[HN Gopher] The Disappearing Art of Maintenance
___________________________________________________________________
The Disappearing Art of Maintenance
Author : TeacherTortoise
Score : 134 points
Date : 2022-09-27 15:58 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.noemamag.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.noemamag.com)
| nappy-doo wrote:
| I recently got bit by the pinball bug, and while reading this
| article all I could think about is that maintenance is part of
| the hobby. And for some it's all the hobby.
|
| Buying a pinball machine is expensive. Prices on used machines
| range from free to thousands (and ten thousand+ for really in
| demand ones). After you buy the machine, assuming it works,
| there's maintenance that occurs on the machine as a direct
| function of how often the machine is played. Maintaining that
| machine can be on you for parts and labor, or someone who comes
| to your home for 100$/hour (or so) +parts. There's no escaping
| the labor. You have to do it, or the pinball machine stops
| working. The maintenance ranges from simple cleaning this and
| that, all the way to removing components from boards, and
| rewiring destroyed traces.
|
| I love this about the hobby, and it's probably my favorite part.
| I like maintaining the machines probably more than I like playing
| them.
| [deleted]
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| fwiw I've noticed that my 2016 vehicle is surprisingly low
| maintenance compared to previous generations of vehicles. From
| longer cycles for basic maintenance[2] to parts just not failing
| as soon as I was used to (eg, check out this article[1] about cv
| joints lasting 2-3x as long).
|
| I wish i could say the same about home appliances.
|
| [1]: https://bobistheoilguy.com/forums/threads/how-long-should-
| yo...
|
| [2]: eg cars going from 3k to 5k to 8k miles between oil changes,
| kn&n filters lasting 50k miles on hwy etc.
| mindentropy wrote:
| How are K&N filters compared to the stock filters? I am
| thinking of changing my stock filter to K&N filters but I have
| a lot of hesitation on how long it will last.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| I think the two main takes are:
|
| 1. a tiny bit of horsepower/fuel efficiency and no
| maintenance -- win
|
| 2. It might work by increasing the size of things allowed
| through, which maybe matters to your engine life? -- loss.
|
| YMMV, literally
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| The ice maker in my Samsung refrigerator has failed. Too late, I
| now know this is common for the brand. The part costs PS100
| ($100). The fridge was kind of expensive, with a deli drawer,
| French doors, etc.
|
| The refrigerant line for the entire fridge loops naked through
| the ice mechanism. Apparently, it is all too easy to nick the
| line, bricking the entire appliance.
|
| Accordingly, no repair person will touch it. I'm moderately
| competent with mechanical and electronic things, and I would try
| it, but I'd like a second brain, set of eyes and pair of skilled
| hands. No one is stepping up, presumably to avoid dealing with
| the hassle we'd have if we fail, myself included.
|
| I do like ice.
|
| Do I:
|
| a) Give it a shot myself risking a PS2500 refrigerator.
|
| b) Keep trying to find someone who will fix it. Offer them some
| kind of waiver on replacement cost if they fail.
|
| c) Continue to make ice in trays, a few at a time, whilst the
| broken ice maker mocks me.
|
| d) Get a countertop ice maker for PS100.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| We also had one of these side by sides. I replaced the icemaker
| twice and the icemaker circuit board once over a period of
| about 12 years. I finally replaced the whole thing last year
| with a new refrigerator after the freezer light quit working
| and the easiest, cheapest replacement part did not fix the
| issue. For what we paid initially and for the other icemakers I
| would not buy a Samsung again.
|
| If you ever need replacement parts for any home appliances you
| should go to one of these places [0], [1] where you can get OEM
| parts instead of aftermarket parts that may not work great.
|
| [0] https://www.appliancepartspros.com/
|
| [1] https://www.ereplacementparts.com/appliance-parts.html
|
| Both sites have exploded diagrams that help you find the part
| you need and in many cases they have videos to show how to do
| the repair.
| yason wrote:
| I approach appliances with the Unix philosophy. One thing to do
| one thing well -- or at least only one thing to be replaced
| when one of them breaks. And if I find a genuinely good item I
| can keep using it even if other machines break.
| Melatonic wrote:
| Or E) Buy the same exact appliance on Gumtree or whatever
| Craigslist approximator is currently available for probably
| something like 400 :-)
|
| You could also guilt trip Samsung on Twitter and they might
| replace it for free
| atoav wrote:
| I recently fixed a AV switcher (HD cinema stuff with custom
| programming by a media tech company) this way. The device
| costed 9kEUR back in the day.
|
| One day it died and took the whole room with itself. Because
| it also controlled the lights via DALI no light could be
| switched on or off in that room.
|
| I figured out that the 24V "Medical Grade" (?) Made in China
| powersupply was toast. The typical bloated and leaking
| electrolytic capacitors were no surprise after nearly a
| decade of 24/7 operation. But there was also an exploded
| SOIC-14 IC by STM that I could not identify because
| coincidentally it was just the manufacturer part number that
| had been vaporized. A search for suspect parts didn't yield
| any results.
|
| I checked ebay and found a used device for 100 Euros and
| bought it. The used device _also_ had a broken PSU. But the
| IC was working (and yeah, nothing you would be able to buy).
| So I swapped the capacitors and everything worked again.
|
| A replacement for that unit including programming would have
| costed my company 20k at least.
| kevstev wrote:
| Heh I have also had trouble with a higher end model's ice
| maker. I have donated about half a pint of blood over several
| stabs at fixing it. Even after I ended up moving and renting
| the place, the new tenant who also considered himself pretty
| handy gave a bunch of goes at it too to no avail.
|
| It seems like such a simple device, yet they are devilish to
| diagnose and repair apparently!
| bsder wrote:
| Ice makers are the #1 failure mode of refrigerators.
|
| Between being broken, taking up freezer space, having weird
| plumbing, having water that doesn't move often so grows
| bacteria, needing filters which nobody ever changes, etc. the
| best maintenance idea is simply to _not have an ice maker_.
|
| I'm sure that some people get more value out of an ice maker
| than a couple of ice trays in the freezer. I'm just not sure
| I've ever met them.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Meanwhile the dirt cheap kenmore I had my entire life had
| an ice maker that never had a problem. It seems more common
| on the more expensive appliances. It just seems like they
| overcomplicate and don't build in redundancy or
| repairability to save a couple bucks.
| onemoresoop wrote:
| > It just seems like they overcomplicate and don't build
| in redundancy or repairability to save a couple bucks.
|
| No, they want you to buy another one aka
| premature/planned obsolescence. Best bet is to research
| heavily and hope to find a manufacturer who doesn't do
| that.
| silisili wrote:
| I think ice makers just got too fancy. I mean, now they do
| water dispensing, cubed ice, crushed ice, even party ice or
| whatever that stupid trend is called. My best working ice
| makers, by far, were the kind that just dumped ice into an
| internal bucket, with a small wire to detect when full, and
| you'd grab it yourself. Not at all common, anymore at
| least.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The root problem seems to be that ice makers are an
| afterthought / outsourced on any price freezer.
|
| Consequently, they're designed to minimal reliability,
| lasting just long enough to outstrip the warranty.
| [deleted]
| ornornor wrote:
| I know it's too late for you, but I have a personal rule that's
| served me very well: never touch any Samsung device ever. You
| can't avoid the chips they make as part of other devices or
| appliances but that seems ok.
|
| The Samsung branded appliances and devices however are total
| garbage and Samsung dgaf. It might actually be part of their
| business model.
|
| I have rarely heard someone say how happy they are with their
| Samsung anything, especially not their fridges and other
| appliances. "Built to fail" is something that often comes up,
| however.
| kingrazor wrote:
| I like their SSDs, and haven't had any Samsung ram modules
| fail, but yeah, for anything else, I avoid the brand.
| donclark wrote:
| I have a neighbor who does external lighting. Highly
| recommends Samsung lighting because it outlasts everything
| else he has used previously.
| jonnycoder wrote:
| I would like to know which fridge company is the most
| reliable. My samsung fridge and washer/drier bought in 2013
| are still running good. I heard bad things about LG
| compressor in fridges, but their cordless vacuum is
| outstanding. I will probably never trust GE.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I bought at least 5 or 6 LG linear inverter compressor
| refrigerators since 2019 and they are all going great, with
| zero noise.
|
| I think they had issues with their initial models, but they
| may have improved them. I mainly stick to LG appliances
| from Costco. But I also avoid getting appliances with fancy
| features like see through doors and crap. I don't even get
| ice dispensers, just the ice bucket inside the freezer
| works.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| My dad has repeatedly installed samsung appliances,
| especially one of their dishwashers, in all his housing
| projects (as a general contractor) because they are "very
| quiet". Meanwhile, ever single one of them, for two decades
| now, fails and becomes useless within a year because a stupid
| water level sensor is exposed to the dishwasher environment
| in such a way that it gets dirty and tells the system
| computer to not do anything. "It's an easy fix" he says. If
| you replace the part, it will just fail again.
|
| I think he might be stupid. He does not get a kickback for
| this.
| donatj wrote:
| It's so sad to see such a rapid decline. In the early 2000s
| every Samsung device I bought was well made and unbreakable.
|
| Every Samsung device I have bought since maybe 2010 including
| my refrigerator and dishwasher have been total junk. I've had
| our refrigerator repaired so many times in the last 8 years
| it's just unreasonable.
| tomcam wrote:
| Proper choice for you is d). I did it about 6 months ago and am
| thrilled.
| montereynack wrote:
| I guess I'll take the opportunity to throw in my hat... I'm
| currently running a very early-stage startup trying to address
| some of the brain drain and complexity in industrial maintenance.
| If you'd like to talk/rant about your job and the pain points you
| have, I'd be all ears! Wouldn't be a sales call, I'm just trying
| to talk to people at this point. Feel free to DM me if
| interested.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Making maintenance easier requires a fair amount of industry-wide
| standardization and interoperability, and many corporations view
| this a threat to their market share and hence, profitability.
| This has been widely seen in the computer industry over the
| years, although the long-term conclusions might oppose the short-
| term view, i.e. while at first the closed-system strategy might
| succeed, in the long term having an open-system approach will
| bring in customers who've been burned in one way or another by
| the closed-system world.
|
| A particular example I'm very familiar with is bicycles - they're
| fairly easy to maintain and work on relative to automobiles (no
| fluids, not much electronics until recently etc.). Ideally a
| bicycle can be maintained easily and replaced piecemeal from a
| wide variety of suppliers, i.e. everything is swappable and there
| are no non-standard parts, such as weirdly threaded bottom
| brackets or non-standard axle widths. Some companies have tried
| to do things like that - I think Shimano made an integrated brake
| lever/gear shifter for a while, whereas most bikes allow you to
| replace each item separately. For example, if your bicycle frame
| breaks, you should be able to remove all the parts and install
| them on a roughly similar frame, even from another manufacturer.
|
| As far as deliberately making repair more difficult in the hopes
| that people would toss their old devices and buy new ones,
| there's good evidence for that with Apple, such as the
| introduction of pentalobe screws for no other plausible reason
| than making repair require specialized tools (IFixit's
| comprehensive screwdriver kit is nice in that regard).
|
| The solution is once again, governmental regulation and agreement
| on certain standards, for example requiring a standard USB-C
| connection for all phones sold in a given market, etc.
| sinoue wrote:
| Check lists are useful for dealing with maintenance. Good
| companies have a process in place to minimize downtime.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Grease points already have a standard: zerk fittings, but many
| car parts don't have them anymore, so you end up replacing all
| of these "sealed" "lifetime" bearings/joints entirely because
| they dried out and creak away.
|
| Would be cool if a bicycle bottom bracket or hub had those
| fittings.
|
| I volunteer at a bike co-op and between the generations,
| there's been a toooooon of "standards".
|
| Frequent mixes of imperial and metric. A French/Italian/British
| bike may have the opposite threading on parts than you expect.
| Different widths of spindles and wheel dishing and spoke
| lengths and oh my!
|
| How many mm wide would you like your tire? And will it even
| fit? Can you use that 700C accessory on your 27" or are you
| SOL?
|
| If we didn't have a boneyard of bikes to scavenge from/strip
| for parts, we'd get nowhere.
|
| Then the corrosion issues when you "upgrade" to an aluminum
| seat post or stem on a steel frame...
|
| I guess part of this problem is the durability of bicycles.
| Cars probably have the same problem but their lifespan is a lot
| more limited.
|
| Lots of (small s) specialized tools out there because the
| manufacturer never intended for you to actually take the thing
| apart. Every design of freewheels required a different tool to
| remove.
|
| Definitely assembled several Frankenstein-bikes in my lifetime
| where you'll need a rather diverse set of tools from different
| generations of bikes to eventually repair!
| kqr wrote:
| Don't get me started on bicycle wheels. My wife and I both
| had wheels nominally of the standard size (28 inches). Guess
| what -- standard 622 ("28 inch") tyres did not fit either of
| our bikes, but her wheels were too small, and mine were too
| big!
|
| So we have two different bikes both ostensibly of the
| standard size, but both differing from it in different
| directions!
|
| (Yes, I have looked it up on Sheldon Brown's bike tyre sizing
| guide -- there are two different sizes that are almost the
| standard size but not quite, one too small, and one too
| large. So this is not just our bikes that were faulty, these
| weird sizes are out there.)
| Melatonic wrote:
| Bicycles have actually gotten much easier to work on but I
| totally know what you are talking about. Bottom Brackets are
| actually the one thing I now refuse to work on (too many god
| damn specialized wrenches just to open and close them).
| Cartridge bearings are so much easier but as you probably
| know not really repairable (I have a late 1980s touring
| bicycle that I regreased the bearings and it rides better
| than new) but also crazy easy to just swap out. Nobody uses
| 27" anymore and everything being 700C (even many mountain
| bikes now with the "29er" trend) makes it all definitely
| better.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| New bicycles won't have 27" wheels, but they're still out
| in the field and manufacturers still mass-produce 27"
| wheels and tires.
|
| But if you want fenders, you'll have to struggle through
| mounting a 700C set. At least the tubes are backwards-
| compatible.
| donatj wrote:
| > The solution is once again, governmental regulation and
| agreement on certain standards, for example requiring a
| standard USB-C connection for all phones sold in a given
| market, etc.
|
| You spend a long time arguing the opposite with your bicycle
| argument. The government never forced them to standardize and
| they did.
| donmaq wrote:
| > You spend a long time arguing the opposite with your
| bicycle argument. The government never forced them to
| standardize and they did.
|
| They really didn't though. From different axel widths forcing
| older ones obsolete (ie my 10yo $450 Chris King hub in
| perfect condition 135x10QR now has precisely zero frames it
| will fit), to actual wheel sizes themselves (26" wheel frame
| are nearly impossible to find, outside of Dirt Jumping), the
| bike industry is busily doing their own version of 'embrace &
| extend'.
|
| There's even electronic shifting now, adding a teensy bit of
| advantage to rich roadies, while removing the ability to fix
| your own derailleur.
| patchorang wrote:
| I agree that bikes are a great way to dip your feet into
| maintenance. But everything is not swappable. There are a
| handful of "standards" for each part of the bike. It's not
| insane, but replacing a part often requires researching all the
| standards and understand what you have and what you could
| upgrade it to. Getting a new bike often requires getting a
| couple of new tools.
|
| That said, if you ride bikes regularly but take it to the shop
| for maintenance, try doing your next service yourself. There
| are tons of online videos to help you. It will require an
| upfront investment of some tools, but they will pay for
| themselves the second time you use them.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| I work in maintenance in the steel industry. To find good people
| is hard, today if somebody has more than two brain cells, the do
| a lot of study and never really start to work with there hands. I
| see it now, at moment several people get retired at our company.
| Instead one smart guy who did everything, you need know one guy
| for paperwork, one guy for his brainwork, one guy for what he did
| with his hands .. and one guy more to coordinate these three
| guys.
|
| Also today with computer everywhere .. before you changed a
| setting with a screwdriver on a poti, now with computer
| everywhere .. your installed version is to old, download the
| latest version, try to install, it fails because the company has
| tight security rules on companys computer, try on a airgaped
| notebook for technic, it fails now because you can't install or
| license the software because no internet .. to keep software up
| to date and running for over 10 or 20 years is just a f**ing
| pain. And it gets worse ever day.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| I think in general the human mind treats Maintenance as less
| important or not important at all. The ancient people realized
| this: When I studied Chinese in primary school, there was one
| ancient text that spoke about a discussion between a king and a
| famous doctor. The doctor explained that his brother was superior
| than him in the medical science but no one heard about him
| because he could always treat small illnesses before then evolved
| into terminal ones, so people said, "Oh he is a fine doctor, but
| he only treats minor illnesses".
|
| This text has been resonating with me for many years. Humans
| simply do NOT appreciate maintenance people TBH. Me as an
| example: I own a house but whenever I plan maintenance of my
| house I always tried to push it a bit further because 1) It's
| expensive, and 2) Manual or company says that I need to do X
| every Y years, can I push back say 10% and still don't break
| things? As for my electronics, unfortunately I never maintained
| them and in my earlier days I never had a computer that lasted
| for 3+ years -- they always broke down due to this or that
| reason.
|
| And then both of my knees have degenerative issues; I had kidney
| stones; I need to maintain physical health but I was and still is
| too lazy to do that. I simply do not have the maintenance
| mindset.
|
| This probably can stretch out to the whole society: We simply do
| not appreciate Maintenance people. They are usually lowly paid
| and have low moral because what they work is chore. They also do
| not get to enjoy creating new things. Basically you need someone
| who has the mindset to appreciate maintenance to be a good
| maintenance person, and a society of this mindset to support such
| work and lower the cost. Nowadays we do not. Nowadays we always
| doubt the necessity of maintenance and sometimes even accuse
| other people to charge a large bill for maintenance (sadly, this
| could be true). There is little trust between.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| As I enter my mid 30s and am now a year into taking care of my
| late father's house, I have come to realize that maintenance
| can really take up so much of your free time that it often
| feels like its never ending. Its as if when one thing is fixed
| or "refurbished" the next thing breaks or changes its behavior
| immediately right after. It can be overwhelming to overcome all
| this entropy.
|
| Seems as if the only way to really reduce a maintenance burden
| is to simplify your life more and more including the things in
| your life. But then you are still having to take care of your
| body and if you have a family others as well. I can understand
| a society that has FOMO will put maintenance on the backburner.
| There just isn't enough time to have your cake and eat it too
| in our modern world it seems.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| This is not something new. It is simply a matter of discipline,
| and choosing long term rewards over short term rewards.
|
| And people have been choosing short term rewards for many
| generations and probably all of humanity, even when they know
| otherwise.
|
| Everyone knows to eat and drink less/better and exercise more,
| but few do it, because it is not fun.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| It's a bit more complicated for the other projects I guess.
| We never know for sure if the budget is correct or too
| inflated to satisfy certain interest groups. We don't even
| know if it is necessary to do X at this moment. Of course we
| can probably blindly trust the engineers who certified on the
| reports (because civil engineers are true engineers while
| software engineers are not?).
| hindsightbias wrote:
| When I started as a CS graduate, I was thrilled to be on a
| complex project as a lowly maintainer. I dove into that code
| and learned how stuff worked. People avoided those areas
| because it was too dirty, scary or hard sounding. That's the
| story of my career. Pick a popular project and be a fish in big
| pond or pick something others stayed away from and own it.
|
| Our future is going to be a shitstorm of breakage. Covid should
| have taught us a lesson but we're going to go on while
| infrastructure (physical and virtual) starts to break and no
| Top 10 grad is going to want to touch it. You're not going to
| have a choice about plumbing or roof leaks - nobody is coming
| for a week and you are on your own.
|
| On your knees - I look at my classmates now and consider HS
| sports to be child abuse. My coworkers talk about their kids
| surgeries. Those 4 or 5 people boarding your plane in
| wheelchairs now? It's going to be 3X that in a decade. But
| that'll be fine, because you'll have to wait a couple hours for
| the rare pilot to show up.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >Our future is going to be a shitstorm of breakage. Covid
| should have taught us a lesson but we're going to go on while
| infrastructure (physical and virtual) starts to break and no
| Top 10 grad is going to want to touch it. You're not going to
| have a choice about plumbing or roof leaks - nobody is coming
| for a week and you are on your own.
|
| Its already happening. It feels like a slow collapse. I am
| trying to maintain my 16 year old car because it is low
| milage and I just don't want to pay the absurd prices for a
| new car until maybe next year (especially a Mazda which I
| like but not at that price). My trusty mechanic has had so
| many labor issues that while he provides me good service even
| he is slipping. I've been teaching myself car repair so I can
| do more and more myself because I know it will be done right
| and with extreme care.
|
| I see the same happening to local hospitals and doctors
| offices. I've had to bring parents there or go there myself a
| few times this year and I can clearly see the degradation in
| service. I can't do anything about this compared to the car
| other than take really good care of myself and hope for the
| best.
|
| Same applies to all of retail. The quality of all mass market
| stuff just seems worse and worse as time goes on. I was
| observing this while having a bagel and coffee from Dunkin.
| Everyone is just flat out "over it".
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| > I look at my classmates now and consider HS sports to be
| child abuse.
|
| It's a serious risk, but the risk-reward is still positive
| when it comes to the value of youth sports. Do you disagree
| strongly with this?
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I disagree with the risk reward of contact sports,
| especially if your kid is smaller than average. Anything
| where the brain collides with the skull is an obvious no
| (American football, soccer headers, etc).
| tomcam wrote:
| > Those 4 or 5 people boarding your plane in wheelchairs now?
| It's going to be 3X that in a decade.
|
| Well... have you seen what happens to the 4 or 5 wheelchairs
| on the other end of the flight? They often remain empty.
| Looks to me like people are gaming the system to get
| preferential treatment on plains.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| The author goes into the whole Reduce, Reuse, Recycle part of
| things but I think they miss out on a current trend [0] that may
| be a subset of Reuse.
|
| [0] https://www.repurposedmaterialsinc.com/
|
| This outfit takes in surplus materials, obsolete parts, etc. and
| sells them either to be reused as originally intended by a new
| owner or repurposed to accomplish a new task that the designer
| never considered.
|
| Repurposing things allows us to keep a lot of stuff out of
| landfills and for many of the things they sell, extend the useful
| life of things that are obsolete in their original purpose but
| that aren't close to being worn out.
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| > "Maintenance must be valued on its own terms, and that means
| tearing down the economic system that rejects it."
|
| This is not how you get people to side with you about the
| importance of maintenance.
|
| Honestly, if I have to choose between capitalism and valuing
| maintenance, I am going to go with capitalism every single time.
| ornornor wrote:
| First, why? You'll have to slave away at your job longer to
| replace things you could have otherwise repaired at a fraction
| of the cost, thus becoming a slave to your job to maintain your
| income just to keep on existing.
|
| And secondly, why? The pollution this kind of thinking
| generates is mind boggling and as everyone is becoming aware,
| we're running out of time to avoid disaster.
|
| So, really, why?
| drstewart wrote:
| This is still an argument for maintenance, not an argument
| against capitalism. Maintenance and capitalism aren't
| diametrically opposed.
| pessimizer wrote:
| It's important to love capitalism, regardless of whether it
| has a positive effect on anything in particular. It can tell
| when you love it, and if it feels loved, the more likely it
| is to favor you.
| rikroots wrote:
| I don't understand why the article assumes there's an either/or
| situation here (maybe it's written from a US-centric POV?);
| there's a lot of good money to be made from maintenance and
| waste management. For example here in the UK, cars have to pass
| an annual road-worthiness test, which gives car owners and
| garage owners a chance to fix things before they break. In
| homes, it's a requirement to have gas boilers checked annually
| - again maintenance. Councils and private housing associations
| regularly come round to check and refurbish exteriors, wiring,
| plumbing, etc - waiting until the house floods or burns down
| doesn't make economic sense to them.
|
| I worked on England's waste strategy published back in 2000.
| The waste hierarchy back then was "Reduce, Reuse, Refurbish,
| Recycle" - the promotional focus at the time was on recycling
| (our recycling rates were abysmal), but maintenance ( ==
| Refurbish) was definitely part of the mix.
| switch007 wrote:
| I'd love to know what housing associations you know of that
| do regular proactive maintenance. My family has decades of
| experience as tenants and I can't agree at all. I feel they
| do the complete opposite - hope that only fixing when things
| break be the cheaper option.
|
| Any regular checks they are a complete farce and on many
| occasions have actually broken things, especially regarding
| boilers (I wish I were joking)
|
| I do agree good money is being made on maintenance. The
| service is sold, it just doesn't properly get carried out
|
| The people they send round to fix things are bluntly thick as
| shit and often damage more than they fix
| s1mon wrote:
| I've spent 30+ years designing and engineering consumer and
| medical products, mostly for high volume production. While I
| detest working on projects I consider "instant landfill", the
| reality is that so much of our built society whether it be a toy
| car, a mobile phone, or a house, is designed to appeal to
| consumers. Consumers who want their phone to be light,
| waterproof, beautiful and more powerful than the last one they
| bought, and at the lowest price possible. Prioritizing things
| like that means that a lot is invested in specialized equipment,
| fixtures, and training for the labor force which manufactures
| their new shiny object. Duplicating that equipment and expertise
| is next to impossible on the scale of maintenance. Maintenance is
| more of a craft. Think about your local car mechanic vs the
| factory which produced the car in the first place.
|
| Even in the factories where your new shiny consumer electronics
| products are produced, when Chinese News Year is over, and a
| bunch of the staff turns over, getting the production line up and
| running again with the same quality is challenging. Despite there
| being documented standard operating procedures, incoming and
| outgoing quality checks, etc... there's a lot which is tribal
| knowledge and muscle memory of the operators. Even if things are
| highly automated (and you'd be shocked how much is done by hand
| despite all those magical How It's Made videos), those machines
| need to be adjusted and tuned to keep from producing junk. This
| is all to say that so many things are on the hairy edge of
| working well. They're not always so easy to disassemble and
| reassemble without destroying seals, alignment, calibration etc.
|
| To a degree, some of this can be blamed on products becoming more
| and more electronic and miniaturized, but the reality is that so
| many things involve inseparable assemblies (whether it's an
| heirloom chair glued out of wood, a PCBA, the drywall in your
| house, or a welded and painted autobody). While there are rework
| techniques for these, they're never the same as following the
| normal process in the factory.
| mountainb wrote:
| The last time I paid a general appliance repairman to fix my
| dishwasher, he replaced it with a nonstandard part. It semi-
| functioned for another couple years, but it generally had a hard
| time self-cleaning its own filter, which lead to lots of strange
| and persistent problems. Eventually, the dishwasher failed,
| causing a leak that required a lot of the flooring around it to
| be replaced.
|
| I should have just purchased a new dishwasher at the time that
| GE's planned obsolescence part failed, right at the end of its
| warranty period.
|
| So, what the article misses is that a lot of the suppression of
| maintenance providers is related to how our intellectual property
| regime has been crafted. The statutes and case law give
| corporations enormous power that they did not really have in
| previous eras to control supply chains and documentation. There
| are other factors feeding into this, but if you are looking for a
| solution to this set of issues it lies within IP reform first and
| foremost, although that would have its own set of tradeoffs and
| consequences.
| bombcar wrote:
| Designing for maintenance often means designing for failure;
| for example, I want to design my kitchen under the assumption
| the dishwasher will fail and flood the room, such that it
| drains safely away without causing damage.
| ticviking wrote:
| Sure, the consequence of our IP regime is that there is a
| temptation to design to milk those failures as a revenue
| source.
|
| With a different IP regime one could imagine incentives that
| allowed a "right to repair" where IP violation done as a part
| of a owner commissioned repair were widely accepted or a
| manufacturer forfeit's the IP when they cease stocking the
| part defined as "admit they don't stock it" or "do not have
| it in stock for 6 total months of a year"
| mjevans wrote:
| Then your kitchen (and laundry room, etc) would have to be
| properly designed and built, with drains, and a floor sloped
| to them, waterproof and mold proof materials.
|
| Maybe even a sub-panel so the major appliances and each wall
| outlet were each on their own circuit and you could plug in a
| waffle maker and toaster oven on the same wall without
| popping a circuit breaker.
| Melatonic wrote:
| I tell people I still do some of my shit "on prem" these days and
| get weird looks but its a skill I can't help but think is going
| to become very useful someday soon
| deathanatos wrote:
| It's funny because I've been "in cloud" all my career and that
| experience has taught me the value of "on prem".
| Eleison23 wrote:
| I attended community college a few years ago and took a pair of
| courses designed as preparation for CompTIA A+ certification. Our
| final project for the class was to refurbish a desktop computer
| and donate it.
|
| Our instructor fired up a compressed air machine and we blew out
| all the dust. We checked connections and RAM, peripherals,
| optical drive, HDD, etc. We made sure the things booted and
| probed OK. We checked cosmetics on the front bezel and around the
| case. No wiping HDD or installing of OS was necessary here, it
| was strictly a hardware/BIOS-level project.
|
| Then we were graded and the refurbished machines were all shipped
| off to a local student-run project that provides usable computers
| to worthy organizations who need them. Definitely a feel-good
| project, all around!
| Syonyk wrote:
| I work in the tech industry. I'm somewhat rare in that I also
| work on my own vehicles, do my own maintenance, repair things,
| build my own stuff around the property, etc. A lot of coworkers
| at various places I've worked over the years view this as
| somewhere between "eccentric" and "slightly mad." "Why would you
| do that yourself, just _pay someone else_ to do it! " is the
| common sentiment.
|
| But even with electronics, in an office full of tech workers, I
| still seemed to be one of very few who was willing to get my
| hands dirty. I had a steady side stream of evening projects
| repairing phones, laptops, etc (or, more usually, buying the
| broken ones, fixing them or merging them together into working
| ones, and then selling the working ones). I was also, far as I
| could tell, the only one in an office of >1000 willing to do
| things like take a soldering iron to a laptop to repair a failed
| power jack, or even just do things like taking a laptop
| substantially apart to _replace_ a power input board with a new
| one.
|
| It never made any sense to me that I was the only one willing to
| do this sort of stuff. It's paid off well over the years, but
| it's quite baffling.
|
| This, of course, means that a lot of new things seem to be
| designed by people who've never had to work on things or repair
| them, with the expected results of "This is more painful to
| repair than it has any business being, because you never thought
| about it." Some of the best vehicles I've worked on over the
| years were old gen Subarus - EA82, so late 80s wagons. Every time
| I had to do something on them, it felt like the engineers had
| considered that someone would have to do this, and made it as
| easy as possible within the design. Things like the fuel filter
| were on the firewall, instead of under the vehicle out of the
| way. The fuel pump was on a skid plate in front of the tank,
| instead of in the tank. There was a storage compartment in the
| back that would fit a CV axle, should you want to carry your old
| one. Etc. They were simple, and easy to work on - so I drove them
| for quite a few years.
|
| But even today, I still constantly see the sentiment that "Well,
| it doesn't matter if it's easy to fix, we'll just recycle it and
| build a new one!" Usually in fields where recycling is poorly
| defined, at best - consumer electronics and EVs draw this sort of
| thing frequently. I view that as complete madness, because it's
| always going to be cheaper to repair something (at least if it
| wasn't a glued together hell to repair) than to crush it and
| replace it, but... again, this is an oddly minority view in the
| tech industry.
|
| I'm not sure how to fix it. We have a lot of people who are
| afraid to get their hands dirty, designing the things that are
| supposed to be the future of our civilization. That's a real
| problem.
|
| > _No amount of utopian dreaming can make a battery hold any more
| energy or a piece of steel bear any more weight than it's
| designed for._
|
| Yeah. That describes an awful lot of the problems we're facing...
| jlg23 wrote:
| > I'm not sure how to fix it. We have a lot of people who are
| afraid to get their hands dirty, designing the things that are
| supposed to be the future of our civilization. That's a real
| problem.
|
| I think "garbage" disposal is way too cheap: books, clothing
| and electronics are things that should be really expensive to
| throw away as most often they can be re-used, re-purposed or at
| least gutted. When disposing them as garbage is more expensive
| and less convenient than finding someone who wants to take the
| stuff, people will be motivated to at least donate them.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Getting rid of trash service would solve a lot, yes... though
| it would take some adjustments. It's a lot harder if you're
| denser urban.
|
| I got tired of paying a lot of money to have trash hauled, so
| I solved it around our property. I built a trash trailer out
| of some old stuff laying at a relative's place (old pickup
| bed trailer and a topper, some new plywood for the bottom,
| some Great Stuff foam to seal it up, and a couple used
| tires), and I now haul trash every 18 months, aiming for 24
| months. Food waste goes to the property cats or the compost
| bins, and I'm able to separate out almost all our waste
| stream into assorted recycling or reusable packing material
| (boxes, newspaper, random padding, stuff like that gets
| reused either by me or by some other people locally with some
| ecommerce sorts of sales flows). Very little ends up in the
| trash trailer, and it's not organic, so it just sits there
| until I haul it.
|
| It's really quite eye opening just how much waste there is in
| the normal flows of packaging material. I have a
| local(ish...) way to deal with plastic waste, so I can deal
| with the "mixed unusual plastics" in a recycling flow as well
| (it goes to be burned to offset coal use in a cement kiln
| over in Utah), but that makes up an awful lot of volume in
| our waste.
|
| With the metal recycling, though, I'm "net positive" on
| annual trash spend now, and I'm far better able to optimize
| our waste streams down than I was before. But I also
| recognize this isn't something that will scale nearly as
| easily as I can do it.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| My trash pickup is included in my rent, but to take out the
| trash involves walking 500 feet accross the property, which
| turns out is a lot of effort carrying tens of pounds of
| awkward trash.
|
| So I make less trash now. That cheese danish in the store
| looks tasty, but the plastic clamshell packaging is
| incredibly space inefficient as trash, so I'll buy the
| cookies instead, they're in easy to compact paper boxes.
| Maybe you think I'm putting a burden on myself but I didn't
| need either the danish or the cookies in the first place!
| PuppyTailWags wrote:
| Donating itself is also fraught, however. Very few people are
| going to want a 20-year-old pulp book, soiled magazine, out-
| of-date manual, etc. Librarians commonly have to curate their
| collections which includes throwing out a ton of books, often
| donated books. Clothing is also often stained, holey, or
| dirty. While clothing can be repurposed to cleaning rags I
| suppose, I don't know if one can easily repurpose books.
| mellavora wrote:
| > While clothing can be repurposed to cleaning rags I
| suppose,
|
| Not anymore, when almost all clothing is partly synthetic.
| If it isn't 100% cotton or 100% wool, it is probably going
| straight to a landfill.
| bombcar wrote:
| You can find online the absolute bales of clothing crap
| Goodwill et all throw away; people use them as a dumping
| ground for garbage so they don't have to feel bad about
| it.
| InitialLastName wrote:
| If you get rid of garbage disposal, you get people dumping
| things in random places. Maybe it's more expensive, maybe
| some places can enforce not doing it, but if you make
| instigating negative externalities the easiest solution, what
| you get is the destruction of the commons.
| mfer wrote:
| It's not just cheap. The effects of disposing of all the
| things are out of side and out of mind. People don't see the
| results of their actions.
| [deleted]
| mfer wrote:
| I'm like you. I fix my own things including vehicles.
|
| In the past, schools had shop classes and home economics. I
| took both when I was growing up. Many schools don't have these
| classes anymore so kids don't get a foundation in being hands
| on. They don't get comfortable doing their own things. I think
| this is bad for society.
|
| I know retired folks who work as handy men who have people in
| their 20's and early 30's as clients. They do simple things
| like hang pictures on walls (not joking).
|
| Skilled trades working in plumbing, electrical work, carpentry,
| and so forth are going to be in higher demand in the future.
| Many are hitting retirement age and the back fill behind them
| isn't happening. This is happening at the same time
| construction is going up. Where I live it's almost impossible
| to find someone to do minor work around your house. Everyone is
| off doing the big ticket jobs.
|
| Of course, the idea of recycle old things and buy new isn't
| working out so well. It's often throw out the old (where we
| fill dumps at increasing rates) and buy new. Setup by companies
| who make more money that way. For their financial benefit
| rather than our or our planets benefit.
|
| Fixing things has never been easier. You can learn a ton a
| youtube these days. There are books, too. Parts are easier than
| ever to find and order.
| spfzero wrote:
| >>Parts are easier than ever to find and order.
|
| So true. I was surprised to be able to replace a circuit
| board on a (probably) 20 year old garage door opener.
| Surprised, in that I had no knowledge of the things, couldn't
| really be sure I was searching for the right part, no
| instructions for replacement on YouTube, etc. Fortunately you
| could look at the drive, see that there was a PC board in
| there which was screwed in so you could remove it and look it
| over, google the part number.
|
| Pretty sure if I had called a specialist out to repair it,
| they would have told me it's not worth repairing, hard to get
| parts, will just break again in a different way due to its
| age, just get a new one. And that argument is probably both
| true and well intended.
| bertr4nd wrote:
| So I'm one of those people who doesn't know how to fix
| anything; I wish I did! I'll tell you what holds me back: I
| didn't grow up around anyone particularly handy, so I don't
| know what I don't know.
|
| Simple example: I was trying to hang some shades in my kid's
| room. First set went in fine, second set, my drill hit
| something too hard for it (brick? Metal?). At this point I'm
| kind of stuck. I can search Google for this scenario but it's
| hard to know conclusively which situation I'm in, and I don't
| know how dangerous or destructive what I'm doing could be.
|
| This is probably laughable to lots of you who know,
| intuitively from experience, what's happening and what to do,
| but for someone who had no idea like me, it's pretty
| intimidating.
|
| (Coda: we bought stick-on shades and they were trivially easy
| to install and worked great)
| mindentropy wrote:
| >I didn't grow up around anyone particularly handy
|
| I grew up in a similar household. Fortunately I was the
| handyman for my family. I never had tools but I used to
| improvise. I also used to fix some of my hot wheel toy cars
| and I longed for a soldering iron and pliers.
|
| Now I really wished I could learn in a more formal way on
| how to repair and maintain things. I have severe anxiety
| dealing with people and the attitude and workmanship of
| some of the repairmen makes my anxiety worse.
| bombcar wrote:
| You probably hit a "nail plate" or just happened to hit a
| drywall screw directly.
|
| It can be really hard to start off without someone to at
| least bounce ideas off of over a beer; one of the nice
| things about knowing handy people, for sure.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| I understand the predicament where you have a project that
| needs to be completed but you don't have the background
| skills to understand how to do it efficiently or at all.
|
| I would like to point you to a subreddit [0] where you can
| get answers to questions like the one you described. There
| are lots of people like myself who hang out looking for
| inexperienced people who just need guidance since they
| already have the motivation.
|
| [0] https://old.reddit.com/r/DIY
|
| People post everything from complex projects that took them
| multiple months to complete to ordinary maintenance tasks
| like replacing light fixtures or door knobs.
|
| I hang out there a lot. I'm a guy who grew up fixing things
| and just never stopped even when I had the money to pay
| someone else. I (we) don't mind passing on useful skills to
| inexperienced people. It's very satisfying to know that
| someone tackled a problem that they thought was difficult
| and solved it using something you recommended.
|
| Good luck!
| [deleted]
| veqq wrote:
| A bit tangential, but construction isn't rising. More houses
| were built in Los Angeles in the 50s than today. More in New
| York in the 20s. But the populations are far larger and
| expand more. (Hence the explosion in housing prices.)
|
| Viewing the data is a bit less extreme at first:
| https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/HOUST You can see that we
| are around the mean today. However the population is 2x
| larger...
| mfer wrote:
| That graph shows new development rising. It's not as high
| as it once was but it's an upward trend. The valley was
| around 12-13 years ago.
|
| Talking to people currently in the industry, they are
| busier than they've been in years. I know people trying to
| find contractors for small jobs who can't.
|
| NY and CA may not be having a lot of new construction. But,
| other places are. California is seeing a population decline
| bobthepanda wrote:
| also, reduction in household sizes.
|
| all wealthy countries have observed significant falls in
| household size over the past century. tenements used to
| have whole multigenerational households in a single room.
| that's obviously not tenable today (and it shouldn't be)
| but now the same amount of people needs more units.
| peteradio wrote:
| I'm similar, except a Jeep guy. I was reticent to move into the
| new millennia Cherokees because I was worried about all the
| computerization of everything. When push came to shove I bought
| an adapter (Hell yes Jeep/Dodge/Ram for making this possible at
| a reasonable price!) and changed my air springs. I was
| initially quite pissed, who swaps coil springs for air!? But in
| the end it was way easier than changing the leafs on my old XJ.
| ambientenv wrote:
| Two thoughts come to mind ...
|
| [1] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [2] Shop Class as
| Soul Craft
|
| Huge impact for me over my decades here.
|
| [1]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_...
| [2] http://www.matthewbcrawford.com/new-page-1-1-2
| greedo wrote:
| I would add https://www.amazon.com/Keep-Volkswagen-Alive-
| Step-Step/dp/15...
| pengaru wrote:
| The aversion to getting one's hands dirty I've found is common
| in software engineering as well.
|
| It just takes the form of nobody wanting to inherit someone
| else's project. Nobody wants maintenance tasks, everyone wants
| to do green-field development or if they must inherit some
| existing product they quickly conclude a rewrite from scratch
| is necessary.
|
| I too have a scrappy hands-dirty DIY IRL history starting with
| childhood. When I entered the software industry after years of
| sysadminning, it became very clear my enthusiasm for facing
| existing complexities head-on was somewhat unique among my
| peers as well.
|
| But I think this is a more general struggle everyone encounters
| in life; it's _always_ more attractive to create new problems
| than solve existing ones. (I 'm pretty sure that's a quote I've
| heard/read at some point, but its origin escapes me)
|
| Some examples from other domains:
|
| Relationships (my mate and I are arguing and I've been sleeping
| on the couch, my OkCupid profile just notified me; cheat)
|
| Automobiles (my car needs tires, brakes, a paint job, and
| thorough cleaning, the car dealership down the road is having a
| sale; new car loan)
|
| Living spaces and projects/hobbies (the closet is an
| unmitigated disaster area, I can't even open its door anymore,
| but the spare bedroom is empty and I need to start a new
| project rather than finish any of the dozen abandoned ones
| occupying said closet; new projects in spare room until it too
| overflows) This starts to look like hoarding, but it's really
| just backing down from solving existing problems in favor of
| making new ones.
|
| The list goes on, I'm sure you can come up with a bunch of
| examples yourself.
|
| Starting anew is an immediate gratification, anything else, not
| so much until you make forward progress which almost certainly
| will be a slog since the immediate gratification low hanging
| fruit phase was already burned by either past you or someone
| else altogether.
|
| Personally I find it far more rewarding to resolve existing
| difficult problems, especially now that I have so much
| experience that whenever I start anew I'm fully aware that I'm
| likely making problems future me will have to deal with.
| Existing problems usually have a bunch of evidence to
| scrutinize and inform what you're doing to make meaningful
| progress. _Real_ problem solving. Creating from scratch is
| problem making.
|
| Honestly I suspect it comes down to a sort of anxiety about
| failure.
| tra3 wrote:
| > I work in the tech industry. I'm somewhat rare in that I also
| work on my own vehicles, do my own maintenance, repair things,
| build my own stuff around the property, etc. A lot of coworkers
| at various places I've worked over the years view this as
| somewhere between "eccentric" and "slightly mad." "Why would
| you do that yourself, just pay someone else to do it!" is the
| common sentiment.
|
| I feel like it's partly a consequence of a highly specialized
| society. I'm not sure how to fix it. There's an opportunity
| cost. Why would I change the oil in my car when it's $40 to get
| it changed at the shop? Since I don't change my oil, I now
| don't know the basics of how to jack up the vehicle, I don't
| understand how to use the torque wrench to tighten the drain
| plug and I'm basically missing all the fundamental skills so I
| got no knowledge to build on.
|
| The other contributor, is that growing up in the city, in an
| apartment, there was never any opportunity to work with my
| hands. I still recall a shop class in high school. I got to use
| a lathe and a oxy acetylene torch. That was many years ago now.
|
| Now that I'm older, I make conscious effort to learn how to do
| things with my hands. There are things that I still must
| outsource, when they are on a critical path. For example if the
| car is down because the suspension needs to be replaced, I'm
| not going to spend 3 months researching and fixing it. We need
| it now.
|
| I've come to really appreciate the famous Heinlein quote:
|
| > A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an
| invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write
| a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort
| the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,
| solve equations, analyse a new problem, pitch manure, program a
| computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
| Specialization is for insects.
|
| Im also very much attracted to the idea of a "renaissance man"
| [1] :
|
| > Embodying a basic tenet of Renaissance humanism that humans
| are limitless in their capacity for development, the concept
| led to the notion that people should embrace all knowledge and
| develop their capacities as fully as possible.
|
| "Specialization is for insects" indeed.
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competent_man
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymath
| mauvehaus wrote:
| You change your own oil so that you develop the skills to do
| a brake job, which you do yourself to develop the skills to
| work on the suspension.
|
| That said, depending on where you live and whether or not you
| have winter, any fasteners on the underside of your car may
| be rusted to the point where you need the oxy-acetylene torch
| you used in high school to get the damned things loose. The
| nuts and bolts on the steering and suspension systems live a
| particularly rough life.
| Syonyk wrote:
| > _Why would I change the oil in my car when it 's $40 to get
| it changed at the shop?_
|
| Because you like your car...
|
| Every decade or so, I try a fast oil change place, usually
| when I'm in a hurry, and it sells me on changing my own oil
| for the next decade, because it's either _obscenely_
| overpriced, they screw up my car somehow, or both.
|
| Last time I took vehicles in for oil changes, it cost nearly
| $200 for my truck (I know it takes a lot of oil, but ffs...),
| and for the car, they didn't get the airbox back together
| properly, so I had a nice post-air-filter leak. They even
| left the bolt they couldn't get lined up sitting in the
| windshield air inlet tray - because they'd not lined the
| filter box up right. And, they forgot a crush washer on the
| drain plug, so I had a dinner plate sized oil puddle under
| the car in the morning. Sorry, I see no point in paying
| someone to screw my vehicles up like that.
| cagey wrote:
| DW took our car to Costco for a free scheduled tire
| rotation (mandatory to maintain the tire warranty) about a
| month ago.
|
| She called saying "they're saying 'the lug nut broke'"; I
| was thinking (and asking) "how is that possible (it can't
| possibly be a defective lug nut)?" 10 minutes later "the
| stud is broken"; 5 minutes later "they [Costco] admitted to
| breaking it".
|
| The resolution was to have a local shop replace the lug
| stud and get reimbursed for the repair cost: $125 (the part
| might have cost $2)!
|
| I chalk this episode up to them hiring warm bodies lacking
| any mechanical experience or aptitude (to the extent of not
| being aware of "righty tighty, lefty-loosey") and handing
| them an impact wrench.
| bombcar wrote:
| Costco sheared off the locking socket for my weird
| locking lug nuts, so I daresay they're more capable of
| some to just uggadugga it until it (usually) works.
| Syonyk wrote:
| Huh. A couple months back, I helped someone replace a
| broken stud in their garage with some C-clamps and
| hammers. On a lot of vehicles, it's just "press the old
| one out, pull the new one in."
|
| But there's a reason that r/justrolledintotheshop talks
| about "uggaduggas" as a torque spec - to make fun of the
| people who just let an impact driver pound away at things
| like lug nuts. Cross threaded? Screw it, more uggaduggas!
| It'll snap when someone takes it off? _Not My Problem!_
|
| Oddly enough, it's not always righty tighty. I rode
| motorcycles that had axles that were the opposite (so
| normal rotation would tighten them), and it was well
| known on the forums that if you let a shop just go at it,
| they'd try to loosen it, tighten it, smash the spacer,
| and your wheel bearings would then fail in short order. I
| always either watched the shop take my wheels off, or
| just took the wheels off myself and took them in to get
| the rubber replaced (alarmingly frequently - I was riding
| a lot).
| AngryData wrote:
| To be fair, it might not have been Costco's fault, it
| could have been the last guys to put the wheel on who
| impact gunned the fuck out of it, or shitty studs or
| lugs, or a combination of all three. That said, Costco
| should have had zero problems replacing a broken stud on
| the spot, any business who regularly removes wheel from
| cars should be prepared to replace a few studs here and
| there. It would be like hiring a guy to change your light
| fixtures but he can't finish because he didn't bring any
| spare wire nuts because he assumes their are already good
| wirenuts on the old light fixtures.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| I've also had similar bad experiences, usually at large
| "chain" garages where turnover is probably high. I think
| it's one thing to pay a mechanic you trust to do some work
| on your car and quite another to leave your car at a chain
| garage where it will be prodded at by some kid fresh out of
| high school and then taken for a joy ride to "test" it.
|
| It's also not uncommon for garages to under or over torque
| fasteners because they're in a hurry. My friend had his
| power steering pump come off the engine block while he was
| driving because the garage didn't bother torquing it
| properly after replacing it.
| jjav wrote:
| > Why would I change the oil in my car when it's $40 to get
| it changed at the shop?
|
| The shop might be incompetent and strip the threads for
| example (very common) which will cost you a lot more money
| down the road when it's discovered and becomes a problem.
|
| But, aside that, even competent shops can't provide the same
| quality of care than DIY because they have to operate on the
| booked time it takes to do a job. So they can't deviate from
| doing exactly what's on the work list.
|
| Meanwhile, when I work on my cars I'm taking time to look
| around and pay attention and address any other upcoming
| problems I might notice even if they are entirely unrelated
| to the work I started out doing. And I clean the parts and
| nearby parts as I go, which a shop could never afford to do
| even if they cared.
|
| Oil changes tend to be a loss leader so you can't often save
| money by DIY (but I always DIY due to the reasons above). But
| on other types of work you usually also save a lot of money
| by DIY.
|
| For instance I replaced the fence between us and neighbor for
| ~$500 in materials. That neighbor had to also replace his
| other side fence (between him and third neighbor). Identical
| fence, but cost them over $4K to have it done by a
| contractor.
| rglover wrote:
| Oddly, I've gotten a similar response when I tell people I'm
| building my own house by hand instead of hiring contractors.
|
| When they ask "why on earth would you do that," I just say:
| "because we're rapidly moving toward a point where nobody
| actually knows how to do anything because they just hired
| someone else to do it and now those people don't exist (and
| other people weren't interested in inheriting their knowledge).
| 20 years down the road, I'd like to be able to fix stuff when
| it breaks without having to wait months, years, or potentially
| never to get it fixed."
|
| There's a deep, deep need for a resurgence of DIY culture
| across the board.
| jonnycoder wrote:
| If I had the time, I would have a house built by others when
| it comes to concrete, framing, roof, electrical and drywall.
| The repetitive skills those tradesmen have is far more
| efficient than DIY. I quickly learned that by watching
| concrete videos on youtube of professionals. For DIY, I've
| come to appreciate the time and quality it takes to do the
| finishing work such trim. Oil based paint with high VOCs
| can't be bought in California unless it is small such as a
| pint or quart, but it's the most durable and looks the nicest
| for trim. It can be ordered online from out of state though.
| avgcorrection wrote:
| rglover wrote:
| ce4 wrote:
| Well written. That really resonated with me.
|
| I work in IT and grew up in a locksmith/car repair shop where I
| got my hands dirty very early on. I got my DIY/repair attitude
| from my father who does almost anything by himself - building
| and maintaining houses, making furniture, metal work, vehicle
| maintenance. So that is also deeply rooted in me.
|
| It's not uncommon in my circle to DIY, mostly as a hobby, to
| save money or because availability of craftsmanship is so poor
| (waiting months to get someone to do it).
|
| I really like to get broken stuff, fix it and then use or sell
| it. Such work leaves you with a broad knowledge, and also who
| is designing repairable machines. Old style italian espresso
| machines come to my mind. While only some components are
| standardized (piping, thermostats, portafilters, e61 brew
| group) many proprietary components needed for repairs are still
| openly sold on 3rd party stores on the Internet. Sometimes the
| schematic is also published. The newer and more integrated
| plastic machines are less of a joy to work on, alas. That's
| mostly toss-and-rebuy gear.
|
| Before I buy anything, I check maintainability first. Parts
| availability, hackability, etc. Glued stuff, soldered on chips
| (formerly RAM, wifi, CPUs etc), nonswappable batteries, hard
| cloud dependencies and similar scaries me.
| loganwedwards wrote:
| I am on your same wavelength. Props to you for pursuing this
| mentality. I believe you would enjoy the book "The Innovation
| Delusion" by Vinsel and Russell
| veqq wrote:
| Unfortunately, I've encountered the same thing. It's universal
| though.
|
| Tinkering is a lost art. Increasingly, people seem to just
| watch others tinker or solve problems. Why do x if you can just
| search for what happens on youtube? Why think through the
| process or what a reasonable answer is if you can just google
| (andisearch is good too) it? (Why search, when you can just
| post it as a question on a forum?) 10 years ago, commenters
| here would talk about tinkering with their systems in basic,
| when asked how they learned to program. Nowadays, people talk
| about textbooks or the like. But why?
|
| Everything is more complex and complicated. Fixing something in
| 1950 was easy, you could wire it yourself with copper, you
| could replace the vacuum tubes. Nowadays, you can just replace
| electronic parts - but you can't make the circuit board
| yourself (well, some people do, but that's much more in depth,
| requires very fine motor control and you are still just
| soldering tiny components. I suspect a lot of would-have-
| tinkereds give up when they take apart their x with a screw
| driver and can't figure out what anything is. Their curiosity
| nipped right in the bud, they default to trusted solutions and
| devote less of their daily mindshare to understanding, and
| eventually improving the world.
|
| (Even there, it's not like many people could create vacuum
| tubes in their garage in 1950 to repair something...)
| Syonyk wrote:
| You _can_ do your own surface mount soldering on boards for
| assembly, but it 's an awful lot easier to design a single
| sided board (at least for the surface mount stuff) and hot
| plate it to get the solder melted. It's rather magical to
| watch surface tension in action - parts just... _zoop_ right
| into the positions.
|
| I live in weird circles, I suppose, where this and "do your
| own PCB etching" are still things.
| outworlder wrote:
| > but you can't make the circuit board yourself
|
| True. Thankfully, they have become dirt cheap. I can design
| and push a button to order a multilayer board from China,
| which is going to be done by the same industrial processes as
| any commercial boards, and will even be tested for me. I
| don't have to worry that I left it etching for too long. Or
| drilling holes. Or silk screening text. All that, and
| shipping costs more than the board.
|
| > I suspect a lot of would-have-tinkereds give up when they
| take apart their x with a screw driver and can't figure out
| what anything is
|
| I suspect your memory is playing tricks with you (as it does
| with everybody). Open an old CRT monitor and you won't know
| what anything is. Sure, you may learn what the individual
| components are, but you need a lot of schematic study to even
| understand what all those components are even doing. Today,
| we can just open a phone and go "oh, that's the wifi chip".
|
| It is still possible to do SMD work at home. Air rework
| stations have dropped from 4 digit dollars to 2 digits. Other
| tools are getting cheaper too. Oscilloscopes have never been
| cheaper (and, if you don't need anything fancy, at least in
| the US there's a flood of perfectly good used models).
|
| Microcontrollers are incredibly cheap. A lot of what was done
| by hardware today can be handled with software. With <$1
| parts.
|
| 3d printing allows us to not have to drill soap containers
| for our electronics cases.
|
| Also, all those old electronics magazines? Most of those
| circuits can be built today just fine.
|
| People dabbling in electronics were always a small subset of
| the population. I am willing to bet that, percentage wise,
| those numbers are way bigger today.
| mikrl wrote:
| >requires very fine motor control and you are still just
| soldering tiny components
|
| I thought the key fob for my used Impreza just needed a new
| battery but the relay had actually fallen off the board.
|
| I had to buy a soldering iron and fine point tips but the
| rush I got when it finally settled in place and I could lock
| my car remotely was intense. Or maybe that was the lack of
| ventilation.
|
| My wheel hub and brakes on the other hand... I'd need various
| grinders, pullers and oxyacetylene to get through 12y of
| Ontarian corrosion. Not even a 4lb hammer on a breaker bar
| shifted my axle nut or caliper bracket bolts. With rounds of
| bolt blaster and blowtorch.
|
| Luckily my local garage charges reasonable rates and lets me
| supply my own parts. From here on out maintenance is gonna be
| a breeze!
| AngryData wrote:
| If you work on older rusted vehicles, a high quality impact
| gun and air hammer are worth every penny. A shitty impact
| gun will take off like 60% of things, a high quality one
| will take off 90% of things. And for the final 10%, (likely
| in combination with torches and large breaker bars and
| impact gun) you can air hammer the living fuck out of the
| bolt or part for 15 minutes and it should help break apart
| some of the rust.
|
| And for future self, a tube of anti-seize.
|
| I questioned the need for my heavy equipment "fuck-you"
| sized impact gun when I bought it, but ive helped out more
| than a couple people remove old rusted on shit with it that
| their cheaper consumer impact gun simply couldn't handle.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I have plenty of money for these tools but what I can't
| afford in modern day America is a shed to put the tools
| in, a garage to work on my car in, and an alternative
| means of transportation to get me to the parts shop while
| I take 3 days in my off hours trying to figure things out
| because I'm inexperienced.
| mikrl wrote:
| I've always lived in places with crap driveways but this
| one is nice, paved and level. Unfortunately no room for a
| garage or shed so yea, I spend about 20 minutes hauling
| various tools out of the basement (and hoping they don't
| get stolen) before I can even loosen my lug nuts.
| tristor wrote:
| Same situation, hardly anyone believes me that I'm skilled in
| construction, electrical, plumbing, electronics, and car
| mechanics in addition to my IT skills, because hardly anyone
| actually tinkers with things or repair them. Meanwhile, I
| always followed my dad's advice (who was doing construction
| when I grew up) that you should invest your time and money in
| tools and knowledge, not in disposable things. I can
| disassemble, repair, and reassemble nearly anything, and thanks
| to that have built my own high quality things, repaired many
| older high quality things, and generally structured my life
| around "buy it for life" with repairability as part of it.
|
| Unfortunately, the one exception to above is laptop & phone,
| where I buy Apple products because they are just clearly the
| superior option, but unfortunately are not very repairable at
| all. Nonetheless, I kept my iPhone 8 going until just recently
| where I finally bumped to an iPhone 14 Pro, and I have kept my
| 2013 MacBook Pro going and am still using it, although it may
| be replaced soon.
|
| I really wish things were built to be repairable, but like you
| I have long suspected (and cursed) the engineers who design
| products have never actually tinkered with them so don't even
| consider this as part of the design. They are only optimized
| for assembly because there is a business cost reason to do so,
| but repairability doesn't matter to them.
| donkeybeer wrote:
| Its deliberate. Things are deliberately made hard to repair so
| you are forced to buy a new one when it breaks.
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'd say semi deliberate. Market dynamics evolved to cut
| prices extremely low.. so manufacturers don't make enough
| cash to want to design complex and manage parts etc.
|
| Most printers are horrible.. even the assembly is hell, but
| if you pay a pro model (6x times the price) you get a modular
| and easy to open device.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| That's a cynical take -- I'm not sure it's untrue, but
| another factor is cost. Things that are not meant to be
| maintainable also tend to be cheaper to design and build
| initially. You don't have to worry about maintenance access
| when you design the product, or making the components
| replaceable, or using industry-standard parts.
|
| By avoiding maintenance concerns in design and production,
| you can sell a cheaper product, and the vast majority of
| buyers will look at purchase price and not total cost of
| ownership when they are evaluating choices.
| coldacid wrote:
| Just because it's cynical doesn't mean it's wrong.
| drstewart wrote:
| Just because it's cynical doesn't mean it's right either.
| outworlder wrote:
| > just pay someone else to do it
|
| Sometimes that's what you have to do. I generally like to have
| at least a cursory understanding of what the person I'm paying
| is doing.
|
| > Well, it doesn't matter if it's easy to fix, we'll just
| recycle it and build a new one
|
| Last night I've diagnosed the problem with a Z80 computer - the
| one I wrote my first lines of code in 1988. It _cannot be
| replaced_. I 'm waiting for a chip to come from China to fix.
| Cost $1.50 + my spare time.
|
| Some things just have to be recycled and rebuild. Batteries
| come to mind. Modern cars should be getting progressively
| easier to repair - they have onboard computers that basically
| _know_ what's wrong. But the parts we replace are getting
| larger and larger. Where we would replace a capacitor, we are
| replacing entire computers.
| bombcar wrote:
| Some things it's worth paying for because the person you're
| paying has years of experience - I can hang and tape drywall
| but I absolutely suck at it and will willingly pay to get
| that done.
|
| Other things are worth paying for because the tools to do it
| easy are very expensive.
|
| But in many of those cases, you should still have a general
| idea of what is going on, or have hired someone who does
| (this is often the general contractor).
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Owned an '86 Subaru BRAT GL (EA81, not EA82). You could take
| the whole damned car apart with a 10mm, 12mm, 14mm, and 17mm
| socket. The 4 speed 4wd (not awd, that came later)
| transmission, however, is a pain in the ass to get apart. I had
| to do that to replace the input shaft seal. It was a great car.
|
| Nowadays, the running joke in the Subaru community is that you
| change the spark plugs any time you have the engine out of the
| car whether they're due or not. My wife has a 2018 Impreza.
| It's somewhat more cramped in the engine compartment. I dread
| the day I have to work on it.
| mcguire wrote:
| I have a 1995 BMW R1100GS. You could do almost _anything_ to
| that motorcycle using the toolkit that lives under the seat.
|
| The one exception is checking the valve clearances; that
| requires feeler gauges that weirdly aren't included (although
| the kit includes feelers for the ABS sensors and valve checks
| are necessary every oil change). I haven't replaced the final
| drive lube because, without removing the rear end, it
| requires suspending the motorcycle vertically, although I
| have siphoned much of the lube out and replaced that.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| re transmission -- someone told me a long time ago, you
| really do not want to open a transmission
| Syonyk wrote:
| A manual isn't that bad, and I know people who work on
| them, but the main problem is that they're just an
| _entirely_ different set of tools and techniques from just
| about everything else. You need a bunch of different tools
| for "rotating part" assembly and disassembly, and a bunch
| of different skills. Mostly, manual transmissions don't
| fail randomly, though.
|
| Automatics be black magic boxes that will fail expensively,
| though. :/
| mauvehaus wrote:
| Precisely this. If you don't need to actually rebuild a
| manual and just need to get to a seal that can only be
| replaced by cracking the case apart, it's not that bad.
| There just isn't _that_ much to a manual.
|
| Keep it clean, and work with care and diligence, and
| you're probably not going to get in truly deep shit.
|
| I'll second that a manual in normal service is unlikely
| to fail catastrophically. The synchros can wear or the
| transmission can start popping out of gear, but they tend
| to experience graceful degradation, and the control
| software is sufficiently adaptable to work around the
| quirks.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Not true at all. They do have a scary reputation and unlike
| a lot of other vehicle maintenance, you need to be very
| aware of cleanliness. But they are just mechanical devices.
| They can be taken apart, worn components replaced, and
| reassembled. Watch Gary Ferraro on YouTube if you're
| interested.
| MomoXenosaga wrote:
| Labor costs in the Netherlands are frankly insane. Unless you
| are paying under the table there's no reason to have someone
| fix a coffee machine or vacuum cleaner. As for laptops,
| printers etcetera you can just get a tax rebate and buy new
| ones.
| zwieback wrote:
| I work in the tech industry as well but in a more hands-on
| division (hp inkjet) and in a small town (Corvallis OR). Here
| it's the norm to work on your own stuff, build your own
| structures or fix cars, really mostly for fun and out of pride
| than for economical reasons.
|
| I think this attitude does carry over into our product design
| efforts but only to a degree - in consumer tech it makes sense
| to make your product somewhat robust and serviceable but a
| device from 10 years ago, with lo-speed Wifi, no bluetooth, no
| USB, etc. just isn't useful anymore. On the flipside, the
| manufacturing tools we design for our own use are so robust and
| reconfigurable that they are still cranking out product 20+
| years later.
| bee_rider wrote:
| Is a printer with low-speed WiFi really so obsolete? I can't
| really imagine that that is the bottleneck while printing (of
| course, lots of more recent printers have lost the ethernet
| jacks, so really they are downgrades).
| Animats wrote:
| Is this a US thing?
|
| Here's a girl mechanic in China.[1] She's from a small village in
| the mountains, was able to go to a technical school in Kumming to
| learn hydropower, and came back to her village. She has a popular
| YouTube channel, so she's making money off of that, as well as
| repairing broken engines and generators in the village.
|
| Having restored rusty Teletype machines myself, I'm impressed
| with what she's doing. She routinely rewinds generator armatures,
| which is almost a dead art in the US. (There's one guy in San
| Francisco who still does that, and he has a backlog. He never got
| to the Teletype motors I wanted done. Urgent projects for old
| freight elevators and industrial equipment keep him busy.) She's
| an artist with an angle grinder, making parts from sheet steel.
| She cuts curves with an angle grinder, something usually done
| with a bandsaw. Her welding is so-so, but she is using a crappy
| AC welder.
|
| The engines she works on, usually small Diesels in the 5-30 KW
| range, are very basic and maintainable. They're a standard design
| in China from the Mao era. Look up "R175 Diesel engine". Hand
| crank start, cooling system is a water tank you have to fill when
| you refuel, no oil pump. You can buy one on Alibaba for under
| US$200, shipping not included.[2]
|
| There are people who post claiming she's fake. But there are many
| hours of videos showing her work. Once or twice, there are
| indications of outside help with heavy lifting, but that's about
| it. There are more informed nit-picks - getting paint on the
| mating faces of the cylinder head may cause leaks later, banging
| on bearings with a claw hammer can damage the bearing races, and
| those motors really need to go out the door with a motor
| protection circuit breaker (US$6 on Alibaba) so they don't burn
| out the windings again. But all this stuff is overbuilt, to
| survive years of minimal maintenance in agricultural villages.
|
| Although her electrical safety is scary. No strain relief where
| cables enter boxes, plain wires rather than nonmetallic armored
| behind walls when remodeling, standing in a stream while holding
| an outlet strip.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpPt42tLH5FRk__ytvMsejw
|
| [2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/R175-Diesel-Engine-
| En...
| drstewart wrote:
| >Is this a US thing?
|
| I like how one counter-example from China means that something
| is a "US thing". This happens a lot on the internet: "Here's a
| non-US counter example, that must mean this is US only!"
|
| Here's a YouTube channel that restores things in the US:
| https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPygLEFniGZmehxouDK-vbw
| Kerrick wrote:
| I think it's an urban thing. I live in a rural area in the US,
| and there are multiple people who make their living maintaining
| small engine machines (e.g. lawn tools), maintaining tractors,
| maintaining cars, maintaining roads (gravel roads need at least
| annual maintenance), maintaining HVAC systems, and maintaining
| fence lines. Plus, lots of folks do their own maintenance.
| coldacid wrote:
| >Is this a US thing?
|
| If it is, it's also a Canadian thing, and a western European
| thing, at the very least.
| mindentropy wrote:
| My colleague in Germany showed his in-law's house and he said
| that his father in-law built the whole house by himself. Is
| this something common in Western Europe and especially
| Germany? I was very impressed as this is something very rare
| in my country.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| This is why I buy Toyotas: someone in the world knows how to
| fix it and/or makes/warehouses spares for it.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| The key component is _stuff_ being one hell of a lot cheaper
| than _labor_.
|
| This is a natural outcome of a combination of rising wages
| and dropping prices for finished products, plus, in some
| cases, increasing standards--for example, single-pane windows
| with glass held in by paste were really easy to repair but
| provided almost no insulation--modern windows are really hard
| to repair, but insulate well.
|
| If we want repair-culture to come back we have to make
| everyone materially poorer first. Everyone who's not crazy-
| rich would know how to sew if a t-shirt cost $100 new and
| could be sold used for $50, instead of like $10-15 and $0-3,
| respectively. Nobody pays a cobbler $150 to re-sole their $50
| sneakers--their $400 leather oxfords, maybe.
|
| We stopped repairing stuff because stuff is cheap--it's not
| worth developing or maintaining repair skills to try to get
| another year out of the odd $20-$150 appliance, or tens-of-
| dollars pieces of clothing, or paying five times as much for
| floor trim that can be re-finished or repaired when it gets
| dinged up, over cheap crap that'll just have to be replaced
| if it gets damaged, when the labor to replace it's not much
| different from the labor to repair the nicer stuff. We
| stopped having experts repair stuff because labor is really,
| really expensive relative to goods, now. We just throw away
| the broken thing and replace it. The fix, if we want one, is
| to make stuff way more expensive.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > we have to make everyone materially poorer first.
|
| that's false. We can also make repairs materially faster
| (more productive).
|
| Just to illustrate the point with something extreme. If a
| worker could fix 100 fridges a day, they'd only have to
| charge like $5 labor.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| This is a good point, and might actually be viable in
| some cases. Though I think most of those end up looking
| less like what we'd think of as repair and more like, I
| dunno, replacing the batteries in a remote control, or
| lightbulbs in a lamp. Not that that's necessarily a bad
| thing, but it's also probably not easy to engineer into a
| lot of products, especially without driving up the price
| significantly.
| soperj wrote:
| > Nobody pays a cobbler $150 to re-sole their $50 sneakers
| --their $400 leather oxfords, maybe.
|
| I paid a cobbler $90 to resole(and re-cork) my birkenstocks
| after 2.5 years. It's been 4 years since I've done it, and
| they aren't even close to where they were when he did it. I
| honestly just wish I'd done it sooner. He re-corked them as
| well, but some of that is now falling apart. Might have to
| go back.
| DwnVoteHoneyPot wrote:
| uh, aren't birkenstocks cork sandals... so if you replace
| the cork and rubber soles, it's pretty much a new sandal?
| It's like the question: if you replace the handle of an
| axe one year and then axe head the next year, is it still
| the same axe?
| soperj wrote:
| No, the main part is the leather. Not all the cork was
| replaced either, it was just firmed up. Regardless, it's
| still lasted twice as long as a resole (and I didn't have
| to break them in) for half the price of new, and they're
| still going strong.
| donmaq wrote:
| > We stopped repairing stuff because stuff is cheap
|
| However, OP's main example is the NYC metro system, which
| is decidedly not cheap. A similar problem occurred in SF:
| BART cars are being replaced with multi-$M cars full of
| electronics & are now having numerous breakdowns.
|
| BART drivers used to reboot the old trains by flipping 4
| sets of switches. Now the reset process has hundreds of
| steps, so most drivers just take the car offline & call for
| a mechanic. And there's far more failure modes to the new
| cars as well. Thus: the new cars are more expensive, more
| fragile, & harder to maintain. BART scored a perfect
| 'Reverse Better-Faster-Cheaper'.
|
| How did this happen? Politics & payola. The new proposed
| cars were barely shown to the public, & only for UX/design
| feedback.
|
| The tie-in's to capitalism that OP describes are apt too:
| very big companies tendered their bids for these new cars.
| Maintainability wasn't a key design feature. It's not just
| our economic system (capitalism) that isn't interested in
| maintainability- our political system isn't either.
| Decision makers who won't be in power to see the need for
| their shiny new acquisitions to be maintained, never seen
| to care that they will.
| Animats wrote:
| How do you build modern electronics for a 30-50 year
| lifespan? What parts do you use?
|
| I happen to know that the Ford EEC-IV engine control
| module of the 1980s was designed for a 30-year lifespan.
| Which it delivered; many 1980s vehicles are still running
| with it. But newer electronics won't last that long. Line
| sizes are too small, and minor effects such as
| electromigration cause wear-out.
| Mountain_Skies wrote:
| Long ago, the gameshow 'Wheel of Fortune' made players
| spend the money they won on selection of prizes instead of
| getting cash. Watching an old episode recently, I put the
| price of the refrigerator into an inflation calculator and
| was astonished by just how expensive it was, relatively
| speaking, back then. No doubt that was the MSRP and could
| be purchased for less at Sears, but it still was a shock to
| see how much more expensive such goods were back then.
| Ditto for exercise equipment. We've become so accustomed to
| even large appliances being relatively inexpensive that we
| tolerate them being mostly disposable instead of
| repairable.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Right--most of our _stuff_ is so very much cheaper,
| especially relative to wages, than it was even in the
| 1980s, let alone earlier. Of course we aren 't as
| interested in repairing our stuff, either DIY or paying
| to have it repaired.
|
| This goes for food, too. Articles about food waste can be
| read as articles lamenting that food's so cheap it's not
| worth trying to recover all that waste.
|
| I'm pretty far from a free-market superfan, but these two
| particular, perennial stories--"can you _believe_ how
| much food waste there is?! What a tragedy! " and "nobody
| repairs anything anymore, what a shame"--amount to
| complaining that shit's way too cheap, to my eye.
| Neither's due to carelessness or wastefulness or
| laziness, really, but _economy_. Quintuple the prices on
| everything and watch food waste plummet and interest in
| repair skills achieve levels not seen in decades. But,
| like... I 'd rather we not.
| Ekaros wrote:
| It is actually amazing jus how cheap the low end stuff
| is. Just look at pretty much anything.
|
| Next step to think is that if they can make that for that
| price. What are we paying for when the price is 2x, 3x,
| 5x or more? Is the quality and longevity really similar
| or is there something shared...
| avgcorrection wrote:
| Hah, "fix". Basics like food and electricity is already
| becoming way more expensive.
|
| Don't get how someone can write multiple paragraphs on this
| stuff and not mention "planned obsolesence". Consumer
| capitalism is not a lifestyle but an economic system. Every
| household is supposed to have 1-2 cars, one lawnmower, one
| electric snow blower, one chainsaw, one of every this and
| that tool, and so on. And everyone is supposed to buy
| something new when these things break down. Not
| fundamentally because labor is expensive but fundamentally
| because consumer capitalism demands consumption.
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| In China it's a bit different (or maybe the same thing):
| The key component is _stuff_ being not very affordable than
| one 's _salary_. This is no longer true for many Chinese so
| we are losing the arts anyway. For example my father was
| never a professional carpenter but he made his own wedding
| furnitures including a double bed. He did probably know
| some carpentry from his early work in the factory /farm
| though.
| aaron695 wrote:
| mindentropy wrote:
| I love maintenance and salvage videos. It is so addictive
| especially machines and electronics. I would recommend Diesel
| Creek videos ( https://www.youtube.com/c/DieselCreek ) which is
| really fun. I am in awe at some of the old American diesel
| machines and how resilient they are.
| ptero wrote:
| I think a missing part for the propagation of those skill is
| being able to learn it as a hobby / side project.
|
| I would _love_ to take some classes (and sign up my teenage son,
| too), but the adult education classes that I could find in the
| Boston area do not teach basic woodworking, metalworking,
| electrical, engines skills anymore (I heard insurance is blamed
| way more frequently than lack of interest). I would gladly pay
| good money for tuition and access to a machine shop, but it is
| impossible to find any options.
|
| Edit: to clarify, I am treating this as a hobby (I am happy with
| my job working on algorithms for things that fly), not a full-
| time trade program.
| soperj wrote:
| I've been pretty happy with hand tools for woodworking for what
| it's worth. Cheap(except for the wood), and it's hard to cut
| off your own arms with hand tools. Lots of good youtube
| channels (Paul Sellers is awesome).
| hnthrowaway0328 wrote:
| Even if there are classes, it's almost surely that they are NOT
| going to be evening classes. In Canada we have vocational
| schools and you can have full training for 1-1.5 years, but the
| problem is, how do I do it when I have a full-time job?
|
| Maybe YouTube videos work too, but I really do not have
| confidence changing toilets or laying out my own plank wood.
| Like, how many times do I renovate in my LIFE? Probably just
| 3-4 times, so if I fuck up once I pretty much take away all
| values from the other 2-3.
| Ancalagon wrote:
| Nevermind adult education, these skills aren't usually taught
| at even a high school level anymore.
|
| My highschool had the most garbage technical curriculum
| (southwest US).
| mrguyorama wrote:
| My rural northern maine town high school had a "Vocational
| wing" that taught classes from nursing prep, to childhood
| development, to cooking, sewing, running a greenhouse growing
| vegetables, heavy equipment operation including getting your
| CDL, a class to become a car mechanic, CompTIA+ certification
| class, entry level business management, etc etc etc. These
| programs are dirt cheap to run because the educators are paid
| pennies, and the equipment (computers, loaders, etc) are all
| local trash procured through people knowing people. Consider
| spending time in local school board meetings to vouch for these
| types of programs. Even the "traditional" students aiming for
| AP classes and 4 year college degrees love these classes.
|
| For more urban places, look for makerspaces or hacker spaces.
| If you find one that doesn't have the stuff you are looking
| for, consider donating some entry level versions. One huge
| problem for urban centers like this is just how much space
| machinery takes up. You need a large open shop, and that costs
| a lot.
| sct202 wrote:
| A lot of art studios and makerspaces will teach basic
| woodworking and metalworking (usually jewelry or decorative
| though).
| greedo wrote:
| The university in my town has an Innovation Studio that has
| woodworking, metalworking, ceramic, textiles, 3d printing,
| basically everything maker related. Students get in for a cheap
| rate, non-students pay around $75/month. Not a bad deal really,
| to get access to all sorts of equipment and classes on how to
| use the gear. Even has some fancy CNC mills and laser cutters.
| Perfect for the hobbyist, or maker wanting to expand their
| skillset.
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