10-04-2019, 10:59 AM
I watched enough of it to know that it was about planned obsolescence in general. But lamp life was cited as an early example which may be true to some extent but far from the whole story.
Deliberately causing something to stop working after X operations is clearly a vey nasty thing to do unless it's a safety critical item. Degrading the design so it doesn't last as long is an ordinary set of design and finance decisions. Desing for maintainability is another controversial area. If a mobile phone was easy to pull apart it would probably have to be bigger and heavier.
In many cases you have to look further than the item itself. Plastic packaging is very much in the news. This article notes that it's not so simple as plastic = bad: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47161379 If wrapping cucumbers in plastic reduces the wastage rate there's a calculation to be done about the total cost (including externalities) of plastic wrapping agains the total saved in wastage. I'm not saying the calculation is easy.
Deliberately causing something to stop working after X operations is clearly a vey nasty thing to do unless it's a safety critical item. Degrading the design so it doesn't last as long is an ordinary set of design and finance decisions. Desing for maintainability is another controversial area. If a mobile phone was easy to pull apart it would probably have to be bigger and heavier.
In many cases you have to look further than the item itself. Plastic packaging is very much in the news. This article notes that it's not so simple as plastic = bad: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-47161379 If wrapping cucumbers in plastic reduces the wastage rate there's a calculation to be done about the total cost (including externalities) of plastic wrapping agains the total saved in wastage. I'm not saying the calculation is easy.
www.borinsky.co.uk Jeffrey Borinsky www.becg.tv
