wow just noticed no shipping to Maryland...

just glanced at powernotebooks website.

ok i'll bite.

whats Maryland House Bill 488 about?

 

Something that has to do with them having to work out a ton of extra paperwork in order to ship you a notebook. You can ask paladin44.

 

LCD recycling.

The short version is MD House Bill 488 requires all laptop manufacturers to register with them, at a price of $10,000 for the 1st year and $5,000 every year after that.

 

So would Clevo or Sager be responsible for that $10k since they manufacture the notebooks or the resellers?

 

Either which way that is rediculous.. Maryland ftl.

 

For Sager laptops Sager would be. For PowerPro and Crown laptops PowerNotebooks.com would be.

Sager has actually paid the fee, so Sager laptops can be offered for sale and shipped to Maryland.

At the moment PowerNotebooks.com continues to "boycott" the State of Maryland which, sadly, affects Maryland residents. We may reconsider that position soon but for now prefer to "get the word out" as best we can.

 

hey Markyland screw gun owners as well.

kinda like the republic of California lol

 

The bill in question covers the issue of recycling electronic waste. The environmental costs of the toxic materials contained in a computer being just dumped into the landfill are huge. But given the choice of dumping it for free or paying to have it properly recycled, most people will just dump it. Any realistic solution has to remove the cost of recycling from the end consumer. The main goal of the bill is to force computer manufacturers to take back the machines they manufacture at no cost to the consumer (and thus force them to front-load that cost). Anyhow, I don't know enough to say whether this is the best way to achieve the goal. It certainly does seem to proportionally hurt smaller manufacturers much more than the big ones. But I think the goal of making sure that computers get recycled is a good one. I hope PowerNotebooks and other smaller manufacturers who have problems with this legislation are proposing workable alternatives rather than simply boycotting the state of Maryland.

As a point of clarification--the $5000 per year after the initial registration that Paladin mentioned only applies to manufacturers who refuse to take back their computers. The fee is $500 per year for manufacturers who have a program to take back their computers when consumers wish to dispose of them.

 

so its the price of one decked on 901C to renew everyyear if they take it back hehe...

 

JMac, it is not up to PowerNotebooks.com or any other manufacturer to solve a local (Maryland) recycling problem. It is up to the citizen's in that local area.

What Maryland is trying to do is make the manufacturer's state solve Maryland's recycling problem by making the manufacturer pay Maryland huge registration fees and then pay the user to ship their laptops back to the manufacturer when they are ready to dispose of the item. This is not only not affordable for the small manufacturer it is a ridiculous waste of energy. Just think of the cost to the environment of this extra shipment, in most cases across the country, to return it to the manufacturer so that the manufacturer then has to use their local disposal site. So that is fair to the citizens of the manufacturer's state?

Interesting that California charges $8 per laptop (or LCD of any kind), collected by the reseller, for their recycling fee. This fee does not discriminate against a small manufacturer and can reasonably be passed on to the local citizen/user as an "up front" disposal fee. However Maryland's method costs the Multi National Brands a few pennies per laptop while it costs the small manufacturer a bunch of dollars per laptop. The small manufacturer has a hard enough time competing against the big boys...this just widens the gap in pricing that much more.

Also, why should we put the additional cost of doing business in Maryland on the backs of all the rest our customers? We simply won't punish the rest of our customers for the unfair practices of a maverick state. The citizens/users in Maryland should be paying an "up front" disposal fee, not charging the manufacturer a huge "registration" fee and then making the manufacturer pay for a wasteful shipment back to them some years later when it is ready for disposal.

 

HERE HERE!!!

THANK GOD!!!

a company that doesnt follow the principle of punish everyone for someone elses mistake.

i live in the free state of TEXAS!! so i am all good.

 

Yeah, I heard this and I wanted to cry..

 

There's no denying that MD H.B. 488 is well-intentioned; sadly, good intentions not only pave the road to hell, but also the road to waste, irrelevance, and unintended consequences.

I've already gassed on enough about how this bill is the embodiment of well-intentioned stupidity (or, as is more likely, venality and corruption) here: http://forum.notebookreview.com/showpost.php?p=2802986&postcount=17 , so I won't go on at length again here. Suffice it to say that MD H.B. will do little or nothing of substance to reduce the waste the bill's supporters claim to care about, will unduly burden small business and is unlikely to have any effect on any big business that doesn't really give a damn (i.e., the bill's principal intended targets), and in sum does nothing more than let venal legislators and eco-fascists claim that they've done something other than simply burnishing their already overweening egos.

 

Before I retired I worked for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection (which later had its name changed to the Department of Environmental Regulation). There were lots of examples of products like car tires and batteries causing huge environmental problems. The result was a charge like Donald described California has for laptops. You get nicked for a couple of bucks when you buy new tires or batteries. Even with that relatively small charge there were folks who kept their tires or battery to avoid the surcharge and dumped the junk on the side of the road; or worse in a pristine water supply or fragile wetlands.

Not to say a laptop is not a disposal problem, but desktops are even worse. They are much bigger and harder on the environment. The big CRTs really have nasty stuff inside. Quite frankly the best solution from the standpoint of keeping junk from being dumped in the dead of night is for the government to set up a place for environmental hazards to be dumped off at no charge. For stuff like paint (which is one of the biggest problems in terms of sheer volume), batteries, house hold chemicals, and electronic goods in general (you cant believe what kind of bad chemicals in in a TV).

From what I can see the Md. bill only serves to keep small computer guys out of the state. It does nothing to solve the problem of all the laptops already out there. And quite frankly laptops are not really that big a problem in the big picture.

What most folks dont realize is that runoff water from rain washing the chemicals off the roads (like tire rubber, leaked oil and gas, and lead from burning gas) is a far bigger problem. There have been studies that show having auto inspections and not allowing cars leaking oil on the road (or ones that dont meet emission standards) would do more than any thing else to clean up the environment.

But the pols know they can get away with beating up on small computer sellers and look like they are doing some good; but they dont dare make every voter who drives a car mad.

 

Yup, that's the basic principle (if you can call it that) at work here - since little folk, like Donald and Justin, cannot (and do not) vote in MD, they're fair game.

BTW - I just realized that there may be another ulterior motive at work here - another undercover attempt to get around the federal prohibition on states imposing sales taxes on internet commerce; essentially, this "fee" is a loose proxy for the MD state sales tax that would otherwise be imposed on sales from out-of-state retailers who are not otherwise subject to MD sales tax. I realize that it's not a very well-fitted proxy, but then again, most proxies aren't.

It reminds me the most of New York's "use tax" proxy. New York (and in particular, the proto-fascist denizens of the NYC city council) cannot stand the fact that someone might cross the border into, say, NJ and buy something there without paying sales tax (8.75% in New York City) - this is a big deal since a lot of retailers in Jersey City (right across the Hudson) are not required to collect much, if any, NJ sales tax.

Since NYC/NYS cannot put armed border guards up to search everyone and impose the state "use tax" on every out-of-state purchase made by NY residents, and since they don't trust that every NY resident will faithfully report every actual out-of-state purchase (and pay the use tax), NY instead "presumes" that you purchased a certain amount of out-of-state goods based on your level of taxable income, and imposes an ersatz "use" tax on every resident that must be paid unless you actually have all your receipts and report actual purchases (subject to serious audit if you happen to report purchases below the amount presumed on the basis of your income).

Obviously, assuming that the higher your income, the more often you go out of state to buy goods, and the greater the amount you spend out-of-state, is not even an adequate approximation of an individual resident's actual use-tax base; however, it's a good enough proxy that it still counts as a bona-fide "use tax."

By analogy, even though the MD H.B. 488 "fee" doesn't really adequately measure in-state sales by non-MD retailers (i.e., retailers who otherwise do not have enough connections to MD to be subject to MD sales tax collection obligations), it is probably still sufficiently within spitting distance that the twits in the MD legislature decided that it was a good-enough attempt to end-run the federal ban on taxing internet sales.

 

Great news.
A company that's not following the principle of punishing everyone for someone's else mistake.

I live in the free state of Texas!! so i am all happy.

shabby

Maryland Treatment Centers

 

I hate those ecomentalists ...