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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 But Prof George claims that many broken or outdated gadgets could be fixed or repurposed with only a brief knowledge of engineering and electronics. "
Some things can be fixed but would you want to? My previous oven got replaced because it's failure mode was to go into it's cleaning cycle. I could have replaced the faulty control board but I didn't really want to. I didn't want another one of THOSE control boards nor did I want a same brand replacement.
I didn't want to wait for this "fixed" item to eventually burn my house down.
OTOH, many other things are so cheap that they are not worth the parts and labor it would take to fix them.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
These are not cost reduction measures but rather anti-tamper protections.
Yes and no. In some cases you may be correct, but when I worked in consumer electronics, the devices were glued because it was cheaper and screws would have required us to use a thicker care just so there was space for the screws.
And 99.9% of people would just throw it away if it failed, so why worry about it?
Went to replace the fog light in my 2014 Ford Fusion; the instructions start with "Remove the front bumper" and the entire process took over an hour due to the bumper being attached in some places with somewhat of a "just wedge it in there and hope you're not breaking something" approach.
To a certain extent that is true. I just replaced the tailight on my mustang and to disassemble most of the trunk.
However, in another case I watched two people try to get a PT Cruiser running on my street. They worked on it for two days before I went over. I said "you know, the car is trying to tell you what's wrong!" The check engine light was on.
You can flip the ignition switch ON, OFF three times and it will print the error code on the odometer. A quick Google search and I resolved the problem to be a bad oil pressure sensor. $20 for the sensor, $10 for a socket to fit it ad the car fired right up.
Improved, more comprehensive diagnostics make a lot of things easier on new cars.
There was an amusing scene in Mythbusters about this, where Jamie goes to replace the battery in a Dodge Stratus they purchased and has to take one of the wheels off in order to access it. Needless to say he was unimpressed; I think his quote was "You see, what happened here is some idiot designed this in a computer and didn't think."
Even better was the fact that a friend of ours had recently purchased the same car, something we mocked him incessantly about, and this was just extra fuel for the fire. :)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.