Do you like the economic policy that is in place in the USA at minimum of planned obsolescence. In short, everything we buy is junk and is built to fail after the warranty expires. Most washers/dryers/refrigerators, tools, headlights, meters, etc.. are made to fail. The cost to repair them is just shy of buying a new unit, so people buy new.I don't know when this started, but it became apparent under Obama. in the 1990's, stuff worked and lasted more than 10 years, often 30 years for washers or fridges. Now, lucky to get 10yrs out of them.
This policy is setup to keep the $ flowing, so the taxes keep flowing, jobs to manufacture and recycle are in place. I believe this is related to our currencies becoming worthless.. that is we have to buy cheap junk with our cheap currencies.
The downside is landfills fill up, we buy things and they fail fast... e. g. my new dryer almost caught on fire, then the bearing failed. I dehumidifer failed at year 1.5. It's frustrating to spend hard worked $ to get junk. Even many houses are now made out of junk that is going to fail.
Well this depends on your point of view really. Sure its not good that products are inherently flawed but quite frankly this is part of what has made USA so economically powerful. Their consumerism is insane with people buying all kinds of junk, some they do not even need which keep money flowing non-stop and turbocharges the economy.
It also allows companies to use lower quality materials or components thus making the machines in question cheaper for what that is worth. The most novel approach however is putting in points of failure that would make the machine unusable after some time at which point it might start to develop much more catastrophic or outright dangerous problems and as such it can be used as a safety mechanism to force the customer to replace it instead of using it until something bad happens.
That said I am personally against planned obsolescence because I believe products should be made at the best quality you can manage.
Planned obsolescence is sometimes a real phenomenon though really only with market leaders.
More common is not bothering to make things last.
Partly that’s simply a natural economic response: the cost of new goods from a factory has dropped much faster than the cost of having a skilled technician repair a unit. Consequently it’s only worth having high value items repaired since the repair cost is so close to the cost of new. Given that, it makes even less sense for manufacturers to engineer any part to last much longer than the parts most likely to fail first since they just add cost... so you end up with cheap junk that’s even less worth repairing. But the alternative is MUCH more expensive goods and no reduction in repair billls.
That's a good angle I didn't see before. The cost of repair actually goes up given labor cost. Cost of parts is marked up a lot, one would think cost of parts would go down with attempts to repair, but maybe its up because it isn't worth it. thus competition of cheap manufacturing vs repair. interesting...
I think cost of manufacturing went down due to deal with China and outsource to low cost producers. without their cheap (and polluting) power plants and cheap labor, there'd be more balance. economic and gov policies dictate. one wonders if the costs of stuff under "Trumpism"... will go up, thus giving the inflation ever Pres wants?
The cost of manufacturing continues to drop, not just because of China, but because of automation. You can make a completely robotic factory that builds washing machines. However much it costs to build such a factory, it will almost certainly cost LESS in the future. That's partly because of technology, but another factor is that capital stocks are growing, which means the required return to capital has gone down (i. e. real interest rates are lower over decades). So you can get capital and apply technology cheaper.
By contrast, repairing a washing machine requires a trained technician on site to spend time. Technology is NOT radically improving that. So it's less that 'labor has gone up' though it likely has somewhat, and more that labor has stayed steady while automated production has plummeted.
good point on cost of capital... cheap money means investment into productivity and aggressively... hummm... whom is making those robots, tools for robots, software patents, and maintaining them? that sounds like a $ career.
Absolutely. Software developers, electrical engineers, mechanical engineers, etc are doing all the design work. Technicians are doing the maintenance on the factories, and that's a decent career area as well.
I read something recently, discussing gig economy and companies like Uber. Note that all the drivers are not technically employees, they are contractors … and don't even have managers they deal with. They deal with the software. Actual uber employees are all the designers etc who work on the software or business model. The people who work 'above the interface', i. e. who deal with human managers, are adding skilled labor and working on how 'uber' works get paid and treated well. Anyone 'below the interface' i. e. drivers can't even ask for a pay raise, because they don't talk to a person, they just get assigned work by a computer. It's likely that more of the world is heading in that direction.
I agree, and that is fascism right... state and corp merged. It's easier for a govt to manage 1000 corporations than 50,000 small businesses and 300m people. I see why, but it's bad. and the corps get protection in legal and other ways as they have the $ (Obama just passed out 14 trillion to banks and everyone else and the others do the same) so they have lots of cash... and oodles of debt. And to think we started out with "freedom", you work you eat... lol... that's gone.
I would say it depends on the situation. Businesses trying to improve their products should focus on encouraging planned obsolescence rather than selling old items that are flawed forever. It's good for competing against other businesses to nurture innovation rather than stagnation. However, I believe some products should have much less planned obsolescence like clothes, vehicles, home appliances, and others to keep people from fending for themselves. From what I gather, planned obsolescence has gotten increasingly worse for some products in the most cut-throat way. For example, Walmart's fast fashion industry comes from trafficking overseas that keeps women in wage slave working conditions that keeps them easily harassed sexually without any legal protection. America's C. I. A. agents created sweatshop countries normalizing planned obsolescence in products by destroying democratic rulers to benefit patriarchal oligarchs. This is why women have been abused overseas to keep Walmart's stockholders exclusively wealthier than working class Americans, especially though increasing wealth inequality. I cringe when mainstream media sellouts in America say they care about womens' plights. These sellouts only care about money, not women's plights caused by cut-throat men in the business world. Which men score higher on rape, violence, con artistry, and sociopathy. From what I gather, planned obsolescence is just enabling women to be impulsive consumers. Which mostly benefits the exclusively wealthy men who make more money and usually have higher intelligence than women on average. It's not about feminism. It's about making women exploitable consumers to businesses that are more likely owned by men. Especially when women have been groomed to be insecure consumers buying beauty products rather than things to improve their critical thinking and self-control. It's why stupidity keeps happening. Unfortunatley, female-dominated neuroticism and being risk-averse make women struggle to improve themselves. This increasingly worse planned obsolescence isn't helping them to improve themselves, either. From what I gather, younger generations are in a cesspool of increasingly worse planned obsolescence, especially from the fast fashion industry, that makes them look poor rather than civilized and sophisticated. I actually want to go back in time when products lasted longer and ran smoothly and society never allowed people to become impulsive consumers with planned obsolescence by disciplining children through family stability. It's already been proven that older generations managed their money better than these younger ones. I just find businesses these days are run like a mafia and civilization collapsing everywhere.
Yea, it certainly looks planned. I'm not so sure it's so devious against women, but people are trained to be consumers, boys included. We are trained to consume and the consumables are designed to expire much faster than before. good points on womens cosmetics, which I suspect are laced with things that cause problems over time, requiring more products. all of this looks designed to "create" economy and jobs, which helps people work. gotta wonder how much longer it works as prices rise...
Society can see the end of the world better than it can see the end of capitalism. So this current state of being is not obsolescence but just the end of history and the ultimate goal competed. On other matters of study using that same notion historically has been complete shit.
To say we are at the end goal of economics by the means of capitalism is the same way as the scientific golden age is achieved and no further advances can be made.
Time always moves forward and capitalism a necessity for its time will drift away.
you lost me there, what is the ultimate goal? but I think you are saying.. capitalism works for a "season" of time, but it always fades back as innovation wanes or society matures, and the other stuff takes over. I can see that. Beyond that, I see the corruption of $ in which every bailout devalues the $ and thus peoples time working for it, but those who control the assets receive it and thus rich get richer. It's corruption of money, exactly what the constitution of USA attempted to prohibit.
Yeah, this has been a thing for almost 100 years now. The first lightbulb invented was far more durable than the ones used today, even the "eco-friendly" curved ones.
@SuccessfulHornDog electronics harder since innovation much higher. appliances, stop making junk tools that break right after the warranty is up. waste of $... which is the whole point... keep $ rolling. which may mean the issue is the taxation system and size of govt. its not going to change without some catastrophe...
@SuccessfulHornDog We don’t need things like ‘smart’ refrigerators that break on a software update. We don’t need engineers building cars where the entire front end has to be removed to change out a headlight. We don’t need Apple throttling iPhones and making them slower just because they’re older.
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