Planned obsolesence

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wv9MyB0hbI4

This version of the film has subtitles in ?Danish, and quite a lot of dialogue in French and German, but even if you can't get much from the non English content, it still gives a fascinating insight into the scourge of planned obsolescence.

There are several examples of PO in the film, and some encouraging examples of people defeating it. On strand shows someone hacking his printer, which has and EEPROM chip in it that makes if fail after a preset amount of time. As to the cartel that forced lightbulb manufacturers to limit the life of bulbs to 1000 hours, we should be shocked. The everlasting lightbulb is not a myth! There's one in the US that's burned for >100 years.

What's most harrowing is seeing the computer scrap in Ghana, and the poor people scavenging for recyclable materials. There is a campaigner featyred there who tracks down the end users of the computers and pints out to them where they end up.

Another stand-out for me was the objection of workers to the making of long lasting goods, as this would do them out of their jobs. True, it would, but using up the planets finite resources to create jobs is completely insane. Use the resources consevatively, do only the work that the sustainable systen puls in - don't create work. And finally, share out the food, water, shelter, etc to everyone, so they don't have to work to survive.