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Who do you think will pay for this tax or regulation, if not the consumer?

• blagie 5y ago
  No one will pay for this. The point of a more efficient economic system is that everyone is better off. Capitalism assumes perfect information and transparency. When this doesn't happen, you have inefficiencies, and those require regulation to address. Throwing away my phone before it's broken is extremely inefficient economics. If you address that through regulation, those same resources will get reallocated elsewhere. Google might be an epsilon smaller, but that will be more than compensated for with more gainful employment elsewhere. Same thing with regulations to prevent polluting a commons, to prevent monopolistic trusts, truth-in-advertising laws, and otherwise. Indeed, in many of these places, without regulation, *everyone* is worse off. For example, if you can lie in advertising, and my business does and yours doesn't, mine will win in the free market system. As an executive, you don't have the choice to be honest. With truth-in-advertising laws, everyone is required to be honest, and that's better for the executives, businesses, and consumers.
  • brap 5y ago
    You said that you'd be happy to get security updates beyond 3-4 years, this is what I was referring to. This is HN, so I assume you're involved in tech, so surely you understand that releasing security patches for legacy devices requires more engineers and therefore more money. Who's paying?
    • mopsi 5y ago
      It does not have to cost more, if it results in greater commonality between different generations of a device and allows backporting without significant overhead.
    • blagie 5y ago
      I don't think maintaining security beyond 3-4 years involves more money. It just involves having a clean abstraction between lower layers and higher layers, much as we have in any desktop OS. At this point, cell phone hardware is generations ahead of the 80386, where this model worked just fine. This might involve fewer synergies occasionally and more standardization, as we have in x86 computers. This might slow progress a little bit or lead to a slight decrease in performance. Or it might not. If my device is 10% slower, I'm fine with it; I don't think I'd notice. The primary "cost" is in number of units sold. If phones don't obsolete, you'll sell less phones. This means Apple/Samsung/Sony/... make lower revenues selling phones. R&D costs are roughly fixed, while economies-of-scale are reduced, so per-unit costs are a little bit higher. I do pay a little bit more for my phone, which I'm glad to do, since I'm doing it less often. On the whole though, society is more efficient, and so an average, everyone is better off.