New Refrigerators, Washing Machines, Furniture and Tires Will All Have to Last Longer, Europe Mandates
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I don’t even understand what fascism means in each case on lemmy and whether it is a fixed term or some adaptive catch it all
The definition I find useful is, Fascism is when an imperial power begins applying colonial policies to citizens in its core.
So, for a practical example, the United States has used extra-judicial black sites to disappear and torture people the CIA/pentagon deem enemies for decades. Locking up people in El Salvador without (constitutionally mandatory) trial or legal council is just that policy brought home.
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Longer means more forever chemicals
Not really, it means mechanically working longer not forever.
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My washing machine is around 25 years old. Not giving it up till its absolutely done haha. But since parts are relatively available, it might just be a few more years.
The washing machine, dishwasher and fridge my wife had when we got married were already old and all lasted 20 years more. In the 12 years since the fridge finally gave out we've bought two more of each of those things.
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why such stuff should be allowed in the first place,
Because we have a market economy. We can switch to planning, but that has its own disadvantages
why should ordinary folks have trouble getting apartments just so that some rich fucks can try to make profit.
They should not. It's market manipulation that we don't have enough apartments. With different zoning laws or more plots to built, there would be enough apartments.
speculators throwing money around, artificially increasing property, land, and construction prices.
Tax empty housing, or housing in general, and speculation will disappear.
Still the rent prices you can achieve with that are nothing like you see on the open market.
In which way? Why are those apartments not on the open market?
It is irrational to expect rational behaviour from people.
That's also why people shouldn't be forced to be rational. The Sovjet Union was forcing people to be rational but people weren't happy.
Broken window
I tried to make sense with this.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_windows_theoryNow it's clear.
Because we have a market economy. We can switch to planning, but that has its own disadvantages
Planned economy is not when there are regulations.
They should not. It’s market manipulation that we don’t have enough apartments.
"Manipulation" implies intent to achieve that state of affairs, and, no, that wasn't the goal of capital. Capital wanted ROI and looked for it in the wrong place.
With different zoning laws or more plots to built, there would be enough apartments.
In the US, yes. Europe by and large doesn't have such inane laws.
In which way? Why are those apartments not on the open market?
The syndicate -- did you read the link I gave you -- specifically works towards removing properties from the market, get all control into the hands of the tenants. Rents pay for the mortgage, that's it, no middleman, and the legal structure ensures that tenants can't band up and cash out like many a cooperative did.
That’s also why people shouldn’t be forced to be rational. The Sovjet Union was forcing people to be rational but people weren’t happy.
The fuck has the USSR to do with anything we're talking about. Also why are you calling tankies rational go to lemmygrad if you like them so much.
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Laptops should last longer than 3-5 years too. It should go without saying, but this is the internet.
Agreed but in most larger businesses swap out the laptops around 3-5 years.
Consumers use laptop 5-10+ until they die.
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Do you even know what forever chemicals are or do you think they're a magic thing that are added to machines to make them last longer?
Companies literally add pfas to everything to make things last longer
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Companies literally add pfas to everything to make things last longer
Ahhh, so you are the type of dumb that heard the name and assumed the wrong interpretation and ran with it. The so-called "forever chemicals" are called that because they themselves don't really break down, but they don't give that property to other things. These "forever chemicals" are stuff like teflon, they're stuff that doesn't react with other things and that makes them nonstick, something that can be useful in a bunch of different things besides just nonstick pans, but because they're so nonstick, it's difficult to make them stay in the pan or whatever industrial machine they're a part of, so they can flake off and be in the end product, in our food, water, soil and much more, and since like I said before they're not reactive, they can just stay there as their molecules, forever. Using them in a machine doesn't give the machine more durability or extends it's work life, it just helps it not stick to stuff
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Agreed but in most larger businesses swap out the laptops around 3-5 years.
Consumers use laptop 5-10+ until they die.
Framework like modular laptop would fix this. Need a new screen? No problem. Need a new processor? No problem.
Upgrade whatever is outdated and just that
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Framework like modular laptop would fix this. Need a new screen? No problem. Need a new processor? No problem.
Upgrade whatever is outdated and just that
Yeah but imagine if we had a laptop motherboard standard like desktops.
Instead of ATX it would be something like MLF - Modular Laptop Framework
Where there would be some board standard for laptop boards.
Then you get screen ribbon standards, keyboard ribbon standards, etc.
This would allow one to order a laptop case with screen, keyboard and touchpad. But you can pick your board, cpu, ram.
I know some companies have done GPU upgrades but how nice would it be to upgrade your 4 year old $3k laptop's GPU?
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As much as I love this, I fail to see how this would be able to be written into law. It's basically gov mandated warranty period. If the goal is to have manufacturers make products that last, how long is long enough? What's to say that they do the same thing and design products that fail right after warranty ends? Who decides if there is foul play in designing faulty products and how? Unless the gov makes their own product that lasts for 20 years and tells every other company to use this as a baseline otherwise get fined, I don't know how they would be able to enforce this.
I just think this is a big gray area and it would be hard to make this cut and clear. The only thing I think they could do for now is to have companies provide repair manuals and provide parts for a set amount of years after product launch, and repairs should be able to be made by customers themselves without needing to go through 1st party verification like Apple does with their phones.
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Did you research spare part availability / reparability scores when buying the new one?
I always start with that when buying major items. Some brands are more consumer friendly than others. I was still able to buy replacement parts for my 2005 fridge and dishwasher in 2019 and 2023 for 13 and 100 euros respectively (the 100 euro was a heat exchanger one of the biggest pieces of the machine). With 6 Euro shipping costs, 2 day delivery. And a bunch of YouTube videos to do the repair.
In 2024 we equipped a whole new house with the same brand, voting with our wallets.
Yes, to the best of my ability and available resources. It is a newer model, so currently spare parts seemed to be abundant vs the 12 or so year old previous model.
Nice work on the cheap repairs! Which brand, if I may ask?
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Yes, to the best of my ability and available resources. It is a newer model, so currently spare parts seemed to be abundant vs the 12 or so year old previous model.
Nice work on the cheap repairs! Which brand, if I may ask?
Neff, but it's exactly the same hardware as Bosch and Siemens (BSH).
We sold the apartment with the 20 year old devices still working perfectly.
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As much as I love this, I fail to see how this would be able to be written into law. It's basically gov mandated warranty period. If the goal is to have manufacturers make products that last, how long is long enough? What's to say that they do the same thing and design products that fail right after warranty ends? Who decides if there is foul play in designing faulty products and how? Unless the gov makes their own product that lasts for 20 years and tells every other company to use this as a baseline otherwise get fined, I don't know how they would be able to enforce this.
I just think this is a big gray area and it would be hard to make this cut and clear. The only thing I think they could do for now is to have companies provide repair manuals and provide parts for a set amount of years after product launch, and repairs should be able to be made by customers themselves without needing to go through 1st party verification like Apple does with their phones.
Think you answered your own question there.
Mandated warranty periods. Pretty straight forward.
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Because we have a market economy. We can switch to planning, but that has its own disadvantages
Planned economy is not when there are regulations.
They should not. It’s market manipulation that we don’t have enough apartments.
"Manipulation" implies intent to achieve that state of affairs, and, no, that wasn't the goal of capital. Capital wanted ROI and looked for it in the wrong place.
With different zoning laws or more plots to built, there would be enough apartments.
In the US, yes. Europe by and large doesn't have such inane laws.
In which way? Why are those apartments not on the open market?
The syndicate -- did you read the link I gave you -- specifically works towards removing properties from the market, get all control into the hands of the tenants. Rents pay for the mortgage, that's it, no middleman, and the legal structure ensures that tenants can't band up and cash out like many a cooperative did.
That’s also why people shouldn’t be forced to be rational. The Sovjet Union was forcing people to be rational but people weren’t happy.
The fuck has the USSR to do with anything we're talking about. Also why are you calling tankies rational go to lemmygrad if you like them so much.
Planned economy is not when there are regulations
For me, the context was surplus to drive prices down. If you want to avoid surplus, you need other ways to regulate prices. Do you just want to fix prices for many things and otherwise let companies figure out how to supply the things for the given price?
“Manipulation” implies intent to achieve that state of affairs, and, no, that wasn’t the goal of capital. Capital wanted ROI and looked for it in the wrong place.
It is a political decision to keep the housing market stable. If the market goes down, many people lose their retirement provisions.
There are not enough plots, in Germany the rent is capped but the building requirements don't allow to reduce costs. Change those, and capital will build more housing. But capital doesn't matter. Those syndicates could build all housing, but they can't, because the housing market is politically manipulated.
In the US, yes. Europe by and large doesn’t have such inane laws.
There are enough laws in Germany that you cannot have a prefabricated house and build it everywhere without ajustments. Low tech high risers should bring rent down to a fraction but they are not allowed to be built.
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Back to the good old days when products were of higher quality. What a concept.
We have a Bosch washing machine we bought second hand 15 years ago for £50. It's basic, not digital, but has all the functions we need. We've never had a problem with it. It will break one day but I'm hoping it lasts a lot longer still.
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Never buy cheap tires - they are your only contact with the road. You can have the best car in the world, and shitty tires will make it worthless.
There are videos on the subject, making the point of buying good tires, cause they will save your life.
Same goes for wipers.
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Planned economy is not when there are regulations
For me, the context was surplus to drive prices down. If you want to avoid surplus, you need other ways to regulate prices. Do you just want to fix prices for many things and otherwise let companies figure out how to supply the things for the given price?
“Manipulation” implies intent to achieve that state of affairs, and, no, that wasn’t the goal of capital. Capital wanted ROI and looked for it in the wrong place.
It is a political decision to keep the housing market stable. If the market goes down, many people lose their retirement provisions.
There are not enough plots, in Germany the rent is capped but the building requirements don't allow to reduce costs. Change those, and capital will build more housing. But capital doesn't matter. Those syndicates could build all housing, but they can't, because the housing market is politically manipulated.
In the US, yes. Europe by and large doesn’t have such inane laws.
There are enough laws in Germany that you cannot have a prefabricated house and build it everywhere without ajustments. Low tech high risers should bring rent down to a fraction but they are not allowed to be built.
For me, the context was surplus to drive prices down.
Then you want to regulate the market such that there's a surplus of ordinary apartments and a relative lack of luxury ones. People are free to furnish theirs more luxuriously, that's not an imposition, but not having affordable ones would be. No need to get into fixing absolute prices all you need to control for is relative availability.
The market is not a good in itself. It is a mechanism to attain good things. To do that, in the real world, to actually approach the free market ideal (perfect resource allocation by perfectly rational actors acting on perfect information) you have to enact regulations because, as we already discussed, both rich and poor folks alike are idiots: The rich invest in stuff based on hype, creating real estate bubbles, the poor tolerate 120 buck fridges even though they want 150 buck fridges.
If the market goes down, many people lose their retirement provisions.
Again we're in /c/europe, here, not in the US. Also why should irrational investors deserve protection. "Socialism for the rich but not the poor"?
There are not enough plots, in Germany the rent is capped but the building requirements don’t allow to reduce costs.
Rent increases are capped. Not rents for new construction. Rents that the welfare system will pay are capped, not the ones on the open market.
...and yes there are plots. There's actually a shortage of construction capacity, not in the least because politics just won't commit to firm targets, something that construction companies can work with, make sure they don't overshoot when growing. They'd rather not go bankrupt so they only increase capacity conservatively.
Change those, and capital will build more housing.
There is no shortage of capital flowing into the market, there has never been a shortage during all of this. The issue that noone wants to, or can, pay the rents that those people demand. We've been over this. The same investment at a more moderate ROI expectation would've built everything we need multiple times over.
There are enough laws in Germany that you cannot have a prefabricated house and build it everywhere without ajustments.
Oh sure some municipalities will tell you that your roof needs to be at a certain angle. That's peanuts compared to the overall costs and believe it or not, there's generally a reason for those requirements -- it may seem cultural but if you e.g. get a lot of snow you either want all snow to come down as fast as possible, or not at all. People weren't stupid 500 years ago when everyone started to angle their roofs like that.
Low tech high risers should bring rent down to a fraction but they are not allowed to be built.
They're absolutely allowed to be built, you can still build the same kind of housing stock as was done after the war during reconstruction.
Lastly, beware of looking at all this in isolation: Getting rid of regulations that ensure that the city looks nice, is liveable, is walkable, that housing is healthy to live in, the whole shebang, would have untold macroeconomic costs down the line.
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Think you answered your own question there.
Mandated warranty periods. Pretty straight forward.
And they currently engineer product to have things fail right after their warranty expires, so, that’s not really a concern, since we’re already living with the that.
Which is exactly my point of why mandated warranty period does not really fix the core of the problem, which is intentionally making products not last. It's just a bandaid solution (Yes I know a solution is still better than nothing, and may be the first step to address this issue). What I want to see is prolonging the life of a product by letting consumers freely fix their own stuff (parts, schematics, etc.) without the manufacturer locking things down, even after the warranty expires.
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Neff, but it's exactly the same hardware as Bosch and Siemens (BSH).
We sold the apartment with the 20 year old devices still working perfectly.
Cool! Bosch is going to be my next set of appliances after I sell my current place, and my new place needs new ones.
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And they currently engineer product to have things fail right after their warranty expires, so, that’s not really a concern, since we’re already living with the that.
Which is exactly my point of why mandated warranty period does not really fix the core of the problem, which is intentionally making products not last. It's just a bandaid solution (Yes I know a solution is still better than nothing, and may be the first step to address this issue). What I want to see is prolonging the life of a product by letting consumers freely fix their own stuff (parts, schematics, etc.) without the manufacturer locking things down, even after the warranty expires.
Let’s not let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Mandated warranty minimums and right to repair regulations are not mutually exclusive. We can do both, even if we don’t do them at the same time.
