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Comment by greekanalyst | Hacker News Reader

The EU gets a lot of heat for many things (and rightfully so), but this is an area where it is actually doing wonders in favor of consumers.

Here is the directive adopted by the EU Council to promote the repair of broken or defective goods, also known as the right-to-repair (or R2R) directive:

"The directive adopted today enshrines a new right for consumers: the right to have defective products repaired in an easier, cheaper and faster way. It also gives manufacturers the incentive to make products that last longer and can be repaired, reused and recycled."

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2024...

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The US, the UE and China have wildly different approaches to many important topics, and the fact they are all affecting the entire world has the tendency to break political stale matches and balance things out.

It shows that diversity is a good thing, you end up having to compromise no matter how rightful you feel.

I'm often guilty of missing mistakes in my own posts, but as a PSA: please proofread your posts, especially if using prediction on a phone.

You can edit your post if you do so soon after posting, and sometimes the meaning isn't lost (stale matches -> stalemates) but other times it (subjectively) is. For example I don't know what "rightful" should be here.

I always thought it would be a good idea to have a suggest spelling improvements on social media & forums. Gives a low-key way of improving things without wasting comment space and potentially saving embarrassment. But I’m sure it needs a good ux or otherwise will be abused

I agree. Stack overflow has/had something like this where users with at least N karma could make edits to others' posts. I believe that was done with an aim like what you've described, though of course it is also subject to some abuse.

English may not be their first language. I found the post to be perfectly understandable.

ESL commenters are perfectly capable of learning to avoid and correct mistakes. In face, in written language some kinds of errors are more common in native speakers in my experience.

Indeed, I'm French.

The thing is, if you say something stupid, people forget about it. If you write it down, it stays.

But often I write like I speak, not thinking about the consequences.

The problem is people keep trying to stamp the diversity out.

The model in the US is nominally to have few regulations limited to things like enforcing contracts and antitrust laws and pricing major externalities, then leave the rest of it to free market competition. That isn't compatible with a model where regulators are trying to run the economy, because then the regulators get captured by industry and thwart rather than protect competition, and competition can't save you from needing complicated rules if it is not present. And those kinds of complex competition-destroying regulations are showing up everywhere, including in the US.

Conversely, the model in the EU is to not care a lot about small businesses and just regulate the large ones. But that model isn't really compatible with free trade. You can't impose expensive regulations on domestic companies and then put them into competition with countries that don't do that and expect them to succeed. But people want to have their cake and eat it too. They want the expensive regulations but not the correspondingly higher prices, and then the stuff they buy gets made in China where the rules don't exist (or exist on paper but the government waives them in order to capture the market). If you want to have the rules without destroying domestic industry then you have to impose them on the manufacturers of imported products too. Which would actually help the US increase competition, because the regulations would then shackle global megacorps that want to sell into the EU but not smaller domestic US companies that don't. But then foreign-produced stuff sold in the EU would cost as much as domestically-produced stuff -- a boon to local industry but higher prices on local consumers, and apparently they're not willing to suffer the latter.

Doesn't the US allow "diversity" by allowing different states to pass laws that their residence find important? I'm pretty sure CA has some specific right to repair laws.

Also, this (to me) is a strange use for the word diversity.

States and localities can pass their own laws but they can't remove the federal ones, and federal laws preempt state laws. Naturally large corporations then make a point to capture the federal regulators.

It can be slightly more complicated with things like CARB which has an explicit waiver in the Clean Air Act to enact its own standards and given how big it is it basically ends up setting de facto standards for the state (it’s one of the big complaints from Republican states).

A similar issue comes up around education although things are a bit more even there with Texas and Florida also using the size of their markets to set their version of education standards.

The difference of culture between different parts of the world fosters bigger legal variations.

Do US consumers buy less Made In China stuff than EU ones?

According to ustr.gov, US imports from China in 2022 were worth $562.9 billion.

According to eurostat EU imports from China were 627.3€ billion, so a significant difference (note the currency).

As a rate of the total import/export they are actually quite comparable.

It "shouldn't" be a problem for the US to do that, because it's supposed to be minimizing regulatory overhead and promoting competition so its companies are globally competitive. Importing something from a country because they have a large labor market is a different thing than importing things from that country because your country imposes high regulatory overhead on domestic producers but not on foreign imports.

This also gets back to my point about the US increasingly failing at its ideal of not imposing high regulatory overhead.

> The problem is people keep trying to stamp the diversity out.

I'm very cynical about this "diversity is our strength" stuff

In my opinion the problem is that society has been working hard to reduce "diversity" to mean different skin colors, genitals or sexual preferences, with a sprinkling of different cuisine. What most people refer to as diversity is very superficial

Diversity of ideas, diversity of politics, diversity of beliefs are still not very popular

The idea seems to be that the superficial diversity automatically produces the meaningful diversity, but I don't think that is true

Well said. And ironically "diversity" is a topic where diverse opinions are often met with particularily hard scorn.

It’s trivial for companies to avoid complying.

Meta don’t, for instance. They sell their quest headsets throughout Europe, but offer no warranty or support in many European countries in which they sell them, which is illegal under the EU CRD.

I foolishly bought one, knowing the risk - and it stopped working after a week, and that’s the end of the story - they refused to do a return or exchange, said I could ship it at my own expense, which I tried, only for them to “lose” the inbound package. They received it from the courier, mislaid it - my problem. They then kindly offered to ship a replacement controller at my expense (€150), but only to a different country, not to where I live. They then “lost” that too, forcing me to do a chargeback to get my money back, as despite having no proof of delivery to me, they insisted it had been.

As to “take them to court” - they know damned well that it’s not worth it to spend €10,000+ on legal fees over a €500 piece of electronics, which is why they knowingly and willingly act illegally.

The EU needs a simple, pan-European way to deal with bad actors, or it’s just meaningless legislation that provides no protection to consumers.

Does your country not have small claims court?

It does, but there’s a get-out - meta just say that they don’t operate in Portugal, even though they do sell to Portugal, and therefore there’s nobody to claim against. I’d have to go to a higher court, and again, the calculus here is that it’s not worth the consumer’s time - I don’t want to spend years and thousands of euro fighting over it - so the quest just went in the trash, and I’ll never buy anything from them again.

The European Small Claims Procedure[1] might be helpful.

[1] https://e-justice.europa.eu/content_small_claims-42-en.do

Huh. I was not aware of this - will give it a go, thanks!

Did you do a charge back on the card used for the purchase?

Only for the purchase of the replacement controller that they lost in transit, as I had proof that that was delivered to the wrong address in the wrong country - the original purchase, no, as my bank said I could just return it to them for a refund, and I had to exhaust that first - but because they wouldn’t accept a return, I couldn’t be seen to have exhausted that option by the bank. It’s kafkaesque.

> offer no warranty or support in many European countries in which they sell them

Do you mean that you can buy it from the manufacturer website and have it shipped directly to a country where it's not released officially? Or are you taking about third party retailers selling grey market units?

I’m talking about buying from a reputable third party retailer (Amazon) who reasonably passed the buck for RMA support to meta - and ultimately, if you sell your product in an EU country, or allow the sale of your product in an EU country via a retailer, you are liable to provide support for that product.

This article is actually about implicit warranty rather than right to repair, which the EU also has (my memory is at least 2 years, but I don't know if it's higher for different categories of things like in NSW).

It's also a great consumer friendly regulation!

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