Has your washing machine broken down, or is your electric kettle, laptop or mobile phone refusing to work?
Well if you live in Austria, the government will pay up to €200 ($219; £173) towards getting it repaired.
...
Mr Schmidgruber says customers have to download a voucher from a government website and then pay the repair shop upfront. "Then you get back half of the costs after three to four weeks."
The Austrian government's repair voucher system, which is financed through the Covid Recovery Fund, is just for electrical appliances.
But the City of Vienna runs a separate scheme - which works in a similar way and helps people pay for repairs to old clothes, bicycles or furniture.
Maybe should move to Austria.
Damn. My old EU passport no longer works cos of these English idiots voting for Brexit cos they think the "British Empire" could be great again (not that it ever was in human terms). Honestly, I want back into the EU... please... I never asked to leave. Forget NATO - the EU is enough for me.
Okay so I have many (too many) old laptops now. Some of them still work, but total rubbish nowadays so wouldn't wish them on anybody. Bicycles are a different matter - I've collected tons of these (more than laptops in fact) over the years - none of that electric crap - I'm getting old but I'm not yet infirm and one of the points of cycling is to keep fit. Fact is though, being a trained electronics engineer I don't need to pay half the repair costs if I needed to fix my laptop, and I've also been fixing up bicycles for years. Nevertheless, for those who cannot fix such machines themselves, the scheme in Austria isn't too bad really.
In terms of fantastic utility and long life importance, bicycles are way more important than stupid laptops or desktop computers in terms of their amazing utility, and certainly tons better than cell phones which simply waste more and more of our limited life time. Apparently you won't need any of that junk in paradise so don't plan on taking it with you; you might be able to gate crash seances and ouija board sessions, any time you feel the urge, instead of using whatsapp anyway.
Re: repair your gadgets
Posted: Sat Dec 30, 2023 7:59 am
by Jasper
I know of a community based project that repairs electrical items:
.......does "planned obsolescence" ring a bell, hmm..??
There was a science fiction book I read several decades ago where a company started that made perfect ever-lasting products. In the book that utopia quickly turned into a distopia with riots and so on cos nothing needed replaced or therefore made and thus no wages for the people so basically couldn't live, but I can't recall the name of the book.
Hah. Yeah, good one. Haven't seen that for a LONG time.
Fact of the matter is, there always was plenty of employment for the after-market parts/repair ecosystem paradigm. But companies eventually figured out they could make even more money from forcing people to upgrade every 2-3 years, whether they wanted to or not.
Of course it was going to generate a backlash, sooner or later. They just timed it wrong. If they'd waited another 20 years before implementing this practice, they'd have then been dealing with generations that had grown up never knowing any other way. Because they put it into practice when they did, there were sufficient numbers of the older generations still around who could remember when the system used to be very different.
Needless to say, the business "motto" of the last 15 years - "Expand or die" - played right into the hands of those money-grubbers who saw this as the best thing since sliced bread.......and were determined to milk it for all they were worth.
Never mind, eh? "What goes around, comes around..."
