It's sad, but not only because it means people are forced to buy new too often or because of the atrocious increasing e-waste associated with it.
It's sad because folks will be less and less interested in fixing their things or simply opening their devices to understand how they work. It'll be general knowledge that it's "dangerous" to attempt a repair, and they're impossible to fix anyway.
Attempting a repair is one of those sparks that nurture curiosity. It's the same spark that ultimately gave us Apple and many other great businesses. Why are we indirectly undermining ingenuity and inventiveness? Is it a false perception? Or maybe Hanlon's razor?
On the other side, China has relatively affordable access to parts (low-level components included), schematics, extensive tooling and a growing hacker/maker culture.
Sometimes, I feel we (occidentals) are going into reverse.
I don't think it's a stretch to assume malice, billionaires are running the show and they aren't nice people that want to build a better world. If they want a population of poor, ignorant and unengaged worker drones they're doing great though.
Its the trillionaires that are the problem -- why don't you know their names? Because they don't want a better world for you just for them and their 'better' world keeps their insanely high living standard at the expense of us the little people getting to exist at all. The only people that believe the very rich want a better world are still watching television.
Youtube has made it easier than ever to do diy repair. Its massively different than even 5-10 years ago. If the billionaires don’t want people fixing things they are going to lose in the long run.
A lot of what Apple has done is to try to discourage DIY and third party repair services with device locked components, screens, and batteries (yes, even batteries)
It is a stretch to assume it. Billionaires generally do well in countries of hard-working, educated people. And they aren't running the show, although they might run a little bit of it.
Benign malice is still malice. Billionaires do well in countries of hard-working, educated people the same way parasites do well in a healthier host. They often aren't contributing to said health, merely profiting from it by chance.
Don't get me wrong some Billionaires are legitimately moving the ball forward, or at least trying to, but for every Elon Musk (despite the man's many flaws he's at least snapped the space launch and EV markets out of decades of stagnation) there's a few Sacklers who seemingly exist solely to abuse the populace for their own benefit, and are only shaped by how much effective resistance they are met with, resistance they will obsessively attempt to overcome/circumvent until they die.
People at that level tend to care about themselves and only about themselves, or at least that's what many of their actions would suggest. They're predators, and even if the wolf can't control what it is you generally want to keep it away from the flock.
That said I have nothing actionable to offer. Short of mass collective action it's hard to see how we deal with them, and mass collective action requires lots of mass collective pain for enough people to be motivated in a single direction. I'd imagine most of the billionaires are well aware of this and are betting that the breaking point will occur after their death, or they arrogantly think that they can be insulated from it somehow. Seems they get away with blatant malfeasance time and again.
Frankly I'm surprised the Sacklers haven't been shot at yet. If I was a broke West Virginian who's family had been torn apart by opioids and I had nothing to lose, I'd be saving my pennies for a bus ticket and take my hunting rifle to their next public appearance.
Depends on your priorities I guess. I'd say making reusable rockets a reality, creating a serious market for EVs where none existed previously, and from all appearances about to provide the first real competition to terrestrial internet/cable providers has made the world an objectively better place on a scale most individuals can only dream of.
Does that excuse sexual harassment, union-busting, defamation, stock manipulation, and other crimes? Of course not, and he should be punished for all of the above. But the scale of his positive works far outsizes the scale of his negative works IMO, at least so far.
Capitalism and Democracy are fundamentally based on (imperfectly) burning assholes for fuel. They're fundamentally cynical systems, that's part of why they're so stable. We give the assholes a relatively safe outlet for their mental conditions while in exchange demanding they provide some good or service for the rest of us. So don't be surprised when the people who do the most good also have some skeletons in their closets, that's how the system works. The people without skeletons tend to be naturally filtered out of the power hierarchy by refusing to compromise their principles past a certain point.
Put more bluntly: The obsessive, selfish, narcissistic careerist who puts 80 hours a week into his career, has no real friends and neglects his family and sexually harasses potential partners will generally rise higher in terms of power/wealth than the honest, stable, principled family man who intentionally clocks out after 40 hours so he has time to spend with his kids when he gets home. There are lucky exceptions of course, heirs to fortunes and so on (where likely their mother/father/grandparent was the maladjusted careerist). But the percentages speak for themselves IMO.
Before jumping on the sexual harassment bandwagon. Is there actually any concrete evidence of this? And what was the exact context? These accusations and actual cases exist in degrees, not absolutes of evil male pig or perfect feminist male. Believe it or not, it's very, very easy to accuse a famous man of sexual harassment for all sorts of frivolous reasons and have it stick to their reputation like shit.
> Billionaires generally do well in countries of hard-working, educated people.
What does that mean? Are you able to provide examples of “countries of lazy[1] people” and how one reaches that conclusion? Which metrics do you use to define who is hard-working, and how do you confidently apply the categorisation to a whole country?
[1]: Or however you want to define the antithesis of “hard-working”.
Believing that these agendas exist simply because they are evil people is reductionist. For example, my parents wholly support private schools because they believe that public education will strip students of their cultural identity and religious beliefs. They aren't evil. Devos and R's respond to those fears to get elected.
The belief itself is probably based on the fact that college grads are extremely likely to have the "other party's" politics. And, that is true because (partly) the higher education system has become quite uniform and (apparently) seeks to squash dissenting opinions among the teaching ranks. How many professors are conservative or openly religious? I suspect those positions are viewed as defacto disqualifications by most on the left.
I recommend everyone read Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt. He discusses with nuance and much persuasiveness the importance of returning political representation to higher education. I see it all very differently now.
> Believing that these agendas exist simply because they are evil people is reductionist. For example, my parents wholly support private schools because they believe that public education will strip students of their cultural identity and religious beliefs.
I think the issue is that do we want to inject profit into every aspect of human life. We do this with prisons and schools to some extent already. How about a privatized police force anyone?
Here is an argument about why academia is relatively more left leaning. Would love to hear rebuttals but that's how I think about it for now.
https://youtu.be/LwI25UhTtGo
They aren't doing it because they are evil - that's totally silly. They're doing it because they hold what I consider to be bad ideas around supporting the public good and it's simply in their best interest to pay less taxes and have a less educated and more compliant workforce in the process.
Betsy Devos is a billionaire private school activist that Trump appointed. The less they need to worry about public opinion the better, it's the same reason they've succeeded so wildly in controlling the Supreme Court. Their strategy with the Federalist Society has been to work around what is popular, no majority would vote to overturn Roe. Public education is definitely on their minds now.
> How many professors are conservative or openly religious?
Separation of church and state happened a long time ago, so the age of finding out your teacher's religion is generally in the past. It's not because they aren't religious, it's because they'll get punished for discussing it with their students.
There is hostility in some education sectors though, which has driven out a lot of conservative and religious teachers.
> How many professors are conservative or openly religious?
At German universities the answer is actually "quite a number of professors", and being conservative or religious is just as normal and accepted as being on the progressive side.
The major difference, however, is that Conservatism there (fortunately) is still very pro-science and you won't find many climate change deniers, creationists, anti-vaxxers, etc. among conservatives, especially not among educated conservatives. Overall, society is also much less scarred by years and years of relentless culture wars, and the majority of the population clusters in the middle of the political spectrum (i.e., in the range "moderate conservative" to "moderate progressive").
In the US, there seems to have been a vicious circle going on for a long time now with conservatives becoming more and more anti-science, because they perceive universities and most scientists as leftists; and scientists becoming more and more hostile to conservatives, because they perceive them to be waging a war on science. I don't know what started this arms race (i.e., whether universities in the US first became hostile to conservatives, or whether conservatives first turned anti-science), but I find this development incredibly depressing and heartbreaking.
> Betsy Devos isn't interested in quality public schools, she wants to privatize schools and degrade public education. Who knows what a radical Supreme Court will do next? Republicans have had public education in their crosshairs for decades.
Amway Princess gets a lot of flack for pushing all of the same policies that Arne Duncan and his boss pushed before her. Democratic politicians have been positively energetic in undermining and privatizing public education.
If Billionaires are running the show, why to they have to keep showing up to congressional subpoenas and kowtowing to government bureaucrats of various types and stripes?
Power and money are frequent bedfellows, but power trumps money every single time.
"Despite the seemingly strong empirical support in previous studies for theories of majoritarian democracy, our analyses suggest that majorities of the American public actually have little influence over the policies our government adopts. Americans do enjoy many features central to democratic governance, such as regular elections, freedom of speech and association, and a widespread (if still contested) franchise. But we believe that if policymaking is dominated by powerful business organizations and a small number of affluent Americans, then America’s claims to being a democratic society are seriously threatened."
Congressional subpoenas are pure kayfabe. To win their districts, congress members need money. And the more of it they get the happier they are. So money is power.
Don't worry. Defeated this time, but it will keep coming back again,
and again, and again until it's made law, no doubt about it. We're in
a different era now, and e-waste is very topical [1]. A vote against
"right to repair" is a clear vote against ecological common
sense. California is unfortunately in a vulnerable position with
respect to climate impact. Another season of wildfires and droughts
will help the naysayers see some sense.
> If you want to sell this bill, show voters how it will impact their
wallets.
I hear you, but the sad thing is the financial impact isn't really
that compelling. That's because waste is effectively subsidised.
Carriers will be happy to push a new handset on customers every 18
months and just absorb that in the contract fees. Repair is expensive
(time consuming) in comparison. And of course they have stacked the
services and tariffs to make owning older gear less attractive.
> The average person has spent about zero seconds in their life
thinking about e-waste.
I'm about to find our a lot more about that as some research students
are looking at e-waste solutions and their first stage is interviewing
people on their gadget recycling habits. I reckon the average person
does think about it, but has no information or guidance at present.
Hopefully we can change that.
From what I can see, the right to repair suffers when "buying brand new" becomes significantly less expensive than "buying only the parts you need and spend some time fixing it". The former is always cheaper in developed economies, and the latter is often cheaper in third-world countries. Economic tradition like planned obsolescence is the single biggest culprit
> The former is always cheaper in developed economies
Is it?
It seems cheaper in developed countries because the cost of labour is high, the cost of goods is low, and serviceability is rarely a consideration. Yet those factors have more to do with this point in time than the distinction of being a developed economy. If you went back in time 20 years: a cell phone with a dead battery would be user serviceable, regardless of that user's skill level; a computer with a dead hard drive would be user serviceable, to anyone who could handle a screwdriver. Fixing the socket on most devices would require a learned skill, soldering, but would be accessible to most people. The reason why I selected those examples is because they are easily diagnosed by the end user and don't require much technical sophistication to fix, so the cost of labour is cut out.
These days, something as trivial as replacing a battery or hard drive requires a great deal more skill. Heck, in many cases it takes a great deal more skill to non-destructively open the enclosure simply to peek inside. None of that has anything to do with developed or developing economies. It has to do with how products are designed.
(And if you were to go back yet another 20 years, the contrast is even more stark.)
I completely agree with your point on skill level, and also think parent’s point is true at the same time.
We had a washing machine die on us after 5 yers. After searching for repair manuals, we got the probable cause, and the part number of the controller board to replace (or test the chips and replace and resolder the parts that died, which goes to your point on skills). Except the price of the controller board was 90% of a new washing machine. And we’d still be taking the risk to either botch the repair, or have something else fail after we fix the controller.
Same way, looking at the pixel 4a replacement screens, they retail around 170$, shipment not included, and you can buy a decent second hand pixel 4a at a bit less than 200$. The price difference doesn’t make it worth it to try to repair the screen, except to spare reinstall time perhaps.
I expect most of our appliances to have that core part that just costs almost as much as the whole device to repair, though from a material mass/role perspective it doesn’t make any sense.
But that raises the question: is the 90% the cost of a new washing machine or 50% the cost of a mobile phone in any way reflective of the cost of getting replacement modules to the consumer, or are they using the price of replacement modules as an attack on independent repair?
I am looking at the relative cost of those modules and comparing them to the relative cost of components on my bike. Cycling is different since there is a culture of repair, may it be DIY work or through independent repair shops, and I would be hard pressed to name any component that would amount to 20% of the market value of my bike (which is about 30 years old at this point). Even then it may not be necessary to replace an entire component since it is often possible to rebuild what is already there. That component that costs 20% the market value of my bike may actually cost a few dollars to rebuild, assuming that I had the cost and skill.
In cycling, the approach you take often comes down to how much skill you have, how much time you have, and whether you are willing to pay for someone else to do the work for you. While electronics may be different due to integration and miniaturization, it is really difficult to see how a washing machine is all that different from a bike. Yes, there is going to be some degree of integration to reduce costs. Yes, there are some electronic and electromechanical parts in there. Yet what a washing machine does today is not all that different from what one did 50 years ago. The big difference is how everything is controlled, and that should be cheaper than it was 50 years ago.
Going for the cycling analogy, if your otherwise bog standard road bike came with a wireless SRAM drivetrain, when you kill your derailleur you might be looking at 400~500$ of replacement parts when the whole bike was 700$ new, and probably 550$ second hand.
I had the same experience the other way round, where upgrading the derailleur and the shifting gear costed more that the initial price of my bike.
I would compare that to current gaming laptops where the CPU and really the GPU make for the bulk of the price. It seems to be common across enough industries that I don’t think it’s just makers fighting consumers. Making repairs technically more difficult feels more inline with maker’s malice.
I'm an all-season rider who lives in a city that loves salt. Most of the drive train on my older road bike (plus cables, cable housings, and the rear wheel) has been replaced piece by piece for considerably less than your modern SRAM derailleur. Parts are readily available and most modern bikes use the same components. Sure there are modern bikes where replacement parts are considerably more expensive, but they're easy to ignore unless you are in the market for something specific. Then again, the same thing could have been said about bikes 10, 20, or 30 years ago. This strikes me as being in sharp contrast to most electronic devices and many electric appliances, where finding something repairable is the exception and it may not even be possible if the given component is specific to a given model or manufacturer.
I think the balance is just opposite in electronic devices.
As you mention, you can assemble a bike with all parts at roughly the same costs without that much of a trade-off. The example I was giving is more of the exception of putting a very performant/specific core part into a meh setup.
As I see it, in electronic devices it’s more common to have a very basic structure with super cheap commodity components, except that one corepiece that pushes the whole appliance’s capabilities far ahead. For my washing machine, the metal frame, belts and motors are cheap run of the mill parts that might not have changed for decades, and only the controller is custom designed to adapt to modern use. Or looking at rice cookers, a tremendous portion of the value would go into the pan and the controller, and the rest of the housing and heating structure is pure commodity. As a caveat, that might not be the case for high end appliances, where perhaps every component could be high quality, but I’m too cheap to confirm that.
If the software were supported closer to decades rather than years, I suspect it'd be worthwhile to have a refurbishment center that carefully scraps the major bits apart, re-tests them, and re-assembles a working device out of the non-failed parts. (Ideally with a fresh battery and replaced storage chip.)
I just don't see "planned obsolescence" as a top-down directive.
Has any engineer come forward to say management told them to make specific changes to cause a thing to become obsolete in some period of time? I am not aware of any.
Rather what looks like planned obsolescence can generally be explained by other factors — not the least of which might just be the fickleness of consumers.
Looks like a top-down directive to me. Just look at the lightbulb cartel.
From an engineering perspective, some designs simply don't make any sense if not for planned obsolescence: on a quite famous printer brand, the printer stops working after X pages printed [1]. You can fix that with soldering and chip reprogramming, but it may or may not be trivial. In the end, warranty is really short and is void the minute you open the product to see its guts, so it's not exactly for safety reasons.
Some people blame planned obsolescence on the consumer, but in fact that's just blame shifting. The truth is rent-seeking, at the expense of the environment.
Lightbulb cartel, I agree. But that's ancient history now.
Any current "cartel" would no doubt also have a Wikipedia page write-up. Maybe I should have said I am unaware of any current planned-obsolescence directive.
I was, to be sure, putting some of the blame on the consumer, there are other reasons though — like the always moving technology wavefront that makes composite-video "obsolete", SCSI "obsolete", etc.
Your printer example is the first I had heard about a printer designed to stop after 'n' prints. That sounds ripe for a class-action lawsuit.
Legality indeed varies, but even if it's illegal hardware vendors easily away with it, and will still bill you the repairs if they want to repair it at all.
as someone who repairs things for myself and others its really hard to explain some of these failures as anything other than planned obsolescence. board-mounted fuses. sacrificial plastic gears in the drivetrain. chillers with the filler tube folded over and brazed.
the most charitable explanation is cost reduction. but $0.05 savings on a $500 retail item isn't helping anyone if it means my mixer lasts 1 year instead of 20 like the ones they used to make.
That explanation, as dumb as it seems, can be the actual and only reason for many designs. Barely functional heatsinks in laptops, using 0.1mm metal backsides in keyboards instead of 0.25 or something (the fucking thing bends and keys stop working!), plastic clips instead of screws, etc.
Yeah, we say "it's just $0.05, I'll gladly pay that for higher quality!". But somewhere, a new CxO is saying "we have saved $10,000,000 on production this year". And it's a big number, indeed.
But what about the users? Well, fuck the users. They will buy overpriced parts from the company or a new device from the company or the few competitors who do the same thing. They could be in cahoots, but it's more than likely they all decided saving tens/hundreds of millions a year is worth far more than a small number of disappointed buyers.
I think you're right. Planned obsolescence has perfectly sensible
bottom-up explanations that revolve around the linear algebra and
optimisation of MTBF in mixed source components. Indeed, planned
obsolescence is no problem whatsoever if you have a "Right To
Repair". Even better if you Design for Repair
Your point is valid, however we shouldn't forget that right to repair doesn't mean being forbidden from buying new products. That is, people wanting to buy their new device wouldn't see any difference, until the day they're forced to buy a new product because either repairing it from only authorized shops is too costly, or because there are no documentation and spares available at all. A right to repair law would be a win-win scenario for everyone, except greedy beancounters of course.
That would be the case if for some reason, the third world countries would be getting repairable stuff. But no, they get the same shit that's popular in developed countries, even worse - because the main reason for soldering and gluing everything shut is cost reduction. And there are no parts.
The former is always cheaper in developed economies
Is it really cheaper to buy a new house than to replace a fuse? Really cheaper to buy a new car than to replace a tyre? Really cheaper to buy a new OS than to install some updates?
I am not sure about the house, but on used cars replacing a broken engine/transmission/hybrid battery is more expensive than the car itself (or even better: a car value if sold whole is sometimes less than the sum of its parts).
For the rest, I was mostly talking about electronic hardware: replacing broken screens, wanting more Processor/RAM but buying a new motherboard is needed, etc.
It's not the American Way (tm) to have congress force this. Let The Markets Decide (c)
Yet, now, we have Farmework laptop and OEM parts for Apple products. We're better in those ways, but worse in others, for sure.
I only hope soon these concepts catch on. The image of small car repair shops working on teslas both scares and inspires me. Or the future of a handyman with a laptop to debug a washing machine both infurates me and gives me hope.
>It's sad because folks will be less and less interested in fixing their things or simply opening their devices to understand how they work
those days are long gone. you might be able to disassemble a turntable to figure out how it works, but disassembling a phone isn't going to tell you much when all the magic is in the silicon. all you get from disassembling it is a circuit board with random bumps.
Hm, these markets in Shenzhen seem to offer different stories. Youtube is full of those, you can replace/upgrade displays, memory, storage of your phone or even assemble your own.
And in my country you have these little shops as well, where you pay a premium, but you dont have to buy a new phone.
So, unless you really want to fix something very integrated, i am rather positive about the situation.
And from my own history, mainboard was never really a problem, it was always something attached or plugged or solded onto it.
It's possible, however sad, that there are societal stages where China is in a stage we saw in early Americana when farmers were often the "techies" that kept engines and equipment functioning. They had tools and learned from doing, repairing, making.
But as we went from farm to factory and our wages got us a higher standard of living, we preferred to buy new things rather than keep old things working.
If China follows the path of the U.S., Japan, Korea, they too will grow a middle class that no longer want to work for low wages in factories and will look for cheaper labor elsewhere in the world to meet the needs of their growing consumption.
> On the other side, China has relatively affordable access to parts (low-level components included), schematics, extensive tooling and a growing hacker/maker culture.
Having had repairs made in Beijing in hole in the wall E shops, no thank you. You have to watch the repairs being done like a hawk, or they will “fix” what wasn’t broken with some flaky parts they want to get rid of in addition to making your repair. The Apple Store is much more reliable in comparison, while being price competitive.
RTR doesn't seem like the optimal solution to e-waste.
If manufacturers were required by law to take care of e-waste they generate, to recycle everything they produce, rather to shifting that onto the consumer, perhaps they'd start building things to last in the first place.
Also increase minimum warranty, 5 years for solid state devices?
> Attempting a repair is one of those sparks that nurture curiosity
I appreciate the sentiment, but repairing an iPhone only gives you a very superficial understanding of how it works. It's about as technical as setting up a computer with a discrete monitor, webcam, UPS, case, speakers, etc.
I don't think he's saying that the repair will teach you the first principles of phone design. It's that by taking the step of actually opening the device, you significantly lower the hurdle to any next steps.
Indeed, it requires more physical dexterity than technical skill to repair an iPhone. The technical skill is really limited to being able to follow instructions, and basic things like ESD control.
Can anyone familiar with the process, explain exactly how these industry lobbyists win these cases? With a 75% of Californians being pro-right to repair, and with bipartisan support - you'd think this would be an easy case to argue.
Do the lobbyists have some incredibly legitimate insider information they share with the senators? Do they just throw cash/donations at them?
> With a 75% of Californians being pro-right to repair, and with bipartisan support - you'd think this would be an easy case to argue
“Bipartisan support“ is, since we are well out of the pre-1990s realignment period, mostly a sign of low political salience, an issue that doesn't have much relevance to voting behavior to most of the public. Breadth (%) of support or opposition is far less important than depth (impact on voting, volunteering, and donating behavior), and this is an issue where the depth of support in the general public is near 0, where the depth of opposition from entrenched industry interests is high.
Part of the problem is that all of our depth in political support gets black-holed into advertising for simple polarizing issues like abortion, guns, and high vs. low taxes. This gets largely negated by the other side advertising for the opposite position, so in the end very little gets done.
I agree with you that it is a problem, but I don't think it's the primaries as much as it is the two-party system. If we are going to have political parties, then they should be allowed some semblance of self-governance. Otherwise, what's the point? There could just be one state controlled party that does everything. The more we control individual parties, the more pointless it is to even have different parties.
Personally, I see political parties as potentially important to a well-functioning democracy. The main problem I think is lack of competition. I would love to see at least a third party, maybe half a dozen or more, emerge in the United States. Obviously people have been trying to make that happen for decades, without success. I wonder what type of solutions there are to increase the number of viable parties? The one that seems most plausible to me is ranked choice voting, for one of the many minor variations of the idea. Are there other things?
> The real issue is actually partisan primaries that push both sides further to the edge.
No, it's not. California has eliminated primaries in the usual sense (what is called a “primary”, outside of Presidential nominations, in California is the first round of a two-round majority-runoff general election where you aren't allowed to win outright on the first ballot even with a clear majority), and yet here we are talking about the effect in California, so partisan primaries can not be the issue. We’ve ruled that out by not having them.
The issue is FPTP single-member district legislative elections, which supports partisan duopoly and narrows the meaningful space of political debate toward a single high-salience axis and issues where splits align well with that axis, marginalizing all other issues. This has been somewhat extensively studied in comparative study of modern representative democratic systems, see, e.g., Lijphart’s Patterns of Democracy.
> CA is a one party state, for all practical purposes
This is much less true than it seems superficially; its true that the state-level government is dominated by Democrats (including many offices that are nominally nonpartisan), but important local government offices, particularly Sheriffs–which are also nominally nonpartisan–are dominated by Republicans. This was particularly significant during the height of the COVID pandemic, because enforcement of public health orders is, under the State Constitution and laws, almost entirely entrusted to county Sheriffs, and every single county Sheriff in the State publicly announced one form or another of non-enforcement.
If you are a one party state minus Sheriffs then you are a one party state. Covid aside, 95% percent of the government is not law enforcement. And all the prosecutors are dems
Which is not what I said, Sheriffs were an example, not an exhaustive list of exceptions.
> 95% percent of the government is not law enforcement.
That’s strange, because law enforcement, corrections, and criminal legal system is about 10% of California’s budget.
> And all the prosecutors are dems
No, they aren’t. Like all local offices, it’s a formally nonpartisan office, but its fairly common for Republicans or (especially in Dem-leaning areas), “independents” who were Republicans before running for the office and whose stances on policy issues are indistinguishable from Republicans to be DA’s, though DA’s are less consistently hard-right than Sheriffs.
This is a good point for other issues as well. Support for legal recreational marijuana nationally has been at a decently strong majority level for a while now, but that hasn't resulted in any action at the federal level. It hasn't even been rescheduled when Democrats hold the presidency, and support within the Democratic party in particular is extremely high. That, too, is an issue of depth. Yeah, most Democrats and even Americans support it at this point, but for most it's not a major issue.
That's part of why it's been so common to pass as a state-level initiative. If you actually get it to a popular vote, it'll pass because people are at least lightly in favor, but legislatures are slow to pass it themselves because it has little impact on their re-election chances.
> Support for legal recreational marijuana nationally has been at a decently strong majority level for a while now, but that hasn't resulted in any action at the federal level.
While it is technically still federally prohibited, and there is some danger of reach-back prosecutions if policy changes, since 2014 state law has effectively controlled because of the enforcement restrictions in the Rohrbacher-Farr Amendment, which has been continuously renewed as part of funding bills, and is a substantive federal action.
My naive take on this would be to have poll questions like:
> Are you in favor of consumers' right to repair? ...How strong is your position? (1–5)
Of course this is vulnerable to strategic answering, where people just slam on ‘5’ for each question. Like how star ratings are inflated on Amazon.
My next strategy would be pairwise contests. So:
> Alice supports right-to-repair (RTR) and raising property taxes. Bob is opposed to RTR and wants to lower property taxes. Who would you vote for?
> Carol supports RTR and applying the death penalty to a wider range of felonies. David opposes RTR and wants to eliminate capital punishment altogether. Who would you vote for?
But too much of that and you'd start to lose people. How many questions can you pose before you're only getting answers from serial poll-takers?
It's an open secret in politics that government jobs are a revolving door to/from industry.
Corporate executives frequently go in to politics, and when politicians retire they often get cushy, high paying jobs at the very corporations they benefited while in office.
They don't have to be outright bribed while in office (though it's not unknown for that to happen), but they know they'll be handsomely rewarded once they leave.
That's not to mention them or their family members investing in companies they know will benefit from their actions while in office.
This is a tired argument. Of course people who have industry experience will continue to work in that industry. And if the chance of being rewarded with a "cushy" job after leaving office is so compelling then why are so few people interested in becoming politicians?
> if the chance of being rewarded with a "cushy" job after leaving office is so compelling then why are so few people interested in becoming politicians?
Becoming a politician is a bit like becoming a musician: Spend the best years of your life 'putting your time in' with a 98% chance you'll never make it big. Only the 2% that made it big get offered those $500k/year sinecures.
If you're already in the powerful 2% you've probably already compromised on your principles many times to get there, so the $500k/year for compromising them a little more is practically free money.
If you're entering politics, though? As you've only got a 2% chance of making the $500k, the expected value is only $10k. Not much of a motivation.
It's not clear to me that the overlap between corporate and political career paths really has any meaningful impact on the way politicians vote on individual bills, so I wouldn't call that a fact
There might technically be enough politicians to fill all available positions, but there clearly aren’t enough for a competitive and diverse ideological landscape.
When it comes to US, adding more candidates doesn't change the politics. Genuine grassroots campaigns have an almost impossible climb against establishment endorsed candidates in both major parties, and creating your own party does nothing either. Without a large battle chest, you ain't gonna win against a candidate with a huge corporate campaign budget. If anything, adding more candidates creates a "spoiler" effect, where the establishment candidate doesn't need as many votes, because the opposition vote is split due to two or more opposition candidates. And even if you manage somehow to get elected, you'll have a hard time getting anything done if you don't tow the party line.
The US system steers naturally towards two parties that both advance corporate interests, and that's what's happening now.
I just remembered a guy who became a mayor and then started his own party with some decent, western inspired ideas in my country. Things which are sane in the UK, Ireland, France, Germany, you know, countries which we consider developed.
I really should've saved that story because I can't find it anywhere now.
Basically, on the streets, most people supported him. In reality, people weren't enough. If they even mattered. Turned out you had to align yourself with one of the four major parties or you had zero chance at gaining traction in any county that mattered. Funnily enough, the "easy" counties would be even harder - low population, low income, lack of education, low voter turnout, always voting for populists/authoritarians.
The major parties have the power and the money and there was no way they'd ever let a newcomer just barge in without being vetted first. The majority of new parties were absorbed into the big ones.
This is a joke, I don't know what's to be done about it and I'm sure that's the case in other countries, too. Only good thing is politicians stay out of private business as they're starting to realize the richer the private population becomes, the richer they will be.
And even then, they fail at making a better environment for small businesses, instead choosing to focus on big companies, especially foreign ones. Let them come, buy up everything for cheap and use the population as cheap labor forever. Why would the government care?
Not quite. He entered office with net neutrality in effect but then changed the regulatory umbrella it fell under into one without net neutrality in 2009, which Comcast and Verizon took advantage of in the courts. It wasn't until 2015 that ISPs were categorized in Title II and made subject to net neutrality constraints again.
Obama also nominated Ajit Pai to the FCC in the first place.
75% of Californians are pro-right to repair when asked, but that doesn't mean that 75% really know what it means much less care about it. The legislature is probably assuming that the campaign money from the lobbyists will more than make up for the lost votes from the tiny minority that truly cares.
It also depends on who is asking the question. A right-to-repair advocate would ask "Do you support this law that will lower the cost of repairing old phones?" and most people will agree. Then an industry group asks the same people "Do you support this law that will raise the cost of making new phones?" and get a different answer.
Anti-right-to-repair lobby out in full force to stop it—and they’re winning. And yet you’re still blaming the average Joe based on hypothetical questionairre framing.
I realize you’re making a hypothetical point about the importance of question phrasing, but I really don’t see how this law would raise the cost of making new phones.
Doesn't making "repairable" things imply having to add design constraints, which would translate to increased costs of research/development/production?
Anyone who thinks that’s what this is about has not been following Right to Repair. While it would be great if things were designed with repairability in mind, the ask from Right to Repair is that no one be impeded from accessing manuals, components, and software needed for repair.
This specific bill was just about access to repair information and the ability to use third-party repair facilities. However, the Right to Repair organization specifically lists on their policy goals (https://www.repair.org/policy):
> Products should be designed to have their lifespan extended by regular maintenance and repair.
> Design: Integrate Design for Repair principles into eco-design product design practices.
And I have seen Right to Repair efforts that demanded repairable devices, even if that meant more bulk or more cost, or other tradeoffs.
Framework and similar efforts have demonstrated that it's possible to build a repairable device that people actually like, without compromising too much on other factors. But until those substantial engineering efforts had been put in, this seemed like a fundamental tradeoff between two sets of somewhat-incompatible properties consumers may want, and should be able to choose between. (It's still a tradeoff insofar as devices providing repairability don't provide all the features available from other devices.)
What I've heard from the many people who talk about right to repair on YouTube (channels like LTT, EEVBlog, and of course Louis Rossmann), is that they aren't asking for laws to restrict how products can be designed. A law like that is highly unlikely to pass and would seriously anger a lot of people if it did.
It looks like the reason for this mismatch in opinions is because repair.org is not associated with Rossmann. To me, their existence is going to hurt the chances of right to repair, because people will point to their goals as a reason to not consider the part/version of right to repair that should be much less controversial (in a relative sense. any regulations are controversial just due to being regulations)
Right to repair means that if the company A making the product buys a component from another company B, then A cannot forbid B from selling the same component to a repair shop. It does not mean that Apple is no longer allowed to glue their battery into the iPad.
So that means if Apple buys their chips from TSMC, then TSMC can now sell Apples chips directly to whoever wants them?
It’s not surprising it’s a dead bill. That leaves a nice opportunity for TSMC to capture a bunch of Apple’s margin without having had to do any of the chip R&D.
No. TSMC does own that IP. This is about instances where the IP is owned by company B.
I don't know how the legislation would work in a case like that. Most likely Apple would be required to sell replacement parts to everyone, rather than only to its licensed repair shops.
In any case this is a theoretical point, it's usually some stupid little chip on the motherboard that got wet and rusty, not the CPU. Or the screen broke. Or the battery is too old.
No, it just means making it possible to buy parts, repair manuals/schematics for products and preventing manufacturers for refusing warranty coverage when a repair is done correctly by a third party or product owner. We have right to repair for cars, and have since the 1970s, and without it... the car economy would be more frightening than it already is.
I think it is reasonable to imagine some manufacturing processes that are single shot construction. Gluing pieces together rather than screws/fasteners comes to mind.
Yes, but this bill wouldn't have affected any of that. Manufacturers could have continued making their devices difficult or even impossible to repair, they just would have had to make their own parts and repair manuals available to third parties.
In my experience, lobbyists are essentially individual people hired by an organization to do extensive, cited research on the topic, and develop "well written and formatted" proposals for/against, as well as dedicate time to delivering the proposals and arguments in person. They call the legislators, they schedule meetings with them, they go through whatever bureaucracy of a given office to get in contact with the legislator, and present their information directly in ways that make the legislator "understand" the position better. There might be financial contributions and vague promises of future opportunities, but those tend to come from a different angle via the same organization.
On the other hand, the regular people complain about the topic in pubs and coffee shops and online and at the dinner table, and might fill out a petition or a pre-made letter. They might even send a personalized email or physical letter (too often poorly worded and badly formatted with no evidentiary backing), or leave voice mails with a staffer. They won't do this very often, but feel that they have strength in numbers. Spoiler: receiving the same misspelled email from 5000 people doesn't make the legislator (or their staff) think "oh wow a lot of people are really upset by this", it just to spam/trash cans.
Financial contribution ("bribes") and fancy dinners or gifts are usually the boogeyman when it comes to blaming lobbyists, but those are tangential and not as common as most people think. The biggest factor for a successful lobbyist is the research, presentation, and persistence.
> In my experience, lobbyists are essentially individual people hired by an organization to do extensive, cited research on the topic, and develop "well written and formatted" proposals for/against, as well as dedicate time to delivering the proposals and arguments in person.
My experience is quite different and comes from doing grass roots lobbying at the state and Federal level. Grass-roots lobbying is just where regular citizens go do the lobbying instead of paid professionals. If you ever get a chance to get involved in this kind of lobbying, it will change how you think about government, and you'll be pleasantly surprised to see you can actually make a difference. You'll also find out that being a legislator at any level is an almost impossible job.
Lobbyists (yes, they are individuals, but usually have an organization and staff behind them) are paid to show up and "help" legislators. This ranges from providing information all the way up to writing bills. Often bills are initially written by lobbyists (the joke is that most laws are written by staff interns and lobbyists). The reason lobbyists are effective is simple: legislators all the way up to the US Senate don't have time to do the work needed to write laws, debate them, pass them, campaign, go to parades and graduations and communicate with constituents... so they work with lobbyists, who are well paid to have time. Yes, professional lobbyists always have an ulterior motive, and always have time, because their paycheck depends on it.
> Do the lobbyists have some incredibly legitimate insider information they share with the senators? Do they just throw cash/donations at them?
I do some grass roots lobbying in Indiana. When we can't get a bill to the floor, it usually comes down to this:
1. The public might support the bill, but voters aren't willing to vote across the aisle over the issue behind the bill. So, the politician can kill the bill without fear.
2. There's a technical problem with the bill that would make it a bad law. Sometimes, this is sabotage, but most often, it is discovered late in the process and the bill dies in committee until next session.
3. The law would change the staus quo in some way that is harmful to the close supporters of legislators. This is less about money, and more about relationships.
The answer to all of the above is simple: get more public support, and even work to unseat legislators that are opposed to your issue. State legislators usually don't have a strong grip on their seats (some do), so they can be unseated, often in primary elections.
It was killed in the Appropriations committee on a 7-0 vote, after passing in the Judiciary committee on a 8-1 vote.
The Appropriations committee (AKA Ways and Means in the US House) is where lobbyists spend their money. Anything that costs money has to go through this, and everything costs money.
The argument that this bill cost money was based on the potential impact on the courts as legal actions would be files to enforce the new warranty rights.
Rather than trying to influence every potentially concerned member of legislature, better to spend 100x on the people who control the purse.
California instituted term limits for its state representatives in 1990. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but what you end up with is that the most senior politicians in Sacramento are the lobbyists.
The outcome of that is that most bills are written by lobbyists and most state reps vote how the lobbyists tell them to, because they lobbyists are the ones making the deals with the other lobbyists, instead of the long time representatives being in leadership.
Each system has its pros and cons, but one of the main cons of term limits is that lobbyists are in control.
75% of people like the idea of “right to repair” but that doesn’t mean they would support this particular implementation if they knew the details and side effects. Committees in the ideal allow a more nuanced examination and development of law.
Sponsors have lobbyist support and the bills themselves may be written by them, for them, with any public benefit a side effect. As long as it “sounds good” other lawmakers feel forced to go along with.
I imagine it's very complicated. Sometimes they just need cooperation on other things, then they own stock, their friends own stock, they run in the same social circles, you can bet many are just corrupt and if not their friends are, then there's the actual power the companies have (like the ability to build or layoff in their district, strategically hike prices, minor capital strikes, blackmail (remember who has all the data), all kinds of stuff.) Also, there aren't really any consequences to ignoring you anyway. On average, they'll either get re-elected because nobody notices/understands or they'll just be replaced by a new sock puppet.
This is why you'd want liquid democracy, arbitrary right of recall or something along those lines.
> They're also tenured. Even if they disappoint, what are people going to do vote Republican?
Unlike the rest of the country, California has "jungle primaries". So, you can wind up in the election with "Democrat vs Democrat". This prevents the "Barely win the primary and cruise to a safe general election."
In addition, California can put something like this up as a proposition and override the legislature.
However, both of these situations are likely to wind up with a LOT of entrenched money being thrown around in opposition to "right to repair". So, the supporters need to get their ducks in a row and demonstrate real support in the electorate for this.
> Same one party rule situation exists in some very "red" states of course.
I'm speaking in ignorance right now, but I am unaware of any red states that implement either jungle primaries or election propositions.
Occasionally a politician does so poorly that the voters vote across the aisle. Right to repair can become one of the issues that causes people to vote for the other party. It really sucks to have to throw expensive products away because you simple can't fix them. Not being able to repair products is bad for everything but short term profits.
We're seeing certain industries where right to repair is getting traction and funding: military and agriculture. As funding for the issue goes up, so will public awareness. Another positive is that right to repair is 100% non partisan.
> Can anyone familiar with the process, explain exactly how these industry lobbyists win these cases? With a 75% of Californians being pro-right to repair, and with bipartisan support - you'd think this would be an easy case to argue.
Well, what does that tell you? Majority public opinion does not matter. Money does.
Peoples politics are closer to sports team fandom than anything pragmatic. As long as you keep pulling the red or blue lever no matter what they don't have much incentive to do much of anything.
> Peoples politics are closer to sports team fandom than anything pragmatic.
This is the result of the deliberate way in which clever malicious spindoctors manipulated political debate over the years in such a way so that what once was a pondered opinion became later akin to a religious affiliation. The bottom line is that an opinion can be changed while a religious belief cannot; it's the system's way to ensure that once a voter is captured it stays loyal forever.
Let's don't be too credulous about the polling performed by the bill's supporters. What would be the "pro right to repair" fraction if it were posed as a tradeoff between repairability and a slightly higher retail price?
In my personal opinion the "security lock" language of this bill is dangerously vague, and the benefits it offers in terms of third-party repair are worth almost nothing to me, so I opposed the bill.
You know, sometimes bills intended to do something good are actually really bad. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but two things strike me as red flags on a quick read:
- There are references to specific dollar amounts in the bill with no provision for automatic adjustment due to inflation.
- There is the following passage.
“(2) For products with a wholesale price to the retailer of not less than fifty dollars ($50) and not more than ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents ($99.99), that contains an electronic security lock or other security-related function, the manufacturer shall also make available to owners of the product, service and repair facilities, and service dealers, on fair and reasonable terms, any documentation, tools, software and parts needed to disable the lock or function, and to reset the lock or function when disabled, during the course of the inspection, diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of a product for at least three years after the date a product model or type was manufactured, regardless of whether the three-year period exceeds the warranty period for the product.”
That sure seems like a requirement for a secure enclave backdoor.
What the hell is their reasoning for only having a rule that applies to devices that cost $50-$99.99, aside from likely ruling out every cell phone?
> the manufacturer shall also make available [...] for at least three years after the date a product model or type was manufactured
How much you want to bet that was put in to allow manufacturers to supply software tools that the manufacturer can either remote-disable, or have time-bombs built in, or both?
Watch a cell manufacturer shrug and come out with the "YZ 5 Pro", manufacture it for a year, and then come out with the YZ 5 Pro A" the next year, etc.
Seems like this got poison-pilled just like a lot of gun legislation which is written to focus on things easily changed so they're not effective. "Guns over 14 inches with a vented barrel grip installed during manufacture" write the lobbyists, and then they send a memo to gun manufacturers to plan on adjusting their tooling to make 13.95 inch barrels, or leave off the barrel grip, easily installed by dealers or buyers.)
I don't know how relevant this point is specifically for this bill — but I've always wondered if politicans simply "supported" a bill or otherwise did not speak out in favour/against because they know it'll be a quiter death if they say one thing/vote another. Rather then begin a drawn-out and public campaign in support/against.
Easier to be disingenious than "make it my issue."
The lobbies only have to focus on swaying the committee members because all bills have to make it through the relevant committees before being voted on widely. There are ways for bills in some legislatures to skip the committee process but usually by unanimous votes or large percentages.
Lol yes, after years of actual water shortage and housing shortage being "not great, but you know, we manage" this would certainly push the state over the edge into full-on Mad Max thunderdome mood. :D
According to what estimates? I'm seeing various numbers but they're suggesting a bit under 2000 gallons of water to make a pound of both almonds and beef. The almonds do have more calories, but that's a really unimpressive number for both.
The reason we talk about almonds is because both of those are wasteful, and both of those are enormous uses of california water, but california has 6% of the country's cattle and 80% of the entire world's almonds.
That’s a lazy response. Just charge for water, the cost will be reflected accurately in the food, and people will move to cheaper alternatives. We’re nowhere near a food shortage, that’s propaganda from California farmers that don’t even want you to consider the possibility of touching their draconian water rights.
The fruits and vegetables (I'm not counting nuts) need a couple gallons per ounce. Even desalination would only cost about 0.3-2 cents per ounce of those foods, and that's pretty much the upper limit of long-term water prices next to an ocean.
I dont know if they made that threat to California, probably not for Apple, since they could get what they want without doing so. But they did made similar threat to the UK and EU. Possibly hinted in AUS.
With almost 90% of the population in California being over age 10, that would be quite that market to ignore. It's more people than almost all of Scandinavia combined.
I'm trying to understand the specifics of what happened in this particular case. Was it corporate influence? Was it bad policy design? Was it a failure of process? None of the above? All of the above? Something else?
It's all too easy to cynically handwave and parrot platitudes like "politicians are corrupt", "capitalism is bad", etc. Reality is far more complicated than those overly simplistic platitudes let-on and parroting them doesn't meaningfully contribute to the discussion of what to do better next time.
If we want to understand how to implement lasting change through government policy, the context and details matter when seemingly good policies fail.
As someone that doesn't have a strong understanding of american politics, can I check my understanding?
This means that a majority of senators voted to oppose the bill, (after it had been approved by the house). Is that correct?
Are there common websites where you can see exactly how individual senators vote on specific issues? (in the UK we have publicwhip.org.uk where you can search anything that you care about and see if your mp voted in a way you agree with).
What method do americans tend to use to check that their politicians are voting in their interest?
"Dying in committee" means that the bill did not go to the entire California Senate for a vote, but that a majority of the committee to which the bill was assigned were unable to support the bill to move it onto the floor. It looks like the article links to the site that tracks bill status, but it appears that site does not record how a committee voted.
They're accountable in the sense that they're all up for reelection. You can show up and demand an explanation of the bill status and the role they played. If you don't like it you can vote for someone else.
In practice I suspect very few people care all that much. Some do, of course, but for most it won't be top of their priority list.
This is the real challenge of democracy. We think of it in terms of yeah no votes, but the real work is done by the people choosing from millions of options to put the final up-down choice in front of you. Nobody has yet found a good way to do collaboration on that scale.
> demand an explanation of the bill status and the role they played
That's just what I meant. Can you know which senator voted how within that committee? Otherwise it'd be easy for them to say "well I voted for it of course!"
It shows the history of the bill including votes. Each state does this differently, as well as the federal government. As for what happened to this bill, it never made it to a full senate vote, it died in a sub-committee, essentially.
If they vote against your interests you don't vote for them again and try to not get them re-elected. However, through writing their own rules, heavy campaigning and the two party system making a vote for your favorite team better than letting the other guy get in this in effect no longer works on either side. It requires a fairly unified effort to get someone out but the majority of voting attention is squarely captured on both sides leading to the same hackery voted in again and again.
It's one of the many reasons why I don't see changes in the American political system happening without real rebellion type actions but the pain isn't felt enough yet to make thinking like that completely palatable.
And not to mention the voting body of the united states is completely polarized and divided.
> It's one of the many reasons why I don't see changes in the American political system happening without real rebellion type actions but the pain isn't felt enough yet to make thinking like that completely palatable.
Parties have changed in this country's history before without rebellion.
It will happen again. I imagine soon (25 years or less), even.
IIRC the last time that happened was in the 1850s, when the Whig party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whig_Party_(United_States)) lost its significance and was replaced by the Republican party? That's more than 170 years ago, so I'm not holding my breath waiting for it to happen again...
The republican party just in the last 10 years changed from Reaganism to populism. Even if the name is the same their platform absolutely is not. When a party realizes their platform is a loser it'll change its tune.
I think fundamental elements of the system are broken such that we even landed on a two party system in the first place and it’s more of those types of changes I’d like to see. In terms of ideology Parties change all the time. Look at the transformation the GOP has had over the last 10 years even. That I’m not worried about, but issues like term limits to prevent the effective gerontocracy we have, ranked choice voting, stopping arbitrary district restructuring, effective representation by population and more are things that benefit both existing parties regardless of their current ideology and so they don’t stand to change.
I also go back and forth on the electoral college in the case of the president but I’m not quite at the point where I want it to disappear without having an alternative.
Are there common websites where you can see exactly how individual senators vote on specific issues?
From the article, where it is linked "SB 983", clicking that, and clicking the tab that says "Votes" will show who voted yay and nay for this bill[1]. There are many sites, yes, but you can also just get this directly from state legislatures.
This means that a majority of senators voted to oppose the bill, (after it had been approved by the house). Is that correct?
No, the bill did not get to a vote by the full CA senate. Senate committees deal with the bill before that and this one did not get through that hurdle on the way to becoming law.
Before a bill goes before the full Senate it gets debated/edited in a relevant committee, if the committee votes against the bill it never goes up for the full vote.
The committees are generally permanent, not instantiated per bill, and the senators on the committee doesn't change often (the majority party does get to have a majority membership in all the committees) but yeah, committee membership can be really powerful and gets used as a reward/threat by party leadership.
Anytime anyone says that Democrats are on the right side of morality, please point to things like this. California has been strongly Democrat for decades and this is how things are. They are "progressive" on hot button issues like abortion and gun laws, but for the most part, they don't give a shit about regular people just like Republicans.
We need a third party to disrupt the two party oligopoly that has tricked most Americans into thinking we have a choice. We currently have no choice because both parties don't give a shit about citizens, just how can they perpetuate the ruling class to continue to feed off us.
MA passed a right to repair bill requiring tools be made available to third party mechanics. So car companies shifted all the functionality of those tools into "telematics" (so for example, instead of a Subaru tech plugging in a scan tool, now he logs into a Subaru website which talks to the car over its cellular based telematics link) and said "neener neener, you didn't say telematics in your law, HAW HAW!"
So MA passed a second right to repair bill specifying telematics is included, and slapped back harder by speccing that they had to establish various systems to grant third parties access, etc.
A couple of automakers responded by petulantly disabling telematics functions for any vehicles sold in MA.
Of note: both bills were general ballot measures, because the Right To Repair folks knew that they'd never get a bill like it through the MA legislature due to lobbyists and legislative corruption (aided by much of the MA legislature's activities not being public record; the executive branch has also declared itself exempt from public record/meeting laws, as has the judiciary.)
The other thing of note: automakers ran a massive advertising campaign including videos strongly implying that women would get stalked and sexually assaulted/murdered, presumably by third parties given access to their vehicle's telematics. They basically called independent mechanics rapists and murderers.
Worse, they claimed that a sexual assault victim's NPO (RAINN I think? I forget) was against the bill. Turns out it was a bald-faced lie and the org wasted no time reaching out to press to inform them of that.
It really tells you how much was at stake here profits-wise, and how important right to repair is, that automakers were willing to shout "YOU'LL BE RAPED BY YOUR MECHANIC!" and lie so blatantly about NPOs supporting them
There are a lot of non Americans asking how a bill that was universally condoned was killed and the answer is sad but not particularly complicated.
American politics primarily works based off of what people see on TV or read in the news and what a politician says and what they do are entirely disconnected. So these politicians publically say whatever is the popular openion which in this case is that right to repair is good but then they placate to companies who don't want right to repair to succeed.
This allows them to have their cake and eat it too. They get to say they tried to push for it but there wasn't support even when you can search and find that they in fact voted against it and are even often on the payroll of many of these companies in a round about way.
How is this possible? Well you don't have too fool every American just most Americans and the overwhelming majority of Americans don't care about any issues that do not effect abortion, gun control, taxation, or jobs. This doesn't directly effect those things in a significant for Californians so it becomes quick forgotten in a month when some other hot topic becomes the news of the week.
If a conservative politician is pro abortion and pro gun control they can do anything else they want legislatively and get the votes they need for reelection so they pass laws on the side in which they are sure to get financial kick backs for. It's basically a mr.smith goes to Washington but nobody ever has to deal with the consequences of corruption they just get upset when they are caught.
It’s required by California state law to post all bills online along with associated vote tallies in committee and floor votes. The vote types are as follows:
- Ayes (in favor),
- Noes (against),
- and No Vote Recorded (NVR; the equivalent of abstaining).
It's not just "billionaires bad", there's a whole population of people in govt on both sides who are not impartial, and who have made the govt itself implicit in backing monopolous behavior here. No one took control of politicians mind to make them shills, they shilled out themselves
So if I am reading this correctly, a majority of votes (unanimous) were cast to pass the bill, but this was held in some subcommittee instead of moving to senate floor? Who is this subcommittee, and why do they have more power than the people, plus the senators who voted unanimously?
Sometimes legislation being worked out dies because the details really can't be squared with reality or practicality.
I have not seen an example proposal of language for such a bill that didn't invite many, many questions about how it would apply to certain manufacturers or products, and raise all sorts of issues about how it would be implemented, both now and in the future.
Remember that legislation, if it is to be sensible, is necessarily a snapshot in time of some set of principles to govern the future. If those principles are sound, they can be stated in some finite and non-specialist text that an agency can go implement (which is their role to do the technical implementation of).
If the legislation is 1000+ pages, something is being legislated at the wrong level, and something has been designed with too many exceptions, special cases, and opportunities for something to slip through a loophole. Or if it's just one page, how will someone figure out from that ambiguity whether something applies to their product?
Some noteworthy fraction of people are in support (although... a certain minority if asked say they are in support of it, while many others have no idea what the issue is), but when it comes to their purchasing behavior it doesn't seem so.
If you were to state the principles by which such legislation should be designed, what would they be? And if you then look at that language objectively, how many times would you have to ask "but what about...<xyz> issue/consideration"? If you, or the industry, have to ask that enough of a proposed bill, it will not work. You can say, well we'll have an agency responsible for working out these details. Ok, well that's how California has 200+ agencies, all paid government employees.
Not everything is corruption and "influence of big money". Sometimes it is, yes. But sometimes it's that it can't be made a sensible law (for the moment).
Every manufacturer of an electronic or appliance product with a wholesale price to the retailer of not less than fifty dollars ($50) and not more than ninety-nine dollars and ninety-nine cents ($99.99), shall make available to owners of the product, service and repair facilities, and service dealers, sufficient service literature, at no charge, and functional parts and tools, inclusive of any updates, on fair and reasonable terms, to effect the diagnosis, maintenance, or repair of a product for at least three years after the date a product model or type was manufactured, regardless of whether the three-year period exceeds the warranty period for the product.
To be made available at no $ charge? Why? What other publication or service do we mandate people do for no compensation?
This section does not require a manufacturer to divulge a trade secret, except as may be necessary to provide service literature, documentation, tools, software, and parts on fair and reasonable terms.
What constitutes a trade secret? Is it simply up to the manufacturer to declare that something is a trade secret and thus cannot be revealed?
This section shall not be construed to require the distribution of a product’s source code.
What is that defined as? What if the ability to repair is tied very closely to something about the source code which should not be revealed for security considerations?
How about if the parts cost such a price as to make repair uneconomical? How about if the repair requires specialized equipment and training that the general public cannot receive feasibly?
California Civil Code § 3426.1 defines "trade secret" thus way:
> “Trade secret” means information, including a formula, pattern, compilation, program,
device, method, technique, or process, that:
> (1) Derives independent economic value, actual or potential, from not being generally known to the public or to other persons who can obtain economic value from its disclosure or use; and
> (2) Is the subject of efforts that are reasonable under the circumstances to maintain its secrecy
Unless this bill contains its own definition, "trade secret" in this bill will be the same as that.
So manufacturers are free to declare that the method of putting in some part is a technique covered by trade secrets? How will the bill deal with that, when manufacturers declare that most of the things you want to repair are their proprietary process?
What if FOSS an Open Hardware related pages would show links to the pages of those opposing the law, whether politicians or companies, along with "don't vote" or "don't buy" alerts? Sometimes, just sometimes, they fear bad advertising.
It's referring to a bill (a proposed law) in California "which would have significantly expanded Californians’ access to the parts, tools, and service information needed to fix consumer electronics and appliances."
So California state law remains the same as it has been. No changes (other than less hope for improvement via California state law in the near future).
May 19th? Surprised it took this long for a post/story about this to make its way here. Didn't see anyone really talking about it around then either, though I see there were a number of Bay-area news stories about it.
Senator Anthony J. Portantino (Chair)
Senator Patricia C. Bates (Vice Chair)
Senator Steven Bradford
Senator Brian W. Jones
Senator Sydney Kamlager
Senator John Laird
Senator Bob Wieckowski
You would think if anyone understood the problem of eWaste it would be Sen Laird. From his Bio:
"Laird served as a member of the State Integrated Waste Management Board from 2008 to 2009 and taught state environmental policy at University of California Santa Cruz."
It's sad because folks will be less and less interested in fixing their things or simply opening their devices to understand how they work. It'll be general knowledge that it's "dangerous" to attempt a repair, and they're impossible to fix anyway.
Attempting a repair is one of those sparks that nurture curiosity. It's the same spark that ultimately gave us Apple and many other great businesses. Why are we indirectly undermining ingenuity and inventiveness? Is it a false perception? Or maybe Hanlon's razor?
On the other side, China has relatively affordable access to parts (low-level components included), schematics, extensive tooling and a growing hacker/maker culture.
Sometimes, I feel we (occidentals) are going into reverse.