The human activities that enable someone to have access to healthy food, good education, healthcare and security make use of value-engineered products.
Really? It’s definitely not true for education, good education is essentially completely independent of technology, and it seems to me that healthy food at reasonable prices is more a question of mechanized agriculture and supply chains.
Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes that last a single season.
Maybe I misunderstood what value engineering is, but I don’t really see how the philosophy behind cheap consumer goods is very related to those things.
> good education is essentially completely independent of technology
It can be, to a point, but most developed societies have schooling systems that use various types of supplies and equipment in the course of education. More affordable transportation, facilities, supplies, and equipment is generally good for students.
> Healthcare, maybe I can see it, but not really. The proliferation of single use stuff in hospitals for example seems like a different thing than cheap bicycles and shoddy clothes that last a single season.
Well, yes, those are very different things. But, cheap disposable medical supplies both lower barriers to access those things. Not only does this mean that someone who is low-income might be able to more easily access something like, say, an oral thermometer ... but it also means that things like equipment with a high infection risk can be disposed of instead of reused. Many hospitals, for instance, have started switching to disposable surgical tools, because that's now a possibility, and it decreases infection risk.
The bottom line is, cheap stuff enables more people to have more tools at hand to solve problems.
There's no doubt "value engineering" occurs. Your claim is that early obsolescence is not planned but rather a side effect of value engineering.
There's nothing in the universe that stops a feature that meets a design goal of lowering value from also meeting the design goal of planned obsolescence. So it's 100 percent possible that a company still has two design goals: making a cheaper product and obsolescescing that product.
So if you claim that it's basically not happening. Tell me in what way is a company not incentivised to plan the early obsolescence of a product and what evidence do you have that this is basically not happening as a deliberate design decision?
Your evidence is only an example that a company can both meet the goal of obsolescence and lower value with a singular feature of cheaper materials. I have stated that this is not evidence because a company can still have the design goal of obsolescence while meeting that goal with a singular design feature intended to make the product cheaper as well. You need to counter this reasoning because it invalidated your evidence.
The phrase "planned obsolescence" implies and is a claim of intent. The obsolescence wasn't "planned" if it was simply a side-effect of value engineering... it was simply consequential. There are some proven instances of obsolescence being planned, but this is by far an exception, not the norm.
The broad root claim above that "Consumer grade products are deliberately designed to fail." is the assertion with insufficient evidence. The video attached to that claim has a few valid examples, but a few examples over the past century is not indicative of the current state of the entire manufacturing industry... especially when there is a textbook engineering practice that does explain the same.
> The phrase "planned obsolescence" implies and is a claim of intent. The obsolescence wasn't "planned" if it was simply a side-effect of value engineering... it was simply consequential. There are some proven instances of obsolescence being planned, but this is by far an exception, not the norm.
You are missing the point. I am claiming that ONE feature can be built to meet TWO objectives. One for value engineering and the other for planned obsolescence. That would make NEITHER of the two objectives a side effect.
Example: Airplanes are painted with colored paint both to prevent the metal from degrading AND to give the plane a better aesthetic. ONE feature meeting TWO objectives.
>The broad root claim above that "Consumer grade products are deliberately designed to fail." is the assertion with insufficient evidence. The video attached to that claim has a few valid examples, but a few examples over the past century is not indicative of the current state of the entire manufacturing industry... especially when there is a textbook engineering practice that does explain the same.
My broad root claim is that the practice has happened, is happening and will happen.
My evidence for this is examples of this actually occurring. And real incentives for this practice to exist.
I made no claim about how widespread the practice is. That is more your claim. Your claim is basically saying that the amount of entities practicing planned obsolescence is so minuscule that it's basically negligible.
Your evidence for your claim is that value engineering exists in a text book. That's it. You know what else exists in certain text books? How crypto works. Does that make crypto frauds and scams negligible? No.
No doubt your claim is hard to prove, the burden of proof for you is astronomically harder than it is for my point. But then think about it... why do you hold strong opinions and stances on topics that are almost impossible to prove?
