Edit: One can make the case about the roman empire, and some really old civilization in India I am too lazy to look up, building quite impressive empires running on engineering and other stabdards across gigantic portions of thebthen known earth. That neother of those exists anymore is hardly the fault of those norms.
Oh, nor to forget: measurement units.
One visit to an industrial fastener store will let you know that there is no such thing as a standard screw/bolt. Even metric Mx machine screws (which are the closest thing I can think of to a standard) have 4 different common pitches, and you can have them custom made to ANY pitch.
And of course you can get custom parts for everything. Those are, as the name implies, custom and not standard.
Ehich makes Apples bahvior even worse, litterally everybody else managed to agree on common standards, but thay had to insist on proprietary tech to the point they got their set of legislation.
https://www.aerzteblatt.de/nachrichten/142097/116-Millionen-...
As of the end of February, the federal government had around 116 million doses of corona vaccine in stock. This emerges from a response from the Federal Ministry of Health ( BMG ) to a request from AfD member of the Bundestag Thomas Dietz.
According to this, the delivery of almost 111 million more vials with a value of around 2.5 billion euros is still pending. According to the reply, the federal government is obliged to accept them under the EU treaties.
"In view of the current development of the pandemic, the Federal Government is committed to making these EU contracts more flexible," the letter continues.
But even that that wasn't enough trash! Germany decided that it was also needed to purchase over 3.7 billion masks for their federal inventory. But masks expire, and now they have so many expiring and useless masks nobody wants that they have resorted to mass incineration of them, which they call "thermal reprocessing".
Yet even that wasn't enough trash pointlessly manufactured and then immediately burned for the EU. Even as they literally set fire to mountains of masks they were simultaneously purchasing another ~250 million for a National Reserve, many of which will expire at the end of 2023.
This is the EU that claims to care about the terrible trash problem created by mobile phone chargers.
That's the whole point: they cannot. You guys are missing the problem here. The exact same systems and people who made the bad decisions about masks and vaccines are the ones making the decisions about phone chargers.
You can't say well obviously that decision was bad, but this one is good. Some of us recall that when the EU was writing blank cheques to Pfizer as part of a collective scheme to do purchasing for all of Europe it was being widely hailed as a genius move. So much money saved! So efficient, to do bulk purchasing. Now every single reply to my post admits that the decisions were terrible but this time it'll be different because this time the decision is obviously right.
Give it some years and people will be pointing to the USB-C decision as an example of EU dysfunction and HNs will be replying, "just because that decision was bad doesn't mean this one is!".
Sure, burning warehouses full of covid masks is absurdly wasteful. But do they really drop to zero effectiveness on their expiration date? Experience says no. If they're not fit to surgical standard, maybe they can be stamped with some identifying mark and redistributed as dust masks or something. The main reason the default option is to burn them is because history suggests that otherwise businesses will buy them and resell them as medical-grade or whatever without fully informing prospective customers.
Do you have a proposal for dealing with commercial mendacity that's less severe than just abolishing all state efforts at procurement or establishment of consumer standards?
I absolutely can and will say that.
A football manager can make bad decisions and lose 5-0, and yet the same manager can then win the next game with the same team. Furthermore, in the case of the EU, these are not even the same people, context, or decision.
It's like when people claim standardized air port codes are made by the same people who sit in the security council, because both are UN bodies. It doesn't make it any more true.
The gazillion iPhone users in the EU use this twice a day, in physical space, and honestly that feels ok rather than nit-picking. If they do an EU-only model, I’ll absolutely go out of my way to get one
Why? Standards harmonization has big upsides too.
For example, the EU PPE safety standards are so good that there aren't even North American equivalents for many products.
If you buy a climbing carabiner in the US, it's being tested according to a test procedure defined by the same EU bureaucracy you deride.
What's the electrical failure rate of every appliance in your home, and the associated risk of death by electrocution? If you don't know offhand, it might be that you are implicitly relying on UL standards to keep you safe and whole.
Consumers don't have perfect information, so the risk is asymmetric. If you assume the market will sort out risk and quality so we don't need standards and enforcement thereof, I don't believe your model is aligned with reality.
What do you see as the main safety differences between Lightning and USB-C? As both systems have been in use at scale for some time now, this should be easy enough to answer quantitatively.
My understanding is that they offer equivalent safety, in spite of Lightning not having been standardized by the EU, but I may be wrong.
USB for small devices like phones has gone: Proprietary -> Mini -> Micro -> USB-C
In the same timespan apple has gone: 30-pin -> Lightning
Proof: look at all the craptastic companies that sell ersatz products on Amazon. For some kinds of products they can be almost as good as much more expensive offerings, for others you might get a great deal or you might get an explosive paperweight.
Humanity does not have an alternative to bureaucrats because lassez-faire markets optimize for maximum company profits over all time spans instead of consumer convenience.
For context, I was a pro sound engineer in the film industry for many years, so I have lots of experience with industrial grade connectors and operating in hostile environmental conditions from heavy rain/marine environments to desert dust storms. There are times when I go straight to industrial/military manufacturing specifications, but USB-C is still great.
This is a truism, but does it have any basis in reality? Certainly, if every manufacturer were forced to use USB-C for everything it could lead to an innovation problem, but I don't think makers of new products are forbidden from offering innovative kinds of connectivity, which the market might or might not decide to adopt. Nor is the issue trivial just because it's physically small, any more than the design of electrical wall sockets is of low importance.
They're making Apple do it because they have huge market share, a long history of foisting different physical connectors on their customers and generating a significant amount of electronic waste as older models are abandoned. Crucially, the charging devices end up being unwanted because they don't work with anything else including other iphones. Sure, they could enjoy a longer life with the use of adapters, but physical adapters are Not Great.
It's a pity, because Apple does innovate and some of their innovations are very cool, eg the magnetized charging ports on Macbooks was an Apple first iirc. But they also have a reputation for stiffing their own customers by ignoring backward compatibility , assuming that most of their customers will grumble but keep paying for the new model because they like the ecosystem.
It's hilarious that your big question is: "Does the idea that bureaucracies routinely make money-and-time-wasting decisions have any basis in reality." You should investigate this reality at some point.
It's not that bureaucracies can't be terrible, they absolutely can. But it's overly simplistic to argue that they're constitutionally terrible by virtue of merely existing.
What I actually said was that a very large bureaucracy operating over a gigantic domain and trying to make rules at very fine levels of detail across that domain would make bad decisions. Like, say, "we're regulating the entire economic system of half a billion people in very diverse economic circumstances down to the level of exactly what heads should be in what phone chargers."
Where are you getting this figure? It's below 450M AFAIK.
But the idea that a trans-national government over 750M people should be trying to regulate in this level of detail is just obviously a recipe for disaster. For every one time they successfully push a company to do something correct -- but ultimately trivial, like this thing -- there are going to be 10 cases where some bureaucrat makes a bad decision and they're like fifteen steps removed from any kind of oversight, or where no uniform rule-making makes sense over the vastly diverse areas of the EU. Humanity is just not capable of making a bureaucracy of this size that makes decisions at this level of detail in a on-average-good way.