Welcome to the "Last Word Café".

[RichD]

Permit me a sidebar...

I just watched this documentary about planned obsolescence. In fact you can watch it too, below.

The documentary is quite interesting, and it discusses how items are engineered with deliberate flaws to diminish their lifespan in order to drive economic growth. The prime example of this being the ubiquitous inkjet printer, which it turns out has an eeprom within it that counts the number of printed pages and deliberately dies at a predefined number. Another example is everything made by Apple computer, designed to be out of style within a year's time.

The flaws designed into products are deliberately obfuscated and almost impossible to discern through casual inspection. Lacking a laboratory, the only thing we have to work with is anectdata.

The docu also touches on the fact that, thanks to social media and forums like this, we as consumers are empowered like never before to discern the quality of one article over another before purchase, and overcome the flaws deliberately built in to the product after the fact. And so, adding cooking spice to your coolant aside, this kind of thread is really terrific stuff and should be thoroughly encouraged.