On cell phones and government
Here is an example of how government works. Cell phones and cell phone accessories are one of the most ridiculous wastes of money for consumers on the market today. It seems all phones have their own special cord that goes with them, even among the same manufacturer.
That’s by design, because when you buy that $30 charger for your cell phone and that phone breaks down, you’re stuck with a perfectly good but useless $30 charger. That’s the reality of the free market: everyone is out to make money, so every phone manufacturer is in on the scam, and you as a consumer don’t have a choice.
But soon (well, in 2012), thanks to government intervention, this little racket is coming to an end (from Yahoo! Tech):
This morning at the GSMA Mobile World Congress conference taking place in Barcelona, a mammoth pile of cell phone manufacturers have agreed to a universal cell phone charger standard. [...]
Only days ago, the European Union announced it would be pursuing stronger means of forcing cell phone makers to get together on a charging standard that would work across a range of different handsets.
So a uniform standard was not impossible to find, and it was not even that difficult to find. The fact that this was done so quickly tells us that probably these cell phone manufacturers already knew of a standard that they would all be happy with some time ago. But it still took that added step of government intervention to actually get them to adopt something as commonsense as a universal standard.
This will save everyone who buys a cell phone money. And for those who worship the myth of the free market, don’t worry, you can still waste your $30 in plenty of other ways.