Haha, tell me you're from the US without telling me from the US. Government regulation in this sector is exactly what it needs. Hell, it's one of the main reasons we managed to standardize on micro-USB for mobile devices; it was a flexible enough standardization that the industry has been able to switch to USB-C as a whole without running foul of it.
Right now there's clearly an incentive for companies to push these shitty features, whereas many consumers would consider that a downside. Regulations don't mean the complete removal of the free market, but rather the incorporation of that kind of externality into the market.
God no please stop with the anti-regulation BS.
> The answer is don't buy the damn house it's that simple.
If you're already several months into building, with partial payments having been made, when the builder tells you that this is the only option allowed, they have you over the barrel. They've violated the social contract of providing options, and expect you to pay the cost of it. That cost is either a reduction of your choices, or needing to forgo incremental design altogether while maintaining an antagonistic relationship with your builder.
> Pay more build what you want and be happy.
The parent post already tried to pay more to build what you want. The general contractor did not allow for any other options. The free market does not work with this sort of bundling.
> People want cheap houses and this is that.
First, nowhere did the poster state that they were unwilling to pay a higher price for a functional oven. They stated that there was no other option available. Second, the term you're alluding to is "revealed preference" [0], which is a load of economic bollocks. It implies that you can entirely ignore what people state they want, the circumstances in which choices have been made, or forms of market failure (e.g. [1]).
Overall, the appropriate response to market failure, including anti-competitive deals between builders and appliance manufacturers, is to change the environment in which that market exists. Introducing regulation in order to avoid unfavorable Nash Equilibria is the role of government, in order to fix these market failures.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revealed_preference
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_small_decisions
"Simply fix the government" is useless advice.
Here are some starting patches...
First we have to make political donations anonymous and capped. Also, no money from companies, only people.
Then we need to fix the fake news problem. Make sure nobody is living in a bubble and we are all living in the same reality. (The fix is to make news the forth estate officially)
Then we need to fix the size and shape of our electorates. Much smaller. No Gerrymandering.
Also need to ditch the two party system and allow our elected representatives to vote as desired by the electorate they represent.
Also push as much power as we can down to state and city level governments. Allow states and cities to be more different to one another so that we can all learn from the successes and failures of the choices of other states. Move power closer to the people.
> The fix is to make news the forth estate officially
It's difficult for me to see how formally establishing the main-stream media as a branch of government would do anything to improve the credibility of the news.
And just to mention, we also have problems in our society with the centralization and expanding powers of law and order in our government. Maybe that isn't the best example of "we centralized that, and now everything is OK!".
I didn't have it in my list above, but one thing capitalism did get right is that humans are self interested and motivated by competition. We need some of that competition in our public services so that the individuals who run them can be rewarded for doing a god job (whatever that might mean.)
For instance if I think scrapping the department of energy would make things work better, how can I get that done?
I can't. It's impossible. If HP doesn't make a laptop I like however, I can buy a Dell.
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?st=Dumb+tv&_dync...
If you have specific problems with my suggestion as proposed I'd be happy to discuss the details, but "I don't like Biden" is not a convincing argument against the concept of regulations.
In my view, an oven that needs wifi to operate correctly crosses a line from creative business strategy into corporate abuse, nobody wants to live in a world where you need to login to a corporate website to cook your meals, but this is a completely plausible reality that we have the power to avoid if we agree that we don't have to live that way. I think regulation works well here too because the undesirable behavior is clear and easy to target legally without much possibility for unintended consequences. Further, this is a new trend that hasn't become widespread (yet), so getting rid of it now won't be disruptive to existing businesses.
For microwaves and toasters this kind of thing isn't a big deal because they're small and cheap, but stationary appliances like stoves and ovens are appliances that can't simply be replaced on a dime, they are investments meant to last many years and in practice they often operate as part of the home itself and can see multiple owners throughout their lifetimes. Not to mention, the rental and housing market is absolutely insane right now and for the foreseeable future, the vast majority of people do not have the luxury to quibble over the type of oven installed in their home assuming it is otherwise functional and sanitary. Or, more likely, they won't have any idea about this detail until its too late.
It's pretty close to 222 years.
Maybe in some alternative universe where the government never mandated social security numbers, driver's license numbers, birth certificates, or laws against "fraud" for using narrowly-scoped nyms. Where the economic treadmill wasn't run so hard, so people had time to practice good digital hygiene like installing Adblock and the advertising industry never developed. But that's not the world we're staring down, and we only get one.