Godammn vacuum cleaner broke. Took it apart, its just a part of the brush roller that is broken. Should be an easy fix. But they don't sell spare parts for my vacuum. They never have, they just want you to buy a new one. So one little easily replaced plastic bit makes the whole thing into non-functional mostly plastic waste. The vacuum is even clearly designed to be easily repaired, it's one of the most intelligently laid out appliances I've ever seen.

But it's not profitable to sell spare parts, so I have to send this thing to a landfill if I can't figure out some ghetto fix. This intentional wastefulness is one of the things that pisses me off about capitalism nearly every day.

    • gundambigtex [he/him]
      ·
      4 年前

      First time I learned about that, and they used light bulbs as an example because I guess they used to last very long compared to nowadays. Infuriating.

      • Vostok [he/him]
        ·
        4 年前

        What? I'm not being funny, but the modern LED bulb lasts orders of magnitude longer than even the best incandescent.

          • Vostok [he/him]
            ·
            4 年前

            I'm not really sure what you're trying to say? Obviously they've only been around for a decade or two, but even CFLs before then we're better than an incandescent. The light bulb planned obsolescence thing was from back in the 30s, and it takes one look at the market to see that it's longevity and efficiency that sell now?

            There's so many examples of planned obsolescence out there, I really don't see why you need to use an example that's not true.

              • Vostok [he/him]
                ·
                4 年前

                Well, not quite, but yeah they had a long run on their own.

                Even then, the cartel that limited light bulb lifespan has been dead since ww2, and there were even decent reasons to limit their lifespans to that, given the added energy inefficiencies that that would bring.

                There is always a barrier to what can be achieved with a level of technology. We've reached it with lithium batteries today, and they'd reached it with incandescents back in the day. Again, you can point to so many things that are needlessly disposable around you like difficult to replace phone batteries, non replaceable washing machine bearings or clipped/glued together appliances that you don't need to use what some dudes did with a long obsolete lightbulb technology that may not even have been that much of an issue anyway.

                  • furryanarchy [comrade/them,they/them]
                    ·
                    4 年前

                    Because CFLs were designed after their form factor was designed, and it's really expensive to make a good ballast that small. Florescent tubes have the ballast mounted separately, and it has room to be as big as it needs to be. The ballast in a CFL has to be cheap enough to be disposable with the lamp itself when it goes bad, and small enough to fit, which means it has to sacrifice lifespan and effectiveness at it's job. An inefficient ballast wears out the lamp faster, and itself degrades faster.

                  • Vostok [he/him]
                    ·
                    4 年前

                    Well you have to appreciate that's anecdotal evidence, and presuming that you're using both kinds of bulb in the same way there's really no reason why that should be happening. Like for like, a CFL bulb should last anywhere from 6-15 times longer than an incandescent, and an LED should last more like 25 times longer. This doesn't mean that all CFL bulbs will last that long, there's always defective units, power fluctuations, ambient temperature, high numbers of cycles - these can all reduce the lifespan of a bulb.

                    Unless you're using especially cheap bulbs, I'd guess your usage or power supply isn't conducive to long bulb life.