I get that Rossmann’s whole “right to repair” crusade is a net good. No arguments there. It’s cool he wants people to be able to fix their own stuff and not get fleeced by Apple’s clown show.
But I’ve never understood the pedestal people put him on. Half his content is indistinguishable from an unmedicated rant at 2x speed. It’s like watching someone livestream their internal monologue after downing a ton of caffeine and Reddit takes. If literally anyone else talked like this outside his bubble, they’d be written off as a schizo shitposter and banned. Somehow he gets a pass for “speaking truth.” Yes, he does some good. But let’s not pretend he’s above criticism just because he runs a repair shop and figured out how to milk YouTube’s algorithm with word salad and pseudointellectual outrage over whatever the current "bad thing of the day" is.
I, like many, am blackpilled about the whole "repairable consumer electronics" thing. Laws won't change anything, they'll just make a new bureaucratic structure to force companies to abide by rules that bureaucrats come up with. It's not gonna be in the consumer's best interest, but again lobbying groups are gonna neuter, backdoor and stupify the law that actually gets passed, so that the corporations can keep doing what they want and making backdoored unrepairable cheap chinese junk marked up at 1000% (but it looks like a spaceship or an anal probe - like Dyson vacuums and almost all home appliances that are now marketed towards women, no substance and all looks). If you want to actually achieve what his "right to repair" is fighting for, you're gonna have to abolish copyright laws. Because the corporations are always gonna say that something in the product is their intellectual property and you can't have it - and current copyright or patent law says they're right. They can say that they own the rights to x or y software or hardware (copyright or patent) and they're gonna be right.
Of course even if R2R were to pass and corporations were forced to provide repair manuals, software and all spare parts to repair shops and/or consumers, they'd just make it uneconomical to repair stuff by jacking up prices on the manuals and parts. They're not that wrong in saying that distributing and supporting a business of selling manuals and spare parts will cost them some money, and that money will be reflected in the price of the parts. The auto industry has enjoyed the relatively cheap spare parts because they were forced to by the government, and given free money (how many times has the government, aka taxpayer, or via funny money printing by banks, bailed out the auto industry, in every western country with one - America, Germany, France, ...? GM, VAG, Stellantis, Peugeot, Citroen,...
Every excess of cunsumerism in the west has been financed by the unlimited printing of funny money in the banks. The upper middle class wouldn't spend their money on frivolous luxuries if they actually had to work for their money and not get a loan from a bank, and compound loans on top of each other. They're at the top of the pyramid scheme and they can throw their money around and not care if they lose it as it's not their money and they can just take out another loan. Same goes for big corporations - there's a saying, if you own a small amount of money to the bank, the bank owns you, but of you own a large amount, you own the bank. Banks will do anything to not have their existing large investments or loans go under water, as that would mean a catastrophe for them, so they do whatever they can to keep the pyramid scheme going by printing new money and giving it out. And those people that are at the receiving end of that free money don't care about R2R as they don't even care if they have to buy a new PC, car or chinkphone every other week. They have to keep up appearences and their lifestyle to appear rich. In their mind, only poor people fix their old stuff and keep their luxury goods more than a few years, they get rid of them when something new and more blingy comes out. This is the type of consumer that the banks and politicians have created. They're not gonna magically reverse this course. Imagine what would happen to all the banks that have given out loans to the big tech companies that make the majority of their income from selling new goods. Their investments would go under, their pyramid schemes would implode, the rich would lose a lot of money, the show-offs couldn't buy the latest new gadget every other week to show off with and feel high-status. It would be a catastrophe for those narcs and psychos. They can't live any other way, they would claim they're being genocided. They have to keep it going, so R2R is never gonna pass.
The most we can hope for is that if we, the group of people that do want repairable electronics, repairable cars, and so on, vote with our wallet and buy stiff that's repairable or don't buy stuff at all. This is what I do and hope others will do too. I drive a 30+ year old car because of that. I've had to make my own workshop, buy all sorts of tools and practically become a mechanic in order to fix my own stuff, as noone will fix it affordably any more, and the competence crisis means they'll more likely fuck your stuff up than fix it right. I only buy 10+ year old PC hardware as those had some stuff that's more repairable and can run open-source BIOS replacements like Libreboot. Even then I treat PCs like only semi-repairable, it's inevitable they'll be junk some day. But some stuff, like appliances and cars, could last a lot longer, 30+ years is no problem for well made mechanical machines. That don't' have much electronics in them. Microcontrollers, computers, anything that has software in it, is the big problem, and I avoid it like the plague. If you go oldschool completely electromechanical, you can always figure out how the thing works just by looking at it, and if the part isn't available, reproduce it yourself. Not so with microcontrollers that have firmware baked into them that's impossible to read out without extreme levels of effort like side chain attacks, supply current analysis, or literally looking at the silicon with a $100k microscope in a lab.
