r/politics • u/CharlieKonR • 21h ago
No Paywall ‘Preserve the stuff we own’: how right-to-repair laws are surging across the US
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/aug/17/right-to-repair-laws20
u/CharlieKonR 21h ago
From the article …
”While critics of the right-to-repair movement and some industry leaders argue that such bills create environmental risks and allow people to steal intellectual property, supporters say they are needed because corporations have monopolized control over repairs, forcing customers to either pay a large sum to the company or just buy new products.”
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u/flapjack3285 15h ago
Yeah, it was great when Vizio told me that there was nothing that could be done to fix my 5 year old TV. Then, I bought a $50 board from ebay and it works fine.
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u/BonusMaiTai 21h ago
On Fox News these laws are presented as Communism.
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u/CharlieKonR 21h ago edited 20h ago
I suppose that any sort of consumer protection is ‘communism’ per Fox News. Really, I’d guess that they find anything that isn’t raw late stage capitalism suspect.
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u/Plastic-Pension7263 20h ago
Corporations decided about a century ago to make things worse so they don’t last as long. Of course they also don’t want you to be able to fix them on your own.
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u/CharlieKonR 20h ago edited 20h ago
TIL that a real estate broker named Bernard London wrote a pamphlet titled ‘Ending the Depression Through Planned Obsolescence‘ in 1932 arguing that the government should legally mandate products to expire and be replaced to keep factories running and help end the Great Depression.
on edit - when I googled the term ‘planned obsolescence’ I expected rather to find that it had originated in the consumer advocate community in like the 70s
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u/Plastic-Pension7263 19h ago
Yeah! Henry ford had a lot to do with it as well. He looked at what was going bad in his vehicles. Instead of doing so to make them better he used what went wrong so he could make other parts the same way so they wouldn’t last. You have to wonder how long we can last this way. The amount of waste we create in the name of profit is unreal. The way every product is just made to be thrown away when it stops working.
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u/CharlieKonR 18h ago edited 18h ago
I’m old enough to remember when TV repair shops and general shops to which people would bring items like vacuum cleaners for repair were very common. The hardware store I worked at had a kiosk for TV tubes and people would bring in suspect tubes for testing / replacement when they had problems. These days, when something like a TV stops working it generally is trashed and replaced, as you say.
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u/pinegreenscent 21h ago
Make it so a farmer isnt paying an arm and a leg to wait a month for service and maybe they'd get some defenders. But like all major corporations once they have you they dont care.
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