xQc Reacts to This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things by Veritasium with Twitch Chat

okay chat chat this is something like conspiracy what is this like cars phones and light bulbs and an actual conspiracy that made them worse this video was sponsored by nordvpn more about them i am outside livermore fire station number six and in here they have the longest continuously on light bulb in the world it has been on for 120 years so close since 1901 there it is huh it's not even connected to a light switch but it does have a backup battery and generator so the big question is how has this light bulb lasted so long it was manufactured by hand not long after commercial light bulbs were first invented holy [ __ ] and yet it has been running for over a million hours way longer than any light bulb today is meant to last a while back a friend of mine told me this story that someone had invented a light bulb that would last forever years ago but they never sold it because an everlasting light bulb makes for a terrible business model i mean you would never have any repeat customers and eventually you would run out of people to sell light bulbs to i thought this story sounded ridiculous if you could make an everlasting light bulb then everyone would buy your light bulb over that competitor is this a planned absolescence and so you could charge really high prices make a lot of money even if demand would eventually dry up i just couldn't imagine that we had better light bulbs in the past and then intentionally made them worse but it turns out i was wrong at least sort of inventing a viable electric light was hard i mean this is the typical incandescent design which just involves passing electric current through a material making it so hot that it glows you know less than five percent of the electrical energy comes out as light the other 95 heat is released as heat so these are really heat bulbs which give off a little bit of light as a byproduct you know the temperature of the filament can get up to 2800 kelvin that is half as hot as the surface of the sun at temperatures like those most materials melt and if they don't melt they burn which is why in the 1840s warren de la rue came up with the idea of putting the filament in a vacuum bulb so there's no oxygen to react with by 1879 thomas edison provided a bulb with a cotton thread filament that lasted 14 hours other inventors created bulbs with platinum filaments or other carbonized materials and gradually the lifespan of bulbs increased the filaments changed from carbon to tungsten which has a very high melting point by the early 1920s average bulb lifetimes were approaching 2 000 hours with some lasting 2500 hours but this is when lifetimes stopped getting longer and started getting shorter in geneva switzerland christmas 1924 there was a secret meeting of top executives from the world's leading light bulb companies philips international general electric tokyo electric osram from germany and the uk's associated electric among others guys guys who's the leader in bulbs like that dude because i got a bunch of philips hue and they're pretty good man they're pretty good they formed what became known as the phoebus cartel named after phoebus the greek god of light there all these companies agreed to work together to help each other by controlling the world's supply of light bulbs in the early days of the electrical industry there had been lots of different small light bulb manufacturers but by now they had largely been consolidated into these big corporations much dominant in a particular part of the world the biggest threat they all faced was from longer lasting light bulbs for example in 1923 osram sold 63 million light bulbs but the following year they sold only 28 million light bulbs were lasting too long eating into sales so all the companies in the cartel agreed to reduce the lifespan of their bulbs to one thousand hours cutting the existing average almost in half but how could each company ensure that the other companies would actually follow the rules and make shorter lasting light bulbs after all it would be inaudible i'm all for capitalism chat but i think this cap hasn't gone too far though because as i understand it i'm i'm i'm a capitalist myself but i think when you start doing stuff like that i think you're going backwards in the name of capitalism i think it's kind of their individual interests to make a better product to outsell the others well to enforce the thousand hour limit each of the manufacturers had to send in sample bulbs from their factories and they were tested on big test stands like this one if a bulb lasted significantly longer than a thousand hours well then the company was fined if a bulb lasted longer than 3000 hours well the fine was 200 swiss francs for every thousand bulbs sold and there are records of these fines being issued to companies but how do you make a worse light bulb in the first place well the same engineers who had previously been tasked with extending the lifespan now had to find ways to decrease it so they tried different materials different shaped filaments and thinner connections and if you look at the data they lot they got fines if the the bulbs were uh not good enough they were successful ever since the formation of the cartel the lifespan of light bulbs steadily decreased so that by 1934 the average lifespan was just 1205 hours and just as they had planned sales increased for cartel members by 25 in the four years after 1926. wait so the government agreed and had laws to propel that capitalism out maxed out and even though the cost of components came down the cartel kept prices virtually unchanged so they increased their profits so did people know that the light bulb companies were conspiring together to make their products worse no the phoebus cartel claimed that its purpose was to increase standardization and efficiency of light bulbs i mean they did establish this screw thread as standard you can find it on virtually all light bulbs around the world now but all evidence points to the cartels being motivated by profits and increased sales not by what was best for consumers so one of the reasons this light bulb has lasted so long is because it was made before the cartel era another reason is because the filament has always been run at low power just four or five watts it was meant to be a night light for the fire station to provide just enough light so that firemen wouldn't run into things at night and the fact that it was always on reduced the thermal cycling of the filament and components limiting the stress caused by thermal expansion and contraction i know this next cartel was initially planned to last at least until 1955 but it fell apart in the 1930s it was already struggling due to outside competition and non-compliance amongst some of its members but the outbreak of world war ii is really what finished it off so this cartel was dead but its methods survived to this day there are lots of companies out there that intentionally shorten the lifespan of their products it's a tactic known now as planned obsolescence aha this was actually the subject of casey neistat's first viral video all the way back in 2003. what about when apple starts slowing [Music] 255 plus a mailing fee to send it to us to re to refurbish to correct it but at that price you know you might as well go get a new one this video got millions of views in a time before youtube or social media and it spawned a class action lawsuit which apple settled out of court but it didn't stop the company from practicing planned obsolescence after an ios update in 2017 users of older iphones found apps loading significantly slower or the device shutting down all together they throttled performance to protect the battery of all the devices and increase their longevity of course that wouldn't be an issue if the battery were replaceable guys seriously here's my actual thoughts okay if your company does this you know it's wrong and oh dude it's just one instance just having the thoughts of even trying this or doing this i think your company is like beyond repair dude i i think it's fundamentally so bankrupt lawsuits that concluded in 2020 apple was fined or reached settlements to pay hundreds of millions of dollars undoubtedly this amount pales in comparison to the extra revenue they generate by limiting the lifespan of their products bankrupt yeah like you it's empty but some would argue that and obsolescence isn't just about greed that it's also good for everyone during the great depression in the 1930s when as much as a quarter of americans were out of work an american real estate broker bernard london proposed mandatory planned obsolescence as a way to get people back to work and lift america out of the depression he wrote i would have the government assign a lease of life to shoes and homes and machines when they are first created and they would be sold and used within the term of their existence definitely known by the consumer after the allotted time had expired these things would be legally dead and would be controlled by the duly appointed governmental agency and destroyed if there is widespread unemployment now this might sound like a wild fringe idea dangerous but people were clearly afraid of being put out of work by technological progress and products that were too good there was even a popular oscar-nominated film about it this is the man in the white suit from 1951 it's about a scientist who invents the perfect fiber it won't stain or break or fray i think i've succeeded in the co-polymerization of amino acid residues and carbohydrate molecules both containing ionic groups it's really perfectly simple the academy award nomination was for best screenplay i kid you not anyway everyone is initially excited about our hero's scientific discovery he makes a suit out of the thread and it has to be white because the fiber is so stain resistant it can't even be dyed but this is when trouble strikes the factory owners realize they won't be able to sell as much of this thread because it's so durable and the workers worry it'll put them out of a job why can't you scientists leave things alone oh what about my bitter washing when there's no washing to do this is when you get the climactic scene where factory workers and factory owners team up to chase down the scientist to destroy him and his invention and believe it or not this movie may have been inspired by real events in the 1940s the synthetic fiber nylon replaced silk in stockings and it was so durable that the products became an overnight sensation there were literal riots when women tried to get their hands on them when the manufacturers realized they had made the product too good they didn't destroy the fiber but they did follow the example of the phoebus cartel they instructed their engineers and scientists to find ways to weaken the product to shorten its lifespan so people would have to buy more now it seems like consumers are finally fighting back against planned obsolescence in the european union and in over 25 states in the u.s there's proposed legislation to enshrine the right to repair these laws would force manufacturers to make it easier to repair their products they would have to provide information and access to parts so you could replace a battery or fix a cracked screen at a third-party repair shop without voiding your warranty so if the right to repair does become law does that mean artificial obsolescence will be gone for good sadly no because there is one last thing manufacturers can use to make their products obsolete which is you henry ford released the first mass-market car the model t in 1908 and he envisioned it like a workhorse an affordable tool that wouldn't wear out a bit like the everlasting light bulb rally in 1922 ford said we want the man who buys one of our cars never to have to buy another we never make an improvement that renders any previous model obsolete but by 1920 55 of american families already owned a car nearly everyone that could afford one had one and that same year there was a small economic downturn driving down sales for both ford and general motorsports in 1921 dupont the chemical and paint company took over the controlling share in general motors oh no and they started experimenting with painting cars different colors up until then henry ford had said you could have whatever color you like so long as it's black it took a couple years of testing but in 1924 gm released their first cars in different colors and soon after they introduced a trick that feels very familiar now each new year they would introduce cars the goal wasn't just to make ford's model t look outdated but to make their own cars feel outdated every year encouraging customers to trade in their old cars for shiny new ones years later it gm's to me like apple are working backwards they think all the skamaz techniques that history thought us and they're just jamming them in their [ __ ] marketing strategies what the [ __ ] is going on man dynamic obsolescence our big job is to hasten obsolescence in 1934 the average car ownership span was five years now which was 1955 it is two years when it is one year we will have a perfect score by the time he said this general motors was the most valuable company in the world and it sold half of all vehicles purchased in the u.s every year that's sick and then what these days the world's most valuable company apple seems to have copied directly out of this playbook i mean new styles every year check new special colors every year check marginal technological cosmic gray galactical purple interstellar white dude this [ __ ] made up [ __ ] is this useful innovation or just a gimmick the inspiration for general motors and hence for apple comes from fashion where real innovation is all but impossible so the only way to make people feel the urgency to get out there and buy is to create styles that last but one season the trouble then is you run through these styles too quickly and then what are you supposed to do well just recycle the styles from a few decades ago the iphone also shows this recycling trend i mean just look at the way the edges were initially rounded and then they were squared off and then they were rounded again and now they're squared off and how much do you want to bet that the iphone 14 has rounded edges i think the point is that with design and styling there is no best there's only different which is apparently enough to remind us that we don't have the latest and greatest and so we have to rush out and keep buying the only type of obsolescence we should support is technological which brings us back to the light bulb you know in the last 20 years light bulbs have gone from incandescent which was basically unchanged for 100 years to compact fluorescent and now to led these use just a tenth of the energy and can last anywhere from ten times longer yeah that's pretty bright so you're more likely to sell your house than to have to replace an led bulb that you've installed inside it so we've finally reached the point of what is essentially an everlasting light bulb [Music] that's what i have that was a good video though i enjoyed this video was sponsored by nordvpn featured in an episode of the british tv program qi it's a show i really like and i'd highly recommend it if you haven't seen it already and it's on netflix but only if you're in the uk i feel like tv and film are still trapped in antiquated business models where they divide up the world into broadcast territories yep that doesn't make a lot of sense now that information can flow freely through the internet luckily using nordvpn anyone can set their location to the uk and watch whatever they like if you're interested in seeing what streamers have to offer in different countries you can get a huge discount on a two-year plan at nordvpn.com veritasium absolutely use code veritasium to get an extra month free and using nordvpn you can also protect your products asking your ip address in fact you can change your ip twice to cover your web traffic within video security nordvpn has a no logs policy they don't track collect or share your private data which is what a lot of the world's biggest companies are trying to do right now so for privacy when browsing and access to all the shows the world has to offer go to nordvpn.com veritasium for a huge discount of a two-year plan and use code veritasium to get one additional month free and this is all risk-free with nord's 30-day money-back guarantee so i want to thank nordvpn for sponsoring veritasium and i want to thank you for watching [Music] [Music]

Channel: Clipped & Shipped

Views: 21,681

Keywords: clipped and shipped, clip it and ship it, xqc, xqcow, veritasium reaction, xqc veritasium, xqc reacts to veritasium, veritasium why we cant have nice things, conspiracy videos, xqc conspiracy videos, xqc reacts, xqc reacts to with chat, veritasium, xqc vods, xqc highlights, xqc clips, why we cant have nice things, conspiracy

Id: QS7zs9Xe5SY

Length: 19min 5sec (1145 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 21 2021