So yeah, politicians try to defend the general interest best they can. Sometimes they make mistakes of course.
Countries with strong regulations can thrive. I live in France. People like to bash on our social system and on our strong regulations, but we are still one of the worlds greatest economic powers. Same goes with Germany.
Except that's not how it happened, at least in England and the US in the 19th century.
That's not true. All it needs is for one business among hundreds to require working 90 hours a week. Then all employees would want to work 90 hours a week instead of 100 hours. Then automatically lots of people would want to work in this company instead of all the others.
The other companies in order to keep workers in their companies would also want to lower the bar to 90 hours. And if everyone would require 90 hours a week, then when 1 company would lower the bar to 80 hours a week... etc.
For everyone else, though, this works the other way too. All you need is for one person who's facing foreclosure to put in 110 hour weeks before it becomes the norm.
Hell, how many people here are on Slack at the weekend because their colleagues are and they fear looking lazy, and not because they're "passionate" (or whatever BS word we're using to describe abuse)
By introducing more and more regulations, it's more complicated to run the business. Less people are creating businesses, because it's so complicated to run it, and regulations change from year to year. So, the only real beneficiary of regulations are businesses established 100 years ago, where there were not much regulations, and they had their 'hothouse' conditions allowing them to grow without much competition.
In my country in small towns there are i.e. 3 companies to choose from when a person is trying to find a low-tech job. The owner of the first company is a good buddy with the mayor, the second company has a big legal department and is able to pull lots of million of PLNs from EU's dotations, and the third one will probably end their life in few next years, because it's too hard to compete with the previous two. So, in this context, it is possible that the previous 2 will just raise the work time bar and nobody will shed a tear about anyone.
I do see what you're saying, for instance setting a maximum interest rate on payday loans caused lenders to shift to that maximum (even those which were below before), and having rules about what's part-time or full-time work does tend to solidify jobs around those points (get as much work out of them as you can without providing health insurance, etc.) but the alternative doesn't seem to work.
If that is the case, it seems unwarranted to present it as an example of failure. Poor people were attracted by the success, and accommodating them was not seamless. But how could it be - no system can be prepared for that.
What you describe works if companies struggle to hire people and need to compete with each-other for workforce. Nowadays in many sectors throughout the world (and often for less educated workforce) it's the other way around: there are more people looking for a job than there are vacancies.
Clearly in this situation it works the other way around: the worker who's ready to work longer for cheaper will be hired over the others. Then it's a race to the bottom.
Beyond that, I often feel like most people on HN are hugely privileged when it comes to job hunting and working conditions and it shows in the discussions. It's easy to lose track of the difficulties the majority of people experience when it comes to finding a job when you have half a dozen recruiters fighting over how much money they're going to throw at your face at any given moment.
"I wish those recruiters would stop spamming my inbox" is not a problem the average human being has ever (and probably will ever) experience.
I also don't think a sane person would like to stop receiving messages from recruiters.
I'm also not sure I understand what you have in mind when you write "privilege".
Why not?
>I also don't think a sane person would like to stop receiving messages from recruiters.
If you're not looking for a new job it's a useless distraction. Emails aren't too bad, phone calls are more annoying.
>I'm also not sure I understand what you have in mind when you write "privilege".
Then try re-reading my comment with a less adversarial attitude, I think it's fairly transparent. You seem more interested in winning the argument than engaging in constructive discussion, but maybe it's just one of these situations where the text medium fails to convey enough nuance and context cues to judge a person's intentions.
Did I get this right?
How exactly can the market be doing good work here? And why didn't this work with cars, where the hobbyist can no longer service 99% of their newly bought car?
The problem here is that people don't really want these devices. Maybe they think they want them, but in reality the effort to have them repaired would be too much to them. As others have pointed out, wages are the real issue, not cost of spare parts.
Except when no one provides such products, or the only ones fitting that goal require very large sacrifices elsewhere.
Look at mobile phones and tablets before the EU rules. Finding one that charged off a standard USB socket was near impossible.
Again with mobile phones, since there is no right to actually own and control your device, finding a phone that allows you to root it constrains your choices in just about every other way, including ways that have nothing to do with being able to root the phone, such as being a second class citizen from your carriers point of view (e.g. Verizon refused to enable international calling for my phone because it wasn't an "approved", aka Verizon branded, phone.)
So, right to repair regulations mean that I wouldn't have to decide between being environmentally conscious (if that open is even available) and having a product that works.
> wages are the real issue, not cost of spare parts.
I can and do perform many repairs myself when the device allows a repair to be done (even sometimes when it doesn't).
You have things like fairphone where you can exchange and upgrade parts. In general, the magic of capitalism is that if people want something, somebody will eventually make it.
I also wonder how much of companies trying to prevent repairs is actually BECAUSE of regulations. Like they could be liable if something goes wrong. What if somebody tries to repair a phone, does it wrong, and the battery explodes. Who would be liable?
Your final point, with you being able to do a lot of repairs: you are not normal in that respect. Most people could not do that.
And even the hourly rate of most people would probably make it ineffective for them to do it, even if they could.
Since it is inefficient, I question the assumption that repairs are automatically good for the environment. Maybe buying a newer, more energy efficient machine every couple of years is better in some cases, especially if the old machine is recycled properly.
I would be much more in favor of regulations with respect to recycling. This "repairing is better" is mostly ideology and virtue signalling.
Citation needed. People keep trotting this out as if it's some kind of accepted truth, and it just isn't.
As usually, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.
I think what the EU is trying to do is to force both companies and consumers to think about the consequences of mindless mass consumption and obsolescence. Beyond petty laws and regulations, the EU sometimes does have a noble fundamental concept behind their policies; it remains to be seen if the resulting policies are effective in practice.
the word you're looking for is "populist" - i.e.,"we care, but we don't care enough to start looking bad".
It's a good step, but not great. Greater urgency is needed at this time.
We have regulation that makes machines safer. This is regulation that makes machines safer for the environment. If the regulation turns out to be counterproductive it can be adapted later...
Experts are not better than business leaders at running businesses.
As usually, when politicians think they can do business better than the businesses themselves, this will probably be a net waste.