Quebec moves to ban planned obsolescence, ensure products can be repaired

You need the carrot and the stick. It’s one thing to weaken things like you’re talking about (a good thing I’m on board with) … But you’re not going to incentivise them to move in the direction without the enforcement “stick”. Shorter protections and weaker IP laws will incentivise cheaper nastier even less repairable products as the companies attempt to exploit every last niche left to hang on to exploitative tactics, because they are exploitative they are more profitable, so we need to have a way to make them less profitable outside the normal producer/consumer relationship which lacks a good forcing function for this. “The Consumer won’t choose to be exploited in exchange for <insert consumer justification here: cheapest, brand tie in, etc>” isn’t a reliable way to ensure the consumer’s are not exploited…

People are inherently imperfect beings with many flaws and fears that can be exploited by malicious actors in order to profit from them. While I do like capitalism, it gets me shiny new things after all, it’s inherently a system of transactional utilitarian ethics which without “unnatural laws” (one’s we make and choose to opt into as a society) will inevitably slide towards large scale exploitation the way gravity slowly turns dust into stars and planets. It is a slippery slope, from “you can charge more money for your speciality skills” to “you are a replaceable cog doing unskilled labour and in order to even get this job you must accept payment half in company scrip which can only be spent at the company store” to “wage slavery” … we want the shiny toys and the simple sort of transactional utilitarian ethics (utilitarian ethics obviously isn’t always simple) that our meat brains on average are good at dealing with in day to day life, we don’t want the slavery.