As far as I'm concerned, only the highest quality product should be made.
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If you want to buy a Chinese carbon frame from Aliexpress that has had no safety/longevity testing done on it, but costs 100$ . . . I kinda think you shouldn't be allowed to do it.
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Sure. I'm with Dabnasty. The ultimate goal of 'last long' is to have the product last forever.
... If you hold any single design criteria to infinitely exacting standards you are fucked when designing a product. ...
... Exactly the way that the stated goal of having a product not cause harm will result in products vastly over-engineered for safety harming both their suitability for their intended purpose and taking far more resources to build. ...
... Yep. That's why longevity can't be the only design criteria. Just like (as we've established above) safety can't be the only design criteria. ...
...But again, as with safety it can't be the only goal. ...
... Just as regulations for longevity can guide people towards longer lived products. ...
The only thing we really seem to disagree on here is that safety is somehow a magically different design criteria than anything else . . . be it efficiency, longevity, or other.
No, where we disagree is where this started.
OK, cool. I thought you were arguing that safety is somehow a more objective criteria than longevity. That's actually the whole reason I started discussing longevity in the first place.
You stated, very clearly, that you think that only the highest quality products should be legal to sell/purchase.
Re-read the (out of context) quotes you have provided up above. None of them say what you're claiming they do.
I do personally think that only the highest quality products should be made. That would be my preference from a waste/ethics perspective. Some regulation based on quality is necessary, but I've never advocated the levels that you have immediately jumped to several times in this discussion.
If you want to buy a Chinese carbon frame from Aliexpress that has had no safety/longevity testing done on it, but costs 100$ . . . I kinda think you shouldn't be allowed to do it. Besides the personal risk to yourself (which in a civilized country that recognizes the right of citizens to health care ends up being a risk that everyone pays), there's also the waste created when the terrible product inevitably fails and is not worth fixing.
When there are serious and severe health and safety risks associated with buying stuff - yeah, it should be regulated.
But you seemed to get really hung up on 'highest quality' thing (assuming that my goal was the banning of huge swaths of the market or something). So then I tried to explain that most products currently made would fit into a pretty high quality category by using the example of my (very average) road bike:
What happens when your $800 bike you use and love is deemed unacceptable because the $2,500 bike is the one that is now government approved because it lasts longer?
Bad initial assumption. You need to first explain why the 800$ bike that I use would be deemed unacceptable. 'Lasts longer' doesn't seem to be a valid argument . . . I've put tens of thousands of kilometers on it over seven or eight years.
The goal of the design criteria 'last long' is to have a product last forever. If you had the option to buy a bike that lasted forever and a bike that lasted a couple years, all other things being equal you would pick the bike that lasted forever. In the real world of course, all other things are not equal . . . but how else would you define the goal of that design criteria?
You've expanded on that to say that high quality means longevity.
Nope. I neither believe that nor have I said it in this thread.
I'd define something as being high quality if it can do the task it was designed to do well and reliably for a long period of time. (Probably should have some requirements for safety as well.) Longevity is a part of quality, but I've never argued that it was the only part. Read back through the posts I've made.
And you've further expanded that so say that the desired longevity is "forever". In other words, you are saying that you think only products that last forever should be legal to sell. In other words, you want to enforce (not merely encourage) longevity to "to infinitely exacting standards". Then, amusingly, you start to lecture about how no single quality should be held paramount (because, in your own words, we'd be /fudged/), which is a directly contradictory statement.
Incorrect initial assumptions lead to incorrect conclusions. I didn't argue what you said I did, so the extrapolations you're making from those bad assumptions are likely the source of your confusion here. (If it makes you feel better, I concede that you vanquished the hell out of that straw man. :P )
So which is it. Should longevity be legally mandated, or should the overall quality of a product be managed? If it's the latter, who should be making the decision on what overall quality means?
I do think that some aspects of quality should be legally mandated. Longevity is one of them. Safety is one of them. Energy efficiency too. Who should be making the final decision on what overall quality means? I'm not sure what the best answer is. I'd imagine that it would be somewhat product specific and would need some combination of input from informed manufacturers, government officials, users, and developers. We could look at various use cases (energy regulation regarding light bulbs, safety regulation regarding automobiles, etc. The UK has had legal requirements regarding satisfactory quality of goods since the Sales Goods Act of 1979 for example). What would you suggest?
