Of course when talking about designs, that’s about the future. After a design has been implemented, it’s too late. You can change a past design but it would only be for a future production because a design has already served its purpose after implementation. Apart from that, you would need a time machine.

But the right to repair in the EU is not just about designs. Design is only a small part of it. If a dishwasher were to end production 1 year before the right to repair law is enacted, that last dishwasher is already under a statutory warranty for another year, and likely under a commercial warranty for a year or three more. So spare parts would already be in production just to satisfy warranty obligations. There would be nothing radical about extending that since it would not have stopped production anyway. It would be foolish not to take that opportunity. And with manuals… who loses manuals? Consumers do, but not likely producers. Mandating that literature be made available for old appliances would be reasonable, at least in electronic form. The EU would be foolish not to make literature disclosure retroactive. Some EU countries will even enact retroactive taxation. If they will do that, anything is possible.

Emulation is an extremely CPU intensive activity particularly when you are emulating a different instruction set at the hardware level. If you are emulating a gaming system rather than just running that gaming system, you’re doing it wrong (from a permacomputing PoV). The simple physics answer is to pick up an snes at a yard sale for $5 and save it from the landfill, instead of blowing a wad of cash on new hardware you don’t need. Then hack that snes to do whatever you need, such as to attach a copy console. I hacked a Wii to act as a media server, so it can not only play the old wii games but also play AVI movies from the LAN via samba.

Your take is like saying: I want to simulate a nuclear fission reaction in my livingroom… these old PCs suck and should be tossed. Of course if you select an obscure and heavy task you are limited in the hardware you can deploy for that.

It has not been established on when the law will take effect. If it takes effect the day before the last sale of a dishwasher, then they could have a ten year obligation starting instantly. Or not. Those points have not been pinned down in anything I’ve seen. This law has been discussed in the EU for the past 10 years now. It could be retroactive, if lawmakers decide to do that. If the last dishwasher was sold 5 years ago, they could have a sudden obligation to provide parts for the next 5 years forward.

Right to repair means the parts can’t be drm’d to legally prevent you from repair, not that all out of warranty products must be cheap to repair.

You may be confusing US variations of right to repair, or perhaps you are just judging by the “right to repair” title. US states are ahead of the EU and have different motivations. The EU goes much further than mere new design requirements. It is not doing this to be nice to consumers. It’s part of the “green transition”. If parts prices are priced out of the market, it defeats the purpose of the right to repair. The EU is actively trying to reduce unsustainable consumption of new products and prevention of e-waste.

Here is a jan.2022 clip from the EU Parliament briefing:

In its resolution of 4 July 2017 on a longer lifetime for products, Parliament proposed a number of actions to promote product reparability, including: measures to make repair attractive to consumers; requiring products to be designed for easy and less expensive repair; extending the guarantee if repair takes more than a month; discouraging the fixing-in of essential components such as batteries; urging manufacturers to provide maintenance guides at the time of purchase; developing the standardisation of spare parts and tools necessary for repair; encouraging manufacturers to develop battery technology to ensure that the battery’s lifespan better matches the expected lifespan of the product or, alternatively, to make battery replacement more accessible at a price that is proportionate to the price of the product.

Parliament raised the level of ambition in the current term by adopting two resolutions that call on the Commission to establish a consumer’s right to repair, with a view to making repairs systematic, Right to repair cost-efficient and attractive. Its resolution of 25 November 2020 on a more sustainable single market for business and consumers and its resolution of 10 February 2021 on the new circular economy action plan both called for the adoption of a set of measures, including: mandatory labelling on the estimated lifetime and reparability of products, such as a repair score and usage meter for certain product categories, and ensuring that consumers are provided with the information on availability of spare parts, repair services and software updates at the time of purchase; giving the repair industry, ‘including independent repairers, and consumers’ free access to repair and maintenance information; encouraging standardisation of spare parts; setting a mandatory minimum period for the provision of spare parts that reflects the product’s estimated lifespan, and reasonable maximum delivery times; and ensuring that the price of spare parts is reasonable, and that independent and authorised repairers, as well as consumers, have access to the necessary spare parts without unfair hindrances.

The projector manufacturer doesn’t control those costs. The Dcd isn’t drm’d. It’s not covered by right to repair.

The Right to Repair is not limited to DRM issues. From the briefing:

New implementing acts on servers and data storage products, washing machines, dishwashers, fridges, electronic displays (televisions and monitors) and lamps require manufacturers, for instance, to ensure that spare parts are available for a certain number of years after the last item has been placed on the market (e.g. ten years for washing machines and seven years for fridges); to deliver the ordered parts within 15 days; and to make maintenance information, including manuals, available to professional repairers.

I have yet to see a DRMd washing machine.

Of course manufactures can control the costs by shifting the cost onto the purchase price. If they must offer reasonably priced spare parts for ten years, then they might have to factor that cost into the sales pricing. And fair enough, because consumers should be discouraged from buying new stuff anyway.

I am writing this from a 2008 machine.

Bad software forces people into the market for new hardware. I can run the most recent version of Debian on this old hardware with 4gb RAM just fine. I will never for the rest of my life have to buy a PC or laptop because I keep finding abandoned PCs and laptops that are faster than what I have (faster than what I need). Microsoft will exploit these consumers for decades to come. Glad I am not feeding the ecocide.

The infrastructure established by the right to repair laws will not likely be that sharply keen to deny rights on old products because there is a cost in making that separation.

Think about why Dell computers snap apart easily. The EU forced Dell under environmental law to make their PCs come apart easily for disposal. Dell resisted at first but did not want to give up the EU market. So they complied. Dell also decided that it costs more to have a separate infrastructure for US consumers, so Dell made all their PCs snap apart wherever sold globally. So rights will manifest unintended benefits.

I’ve already accidentally exploited this. I /thought/ a right to repair law was already enacted, so I requested replacement rubber o-rings citing the not-yet-enacted right to repair law. They sent me the rubber rings (which cannot be bought in stores) at no cost.

I think France has subsidised some repair shops and incentivised consumers using them instead of buying replacements. So if some particular manufacturer tries to get persnickety about the timeline, 3rd party repair shops may be willing to step in.

I bought a DJ mixer, which turned out to be dead. I popped it open and could not see any obvious issue, thus fixing is beyond my expertise. So I plan to get out of warranty repair at a reasonable price.

I bought a projector and the DCD chip turned out to be bad. DCD chips are about as costly as a whole projector. So I expect the right to repair law to force the replacement part to be reasonably priced. I have the same expectation for the boiler mentioned in my other comment.

I have 2 vaccums with broken proprietary nossle/hose and one has a broken plastic part. Both manufacturers ignored my request to tell me of a local parts reseller. I doubt they will be able to ignore that request after the right to repair law passes.

I found a vaccum with missing proprietary floor rolling attachment (so it only functions as a hand-held vaccuum). No idea if the part I need is separately sold or if the price is reasonable. But the right to repair should ensure that repair becomes viable if it’s not already.

There are a lot of things I bought 2nd hand for which the manuals are either on tor-hostile websites, or jailed in various enshitified 3rd party manual repos. I hope the right to repair can be used to force the manufacturer to send me a paper manual that avoids the enshitified web. Not sure if that will be a reality as we get more and more to a point where people have lost the right to be offline through legislation that assumes everyone is happily online with no issues.

The right to repair (at least in the EU) is being written to facilitate both people who have the ability to repair and those who do not. If you do not have the ability to repair, the law will entitle you have the device repaired outside of the warranty for a reasonable price.

If you have the ability to repair, the law entitles you to manuals and parts, and the parts must be at a reasonable price.

I had a proprietary valve fail in a boiler. The valve should be under $10, but because the manufacturer bundles the valve with many other fittings people are forced to buy a kit that’s no less than $100. That’s one thing the right to repair should solve.

What do you mean by “good”? I see a constant stream of articles about EVs being enshitified with cloud-attached surveillance tech and vulnerable to unwelcome remote hacking. To privacy advocates and tech rights proponents this means the ones designed as EVs are worse.

If you mean efficient, I’d be tempted to say the difference would be negligible in the big scheme of things. Factory produced EVs are not only surveillance systems on wheels, they are more hackable by threat agents than they are by their owners. Whereas a converted EV is likely more conducive to a /right to repair/.

The best scenario I could envision is this:

You bring your car to shop of expert converters. You watch over their shoulder as they convert it. This serves as training to know your own car. And as well to know how the power generator is built. You drive away with an open source EV that you can fix yourself, pulling behind it a trailor with a power generator, which is then connected to the charging inlet of the EV.

Okay, that last sentence was a joke, to be clear… Some Teslas have been spotted pulling a power generator on a trailer which then plugged into the car. I hope that practice of towing a generator is not actually a serious trend.

I had one of those great Iiyama CRTs – and still do, in storage. I heard when LCDs emerged that LCDs cannot achieve the refresh speeds and color richness of CRTs and that CRTs were still the best for gaming. Not sure if that still holds true. But as a kid, I embraced the Iiyama.

Anyway, I do not imagine desk space can be a reason people are tossing out LCDs.

IMO if something is particularly inefficient, it’s better off not being used if there’s a substantially more efficient alternative to do the same thing.

It’s hard to get a clear-cut measurement and compare the different kinds of eco impacts like that.

But also consider this: the avg. age of a car bought in Africa at the time of purchase is 21 years old. All these people buying EVs think they are taking a gas-burner off the road, but who destroys their car? They sell it. Then it goes to Africa where it continues to pollute for decades more.

If you dump your e-waste in a reckless manner, it ends up in a landfill where the toxins pollute ground water. Or it goes to a trash heap in a poverty-stricken part of India where someone salvages it.

If you dump your e-waste in a responsible manner, the chain of handlers will repair if needed, and ultimately get the working products on the shelves of charity-operated 2nd-hand shops.

In my particular case, I have no TV and don’t watch TV. If I salvage a TV, I would likely watch it occasionally. So I think it’s clear cut in my situation the usage harm would be shadowed by production harm. But note as well my ethical values are not limited to ecology. There is an enshitification of products and digital rights at hand as well. Buying a new electronic appliance supports the makers of shitty cloud-dependent “smart” devices that have supercharged designed obsolecence. So even in neglecting the environment, it’s an injustice to support the makers of electronic goods today.

When you host a neighborhood party and give neighbors access to your house, they will all feel right at home.

All my furniture is salvaged from neighbor’s curbs. So I think if I hosted a local event everyone would find something that was theirs.

That’s interesting indeed because only the 1st bullet would impede me from rescuing one. I avoid buying new electronics to large extent to mitigate excessive production and then disposal of e-waste.

I would say roughly ~40% of the TVs I see are visibly damaged, and I wonder if kids had destructive fun with it after it was set on the curb. If it’s damaged but the backlight works, one option might be to remove the LCD and leave the light diffuser in place, then use it as a light table (e.g. for stained glass work).

A portable testbed sounds like a good idea. Since you found a good one, I get the impression it might make sense for me to go grab battery + invertor and a laptop and test it before carrying it.

Indeed I’ve seen basic checking accounts with no interest. Then the more feature-rich accounts which offer a number of perks at either a higher fee or higher requirements to offset the fee also include interest. That’s really backwards because an anti-feature is being bundled in. By giving up interest the client should get more features, not less.

fees - either no fees, or fees are really easy to avoid

Try getting out of the paper statement fee at a CU. That’s an important one because when the enshitification of their tech crosses your threshold of tolerance, it’s important to have agency to instantly go back to analog. Having that power also creates pressure on them to not enshitify their tech in the first place.

Gratis paper statements seem much less common at CUs than commercial banks.

Also regarding fees: very hard to find CUs that give a zero FX fee when pulling cash from a foreign ATM. IIRC, there is only one CU in the US (Penfed?) that has fee-free foreign currency.

Chase is okay if you can reliably avoid fees

Unless you consider ethics. Chase is one of the worst.

You should never pay for a bank account, that’s just dumb.

I used to think that. But in my boycott on free technofeudal pushers (Facebook, Google, Amazon, etc) I’ve evolved to prioritize privacy (and thus control) over non-transparent exploitation of my data. Have you thought about why your billpay service is free? It’s outsourced, so the billpay service has to make money somehow. Of course they are selling your data. Google and Amazon want to know about people’s offline purchases so they know whether it traces to an online ad.

I also learned the hard way that Credit Unions are exempt from this

Wow… there’s a gem of knowledge for sure.

I don’t get why folks even care about interest rates when they are so negligably low anyway. When interest rates are ≤1%, I would rather get zero interest just to silence the excessive reporting, like a 1099-int for a couple dollars which serves as a kind of heartbeat signal for where your assets are kept and then having to pay your accountant to declare it. Not worth it. I would rather see the 1% go to a good cause, if not toward just improving the banking service.

I’m done with credit unions. They just create the illusion of a small org but then farm you out to big companies via outsourcing anyway.

• Most credit unions have outsourced just about every aspect of their business. They are like shell companies all working as many different façades to the same giant corporations. CUs in-house expertise doesn’t go far beyond their branding and marketing. Your sensitive financial info gets shared around with a handful of giant corporations while giving the illusion that you have the privacy benefits of a small CU.
  • billpay outsourced to 1 or 2 different billpay services nationwide
  • monthly statement generation: outsourced to the same few corps
  • statement printing: outsourced, then they charge you for it
• Credit unions spam the shit out of whatever email address you supply, thus enabling all entities handling the email to see where you bank each time the CU decides to spam you. Commercial banks are better on this in my experience. I think commercial banks have calculated that spam just angers people and drives them off, whereas credit unions are either not diligent enough to make that calculation or they are assuming their small org appearance will go a long way in obtaining forgiveness.
• Most credit unions have put their website on Cloudflare in the past few years. Which means:
  • Consumers are generally forced to expose their account credentials to a privacy-abusing tech giant (while agreeing to be accountable for damage stemming from credential leakage)
  • Consumers are generally forced to expose to their credit union their approximate physical location every single time they connect to the website as a consequence of Cloudflare. Which means if they move outside of the CUs service area some CUs will notice that and even freeze/lock the account. They tend to admit directly in their privacy policy that they collect IP addresses specifically for geolocation tracking of their customers.
  • Consumers are generally forced to expose to their ISP where they bank as a consequence of Cloudflare. And considering Trump overturned an Obama policy that required ISPs to obtain consent for collecting and selling customer personal data, there is nothing to stop your ISP from selling info about where you bank to data brokers and debt collectors. Biden did not reverse Trump’s privacy sabotage.
  • Cloudflare can at any moment decide to block you for any reason arbitrarily, and suddenly your web access to your money is gone.
  • Consumers who are behind CGNAT outside of their control are often blocked by Cloudflare. If a snot-nose script kiddie in your CGNAT pool decides to scrape some websites, CF’s excessive protectionism might kick in and block the IP which could go to you next, and you lose access to your money because CF overreacted to a harmless snotnose kid.

Being free from Cloudflare sometimes means you can login over Tor and avoid most of the problems above. OTOH many commercial banks also block Tor increasingly more frequently lately (because they also want to track your physical whereabouts). There may be some Cloudflare-free CUs that still permit Tor logins though it’s becoming harder to find them.

Gratis paper statements are important more than you realise:

If you cannot find a bank or CU that gives you the privacy of Tor, the best feature to look for is gratis paper statements and paper checks so you can scrap the website and take back your privacy. It’s more common to find gratis paper statements from banks than CUs. As enshitification of the web proliferates and more FIs join Cloudflare, gratis paper statements is an important safety net so you can ditch their tech the moment it goes sour.

Regarding apps:

Credit unions do not write their own software. You have just a few closed-source Google Playstore banking app makers who all the credit unions outsource to. Whereas every commercial bank reinvents the wheel with their own implementation. For me it’s a shitshow no matter what. I am not going to enter Google Playstore and tell Google where I bank and let Google track exactly which software version I have which also reveals what vulns I inherit, to then run a closed-source app that snoops on me in countless unknown ways. Fuck all that.

I have a shopaholic aunt who is said to wear things she buys once on avg. She could open her own 2nd hand shop (or if she moved her stock to Europe she could open ~6 2nd-hand shops). Many women in my family are inflicted with this disease to varying degrees. It’s a gender-specific disease that I think men are immune to.