People who advocate for right to repair (which I'm in favor of by the way) sometimes ignore the economic realities.
For example, my dad was an electrical engineer who could fix any radio or TV. Reality: radios & TVs were relatively expensive AND the circuits within them were relatively large (observable with the naked eye or at least a magnifying glass). Today "repair" means at most replacing a capacitor although it's often cheaper & more efficient to just swap out a board. That of course assumes the board is still being manufactured and there are costs for companies to continue doing that, especially how fast technology moves forward.
Of course there are reasonable rights to repair we should have like being able to replace the software with software of our choosing, being able to modify parts within things we own, etc. But it won't be like it was prior to the 2000s where you could actually meaningfully enact repairs on electronic components by swapping out small easily available generic parts.
There are also secondary considerations like security that we haven't figured out technical answers to for right to repair (i.e. right to repair today also often means right to inject security vulnerabilities).
I actually work in the industrial repair industry. The thing to remember is not every company is insanely rich. Maybe top level companies but they are supported by a wide network of smaller companies. Those smaller companies don't have a ton of money to throw around. The manufacturers of the equipment have become quite greedy. The majority of them offer whole systems and then if anything breaks they want to charge an insane amount to send out a field engineer. And then if something is broke most of the time they either don't carry that part/panel/whatever in stock and will try and upsell you to the new model which is of course a massive investment.
So repair shops fill the gap for all these smaller companies and factories to get support higher than the on staff maintenance. Not everything is fixable though. They may use unique hardware signatures on drives or FPGA's or PAL's with security bit enabled. That has been true for a while though. Even in consolidation there is still plenty of business and repairs to be made.
Conversely the medically industry might be a good example. Anyone making medical equipment has to provide documentation on it. Which makes them far more repairable and easily diagnosable.
TV's especially are peak commodity. They are so cheap that the skilled labor cost to fix them isn't economically. They also are not easily transportable so repair and resell is a rough business for them. Things like laptops and phones though seems much more reasonable. Plenty of people do that professionally or even as a hobby. I like a large portion of repairs on those types of devices can be fairly economical and Chinese part makers provide plenty of affordable parts. It would cost OEM's extra to keep these parts in stock, but it's not a terrible hard task. Providing schematics also isn't a huge ask. Most are reverse engineered anyway.
When it comes to security I think this is fairly simple. Provide a blank security chip and create a secure method to connect and program it. Apple does this with its self repair when it comes to matching hardware UID's in the firmware so all the functionality is unlocked. Companies like Apple and Samsung can keep their Knox and Secure Enclave/exclave. Data can be seen as something that is not repairable in most cases. But they can provide the parts the secure a device again and leave it as a blank slate.
The biggest problem with Right to Repair is pricing. Right now Chinese makers can whip out parts for really cheap. Comparing to official parts from Apple or Google or Samsung when they did sell them and they are way higher and sometimes prohibitively so. Would be better to treat it like auto parts. Where you can get the OEM part or the third party part and both can work. Some things like security would need to be first party, but that would be a great deal. So it's doable, but would require a LOT of political will against tech companies. So it's just a really tough sell to get to that point.
Consumerism can be avoided regardless of right to repair legislation. We just stop buying shit we don’t really need which is most of what people buy on Amazon I imagine.
If your argument begins with "people should just..." then generally you've already lost the argument. The fact is that people aren't doing whatever you're suggesting, for whatever reason, and no amount of righteous indignation is going to suddenly make people change that. I guess you can sit there smug and feel good about yourself, and that's worth something, but you can't expect people to give a shit about that.
In this case, legislation could help ameliorate this problem, and maybe taxing the actual cost of things (e.g. environmental impact) instead of just letting the future generations deal with it.
Sorry, I think I read a bit more indignation in your message than you intended.
I mostly have a visceral reaction to "people should just.." arguments because I heard stuff like that brought up a lot during abortion arguments, particularly in regards to birth control.
"Teenagers should just stop having sex!!" was something I thought was particularly dumb, because a) have they never been a teenager? that's all a lot of them think about cuz hormones and b) whether or not they should, they're going to anyway.
Anyway, sorry for the kind of pissy response, no offense meant.
Well, no, when I say "people should just" arguments, I'm referring to arguments that talk about society at large. I think those are bad arguments. I didn't say "people should stop", I just think it's a bad argument, they're obviously free to make bad arguments. I wouldn't take that right away from them even if I could.
"People should just" pass legislation would be specific to congress, so not quite the same thing, or at least not the kind of argument that I was referring to. You're free to think it's a dumb argument but there's a slight pedantic difference.
>People should just" pass legislation would be specific to congress, so not quite the same thing, or at least not the kind of argument that I was referring to.
Isn't that even worse? In that case it's entirely externalizing the problem.
I think I take the opposite position to you. I think that arguments (or discussions) about society at large are the most important and critical.
I think there is a common trend to ignore and dismiss the importance of decentralized social values and individual choice, instead only focusing on concrete policy proposals.
The latter is almost never productive without consensus on the former. If 90% of people want disposable crap, it will be difficult to shove a law down their throat preventing them from getting it.
Either way, as a result of being triggered by social opinions, you seems to miss the point of the parent post, namely, that right to repair only addresses a tiny fraction of consumerism, nor is it a prerequisite to buy less garbage in general.
The solution to people buying single use toys and inflatable Jacuzzis on Amazon is not to mandate their repairability.
I think religion is stupid. I think it’s harmful. If I said “people should just stop being religious” and acted like that in itself was in any way insightful, you would consider that a dumb argument.
To be clear, this isn’t to say community outreach is bad or a waste of time. I think getting the larger populous onboard with the narrative that you think is going to make the world best is a good thing, please don’t let me stop you.
I have mostly seen these arguments pop up with giving teenagers access to birth control, with conservatives saying stuff like “people should just stop having sex out of wedlock” or something to that effect, and act that argument along is an insightful or useful comment.
The people were going to church and getting harmed and someone proposed a 5 cent wafer tax as a solution, a response that "no, people actually just need to stop going" is useful and insightful.
It points out that the tax doesn't solve the actual problem. It points out that any solution will require people not wanting to go to church. It is not a complete instructions set.
I think you are confusing use in normative statements (value judgments or opinions) with instructional statements (step by step how to).
Just to be clear, I think the act of being religious is harmful even if you were to get rid of every single church. Pedantic, yes, but the point is that this is purely a behavioral thing, not a specific action. I have tax-free ideas on the best ways to go about getting people to stop believing in dumb things but those are far beyond the scope of this conversation.
I am not “confusing” anything. In the case of teenage pregnancy, I have seen the conversation start and stop with “teenagers just shouldn’t have sex”.
If you’re just saying “I wish the world were X”, then sure you can make a declarative statement about what people are doing. That’s not what I have an issue with.
My issue is when people make a statement like “people should just…” without engaging in any meaningful way for that to happen.
Taxes on harmful behavior is one possible way we can curve it. It’s not the only way, and I am not claiming as such, but clearly righteous indignation telling people to stop using single-use plastics has not worked. We can wax philosophical as to why it hasn’t worked, and there might be value in that, but I just don’t think it’s particularly useful to begin an argument with “people should just stop buying single use plastic” as if that by itself is a meaningful thing to say.
At the risk of splitting hairs, I was suggesting that people "promote the right to repair" more and not necessarily "pass legislation". While I agree that it's a good goal to buy less plastic junk, the subject probably needs more of a positive narrative behind it to gain traction. Repairability is a positive way to look at our stuff (eg speed queens and Toyotas last forever!). Plastic junk is a negative.
We probably agree in our interests. Almost nobody is for "plastic junk", described as such. Im not opposed to repair rights in general. I think it is relatively niche, but that isn't a reason to oppose it (people can be for multiple thing).
What I do think is powerful is cultivating anti-consumerism or selective consumption behavior and belief. The desire for reparability falls within within this.
