Technology

Absolutely!... It would be hard to write a law against it, but definitely we should try

Planned obsolesce is like steroid for an infection in our consumerist societies

This will make starting a business (any kind) in this area another little bit more expensive, while much less affecting the existing ones. And when everybody big is sabotaging a rule, you'll see it becoming just a symbolic fine.

EDIT: I wrote a lot of stuff elaborating it further, don't read it if you are not interested in my political views.

It's counterintuitive, but regulations won't work. Those supposedly in our favor still have such side effects, being the more bothersome the smaller you are. Those openly not in our favor work more efficiently, cause the state enforcing them is an organism much more similar to corporations than to us. They understand each other better and work in symbiosis.

All these things are the consequence of patent and trademark laws. Very basic and short-term versions of these are better than none, but what we have now is killing our civilization. Not slowing it down, not making it worse, just killing it.

Competition does work when it's not fucking prohibited! And that's what we now have, competition being discouraged.

With idealized unimpeded competition everybody really gets their needs, because the demand of poor people for housing, for example, is still something that can well be provided with the value they can give back.

I don't understand people who look at our current world and think it's not regulated enough, thus it's capitalism's fault. It's regulated to sea hell. And the more regulated a country is, the more likely it is to be an oligopoly. Say, Sweden which many people like a lot. Most of its economy is owned by a few families. They are just kinda magnanimous.

Which leads us to the question why the legal and social and economic systems become what they are, that's because they are affected by power manifested in various ways. You can't vote for the world becoming better and expect it to become better.

Openness, transparency, voluntarism, right to cut off voices you don't want to hear and right to raise your voice anywhere on any matter are things that make power more distributed and competitive.

And any regulation gives additional power to people who already have enough.

Communist West Germany? You mean East Germany?

Because I lived there when the Wall came down, and I can tell you based on the huge influx of Eastern Germans who had floorboards you could see through that quality was not a priority.

Sometimes you stuck gold. Got one of those amazing Philips electric kettles 20 years ago. Works like new still. Of course they don't make them anymore.