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Comment by djsumdog | Hacker News Reader

> one shitty product.

Many of the things made during the Soviet era were made to last. I'd recommend the documentary: "The Lightbulb Conspiracy." It talks about planned obsolesce and the throw away economy.

It's not necessarily because the Soviet state, but more simply due to resource scarcity and needing to make things that last a very long time.

It's more than appalling that our cell phones are only intended to last two ~ four years. Of course that gives miners and Chinese manufactures jobs and growth (and the war industry too as they start a few more wars to collect resources).

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>Many of the things made during the Soviet era were made to last.

They were made to last because they were costly and difficult to obtain, but they were of shockingly poor quality. Consumer goods in the soviet union were uniformly terrible. These dreadful products were the natural result of material shortages, obsolete design, inept management, a total indifference to quality and consumers who had no other choice.

Look at soviet cars. Trabants, Yugos and Ladas were shoddily built from the cheapest materials. Soviet citizens kept these cars running because they had no other choice - either you figured out some way to fix up your pile of junk, or you walked. When Ladas and Yugos were exported to the west, they required major upgrades to meet safety and emissions standards and were still the worst cars on the market.

That maps across the entire soviet economy. The very best goods available to soviet citizens were usually worse than the shoddiest goods on the western market.

> but more simply due to resource scarcity and needing to make things that last a very long time

And no pressure to make shitty things just to ensure you have return customers.

Increase sales tax on status/luxury items. Decrease sales tax on long-life products.

I don't see how the latter would help - "long-life" products would break anyway.

OTOH, if we could get minimum warranties from the EU's standard 2 years to something like 20 years for appliances and 10+ years for digital electronics... maybe then companies would start to care.

The idea is to give companies an incentive to make tough stuff by increasing their revenue for such products. But let's do both!

There is both good and bad in a quick product cycle.

The bad, if done wrong, you get poor recycling of input materials. If done right, you get iteratively better more environmentally friendly products.

We would not want to be using inefficient air conditioners, washers, dryers, refrigerators, water heaters, etc. from yen years ago. They are simply inefficient compared to a new model. The problem is in recycling the displaced products.

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