Comment by ghoomketu

Comment by ghoomketu 3 days ago

31 replies

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Growing up in India about 20 years ago, we often repaired or renewed almost everything because our buying power was low and things were expensive. We used a lot of hacks, known as *jugaads*, to make things work. Even clothes were reused, with tailors doing *rafu* (patchwork) to extend their life. This was especially common in middle-class homes like mine.

My dad, who worked in a garment export house, used to tell me stories about how people in the West preferred disposable items and often opted for newer stuff, whether it was cars, gadgets, or clothes. At the time, I didn't understand this mentality. But now, with increased buying power and lower costs (thanks to China), we too tend to just chuck things away and get replacements.

I deeply admire people who don't give up midway and think it's easier to buy new. This type of persistence and resourcefulness is truly commendable.

toast0 3 days ago

Cost to repair has grown while cost for new has reduced.

If you can repair things yourself, and you can find the parts you need to repair things, then sure. But if it's something I've got to pay for someone's experience and wisdom, that's pretty expensive these days, at least where I'm living, and it's just plain hard to find people who repair things too; lots of signs for TV repair outside empty shops.

Thankfully I'm semi-retired, and am on a salary for part time work, so my marginal time has no dollar cost, so I can take a day to try to repair a dishwasher, and then another day to install a new one when it rebreaks a couple days later. A professional installer probably would have had the new one installed in an hour instead of my all day, but I didn't have to wait for scheduling, at least.

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Cthulhu_ 3 days ago

This was how things went for a long time in my region (western europe) as well, my parents grew up patching clothes and repairing stuff a lot. It's only in the past 50 years or so that consumerism has gone up and the quality and cost of e.g. clothing has gone down.

I've been doing maintenance on my motorcycle myself recently, it does take some small investments in some tools to get started (like a tool to undo the oil filter, although in hindsight a strap and a stick would do the job) and you need to source some parts and replacements (fluids, copper washers, but also replacement screws for the weathered brake fluid reservoir ones), but it's in the region of €100-€150 instead of the €1000 the garage quoted me for.

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  • masklinn 3 days ago

    > It's only in the past 50 years or so that consumerism has gone up and the quality and cost of e.g. clothing has gone down.

    The “quality” part is a big factor, cost optimisations and fast turnaround means it’s often not worth repairing things at all e.g. a fast fashion T designed to survive for a season (if it survives even a wash).

    An other major issue is scams around price signals and brand degradation. It used to be you got what you paid for and some brands were known for quality, so you could pay a fair amount of money to a reputable brand and you’d get stuff worth maintaining and repairing.

    But big groups and P-E have taken to “value extract” from brands, so they take a reputable brand and start white-labelling / cost-optimising, initially keeping prices in order to get maximum money for the moo their start selling instead of milk. Then they drop the price as understanding slowly spreads, until a once reputable brand becomes bargain-bin fare even to the general public.

    There’s a similar issue around more bespoke products, which optimise for quality signals (e.g. external design and materials) and sell generic inner parts (or outright garbage) for top-shelf prices.

    Then there’s the shuffling of 6 months brands on generic white label goods (amazon is absolutely infested with that, you’ll get the exact same product under half a dozen brands, and 6 months later most of those have disappeared).

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    • Panzer04 3 days ago

      It seems to me the real problem is that repairs are, in general, labour intensive. Few products today are sufficiently valuable that a repair is better than a new item.

      Cars are worth fixing, a 10$ shirt is not, if you value your time. This only becomes more true as expertise becomes required to effect a repair, since you become less capable of repairing and the time of the repairer becomes more valuable.

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  • ghoomketu 3 days ago

    Yes Reflecting on it, making things last longer had some great side effects. For instance, almost every woman in my family knew how to *rafu* clothes (1), and people understood how things worked under the hood of a car (like you my father did all the maintenance too). These skills were passed down through generations, becoming a part of our everyday knowledge.

    I guess a lot of things aren't that simple or accessible as most of it is often a black box nowadays. But anyway, Skills like these not only saved money but also fostered a sense of self-reliance, resourcefulness and stuff your parents taught you as life skills.

    (1) https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=Rafu+clothes

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    • T3OU-736 3 days ago

      I cannot help but winder if, as a part of 'Fix, don't toss' mentality, there is an attendant[1] additional tenacity present.

      [1] Or a pre-requisite. Correlation, not causation and all.

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  • XorNot 3 days ago

    You can avoid the copper washers! The main reason to change them is under compression the copper work hardens to seal up. To get a good seal though you just need to re-anneal the copper so it's soft - heat it to cherry red and let it cool down. Takes about 5-10 seconds with a blowtorch - I've been doing it for oil changes on my car for several years now with no problems.

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  • jjkaczor 3 days ago

    The best tool I have bought in the last 3 years was a 3d-printer... It lets me make other tools - even if they aren't as durable as steel, I can design them chunkier, or print a new one if they break.

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uep 3 days ago

This is how it was for me growing up blue collar in the northeastern USA in the 80s. My father fixed everything in the house and the vehicles. I inherited my older siblings clothes, and my younger siblings inherited mine. My mother would hem pant legs shorter when we were young, and then let them back out as we grew older. If you wore a knee or an elbow out of clothes, it was getting patched.

This instilled some good and bad tendencies in me. I do almost all of the repairs around the house myself. I work too much though, so I don't always have enough time or energy. Even though I can easily afford it, I have a hard time paying someone else to do them. This means I live with broken stuff longer than I should.

I'd probably have more money if I spent that time working on side projects instead of doing maintenance and repairs.

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  • mschuster91 3 days ago

    > This is how it was for me growing up blue collar in the northeastern USA in the 80s. My father fixed everything in the house and the vehicles. I inherited my older siblings clothes, and my younger siblings inherited mine. My mother would hem pant legs shorter when we were young, and then let them back out as we grew older. If you wore a knee or an elbow out of clothes, it was getting patched.

    Thing is, they were able to in the first place.

    Forget about fixing a modern car. The electronics side is a mixture of "a datacenter on wheels", DRM and anti-tamper technology (sometimes enforced or heavily suggested by law such as in emissions control, sometimes by reality, e.g. "Kia Boys") and high-speed protocols instead of early age wires and relays that you could troubleshoot with a decent multimeter. The physical side is a ton of plastics designed to absorb crash energy and finely tuned metal alloy stuff (with the form also having crash safety implication) that your average DIY person cannot reasonably weld instead of plain old steel sheets. You can't buy a "reasonably repairable" new car any more because of the legal mandates and because you don't want it to be stolen by some kid having watched a YouTube or Tiktok video showing how to bypass the locks.

    And clothing... patching a 1980s piece was possible, the fabrics had weight and structural integrity of their own. Nowadays it's extremely thin fabric everywhere that shreds itself after a few washing machine cycles. Try to patch it and you'll more likely than not find out that your very act of pushing a needle through it to apply the patch just causes the next rip to appear. You are still able to purchase better quality clothing technically but you end up paying like 4x the amount and it's still made in some Bangladeshi or Chinese sweatshop under horrible safety and employee rights standards.

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    • ssl-3 3 days ago

      If one has the proclivity, then: One can get into rather far into troubleshooting and (and ultimately repairing) common modern automotive electronics with an Autel rig that, adjusted for inflation, costs less than an Atari 2600 did.

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  • mc32 3 days ago

    I feel like it’s giving good money away when you hire someone to do work for you that you know you can do. You look at the markups for things and it gives you pause. Things like a valve or whatever. You can go to the Home Depot and get it for cheaper even when you include the cost of whatever tools you need to get.

    But at some point you have to say, let’s just get someone to to it (the deck, the fence, the gutters, etc.) still it’s like zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance. There is some personal satisfaction in being self reliant.

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hyperman1 3 days ago

In our past, this seems a community thing: Someone in your neighbourhood had advanced knowledge in welding, someone else advanced electricity, masonwork, clothes repair, ... They could coach other people to a basic enough level and help if unexpected troubles popped up. The community as a whole had knowledge and basic apprenticeships built in.

Today, repair is something you do on your own. Things like youtube are a great help, but the community aspect is lost.

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CivBase 3 days ago

The "consumerism" mindset is a luxury created by a strong economy and high upward mobility. An unfortunate side effect is that as repair & reuse became less desireable, so too did repairability and logevity as features. Now that economic growth in the US has stagnated (particularly for the 99%), it's becoming aparent what we lost as nothing is made to last and companies are unwilling or unable to offer repairable, long lasting products. So even those who go out of their way to repair their property encounter a myriad of roadblocks.

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craftkiller 3 days ago

When I bought my phone, it was on sale and so I got it new for $94. I dropped it and broke the screen. The replacement screen cost $106, more than the entire phone (just for the part, I do the work myself). I still did it anyway, for environmental/e-waste reasons and because repairing electronics is a fun hobby but the sad reality is, it often makes more financial sense to replace than to repair. That's not even going into the time lost and the money sunk on tools.

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nyarlathotep_ 3 days ago

I grew up lower-middle class in America and to and extent I understand this.

Disposability is especially offensive when it comes to ~computers.

To have perfectly functional (from a hardware perspective) 10> year old smartphones become "e-waste" is absurd to me.

Even a cheap smartphone is a remarkable achievement in manufacturing and engineering. Its wild to think of something like that as "junk" even though it effectively is.

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asicsp 3 days ago

>Even clothes were reused

My mom repurposed old pants as bags (I used it to carry my books at college - did get a lot of odd looks, but that's what I could afford at that time). Even now, I cut pieces of old clothing to be used for cleaning purposes. Those habits die hard.

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mindentropy 2 days ago

The quality of workmanship and repair has gone down drastically in India now. People have figured out how to make money by keeping things locked. Repair is just swapping out parts and cleaning or go for the next model. The mentality of people has also changed drastically with them changing products in short years. Consumerism has gone through the roof and there is an active disdain of people who preserve and get the product to function for a long time.

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smolder 3 days ago

This was my attitude towards cars when younger. Always bought cheap used ones and fixed them. It frustrated me to no end seeing people fail at basic maintenance and cut the lives of their vehicles by half or more compared to a maintained one. (Stuff like not changing fluids or driving with the fluids leaking out, driving with slipping belts or broken suspensions, etc.)

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throw10920 3 days ago

This is fascinating. How were these usually jugaads obtained - did you more commonly get them from friends, family, shop owners, the Internet, or just (re)discover most of them yourself?

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ddalex 3 days ago

I agree that repairing is vastly preferable - I grew up in a poor communist country, where repairing and self-resourcesfullness was the norm.

However it's not the consumerist mentality driven by increased buying power - it's sheer economic sense - the time and effort is way better spent, economically speaking - by simply replacing. It's the lower price of goods that drive this thing.

My fridge broke the other week. I called the repairman who quoted a repair bill that was 10% MORE EXPENSIVE then buying a new fridge. Simply the time of the repair shop and the transportation from home to shop and back was more expensive them just buying a new fridge, chucking out the older one, and calling it a day.

My grandparents, nah, my parents would be horrified by throwing up a "nearly" good fridge. To me, it makes economic sense.

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  • iam-TJ 3 days ago

    This is often due to the total costs being externalised (pushed off to others) and therefore not reflecting the true cost of the replacement nor the costs of (safe) disposal of the old unit.

    Externalised costs such as emissions from manufacturing of new raw materials (metals, plastics, gases, etc.), transportation, disposal, and more.

    Obviously it depends on what exactly fails. I've kept 'white goods' going for over 20 years despite:

      1) known defect where Hotpoint Fridge/Freezer evaporator thermistor fails due to freeze/defrost thermal cycle. Replaced more than 10 times; cost of new thermistor is pennies; time to replace (after initial explore) 10 minutes.

  2) Freezer control PCB misreading thermistor; replace PCB: UK£35.

  3) LG Washing machine bearing failures; replaced about 6 times; time to replace (after initial explore): 45 minutes.
    I think sometimes repair-or-replace depends on one's state of mind. Figuring out what is wrong and how to fix can be frustrating but, equally, it can be extremely satisfying to realise you can do it and are no longer reliant on some mystical "expert" !

    Society as a whole in many countries is losing (or has already lost) the ability to be self-reliant and that lack makes people and communities generally more fragile.

    Self-reliance is one of the drivers of hackers and tinkerers.

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    • varispeed 3 days ago

      I often develop feelings for the products I use (I know...). When I look at dishwasher I reminisce how many moments I had whilst standing next to it tirelessly working through my dirty dishes. I'll give it a tap. Sometimes I talk to it when loading like "Hey there, I got you some new stuff. Don't worry I'll feed you salt at the end of the week. Now I'll do your favourite program". Then once it finishes I say like "Oh what a great work you did there!" and so on. Then when it broke (the motor seized) I just wouldn't have heart to simply dispose of it. I sourced the motor and called in repair guy who installed it. It did cost me in total as much as I would pay for a new dishwasher, but I would never get the sense of feeling that I saved a friend.

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      • hyperdimension a day ago

        I am so glad that I'm not the only one. Every time I shut the hood of a car after working on it, I give it a little loving pat-pat.

        I have this inexplicable feeling, contrary to my usually rational self, that machines have a sort of soul and "feel better" when they're taken care of, and I feel like I'm letting it down when I extend an oil change/put off maintenance/don't take care of a problem I'm aware of yet. I don't really believe they have souls or anything; it's just a feeling I get.

        Come to think of it, I do the exact same things with my plants too.

        I can't explain it. I don't name my cars though.

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    • robocat 3 days ago

      My economic theory is that the price reflects ecological costs fairly well.

      At first glance it might appear that fixing would have a lower environmental cost. But the money spent will be spent by the repairman on things like international travel or whatever - and each of the things the money is spent on have environmental costs and externalities.

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      • gessha 3 days ago

        I don’t quite think so. I think we’re in a status quo that prevents/obfuscates a more efficient economic activity because it inflates GDP which makes the politicians and economists happy.

        The magic number won’t go up much if you call somebody and they tell you what you need to do change the PCB and ship you the part(for a small markup price).

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    • gessha 3 days ago

      Don’t forget the emission offset credits somebody will pay for to dispose of that refrigerant liquid in the fridge!

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hagbard_c 3 days ago

I live in Sweden, coming from the Netherlands, both countries somewhere in the global top yet I still repair hardware, mend my clothes, repair the tractors and car, restored the 17th century farm we live on and extended it, built a barn and more. I intentionally do not make myself lust after the 'latest and greatest' of anything since I realise that such a lifestyle puts you on a treadmill, always running for the next treat. Hence I'm typing this on a computer from 2009 I got for free because the video card was 'broken' (27" iMac, a short stay in the oven later fixed the video card) connected to a second monitor I got for free because of a broken power supply (two capacitors later it worked again) which sits on a stand-up desk I got for free because of some trivial electrical defect (quickly fixed). In a way I still partake of the 'fruits' of that latest-and-greatest lifestyle, only with a decade or so of delay and without the compulsion to 'upgrade'.

Why do I do this? For a few reasons, most of them quite basic. I like fixing things. I get far more satisfaction out of using abandoned hardware which I have fixed myself than I get out of using whatever new gizmo I happen to lay my hands on because I know I can keep the former working (or find an alternative which I can get to work) while I do not know that for the latter. I like being self-reliant. With a soldering iron, a BGA rework station, a few old oscilloscopes and meters and a few decades worth of experience and scavenged parts I can keep things working for the most, design and build circuits to extend whatever is needed, etc. The advent of cheap and relatively open microcontrollers - the ESP series, Arduino, Raspberry Pi pico etc - has given a boost to the DIY electronics sphere which adds to the appeal of keeping older stuff working, e.g. I'm currently looking in to replacing the worn out control circuit and assorted switches of our 35 year old oven with something totally different and more functional, not because I can't get a new oven but because the current one works quite well apart from those switches. The same goes for the tractors and car, motorbikes (Russian Ural and Ukrainian Dneprs with sidecars), etc. There are no electronics in my tractors, they are purely mechanical. They can be repaired by anyone who knows how without the need for proprietary tools, dealer-only computer terminals and such.

Of course I could save a lot of time if I abandoned this 'life style' and just went with the flow, buying new clothes as soon as the old ones needed mending, buying a new computer every 3 years, a new car every 5 years, a new tractor every 10 years, a new dishwasher every 7-12 years, a new washing machine every 10 years, etcetera. I could stop cycling to the village and just take the motorbike, that would be much quicker after all. Think what I could do with all that time saved:

- instead of cycling to the village I could spend time at a sports school for exercise

- instead of fixing that computer (and learning a bit more every time I fix one) I could watch some series on some streaming service

- instead of mending that hole in my trousers (using the Elna sewing machine I got for free because it was 'jammed', took me all of 5 minutes to unjam it) I could browse the web looking for some new trousers - something I'd have to do every few weeks since my clothes somehow seem to acquire holes quite easily, why would that be?

- instead of building that barn I could be working a few more months to pay someone else to build me a barn

- instead of gaining self-reliance I could make myself become more and more dependent on outside sources and 'experts'

Well, thanks but no thanks, I'll just keep on mending my own stuff simply because I can and I like it that way. Here, in Sweden, in the land of plenty.

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  • peterburkimsher 3 days ago

    If you're interested in extending the service life of that old iMac, I recommend OpenCore Legacy Patcher. It lets you run newer versions of macOS on old hardware.

    https://dortania.github.io/OpenCore-Legacy-Patcher/MODELS.ht...

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    • hagbard_c 19 hours ago

      I did install a more recent version of MacOS on the thing but only to see if I could since I do not use MacOS, preferring Linux or, to be more specific, 'Debian' on all my systems. Performance is much better with Linux, I do not need to fight the vendor who wishes for me to buy new hardware. With Linux the thing does what I want, when I want it without telling any third party about my activities. I also have a Macbook Air ('keyboard broken and display problems' which were quickly fixed) on which I run Debian, the same is true there.

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