Repairability would help as well. Many times the only viable option to fix something is to swap a board, or replace the entire item, instead of replacing the one failed component that caused the board to fail, or reflowing the board etc.. Many components also do not offer batteries that can be replaced, such as the magic mouse, so you end up needing to replace the entire item.
It's interesting how as certain things age, such as cars, cottage industries pop up to do just that when new replacement boards and parts are not available.
The other issue is cost cutting. Many components are made cheaply and fail pre-maturely. Great examples of this are mains voltage LED bulbs where the rectifier circuits that power the LED's fail, but the only real option is to replace the entire thing, creating a lot of e-waste in the process.
Changing the PCB for a known-good one: $10 + maybe half an hour of low-skill work.
Changing the failing component: maybe a few minutes, probably a few hours of an electronics engineer that's familiar with the design (plus his expensive tools). He's probably bad at soldering, so you'll need someone else to do that. Then you need to revalidate the board.
It almost never make economical sense to try to repair the board.
If we were provided board and part diagrams it might be worth it because then you don't need an actual engineer or super highly knowledgeable person to waste a few hours of time just to diagnose most problems. But because we lack such diagrams whoever is diagnosing it also has to reverse engineer how it works in their head.
The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting. The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.
Also training techs to repair SMD parts is really easy and cheap, you're grossly overestimating the costs. The real waste comes from boards with designs that can't be repaired so we tolerate a certain yield. For many small devices the yields are shockingly low.
The other thing is that yields are low because of bad designs. If it became uneconomical for you to throw half your boards out then designers would fix their crappy boards with tombstoned jellybean parts because they used shitty footprint libraries. This is a solvable engineering problem and it's gross that it's cheaper to throw shit into a landfill instead of fixing it.
> The fact that we tolerate creating waste because it's "economical" is frankly disgusting.
I don't think anyone here is suggesting we "tolerate" it, but describing the economic incentives that exist.
> The disposal fees for e waste should make it uneconomical to dispose of boards.
I can't think of any number that you could pick that wouldn't either be ineffective, or cause unintended effects. At $10, that's a drop in the bucket compared to labor costs of component level repair. At $100, you're going to see the local lake filled with obsolete cell phones, which is even worse than them being in a landfill.
I'm all for repairability, but as labor costs go up and manufacturing costs go down, the window for which there is incentive to repair narrows.
e.g. there's no amount of repairability design that you could apply to a $3 light bulb which would encourage people to pay someone western wages to repair. I think we're better off lobbying for better standards to communicate the quality of a bulb's design. The whole reason we have crappy LED bulbs to begin with is because the $3 overdriven bulb with crap components jammed into a tiny enclosure looks like a better deal on the shelf than a bulky $20 bulb with a large heat sink and lower output.
And the labor required to do component level repair is wildly expensive and limited (YouTubers who do it on principle notwithstanding), even further narrowing that window.
If you could disassemble and diagnose a failing $3 bulb in 60 seconds, you wouldn't need to hire someone at western wages to fix it. But because it is glued together to not be taken apart, and there are no diagrams for how anything in it works or is put together, it isn't worth the time even if you have a station and equipment all ready setup and replacement component on hand. 95% of the time fixing electronics is just figuring out how they were put together in the first place so you can diagnostically trace along the circuit.
Not that I think lightbulbs are probably worth saving, but expand it to any other device which gets exponentially more complex and it is easy to see why they don't get diagnosed, not to mention repaired. With a board diagram I can point at a spot on the board and say "I should see 15 volts here", without a board diagram i gotta draw out and figure out how the power supply even works so I know what it is suppose to be outputting and then trace that all the way to the test point to make sure there isn't other crap inline before then that might change what I see.
> If you could disassemble and diagnose a failing $3 bulb in 60 seconds, you wouldn't need to hire someone at western wages to fix it.
Sure, I would. Maybe a lot of people on this forum would. But we're 0.0001% of people that use light bulbs. Our personal persuasions are pretty irrelevant in context. And most of the time it doesn't make financial sense for us to do it, it is just personally satisfying.
The vast majority of people have no interest in repairing their own electronics, period. If it is cheap to replace, they will just get a new one. If it was a big investment, then it's important enough to call a professional to fix. In the middle ground you've got people who will ask their handy nephew to try to fix it before they run out to the store, and he'll open it up and look for a blown fuse or a loose wire before giving up. The type of people who can do board level repairs are so rare as to be completely irrelevant to the waste stream of electronics.
Even if we repaired 100% of broken electronics, we'd only make a tiny dent in the volume of waste electronics. Most electronics simply fall out use before they ever break.
If they had board diagrams or schematics that nephew could do a lot more than simply look for a blown fuse or wire. Nobody looks deeper than that because they know it is a waste of time without any reference materials.
No it doesn't solve all the problems, but how many TVs now sit in the dump because of the failure of some 1 cent part that nobody could diagnose even if they wanted because they would have to reverse engineer half the board, rather than probe a few different points on the board?
Appliance repair use to be big business. Did it stop being so because washers and TVs and vacuums became too complicated to understand, or the parts went up in cost, or because $1000 is considered cheap enough of a device to be considered disposable? No. They stopped existing because appliances stopped coming with the reference materials to repair them in a reasonable time and parts are obfuscated from their source so people don't even know what their broken part is half the time. Is that a thermistor, a capacitor, a diode that blew up? Have fun spending the next 2 hours tracing the obfuscated part number down through 5 different suppliers to figure it out because you obviously can't test a broken part and there is no schematic to look at and identify it from.
Major appliance repair is very much still a thing, and manufacturers share repair info under their partner programs. But this makes sense because shipping them back for warranty is prohibitively expensive and people are willing to pay a few hundred bucks to fix a couple thousand dollar appliance. They’re still not doing component level repair, because module replacement is still cheaper and more reliable.
Small appliances and electronics are not repaired as any more much because:
1. their real price has cratered over the past 50 years
2. they have more integrated and specialized parts that simply aren’t repairable or available
3. They have fewer mechanical parts prone to regular failure or which pay the bills for repair shops (belts, timers, etc)
4. They are far more complicated than their predecessors, and therefore more complicated to diagnose even if you have a schematic
But yeah, when everyone’s washing machine has a belt transmission and a clunky mechanical timer, they failed all the time and there were repair shops on every corner. But these places weren’t doing the type of work akin to SMD rework on a digital circuits.
Try buying an LED flashlight.. when the LED circuitry/bulb goes out, the whole thing's a brick, battery, assembly, everything. You have to throw it all out. The bulb assembly is usually fused to the frame so that it's hard just to recycle that frame.
Human-scale engineering is underrated. It is very satisfying when you can repair something yourself using your hands, without having to need specialist equipment.
For example when you have a circuit board that can be serviced with a soldering iron, without having to use a microscope or reflow-oven.
There was a cartel, but this is one of those "more complicated than it appears" situations. In incandescent bulbs, there is a real tradeoff between durability of the bulb, efficiency (lumens/watt), and brightness/quality of the light, for physics reasons you _can't_ improve one without degrading the other.
Since "quality of light" is a very difficult thing to market, there was an incentive to push "lifetime of the bulb" in marketing and just make the light quality increasingly worse. The cartel attempted to halt that by making everyone agree on a lifetime/quality to hit and not participate in a race to the bottom (and yes, there was also the obvious benefit to the cartel members of increased sales and profits, which they explicitly talked about in internal documents).
I want to be very clear that I'm anti cartels and I'm not trying to say "so this was all hunky dory", just that this was not (and these things very rarely are) a simple case of "they made the product objectively worse for the sole sake of more money". Instead, they chose a different point on the pareto-frontier of brightness/efficiency/lifespan that also had the benefit of making them more money.
But yes, LED bulbs are currently mostly garbage and have terrible heat/power management electronics which means that in practice you almost never get anywhere close to the theoretical life span increases (because the electronics die from overheating far before the actual LEDs themselves would go out), and finding out information on how well a given bulb brand does on heat/power management is essentially impossible.
TechnologyConnections debunked the Phoebus Cartel a while ago.
tl;dw incandescent bulbs can be made more efficient and brighter by running them hotter, but this reduces the lifetime. The obvious Nash Equilibrium involves increasingly hot/bright/efficient bulbs and as much lying about lifetime as a typical consumer would accept, which is a lot. The idea behind the Phoebus Cartel was to force honesty on the dimension where it was most likely to disappear. You are free to disapprove of this and reject bulb lifetime policing, but if so you support the "everybody lies" alternative. Pick your poison.
repairability would help quite a bit. How many times do you have to replace an entire board in something when replacing just a component would actually fix things?
1. Offshore jobs, maximize profits and take advantage of incentives to offshore.
2. Political winds shift.
3. Talk a good game about needing to onshore, make some token moves to move a small token amount of manufacturing back to the US. (You are here).
4. Once the admin changes and/or mid terms, continue to spend more on offshoring.
It would be interesting to see if the job prospects of American students and perception of the value of the degrees were to change if they were to eliminate the 15% discount that employers get for hiring foreign graduates (via OPT) by not having to pay FICA taxes.
When the unemployment rate for fresh American college grads is the same or higher than those without a degree, it does not make a compelling case for spending all of that money and time on a degree.
Assuming that one is in favor of the use of these cameras, the security issues seem like they are a big problem. The leaking of police officer personal data and locations was pretty egregious.
Would love to hear from one of the founders on what they are doing to address that.
Back before digital became really high res I was into small, medium and large format silver halide cameras balancing cost with high quality optics. You could get Exackta's, Speed Graphics and Roleiflexes relatively inexpensively and take amazing high quality photos with them.
The larger you went though, the more you had to be mindful about the cost of eash shot both in terms of time and cost for film and developing. There is something to be said about the curation that happened when taking photos like that. You put a lot more though upfront into composition and had to think about your shutter speed, aperture etc..
One thing I learned about during that time was how the old time press photographers would use a Speed Graphic on 4x5 negative, grab a wide angled shot and then crop it. Also, press conferences used to create a lot of broken glass as photographers would snap a shot, shoot out the one time use flash bulb on the ground and then quickly put in another bulb to get another shot.
The country is in decline. I have spent a lot of time there, have family who live there and can easily counter this:
- Many communities still rely on water trucks instead of water pipe infrastructure. The government loots the funds for it, meanwhile the entire system is on the verge of collapse and there are regular water shortages.
- With the electric grid, the amount of load shedding in the past few years where people are regularly without electric to 6-8 hours a day is absolutely crazy. The country didn't used to experience that. Also, cable theft is common, which wasn't an issue 30 years ago.
- 1.6 million people out of 66 million pay 76% of all taxes.
- Public healthcare in ZA is bad and not recommended by anybody who values their life.
- South Africa has more race laws today than it did during apartheid.
- It has a violent crime rate that is one of the highest in the world.
- Unemployment is high.
- It has suffered from massive underinvestment in infrastructure over the past 30 years.
- Extremely high levels of government corruption.
One thing that really brought home how the situation is in South Africa is was when I was talking to someone I know who works for a furniture company there. They used to make all of their furniture in the country, but recently started importing it from China because that is cheaper than producing it locally. Keep in mind that is with an average daily wage of $30 for a factory worker. If a country with South Africa's nature resources and inexpensive labor cannot compete with China for manufacturing furniture for the local market, it is deep trouble.
That is probably why the CEO of a local Tile Manufacturer recently said that South Africa is one of the worlds least manufacturing-friendly economies due to onerous regulation, infrastructure deterioration, energy uncertainty and rising costs.
- Please share which communities rely on water trucks?
- Loadshedding is no more.
- The tax issue is precisely the problem that needs redressing and is primarily because of past injustices. You're almost there.
- I have been treated in public hospitals and while not perfect the access to healthcare is impressive.
- I agree with the race laws. Your basis that SA has more race laws is gaslighting due to the fact of the homeland act. But let's not let facts get in the way.
- Violent crime rate is because why? Apartheid spatial planning. Read up and learn all about why this has re-enforced violent crime.
- Unemployment is high, yes. Doesn't mean the country is in decline.
- Corruption has hit its peak and on the way down post-Zuma years.
I have a close friend who owns a huge furniture company, and builds everything in house and grows year on year very well. So your anecdote is countered by mine.
- Googling for water outages gives a lot of results in just the last few days. In the NorthWest for example there are a lot of failing municipalities which are relying on government assistance to just make it month to month. Water trucks are a common occurrence all over. The official numbers on connection to water, electricity etc. are pretty much a joke.
- Loadshedding is indeed no more: Up to about 10-15% of households are now living off-grid, while in the industrial sector I can link you any number of metal processing plants that have closed down, the same for mines, car manufacturing etc. In the last few years our electricity bills have about doubled, rates and taxes aren't far behind either. That's not a win in the least.
- Healthcare: A few of the more well funded public hospitals are ok, but just from Tembisa approximately 2 billion Rands have been siphoned as of recently. Impressive isn't the word to use. Google for images to see the conditions of the hospitals and what the people who go there are experiencing, while on the other hand you can see videos of tenderpreneurs riding their Lamborghini's with police escorts via dirt roads in the outlying areas.
- Violent crime has nothing to do with apartheid (apart from the occasional incitement by political parties etc). We have crime because somewhere between 33-43% of the population is now unemployed, along with having only a barely functional police force. The people stuck on the bottom have no hope of changing their circumstances, which in turn is fueling crime (and violence).
- What makes you think there's less corruption now? The fact that more and more of it is coming to light? As long as the governing party allows it to happen its going to cascade down into all facets of life/business etc. They've begun to realize that they are losing the vote (and with it the power), but we're still a long way off from having any change on the horizon.
- Single anecdotes are pointless, some businesses will naturally grow while other decline, a lot of it is just random luck based on the type, area, time etc. Foreign investment is down something like 29% in just the last two years while we've taken on more than R25 billion in loans just recently.
You say I'm not even close to the facts when I can substantiate everything I have said based off released data. Let's go through your points
- You make the claim that "official numbers on connection to water, electricity etc. are pretty much a joke" yet provide nothing to back that up? Why? I would say giving access to water and electricity to over 90% of the population in under 30 years is a win. And a case against the term "steady decline". No doubt drought ravaged regions like the North West, which if you'd been to, is understandable that consistent water cannot be provided. So does they fall into the 10% of non-connected water residents? I would assume so.
- You state that 10-15% of households are off-grid. I would make a claim that that show's progress in society and not decline. Despite the reasons, it means that there will actually end up in the long run being more electricity for the population overall. Let's also look at overall manufacturing and I will provide sources: PWC you may have heard of them forecast 5.7% growth in manufacturing over the next decade (despite short term decline of -0.4%) due to reforms in regulation and fixing of electricity supply. Here's the link: https://www.pwc.co.za/en/publications/manufacturing-analysis...
- Healthcare is impressive if you take in the fact of providing healthcare free of charge to 60 million people within less than 25 years, is not only a feat but something that is literally the definition of impressive. It's far far off where it should be, no one doubts that but you seem to have a blinkered view that everything must be of a first world standard within the shortest timeframe. We could have gotten closer if it weren't for years of corruption but the aim and the goal and ability to provide healthcare to the people is still impressive.
- If you don't think violent crime has anything to do with Apartheid's spatial planning, has nothing to do with the Apartheid government arming and supplying gangs with drugs, has nothing to do with purposefully underfunding education within townships, ensuring little public transport to working hubs, and the entire multi-faceted list of socio-economic destruction that took place. Then, my friend, you literally do not know what you are talking about, nor the socio-economic reasons for crime to occur. If you think Apartheid has nothing to do with the unemployment rate due to generational injustices, maybe you should take grade 10 history again.
- What makes me think there is less corruption now? Well yes the fact that more comes to light, the fact that we even had the Zondo commission and have the recommendations taken on board in part by parliament and the implementation of the Public Procurement Act of 2024 will have a positive long-standing affect.
- Let's talk foreign investment. I'll just paste links because foreign investment is up over 80% since 2013. "Down something like 29%" without providing any links, or facts is nebulous at best. Mostly due to the fact of the vast increase post-covid caused a huge spike in FDI which if you look at without that context you'd think it is down, which is statistically a misnomer due to the societal causes of a sudden huge increase in investment when economies opened up.
So yeah I fucking hate the ANC. I hate the corruption. But I can see the bigger picture of the 30 year positive change, you can take a microscopic view as you have done - but this conversation is around "steady decline" and you have proven nothing to indicate that it is.
Most places went off grid because of how unreliable the national grid is. The cost of that electricity is also significantly higher than it would have been with well run central grid using fossil fuel.
The lloyds numbers you shared show a steep decline in investment over the past three years.
The IDC is an arm of the South African government, so having it call itself a top investment destination is like having a marketer trying to sell you on their own product.
The UN report only shows the inflow by region, not country.
The PWC report shows everything being down with the exception of net operating cash flow which does not tell you a lot about the sector as a whole. Their predictions do not point to anything to substantiate their prediction of 5.7% per annum manufacturing GDP growth. Of course then again, if these numbers are not inflation adjusted and inflation is at or above 5.7% then that may be where that is coming from.
Given that the average GDP per person is 8k US a year, without a significant increase of the GDP it's not possible to increase the standard of living for the population has a whole. You can't get blood from a stone.
I largely agree with you otherwise (viz. South Africa is on the whole improving) but on this specific point I think you’re optimistic. When summer comes round I’m pretty confident Eskom will start loadshedding again, and their public statements more or less align with this.
Regardless: not a sign of decline! Loadshedding is evidence that demand > supply, but that doesn’t imply supply is decreasing or the system as a whole is failing. On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence that supply has steadily increased since the 90s, new facilities opening and what not. Widespread solar will only improve the situation as the tech improves.
....and that's before we get into things like Transnet and SA Air. I'd love to see the country succeed, but putting your head in the sand and denying that there is a problem will not fix things.
Literally no one said there isn't a problem. No one said that. But disagreeing about a 'state of decline' when the facts of the quality of improvement of the lives of the entire population has increased over a 30 year period disputes the rhetoric of 'state of decline'. Decline from what? When Apartheid made the lives of 10% good and the lives of 90% shit?
GDP is down ~12% since 2010, even though the population has grown by 20% over the same period. Per capita is down ~40% since 2010. Why are you pretending that this isn't an issue?
It sounds like you prefer communism over capitalism. Sadly, South Africa is heading towards communism. The only consolation is that then at least everybody will be poor.
The government is privatising electricity generation and increasing private sector access to the rail network.
The business friendly Democratic Alliance party is in coalition with the ANC, rather than the far left of the EFF which is currently not in government.
You can believe South Africa will end up being communist. But the evidence falls against the statement that South Africa is heading to communism.
What is also hilarious is ad hominem trying to call me a communist (which I am not), and shouldn't matter either way. But what is funny is how you decry the state of things currently, which is happening under capitalism, yet the extent of your criticism of the society can't reach to the system within which it exists. However you create a nebulous hypothetical in trying to plaster me with an insult that another system would be so much worse, when according to you the state of how things is bad as it is.
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