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Comment by _adamb | Hacker News Reader

Pretty much anything engineered (buildings, bridges, electronics, houses, ...) have a death date. Any civil engineering projects I've been a part of have always had a quantified project lifetime. We _could_ build things that lasted hundreds of years, but the cost would be astronomically high and demand would change in that timeline.

Opinion: People seem outraged at this with electronics but not the other products. This confuses me greatly.

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I played my SNES for maybe 25 years or whatever. I see no reason why such longevity should be an exception.

Anyway, I also complain about planned obsolescence in other areas: TVs, fridges, washers, etc. A friend of mine uses 50+ year old fridges and cars. They still run fine, though the cars are a death trap.

I guess what I’m saying is, there’s a gradient or pendulum, and we’ve swung too far towards the wasteful side of things in my opinion.

I'd be pretty unhappy if an engineer built a bridge that could have lasted 100 years if they hadn't cheaped out and saved $10 by using plastic instead of metal for some component, halving its life expectancy. Or if they put components next to each other which really shouldn't be, unnecessarily increasing failure rates. Or if they built a bridge where you couldn't replace any component without blowing part of it up.

It's rarely the engineer deciding this.

It is.. Civil engineers have the opportunity to design for quality in their specs and drawings. If they don't it means the client is getting a raw deal or the client optioned for a cheaper engineering solution.

> or the client optioned for a cheaper engineering solution.

Haha, sure. Let me rephrase: an engineer with a job.

We _could_ build things that lasted hundreds of years, but the cost would be astronomically high and demand would change in that timeline.

...and yet we did, and still use a lot of that construction today.

I've always wondered about skyscrapers; How long will they last, and what will happen with them?

Informative video - "How To Dispose of a Skyscraper":

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b-H7E-KQgHQ (6.5 min.)

According to the video, they're built to last for 50 - 100 years.

It's simply because the dates are not disclosed to the buyers. On the contrary, for a bridge, the lifetime is very clear to everyone involved in the construction.

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