I think we ran the experiment to know what consumer choice gets us: petrol with lead in it, and associated pollution and brain damage.

Do you have an ETA when the magical consumer choice / free market will finally solve issues of single-use plastic pollution, unrecycleability of most products, toxic e-waste poisoning children, slavery in the supply chains, etc, ?

personally I would add "environmental impact" to the list of things that justify regulation which does cover battery/electronics reuse, but then making something reusable doesn't actually mean most folks will bother

I think this the main problem: do you trust a bureaucracy(is. non-technical people working in good faith to make rules for the society) to understand the implications of products or do you trust the manufacturer to do the same. In my opinion the bureaucrat can have good intentions, but lacks technical knowledge, while the manufacturer has the technical knowledge, but has incentives to disregard safety.

Both have incentives to undermine or promote public safety and both have different avenues of accountability.

Is there actually any difference?

Nailed it. Meanwhile, there has never been an experiment with government intervention that has failed. For example, Agent Orange only existed because of consumer choice, as you astutely imply. So your point is airtight and not full of holes from every angle.

>Do you have an ETA when the magical consumer choice / free market will finally solve issues of single-use plastic pollution, unrecycleability of most products, toxic e-waste poisoning children, slavery in the supply chains, etc, ?

What's the ETA on magical government regulation fixing these problems?

I know how to fix politics using consumer choice - what if you could donate money to politicians, and whoever get the most money wins? Oh, wait..

The consent is only required for tracking cookies used to sell your data. So if you don't track your users, then you don't have to the pop-up.

I hope the EU comes down really hard on the companies deliberately making opting out of tracking difficult. A few billion dollar fines and those pop-ups requiring me to manually untick 300 different trackers will be a thing of the past.

At least NOYB does: https://noyb.eu/en/more-cookie-banners-go-second-wave-compla...

This should have been / should be fixed on the user end.

Browsers now use better approaches, but nothing is guaranteed when web developers try to circumvent the protections because they cannot accept that no means no.

I bet Americans love picking a $80,000 hospital bill over a $90,000 one.

Government decisions, done well, go far beyond what voting with one’s wallet can. Oftentimes the consumer is just squeezed out of the equation and everyone’s price will follow.

One company decides to do away with replaceable batteries and you will say "let the consumer vote with their wallets." Then everyone does the same and the user can no longer vote.

What we get is instead a mountain of waste that everyone has to pay for, indirectly, forever.

I'm always all in for government regulation, as long as those regulations are in the benefits of the common man.

I’ll agree, with one caveat - governments MUST price in externalities appropriately.

In the case of batteries in things like cell phones, that externality is excess waste and more mining of raw materials. There should be taxes applied somewhere in the supply chain to force manufacturers/consumers to manage that waste and reduce mining.

This is needed in the US too. I just bought an electric toothbrush to replace a very old one. My old one is 10+ years old. Has easily replaceable batteries. New one? Nope! Manual says if battery doesn’t hold a charge, remove the battery and recycle the device. Removing battery literally destroys the device.

There are videos on YouTube that show the battery is literally a Panasonic generic one. Wanna bet if this new brush can be used for 10+ years?

Markets are not efficient nor complete. And telling ourselves that is a lie.

I bet there are hundreds of counter-examples to your claim that water-proofing with an o-ring is an engineering challenge of the utmost difficulty.

No way is this new tooth brush going to last me 10 years.

And people making excuses - do you know that kids electric tooth brushes have replaceable batteries? Shouldn’t that be a bigger problem? Here’s the kicker - kids electric tooth brushes don’t have replaceable brush heads.

Yeah - this is nothing but planned obsolescence.

The comment you replied to explicitly said:

> > an o-ring, you know like the one that keeps the water in the pipes.

> You couldn’t really submerge it and expect it to continue working. There is a huge difference between hermetic sealing an an O ring or a gasket.

No, there isn't. O-rings and gaskets are exactly what one uses to make stuff waterproof.

So many things are water proof and user serviceable: Piping, engines, transmissions, water cooling (for pc or car) and those electric toothbrushes that have replaceable batteries.

This isn't a technical problem. We figured out how to make things water tight a long time ago.

A toothbrush is cylindrical, like a pipe. We know gaskets exist. A threaded cap on the end with an o-ring would suffice to allow easy access to the internals while keeping even pressurised water out.

In fact, the majority of electric toothbrushes fail due to water entering the head end, and they don't have a good seal there.

That in itself is an incredibly ideological remark. "These arguments are false/invalid/insincere! There is no cost/manufacturing/reliability/usage benefit to completely sealing a toothrush, gaskets/o-rings/re-welding are just as good!"

Ya, I get it: you'll make us buy the toothbrushes that became outdated 10 years ago through some sort of top-down government regulation, and we will grudgingly like it because all of our arguments otherwise for preferring the newer things are invalid.

Why is that; where does it come from? Is it some weird fetish you have, or what?

> you are really curious and not trying to find the most stupid excuse possible

This sounds like you are trying to make a Reddit comment rather than an HN one.

Nope. My point was that you can have things in hyper hard conditions, underwater at high pressure and salt and you can still say shoot torpedo.

Do I need to send you video proof that tooth brushes with replaceable batteries exists or you can google it yourself? My son has one that is almost 10 years old too , it uses 2 AA batteries , brand is Oral-B .

Please don't excuse wanton waste. It's not a good look.

However, the cumulative frustration and time wasted by that button is probably quite large, across the world.

It directly impacts long term health issues at a global scale, through e-waste and carbon footprint. In your book this should totally be a governing body decisions.

2. I feel like the customers do not have much of a choice if no product allows to replace the battery. So there is no way to vote with our wallet.

3. Which cookie disaster? I only see a directive that enforce companies to reveal when they are tracking users.

I have some bad news for you: https://www.transportenvironment.org/discover/shipping-emiss...

Where is the sense in greenwashing yourself about recycling your lightbulb when it was made 6000 miles away, and added more CO2 emissions than manufacturing it end-to-end?

In other words, the new proposed rules were intended to benefit primarily the industry in the long term, not necessarily the consumer. Product design departments may not think farther than the next product, but their higher-ups should be concerned.

This also reminds me how people are blamed in 3rd world countries for throwing the trash on street. The solution is to give people garbage bins and have garbage trucks pick them up. No one likes to throw trash on street. But no politician there has managed to thinks of this as solution yet. Burocratic solution is levy taxes, fines and have celebrities clean street for a photo in press.

> If fixed batteries makes product smaller or better

I don't think I've ever used a single product that is better for using fixed batteries. Even the size is arguable; if hearing aids can have replaceable batteries then so can Airpods.

The german constitutional court (and IIRC the dutch one?) ruled that any govt action will also have to account for the "right to future" of current and coming generations. Trashing our planed (literally, in this case) doesn't square with that.

This kind of "constant interference" from the EU is very welcome on my part and on the part of anyone who has spent a bit of time thinking about sustainability, pollution, and generally the question of "how do we keep a planet worth living on?" Your borderline-religious (borderline because it lacks a moral backing, it seems to mostly do away with morality altogether) dismissal of "interference" is exactly what got us into this mess.

I'm very happy to be made aware by the sites themselves of their degree of sleeziness.

If manufacturers need regulation to correctly protect consumer health, what makes you think they will act in favor of the environment or repairability?

I think it's extremely arrogant of you to assume that laws like GDPR were just made a bunch of bureaucrats without "understanding technical details".

This only works when there are no monopolies or oligopolies.

This is an idealistic view that is not worth anything because most markets have monopolies and oligopolies.

2. Are you sure the others aren't focussing too much on a few technical details, losing the global perspective?

So widen your fucking horizons and learn a few languages. Being uneducated to start with is one thing, but staying uneducated is a choice. (At least in most places; it's mandatory only in very few jurisdictions.)

> But it doesn’t seem implausible to me that government regulators could have overlooked important technical factors while pursuing a politically advantageous agenda.

Oh, yadda yadda. You had proven your parochialism already.

On the flip side, every charged with a mini-USB or USB-C for a reason.

And internally, most electronics use standard battery sizes anyways, AA or AAAs.. I'm not a subject matter expert, but looks like they are just packaging high quality rechargable batteries inside a device.

For innovators they could simply apply a fee, that would allow companies like Apple to do whatever they want, so long as they (or their customers) pay.

Now, how can a consumer vote with its wallet? Are you able to tell the whole environmental, social and impact on wars of any device you buy? Personally I can't.

I also think that making the end user the sole responsible for the impact of the whole chain action is horrible. This is exactly what the ad with the fake native american crying about littering in the us was about. Let's company introduce an insane amount of plastic in the environment with no idea how to re-process it once used, the sole responsibility of the pollution will be the last person in the chain: the consumer.

It brings me to the last point, isn't it's the role of a government elected by the people? To represent them and balance the power?

You're welcome to draw up a table which surgically defines what should be regulated or legislated, and what shouldn't. I'll just drop by later to tell you how alarming your assessment was.

After all who's the government to tell companies not to put asbestos in your walls or lead in your water. I'll be honest, every time someone complains governments shouldn't regulate I wonder if they realize they might be alive because of that.

And that's okay. If consumers didn't like their products then they would stop buying them. iphones don't have replaceable batteries but people keep buying them because they don't see that as important. There are phones with replaceable batteries that consumers can buy if they want them.

You need a mobile phone and you have very few choices. How exactly are you protesting? By shooting yourself in the foot and not getting a phone? By going to boutique manufacturers who can barely supply 1% of the market?

Your reasoning is good on paper but not realistic. I'll say it again, the reason you don't have asbestos in your walls or lead in the air (from fuel) isn't because you voted with your wallet but because governments did their part. That should be evidence enough that your assumption is wildly idealistic.

And you completely avoided their very valid point that the likes of asbestos and lead. Perhaps because you have no counter to it?

I don't understand the point you're trying to make about asbestos and leaded gasoline. I support those regulations because they cover much more important issues. As far as I know nobody's gotten lung cancer from not being able to remove their phone's battery.

In the case of batteries and other electronic components, the amount of e waste is very much becoming a problem that other people are being forced to deal with, and that’s not even considering future generations, whose freedoms I very much argue should also be protected.

“Your rights end where mine begin” is very much a laudable sentiment, but we need to be honest about when things sneak over that line, and not fool ourselves because the negative externality isn’t blatantly obvious.

And that's because the companies making them have almost all the power. The power of the consumers' wallet is essentially zero.

Primarc clothing sometimes comes with scraps of paper 'Help, i am being kept as a slave', but people keep buying it. That tells us they don't see slavery as important.

On the contrary, the fact that they were willing to die to end slavery doesn't tell us anything.

I've never heard of that and couldn't find any reference to it with a internet search.

Edit: found it: https://metro.co.uk/2015/12/11/girl-finds-cry-for-help-note-...

How are they going to do that when they're paid barely subsistence wages in corporate scrip that can't be spent on that?

That's what governments are for, to do stuff the people want but can't do individually.

In my book, allowing you to buy a device without replaceable batteries, a choice that you made freely yourself, is not causing harm.

Saying that “people want it” is not good enough. The majority may also want to silence the minority. That’s why we have rights.

user replaceable battery is important because what's most likely to die 1st in your electronics is the battery, if it is soldered, high chance you'll have to replace your whole thing, producing useless e-waste

i had to replace my electric toothbrush recently because the battery died, but the whole thing was still in perfect condition, such a waste

Now people know that they're being tracked. Great. They are still being tracked and now are being annoyed with the modals everywhere. Those of us that get bothered enough can install some extension to hide them, but the for most people it's just another annoying thing they have to click away in order to continue what they were intended to do.

And now when I tell people 'companies are tracking you' noone calls me a conspiracy theorist any more. They say- yes they are.

Mission accomplished, this policy gets my vote

[1]: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/i-dont-care-about-...

There. Problem solved. In a different discussion someone even linked a great example of a GDPR-compliant site: https://github.com

See? Easy

2. Okay, for some reason you decide to collect more data. Just as easy:

You present the user with a simple accept/reject, where "reject" is clearly labeled, is the default selected option, and the website continues working when the user choses "reject"

See? Easy.

Those "pain-in-the-ass dialogs"? If they are pain in the ass, they are not compliant.

So, your beef is with people who implement all this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web#...

so you might want to update your limited general knowledge or comment only on topics you really know what you are talking about. You see cookies because

1 the website wants to track you

2 the website ad-partners want to track you

3 the web developers are idiots and don't know that non-tracking cookies don't need a NAG popup

BTW GDPR is more then cookies, it is applied in real life too. Also it has benefits like forcing websites to implement a delete my account functionality too.

So your equivalence is invalid.

This just indicate that you are unaware of the requirements of GDPR.