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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."
In Asimov's Empire books, when a society no longer recalls how to repair something, it is a sign of societal collapse.
Looks to me like a false choice.
I'm a step further, I eliminated the need of throwing the junk away by not buying it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not the engineers. Blame the business-school types who manage them, who went through the US b-school system and learned how to be better sociopaths.
As far as laptops, business-grade Dells and Lenovos (7000 series and X series) work fine, are repairable, and last long. Yeah, Apple is junk.
I have industrial machines. If manufacturers designed equipment where I could no longer repair them by myself, I'm not going to purchase their machine. I'm quite capable of designing and building my own if I have too.
And believe me, I've already met some manufacturers attempting to do so under the guise of "Litigation", "Liability", "Proprietary". They lock down their devices, do not want to give me electrical or control schematics and insist this is the way the industry always was (By the way, access is required under all our standards in both Europe and the US for industrial machines, including schematics, so go F*** yourselves). Imagine the whole debacle with locked down phones being placed on multi-million dollar machines where you're required to somehow dispose of it after 2-3 years (Or of course they'll buy it off of you for pennies and resell it for another million). A lot of equipment is designed with standard replaceable parts, the moment they try to veer from that path, I'm no longer interested.