It's not about not being able to mend at all, these things are fairly easy to do (or to learn).
It's unthinkable anyone would come to work in mended clothes. They would be concerned everyone thinks they're poor and can't afford buying new clothes. As long as there is this social stigma, and clothing brands interest in people buying new pieces of clothing continuously, we can forget about mending.
The article includes a picture of Prince Charles wearing a mended jacket. If it’s acceptable for royalty to appear in public in mended clothing I imagine it’s ok for us plebeians.
Prince Charles doesn't have to care because he is Prince Charles.
It's like casual friday. The CEO can wear shorts and the junior engineer can probably wear shorts. However, you probably won't see the upwardly mobile managers ever wearing shorts without a direct order.
Social signalling matters and clothes are part of social signalling.
Not really. Countless behaviors are seen as "chic" when done by millionaires and thrashy when done by lower class: owning 2nd hand of flashy clothing, drinking alcohol early, owning a strip of land or a horse, keeping a food garden, doing home repairs...
Prince Charles doesn't need to look sharp to prop up his status, which is solidified in the most formal manner. Neither is the Prince best known for his stylishness.
He has, at times, been derided for it in the media, especially at the lower end. At least he's followed his eco beliefs fairly consistently for decades. It would be much easier for him to not bother whilst he's being sent around the globe on official duties.
This model is way too simple. People don’t distinguish themselves between those they don’t deal with. No one’s going to confuse a social worker with the genuinely wealthy, but they could pass for a professional like a doctor or lawyer. Equally they could be mistaken for someone of the class of their clients if they dress like them. The social worker will try to dress like the successful professional. The professional is not going to be mistaken for a poor person. If it happens they’d laugh unconcerned and move on. But they are probably socially exposed to genuinely wealthy people or the extremely professionally successful, businessmen, parliamentarians or congresspeople, executives. They could move into these circles themselves or marry into them.
People define themselves by those they could plausibly be mistaken for, not the full range of possible social roles.
> Everyone wants to look like they are a member of a higher class than they actually are. But everyone also wants to avoid getting mistaken for a member of a poorer class. So for example, the middle-class wants to look upper-class, but also wants to make sure no one accidentally mistakes them for lower-class.
> But there is a limit both to people’s ambition and to their fear. No one has any hopes of getting mistaken for a class two levels higher than their own: a lower-class person may hope to appear middle-class, but their mannerisms, accent, appearance, peer group, and whatever make it permanently impossible for them to appear upper-class. Likewise, a member of the upper-class may worry about being mistaken for middle-class, but there is no way they will ever get mistaken for lower-class, let alone underclass.
> It's unthinkable anyone would come to work in mended clothes.
Nailed it. The same is true in many social situations as well (although by no means all - repaired or damaged clothing is absolutely acceptable at gigs for many genres, for example).
The problem is not that we can't mend, but that we can't mend seamlessly. We can repair clothes but can't do so in a way that makes them good as new again, which sends an undesirable social signal in many situations.
Why is it unthinkable? I do. I wouldn't consider throwing something away I ripped somehow, unless it was also nearing worn out - like all the material was becoming worn or too thin.
I might have been sniffy about it in my 20s. Couldn't care less nowadays as it bears no relation to my poverty or not.
Isn't it the other way around? Someone who mends their own clothes looks capable, creative, and economical. Also, elbow patches are trendy.
Of course there is a difference between mending otherwise fine clothing and having to go on wearing worn or threadbare clothes, as you rightly point out.
People who are confident and strong can definitely pull off mended clothes. On the other hand, it's not wise to hand your children obviously mended stuff if you know that they already struggle socially. Bullies sense the weak ones and attacks based on clothing are common, also in later life (although this phenomenon peaks at school).
It’s about signaling social status. If you dress in cheap clothes but you drive a really nice car no one’s going to think you’re poor. If you wear the exact same clothes and don’t have a car people will make a different guess as to your social status.
I just took my son to buy his first car on his own. I told my son that if we couldn’t make the numbers work for him, I would just let him take over payments on my car for the next year ($300/month) and I would by myself another car.
I guess because of the cheap car I was driving (It is about $15K brand new and I bought it used four years ago) and I showed up in just casual clothes, they thought I was struggling.
When they heard I was contemplating buying myself a car instead and I was looking at some of the higher end cars, they kept steering me to the lower cost cars. Not that I would have bought anything from there anyway. I don’t buy new cars.
We're talking about at work, where I've never seen any hint it matters beyond be clean, be presentable, be personable etc. 30 years ago, usually wear a suit. In other words, fit in. Choose carefully when making first impression - be that interview or date. :)
At work being junior programmer or CTO reveals status. These days both rich and poor alike will buy £10 jeans, or £2 T shirts. I think no less of them or any higher of someone with a label addiction, if I even noticed. I would think a lot less of someone who acted on perceived social status at work. We're not there for a first date.
Affluence and status signaling using clothing: is there an inverse correlation? Any recommended scientific literature on this?
Personal anecdata:
* I notice a more relaxed attitude to mended clothes in my native western European country than in my eastern European second home country.
* I also noticed a pattern in secondary school. In the economically privileged environment I went to school, kids cared less about clothing brands than at the less afluent schools in the vicinity.
* I carry mended clothes to work every now and then.
>Affluence and status signaling using clothing: is there an inverse correlation?
It's straightforward countersignalling - some people are sufficiently wealthy that the cost of their clothes carry negligible economic signalling value, so they can signify the fact that they're above that level of status game or use their clothes to convey different kinds of status. Nobody would believe that the Prince of Wales can't afford a new suit, so patching a tear in his jacket signals thrift and tradition. The patch in his jacket signals that he is old money, that his status is higher than someone who needs to signal their status through clothing. Distressed jeans are the obvious example of retail-level countersignalling; when you can buy a new pair of jeans for $8 at Walmart, the fact that your jeans aren't ripped at the knee carries very limited signalling value, making the countersignal more accessible.
We see the same thing with cycling. The very poor cycle, because they can't afford a car. The very wealthy cycle, because nobody would believe that they can't afford a car and choosing to cycle signals that they could obviously afford to drive but they're conscious of their health or the environment. People in the middle wouldn't be seen dead on a bicycle, because they're not confident of their ability to convey the high-status countersignal rather than the low-status signal. In this example, social capital often substitutes for economic capital; if you're young, bohemian and cosmopolitan, you can more easily convey the countersignal. There's a fairly nuanced meta-signal that says "I have the education and the opportunity needed to be a wealthy professional, but I have made the conscious choice to be an impoverished artist instead".
I'd argue that the strong social safety net in western Europe drives more people into countersignalling and meta-signalling behaviour, because base-level signalling of economic security is less necessary. You don't need to signal the fact that you're not desperately poor in a society where very few people are desperately poor, which opens up a wider range of signalling behaviours.
When I visited London, UK a couple years ago, I saw the "class system" up close for the first time. A friend pointed out that the lower and upper class actually had a more in common in certain ways than the upper and middle. Neither typically fit in with certain norms. The lower due to necessity, the upper due to immunity - they would simply be labeled eccentric.
It has stuck with me every since, and honestly has made me realize how silly this practice of signaling to each other is. It is entirely a phenomenon coming out of the middle class. Even signaling among the upper class is usually due to young or new money.
I often wonder if it was always like this, or of it was created when the consumer middle class was created in the last hundred or so years.
>I often wonder if it was always like this, or of it was created when the consumer middle class was created in the last hundred or so years.
Sumptuary laws are an interesting example - at various times in our history, people of certain social status were forbidden by law to wear certain garments or own certain items. Sometimes this was to prevent runaway consumption due to zero-sum status games, but often it was because the declining cost of luxury goods or the emergence of a nouveau riche undermined the status of the established elite.
I'd argue that the invention of fashion was a necessary response to the falling cost of clothing; when most people of a given social standing can afford equally high-quality clothing, fashion emerges as a kind of planned obsolescence.
The emergence of cultural capital amongst the aristocracy of the 17th century feels remarkably modern. During this period, the role of universities expanded from being practical training colleges for clergymen to a status symbol. The children of landowners could afford to spend their time cultivating "useless" knowledge, while the children of the nouveau riche merchant class needed to learn the family business. Young aristocrats would embark on what we might now describe as a gap year, travelling across Europe to gather knowledge of exotic cultures and collect souvenirs. It could be argued that modern science emerged largely as a byproduct of status signalling - many of the idle rich spent their days showing off expensive scientific apparatus and their access to the latest books and journals, inadvertently inventing modernity in the process.
Really? I'm probably not going to go into the office or on a trip with clothing that has some obvious quick and dirty repair or is in need of one. But I semi-regularly mend or have mended clothing that's missing a button, has a hem that needs to be tacked back in place, etc. Those aren't visible if they're done even half-competently.
I definitely have been both to the office and on holidays with self-mended clothes. Especially tears in my favourite shorts I repaired perhaps ten times before giving up on the brittle fabric. I never was worried of stigma of clearly mended clothes; I rather was quite proud of my bohemian clothing.
Maybe it helps that we work in software engineering, so it's quite clear to my colleagues that we could buy a new pair of shorts for each and every day? Or maybe it's because of increase in environmental concerns especially with younger urban people? I can't honestly say, as it never occurred to me that it could convey a negative message.
There isn't a need to mend when clothes are as inexpensive as they are. Especially for children's clothes as they outgrow them before they need mending and it's easier to buy new clothes than find what you need second hand.
This may be the case in the US, but in most of the world, places such as India, China, and even parts of Europe, people still hand down clothing, and have a very real need for mending...
Even parts of Europe? That makes it sound as if this is just something poor Polish country folk do. This is common sense everywhere, including here in the fairly affluent Netherlands!
We are expecting our first child, and the amount of second-hand clothing that found its way to us via family is astounding. Children outgrow clothing fast, so even without mending clothing gets reused as a matter of course.
By parts of Europe, I meant that this may not be very common in the UK or Germany (no idea about Germany), but is definitely common in large parts of EU (Poland, sure, but also Portugal, and I think it's relatively common among the nordics, for example).
Even in the UK. Parents don't want to just throw out clothes, with their associated memories, so they try and pass them on.
We bought 6 months of clothes for our son when he was born, and have barely bought anything since, he's 2 and a half now, and has more foot wear than me.
Interesting. My experience from London is, people buy clothes that they never even open, and donate them to charity 3-5 years later with tags still on. The consumerism I've seen is utterly ridiculous.
Not so poor Pole here. We're expecting our first child. We could buying clothes & other stuff new, but my frugal wife went on-line, and in two months got us more than enough clothes for the first two years, + a stroller, for free, from local give-away groups. Couple of messages and short car trips is all it took, and in total, we're easily ~$1500 ahead because of that.
Unless a second child happens, we'll likely give away all stuff in decent conditions too. Pay-it-forward & all.
Speaking of those groups, she also managed to pick up an old Łucznik sewing machine that's older than our parents. It's repairable, indestructible, and has already created a bunch of stuff, including hand-made gifts.
If that's a hallmark of a "poor" country, then I don't want to live in a "rich" one.
Children's clothes do need mending. They fall over and play games in their newest jeans or jumper, no matter what you tell them. When they outgrow they can be passed to the younger brother or sister.
It was actually children that caused us to rediscover mending. Case of having to really. We were not going to throw away the week old jacket because they inconveniently put a rip down half the front, or buy new school pants because they put a hole in the knee playing football at break.
Jeans, no matter how cheap, go first in one of two places. The main button hole or knees. 5 mins patching will get another year out of them. More expensive jeans can be patched for much longer though. Which is where the whole fashion for ripped or patched jeans came from in the first place. :)
If we paid more, would the factory owners have built a safer factory? No, they'd pocket the profits. If they didn't have factory jobs, would they be subsisting on coastal fishing and be killed by tsunami?
Poorer parts of the world are poor by default, not because of trade.
There are externalities to mass consumption of clothing though, from the resources needed to grow cotton, dyes, transportation of goods across the planet and sweat shop labour.
Through to disposal where discarded products will either go to poor countries to be resold, or thrown into landfill.
When I was studying, I used to turn my round neck shirts into V neck by cutting the middle and stitching. Just for fun and it thought me how to stitch, at least to a point.
Today it is not about knowing, it is about time. I can't spend 30 minutes fixing my clothes because my 30 minutes is more valuable than a tshirt's cost. Or I don't want to deal with ordering glue for my shoe and work on fixing it, I take it to a shoe repair and get it fixed for $10.
Things got more convenient than war times. We don't need to turn potato sack burlap into clothing anymore. Although, I also believe a man should know how to stitch a button if they need to. I want people to repair electronics rather than clothing.
>I can't spend 30 minutes fixing my clothes because my 30 minutes is more valuable than a tshirt's cost.
I think it's a mistake that we value our own time like this. There's satisfaction that can be derived from spending time mending some of your own clothing, and that contributes to wellbeing. That wellbeing is not something that you can put a dollar value on.
What if there are other activities that OP considers more valuable and rewarding? Spending time with friends or family? Starting a new business? Working on that programming project? Learning how to play an instrument? Exercising? Meditating? Cooking?
I'm not sure such a blanket statement is helpful. This isn't just about money, it's about opportunity cost. The time that he sinks into mending that Tshirt is time he could have put into any other potentially more worthy endeavor.
Platitudes like that often don't work out in practice. Take my life for example; what do you suggest I substitute in return for time spent mending clothes?
* Time spent with the family / kids? That contributes far more to my wellbeing (and theirs). Sure I could mend my clothes with the kids but that isn't something they'd enjoy (nor me to be quite honest) and there are already enough chores I make them do as a family.
* How about time spent cooking and cleaning? But unfortunately I already pay different people to wash the windows, clean the house, mow the lawn... there isn't much less responsibility I can hand off there.
* I guess I could spend less time tinkering with my own hobby projects - but that amounts to very few hours a week and given it's my own personal time, I think I should do what I find more rewarding and relaxing and that isn't mending old clothes.
I barely get time in the week to do fun things as it is. I mean stuff like going on bike rides with my eldest son (who's 5) and I certainly don't get any time to look after my own personal health (I used to run 5k several times a week - it's not much but it made a difference. These days I'm lucky if I get one 5k run in a week). So if I can outsource stuff I don't enjoy to someone else for a reasonable fee then my time is most certainly worth it.
Speak for yourself. I'm rarely on Facebook, don't do Twitter / Reddit / Instagram / whatever else. HN is my one social media vice and even that isn't something I generally visit on a weekend (usually just during the week if I need to take a mental break from coding). However today is the exception but my family are out of town and I'm in bed with a head cold so don't feel much up to being productive anyway.
This is also true for most adults I'm friends with - in that a couple might occasionally go on Facebook but most of them aren't heavy users of social media.
For context: on average we're late 30s and most of us have young kids. We didn't grow up with social media and we've have better things to fill our adult time with since social media become a "thing". So it's not something we spend a great amount of time on.
I'm sure yours (and a many other peoples) experience will differ but my point is you shouldn't generalise that adults spend a lot of time on social media because that isn't always true.
Well I'm 41 and have kids, so your age card is poorly played. Most people of my generation spend their life on social media, I know that for a fact.
Speaking of the milage, I took the liberty to glance at your HN account stats. You appear to be a more prolific poster than I am, even though my account is couple years older.
Not judging mind you. I have my hobbies too, including a nice metalworking shop. But the proportion of time I stand at the lathe to me watching YouTube videos of people machining is tiny.
People in 21st century first world have a lot of disposable time. They also complain most about lack of it.
> Well I'm 41 and have kids, so your age card is poorly played. Most people of my generation spend their life on social media, I know that for a fact.
I wasn't playing an "age card" - I was adding context to why I don't use social media. Also I think you missed the part where I said:
I'm sure yours (and a many other peoples) experience will differ but my point is you shouldn't generalise that adults spend a lot of time on social media because that isn't always true.
> Speaking of the milage, I took the liberty to glance at your HN account stats. You appear to be a more prolific poster than I am, even though my account is couple years older.
I'd already addressed that point in my post: Yes I do spend a lot of time on HN. But only 5 minutes here and there during the week when I need a proverbial cigarette break. I don't generally use HN during the weekend. The fact I post a lot is really more a symptom of how opinionated I am rather than how much time I spend on HN.
> People in 21st century first world have a lot of disposable time. They also complain most about lack of it.
You cannot generalise like that. Some people need to work multiple jobs just to keep their family fed and housed. Others - like me - have long commutes and busy homes to manage. You want to know my weekly schedule?
06:00 get up and showered for work
06:45 drive to train station
07:00 catch train
08:15 arrive in office
16:15 leave for the evening
18:45 get home, bath kids, read them a story then put them to bed
20:00 do house work
20:30 cook dinner
21:00 eat while chatting to wife or watching some crap on TV
21:30 down time
22:00 bed
Granted that 30 minute downtime can be longer and shorter some days depending on how late I go to bed or how much housework we need to do. But I still wouldn't call that "lots of disposable time". The train to work is my disposable time and that's limited by what I can do on the train - which is usually sleeping because my youngest still wakes up multiple times a night (aghhh!)
I wouldn't say I'm unique either nor that I don't have a lucky life (I have a family who love me, a good job, nice house in a good area and enough disposable income to afford a few luxuries). However I don't take kindly to people who assume that I have lots of disposable time. My kids or catching up on sleep is my disposable time and I get very little left after that.
So I suggest you don't make assumptions about other peoples lifestyles based off your own. It's a diverse world out there ;)
You could move closer to where you work, so you have a 15 minute bike ride to and from there every day, saving you two and a half hours. Use that time to mend things so that you save money, which you can use to pay for the more expensive house! Problem solved, you can thank me later...
I had decided I wasn't going to entertain this conversation anymore (on scarejunba's advice) but you do raise a good point there and that is something my wife and I have considered.
The problem is that would mean we'd either end up in a less desirable area (less greenery, higher crime rates, etc) or have much less disposable income. The closer you move towards London the sharper the rise in house prices - and it's quite significant too. Plus as I'm just 10 minutes drive from a direct fast line into central London so moving closer wouldn't actually save myself that much in commute time (maybe half an hour each way if I'm lucky). So there just isn't the intensive to do so.
In fact my wife and I actually did the maths and the money we'd save on my season ticket (which is very expensive) wouldn't even come remotely close to the increased cost in housing. So spending that extra hour mending things wouldn't even scratch the surface. And to be honest, I quite like having that hour of relaxation time on the train ride home as it's uninterrupted me time - which means by the time I get home I've recharged my own proverbial batteries a little so are more energized with the kids. So the time with them is of a better quality.
I'm not suggesting this would work for everyone but there's a few other guys in my office that have the same routine and find it works for them too. In fact it's quite common for people who work in London to live a county or two away from the city and thus have long commutes.
Maybe when the kids are older and want to live in more urban areas, my wife and I might reconsider living this far out from the city. But personally I quite like the contrast of quiet village life after spending the day in the noisy capital.
Understood - I wasn't really serious! However, when I worked in the City back in the late nineties/early two thousands I lived in Islington (20ish minute walk, one stop on the tube) first, and then EC1 (10 minutes or less walking) and although you're right about paying more, as a contractor for a bank, it was still affordable. Plus, I never needed a season ticket, I could pop home for lunch, and it was an interesting area (near Hoxton, Shoreditch, and so on) to live. Admittedly I was much younger and not married, which would definitely change your priorities...
As far as working out, first I realized that taking time out for my own health is worth sacrificing time with my wife and my son. I’m no good to my family if I’m not healthy or dead.
I’m not an outdoors person for a lot of reasons, but I do have a bedroom set aside in our house for a home gym. My wife and I will spend time together talking, watching TV, etc while we are working out together. Also having a gym at home means I can be at home with my wife until she goes to sleep and then work out.
I've got to agree on the personal health side of things but I'm not really a gym kind of person and neither is my wife (we'd both rather go running, cycling, swimming, etc) so any home gym equipment would just gather dust.
What I really need to do is set myself personal goals. At one point I used to train for running longer distances or to get my 5k personal best down to a certain time. But I'd reached those goals around the same time my daughter was born and never really got motivated to do any proper training again since.
So I just need to set myself motivated with some personal goals again.
Being able to turn 30 minutes into longer-wearing clothes means you don’t have to be able to get paid the way you currently are for those 30 minutes forever. Along with various clothing repair activities and normal cooking, I bake bread and can jam from seasonal fruit surplus. If I just look at my hourly take-home, that is some expensive bread and jam.
However, if I think about when I won’t be earning like that anymore, it shifts a bit. That “when” is hopefully 20 years from now (when I’d like to retire), but could be next year and for awhile if the economy goes south. It also helps that I enjoy those things enough to consider them hobbbies.
We also remodeled our own kitchen, doing everything but electricals ourselves (including knocking through a new entrance and closing the old one). From an immediate cost perspective, I should have hired someone to lay the tiles instead of doing it myself. That experience, though, means that I can now easily do my own tile repairs and can better assess the quality of work I might pay others to do. It ended up being fun enough that I’m looking for another tiling project!
I rather use my free 30 minutes playing with my 3d printer or laser engraver. As others stated, we only have limited free time and I really don't want to use it to fix my ripped tshirt or shirt and make it look barely okay. I agree with you, but I also think there are more satisfying and educational things than fixing cheap stuff. (Also clothing is not as expensive as 100 years ago, we don't buy tailored anymore so no need fixing as much.)
There's that, and there's mistaking. GP assumes three things:
1) that it takes 30 minutes to mend, which is high in my experience.
2) That a t-shirt costs less than a half-hour's income. Less than a half-hour's after-tax income, even. Some t-shirts do: The t-shirts I got for free at conferences cost less. But my favourites, the ones I might wear out, aren't the cheap ones.
3) That purchasing new clothes takes no time.
Valuing our own time is okay, but it has to be done correctly. Not bent to produce a particular outcome.
(Yes, I mend. Not t-shirts, because I hardly ever wear those. But I mend shirts.)
How are you planning to fix a ripped t-shirt without making it look terrible? This era, we are wearing very simple clothing which is disposable, also very durable (jeans). I mostly wear shirts/tshirt and jeans. I don't even remember needing to fix any and still have my old jeans for over 15 years.
I don't wear t-shirts often, and don't think any of mine have needed mending. I do wear thin long-sleeved sweaters, so if you don't mind I'll answer for those: The most common problem starts with a small hole somewhere, frequently just next to a seam, and is mended in a minute or two if caught early. Disastrous tears are a different matter, but happily also a rare one.
Those 30 minutes of your time are only more 'valuable' if the only thing of value which counts is monetary value. This is, of course, not the case. Money is nothing but a means to an end, it should never be the end itself. Assuming the end to be a sense of personal satisfaction over a task well accomplished - whether that task be feeding yourself and possibly your family, raising any children to be a boon instead of a burden to society or just enabling you to be lazing on a beach somewhere - it is not inconceivable for time spent mending something to have more total value than time spent earning money so you can buy a new something.
When people talk about how much their time is worth; they're not talking about it from a strictly financial point of view but from a personal satisfaction point of view. ie if I spend an hour fixing this; this is an hour less I spend with my kids or an hour I miss chatting to my wife.
So it's not about counting pennies but about justifying outsourcing jobs you don't enjoy so you can spend more time on the stuff that really matters.
This point of view is particularly important to those of us who have really busy lives and thus are often juggling our time between different responsibilities (family, work, household chores, etc).
I discussed this in my other post but to expand on that, we do a lot of household chores together (tidying, cleaning, washing car, gardening, etc). However I wouldn't trust a a toddler and 5 year old with a sewing needle.
A 5yo can certainly be trusted with a blunt sewing needle, the type used to mend holes in socks etc ('stopnaald' in Dutch, darning-needle in English). A toddler can not but might find it interesting to toddle around while you show the 5yo to mend that hole in that sock - or something similar.
He can't. We have actually tried before with a sowing-craft set he got for Christmas (which my wife ended up making with him watching).
To be honest I shouldn't have to defend what chores I choose to spend time doing with the kids. I'd be interested to know how many on here have kids, do all of the aforementioned chores and still find time to teach 5 year olds to mend socks, shirts and jumpers? There seems to be an inordinate amount of "high-roading" happening today.
Dude. Everyone acts like this. For the guy teaching his kid robotics, you're missing out by not teaching your kid robotics. But he isn't teaching his kid chemistry. And the chem guy isn't teaching his kid carpentry.
Each of them doesn't realize what they aren't doing. Only that they're very busy and somehow manage to fit in this one thing. So why can't you?
Don't take advice on parenting from HN. It's the essential oil mommy blog of the programmer community.
I do. We live on a farm where they also get to do other interesting things, e.g. two days ago I was splitting firewood with my 7yo daughter - that is she did the splitting with a hydraulic press, I watched and helped where necessary while showing her where danger lies and how to avoid problems. Both daughters (7yo and 14yo) know how to sew - the 14yo got a sewing machine when she was 11. They can do many other practical things as well since we involve them in many tasks around the house and farm.
...and that is the 'secret' to raising self-reliant children: involve them in common tasks when those tasks are performed anyway. This does not take any "high-roading" as you imply, it just takes a little bit of forethought and might make things go a bit slower than they normally would.
Good for you. However not all kids are the same so what activities worked well for you might not work well for other families - despite their best efforts.
Like I said - we have tried doing needlework with my son with a kit that was specifically designed for kids. So my comments are not without precedence.
> ...and that is the 'secret' to raising self-reliant children: involve them in common tasks when those tasks are performed anyway. This does not take any "high-roading" as you imply, it just takes a little bit of forethought and might make things go a bit slower than they normally would.
Geez, I wish I thought of that. So all those years I've spent playing number and word games with them; teaching them to cook, handle scissors, knives, gas cookers and even open fires responsibly; how to do a great many DIY projects with power tools safely and engage in their curiosity for the natural world was all just a waste of time because I didn't happen to do that one thing you do. /s
> I shouldn't have to defend what chores I choose to spend time doing with the kids.
Of course you shouldn't, but you presented a false dichotomy with "if I spend an hour fixing this; this is an hour less I spend with my kids."
There is nothing a parent can take apart or put together without any curious child immediately having a deeply rooted interest in- and a thousand questions about the matter.
It's okay not to be able or want to fix something, but don't blame it on your kids.
As an aside, I believe it's the best way to parent. It teaches kids that no matter what happens in life, they always have themselves to rely on.
> Of course you shouldn't, but you presented a false dichotomy with "if I spend an hour fixing this; this is an hour less I spend with my kids."
Given you know precisely zero about me, my family, nor our routines; you are in no position to assume what is a "false dichotomy".
> It's okay not to be able or want to fix something, but don't blame it on your kids.
If you're takeaway was that I'm blaming it on the kids then you've clearly not been reading my posts properly. My stance from the very start was that I don't want to do it.
> As an aside, I believe it's the best way to parent. It teaches kids that no matter what happens in life, they always have themselves to rely on.
Thank you for that titbit of advice. I'd never considered teaching my kids basic life skills. /s
"False dichotomy" being a general concept means I don't have to be in any sort of position of knowing any specifics. It's generally applicable. I have no idea why you're defensive about this.
> I don't want to do it.
which is different from "if I spend an hour fixing this; this is an hour less I spend with my kids". "I don't want to do it" or "I can't do it" is a perfectly fine reason by itself.
> "False dichotomy" being a general concept means I don't have to be in any sort of position of knowing any specifics. It's generally applicable.
Specifics do matter when they're critical to the conclusion being made. In this case my daughter it too young to do needlework and my son isn't interested in it either (as I've said before, we have tried). So ultimately I would end up -- and previously have ended up -- doing it by myself despite any best efforts to incorporate the kids.
I do get at some point he'll have to learn that not all chores are fun but he's only 5 and there are a lot of chores he does love doing (including stuff "normal" people hate) so I'm willing to let him stick to the ones he finds enjoyable while he's still young enough to get away with it. After all, he has a whole lifetime of work ahead of him.
> I have no idea why you're defensive about this.
Wouldn't you get a little defensive if I started telling you how I think you should raise your family when I've never met you? I see it time and time again where HN posters pretend to be experts on the weirdest of subjects and this is no exception. I swear this place was never like that when I first joined...
In any case, comments about ones family are a deeply personal topic so you should expect one might take those comments personally. ;)
If you can have as much work as you want then your free time is worth exactly as much per hour as your hourly work rate.
The point is, you shouldn't be alarmed. You can afford your free time. Just know how pointless it is to suffer through some of your time to save a bit of money that is much less than the value of the time you spent suffering.
I'm still fixing things, but not because I want to save anything. I just like to tinker and figure stuff out so I'm geeting my money's worth out of every attempted repair.
Also I hate shoping so shopping time saved is often worth for me more then time used for repairs.
I think looking at opportunity costs is important. still, different chores make different demands. the value of my time at, say 10pm after a long day at work is less than at 10am. mrend at night, code during the day.
Still, he paid (in lost profits) for his tv watching and social browsing. He's t-shirt mending would cost the same but he would additionally lost pleasure and gained t-shirt which value is neglible when compared to all other vslues involved.
"my 30 minutes is more valuable than a tshirt's cost"
Of course, I know what you mean. But consider, at least for a moment, that the cost of that t-shirt to you includes the wages paid to the cotton pickers, thread makers, cloth makers, cutters, stitchers, packers, transport and warehouse workers, and the amazon delivery driver, who will contribute to making that t-shirt and getting it to your door. So in a way, you're saying your 30 minutes is more valuable than however many minutes of all those people's lives that would have to be spent to get you a new t-shirt.
There's some profound insight into how economics works to be had when you truly consider what it means to trade off your time and the value of your labor output, against the time and labor of countless people, all put into supplying you with stuff.
I bought a used three-zone Weber Summit-series barbecue for a really good price. It was well-used. Many of the screws keeping it together were corroded and falling apart. There were a couple of holes in the main cooking box. I repaired and restored the entire grill to a very workable condition with the help of Weber, who sells replacement parts and offers great customer support. Unfortunately, I don't weld, so my solution to patching holes involved washers, nuts, screws, and custom cut sheet metal.
Restoring this grill required a few hours of labor and lots of patience. The grill retails for a few thousand dollars. I bought it for less than 10% retail, used and requiring repair. The parts cost less than 100.
Many of us value our personal time in a way that rationalizes avoiding a project such as this. However, the cost savings and value created by this project were sufficient to justify the effort.
I know someone who picked up a stainless gas BBQ free from the curb in front of someone's house. It was in great condition, the burners and grills looked like it had hardly been used. New, it would have been in the $1000-2000 range. What was wrong with it? All it needed was a new AA battery for the ignitor!
My experience with gas BBQs is that the ignitor is usually the first thing to go. Usually, again in my experience, it happens due to corrosion of the ignitor itself. My solution is usually just to use a match, I find that the ignitor stops working so quickly that it's not worth replacing.
Replacing the grills, heat spreader, and burners however makes a lot of sense and can make an old BBQ virtually new again.
During undergrad studies I used to wear a jacket with a cross-stitched logo from a game I was playing at the time. It was unbelievable how everyone assumed that it was my mother’s doing. What bothered me was not the thing about the gender stereotype but the fact that putting a string in a needle and using it seems so hard for anyone from teenagers to grown up adult. Sometimes the barriers are just in the mind.
Every 6 months I used to go to my mother and use her Bernina sewing machine to fix some clothes. The machine is old already but still works good. Recently she bought me a new mechanical one. I really hope it will last all my life. I don't need it much, but it's a pleasure to fix things or make something small. Plus, the use of a powerful machine makes it way more fun than stitching. Also, it still wastes less time than me searching and buying something new.
I buy up the really old ones and repair them then give them away. They last a lifetime (literally, these are machines from the 30's to the 70's and it is not rare that the previous owner had it as a wedding gift and passed away). I love the Naumann brand, they are really indestructible, light industrial stuff.
There are some intricate bits the trickery required to get the timing just right is at the edge of my patience but when they run it is like music.
As opposed to a non-mechanical sewing machine? What does this mean? Guessing you mean one with metal gears unlike the plastic-geared junk sold new in most stores now?
From what I know there is just less logic and software inside. Whenever I change the style of stitching, I can hear some mechanical clicking inside of it. So I assume there is no fancy logic inside. Just pure mechanical switches and an engine.
In this context, it seems worth mentioning Woolfiller, a product I love because I always wear out the elbows in my wool sweaters and it lets me mend them: https://www.woolfiller.com/
It's a great example of a company trying to reverse this trend.
I recently ordered a new kit from them, and learned that they are working on a new project to produce a more mendable fabric: https://madetomend.com/ I can't wait until I can buy a jacket from them and try it out.
Today, all things are too cheap. We need include the cost on the environment within the cost of our goods. Altering the price of goods is an extremely important mechanic to move us towards sustainability. It is ok for us to have fast fashion if it can be done in a non damaging way, if it cannot then we will have to learn to mend again.
Some people can not afford food. I grew up in a single parent household, 2 boys who ate like horses. My poor mother could not keep up feeding us working her $12/hr job. We ate food from a store where products go before they go to trash (I believe).
I've been pitching the idea to any one who will listen. Many makerspaces already have stuff for textiles. Kids these are really into cosplay, crafts, homemade. Outside of a few STEM hubs, there's excess warehouse space AND untapped labor.
While a child labor force sweating away over textiles in a rundown warehouse may be a classic business model, it could be a difficult idea to pitch nowadays.
I'm old enough to know how to mend, but surely even younger people could just watch one of countless Youtube tutorials if they suddenly decided they'd like to learn this? Knowledge is more accessible than ever before, nowadays we just "know where to look" whereas previous generations knew what they were taught (or, sometimes, learnt from books).
The real issue seems to be that people are helpless without the Internet - and that our consumerism has brought a throwaway mentality with it.
I grew up in a way that didn’t involve learning traditional skills from my parents. That seems almost antiquated although I’m sure some people my age did have it like that. Divorced parents, not so much time spent with grandparents. Mom didn’t have a lot of need for mending, etc. There was no war, affordable stuff was plentiful enough. Many people my age describe this kind of rupture in the passing down of skills. But we are also quite resourceful and it’s like we are teaching ourselves to be different as we grow up into parental age. We also have a sense that life might be getting more difficult when we project decades ahead, so we want to resurrect some of this lost knowledge.
> Mom didn’t have a lot of need for mending, etc. There was no war, affordable stuff was plentiful enough. Many people my age describe this kind of rupture in the passing down of skills.
My mother made our Halloween costumes by hand. We didn't (and don't) really mend clothes, but the skill set is the same. And when I had a shirt fail by coming apart at a seam, rather than having a hole worn through the fabric, my reaction was that I should sew it back together.
Mending a seam is invisible. Mending a hole will give you a visible patch; I think there are good reasons people don't do that. And far and away the most common failure in my clothes is wearing a hole in the knee of a pair of pants.
Some people buy pants with manufactured holes, as I'm sure we all know.
What's bizarre is when you see two people wearing the same brand/pair of pants with the same manufactured holes. All the holes/rips/tears in the pants are identical, a marvel of mass-production.
You're right that YouTube has a lot of helpful videos for repair / disassembly that make it a lot easier than it used to be. I don't know why "being helpless without the internet" would be "the real problem" though, given that we ... have the internet..?
The real problem is that today's technology is generally much more complicated than it used to be. Also manufacturers don't expect things to be repaired (because it isn't cost effective unless you do it yourself) so they don't make things easy to disassemble.
>The real problem is that today's technology is generally much more complicated than it used to be.
I broadly disagree - the proportion of people who can fix a TV is probably no lower now than it was in the 1970s; a modern TV might be more complex, but the accessibility of information, tools and parts is far better.
The wider issue is the broadly positive fact that automation has drastically reduced the cost of goods relative to labour. The range of products and failure modes that are economically repairable is much narrower, because repair is relatively more expensive and replacement is relatively cheaper. Generally speaking, the most expensive part of repairing a TV is simply the labour cost of dismantling and reassembling it. As mentioned in the article, paying a seamstress to patch a jacket or darn a sweater is often more expensive than just buying a new one. There are worse problems in the world than "we've got so good at making stuff cheaply that it isn't worth the effort to fix it".
It's both. Things are so much cheaper to buy because the marginal cost of a factory assembling parts (on hundreds of widgets a minute) is ridiculously cheap.
But also, a set of tools was once a necessity, because things were built to be repaired. Now it's a luxury item for most people. Simple things like changing oil are, in most cars, way more complicated and difficult than they used to be, because the market has spoken. Easy DIY maintenance is not the priority.
>broadly positive fact that automation has drastically reduced the cost of goods relative to labour
Only because the huge negative external costs of a new appliance aren't priced in - pollution created in manufacture, environment disposal of the old one, long-term exhaustion of raw materials.
Exactly. Had part of the bottom LED backlighting strip go bad on a monitor recently. I'm no stranger to electronics work, but repairing it proved impossible due to the way the monitor was manufactured, even if I had been able to source proper replacements. Compare that to old CRTs I used to repair in high school by swapping out parts you could often find at radio shack and get to with just a screwdriver.
True, but not too much higher if you're careful to ground out the HV circuitry before you touch anything. It's also not nearly as high a risk as people tend to think [1].
The primary failure mode of a TV in the 70s was a tube that went bad. Easy fix: open TV, pop out old tube, pop in old tube, done.
If a TV breaks now, it's some component that's either glued in or soldered in, so good luck replacing that. Modern TVs are not designed to have replaceable parts.
I'm young enough that i'm part of the generation that the article is complaining about, but my first thought was also youtube. The amount of knowledge available there is amazing. Yes, it's full of stupid videos and conspiracies too, but if you ever want to learn how to do anything, it's a simple youtube search away. There must be thousands of excellent, clear tutorial videos for every point the author raises.
Additionally, availability of replacement parts is excellent. Whatever you need is only a $2 package with free shipping from amazon or aliexpress.
I don't see being helpless without the internet as a problem. I know how to find the information i need, and barring some apocalypse knocking out the internet that's probably just as good as actually knowing it.
It's not every day my worlds collide like this, so I'll plug https://freesewing.org/ for those of you who have an interest in making clothes and are looking for a place to start that is a good match for the hackernews crowd.
We don't use patreon. Patrons can subscribe directly through PayPal.
We don't need the Patreon approach because everything on the site is available for free. Being a patron is completely optional.
It boils down to the fact that all are patterns are made-to-measure. So we need your measurements, thus we need a way to store them. That's why a (free) account is needed.
Nothing wrong with specialization. It's a waste of my time and potentially a waste of money if I ruin the item. There are many shops in town, some excellent at mending and alterations and at very reasonable cost.
For that, I get excellent quality work that will hold up instead of me ruining the garment through inexperience.
I'll stick to my soldering iron, they can keep their thread and needle.
A friend was recently complaining about having to buy a new $2000 fridge, how his old one only lasted 8 years, and how everything is junk nowadays. He described the symptoms to me [gradual loss of cooling capability, soft ice cream, then melting ice cubes] and I told him I solved the same problem 2 years ago and his was almost surely a broken defrost heater leading to a totally iced up [therefore no airflow] cooling unit, that troubleshooting would take him 15 minutes to confirm, and if that was it, it was a $20 90-minute repair (most of which is waiting for the freezer to defrost).
He looked at me like I had 3 heads to even consider a fridge repair and a week or so later sent me a pic of his new, $2000 fridge in place. I tried.
The idea is that one would simultaneously studiously separate and recycle plastic bags (at the cost of hours of their time over a period of a decade) to prevent a few pounds of plastic from entering a landfill while not being willing to use a Phillips screwdriver and a hair dryer for 45-90 minutes to save $1950 and 250 pounds of refrigerator from entering a landfill.
There might even be more mass of just polystyrene insulation in the fridge he's just trashed than the mass of plastics he keeps out of the landfill. There is certainly more overall plastic in there.
It varies on jurisdiction, but the depth of recycling can be a lot better for electronics and appliances. In Europe an old fridge would typically not go to the landfill but to reprocessing facility first, stripped into metals, plastics and "electronic waste".
To my mind, that is a significant amount of waste, and definitely worth chasing.
* Durable Plastics: 72.9 lbs
* Nodurable Plastics: 28 lbs
* Plastic Bottles and Jars: 17.7
There is more, but this gives a sense of the statistics they quote on their site. These do not seem unreasonable to me, and they suggest that recycling plastics would save a refrigerator or two in weight per household per year, depending a bit on the size of the household.
They're implying that the friend is "penny-wise and pound-foolish", by making a large effort to recycle small bits of plastic, while making no effort to avoid wasting lots of plastic/steel/coolant/electronics/motors etc.
That his friend does a token BS gesture towards being 'environmentally friendly" while participating in the same needless consumerism attitude that's responsible for 99% of the cost on the environment.
The problem with plasic bags isn’t so much that they go to landfills, but rather that they end up going into the wider environment where they pose significant dangers to many kinds of wildlife.
I take your point: the trashed refrigerator may be a heavier environmental cost than the plastic bags.
It is best if we both recycle and fix the refrigerator. But doing either is better than doing nothing. In other words, arguing that one good is more effective than another good doesn't mean that it isn't admirable to do only the smaller good.
Many of us up here on Hacker News are good at fixing things. But some of us might be less skilled in other areas, such as organizing political campaigns or working in the medical field. It's easy to criticize someone for not doing something we find easy, but it is harder to see how they might be skilled in areas where we struggle.
>It is best if we both recycle and fix the refrigerator.
It might just be marginally better.
If "fixing the refrigerator" (and other such items in our lives, cars, etc) yields 100 e (e = a made-up token measure of environmental benefit) and not using plastic bags for a decade yields 1 e, then it's almost irrelevant.
I think abstractly in these terms too, probably too much so. Whenever my wife or I purchase something or throw it away, I ask myself how much we just debited from the earth. I wonder how one would actually go about defining this measure?
One thing is that companies don't help at all at this -- and they wont unless they are forced to (the same way companies were forced to add calorie and nutrition breakdowns).
In most places I’ve lived in the US it’s takes a lot of work to get an old appliance to a landfill and out of the hands of someone who would repair or recycle it. Somebody buying a $2000 fridge probably had the old one taken away and somebody involved in that process would repair and resell it.
I think the concern is that I might get a significant warm fuzzy feeling from my actions that is disproportionate to the significance of my actual impact on the environment. Presumably (hopefully) my goal is to actually have a positive impact on the environment rather than just feel good by reusing a few plastic bags per month.
Similarly resuscitated a washing machine twice with 10 and $20 dollar parts. Hardest thing was getting sheet metal back in place as it tends to contort and warp.
YouTube and specialized forums are very helpful in pinning the issue and parts.
Even, some years years back (10 or so?) when buying a woolen pullover you’d get a bit of mending yarn wrapped around cardboard bobbins with the exact same color as your sweater.
Nowadays they’re not included, at least where I buy.
Strong agree. YouTube creates so much value around repairs. I can fix all sorts of things with my pool thanks to YouTube. And everyone I know has learned tiny practical skills of one sort or another from there.
I followed a youtube to take out an lcd panel from a laptop to replace. The panel is cracked in the corner and the whole picture if fuzzy. It was easy enough and that then gave me the confidence to order a new one, which is in the mail as I speak. Cost is circa 15% of the new laptop price.
To add to the anecdotes, I wanted to add a chip of ram to my laptop but was very uncomfortable with the amount of pressure that was required to take off one of the bottom edges. Watching a video of someone doing it without damaging the device gave me the confidence to go ahead.
On the other hand, I had a not-too-old fridge with a broken ice maker, which I tried to repair. The replaceable part was "the whole ice maker", which was out of production and not available anywhere. With some knowledge of electronics and 3d printing, I could probably get it working again, but at the cost of multiple hours of my free time, with no guarantee of success. The best intentions can't always defeat planned obsolescence.
It does depend on the car part. There are a lot of low quality fakes on ebay, which won't either work, or will break quickly, and finding information with which to sort through which are good and which are not is a task in itself.
The consequences can be even more serious if you're looking for aircraft parts. A few years ago there was a discussion about Chinese made crankshafts for Corvairs on HackerNews, covering this exact issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18788861.
Fixing household white goods where a failure could result in a bad load of laundry or burnt toast is very different from aviation where utmost care must be taken with regard to maintenance, overhauling and repairs.
Even in cars, you gotta figure, is the part critical? (brakes, steering) or non critical (wipers, seats, heating/ac, etc).
For sure. I was pointing it out more for interest's sake than as a serious point of comparison for fixing your washing machine. Still, even there I'd probably be relatively careful, because flooding your kitchen isn't so much fun (bitter experience speaking there, although fortunately the kitchen is at ground level and has a concrete floor under the lino so no serious damage done).
You’re right that there is a possibility of somewhat disastrous results, but in my experience it’s not the motor or high voltage electrical that goes out but a plastic part, an on-off switchbor or a sensor.
Yes be careful, you could get an electric shock photograph before you take things apart and read instructions before putting things back together.
Yeah, Ebay is great for this. I was able to replace the mainboard on an older LCD TV I was gifted years ago. $50 for a used one, exactly matching model#. 15 minute replacement job, 0 wasted televisions.
I've had excellent luck with several of the online repair parts vendors. I hesitate to recommend any individual one as I've only ordered about once per year, not enough to generate a meaningful recommendation and I've gotten what I've ordered from every one of the ones I've used.
Two notes on ice makers specifically: 1. There is a much smaller number of models of ice makers than refrigerators. (One model of ice maker crosses over to many fridges, though you may need to unplug and move the fridge-specific wiring harness over to the new ice maker.) Many times it's an extra half hour of googling to find the generic ice maker part number and then chase that down. 2. Some ice makers that are not OEM are painted to look non-stick and that paint will start flaking off into your ice in about 2-3 years of use (disgusting). This is a case where I'd rather take a used OE part over a new part of unknown provenance, even though they are a high failure part.
I'm loving the 2 inch ice cube tray from Tovolo. Liked it so much I bought a second, but sadly amazon sold me a knock off, thin sides and very jiggly. So, get one with thick sides, and I checked amazon, there are way more vendors now for 2 inch ice cube trays with more cube slots.
My microwave I had for 8 years (and I got it second hand) stopped working. A quick inspection + watching a couple of YouTube videos revealed that a plastic latch inside the door got broken.
It would have been very easy to replace it if only it was still being sold. Extensive search on the internet showed it was not :( :( :(
If only I had some time (well a LOT of time) to reverse engineer the existing latch and 3D-print a new one... But I did not.
So, I had to put the microwave outside on my curb. I attached a note to it saying it works well if the latch is fixed and also attached the broken latch.
I was happy to see it was gone in a few hours. I live in a city (Montreal, Canada) so I guess it helped my microwave to not be wasted.
I wish 3D-printing technologies - or more precisely, a technology that helps to create 3D specs out of an existing object - would be more advanced. Well, I did not do an extensive search about it so I may be well mistaken :)
The latch for my vacuum clean bin broke. I fished it out (10m), modelled a replacement in FreeCAD (2hr, I had to learn how to use FreeCAD since I’d never used it before), and printed a replacement (40m print time) - and now I don’t have to buy a new vacuum cleaner.
Similar story for my ironing board: A nylon runner wheel cracked in half, breaking the folding mechanism. Modeling a replacement in CAD (I used fusion 360), 3D printed it, little drilling to get the axle to fit, and the ironing board was back working same day. It felt great to fix a problem like that - there’s something very techno-utopian about it, like you’re living the dream of a Wired article from 1997 predicting a future where we will all effect household repairs by replicating spare parts.
But that’s happened once in the three years I’ve owned a 3D printer. Simple mechanical part failures just don’t seem to happen that often.
And it can be fun to fix something. I felt very rewarded after I replaced our kitchen machines worn out gears, by designing and printing out new identical ones.
I often find it much faster for me to "widdle" small parts using my "art" skills. Just get a piece of plastic or metal and a dremal and carve it. In 30 min you will have a latch... making a 3d printing model takes forrrrrevvverrr
One advantage of 3D printers is that the part you need might already be designed, you can find all sorts of things on thingiverse. Once the design exists any number of people can use it.
I’m finding Gorilla Glue works wonders for plastic parts broken from bending or shearing forces. I’ve had a few things around the house that have broken and led me to think I should 3D print replacements. I glue them to buy a few days or weeks and the glue ends up bonding so well that I have yet to print replacements yet.
Another good technique for hard plastic is plastic welding, especially for clean snaps. Basically using a soldering iron to melt the plastic back together. Seems to be as strong as before. Plenty of good YouTube videos showing the technique.
I recently bought a lathe and a mill, and while that certainly isn't an option for everyone, I've found them to be quite useful for repairing random things around the house. I've got about $2,500 in the equipment and another $500 or so in tooling, but in the three months or so I've been good enough with them to make things I want, I've probably saved $500 in miscellaneous repairs.
I guess my point is "don't discount traditional processes". Someone good with a razor and file could make a new plastic latch from an old cutting board faster than someone with a 3D printer could print the part, much less design, print, and verify.
For equipment like that which you only use occasionally, they'll often have one at your local hackerspace, along with friendly people who can show you how to use it.
Or let you keep yours there where more people can get use out of it and it isn't taking up space in your garage.
It takes me about 30 minutes to cad up most parts and I can do it while watching TV. It just takes a bit of practice. You likely didn't used to be able to whip up a simple web scraper in 10 minutes but can do it now.
You can try sculpy or similar things next time too to make plastic parts. There are several materials that are basically play-dough that hard set to plastic like materials.
Frustrating for me to hear - I was looking forward to getting a new fridge with an ice maker. Carrying trays of ice in a wheelchair (especially in liquid form from the sink back to the freezer) is an interesting, if damp challenge.
I imagine carrying ice trays on a wheelchair should be easier than on legs. Instead, I just carry water in container and fill the ice tray on the fridge shelf.
My fridge leaks water into the vegetables, freezes where it shouldn't, and gives a loud thuuunk when the cycle ends. I disconnected the water line from the ice maker long time ago, so water must be condensation. I wonder what it might be.
Your fridge also makes water from its auto-defrost cycle (often 15 minutes every 12 or 24 hours). This will typically defrost behind the freezer compartment, drain down to a catch tray that drains to a tray underneath the fridge [where it will then evaporate back into the kitchen]. If that drain line is plugged or frozen, it could leak somewhere else. If the defrost has failed, you can get uneven (and eventually little/no) cooling.
Probably the cooling fan not running. The cold air doesn't circulate so the drain line freezes up and overflows into the refrigerator. It's not hard to replace yourself or a repair guy can probably do it for around $200 parts and labor.
I had this exact problem on mine. I took a panel off from back of inside freezer compartment, and there was a solid block of ice below coils. I didnt own a hairdryer, so used a turkey baster and hot water to melt it. Spray hot water in, wait 30 sec, suck it back out, get fresh hot water, repeat till you get drainage.
It's also interesting to note changes in efficiency for things like refrigerators. I suspect at 8 years repair might be more environmentally sound, but any older... refrigerators today aren't indeed built like they were 20 years ago. They use far less energy.
Did he have to drop $2000 in cash to buy it, or did he finance it (either directly or indirectly)? He may have said "Huh, $65/month; I can afford that!"
I'm not picking on your friend specifically, just pointing out one factor that can reduce the immediate friction of people buying new stuff, instead of trying to fix the old.
I've a standing offer out to friends of mine. They can drive their car over to my place (pre-arranged, of course) and we'll change their brakes together and all they have to pay is the cost of the parts (which is usually much less than they expect).
A few of my mechanically inclined but lacking confidence friends and a few of my other broke as a joke friends have taken me up on it over the years. Most can't believe how cheap, fast, and easy to do/hard to screw up it is. Very few repeat "customers" though. :(
In the fridge case, it turns out he had already ordered one for delivery in a few days and had already mentally parted with the money, so didn't want to fix his and call to cancel the order...
I'd expect "few repeat customers" to be a good thing - after pairing on DIY repair the one time, they have the confidence to do it on their own the next time.
I found that I had to chip ice out the base back panel of the fridge, where it had significant ice accumulation. No way in hell I'm treating something we paid 1.5k$ for and 'throwing it away'.
I still maintain there's 4 R's: Repair, Reduce, Reuse, and eventually Recycle.
For the less hack-inclined, I highly recommend looking at the https://SensorPush.com devices after researching a bunch of wireless remote thermometer options (including a couple marketed for cigar humidors). Bluetooth to (multiple) phones, replaceable battery that should last ~1 year, available Bluetooth-Wifi gateway to let you set up a whole monitoring system, $50.
For the Samsung fridge getting ice buildup, there are relatively few causes and likely the simplest is the same defrost timer mine had issues with. I like https://repairclinic.com for appliance parts, though they don't have any of the 3 models of Samsung defrost timers in stock right now.
Even simpler than the defrost heater, in an awful lot of fridges there's a little mechanical timer circuit that turns the heater on and off periodically. Those timers are full of plastic gears and can die, but while you wait for a new one there's likely an opening where you can use a flathead screwdriver to cycle around and manually trigger a defrost cycle.
Just remember to set a timer and turn that back off after 20 minutes or so, because the same nonfunctional timer that starts it turns it off as well.
It's possible this problem was an excuse that allowed him to mentally justify the <fancy new fridge> he really wanted. The last thing he wanted to hear is an easy fix.
I believe many products are designed to fail, or they are not using robust enough computers?
Many products are so complicated, they don't make sense to repair. I have found the "experts" are many times learning on your dime while trying to fix your appliance. I won't get started on Automotive repair.
I have a relative whom buy two Bosch washers in three years. She still likes the brand, and even recommends them. And she's not wealthy.
It's almost like people are hypnotized? Put a few qismos on the product, which just add to the complexity of the product, and usually add another fail point. I have seen a important electronic systems wired in series.
It's fine if you have the money I guess?
And there's always the guy whom claims new products actually last longer than old stuff. "It's just a myth the new high tech stuff doesn't last."
Recently, on the nature strip outside my place, someone dumped what was essentially a brand new brushed stainless fridge. Why I new it was almost new was that it was lying on its back and I could look into the compressor compartment at the bottom and it was clean—totally pristine! (Just about everyone knows that refrigerators get filthy down there real quick).
Seems people were moving out and it was too much trouble to take it with them. Nevertheless, it was there for some weeks before someone collected it (I don't have room or I would have taken it pronto).
I was about to buy a new fridge but held off due to a lot of complaints about pieces of ice falling down the back section of samsung and other refrigerators. I've got a shitty 90s ge fridge, that has a wierd defrost drain. Basically the issue is it freezes down the drain line. A bunch of googling and one dude had a gem, take a piece of 8 ga copper wire, hang it over the defrost coils, and run it down the drain, copper conducts heat amazingly. Hasn't been a issue for 5 years since.
I replaced a broken cooling fan in my girlfriend's fridge. Ordered the new part but the connecter was wrong. So I cut the connectors off and spliced the old to the new and voila! Whole thing cost me $11. Quite empowering.
Many people want to buy new stuff just for the sake of it. A breakdown is just the excuse they need to do it. By the time you talked to him his wife had probably already picked out the new one.
> The two biggest blows came in the 1990s. The first was the shift in the US economy from manufacturing to knowledge-intensive services (a shift that has been in the making for a long time, but came to a head during the information technology revolution).
People call it "knowledge based economy," but one of my previous bosses had that phrase about it "it feels more like it is an ignorance based economy"
And yes, the service economy is there to accommodate living of very one sided people, in regards to both work and life skills.
The amount of money spent in service economy is seemingly directly proportional to at what cost intellectual ineptness comes to money earning classes of society: branding consulting, financial consulting, management consulting, "change management" - really all that stuff is available to any able minded person if he can give 5 minutes of serious thought to that. I do believe that most of HN readers have hard time understanding people buying into that stuff too.
I wonder, if I would've been a multibillionaire, would I be also paying millions to random consultants to do 2+2 things for me?
If you wear belts, you might decide you don't need to repair the button because the belt hides it, and duplicates its function of holding the pants up. This will eventually result in the zipper breaking, which cannot be hidden with a belt, and is much more difficult to repair. The button has the additional non-obvious function of reducing load on the zipper, so you should repair it even if it looks unnecessary.
I dont know why but it gives you massive pride, to remove planned obsolescence from a very cheap item. Take the water heater of my mum - the toplid did no longer work, because the axis it used was made from cheap plastic, resting on even thinner plastic holders. Solution: Hot screw driven through. Now this cheap item works trouble free since 5 years.
Same thing with a fancy looking scale- the wires internal where glued together with a sort of ducttape. Two solder points later - meet the eternal scale.
I sometimes wonder, why this is not a buisness model. There must be money in making cheap items ever lasting.
I'd be willing to bet that the failure points you found are far from the only places in the design where they cheaped out. People tend to buy based on price and/or superficial details. It's hard to sell people on substantially hardened designs absent a brand that allows for charging a real premium.
>I sometimes wonder, why this is not a buisness model. There must be money in making cheap items ever lasting.
It is, and it's wide out in the open. I bet the high end water heater with a solid reputation for quality would have proper hinges and insulation. It's just that most people are wary of paying a premium for what they perceive to be the same item.
Thanks to the Internet everyone thinks engineering and manufacturing is all about "planned obsolescence". Consumers want to blame the maker for the cheap product they bought instead of blaming themselves for only wanting cheap products.
This has been an issue since before the internet. Growing up in the 80s my parents and grandparents would always be making comments like, "They don't make things like they used to!"
Well I, for one, am extremely glad they don't. I remember cars from the 1960s and 1970s, and they were ####ing terrible: unreliable, unsafe, slow, poor handling. Cars today are vastly better, although I think the accelerating trend for packing them full of complex electronics and gizmos may bite us in the arse. There is simply a lot more to go wrong in a car from 2019 than a car from 1979, even if individual parts and subsystems are much more reliable.
My uncle and my step-dad both have more realistic views. My uncle used to ride motorcycles back in the 60s and 70s and looked at me askance when I'd complained that the problem with doing long distances on a bike with chain rather than shaft drive is that you always needed to carry chain lube with you to oil the chain every 200 - 300 miles. His comment, about an old Norton he'd had, was that he needed to strip down and rebuild the engine every time he'd done 100 miles (he didn't keep it long; even back then this was considered awful).
Likewise, about 15 years ago I'd mentioned some relatively minor part needing replacement after 50,000 miles on my first car, and my step-dad pointed out that with a lot of the cars he'd driven in the 60s, after 50,000 miles you'd need a replacement engine, never mind the odd part.
And if the engine didn't need rebuilt, the frame was probably rusting out by 50,000 miles if you lived anywhere that it snowed regularly in the winter.
50K miles was about how long my parents' cars lasted. 100K miles was considered exceptional at the time and the owner probably babied the car and didn't drive it in places or seasons where it would be exposed to salt.
This has been an issue, however, once upon a time durability was actually a marketing term used for regular appliances. Companies sold people on it.
Now durability as a term exists only for things like jeans and trucks where it’s not supposed to indicate that you can use the thing for long, but rather, to indicate a macho DIY culture.
I believe marketing has played a large role in moving consumers away from even considering how long a product will last.
The consumer is not informed on the quality of a product. How am I meant to know how long a product will last? Price is only a vague estimate of quality. You can spend a lot of money on something that won't last long at all. In fact if it cost a lot of money it was probably built for people who can afford to replace it regularly.
The teeth of a zipper on my backpack came detached from the tape material on the side of the zipper and a friend said that it looks like I would have to get a new backpack.
Well... it turned out that the teeth of the zipper are just a plastic string wrapped around a cord (and both still perfectly fine) and that stitching the cord back onto the tape material required not much more than some dexterity and accuracy. It took maybe half an hour from diagnose to the finished fixed zipper.
Bonus: feels empowering to do things that someone else considered impossible.
I had a zipper go recently in a way where the whole zipper did need replaced. I was annoyed to learn that at least my local REIs don't do repairs any longer like they did in the past. I'd have sent it out for repair to a company that specializes in outdoor gear repair but a friend of mine was able to do it for me. (I don't have a sewing machine myself and this really needed one.)
FYI in the future there might be a "luggage repair" place in your area that could do this work for you. Had the same thing happen to a backpack I really like and paid $50 to get the zipper replaced and a couple seams reinforced instead of buying a new one.
Never thought of that and I've even had luggage repaired. As I said in another comment, a cobbler could probably have done it as well though I'd probably have had to order the zipper myself in that case.
I think with outdoor gear, there's actually a certain cachet to gear that's obviously well-used and battle-scarred :-)
I was just talking to my wife about this yesterday. My gloves wore out on the index fingers and I had to mend them with a needle and thread. Literally 5 minutes of work and gloves are good to go. I then commented on how as Americans lost our way with mending old things and she said why I just didn’t buy new ones. I wonder how future generations will fare while having grown up with disposable material things.
Somewhat ironic this comes in a day after I sewed a hole in the armpit of a tee shirt I like. Doesn't really vibe with the target audience of a site like 'Hacker News'...
Hacking essentially means the exact opposite of buying and throwing away stuff (a cycle known as consumerism i.e. being a sheeple). Fixing and modifying all kind of things to suit your weird imagination is the core idea of hacking. The skill of mending applies to software too, of course.
I have a good paying job, yet I 100% will pick up major appliances or lawn mowers from the garbage if they are somewhat recent with no shame. It is very rare that they have some issue that is worth discarding over. I get tons of junk mail and behind a doctor's office they threw out a $1700 heavy duty paper shredder. It turned out to be a dead hall field sensor to detect when it jams. $25 from fellowes.
That's cool but watch out for hoarding. While I agree with picking up discarded fixable or like new appliances, there are so many of them out there that one may end up hoarding.
My wife learned that youth shelters/foster parenting agencies need suitcases to help the children move their clothing and stuff around. The usual alternative children get: garbage bags.
We collected up suitcases off the curb that in theory need minor mending (no smells, certain problems left behind), and over time the backlog has built up. Time is also an ingredient, here; in the best case it takes fifteen minutes to prep a curb suitcase, in the worst (cleaning stains, etc.) the suitcase might need to sit around in a ventilated area for days over the course of treatment.
Have a friend who had a habit of picking up furniture etc from the side of the road, and (perhaps related) got bedbugs. I am very very hesitant to do the same.
Definitely, but I would use a similar amount of caution with used luggage. Luggage is used for visiting many places, left in hotel rooms and overhead bins (high traffic areas), hold clothes, lots of seams and nooks and crannies ... pretty ideal bedbug territory.
There are a few strategies you can use, dependent on the time of year -- they don't like it cold (assuming you don't give them a chance to adapt), nor overly hot, and the suitcases can also be quarantined. I wouldn't drag them into core living areas of your space, right off.
One addition I'll make: locally there is a bulk pickup day twice a year that people hold things for; if it was a suitcase wrapped in plastic or out on a non-bulk pickup day, I likely would steer clear.
Yes this is true. I don't pick up lawnmowers anymore because mine is fine. But I have given some of my old ones to people that just moved into a home and stuff. And yes I am selective about appliances unless I know a friend needs one. Currently everything I own is plugged in and being used, no yard full of junk :).
As for the Hall field sensor yeah I know I probably could have found an equivalent on Digikey and saved $15 or so when you factor in the shipping, but the convenience factor and knowing that I just fixed an otherwise fine $1700 commercial shredder for $25 is fine.
Unless there's been an update since EEVBlog #1154, he identified that the faulty part was bad solder on a single chip, but he screwed up the reflow. Presuming nothing else was damaged in the process (such as via a hypothetical power pin short), the chip would need to be re-balled and replaced.
no he didnt, he managed to destroy the mainboard by doing his _first reflow ever_ without any kind of preparation, and later fixed that TV by replacing all the electronics inside
We haven't lost our ability to mend. What has happened is people used to rely on material way back in the past to teach them how to mend. Today our products are constantly being upgraded / changes in real time. Those tutorials are often for specific types of products and those products now have radically different electronics and people when they see different products don't understand that the patterns in designing them are functionally identical. The circuit boards on the other hand might be slightly different. Long story short, if you want your stuff to last longer, stop buying into features, buy simple stuff. Simple works longer because it has less things to break. When the simple stuff does break, it's easier to figure out how to fix it.
Also I used to have DIY books which would have diagrams to help you fix things. Today all of those diagrams are worthless. Nobody has a rotary telephone anymore. No one has washing machines without circuit boards anymore. Even toilets have different flushing mechanisms, and if you don't know which one you have, you get worried you can't replace the original. Repairing VCR -- give me a break -- or a TV? I think the mending culture needs to start teaching people how electronics work, and then people will start to see the errors of their ways.
> What has happened is people used to rely on material way back in the past to teach them how to mend. Today our products are constantly being upgraded / changes in real time.
When I was a kid, my Dad and I rebuilt a 1945 Ford 9N tractor from the ground up, including a complete engine teardown. Pistons, rings, valves, carburetor, distributor, points, plugs, the whole shebang. He'd undertaken a similar project in the 70s with his father, and it had served him well, allowing him to do his own maintenance on his used cars, keeping his TCO extremely low. They never had to worry about a car payment, and considered a lease to be for suckers.
Now, though, my car is somewhat more reliable but also hugely more complex. When something goes wrong, I don't need to remove a casting and clean some passage, I need my oscilloscope and some eBay spelunking for the dealer's computer manual.
It used to be reasonable for a home mechanic to be able to keep up with trends in auto manufacturing and be competent at every task they needed to do. Now I'm not sure a professional can keep up, without specializing.
Likewise, I'm an EE, and could probably repair a VCR -certainly done a few stereo recievers in my day. But when my dad (as mentioned above, of the repair mindset) sent me a picture of the PCB from a $30 kitchen appliance, showing an epoxied flip-chip controller and LCD zebra connector, I walked him through checking the batteries and that was reasonably all we could do to fix it. Knowing how to do electronics manufacturing profitably at scale is at cross paths with repairing those electronics.
>Now I'm not sure a professional can keep up, without specializing.
Professionals get maintenance manuals from manufacturers. They tell them how to unmount the broken part, and then say "OK, now buy a new one." No oscilloscopes involved.
Right after college I had a motorcycle that I smoked the rings on because the guy who sold it to me lied about it's condition. "I've totally started it every month". When it broke down I was pissed for a bit and then was like "welp now I get to take apart a whole vtwin. Worst case I know how to take apart a vtwin. It cost about $300 and 10 hours but we fixed it, it was a great learning experience esp when you've got time and money like a software dev does.
I just finished tuning up a White sewing machine and it blew me away how well built the thing was. Very well used but still works like a charm. 99.9% metal and made in Japan.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 682 ms ] threadIt's unthinkable anyone would come to work in mended clothes. They would be concerned everyone thinks they're poor and can't afford buying new clothes. As long as there is this social stigma, and clothing brands interest in people buying new pieces of clothing continuously, we can forget about mending.
It's like casual friday. The CEO can wear shorts and the junior engineer can probably wear shorts. However, you probably won't see the upwardly mobile managers ever wearing shorts without a direct order.
Social signalling matters and clothes are part of social signalling.
You'd be surprised.
https://www.nowtolove.co.nz/celebrity/royals/prince-charles-...
People define themselves by those they could plausibly be mistaken for, not the full range of possible social roles.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
> Everyone wants to look like they are a member of a higher class than they actually are. But everyone also wants to avoid getting mistaken for a member of a poorer class. So for example, the middle-class wants to look upper-class, but also wants to make sure no one accidentally mistakes them for lower-class.
> But there is a limit both to people’s ambition and to their fear. No one has any hopes of getting mistaken for a class two levels higher than their own: a lower-class person may hope to appear middle-class, but their mannerisms, accent, appearance, peer group, and whatever make it permanently impossible for them to appear upper-class. Likewise, a member of the upper-class may worry about being mistaken for middle-class, but there is no way they will ever get mistaken for lower-class, let alone underclass.
Nailed it. The same is true in many social situations as well (although by no means all - repaired or damaged clothing is absolutely acceptable at gigs for many genres, for example).
The problem is not that we can't mend, but that we can't mend seamlessly. We can repair clothes but can't do so in a way that makes them good as new again, which sends an undesirable social signal in many situations.
I might have been sniffy about it in my 20s. Couldn't care less nowadays as it bears no relation to my poverty or not.
Of course there is a difference between mending otherwise fine clothing and having to go on wearing worn or threadbare clothes, as you rightly point out.
I guess because of the cheap car I was driving (It is about $15K brand new and I bought it used four years ago) and I showed up in just casual clothes, they thought I was struggling.
When they heard I was contemplating buying myself a car instead and I was looking at some of the higher end cars, they kept steering me to the lower cost cars. Not that I would have bought anything from there anyway. I don’t buy new cars.
We're talking about at work, where I've never seen any hint it matters beyond be clean, be presentable, be personable etc. 30 years ago, usually wear a suit. In other words, fit in. Choose carefully when making first impression - be that interview or date. :)
At work being junior programmer or CTO reveals status. These days both rich and poor alike will buy £10 jeans, or £2 T shirts. I think no less of them or any higher of someone with a label addiction, if I even noticed. I would think a lot less of someone who acted on perceived social status at work. We're not there for a first date.
Personal anecdata:
* I notice a more relaxed attitude to mended clothes in my native western European country than in my eastern European second home country.
* I also noticed a pattern in secondary school. In the economically privileged environment I went to school, kids cared less about clothing brands than at the less afluent schools in the vicinity.
* I carry mended clothes to work every now and then.
It's straightforward countersignalling - some people are sufficiently wealthy that the cost of their clothes carry negligible economic signalling value, so they can signify the fact that they're above that level of status game or use their clothes to convey different kinds of status. Nobody would believe that the Prince of Wales can't afford a new suit, so patching a tear in his jacket signals thrift and tradition. The patch in his jacket signals that he is old money, that his status is higher than someone who needs to signal their status through clothing. Distressed jeans are the obvious example of retail-level countersignalling; when you can buy a new pair of jeans for $8 at Walmart, the fact that your jeans aren't ripped at the knee carries very limited signalling value, making the countersignal more accessible.
We see the same thing with cycling. The very poor cycle, because they can't afford a car. The very wealthy cycle, because nobody would believe that they can't afford a car and choosing to cycle signals that they could obviously afford to drive but they're conscious of their health or the environment. People in the middle wouldn't be seen dead on a bicycle, because they're not confident of their ability to convey the high-status countersignal rather than the low-status signal. In this example, social capital often substitutes for economic capital; if you're young, bohemian and cosmopolitan, you can more easily convey the countersignal. There's a fairly nuanced meta-signal that says "I have the education and the opportunity needed to be a wealthy professional, but I have made the conscious choice to be an impoverished artist instead".
I'd argue that the strong social safety net in western Europe drives more people into countersignalling and meta-signalling behaviour, because base-level signalling of economic security is less necessary. You don't need to signal the fact that you're not desperately poor in a society where very few people are desperately poor, which opens up a wider range of signalling behaviours.
It has stuck with me every since, and honestly has made me realize how silly this practice of signaling to each other is. It is entirely a phenomenon coming out of the middle class. Even signaling among the upper class is usually due to young or new money.
I often wonder if it was always like this, or of it was created when the consumer middle class was created in the last hundred or so years.
Sumptuary laws are an interesting example - at various times in our history, people of certain social status were forbidden by law to wear certain garments or own certain items. Sometimes this was to prevent runaway consumption due to zero-sum status games, but often it was because the declining cost of luxury goods or the emergence of a nouveau riche undermined the status of the established elite.
I'd argue that the invention of fashion was a necessary response to the falling cost of clothing; when most people of a given social standing can afford equally high-quality clothing, fashion emerges as a kind of planned obsolescence.
The emergence of cultural capital amongst the aristocracy of the 17th century feels remarkably modern. During this period, the role of universities expanded from being practical training colleges for clergymen to a status symbol. The children of landowners could afford to spend their time cultivating "useless" knowledge, while the children of the nouveau riche merchant class needed to learn the family business. Young aristocrats would embark on what we might now describe as a gap year, travelling across Europe to gather knowledge of exotic cultures and collect souvenirs. It could be argued that modern science emerged largely as a byproduct of status signalling - many of the idle rich spent their days showing off expensive scientific apparatus and their access to the latest books and journals, inadvertently inventing modernity in the process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumptuary_law
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour
Maybe it helps that we work in software engineering, so it's quite clear to my colleagues that we could buy a new pair of shorts for each and every day? Or maybe it's because of increase in environmental concerns especially with younger urban people? I can't honestly say, as it never occurred to me that it could convey a negative message.
We are expecting our first child, and the amount of second-hand clothing that found its way to us via family is astounding. Children outgrow clothing fast, so even without mending clothing gets reused as a matter of course.
We bought 6 months of clothes for our son when he was born, and have barely bought anything since, he's 2 and a half now, and has more foot wear than me.
Unless a second child happens, we'll likely give away all stuff in decent conditions too. Pay-it-forward & all.
Speaking of those groups, she also managed to pick up an old Łucznik sewing machine that's older than our parents. It's repairable, indestructible, and has already created a bunch of stuff, including hand-made gifts.
If that's a hallmark of a "poor" country, then I don't want to live in a "rich" one.
It was actually children that caused us to rediscover mending. Case of having to really. We were not going to throw away the week old jacket because they inconveniently put a rip down half the front, or buy new school pants because they put a hole in the knee playing football at break.
Jeans, no matter how cheap, go first in one of two places. The main button hole or knees. 5 mins patching will get another year out of them. More expensive jeans can be patched for much longer though. Which is where the whole fashion for ripped or patched jeans came from in the first place. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_industry_in_Bangladesh...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Savar_building_collapse
Poorer parts of the world are poor by default, not because of trade.
Through to disposal where discarded products will either go to poor countries to be resold, or thrown into landfill.
Today it is not about knowing, it is about time. I can't spend 30 minutes fixing my clothes because my 30 minutes is more valuable than a tshirt's cost. Or I don't want to deal with ordering glue for my shoe and work on fixing it, I take it to a shoe repair and get it fixed for $10.
Things got more convenient than war times. We don't need to turn potato sack burlap into clothing anymore. Although, I also believe a man should know how to stitch a button if they need to. I want people to repair electronics rather than clothing.
I think it's a mistake that we value our own time like this. There's satisfaction that can be derived from spending time mending some of your own clothing, and that contributes to wellbeing. That wellbeing is not something that you can put a dollar value on.
I'm not sure such a blanket statement is helpful. This isn't just about money, it's about opportunity cost. The time that he sinks into mending that Tshirt is time he could have put into any other potentially more worthy endeavor.
* Time spent with the family / kids? That contributes far more to my wellbeing (and theirs). Sure I could mend my clothes with the kids but that isn't something they'd enjoy (nor me to be quite honest) and there are already enough chores I make them do as a family.
* How about time spent cooking and cleaning? But unfortunately I already pay different people to wash the windows, clean the house, mow the lawn... there isn't much less responsibility I can hand off there.
* I guess I could spend less time tinkering with my own hobby projects - but that amounts to very few hours a week and given it's my own personal time, I think I should do what I find more rewarding and relaxing and that isn't mending old clothes.
I barely get time in the week to do fun things as it is. I mean stuff like going on bike rides with my eldest son (who's 5) and I certainly don't get any time to look after my own personal health (I used to run 5k several times a week - it's not much but it made a difference. These days I'm lucky if I get one 5k run in a week). So if I can outsource stuff I don't enjoy to someone else for a reasonable fee then my time is most certainly worth it.
This is also true for most adults I'm friends with - in that a couple might occasionally go on Facebook but most of them aren't heavy users of social media.
For context: on average we're late 30s and most of us have young kids. We didn't grow up with social media and we've have better things to fill our adult time with since social media become a "thing". So it's not something we spend a great amount of time on.
I'm sure yours (and a many other peoples) experience will differ but my point is you shouldn't generalise that adults spend a lot of time on social media because that isn't always true.
Speaking of the milage, I took the liberty to glance at your HN account stats. You appear to be a more prolific poster than I am, even though my account is couple years older.
Not judging mind you. I have my hobbies too, including a nice metalworking shop. But the proportion of time I stand at the lathe to me watching YouTube videos of people machining is tiny.
People in 21st century first world have a lot of disposable time. They also complain most about lack of it.
I wasn't playing an "age card" - I was adding context to why I don't use social media. Also I think you missed the part where I said:
I'm sure yours (and a many other peoples) experience will differ but my point is you shouldn't generalise that adults spend a lot of time on social media because that isn't always true.
> Speaking of the milage, I took the liberty to glance at your HN account stats. You appear to be a more prolific poster than I am, even though my account is couple years older.
I'd already addressed that point in my post: Yes I do spend a lot of time on HN. But only 5 minutes here and there during the week when I need a proverbial cigarette break. I don't generally use HN during the weekend. The fact I post a lot is really more a symptom of how opinionated I am rather than how much time I spend on HN.
> People in 21st century first world have a lot of disposable time. They also complain most about lack of it.
You cannot generalise like that. Some people need to work multiple jobs just to keep their family fed and housed. Others - like me - have long commutes and busy homes to manage. You want to know my weekly schedule?
Granted that 30 minute downtime can be longer and shorter some days depending on how late I go to bed or how much housework we need to do. But I still wouldn't call that "lots of disposable time". The train to work is my disposable time and that's limited by what I can do on the train - which is usually sleeping because my youngest still wakes up multiple times a night (aghhh!)I wouldn't say I'm unique either nor that I don't have a lucky life (I have a family who love me, a good job, nice house in a good area and enough disposable income to afford a few luxuries). However I don't take kindly to people who assume that I have lots of disposable time. My kids or catching up on sleep is my disposable time and I get very little left after that.
So I suggest you don't make assumptions about other peoples lifestyles based off your own. It's a diverse world out there ;)
The problem is that would mean we'd either end up in a less desirable area (less greenery, higher crime rates, etc) or have much less disposable income. The closer you move towards London the sharper the rise in house prices - and it's quite significant too. Plus as I'm just 10 minutes drive from a direct fast line into central London so moving closer wouldn't actually save myself that much in commute time (maybe half an hour each way if I'm lucky). So there just isn't the intensive to do so.
In fact my wife and I actually did the maths and the money we'd save on my season ticket (which is very expensive) wouldn't even come remotely close to the increased cost in housing. So spending that extra hour mending things wouldn't even scratch the surface. And to be honest, I quite like having that hour of relaxation time on the train ride home as it's uninterrupted me time - which means by the time I get home I've recharged my own proverbial batteries a little so are more energized with the kids. So the time with them is of a better quality.
I'm not suggesting this would work for everyone but there's a few other guys in my office that have the same routine and find it works for them too. In fact it's quite common for people who work in London to live a county or two away from the city and thus have long commutes.
Maybe when the kids are older and want to live in more urban areas, my wife and I might reconsider living this far out from the city. But personally I quite like the contrast of quiet village life after spending the day in the noisy capital.
I’m not an outdoors person for a lot of reasons, but I do have a bedroom set aside in our house for a home gym. My wife and I will spend time together talking, watching TV, etc while we are working out together. Also having a gym at home means I can be at home with my wife until she goes to sleep and then work out.
What I really need to do is set myself personal goals. At one point I used to train for running longer distances or to get my 5k personal best down to a certain time. But I'd reached those goals around the same time my daughter was born and never really got motivated to do any proper training again since.
So I just need to set myself motivated with some personal goals again.
However, if I think about when I won’t be earning like that anymore, it shifts a bit. That “when” is hopefully 20 years from now (when I’d like to retire), but could be next year and for awhile if the economy goes south. It also helps that I enjoy those things enough to consider them hobbbies.
We also remodeled our own kitchen, doing everything but electricals ourselves (including knocking through a new entrance and closing the old one). From an immediate cost perspective, I should have hired someone to lay the tiles instead of doing it myself. That experience, though, means that I can now easily do my own tile repairs and can better assess the quality of work I might pay others to do. It ended up being fun enough that I’m looking for another tiling project!
1) that it takes 30 minutes to mend, which is high in my experience.
2) That a t-shirt costs less than a half-hour's income. Less than a half-hour's after-tax income, even. Some t-shirts do: The t-shirts I got for free at conferences cost less. But my favourites, the ones I might wear out, aren't the cheap ones.
3) That purchasing new clothes takes no time.
Valuing our own time is okay, but it has to be done correctly. Not bent to produce a particular outcome.
(Yes, I mend. Not t-shirts, because I hardly ever wear those. But I mend shirts.)
Perhaps for some people. I've tried mending my own clothes, but it always ends up looking kind of crap and so I don't end up wearing it anyway.
So it's not about counting pennies but about justifying outsourcing jobs you don't enjoy so you can spend more time on the stuff that really matters.
This point of view is particularly important to those of us who have really busy lives and thus are often juggling our time between different responsibilities (family, work, household chores, etc).
Doing chores and fixing stuff can be an interesting activity for a kid, depending on the age. Granted, I'm not good at mending either.
To be honest I shouldn't have to defend what chores I choose to spend time doing with the kids. I'd be interested to know how many on here have kids, do all of the aforementioned chores and still find time to teach 5 year olds to mend socks, shirts and jumpers? There seems to be an inordinate amount of "high-roading" happening today.
Each of them doesn't realize what they aren't doing. Only that they're very busy and somehow manage to fit in this one thing. So why can't you?
Don't take advice on parenting from HN. It's the essential oil mommy blog of the programmer community.
...and that is the 'secret' to raising self-reliant children: involve them in common tasks when those tasks are performed anyway. This does not take any "high-roading" as you imply, it just takes a little bit of forethought and might make things go a bit slower than they normally would.
Good for you. However not all kids are the same so what activities worked well for you might not work well for other families - despite their best efforts.
Like I said - we have tried doing needlework with my son with a kit that was specifically designed for kids. So my comments are not without precedence.
> ...and that is the 'secret' to raising self-reliant children: involve them in common tasks when those tasks are performed anyway. This does not take any "high-roading" as you imply, it just takes a little bit of forethought and might make things go a bit slower than they normally would.
Geez, I wish I thought of that. So all those years I've spent playing number and word games with them; teaching them to cook, handle scissors, knives, gas cookers and even open fires responsibly; how to do a great many DIY projects with power tools safely and engage in their curiosity for the natural world was all just a waste of time because I didn't happen to do that one thing you do. /s
Of course you shouldn't, but you presented a false dichotomy with "if I spend an hour fixing this; this is an hour less I spend with my kids."
There is nothing a parent can take apart or put together without any curious child immediately having a deeply rooted interest in- and a thousand questions about the matter.
It's okay not to be able or want to fix something, but don't blame it on your kids.
As an aside, I believe it's the best way to parent. It teaches kids that no matter what happens in life, they always have themselves to rely on.
Given you know precisely zero about me, my family, nor our routines; you are in no position to assume what is a "false dichotomy".
> It's okay not to be able or want to fix something, but don't blame it on your kids.
If you're takeaway was that I'm blaming it on the kids then you've clearly not been reading my posts properly. My stance from the very start was that I don't want to do it.
> As an aside, I believe it's the best way to parent. It teaches kids that no matter what happens in life, they always have themselves to rely on.
Thank you for that titbit of advice. I'd never considered teaching my kids basic life skills. /s
> I don't want to do it.
which is different from "if I spend an hour fixing this; this is an hour less I spend with my kids". "I don't want to do it" or "I can't do it" is a perfectly fine reason by itself.
> Thank you for that titbit of advice.
You're welcome.
Specifics do matter when they're critical to the conclusion being made. In this case my daughter it too young to do needlework and my son isn't interested in it either (as I've said before, we have tried). So ultimately I would end up -- and previously have ended up -- doing it by myself despite any best efforts to incorporate the kids.
I do get at some point he'll have to learn that not all chores are fun but he's only 5 and there are a lot of chores he does love doing (including stuff "normal" people hate) so I'm willing to let him stick to the ones he finds enjoyable while he's still young enough to get away with it. After all, he has a whole lifetime of work ahead of him.
> I have no idea why you're defensive about this.
Wouldn't you get a little defensive if I started telling you how I think you should raise your family when I've never met you? I see it time and time again where HN posters pretend to be experts on the weirdest of subjects and this is no exception. I swear this place was never like that when I first joined...
In any case, comments about ones family are a deeply personal topic so you should expect one might take those comments personally. ;)
I see, and I agree. My apologies.
The point is, you shouldn't be alarmed. You can afford your free time. Just know how pointless it is to suffer through some of your time to save a bit of money that is much less than the value of the time you spent suffering.
I'm still fixing things, but not because I want to save anything. I just like to tinker and figure stuff out so I'm geeting my money's worth out of every attempted repair.
Also I hate shoping so shopping time saved is often worth for me more then time used for repairs.
I've got a dollar that says you watch TV while looking at a social network or something on your phone. You could fix a shirt instead.
Of course, I know what you mean. But consider, at least for a moment, that the cost of that t-shirt to you includes the wages paid to the cotton pickers, thread makers, cloth makers, cutters, stitchers, packers, transport and warehouse workers, and the amazon delivery driver, who will contribute to making that t-shirt and getting it to your door. So in a way, you're saying your 30 minutes is more valuable than however many minutes of all those people's lives that would have to be spent to get you a new t-shirt.
There's some profound insight into how economics works to be had when you truly consider what it means to trade off your time and the value of your labor output, against the time and labor of countless people, all put into supplying you with stuff.
Restoring this grill required a few hours of labor and lots of patience. The grill retails for a few thousand dollars. I bought it for less than 10% retail, used and requiring repair. The parts cost less than 100.
Many of us value our personal time in a way that rationalizes avoiding a project such as this. However, the cost savings and value created by this project were sufficient to justify the effort.
I like to consider this strategic mending..
Replacing the grills, heat spreader, and burners however makes a lot of sense and can make an old BBQ virtually new again.
There are some intricate bits the trickery required to get the timing just right is at the edge of my patience but when they run it is like music.
As opposed to a non-mechanical sewing machine? What does this mean? Guessing you mean one with metal gears unlike the plastic-geared junk sold new in most stores now?
From what I know there is just less logic and software inside. Whenever I change the style of stitching, I can hear some mechanical clicking inside of it. So I assume there is no fancy logic inside. Just pure mechanical switches and an engine.
I recently ordered a new kit from them, and learned that they are working on a new project to produce a more mendable fabric: https://madetomend.com/ I can't wait until I can buy a jacket from them and try it out.
There's an opportunity in there somewhere.
What if clothing were made to order locally?
I've been pitching the idea to any one who will listen. Many makerspaces already have stuff for textiles. Kids these are really into cosplay, crafts, homemade. Outside of a few STEM hubs, there's excess warehouse space AND untapped labor.
Etc.
The pendulum swings back.
The real issue seems to be that people are helpless without the Internet - and that our consumerism has brought a throwaway mentality with it.
My mother made our Halloween costumes by hand. We didn't (and don't) really mend clothes, but the skill set is the same. And when I had a shirt fail by coming apart at a seam, rather than having a hole worn through the fabric, my reaction was that I should sew it back together.
Mending a seam is invisible. Mending a hole will give you a visible patch; I think there are good reasons people don't do that. And far and away the most common failure in my clothes is wearing a hole in the knee of a pair of pants.
Which might be considered stylish and left alone as it is.
What's bizarre is when you see two people wearing the same brand/pair of pants with the same manufactured holes. All the holes/rips/tears in the pants are identical, a marvel of mass-production.
The real problem is that today's technology is generally much more complicated than it used to be. Also manufacturers don't expect things to be repaired (because it isn't cost effective unless you do it yourself) so they don't make things easy to disassemble.
I broadly disagree - the proportion of people who can fix a TV is probably no lower now than it was in the 1970s; a modern TV might be more complex, but the accessibility of information, tools and parts is far better.
The wider issue is the broadly positive fact that automation has drastically reduced the cost of goods relative to labour. The range of products and failure modes that are economically repairable is much narrower, because repair is relatively more expensive and replacement is relatively cheaper. Generally speaking, the most expensive part of repairing a TV is simply the labour cost of dismantling and reassembling it. As mentioned in the article, paying a seamstress to patch a jacket or darn a sweater is often more expensive than just buying a new one. There are worse problems in the world than "we've got so good at making stuff cheaply that it isn't worth the effort to fix it".
But also, a set of tools was once a necessity, because things were built to be repaired. Now it's a luxury item for most people. Simple things like changing oil are, in most cars, way more complicated and difficult than they used to be, because the market has spoken. Easy DIY maintenance is not the priority.
Only because the huge negative external costs of a new appliance aren't priced in - pollution created in manufacture, environment disposal of the old one, long-term exhaustion of raw materials.
[1] http://lowendmac.com/2007/the-truth-about-crts-and-shock-dan...
If a TV breaks now, it's some component that's either glued in or soldered in, so good luck replacing that. Modern TVs are not designed to have replaceable parts.
I'm not sure reseating a broken component would help, I think you might mean "new" :)
Additionally, availability of replacement parts is excellent. Whatever you need is only a $2 package with free shipping from amazon or aliexpress.
I don't see being helpless without the internet as a problem. I know how to find the information i need, and barring some apocalypse knocking out the internet that's probably just as good as actually knowing it.
Full disclosure: I'm the freesewing maintainer
You might want to redirect http:// to https:// right now if I type "freesewing.org" into my browser it heads to a "Apache2 Debian Default Page".
All of the Patreon links so far just seem to be hugely overboard "sign up" ones, with nothing linking to the actual account.
Guessing I didn't spot something obvious? :)
The reason why you need an account is explained in the FAQ on our new beta site: https://beta.freesewing.org/en/docs/faq
It boils down to the fact that all are patterns are made-to-measure. So we need your measurements, thus we need a way to store them. That's why a (free) account is needed.
There's no catch.
He looked at me like I had 3 heads to even consider a fridge repair and a week or so later sent me a pic of his new, $2000 fridge in place. I tried.
There might even be more mass of just polystyrene insulation in the fridge he's just trashed than the mass of plastics he keeps out of the landfill. There is certainly more overall plastic in there.
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/lifestyle/trash-on...
To my mind, that is a significant amount of waste, and definitely worth chasing.
* Durable Plastics: 72.9 lbs
* Nodurable Plastics: 28 lbs
* Plastic Bottles and Jars: 17.7
There is more, but this gives a sense of the statistics they quote on their site. These do not seem unreasonable to me, and they suggest that recycling plastics would save a refrigerator or two in weight per household per year, depending a bit on the size of the household.
It is best if we both recycle and fix the refrigerator. But doing either is better than doing nothing. In other words, arguing that one good is more effective than another good doesn't mean that it isn't admirable to do only the smaller good.
Many of us up here on Hacker News are good at fixing things. But some of us might be less skilled in other areas, such as organizing political campaigns or working in the medical field. It's easy to criticize someone for not doing something we find easy, but it is harder to see how they might be skilled in areas where we struggle.
It might just be marginally better.
If "fixing the refrigerator" (and other such items in our lives, cars, etc) yields 100 e (e = a made-up token measure of environmental benefit) and not using plastic bags for a decade yields 1 e, then it's almost irrelevant.
I'd like to see a "CO2/water/etc cost" sticker
YouTube and specialized forums are very helpful in pinning the issue and parts.
Even, some years years back (10 or so?) when buying a woolen pullover you’d get a bit of mending yarn wrapped around cardboard bobbins with the exact same color as your sweater.
Nowadays they’re not included, at least where I buy.
I was quoted 600 for a whole system part of a car (dubcomponent wasn’t sold separately), the actual necessary used sub-part was 50 on eBay.
Even in cars, you gotta figure, is the part critical? (brakes, steering) or non critical (wipers, seats, heating/ac, etc).
Those aren't the only failure modes to consider for washers, dryers, and toasters. Flooding (for the first) and fire (for the other two) are concerns.
Yes be careful, you could get an electric shock photograph before you take things apart and read instructions before putting things back together.
Two notes on ice makers specifically: 1. There is a much smaller number of models of ice makers than refrigerators. (One model of ice maker crosses over to many fridges, though you may need to unplug and move the fridge-specific wiring harness over to the new ice maker.) Many times it's an extra half hour of googling to find the generic ice maker part number and then chase that down. 2. Some ice makers that are not OEM are painted to look non-stick and that paint will start flaking off into your ice in about 2-3 years of use (disgusting). This is a case where I'd rather take a used OE part over a new part of unknown provenance, even though they are a high failure part.
It's almost my story as well.
My microwave I had for 8 years (and I got it second hand) stopped working. A quick inspection + watching a couple of YouTube videos revealed that a plastic latch inside the door got broken.
It would have been very easy to replace it if only it was still being sold. Extensive search on the internet showed it was not :( :( :(
If only I had some time (well a LOT of time) to reverse engineer the existing latch and 3D-print a new one... But I did not.
So, I had to put the microwave outside on my curb. I attached a note to it saying it works well if the latch is fixed and also attached the broken latch.
I was happy to see it was gone in a few hours. I live in a city (Montreal, Canada) so I guess it helped my microwave to not be wasted.
I wish 3D-printing technologies - or more precisely, a technology that helps to create 3D specs out of an existing object - would be more advanced. Well, I did not do an extensive search about it so I may be well mistaken :)
The latch for my vacuum clean bin broke. I fished it out (10m), modelled a replacement in FreeCAD (2hr, I had to learn how to use FreeCAD since I’d never used it before), and printed a replacement (40m print time) - and now I don’t have to buy a new vacuum cleaner.
But that’s happened once in the three years I’ve owned a 3D printer. Simple mechanical part failures just don’t seem to happen that often.
I’ve actually fixed this vacuum cleaner numerous times! Not always with 3D printer parts though.
I guess my point is "don't discount traditional processes". Someone good with a razor and file could make a new plastic latch from an old cutting board faster than someone with a 3D printer could print the part, much less design, print, and verify.
Or let you keep yours there where more people can get use out of it and it isn't taking up space in your garage.
You can try sculpy or similar things next time too to make plastic parts. There are several materials that are basically play-dough that hard set to plastic like materials.
Don't buy a fridge with an ice maker.
The ice maker is by far the least reliable portion of a refrigerator.
Ice cube trays don't break down and need repair.
I'm not picking on your friend specifically, just pointing out one factor that can reduce the immediate friction of people buying new stuff, instead of trying to fix the old.
People look at me funny when I say "corporate propaganda", but in case you needed evidence that corporate propaganada is a real thing, here it is.
Also, a lot of people complain to generate conversation, not for the 2nd opinion they get.
Doesn't make his friend look any better...
A few of my mechanically inclined but lacking confidence friends and a few of my other broke as a joke friends have taken me up on it over the years. Most can't believe how cheap, fast, and easy to do/hard to screw up it is. Very few repeat "customers" though. :(
In the fridge case, it turns out he had already ordered one for delivery in a few days and had already mentally parted with the money, so didn't want to fix his and call to cancel the order...
I found that I had to chip ice out the base back panel of the fridge, where it had significant ice accumulation. No way in hell I'm treating something we paid 1.5k$ for and 'throwing it away'.
I still maintain there's 4 R's: Repair, Reduce, Reuse, and eventually Recycle.
For the Samsung fridge getting ice buildup, there are relatively few causes and likely the simplest is the same defrost timer mine had issues with. I like https://repairclinic.com for appliance parts, though they don't have any of the 3 models of Samsung defrost timers in stock right now.
I would only recommend people stay away from microwaves.
Just remember to set a timer and turn that back off after 20 minutes or so, because the same nonfunctional timer that starts it turns it off as well.
Many products are so complicated, they don't make sense to repair. I have found the "experts" are many times learning on your dime while trying to fix your appliance. I won't get started on Automotive repair.
I have a relative whom buy two Bosch washers in three years. She still likes the brand, and even recommends them. And she's not wealthy.
It's almost like people are hypnotized? Put a few qismos on the product, which just add to the complexity of the product, and usually add another fail point. I have seen a important electronic systems wired in series.
It's fine if you have the money I guess?
And there's always the guy whom claims new products actually last longer than old stuff. "It's just a myth the new high tech stuff doesn't last."
Seems people were moving out and it was too much trouble to take it with them. Nevertheless, it was there for some weeks before someone collected it (I don't have room or I would have taken it pronto).
Seems many have too much money these days.
Even professional house cleaners could do some checks as add on sales.
People call it "knowledge based economy," but one of my previous bosses had that phrase about it "it feels more like it is an ignorance based economy"
And yes, the service economy is there to accommodate living of very one sided people, in regards to both work and life skills.
The amount of money spent in service economy is seemingly directly proportional to at what cost intellectual ineptness comes to money earning classes of society: branding consulting, financial consulting, management consulting, "change management" - really all that stuff is available to any able minded person if he can give 5 minutes of serious thought to that. I do believe that most of HN readers have hard time understanding people buying into that stuff too.
I wonder, if I would've been a multibillionaire, would I be also paying millions to random consultants to do 2+2 things for me?
Same thing with a fancy looking scale- the wires internal where glued together with a sort of ducttape. Two solder points later - meet the eternal scale.
I sometimes wonder, why this is not a buisness model. There must be money in making cheap items ever lasting.
Manufacturing is cheap. Labor is expensive.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
It is, and it's wide out in the open. I bet the high end water heater with a solid reputation for quality would have proper hinges and insulation. It's just that most people are wary of paying a premium for what they perceive to be the same item.
Well I, for one, am extremely glad they don't. I remember cars from the 1960s and 1970s, and they were ####ing terrible: unreliable, unsafe, slow, poor handling. Cars today are vastly better, although I think the accelerating trend for packing them full of complex electronics and gizmos may bite us in the arse. There is simply a lot more to go wrong in a car from 2019 than a car from 1979, even if individual parts and subsystems are much more reliable.
My uncle and my step-dad both have more realistic views. My uncle used to ride motorcycles back in the 60s and 70s and looked at me askance when I'd complained that the problem with doing long distances on a bike with chain rather than shaft drive is that you always needed to carry chain lube with you to oil the chain every 200 - 300 miles. His comment, about an old Norton he'd had, was that he needed to strip down and rebuild the engine every time he'd done 100 miles (he didn't keep it long; even back then this was considered awful).
Likewise, about 15 years ago I'd mentioned some relatively minor part needing replacement after 50,000 miles on my first car, and my step-dad pointed out that with a lot of the cars he'd driven in the 60s, after 50,000 miles you'd need a replacement engine, never mind the odd part.
50K miles was about how long my parents' cars lasted. 100K miles was considered exceptional at the time and the owner probably babied the car and didn't drive it in places or seasons where it would be exposed to salt.
Now durability as a term exists only for things like jeans and trucks where it’s not supposed to indicate that you can use the thing for long, but rather, to indicate a macho DIY culture.
I believe marketing has played a large role in moving consumers away from even considering how long a product will last.
Well... it turned out that the teeth of the zipper are just a plastic string wrapped around a cord (and both still perfectly fine) and that stitching the cord back onto the tape material required not much more than some dexterity and accuracy. It took maybe half an hour from diagnose to the finished fixed zipper.
Bonus: feels empowering to do things that someone else considered impossible.
I think with outdoor gear, there's actually a certain cachet to gear that's obviously well-used and battle-scarred :-)
"ending is better than mending" and "the more stitches the less riches"
We collected up suitcases off the curb that in theory need minor mending (no smells, certain problems left behind), and over time the backlog has built up. Time is also an ingredient, here; in the best case it takes fifteen minutes to prep a curb suitcase, in the worst (cleaning stains, etc.) the suitcase might need to sit around in a ventilated area for days over the course of treatment.
As for the Hall field sensor yeah I know I probably could have found an equivalent on Digikey and saved $15 or so when you factor in the shipping, but the convenience factor and knowing that I just fixed an otherwise fine $1700 commercial shredder for $25 is fine.
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/interesting-youtube-repa...
Also I used to have DIY books which would have diagrams to help you fix things. Today all of those diagrams are worthless. Nobody has a rotary telephone anymore. No one has washing machines without circuit boards anymore. Even toilets have different flushing mechanisms, and if you don't know which one you have, you get worried you can't replace the original. Repairing VCR -- give me a break -- or a TV? I think the mending culture needs to start teaching people how electronics work, and then people will start to see the errors of their ways.
When I was a kid, my Dad and I rebuilt a 1945 Ford 9N tractor from the ground up, including a complete engine teardown. Pistons, rings, valves, carburetor, distributor, points, plugs, the whole shebang. He'd undertaken a similar project in the 70s with his father, and it had served him well, allowing him to do his own maintenance on his used cars, keeping his TCO extremely low. They never had to worry about a car payment, and considered a lease to be for suckers.
Now, though, my car is somewhat more reliable but also hugely more complex. When something goes wrong, I don't need to remove a casting and clean some passage, I need my oscilloscope and some eBay spelunking for the dealer's computer manual.
It used to be reasonable for a home mechanic to be able to keep up with trends in auto manufacturing and be competent at every task they needed to do. Now I'm not sure a professional can keep up, without specializing.
Likewise, I'm an EE, and could probably repair a VCR -certainly done a few stereo recievers in my day. But when my dad (as mentioned above, of the repair mindset) sent me a picture of the PCB from a $30 kitchen appliance, showing an epoxied flip-chip controller and LCD zebra connector, I walked him through checking the batteries and that was reasonably all we could do to fix it. Knowing how to do electronics manufacturing profitably at scale is at cross paths with repairing those electronics.
Professionals get maintenance manuals from manufacturers. They tell them how to unmount the broken part, and then say "OK, now buy a new one." No oscilloscopes involved.
Now a day it's even easier cause Youtube.