Slashdot Mirror
Professor: Young People Are "Lost Generation" Who Can No Longer Fix Gadgets
antdude points out this story about one of the problems with our ever increasingly disposable world. "Young people in Britain have become a lost generation who can no longer mend gadgets and appliances because they have grown up in a disposable world, the professor giving this year's Royal Institution Christmas lectures has warned. Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering, at the University of Manchester, claims that the under 40s expect everything to 'just work' and have no idea what to do when things go wrong. Unlike previous generations who would ‘make do and mend’ now young people will just chuck out their faulty appliances and buy new ones. But Prof George claims that many broken or outdated gadgets could be fixed or repurposed with only a brief knowledge of engineering and electronics. "
wrong, we over 50 were taught to fix shit, starting at age 10 in my case. Guys [1] usually fell into two categories, the electrical or mechanical.
[1] sorry wrong headed thinking about women meant females left out, though sewing and cooking are good skills everyone should have
Since Prof George is (a) under 40 and (b) not a 'he', that seems rather unlikely: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
Some brands are simply more maintainable than others.
Spare parts may be readily available. This isn't true universally. Most brands are cheap crap that are intended to be disposable. Ensuring that the product has a long useful life isn't even a consideration.
If longevity is something you care about then that's an informed choice you have to make at the time of purchase.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
There's your problem right there. Because you expect everything to be unfixable you assume replacing a bulb is beyond your capability. Fact is bulbs in cars are a darn sight easier to replace. ...
Now get off my lawn.
My Ford Falcon used to get low voltage. The cure was to whack the regulator with a tire iron.
No special smarts needed.
when you open the latest gadget, it's black boxes, nothing that you can see working, or replace without just desoldering a chip.
Prof George knows this of course:
"All of these things in our home do seem to work most of the time and because they don't break we just get used to them. They have almost become like Black Boxes which never die. And when they do we throw them away and buy something new."
The Daily Telegraph, knowing its readership (traditionally rather conservative and not exactly in the first flush of their youth) has chosen to emphasise the 'young people are lost generation' angle, which is reflected in the summary. But the message she's putting across in the Christmas Lectures is much more positive - the talks are intended for a general audience, especially kids, and she wants to get them excited about using everyday technology in creative ways, in the spirit of the Maker community.
Nice article here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
If you have a UK IP address or VPN, the Lectures are available here:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...
They're part of a series goes back to the time of Faraday, and has featured many eminent scientists (including several Nobel laureates). They've just been broadcast on national TV, as they have been since the 60s (I suspect quite a few of us who ended up being scientists in the UK got early inspiration from one or more of these lectures).
There's your problem right there. Because you expect everything to be unfixable you assume replacing a bulb is beyond your capability. Fact is bulbs in cars are a darn sight easier to replace. ...
Incidentally... bullshit. I've got a modern (2008), Big Three car and to replace the headlight bulb, you literally have to remove the entire fascia from the car. Then you have to remove the headlight housing from the car. Then you have to excavate to extract the HID bulb from within the housing. This is nontrivial because you are working through a small hole to undo metal latches inside. Then you get to replace the actual bulb, which the oils on your skin can easily destroy. Finally, you reassemble the entire front-end of your car.
I've done it. But it's nowhere near as easy as my first car (a 1985 model, same manufacturer) was. That was trivial.
All of my corner lights and brake lights are trivial, but the headlights... nasty. This is simply because of all of the complex sculpted front-end structure. When cars were simple box shapes, it was easy.
"Oh no... he found the
Car factory worker here. Welding and paint shop is mostly automated nowadays, but assembly is 99% manual. It's just not designed with reparability in mind. Or it is, but in the sense that repair shops and sellers are here in Europe normally the same business , and with nowadays margins you better let them charge a whole hour to change a bulb.
Thank them they still let you change a fuse...
And for robot “reachability”, it's normally the other way around. Industrial robots in car making are bulky things not meant to access small or hidden spots. For that, it's better a human being.
They don't talk about this issue because you've got the economics wrong.
The government cannot force people to pay more then they want for labor in a market system. It is a free market. If I refuse to pay more then $10 an hour, and I know the government is gonna tax me 10%, and then take another 20% from the laborer, I will end up paying roughly $9, and the worker will take home about $7. The problem caused for me by the government's tax rate isn't that it increases my cost directly, it's that it's probably harder for me to get workers for $7 an hour take-home then it would be for $10.
OTOH, that $3 taxes is probably being spent on something. And if that something is something he was spending money on before anyway then his demand for take-home pay went down in roughly the amount of the tax.
BTW, actual reality disagrees with you on the efficiency of government spending in some sectors. Low health costs, for example, are strongly correlated with the level of government involvement in the system. The UK's NHS, in which private medical practices are illegal is lower cost then Canadian Medicare (in which private payment for medical services is virtually unheard of) is lower cost then us.
There are a lot of reasons for this. Most of them go back to basic economics. When you're sick your demand for health care is virtually infinite, therefore you'll pay anything, therefore the price a doctor can get is incredibly high. If there's some government body dictating what he can charge, or paying him itself, the cost can be kept relatively low by decree. If there isn't he can hire a bunch of six-figure business consultants to help him convince patients that his costs are 20% higher every year.
Have you priced a Kirby lately?