No mention of what makes video game consoles so miraculously different than a video camera, television, etc.
It seems like a good step for consumer rights aside from that.
1. Lawn, garden, golf course, landscaping, or grounds maintenance,
2. Planting, cultivating, irrigating, harvesting, and producing agricultural or forestry products,
3. Raising, feeding, or tending to, or harvesting products from, livestock and any other activity in connection with those activities,
4. Industrial, construction, maintenance, mining, or utility activities or applications, including, but not limited to, material handling equipment,
although that exclusion does not apply to "self-propelled vehicles designed primarily for the transportation of persons or property on a street or highway" even if they are used for one of the above things.
There is also an exclusion for alarm systems, which are "an assembly of equipment and devices arranged to detect a hazard or signal the presence of an off-normal situation".
FFS, Deere's egregious behavior is a large part of the push for RTR legislation.
Disappointing, if not unsurprising.
Walk through your local Lowe's and home Depot and take a close look at their lawn equipment. It's all junk that will be thrown away in a decade. Plastic bushings, plastic spindles, flimsy exhaust mounts, etc. If you seriously take the time to look closely, you can see where you they are engineered to fail.
Even contractor brands like Stihl are starting to do this stuff. Most of their trimmers now do not have a grease fill port on the head. To make matters worse, replacing a head costs almost as much as an entire trimmer...
Require Deere to make RTR easily available, let small upstarts focus on the product
I don't see why we can't find both to be scum.
A public official taking a contribution in return for carving out an exception in a law is quite an easy one.
If you want to know why american society is prone to this sort of privitized corruption: this is it. Business is seen as a pure mechanism, but politics is a place of hyper-individualized duty.
In europe, i think the reverse is more often true. Businesses are seen in personalized ways, as having explicit social duties compromised by greed; and politics is a pure mechanism.
The only difference is businesses get money for doing something someone else wants, and they need to keep doing that. Politicians take your money and can't even do the one thing they should be doing: be impartial and resistant to even more free money.
That's my point. We agree.
> businesses get money for doing something someone else wants > Politicians take your money and can't even do the one thing they should be doing
^ Here is my issue. This is a cognitive-dissonance. You can equally say: businesses failing their social duty aren't giving society what it wants; rather, they are sating the greed of their customers, shareholders and execs.
Whereas politicians are balancing competing power interests into a compromise piece of legislation with a chance of being passed, and thereby improving the situation; if, very imperfectly.
You see, under these reframings it is the biz failing, not the polician.
to be clear, I do not agree with either framing. My point is only how quickly americans adopt this "if someone's buying, it's excusable" morality as applied to business. As-if politics were a place of heroic powerful individuals, and business merely a mechanism.
The reality is both is true of both. Business can be held to much higher standards; and politicans can be more subtly understood.
I'm not sure why you're talking about Americans, but my point is that the main thing a business does is create employment and useful goods or services.
> As-if politics were a place of heroic powerful individuals, and business merely a mechanism.
No, creating employment and useful goods or services is extremely important and heroic. It's just different to being the person who takes money from others on the sole basis that he/she will be impartial and not take bribes.
As a foreigner in America, I think America is culturally particularly business oriented and holds favorable views on business activities (until they get too large and obscure, then they become led by lizards or some such), and in particular I think the average person here is more prone to think that it's ok for a business or person to seek to maximize their position in the market by almost any legal means. As in, if the player is good at the game, you can't blame the player (up to a point).
D'you not see this sort of double-think taking place?
Exactly the same naive gloss can be given of policitians: their compromises are part of the democratic process by which competing power interests are balanced without oppression. There are no Company Stores, or Company Scrips because corporate power is given "an inch" but no more. And there are FDAs and the like because Society gets its two inches. And so on.
Politicans are creatures of a mechanism as much as businesses.
This "reduce one to mere mechanism, but not the other" is pure naive ideology.
Business does not "offer better prices" etc. through this mechanism. It offers prices every bit as flawed as politics offers policies.
I don't think that's a virtue of businesses. It's their primary function, and their primary good: producing useful stuff or services for their customers, and employment to their employees. The more useful their product/service, the more money they get, and the better their customers' and employees' lives will be. If they campaign to make that easier by making regulation less onerous, that's in pursuit of those primary goals.
That's different to a government job (e.g. in regulation-setting/enforcing) where their sole job is to set and maintain good standards in their area. They provide no value other than that, and if they aren't even doing that, then they're worse than useless. They're useless and they cost money we aren't allowed to refuse to pay.
This claim is a specific ideological interpretation of business, call it "consumer capitalism".
You can reject than and believe say, "social capitalism" or "democratic capitalism". Where the purpose of business is to, on net, improve society -- and is given a licence to operate only insofar as, on net, it does so.
> their sole job is to set and maintain good standards in their area
Again, call this "noble bureaucracy". You could instead believe, "resolution bureaucracy" where the job of bureaucracy is to prevent conflict, not to resolve to an ideal.
You could do, but then you have to invent a currency to award to people who you think improve society from your perspective. Or you could just use the existing one.
Businesses routinely do not produce net benefits; routinely do not have efficient prices; routinely benefit their customers at the expense of society; and routinely distribute money away from net goods towards net bads. Indeed it is routine that an efficient market operating at marginal profits is a catastrophe for society: consider social media, climate change, and so on.
This isnt a problem I need to solve for the observation to be true.
The issue I have here is the black/white false perceptions of politics/business.
I don't think this is automatically an ideology. Money is a universal intermediary for exchange of goods and services - "reward" is a bit of a juvenile word for it, but it is obviously an exchange of value.
> Indeed it is routine that an efficient market operating at marginal profits is a catastrophe for society: consider social media, climate change, and so on.
But this is just seeing the bad side, and also assuming that markets somehow are worse than alternatives. Almost everything produced, e.g. the thousands of specialist components that go into your laptop or phone, and them not costing a giant amount of money or advancement, is based on efficient markets. And big government solutions such as communist Russia is much more of a catastrophe, as people tend to be slaughtered or starve to death. Markets, while not perfect, are clearly better than them, even in the worst cases.
If you want a morality police to decide who gets to decide how moral each business is, you have to decide how corruptable that incredibly powerful entity would be, compared to the decentralised market action of customers voluntarily paying for products and services.
They have access to money they take forever, so they need to be held to a higher standard. Thus in general, the market should handle money and not power (as it does, mostly[0]), and the government should handle power.
[0] an example of this probably being a bad idea is private prisons
The only solution is to change the rules.
Really? Please give an example. I have been hearing this for at least the last 15 years and have yet to find someone who can offer an example of anything that was "engineered to fail" when challenged. Not saying it doesn't exist, but I'd just like to see a single example of it happening.
Sacrificial parts that are designed to fail in order to mitigate a more serious failure do not count for the purposes of this request -- that's just Good Engineering Practice.
If you use that metric, it's insanely easy to quantify. Just look at the average refrigerator today, compared to one from the 50s-70s. It's a fraction of the cost, but it's built from cheaper/less reliable parts in a repair-unfriendly (but quick to produce) manner. The idea being that you'll buy a new fridge every 8-12 years and recycle (ideally) the old one, versus spending the cost of a car on one and keeping it for a generation or two. This is what planned obsolescence means, usually.
The only nefariously intended to "break" items that I can think of are electronic devices that are unrootable and rely on third-party networked services.
I'm not being difficult. When I read "engineered to fail" that's not the impression I get from the statement.
Yes, a change like this would mean that, in the short term, there'd suddenly be no "consumer" version of many products. But that'd only be the short term. In the medium term, I'd expect heavy pressure for innovation in materials science, with all these companies that were fine with plastics before, suddenly investing money and labor into operationalization of e.g. scaling carbon-fiber production.
I generally call these products "<thing> shaped objects", e.g. a helmet shaped object that has all the outward appearance of an actual helmet, but does little to protect the wearer in the event of a crash. "DOT standards!" you might object, but DOT is generally known to be the worst standard in the world, often holding the industry back instead of moving it forward. If the department of transportation is unable to properly regulate safety equipment like helmets, I'm not sure I expect better results from a government committee intended to regulate the quality of nearly everything.
This, of course, assumes that one can not only define "quality", but determine a threshold on a spectrum that delineates legality. Or maybe we'll just accept Tsars that "know it when they see it."
Or let me put it this way: the commercial/industrial versions of these products do some things differently. Why do they do those things? To increase "quality." If the industry didn't know what its "quality" metric was, then it would be impossible for them to make the commercial/industrial product "better" for long-term commercial/industrial use than the consumer one.
In any industry where the commercial/industrial version of a product — one that lasts decades in heavy use — is already an existence proof for the possibility of "quality" in the product category, you can simply regulate that the consumer version must also be made to last at least N years of regular consumer-duty use. Doesn't matter how they accomplish that. Maybe they can't accomplish that, with positive margins, at a price point anyone is willing to buy, at first. Oh well. Keep trying.
Compare/contrast: FDA stage-3 drug trials — the trial phase that tests drug efficacy. It's up to the drug's manufacturer to declare to the FDA what effect the drug is supposed to have — it's the very same effect the company is applying to the FDA to be able to market the drug as having. An efficacy trial, is simply the FDA demanding, from a drug's manufacturer, proof positive of its own planned marketing claims about the drug. That efficacy proof uses metrics specific to the pathology that the drug treats — and likely metrics invented by the drug manufacturer themselves, while researching the problem. But crucially, the manufacturer, before even starting the trial, has to convince the FDA that these metrics are sensible ones to measure efficacy by; and also has to work with the FDA to reach a consensus on what would constitute a satisfactory level of efficacy for their drug (i.e. what metrics thresholds are meant by a marketing claim like "relieves headaches.")
Would I enjoy high quality items? As someone shopping for a new toaster after ours simply stopped working (and after allowing my son to disassemble it both impressed and appalled at its design), in a word, yes! I suspect, however, that attempting to centrally plan quality would merely achieve a lower standard of living for most people. Telling the average person "you're not allowed to buy that because we deemed it to not be high enough quality (trust us)" and following up with "Oh well" seems well meaning but, respectfully, out of touch.
My feeling is different, and comes from an intuition about capitalism:
• Companies will make money the easiest way that they can, with regard for any kind of unenforced "code of ethics" being a path-dependent rarity, rather than something common.
• But companies do have the internal talent to solve problems in more challenging, constrained, and ultimately useful/ethical ways, if they're simply prevented (through regulation) from choosing the "easy way out."
If you allow a game studio to put slot machines in front of children, then that's what they're going to do to maximize ROI. If you don't permit them to do that, then the market demand for "games" is still going to drive them — or at least, one of their competitors — to ship some actual video games that are fun-qua-fun rather than being addictive and money-sucking.
If you allow a drug manufacturer to make an "anti-colic" baby formula that contains heroin, then that's what they're going to do. (And did! The early 1900s were wild!) If you prevent them from doing that, then the demand that still exists is going to force them [or one of their competitors] to put some research into how to actually address colic without just effectively putting the kids in a coma. And someone's going to figure it out.
If you let companies sell asbestos insulation, then that'd be what they'd do — it's the cheapest insulation to manufacture, and so it'd also be the cheapest insulation to buy if it were on the market. If you prevent them from doing that, then they'll have to get off their asses and innovate up a cheaper form of non-asbestosis-causing insulation.
I don't see why "you can't market this as a 'lawnmower' if it shakes itself apart after eight months; try again" is all that different from "you can't market this as 'building insulation' if it destroys your lungs; try again." In both cases, I'd expect the continued market demand + supply-side talent-base to come together to solve the problem a better way.
I agree with you. I think people mean something else entirely, colloquially. Which is why I distinguished for clarity.
I think the people who came up with the concept of "planned obsolescence" meant something entirely different to the zeitgeist meaning. That is, building something cheap with the intention of consistent replacements versus building something expensive with support/operational costs ongoing. One guarantees you return to them, the other you're just as likely to seek services elsewhere.
The zeitgeist took that and morphed it into "they actively engineer/design parts that will fail after two years".
The commercial line still uses metal gears. The maintenance on it is to check grease/lubricant after a certain amount of use.
(We used the stand mixer daily. Our home edition lasted 6-9 months before needing a gear change. The commercial edition has been going strong for a few years now.)
I’m sure there’s a reason why they moved to a fail-safe gear for consumer use — but as a consumer — I have no clue what that reason is. (We do ask a lot of our mixer tho!)
Based on what I see when I open up the unit, the reason they don't have an all metal gear train is that doing that would impose the need for higher strength on everything in the transmission and the chassis up to the motor. That would increase the cost to the point where it would cut into sales.
The larger consumer mixers (6qt?) are built more heavy duty since I know that they can take a larger vertical load, but I don't know if they also have the nylon gear.
As someone who just infrequently uses their gifted kitchen aid mixer let me offer a new perspective.
I’d be ill-inclined to use it if I had to oil my kitchen equipment. That’s the reality. I use it once a month, and i would be turned off if I had to add lubricant. I’m an engineer, I get why it’s good, I get the purpose, but it’s just one more chore I wouldn’t do.
Except when that part breaks and the company does not make replacements available and the product was not meant to be taken apart to replace it. Mechanical fuses only work when you can easily buy and replace the mechanical fuse and ALSO fix whatever caused the failure in the first place. Otherwise it's just a weak link.
That designed-in weak link that you can't fix could be the difference between you being pissed off because your machine doesn't work anymore and you losing a hand.
Another is drills with cheap housings or gears. The drill will happily rip a glove off and de-skin you. But it'll still wear out faster than if it had metal gears or a tougher housing.
Usually safety is an expense. Extra sensors, very carefully engineered weak links that suddenly break under load.
Another counter example to your point is my automated litter box. It has a pinch sensor for safety reasons, which is made of two metal contacts. This sensor is directly above the pee/poop so it corrodes and I have to take out like 20 screws in a machine filled with poop to fix it, like every year. They could just have added a plastic cover and one screw to protect the contacts, but no.
Probably the only thing I can think of to support your argument is cars. The front end of a car is plastic and metal designed to absorb energy in an impact. But household stuff...
There was nothing particularly complex about that part, they could have easily used steel brackets. I can't help but feel like it was designed for a specific lifespan.
I gave you one already. Newer stihl trimmers removed the grease plug. It's impossible to lubricate the trimmer head and they predictably fail after so may hours. A replacement head costs nearly as much as a new trimmer. The head is the most common part that fails on trimmers.
California farmers have more influence in Sacramento than John Deere. Either they didn’t engage in this fight. Or there is a reason they would want this exempted.
Well, I'm not in CA, but I do know a ton of farmers and not a single one is happy with the current situation.
Take the money out of politics. Pass strict campaign finance reform laws, kill super PACs, and put severe limitations on what qualifies as "lobbying", and a lot of these problems will go away.
Tim Cook: And one more thing... iPhone 16 can control your lawn mower!
Don't iPhones have that earthquake detection as well so they might as well be an alarm device.
Hell, the last paragraph on the alarm bits basically opens the door so damn wide, this moght as well have not even been drafted.
In practice, though, I feel like the exemptions here will be interpreted as part of the "spirit of the bill" rather than examples of realpolitik expediency...
* Sony produces semi-conductors and movies (Sony Pictures, Columbia, Tristar)
* Microsoft is big in enterprise cloud (ie: government)
* the impact of people being forced to upgrade their phone because they can't fix it, is probably larger than people being forced to upgrade their game system because they can't fix it
Note: I 100% agree with you. I see video games as the same as all other consumer electronics which were included, but I can see if Sony/Microsoft came complaining, it's a good bargaining chip/favor for other initiatives.
Alternatively, the iPhone and AppleTV, and all their computers will now be redefined as gaming consoles (which honestly, what’s the technical difference)
According to the Tetris movie, it's that they don't have a keyboard and they are expected to stay in one spot.
For generations now, video game consoles have had very aggressive cryptographic pairing of parts, done in the name of securing the hardware against hacking by the console owner. This is done to prevent mods to enable cheating and piracy. Given that consoles are often sold at a loss with profits recouped on game sales, there's a justification for this.
Providing replacement parts for game consoles would also require tools to re-pair the replacement parts. If these tools need to be provided to independent repair shops, there's approximately a 100 % chance of them getting leaked and destroying the security of the console.
I'm not going to say that this is a good or a bad thing. I'm just pointing out that there's a real reason for lawmakers to treat game consoles different than phones or computers, and that it isn't necessarily a sign of corruption.
There's no reason you shouldn't be able to e.g. buy replacement analog stick parts.
I've wondered about this before: how is this not anti-conpetitive pricing? Is it okay because Sony/MS don't raise prices?
Specifically
> Pricing below a competitor's costs occurs in many competitive markets and generally does not violate the antitrust laws. Sometimes the low-pricing firm is simply more efficient. Pricing below your own costs is also not a violation of the law unless it is part of a strategy to eliminate competitors, and when that strategy has a dangerous probability of creating a monopoly for the discounting firm so that it can raise prices far into the future and recoup its losses.
So
> Is it okay because Sony/MS don't raise prices?
Yes exactly this.
See also:
Printers sold below cost with expensive ink refills.
E-readers, often
Razors for shaving - the base or chassis or whatever you call it is often sold below cost.
Their consoles may be sold at a loss at launch, but I don't know of any console hardware that wasn't net profitable over it's lifetime with the possible exception of the XBox with the ring-of-death problem.
The "security" of the console against "unauthorized" software is arguably against the public interest. Is it really to the customer's benefit to exclude software providers from the market? Haven't we been round this with app store discourse?
> consoles are often sold at a loss with profits recouped on game sales
This used to be true, but is it still true?
See?
But you can in fact turn it around, because both phones and games consoles are in fact general purpose computers that are able to execute any program, before the arbitrary limitations are imposed on them by the manufacturers.
If the immobilizer on your car fails, it will brick your car too. The solution isn't to prohibit immobilizers and shrug our shoulders at car thieves, it is to require manufacturers to provide parts. Which we have long done for cars in the US.
TL;DR: Don't prohibits locks that protect consumers just because the lock could need maintenance. Require the manufacturer to provide parts for the lock.
- genuinely third party software, e.g. the short lived Playstation Linux => "good"
- modified software (usually "bad" but we can find non-bad cases)
- piracy. "Private servers" probably count under this
- preservation (unfortunately indistinguishable from piracy, but covers what happens when required online services shut down)
More popular games have shifted towards anti-cheat systems that run at ring zero and prevent you from playing the game unless it is happy with everything running on your system.
They could have extended that to include anti-piracy or anti-cheat or cryptographic pairing, but they didn't. They created a specific carve out for video game consoles and not for those other things you mentioned.
When the government uses words generically to define its compelling interest to regulate, they are usually sincere. When the government uses words to protect an industry explicitly, they usually have been bought.
and perhaps the FTC should be smashing down that practice as anticompetitive?
The DMCA exception for consoles is the same thing. The government is just taking these companies word for it, and harming everyone else. If Playstation/Xbox/Nintendo can’t survive without these handouts from the government, then why should they? It’s not like game consoles are a necessity. The free market is what should decide whether a business model succeeds or not.
And regarding privacy, that’s bs. If consoles somehow become overrun with piracy, then publishers can just move their games to other platforms. PC is much easier to pirate on, is in general used by more tech savvy people, and it doesn’t have a rampant piracy problem. Steam wouldn’t be as successful as it is otherwise.
That said, the same argument could be made for mobile phones as well, so it's clearly spurious.
The value difference between 10 year old console (PS4!) and new one, can be smaller than 10 year old LCD vs new OLED.
I disagree with your point, but I'll reply to this one:
> That argument made sense 10 years ago, but since then we've seen a lot of slowdown in computers, consoles and mobile phone progress
That argument doesn't made even less sense 10 years ago in my opinion. When things are moving fastest (eg, most profitable) is when parts must be made available for consumers to repair themselves. When things are moving slower, then the IP/schematics should absolutely be provided if nobody is willing to make the parts.
These kinds of arguments are hollow. Especially in gaming, if you make a good console with good games, people will want to hang on to them and play them for literally decades. But even ignoring that specific aspect of gaming culture, it really should not be up to some top-down, self-serving analysis about what most consumers should expect. Otherwise it's just a race to making the least consumer-friendly product so you can make legal/political arguments about consumers obviously want to buy expensive garbage which they expect to break beyond repair in a few years at best.
Section J9
Some products are significantly cheaper to replace than repair, even if they cost more than $99.
Knowing that if I buy a technology product that is more than $100, it will either work for 5 years (or whatever) or be repairable for some fraction of the original cost, would make me satisfied.
Yes, we can regulate the price, but if only the original vendor can perform repairs we might also need to regulate quality and timeliness (similar to how lemon laws for cars often specificy a maximum number of repair attempts, or hours away from the owner for repairs, before the vehicle must be refunded).
I think it’s an okay approach, but I also think it requires a heavier hand from the government, and from ongoing oversight, than letting the market figure out reasonable rates for a repair.
Basing them on the already-existing protections around the auto industry is probably a decent place to start.
tim sweeny does not care about unlocking your xbox. at no point was that a possible outcome or a consideration in his thoughts, no matter how much the android guys waved the flags.
it's about unreal and unity legislating higher gross margins, and about breaking the apple restrictions on facebook's permission requests, and about safari resistance against google chrome browser monoculture. and y'all lost.
is that crass? I guess, but it doesn't matter, because we have to live with the google browser monoculture anyway. I had some people recently tell me "EU will just regulate it if it becomes a problem!". how long did it take to become a problem? didn't google move pretty much right into the enhanced ad profile thing?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36823031
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33821820
it is what it is, the laws are passed, but holy shit the arguments have been so transparently bad-faith, or incredibly blind.
I’m just so tired of the fanboy wars and the “wow did you actually read someone advocating resale of stolen/mugged parts to bring prices down”. Yes, on HN no less. The android fans are shameless. I’m so tired of the “wow iPhone fans are brainless” (earlier this week). Etc.
It’s become so casually normalized for android fanboys to be toxic and gloat about anyone who calls it out. It’s so fucking weird. When did this happen. 2012? 2014?
And no, there is no iPhone contingent going around calling android people brainless blue bubble sheeple or saying that their purchase melted their brains etc. it’s crazy. I am so tired of the way the android contingent casually misbehaves, everything is brainless this and brain-rotted that and sheeple this.
>there is no iPhone contingent going around calling android people brainless blue bubble sheeple
On HN? Maybe not. Out in real life? Yes, there absolutely is. I recently got an iPhone, and the number of people who said something along the lines of "OMG you finally got an iPhone, yay!" was fucking obnoxious.
Don't get me wrong, any progress is good, but this is, at best, a very tiny baby step.
It's bribery. They were paid a Bribe. Use the word.
And solve some of the major garbage issues of our times.
Of course the billwriters couldn’t push for a later timeframe for those “exceptions” rather than an outright pass.