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The Dutch Repair Cafe Versus the Throwaway Society
circletimessquare writes "Everyone in the modern world has thrown away at least one thing that was perfectly good except for an easily fixed defect, because it's just easier to buy a new one. In the Netherlands, in the name of social cohesion, and with government and private foundation grants, there is a trend called the Repair Cafe (Dutch). People bring in broken items: a skirt with a hole in it, an iron that no longer steams, and they fix each other's stuff and meet their neighbors. Now that's an idea worth keeping."
When American population just sits at home watching TV or playing video games, Europeans and especially Dutch tend to spend time together. Sit at cafes getting high, eat at a restaurant and have some fine wine, and socialize with people. The same is true for Asians and Australians too. And the American people introvert culture isn't a new thing that came with computers - they did this before geeks too. Sitting in front of TV watching mindless shows and eating TV dinners, alone.
One great geeky example about Americans making artificial social walls around them is how quick companies were to replace LAN gaming with online gaming so that you could sit alone and not interact with people. I live in asia and when people play games, they go play them with friends to internet cafes. There's a place near me where there is always young guys gaming together. There's a huge cultural difference between US and the rest of the world.
As the saying goes - "We have the technology, we can build anti-social walls around us!"
We throw away perfectly working pieces of tech. Thing accumulate around the house and just become clutter to be picked up and tossed during a spring cleaning. The problem is that newer tech makes it so that almost no one even wants old laptops and such. Then there is the risk that there is something person stuck somewhere inside and you have to spend extra effort clearing it completely to be safe if you want to give it away. I have an old laptop sitting around that I have run some clean up tools on and I'm still not quite ready to put it up on Freecycle. We really need better recycling programs for old Phones, batteries, etc. People are going to just want something new when the new thing is 100x better than the old thing even if the old thing still works.
Things are generally made extremely cheaply these days, and are not designed for repair, so it does make things a bit more difficult than it used to be. In many cases there are tear-down videos and instructions for things available on the internet, so I think this balances out nicely. It's a great chance to learn how things work and teach other as well. I'd really like to see this done in North America, perhaps as a school fund-raising project or something.
This would be a great idea for a Makerspace trying to attract more people/funding.
You've already got tools and a core of tinkerers that know how to fix stuff -- if you could draw in a broader audience from the community, you could make some extra money selling them drinks and munchies, and possibly convert some people to the hobby.
It was done because it offers you the ability to play with people in either scenario, no matter how far away they were.
No. Local play was replaced by internet play because it was seen as more profitable by the games industry to enforce DRM online.
If it were truly about adding features, LAN / local play would still be enabled on Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, and Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 games.
Exchanging services is barter, which is subject to taxes. Did you pay your taxes?
Only idiots would do that.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
The real problem is with lifecycle sustainability.
If raw material sourcing is sustainable, and disposal is as well, then there is no problem with the "throwaway" culture. The "throwaway" culture frees up repairmen to pursue more useful or enjoyable things by using machines to alleviate their burden.
Technology is a separate issue. As technology gets better and better, why should we spend so much repairing it? The recent advances in reducing power consumption and doing more processing in hardware is a good thing. Getting rid of a several year old computer is like getting a gas guzzling junker off the road.
The ecological aversion to the "throwaway" culture comes from a time where reuse and repair was seen as necessary to the inherent unsustainable sourcing and landfill disposal. Once those problems are addressed we must reexamine our assumptions about the value of reuse and repair.
It's a sad fact of life that in the U.S. it is often cheaper to replace something than it is to repair it. With electronics you have the added penalty that you're often repairing something that's now slower than the replacement.
A sign of our times
I was babysitting a 5 year old in high school and she had this alphabet book of professions. U = upholsterer. She asked me what that was. I told her it was someone who repaired or replaced the fabric on your couch. She asked me why you didn't throw it out and get a new one. That it didn't even occur to her that someone might want to try to fix something rather than just dump it in a landfill somewhere really struck me.
I remember a slashdotter telling about something similar in germany, where you can come into a shop where the rent you the tools, and you fix the stuff there and then. It also acted as an edutainment, with people coming in to watch and learn.
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
While I don't exchange services for automotive work (I do my own) I still help out my next door neighbor with some of his yard work (currently putting in a good retaining wall) and in exchange I get access to his phenomenal collection of tools. I have a lot, but things like spring compressors, professional scan tools (much more functionality than even a high end OBDII reader), gear pullers, compression tester, etc that I don't use very often but are essential for some repairs. I also like the things that people put out just after trash day with free signs on them that if they are still around the next trash day get hauled off. That is how I got my mower, snow blower, trimmer, and compressor. None of them worked when I found them but only required relatively minor fixes. The most complicated one was the snow blower as the carb needed a really good cleaning, new fuel hoses, the engine needed all new gaskets, and a new kill switch. The snow blower was $18 in parts to get working and was by far the most expensive. The mower and trimmer needed a carb cleaning, fuel hoses replaced, and new spark plugs. The compressor had a bad switch.
Time to offend someone
When American population just sits at home watching TV or playing video games, Europeans and especially Dutch tend to spend time together. Sit at cafes getting high, eat at a restaurant and have some fine wine, and socialize with people.
I've lived in America and the Netherlands, Americans do that just as much as the Dutch. Go into any large city and visit bars and restaurants, you'll find them plenty crowded with people socializing.
What is somewhat true is that the Dutch watch less TV, but they do other things around the house too.
People in general are social and like to go out. People with families stay in more because it's harder to go out with children. That does not really change much across cultures.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Take for instance an electric iron. It might just be clogged up from hard water deposits that could be removed with some solution like CLR or LimeAway. The problem is, in order to get to the parts that are clogged you have to deal with sonic welding, adhesives and fasteners that were designed to be one-way. The only way to disassemble the unit is to break it and glue it back together, which is not very elegant nor safe when dealing with mains current plus heating elements.
Same thing goes for about 90% of small electric appliances today. They are not designed to be repairable.
Most of this is not so much cultural as others have pointed out but it all comes down to the cost of labor. At one time in the US decorative scrollwork in homes was hand-carved. The craftsman doing the work made maybe $0.25 a day which for the time wasn't all that bad but it was by no means extravagant. It would be comparable to what any common laborer would get paid or someone clerking in a store.
Today, to have someone skilled in wood carving come to your home and do some work would be easily $200 an hour. An experienced technician wouldn't be getting that individually, but you can figure a company in the business of appliance repair is going to be charging at least $100 an hour. Which makes a $30 electric iron absurd to even consider repairing - it would cost $30 for someone to spend 20 minutes on it. Even larger appliances begin to reach the point where it makes no sense to repair them simply because of the cost of labor. Why spend $200 to fix a washing machine that cost $250 to replace?
Where things get really confused is in the 1800s and early 1900s the US saw significant immigration from Europe of craftsmen and skilled workers. Someone that spent 20 years making fine furniture would come to the US and could find immediate work basically doing the same sort of thing for at least as much money if not more. Today, we have huge low-skill immigration which skews the wage scale in interesting ways. In some parts of the country it is cheaper to hire more people (immigrant labor) using hand tools to do a job than it is to use power tools or other modern assists with fewer people. This only works in low-skill areas, though. If the US had a huge number of immigrants coming in that were skilled electronics technicians or computer programmers it would be quite different.
What we have now is it is cheaper to hire five people to use hand tools to do landscaping work than one person with a power mower. But it is also cheaper to replace a $800 TV than it is to bring it to a technician to look at it because his labor is incredibly expensive. The US today is a confused mess of labor rates that will end up sorting itself out in the end, but likely as not things will shift to the low end of the scale.
At this point friends and family are the only PC's I work on. They at least understand the concept of returning the favor in some way/shape/form. I stopped doing that for anyone else.
If you repair some electrical device for someone else, and at some point down the line it starts a fire or electrocutes someone, you could easily be held liable here in the US, whether your repair had anything to do with it or not. And half-assed repairs done by well-meaning but untrained people are just BEGGING for trouble. From the NYT article (emphasis mine):
When Mr. van den Akker put the iron back together, two parts were left over â" no matter, he said, they were probably not that important. He plugged the frayed cord into a socket. A green light went on. Rusty water poured out. Finally, it began to steam.
Actual repair shops carry insurance for such eventualities, but random folks at a "repair cafe" wouldn't.
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Complementary to your comment, we have a lot of tech that was created so long ago that it's terribly inefficient and should best be retired. Consider an old machine with an Athlon 1200 CPU, drawing 330 watts of power while an Intel i5-2400 based machine draws only 75 watts. Consider an old hard drive that draws 30 watts to spin at idle, compared to a modern drive that uses 8 watts to do the same, or a SSDD that draws 0.14 watts. Or consider a CRT monitor drawing 120W compared to a newer LCD that draws 22W.
Yes, I get that obviously there are things that people can't afford to replace today, and when repairing them for free is an option, it'll happen. But these old devices still cost them tremendously on their electric bills. I believe the Dutch pay somewhere around $0.40/kWh, meaning that an old PC there would cost over $4 per day to run, compared to a new efficient machine that would cost less than $1 per day. And that new machine would certainly have better performance, more capabilities, and likely better security (not that I want to get into a big debate about it, but running Windows 7 and IE 9 instead of XP and IE 6 would be a big improvement for most home user's security.)
Some working things should be retired.
John
http://raisedonhoecakes.com/ROH/2012/04/12/your-son-has-been-arrested-for-being-able-to-fix-a-lacrosse-stick/
Try and fix certain electronics governed by the FCC. There are other things that are made less functional to conform to regulations.
I fixed my custom DVR by delivering the feed over Component video and re-encoding it. I'm sure that's illegal too...
Actually, I think that the rise of internet gaming VS LAN gaming has several factors, few of them due to being antisocial. I still do LAN game but play online as well at times
The bad...
a) Convenience: Pack up your oversized gaming PC, monitor etc. Drag them to somebody's house, possibly popping a few vertebra hauling crap around. Plug into power for 3 daisy-chained power bars and an ethernet cable that is just a bit too short. Pop a few breakers until you figure out who plugs in where. After an hour you might actually get things ready to play.
b) Availability: Try and figure out what you're all going to play. Six of us want to play Shooter Game X, but Bob only wants to play RTS's. Everyone finally agrees on game Y, except John who doesn't have it and needs to install/download. By the time John installs, everyone else has played up and is moving on to another game
c) Play games on a LAN that still need an internet connection. Lag occurs. People get dropped, and even though you're all trying to play with only those in your room, hackerKid239 joins the game and headshots every one of you within 2.5 seconds whilst insulting your mom
d) Several makes of various shapes and sizes drinking, eating greasy food, and fit into a small poorly ventilated room. 'nuff said
The good...
a) Social: You get to visit with your buds, have a few drinks perhaps etc. While loading you can trade funny youtube clips or photoshopped pictures of Bob's wife
b) Private LAN games: For games that actually allow it, being able to play with your buds and *NOT* hackerKid239 is fun
c) Trading: Although arguments over what to play may arise, you get to see what other cool games people in your group have. Rather than spending 5h downloading, buy the game in steam and then snag the install files from a USB drive being passed around
Because to repair an item, you would have to first reverse engineer the item to understand how it works. This is specifically prohibited by the DMCA, and you could face a civil lawsuit, criminal penalties and jail time/fines.
In the USA it is ILLEGAL to understand how a product works. You're not allowed to fix stuff, only to consume, and obey.
Remember what country you live in folks, we're just trying to protect you. Now, please strip naked so you can board the subway.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
As a hobby, I repair old Teletype machines, from the 1920s and 1930s. These machines were designed for a long life of nearly continuous operation and to be repairable. I have 70 and 80 year old machines running. Everything unscrews (and every screw has a lock nut), everything is interchangeable, and all parts can be reached without dismantling too much. The detailed repair manuals still exist. If one of these machines hasn't been seriously damaged and has all the parts, it's usually repairable. This is as good as it gets in repairability.
The price of this is weight, bulk, and routine maintenance. The frame is cast steel. A printer weighs about 75 pounds, about twice the weight of an electric typewriter. There are over 500 oiling points to be oiled annually, plus about 50 points that require greasing. Every few years of operation, a full cleaning is required. This involves removing the two electrical parts, the motor and the selector electromagnet, and soaking the entire machine in solvent. Western Union did this to their machines routinely.
Then there are adjustments. There are spring tensions and clearances to be adjusted. A spring scale and a feather gauge are required. After any part replacement, there are adjustments to be performed according to the manual.
Nobody would put up with that bulk, weight, and maintenance today to get a machine capable of decades of operation. That is the price of repairability.
Poor people barter informally (and don't consider reporting it) and work for cash "under the table". They're rarely caught. Rich people have loopholes written for them. Only those in the middle have to pay. If a plumber barters for services an electrician, the IRS will never find out. If a lawyer does with his accountant, BAM!
(I guess the distinction is more blue-collar verus white than poor versus middle; plenty of plumbers have more money than plenty of accountants)