Proposed EU rules would require clothes to last longer and be easier to repair

That sounds fair, until it's not. It's perfectly normal that a washer as a whole fails after 15 years: the thing is the belt is the only part that should fail and it should be easy to replace. Like with IT parts, manufacturers go to great lengths to ensure parts are incompatible with one another and hard to replace.

Most electro-mechanic devices i've seen fail in the past two/three decades were due to electronics: heater thermostat (not the IoT kind, the dumb kind), washing machine program selector (also dumb kind), etc. Likewise in auto industry it was reported that most vehicles being recalled in the past years in USA were due to electronics failing, not mechanics.

I personally find that outrageous and bet everyone would be better off if consumer products had standard bodies mandating use of specific interchangeable parts (like we have for electric/USB sockets or lightbulbs), and if it was illegal to sell hard-to-repair products (no glue breaking the device when you tear it apart).

Mandating a >20y warranty and duty of available spare parts is in my view the path of least effort for regulators: it will significantly raise the overall price of pushing out new incompatible models. Manufacturers would only release a device once every decade once they have achieved some significant efficiency/usability gains, instead of releasing parts-incompatible new designs for bad products every month just to profit. If you add in some standards regulations dictating interoperable formats for specific parts, that would start to look like an eco-friendly user-benefiting regulation.

Of course amateur industry like Pine64 needs to be exempt from such regulations to allow for innovation, but customer devices are a currently a nightmare destroying our planets and ruining our lives and wallets. I applaud Quebec for taking those steps, but they simply won't cut it.

PS: How is IoT even legal? In 99% of cases, it introduces unnecessary complexity and fragility, and in most cases has glaring security concerns.

That might be true in terms of CO2 and energy efficiency, although the only sources i've found on the topic gave very opposite results. But no study that i know of accounts for pollution (waste water and polluted surroundings of extraction sites, refinement sites, assembly sites, and "recycling" sites) so i'm tempted to argue that anything we don't manufacture is better for the environment than better efficiency.

> The lack of appliances that last this long is itself a result of better production: if you have some large number of components, each one must have a 50 year expected lifetime if you want a chance for the machine to work for even a decade.

I strongly disagree with this interpretation. First, because industry routinely employs bad parts and bad design on purpose (planned obsolescence, eg. televisions placing heat-sensitive capacitors near heat sources). But also because an individual part failing is in my view OK as long as this part is standard and easy to source.

There are some environmental/logistic concerns if you want to repair old devices given the gazillion incompatible spare parts they each use. But if they all used standard parts, we could and should have repair shops run as a free public service to avoid throwing stuff away. This in itself would do more for the environment than any "green new deal" would ever do.

I recently bought a new washing machine. It is twice as efficient as the old one that broke down irreparably after 12 years.

I chose it by summing machines' cost, and the projected cost of each one's electricity needs going 10 years in the future, if prices go up by 10% per year, and picking the cheapest total one.

The cost of the machine itself ended up being 1149 RON, and the cost of the electricity would be 938 RON, which is almost the cost of the machine entirely.

So it is indeed important to consider efficiency and updating an old machine, and compare with what you have.

As long as the improvement in power efficiency keeps up, it will not make sense to keep an appliance for 50 years. But once that improvement stops, so does the reason for replacing them.

I am very skeptical: Washing machine has two functions: Spinning and heating water. heating is 99% efficient, and electric motors are like 95% efficient - where is the improvement coming from? Is is smart features? What do they do, instead of spinning left it spins right?

What about an oven or a kettle, there is no possible improvement, and I bet the shoddily made ones are actualyl less efficient and worse insulated.

I see no reason to replace it, new stuff doesn't look better, doesn't work better and doesn't last more (probably the opposite). Tons of things are like that. Yes new fridge will save a bit more electricity (compared to already savvy one from 15 years ago) but the amount of energy and material that go into creating new one, and the amount of waste it produces when disposed of, are non-trivial and not handled well even in richest western societies.

I don't agree with 20 years warranty, many things like batteries and capacitors just don't last that long. But some form of longer warranty would definitely motivate manufacturers to focus more on quality.

This is the first time that I've seen the term "MBA" being verbed (at least with that meaning) and yet I understand exactly what you mean and I fully agree with you. Congratulations if you coined this usage, it's a great way of expressing something for which I was missing a word.

I don’t know when I learned it, but I’ve looked it up a few times to be sure I’m not day dreaming; after the WW2, declassified propaganda research became the basis for ad and marketing programs in university.

It’s always been about establishing a mood and inserting a meme to go with it. Maybe that’s “gotten worse” as we whittle stats looking for growth. I think people are just aware of what’s always been true.

Somewhere along the way it became blind allegiance to a certain kind of agency, like a religion. We’re all busy FOMOing, being ourselves, like the Sprite commercials told us, we miss that we’re just shuffling along the same old routine as dad and grandpa, feeling too unique to be required to grow a potato or sew a pillow.

Also worth noting: hardware manufacturers have found a better option to suppress the second hand market. Hardware locking (iCloud/Knox lock) is terribly efficient at this, essentially turning perfectly good devices into bricks. It's even "better" because they can advertise it as a security feature for gullible users who don't realize Apple/Samsung still has the master key and there's an entire corrupt grey market of company workers getting money under the table to defeat the lock in almost every phone store across the planet...

There are no items where it’s 5 times as much for the same item with the same speed to your door.

I buy things in aliexpress all the time. You’re paying in unavailability. Much of the time orders are actually batched

It's also possible that the type of damage to your gear (peeling laminate) was not repairable, but I would have at least expected a replacement.

And that's just Levi's... I don't have the time or the energy to bother with the kind of denim fanaticism that blew up over the last decade or so.

Before they IPO'd, my trick to long-lasting Levi's was to wait until whatever seasonal collection they had with 'toughness' in mind went on sale or blowout, because they used to experiment more with fabrics. I've got a pair of 501s made with Dyneema, the stuff they make ropes for ships out of. The Skateboard line was marketed as being able to take more abuse than normal, and so far has lived up to that. For better or for worse, they've simplified their product line a lot since being publicly traded.

And if you want to get real weird, the other thing that I found helps is... that's right, not washing my jeans every time I wear them. There are exceptions, but I work from home, I'm generally not doing much to stink up my jeans. I have a rolling rack that I keep 10 pairs of jeans on, and I cycle through them, so that at the very most, any pair gets worn once every week and a half.

Anyway... I haven't had to buy new jeans in a long time, and I switched over to all-Levi's years ago - but It took a little trial and error to get a lay of the land.

These businesses have extremely high markups because they spend lots of money on marketing or marketing-adjacent things, plain and simple. It’s typically quite easy to see - around the same time that they’ll shift from made in the USA with a lifetime warranty they’ll start paying “influencers”, hiring marketers, sending things to blogs, maintaining a beefed-up social media presence, increasing ad spend etc. They simultaneously cut material costs by outsourcing and raise marketing spend. Their profit margin may not even be changed - but with the higher growth rates that the marketing spend brings the business is more appealing.

There’s no reason you can’t get quality goods at reasonable prices. LL Bean, although not cheap, was reasonably priced before they slashed quality a few years ago. Darn Tough is not cheap but the prices aren’t crazy and they’re made in the USA with a lifetime guarantee. American Apparel was 100% made in the USA until some years back and was solid quality. Los Angeles Apparel is 100% MiUSA and solid quality, prices are fairly reasonable. Clothing just doesn’t cost that much to make; MiUSA and good quality is possible, it just needs to make a comeback.

Yeah sure, you can get insurance in other countries, but there WILL ALWAYS BE fine print, some random procedure and you're not covered, or out of pocket expense, etc.

With free healthcare, there's no fine print, everything from a allergic reaction, to neurosurgery the cost will always be 0 no matter what.