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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.
If anything, it would be in the best interest of politics to enforce that things have to be repairable. If politicians put their money where their mouth is, making things repairable IS where "taking jobs home to the US" is.
That would take care of all the thinks currently done. First, repairing locally is cheaper than sending stuff halfway around the globe. Repair shops would pop up quickly where people with the skill to repair sell that skill to those that need it. It's also one of the best kinds of industries you can possibly have, because you're selling raw work force with a minimum of investment. This would be American as all hell, something where someone who has little money but lots of skill and talent can start a business. And it would instantly also take care of the postal bickering with China, because that is only a problem because sending stuff from China to the US is cheap and nothing moves the other way. China would either have to accept that fewer things get shipped over here, because the stuff isn't thrown away but repaired, or they have to accept that they, too, have to uphold their part of the deal and deliver the returns for free, too. Which they won't.
So if our politicians really were about getting jobs back, they wouldn't try to bribe large corporations into building plants here. All they really had to do is to force them to make their shit repairable. But, of course, where's the kickback in that?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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"
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.
Try replacing the (glued in) battery in that 3 year old Apple laptop. Apple design has gone way downhill since 2013 or so -- they've sacrificed good engineering on the altar of style.
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.