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Is Repair As Important As Innovation? (economist.com)
An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from The Economist: Events about making new things are ten a penny. Less common are events about keeping things as good as new. Maintenance lacks the glamour of innovation. It is mostly noticed in its absence -- the tear in a shirt, the mould on a ceiling, the spluttering of an engine. Not long ago David Edgerton of Imperial College London, who also spoke at the festival, drove across the bridge in Genoa that collapsed in August, killing 43 people (pictured). 'We're encouraged to pride ourselves on all being innovators and entrepreneurs,' he said. Maintenance is often dismissed as mere drudgery. But in fact, as he pointed out, repairing things is often trickier than making them.
It is also more difficult for economists to measure. The discipline's most prominent statistic, GDP, is gross (as opposed to net) because it leaves out the cost of wear and tear. To calculate these costs, statisticians must estimate the lifespan of a country's assets and make assumptions about the way they deteriorate. [...] And how much do economies spend fighting decay? No one knows, partly because most maintenance is performed in-house, not purchased on the market. The best numbers are collected by Canada, where firms spent 3.3% of GDP on repairs in 2016, more than twice as much as the country spends on research and development. In closing, the report mentions the tyrannies of the ancient East where people were forced to maintain fragile irrigation systems. "In those societies, to repair was to repress," the report says. "But some people today have the opposite concern. They see maintenance and repair as a right they are in danger of losing to companies that hoard spare parts and information too jealously."
It is also more difficult for economists to measure. The discipline's most prominent statistic, GDP, is gross (as opposed to net) because it leaves out the cost of wear and tear. To calculate these costs, statisticians must estimate the lifespan of a country's assets and make assumptions about the way they deteriorate. [...] And how much do economies spend fighting decay? No one knows, partly because most maintenance is performed in-house, not purchased on the market. The best numbers are collected by Canada, where firms spent 3.3% of GDP on repairs in 2016, more than twice as much as the country spends on research and development. In closing, the report mentions the tyrannies of the ancient East where people were forced to maintain fragile irrigation systems. "In those societies, to repair was to repress," the report says. "But some people today have the opposite concern. They see maintenance and repair as a right they are in danger of losing to companies that hoard spare parts and information too jealously."
I'll bet there are in fact many prestigious and well funded events about repairing people
Nullius in verba
I buy Apple products and throw them out when they break.
It's not just about companies; it's more about politics. Given the terrible state of our infrastructure, apparently it's not politically expedient to repair things, rather it's important to show you're building things. That's why for example the government of California is talking about implementing a single-payer healthcare system it can't afford, but can't fix it's self-made pension crisis or water infrastructure.
In Asimov's Empire books, when a society no longer recalls how to repair something, it is a sign of societal collapse.
I say no. Business analysts want clean revenue cycles. They like planned obsolescence. Or they build only a few spares, moving on, because the design said that only a fraction of people would complain that there are no spares/replacement parts/people trained to fix them.
This behavior, however, is praised by the corporate hegemony. They like clean numbers, campaigns, so they can shift quickly in a highly competitive world. The consumers get the shaft, and not very much justice from bad equipment. Quality counts, but so does the supply chain for post-sale equipment support. The general public isn't taught to look for post-sale support, only to buy the shiny new object with easy third party financing.
Most every laptop I buy these days croaks early. Looking at you, Apple, Lenovo, Asus. Disposable electronics is a bad concept. And that's what happens when you can't fix it or get it fixed (or for a reasonable cost).
To my fellow engineers that design short lifecycle drek: you're evil.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Maintenance lacks the glamour of innovation
Maybe, but there's something pretty fantastic about something like this: Commodore 64 left outside for over a decade! Could it still work??
Looks to me like a false choice.
Nobody cares if your cell phone is not the latest model.
Nobody expects some technically illiterate customer to repair it with common household tools. And repairs rarely require a BGA chip to be removed. But frequently can be done with the replacement of a few visually failed capacitors, or a bad solder joint refreshed.
Your time is in fact, worthless.
Unless someone is paying you to do something other than repair your stuff, or you are taking time off a paying job to repair something.
Now on with the car metaphors, outrageous complaints that every company will sto[p functioning if their products outlive the warranty, and panicky screeches that you will never be able to persuade your mother to buy you the new shiny, unless you can show that the old one is beyond repair.
That was easy one.
IT's about joining China and India in a race to the bottom. Who can make the least functional, most useless, plastic garbage society?
It's a lot of assumptions, too. If it's cheaper to make something that lasts 10 years and then gets replaced, then do that.
Think of it this way: humans build machines, produce electricity and energy storage, mine and recycle materials, refine things, build components, assemble products, and ship and retail them. That's a lot of human labor, and it's reflected in the price of products--yeah, it's not that the mining equipment is expensive, but that the labor to create it, maintain it, and fuel it is expensive.
Your $20 toaster comes down to a grand total of $20 of human labor. At Chinese $3/hr rates, that's around 7 hours. Troubleshooting the electrical circuit when it fails can be costly: maybe it's some internal module which is 80% of the toaster anyway, and your repair tech spends an hour swapping it out, and it costs you $30 to repair. For that matter, maybe it's just a blown MOSFET, and your repair tech spends an hour disassembling the device, and another 3 hours troubleshooting it, and then 10 minutes replacing the MOSFET itself. You might be ahead on labor, but the labor-hours are priced high.
Assembling a computer motherboard doesn't take much in terms of labor-hours. Once you've set up the assembly line, it's fairly rapid. The motherboard is extremely-complex and takes potentially days to troubleshoot, meaning there's more human labor in repairing it than in replacing it.
At a point, you've reached the break-over: it's a waste of time to repair this. Maybe you're poor and you can spend 4 hours repairing your $20 iron, at $10/hr, when you could work 4 hours for $15/hr--if only you had work. It's still a waste of time; you're just poor.
At that point, the economics of reuse have passed. You've got electronics waste, and you should send it for recycling. We readily smelt chips for silicon and gold. Copper, plastic, and aluminum are valuable.
You're going to spend $2,400 on high-quality oil changes for your engine, and another $100 on spark plugs, every 100,000 miles. You might spend $800 for an engine rebuild around 200k-300k. If you don't maintain that engine, you're spending $6,000 for a remanufactured engine swap somewhere around the 80,000-100,000 mark, if not closer to the 50,000 mark. Which is cheaper?
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On a lot of things. One of those things is a side-effect of the rate of change of computer systems.
Sure, my Tandy 2000 from 30 (or so) years back should be repairable. But that would require that the maker continue making parts for 30 or so years. Which would make sense if nothing much had changed in 30 or so years.
Alas, a smartphone today has more computing power than my Tandy 2000 did. Making parts for the Tandy 2000 today makes about as much sense as making parts for a stagecoach does.
As is, for the most part, spare parts are made as long as it's profitable to do so. And no, the fact that seventeen people in Maryland want to be able to repair their Tandy 2000's doesn't mean that it's worth the bother of maintaining archaic machine tools, training operators for same, and distributing parts to stores for display on strictly limited shelf-space....
Of course, there are other considerations sometimes. For instance, pollution control laws exist. Allowing the owner of a vehicle to bypass the pollution controls on his vehicle (or just to muck them up by accident) is generally considered a bad thing.
And on and on.
Short form: yes, you should be able to repair your stuff. Except when you shouldn't....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
But in fact, as he pointed out, repairing things is often trickier than making them.
That's usually a result of shitty design. Designing something so that it can be repaired easily costs money and is (usually) more difficult so unsurprisingly people/companies prefer not to bother if they don't have to. If something is difficult to repair it is usually because they didn't adequately consider repair during the design of the product. Once in a while you run into a product that is made intentionally hard to repair (Apple I'm looking at you) but most of the time it's just benign neglect and/or economics.
I was wondering the same, what do they have to do with each other at all?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You could just as well ask "is food as important as air?". We need both!!
Where was it written they are mutually exclusive? To say repair is "as important" as innovation is to raise repair, not demean innovation. The simple truth is that to measure any innovation you must measure its useful impact. And if repair is a part of that "use", which it almost invariably is, then repair is a fundamental part of the equation. Often that repair now days comes in the part of automatic software updates. Often times efforts are made to thwart repair in the name of obsolescence or design over any other concern.
The innovation that is long lasting is that which is supported by what is economically feasible. At some point, the practice of wholly discarding devices when they break will no longer be economical and those that push such designs will suffer greatly.
Electronics are freakishly reliable. They basically never fail. I've not had a component fail in over 20 years, and that includes hard disks and fan motors. Only a lightning strike frying a 56k modem in 98 broke the streak.
Are you keeping your stuff in a dusty environment? Hot environment?
Is your power dirty / not using an UPS?
Are insects or rodents chewing on your gear?
I don't get it.
"Innovation" is not making new things--that would be "invention". Innovation is bringing things to market that weren't available before.
Innovation can be as simple as offering the same car, but with financing that wasn't available before. Simple change, "innovation". (Peter Drucker, the late management writer, gives this exact example involving cars. Make of that what you will.)
Repair hasn't been a credible option in a long time for a lot of things. Make repair affordably available, and you're innovating.
If it was ACTUAL innovation then difficult or non-repair might be understandable. Things that are LABELED unrepairable by some manufactures have been proven otherwise and have been shown to be purely for the benefit of profit.
As repair encompasses the ability to update out of stock and/or out of date units. Innovation isn't contained to wholly new things but also in repurposing and updating the still functional.
Silly business paper.
with all these philosophical dissertations.
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
"In closing, the report mentions the tyrannies of the ancient East where people were forced to maintain fragile irrigation systems."
Not to mention the tyranny of the modern West, who forces people to repair roads, bridges and tunnels or withholds their pay.
Or you don't force them an let the bridges collapse and the potholes wreck havoc on cars and trucks.
But in fact, as he pointed out, repairing things is often trickier than making them
Most people don't have a clue how to repair anything lets take your average mechanic. How many times have you had your car fixed only to have the problem return soon afterwards. Of course when the school dropout goes to mechanics class he is taught a few things however most lack investigative thinking. you walk in say you hear a rattle. after several hours (they said it took them that long) they found a bolt that was loose and tightened it. Very few of them question how or what caused the bolt to get loose. Of course the cause makes the bolt go loose or something else to fail, lather, rinse, repeat, and now your car is designated a lemon.
I find this too common across any kind of repair they fix the symptom not the cause
Your'e all thinking it, I just said it for you
You're going to spend $2,400 on high-quality oil changes for your engine, and another $100 on spark plugs, every 100,000 miles. You might spend $800 for an engine rebuild around 200k-300k. If you don't maintain that engine, you're spending $6,000 for a remanufactured engine swap somewhere around the 80,000-100,000 mark, if not closer to the 50,000 mark. Which is cheaper?
You must buy dome awesome spark plugs.
And you raise one interesting aspect that is true.
There is another aspect out there though, and that is at what point do we decide that it is time for the technology to stop?
When do we become technological Amish?
The right to repair concept includes a decision process enforced by law that will force interesting things like a return to discrete components, highly accessible design, and the death of a lot of the innovation we take for granted today. I could envision a future of olde school tube based technology. That stuff was easy to repair.
Imagine, a hollow state smartphone.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Just kidding. Throw that plastic piece of shit in the landfill and order a new one from China, like the good goy consumer you are.
The new one wont work right either, of course.
This was discussed on the Freakonomics podcast several years ago - In Praise of Maintenance. He had been doing a series on innovation and then did a counterpoint on how maybe maintenance was as much if not more important than innovation. It's a good podcast and goes into more detail than the short Economist piece.
There really needs to be both. We tend to get caught up in Consumer Technology and how hard it it is to repair. This is akin to the ancient pottery shards, archeologist dig up. Our ancient ancestors rich or poor. Probably had acquired some pottery, then it broke, from a fall, or just from a lot of use. In theory they could repair them, but after it became unusable they got themselves a new one. Because the cost of getting/making a new one is less then trying to repair it.
However for these same people clothing may be mended and stitched back together, while it is also a consumer product it was easy to fix and and historically textiles were expensive to produce until the industrial revolution.
Now to consumer technology the problem we have is often the cheaper stuff is easier to repair then the more expensive stuff. This is mostly due to size. Cheaper electronics are bigger, thus allowing room for us to get our hands in it and replace faulty parts. More expensive stuff currently is small and thing, and mostly all embedded with a very low margin of error to get it to fix.
But I think the real point, is we should make sure we are wise on what to fix and what to replace. When do you just fill a pothole vs repaving a road, What is the environmental cost or refurbishing an old building vs. knocking it down and building a green one.
Part of the reason why colleges are so expensive is that they are always building new buildings, while their current classrooms are only 20% utilized. Why not just refurbish the rooms? Because it is tough to get funding to fix up rooms as that is just boring. However to get a new building with some rich doners name on it, is much easier.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
of the not so ancient past could be repaired. It was not always easy - a set for repairing a diesel engine or its fuel pump could cost quite nice sum of money and require some feeling in the fingers as well as knowledge. The company that produced the machine could have ceased to exist and yet the repair was still possible by getting the spare parts from the junkyard. The modern car of today electric or ICE have computers on board which if secured from malware may be impossible to fix if company producing them did not leave the code open and even then the cost of fixing the bug in a sw of an ancient car make repairs probably not feasible. This is a problem because almost each part has now some sort of SW identity with which it communicates with other parts or with central unit. That leaves car repair where exactly? Add to this that SW running diagnostic may not be able to identify the fault properly - the result is very expensive exchange of parts by try and error. How do you maintain SW in all the gadgets in your house that have IP address? How do you know nothing possessing a camera (light bulb in the ceiling or vibrator) has not been hijacked and and sending photos of yourself eating tv dinner half naked in front of a TV sent to youtube for perverts to enjoy.
Company I work for produces industrial SW - maintenance group has been outsourced to India with fixed yearly cost. What do you think happens then after the cap has been reached in May or even April due to lousy design practice? I talked with customer representative lately and they were not annoyed just mildly disgusted.
Most people throw out their smartphone every two years and because most manufacturers don't provide software updates the cycle contiunes. Only around 7% of androids in active use are over 5 years old, the majority get thrown in the pacific garbage patch.
Me: Canada, woo-hoo!
You: Don't you want to know what numbers they're talking abo -
Me: Nope! Canada is number one! Woo-hoo!
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Repair is typically - but not always - the best way to preserve the environment for our grandchildren.
As for repairing/refurbishing that napkin I used at the fast food place, not so much.
Know and learn from history, shape and innovate the future standing on the shoulders of giants ;-) https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
All this is nice and correct, except it only take labor costs into account. Mining raw materials and throwing waste are not zero-cost. They cause a big impact, but economists, specially those promoting free market, prefer to ignore it.
Products(and other things) evolve fastest if you can just replace the old ones. That's not just the case for living beings. It's a high-metabolic process, very wasteful but it allows to adapt quickly. Once you start to recycle and repair it slows down product evolution. Not just of the things you use longer but of all things connected to it somehow in higher orders.
We live in the anthropocene. We have large impact on many aspects of the planet and that includes the climate. You can disagree about how damaging and how large the impact is but it's possible to agree on the fact that the rough scale of the impact is now such that you have to take it in account. It can no longer be neglected. So we have to start paying attention to our ecological and economical footprint. Reusing, repairing and recycling is part of that.
A century ago, technology was sustained by repair. This kept economies diversified and distributed. But predatory financial interests realized that centrally controlling production and distribution was more profitable to their schemes of empire. They saw they could reduce payrolls while ensuring the costly material and economic thrash they use to manipulate the economy, and economic bubbles, to their gain. So, here we are.
There's an easy solution to all those problems - modularity. You can streamline the process even further by spending a few extra cents per unit installing well-considered diagnostic elements so that it's easy to determine what's wrong.
Dead toaster? Test the coils. Test the cord. Test the switch. If one of them has a problem, replace it. If none does, replace the electronics board (which is not "the toaster" - in fact it's probably one of the cheaper components in it). Total diagnostic time - 5min. Total repair time, 10min. After all, all you need to do is remove a few screws, unplug the faulty module, and install a new one.
If a device takes hours to diagnose, and more hours to repair, it's because it wasn't designed for easy diagnostics and repair. That's a failure of design, not an argument against the value of repair.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Where are you seeing exclusivity? I see "is A as important as B? Because right now B gets all the attention"
That's the diametric opposite of a mutually exclusive statement.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
I think we're already headed that way. Most people change their computers a lot less than in the early days of home computing. Even tablets sales have been slowing down and people don't feel the need to buy a new one. The closer we get to "peak computing capacity per watt", the more the need to upgrade goes down.
My main computer is a Mac mini released in 2010. I "repaired" it three times by upgrading the RAM, swapping the HDD by a low-end SSD and replacing the fan.
Two decades ago, the top new games required a PC no more than one or two years old to run properly.
Today, people are playing the latest games on PCs they built five years ago or more. If you lower the quality settings, you can run games with PCs built a decade ago.
Most PCs can be upgraded which is a similar to being able to repair it. Need more RAM? Add RAM. No room for more RAM? Remove old RAM and add new higher capacity RAM. New game requires a better GPU? Remove the old one and install a new one. That's a kind of repair, removing old "non-working" parts to install a brand new ones.
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There is another aspect out there though, and that is at what point do we decide that it is time for the technology to stop?
Hey look, I'm rich; I can spend $50,000 on a brand new car, and in 5 years I'll buy another one.
You lot don't get that luxury. You can buy my nice, shiny Audi S5 for $12,000 when it's 10 years old and have a nice car with 70,000 miles on it. That's efficient. Your econoshitbox of today isn't on-par with a nice Audi luxury car from last decade.
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Repair's importance relative to innovation's importance is irrelevant unless they're mutually exclusive concepts-- which they're not. One can enhance/improve/maintain device repairability while furthering technological development. Repairability is simply be a constraint like weight, power consumption, dimensions, water resistance, etc. All of those factors are important and part of design. In certain applications, you may need to focus more on power consumption than maintaining water tightness, but for mass-market electronics, you need a healthy dose of each factor.
My main computer is a Mac mini released in 2010. I "repaired" it three times by upgrading the RAM, swapping the HDD by a low-end SSD and replacing the fan.
You lucky bastard! I can't do that on my new Mac :*(
Id love to see repairability and modular design/services to avoid just tossing equipment. Its just wasteful....
How many years do you design it to be repairable for?
That's a decision that has to be made and there will be trade offs as a result both in economics and performance. I did not argue that everything should be made as easy to repair as possible so you are putting up something of a strawman here. I merely pointed out that repairability is almost always a function of product design and that many companies these days are electing to design products that are hard to repair because it is in their (usually short term) financial interest to do so even when it negatively impacts society and their customers and sometimes themselves in the long run.
It's a sort of prisoner's dilemma problem. Companies want the cheapest product and so do customers even though a company might get a better reputation and customers might get a better product if both were willing to sacrifice a little money in the short run for a better long term outcome.
There is another aspect out there though, and that is at what point do we decide that it is time for the technology to stop?
Hey look, I'm rich; I can spend $50,000 on a brand new car, and in 5 years I'll buy another one.
You lot don't get that luxury. You can buy my nice, shiny Audi S5 for $12,000 when it's 10 years old and have a nice car with 70,000 miles on it. That's efficient. Your econoshitbox of today isn't on-par with a nice Audi luxury car from last decade.
Audi S5? That is so cute.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
There is an old joke about software. "Do you know why God was able to create the world in seven days? He didn't have an installed user base."
For software, maintenance is usually harder than writing new code. I assume that is also true for most products. I also agree that we need to spend more money on maintenance, especially on infrastructure. The infrastructure in the U.S. is in a deplorable state.
How is glueing in the battery so you can't replace it "Innovation"?
That is like making a car with epoxy tire attachment.
Tires are bald time to throw away the whole damn car!
And I'm scared to the bones about what Apple is going to unveil on the 30th.
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The lack of the ability to repair is a tragedy of the commons. People are willing to pay more for a sealed phone at the expense of the environment when they throw it away. The commons is the environment that nobody owns but everyone benefits from. This is exactly the sort of thing that regulation is for.
"What lies behind us, and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us." Ralph Waldo Emerson
Electronics are freakishly reliable. They basically never fail.
Wrong.
Even ignoring sloppy manufacturing and using them outside of their rated environments, electronics DO wear out with lots of use or lots of heating/cooling cycles or which is exposed to too much heat too quickly. Anything with a motor in it will wear out, including hard drives and fans.
Many a consumer-grade PC has died an early death due to mains electricity that, while clean enough for most consumers to not notice, is not as clean as the manufacturer expected. What would have lasted 10 or 20 years may last only 3/4 or half that time. Bad mains electricity can wear out a power supply and after several years, the power supply is delivering "not quite on spec" power to the motherboard and other equipment, and after a few years of that, those components become unreliable or just plain die.
I will credit you for asking the important questions about a hot or dusty environment or about not using a UPS. However, these days most consumers and many businesses don't use UPSes on non-server/non-infrastructure equipment and they may run them routinely in a home or office that, over time, is exposed to dust. Manufacturers know this, or at least they should, and they should be building things accordingly. When they don't, it's fair to complain.
I don't expect consumer/small-business-grade equipment to be the same spec or same price as enterprise or mil-spec equipment, but I do expect it to run for many, many years in a typical home or office. In some cases, home/small office equipment has to have BETTER specs than enteprise-grade equipment because you can expect or even demand (as a condition of your support contract or warranty) that enterprise-grade equipment to be on a UPS in a climate-controlled environment, but you can't expect the same for consumer- and home-office equipment.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Gee there's no way anyone could bitterly disagree about this topic.
"I think we're already headed that way. Most people change their computers a lot less than in the early days of home computing."
I dunno. Other than this year or next year's games, I can't think of much that can't be done on a 5 year old machine. Sure, add some RAM, maybe swap in a bigger or faster hard drive or go SSD, but I think what has driven consumer average non-geek computer purchases have iether been hardware failure, a new OS is released, or a new CPU is released.
In the past 5 years though the capabilities of CPUs have been stagnant from a "email and facebook" users point of view. The new Windows was helpfully installed overnight for you, so you didn't need to go buy a computer with it installed. So aside from breakage, why spend the few hundred dollars?
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
How could you make the next thing without knowing the current thing?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Stick to your day job. You have no attention to detail.
The automobile industry has elevated non-repairability to an art form, and for most parts, in a good way.
We don't want our cars to break, and we don't want to perform unnecessary maintenance. It is downtime, and downtime is bad. We also want to pay a reasonable price and have good performance.
Cars are full of moving parts, making them last forever is impossible, at least not without ridiculously heavy and expensive over-engineering. So the solution is to set an expected lifetime (250000km is typical for personal cars) and make sure that everything fails at the same time. It it fails earlier, make it stronger, if it fails later, make it lighter/cheaper. The result is car that are not repairable, because there is nothing left to repair.
I worked in aeronautics and while aircraft are much more maintainable than cars, there is still this idea of: that part will last forever, it is bad, let's make it weaker and save weight.
Deliberately making things hard to repair is bad, but good engineering should make it so that there is no need for repair.
the most innovating products were always easy to repair.
look at cars that made a difference, for example the citroen 2cv & vw beetle/golf; they were easy to take apart and repair.
the first (apple) computers basically were build your own and thus easy to repair.
if innovation makes your product hard to repair, it will be a pain to build upon for the future as well as the complexity makes it difficult or at least very expensive to advance the technology used within.
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.