hvacrmedic wrote:
Again you're fooling yourself. Evaporator coils, a good example again,
are known by the manufacturers to be inferior to older versions. The
decision to market them despite this defect is a conscious decision.
While the logic may not in fact have been "Well lets design them to be
inferior so that they won't last as long", nevertheless that is
precisely what they are doing. The objective is profits, and since
this practice increases them, that is why they make the desision.
Taking these two factors as premises yeilds the conclusion "planned
obsolescence". It is a subconcious desicion, but only because they've
either rationalized it as something else, or they have fooled
themselves into believing that their view isn't equivalent to the
latter, when in fact it is PRECISELY equivalent.

It is not the same thing at all. Building something poorly or cheaply such that
it doesn't last as long as the consumer would like is NOT the same thing as
building something with the specific intent that it not last that long.

You are just as dead if you fall off a tall building as if you jump off. That
does not mean they are both suicide.