California Right to Repair Bill Dies in Senate Committee
calpirg.org
calpirg.org
It's sad because folks will be less and less interested in fixing their things or simply opening their devices to understand how they work. It'll be general knowledge that it's "dangerous" to attempt a repair, and they're impossible to fix anyway.
Attempting a repair is one of those sparks that nurture curiosity. It's the same spark that ultimately gave us Apple and many other great businesses. Why are we indirectly undermining ingenuity and inventiveness? Is it a false perception? Or maybe Hanlon's razor?
On the other side, China has relatively affordable access to parts (low-level components included), schematics, extensive tooling and a growing hacker/maker culture.
Sometimes, I feel we (occidentals) are going into reverse.
those days are long gone. you might be able to disassemble a turntable to figure out how it works, but disassembling a phone isn't going to tell you much when all the magic is in the silicon. all you get from disassembling it is a circuit board with random bumps.
And in my country you have these little shops as well, where you pay a premium, but you dont have to buy a new phone.
So, unless you really want to fix something very integrated, i am rather positive about the situation.
And from my own history, mainboard was never really a problem, it was always something attached or plugged or solded onto it.
Is it?
It seems cheaper in developed countries because the cost of labour is high, the cost of goods is low, and serviceability is rarely a consideration. Yet those factors have more to do with this point in time than the distinction of being a developed economy. If you went back in time 20 years: a cell phone with a dead battery would be user serviceable, regardless of that user's skill level; a computer with a dead hard drive would be user serviceable, to anyone who could handle a screwdriver. Fixing the socket on most devices would require a learned skill, soldering, but would be accessible to most people. The reason why I selected those examples is because they are easily diagnosed by the end user and don't require much technical sophistication to fix, so the cost of labour is cut out.
These days, something as trivial as replacing a battery or hard drive requires a great deal more skill. Heck, in many cases it takes a great deal more skill to non-destructively open the enclosure simply to peek inside. None of that has anything to do with developed or developing economies. It has to do with how products are designed.
(And if you were to go back yet another 20 years, the contrast is even more stark.)
We had a washing machine die on us after 5 yers. After searching for repair manuals, we got the probable cause, and the part number of the controller board to replace (or test the chips and replace and resolder the parts that died, which goes to your point on skills). Except the price of the controller board was 90% of a new washing machine. And we’d still be taking the risk to either botch the repair, or have something else fail after we fix the controller.
Same way, looking at the pixel 4a replacement screens, they retail around 170$, shipment not included, and you can buy a decent second hand pixel 4a at a bit less than 200$. The price difference doesn’t make it worth it to try to repair the screen, except to spare reinstall time perhaps.
I expect most of our appliances to have that core part that just costs almost as much as the whole device to repair, though from a material mass/role perspective it doesn’t make any sense.
I am looking at the relative cost of those modules and comparing them to the relative cost of components on my bike. Cycling is different since there is a culture of repair, may it be DIY work or through independent repair shops, and I would be hard pressed to name any component that would amount to 20% of the market value of my bike (which is about 30 years old at this point). Even then it may not be necessary to replace an entire component since it is often possible to rebuild what is already there. That component that costs 20% the market value of my bike may actually cost a few dollars to rebuild, assuming that I had the cost and skill.
In cycling, the approach you take often comes down to how much skill you have, how much time you have, and whether you are willing to pay for someone else to do the work for you. While electronics may be different due to integration and miniaturization, it is really difficult to see how a washing machine is all that different from a bike. Yes, there is going to be some degree of integration to reduce costs. Yes, there are some electronic and electromechanical parts in there. Yet what a washing machine does today is not all that different from what one did 50 years ago. The big difference is how everything is controlled, and that should be cheaper than it was 50 years ago.
I had the same experience the other way round, where upgrading the derailleur and the shifting gear costed more that the initial price of my bike.
I would compare that to current gaming laptops where the CPU and really the GPU make for the bulk of the price. It seems to be common across enough industries that I don’t think it’s just makers fighting consumers. Making repairs technically more difficult feels more inline with maker’s malice.
As you mention, you can assemble a bike with all parts at roughly the same costs without that much of a trade-off. The example I was giving is more of the exception of putting a very performant/specific core part into a meh setup.
As I see it, in electronic devices it’s more common to have a very basic structure with super cheap commodity components, except that one corepiece that pushes the whole appliance’s capabilities far ahead. For my washing machine, the metal frame, belts and motors are cheap run of the mill parts that might not have changed for decades, and only the controller is custom designed to adapt to modern use. Or looking at rice cookers, a tremendous portion of the value would go into the pan and the controller, and the rest of the housing and heating structure is pure commodity. As a caveat, that might not be the case for high end appliances, where perhaps every component could be high quality, but I’m too cheap to confirm that.
Has any engineer come forward to say management told them to make specific changes to cause a thing to become obsolete in some period of time? I am not aware of any.
Rather what looks like planned obsolescence can generally be explained by other factors — not the least of which might just be the fickleness of consumers.
the most charitable explanation is cost reduction. but $0.05 savings on a $500 retail item isn't helping anyone if it means my mixer lasts 1 year instead of 20 like the ones they used to make.
Yeah, we say "it's just $0.05, I'll gladly pay that for higher quality!". But somewhere, a new CxO is saying "we have saved $10,000,000 on production this year". And it's a big number, indeed.
But what about the users? Well, fuck the users. They will buy overpriced parts from the company or a new device from the company or the few competitors who do the same thing. They could be in cahoots, but it's more than likely they all decided saving tens/hundreds of millions a year is worth far more than a small number of disappointed buyers.
From an engineering perspective, some designs simply don't make any sense if not for planned obsolescence: on a quite famous printer brand, the printer stops working after X pages printed [1]. You can fix that with soldering and chip reprogramming, but it may or may not be trivial. In the end, warranty is really short and is void the minute you open the product to see its guts, so it's not exactly for safety reasons.
Some people blame planned obsolescence on the consumer, but in fact that's just blame shifting. The truth is rent-seeking, at the expense of the environment.
[1]: https://www.ft.com/content/4a965dc0-f27c-11db-a454-000b5df10...
That's not legal (in the US). https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/04/11/601582169...
Any current "cartel" would no doubt also have a Wikipedia page write-up. Maybe I should have said I am unaware of any current planned-obsolescence directive.
I was, to be sure, putting some of the blame on the consumer, there are other reasons though — like the always moving technology wavefront that makes composite-video "obsolete", SCSI "obsolete", etc.
Your printer example is the first I had heard about a printer designed to stop after 'n' prints. That sounds ripe for a class-action lawsuit.
AFAIK the printer manufacturer hasn't been affected by any class-action lawsuit (yet) regarding its design.
Is it really cheaper to buy a new house than to replace a fuse? Really cheaper to buy a new car than to replace a tyre? Really cheaper to buy a new OS than to install some updates?
For the rest, I was mostly talking about electronic hardware: replacing broken screens, wanting more Processor/RAM but buying a new motherboard is needed, etc.
Don't get me wrong some Billionaires are legitimately moving the ball forward, or at least trying to, but for every Elon Musk (despite the man's many flaws he's at least snapped the space launch and EV markets out of decades of stagnation) there's a few Sacklers who seemingly exist solely to abuse the populace for their own benefit, and are only shaped by how much effective resistance they are met with, resistance they will obsessively attempt to overcome/circumvent until they die.
People at that level tend to care about themselves and only about themselves, or at least that's what many of their actions would suggest. They're predators, and even if the wolf can't control what it is you generally want to keep it away from the flock.
That said I have nothing actionable to offer. Short of mass collective action it's hard to see how we deal with them, and mass collective action requires lots of mass collective pain for enough people to be motivated in a single direction. I'd imagine most of the billionaires are well aware of this and are betting that the breaking point will occur after their death, or they arrogantly think that they can be insulated from it somehow. Seems they get away with blatant malfeasance time and again.
Frankly I'm surprised the Sacklers haven't been shot at yet. If I was a broke West Virginian who's family had been torn apart by opioids and I had nothing to lose, I'd be saving my pennies for a bus ticket and take my hunting rifle to their next public appearance.
Does that excuse sexual harassment, union-busting, defamation, stock manipulation, and other crimes? Of course not, and he should be punished for all of the above. But the scale of his positive works far outsizes the scale of his negative works IMO, at least so far.
Capitalism and Democracy are fundamentally based on (imperfectly) burning assholes for fuel. They're fundamentally cynical systems, that's part of why they're so stable. We give the assholes a relatively safe outlet for their mental conditions while in exchange demanding they provide some good or service for the rest of us. So don't be surprised when the people who do the most good also have some skeletons in their closets, that's how the system works. The people without skeletons tend to be naturally filtered out of the power hierarchy by refusing to compromise their principles past a certain point.
Put more bluntly: The obsessive, selfish, narcissistic careerist who puts 80 hours a week into his career, has no real friends and neglects his family and sexually harasses potential partners will generally rise higher in terms of power/wealth than the honest, stable, principled family man who intentionally clocks out after 40 hours so he has time to spend with his kids when he gets home. There are lucky exceptions of course, heirs to fortunes and so on (where likely their mother/father/grandparent was the maladjusted careerist). But the percentages speak for themselves IMO.
What does that mean? Are you able to provide examples of “countries of lazy[1] people” and how one reaches that conclusion? Which metrics do you use to define who is hard-working, and how do you confidently apply the categorisation to a whole country?
[1]: Or however you want to define the antithesis of “hard-working”.
Power and money are frequent bedfellows, but power trumps money every single time.
Conclusion:
"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."
> strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy
What do those other studies say? Why not quote them?
>Power and money are frequent bedfellows, but power trumps money every single time.
Power and money are bedfellows? They are synonyms. Power trumps money only because money was involved with the power.
Are you a billionaire?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-locking-down-iphone-batt...
I appreciate the sentiment, but repairing an iPhone only gives you a very superficial understanding of how it works. It's about as technical as setting up a computer with a discrete monitor, webcam, UPS, case, speakers, etc.
But as we went from farm to factory and our wages got us a higher standard of living, we preferred to buy new things rather than keep old things working.
If China follows the path of the U.S., Japan, Korea, they too will grow a middle class that no longer want to work for low wages in factories and will look for cheaper labor elsewhere in the world to meet the needs of their growing consumption.
Just my armchair observations.
[1] Here's an interview I did recently:
https://www.thisishcd.com/episode/andy-farnell-perils-of-e-w...
If you want to sell this bill, show voters how it will impact their wallets.
I hear you, but the sad thing is the financial impact isn't really that compelling. That's because waste is effectively subsidised. Carriers will be happy to push a new handset on customers every 18 months and just absorb that in the contract fees. Repair is expensive (time consuming) in comparison. And of course they have stacked the services and tariffs to make owning older gear less attractive.
> The average person has spent about zero seconds in their life thinking about e-waste.
I'm about to find our a lot more about that as some research students are looking at e-waste solutions and their first stage is interviewing people on their gadget recycling habits. I reckon the average person does think about it, but has no information or guidance at present. Hopefully we can change that.
Yet, now, we have Farmework laptop and OEM parts for Apple products. We're better in those ways, but worse in others, for sure.
I only hope soon these concepts catch on. The image of small car repair shops working on teslas both scares and inspires me. Or the future of a handyman with a laptop to debug a washing machine both infurates me and gives me hope.
Having had repairs made in Beijing in hole in the wall E shops, no thank you. You have to watch the repairs being done like a hawk, or they will “fix” what wasn’t broken with some flaky parts they want to get rid of in addition to making your repair. The Apple Store is much more reliable in comparison, while being price competitive.
A lack of "right to repair" seems to kill some aspect of both if not one of these.
If manufacturers were required by law to take care of e-waste they generate, to recycle everything they produce, rather to shifting that onto the consumer, perhaps they'd start building things to last in the first place.
Also increase minimum warranty, 5 years for solid state devices?
Do the lobbyists have some incredibly legitimate insider information they share with the senators? Do they just throw cash/donations at them?
> Products should be designed to have their lifespan extended by regular maintenance and repair.
> Design: Integrate Design for Repair principles into eco-design product design practices.
And I have seen Right to Repair efforts that demanded repairable devices, even if that meant more bulk or more cost, or other tradeoffs.
Framework and similar efforts have demonstrated that it's possible to build a repairable device that people actually like, without compromising too much on other factors. But until those substantial engineering efforts had been put in, this seemed like a fundamental tradeoff between two sets of somewhat-incompatible properties consumers may want, and should be able to choose between. (It's still a tradeoff insofar as devices providing repairability don't provide all the features available from other devices.)
It looks like the reason for this mismatch in opinions is because repair.org is not associated with Rossmann. To me, their existence is going to hurt the chances of right to repair, because people will point to their goals as a reason to not consider the part/version of right to repair that should be much less controversial (in a relative sense. any regulations are controversial just due to being regulations)
It’s not surprising it’s a dead bill. That leaves a nice opportunity for TSMC to capture a bunch of Apple’s margin without having had to do any of the chip R&D.
In any case this is a theoretical point, it's usually some stupid little chip on the motherboard that got wet and rusty, not the CPU. Or the screen broke. Or the battery is too old.
Thee party controls 31 of the 40 seats in the senate, and 60 of the 80 seats in the lower house.
They have had a majority since 1996.
Same one party rule situation exists in some very "red" states of course.
> The United States is also a one-party state but, with typical American extravagance, they have two of them.
Even more of a stark difference once you look at differences in state laws.
Unlike the rest of the country, California has "jungle primaries". So, you can wind up in the election with "Democrat vs Democrat". This prevents the "Barely win the primary and cruise to a safe general election."
In addition, California can put something like this up as a proposition and override the legislature.
However, both of these situations are likely to wind up with a LOT of entrenched money being thrown around in opposition to "right to repair". So, the supporters need to get their ducks in a row and demonstrate real support in the electorate for this.
> Same one party rule situation exists in some very "red" states of course.
I'm speaking in ignorance right now, but I am unaware of any red states that implement either jungle primaries or election propositions.
This is why you'd want liquid democracy, arbitrary right of recall or something along those lines.
On the other hand, the regular people complain about the topic in pubs and coffee shops and online and at the dinner table, and might fill out a petition or a pre-made letter. They might even send a personalized email or physical letter (too often poorly worded and badly formatted with no evidentiary backing), or leave voice mails with a staffer. They won't do this very often, but feel that they have strength in numbers. Spoiler: receiving the same misspelled email from 5000 people doesn't make the legislator (or their staff) think "oh wow a lot of people are really upset by this", it just to spam/trash cans.
Financial contribution ("bribes") and fancy dinners or gifts are usually the boogeyman when it comes to blaming lobbyists, but those are tangential and not as common as most people think. The biggest factor for a successful lobbyist is the research, presentation, and persistence.
My experience is quite different and comes from doing grass roots lobbying at the state and Federal level. Grass-roots lobbying is just where regular citizens go do the lobbying instead of paid professionals. If you ever get a chance to get involved in this kind of lobbying, it will change how you think about government, and you'll be pleasantly surprised to see you can actually make a difference. You'll also find out that being a legislator at any level is an almost impossible job.
Lobbyists (yes, they are individuals, but usually have an organization and staff behind them) are paid to show up and "help" legislators. This ranges from providing information all the way up to writing bills. Often bills are initially written by lobbyists (the joke is that most laws are written by staff interns and lobbyists). The reason lobbyists are effective is simple: legislators all the way up to the US Senate don't have time to do the work needed to write laws, debate them, pass them, campaign, go to parades and graduations and communicate with constituents... so they work with lobbyists, who are well paid to have time. Yes, professional lobbyists always have an ulterior motive, and always have time, because their paycheck depends on it.
“Bipartisan support“ is, since we are well out of the pre-1990s realignment period, mostly a sign of low political salience, an issue that doesn't have much relevance to voting behavior to most of the public. Breadth (%) of support or opposition is far less important than depth (impact on voting, volunteering, and donating behavior), and this is an issue where the depth of support in the general public is near 0, where the depth of opposition from entrenched industry interests is high.
My naive take on this would be to have poll questions like:
> Are you in favor of consumers' right to repair? ...How strong is your position? (1–5)
Of course this is vulnerable to strategic answering, where people just slam on ‘5’ for each question. Like how star ratings are inflated on Amazon.
My next strategy would be pairwise contests. So:
> Alice supports right-to-repair (RTR) and raising property taxes. Bob is opposed to RTR and wants to lower property taxes. Who would you vote for?
> Carol supports RTR and applying the death penalty to a wider range of felonies. David opposes RTR and wants to eliminate capital punishment altogether. Who would you vote for?
But too much of that and you'd start to lose people. How many questions can you pose before you're only getting answers from serial poll-takers?
See what Alaska did recently for an example of how to fix this
Personally, I see political parties as potentially important to a well-functioning democracy. The main problem I think is lack of competition. I would love to see at least a third party, maybe half a dozen or more, emerge in the United States. Obviously people have been trying to make that happen for decades, without success. I wonder what type of solutions there are to increase the number of viable parties? The one that seems most plausible to me is ranked choice voting, for one of the many minor variations of the idea. Are there other things?
No, it's not. California has eliminated primaries in the usual sense (what is called a “primary”, outside of Presidential nominations, in California is the first round of a two-round majority-runoff general election where you aren't allowed to win outright on the first ballot even with a clear majority), and yet here we are talking about the effect in California, so partisan primaries can not be the issue. We’ve ruled that out by not having them.
The issue is FPTP single-member district legislative elections, which supports partisan duopoly and narrows the meaningful space of political debate toward a single high-salience axis and issues where splits align well with that axis, marginalizing all other issues. This has been somewhat extensively studied in comparative study of modern representative democratic systems, see, e.g., Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy.
This is much less true than it seems superficially; its true that the state-level government is dominated by Democrats (including many offices that are nominally nonpartisan), but important local government offices, particularly Sheriffs–which are also nominally nonpartisan–are dominated by Republicans. This was particularly significant during the height of the COVID pandemic, because enforcement of public health orders is, under the State Constitution and laws, almost entirely entrusted to county Sheriffs, and every single county Sheriff in the State publicly announced one form or another of non-enforcement.
Which is not what I said, Sheriffs were an example, not an exhaustive list of exceptions.
> 95% percent of the government is not law enforcement.
That’s strange, because law enforcement, corrections, and criminal legal system is about 10% of California’s budget.
> And all the prosecutors are dems
No, they aren’t. Like all local offices, it’s a formally nonpartisan office, but its fairly common for Republicans or (especially in Dem-leaning areas), “independents” who were Republicans before running for the office and whose stances on policy issues are indistinguishable from Republicans to be DA’s, though DA’s are less consistently hard-right than Sheriffs.
Name any three blue counties with Republican county sheriffs.
That's part of why it's been so common to pass as a state-level initiative. If you actually get it to a popular vote, it'll pass because people are at least lightly in favor, but legislatures are slow to pass it themselves because it has little impact on their re-election chances.
While it is technically still federally prohibited, and there is some danger of reach-back prosecutions if policy changes, since 2014 state law has effectively controlled because of the enforcement restrictions in the Rohrbacher-Farr Amendment, which has been continuously renewed as part of funding bills, and is a substantive federal action.
Corporate executives frequently go in to politics, and when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs at the very corporations they benefited while in office.
They don't have to be outright bribed while in office (though it's not unknown for that to happen), but they know they'll be handsomely rewarded once they leave.
That's not to mention them or their family members investing in companies they know will benefit from their actions while in office.
> then why are so few people interested in becoming politicians?
Obviously because they can't afford to because they actually have to work.
Uh... what? There's a shortage of politicians nowhere, lol.
The US system steers naturally towards two parties that both advance corporate interests, and that's what's happening now.
Becoming a politician is a bit like becoming a musician: Spend the best years of your life 'putting your time in' with a 98% chance you'll never make it big. Only the 2% that made it big get offered those $500k/year sinecures.
If you're already in the powerful 2% you've probably already compromised on your principles many times to get there, so the $500k/year for compromising them a little more is practically free money.
If you're entering politics, though? As you've only got a 2% chance of making the $500k, the expected value is only $10k. Not much of a motivation.
I really should've saved that story because I can't find it anywhere now.
Basically, on the streets, most people supported him. In reality, people weren't enough. If they even mattered. Turned out you had to align yourself with one of the four major parties or you had zero chance at gaining traction in any county that mattered. Funnily enough, the "easy" counties would be even harder - low population, low income, lack of education, low voter turnout, always voting for populists/authoritarians.
The major parties have the power and the money and there was no way they'd ever let a newcomer just barge in without being vetted first. The majority of new parties were absorbed into the big ones.
This is a joke, I don't know what's to be done about it and I'm sure that's the case in other countries, too. Only good thing is politicians stay out of private business as they're starting to realize the richer the private population becomes, the richer they will be.
And even then, they fail at making a better environment for small businesses, instead choosing to focus on big companies, especially foreign ones. Let them come, buy up everything for cheap and use the population as cheap labor forever. Why would the government care?
https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ftc-report-shows-growing-i...
Politician support corporations, not the people. Wake the F up.
Sponsors have lobbyist support and the bills themselves may be written by them, for them, with any public benefit a side effect. As long as it “sounds good” other lawmakers feel forced to go along with.
I do some grass roots lobbying in Indiana. When we can't get a bill to the floor, it usually comes down to this:
1. The public might support the bill, but voters aren't willing to vote across the aisle over the issue behind the bill. So, the politician can kill the bill without fear.
2. There's a technical problem with the bill that would make it a bad law. Sometimes, this is sabotage, but most often, it is discovered late in the process and the bill dies in committee until next session.
3. The law would change the staus quo in some way that is harmful to the close supporters of legislators. This is less about money, and more about relationships.
The answer to all of the above is simple: get more public support, and even work to unseat legislators that are opposed to your issue. State legislators usually don't have a strong grip on their seats (some do), so they can be unseated, often in primary elections.
The outcome of that is that most bills are written by lobbyists and most state reps vote how the lobbyists tell them to, because they lobbyists are the ones making the deals with the other lobbyists, instead of the long time representatives being in leadership.
Each system has its pros and cons, but one of the main cons of term limits is that lobbyists are in control.
In my personal opinion the "security lock" language of this bill is dangerously vague, and the benefits it offers in terms of third-party repair are worth almost nothing to me, so I opposed the bill.
This is the result of the deliberate way in which clever malicious spindoctors manipulated political debate over the years in such a way so that what once was a pondered opinion became later akin to a religious affiliation. The bottom line is that an opinion can be changed while a religious belief cannot; it's the system's way to ensure that once a voter is captured it stays loyal forever.
Well, what does that tell you? Majority public opinion does not matter. Money does.
The Appropriations committee (AKA Ways and Means in the US House) is where lobbyists spend their money. Anything that costs money has to go through this, and everything costs money.
The argument that this bill cost money was based on the potential impact on the courts as legal actions would be files to enforce the new warranty rights.
Rather than trying to influence every potentially concerned member of legislature, better to spend 100x on the people who control the purse.
> “Sadly, the powerful tech manufacturers won out over the everyday Californians and small businesses that would benefit from Right to Repair..."
Can someone elaborate specifically on how something like this failed with, apparently, so much support?
Easier to be disingenious than "make it my issue."
- There are references to specific dollar amounts in the bill with no provision for automatic adjustment due to inflation.
- There is the following passage.
“(2) For products with a wholesale price to the retailer of not less than fifty dollars ($50) and not more than ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents ($99.99), that contains an electronic security lock or other security-related function, the manufacturer shall also make available to owners of the product, service and repair facilities, and service dealers, on fair and reasonable terms, any documentation, tools, software and parts needed to disable the lock or function, and to reset the lock or function when disabled, during the course of the inspection, diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of a product for at least three years after the date a product model or type was manufactured, regardless of whether the three-year period exceeds the warranty period for the product.”
That sure seems like a requirement for a secure enclave backdoor.
See ya later, legislator!!
Apple uses hardware pairing. Without such a tool you couldn't even swap two genuine parts with eachother.
> the manufacturer shall also make available [...] for at least three years after the date a product model or type was manufactured
How much you want to bet that was put in to allow manufacturers to supply software tools that the manufacturer can either remote-disable, or have time-bombs built in, or both?
Watch a cell manufacturer shrug and come out with the "YZ 5 Pro", manufacture it for a year, and then come out with the YZ 5 Pro A" the next year, etc.
Seems like this got poison-pilled just like a lot of gun legislation which is written to focus on things easily changed so they're not effective. "Guns over 14 inches with a vented barrel grip installed during manufacture" write the lobbyists, and then they send a memo to gun manufacturers to plan on adjusting their tooling to make 13.95 inch barrels, or leave off the barrel grip, easily installed by dealers or buyers.)
This means that a majority of senators voted to oppose the bill, (after it had been approved by the house). Is that correct?
Are there common websites where you can see exactly how individual senators vote on specific issues? (in the UK we have publicwhip.org.uk where you can search anything that you care about and see if your mp voted in a way you agree with).
What method do americans tend to use to check that their politicians are voting in their interest?
Sadly it's usually directly correlated with how much money you give them.
Or use the proposition system (public vote), but that system is just as captured, IMO.
No, the bill did not get to a vote by the full CA senate. Senate committees deal with the bill before that and this one did not get through that hurdle on the way to becoming law.
It's one of the many reasons why I don't see changes in the American political system happening without real rebellion type actions but the pain isn't felt enough yet to make thinking like that completely palatable.
And not to mention the voting body of the united states is completely polarized and divided.
Or being replaced by an isomorphic sock puppet.
Parties have changed in this country's history before without rebellion.
It will happen again. I imagine soon (25 years or less), even.
I also go back and forth on the electoral college in the case of the president but I’m not quite at the point where I want it to disappear without having an alternative.
From the article, where it is linked "SB 983", clicking that, and clicking the tab that says "Votes" will show who voted yay and nay for this bill[1]. There are many sites, yes, but you can also just get this directly from state legislatures.
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xht...
https://clerk.house.gov/Votes https://www.senate.gov/legislative/votes_new.htm
It shows the history of the bill including votes. Each state does this differently, as well as the federal government. As for what happened to this bill, it never made it to a full senate vote, it died in a sub-committee, essentially.
Do you know if that information will be public record in any way? If not, this seems like an awful lot of power in very few, non-accountable hands...
In practice I suspect very few people care all that much. Some do, of course, but for most it won't be top of their priority list.
This is the real challenge of democracy. We think of it in terms of yeah no votes, but the real work is done by the people choosing from millions of options to put the final up-down choice in front of you. Nobody has yet found a good way to do collaboration on that scale.
That's just what I meant. Can you know which senator voted how within that committee? Otherwise it'd be easy for them to say "well I voted for it of course!"
The Rules Committees from both chambers have required Roll Call votes, primarily so CADEM can punish its members who go off message.
We need a third party to disrupt the two party oligopoly that has tricked most Americans into thinking we have a choice. We currently have no choice because both parties don't give a shit about citizens, just how can they perpetuate the ruling class to continue to feed off us.
I know at least Subaru and Kia now don't sell with certain features in MA as a result.
So MA passed a second right to repair bill specifying telematics is included, and slapped back harder by speccing that they had to establish various systems to grant third parties access, etc.
A couple of automakers responded by petulantly disabling telematics functions for any vehicles sold in MA.
Of note: both bills were general ballot measures, because the Right To Repair folks knew that they'd never get a bill like it through the MA legislature due to lobbyists and legislative corruption (aided by much of the MA legislature's activities not being public record; the executive branch has also declared itself exempt from public record/meeting laws, as has the judiciary.)
The other thing of note: automakers ran a massive advertising campaign including videos strongly implying that women would get stalked and sexually assaulted/murdered, presumably by third parties given access to their vehicle's telematics. They basically called independent mechanics rapists and murderers.
Worse, they claimed that a sexual assault victim's NPO (RAINN I think? I forget) was against the bill. Turns out it was a bald-faced lie and the org wasted no time reaching out to press to inform them of that.
It really tells you how much was at stake here profits-wise, and how important right to repair is, that automakers were willing to shout "YOU'LL BE RAPED BY YOUR MECHANIC!" and lie so blatantly about NPOs supporting them
American politics primarily works based off of what people see on TV or read in the news and what a politician says and what they do are entirely disconnected. So these politicians publically say whatever is the popular openion which in this case is that right to repair is good but then they placate to companies who don't want right to repair to succeed.
This allows them to have their cake and eat it too. They get to say they tried to push for it but there wasn't support even when you can search and find that they in fact voted against it and are even often on the payroll of many of these companies in a round about way.
How is this possible? Well you don't have too fool every American just most Americans and the overwhelming majority of Americans don't care about any issues that do not effect abortion, gun control, taxation, or jobs. This doesn't directly effect those things in a significant for Californians so it becomes quick forgotten in a month when some other hot topic becomes the news of the week.
If a conservative politician is pro abortion and pro gun control they can do anything else they want legislatively and get the votes they need for reelection so they pass laws on the side in which they are sure to get financial kick backs for. It's basically a mr.smith goes to Washington but nobody ever has to deal with the consequences of corruption they just get upset when they are caught.
Rinse and repeat.
- Ayes (in favor), - Noes (against), - and No Vote Recorded (NVR; the equivalent of abstaining).
Looks like the [most recent committee vote referred in the article for SB 8](https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billVotesClient.xht...) is not online but will likely be by mid week.
It's free to subscribe. But - IMO - it is likely that the OpenStates.org site monetizes the subscriber data somehow.
As far as CA-specific 'follow what a piece of legislation is doing' there's this site from the California state government: https://www.assembly.ca.gov/informationtohelpyoufollowthepro...
How did you conclude this?
I have not seen an example proposal of language for such a bill that didn't invite many, many questions about how it would apply to certain manufacturers or products, and raise all sorts of issues about how it would be implemented, both now and in the future.
Remember that legislation, if it is to be sensible, is necessarily a snapshot in time of some set of principles to govern the future. If those principles are sound, they can be stated in some finite and non-specialist text that an agency can go implement (which is their role to do the technical implementation of).
If the legislation is 1000+ pages, something is being legislated at the wrong level, and something has been designed with too many exceptions, special cases, and opportunities for something to slip through a loophole. Or if it's just one page, how will someone figure out from that ambiguity whether something applies to their product?
Some noteworthy fraction of people are in support (although... a certain minority if asked say they are in support of it, while many others have no idea what the issue is), but when it comes to their purchasing behavior it doesn't seem so.
If you were to state the principles by which such legislation should be designed, what would they be? And if you then look at that language objectively, how many times would you have to ask "but what about...<xyz> issue/consideration"? If you, or the industry, have to ask that enough of a proposed bill, it will not work. You can say, well we'll have an agency responsible for working out these details. Ok, well that's how California has 200+ agencies, all paid government employees.
Not everything is corruption and "influence of big money". Sometimes it is, yes. But sometimes it's that it can't be made a sensible law (for the moment).
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I quote some notable passages from the bill that are examples of the above (https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...):
Every manufacturer of an electronic or appliance product with a wholesale price to the retailer of not less than fifty dollars ($50) and not more than ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents ($99.99), shall make available to owners of the product, service and repair facilities, and service dealers, sufficient service literature, at no charge, and functional parts and tools, inclusive of any updates, on fair and reasonable terms, to effect the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of a product for at least three years after the date a product model or type was manufactured, regardless of whether the three-year period exceeds the warranty period for the product.
To be made available at no $ charge? Why? What other publication or service do we mandate people do for no compensation?
This section does not require a manufacturer to divulge a trade secret, except as may be necessary to provide service literature, documentation, tools, software, and parts on fair and reasonable terms.
What constitutes a trade secret? Is it simply up to the manufacturer to declare that something is a trade secret and thus cannot be revealed?
This section shall not be construed to require the distribution of a product’s source code.
What is that defined as? What if the ability to repair is tied very closely to something about the source code which should not be revealed for security considerations?
How about if the parts cost such a price as to make repair uneconomical? How about if the repair requires specialized equipment and training that the general public cannot receive feasibly?
The list of questions goes on and on.
> “Trade secret” means information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program, device, method, technique, or process, that:
> (1) Derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to the public or to other persons who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use; and
> (2) Is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy
Unless this bill contains its own definition, "trade secret" in this bill will be the same as that.
Does lack of "right to repair" essentially block someone from repairing his/her device or is it simply lack of legislation in regard to this matter?
So California state law remains the same as it has been. No changes (other than less hope for improvement via California state law in the near future).
Broken laptop? How California’s right-to-repair movement is trying to make it easier to fix your electronics
Senator Anthony J. Portantino (Chair)
Senator Patricia C. Bates (Vice Chair)
Senator Steven Bradford
Senator Brian W. Jones
Senator Sydney Kamlager
Senator John Laird
Senator Bob Wieckowski"Laird served as a member of the State Integrated Waste Management Board from 2008 to 2009 and taught state environmental policy at University of California Santa Cruz."
Now, where did you find it, so I can look there next time?