If there’s one thing which probably unites all of Hackaday’s community, it’s a love of technology. We live to hear about the very latest developments before anyone else, and the chances are for a lot of them we’ll all have a pretty good idea how they work. But if there’s something which probably annoys a lot of us the most, it’s when we see a piece of new technology misused. A lot of us are open-source enthusiasts not because we’re averse to commercial profit, but because we’ve seen the effects of monopolistic practices distorting the market with their new technologies and making matters worse, not better. After all, if a new technology isn’t capable of making the world a better place in some way, what use is it?
It’s depressing then to watch the same cycle repeat itself over and over, to see new technologies used in the service of restrictive practices for short-term gain rather than to make better products. We probably all have examples of new high-tech products that are simply bad, that are new technology simply for the sake of marketing, and which ultimately deliver something worse than what came before, but with more bling. Perhaps the worst part is the powerlessness, watching gullible members of the public lapping up something shiny and new that you know to be flawed, and not being able to do anything about it.
Here at Hackaday though, perhaps there is something I can do about it. I don’t sit in any boardroom that matters but I do have here a soapbox on which to stand, and from it I can talk to you, people whose work takes you into many fascinating corners of the tech industry and elsewhere. If I think that new technologies are being used irresponsibly to create bad products, at least I can codify how that might be changed. So here are my four Rules For The Responsible Use Of New Technology, each with some examples. They should each be self-evident, and I hope you’ll agree with me.
New technology should not be used to shorten the lifespan of a product
We now know that everything we do carries a penalty in terms of the environmental impact of its manufacture. Thus as a society we are now much more aware of the CO2 generated in manufacture of the things we use, and of what happens to them after we are done with them. We expect the things we use to minimise that impact as well as deliver us value for money, but instead we so often find that the use of new technologies are being used to shorten the lifetime of the things we buy in order to increase the sales of new products.
There are plenty of examples of this to be found, for example in the past we’ve written about technology becoming the new rust in the automotive business, but perhaps when looking for a poster child we find it in the lithium-ion or lithium-polymer battery. What should be an innovation which provides the product with a long life and great performance is all too often designed instead to give it a life of only a few years before it must be discarded for a new one. It’s normal for lithium-ion batteries to be sealed for life inside a product with no way for a consumer to replace them, resulting in what should be perfectly good products becoming junk well before their time. No new technology should be used as an excuse to intentionally shorten the lifespan of a product.
New technology should not be used as an excuse to inhibit repairability
Manufacturers often dislike people repairing their products when they break, either because they would prefer to sell a new product, or because they want to restrict repairs to their own ecosystem of repair agents. The tractor manufacturer John Deere is notorious for their use of digital registration of all new parts before a tractor will recognise them, but there’s a more insidious trend which you’ll probably recognise if you own an Apple device. The cult of no user repairable parts inside has moved from merely a meaningless phrase on the back of your 1970s TV set to the designed-in unreparability of glued-together consumer electronics, alongside a systematic removal of low-tech alternatives. We’ve railed about the motor industry doing this on a grand scale here at Hackaday in the past, overusing automotive electronics to make what should be a 25-year vehicle into a 10-year one as the second or third owner balks at the excessive cost of a replacement do-everything module.
Perhaps the saddest part of this erosion of repairability is that the consumers who are its victims simply don’t care, so mesmerised are they by the superficially pretty toys with which the manufacturers coat their next big thing.
New technology should not be tied to unnecessary services
My washing machine is a fine appliance, it does my laundry without complaint, and given a bit of extra time it will also dry it, too. It’s functionally similar to the one my family had in the 1970s, except it uses less energy and the mechanical sequencer with a big clicky knob had been replaced by a smart computerised interface.
It also has an app, through which if I installed it I could see if my washing is done, and set it going from the comfort of my sofa. To activate the app I must connect it to my network and sign up for an account with the manufacturer… for what? In fact a stand-alone appliance has become a means to gather usage data. Today I can use it standalone, but perhaps tomorrow its successor will require the app.
My washing machine is simply a small example, as everything from a lightbulb to a car now requires an internet connection so my usage data can be sold or I can be targeted with advertising. I simply want my appliances or other devices to do their job, if all the new technology does is enable a data slurp then you are doing new technology wrong.
This of course becomes much more insidious when the device won’t work without the online connection, because then it becomes junk when the online service ends. A few years ago I reviewed the Nabaztag, an early internet appliance that went silent when the company behind it folded, and while it was one of the first bricked appliances there have been many more. Far worse are companies who intentionally brick otherwise perfectly good devices to sell new ones, while it’s one thing for an older phone to simply become outdated it’s another entirely for Sonos to intentionally disable their older products.
New technology should not be detrimental to the planet
It’s safe to say that over the coming century one of the greatest challenges every to hit humanity will unfold further, as we will have to manage the effects of climate change. We’re living now with the after-effects of technology from decades ago, and our kids and older selves will in turn live with the effects of the technology we have now. It’s no longer the preserve of wild-eyed environmentalists to talk about the dangers of harmful practices, it should be front-and-centre for every engineer as they design something, what its environmental impact will be.
Unfortunately this is in conflict with the commercial motivation to sell more products, thus we all too frequently see new technologies with less concern for environmental impact than they should have. In a way this paragraph has the most overlap with all the previous ones because they all point towards things which extend the life of a product, but it goes beyond that into the world of software. Two of the biggest hype centres of the last few years have been cryptocurrencies and generative AI, both of which are certainly interesting, but should they come at the expense of using more power than Argentina? If your new technology wastes energy on an industrial scale, yet again you are doing it wrong.
So there you have it, apply these rules to anything you design, and use them to inform your purchasing choices. Demand better use of technology, and say no to exploitative garbage!
“Don’t be evil.”
It couldn’t last when [the world’s largest marketing analytics company] got into producing [the world’s most popular mobile phone operating system].
It could last but ONLY so long as they remained a private company. As soon as they had an IPO, it was all downhill.
It’s odd how companies going IPO is getting more and more destructive for society.
I have the impression it didn’t use to be so extreme.
My guess is that it’s the move to quick profit and quick trade that is an issue, they all buy shares to sell them very quickly and it make it not interesting to be a good reliable company, all that counts really is growth.
But hey that’s how evolution of societies goes I guess, it peaks then drops then goes.
This is largely because regulation used to have teeth. Between intentional deconstruction and the sheer size of modern corporations that isn’t the case any more.
The part about writing a bill of rights or a manifesto that nearly everyone forgets about is the prerequisite for its enforcement: go to war with the most powerful people on Earth. It would be nice if merely writing it down made it so, like in Myst.
It looks more like a “Bill of Shoulds”, something the Karens who populate Youtube comments never tire of.
I’d argue that it’s a different kind of bleak: it’s a war vying for peaple’s time and cares.
We commenting on this iste are almost all STEM enthusiasts of one shade or another, and we like to think about engineering tradeoffs. But we are a minority of the general population.
My friend who won’t spare enough attention to load the dishwasher so that all the dishes actually get cleaned? Annoying to me, but the person is multitasking and OK with the occasional dirty plate. Another friend knows that Bytedance has turned his phone into a spying post, but that’s the cost of entertainment and he considers it pretty cheap. Everybody is busy and has different interests and cares.
But these small things are common, and have large actions. Manufacturers know that most people sort my lowest price first and little thinking goes beyond that.
Manufacturers can absolutely be bent to customers’ will – but customers neet be informed and act consistently. Doing so instantly creates a market, and that market will be glommed on to just as soon as the factory can be retooled. But like any form of collective bargaining, it only works if you commit.
Take it from someone:
– with a domestically-manufactured cell phone
– who actively avoids Chinese products (reads the disclosure labels on cross-shopped products and makes a decision)
– has a physical music collection
– who chopped enough wood last summer to share with his neighbor
– who knowingly buys early-generation products doing something better to try to stimulate growth in the markets for those products
… we, as a species, get what we deserve.
Thanks, those are good deeds. :)
I bought a Logitech Squeezebox some 20 years ago. It was not possible to start the thing up without first connecting it to the internet and creating some kind of account, so I put it back in it’s box and brought it back to the shop I bought it from.
I don’t buy products from the fruit brand.
About the car industry… Some time (half a year?) ago there was an article about replacing a tail light because of water ingress. Costs were apparently USD 1000 or so. I just would have sawn off the back side and put in some LED’s myself. Maybe dunk it in clear epoxy to seal it.
Your mention of cars brings up a real pet peeve of mine. Perhaps a worthy addition to this list.
Paywalled documentation/repair manuals.
Make your product documentation available to your end users.
The repair manuals are traditionally done by someone else, like Haynes. They don’t exist as a “byproduct” of manufacturing the car, and the manufacturing documentation would be useless to a person trying to repair the vehicle because they deal with the special tools and fixtures used in the manufacturing plant.
So of course they’re paywalled; the company that makes them, sells them. They’re not a charity.
Haynes makes repair manuals, sure (or at least they did, but do they still do so?), but the car companies also make repair manuals for use by dealership techs and others who have paid the fee to see the secret instructions. How easy it is to access these instructions if you merely own the corresponding machine that costs dozens kilobucks varies.
” How easy it is to access these instructions if you merely own the corresponding machine that costs dozens kilobucks varies.”
That’s a significant barrier into itself, not to mention the skill and experience making the investment useful.
I’m still upset that Haynes won the repair manual wars over Chilton!
An excellent example of shoddy writing gaining market share over accuracy.
You are referring to the “FSM’s”; Factory Service Manuals, paper copies of which cost upwards of $1000, depending on the vehicle, and are sometimes restricted distribution. Of course, they can often be found “at sea” in PDF form…
Oops, my mistake. It was apparently USD 5600 for a tail light.
https://hackaday.com/2023/09/09/when-tail-lights-lose-touch-with-reality/
The fact that water infiltration in a tail light could screw up the CAN bus and result in an engine not starting is straight up horrible. An engineer needs to be put in pillory in town square for a month for this
I get the hyperbole and understand this is just a comment under a HaD article.
However, to be serious for a moment, this isn’t something to blame on an Engineer. Yes, someone screwed up but the answer is not “punish mistakes” or “make smarter Humans”.
I would bet a week’s salary there’s a process fault here. How did such a design flaw get to production? Did the manufacturer not have a good review process? Did they have a culture of “quality” or “just ship it”? Short version, this is the Company’s fault and they should be paying for the repair. (Yeah, I know. Idealistic of me.)
There is no process to make can bus not have this issue though, it’s inherent in the topology. You can mitigate but not totally prevent.
It’s a bit strange that it’s not been replaced, but I guess it’s not a problem for new cars. (It is a problem in development though, that’s like half of any issues!)
I’ll do you one better, I don’t blame the engineer that designed the headlight.
If people at each level are not telling their managers that this is a really damn stupid idea then I am sorry but they all share some of the blame.
What is the actual justification to put the headlights and taillights on a can bus?
I get it, you save some cost of wire, but in all honesty do you really?
My 2007 car has 6 wires to the taillight, and this can bus unit has 4.
So you save maybe 100 foot of wire at a cost of several dollars, by adding $3000 dollars to each taillight, and now my car can be stolen by plugging a box into the socket after the light is pried out.
CAN attack to steal Toyota vehicle through the headlight
https://kentindell.github.io/2023/04/03/can-injection/
I’m keeping a list. If I ever get a time machine, these are the engineers I am gonna go track down before they release their awful products and say “Hey, what were you thinking?!?” Of if they made it that way out of greed, I will just assassinate them. Law enforcement won’t be able to get me if I have the time machine. Well, assuming I have the only one.
It’s not the tail light engineer making the high level architecture decisions or process decisions, that’s at a lead or management level. Certainly the tail light engineer is not getting rich on expensive tail lights: they’re probably salaried, not on commission, and probably with negligible equity in the business (profit share).
But it’s probably better to not make death threats on the Internet even if based on false premises.
I thought that vehicles had one CAN bus for important stuff like engine management and ABS brake system, and second one for unimportant stuff like lights, A/C, speedometer and InfoBS screen.
That is how I felt when I bought a laptop with Windows on it. Almost the first thing it wanted me to do was create an ‘account’ with M$. Nope, notta. Wiped and put Linux on it. I planned to do that anyway, but just wanted to make sure things worked hardware wise before I wiped. Linux installed flawlessly and every thing worked… And no accounts to create.
I bought a new Subaru Forester a couple months ago now. Yep, they wanted me to sign up, create accounts for the ‘services’ they wanted to provide. No thank you. I don’t need them to drive ‘my’ car. I wish I could get in and disable 80% of the electronic junk they have in them now by default (can’t order without) . Looking into disabling the antennas at least so it doesn’t call home all the time. I still have a few ‘knobs’ (instead of using touch screen) to control the temp and where it is directed…. Other than that I like the vehicle. Just not ‘simple’ enough for my tastes.
I agree with your sentiment completely
Just want to point out that Microsoft accounts can be avoided on new installs – Rufus allows you to disable the requirement when creating a boot disk, and I have gotten around it on a prebuilt desktop by pulling up a terminal and running some commands. There are obviously many more reasons not to use windows, but we can still get around the Microsoft accounts (for now)
no@thankyou.com & any old guff stuck in the password field allows one to create an offline account.
Do it every day provisioning PCs…
yep, recently saw an article almost new EV written off by insurance because it had a dent in the battery case, so OEM said buy new battery “module” price almost the same as the car. instead of opening the current batty and fixing that for labor and parts price.
but also my slightly modern car already needs a scantool to properly bleed the brakes ( abs module )
so even replacing a caliper is barely diy doable. i luckily have a clone of the oem software so i also have acces to the “special functions”.
wassing machines and dryers are fun to, shure they can be repaired and parts are often also available direct from oem along as your a “licensed” repair person ……. now i could probebly go on for hours with examples but.
long story short almost nothing is made to be repaired anymore, either because its cheaper to replace then pay for time to fix it or because its made difficult to impossible to repair
I think that’s more of a standard rule around insurance though, and not the insurance companies’ fault. If you damage your vehicle, and the cost to repair is 40% or more of the current appraised value, they have to total it and it becomes a salvage vehicle. They can’t choose to repair it if they wanted to. (This pertains to the US, and that percentage may not be exact, but it’s close.)
I worked for an insurance company and they talked about if you had a brand new car (even luxury), and made a single scratch with a key around the circumference of the car (where every body panel was touched), the car would get totaled b/c the repair cost to fix the scratch on every panel would be more than 40% the cost of a brand new car. It lets lots of body repair guys drive really nice vehicles though (and you can’t tell on the road that it has a salvage title.)
Makes for a thriving foreign market.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/11/the-reincarnation-of-totalled-teslas-in-ukraine/
Wait, so you are saying it’s MORE expensive to paint a more expensive car? Silly car companies..
“New technology should not be tied to unnecessary services”
I wholeheartedly agree with this! I prefer a broader term: “unnecessary dependencies”.
Example: Blu-Ray optical disk drives for PCs require both the CPU and Motherboard to support Intel SGX for playback of UHD discs. Intel SGX is only supported by specific generations of intel CPUs (8th-10th generation). Luckily there are firmware hacks that work for some models of drives. This example also ties into two other issues: DRM being too strict and decline of physical media.
I have another rule:
Old technologies shouldn’t be banned before they have good substitutes.
Example: Banning/restricting/taxing ICE and Hybrid cars, while many people cannot afford Electric cars and the infrastructure isn’t up to it yet.
Meanwhile there is still room for improvement for engines (Liquid Piston is developing a new type of rotary engine and there are plenty of other companies that have patents for improving engines).
Yes exactly! I love hybrids, specifically series, hub motor, and small efficient engine. The small engine doesn’t need much of any torque, just powers batteries or capacitors, which power hub motors. Doesn’t need wifi, or anything else fancy
“New technology should not add dependencies that serve only to benefit the manufacturer.”
E.g. the smartphone app for a washing machine should use wifi or bluetooth, not a remote service.
Unfortunately, lots of new technologies are invented specifically for the benefit of the manufacturers.
“Old technologies shouldn’t be banned before they have good substitutes”
I’m thinking Freon here.
Use CO2.
https://youtu.be/npqzHpeIvhM
I’ve read that CO2 as a refrigerant requires a higher pressure. There are other substitutes such as ammonia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refrigerant
Ammonia may be practical for some industrial uses but probably not appropriate for residential refrigeration use. It is extremely toxic (OSHA class 4 for toxicity) and a lot more hazardous than typical refrigerants in the event of a leak.
….yeah, that whole ‘hole in Earth’s radiation shield’ thing kinda justifies stopping “Freon” (CFCs, esp. R-12). Take it from someone who designs with these systems and works in a building heated by VRF heat pumps: we have the technology, we had the technology, and good riddance to CFCs. ‘pedia tells me the hole is almont fixed, on track for 2040 or so!
It’s not even like the bans made any kind of step change – I still encounter R-12 equipment running (probably getting EER 4, but whatever).
Society didn’t collapse, I don’t even remember a lack of conditioning (and I can already hear the ‘uphill-both-ways’ crowd telling me that I ‘had it too easy’ in between telling we that any small interruption in air conditioning is some kind of crisis).
Bad example, IMHO. Yes, the transition away was painful and expensive – R12 was SO close to a perfect refrigerant, except for the whole “destroy a critical part of the atmosphere” thing.
Sometimes you don’t have the luxury of waiting for a good substitute.
> I don’t sit in any boardroom that matters
I think this one line highlights the underlying issue.
After all, it’s those very boardrooms which figure out how to extract the maximum amount of profit from their products. You’ll note that mandate is entirely incompatible with the (entirely reasonable, imho!) rules you’ve written up.
So, the question becomes: How do we convince boardrooms to stop extracting maximum profit?
That’s a pretty silly question, all right – until you realize that the problem is the system which these same boardrooms operate under.
Capitalism doesn’t care about consumers. It doesn’t care about the planet. It rewards one thing, and one thing only: Profit.
As long as we operate under such a system, the rules you’ve written down above will remain irrelevant.
>Capitalism doesn’t care about consumers. It doesn’t care about the planet. It rewards one thing, and one thing only: Profit.
Capitalism cares deeply about consumers, it is the consumers that provide the profit. Consumers are in practically every boardroom and they vote with their purchases.
When given the choice, we consumers should prefer environmentally friendlier products. The alternative to capitalism is the removal of the choice.
Capitalism has three flaws:
1) corporations have an incentive to monopolize and reduce choice for profit
2) corporations have an incentive to regulatory capture in order to effect point 1.
3) corporations are limited liability, so the actual people behind them never face any consequences from the way their operations behave, which enables point 1.
The irony is that such corporations are creatures of the state, because Limited Liability is just what the laws allow to exist, so there’s really only one flaw in modern capitalism:
“[T]hat he who acts through an agent should be responsible for his agent’s acts, and that he who shares the profits of an enterprise ought also to be subject to its losses; that there is a moral obligation, which it is the duty of the laws of a civilized nation to enforce, to pay debts, perform contracts and make reparation for wrongs. Limited liability is founded on the opposite principle and permits a man to avail himself of acts if advantageous to him, and not to be responsible for them if they should be disadvantageous;”
– Edward William Cox, 1855
1 & 2 are true, but silly – rent-seeking is present everywhere, not just capitalism.
3 is only partially true – I may not have to sell my house if my LLC goes bankrupt, but forgoing future profits isn’t the same thing as “no consequences.”
It enables sociopathic people collecting salaries and bonuses, ruining businesses and leaving smoking ruins behind them. These people aren’t competent businessmen per se – they just know when to bail out.
A lot of rich people have started out as investors who have put their money into failing companies. These companies ended up in debts and lawsuits, while the CEOs took their golden parachutes and went to different companies, amassing personal wealth along the way whether their businesses succeed or not, because they’re not personally liable for the faults of the company.
Modern Limited Liability capitalism doesn’t care about consumers, because the corporate owners are insulated from the effects of their choices. If they make a profit, it’s their profit, but if they make a loss then it’s society’s loss.
Yep, “Heads I win, tails you lose.” When they have done foolish or very risky things due to profit seeking, even when they involve blatant acts of fraud, rather than being allowed to enter bankruptcy, they are bailed out.
Example of that: The sub-prime housing bubble aka global financial crisis (GFC). On that, see the outstanding film that too many think would be boring because of the subject matter, but it most definitely is NOT, “The Big Short.”
When those at fault don’t face the consequences of their actions, that then sets up a “moral hazard” where they will do anything they want because they know they will be bailed out.
Great movie. May I also recommend “Margin Call” (2011)?
If a business corporation makes a loss then the owners make a loss also. Business corporations go bankrupt every day thereby taking every penny the owners have invested. Even if they don’t go bankrupt poor performance can drive the stock price down thereby reducing the market value of the owners’ possessions.
It depends. Take Elon Musk for example: he “invested” in his own companies by lending them money, for which the company pays interest, and if the company goes under he’s entitled for his money back when the company assets get liquidated and turned into cash. Meanwhile, the other investors who merely bought stock do lose their money as the stock value crashes.
The owners have their ways of pumping the money out before the company folds. It’s just a poker game – you don’t count your winnings at the table while you’re still playing, you count them when you leave the table.
“Consumers … vote with their purchases.” except when they can’t.
My ISP sucks and charges an absurd amount but they are literally the only high speed vendor in town.. I’m not sure if they’ve payed off the right people or if the other vendors have not but it’s not because there’s lack of demand for alternatives. And, no, NOT having high speed Internet is not an option in this society.
My handset vendor sucks and tracks everything I do with the device. I could purchase form the one other vendor but they do the same thing. Again, NOT having solid data access at hand is not an option.
The healthcare vendors here it intentionally make it difficult to understand what they charge for services and there’s no good/easy way to understand, in advance, what something will cost. In short, there’s no good way for me to vote with my purchase. I just go wherever is convenient and my Insurance pays for it. (Yes, I’m fortunate.)
I’m not anti-capitalist but let’s not pretend the “invisible hand of the market” is fully under the control of consumers.
“My handset vendor sucks and tracks everything I do with the device. I could purchase form the one other vendor but they do the same thing. Again, NOT having solid data access at hand is not an option.”
Get one that supports LineageOS and the only one doing any tracking would be the service provider, and only when you don’t have airplane mode on.
I do, in fact, have a handset that runs LineageOS. But that doesn’t matter. It’s not “voting with my purchase” if I have to purchase the device to begin with.
Capitalism does not care about consumers, and you practically also said this yourself already. Capitalism cares about money, and often consumers care enough about themselves/their economy/the planet/etc to make meeting these points the more profitable way.
But make no mistake, if there’s a loophole or oversight where more profit can be had by throwing the consumer under the bus, capitalism will do it faster than you can blink.
Capitalism cares about maintaining productive assets.
Limited liability capitalism enables opportunistic abusers who jump from ship to ship as they sink underneath them.
More to the point, limited liability was invented to reduce the risk for investors investing in businesses that might fail, so they wouldn’t have to bet their whole house on a venture. Back in the day, if you bought one share of a company for a dollar, you could end up to your ears in debt for having a stake in the company.
Full liability prevented business from growing bigger and doing bigger things, because the person who was left in charge would be completely ruined if things didn’t work out. The new system treated the corporation as a legal person, so the liabilities fell on the corporation and the business would get taken down and liquidated instead of throwing the last person to hold the title into debtor’s prison.
The unintended consequence was short-sighted high risk quartal capitalism where short term profits became more important than long term productivity, because you could always pull out and collect your winnings before the shit hits the fan. It created a system that rewards bubble economies and hot-potato games, like pumping up stock value and then cashing out just before everyone discovers that your whole business is just hot air, Bad business choices became good business choices as long as you keep running away from your failures.
OpenAI apparently has a board who believes its primary goal is to prevent the success of the company’s primary aim. And if you think this is still capitalism a la 19th century Dickens novel you haven’t been paying attention. Clearly profit motive is not the prime shot-caller anymore, or else countless recent events make no sense at all
For now, yes – but what’s to stop them from changing their minds when competition starts to heat up?
> Clearly profit motive is not the prime shot-caller anymore
I disagree with this point.
OpenAI has a rather specific setup, it consists of a non-profit that has some kind of trust that controls the commercial OpenAI version, to mainatin a seperation, and the board that tried to fire Altman is the non-profit main org.
In theory the non-profit should be able to control things but once microsoft started to give the commercial arm billions then the force of money took control I guess.
And Altman lives in between the two, he was pushing it commercially as well as being the driving force in the non-profit section as far as I can tell.
Anyway, their setup is(was?) not the basic commercial one.
I guess that’s how it went in your neck of the woods but over here cable just progressively goes faster, although the upload/download ratio metric changed to be less upload equalizing, but we do have regulation putting force on internet speed-shenanigans reduction though.
And I don’t recognise your USB stick experience either, but that might be a bit subjective depending on how and when I bought and used them though, I don’t buy so many of them but when I do they are usually faster because I buy a new standard like USB3 after the previous USB2 ones.
And SD cards are getting faster for me because I buy higher speed grades as they get cheaper, so I don’t know if the same speed grade ones are getting slower or not.
You can make a case that it is not capitalism per se that is the problem (or not the whole problem), but the rules under which publicly-traded stocks operate. The board of directors of a public company has a legal obligation to the stock price.
Still, with all its flaws, the current capitalist system provides a lot of good as well. Separating the baby from the bath-water is not so simple.
And the shareholders have no liability beyond their investment, so if the company does evil things all the damages paid come out of the company’s assets – none off the private assets of its owners who are not personally responsible for what their corporations are doing.
Yes, that is a flaw in the government creation of paper golems–corporations. Originally a creating a corporation required a special sovereign act–usually that of a monarch or a legislature. It was only done when there was public purpose to the corporation and the corporation was limited in what it could do. It became a race to the bottom in the USA when states realized that the easier and more liberal the rules for corporation creation the more corporate taxes the state could get. Delaware in now the current winner.
“So, the question becomes: How do we convince boardrooms to stop extracting maximum profit?”
Flip side is consumers demand for the lowest profit aka the race to the bottom on the price for everything. Somewhere there’s the middle no one can agree on.
“Capitalism doesn’t care about consumers. ”
And communism does?
“For the people, by the people” has yet to exist, so no one knows.
Communism defines “people” differently. People are not individuals – people are the interrelations of society, and the state is the interpreter of these relations. People are “actualized” through the collective state, so when communism says it’s working for the people, it means it works in the interest of the state that represents the people. The state is nominally interested in the welfare of its individuals, but in practice it is only interested in the matters of the political elite.
New tech should solve more problems than it creates.
Especially on the long run.
I don’t see a sealed in lithium battery as inherently bad the way you paint it.
Yes, I would love more easily user replaceable battery to be the normal mode for every device it can be, as in so many cases its been glued in, inside a case sealed so it is inaccessible (non-destructively) when there is no requirement for it be so. But it is going to be next to impossible to actually have some things like the earbud and easy swap battery – either the new shrinking of the silicon, mems and battery gets used to create a practically small wireless earbud sealed well enough to actually function till the battery reals EOL or the whole thing is either too heavy and bulky to be used or likely to break much earlier than battery EOL for lack of sufficient seal. There are still engineering limits that can’t be bypassed (yet anyway).
Even things that are larger have some good reasons to not be easy swap too – for instance your Steamdeck like portable gaming device you are intended to hold in use requires a rather substantial battery pack as it is a power hungry device yet can’t really afford to get bulkier and heavier to encase that battery and provide connectors for the easy swap battery. Either the already fairly short battery life would have to get shorter or the device heavier and bigger, which personally wouldn’t bother me – might even make it more comfortable in my hands, but would be a problem for some of the more normal size and strength humans the device should serve. Though in these cases the part is probably replaceable, with care and some skill it won’t even be that bad to replace as the portable computer market still puts some value on screws and openable covers – unlike many phones where the shape of the joints between glass panels and frame are often it seems deliberately designed to make getting that initial access at all into a lottery where the odds are good you will break the screen or glass back… In that case also rather harder to argue its required as the miniscule amount of extra thickness and weight required to have easy change battery wouldn’t even be noticed – seriously the old Note 3 for instance has a nice easy change battery and yet looks and weighs in nearly identically to a comparable modern phone…
Otherwise I mostly agree – though I’d also caveat that ‘detrimental to the planet’ is a broad brush that would probably apply to every single possible new technology while in its earlier phases and can arguably be used to describe clear upgrades like LED lighting – its better than Incandescent (at least in theory, when made properly and not so over driven the LED bulb lasts less time than an incandescent), but better still you can argue is no artificial light at all…
Part of the problem with phone battery replacement is that manufacturers are still bragging about how thin their phones are (which stopped being interesting a few millimeters ago), and customers want waterproof phones, and the intersection of those two goals practically requires intricate interlocking parts held together with glue, rather than simply stacking and bolting.
I wonder if a Fairphone would work on a US mobile network…
I wonder if the frame.work folks will add a phone to their product line…
>still bragging about how thin their phones are (which stopped being interesting a few millimeters ago)
I’d go further than stopped being interesting and into actively hinders the useablity of the device. there is a reason folks are sticking big cases and those weird pop out buttons on the back that renders all that thinness pointless… Heck the nicest phone I’ve had in hand that isn’t stupidly old in recent years is the Unihertz Jelly 2 – I have giant hands and this tiny phone is much nicer to hold and use than the big flat slabs, enough so that with Mediatek seemingly become a better FOSS contributor I am tempted to get another in hope of getting a mainline kernel and normal linux running on it. Also fits in pockets really well and they did sell spare parts enough I’ve fixed it more than once after my sister stole and then broke it. But she plays with chainsaws up tree and has lived on a boat – its not like the thing is fragile…
I’d love to see a Framework company or at least the Framework IO module come to a phone – the specs in the phone chips and all the supported hardware features now are more than up to it, those modules are still thin and small enough that putting one behind the screen at one end shouldn’t be a major hurdle. So being able to just dump in that HDMI port, the extra SSD, a fast ethernet port etc when you need it would be awesome.
That said I don’t think such a thing can really come to pass usefully until a more native real computer Linux with a phone UI experience exists – you want to be able to take and receive calls and SMS, deal with VoLTE etc and the wwan modem to keep time and wake the main CPU on receiving stuff, probably be able to tell the modem to issue a wakeup call so that alarm you set for 8pm goes off without having to keep the main chip powered at all between now and then etc, (though maybe most of this stuff really does exist and is ready for prime time and and I just don’t know it having not had call to look).
Hm well the framework modules are all USBC in the back, so you can probably already use all of them with your current phone! Probably not what you where thinking about, but if you are going to connect a cable and keep track of a module.. might just connect a cable with a module bump instead? Aka dongle?
Indeed, I’m thinking of a Phone like object probably with two USB-C ports built in – one recessed into the framework module retention frame so whatever port you slot in just fits in the phone as it does on a framework laptop (and that port must be supporting ALL the optional features of USB-C ports the CPU can) and the other on the mainboard that can be just USB-2 and charging, but I’d hope could manage all the optional features too.
Though I don’t think that many of these modules would just work, android devices are weird and may well lack the drivers for the hardware, though equally many of them should just work.
>But it is going to be next to impossible to actually have some things like the earbud and easy swap battery
If you look at x-ray images of airpods, you can see that the battery is a tiny cylinder in the stem of the device. You could have that part unscrew by tiny threads, and sealing it from water is not that difficult. The more difficult part is coming up with and maintaining a battery standard that suits the setup without breaking the bank, because the only user for such batteries is going to be yourself – at least until other people start using the form factor for other things.
Tiny threads isn’t durable or easy to do in this case – you may end up torquing the wires off the battery trying to screw the assembly back in, fail to get sufficient mounting pressure for the contacts or just end up having lots of failures because tiny threads holding a big lever are never going to survive (in plastic anyway). Earbuds are just so darn tiny and densely packed with stuff that actually creating a remotely suitable sealed electronics enclosure that is easy to open is really going to be tough and quite likely create more points of failure that accelerate the device EOL over the current dead when the battery wears out method.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t actually like that Earbuds are made this way, but it is one of the few cases where doing anything else and still having that functional earbud concept is really really tricky.
Why would you have wires between the board and the battery? If the entire battery is a tiny metal canister with threads on one end like a miniature soda bottle, the threads serve as one terminal and a spring loaded pin in the middle works the other terminal.
If the entire stem of the earbuds is the battery, you can fit in M3 sized thread easily, and that’s large enough that it’s no longer fragile.
just like aluminum 18650-powered flashlights. The body is part of the circuit.
I’d suggest M3 with a battery inside is still going to be darn fragile for both the battery case and at the plastic interface – its a pretty darn long lever, can’t be screwed in all that many threads, and must have rather thin walls or there is no functional battery inside… And I wasn’t thinking wire between the board and battery directly, but that cheap fold the wire over the lip or shove it in a small recess of the case to make contact between parts as they are screwed together type concepts.
Also your idea puts a ‘live’ conductor right against a sweaty human, two of them infact – seems like it would a recipe for problems, at the very least weird grounding issues.
>and at the plastic interface
It would be a metal thread to metal thread, since it provides the electrical connection. Think something the shape and size of a PCB standoff screwing into another. You can’t break that with your fingers.
>your idea puts a ‘live’ conductor right against a sweaty human
No it doesn’t. The grounded shell of the battery might be exposed, but that can easily be coated with vinyl like any other battery.
I love the idea of appliances that I can check the status of from my phone.
Pretty much every commercial implementation of that idea… not so much.
And making it impossible to use the appliance w/o the app.. that’s way too far.
Give me something that sits on my LAN and can be linked to an MQTT broker and some documentation. I’ll take it from there!
Give me something that sits on the LAN and just serves up a simple web page. No apps needed, no MQTT clients needed – everyone and everything has a web browser.
The only problem nowadays is that every browser wants an SSL certificate which has to come from a trusted party or else they throw up warnings and all but refuse to work, so you have to get third parties involved even if you’re just accessing your own private network.
If persuing an obsession with “GREEN” energy production destroys the country you live in, is that a good outcome? Yes, if you have been taught to hate the country you live in to begin with.
Honestly, just no, to all of this. The one exception I’ll make is, companies should not be able to sue for circumvention of tamper-proofing.
Aside from that – batteries, as mentioned at length above, are not “designed” to fail, and sealing them in is not a choice to shorten the lifespan of the product. If people wanted to pay more for earbuds with swappable batteries they would – but the odds are I’m going to lose or damage them way before the batteries peter out.
Inhibiting reparability: bring it on. Aside from actual legal action, the fact is that corporations can spend millions of dollars on some protection scheme, which is inevitably circumvented by someone in a garage. Without legal protections, these attempts would have been abandoned long ago, except for places where it brings actual value – locked down app stores annoy the hell out of me, but there IS some value in knowing I can trust the source.
Unnecessary Services: vote with your money. Don’t like ads? block them or use something else. Don’t like risking getting bricked because a backing service went away? Don’t buy it. Maybe I don’t *want* to run a local mqtt broker etc. etc. but I want to connect to my washing machine. Now I’m not allowed to because of your “rules”? Bah
Detrimental To The Planet: Nope, nope nope. We’re all savvy here, and know exactly how vague and subjective of a statement this is. I’ll give you a hint: the word “detrimental” carries a moral connotation, the only *absolute* way you *might* define it is “change” – by which definition all technology would be banned unless used in space. Since you clearly mean “bad” in some sense, someone has to evaluate it. Now, if you want to advance some kind of moral argument that the planet’s “good” state is that state it was found in around 1 million years ago, well, feel free to give that a shot. But you don’t get a free pass to say application X “wastes” energy while application Y doesn’t.
There should be a requirement that devices using lithium batteries sold to the general public must provide the option to limit charge level to 85% and charge rate to 1C or less, allowing the end user to trade off runtime for longer service life.
On repairability of devices and dependence on services, require clear disclosure so the user doesn’t get caught by surprise. And that if a manufacturer “bricks” product they sold due to end of support, they must accept it back for proper disposal at their cost. (The last one with an intentional loophole if the manufacturer releases information on how to reprogram the device to work with an alternative service and how to make that alternative service.)
As far as environmental impact goes, evaluating it is great but actually making that work well is much harder than it seems.
So tired of the consumer being blamed for not recycling enough, using to much non renewable energy, etc etc.
Until large corporations stop waste at grand scales, nothing the consumer does will have a meaningful impact.
At John Deere, we threw out all but 5% of the spare parts for a model 5 years after they stopped selling that model, 2 years later, all remaining stock thrown out. Was anything recycled? No, all went directly into general waste bin (quicker and easier), thus making it almost impossible to repair a 7 year old machine.
At a large food manufacturing plant, when the new packaging for a product was introduced, all remaining stock of previous packaging thrown out, not recycled, 100,000s unused plastic containers go into landfill (more than a consumer of this product would use in a lifetime).
100 ton of frozen pork (imported from otherside of the globe) sent to landfill simply because useby date was too short to send to supermarkets (min 6month useby date required by supermarkets). Offered to a food charity? No.
Big business needs to be more responsible.
Can’t agree more
I have a cousin with a Ph.D. in business and economics. Spent most of his life teaching it at various universities. Until he quit. He got disgusted with the downward spiral of business ethics. Each year the students would get more greedy and uncaring. Ethics is also a required course and the students often could not pass it and those that did didn’t take any of it to heart.
https://www.amazon.com/Business-Tale-Ethics-Choices-Success/dp/0814471978
Ethics starts with the individual. All of them.
I think this is really the crux of the issue. I think society has slowly become more selfish, cynical, and uncompassionate, and it means that decision makers at all levels are driven less by moral, ethical, and community concerns.
No easy fix though, this is a social issue at scale and can’t just be legislated away
Well, the world is de-humanising more and faster every day, unless humans ever been like “robots” ?
(Hmm… )
Selfishness and greed (if not about the same, somehow) seems to be the root cause of everything going wrong in this world.
We all, absolutely all, should (re-)think about the world we are living in nowadays and look at how things evolved during humans (pretty brief, as widely “known” for now) history to realise that people traded freedom in life against limited options of provided comfort that nowadays makes us all slaves of machines we created and keep perfectionning…
It’s way more than time to bring some necessary changes at global scale to give back Life experience a better taste than just being slaves of someone or something (either a machine or greed / obsession for money and the power it is synonym of), because even those on top of any hierarchical pyramid are still slaves of something, could it be an illusion and more likely a miss / void of enjoyment from life in its simplest ways possible, like having a social life and enough food and security (if living in the wild Nature) for everyone to be happy and willing to share and enjoy with the others, because it’s possible until over population in a given natural environment (not a corporate created one) makes things tough and failing…
… Well, our knowledge and technologies should help us all to free ourselves from such an awful experience (or feared of it to happen), instead of serving the selfishness / greed of a very little number…
I am more than tired of this “life” experience and may have Not expressed myself well, just because of how way too much hectic is “life” nowadays, and that I am going towards my 5th decade of trying to survive in this sad world that nowadays Scientific News & Technologies have hard time to help “ignoring” for a while.
H.P.
I think much of what is being said is missing the fact that companies are using up resources at a rate like never before but what they are using them on is not really worth “wasting” them those products. When designing a new product, there needs to be a sufficient advancement being made to justify making it, not just for profit. Adding Bluetooth to everything that already exists in an effort to reduce a few wires isn’t really a good reason since Bluetooth itself may have to go through many changes to become a real contender with wires.
But on top of that, these same companies are purposely making products that will fail in a set period of time so there’s a doubled up waste of resources. Once those resources are depleted, everyone will be looking at each other thinking WTF just happened? They’ll tink back to how the profit margin made the new crap products a necessity and who’s to blame? The manufacturer, the designers, the consumers? They all played a part in it.
When you talk about batteries I can’t help but think of how companies spend millions each year changing things so batteries can’t be used in new hand tools. A power source is the same 18vdc so why not use the batteries until they’re dead even if you buy new drills leave that option open but offer the new batteries as well?
One more point, this has to do with using technology to stifle the growth of technology. I think back to when cable Internet was new, it was fast as hell, then suddenly they decided to slow it down. For profit, no other reason, they called it teirs. Well a few years later the USB stick and smart media cards came out. They took were fast, but then a year later they were all slowed down to create speeds do they could charge more for what was the norm prior. It has transfered to every aspect of our lives. There’s millions spent on slowing down tech to make more money.
Remember A,AA,C,D, cells. Universal as heck for more than a century. Even though we have 18650 and other Lithium cells in standard sizes almost every thing uses custom sized packs or seals up standard cells inside welded packs.
Why we can’t have good things including our home.
One of the best things about Nabaztag was the way they handled this. When they had to turn off the cloud back end, they open sourced the server code, and it has been ported by people cleverer than me to Raspberry pi, so you can run your own server for several bunnies, using a single, old low end pi. I occasionally pick up cheap ones on eBay; I currently own 5 or 6 of them 🐰
“Thought-provoking rules for responsible tech use, emphasizing longevity, repairability, service necessity, and environmental impact.
Nice post liked it