Some detergents say “septic safe” on the container. My folks bought the cheapest option which did not say one way or another, so I had to call the supplier, who then said it was septic safe. It’s a shame that in the 2020s we still don’t have transparency on what we buy.

I recall someone in #chemistry (on freenode) talking about measuring detergent. He could have been a nutter, but stressed the importance of measuring the right amount, saying get a scale and weigh it according to the manual.

The manual for one of my machines is shit… says look at the program table for detergent amount - then it’s omitted from the table. But what was useful was the manual said what the numbers meant. The lines marked “15” and “25” are for 15cm³ and 25cm³. The brim is 40cm³ and the prewash cup is 5cm³. Those are volumes, not weight. So I calculated the weight I needed at one point and IIRC it turned out that 15g of powder came out to 15cm³ (lucky me!). I don’t recall how I figured out that I needed 15g.

Anyway, these are the variables that influence the amount of detergent to use:

• load size (some manuals make that a factor, but it’s unclear why because it’s always the same amount of water in the tub. The guy in #chemistry seemed to think it was important)
• water hardness
• program selected (I have ~6 or so programs plus a ½-load button, so effectively 12; some have a prewash cycle, some not)
• type of detergent

Some of the short programs imply that slow solving detergents (tablets) should be avoided.

I still have not figured out what the ½-load button really does. Manual just says press it if you have less than half a load to save on water and power. That’s it. WTF? So I asked the manufacturer and they repeated the same useless answer, but said fill only 1 rack. WTF… which rack? I wanted to know what the ½-load button actually changed the program so I could use it wisely. How does the machine know which rack I chose? I think the “load only one rack” answer from the manufacturer is bullshit. I’ll probably sprawl out my partial loads. The manual should be telling people how much water is used with this setting. I have no idea how it saves on energy since the program choice dictates a fixed water temp. Maybe it just comes down to the fact that it has less water to heat. In any case, I should probably use less detergent on partial loads but the manual doesn’t give the calculation or even enough info to be able to calculate it.

Too much detergent → etching (and waste of detergent)
Too little detergent → repetition needed, which wastes water, energy, and detergent

If you don’t care about etching, then using too much is probably not a big deal.

In the past couple months Google has become quite hostile toward front-ends that previously made it possible for Tor users to reach their content. And I don’t have a good connection so I can’t do videos anyway.

But indeed, it’s hard to find proper detergent. I have to go to a big store of a big grocery chain to get it. But it’s worth it on the basis of price alone. Buying a couple kilos of powder gives the most loads for the money. IIRC the pods were twice the cost of powder when comparing a promotional sales price on pods.

(edit) Oh, but speaking of youtube, video rBO8neWw04 (which I have a saved a copy of) goes into pods. The guy makes an interesting point: pods discourage the use of detergent in the prewash. Though I think he over stresses that.

Not in this context. That sort of thing is common for paychecks and various recurring transactions but I think it’s quite rare that a builder would offer it.

Square charges 2.6% + 10 cents for in-person physical transactions (swipe/etc).

That’s interesting, but I have to say I did not mean to imply a p2p transaction. In the case at hand, the contractor was a proper company with employees. So they would not be using Square or some kind of smartphone solution. But I suppose Square is still a good enough example since it wouldn’t deviate much in a b2p scenario.

Any other method would only be able to discount a max of an additional $40.10.

Woah, why is that? That’s alarming. Does the merchant agreement impose that limit?

If yes, that would answer a question I had. A local business gives a 10% discount on cash payments and refuses all credit cards but accepts debit cards. I thought that’s odd… why accept debit cards but not credit cards? If the merchant agreement for credit card acceptance dictates how much other payment methods can be discounted, that might explain that shop’s policy.

But think about the alternatives and what it means. Cash means they now have to physically carry it to a bank to deposit, fill out the paperwork, and wait for it to be processed. If they do a night deposit thing, they still have to set it all up. Checks have historically been bad, creating all sorts of headaches. Still probably requires physically transporting, and quickly before the money disappears. Besides, who uses checks anymore? Square (etc) process and guarantee the transaction immediately, directly into the business account.

Convenience is certainly a fair factor. But I would not disregard merchant’s inconvenience of chargebacks. Cash is instant and both cash and checks are chargeback immune. Regardless, the question is whether the merchant’s convenience is worth $65.10 on a single transaction (which means that cost adds up to a huge amount). If you figure 5 jobs per week each worth $2500, that’s ~$325 per week in overhead. I would gladly make a bank run for $325 (or even for just $25). Also figure that because cash is an option, there will always be some occasional cash payers anyway, which means making a bank deposit anyway.

If I had a plumbing, roofing, or building gig I would gladly cut out this fat middleman purely from a business standpoint, even neglecting the ethics of supporting the privacy abuses, the war on cash waged by the banks, and the fossil fuels, private prisons, and republican politicians that the banks invest in.

Then there’s consumer habits. Back in the early days of credit cards, Visa and the rest put out some promotional materials. These were reasons that merchants should accept cards, even with the fees (which were not allowed to be passed on to the customer).

This does not seem like a valid answer. But first, it’s unclear what you mean by consumer. Do you mean the ultimate customer whose house is being worked on? Or do you mean the contractor who is a consumer of payment services? If the former, then that’s not a factor in whether the supplier discounts non-credit card payments – it’s just a factor in whether they accept credit card.

Most notably, people are a lot less concerned with price when it was going on a CC. The contractor may be a unique case, but it does ease the pressure when it comes time for the bill.

Still not sure if /people/ in this case is the contractor or the payer. A contractor who is not concerned about price is terrible at business. But if you mean to refer to the payer, well, that’s not good… the only reason an informed payer would not be concerned about cost would be if they are forced to spend beyond their means, whereby cash is not an option. That kind of over-spending is precisely what the credit card industry is exploiting in their predatory mission.

I suspect there must be a flat fee for micro purchases because small restaurants will sometimes post a sign on the cash register indicating a min. purchase to use a card. Otherwise if it were strictly a percentage there would be no reason to care. I also vaguely recall McDonalds did not accept credit card until they got a special deal like $30 flat per month per store to process card payments.

The pics are a bit deceiving. They make it appear as if you get uniform thicknesses, but is that often the case? I doubt it. When a building is demolished, it’s disturbing how sloppy and chaotic they are. They just smash it to bits, producing all different sizes and shapes. I wish they would think about reuse. They could take a cutter and cut uniform blocks off the building which can then be used like building blocks. Instead you got a gnarly mess of blobs with rebar sticking out.

Anyway, I think it’s common to buy much less concrete than you need for a driveway, then mix urbanite with the wet mix so a large portion is reused. I’ve not done it myself but probably entails soaking the urbanite in polyvinylacetate (PVA aka wood glue). I once had to repair a broken concrete step as well as patch some existing stucco. If I had just put new concrete where needed, it would not stick to the old concrete well. So many bonding layers are needed. You water down PVA and paint that onto the old surface. Then when that’s ½ dry you do it again but with a little concrete in it. It’s like a sloppy slurry… gets everywhere. Then again with a thicker layer. Then you also add PVA in the new concrete mix. That’s how to make it bond. So it’d be the same idea with urbanite. It would only trust that for non-structural projects though. Probably wouldn’t want a foundation relying on it.

We are indeed.

Of course when talking about designs, that’s about the future. After a design has been implemented, it’s too late. You can change a past design but it would only be for a future production because a design has already served its purpose after implementation. Apart from that, you would need a time machine.

But the right to repair in the EU is not just about designs. Design is only a small part of it. If a dishwasher were to end production 1 year before the right to repair law is enacted, that last dishwasher is already under a statutory warranty for another year, and likely under a commercial warranty for a year or three more. So spare parts would already be in production just to satisfy warranty obligations. There would be nothing radical about extending that since it would not have stopped production anyway. It would be foolish not to take that opportunity. And with manuals… who loses manuals? Consumers do, but not likely producers. Mandating that literature be made available for old appliances would be reasonable, at least in electronic form. The EU would be foolish not to make literature disclosure retroactive. Some EU countries will even enact retroactive taxation. If they will do that, anything is possible.

Emulation is an extremely CPU intensive activity particularly when you are emulating a different instruction set at the hardware level. If you are emulating a gaming system rather than just running that gaming system, you’re doing it wrong (from a permacomputing PoV). The simple physics answer is to pick up an snes at a yard sale for $5 and save it from the landfill, instead of blowing a wad of cash on new hardware you don’t need. Then hack that snes to do whatever you need, such as to attach a copy console. I hacked a Wii to act as a media server, so it can not only play the old wii games but also play AVI movies from the LAN via samba.

Your take is like saying: I want to simulate a nuclear fission reaction in my livingroom… these old PCs suck and should be tossed. Of course if you select an obscure and heavy task you are limited in the hardware you can deploy for that.

It has not been established on when the law will take effect. If it takes effect the day before the last sale of a dishwasher, then they could have a ten year obligation starting instantly. Or not. Those points have not been pinned down in anything I’ve seen. This law has been discussed in the EU for the past 10 years now. It could be retroactive, if lawmakers decide to do that. If the last dishwasher was sold 5 years ago, they could have a sudden obligation to provide parts for the next 5 years forward.

Right to repair means the parts can’t be drm’d to legally prevent you from repair, not that all out of warranty products must be cheap to repair.

You may be confusing US variations of right to repair, or perhaps you are just judging by the “right to repair” title. US states are ahead of the EU and have different motivations. The EU goes much further than mere new design requirements. It is not doing this to be nice to consumers. It’s part of the “green transition”. If parts prices are priced out of the market, it defeats the purpose of the right to repair. The EU is actively trying to reduce unsustainable consumption of new products and prevention of e-waste.

Here is a jan.2022 clip from the EU Parliament briefing:

In its resolution of 4 July 2017 on a longer lifetime for products, Parliament proposed a number of actions to promote product reparability, including: measures to make repair attractive to consumers; requiring products to be designed for easy and less expensive repair; extending the guarantee if repair takes more than a month; discouraging the fixing-in of essential components such as batteries; urging manufacturers to provide maintenance guides at the time of purchase; developing the standardisation of spare parts and tools necessary for repair; encouraging manufacturers to develop battery technology to ensure that the battery’s lifespan better matches the expected lifespan of the product or, alternatively, to make battery replacement more accessible at a price that is proportionate to the price of the product.

Parliament raised the level of ambition in the current term by adopting two resolutions that call on the Commission to establish a consumer’s right to repair, with a view to making repairs systematic, Right to repair cost-efficient and attractive. Its resolution of 25 November 2020 on a more sustainable single market for business and consumers and its resolution of 10 February 2021 on the new circular economy action plan both called for the adoption of a set of measures, including: mandatory labelling on the estimated lifetime and reparability of products, such as a repair score and usage meter for certain product categories, and ensuring that consumers are provided with the information on availability of spare parts, repair services and software updates at the time of purchase; giving the repair industry, ‘including independent repairers, and consumers’ free access to repair and maintenance information; encouraging standardisation of spare parts; setting a mandatory minimum period for the provision of spare parts that reflects the product’s estimated lifespan, and reasonable maximum delivery times; and ensuring that the price of spare parts is reasonable, and that independent and authorised repairers, as well as consumers, have access to the necessary spare parts without unfair hindrances.

The projector manufacturer doesn’t control those costs. The Dcd isn’t drm’d. It’s not covered by right to repair.

The Right to Repair is not limited to DRM issues. From the briefing:

New implementing acts on servers and data storage products, washing machines, dishwashers, fridges, electronic displays (televisions and monitors) and lamps require manufacturers, for instance, to ensure that spare parts are available for a certain number of years after the last item has been placed on the market (e.g. ten years for washing machines and seven years for fridges); to deliver the ordered parts within 15 days; and to make maintenance information, including manuals, available to professional repairers.

I have yet to see a DRMd washing machine.

Of course manufactures can control the costs by shifting the cost onto the purchase price. If they must offer reasonably priced spare parts for ten years, then they might have to factor that cost into the sales pricing. And fair enough, because consumers should be discouraged from buying new stuff anyway.

I am writing this from a 2008 machine.

Bad software forces people into the market for new hardware. I can run the most recent version of Debian on this old hardware with 4gb RAM just fine. I will never for the rest of my life have to buy a PC or laptop because I keep finding abandoned PCs and laptops that are faster than what I have (faster than what I need). Microsoft will exploit these consumers for decades to come. Glad I am not feeding the ecocide.

The infrastructure established by the right to repair laws will not likely be that sharply keen to deny rights on old products because there is a cost in making that separation.

Think about why Dell computers snap apart easily. The EU forced Dell under environmental law to make their PCs come apart easily for disposal. Dell resisted at first but did not want to give up the EU market. So they complied. Dell also decided that it costs more to have a separate infrastructure for US consumers, so Dell made all their PCs snap apart wherever sold globally. So rights will manifest unintended benefits.

I’ve already accidentally exploited this. I /thought/ a right to repair law was already enacted, so I requested replacement rubber o-rings citing the not-yet-enacted right to repair law. They sent me the rubber rings (which cannot be bought in stores) at no cost.

I think France has subsidised some repair shops and incentivised consumers using them instead of buying replacements. So if some particular manufacturer tries to get persnickety about the timeline, 3rd party repair shops may be willing to step in.

I bought a DJ mixer, which turned out to be dead. I popped it open and could not see any obvious issue, thus fixing is beyond my expertise. So I plan to get out of warranty repair at a reasonable price.

I bought a projector and the DCD chip turned out to be bad. DCD chips are about as costly as a whole projector. So I expect the right to repair law to force the replacement part to be reasonably priced. I have the same expectation for the boiler mentioned in my other comment.

I have 2 vaccums with broken proprietary nossle/hose and one has a broken plastic part. Both manufacturers ignored my request to tell me of a local parts reseller. I doubt they will be able to ignore that request after the right to repair law passes.

I found a vaccum with missing proprietary floor rolling attachment (so it only functions as a hand-held vaccuum). No idea if the part I need is separately sold or if the price is reasonable. But the right to repair should ensure that repair becomes viable if it’s not already.

There are a lot of things I bought 2nd hand for which the manuals are either on tor-hostile websites, or jailed in various enshitified 3rd party manual repos. I hope the right to repair can be used to force the manufacturer to send me a paper manual that avoids the enshitified web. Not sure if that will be a reality as we get more and more to a point where people have lost the right to be offline through legislation that assumes everyone is happily online with no issues.

The right to repair (at least in the EU) is being written to facilitate both people who have the ability to repair and those who do not. If you do not have the ability to repair, the law will entitle you have the device repaired outside of the warranty for a reasonable price.

If you have the ability to repair, the law entitles you to manuals and parts, and the parts must be at a reasonable price.

I had a proprietary valve fail in a boiler. The valve should be under $10, but because the manufacturer bundles the valve with many other fittings people are forced to buy a kit that’s no less than $100. That’s one thing the right to repair should solve.

Indeed those are good ideas. In fact it would be possible to solve the enshitification problem at the same time. If someone copy-pastes a whole article into their Lemmy post, then it solves the problem of getting the article out of Cloudflare jail (or other varieties of prisons and barriers).

There is a university that has its own small in-house archive. I forgot which uni. But the idea was that any papers or articles produced by students or profs at that university would naturally refer to outside docs. Of course it’s a problem when those outside references are unreachable. So the university archives everything referenced by in-house papers to ensure the integrity of the sources. Outsiders do not have the power to add a page to the archive… only to browse the archives made by insiders. Every university should be doing this.

All this only covers articles though. There are lots of web resources that need to be archived. Ideally it should be integrated into the browser. Instead of fetching and throwing it away, browsers could keep a local archive. From there, it’s a matter of getting the browsers talking to each other over Tor. Perhaps using IPFS (something I’ve been putting off looking into but seems to be part of the answer).

archive.is is in a walled-garden of its own. For a while the best way to reach NY times content was on their onion host:

https://www.nytimesn7cgmftshazwhfgzm37qxb44r64ytbb2dj3x62d2lljsciiyd.onion/

but now they have enshitified the onion. Normally archive.org is the free world way to reach jailed content. But today archive.org is under attack.

The next best port of call is normally 12ft.io, but NYT has managed to sabotage them too. At this point the only just, egalitarian and inclusive way to discuss NYT content is to either copy the NY Times text into your post, or don’t share that content at all.

What do you mean by “good”? I see a constant stream of articles about EVs being enshitified with cloud-attached surveillance tech and vulnerable to unwelcome remote hacking. To privacy advocates and tech rights proponents this means the ones designed as EVs are worse.

If you mean efficient, I’d be tempted to say the difference would be negligible in the big scheme of things. Factory produced EVs are not only surveillance systems on wheels, they are more hackable by threat agents than they are by their owners. Whereas a converted EV is likely more conducive to a /right to repair/.

The best scenario I could envision is this:

You bring your car to shop of expert converters. You watch over their shoulder as they convert it. This serves as training to know your own car. And as well to know how the power generator is built. You drive away with an open source EV that you can fix yourself, pulling behind it a trailor with a power generator, which is then connected to the charging inlet of the EV.

Okay, that last sentence was a joke, to be clear… Some Teslas have been spotted pulling a power generator on a trailer which then plugged into the car. I hope that practice of towing a generator is not actually a serious trend.

I had one of those great Iiyama CRTs – and still do, in storage. I heard when LCDs emerged that LCDs cannot achieve the refresh speeds and color richness of CRTs and that CRTs were still the best for gaming. Not sure if that still holds true. But as a kid, I embraced the Iiyama.

Anyway, I do not imagine desk space can be a reason people are tossing out LCDs.