Repeat sales/planned obsolescence, and the fate of the world

[Sun Wukong]

So, leaving aside the perpetual snackbar issue “we” seem to be facing, and facing more towards our rapidly diminishing resources… how do you think we can escape this cornerstone of capitalist economics?

For 30 years people have been complaining about how washing machines aren’t built to last any more, and die just outside of warranty.

Now the standard business model is to produce shiny things you market to upgrade each year… Computer equipment especially.

A Nokia 5110 is still a perfectly good phone, and you’d find your old one probably works as well if not better than the phone you now own – or the 10 phones you’ve owned since.

I never lose things (touch wood), I use them until they slowly crumble to dust. I am noticing how short this period is becoming, cheap or expensive, literally nothing is built to last now. The only exception to this rule that I can think of are high-end tools and cookware, that’s it.

Brought it once.com is one website to be bucking the trend, but it seems like no business can survive without repeat business, or so the capitalists say.

How do you guys feel? Where does it end?

I have a horrible feeling nothing will change until some quite impressive cataclysm. Would be nice to stop destroying the place like an unruly school child before hand though.
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Top cat
"Hard times lead to hard people. Hard people lead to good times. Good times lead to weak people. Weak people lead to hard times." Smegballs
"Oh and STE balloons would be one of the nicer things we would receive at the office, the amount of dog turd in jiffy bags is not funny." Jsmith86

[Sun Wukong]

Reminds me of this;

https://crueltyfreelife.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/spoon.jpg
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Top cat
"Hard times lead to hard people. Hard people lead to good times. Good times lead to weak people. Weak people lead to hard times." Smegballs
"Oh and STE balloons would be one of the nicer things we would receive at the office, the amount of dog turd in jiffy bags is not funny." Jsmith86

[Kickstart]

Hi

Depends if you can get enough people to spend more on the product that will last longer. There often are options that do last longer (eg, with washing machines Miele stuff), but the prices are substantially higher than for something lobbed together by this weeks cheapest sub contractor .

All the best

Katy
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Traxpics, track day and racing photographs - Bimota Forum - Bike performance / thrust graphs for choosing gearing

[ZX-7R]

Years back electrical equipment was way more expensive in relation to salary compared to today,so company's knew people wanted products that would last.I remember when the Ferguson Videostar VCR came out around 1980,and cost about £600.Now you can buy a DVD player for under £20.

Nowadays its cheaper to bin things when it packs up and buy a new one than have it repaired on many products.
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Current Bike - 2000 ZX-7R

[Suntan Sid]

"The Man In The White Suit" has the answer!
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"Everybody needs money, that's why they call it money!"

[c_dug]

A better reuse and recycling system is what's needed.

The economics of "throw away and buy a new one" work for the majority of people - particularly when our cheapest technology has gotten to the point where it is pretty reliable most of the time - I'd expect the above mentioned £20 DVD player to last at least 5 years.

We need to get to a point where breaking down old goods and turning them into new goods costs less than churning oil and metal out of the ground. This might come from improving the recycling process, or it may come from increased costs and reduced availability of mined materials.

When that happens, it doesn't matter so much that your phone only lasts a year, because when it gets sent off for recycling, a large proportion of the materials get re-used.
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I am a bellend, I am a man of constant sorrow, I am a gummy bear, I am a rock.

[Kickstart]

[Wonko The Sane]

[orac]

while I see your point, I don't seem to have the issues you do, a few power saving tricks mean my phone battery will last as long as the old house brick phones of yester year. The only pieces of electrical/electronics I have that I less than 3 years old is my fitbit (second hand when I got it) and phone.

I replaced my cooker few years ago as I set fire to the 15 year old one, and washing machine was nearly as old with knackered bearings (but still doing a Stirling service). microwave is at least 10 years old

the bandit was 20 years old and had been around the clocks before I got the triple. all the camera equipment I have is all still going strong, some of which was second hand to start with.

The youngest of my computers is a laptop which I bought 3.5 years ago, the oldest is a machine made of random parts that I have had in various machines dating back nearly 10 years.

Personally I am not sure you can blame the makers, I find from personal experience that most people have no idea how to fix things, most don't even know how to change a fuse - this is an education issue. I remember being taught how to change a plug at school - hang on that changed due to the health and safety a$$ hats in Brussels, but I digress - if people knew how to fix things its would not be an issue, makers can, and often do sell replacement parts.

between education and the "I want it now" attitude with the "I cant be bothered" state of mind it drives the constant throw away society further into the depth of depravity.

weirdly though, to a point we need it. Technology is driven forwards by the need or desire for a greater amount of power at ones fingertips. If that did not happen we would still be using valves and relays in electro-mechanical computers storing programmes on punch cards. we would still be using carbs and more fuel than the fuel injection system we have now. washing machines would still be the woman of the house and sexism would still run rife through society. Its an unfortunate fact of life that we need consumerism and too a point capitalism for progress, its existed since the dawn of humanity, it not going anywhere soon. In other words, we would not be able to have this conversation on one of the most powerful pieces of tech to be invented by our species if it wasn't for throwing things away and replacing it with the next greatest thing despite the old thing working just fine.
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Current rides - 2016 Triumph Street Triple Rx, 1994 Suzuki Bandit 400 VM, TGB 204 Classic 125cc
"with nothing left to lose, there is everything to gain. It's not the size of the dog in the fight, it's the size of the fight in the dog"

[MCN]

Everyone get nakid and go to work on a bicycle.
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Disclaimer: The comments above may be predicted text and not necessarily the opinion of MCN.

[iooi]

Personally we do not have a issue with our electrical stuff. The vast majority is over 6 years old and still going strong.
Only stuff like phones (upgrades and old sent for recycling) and laptops upgraded, old still sat around.

Yet M-I-L goes through electrical products like waster. I do not think she has one kitchen product that is over 2 years old, other than fridge.
I put that down to her turning everything off at the switch after using it.
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Just because my bike was A DIVVY, does not mean i am......

[barrkel]

Most of the cost of everything is ultimately labour, and making something from scratch can use much cheaper, unskilled labour than diagnosing something that's broken. Everything that's broken is broken in some slightly different way. Everything that's made new is made in the same way (given modern industrial manufacture).

There's a reason that computers are designed around restarting every so often, rather than always saving state in non-volatile storage: a clean boot is a known good position where any corruption is cleaned out. Eliminating all bugs that could cause memory corruption is unfeasibly expensive, particularly since marginal hardware, with the help of cosmic rays, can occasionally flip bits all on its own.

It's the same with life. Plants and animals start out from very small initial seeds that grow, rather than splitting like bacteria. Starting out with everything fresh and new leads to better outcomes than continuous development of repair mechanisms.

When things were more hand-crafted, and industrial production had larger tolerances, things had to be under-stressed and over-engineered to work at all, and had to be built to be repaired because repair sometimes had to happen during quality checking.

As we increasingly remove humans from the manufacturing process, I expect less and less repair and more re-creation. In a few hundred years, I'd expect what we currently call 3D printing to be nearly universal and combined with its opposite, automated deconstruction. Instead of fixing the future equivalent of a complex machine like a car, significant chunks of it will be wholly deconstructed into raw materials and rematerialized like new.
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Bikes: S1000R, SH350; Exes: Vity 125, PS125, YBR125, ER6f, VFR800, Brutale 920, CB600F, SH300x4
Best road ever ridden: www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2MhNxUEYtQ

[Rogerborg]

[andyscooter]

[Motorhate]

[G]

There are sturdy basic phones still available.

For the most part they're not very popular.

For what it's worth; the Hotpoint Washing machine I bought ten years ago is still going well, despite them having a bad rep.
It's been all over the place too. Currently installed at my work, where it replaced a much shorter lived hot point.

Microwave I got 7 years ago still going fine at my mums.
I'm using one that must be a good chunk older than that, which was given away free on a facebook group.

But then my 12 year old van is covered in rust.
Partly because I didn't clean it enough/sort the rust when it started, but also this model is known to be really bad for it.


The metal vs plastic spoons doesn't consider all the factors.

Lets say we're talking in a field at a festival.
Some are going to get lost - you could ensure they get returned, but you'd have to spend more resources on doing that.
Metal spoons weigh more to transport. You have to pay someone to rearrange them into something to be transported. Humans I believe are pretty 'expensive' as far as consumption of physical resources goes for the work done (vs a machine in a factory).
Then you have to get water on to site. You have to get other things such as water heaters, washing up bowls or machines and associated infrastructure. You have to get the dirty water off site, keep all the mobile washing system running and do on. You have to decontaminate the dirty water.

Annnd... some places use wooden cutlery. 'Renewable' source that can be composted.
But that doesn't mean for it's life cycle, it's actually 'better' when all is considered.

Sadly, life is rarely as simple as the viruses might suggest!



Plenty of companies do provide services to mend and service things you already have; but the reality is that it's often not economic compared to the cost of buying new. If the world equalises a bit as far as global income inequality goes, you may find there's less throw-away stuff available. But at the same time automation is increasing.
I looked at having my tatty leathers fixed up. Would have cost at least 5x as much as the secondhand set on ebay (ok, also slightly tatty, but came with free sliders that would have cost the £20 I paid for them on their own ).

[G]

Carrying on...
An old nokia is fine for making calls I'm sure.
I much prefer a smart phone for sending textx.

Rare I do either with my Personal Access Display Device .

My £90 (secondhand - I did consider getting a new top spec one, but they didn't do anything more that interested me) connected up to a faster GPS unit and a not fast enough OBD unit (spending £10 rather than £2 delivered on the latter probably would have seen me ok) gets the sort of setup that a few years ago would cost many thousands.

The setup is far from perfect as first time trying it out, but gives you an idea:.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02J6filT0CE
Overlays etc, etc all done from within the smartphone.

I have no qualms about having a phone that ten years ago would have been a really high spec desktop computer in my pocket, with the added benefit of an array of sensors, high spec camera etc.


Personally, I often profit from other people chucking stuff away.

We sorted out someone else with pretty much a complete set of festival stuff from things left at Glastonbury.
Not unknown to see me 'dumpster diving' for useful bits of electronics and so on. Plenty of nice clothes either passed on to me or from charity shops.

[-]

[G]

To be fair on the microwaves; my mum's one that mine replaced probably wasn't that much older and was knackered.
Similar for the one that was at work.

Both were cheap ones, while mine was £300 (oven, grill, do everything version) or so - suspect the one I've now got was also reasonably expensive at the time.

The one in my Gran's house can't have been much younger than me if at all and was still going.
However, it wasn't very good - low power and turn table, but none of the modern technology that tries to still keep an even distribution of heat without one.

[MCN]

Watching pron on my Sony Erricson T 850 is dire. The refresh rate must be to slow.
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Disclaimer: The comments above may be predicted text and not necessarily the opinion of MCN.

[Kickstart]

[G]

[Kickstart]

[Hong Kong Phooey]

Education is key. However big business will get a hold on that soon.

It's only a matter of time until your maths lesson is sponsored by CASIO or Texas Instruments, and your English lessons are brought to you by Ladybird / Penguin books.

Errm, too late
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'81 CG125, '97 FZS600 : '99 CBR600F4, '09 KTM RC8

[c_dug]

You mean like science sponsored by an oil company?
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I am a bellend, I am a man of constant sorrow, I am a gummy bear, I am a rock.