https://www.gofundme.com/f/lets-get-right-to-repair-passed
“We shall soon be in a world in which a man may be howled down for saying that two and two make four, in which furious party cries will be raised against anybody who says that cows have horns, in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure, and hang a man for maddening mob with the news that grass is green.”
― G.K. Chesterton
Can't help thinking we will be inundated by family/friends/work colleagues who say things like "your good at fixing electronics/computers/other items, here have a look at this for me", they wouldn't want to pay a shop to fix it of course. Think we are going to need to retrain a lot of people if they want to fix their own stuff.
David
This is one of the many objections I have to the concept of the “right to repair” which are roughly summed up as:
1. Most people don’t have the skills to repair anything thus will damage it.
2. Manufacturers will wash their hands of anything instantly that the right has been exercised against something because it’s tainted.
3. Manufacturers can use this as a marketing point while reducing their service and support to minimal.
4. Most of the stuff manufactured today is near impossible to repair without specialist equipment.
In the vastness of human experience this will only result in a negative outcome for consumers and put them at the mercy of the cheapest and least competent commercial repairers (the dude down the local market). The whole concept hangs the owner of whatever was bought.
Really we should have:
1. Minimum life guarantee of 6 years for all things manufactured for both business and consumer use.
2. A mandatory refund or replace scheme of the original purchase amount minus utilisation if there is a failure. You should be able to choose to return it after two years and get 2/3 of the price back if it fucks up.
That includes due to software problems and it being abandoned and insecure3. A mandatory 15% recycling buy back whatever the age of the device.
The issue is everything is a race to the bottom. It is designed for cheap manufacturing and a cost adjusted failure rate. And the manufacturer never has to deal with the tonnes of trash it produces.
Right to service is a far better concept than right to repair.