As someone who frequently disagrees with the overwhelming majority political opinion on this site, this is one thing I wish all states could find common ground on. The amount of waste and value extraction that corporations force on us, when we could simply repair and maintain what we already have, is downright evil.
If your net worth is high enough that anti-consumer policy pumps your assets harder than it dumps your consumption, it's rational. A huge jerk move, sure, and arguably unreasonable on those grounds, but it's rational. Unfortunately the $600B sponsor and $6B president are faaaar on the other side of the invisible net worth boundary where that starts to be the case, so I wouldn't expect RtR to get much traction, but who knows. There is enough chaos to make it worth a try even if it "ought" to fail on grounds of "government by the rich, for the rich."
It needs to be explicitly shown how and why it increases costs because if anything it feels like the opposite to me, especially when companies use proprietary pieces and hiding schematics rather than open standards and common configurations.
It has been politicized heavily by maga type crowds who don't really know what it means.... I have had ppl at the barbershop call me a socialist because I wanted right to repair...
I imagine bringing up the current situation with John Deere and how the law would enshrine the right to repair the tractor that you bought with your own money would go farther than most arguments with those folks.
It's an interesting idea. But I like to think if they owned equipment like that, they'd already be on the side of right-to-repair. Farmers are smart businessmen and this is an obviously needless extra cost.
But for the non-farmers, perhaps it'd really sway tribal mindsets to understand people "similar to them" (more so than elite techies...) benefit too.
He's just advertising the filter bubble he lives in. Everyone wants owners to be able to be able to access the info they need to repair things. About the only gripe you'll hear from the most hardline libertarians is "that's not the government's job" and even then it's usually prefixed with "this is nice but". Occasionally some Karen who hasn't really put much thought into it will screech about "but what it someone repairs something wrong and makes it unsafe" as if supposed professionals don't do that all the time and right to repair isn't just as much about enabling individual professionals as it is owners.
I did receive the "it's not the governments job" speech but they had no rebuttal when I asked about border agents seizing official refurb apple parts as "counterfeit" or Microsoft jailing someone trying to keep old PCs out of landfill... Or the concept of IP as a whole and the John Deere tractor example someone else replied to me with in this thread .
As if I'm blind or stupid and wouldn't try the obvious??
You can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason into
Doesnt work. Nor examples of apple screen being seized as "counterfeit" nor blatant abuses by Microsoft or Nintendo that has ppl JAILED for doing what they will with their own property. They don't really listen to reason. Right to repair sounds" nice" and like it might help poor people .... So they will fight it to the death as socialism handouts.
Reasonable people are sometimes lead to believe that repairability is counter to
safety (i.e. "if an amature does the repair wrong, they could hurt themselves or the owner"),
security (i.e. "if we let people know how it works, it'll be easier to hack"),
technilogical advancement (i.e. "smartphones would have to be chunky bricks with no water resistance if we designed them to be easily opened for repair"),
consumer protection (i.e. "unauthorized repair technicians are unaccountable and might do something unscrupulous to your device"),
value (i.e. "if companies have to design for repair and provide support for repair, then those costs get passed onto consumers"),
among other things. I don't find these arguments compelling and I think there is plenty of precedent for repairability being best for consumers. But they come up a lot - especially from anti-R2R lobbiests.
Our society has also been trained to be consumers, always throwing away old stuff in favor of the latest and greatest. When something breaks, the first thought is usally "how much will it cost to replace this?" instead of "how do I fix it?" Everything is treated as disposible, so there isn't much motivation for the average person to care about repair.
But there isn't really an "overwhelming majority political opinion" on this site? Hence the long threads of comments of people disagreeing on the merits of ideas. Unless you're referring to the anti-trump sentiment, which is more pan-political as there are obviously a whole bunch of Americans that don't want to see our country destroyed regardless of how we wish it might be reformed.
a specific term, used mainly in social sciences as a designation for those forms of nationalism that aim to transcend (overcome, expand) traditional boundaries.
I never heard of the term before as why Im asking.
Also, in my own view. I don't consider myself political, I watch what people do, versus what they say they're going to do. And for me, any political figure can say one thing when the really want to do another.
I agree that government needs to be reformed, but somhow, Im thinking the reform issue is just being used as a vehicle to push a Accelerationism agenda.
No. Trump got a 49.8% plurality of the vote was the second time around. The first time around he only got 46.1% to Hillary Clinton's 48.2% (not even a plurality -- yay electoral college). He did not win a majority in either of his wins, and a plurality only the second time. Amazing what you can do with a $44 billion propaganda platform and another quarter billion in usable funds.
Sure, simplistic populism plays out in wider society where short quips and repetition matter more than coherent ideas. That doesn't really change what I said though.
(For context, because I know the tendency is to pigeonhole commenters - I'm a libertarian who shares many of the frustrations driving the destructive fervor)
the popular vote win represents something like 25% of Americans, the other option being a genocidal dementia patient. how can anyone say that was a legitimate choice?
That's real funny, bravo, but you didn't say that the policies were identical, you said that the choice was a "dementia patient", and now you've moved the goalpost.
If you’re referring to people who don’t vote, they de facto support the outcome. Particularly if in a swing state.
> genocidal dementia patient
People who voted for Trump (or threw their vote in a swing state) because of Palestine are the definition of stupid and selfish. By prioritising their interests above those they purported to represent, they will have played a (non-critical) role in the destruction of Palestine.
It baffled me that anyone thought that Trump was going to somehow be better than Kamala in regards to Palestine.
I could understand voting for a third party, but Trump outright tried to impose a Muslim ban in his first time, and said that his son in law was going to quickly solve the Middle East conflict single-handedly; seems unlikely that he would be sympathetic to people in the Middle East.
> baffled me that anyone thought that Trump was going to somehow be better than Kamala in regards to Palestine
I was in Phoenix in April 2024 when an otherwise-intelligent friend remarked on whether Trump was pro Israel. She wound up remembering his first term eventually. But at that moment I realised that the checkmate Democrats thought they had Republicans in with abortion, Republicans had Democrats in with Palestine: move to the left and you lose moderates and Pennsylvania. Move to the right (or fail to message) and you lose Michigan and your base. Message at all and you lose swing voters who don’t want to hear about foreign policy.
I'm not sure they thought that Trump would be better.
It seems they think that voting is a test unrelated to the likely outcomes. So you should vote "right" rather than compromising and voting for the better among the possible outcomes.
why would people vote in an election they have no stakes in? if both sides are genocidal, there's no choice where your life gets better.
i didn't vote trump, but i did vote socialist/green. im not voting for genocide sorry.
if liberals want to win elections, they need to start offering a vision of a better future, not bizarre bitcoin financial scams targeted at minorities, privatization of every social benefit, and genocide.
That's fine, you have the right to vote third-party, but are you saying aren't sympathetic to the other issues that Trump is raising?
I am not sure I loved Kamala's stance on Palestine, but I thought that Trump's tariff policies were stupid, his anti-immigrant and anti-trans rhetoric was harmful, and virtually every single stupid thing that the Diablo cheater has done with DOGE (and said he would do before the election, to be clear) seemed short-sighted-at-best and malicious-at-worst. It can be difficult to tell since both Trump and Musk are supremely stupid people who depend on hubris to fail upwards their entire lives, but regardless it seemed pretty bad to me, and it seemed like the totality of it indicated that Kamala would have been fine.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with voting on a single issue, if you think Palestine is more important than all the stuff I listed then that's fair enough and I'm actually fine with people voting third party. The way I see it though, the only person who is going to do exactly what I want, politically speaking, is me, and I'm not running. No matter who I vote for, as a result, is going to inherently be a compromise on something. I have to vote for the person that I think will do the least amount of damage and/or try and prevent the person who is going to do the most from getting in power.
I felt like a vote for a candidate that had a shot at winning was better than one that didn't, even though I tend to actually be a bit closer-aligned with the green party.
> if both sides are genocidal, there's no choice where your life gets better
As I said, stupid and selfish. Not seeing the difference between bombing and explicit ethnic cleansing and relocation for the people in Gaza is modern Sykes-Picot.
Note that I’m fine with that person not voting. (Almost prefer it.) It’s wild, though, to pretend it furthered the interests of the people they pretend to hold dear, versus some personal moral purity they’d prefer to preach about online.
> i did vote socialist/green
This is fine, even admirable, if you’re not in a swing state. If you’re in a swing state, you de facto voted for Trump and the destruction of both Gaza and the dream of a Palestinian nation-state.
> if liberals want to win elections, they need to start offering a vision of a better future
Sure. And never mention Israel or Palestine again, because I no longer have any desire to engage with the US elements of those movements who are, on both sides, adamant about redrawing foreign borders in respect of countries and cultures they have no direct relation to nor experience with.
do you have any concept of what they were doing in Gaza? 85% of schools bombed/damaged, almost every hospital destroyed, tens of millions of tons of rubble, Trump said 1.7-1.8M remaining (meaning 400-500k dead). this is a holocaust. Democrats are not doing an "innocent war". They are hiterites with a smile on their face. The Republicans are hitlerites with a frown. Sometimes vice versa depending on the situation.
I voted in PA. You guys want my vote? appeal to me and people like me.
> 85% of schools bombed/damaged, almost every hospital destroyed, tens of millions of tons of rubble, Trump said 1.7-1.8M remaining
How do you think those 2mm remaining would prefer the future to go? Razed, relocated and—let’s be honest—in all likelihood ersatz enslaved somewhere in Central Asia or Africa? Safe in the knowledge someone in America made this choice for them with a false equivalence between living on their land to fight another day and being dissolved as a nation?
That is the selfishness. That is the holier-than-thou imperial mindset; what matters is how one is portrayed and gets to think about oneself, not how the people one uses as puppets fare. (Sykes and Picot’s supporters thought they were helping, too!)
Don't get your hopes up just because they have something they call right-to-repair legislation. It doesn't imply a practical ability to get repairs done. That requires e.g. parts availability, schematics, etc., way behind what legislation I've heard of requires.
Car manufacturers trying to lock down their systems turned the tide on this issue.
Tell someone their $500 gadget is disposable; most people will be mildly frustrated. Tell someone that their $70,000 vehicle, on which they still have years of payments to make, is disposable or unrepairable by their usual mechanic; most people will feel more than just frustrated.
I want to think you're right, but most of the activation I've seen on RtR is from people who are mechanics and others whose livelihoods are threatened by this (like farmers). Most consumers (at least in my small sample of anecdata) don't seem to care at all for whatever reason. The ones who do are a small enough group to be safely ignored.
This is an easy dodge. The problem is that when lack of repairability becomes the norm, the consumer no longer has that choice. Or they have to severely compromise their market choices in the search for repairable products.
And wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase. Its something that comes further down the line, when the purchase decision has already been made.
> wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase
This is the core of the problem. The coalition pushing for these laws doesn’t include most consumers. Absent an expensive ad push, I don’t see that changing.
Takeaway: make hay where the sun shines. Focus on farming states and those with lots of dealerships and repair shops. Maybe put an anti-Musk / anti-Tesla angle on it in blue states.
This is why organizations are pushing for repeatability scores to be printed on purchasable items, I think that would go a long way towards hinting that this issue is important for consumers in the long run.
there are ways to omit the right to repair. My mechanic told me story about the new emergency system (mandatory in EU) that calls automatically for help on the crash event. It has a battery and a small controller in a all-in-one module. If the battery goes down - it will stop working and require replacing. If you replace only the battery it won't work. Not sure if you can replace battery while maintaining voltage, but this might be impedimented using plastic cover or something like that.
Also farmers, who have been turned upside down and shaken by John Deere and other manufacturers using locked down hardware. The farming lobby is powerful.
Yeah, my sense in following this is that farmers have had a far bigger impact than consumers. I see your $70,000 car and raise you a $500,000 tractor that's core to a farmer's livelihood.
From what I can tell the only mechanics who care are trying to illegally bypass emmissions controls, or they are trying to run a chop shop steeling cars for parts. Cars are very repairable outside a dealer for most things.
though I'm told tesla is an exception and they are unrepairable - I don't drive one so I wouldn't know.
the above is my personal opinion. My employeer has an opinion on this subject, but I don't speak for them.
This is incorrect. Often times manufacturers will lock down the systems that can report statistics and reset failures to only work with their proprietary tools. They will not sell these tools and force people to go to the dealer. After a while the dealer can close or not sell that tool anymore and now people have an expensive paperweight that caused tons of emissions to create.
This is often accused but it is already a violation of federal laws that have been around for ages. It is called obd and covers a lot more than emissions.
right to repair may cover more but it isn't nearly as useful for normal diagnostics.
OBD standards literally only require emissions controls to be openly diagnosed. The rest of the CEL codes can 100% be vendor specific. So when your body control module shits out, and you can't lock and unlock your doors anymore, you're fucked. When your ABS light comes on, and all you need to do is replace a $10 wheel speed sensor, you still need an expensive proprietary code reader to read the codes.
"OBD II is an acronym for On-Board Diagnostic II, the second generation of on-board self-diagnostic equipment requirements for light- and medium-duty California vehicles. On-board diagnostic capabilities are incorporated into the hardware and software of a vehicle's on-board computer to monitor virtually every component that can affect emission performance. "
Yes a lot of the primary engine functions affect emissions, but the majority of diagnostic codes on modern cars are not available to standard OBDII readers. Once you get outside of the engine, forget it. Every module in modern cars now is VIN-locked and can only be swapped in by a dealer, or some kind of cracked 3rd party software if you're lucky.
I had to find on some strange forum the CEL codes to monitor my DPF. Otherwise I would never know when it is filling up and never be able to reach out a highway to allow it to clean nicely.
This shouldn't be obscure. But they keep saying "hey this is our intellectual property"
Take Volkswagen vehicles (VW/Audi, mainly). Nearly every electronic module in the car that you'd want to replace has component protection, making it literally impossible for a non-dealer to replace it since you need access to VAG servers to get the token to code the module for the car VIN. I had this experience recently with a CAN bus controller module that just randomly failed. $3k at the dealer. I would have preferred to do it myself but there is no way.
If anyone from The Repair Association is reading, there are a bunch of issues with the website. It sends me to https://tennessee.repair.org/ , which has a broken iframe for the "Make your voice heard" section. Fortunately the "Tell your repair story" section seems to also handle contacting representatives, except it auto-fills to what seems to be the wrong bill. It tells them I want them to support SB0077, which "As introduced, extends the medical cannabis commission to June 30, 2029" (I don't know enough about it to know if I actually do support this or not), instead of SB0499, which "As introduced, enacts the "Agricultural Right to Repair Act." The header of the page has correct bills for last year.
Thanks for the feedback! Fellow Tennessean here so I'm a bit embarrassed. I fixed the Make your voice heard embed (we removed a CallPower integration).
I'm working on fixing the letter now.
We built this tech when having five or six states with bills was exciting. Now, 50 states times two chambers times sometimes two or three bills has become a whole thing to keep track of it all.
Keeping all of these bills up to date across 50 states that change every year is quite the project. It's a pretty manual process right now, alas. I'd love to automate it.
Everyone else: please thread any bill year mismatch / other issues you find here, and I'll fix them!
And those that have passed, are not necessarily universal. For example, Californias (I think) only applies to electronics, not cars. The John Deere "thing" is still a "thing" in California. The CA law is mostly about iPhones.
I don't know if they have other bills and what not in play to address other industries.
I really have trouble understanding that map. What does "Active and Passed" mean? I assumed it meant they had passed laws and updates in the works, but those States are excluded from the praise over the "Passed" States. I presume "Historical" means "Failed to pass" and no current activity to get a law passed.
You are correct, something is not in sync with that map and their description. That is, their description says that five states have passed legislation: New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado. But in the "Passed" and "Active and Passed" categories on the map, it includes those 5 states plus Massachusetts.
FWIW, all of the searching I could find about Right to Repair laws in Massachusetts focused solely on vehicle right to repair (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Massachusetts_Question_1), not on electronic devices generally, so maybe that's why Massachusetts was not included in the description (which specifically said "passed electronics right to repair legislation") but was categorized on the map.
Maybe they're excluded because they've already been praised, and they're focused on the new states joining in? I assume "active and passed" means that they not only passed the laws, but they are currently in effect. A law being passed doesn't necessarily put it into immediate effect.
I did consider that interpretation, but by "praise" I simply mean that the article says "Five states (New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado) have passed electronics Right to Repair legislation" and that "the remaining states are working hard to restore repair competition" which is also overblown since so many of the States are merely "Historical" with nothing going on.
Based on what I know about one of the states in question, I'm thinking that "Active and Passed" means they have both a passed bill and an active bill that isn't passed. Though I'd think they'd call that "Passed and Current" to match their other nomenclature.
Who is most likely to be against this? NADA most of all maybe? They seem to be the most anti-consumer and (rightfully to them) propping up their member dealers.
I wonder if we’ll see “compliance devices” like we saw compliance cars in California. That is, highly modular, repairable devices available to consumers inclined that way, “offsetting” some of the other devices companies like Apple make
Right to Repair should extend to software also. Just the same way someone can make an accessory for a tractor without permission from the tractor company, developers should be able to make tools for software/accounts without the express permission of the megacorp behind it without needing to worry about legal threats.
It's not perfect (see the last link for details), but it's a great start. Also, if you have the time, read the actual directive. It's fairly readable as far as laws go.
Article 11 is the one that's probably most interesting to people here, the reason why we are now starting to see easily removable batteries in mobile devices, again. Actually "easier to remove", they're definitely not as easy to remove as the Nokia 5110 batteries :-p
>The association of automakers also alleges that because the “independent entity” has not created a “standardized platform,” they have no way to securely share vehicle data. They are asking the court to declare the law unenforceable until the independent entity has undertaken its obligations.
That sounds understandable. Just until the independent entity gets their act together.
It's better than nothing. But introduced and passed are different things. An introduced bill may never actually become law.
The upside is that this shows how popular RtR is, and there's a good chance at least several states may implement their laws. At some point, even if it isn't universal, all it takes is enough states to force manufacturers to support independent repair by default.
In particular it's depressing that the map near the top of the article shows that for a majority of states, the introduction of the bill is "historical", as in neither passed, active or current, but (IIUC) it was floated in some prior legislative session, but it's not even under consideration in the present session.
They could go for the Apple-in-Europe model, where you have the right to repair only if your geolocation detects you being in a state where it's mandatory for you to have that right, otherwise it still locks you out.
Because this just means a single legislator has sponsored a bill. It doesn't mean it has pass, nor does it it even mean it is likely to pass. It's actual laws getting passed that matter.
Of course this IS a milestone to getting a law passed, and shows that the campaign is getting legislators' notice etc. So it is still good.
Even the "active and passed" states (particularly New York) passed a neutered version of right-to-repair that barely does anything. I only understand vaguely, but Louis Rossman has been outspoken about the progress of NY right-to-repair in particular, and how it flopped hard. As much as right-to-repair seems like a party line issue, even many of the Democrats have thus far been all talk and no substance.
Because the large corporations have virtually unlimited power to water down bills with campaign contributions. It takes very little to money to sway a representative federally. How much less do you think it takes to sway a state level candidate?
Spending cash on candidates to prevent bills like this is likely a rounding error on their yearly budget.
>Can someone explain why this isn’t the big win we think it is?
I mean, there is the psychological phenomenon known as the Just World Hypothesis. When presented with something that's simply bad, or simply good, people are skeptical and tempted to search for the counterbalancing element, treating it like a trick question even if it's not.
And so it can be hard to accept it simply is good. But that doesn't have to be the end of the conversation because that impulse can be channeled productively just by changing the baseline. Right to repair, I would think, simply is good, but since we need a bad thing, we can talk about the long road ahead to full implementation, or the effort necessary to overcome cultural inertia, as well as status quo extremism in our institutions.
But I think the right to repair itself is a good thing.
i’m more for right to repair than not but i can see unintended consequences of things like iphones being bulkier and heavier if modular components like batteries are required in the broadest reach of the concept. these bills may be narrower and probably are. that’s the ultimate question though is how far the balance should be.
Im pretty sure thats a falsity. Making tech repair friendly doesnt really add to the form factor of a device if you know how to design correctly, even with phones.
I remember that phone[0] that google killed and that was back in 2013? Since then other projects have sprung up to tackle this. There are links at the bottom of the page.
One drawback to consumer-rights laws is that we as consumers end up with less access to cool stuff. Some companies have chosen to stop selling into the B2C market altogether, to avoid incurring expenses and liabilities associated with conforming to right-to-repair and other pro-consumer legislation. Rohde & Schwarz and Keysight come to mind.
That is bullshit, of course -- just an excuse for companies to dodge basic business responsibilities, and a blatant failure on their part to acknowledge why consumers felt this legislation was needed in the first place. But it is certainly true that there are short-term drawbacks.
To be fair, Rohde & Schwarz and Keysight aren't names I'd normally associate with consumer devices. On the other hand, neither are Mcdonands' ice cream machines.
Interesting! I think you're probably onto something there. Agree it's more of an excuse than a reason, but still there will be low margin products that have to go that direction due to the math.
I tend to think B2C is who needs the most protection from the gov since C are relatively powerless, whereas B2B tends to be more balanced, but the more I think about it the more I think that perhaps we're overlooking an important area. Nevertheless I think for now we need to focus on B2C and worry about B2B later. Can't spread ourselves too thin.
Lawyers and lobbyists paid lots of money to figure out how to subvert stuff.
OEMs may work to make stuff less consumer repairable/upgradeable to force folks to use their repair services that need stuff like bga reballing or soldering. Bye bye upgradable ram slots!
Things like software locks and restrictions in the name of ‘security’ will lock stuff down and make repair harder (see Apple’s part pairing)
> Things like software locks and restrictions in the name of ‘security’ will lock stuff down and make repair harder (see Apple’s part pairing)
Unfortunately, I don't see an alternative to that given how juicy targets even locked phones were for "chop shops" before Apple introduced parts pairing. People were mugged left and right for their phones.
(Obviously the solution would be to tackle poverty, drug abuse and mental health issues, but that is even more unrealistic)
As someone who frequently disagrees with the overwhelming majority political opinion on this site, this is one thing I wish all states could find common ground on. The amount of waste and value extraction that corporations force on us, when we could simply repair and maintain what we already have, is downright evil.
Hard to imagine any reasonable individual being opposed to this, regardless of politics!
> reasonable
If your net worth is high enough that anti-consumer policy pumps your assets harder than it dumps your consumption, it's rational. A huge jerk move, sure, and arguably unreasonable on those grounds, but it's rational. Unfortunately the $600B sponsor and $6B president are faaaar on the other side of the invisible net worth boundary where that starts to be the case, so I wouldn't expect RtR to get much traction, but who knows. There is enough chaos to make it worth a try even if it "ought" to fail on grounds of "government by the rich, for the rich."
I think there are reasonable arguments against it. It increases costs of selling products, reduces profitability.
I think the benefits outweigh those costs, but the argument isn't unreasonable.
It needs to be explicitly shown how and why it increases costs because if anything it feels like the opposite to me, especially when companies use proprietary pieces and hiding schematics rather than open standards and common configurations.
It has been politicized heavily by maga type crowds who don't really know what it means.... I have had ppl at the barbershop call me a socialist because I wanted right to repair...
I imagine bringing up the current situation with John Deere and how the law would enshrine the right to repair the tractor that you bought with your own money would go farther than most arguments with those folks.
It's an interesting idea. But I like to think if they owned equipment like that, they'd already be on the side of right-to-repair. Farmers are smart businessmen and this is an obviously needless extra cost.
But for the non-farmers, perhaps it'd really sway tribal mindsets to understand people "similar to them" (more so than elite techies...) benefit too.
He's just advertising the filter bubble he lives in. Everyone wants owners to be able to be able to access the info they need to repair things. About the only gripe you'll hear from the most hardline libertarians is "that's not the government's job" and even then it's usually prefixed with "this is nice but". Occasionally some Karen who hasn't really put much thought into it will screech about "but what it someone repairs something wrong and makes it unsafe" as if supposed professionals don't do that all the time and right to repair isn't just as much about enabling individual professionals as it is owners.
I did receive the "it's not the governments job" speech but they had no rebuttal when I asked about border agents seizing official refurb apple parts as "counterfeit" or Microsoft jailing someone trying to keep old PCs out of landfill... Or the concept of IP as a whole and the John Deere tractor example someone else replied to me with in this thread .
As if I'm blind or stupid and wouldn't try the obvious??
You can't reason people out of positions they didn't reason into
Doesnt work. Nor examples of apple screen being seized as "counterfeit" nor blatant abuses by Microsoft or Nintendo that has ppl JAILED for doing what they will with their own property. They don't really listen to reason. Right to repair sounds" nice" and like it might help poor people .... So they will fight it to the death as socialism handouts.
Reasonable people are sometimes lead to believe that repairability is counter to
safety (i.e. "if an amature does the repair wrong, they could hurt themselves or the owner"),
security (i.e. "if we let people know how it works, it'll be easier to hack"),
technilogical advancement (i.e. "smartphones would have to be chunky bricks with no water resistance if we designed them to be easily opened for repair"),
consumer protection (i.e. "unauthorized repair technicians are unaccountable and might do something unscrupulous to your device"),
value (i.e. "if companies have to design for repair and provide support for repair, then those costs get passed onto consumers"),
among other things. I don't find these arguments compelling and I think there is plenty of precedent for repairability being best for consumers. But they come up a lot - especially from anti-R2R lobbiests.
Our society has also been trained to be consumers, always throwing away old stuff in favor of the latest and greatest. When something breaks, the first thought is usally "how much will it cost to replace this?" instead of "how do I fix it?" Everything is treated as disposible, so there isn't much motivation for the average person to care about repair.
+ecology (i.e. "the new device uses 1kW less energy per month so you shouldn't even try fixing the old one")
But there isn't really an "overwhelming majority political opinion" on this site? Hence the long threads of comments of people disagreeing on the merits of ideas. Unless you're referring to the anti-trump sentiment, which is more pan-political as there are obviously a whole bunch of Americans that don't want to see our country destroyed regardless of how we wish it might be reformed.
When you say pan-political do you mean this:
a specific term, used mainly in social sciences as a designation for those forms of nationalism that aim to transcend (overcome, expand) traditional boundaries.
I never heard of the term before as why Im asking.
Also, in my own view. I don't consider myself political, I watch what people do, versus what they say they're going to do. And for me, any political figure can say one thing when the really want to do another.
I agree that government needs to be reformed, but somhow, Im thinking the reform issue is just being used as a vehicle to push a Accelerationism agenda.
Almost anything is worth it to stop the mutilation of children for the gender religion. Leftists have themselves to blame for Trump being elected.
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He got 49.8% of the popular vote.
The first time, didn't he get more than that the second time though?
2016: 46.1%
2020: 46.8%
2024: 49.8%44
No. Trump got a 49.8% plurality of the vote was the second time around. The first time around he only got 46.1% to Hillary Clinton's 48.2% (not even a plurality -- yay electoral college). He did not win a majority in either of his wins, and a plurality only the second time. Amazing what you can do with a $44 billion propaganda platform and another quarter billion in usable funds.
Sure, simplistic populism plays out in wider society where short quips and repetition matter more than coherent ideas. That doesn't really change what I said though.
(For context, because I know the tendency is to pigeonhole commenters - I'm a libertarian who shares many of the frustrations driving the destructive fervor)
the popular vote win represents something like 25% of Americans, the other option being a genocidal dementia patient. how can anyone say that was a legitimate choice?
I don't think Kamala Harris has dementia. I'm not sure I like her stance on Gaza either but criticize her for the right reasons.
my bad, she was so identical to biden on policy and so forgettable i forgot about her.
That's real funny, bravo, but you didn't say that the policies were identical, you said that the choice was a "dementia patient", and now you've moved the goalpost.
If you're not American it's easy to lose track but the other option was Kamala Harris, not Biden.
that's true they swapped her in, but her policy platform was identical. she said there was no difference between her and biden explicitly.
https://www.cnn.com/politics/harris-2024-campaign-biden/inde...
> 25% of Americans
If you’re referring to people who don’t vote, they de facto support the outcome. Particularly if in a swing state.
> genocidal dementia patient
People who voted for Trump (or threw their vote in a swing state) because of Palestine are the definition of stupid and selfish. By prioritising their interests above those they purported to represent, they will have played a (non-critical) role in the destruction of Palestine.
It baffled me that anyone thought that Trump was going to somehow be better than Kamala in regards to Palestine.
I could understand voting for a third party, but Trump outright tried to impose a Muslim ban in his first time, and said that his son in law was going to quickly solve the Middle East conflict single-handedly; seems unlikely that he would be sympathetic to people in the Middle East.
> baffled me that anyone thought that Trump was going to somehow be better than Kamala in regards to Palestine
I was in Phoenix in April 2024 when an otherwise-intelligent friend remarked on whether Trump was pro Israel. She wound up remembering his first term eventually. But at that moment I realised that the checkmate Democrats thought they had Republicans in with abortion, Republicans had Democrats in with Palestine: move to the left and you lose moderates and Pennsylvania. Move to the right (or fail to message) and you lose Michigan and your base. Message at all and you lose swing voters who don’t want to hear about foreign policy.
I'm not sure they thought that Trump would be better.
It seems they think that voting is a test unrelated to the likely outcomes. So you should vote "right" rather than compromising and voting for the better among the possible outcomes.
why would people vote in an election they have no stakes in? if both sides are genocidal, there's no choice where your life gets better.
i didn't vote trump, but i did vote socialist/green. im not voting for genocide sorry.
if liberals want to win elections, they need to start offering a vision of a better future, not bizarre bitcoin financial scams targeted at minorities, privatization of every social benefit, and genocide.
That's fine, you have the right to vote third-party, but are you saying aren't sympathetic to the other issues that Trump is raising?
I am not sure I loved Kamala's stance on Palestine, but I thought that Trump's tariff policies were stupid, his anti-immigrant and anti-trans rhetoric was harmful, and virtually every single stupid thing that the Diablo cheater has done with DOGE (and said he would do before the election, to be clear) seemed short-sighted-at-best and malicious-at-worst. It can be difficult to tell since both Trump and Musk are supremely stupid people who depend on hubris to fail upwards their entire lives, but regardless it seemed pretty bad to me, and it seemed like the totality of it indicated that Kamala would have been fine.
Obviously there's nothing wrong with voting on a single issue, if you think Palestine is more important than all the stuff I listed then that's fair enough and I'm actually fine with people voting third party. The way I see it though, the only person who is going to do exactly what I want, politically speaking, is me, and I'm not running. No matter who I vote for, as a result, is going to inherently be a compromise on something. I have to vote for the person that I think will do the least amount of damage and/or try and prevent the person who is going to do the most from getting in power.
I felt like a vote for a candidate that had a shot at winning was better than one that didn't, even though I tend to actually be a bit closer-aligned with the green party.
> if both sides are genocidal, there's no choice where your life gets better
As I said, stupid and selfish. Not seeing the difference between bombing and explicit ethnic cleansing and relocation for the people in Gaza is modern Sykes-Picot.
Note that I’m fine with that person not voting. (Almost prefer it.) It’s wild, though, to pretend it furthered the interests of the people they pretend to hold dear, versus some personal moral purity they’d prefer to preach about online.
> i did vote socialist/green
This is fine, even admirable, if you’re not in a swing state. If you’re in a swing state, you de facto voted for Trump and the destruction of both Gaza and the dream of a Palestinian nation-state.
> if liberals want to win elections, they need to start offering a vision of a better future
Sure. And never mention Israel or Palestine again, because I no longer have any desire to engage with the US elements of those movements who are, on both sides, adamant about redrawing foreign borders in respect of countries and cultures they have no direct relation to nor experience with.
do you have any concept of what they were doing in Gaza? 85% of schools bombed/damaged, almost every hospital destroyed, tens of millions of tons of rubble, Trump said 1.7-1.8M remaining (meaning 400-500k dead). this is a holocaust. Democrats are not doing an "innocent war". They are hiterites with a smile on their face. The Republicans are hitlerites with a frown. Sometimes vice versa depending on the situation.
I voted in PA. You guys want my vote? appeal to me and people like me.
> 85% of schools bombed/damaged, almost every hospital destroyed, tens of millions of tons of rubble, Trump said 1.7-1.8M remaining
How do you think those 2mm remaining would prefer the future to go? Razed, relocated and—let’s be honest—in all likelihood ersatz enslaved somewhere in Central Asia or Africa? Safe in the knowledge someone in America made this choice for them with a false equivalence between living on their land to fight another day and being dissolved as a nation?
That is the selfishness. That is the holier-than-thou imperial mindset; what matters is how one is portrayed and gets to think about oneself, not how the people one uses as puppets fare. (Sykes and Picot’s supporters thought they were helping, too!)
Don't get your hopes up just because they have something they call right-to-repair legislation. It doesn't imply a practical ability to get repairs done. That requires e.g. parts availability, schematics, etc., way behind what legislation I've heard of requires.
Car manufacturers trying to lock down their systems turned the tide on this issue.
Tell someone their $500 gadget is disposable; most people will be mildly frustrated. Tell someone that their $70,000 vehicle, on which they still have years of payments to make, is disposable or unrepairable by their usual mechanic; most people will feel more than just frustrated.
I want to think you're right, but most of the activation I've seen on RtR is from people who are mechanics and others whose livelihoods are threatened by this (like farmers). Most consumers (at least in my small sample of anecdata) don't seem to care at all for whatever reason. The ones who do are a small enough group to be safely ignored.
On the surface that makes sense. From a consumer perspective lack of RtR just indicates the consumer needs to spend elsewhere if it becomes a concern.
This is an easy dodge. The problem is that when lack of repairability becomes the norm, the consumer no longer has that choice. Or they have to severely compromise their market choices in the search for repairable products.
And wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase. Its something that comes further down the line, when the purchase decision has already been made.
> wanting repairable products is something most consumers don't even think about at time of purchase
This is the core of the problem. The coalition pushing for these laws doesn’t include most consumers. Absent an expensive ad push, I don’t see that changing.
Takeaway: make hay where the sun shines. Focus on farming states and those with lots of dealerships and repair shops. Maybe put an anti-Musk / anti-Tesla angle on it in blue states.
This is why organizations are pushing for repeatability scores to be printed on purchasable items, I think that would go a long way towards hinting that this issue is important for consumers in the long run.
there are ways to omit the right to repair. My mechanic told me story about the new emergency system (mandatory in EU) that calls automatically for help on the crash event. It has a battery and a small controller in a all-in-one module. If the battery goes down - it will stop working and require replacing. If you replace only the battery it won't work. Not sure if you can replace battery while maintaining voltage, but this might be impedimented using plastic cover or something like that.
The new module costs 500$
Also farmers, who have been turned upside down and shaken by John Deere and other manufacturers using locked down hardware. The farming lobby is powerful.
Yeah, my sense in following this is that farmers have had a far bigger impact than consumers. I see your $70,000 car and raise you a $500,000 tractor that's core to a farmer's livelihood.
From what I can tell the only mechanics who care are trying to illegally bypass emmissions controls, or they are trying to run a chop shop steeling cars for parts. Cars are very repairable outside a dealer for most things.
though I'm told tesla is an exception and they are unrepairable - I don't drive one so I wouldn't know.
the above is my personal opinion. My employeer has an opinion on this subject, but I don't speak for them.
This is incorrect. Often times manufacturers will lock down the systems that can report statistics and reset failures to only work with their proprietary tools. They will not sell these tools and force people to go to the dealer. After a while the dealer can close or not sell that tool anymore and now people have an expensive paperweight that caused tons of emissions to create.
This is often accused but it is already a violation of federal laws that have been around for ages. It is called obd and covers a lot more than emissions.
right to repair may cover more but it isn't nearly as useful for normal diagnostics.
Have you ever worked on a car?
OBD standards literally only require emissions controls to be openly diagnosed. The rest of the CEL codes can 100% be vendor specific. So when your body control module shits out, and you can't lock and unlock your doors anymore, you're fucked. When your ABS light comes on, and all you need to do is replace a $10 wheel speed sensor, you still need an expensive proprietary code reader to read the codes.
"OBD II is an acronym for On-Board Diagnostic II, the second generation of on-board self-diagnostic equipment requirements for light- and medium-duty California vehicles. On-board diagnostic capabilities are incorporated into the hardware and software of a vehicle's on-board computer to monitor virtually every component that can affect emission performance. "
Yes a lot of the primary engine functions affect emissions, but the majority of diagnostic codes on modern cars are not available to standard OBDII readers. Once you get outside of the engine, forget it. Every module in modern cars now is VIN-locked and can only be swapped in by a dealer, or some kind of cracked 3rd party software if you're lucky.
I had to find on some strange forum the CEL codes to monitor my DPF. Otherwise I would never know when it is filling up and never be able to reach out a highway to allow it to clean nicely.
This shouldn't be obscure. But they keep saying "hey this is our intellectual property"
OBD isn't enough anymore.
Take Volkswagen vehicles (VW/Audi, mainly). Nearly every electronic module in the car that you'd want to replace has component protection, making it literally impossible for a non-dealer to replace it since you need access to VAG servers to get the token to code the module for the car VIN. I had this experience recently with a CAN bus controller module that just randomly failed. $3k at the dealer. I would have preferred to do it myself but there is no way.
If anyone from The Repair Association is reading, there are a bunch of issues with the website. It sends me to https://tennessee.repair.org/ , which has a broken iframe for the "Make your voice heard" section. Fortunately the "Tell your repair story" section seems to also handle contacting representatives, except it auto-fills to what seems to be the wrong bill. It tells them I want them to support SB0077, which "As introduced, extends the medical cannabis commission to June 30, 2029" (I don't know enough about it to know if I actually do support this or not), instead of SB0499, which "As introduced, enacts the "Agricultural Right to Repair Act." The header of the page has correct bills for last year.
Thanks for the feedback! Fellow Tennessean here so I'm a bit embarrassed. I fixed the Make your voice heard embed (we removed a CallPower integration).
I'm working on fixing the letter now.
We built this tech when having five or six states with bills was exciting. Now, 50 states times two chambers times sometimes two or three bills has become a whole thing to keep track of it all.
Keeping all of these bills up to date across 50 states that change every year is quite the project. It's a pretty manual process right now, alas. I'd love to automate it.
Everyone else: please thread any bill year mismatch / other issues you find here, and I'll fix them!
Note that “introduced” refers to bills being filed. Only five states have actually passed RtR laws yet.
And those that have passed, are not necessarily universal. For example, Californias (I think) only applies to electronics, not cars. The John Deere "thing" is still a "thing" in California. The CA law is mostly about iPhones.
I don't know if they have other bills and what not in play to address other industries.
Proposed would have been more accurate, for the average person.
Pretty clearly this is a good idea, but even the best ideas need champions to get up.
Thanks iFixit for championing this cause for so long. The rest of the world will follow these states’ lead.
I really have trouble understanding that map. What does "Active and Passed" mean? I assumed it meant they had passed laws and updates in the works, but those States are excluded from the praise over the "Passed" States. I presume "Historical" means "Failed to pass" and no current activity to get a law passed.
You are correct, something is not in sync with that map and their description. That is, their description says that five states have passed legislation: New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado. But in the "Passed" and "Active and Passed" categories on the map, it includes those 5 states plus Massachusetts.
FWIW, all of the searching I could find about Right to Repair laws in Massachusetts focused solely on vehicle right to repair (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Massachusetts_Question_1), not on electronic devices generally, so maybe that's why Massachusetts was not included in the description (which specifically said "passed electronics right to repair legislation") but was categorized on the map.
Maybe they're excluded because they've already been praised, and they're focused on the new states joining in? I assume "active and passed" means that they not only passed the laws, but they are currently in effect. A law being passed doesn't necessarily put it into immediate effect.
I did consider that interpretation, but by "praise" I simply mean that the article says "Five states (New York, California, Minnesota, Oregon, and Colorado) have passed electronics Right to Repair legislation" and that "the remaining states are working hard to restore repair competition" which is also overblown since so many of the States are merely "Historical" with nothing going on.
Based on what I know about one of the states in question, I'm thinking that "Active and Passed" means they have both a passed bill and an active bill that isn't passed. Though I'd think they'd call that "Passed and Current" to match their other nomenclature.
Who is most likely to be against this? NADA most of all maybe? They seem to be the most anti-consumer and (rightfully to them) propping up their member dealers.
I wonder if we’ll see “compliance devices” like we saw compliance cars in California. That is, highly modular, repairable devices available to consumers inclined that way, “offsetting” some of the other devices companies like Apple make
Right to Repair should extend to software also. Just the same way someone can make an accessory for a tractor without permission from the tractor company, developers should be able to make tools for software/accounts without the express permission of the megacorp behind it without needing to worry about legal threats.
For comparison:
https://commission.europa.eu/law/law-topic/consumer-protecti...
https://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/press-room/20240419IP...
https://repair.eu/
It's not perfect (see the last link for details), but it's a great start. Also, if you have the time, read the actual directive. It's fairly readable as far as laws go.
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A... - see Article 5.
Also the FAQ:
https://commission.europa.eu/document/download/2d443b31-dc2a...
Also there's an entire directive for batteries:
https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2023/1542/oj
Article 11 is the one that's probably most interesting to people here, the reason why we are now starting to see easily removable batteries in mobile devices, again. Actually "easier to remove", they're definitely not as easy to remove as the Nokia 5110 batteries :-p
Does this mean I have the right to repair my Tesla, and how long until Musk thinks this is a bad idea.
Challenges from Alliance for Automotive Innovation mounting also though:
Massachusetts https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43021108
Maine https://pirg.org/articles/automakers-sue-maine-to-block-repa...
Regarding the Maine aricle:
>The association of automakers also alleges that because the “independent entity” has not created a “standardized platform,” they have no way to securely share vehicle data. They are asking the court to declare the law unenforceable until the independent entity has undertaken its obligations.
That sounds understandable. Just until the independent entity gets their act together.
This is morally obvious. We only have a law about it because somebody's feeling greedy or squeezed.
Law is a maximally complex representation of reality manifested by anxiety.
that last sentence is great.
Time for republicans to call them woke and dei so they can be safely disposed of.
Can someone explain why this isn’t the big win we think it is?
It's better than nothing. But introduced and passed are different things. An introduced bill may never actually become law.
The upside is that this shows how popular RtR is, and there's a good chance at least several states may implement their laws. At some point, even if it isn't universal, all it takes is enough states to force manufacturers to support independent repair by default.
In particular it's depressing that the map near the top of the article shows that for a majority of states, the introduction of the bill is "historical", as in neither passed, active or current, but (IIUC) it was floated in some prior legislative session, but it's not even under consideration in the present session.
They could go for the Apple-in-Europe model, where you have the right to repair only if your geolocation detects you being in a state where it's mandatory for you to have that right, otherwise it still locks you out.
Because this just means a single legislator has sponsored a bill. It doesn't mean it has pass, nor does it it even mean it is likely to pass. It's actual laws getting passed that matter.
Of course this IS a milestone to getting a law passed, and shows that the campaign is getting legislators' notice etc. So it is still good.
Even the "active and passed" states (particularly New York) passed a neutered version of right-to-repair that barely does anything. I only understand vaguely, but Louis Rossman has been outspoken about the progress of NY right-to-repair in particular, and how it flopped hard. As much as right-to-repair seems like a party line issue, even many of the Democrats have thus far been all talk and no substance.
Because the large corporations have virtually unlimited power to water down bills with campaign contributions. It takes very little to money to sway a representative federally. How much less do you think it takes to sway a state level candidate?
Spending cash on candidates to prevent bills like this is likely a rounding error on their yearly budget.
I think it is. But what company is going to advertise this on times square?
Because a bill was introduced does not mean that it will pass nor be signed into law.
>Can someone explain why this isn’t the big win we think it is?
I mean, there is the psychological phenomenon known as the Just World Hypothesis. When presented with something that's simply bad, or simply good, people are skeptical and tempted to search for the counterbalancing element, treating it like a trick question even if it's not.
And so it can be hard to accept it simply is good. But that doesn't have to be the end of the conversation because that impulse can be channeled productively just by changing the baseline. Right to repair, I would think, simply is good, but since we need a bad thing, we can talk about the long road ahead to full implementation, or the effort necessary to overcome cultural inertia, as well as status quo extremism in our institutions.
But I think the right to repair itself is a good thing.
i’m more for right to repair than not but i can see unintended consequences of things like iphones being bulkier and heavier if modular components like batteries are required in the broadest reach of the concept. these bills may be narrower and probably are. that’s the ultimate question though is how far the balance should be.
Im pretty sure thats a falsity. Making tech repair friendly doesnt really add to the form factor of a device if you know how to design correctly, even with phones.
I remember that phone[0] that google killed and that was back in 2013? Since then other projects have sprung up to tackle this. There are links at the bottom of the page.
[0]: https://www.onearmy.earth/project/phonebloks
One drawback to consumer-rights laws is that we as consumers end up with less access to cool stuff. Some companies have chosen to stop selling into the B2C market altogether, to avoid incurring expenses and liabilities associated with conforming to right-to-repair and other pro-consumer legislation. Rohde & Schwarz and Keysight come to mind.
That is bullshit, of course -- just an excuse for companies to dodge basic business responsibilities, and a blatant failure on their part to acknowledge why consumers felt this legislation was needed in the first place. But it is certainly true that there are short-term drawbacks.
To be fair, Rohde & Schwarz and Keysight aren't names I'd normally associate with consumer devices. On the other hand, neither are Mcdonands' ice cream machines.
Interesting! I think you're probably onto something there. Agree it's more of an excuse than a reason, but still there will be low margin products that have to go that direction due to the math.
I tend to think B2C is who needs the most protection from the gov since C are relatively powerless, whereas B2B tends to be more balanced, but the more I think about it the more I think that perhaps we're overlooking an important area. Nevertheless I think for now we need to focus on B2C and worry about B2B later. Can't spread ourselves too thin.
Lawyers and lobbyists paid lots of money to figure out how to subvert stuff.
OEMs may work to make stuff less consumer repairable/upgradeable to force folks to use their repair services that need stuff like bga reballing or soldering. Bye bye upgradable ram slots!
Things like software locks and restrictions in the name of ‘security’ will lock stuff down and make repair harder (see Apple’s part pairing)
Wait a bit and you'll see what Tim Cook's donation to the inauguration fund bought him.
A lump of coal if he's lucky
> Things like software locks and restrictions in the name of ‘security’ will lock stuff down and make repair harder (see Apple’s part pairing)
Unfortunately, I don't see an alternative to that given how juicy targets even locked phones were for "chop shops" before Apple introduced parts pairing. People were mugged left and right for their phones.
(Obviously the solution would be to tackle poverty, drug abuse and mental health issues, but that is even more unrealistic)
Yes - but they paint with a big brush. Unfortunately legitimate repair and reuse is caught in the mix and made much more difficult.