Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vasco | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

It's the opposite, it makes no sense to build something forever. You have no clue what people will want or need in the future. If you make a bunch of forever glasses and in 50 years nobody wants to use glass containers anymore (or at least the ones you made), you just wasted a bunch of resources and energy making them last longer than they needed. Specially due to changing "taste" people want to change the items they use frequently.

You can imagine other reasons why we shouldn't make products last forever, it's a huge over-investment of limited resources that could be used in the future for better things. Specially in a planet with limited resources but continuously evolving technology, it is really not good to make forever stuff unless the technological innovation stops. Because you could use the same resources later to do better stuff at the same cost.

What we should do is wherever possible make things repairable and prosecute anyone that intentionally makes something harder to repair (not really applicable to glass, where recycling is the only option).

> in 50 years nobody wants to use glass containers

yet here we are, 50 years later, still using glass containers and fluorescent tube lamps that break because they are designed to break every two years

Im pretty happy I don’t have to use a fluorescent tube lamp that’s 50 years old, LEDs are much better. I don’t think this is a good counterexample.

Don't worry, they're probably working on 2-year LEDs right now.

They've already managed that, just buy any of the low-cost LED replacement bulbs in any major store made in bulk in China. They don't put proper heatsinks on the power circuitry driving the LEDs so it eventually fails, especially under conditions of being turned off and then back on again often, like the lights in most rooms in most houses.

I realized something similar after working in auto parts for a few years. Not sure about now as I don't really buy them anymore, but at the time there was a clear difference in quality between the cheapest of the cheap and the normal items (reman alternators, brake pads, etc.)

Even though I tried to steer people away from the known questionable quality stuff (for no benefit of my own, not on commission), 95% of people would get it anyways. For the same reason "oh, I'm thinking of selling it soon anyways." And they rarely actually seemed to, based on my memory, but they had that mindset.

Glasses are perhaps more 'timeless', but I could see them not selling well at a premium because of the 'ephemeral' mindset of potential life and style changes.

But you can't really repair a glass.

So why doesn't this apply to plastic?

So let's make things that only last a day because you never know what tomorrow will bring.

Are you familiar with the concept of trade-offs?

Sure. Do you see glassware not being in use at any point in the next 100 years though?

Maybe they current style of glassware. The Superfest glasses already look outdated and retro to me, I wouldn’t want to decide which glasses I use in 50 years now.

Fashion is a huge driver of waste.

As pointed out in my original comment in the thread. The question is, do you want to moralize and tell people to not behave as they behave, or do you recognize that "fashion" is associated to inherent human traits and design the world to have a good middle ground between doing what people want and not messing up everything super fast. In the end the only way to protect everything is to kill all humans, so if we agree that is not a solution, we should understand that the concept of fashion or changing preferences is not going to go away and not design products forever.

We moralize about all sorts of important things like washing hands, putting rubbish in the bin etc.

Fashion benefits from morals - like the idea of showering daily benefits the cosmetics/body care industry. I have a relative in one of the big French companies who saw a huge drop-off in shampoo/bathing products during covid when people were working at home. If we all decided that fresh water was too precious to waste we might materially impact this person's business - so they are eager to convince everyone that it's morally right to wash umpteen times a day.

Similarly clothing is marketed and that marketing works on us.

Other than telling such people to f-off, how do we get out of the negative loop they are only too eager to drive us into?

I mean nobody is forcing you to buy anything. I wear shoes that are 5-10 years old often and clothes that are 15 or 20 years old. And for most normal people they look "disheveled", my mom would gasp if she saw it. Yet I've been to work offsites with holes in my 8 year old shoes meeting with C-levels. But whenever I feel like buying something that you think is superfluous I also don't want anyone telling me what to do.

We all accept some telling what to do - like the law, tax and so on. Ideally it's meant to be for the general good.

So if some activity were to be negative for everyone - e.g. if it generated a lot of waste that was hard to handle and caused large unnecessary carbon emissions .... then we could end up needing laws to limit that damage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com