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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

It also looks like it doesn't apply to all-terrain vehicles, or to machinery, equipment, implements, or attachments used for or in connection with:

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".

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AKA the John Deere exception.

FFS, Deere's egregious behavior is a large part of the push for RTR legislation.

Disappointing, if not unsurprising.

And as planned, were sitting here blaming Deere and not the politicians who allow this to happen. Deere is simply looking out for its best interests. The real scum are these so called "representatives" who place corporate interests over small businesses and citizens.

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...

And every time the citizenry tries to use regulation to reign in a megacorp it ends up creating more burden for that company's competition. megacorps legal team can easily squeeze into the loop holes, but mom and pops (and entrepreneurs) get ground up like cheap meat.

Then exceptions (if any exist) should be based on company revenue (to include any and all holding companies), not what the tool or device does.

Require Deere to make RTR easily available, let small upstarts focus on the product

So I definitely prefer this, and this is used to be a sort of unspoken rule in Canadian law. The law just had this bias built into for the "little guy" in the fight. Seems to have changed under the current Führer, at least from a non-resident's perspective. IMO that's the right bias to have to counter the matthew effect in Capitalism.

>The real scum are these so called "representatives" who place corporate interests over small businesses and citizens.

I don't see why we can't find both to be scum.

Because only one is being paid for by public funds to be impartial.

The corporation can also be scum by virtue of being an unpleasant actor in society.

Yes but it's much harder calculus. What's the net of a very large tractor manufacturer existing or not existing? If they lobby in a way you don't like but they also cause cereals to be 15% cheaper, how can you calculate their "unpleasant"-ness?

A public official taking a contribution in return for carving out an exception in a law is quite an easy one.

The same calculus applies to the politician, you're just imparting certain social duties on one and not the other.

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.

Erm no - businesses can also be moral. In fact there's an enormous social pressure to look good. That's why people get fired for things that happen on Twitter.

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.

>Erm no - businesses can also be moral.

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.

> My point is only how quickly americans adopt this "if someone's buying, it's excusable" morality as applied to business.

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.

> I'm not sure why you're talking about Americans

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).

They should maximise by legal means. That's how you get better service, lower prices and better products. That's why computers aren't $1m each or still in the KHz CPU range. Or why every company is now making electric cars. Or... why most things are as good as they are.

But that's an naive ideological take on the virtues of business; whilst at the same time you offer a naive cynical take on the vices of politics.

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.

> But that's an naive ideological take on the virtues of business; whilst at the same time you offer a naive cynical take on the vices of politics.

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.

> It's their primary function, and their primary good: producing useful stuff or services for their customers

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 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.

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.

That's the ideology of money = reward.

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.

> That's the ideology of money = reward.

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.

Now apply that reasoning to politics.

Sure: because there's a load of power in politics, it should be minimised where possible, as the state has the ability to take your money and also to lock you up, so the people we pay for with our taxes need to be beyond reproach. There is no natural check and balance that the free market has where if I don't like a product or service, I don't pay for it any more.

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

If the politician is scum as a result of having ought to judge the corporations' lobby as being scum, then it follows that the politician is able to come up with a calculus where the corporation is scum. And if the politician is able to, so am I.

You can call them "scum" if it makes you feel better. But even if the greatest shame campaign the world has ever seen was to miraculously convince John Deere to change their ways, other companies would just step in and take advantage of the system the same way John Deere has.

The only solution is to change the rules.

Clearly one side is giving substantially more.

> you can see where you they are engineered to fail

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.

I think people should rephrase it to "not engineered to last/repair". This is a much easier metric to point out and is about equivalent (though, less nefarious) to what they mean.

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.

Oh, I completely agree with you on that. Most consumer items are built to a price point. If you're building to sell at a low price, you have to keep Bill of Materials cost low to make selling the thing worthwhile, so it's not surprising that, e.g., a cheap riding mower is made from thin stamped steel chassis whereas a commercial one is mostly heavy weldments that hold up to being banged around for hours each day.

I'm not being difficult. When I read "engineered to fail" that's not the impression I get from the statement.

Honestly seems to me that some BOMs (and therefore some practically-achievable price-points) should be illegal, then. You shouldn't be allowed to market something as a mower, if it's built such that the act of mowing gradually shakes the mower apart.

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.

This sounds like me like an inquiry into "quality" and an attempt to make illegal those products lacking a certain quality.

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."

Yes, there is no general definition of "quality." But every industry and product has its own internal, domain-specific definition of quality. For hard drives, "quality" is MTBF. For batteries, "quality" is measured in loss of charge capacity per charge cycle.

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.")

If the industry is already able to determine quality, how do you propose to wrest that design process— enforceably, and without destroying value— and place it in the hands of aging politicians? The FDA example is a good one, with complaints like American sunscreen and toothpaste being subpar, and amid news that Phenylephrine is effectively a placebo (and was not the manufacturers' first choice).

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.

> I suspect, however, that attempting to centrally plan quality would merely achieve a lower standard of living for most people.

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'm not being difficult. When I read "engineered to fail" that's not the impression I get from the statement.

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".

Kitchen aid stand mixers converted from using metal gearing to plastic gearing in their consumer stand mixers. After a certain amount of use, the gear wears out and costs $50 for a replacement.

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!)

Does the plastic gear break if you attempt to recreate "will it blend" videos at home? They probably try to sell this as a safety feature.

I have one of those mixers and I've replaced the sacrificial gear at least 3 times, although I usually get the gears for far less than $50. I gotta learn to not overload it with bread dough :-)

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.

They can use glass reinforced plastic instead, and powdered metal or nylon gears like the mid range $150 consumer drills...

I think I may have misunderstood GP's post. I thought they meant that one of the gears was changed to plastic (as in mine) with the rest remaining metal. But it's more likely that they meant that the newer models are now using a fully plastic geartrain based on what I've read since.

Why not a shear pin? There's no need to make the (more expensive) gears the shear point when you can use a pennies-each shear pin (or shaft, or similar).

No idea. I didn't design the thing :-)

> 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.

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.

>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.

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.

Yes, but.

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.

That's just not the thought process. A vacuum with a cheap motor isn't going to have trouble hurting your fingers if you stick them in the brush at the right angle. But the bearings will wear out in 5 years.

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...

I owned a treadmill (second-hand, details long forgotten, sorry) which had two long steel rails (running the length of the machine) for the main structure. The brackets which connected the rails on the front side were steel, but the ones on the back of the machine were inexplicably plastic. There were major load paths (cyclical loading from running) going straight through these brackets to the feet. Between the wear and plastic embrittlement, these parts were the first to fail, and the entire rest of the machine was in decent condition (easily years of life left).

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.

The father of a friend worked at a high position at Canon. For a specific enterprise command, the client company wanted printers with a lifetime 20,000 copies instead of the base 10,000. Canon went "no problem, we'll see with our engineers" and actually they only had to remove a small device which was basically a print counter and would artificially block the ink input at approx 10,000 copies. So nothing to do with good engineering, only bad business practices.

Usually by using very cheap bearings which last just past the warranty period and cheaping out on reinforcement in critical areas. The AvE YouTube channel covers lots of this with his BOLTR teardowns.

> Really? Please give an example.

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.

> so called "representatives" who place corporate interests over small businesses and citizens

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.

> 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.

Those representatives get elected because wealthy companies like John Deere spend lots of money to make sure that happens.

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.

Sure. And guess who needs to do that? The politicians. Again, all the blame sits on their shoulders. Expecting companies to have some sort of morale compass is just a result of the media hiding the truth from everyone.

> Lawn, garden, golf course, landscaping, or grounds maintenance

Tim Cook: And one more thing... iPhone 16 can control your lawn mower!

I mean iPhones (and other phones) have apps that help you identify weeds and the like.

Don't iPhones have that earthquake detection as well so they might as well be an alarm device.

To me, it'd make sense in theory to carve out these exceptions even without a lobbyist asking for them: it'd make for a bill that gets immediately passed rather than endlessly argued about and shot down, because a bill with these exceptions has nobody on the other side of it pushing back. And that could just be the first step; you could then do a series of smaller bills (or better yet, riders to must-pass bills) that each try to knock out one of these exceptions.

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...

So, it applies to basically nothing at all important that wasn't already covered in one way shape or form?

Hell, the last paragraph on the alarm bits basically opens the door so damn wide, this moght as well have not even been drafted.

This country has become such an effing joke. This story of exceptions for big companies and the rich repeats itself over and over.

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