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Comment by fshbbdssbbgdd | Hacker News Reader

True enough, but I’m hopeful for an energy-abundant future where we figure out how to make solar, wind, nuclear, and batteries cheaply and at scale. Imagine what we could do if energy efficiency didn’t trade off against carbon output. We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years. And the resources it takes to do that could be redirected elsewhere.

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> We wouldn’t have to replace all our appliances with something slightly more efficient (and less maintainable) every so many years

We are forced into poorly built, unrepairable appliances through a market failure.

Failure of consumers to spread the word about appliance repairability. Fraudulent forgery of consumer reviews by manufacturers.

Failure of the housing market driving the repair technicians out if business - its cheaoer for someone in china to spend 10 hours building new washing machine than for someone in uk to spend 2 hours fixing it.

In some cases, a deliberate subversion of the spare parts market by manufacturers.

There is not a grand plan to improve efficiency and solve clinate change.

Sure, there’s not much incentive for manufacturers to develop reliable appliances, because people just shop based on price and features. Once of the only constraints is government regulations which ban the old, less efficient designs. Take away those regs, and manufacturers who don’t want to pay for R&D can churn out those simple designs again.

> because people just shop based on price and features

But thats all they can do - suppose I want to fins out if a Samsung phone is more reliable than Fairphone or Huawei - how would I find out? Will their salesmen tell me the truth? would customer support? Does their marketing department publish mean time between failure or statistics for repair?

There is very little hard data where anyone took thousands of appliances and measured their reliability.

I guess part of the problem here is that everything changes so frequently. If technology moved so slowly that generational change in craftsmen was the major source of a change in quality, then you could actually use word of mouth and other external sources of information. Nowadays, the experience of a year or two ago really doesn't necessarily tell you much about the quality of the products that are available now.

The Linus Tech Tips labs is already doing wonders in their market niche, I really really hope it all works out for them.

They've built up significant trust with their community, they're not perfect, but close enough that I'd trust their reviews blindly in domains where I'm not informed enough already. (Everything except their dabble into datacenter storage, virtualization and networking)

Everything else is getting cheaper, at an exponential rate, but nukes are getting more costly.

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