Quote:
Originally Posted by Jon
This is what I was talking about. "Designed to fail" is not an urban legend or an old wives tale. Many companies have discovered (some of them - like the DeLorean Motor Company - the hard way) that if they don't design failure into components that they'll go broke before long.
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DeLorean Motor Company
A car company that only manufactured cars for two years doesn't help your case at all, unless you're arguing that DeLorean failed to build cars that wouldn't fall apart after three months, necessitating a new purchase at that point.
In fact (damn those pesky facts) it seems DeLorean's biggest problem was that they DID build cars that fell apart after a few months. You could try and say that's planned obsolescence, but most of us would just call it shoddy workmanship.
Nothing lasts forever. There's no manufacturing process that produces products that never fall apart or break down. If that were possible, we'd all be running our houses off Perpetual Motion Machines.
As Homer Simpson would say "In this house we obey THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS!"
One shouldn't confuse entropy with planned obsolescence.
But who knows? Maybe the oil companies really did buy that water-burning engine technology and buried it. Maybe we didn't land on the moon. Let me go grab my tin foil hat and think about it for awhile...