Free Republic

Making your entire economy a Landfill Economy dependent on the fantasy of infinite replacements and substitutions is the height of hubris and folly. Very few people ask: what if it breaks? It's a question we can ask of a great many things: touchscreens, motherboards, tools, vehicles, supply chains and entire systems: what if it breaks? The first thing we notice is the great number of things which can't be repaired, they can only be replaced. Good luck repairing the touchscreen or motherboard in your vehicle. Oops, the puncture in your tire is in the sidewall, no repair possible, buy a...

Planned obsolescence, or built-in obsolescence, in industrial design and economics is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so it will become obsolete (that is, unfashionable or no longer functional) after a certain period of time. No company will admit they have this policy, but we can observe this from a products’ average failure rate and the company’s sincerity in fixing it by making available parts required to fix it. This is why I am a huge fan of Japanese products and also Apple. Products are not merely hardware, Apple on the other...

Rising drug and alcohol overdoses, suicides, and disease from chronic alcoholism — labeled “deaths of despair” by one expert — are cutting the lives of white Americans short by nearly a half a year on average. Increases in these types of deaths among whites means that life expectancy for whites is not increasing as fast as it is for other groups, according to a government report that offers an unusual look at how different threats are affecting U.S. lifespans. “Things are moving in the wrong direction,” said Anne Case, a Princeton University researcher, of what she calls “deaths of despair.”...

U.S. hiring slowed to a near-standstill in May, sowing doubts about the economy’s health and complicating the Federal Reserve’s efforts to raise interest rates. While unemployment slid from 5 percent to 4.7 percent, the lowest since November 2007, the rate fell for a troubling reason: Nearly a half-million jobless Americans stopped looking for work and so were no longer counted as unemployed. Employers added just 38,000 jobs in May, the fewest in over five years. Less-educated workers bore the brunt of the hiring slump, with a quarter-million high school dropouts losing their jobs in May. That has perpetuated a long-term...

A Camry hybrid costs about $5,000 more than it's nonhybrid brother, or is it sister? If a driver goes 15,000 miles a year with an efficiency of 39mpg s/he will save about $500/yr. Easy math. It will take 10 years to get your money back. The good news is a Toyota will last 10 years and 150,000 miles. The bad news is Americans won't drive the same car for that long. But then neither will anybody else in any other country. The Japanese will change cars every 3-5 years. This is one of the reasons why the hybrid market only...

Bill Gates on Monday offered the first public look at Longhorn, the next generation of the Windows PC operating system that he said would be Microsoft's "biggest release of this decade and the biggest since Windows 95." However, the Microsoft chairman gave no timetable for the launch of the software, which has already slipped to a later timetable than originally thought. With Longhorn now not expected before 2006, Microsoft faces a gap in its new product cycle that has left a question over its growth rate in the meantime. Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer, has called Longhorn a "bet the...