My Kingdom for the old, outdated, inefficient tech

B/c that stuff actually worked when you needed it.

My fancy, government mandated, high SEER computerized furnace is throwing a random error "E2", which when you look it up is so insightful it could be anything from a dirty filter to a major part failure. It will work, then kick the error and rather than restart after X time it just shuts down in error condition.

So I'm going to have to nursemaid my furnace all night, and all day etc. until someone can get out here with the right tech to fix this thing. Probably a couple of days. I do have a great HVAC guy, this isn't on him, but he will be busy with people who have zero heat, and my heat is just at the expense of getting any sleep or work done tomorrow.

Give me the old tech. Cars without computers that ran for 500,000 miles and you could fix in your own garage. Furnaces that yes were less efficient and less sealed, but were workhorses that kept you from freezing to death when it got this cold.

There's a reason firearms technology hasn't really evolved too much since the early 1900s. It's an area where a) the government has yet to regulate design and efficiency standards, and b) reliability is usually the single biggest factor in having people buy your product. That's why fingerprint lock guns etc. are so deeply unpopular. They are the firearms equivalent of the cars with 50 separate computers, furnaces with completely unhelpful error codes on their overly complex circuit boards, etc.

Give me a coal fired boiler and a 1951 Ford. I'll pass them down to my grandkids in still running condition. I'd have to stack Teslas and these modern furnaces up like cordwood if they didn't take them at the city dump.

Refrigerators are the worst. I mean, I get it, but there ought to be some compromises between the compromises, you know?

It's not just that you can't expect them to last. You can't afford to fix them. The cost is 90% of what it costs to buy a new one, so they become disposable, landfill items.

Again, I get it. But we're too smart not to have something in between an appliance that lasts 30 years that is inefficient and an appliance that lasts 3-5 years that is efficient, but you need to buy 5-6 of them in the same time period. Just has to be some middle ground.

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Just has to be some middle ground.

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A fireplace, warm morning stove, a slide rule and an abacus, and a horse would fit the bill I think.

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Originally Posted by Darrell KSR

Refrigerators are the worst. I mean, I get it, but there ought to be some compromises between the compromises, you know?

It's not just that you can't expect them to last. You can't afford to fix them. The cost is 90% of what it costs to buy a new one, so they become disposable, landfill items.

Again, I get it. But we're too smart not to have something in between an appliance that lasts 30 years that is inefficient and an appliance that lasts 3-5 years that is efficient, but you need to buy 5-6 of them in the same time period. Just has to be some middle ground.

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Yep. Hate appliances that are essentially disposable due to cost to inspect/repair. Fridges are bad, washers/dryers may be the worst.

My parents had a Kenmore fridge that lasted 35 years. We bought one in 1996 and it lasted until 2006, and we were told we were lucky to get that much out of it.

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Originally Posted by CitizenBBN

B/c that stuff actually worked when you needed it.

My fancy, government mandated, high SEER computerized furnace is throwing a random error "E2", which when you look it up is so insightful it could be anything from a dirty filter to a major part failure. It will work, then kick the error and rather than restart after X time it just shuts down in error condition.

So I'm going to have to nursemaid my furnace all night, and all day etc. until someone can get out here with the right tech to fix this thing. Probably a couple of days. I do have a great HVAC guy, this isn't on him, but he will be busy with people who have zero heat, and my heat is just at the expense of getting any sleep or work done tomorrow.

Give me the old tech. Cars without computers that ran for 500,000 miles and you could fix in your own garage. Furnaces that yes were less efficient and less sealed, but were workhorses that kept you from freezing to death when it got this cold.

There's a reason firearms technology hasn't really evolved too much since the early 1900s. It's an area where a) the government has yet to regulate design and efficiency standards, and b) reliability is usually the single biggest factor in having people buy your product. That's why fingerprint lock guns etc. are so deeply unpopular. They are the firearms equivalent of the cars with 50 separate computers, furnaces with completely unhelpful error codes on their overly complex circuit boards, etc.

Give me a coal fired boiler and a 1951 Ford. I'll pass them down to my grandkids in still running condition. I'd have to stack Teslas and these modern furnaces up like cordwood if they didn't take them at the city dump.

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No offense Chuck but you are off the mark on this one. This is almost 100% due to the manufacturers cutting costs and intentionally making things hard/impossible to repair, not any sort of government mandated features. The vast majority of manufacturers these days aren't just against repair but are actively antagonistic to it. In large part because if you can't fix it then you have to buy another one. The sooner you do that, even if only 20% buy from the original company, then the quicker their number look better, the better the stock price, and the bigger the bonus that the C-suite gets. There is a huge push right now by Tesla and others to make pretty much all cars unrepairable as well (or as close to that as possible).

Essentially nothing about these government regulations mean you have to cut corners and lock out reparability. The manufacturers use the government as a cheap and easy scapegoat, even though it is an outright lie, because it is far cheaper than making things which would last which cuts into their bottom line.

Also, cars that last 500,000 miles is a relatively recent thing (early 90s to late 00's depending on the company). The vast majority, especially American made, were barely capable of lasting 100,000 miles. Yeah you could repair them but at some point, it became just as cost prohibitive due to so many things breaking. For example, my 96 Pontiac Grand Prix was a total piece of crap. Failure after failure. Yeah I could fix them but after a wheel falls off and it blows a piston rod, it just wasn't worth it. On the other hand, my 2004 Honda CR-V is at 250,000 miles and I just replaced the starter motor myself. Pretty much all of the documentation is available online for any repair (big or small). As for the reparability of the late 90s and on vehicles, a large part of it is due to government mandated ODBII standard. It is easy to check data, diagnose issues, etc. There is actually a big push right now to require the same on all modern vehicles.

I am a big follower of the 'right to repair' movement, so I am intricately familiar with the current issues around reparability.

HVAC guy that has been doing some work at the office, says the environmental regulations are making HVAC systems to complicated to repair for the DIY Handy Man.

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Originally Posted by KentuckyWildcat

HVAC guy that has been doing some work at the office, says the environmental regulations are making HVAC systems to complicated to repair for the DIY Handy Man.

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That is almost entirely not true. The one exception being a certification required for adding/removing refrigerant from a system. For everything else, the OEMs are just refusing to provide decent error detection/messages/indicators like they used to (along with outright trying to lock users out of being able to do simple repairs ) and blaming environmental regulations. It isn't like the main things that a DIYer would be able to fix have changed much (failed fan motors, failed motor start capacitors, clogged filters, etc.).

I'm no fan of big companies, but it will take me a couple of hours to break this down fully, and how you aren't wrong but you aren't right either, b/c the underlying alliance between big government and big business has led to exactly this situation.

No, big corporations don't want to fight government, and will blame it will pocketing more profits, but they are in fact in bed with big government, using regulations as a key barrier to entry to make sure they can then get away with exactly what you describe.

Big business isn't pro-market. The established players in any market are inherently wanting to lower competition, raise barriers to entry and they LOVE government b/c that locks them in place as a market leader.

I never said businesses weren't at fault, if you notice. I said, and will happily maintain, that these companies couldn't possibly get away with those policies without the assistance of government making sure no one can offer cheap, if inefficient, technologies that would compete against those big corporate producers.

The fault is in all of them, but I know there is no way to change humans from being profit motivated, so the key is to maintain a competitive market that does not allow large corporations to control those markets. Government regulation is a key way to control barriers to entry by raising costs of entry, development and production such that big companies can create a producer surplus that cannot be eliminated b/c there is no free market to allow new players willing to sell and cut into that surplus.

People in this country increasingly criticize capitalism and free markets, and don't even realize we aren't a capitalist free market country any longer, and are less of one every year. The few markets that are left with relatively little regulation generally function very well. Government has no standards for example for computer efficiency, and they don't require you to get a license to build your own computer from components, and you don't need a city contractors license or a state board certification for it, so guess what? Computers are cheap, efficient and there is vast competition for systems so larger producers are limited in their ability to gouge and distort the market.

This is a much longer discussion, but I'm pretty comfortable defending the fact that government plays a huge role in this problem. Obviously they are not dragging Amana kicking and screaming into this position, but rather are marching hand in hand with them. Which of course is how key heads of federal agencies retire to end up on their boards of directors or in well paid advisory or lobbying roles.


As for "right to repair" I too am a huge advocate, and big supporter. I've been following the French laws in this area for some time as they are arguably the most forward of this movement, and will be curious to see the impact.

Also as a libertarian I will point out that the true costs of production, i.e. disposal of vast amounts of toxic materials and rare earth minerals etc. are not being accounted for, again b/c government basically runs the landfill business and for many political reasons, again in league with the Apples of the world, have no desire to truly charge consumers the real cost of such disposal, which of course would have to be in the end dealt with by Apple, which has many lobby firms making sure this tidy arrangement stays in place.

But none of this distortion happens if government does its job, which is not to get in bed with big corporations, but to maintain a level field of competition and to insure there are not externalities to production being absorbed by those not using the product.

If I could legally buy the parts for my furnace and build it myself and not be in violation of about 100 federal, state and local laws then we wouldn't be having this discussion. b/c like a desktop computer, we would have a wide range of options at low cost to suit just about any particular set of consumer wants. Maybe some of that is justified due to safety, but the comparison still stands.

Of course safety is the favorite justification for regulators and their existence, with climate change being the biggest such "safety" pitch of all time. But most of this is justified to either improve safety or "protect the consumer". Both admirable goals which, with the partnership of bureaucracies that want to justify their expansion and budgets, and businesses that want to lock in their market share advantages, quickly become overreaching and corrupt and stifling.