Why not?
> I'd rather see legislation that ensures when a piece of tech reaches the end of its useful lifetime it can be submitted back to the manufacturer and properly recycled at no cost to the user.
It is always and exclusively at the cost of the user?
So, you can still make it mandatory where you don't need to make things bigger?
I'd love more things to be fixable but this kind of micro-management sounds terrifying.
You propose some new design which is more compact / easier to manufacture / more reliable because it has fewer connectors, and then you take it to the ministry for approval. How do they know whether your changes are justified? Maybe they sketch an easier-to-disassemble variant which is no bigger than yours, and reject your design, but they don't understand the why it will cost you twice as much to assemble that design (in your factory, with your workforce) or why you rejected that kind of connector (your experience with the supplier, or your vibration tests). Can you prove why you made these decisions? Call expert witnesses? This just seems like an impossible minefield to me.
I think better to tilt the balance in other ways, like pushing longer guarantees (regardless of whether the best solution is an unbreakable one-piece object, or a repairable one) and forcing recycling (so that the sticker price includes more of the total lifecycle cost).
Well, I dunno, but that's a question with every law, and thus not exactly an argument by itself?
> I'd love more things to be fixable but this kind of micro-management sounds terrifying.
But why would there need to be micro-management?
We're not talking about the need to have cops decide whether 71MPH was too fast or not. We're talking about whether your customers would hypothetically have been as satisfied with an iphone that was 1mm thicker, because if they would, there's a law which says you have to make it repairable. Bring your expert witnesses and panel surveys to convince the jury.
You shouldn't have to deal with an extra mm and all the inconvenience that comes along with it just to support my right to replace the battery.
> Why not?
Because,
1) I personally don't care about this. 2) More important than 1, I don't think the law/government has any business deciding this. The market can decide (spoiler: it already has).
In a very oblique manner it did. Industrialization (which was very much a product of free markets) of the Northern States made the economics of slavery untenable in the North. Once people were not as blinded by profits, they could actually see that slavery was a moral evil. In the South, the economics were very different and therefore a lot of rationalizations were formed as to why slavery was not that evil.
In addition, Industrialization enabled larger population growth in the North as well as larger production. This is what gave the Union the advantage in manpower and material that allowed the North to win the Civil War.
Even if say free market solved the issue, is it reasonable to wait centuries for the free markets to solve things then dare to vote some laws ?
It's worth knowing that the south was once considerably richer than the north, but industrialisation changed things in the 19th C, by the end of which the north was vastly richer (per capita), richer than anywhere had ever been before. In this sense free capitalism did vastly outcompete an unfree economy.
It was actually quite the opposite. Pre-industrialization, serfdom and slavery were basically equivalent. You hand a local lord and if you worked for him you got food and shelter. Your alternative was to run off into the wilderness and fend for yourself, which frequently meant starving or freezing to death or being mauled by a bear. Unsurprisingly not many people chose that.
Then factories show up and suddenly your alternative is to run off and go work in the factory. Naturally many people started preferring to do that, which turned the plantations upside down because their economic system was based on the workers not having anywhere else to go.
Their response was brutal. Chains to keep slaves from running away, hunting runaway slaves with dogs, savage beatings, etc. None of that stuff was really commonplace before industrialization. The response to industrialization was what made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom.
But that response was as futile as it was brutish. The factories made slavery uneconomical. You can't defeat supply and demand with chains and whips. All they do is cause the slaves to want to run away more.
The factories destroyed slavery directly, by out-competing it. It's questionable whether the war was even net positive -- that was a whole lot of blood spilled over an economic system that couldn't have sustained itself much longer in any event.
In the South, people's livelihood depending on slavery. Because of that, their minds did all sorts of rationalizations as to why slavery was not that bad.
>The response to industrialization was what made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom.
The other thing that made 19th century slavery so much worse than traditional serfdom was the racial aspect. If a serf had some skill and went to a town and somehow became a craftsman, people could not look at the him and know he had once been a serf. Because of the racial aspect, ex-slaves could not escape people immediately knowing that they had been slaves.
Why?
> The market can decide
Does that mean that it should decide?
> (spoiler: it already has).
Has it? How did you determine that?
Garbage is a problematic externality because if you try to charge true cost for it, people throw their garbage in the street or the ocean instead of paying. So we generally have subsidized trash pickup, and then "the market" literally overproduces garbage due to the subsidy.
One solution to that is to require the devices to pay the recycling cost up front, but everybody hates that because it makes the device more expensive, moreso than making it repairable would.
The other is to require it to be modular/repairable so that when one component fails or becomes obsolete it can be replaced or upgraded, which extends the life of the other components and reduces the total number of devices that have to be produced and ultimately end up in a landfill.
This may actually increase the original purchase price of the device by quite a bit, because the manufacturer will end up selling fewer units (that's the whole idea) but still have to recover the same fixed costs. But then the user doesn't have to replace their device as often, so the net cost should be slightly lower (the gain being the actual reduction in waste).