8 ms·

The idea is great. The problems will be with the implementation, how it will change incentives, any loopholes introduced, cost of enforcement and unintended con

The idea is great. The problems will be with the implementation, how it will change incentives, any loopholes introduced, cost of enforcement and unintended consequences. What exactly is a repair? Are parts covered, or only labour? Think ship of Theseus. Is an upgrade a repair, can I put a better compressor, rather than like-for-like in my refrigerator when it's failed? Can I have my TV repaired by replacing all the parts, except the power cord? How broken must something be before it can be repaired? Totally failed, failure imminent, or just worn? (Unintended consequence: people have their things fixed long before it's strictly necessary, leading to greater waste than if they'd just let the thing fail and bought a new one. Another one: appliances are only upgraded to newer, much more energy efficient ones much later than otherwise). And for labour, where is the line drawn? Is the labour cost of diagnosing a problem covered? What if the problem is bigger than expected, and it isn't economical to carry out the repair? What if I have you upgrade the Foo (not a repair), which is trivial, while you've taken the widget apart anyway to fix the Bar (a repair)? What about repairing something, pocketing the tax break, then selling it (perhaps outside of the country)? Once you have considered all of these questions, you either have a lot of loopholes which will make the tax break much more expensive, or have a very long body of legal texts, and some very exited lawyers and auditors which will impose an indirect cost on society broadly. Sure, it's pessimistic, but I'm essentially working backwards from an attempt to impose a tax on dietary fat (for health reasons) in Denmark. Sounds great, right? Hilarity ensued over mixed nuts (the accountants had a field day with that one, and IIRC all kinds of meat being taxed at the same level, and the tax was repealed after only 15 months.

gutnor 10y ago
I'm pessimistic too. However, the labour cost is so huge that it will offset some of your points and only give a slight edge to repair and second hand shops. If you don't have a top of the range, almost new fridge or TV, even phone, repair will almost always come close to replacement cost. And replacement give you back a 2 years guarantee with faster turnaround.
- mikepurvis 10y ago
  Right, but the point of this legislation is to adjust the incentives so that repair becomes possible/economical in a greater number of cases.
  - thrownblown 10y ago
    Aren't we about to be abounding with mechanical inclined labor? Like aren't all truck drivers and car drivers about to be automated? This seems like a nobrainer. Relocating that labor surplus towards supporting a repairable mechanical/technological industry and commercial future seems really plausible. That sounds like a decent job, troubleshooting and repairing the machines, designing machines to be repaired. Better than driving trucks.
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      How much is is worth? Assuming every "fixer" is competing with some industry robots somewhere, what is the ceiling on the fixer salary?
      - thrownblown 10y ago
        I was assuming in our little hypothetical utopia that most consumer goods are designed once again to be repaired and upgraded. I was also imagining a bunch of truck drivers looking for jobs, since the robots took them all. Further along in my thought experiment, I imagined that if I owned a sizable fleet of robot cars I'd rather repair and upgraded than replace them. So I figured if you're into trucks, have basic the mechanical skills required to drive a truck (tire chains, flat tires, oil change, spark plug change) that a new job maintenaning, repairing and upgrading the new fleets of robot taxis and trucks might be right up your alley. For some reason self repairing robots seem a bit further off.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  > If you don't have a top of the range, almost new fridge or TV, even phone, repair will almost always come close to replacement cost. I tend to repair everything, and let me say that's not true for the vast majority of my possessions, including cars, appliances, electronics, etc. It highly depends on the nature of the failure, but generally parts are cheaper than replacement. Here are a list of things I've recently repaired around my house + the parts to repair. I don't recall the parts costs, but all were far lower than replacing the entire thing: Dishwasher: Control board Garage door opener: Broken gear and sprocket Hot tub: Two pumps and a pressure/flow sensor AV receiver: Three capacitors Rear projection TV: Convergence ICs Attic fan: Fan motor And probably tons more that I'm not recalling at the moment. The key is to stop throwing money away on labor costs. Even getting someone out to your house can cost $50-100 and that's before he even does anything. Total scam. I disagree with a lot of replies here--DIY repair is still a viable option for most things around the home.
AJ007 10y ago
A alternative approach could be taxing garbage. Perhaps inevitable once sensors become pervasive and cheap enough. Too some extent this is already done and enforced for disposing of blatantly dangerous things. In some cases you could end up in prison in addition to fines, if caught. The more subtle things that add up to a big problem have been given a lot of leeway. Right now it is profitable for many parties to extract non-renewable resources, assemble them in to something that has a short life cycle, and be sold to consumers who would rather keep buying the same thing over and over again than a single time. There have been big incentives on the government side for hitting GDP numbers, which has led to both low interest rates and an urgency to extract and process non-renewable resources as quickly as possible. Capital utilization numbers certainly doesn't account for any of this and very well exacerbate the problem. I don't want to confuse cause and effect here, but the consumption of low quality products directly relates to the volume which they are produced. The actual costs have just been transferred to the future. In the future there will be both fewer resources to produce those goods and more pollution/ecosystem effects to account for it. At Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder meeting this year Charlie Munger specifically said he thought all petrochemical reserves would be eventually exhausted to make things, not for fuel (there was a specific word he used which I never use and forgot.) Billionaires are thinking about resource exhaustion. Poor, uneducated people are not, unless they are still in hunter-gatherer societies and see problems first hand. We often think of food and bio-products as renewables, but in many cases they are not. National Geographic (August 2016) ran a great article on the exhaustion of the Ogallala aquifer. California gets a lot of attention, but ground water is being drained globally. Longer term, there may be limits with phosphorus as well. Food production is going to become a lot more expensive, global warming or not. I don't know about the returns, but Al Gore's Generation Investment Management philosophically probably has the right approach. The flipside to all of this is that technology can make using the same resources much more efficient. My leading theme for the past 5+ years or so has been exponentially more efficient technology running head on in to global government policies -- of all political leanings -- of creating GDP growth at all costs. The two don't mix, and the results could be very ugly.
- ryandrake 10y ago
  Currently companies externalize the cost of disposing their products. You and I having to pay a bigger garbage bill is not going to change the behavior of the companies making all of this trash. If it were possible to query everything that went into a landfill, and bill the entire value chain proportionally for its disposal cost, THEN we might start to have a fair system and see changes. Current incentives are to produce the cheapest thing that will barely work for long enough that someone will buy it.
mmmpop 10y ago
> Sure, it's pessimistic, but I'm essentially working backwards from an attempt to impose a tax on dietary fat (for health reasons) in Denmark. Sorry, what? Not to derail, but this is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in awhile unless I'm just missing something. The latest science has made it pretty clear dietary fat is quite good for you and simple carbs are what a healthy person should avoid.
rojobuffalo 10y ago
"You optimize what you measure". Seems like incentivizing repair itself could lead to problems. Maybe the focus should be product longevity or components that can be repurposed, if the end goal is to reduce waste. In a totally different direction, share-ability could also do a lot to cut down on waste. There are a lot of products in the world where every individual doesn't need to own one, but only needs periodic access.

gutnor 10y ago

I'm pessimistic too. However, the labour cost is so huge that it will offset some of your points and only give a slight edge to repair and second hand shops. If you don't have a top of the range, almost new fridge or TV, even phone, repair will almost always come close to replacement cost. And replacement give you back a 2 years guarantee with faster turnaround.

mikepurvis 10y ago
Right, but the point of this legislation is to adjust the incentives so that repair becomes possible/economical in a greater number of cases.
- thrownblown 10y ago
  Aren't we about to be abounding with mechanical inclined labor? Like aren't all truck drivers and car drivers about to be automated? This seems like a nobrainer. Relocating that labor surplus towards supporting a repairable mechanical/technological industry and commercial future seems really plausible. That sounds like a decent job, troubleshooting and repairing the machines, designing machines to be repaired. Better than driving trucks.
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    How much is is worth? Assuming every "fixer" is competing with some industry robots somewhere, what is the ceiling on the fixer salary?
    - thrownblown 10y ago
      I was assuming in our little hypothetical utopia that most consumer goods are designed once again to be repaired and upgraded. I was also imagining a bunch of truck drivers looking for jobs, since the robots took them all. Further along in my thought experiment, I imagined that if I owned a sizable fleet of robot cars I'd rather repair and upgraded than replace them. So I figured if you're into trucks, have basic the mechanical skills required to drive a truck (tire chains, flat tires, oil change, spark plug change) that a new job maintenaning, repairing and upgrading the new fleets of robot taxis and trucks might be right up your alley. For some reason self repairing robots seem a bit further off.
ryandrake 10y ago
> If you don't have a top of the range, almost new fridge or TV, even phone, repair will almost always come close to replacement cost. I tend to repair everything, and let me say that's not true for the vast majority of my possessions, including cars, appliances, electronics, etc. It highly depends on the nature of the failure, but generally parts are cheaper than replacement. Here are a list of things I've recently repaired around my house + the parts to repair. I don't recall the parts costs, but all were far lower than replacing the entire thing: Dishwasher: Control board Garage door opener: Broken gear and sprocket Hot tub: Two pumps and a pressure/flow sensor AV receiver: Three capacitors Rear projection TV: Convergence ICs Attic fan: Fan motor And probably tons more that I'm not recalling at the moment. The key is to stop throwing money away on labor costs. Even getting someone out to your house can cost $50-100 and that's before he even does anything. Total scam. I disagree with a lot of replies here--DIY repair is still a viable option for most things around the home.

AJ007 10y ago

A alternative approach could be taxing garbage. Perhaps inevitable once sensors become pervasive and cheap enough. Too some extent this is already done and enforced for disposing of blatantly dangerous things. In some cases you could end up in prison in addition to fines, if caught. The more subtle things that add up to a big problem have been given a lot of leeway. Right now it is profitable for many parties to extract non-renewable resources, assemble them in to something that has a short life cycle, and be sold to consumers who would rather keep buying the same thing over and over again than a single time. There have been big incentives on the government side for hitting GDP numbers, which has led to both low interest rates and an urgency to extract and process non-renewable resources as quickly as possible. Capital utilization numbers certainly doesn't account for any of this and very well exacerbate the problem. I don't want to confuse cause and effect here, but the consumption of low quality products directly relates to the volume which they are produced. The actual costs have just been transferred to the future. In the future there will be both fewer resources to produce those goods and more pollution/ecosystem effects to account for it. At Berkshire Hathaway's shareholder meeting this year Charlie Munger specifically said he thought all petrochemical reserves would be eventually exhausted to make things, not for fuel (there was a specific word he used which I never use and forgot.) Billionaires are thinking about resource exhaustion. Poor, uneducated people are not, unless they are still in hunter-gatherer societies and see problems first hand. We often think of food and bio-products as renewables, but in many cases they are not. National Geographic (August 2016) ran a great article on the exhaustion of the Ogallala aquifer. California gets a lot of attention, but ground water is being drained globally. Longer term, there may be limits with phosphorus as well. Food production is going to become a lot more expensive, global warming or not. I don't know about the returns, but Al Gore's Generation Investment Management philosophically probably has the right approach. The flipside to all of this is that technology can make using the same resources much more efficient. My leading theme for the past 5+ years or so has been exponentially more efficient technology running head on in to global government policies -- of all political leanings -- of creating GDP growth at all costs. The two don't mix, and the results could be very ugly.

ryandrake 10y ago
Currently companies externalize the cost of disposing their products. You and I having to pay a bigger garbage bill is not going to change the behavior of the companies making all of this trash. If it were possible to query everything that went into a landfill, and bill the entire value chain proportionally for its disposal cost, THEN we might start to have a fair system and see changes. Current incentives are to produce the cheapest thing that will barely work for long enough that someone will buy it.

mmmpop 10y ago

> Sure, it's pessimistic, but I'm essentially working backwards from an attempt to impose a tax on dietary fat (for health reasons) in Denmark. Sorry, what? Not to derail, but this is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in awhile unless I'm just missing something. The latest science has made it pretty clear dietary fat is quite good for you and simple carbs are what a healthy person should avoid.

rojobuffalo 10y ago

"You optimize what you measure". Seems like incentivizing repair itself could lead to problems. Maybe the focus should be product longevity or components that can be repurposed, if the end goal is to reduce waste. In a totally different direction, share-ability could also do a lot to cut down on waste. There are a lot of products in the world where every individual doesn't need to own one, but only needs periodic access.