "smart" rearview mirror (I think you're talking about auto-dimming mirrors here), my Mazda came with one from the factory, but buying it afterwards costs about $300, certainly not 1k.
Generally speaking, if the car is fairly new, you shouldn't be replacing parts like that except through insurance. If the car is old and you're trying to restore it, you should be looking for used parts. And if you have a new car and you're trying to add all the nice options to make it like the top-end trim model, then you're doing it wrong: you need to get the car from the factory with the options you want instead of trying to add them later, because that never makes any economic sense.
Especially for cars, they sell you the product with a very low margin betting on high returns in after sales (spare parts). In the long term regulating spare part prices would likely result in an increase of the full product price. Not sure if it good to regulate prices here, maybe it make sense to leave this task to the market (see third party spare parts vendors).
> If the sum of costs of all parts to assemble a car is above 2x the price of the car, someone is getting ripped off, and we all know who that is.
Not really. The business models are way different and have different costs.
You're paying for someone to store that part, ship it in low volume to and from a parts warehouse, market to you, tie up capital in it, and gamble on the possibility that you'd want to buy it before those models go obsolete.
If you buy 500,000 units via container ship from the factory you could get them for way cheaper too.
I think that price limits would not be very good. I'd worry about availability and creation of second-hand market, where third parties would buy out the supplies, to resell them later at higher price, before the manufacturer manages to re-stock the spare parts supplies.
But I think mandating that replaceable parts have to be standardized, would make it so that multiple manufacturers would be using compatible parts.
As a consumer/repairman you'd be able to choose which one to buy from.
This would introduce competition that would put the pressure on the price.
There would possibly be even less waste because standard parts could be more easilly reused with any fitting brand/manufacturer of the product.
I wouldn’t say never, but it’ll take some time before millennials and below have enough political power to change our society.
I think we’re going to see radical changes once that happen though, as we’re generations that haven’t seen the benefits of capitalist freedom, but instead have lived in constant worry of pretty much everything from finding a job and keeping it, an ever increasing retirement age even though some companies don’t hire people older than 35, a destroyed environment, impossible home prices and so on.
Maybe I’m just living in a bubble, but I know no one my age or below who aren’t looking for change because the general consensus is that our current system is broken.
Depends how many millennials think they have something to lose by the time
Be interesting to compare the change of vote as millenials grow into their 40s with the change of vote as hippies grew into their 40s.
Remember the era of woodstock are now those 70 year olds voting for brexit and trump and burn the foreigners. Will today's Extinction Rebellion, or Occupy Wall Street from 10 years ago, change at the same level?
> Remember the era of woodstock are now those 70 year olds voting for brexit and trump and burn the foreigners. Will today's Extinction Rebellion, or Occupy Wall Street from 10 years ago, change at the same level?
I understand what you mean here but I think even back in the days when woodstock happened, the hippies were a minority even among their age group.
Millenials should keep in mind this quote from Milton Friedman: "We economists don't know much, but we do know how to create a shortage. If you want to create a shortage of tomatoes, for example, just pass a law that retailers can't sell tomatoes for more than two cents per pound. Instantly you'll have a tomato shortage. It's the same with oil or gas."
That 400 euro price to repair a laptop might accurately reflect the labour and other costs. Repairing something is much less amenable to automation than mass-producing it in the first place (especially since the latter can be done in a low-cost country).
OP said the replacement screen was 400€ just for the part, not labor. Given the total cost of the computer is 600€ fully assembled that's obviously extortionate pricing for the screen.
They need to be designed to be easier to repair too. To replace a thermal fuse in my dryer requires that I take apart half my dryer. They could have left it behind some panel in the back.
Which ones? Oral-B/Braun toothbrushes make the battery removable on the bottom for proper disposal (it's not really replaceable though, though that can probably be done, but it's not the intent of the design).
I smashed the glass top of my Kenmore (Frigidaire) stove and I was surprised to discover that the fix was almost trivial once I got part. It was not cheap, admittedly, but at $250 it was still much cheaper than a new stove.
Honestly, that's the one aspect of the Kenmore stuff that really impressed me. There was lots of good information out there on what parts to buy and how to do the fix.
Small tidbit, but I am delighted when I find boards that still use through-hole components or chip sockets. Apart from cellphones, you often don't really need the extra space.
BGA are the hard ones and virtually not doable for a home gamer, the rest are fine.
Imo, through-hole are worse, harder to remove than SMD if you have hot air.
(edit) What is actually necessary for electronics - "schematics" and datasheets. It's quite hard and time consuming to trace stuff, esp. on multilayered PCB. Lack of datasheet is even harder to overcome in many cases.
The via yes. That's attached to the pad on the other side which is what I'm referring to. The first "oh shit" moment is when you see the pad attached to the leg of the part.
Not really, no. It's really nit-picking, but a "via" is a (usually small) plated-through hole that is used solely for connecting traces on different layers of the board. I'm pretty sure the term isn't normally used for the plated-thru holes with pads that are used for thru-hole parts, even though the construction of the two is almost the same. The main differences are that the holes for PTH parts are usually larger, and the pads around them are larger, for better soldering. Vias don't need much of a pad around the hole because you're not putting solder in the hole, and vias are usually covered with soldermask.
Yes, really, yes. It isn't nitpicking when you're simply wrong. Via's are vertical interconnects between layers, they can be 'blind' vias which do not connect to either top or bottom layers or regular ones.
"Plated-through holes are no longer required with SMT boards for making the component connections, but are still used for making interconnections between the layers and in this role are more usually called vias.[2]"
Even your own link says nothing about PTH, and just discusses vias for use in SMT.
Depends on the BGA; the extremely high-density ones generally require special tools. They're also nearly impossible to inspect without special camera equipment. The really low-density ones (like DFN) are pretty easy for a hobbyist though, but in general BGAs should be avoided for designs aimed at hobbyists. You can get away with repairing them sometimes, using a reflow oven (made from a toaster oven), or even a hot-plate, and it is possible to re-ball them at home, but I wouldn't count on this as a reliable thing.
"BGA at home", I'd never touch that.
A person w/o experience and/or rework station is likely to meet frustration only. It's a futile effort in my opinion.
The inspection part is bang on - what if there is a short and it just burns the traces. Now the thing is not repairable even by a professional repair service.
I am just a programmer... totally for right to repair, open schematics, easily to source components, etc. I can repair electronics, incl. SMD soldering on laptops, LED light fixtures, diagnose home appliances but I'd not touch any BGA. Or heat pump water/fluid subsystem or high pressure vessels -- and I'd prefer if I'd buy a house with any of them installed not to have been repaired w/o care and experience.
Thru-hole components are horrible, and I'm glad they've mostly gone the way of the dinosaur. Not only are they huge, they're harder to replace and frequently result in damage to the PCB. It's not too bad for resistors and capacitors, but ICs are the worst; the safest way to remove those is to use diagonal cutters and cut all the legs off the chip (destroying the chip of course), and then use your iron and a spring-loaded solder-sucker to remove the legs and the solder from the holes. You can forget about non-destructively removing an IC so you can re-use it. Sockets suck because they fail eventually, due to corrosion, thermal cycling, etc. Gold-plated sockets help, but these are expensive. And yes, the space is significant with PTH components.
Surface-mount stuff is much, much easier to work with. The catch is that you need a hot-air rework station, but you can get a very decent Chinese-made one for less than $200. With one of these, you can easily replace SOIC/SOJ type ICs. The ones with 0.5mm lead spacing are very easy to work with; you can use some tweezers and a hot-air station to replace these chips easily, and just assembling a PCB with them is easy with a regular iron with a fine tip.
I thought that way as well, now unless we are speaking of DIO socketed ICs SMD is faster and easier to desolder and it is harder to lift pads while doing so.
That beeing said, SMD is different. It is like — well — learning soldering once again from the start. The only thing really harder is seeing the parts.
Once in college, I hand fabricated a board some other students designed with SMT bits. I've always been near-sighted (use glasses to see far) and have developed a habit of taking my glasses off when I'm in a room to keep my nearby surrounding clear. For this board when I was populating it, I of course used a magnifying glass to see the parts, but after finding it cumbersome, at times I would find just focusing hard enough to see the little bits was quicker although requiring some effort.
A thermal fuse isn't a routine consumable. Those are designed to trip when something else is wrong. You need to open it up anyway to fix the root cause or confirm it was a fluke and there is no pending safety hazard.
I'm not so sure about this. For John Deere tractors, definitely; there's lots of articles about this. For foreign brands, it may not be the case at all.
>>introduced for refrigerating appliances, household dishwashers, household washing machines and household washer-dryers, electronic displays and refrigerating appliances with a direct sales function.
- This may be costing German consumers €110 a month per person (source)
- A long-lasting washing machine will generate over 20 years 1.1 tonnes less CO2 than a short-lived model. This analysis takes into account manufacturing, distribution, use and end-of-life treatment (source)
- Electronic waste is the fastest growing waste stream in the world (source)
- Only 35% of electronic waste in the EU is collected and treated properly (source)
- Illegal flows within the EU are estimated at 4.65 million tonnes in 2012 (source)
One thing I bet it does not include is a requirement to unlock digital devices when support ends (by providing any private keys required to install 3rd party software/operating systems). This would help stop a lot of old devices going to landfill.
I think this should be mostly about information. Sort of 'right to understand'. The law should compel companies that sell on EU market to release to public domain full documentation of the product. Service manuals, precise dimensions of components and such.
I'd disagree. Lots of small and medium shops can mass-produce appropriately twisted pieces of metal (or appropriately enough) once you give them the specs. One just need to allow for third-party parts and repair.
I wonder if there is a market for a appliance company to have easy to repair products with easy to source spares that could be done by a competent DIYer
I have to replace a fridge freezer that I inherited as it occasionally leaks/defrosts, I've already out €200+ into it with a repair engineer to replace a motor but I don't want to spend more in case it doesn't work and I have to spend €1000 on a new one anyway.
When I was a teenager my dad got me to replace one of the old rotary switches on a washing machine with a second hand spare he got, if I recall correctly there were 30+ wires and I had to label them all, it worked and I was so satisfied.
Now it would be a new PCB and would be difficult to source.
Definitely think there would be a market even if the initial cost was higher.
This is already a thing with EU made appliances - new original parts can be sourced locally or on ebay at good prices.
As non-profesional I managed to replace dishwasher door springs or washing mashine carbon brushes. It needed some time and research - thanks goodness we have youtube and hobbists forums. At the end the family acclaim is priceless.
Unfortunatelly it is harder to fix some brands from S.Korea or China - no parts on the market, hard to open, fragile plastic, glue instead of screws, rare short lived model lines. My fridge's broken control panel costs about 1/5 of new fridge, plus I am not sure I will manage to assemble it back.
This ruling definitely is going to raise a bar for imported products.
It's a good thing even if I can't use it directly.
The popularity of old 2nd hand mercs in Africa is a direct result of them being fairly easy to fix overengineered gear. No need for a laptop to diagnose it.
So in a way I'm hopeful this will reduce waste indirectly
>The popularity of old 2nd hand mercs in Africa is a direct result of them being fairly easy to fix overengineered gear. No need for a laptop to diagnose it.
Labor is cheap relative to the materials in the 3rd world so they run things as long as they can get parts. What they actually use has more to do with how the second hand car market in the first world works than anything else. For vehicles to be prolific in the 3rd world they need to enter the dealer auction system en-masse at a young age but not young enough to be re-sold as certified pre-owned where they are then bought by exporters/importers. These preconditions basically mean they are bought en-masse by people (or companies) who will drive them 5-10yr and then trade them in on a new one which basically means they are bought en-masse by decently well off people. The stuff that people stretch themselves to buy and then keep until it's totally clapped out (or sell private party to maximize value) never enters that workflow.
>Labor is cheap relative to the materials in the 3rd world so they run things as long as they can get parts.
Don't think it's a function of that frankly.
I grew up in South Africa and the market down there is driven by a mentality you describe - cost consideration, pre-owned, access to parts, certifications etc. Stuff any westerner would be familiar with.
Head a bit further into ahem "proper" Africa and things changes very rapidly. e.g. My uncle living in Kenya reckoned that you could get a full transmission change done on the side of the road i.e. on gravel of the road shoulder (if it has one). That's where the old tank style mercs come into their own...anyone with mechanical aptitude and access to tools has a chance. Certified? Nobody fuckin cares - can you fix it in dust conditions with limited tools?
Couldn't agree with you more. 10 years is way too short.
Apple forces iPhone 5S and iPhone 6 owners to buy a new model even if they work fine after 6 years. Why couldn't a mobile phone work for 15years?
Just think of the US cars in Cuba, build in the 50s and still on the road. If I remember well, the amount of fossil fuel needed to build a car is more than it will use during it's lifetime on the road.
Changing to Less is more will require either
- a disaster (war, flooding, hunger) or
- long endurance and perseverance against old thinking by Greta Thunberg and the like.
> Apple forces iPhone 5S and iPhone 6 owners to buy a new model even if they work fine after 6 years. Why couldn't a mobile phone work for 15years?
I'm pretty sure Apple does no such thing. They stop updating product lines after a certain point, but they don't brick them or anything. In fact, you can find examples of people using original iPhones just to compare them to the modern phone amenities.
Really -- our expectations of what our mobile devices should be able to do have increased so much in the past 10 years that it's simply unrealistic to expect them to last 15 years or longer. _Maybe_ we're coming closer to a point where we can expect tech to be usable for longer due to our phones having processors that are nearly as capable as modern laptop processors.
I agree with your comment, but I want to add the answer to "Why couldn't a mobile phone work for 15years?": because the evolution of chips and software makes a new phone much more efficient (energy, user's time) than a 10-15 years old one. I used a Samsung S3 as a GPS-only device on the car dashboard for a few years after I was no longer able to use it as a smartphone (old Android with no updates), getting a new smartphone was required not because the old one was "old", but because it was obsolete enough to be unusable.
EDIT: It does cover "electronic displays" which means TVs & similar.
Alas, this does not cover any electronics at all. It's extremely narrow:
>> introduced for refrigerating appliances, household dishwashers, household washing machines and household washer-dryers, electronic displays and refrigerating appliances with a direct sales function.
Commercial applicance manufacturers often due make serviceability a high priority. You can buy a commercial quality washing machine, but people don't want to pay that price.
Vote with your wallet. If you want something that is repairable, buy it.
A definite step towards reducing wastage and focusing on improved functionality for products, instead of planned obsolescence and sealed units whose warranty is voided if you repair them.
It's worse than any standard pollution offenses we have in place.
It's surprising we even let companies get away with these practices for this long. The practice is against consumer interests, socially irresponsible and utterly reprehensible as a business method.
If you still sit squarely on the side of the companies on this one, realise capitalisms current growth or bust model is entirely dependent on continual expenditure of Earth's resources.
It might not be they progress we are hopping for. We still have to pay for the repair.
Increasing the devices guarantee from 2 to 5 years (maybe 10?) is probably better. Then it will be on producers to provide long lasting devices.
I watched a right to repair video that suggested that if/when a right to repair law gets signed in the United States that it will cause OEMs to provide repair parts/manuals for not only that state but the rest of the country as well because it would be infeasible to maintain two separate "lines" for the same device.
Does anyone know if this holds true between continents such as Europe and America as well? IE: Because OEMs have right to repair laws in Europe they may just go ahead and furnish America with them as well so they dont have to maintain two separate product lines?
That works for macbooks where there's no difference other than a keyboard, but appliances are already quite different between NA and EU. Voltage and frequency are a big one since AC motors have to be built specifically for it. There's also differences in consumer preferences. You'll never get far selling 24" cooktops and kitchen cabinet washing machines in America.
well do you think that perhaps, setting the voltage and other continental variance requirements aside, that repair manuals for products released in EU will coinside (somewhat) for products in the USA? This could potentially be a game changer for USA repair enthusiasts as we will have SOME form of foundational documentaion to go on when attempting a repair (or at least i hope)
And on a side note: Funny how tractors and agricultural equipment were stricken from USA's right to repair and intellectual property laws.
The main issue is that the new star ratings can only be applied to new appliances. Does the right to repair law also include a clause making it easier to repair? If my new dryer has a fried chip, how much will that chip cost me? Can the 3rd party repair service fix it for cheap? The other big issue we have other than planned obsolescence is that new electronics are chip driven and these are proprietary which means either you go to the original manufacturer and pay quite a bit for the part or throw the damn thing away.
I hope these right to repair laws are solid and also allow the manufacturing of third party parts. But what I would love to see is an upgrade system for older appliances. Like a program where you can buy newer more efficient parts for your appliances instead of buying a whole new one.
The mentioned devices are mains powered (well perhaps not led-lighting) - I can see why legislators are not eager to just let anybody mess about with that.
I've changed the heating element in my oven, that was simpler than changing a plug. Plus you'd be surprised by how many people would have trouble wiring up a plug.
I can understand why manufacturers wouldn't like it, it isn't apparent to me that the doom and gloom would play out. The people that attempt these repairs are likely to be self selecting, and if we look at cars or PCs, are the tinkerer communities for those less safe than the general population? I feel you could make a case for the opposite. If you have no idea about cars, that rattle is a thing to be ignored, whereas a person in the know would realise that it's an impending failure of X.
Speaking of right to repair, As anyone seen the price of hard drives lately? External drives are MUCH cheaper (half price in some cases), which seems backwards when the external drive also comes with an enclosure, power supply and cables.
Leading to the term 'Shucking', where people buy external drives just for the drive inside only to discard the rest.
Do you have an example of the same quality hard drive being cheaper as an external hard drive? I find that hard to believe, and would presume inferior hard drives are being sold in external cases.
It's even running the same firmware. It makes no sense, the only logic I see is that customers are willing to pay more for the 'enhanced features'. If you look into this, you'll find no manufacture states the read and write speeds of their USB drives, making it a little harder to compare, so there is a little luck of the draw in what you actually get. Seagate are similar: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/8thr34/seagate...
Your first amazon link is for a product sold by Amazon.com and the second link (the hard drive itself) is being sold by a different merchant, so they are not comparable as the third party sellers have weird pricing for various reasons.
This will not help (enough). There is a problem with regards to other EU regulation regarding warranty. Suppose my appliance breaks down after three years. The seller should organise the repair and pay a major part of the cost (function of the expected lifetime). That's EU law. However: they can choose the repair company. Large firms insource this, thus being able to set repair prices. Then this law is moot. Once I turn over my broken appliance for repair, I have to pay a fee to get it back unrepaired. So market forces cannot play since the price setting of repairs is broken. Nice that some appliances get better repairability, but this only works after the expected lifetime of the appliance. Within the expected lifetime you are still stuck with inflated repair prices.
Edit: see below. This is partially false. In the Netherlands this problem exists since they've implemented a broader warranty (2 years plus depreciation over expected lifetime) than the EU mandates. EU wide is just 2 years warranty and this law facilitates repairs afterwards.
They can't do that because the same spare parts are used by the manufacturer's official support. Νow in case they say that spare part X costs 100euros but only 10 if we do the repair, the regulators could easily jump in and fine the company for unfair tactics. Of course such tactics should be taken into account in the relevant legislation
And this is exactly the problem. The article talks about the huge amount of carbon that could be prevented from going in to the atmosphere because devices will last longer and be repaired. Well think about how much more would be saved if anyone could repair their own thing. And I say this because a new screen for my iphone that I put in myself is about 20$, if I go to Apple I am looking at 99$. I Can't afford to go to Apple and having replaced my screen multiple times as I am currently running an iphone 4s which came out in 2011 with the tiny little screen that has been broken at least 5 times if not more. So making it for professionals is just another barrier these companies were able to squeeze into the law in their favor. We are talking about swapping components here this isn't Rick's Restoration anybody with some basic know how and determination could do these jobs but the companies got away with arguing it was for reliability and product safety.
I do see the point you make, it would be very easy for someone to forget a gasket or not tighten a hose and end up with a flood. But I also believe this is just yet another excuse to try and lock customers out of their right to repair. Something like a microwave has a large capacitor and serious electrocution could occur. However, most appliances like a washer and dryer fridge and stove do not have these giant capacitors and simply by unplugging them one can pretty safely work on them. They could very easily do something like the xbox 360 did which had security stickers that you had to break in order to open your xbox. Pretty obvious that an xbox has been opened. They could do the same with their appliances and just use registered one time screws that break when opened and and only authorize professional repairs will be provided the same screws from the companies. This way the average guy could do it just without the registered screws. If there was a problem resulting in damage the company could verify you had all your registered screws in place or your warranty is void. Furthermore is these companies are so worried about us damaging ourselves then they could very easily provide some documentation on how to properly repair these things without risk. They don't want that. This is nothing but them trying to maximize profits at the cost of the customer and the environment.
You want to allow companies to not honor their warranty if the owner of the product opens their own property? That sounds like a terrible idea. If I buy a product, I am legally allowed to do with it whatever I want, which obviously includes looking at the inside or modifying it for my needs, and it would be a massive limiting of my rights if that suddenly would mean that the manufacturer is not responsible for manufacturing defects or design errors anymore.
I actually do want companies to honor their warranty even if I open up the device but generally I do not need to do that if it is under warranty. I was more thinking after that period when it breaks and you can't have the manufacture repair it. These companies still don't want someone doing unauthorised repairs and starting house fires then saying these machines cause fires when really it is was a bad repair. But on the other hand there are countless people that are capable or out of necessity will repair a machine. With my suggestion of registered one time screws it was not to stop the customer from doing work but just to indicate they did work if there was some negative effect afterwards.
On a side note my son accidentally sat on his ereader, a popular model, but there is no place to buy a screen. There were a couple on eBay but they wanted 20$ less then a new ereader. It is frustrating.
Well, but then what would be the consequence of the customer doing work? I mean, either there is some legal consequence to it, then it's a bad idea, or there isn't, then it's useless?! Especially considering that the mere indication that the appliance was opened does not tell you anything about what was done to it and thus whether there is any likely connection to a given defect.
And while you might not need to repair appliances under warranty, mind you that there are other reasons for opening appliances, from curiosity to quality control to wanting to modify things for your needs.
Whether these companies want me to do repairs really seems like a completely irrelevant interest. It's my property, and if property means anything, then their interest to protect their trademark certainly does not trump my interest in having control over my property, or else you could use the same reasoning to justify pretty much any right for them to control and limit what you can do with your property.
This is actually a restriction of consumer choice. If I am willing to buy a product without "right to repair", the government should not stop me from doing so. Many appliances are cheap enough that it makes sense to buy new ones when they stop working.
Consumer choice is restricted by default: You can only buy what is being sold. This is just the democratically elected bodies of the EU changing that selection.
