Slashdot Mirror
Big Tech Squashes New York's 'Right To Repair' Bill (huffingtonpost.com)
Damon Beres, writing for The Huffington Post: Major tech companies like Apple have trampled legislation that would have helped consumers and small businesses fix broken gadgets. New York state legislation that would have required manufacturers to provide information about how to repair devices like the iPhone failed to get a vote, ending any chance of passage this legislative session. Similar measures have met the same fate in Minnesota, Nebraska, Massachusetts and, yes, even previously in New York. Essentially, politicians never get to vote on so-called right to repair legislation because groups petitioning on behalf of the electronics industry gum up the proceedings. "We were disappointed that it wasn't brought to the floor, but we were successful in bringing more attention to the issue," New York state Sen. Phil Boyle (R), a sponsor of the bill, told The Huffington Post.
Leave it to the Huffington Post to somehow blame lobbyists without blaming the people they lobby. The only way they "gum up the proceedings" is by their influence with the leaders in the legislature, who are the ones who actually control the proceedings.
A bill doesn't get a vote in the legislature because not enough of the right members wanted to vote on it (for a variety of reasons, I'm sure). You can't blame that strictly on the lobbyists without removing the responsibility of the members of the NY State Assembly and Senate for what they decide to vote and pass.
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
The rest of the world calls it corruption.
The US calls it 'lobbying'.
Our "democratic" process is just an elaborate dog-and-pony show designed to make us feel like we have a voice in governance, when really the only voices that matter are those of the super-rich.
People get really defensive when I point this out, because they like believing that we live in a democracy (ahem, constitutional republic), and that our representatives represent us, and that our votes matter.
Wanting something to be true does not make it true.
If people wanted more repairable devices, they would have bought them.
Instead consumers have, in droves, chosen to buy MORE RELIABLE sealed devices that they do not have to screw with.
I'm not just talking about the iPhone, or the other Android phones that all followed suit. I'm talking about cars, about appliances, almost everything is more more contained, much better sealed, and much harder to repair.
If the world wants more "repairable" things then by all means make them and ell them. But do not demand that companies ruin products in the pursuit of a goal few are interested in.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So -- anything that goes wrong with your iPhone, computer, etc. is required to be covered by a manufacturer issued repair guide that's available to the customer? Since when has that been required for anything you buy, even remotely? Not even your dumb refrigerator manufacturer is required to tell you how to fix it.
And in what level of detail / remedy would it have to explain how to repair the item? My laptop's GPU has a few transistors that got fried. Are they saying Apple has to tell me how to disassemble the chip, do nanosurgery on it and refabricate a few layers of silicon? Or that "get a new laptop" is sufficient to fix the issue?
Nice sentiment, but full of holes in how it would be implemented.
Even normal, non-autonomous cars are becoming this way. It used to be it was easy to replace the vendor's radio system with your own using a standard form factor and connections. Now, it's "infotainment" tied closely into the rest of the car, and will throw codes if you try to remove it. Aftermarket alternatives are less and less available as this stuff becomes more and more proprietary.
DRM'ed internal buses in the car are also becoming a thing.
Self-driving or not, this is coming.
You can't always know this though. Especially for larger devices that are comprised of many sub-components. For example, my father had a camper in which the heating controller failed. He asked if I could fix it, since it was electronic. When he showed the unit to me, it was completely encased in epoxy. This was 80's TTL tech, normally totally fixable, but not now. $300 for new unit that should have cost $30, tops.
Would that be something you'd actually think to look into when buying a camper? Maybe after getting burned once, sure, but not before.
This kind of crap is infesting everything you buy these days. It's quite difficult to avoid.
How is this any different than the major news networks and newspapers except Fox are sock puppets for the DNC?
How do you propose that they gather sufficient funding to be persuasive without corporate backing?
Do you think that the NAACP or the AARP or the Sierra Club or PETA etc are all funded by corporate backing? If you can't persuade enough people to agree with you (if a loopy aging hippy socialist from New England can raise millions and millions of dollars from starry-eyed individual donors, why is it you think this isn't possible?), you could always simply persuade a wealthy person (say, an Al Gore, or a George Soros) to throw - as they already do - millions of dollars into things they think should be more visible. This is happening right in front of your eyes every day - why does it seem unlikely to you?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Do you consider, for example, the millions of people backing Bernie Sanders to be a "powerful special interest group?" No? Why not? They gotten together, amassed a very large pile of money dedicated to forwarding a specific agenda, and they've got a person tapped to push that agenda on their behalf.
it's a shame for all those small special bills where it isn't worth building up an entire consortium to argue for its merits
Small, specialty regulations and laws are still fought for an against by special interests - they're just smaller numbers of people. It might be no more than literally a handful of people, some of which manage to get some speaking time at a hearing, or in a private meeting with their congress-creature. If the subject matter so arcane that one person's discussions with the committee or senator or whatever is wildly more persuasive than another's because she's better prepared, better informed, or more able to communicate, then yes - dollars talk because it costs money to have a very talented person making your case for you, if you're not going to go do it for yourself. Can you drop everything you're doing to go educate and persuade politicians on the merits of some arcane niche topic? No? What if you and a bunch of your colleagues carry on with your daily work and send a single talented person on your behalf? That's exactly balanced - you're balancing your need to influence the political process with your need to continue doing what you actually do for a living. There are professionals to help with that chore: they're called lobbyists. Have you ever met one, perhaps had a beer with one? No? You should.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.