Car manufacturers trying to lock down their systems turned the tide on this issue.
Tell someone their $500 gadget is disposable; most people will be mildly frustrated. Tell someone that their $70,000 vehicle, on which they still have years of payments to make, is disposable or unrepairable by their usual mechanic; most people will feel more than just frustrated.
I want to think you're right, but most of the activation I've seen on RtR is from people who are mechanics and others whose livelihoods are threatened by this (like farmers). Most consumers (at least in my small sample of anecdata) don't seem to care at all for whatever reason. The ones who do are a small enough group to be safely ignored.
This is an easy dodge. The problem is that when lack of repairability becomes the norm, the consumer no longer has that choice. Or they have to severely compromise their market choices in the search for repairable products.
And wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase. Its something that comes further down the line, when the purchase decision has already been made.
> And wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase. Its something that comes further down the line, when the purchase decision has already been made.
For cars there is an entirely different problem: New cars come with warranties. The sort of people who buy new cars, typically sell them by the time the warranty expires, so they only care about repairability to the extent it affects resale value, which is an attenuated effect. Then someone else is going to be driving that thing until it's 20+ years old, but the manufacturer isn't responsive to their concerns when designing the car because they aren't the manufacturer's customer in the market for new cars.
>>they aren't the manufacturer's customer in the market for new cars
Wow somehow this simple observation seems to be the greatest critic of capitalism I have heard in long time. It succintly shows why this system if left alone and scaled will destroy everything with its externalities.
The trouble is it isn't limited to "capitalism". A similar set of incentives are implicated in public choice theory, which is why democratic institutions are frequently willing to sell out future generations or compromise the public good to benefit the governing coalition's cronies.
And the latter is more susceptible to it. Things work when you're the customer and you have competing suppliers. They don't work when you're not the customer. But you could still be the customer in another market as long as there is one, e.g. because third parties can reverse engineer the OEM parts and go into competition with them. So a major risk here is that the incumbent captures the government to prevent that from happening.
The closest you generally get to competing alternatives with government is "laboratories of democracy" from having different states each with their own laws and the ability for people to vote with their feet, and even that suffers from the same failure mode. The system is intended to sustain that by having a strictly limited central government, but the central government gets captured by those who want to impose uniformity on what was meant to be diversity.
> wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase
This is the core of the problem. The coalition pushing for these laws doesn’t include most consumers. Absent an expensive ad push, I don’t see that changing.
Takeaway: make hay where the sun shines. Focus on farming states and those with lots of dealerships and repair shops. Maybe put an anti-Musk / anti-Tesla angle on it in blue states.
This is why organizations are pushing for repeatability scores to be printed on purchasable items, I think that would go a long way towards hinting that this issue is important for consumers in the long run.
Focus on farming also gives the issue a bi-partisan spin, which is something you really need to make any actual progress on issues in US politics these days.
Also farmers, who have been turned upside down and shaken by John Deere and other manufacturers using locked down hardware. The farming lobby is powerful.
Yeah, my sense in following this is that farmers have had a far bigger impact than consumers. I see your $70,000 car and raise you a $500,000 tractor that's core to a farmer's livelihood.
there are ways to omit the right to repair. My mechanic told me story about the new emergency system (mandatory in EU) that calls automatically for help on the crash event. It has a battery and a small controller in a all-in-one module. If the battery goes down - it will stop working and require replacing. If you replace only the battery it won't work. Not sure if you can replace battery while maintaining voltage, but this might be impedimented using plastic cover or something like that.
From what I can tell the only mechanics who care are trying to illegally bypass emmissions controls, or they are trying to run a chop shop steeling cars for parts. Cars are very repairable outside a dealer for most things.
though I'm told tesla is an exception and they are unrepairable - I don't drive one so I wouldn't know.
the above is my personal opinion. My employeer has an opinion on this subject, but I don't speak for them.
This is incorrect. Often times manufacturers will lock down the systems that can report statistics and reset failures to only work with their proprietary tools. They will not sell these tools and force people to go to the dealer. After a while the dealer can close or not sell that tool anymore and now people have an expensive paperweight that caused tons of emissions to create.
This is often accused but it is already a violation of federal laws that have been around for ages. It is called obd and covers a lot more than emissions.
right to repair may cover more but it isn't nearly as useful for normal diagnostics.
OBD standards literally only require emissions controls to be openly diagnosed. The rest of the CEL codes can 100% be vendor specific. So when your body control module shits out, and you can't lock and unlock your doors anymore, you're fucked. When your ABS light comes on, and all you need to do is replace a $10 wheel speed sensor, you still need an expensive proprietary code reader to read the codes.
"OBD II is an acronym for On-Board Diagnostic II, the second generation of on-board self-diagnostic equipment requirements for light- and medium-duty California vehicles. On-board diagnostic capabilities are incorporated into the hardware and software of a vehicle's on-board computer to monitor virtually every component that can affect emission performance. "
Yes a lot of the primary engine functions affect emissions, but the majority of diagnostic codes on modern cars are not available to standard OBDII readers. Once you get outside of the engine, forget it. Every module in modern cars now is VIN-locked and can only be swapped in by a dealer, or some kind of cracked 3rd party software if you're lucky.
I used to work for a third party scan tool Maker. We got a lot more data than just the obdii codes by law. We did have to pay 'a reasonable price' which was around $100k so not in reach of people but nothing to a company.
we didn't use a lot of the data but I had it for weird systems.
I had to find on some strange forum the CEL codes to monitor my DPF. Otherwise I would never know when it is filling up and never be able to reach out a highway to allow it to clean nicely.
This shouldn't be obscure. But they keep saying "hey this is our intellectual property"
You are confusing OBDII for OBD - they are different. OBDII covers emissions and never was enough for most diagnosis. There are other laws in place - though I don't recall what they are.
You are confusing OBD for OBDII. OBD was always enough, but also manufacture/vehcile specific. OBDII was required by law and never enough except for some really basic (but common) things.
Take Volkswagen vehicles (VW/Audi, mainly). Nearly every electronic module in the car that you'd want to replace has component protection, making it literally impossible for a non-dealer to replace it since you need access to VAG servers to get the token to code the module for the car VIN. I had this experience recently with a CAN bus controller module that just randomly failed. $3k at the dealer. I would have preferred to do it myself but there is no way.
VW didn't key components for a long time, but a VW Golf was uninsurable in certain cities in the Netherlands because airbags and navigation units were stolen multiple times per year in some instances. Sometimes the thieves waited just a few weeks until most cars in a neighborhood had replaced the stolen components and made another run...
I couldn't believe it when my wife's '16 GTI (base) needed a new battery, and I realized for non-base models, the BATTERY is coded and needs dealer programming to be replaced.
Our '08 Caravan had the ABS module die, and try as I might with 3 or 4 independent mechanics, had to go back to Dodge/FCA to get it reprogrammed for the car to accept the new module.
If anyone from The Repair Association is reading, there are a bunch of issues with the website. It sends me to https://tennessee.repair.org/ , which has a broken iframe for the "Make your voice heard" section. Fortunately the "Tell your repair story" section seems to also handle contacting representatives, except it auto-fills to what seems to be the wrong bill. It tells them I want them to support SB0077, which "As introduced, extends the medical cannabis commission to June 30, 2029" (I don't know enough about it to know if I actually do support this or not), instead of SB0499, which "As introduced, enacts the "Agricultural Right to Repair Act." The header of the page has correct bills for last year.
Thanks for the feedback! Fellow Tennessean here so I'm a bit embarrassed. I fixed the Make your voice heard embed (we removed a CallPower integration).
I'm working on fixing the letter now.
We built this tech when having five or six states with bills was exciting. Now, 50 states times two chambers times sometimes two or three bills has become a whole thing to keep track of it all.
Keeping all of these bills up to date across 50 states that change every year is quite the project. It's a pretty manual process right now, alas. I'd love to automate it.
Everyone else: please thread any bill year mismatch / other issues you find here, and I'll fix them!
I don't know how your site's infrastructure works, but would it be possible to have some way we could submit something like a pull request to contribute easier? It would be no trouble for me if it made it easier for you.
And those that have passed, are not necessarily universal. For example, Californias (I think) only applies to electronics, not cars. The John Deere "thing" is still a "thing" in California. The CA law is mostly about iPhones.
I don't know if they have other bills and what not in play to address other industries.
I don't like being pedantic, but there is a fundamental difference between bill and law. It takes a few people in legislature to introduce a bill but takes majority to create a law with the executive ascent.
The bills have been introduced in 50 states, only 5 have legislated these bills into laws.
Right to Repair should extend to software also. Just the same way someone can make an accessory for a tractor without permission from the tractor company, developers should be able to make tools for software/accounts without the express permission of the megacorp behind it without needing to worry about legal threats.
I really have trouble understanding that map. What does "Active and Passed" mean? I assumed it meant they had passed laws and updates in the works, but those States are excluded from the praise over the "Passed" States. I presume "Historical" means "Failed to pass" and no current activity to get a law passed.
You are correct, something is not in sync with that map and their description. That is, their description says that five states have passed legislation: New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado. But in the "Passed" and "Active and Passed" categories on the map, it includes those 5 states plus Massachusetts.
FWIW, all of the searching I could find about Right to Repair laws in Massachusetts focused solely on vehicle right to repair (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Massachusetts_Question_1), not on electronic devices generally, so maybe that's why Massachusetts was not included in the description (which specifically said "passed electronics right to repair legislation") but was categorized on the map.
Hi all! I volunteer with repair.org to create the map on repair.org/legislation and saw this thread. I'm sorry for the confusion!
I have updated the map to remove MA from the "Passed" or "Active and Passed" category given the law that has passed is related to automotive and our focus is more on digital electronics equipment.
I also updated the legend to address some of the valid concerns mentioned here:
Dark Red = Active in 2025 (or current year);
Light Red = Active before 2025;
Red and Black = Law Passed & Currently Active;
Black = Law Passed
Maybe they're excluded because they've already been praised, and they're focused on the new states joining in? I assume "active and passed" means that they not only passed the laws, but they are currently in effect. A law being passed doesn't necessarily put it into immediate effect.
I did consider that interpretation, but by "praise" I simply mean that the article says "Five states (New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado) have passed electronics Right to Repair legislation" and that "the remaining states are working hard to restore repair competition" which is also overblown since so many of the States are merely "Historical" with nothing going on.
Based on what I know about one of the states in question, I'm thinking that "Active and Passed" means they have both a passed bill and an active bill that isn't passed. Though I'd think they'd call that "Passed and Current" to match their other nomenclature.
It's not perfect (see the last link for details), but it's a great start. Also, if you have the time, read the actual directive. It's fairly readable as far as laws go.
Article 11 is the one that's probably most interesting to people here, the reason why we are now starting to see easily removable batteries in mobile devices, again. Actually "easier to remove", they're definitely not as easy to remove as the Nokia 5110 batteries :-p
Don't get your hopes up just because they have something they call right-to-repair legislation. It doesn't imply a practical ability to get repairs done. That requires e.g. parts availability, schematics, etc., way behind what legislation I've heard of requires.
I wonder if we’ll see “compliance devices” like we saw compliance cars in California. That is, highly modular, repairable devices available to consumers inclined that way, “offsetting” some of the other devices companies like Apple make
The issue is not just the passage of laws, it is enforcement. Unless the penalties are ruinous, corporations will flout the laws and use legal trickery to skirt them.
Who is most likely to be against this? NADA most of all maybe? They seem to be the most anti-consumer and (rightfully to them) propping up their member dealers.
>The association of automakers also alleges that because the “independent entity” has not created a “standardized platform,” they have no way to securely share vehicle data. They are asking the court to declare the law unenforceable until the independent entity has undertaken its obligations.
That sounds understandable. Just until the independent entity gets their act together.
As someone who frequently disagrees with the overwhelming majority political opinion on this site, this is one thing I wish all states could find common ground on. The amount of waste and value extraction that corporations force on us, when we could simply repair and maintain what we already have, is downright evil.
If your net worth is high enough that anti-consumer policy pumps your assets harder than it dumps your consumption, it's rational. A huge jerk move, sure, and arguably unreasonable on those grounds, but it's rational. Unfortunately the $600B sponsor and $6B president are faaaar on the other side of the invisible net worth boundary where that starts to be the case, so I wouldn't expect RtR to get much traction, but who knows. There is enough chaos to make it worth a try even if it "ought" to fail on grounds of "government by the rich, for the rich."
> If your net worth is high enough that anti-consumer policy pumps your assets harder than it dumps your consumption, it's rational. A huge jerk move, sure, and arguably unreasonable on those grounds, but it's rational.
Sounds like narcissistic personality disorder to me. Why are some of us worshipping these people again?
It's irrelevant. The president doesn't do the passing. He's not a dictator. This isn't a tribalism partisan issue, as much as you seem to want to make it. I could point to the blue state of Massachusetts which, immediately after passing RTR through popular support, immediately had its democratic government strip all the teeth out of the bill, at the request of several big corporations. What do you have to say about that? Is that Trump's fault too? Even though it happened when Biden was in office?
Maybe the Supreme Court stacked with his allies will declare RtR is unconstitutional. We lost abortion and gay marriage is on the chopping block. The system is being gamed very hard right now, and they've been lying to you for years.
Not quite yet. An admirer of dictators. He's a wannabe dictator. Stacking the decks with loyalists and purging those that don't roll over. Never failing to take an opportunity to divide, to tear down, to fabricate, to create chaos for the 99%. Constantly crossing lines that would've been unthinkable for any other president - including previous Republican candidates.
Offtopic: I often think of the alternate universe in which John McCain won the Republican nomination over Donald Trump. What a different world we'd be in! Good chance Biden wouldn't have won in 2020. Good chance Russia wouldn't have had an opportunity to invade Ukraine a second time.
Reasonable people are sometimes lead to believe that repairability is counter to
safety (i.e. "if an amature does the repair wrong, they could hurt themselves or the owner"),
security (i.e. "if we let people know how it works, it'll be easier to hack"),
technilogical advancement (i.e. "smartphones would have to be chunky bricks with no water resistance if we designed them to be easily opened for repair"),
consumer protection (i.e. "unauthorized repair technicians are unaccountable and might do something unscrupulous to your device"),
value (i.e. "if companies have to design for repair and provide support for repair, then those costs get passed onto consumers"),
among other things. I don't find these arguments compelling and I think there is plenty of precedent for repairability being best for consumers. But they come up a lot - especially from anti-R2R lobbiests.
Our society has also been trained to be consumers, always throwing away old stuff in favor of the latest and greatest. When something breaks, the first thought is usally "how much will it cost to replace this?" instead of "how do I fix it?" Everything is treated as disposible, so there isn't much motivation for the average person to care about repair.
They don't use that one very much because the difference in energy efficiency between a five year old device and a ten year old device is generally negligible, whereas the ecological consequences of throwing away an entire device and having to build a whole new one are something they don't want to be reminding people about by bringing it up.
I would really like total control of my car's ECU, but I know the most popular use of such a power would be to circumvent emissions controls and maximize MPG or HP.
Neither of those are reasonable arguments. They're arguments, but not reasonable. No one is guaranteed a fixed level of cost-of-sales or profit, so reduced profit is just part of business. Figure it out, it's 100% not the consumer's problem.
And they're arguably NOT arguments at all, as doing something to make your product less repairable is generally MORE expensive that NOT doing that thing. Most of the time in product manufacture, costs come from performing actions, so by not performing actions, those costs go away. That's what these laws are usually about, skipping repair-unfriendly design choices, making repair documents available (that's free, they already exist, companies need not keep them secret/internal), and not creating software locks that are only for keeping out "unauthorized" repairs.
Apple could save money by using all hex/phillips screws and doing away with pentalobe screws as they'd have few different items to buy and use. Apple could save a really good deal of money using NVMe drives, or an open standard for flash-chip boards like in the M4 Mini, because currently they waste a lot of engineering resources on their proprietary solutions. Devices with ultrasonically welded plastic cases could skip the ultrasonic welding step and just use clips on the plastic frame. Etc.
It needs to be explicitly shown how and why it increases costs because if anything it feels like the opposite to me, especially when companies use proprietary pieces and hiding schematics rather than open standards and common configurations.
This, and also, so what if the price of the end product goes up? You wouldn't feel the need to buy a new phone so often if it was more sensible to repair them, which would very likely more than make up for the price increase.
That’s something of a broken window fallacy here. Producing fewer parts while having more working devices is a net win for the economy.
Economies of scale don’t mean things are free. The marginal cost of each transistor is still greater than zero even though where producing what 10^20 ish of them per year.
while you see a net win for the economy, I see a smaller GDP and a bad conclusion after the business year when people start repairing their devices instead of throwing them away and buying new.
That's not an explicit reason. You're acting like they are making custom parts for everything and not buying the same widget as everyone else on the manufacturing line.
It’s also difficult to quantify the true savings of repair (true cost of garbage, shipping protection, etc), incentives punish local work, and the cost of losing local knowledge and know-how.
I wouldn’t call what you mentioned as reasonable, but nobody with the financial muscle or brain power wants to do that deep dive analysis.
It has been politicized heavily by maga type crowds who don't really know what it means.... I have had ppl at the barbershop call me a socialist because I wanted right to repair...
I imagine bringing up the current situation with John Deere and how the law would enshrine the right to repair the tractor that you bought with your own money would go farther than most arguments with those folks.
It's an interesting idea. But I like to think if they owned equipment like that, they'd already be on the side of right-to-repair. Farmers are smart businessmen and this is an obviously needless extra cost.
But for the non-farmers, perhaps it'd really sway tribal mindsets to understand people "similar to them" (more so than elite techies...) benefit too.
He's just advertising the filter bubble he lives in. Everyone wants owners to be able to be able to access the info they need to repair things. About the only gripe you'll hear from the most hardline libertarians is "that's not the government's job" and even then it's usually prefixed with "this is nice but". Occasionally some Karen who hasn't really put much thought into it will screech about "but what it someone repairs something wrong and makes it unsafe" as if supposed professionals don't do that all the time and right to repair isn't just as much about enabling individual professionals as it is owners.
I did receive the "it's not the governments job" speech but they had no rebuttal when I asked about border agents seizing official refurb apple parts as "counterfeit" or Microsoft jailing someone trying to keep old PCs out of landfill... Or the concept of IP as a whole and the John Deere tractor example someone else replied to me with in this thread .
As if I'm blind or stupid and wouldn't try the obvious??
You can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason into
> they had no rebuttal when I asked about border agents seizing official refurb apple parts as "counterfeit" or Microsoft jailing someone trying to keep old PCs out of landfill... Or the concept of IP as a whole and the John Deere tractor example someone else replied to me with in this thread .
They have no rebuttal because you're now making their own arguments. Regulations that allow those parts to be seized or those people to be jailed should be repealed.
In general the libertarian position is that problems like this would be solved by competition if there weren't government regulations stifling competition. And they're often right. DMCA 1201 impairs adversarial interoperability and therefore competition. Trademark law is meant to be about consumer protection and accurately representing the source of goods to the consumer, not enabling price discrimination by putting up trade barriers to cross-border arbitrage.
But a lot of those bad laws, they're federal. So if all you have control over is a state legislature, and those laws exist and have impaired competition and the state legislature can't remove federal laws, you then have to ask what they can do about the problems caused by those laws, until such time as we can get them repealed at the federal level.
If you want a fun compromise, pass a right to repair bill that only applies to companies with more than a billion dollars in revenue (but using the largest entity in the supply chain, so you can't just use a small business as a middle man to get out of it). That's going to make it apply to any of the relevant companies, but then if you ever managed to actually make those markets competitive enough for smaller businesses to be viable, you don't have yet another rule stacking on more barriers to entry for small businesses.
> In general the libertarian position is that problems like this would be solved by competition if there weren't government regulations stifling competition. And they're often right
I disagree. There are many situations in which it will always be more profitable to screw over consumers than it would be to not screw them over, even taking into account that you might steal some business from competitors.
Any company that does spring up out of nowhere and do the right thing for the consumer will eventually be forced to screw over their customers or be bought up by someone who will because shareholders will never leave giant piles of money sitting on the table. Even if a company somehow managed to put every one of their competitors out of business, shareholders will still demand endless growth so the only thing left is to screw the customers and degrade the product which is exactly what we see over and over again once a company has anything close to a monopoly.
> Even if a company somehow managed to put every one of their competitors out of business, shareholders will still demand endless growth so the only thing left is to screw the customers and degrade the product which is exactly what we see over and over again once a company has anything close to a monopoly.
But this is exactly the point.
A competitive market is going to have at least a dozen suppliers. There are some corporate apologists who like to pretend that a duopoly is competition and only a strict monopoly is a problem, but that's BS. With sufficiently few suppliers they can easily collude with each other or use conscious parallelism to make sure that everybody is screwing customers and therefore nobody has to stop.
A competitive market isn't a thing where one company is so great they put all of their competitors out of business. It's a thing where entering the market is easy so lots of people do it all the time.
Suppose there is a market with five companies all colluding to screw the customer. If entering the market is easy then soon there are six companies, because investors like money. If the incumbents are getting 50% margins and you could go eat their lunch while still getting 20% margins, that's what you do. Then there are six companies getting 20% margins, but that's still a good profit margin and it's still easy to enter the market, so soon there are seven and their margins are 8%. Trying to buy out the new guys or collude with them doesn't work because the combination of "industry with high margins" and "easy to enter the market" means new companies will keep showing up forever until the margins come down.
Whereas if there is a market with five companies all colluding to screw the customer and regulations make it hard for anyone new to enter the market, the customer is screwed. Which is what keeps happening.
Interesting how you seem to know more about my personal anecdote and experience than myself??? You where there apparently so tell me more lmao....
I'm not going to bother to address most of your comment because of this.... but just.... Unbelievably rude and arrogant of you lol. Par for libertarians.
Anyway no they where not libertarians they where MAGA as I stated.
They weren't interested in any of the BS you espoused. Things seized at border? Must be dangerous or illegal ,good on our boys in blue.ppl in jail? Must be protecting society.. OBVIOUSLY innocent citizens don't go to jail. Etc etc.
Don't believe climate change is real at all
Don't believe COVID is real or was real. At all.
Highly evangelical Christian while being the most unchristlike beings imaginable.
Personal anecdotes are the "weak man fallacy". You can always find some fool to say any nonsense thing and partisans find it easier to dunk on the other village's idiot than be asked questions they might not have answers for.
People say "rude" when they mean insubordinate, as if subordination is something anyone is entitled to.
No just rude and arrogant... Lol you come across like a pol pot with your vast projections and generalizations... I made no statements other than my anecdote in relation to trying to get people to understand right to repair is difficult as it has been heavily politicized. Then you went into multiple paragraphs of tirades and putting words in my mouth and assuming stances I don't hold.
Anyway. My original point stands. Right to repair is heavily politicized in maga crowds and therefore the current Republican party. Most of the arguments they have against it are nonsense and is very much akin to drug war reasoning. The only people in their eyes who want right to repair are pirates ,thieves and smugglers.
I don't give a fuck what libertarians think because they hold no political power or sway.even if they hold the logical ethical high ground in what SHOULD happen.... Nothing ever changes regardless of their opinions. Again see the drug war.
Doesnt work. Nor examples of apple screen being seized as "counterfeit" nor blatant abuses by Microsoft or Nintendo that has ppl JAILED for doing what they will with their own property. They don't really listen to reason. Right to repair sounds" nice" and like it might help poor people .... So they will fight it to the death as socialism handouts.
But there isn't really an "overwhelming majority political opinion" on this site? Hence the long threads of comments of people disagreeing on the merits of ideas. Unless you're referring to the anti-trump sentiment, which is more pan-political as there are obviously a whole bunch of Americans that don't want to see our country destroyed regardless of how we wish it might be reformed.
a specific term, used mainly in social sciences as a designation for those forms of nationalism that aim to transcend (overcome, expand) traditional boundaries.
I never heard of the term before as why Im asking.
Also, in my own view. I don't consider myself political, I watch what people do, versus what they say they're going to do. And for me, any political figure can say one thing when the really want to do another.
I agree that government needs to be reformed, but somhow, Im thinking the reform issue is just being used as a vehicle to push a Accelerationism agenda.
I have no idea of that specific use of the term and what connotations it has, but maybe it fits? I was using the general prefix to mean across what are usually considered political lines. For example you and I can disagree (and we likely do!!!) on the specific approaches and directions for reforming the government, and we call that politics. But for example, if one of us thinks things would be better if the US was militarily conquered by China, that isn't really the domain of "politics" any longer.
> anti-trump sentiment, which is more pan-political
If such sentiment was across the political spectrum, he wouldn't have been voted in. The notion that what people think in your bubble is what everyone thinks is what leads to conspiracy theories like "Stop the steal", and it has a chilling effect on actually engaging with people who might be voting against their own interests (or maybe even challenging your own cherished viewpoint on something)
There was another response (flagged now) saying that pro-Trump support was pan-political. I agree with that as well.
As far as actually engaging, that's the fundamental problem! Most of his support was basically founded on rejecting discussion and reason, voting the gut feeling of something latched on to from one of the many conflicting things he said, while being happy with other people's frustration because you've pigeonholed them into "the other". Like I'm a libertarian, I personally share many of the frustrations and criticisms that got Trump elected! Yet you've seemingly assumed some caricature of me where I've got a narrow understanding with "cherished viewpoints".
Regardless of the levity with which you intended it, is it not still an assertion that I haven't done the work to understand the viewpoints I am arguing against?
He got more than his opponent the second time. Trump got 49.8%, Harris got 48.3%. This is widely considered to be winning the popular vote; nobody else got more votes than he did.
As opposed to 2016 where Trump won the electoral college but received fewer total votes than his major opponent because extra votes in California don't count in the electoral college.
Notice that if you want to claim that winning the popular vote requires more than 50% then you can't claim that Clinton "won the popular vote" in 2016 because she got 48.2% to Trump's 46.1%.
No. Trump got a 49.8% plurality of the vote was the second time around. The first time around he only got 46.1% to Hillary Clinton's 48.2% (not even a plurality -- yay electoral college). He did not win a majority in either of his wins, and a plurality only the second time. Amazing what you can do with a $44 billion propaganda platform and another quarter billion in usable funds.
Sure, simplistic populism plays out in wider society where short quips and repetition matter more than coherent ideas. That doesn't really change what I said though.
(For context, because I know the tendency is to pigeonhole commenters - I'm a libertarian who shares many of the frustrations driving the destructive fervor)
That's real funny, bravo, but you didn't say that the policies were identical, you said that the choice was a "dementia patient", and now you've moved the goalpost.
If you’re referring to people who don’t vote, they de facto support the outcome. Particularly if in a swing state.
> genocidal dementia patient
People who voted for Trump (or threw their vote in a swing state) because of Palestine are the definition of stupid and selfish. By prioritising their interests above those they purported to represent, they will have played a (non-critical) role in the destruction of Palestine.
It baffled me that anyone thought that Trump was going to somehow be better than Kamala in regards to Palestine.
I could understand voting for a third party, but Trump outright tried to impose a Muslim ban in his first time, and said that his son in law was going to quickly solve the Middle East conflict single-handedly; seems unlikely that he would be sympathetic to people in the Middle East.
> baffled me that anyone thought that Trump was going to somehow be better than Kamala in regards to Palestine
I was in Phoenix in April 2024 when an otherwise-intelligent friend remarked on whether Trump was pro Israel. She wound up remembering his first term eventually. But at that moment I realised that the checkmate Democrats thought they had Republicans in with abortion, Republicans had Democrats in with Palestine: move to the left and you lose moderates and Pennsylvania. Move to the right (or fail to message) and you lose Michigan and your base. Message at all and you lose swing voters who don’t want to hear about foreign policy.
I'm not sure they thought that Trump would be better.
It seems they think that voting is a test unrelated to the likely outcomes. So you should vote "right" rather than compromising and voting for the better among the possible outcomes.
That's fine, you have the right to vote third-party, but are you saying aren't sympathetic to the other issues that Trump is raising?
I am not sure I loved Kamala's stance on Palestine, but I thought that Trump's tariff policies were stupid, his anti-immigrant and anti-trans rhetoric was harmful, and virtually every single stupid thing that the Diablo cheater has done with DOGE (and said he would do before the election, to be clear) seemed short-sighted-at-best and malicious-at-worst. It can be difficult to tell since both Trump and Musk are supremely stupid people who depend on hubris to fail upwards their entire lives, but regardless it seemed pretty bad to me, and it seemed like the totality of it indicated that Kamala would have been fine.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with voting on a single issue, if you think Palestine is more important than all the stuff I listed then that's fair enough and I'm actually fine with people voting third party. The way I see it though, the only person who is going to do exactly what I want, politically speaking, is me, and I'm not running. No matter who I vote for, as a result, is going to inherently be a compromise on something. I have to vote for the person that I think will do the least amount of damage and/or try and prevent the person who is going to do the most from getting in power.
I felt like a vote for a candidate that had a shot at winning was better than one that didn't, even though I tend to actually be a bit closer-aligned with the green party.
> if both sides are genocidal, there's no choice where your life gets better
As I said, stupid and selfish. Not seeing the difference between bombing and explicit ethnic cleansing and relocation for the people in Gaza is modern Sykes-Picot.
Note that I’m fine with that person not voting. (Almost prefer it.) It’s wild, though, to pretend it furthered the interests of the people they pretend to hold dear, versus some personal moral purity they’d prefer to preach about online.
> i did vote socialist/green
This is fine, even admirable, if you’re not in a swing state. If you’re in a swing state, you de facto voted for Trump and the destruction of both Gaza and the dream of a Palestinian nation-state.
> if liberals want to win elections, they need to start offering a vision of a better future
Sure. And never mention Israel or Palestine again, because I no longer have any desire to engage with the US elements of those movements who are, on both sides, adamant about redrawing foreign borders in respect of countries and cultures they have no direct relation to nor experience with.
do you have any concept of what they were doing in Gaza? 85% of schools bombed/damaged, almost every hospital destroyed, tens of millions of tons of rubble, Trump said 1.7-1.8M remaining (meaning 400-500k dead). this is a holocaust. Democrats are not doing an "innocent war". They are hiterites with a smile on their face. The Republicans are hitlerites with a frown. Sometimes vice versa depending on the situation.
I voted in PA. You guys want my vote? appeal to me and people like me.
> 85% of schools bombed/damaged, almost every hospital destroyed, tens of millions of tons of rubble, Trump said 1.7-1.8M remaining
How do you think those 2mm remaining would prefer the future to go? Razed, relocated and—let’s be honest—in all likelihood ersatz enslaved somewhere in Central Asia or Africa? Safe in the knowledge someone in America made this choice for them with a false equivalence between living on their land to fight another day and being dissolved as a nation?
That is the selfishness. That is the holier-than-thou imperial mindset; what matters is how one is portrayed and gets to think about oneself, not how the people one uses as puppets fare. (Sykes and Picot’s supporters thought they were helping, too!)
'Right-to-Repair' covers a broad spectrum of issues and it makes sense to consider them separately as how we deal with them will vary in each case. Clearly it's not possible to cover every aspect as that's worthy of a large book so I'll just highlight few issues.
First, it's worth looking at how we reached this this point and why Right-to-Repair has become such a big deal in recent years.
For younger generations it may come as a surprise to learn that 50 or so years ago the very concept or notion of one's right to repair one's equipment would have been very foreign to the average person. Consumers would have expected their appliances to be both durable and long-lasting and capable of being repaired. Back then, just about every appliance from a toaster to a television set was repairable and manufacturers had service departments where their products could be returned for repairs. Alternatively, owners and independent repairers could buy spare parts and service manuals from these service outlets.
In fact, so ingrained were notions about repairs and service that no one would have given even a second thought that in future they might be discontinued. In hindsight, I think blindness to the fact that things might change is why so few of us saw change coming until it was upon us.
Anyway, that was the normal situation until somewhere around the mid 1970s - early '80s when things changed drastically for the worse.
Why the change? In the decades since then there has been a huge shift in manufacturing and the economics of manufacturing. More than ever the overwhelming issue nowadays in manufacturing is profit, it has become the principal driving force and raison d'être for manufacturers' existence. No doubt, profit has always been a driving force but in the past it was tempered by other considerations, companies often built their reputations on the quality and reliability of their products and that those who ran them often had high manufacturing standards that they wanted to uphold.
In past decades people who ran manufacturing companies were more likely to be their founders—often inventors and or engineers—and they had a vested—intellectual—interest in their products and by virtue of the fact they required their companies to produce good products that consumers would appreciate.
From about 1980s the economic environment in which businesses found themselves changed dramatically, manufacturing thus changed to adapt. Free trade, reduced tariffs, offshore manufacturing, family companies being absorbed into multinationals, change in investment practices and so on meant that the utility and quality of products was often deprecated in favor of profits. With the changes founders and engineers ended up having much less say and influence over production than previously. Now shareholders and accountants ran these companies and their CEOs were no longer engineers but those with MBA degrees.
Of course, that's only part of the story, computers and IP became a big deal during this time and was very influential in rolling product info back into the proprietary realms of companies. Nowadays, information about products that companies once willingly placed in the public domain for the benefit of their customers such as circuit diagrams and maintenance and repair documentation, etc. has almost dried up completely.
Many well-known and highly respected companies succumbed to these economic changes. Had I time I could give many examples but HP and Sony are two egregious cases that immediately come to mind. Probably the quintessential example of where engineering management has given way to profit and the greed of investors is that of Boeing. The 747 was first designed and built 50+ years ago when Boeing was an engineering company run by engineers, nowadays investors and accountants run the company and is product is the 737-MAX.
Also, these changes have brought old nefarious manufacturing practices to the fore. Whilst the notion of planned obsolescence has been around for well over a century modern business practice has brought it to new heights. Products are now designed with less durability and have much shorter lives than in the past.
An example I like to give is that several years ago I bought three plastic buckets at the supermarket and the plastic handle fell off one before I got it home and not much later the handles fell off the other two when in use. Compare them with an old beaten-up and dented hot-dipped galvanized bucket we've inherited from my grandmother that was made sometime around the mid 1920s. It's somewhat the worse for wear but it's still functional. Furthermore, it still has its handle and it's not even rusty.
Here, durability has given way to profit, planned obsolescence ensures that manufacturers sell more. Then there's the serious problem of plastic pollution. And that's just for starters.
It seems to me there's a simple solution to all this but instigating it would be very difficult as manufacturers would fight it every inch of the way. That is to tax products that are deliberately designed without durability and longevity in mind. A durability tax would provide manufacturers with a financial incentive to make better products. Taxes also have the advantage that they can be fine-tuned until they become effective.
A durability/longevity tax would be not only just applicable to buckets but also smartphones and such. For example, phones without the facility for users to change batteries easily would fall into this category and be subject to the tax.
A similar 'utility' tax would apply where manufacturers deliberately depreciate a product's functional utility in favor of profit. Often that could be difficult to define but let me give you an example based on the definition and modus operandi of a device. Again, the classic example is the smartphone. First, we should not lose sight of the fact that a phone is primarily a telecommunications device licensed and tightly regulated under various telecommunications laws.
In recent years, phone manufacturers have deliberately killed the FM radio facility in many smartphones to encourage streaming which is more profitable. FM does not stop streaming, so why should it be removed when it serves an important purpose in times of emergency? During floods, fires, earthquakes etc. when WiFi and cellular services could easily be out of operation FM is very capable of supplying alternative sources of emergency information.
If governments acted responsibly then they ought to deem life and safety as being more important than profits, thus to encourage (rather than mandate) manufacturers to incorporate FM reception on their phones they could levy a utility tax on phones that do not have FM reception.
BTW, an almost identical argument is already being played out in the US over AM band reception in car radios. EV manufacturers want to phase out AM on grounds it's hard to reduce interference in EVs whereas the FCC has stated it's essential in times of national emergency. Incidentally, where I live the national broadcaster assumes the responsibility of broadcasting emergency information on the assumption that smartphone owners may no longer have access to WiFi or cellular networks.
At first thought much of that may seem outside the scope of the basic Right-to-Repair laws but on consideration it's not. Tied up with durability/longevity are related issues such as fitness for purpose, product functionality, minimizing e-waste and so on. When it comes to considering these matters this example just shows that we've barely scratched the surface.
That Right-to-Repair legislation is being widely enacted is no doubt excellent news. That said, the manufacturing lobby is extremely powerful so we need to fear that laws may be watered down to the point of being ineffective.
What's needed is a cultural shift by manufacturers back to those of earlier times. However, given the nature of their cultural shift of recent decades, we should not expect an easy ride going forth. Trouble is—as we've all too often seen—that in democracies where companies have undue power and influence it is very difficult to get effective law enacted.
It's better than nothing. But introduced and passed are different things. An introduced bill may never actually become law.
The upside is that this shows how popular RtR is, and there's a good chance at least several states may implement their laws. At some point, even if it isn't universal, all it takes is enough states to force manufacturers to support independent repair by default.
In particular it's depressing that the map near the top of the article shows that for a majority of states, the introduction of the bill is "historical", as in neither passed, active or current, but (IIUC) it was floated in some prior legislative session, but it's not even under consideration in the present session.
They could go for the Apple-in-Europe model, where you have the right to repair only if your geolocation detects you being in a state where it's mandatory for you to have that right, otherwise it still locks you out.
Because this just means a single legislator has sponsored a bill. It doesn't mean it has pass, nor does it it even mean it is likely to pass. It's actual laws getting passed that matter.
Of course this IS a milestone to getting a law passed, and shows that the campaign is getting legislators' notice etc. So it is still good.
Even the "active and passed" states (particularly New York) passed a neutered version of right-to-repair that barely does anything. I only understand vaguely, but Louis Rossman has been outspoken about the progress of NY right-to-repair in particular, and how it flopped hard. As much as right-to-repair seems like a party line issue, even many of the Democrats have thus far been all talk and no substance.
Because the large corporations have virtually unlimited power to water down bills with campaign contributions. It takes very little to money to sway a representative federally. How much less do you think it takes to sway a state level candidate?
Spending cash on candidates to prevent bills like this is likely a rounding error on their yearly budget.
One drawback to consumer-rights laws is that we as consumers end up with less access to cool stuff. Some companies have chosen to stop selling into the B2C market altogether, to avoid incurring expenses and liabilities associated with conforming to right-to-repair and other pro-consumer legislation. Rohde & Schwarz and Keysight come to mind.
That is bullshit, of course -- just an excuse for companies to dodge basic business responsibilities, and a blatant failure on their part to acknowledge why consumers felt this legislation was needed in the first place. But it is certainly true that there are short-term drawbacks.
Interesting! I think you're probably onto something there. Agree it's more of an excuse than a reason, but still there will be low margin products that have to go that direction due to the math.
I tend to think B2C is who needs the most protection from the gov since C are relatively powerless, whereas B2B tends to be more balanced, but the more I think about it the more I think that perhaps we're overlooking an important area. Nevertheless I think for now we need to focus on B2C and worry about B2B later. Can't spread ourselves too thin.
To be fair, Rohde & Schwarz and Keysight aren't names I'd normally associate with consumer devices. On the other hand, neither are Mcdonands' ice cream machines.
It is a big win, but in the Oregon version at least it excludes large sectors like vehicles which is obviously a big expense to most US consumers. Hopefully it will continue to be extended.
>Can someone explain why this isn’t the big win we think it is?
I mean, there is the psychological phenomenon known as the Just World Hypothesis. When presented with something that's simply bad, or simply good, people are skeptical and tempted to search for the counterbalancing element, treating it like a trick question even if it's not.
And so it can be hard to accept it simply is good. But that doesn't have to be the end of the conversation because that impulse can be channeled productively just by changing the baseline. Right to repair, I would think, simply is good, but since we need a bad thing, we can talk about the long road ahead to full implementation, or the effort necessary to overcome cultural inertia, as well as status quo extremism in our institutions.
But I think the right to repair itself is a good thing.
i’m more for right to repair than not but i can see unintended consequences of things like iphones being bulkier and heavier if modular components like batteries are required in the broadest reach of the concept. these bills may be narrower and probably are. that’s the ultimate question though is how far the balance should be.
Im pretty sure thats a falsity. Making tech repair friendly doesnt really add to the form factor of a device if you know how to design correctly, even with phones.
I remember that phone[0] that google killed and that was back in 2013? Since then other projects have sprung up to tackle this. There are links at the bottom of the page.
I wondered if that Google modular phone ended up inspiring the Moto Z during the time Google owned Motorola.
To your point, I suspect the same, I'm trying to think of adverse consequences. The closest I can think of is something akin to the battery example, but in a different way. Maybe you're more comfortable putting high performing dangerous-to-handle components in a phone if you can seal it shut. Maybe component-by-component tech support accountability to a tech repair community is a new set of burdens they don't want to have. I suppose the latter feels plausible, but the possible impact on components seems less convincing.
Lawyers and lobbyists paid lots of money to figure out how to subvert stuff.
OEMs may work to make stuff less consumer repairable/upgradeable to force folks to use their repair services that need stuff like bga reballing or soldering. Bye bye upgradable ram slots!
Things like software locks and restrictions in the name of ‘security’ will lock stuff down and make repair harder (see Apple’s part pairing)
> Things like software locks and restrictions in the name of ‘security’ will lock stuff down and make repair harder (see Apple’s part pairing)
Unfortunately, I don't see an alternative to that given how juicy targets even locked phones were for "chop shops" before Apple introduced parts pairing. People were mugged left and right for their phones.
(Obviously the solution would be to tackle poverty, drug abuse and mental health issues, but that is even more unrealistic)
Car manufacturers trying to lock down their systems turned the tide on this issue.
Tell someone their $500 gadget is disposable; most people will be mildly frustrated. Tell someone that their $70,000 vehicle, on which they still have years of payments to make, is disposable or unrepairable by their usual mechanic; most people will feel more than just frustrated.
I want to think you're right, but most of the activation I've seen on RtR is from people who are mechanics and others whose livelihoods are threatened by this (like farmers). Most consumers (at least in my small sample of anecdata) don't seem to care at all for whatever reason. The ones who do are a small enough group to be safely ignored.
On the surface that makes sense. From a consumer perspective lack of RtR just indicates the consumer needs to spend elsewhere if it becomes a concern.
This is an easy dodge. The problem is that when lack of repairability becomes the norm, the consumer no longer has that choice. Or they have to severely compromise their market choices in the search for repairable products.
And wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase. Its something that comes further down the line, when the purchase decision has already been made.
> And wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase. Its something that comes further down the line, when the purchase decision has already been made.
For cars there is an entirely different problem: New cars come with warranties. The sort of people who buy new cars, typically sell them by the time the warranty expires, so they only care about repairability to the extent it affects resale value, which is an attenuated effect. Then someone else is going to be driving that thing until it's 20+ years old, but the manufacturer isn't responsive to their concerns when designing the car because they aren't the manufacturer's customer in the market for new cars.
>>they aren't the manufacturer's customer in the market for new cars
Wow somehow this simple observation seems to be the greatest critic of capitalism I have heard in long time. It succintly shows why this system if left alone and scaled will destroy everything with its externalities.
The trouble is it isn't limited to "capitalism". A similar set of incentives are implicated in public choice theory, which is why democratic institutions are frequently willing to sell out future generations or compromise the public good to benefit the governing coalition's cronies.
And the latter is more susceptible to it. Things work when you're the customer and you have competing suppliers. They don't work when you're not the customer. But you could still be the customer in another market as long as there is one, e.g. because third parties can reverse engineer the OEM parts and go into competition with them. So a major risk here is that the incumbent captures the government to prevent that from happening.
The closest you generally get to competing alternatives with government is "laboratories of democracy" from having different states each with their own laws and the ability for people to vote with their feet, and even that suffers from the same failure mode. The system is intended to sustain that by having a strictly limited central government, but the central government gets captured by those who want to impose uniformity on what was meant to be diversity.
> wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase
This is the core of the problem. The coalition pushing for these laws doesn’t include most consumers. Absent an expensive ad push, I don’t see that changing.
Takeaway: make hay where the sun shines. Focus on farming states and those with lots of dealerships and repair shops. Maybe put an anti-Musk / anti-Tesla angle on it in blue states.
This is why organizations are pushing for repeatability scores to be printed on purchasable items, I think that would go a long way towards hinting that this issue is important for consumers in the long run.
Focus on farming also gives the issue a bi-partisan spin, which is something you really need to make any actual progress on issues in US politics these days.
> gives the issue a bi-partisan spin
Credentials. Not spin. The farmers are actually calling for this.
Also farmers, who have been turned upside down and shaken by John Deere and other manufacturers using locked down hardware. The farming lobby is powerful.
Yeah, my sense in following this is that farmers have had a far bigger impact than consumers. I see your $70,000 car and raise you a $500,000 tractor that's core to a farmer's livelihood.
there are ways to omit the right to repair. My mechanic told me story about the new emergency system (mandatory in EU) that calls automatically for help on the crash event. It has a battery and a small controller in a all-in-one module. If the battery goes down - it will stop working and require replacing. If you replace only the battery it won't work. Not sure if you can replace battery while maintaining voltage, but this might be impedimented using plastic cover or something like that.
The new module costs 500$
From what I can tell the only mechanics who care are trying to illegally bypass emmissions controls, or they are trying to run a chop shop steeling cars for parts. Cars are very repairable outside a dealer for most things.
though I'm told tesla is an exception and they are unrepairable - I don't drive one so I wouldn't know.
the above is my personal opinion. My employeer has an opinion on this subject, but I don't speak for them.
This is incorrect. Often times manufacturers will lock down the systems that can report statistics and reset failures to only work with their proprietary tools. They will not sell these tools and force people to go to the dealer. After a while the dealer can close or not sell that tool anymore and now people have an expensive paperweight that caused tons of emissions to create.
This is often accused but it is already a violation of federal laws that have been around for ages. It is called obd and covers a lot more than emissions.
right to repair may cover more but it isn't nearly as useful for normal diagnostics.
Have you ever worked on a car?
OBD standards literally only require emissions controls to be openly diagnosed. The rest of the CEL codes can 100% be vendor specific. So when your body control module shits out, and you can't lock and unlock your doors anymore, you're fucked. When your ABS light comes on, and all you need to do is replace a $10 wheel speed sensor, you still need an expensive proprietary code reader to read the codes.
"OBD II is an acronym for On-Board Diagnostic II, the second generation of on-board self-diagnostic equipment requirements for light- and medium-duty California vehicles. On-board diagnostic capabilities are incorporated into the hardware and software of a vehicle's on-board computer to monitor virtually every component that can affect emission performance. "
Yes a lot of the primary engine functions affect emissions, but the majority of diagnostic codes on modern cars are not available to standard OBDII readers. Once you get outside of the engine, forget it. Every module in modern cars now is VIN-locked and can only be swapped in by a dealer, or some kind of cracked 3rd party software if you're lucky.
I used to work for a third party scan tool Maker. We got a lot more data than just the obdii codes by law. We did have to pay 'a reasonable price' which was around $100k so not in reach of people but nothing to a company.
we didn't use a lot of the data but I had it for weird systems.
I had to find on some strange forum the CEL codes to monitor my DPF. Otherwise I would never know when it is filling up and never be able to reach out a highway to allow it to clean nicely.
This shouldn't be obscure. But they keep saying "hey this is our intellectual property"
You are confusing OBDII for OBD - they are different. OBDII covers emissions and never was enough for most diagnosis. There are other laws in place - though I don't recall what they are.
OBD isn't enough anymore.
You are confusing OBD for OBDII. OBD was always enough, but also manufacture/vehcile specific. OBDII was required by law and never enough except for some really basic (but common) things.
Take Volkswagen vehicles (VW/Audi, mainly). Nearly every electronic module in the car that you'd want to replace has component protection, making it literally impossible for a non-dealer to replace it since you need access to VAG servers to get the token to code the module for the car VIN. I had this experience recently with a CAN bus controller module that just randomly failed. $3k at the dealer. I would have preferred to do it myself but there is no way.
VW didn't key components for a long time, but a VW Golf was uninsurable in certain cities in the Netherlands because airbags and navigation units were stolen multiple times per year in some instances. Sometimes the thieves waited just a few weeks until most cars in a neighborhood had replaced the stolen components and made another run...
I couldn't believe it when my wife's '16 GTI (base) needed a new battery, and I realized for non-base models, the BATTERY is coded and needs dealer programming to be replaced.
Our '08 Caravan had the ABS module die, and try as I might with 3 or 4 independent mechanics, had to go back to Dodge/FCA to get it reprogrammed for the car to accept the new module.
That is about theft. Chop shops won't steel the car for the ABS module.
If anyone from The Repair Association is reading, there are a bunch of issues with the website. It sends me to https://tennessee.repair.org/ , which has a broken iframe for the "Make your voice heard" section. Fortunately the "Tell your repair story" section seems to also handle contacting representatives, except it auto-fills to what seems to be the wrong bill. It tells them I want them to support SB0077, which "As introduced, extends the medical cannabis commission to June 30, 2029" (I don't know enough about it to know if I actually do support this or not), instead of SB0499, which "As introduced, enacts the "Agricultural Right to Repair Act." The header of the page has correct bills for last year.
Thanks for the feedback! Fellow Tennessean here so I'm a bit embarrassed. I fixed the Make your voice heard embed (we removed a CallPower integration).
I'm working on fixing the letter now.
We built this tech when having five or six states with bills was exciting. Now, 50 states times two chambers times sometimes two or three bills has become a whole thing to keep track of it all.
Keeping all of these bills up to date across 50 states that change every year is quite the project. It's a pretty manual process right now, alas. I'd love to automate it.
Everyone else: please thread any bill year mismatch / other issues you find here, and I'll fix them!
I think there's still a mismatch for TN, it looks like SB0499/HB0432 is the version of the bill for the current legislative session (the pre-filled subject line already mentions "H432"). https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/Default.aspx?BillN... https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/BillInfo/Default.aspx?BillN...
I don't know how your site's infrastructure works, but would it be possible to have some way we could submit something like a pull request to contribute easier? It would be no trouble for me if it made it easier for you.
Note that “introduced” refers to bills being filed. Only five states have actually passed RtR laws yet.
Proposed would have been more accurate, for the average person.
Wow, good catch. I've s/introduced/proposed/ the title above. Thanks to both of you!
And those that have passed, are not necessarily universal. For example, Californias (I think) only applies to electronics, not cars. The John Deere "thing" is still a "thing" in California. The CA law is mostly about iPhones.
I don't know if they have other bills and what not in play to address other industries.
I don't like being pedantic, but there is a fundamental difference between bill and law. It takes a few people in legislature to introduce a bill but takes majority to create a law with the executive ascent.
The bills have been introduced in 50 states, only 5 have legislated these bills into laws.
Right to Repair should extend to software also. Just the same way someone can make an accessory for a tractor without permission from the tractor company, developers should be able to make tools for software/accounts without the express permission of the megacorp behind it without needing to worry about legal threats.
I really have trouble understanding that map. What does "Active and Passed" mean? I assumed it meant they had passed laws and updates in the works, but those States are excluded from the praise over the "Passed" States. I presume "Historical" means "Failed to pass" and no current activity to get a law passed.
You are correct, something is not in sync with that map and their description. That is, their description says that five states have passed legislation: New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado. But in the "Passed" and "Active and Passed" categories on the map, it includes those 5 states plus Massachusetts.
FWIW, all of the searching I could find about Right to Repair laws in Massachusetts focused solely on vehicle right to repair (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Massachusetts_Question_1), not on electronic devices generally, so maybe that's why Massachusetts was not included in the description (which specifically said "passed electronics right to repair legislation") but was categorized on the map.
Hi all! I volunteer with repair.org to create the map on repair.org/legislation and saw this thread. I'm sorry for the confusion!
I have updated the map to remove MA from the "Passed" or "Active and Passed" category given the law that has passed is related to automotive and our focus is more on digital electronics equipment.
I also updated the legend to address some of the valid concerns mentioned here:
Dark Red = Active in 2025 (or current year); Light Red = Active before 2025; Red and Black = Law Passed & Currently Active; Black = Law Passed
> Dark Red = Active in 2025 (or current year); Light Red = Active before 2025; Red and Black = Law Passed & Currently Active; Black = Law Passed
I still don't understand these categories. What is the difference between "Active" and "Law Passed & Currently Active?"
Maybe they're excluded because they've already been praised, and they're focused on the new states joining in? I assume "active and passed" means that they not only passed the laws, but they are currently in effect. A law being passed doesn't necessarily put it into immediate effect.
I did consider that interpretation, but by "praise" I simply mean that the article says "Five states (New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado) have passed electronics Right to Repair legislation" and that "the remaining states are working hard to restore repair competition" which is also overblown since so many of the States are merely "Historical" with nothing going on.
Based on what I know about one of the states in question, I'm thinking that "Active and Passed" means they have both a passed bill and an active bill that isn't passed. Though I'd think they'd call that "Passed and Current" to match their other nomenclature.
Pretty clearly this is a good idea, but even the best ideas need champions to get up.
Thanks iFixit for championing this cause for so long. The rest of the world will follow these states’ lead.
For comparison:
https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240419IP...
https://repair.eu/
It's not perfect (see the last link for details), but it's a great start. Also, if you have the time, read the actual directive. It's fairly readable as far as laws go.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... - see Article 5.
Also the FAQ:
https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/2d443b31-dc2a...
Also there's an entire directive for batteries:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1542/oj
Article 11 is the one that's probably most interesting to people here, the reason why we are now starting to see easily removable batteries in mobile devices, again. Actually "easier to remove", they're definitely not as easy to remove as the Nokia 5110 batteries :-p
Don't get your hopes up just because they have something they call right-to-repair legislation. It doesn't imply a practical ability to get repairs done. That requires e.g. parts availability, schematics, etc., way behind what legislation I've heard of requires.
I wonder if we’ll see “compliance devices” like we saw compliance cars in California. That is, highly modular, repairable devices available to consumers inclined that way, “offsetting” some of the other devices companies like Apple make
The issue is not just the passage of laws, it is enforcement. Unless the penalties are ruinous, corporations will flout the laws and use legal trickery to skirt them.
Who is most likely to be against this? NADA most of all maybe? They seem to be the most anti-consumer and (rightfully to them) propping up their member dealers.
This is morally obvious. We only have a law about it because somebody's feeling greedy or squeezed.
Law is a maximally complex representation of reality manifested by anxiety.
that last sentence is great.
Wonder when we will get software right to repair laws.
Challenges from Alliance for Automotive Innovation mounting also though:
Massachusetts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43021108
Maine https://pirg.org/articles/automakers-sue-maine-to-block-repa...
Regarding the Maine aricle:
>The association of automakers also alleges that because the “independent entity” has not created a “standardized platform,” they have no way to securely share vehicle data. They are asking the court to declare the law unenforceable until the independent entity has undertaken its obligations.
That sounds understandable. Just until the independent entity gets their act together.
As someone who frequently disagrees with the overwhelming majority political opinion on this site, this is one thing I wish all states could find common ground on. The amount of waste and value extraction that corporations force on us, when we could simply repair and maintain what we already have, is downright evil.
Hard to imagine any reasonable individual being opposed to this, regardless of politics!
> reasonable
If your net worth is high enough that anti-consumer policy pumps your assets harder than it dumps your consumption, it's rational. A huge jerk move, sure, and arguably unreasonable on those grounds, but it's rational. Unfortunately the $600B sponsor and $6B president are faaaar on the other side of the invisible net worth boundary where that starts to be the case, so I wouldn't expect RtR to get much traction, but who knows. There is enough chaos to make it worth a try even if it "ought" to fail on grounds of "government by the rich, for the rich."
> If your net worth is high enough that anti-consumer policy pumps your assets harder than it dumps your consumption, it's rational. A huge jerk move, sure, and arguably unreasonable on those grounds, but it's rational.
Sounds like narcissistic personality disorder to me. Why are some of us worshipping these people again?
You don't expect laws that are already passed to get much traction because the president is rich and has rich friends?
There's a gigantic map in TFA that shows what has and hasn't passed, did you even so much as glance at the article?
It's irrelevant. The president doesn't do the passing. He's not a dictator. This isn't a tribalism partisan issue, as much as you seem to want to make it. I could point to the blue state of Massachusetts which, immediately after passing RTR through popular support, immediately had its democratic government strip all the teeth out of the bill, at the request of several big corporations. What do you have to say about that? Is that Trump's fault too? Even though it happened when Biden was in office?
Maybe the Supreme Court stacked with his allies will declare RtR is unconstitutional. We lost abortion and gay marriage is on the chopping block. The system is being gamed very hard right now, and they've been lying to you for years.
> He's not a dictator.
Not quite yet. An admirer of dictators. He's a wannabe dictator. Stacking the decks with loyalists and purging those that don't roll over. Never failing to take an opportunity to divide, to tear down, to fabricate, to create chaos for the 99%. Constantly crossing lines that would've been unthinkable for any other president - including previous Republican candidates.
Offtopic: I often think of the alternate universe in which John McCain won the Republican nomination over Donald Trump. What a different world we'd be in! Good chance Biden wouldn't have won in 2020. Good chance Russia wouldn't have had an opportunity to invade Ukraine a second time.
I think if Bernie had been on the ticket in '16 we would be living in a different world.
Reasonable people are sometimes lead to believe that repairability is counter to
safety (i.e. "if an amature does the repair wrong, they could hurt themselves or the owner"),
security (i.e. "if we let people know how it works, it'll be easier to hack"),
technilogical advancement (i.e. "smartphones would have to be chunky bricks with no water resistance if we designed them to be easily opened for repair"),
consumer protection (i.e. "unauthorized repair technicians are unaccountable and might do something unscrupulous to your device"),
value (i.e. "if companies have to design for repair and provide support for repair, then those costs get passed onto consumers"),
among other things. I don't find these arguments compelling and I think there is plenty of precedent for repairability being best for consumers. But they come up a lot - especially from anti-R2R lobbiests.
Our society has also been trained to be consumers, always throwing away old stuff in favor of the latest and greatest. When something breaks, the first thought is usally "how much will it cost to replace this?" instead of "how do I fix it?" Everything is treated as disposible, so there isn't much motivation for the average person to care about repair.
+ecology (i.e. "the new device uses 1kW less energy per month so you shouldn't even try fixing the old one")
They don't use that one very much because the difference in energy efficiency between a five year old device and a ten year old device is generally negligible, whereas the ecological consequences of throwing away an entire device and having to build a whole new one are something they don't want to be reminding people about by bringing it up.
That might be the strongest argument against it.
I would really like total control of my car's ECU, but I know the most popular use of such a power would be to circumvent emissions controls and maximize MPG or HP.
The funniest thing about this list, is that all those things has happened with "approved" "certified" repairs and/or replacement processes.
can't help but think each of those points is something a "<large corporation>" has carefully listed as talking points.
sort of like the bathroom hand dryers that have many biased points saying they are better than paper towels.
I think there are reasonable arguments against it. It increases costs of selling products, reduces profitability.
I think the benefits outweigh those costs, but the argument isn't unreasonable.
Neither of those are reasonable arguments. They're arguments, but not reasonable. No one is guaranteed a fixed level of cost-of-sales or profit, so reduced profit is just part of business. Figure it out, it's 100% not the consumer's problem.
And they're arguably NOT arguments at all, as doing something to make your product less repairable is generally MORE expensive that NOT doing that thing. Most of the time in product manufacture, costs come from performing actions, so by not performing actions, those costs go away. That's what these laws are usually about, skipping repair-unfriendly design choices, making repair documents available (that's free, they already exist, companies need not keep them secret/internal), and not creating software locks that are only for keeping out "unauthorized" repairs.
Apple could save money by using all hex/phillips screws and doing away with pentalobe screws as they'd have few different items to buy and use. Apple could save a really good deal of money using NVMe drives, or an open standard for flash-chip boards like in the M4 Mini, because currently they waste a lot of engineering resources on their proprietary solutions. Devices with ultrasonically welded plastic cases could skip the ultrasonic welding step and just use clips on the plastic frame. Etc.
It needs to be explicitly shown how and why it increases costs because if anything it feels like the opposite to me, especially when companies use proprietary pieces and hiding schematics rather than open standards and common configurations.
fewer sold products, less economy of scale, more cost
Components not just products have economies of scale.
Dell is currently better off buying the same RAM etc used by other computer manufacturers.
This, and also, so what if the price of the end product goes up? You wouldn't feel the need to buy a new phone so often if it was more sensible to repair them, which would very likely more than make up for the price increase.
unlikely: people cost much more (repairing vs automated manufacturing)
second: even if it may make up for it, the manufacturers profits still will be reduced
more products -> more components
replacing some components means fewer components sold overall, because whole products 'replace' just all components
That’s something of a broken window fallacy here. Producing fewer parts while having more working devices is a net win for the economy.
Economies of scale don’t mean things are free. The marginal cost of each transistor is still greater than zero even though where producing what 10^20 ish of them per year.
while you see a net win for the economy, I see a smaller GDP and a bad conclusion after the business year when people start repairing their devices instead of throwing them away and buying new.
Idk where I implied zero cost of things anywhere?
That's not an explicit reason. You're acting like they are making custom parts for everything and not buying the same widget as everyone else on the manufacturing line.
It’s also difficult to quantify the true savings of repair (true cost of garbage, shipping protection, etc), incentives punish local work, and the cost of losing local knowledge and know-how.
I wouldn’t call what you mentioned as reasonable, but nobody with the financial muscle or brain power wants to do that deep dive analysis.
Botched repair then 3 iterations of resale to obfuscate it was originally repaired badly could dilute brand strength, but that's kind of a stretch
It has been politicized heavily by maga type crowds who don't really know what it means.... I have had ppl at the barbershop call me a socialist because I wanted right to repair...
I imagine bringing up the current situation with John Deere and how the law would enshrine the right to repair the tractor that you bought with your own money would go farther than most arguments with those folks.
It's an interesting idea. But I like to think if they owned equipment like that, they'd already be on the side of right-to-repair. Farmers are smart businessmen and this is an obviously needless extra cost.
But for the non-farmers, perhaps it'd really sway tribal mindsets to understand people "similar to them" (more so than elite techies...) benefit too.
He's just advertising the filter bubble he lives in. Everyone wants owners to be able to be able to access the info they need to repair things. About the only gripe you'll hear from the most hardline libertarians is "that's not the government's job" and even then it's usually prefixed with "this is nice but". Occasionally some Karen who hasn't really put much thought into it will screech about "but what it someone repairs something wrong and makes it unsafe" as if supposed professionals don't do that all the time and right to repair isn't just as much about enabling individual professionals as it is owners.
I did receive the "it's not the governments job" speech but they had no rebuttal when I asked about border agents seizing official refurb apple parts as "counterfeit" or Microsoft jailing someone trying to keep old PCs out of landfill... Or the concept of IP as a whole and the John Deere tractor example someone else replied to me with in this thread .
As if I'm blind or stupid and wouldn't try the obvious??
You can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason into
> they had no rebuttal when I asked about border agents seizing official refurb apple parts as "counterfeit" or Microsoft jailing someone trying to keep old PCs out of landfill... Or the concept of IP as a whole and the John Deere tractor example someone else replied to me with in this thread .
They have no rebuttal because you're now making their own arguments. Regulations that allow those parts to be seized or those people to be jailed should be repealed.
In general the libertarian position is that problems like this would be solved by competition if there weren't government regulations stifling competition. And they're often right. DMCA 1201 impairs adversarial interoperability and therefore competition. Trademark law is meant to be about consumer protection and accurately representing the source of goods to the consumer, not enabling price discrimination by putting up trade barriers to cross-border arbitrage.
But a lot of those bad laws, they're federal. So if all you have control over is a state legislature, and those laws exist and have impaired competition and the state legislature can't remove federal laws, you then have to ask what they can do about the problems caused by those laws, until such time as we can get them repealed at the federal level.
If you want a fun compromise, pass a right to repair bill that only applies to companies with more than a billion dollars in revenue (but using the largest entity in the supply chain, so you can't just use a small business as a middle man to get out of it). That's going to make it apply to any of the relevant companies, but then if you ever managed to actually make those markets competitive enough for smaller businesses to be viable, you don't have yet another rule stacking on more barriers to entry for small businesses.
> In general the libertarian position is that problems like this would be solved by competition if there weren't government regulations stifling competition. And they're often right
I disagree. There are many situations in which it will always be more profitable to screw over consumers than it would be to not screw them over, even taking into account that you might steal some business from competitors.
Any company that does spring up out of nowhere and do the right thing for the consumer will eventually be forced to screw over their customers or be bought up by someone who will because shareholders will never leave giant piles of money sitting on the table. Even if a company somehow managed to put every one of their competitors out of business, shareholders will still demand endless growth so the only thing left is to screw the customers and degrade the product which is exactly what we see over and over again once a company has anything close to a monopoly.
> Even if a company somehow managed to put every one of their competitors out of business, shareholders will still demand endless growth so the only thing left is to screw the customers and degrade the product which is exactly what we see over and over again once a company has anything close to a monopoly.
But this is exactly the point.
A competitive market is going to have at least a dozen suppliers. There are some corporate apologists who like to pretend that a duopoly is competition and only a strict monopoly is a problem, but that's BS. With sufficiently few suppliers they can easily collude with each other or use conscious parallelism to make sure that everybody is screwing customers and therefore nobody has to stop.
A competitive market isn't a thing where one company is so great they put all of their competitors out of business. It's a thing where entering the market is easy so lots of people do it all the time.
Suppose there is a market with five companies all colluding to screw the customer. If entering the market is easy then soon there are six companies, because investors like money. If the incumbents are getting 50% margins and you could go eat their lunch while still getting 20% margins, that's what you do. Then there are six companies getting 20% margins, but that's still a good profit margin and it's still easy to enter the market, so soon there are seven and their margins are 8%. Trying to buy out the new guys or collude with them doesn't work because the combination of "industry with high margins" and "easy to enter the market" means new companies will keep showing up forever until the margins come down.
Whereas if there is a market with five companies all colluding to screw the customer and regulations make it hard for anyone new to enter the market, the customer is screwed. Which is what keeps happening.
Interesting how you seem to know more about my personal anecdote and experience than myself??? You where there apparently so tell me more lmao....
I'm not going to bother to address most of your comment because of this.... but just.... Unbelievably rude and arrogant of you lol. Par for libertarians.
Anyway no they where not libertarians they where MAGA as I stated.
They weren't interested in any of the BS you espoused. Things seized at border? Must be dangerous or illegal ,good on our boys in blue.ppl in jail? Must be protecting society.. OBVIOUSLY innocent citizens don't go to jail. Etc etc.
Don't believe climate change is real at all
Don't believe COVID is real or was real. At all.
Highly evangelical Christian while being the most unchristlike beings imaginable.
MAGA BULLSHIT not libertarians...
Personal anecdotes are the "weak man fallacy". You can always find some fool to say any nonsense thing and partisans find it easier to dunk on the other village's idiot than be asked questions they might not have answers for.
People say "rude" when they mean insubordinate, as if subordination is something anyone is entitled to.
No just rude and arrogant... Lol you come across like a pol pot with your vast projections and generalizations... I made no statements other than my anecdote in relation to trying to get people to understand right to repair is difficult as it has been heavily politicized. Then you went into multiple paragraphs of tirades and putting words in my mouth and assuming stances I don't hold.
Anyway. My original point stands. Right to repair is heavily politicized in maga crowds and therefore the current Republican party. Most of the arguments they have against it are nonsense and is very much akin to drug war reasoning. The only people in their eyes who want right to repair are pirates ,thieves and smugglers.
I don't give a fuck what libertarians think because they hold no political power or sway.even if they hold the logical ethical high ground in what SHOULD happen.... Nothing ever changes regardless of their opinions. Again see the drug war.
Doesnt work. Nor examples of apple screen being seized as "counterfeit" nor blatant abuses by Microsoft or Nintendo that has ppl JAILED for doing what they will with their own property. They don't really listen to reason. Right to repair sounds" nice" and like it might help poor people .... So they will fight it to the death as socialism handouts.
You must not have encountered a John Deere engineer in the wild.
Unless your name's John Deere.
I think that right of repair stems from the right of ownership. You can't ever really own a black box.
But there isn't really an "overwhelming majority political opinion" on this site? Hence the long threads of comments of people disagreeing on the merits of ideas. Unless you're referring to the anti-trump sentiment, which is more pan-political as there are obviously a whole bunch of Americans that don't want to see our country destroyed regardless of how we wish it might be reformed.
When you say pan-political do you mean this:
a specific term, used mainly in social sciences as a designation for those forms of nationalism that aim to transcend (overcome, expand) traditional boundaries.
I never heard of the term before as why Im asking.
Also, in my own view. I don't consider myself political, I watch what people do, versus what they say they're going to do. And for me, any political figure can say one thing when the really want to do another.
I agree that government needs to be reformed, but somhow, Im thinking the reform issue is just being used as a vehicle to push a Accelerationism agenda.
I have no idea of that specific use of the term and what connotations it has, but maybe it fits? I was using the general prefix to mean across what are usually considered political lines. For example you and I can disagree (and we likely do!!!) on the specific approaches and directions for reforming the government, and we call that politics. But for example, if one of us thinks things would be better if the US was militarily conquered by China, that isn't really the domain of "politics" any longer.
> anti-trump sentiment, which is more pan-political
If such sentiment was across the political spectrum, he wouldn't have been voted in. The notion that what people think in your bubble is what everyone thinks is what leads to conspiracy theories like "Stop the steal", and it has a chilling effect on actually engaging with people who might be voting against their own interests (or maybe even challenging your own cherished viewpoint on something)
There was another response (flagged now) saying that pro-Trump support was pan-political. I agree with that as well.
As far as actually engaging, that's the fundamental problem! Most of his support was basically founded on rejecting discussion and reason, voting the gut feeling of something latched on to from one of the many conflicting things he said, while being happy with other people's frustration because you've pigeonholed them into "the other". Like I'm a libertarian, I personally share many of the frustrations and criticisms that got Trump elected! Yet you've seemingly assumed some caricature of me where I've got a narrow understanding with "cherished viewpoints".
We all have cherished ideas, like, say, libertarianism. (I wasn't making a specific insinuation, it was really just an innocent parenthetical.)
Regardless of the levity with which you intended it, is it not still an assertion that I haven't done the work to understand the viewpoints I am arguing against?
Ah no. The use of second person was meant to be applied more generally. You may have taken it personally, but it wasn't my intent.
Just to clarify, this is what was going through my mind
https://pbfcomics.com/comics/deeply-held-beliefs/
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He got 49.8% of the popular vote.
Yes, when you get 49.8% of the vote and your opponent gets 48.3%, you have won the popular vote, since 49.8% is more than 48.3%.
One opponent got 48.3%. His opponents got 50.2%, which is what matters since you were claiming winning the popular vote means he had majority support.
The first time, didn't he get more than that the second time though?
He got more than his opponent the second time. Trump got 49.8%, Harris got 48.3%. This is widely considered to be winning the popular vote; nobody else got more votes than he did.
As opposed to 2016 where Trump won the electoral college but received fewer total votes than his major opponent because extra votes in California don't count in the electoral college.
Notice that if you want to claim that winning the popular vote requires more than 50% then you can't claim that Clinton "won the popular vote" in 2016 because she got 48.2% to Trump's 46.1%.
2016: 46.1%
2020: 46.8%
2024: 49.8%44
No. Trump got a 49.8% plurality of the vote was the second time around. The first time around he only got 46.1% to Hillary Clinton's 48.2% (not even a plurality -- yay electoral college). He did not win a majority in either of his wins, and a plurality only the second time. Amazing what you can do with a $44 billion propaganda platform and another quarter billion in usable funds.
Sure, simplistic populism plays out in wider society where short quips and repetition matter more than coherent ideas. That doesn't really change what I said though.
(For context, because I know the tendency is to pigeonhole commenters - I'm a libertarian who shares many of the frustrations driving the destructive fervor)
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I don't think Kamala Harris has dementia. I'm not sure I like her stance on Gaza either but criticize her for the right reasons.
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That's real funny, bravo, but you didn't say that the policies were identical, you said that the choice was a "dementia patient", and now you've moved the goalpost.
> 25% of Americans
If you’re referring to people who don’t vote, they de facto support the outcome. Particularly if in a swing state.
> genocidal dementia patient
People who voted for Trump (or threw their vote in a swing state) because of Palestine are the definition of stupid and selfish. By prioritising their interests above those they purported to represent, they will have played a (non-critical) role in the destruction of Palestine.
It baffled me that anyone thought that Trump was going to somehow be better than Kamala in regards to Palestine.
I could understand voting for a third party, but Trump outright tried to impose a Muslim ban in his first time, and said that his son in law was going to quickly solve the Middle East conflict single-handedly; seems unlikely that he would be sympathetic to people in the Middle East.
> baffled me that anyone thought that Trump was going to somehow be better than Kamala in regards to Palestine
I was in Phoenix in April 2024 when an otherwise-intelligent friend remarked on whether Trump was pro Israel. She wound up remembering his first term eventually. But at that moment I realised that the checkmate Democrats thought they had Republicans in with abortion, Republicans had Democrats in with Palestine: move to the left and you lose moderates and Pennsylvania. Move to the right (or fail to message) and you lose Michigan and your base. Message at all and you lose swing voters who don’t want to hear about foreign policy.
I'm not sure they thought that Trump would be better.
It seems they think that voting is a test unrelated to the likely outcomes. So you should vote "right" rather than compromising and voting for the better among the possible outcomes.
> you should vote "right" rather than compromising and voting for the better among the possible outcomes
This is said well. The vote was about reaffirming an identity. Its effect on the people they purported to care for was secondary.
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That's fine, you have the right to vote third-party, but are you saying aren't sympathetic to the other issues that Trump is raising?
I am not sure I loved Kamala's stance on Palestine, but I thought that Trump's tariff policies were stupid, his anti-immigrant and anti-trans rhetoric was harmful, and virtually every single stupid thing that the Diablo cheater has done with DOGE (and said he would do before the election, to be clear) seemed short-sighted-at-best and malicious-at-worst. It can be difficult to tell since both Trump and Musk are supremely stupid people who depend on hubris to fail upwards their entire lives, but regardless it seemed pretty bad to me, and it seemed like the totality of it indicated that Kamala would have been fine.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with voting on a single issue, if you think Palestine is more important than all the stuff I listed then that's fair enough and I'm actually fine with people voting third party. The way I see it though, the only person who is going to do exactly what I want, politically speaking, is me, and I'm not running. No matter who I vote for, as a result, is going to inherently be a compromise on something. I have to vote for the person that I think will do the least amount of damage and/or try and prevent the person who is going to do the most from getting in power.
I felt like a vote for a candidate that had a shot at winning was better than one that didn't, even though I tend to actually be a bit closer-aligned with the green party.
> if both sides are genocidal, there's no choice where your life gets better
As I said, stupid and selfish. Not seeing the difference between bombing and explicit ethnic cleansing and relocation for the people in Gaza is modern Sykes-Picot.
Note that I’m fine with that person not voting. (Almost prefer it.) It’s wild, though, to pretend it furthered the interests of the people they pretend to hold dear, versus some personal moral purity they’d prefer to preach about online.
> i did vote socialist/green
This is fine, even admirable, if you’re not in a swing state. If you’re in a swing state, you de facto voted for Trump and the destruction of both Gaza and the dream of a Palestinian nation-state.
> if liberals want to win elections, they need to start offering a vision of a better future
Sure. And never mention Israel or Palestine again, because I no longer have any desire to engage with the US elements of those movements who are, on both sides, adamant about redrawing foreign borders in respect of countries and cultures they have no direct relation to nor experience with.
do you have any concept of what they were doing in Gaza? 85% of schools bombed/damaged, almost every hospital destroyed, tens of millions of tons of rubble, Trump said 1.7-1.8M remaining (meaning 400-500k dead). this is a holocaust. Democrats are not doing an "innocent war". They are hiterites with a smile on their face. The Republicans are hitlerites with a frown. Sometimes vice versa depending on the situation.
I voted in PA. You guys want my vote? appeal to me and people like me.
> 85% of schools bombed/damaged, almost every hospital destroyed, tens of millions of tons of rubble, Trump said 1.7-1.8M remaining
How do you think those 2mm remaining would prefer the future to go? Razed, relocated and—let’s be honest—in all likelihood ersatz enslaved somewhere in Central Asia or Africa? Safe in the knowledge someone in America made this choice for them with a false equivalence between living on their land to fight another day and being dissolved as a nation?
That is the selfishness. That is the holier-than-thou imperial mindset; what matters is how one is portrayed and gets to think about oneself, not how the people one uses as puppets fare. (Sykes and Picot’s supporters thought they were helping, too!)
If you're not American it's easy to lose track but the other option was Kamala Harris, not Biden.
that's true they swapped her in, but her policy platform was identical. she said there was no difference between her and biden explicitly.
https://www.cnn.com/politics/harris-2024-campaign-biden/inde...
Louis Rossmann, we speak your name!
Does this mean I have the right to repair my Tesla, and how long until Musk thinks this is a bad idea.
This is something I believe in. How can one get more involved in this? (Beyond donating)
'Right-to-Repair' covers a broad spectrum of issues and it makes sense to consider them separately as how we deal with them will vary in each case. Clearly it's not possible to cover every aspect as that's worthy of a large book so I'll just highlight few issues.
First, it's worth looking at how we reached this this point and why Right-to-Repair has become such a big deal in recent years.
For younger generations it may come as a surprise to learn that 50 or so years ago the very concept or notion of one's right to repair one's equipment would have been very foreign to the average person. Consumers would have expected their appliances to be both durable and long-lasting and capable of being repaired. Back then, just about every appliance from a toaster to a television set was repairable and manufacturers had service departments where their products could be returned for repairs. Alternatively, owners and independent repairers could buy spare parts and service manuals from these service outlets.
In fact, so ingrained were notions about repairs and service that no one would have given even a second thought that in future they might be discontinued. In hindsight, I think blindness to the fact that things might change is why so few of us saw change coming until it was upon us.
Anyway, that was the normal situation until somewhere around the mid 1970s - early '80s when things changed drastically for the worse.
Why the change? In the decades since then there has been a huge shift in manufacturing and the economics of manufacturing. More than ever the overwhelming issue nowadays in manufacturing is profit, it has become the principal driving force and raison d'être for manufacturers' existence. No doubt, profit has always been a driving force but in the past it was tempered by other considerations, companies often built their reputations on the quality and reliability of their products and that those who ran them often had high manufacturing standards that they wanted to uphold.
In past decades people who ran manufacturing companies were more likely to be their founders—often inventors and or engineers—and they had a vested—intellectual—interest in their products and by virtue of the fact they required their companies to produce good products that consumers would appreciate.
From about 1980s the economic environment in which businesses found themselves changed dramatically, manufacturing thus changed to adapt. Free trade, reduced tariffs, offshore manufacturing, family companies being absorbed into multinationals, change in investment practices and so on meant that the utility and quality of products was often deprecated in favor of profits. With the changes founders and engineers ended up having much less say and influence over production than previously. Now shareholders and accountants ran these companies and their CEOs were no longer engineers but those with MBA degrees.
Of course, that's only part of the story, computers and IP became a big deal during this time and was very influential in rolling product info back into the proprietary realms of companies. Nowadays, information about products that companies once willingly placed in the public domain for the benefit of their customers such as circuit diagrams and maintenance and repair documentation, etc. has almost dried up completely.
Many well-known and highly respected companies succumbed to these economic changes. Had I time I could give many examples but HP and Sony are two egregious cases that immediately come to mind. Probably the quintessential example of where engineering management has given way to profit and the greed of investors is that of Boeing. The 747 was first designed and built 50+ years ago when Boeing was an engineering company run by engineers, nowadays investors and accountants run the company and is product is the 737-MAX.
Also, these changes have brought old nefarious manufacturing practices to the fore. Whilst the notion of planned obsolescence has been around for well over a century modern business practice has brought it to new heights. Products are now designed with less durability and have much shorter lives than in the past.
An example I like to give is that several years ago I bought three plastic buckets at the supermarket and the plastic handle fell off one before I got it home and not much later the handles fell off the other two when in use. Compare them with an old beaten-up and dented hot-dipped galvanized bucket we've inherited from my grandmother that was made sometime around the mid 1920s. It's somewhat the worse for wear but it's still functional. Furthermore, it still has its handle and it's not even rusty.
Here, durability has given way to profit, planned obsolescence ensures that manufacturers sell more. Then there's the serious problem of plastic pollution. And that's just for starters.
It seems to me there's a simple solution to all this but instigating it would be very difficult as manufacturers would fight it every inch of the way. That is to tax products that are deliberately designed without durability and longevity in mind. A durability tax would provide manufacturers with a financial incentive to make better products. Taxes also have the advantage that they can be fine-tuned until they become effective.
A durability/longevity tax would be not only just applicable to buckets but also smartphones and such. For example, phones without the facility for users to change batteries easily would fall into this category and be subject to the tax.
A similar 'utility' tax would apply where manufacturers deliberately depreciate a product's functional utility in favor of profit. Often that could be difficult to define but let me give you an example based on the definition and modus operandi of a device. Again, the classic example is the smartphone. First, we should not lose sight of the fact that a phone is primarily a telecommunications device licensed and tightly regulated under various telecommunications laws.
In recent years, phone manufacturers have deliberately killed the FM radio facility in many smartphones to encourage streaming which is more profitable. FM does not stop streaming, so why should it be removed when it serves an important purpose in times of emergency? During floods, fires, earthquakes etc. when WiFi and cellular services could easily be out of operation FM is very capable of supplying alternative sources of emergency information.
If governments acted responsibly then they ought to deem life and safety as being more important than profits, thus to encourage (rather than mandate) manufacturers to incorporate FM reception on their phones they could levy a utility tax on phones that do not have FM reception.
BTW, an almost identical argument is already being played out in the US over AM band reception in car radios. EV manufacturers want to phase out AM on grounds it's hard to reduce interference in EVs whereas the FCC has stated it's essential in times of national emergency. Incidentally, where I live the national broadcaster assumes the responsibility of broadcasting emergency information on the assumption that smartphone owners may no longer have access to WiFi or cellular networks.
At first thought much of that may seem outside the scope of the basic Right-to-Repair laws but on consideration it's not. Tied up with durability/longevity are related issues such as fitness for purpose, product functionality, minimizing e-waste and so on. When it comes to considering these matters this example just shows that we've barely scratched the surface.
That Right-to-Repair legislation is being widely enacted is no doubt excellent news. That said, the manufacturing lobby is extremely powerful so we need to fear that laws may be watered down to the point of being ineffective.
What's needed is a cultural shift by manufacturers back to those of earlier times. However, given the nature of their cultural shift of recent decades, we should not expect an easy ride going forth. Trouble is—as we've all too often seen—that in democracies where companies have undue power and influence it is very difficult to get effective law enacted.
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Can someone explain why this isn’t the big win we think it is?
It's better than nothing. But introduced and passed are different things. An introduced bill may never actually become law.
The upside is that this shows how popular RtR is, and there's a good chance at least several states may implement their laws. At some point, even if it isn't universal, all it takes is enough states to force manufacturers to support independent repair by default.
In particular it's depressing that the map near the top of the article shows that for a majority of states, the introduction of the bill is "historical", as in neither passed, active or current, but (IIUC) it was floated in some prior legislative session, but it's not even under consideration in the present session.
They could go for the Apple-in-Europe model, where you have the right to repair only if your geolocation detects you being in a state where it's mandatory for you to have that right, otherwise it still locks you out.
Because this just means a single legislator has sponsored a bill. It doesn't mean it has pass, nor does it it even mean it is likely to pass. It's actual laws getting passed that matter.
Of course this IS a milestone to getting a law passed, and shows that the campaign is getting legislators' notice etc. So it is still good.
Even the "active and passed" states (particularly New York) passed a neutered version of right-to-repair that barely does anything. I only understand vaguely, but Louis Rossman has been outspoken about the progress of NY right-to-repair in particular, and how it flopped hard. As much as right-to-repair seems like a party line issue, even many of the Democrats have thus far been all talk and no substance.
Because the large corporations have virtually unlimited power to water down bills with campaign contributions. It takes very little to money to sway a representative federally. How much less do you think it takes to sway a state level candidate?
Spending cash on candidates to prevent bills like this is likely a rounding error on their yearly budget.
One drawback to consumer-rights laws is that we as consumers end up with less access to cool stuff. Some companies have chosen to stop selling into the B2C market altogether, to avoid incurring expenses and liabilities associated with conforming to right-to-repair and other pro-consumer legislation. Rohde & Schwarz and Keysight come to mind.
That is bullshit, of course -- just an excuse for companies to dodge basic business responsibilities, and a blatant failure on their part to acknowledge why consumers felt this legislation was needed in the first place. But it is certainly true that there are short-term drawbacks.
Interesting! I think you're probably onto something there. Agree it's more of an excuse than a reason, but still there will be low margin products that have to go that direction due to the math.
I tend to think B2C is who needs the most protection from the gov since C are relatively powerless, whereas B2B tends to be more balanced, but the more I think about it the more I think that perhaps we're overlooking an important area. Nevertheless I think for now we need to focus on B2C and worry about B2B later. Can't spread ourselves too thin.
To be fair, Rohde & Schwarz and Keysight aren't names I'd normally associate with consumer devices. On the other hand, neither are Mcdonands' ice cream machines.
It is a big win, but in the Oregon version at least it excludes large sectors like vehicles which is obviously a big expense to most US consumers. Hopefully it will continue to be extended.
>Can someone explain why this isn’t the big win we think it is?
I mean, there is the psychological phenomenon known as the Just World Hypothesis. When presented with something that's simply bad, or simply good, people are skeptical and tempted to search for the counterbalancing element, treating it like a trick question even if it's not.
And so it can be hard to accept it simply is good. But that doesn't have to be the end of the conversation because that impulse can be channeled productively just by changing the baseline. Right to repair, I would think, simply is good, but since we need a bad thing, we can talk about the long road ahead to full implementation, or the effort necessary to overcome cultural inertia, as well as status quo extremism in our institutions.
But I think the right to repair itself is a good thing.
i’m more for right to repair than not but i can see unintended consequences of things like iphones being bulkier and heavier if modular components like batteries are required in the broadest reach of the concept. these bills may be narrower and probably are. that’s the ultimate question though is how far the balance should be.
Im pretty sure thats a falsity. Making tech repair friendly doesnt really add to the form factor of a device if you know how to design correctly, even with phones.
I remember that phone[0] that google killed and that was back in 2013? Since then other projects have sprung up to tackle this. There are links at the bottom of the page.
[0]: https://www.onearmy.earth/project/phonebloks
I wondered if that Google modular phone ended up inspiring the Moto Z during the time Google owned Motorola.
To your point, I suspect the same, I'm trying to think of adverse consequences. The closest I can think of is something akin to the battery example, but in a different way. Maybe you're more comfortable putting high performing dangerous-to-handle components in a phone if you can seal it shut. Maybe component-by-component tech support accountability to a tech repair community is a new set of burdens they don't want to have. I suppose the latter feels plausible, but the possible impact on components seems less convincing.
Lawyers and lobbyists paid lots of money to figure out how to subvert stuff.
OEMs may work to make stuff less consumer repairable/upgradeable to force folks to use their repair services that need stuff like bga reballing or soldering. Bye bye upgradable ram slots!
Things like software locks and restrictions in the name of ‘security’ will lock stuff down and make repair harder (see Apple’s part pairing)
> Things like software locks and restrictions in the name of ‘security’ will lock stuff down and make repair harder (see Apple’s part pairing)
Unfortunately, I don't see an alternative to that given how juicy targets even locked phones were for "chop shops" before Apple introduced parts pairing. People were mugged left and right for their phones.
(Obviously the solution would be to tackle poverty, drug abuse and mental health issues, but that is even more unrealistic)
> People were mugged left and right for their phones.
The solution to theft shouldn't be taking away your right to own things in the first place.
Yes - but they paint with a big brush. Unfortunately legitimate repair and reuse is caught in the mix and made much more difficult.
Wait a bit and you'll see what Tim Cook's donation to the inauguration fund bought him.
A lump of coal if he's lucky
I think it is. But what company is going to advertise this on times square?
Because a bill was introduced does not mean that it will pass nor be signed into law.