An example of something I might do would be to take this line:
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And I turn that into this: 2bon2btitQ
Anything that could be phonetically interpreted as a number is written as a number. All words are lower case except nouns.
Therefore, all I have to do to remember that password, is to remember "to be or not to be, that is the question" and I remember that password.
Another one might be
"Mary had a little lamb who's fleece was white as snow"
which is: MhalLwFwwaS
The rules you use are half the password. And they're very easy to remember and you don't have to change them... ever. You can make them up once and then use the same rules your whole life.
Then you just remember different quotes, song lyrics, etc and you have your password.
If you need special characters in your password then you just come up with rules such as & = and etc.
You can even write these rules down.
Lets say a thief gets your rules cheat sheet.
And it says stuff like "every first letter, nouns capitalized, any word that could be phonetically interpreted as a number is written as a number, etc"... what is he going to do with that?
Its useless without knowing the text string its based on.
Mnemonics are awesome. Use them. You can make really nasty passwords that you can change all the time and never forget.
The idiots arguing with me say that technology makes it impossible to do this... but computers allow for access to repairs, modification, open standards, and upgrades.
If computers can handle it then why can't a refrigerator or a stove or anything else.
The reason they aren't that modular is because technology changes rather quickly. In five years your non-modular competition makes a better fridge because they aren't locked to supporting antiquated technology. Or do you think you have a better solution to the free market now?
What technology would make the use of modular parts for these appliances impractical?
You say technology changes rapidly?
A refrigerator has insulation, doors, racks shelves for putting things inside, a compressor, some sort of control mechanism, possibly a control panel, etc.
So what part of that couldn't be modular?
I'm thinking the insulation might be hard to be modular. But then again maybe not. Maybe you could make the metal walls come off easily so you can refill the insides with different insulation. But that is probably the hardest part to upgrade or maintain.
Racks? Easy to replace.
Compressor? Easy to replace.
Control mechanism? Do you honestly think the way the control mechanism controls the compressor has changed at all? Doubtless there some diversity but there's a motor that needs to be turned on... the control mechanism has some sort of temperature sensor and it turns it on when its tripped... end of story.
Why don't you tell me why none of this is possible so you don't sound like such a twit.
Which is why cars are replaced wholesale whenever any little part of them breaks. Its why big industrial machinery is just replaced when any little part breaks.
Not at all. Beyond your fixation on the format of my post, the content and points I'm making are novel to the thread and insightful to the issue. While it is possible that someone could be literate and a moron... I find that people with literary issue tend to also be morons.
And it goes without saying, that ideally I'd like to interact with people that are neither illiterate nor morons.
Someone of that character should find value in my post. Though again, I grant there is such a thing as a literate moron.
that ignores the point that they're not designed to be taken apart easily or maintained. They could be.
Furthermore, large bits of these machines could be modular so that if you are unsure and just need to replace a whole portion of the machine it could be easy.
I've seen machines designed this way. Broken down into segments that snap together.
That's fine... as I said, its a step in the right direction but its not really sufficient.
Things simply lasting for five years instead of 2 and then breaking and being unrepairable/unupgradable is not acceptable.
I should be able to sustain the same machine almost indefinitely.
I should be able to buy a washing machine at age 20 and change out modular parts over my lifetime such that by the time I'm 90 the machine is quite a bit different from when I bought it but still includes many of the original parts that never needed to change over the years.
Take a gas oven for another example. I own several of them. I have one that was built in the 1930s and it still works just fine. We had to have a valve replaced about 10 years ago but beyond that it has worked flawlessly for as long as I've owned it.
I have other gas stoves and none of them are as robust as that old oven. The old oven furthermore wasn't expensive when it was first made. It was just properly built. The metal is quite a bit thicker then any of the other machines which doubtless would make it more expensive today. But I really don't think it would make that much of a difference if it were more common. Furthermore... this thing really will never break. Most of its parts are extremely robust and simply don't wear significantly. What is more, replacing a couple of these parts every 20 to 50 years is cheap. Even now they can get the old parts. I call a repair company, they come out, they have the parts which were not custom... they're totally standard parts that are still manufactured... they replace those... and all is well.
Its the best stove ever. I have a newer stove that is always wrong about what temperature is in the oven. We have to use an independent thermometer to know what temperature it is in the newer stove. But in the old one... you turn the dial to 350... and its 350 degrees in there. Almost exactly.
We can still build this way if we want to... it would be better for the environment, better for the economy, and our machinery and appliances would just be less shitty.
This plastic garbage we're making everything out of these days is a joke. I buy some machine and it dies after a couple weeks. I take it apart and I find little plastic gears and bearings in the innards... PLASTIC GEARS... and these are often in machines with a good deal of torque or heat in those mechanisms.
One of the more depressing examples of this was the Roomba which I bought a few years ago. The morons used plastic gears in the innards of the Roomba. Well, guess what gets hot... those little brush wheels that spin really fast to grab hair out of your carpet... well, those brush wheels are turned by a plastic gear... and that plastic gear gets so hot it literally melts itself from friction alone.
There are some good souls online that offer alluminum gears custom milled for the roomba that they hacked together from small CNC machines. That's literally the only way you can make the roomba models that have this defect reliable.
And that's just one of many many examples of this sort of thing. I see this a lot with printers... especially newer laser printers. The older laser printers were built like brick shit houses. You couldn't stop one of those with an elephant rifle. We have a few of those at the office that have been in continuous operation since I think 1992. All we've ever had to do is change out some little rubber grippers that mummified over the years and got so bridle that they couldn't grab paper anymore. So we ripped the rubber off and replaced it with new bits of rubber. And the printers were instantly good as new. Seriously. Perfect prints again.
The rubber pads set us back about 10 dollars for 20 printers.
Look. I'm all in favor of new tech. I love open source. I'm a huge fan of the maker revolution... I think if industry can't get their heads out of their asses on this issue that we should just start making our own stuff. Do that and suddenly the economics of design change. People stop skimpi
As to replacing things being more efficient because new things might be better built... I also said things should have modular components that allow for upgrades.
Really, disagreeing with me on this issue is beneath the Slashdot community... or at least it used to be... I don't know where all these techno-illiterates came from but they've clearly infested the place.
thank... in too many of these threads I sometimes feel like last human being amongst the apes. Its cathartic to run into someone reasonable every so often.
That's a step in the right direction but its not ultimately headed to the same place.
I don't want to know what the estimated repair cost of the machine is... I want the machine to be very easy to repair and ideally require as little resource input as possible to do it... which include labor.
Components should be built to last a long long time. And things that might need to be replaced should be examined to see if they can be designed differently so that the part rather then failing merely needs to be cleaned or something every so often... and make that process as easy as possible.
Additionally, the "disposable printer" business model should be strongly discouraged. That sort of thing is just idiocy on ice.
As to warranties, that's one way to do it. It is not my preferred method.
I'd prefer something consensual. A trade alliance or quasi governmental panel that assessed the ease of upgrade, repair, maintenance, robustness of a given product and issued ratings for them.
Then let companies use their rating on their sales information. Then do some PSAs that associate the rating with how green something is... and get some help from the various opinion makers to get the information disseminated.
IF people want to keep buying easily disposable stuff I would like to try first not forcing them to buy something else. I'd like to see what can be accomplished first why simply organizing and informing people.
The current system is doing so in a largely self defeating fashion that I'd like to avoid.
I also have another major problem with the warranty system in that I am a big believer in small businesses and people being able to get enterprise going on a shoe string. If you put additional burdens on new businesses and small businesses you may find that they can't operate and everything becomes mega corporations that can of course afford to warranty things forever.
Another point here is licensing. So your point about warranties is interesting but what about if companies released detailed specs for all their products and offered reasonable licenses for companies to make replacement parts. That way if a company goes out of business or stops supporting a product because its very old or whatever you can still get replacement parts because the specs are online and between a 3d printer, a CNC machine, and some commonly found components you can continue to produce the widget that the product needs every so often.
The other issue with warranties is that they can make products a lot more expensive. I'd like to avoid that as well.
As to modular products being more failure prone... only if the linkages are badly designed. What is more, in industrial machinary everything is repaired before it is replaced which means products tend to be more repairable because there is an assumption by the consumer in that market that they'll be able to repair it.
Take a jet engine you buy from GE or a steel press or any number of devices from the oil industry... all of it is accessible to repair and maintenance. There is also a high degree of modularity especially in any feature of the device prone to wear.
Look at an oil drill. Do they replace the whole drill, gantry, shaft, motor etc every single time the drill head wears out? Obviously not. And there are literally hundreds of other parts that wear out at various intervals that are replaced or repaired rather then scrapping the whole thing and starting over every single time.
I'm sorry, the problem is that you think you're making an economic argument when really what you're making is an argument about convenience which is itself an artificial product of intentionally or unintentionally bad product design.
If you can build robust reliable modularity into an oil well, then you can manage the same into a washing machine. The oil well is orders of magnitude more complicated and has far sharper economic considerations. Oil companies don't give shit what oil wells look like. They care about money it takes to build them, operate them, and what they get out of them. End of story. You'll find nothing as pure as that in consumer product design. And in that environment they find no trouble meeting my requirements.
If washing machines etc were designed with half that aesthetic most of our environmental problems would be moot.
If the rental cars are likewise repaired when they break down then I have not moved back to a replacement system. I've merely built in some redundancy to buffer the system.
As to costs, we're talking about environmental damage. Not cost.
The cost to the environment is less with a repair system.
The above is obvious. Stop pointing at the sun and denying its existence. Its silly.
The trick is to use technology so alien from the attacker that they can't interface with it.
To that end, I think it would be more practical to redesign certain computer systems especially involving networking.
Totally alien networking protocols. Stuff so different that nothing else on earth can interface with it or even knows how it works.
I'm talking about something beyond encryption. Totally divergent interface languages. Different to the machine code level. Ideally with no precedent.
And while you're at it, consider using "one time pad" type encryption keys for the exchange of larger encryption keys. Something that even if intercepted could not be decrypted... literally impossible.
Do that and any attacker can sit on their thumbs and spin.
You found a typo in my post... wow... I'm just crushed.
*laughs*
Oh well.
Have you noticed amongst your sputtering that you've not actually offered a counter argument on topic? Rather you're just continuing to double down in this pathetic attempt to one up ME at condescension.
Utterly futile. I'm better at it. Your best bet is to try to argue the issue as rationally as you're able. Since you're wrong this will also fail. But its your best shot.
Playing rhetorical games will fail... I know them better then you.
Attempting to wound my ego is totally pointless since I don't take you seriously enough to make that possible.
And clouding the issue with your babble is pointless because I start every single post by glancing at the topic title... thus remembering what we're talking about... and not being at all impressed with your evasions.
So what do you conclude as your next best option, sport? More stupid insults? More circular logic?
I don't believe I am inherently superior to you. I really wouldn't know. All I know is that my posts are superior to your posts. They are. Now you might be superior to me... you might be the smartest man that ever was and ever will be... your posts are fucking stupid.
So if you're not inferior... try harder. Because your posts have thus far been pathetic.
For the sake of argument, lets say I just conceded textiles entirely... would that diminish my over all point at all?
Nope.
So with that understanding, lets talk about textiles.
Generally, they're very hard to repair because the weave breaks down at microscopic level in some cases.
That said, if you WANTED to recycle them into further clothing or textile products it wouldn't be that hard. In the case of natural fibers, you'd blend or rend the material until it was uniform. This will give you very short strands which won't be good for a lot of things but it could be used for paper or anything else that can be made from short natural fibers.
In the case of artificial fibers, most such materials can be broken down chemically and reconstituted into their original polymers. Where in they could be weaved, cut, and sown back into whatever final textile product you wanted.
By and large, the textile industry is already able to do this and probably already does do it to some extent.
If this is considered insufficiently efficient, then we could design modular clothing.
Clothing rarely wears evenly. Your whole sock doesn't disapear all at once. The heel wears out or the toe or the elastic that keeps it tight degrades. So what if you saw a sock as four or five components and rather then replacing the whole sock, you instead removed the degraded portion and replaced it with a new part. Just replace the heel of the sock or whatever wore out.
Then recycle the portion that was degraded. You could do the same thing with any article of clothing. Shirts, underwear, pants, belts, shoes, etc.
This is likely less practical then doing the above with machines... and more problematic it would be a fashion/culture issue where people would choose to not do things this way for aesthetic reasons. But assuming this wasn't an issue you could do things that way.
And again... even if I concede textiles... it wouldn't impact the larger argument.
First off, I do that when I've noticed a lack of reading comprehension in the people reading my posts.
I break up lines because I find that people sometimes skip over sentences, only reading the first and last in each paragraph.
So break it out so they don't do that and consequently seem to actually read my post instead of continuously coming up with stupid argument that I've already shut down in previous posts but which they never read because they were too busy being skimming jackasses.
^^ The above only was written because you whined about something I was forced to do by people that were not reading my post.
Second, as to where you live, you've in no way countered any of my arguments. So whether my brain is open or not isn't relevant since you're not even attempting to make a counter point.
If you are planning on fixing things on demand, you have to have a massive supply of spare parts.
irrelevant when compared to maintaining spare machines.
The spare parts take up less space, cost less, etc.
So this is irrelevant.
Some of those spare parts will end up being unused. The alternative is to ship them on demand, but that tends to cost more. With logistics there is no free lunch. You pay either in time or cost (environmental or monetary). Like the price of a used item is usually less than the sum of its parts, because of accumulated risk of something breaking.
Some machines go unused and unsold. Furthermore, spare parts should be interchangeable between different models and machines. A screw for one machine should work for something besides that one other machine. As such this system would be more efficient then the current system.
Think about the numbers, you have around twenty everyday objects, and each of those includes many parts that are unique to a specific model.
Circular logic. You're saying that if we don't change the way we build things then shift to a repair and upgrade model instead of a throw away and replace model that it won't work because everything will still be designed around a throw away and replace model.
Well I think I was pretty fucking clear that the whole design methodology would have to change.
As such, under what I'm talking about you wouldn't have that much needless diversity of components unless the diversity actually served some kind of purpose.
Since it almost never does it would be considered "non-green" to use such elements that serve no purpose and create additional waste in the supply chain.
That said, even if you did retain those spare parts for all that diversity, it would still use less resources then the wholesale throwing away of everything every time there is some small malfunction in the machine.
You are not alone in this world, so the next guy has his own set of stuff that will break unpredictably. Instead of having twenty items on sale, a repair shop has to have 20*a*b items. This could change with 3D printing but I digress.
Wrong. We used to have repair shops for all sorts of stuff. It used to be much more common. They were able to keep on inventory all the parts they needed to repair things. vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, lamps...
Look at the modern car... What happens when your car breaks. Do you get a new car? Or do you get it repaired?
If your argument were even remotely sensible, then the repair shop would be less efficient and would take up more space then the dealership.
But your point isn't even remotely sensible... and you're wrong.
Utterly and totally wrong without even a shred of being even a little bit correct.
not even a little. Nothing. Utterly wrong.
I'm not debating with you about whether 1+1=2. I'm sorry... I can't deal with it. I'm going to just start flaming you if I keep having this conversation.
You're wrong and you don't understand what you're talking about. So we're going to disagree.
I for my own part agree to disagree with you. You believe whatever the fuck you want and I'll get to be right.
The point I'm making is that we don't have to give up the modern conveniences so long as we stop doing things in a stupid way.
We are suffering from systemic intellectual laziness.
Take air conditioning. Its very expensive from an energy stand point. Same thing with heating.
A large amount of the total energy we produce and use in this society goes to making rooms cooler or hotter.
Okay... but we could do the exact same thing without using so much energy.
Biggest thing would be make use of geothermal energy. Which is not a reference to the machines that tap lava flows in Iceland.
Ever been in an old cathedral? I went to Italy some years ago in the middle of the summer. It was absurdly hot. Everyone in italy just goes to sleep when it gets like that. The whole city literally just takes a nap.
But I'm an American and I don't do that. So I'm walking around this city while its so hot that I feel like I'm going to die... literally. And I see this big cathedral and I figure... might as well go in there.
Well, it was about 75 degrees inside that building. No air conditioning. Just stone going down to bed rock with thick columns and thick walls of stone.
Result? The doors were wide open... giant doors... wide open to the plus 98 degree temps outside. And it was 75 degrees inside with no active energy expenditure. Just the temperature of the earth cooling the inside of the building.
Guess who wins... the temperature of the planet earth or a summer day? Earth wins every time. Its not a contest. Its one force of nature coming up against a bigger force of nature and suppressing it.
We could do the same thing. We see geo thermal cooling and heating systems proposed all the time. They run pipes into the ground, they build thicker walls, they do all sorts of stuff. And it all works.
The point I'm making is that we can keep our modern standard of living. We just need to not do things stupidly.
And that includes our environmentalism which is just as stupid, shallow, and ignorant as everything else.
The cost of labor is influenced by the design of the machines. They're not designed to be repaired or maintained.
They don't use modular parts that can be easily swapped out or upgraded. Everything is intentionally made to be difficult to maintain.
How many machines have you taken apart? Imagine for a moment you were a designer of such machines. How would you design the machine if you wanted it to be easy to fix, maintain, examine for problems, etc?
Completely differently.
If the machines were built properly they'd be cheap to fix. What is more, most people could just do it themselves. Like replacing a lightbulb in most cases.
Do you buy a new house when a light bulb burns out in your home?
That is precisely what most people are doing when they buy a machine because the last one "broke"... it didn't break. Some little part in it wore out. That's it.
I have some older laser printer that have been in continual operation for 20 years.
TWENTY YEARS. Do you know how I've kept those going? I bought the replacement parts. They were 3D printed by a guy in Idaho.
Cost me 40 dollars to buy the bits. They're tiny little bits of plastic with little bits of rubber stop grabbing the paper properly after about 10 years.
What was cheaper? Replacing 20 laser printers or buying replacement parts?
And now you might say "oh but those printers aren't as fast or have as many features as the new ones or the drivers are hard to get working."... True on all counts.
The poor performance of those printers isn't really a problem since everyone pretty much just has their own printer and they're more then sufficient for that task.
And assuming you wanted to get better performance could be upgraded by swapping out some old parts with some new ones. Most of the printer has nothing wrong with it. Some electronics and motors might need to be swapped at most. A tiny fraction of the mass of the whole printer.
The drivers is a pain in the ass but that's just a question of poor support rather then something inherent.
Long story short, you like having disposable machines? Fine... never complain about the environment or the damage you're doing to it then. Because that attitude is what is causing the problem. If more people like you saw the light this whole issue would just go away.
Spare parts take fewer resources to produce then building a whole new thing.
As to distributing massive amount of spare parts... why so massive? If the spare parts are built to last then you shouldn't have to replace things that often. You should get competition between companies to produce better longer lasting spare parts.
Buy our product, it lasts twice as long. etc.
There is no comparison between spare parts and replacing the whole thing. Spare parts will always have a lower debt on the environment then replacing the whole thing every time some little part wears out.
How can you possibly think that replacing a whole machine has a lower environmental debt then replacing a tiny piece of that machine?
What you're almost literally saying is that 1 can be a larger number then 1000.
No it can't.
1 is less then 1000. What you said is actually just making me angry with how wrong it is... I have a strong urge to rage and flame you because its so frustrating to hear an argument that is so obviously wrong.
Please think.
Can it be cheaper to replace a whole thing rather then a spare part? Yes. But that is because the machines are built poorly to accept maintenance. The parts are often welded or sodered together rather then fitted modularly. Furthermore, even accessing the interior of most machines is difficult because they're not built to be taken apart.
Change that as well as standardizing internal parts and labeling each and every little bit so that you can buy JUST that bit if you need it. And then you can take the machine apart easily, find the broken bit, buy just that, and fix it.
Or if you're not the handy sort, there will be a lot of local shops that will do it for you. Drop off your broken machine and pick it up in an hour good as new.
Most things aren't completely new but rather simply have a new PART. Replace that part and you almost always have something equal in capability to the "new thing" that new part is often very small and relatively inexpensive to produce when compared to the whole.
We literally build things to fall apart. The waste from that alone is staggering.
Imagine if practically everything where build to last, be easily repaired, easily upgraded, etc.
When your washing machine breaks did the whole thing break or did a 2 cent nut break? Exactly. But it isn't practical to repair it because its so difficult that its cheaper to just buy a new one.
This is by design. What is more, the parts are intentionally designed to all wear out. They use plastic for parts of machines that should be in metal... parts that experience heat that over time melt and deform. This causes big parts of the machine to fail.
Then you have parts that really must wear out like light bulbs but they aren't modular.
If we did this the amount of things we needed to get made on a regular basis would fall dramatically.
This would have a bigger influence on climate change then any other idea proposed... EVER.
But no one wants to do it because it would effect our industrial supply chain that change the whole way everything is made.
Well, until we do this... all climate change talk is a waste of time largely propagated my the incurious and the stupid.
I have no patience for those discussions... they're a waste of time.
We don't need carbon caps. All that does is give governments an excuse to raise taxes which is the only reason the politicians are even interested in this discussion.
What we need is to change our industrial model. And the sick thing is that if we do this we won't even suffer for it. We'll maintain our existing standard of living. All of it. The gains in efficiency will so outstrip everything that it won't matter. The amount of STUFF that has to be made on a yearly basis could fall to less then a tenth of what we currently produce. Which means the carbon debt of our industry without any effort to make it use less carbon per unit production would fall to a tenth.
This would also mean we wouldn't need to import all this shit from china because if you're buying a lot less you can afford to pay more. US manufacturing costs are at most 20 percent higher then china. If you're purchases fall to 10 percent then paying 20 percent more then 10 percent is easily justified.
This is the solution. It has always been the solution. Until this happens... nothing in the discussion of climate change is relevant. Its just hot air.
Slashdot Mirror
Its very easy.
I use lines of poetry or songs.
An example of something I might do would be to take this line:
To be or not to be, that is the question.
And I turn that into this:
2bon2btitQ
Anything that could be phonetically interpreted as a number is written as a number. All words are lower case except nouns.
Therefore, all I have to do to remember that password, is to remember "to be or not to be, that is the question" and I remember that password.
Another one might be
"Mary had a little lamb who's fleece was white as snow"
which is:
MhalLwFwwaS
The rules you use are half the password. And they're very easy to remember and you don't have to change them... ever. You can make them up once and then use the same rules your whole life.
Then you just remember different quotes, song lyrics, etc and you have your password.
If you need special characters in your password then you just come up with rules such as & = and etc.
You can even write these rules down.
Lets say a thief gets your rules cheat sheet.
And it says stuff like "every first letter, nouns capitalized, any word that could be phonetically interpreted as a number is written as a number, etc"... what is he going to do with that?
Its useless without knowing the text string its based on.
Mnemonics are awesome. Use them. You can make really nasty passwords that you can change all the time and never forget.
Cars are not the only exception.
The idiots arguing with me say that technology makes it impossible to do this... but computers allow for access to repairs, modification, open standards, and upgrades.
If computers can handle it then why can't a refrigerator or a stove or anything else.
I'm sorry. You're wrong. Don't be a moron.
Skipping over the sad attempts to insult...
What technology would make the use of modular parts for these appliances impractical?
You say technology changes rapidly?
A refrigerator has insulation, doors, racks shelves for putting things inside, a compressor, some sort of control mechanism, possibly a control panel, etc.
So what part of that couldn't be modular?
I'm thinking the insulation might be hard to be modular. But then again maybe not. Maybe you could make the metal walls come off easily so you can refill the insides with different insulation. But that is probably the hardest part to upgrade or maintain.
Racks? Easy to replace.
Compressor? Easy to replace.
Control mechanism? Do you honestly think the way the control mechanism controls the compressor has changed at all? Doubtless there some diversity but there's a motor that needs to be turned on... the control mechanism has some sort of temperature sensor and it turns it on when its tripped... end of story.
Why don't you tell me why none of this is possible so you don't sound like such a twit.
Which is why cars are replaced wholesale whenever any little part of them breaks. Its why big industrial machinery is just replaced when any little part breaks.
Or you're wrong.
End of story.
Not at all. Beyond your fixation on the format of my post, the content and points I'm making are novel to the thread and insightful to the issue. While it is possible that someone could be literate and a moron... I find that people with literary issue tend to also be morons.
And it goes without saying, that ideally I'd like to interact with people that are neither illiterate nor morons.
Someone of that character should find value in my post. Though again, I grant there is such a thing as a literate moron.
that ignores the point that they're not designed to be taken apart easily or maintained. They could be.
Furthermore, large bits of these machines could be modular so that if you are unsure and just need to replace a whole portion of the machine it could be easy.
I've seen machines designed this way. Broken down into segments that snap together.
Why can't a compressor be modular? You make these statements and back none of it up, toss off a stupid insult, and then claim victory.
You're a twit.
That's fine... as I said, its a step in the right direction but its not really sufficient.
Things simply lasting for five years instead of 2 and then breaking and being unrepairable/unupgradable is not acceptable.
I should be able to sustain the same machine almost indefinitely.
I should be able to buy a washing machine at age 20 and change out modular parts over my lifetime such that by the time I'm 90 the machine is quite a bit different from when I bought it but still includes many of the original parts that never needed to change over the years.
Take a gas oven for another example. I own several of them. I have one that was built in the 1930s and it still works just fine. We had to have a valve replaced about 10 years ago but beyond that it has worked flawlessly for as long as I've owned it.
I have other gas stoves and none of them are as robust as that old oven. The old oven furthermore wasn't expensive when it was first made. It was just properly built. The metal is quite a bit thicker then any of the other machines which doubtless would make it more expensive today. But I really don't think it would make that much of a difference if it were more common. Furthermore... this thing really will never break. Most of its parts are extremely robust and simply don't wear significantly. What is more, replacing a couple of these parts every 20 to 50 years is cheap. Even now they can get the old parts. I call a repair company, they come out, they have the parts which were not custom... they're totally standard parts that are still manufactured... they replace those... and all is well.
Its the best stove ever. I have a newer stove that is always wrong about what temperature is in the oven. We have to use an independent thermometer to know what temperature it is in the newer stove. But in the old one... you turn the dial to 350... and its 350 degrees in there. Almost exactly.
We can still build this way if we want to... it would be better for the environment, better for the economy, and our machinery and appliances would just be less shitty.
This plastic garbage we're making everything out of these days is a joke. I buy some machine and it dies after a couple weeks. I take it apart and I find little plastic gears and bearings in the innards... PLASTIC GEARS... and these are often in machines with a good deal of torque or heat in those mechanisms.
One of the more depressing examples of this was the Roomba which I bought a few years ago. The morons used plastic gears in the innards of the Roomba. Well, guess what gets hot... those little brush wheels that spin really fast to grab hair out of your carpet... well, those brush wheels are turned by a plastic gear... and that plastic gear gets so hot it literally melts itself from friction alone.
There are some good souls online that offer alluminum gears custom milled for the roomba that they hacked together from small CNC machines. That's literally the only way you can make the roomba models that have this defect reliable.
And that's just one of many many examples of this sort of thing. I see this a lot with printers... especially newer laser printers. The older laser printers were built like brick shit houses. You couldn't stop one of those with an elephant rifle. We have a few of those at the office that have been in continuous operation since I think 1992. All we've ever had to do is change out some little rubber grippers that mummified over the years and got so bridle that they couldn't grab paper anymore. So we ripped the rubber off and replaced it with new bits of rubber. And the printers were instantly good as new. Seriously. Perfect prints again.
The rubber pads set us back about 10 dollars for 20 printers.
Look. I'm all in favor of new tech. I love open source. I'm a huge fan of the maker revolution... I think if industry can't get their heads out of their asses on this issue that we should just start making our own stuff. Do that and suddenly the economics of design change. People stop skimpi
As to replacing things being more efficient because new things might be better built... I also said things should have modular components that allow for upgrades.
Really, disagreeing with me on this issue is beneath the Slashdot community... or at least it used to be... I don't know where all these techno-illiterates came from but they've clearly infested the place.
thank... in too many of these threads I sometimes feel like last human being amongst the apes. Its cathartic to run into someone reasonable every so often.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
That's a step in the right direction but its not ultimately headed to the same place.
I don't want to know what the estimated repair cost of the machine is... I want the machine to be very easy to repair and ideally require as little resource input as possible to do it... which include labor.
Components should be built to last a long long time. And things that might need to be replaced should be examined to see if they can be designed differently so that the part rather then failing merely needs to be cleaned or something every so often... and make that process as easy as possible.
Additionally, the "disposable printer" business model should be strongly discouraged. That sort of thing is just idiocy on ice.
As to warranties, that's one way to do it. It is not my preferred method.
I'd prefer something consensual. A trade alliance or quasi governmental panel that assessed the ease of upgrade, repair, maintenance, robustness of a given product and issued ratings for them.
Then let companies use their rating on their sales information. Then do some PSAs that associate the rating with how green something is... and get some help from the various opinion makers to get the information disseminated.
IF people want to keep buying easily disposable stuff I would like to try first not forcing them to buy something else. I'd like to see what can be accomplished first why simply organizing and informing people.
The current system is doing so in a largely self defeating fashion that I'd like to avoid.
I also have another major problem with the warranty system in that I am a big believer in small businesses and people being able to get enterprise going on a shoe string. If you put additional burdens on new businesses and small businesses you may find that they can't operate and everything becomes mega corporations that can of course afford to warranty things forever.
Another point here is licensing. So your point about warranties is interesting but what about if companies released detailed specs for all their products and offered reasonable licenses for companies to make replacement parts. That way if a company goes out of business or stops supporting a product because its very old or whatever you can still get replacement parts because the specs are online and between a 3d printer, a CNC machine, and some commonly found components you can continue to produce the widget that the product needs every so often.
The other issue with warranties is that they can make products a lot more expensive. I'd like to avoid that as well.
As to modular products being more failure prone... only if the linkages are badly designed. What is more, in industrial machinary everything is repaired before it is replaced which means products tend to be more repairable because there is an assumption by the consumer in that market that they'll be able to repair it.
Take a jet engine you buy from GE or a steel press or any number of devices from the oil industry... all of it is accessible to repair and maintenance. There is also a high degree of modularity especially in any feature of the device prone to wear.
Look at an oil drill. Do they replace the whole drill, gantry, shaft, motor etc every single time the drill head wears out? Obviously not. And there are literally hundreds of other parts that wear out at various intervals that are replaced or repaired rather then scrapping the whole thing and starting over every single time.
I'm sorry, the problem is that you think you're making an economic argument when really what you're making is an argument about convenience which is itself an artificial product of intentionally or unintentionally bad product design.
If you can build robust reliable modularity into an oil well, then you can manage the same into a washing machine. The oil well is orders of magnitude more complicated and has far sharper economic considerations. Oil companies don't give shit what oil wells look like. They care about money it takes to build them, operate them, and what they get out of them. End of story. You'll find nothing as pure as that in consumer product design. And in that environment they find no trouble meeting my requirements.
If washing machines etc were designed with half that aesthetic most of our environmental problems would be moot.
If the rental cars are likewise repaired when they break down then I have not moved back to a replacement system. I've merely built in some redundancy to buffer the system.
As to costs, we're talking about environmental damage. Not cost.
The cost to the environment is less with a repair system.
The above is obvious. Stop pointing at the sun and denying its existence. Its silly.
The trick is to use technology so alien from the attacker that they can't interface with it.
To that end, I think it would be more practical to redesign certain computer systems especially involving networking.
Totally alien networking protocols. Stuff so different that nothing else on earth can interface with it or even knows how it works.
I'm talking about something beyond encryption. Totally divergent interface languages. Different to the machine code level. Ideally with no precedent.
And while you're at it, consider using "one time pad" type encryption keys for the exchange of larger encryption keys. Something that even if intercepted could not be decrypted... literally impossible.
Do that and any attacker can sit on their thumbs and spin.
You found a typo in my post... wow... I'm just crushed.
*laughs*
Oh well.
Have you noticed amongst your sputtering that you've not actually offered a counter argument on topic? Rather you're just continuing to double down in this pathetic attempt to one up ME at condescension.
Utterly futile. I'm better at it. Your best bet is to try to argue the issue as rationally as you're able. Since you're wrong this will also fail. But its your best shot.
Playing rhetorical games will fail... I know them better then you.
Attempting to wound my ego is totally pointless since I don't take you seriously enough to make that possible.
And clouding the issue with your babble is pointless because I start every single post by glancing at the topic title... thus remembering what we're talking about... and not being at all impressed with your evasions.
So what do you conclude as your next best option, sport? More stupid insults? More circular logic?
I don't believe I am inherently superior to you. I really wouldn't know. All I know is that my posts are superior to your posts. They are. Now you might be superior to me... you might be the smartest man that ever was and ever will be... your posts are fucking stupid.
So if you're not inferior... try harder. Because your posts have thus far been pathetic.
For the sake of argument, lets say I just conceded textiles entirely... would that diminish my over all point at all?
Nope.
So with that understanding, lets talk about textiles.
Generally, they're very hard to repair because the weave breaks down at microscopic level in some cases.
That said, if you WANTED to recycle them into further clothing or textile products it wouldn't be that hard. In the case of natural fibers, you'd blend or rend the material until it was uniform. This will give you very short strands which won't be good for a lot of things but it could be used for paper or anything else that can be made from short natural fibers.
In the case of artificial fibers, most such materials can be broken down chemically and reconstituted into their original polymers. Where in they could be weaved, cut, and sown back into whatever final textile product you wanted.
By and large, the textile industry is already able to do this and probably already does do it to some extent.
If this is considered insufficiently efficient, then we could design modular clothing.
Clothing rarely wears evenly. Your whole sock doesn't disapear all at once. The heel wears out or the toe or the elastic that keeps it tight degrades. So what if you saw a sock as four or five components and rather then replacing the whole sock, you instead removed the degraded portion and replaced it with a new part. Just replace the heel of the sock or whatever wore out.
Then recycle the portion that was degraded. You could do the same thing with any article of clothing. Shirts, underwear, pants, belts, shoes, etc.
This is likely less practical then doing the above with machines... and more problematic it would be a fashion/culture issue where people would choose to not do things this way for aesthetic reasons. But assuming this wasn't an issue you could do things that way.
And again... even if I concede textiles... it wouldn't impact the larger argument.
Oh that old chess nut?
Okay... I'll just dig into the old box that has its counter:
""So anyone that thinks YOU are wrong must think everyone is wrong and must also themselves be conceited and crazy?""
Do you have something better? Or is this really all you've got?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
First off, I do that when I've noticed a lack of reading comprehension in the people reading my posts.
I break up lines because I find that people sometimes skip over sentences, only reading the first and last in each paragraph.
So break it out so they don't do that and consequently seem to actually read my post instead of continuously coming up with stupid argument that I've already shut down in previous posts but which they never read because they were too busy being skimming jackasses.
^^ The above only was written because you whined about something I was forced to do by people that were not reading my post.
Second, as to where you live, you've in no way countered any of my arguments. So whether my brain is open or not isn't relevant since you're not even attempting to make a counter point.
irrelevant when compared to maintaining spare machines.
The spare parts take up less space, cost less, etc.
So this is irrelevant.
Some machines go unused and unsold. Furthermore, spare parts should be interchangeable between different models and machines. A screw for one machine should work for something besides that one other machine. As such this system would be more efficient then the current system.
Circular logic. You're saying that if we don't change the way we build things then shift to a repair and upgrade model instead of a throw away and replace model that it won't work because everything will still be designed around a throw away and replace model.
Well I think I was pretty fucking clear that the whole design methodology would have to change.
As such, under what I'm talking about you wouldn't have that much needless diversity of components unless the diversity actually served some kind of purpose.
Since it almost never does it would be considered "non-green" to use such elements that serve no purpose and create additional waste in the supply chain.
That said, even if you did retain those spare parts for all that diversity, it would still use less resources then the wholesale throwing away of everything every time there is some small malfunction in the machine.
Wrong. We used to have repair shops for all sorts of stuff. It used to be much more common. They were able to keep on inventory all the parts they needed to repair things. vacuum cleaners, dishwashers, lamps...
Look at the modern car... What happens when your car breaks. Do you get a new car? Or do you get it repaired?
If your argument were even remotely sensible, then the repair shop would be less efficient and would take up more space then the dealership.
But your point isn't even remotely sensible... and you're wrong.
Utterly and totally wrong without even a shred of being even a little bit correct.
not even a little. Nothing. Utterly wrong.
I'm not debating with you about whether 1+1=2. I'm sorry... I can't deal with it. I'm going to just start flaming you if I keep having this conversation.
You're wrong and you don't understand what you're talking about. So we're going to disagree.
I for my own part agree to disagree with you. You believe whatever the fuck you want and I'll get to be right.
Good day, sir.
The point I'm making is that we don't have to give up the modern conveniences so long as we stop doing things in a stupid way.
We are suffering from systemic intellectual laziness.
Take air conditioning. Its very expensive from an energy stand point. Same thing with heating.
A large amount of the total energy we produce and use in this society goes to making rooms cooler or hotter.
Okay... but we could do the exact same thing without using so much energy.
Biggest thing would be make use of geothermal energy. Which is not a reference to the machines that tap lava flows in Iceland.
Ever been in an old cathedral? I went to Italy some years ago in the middle of the summer. It was absurdly hot. Everyone in italy just goes to sleep when it gets like that. The whole city literally just takes a nap.
But I'm an American and I don't do that. So I'm walking around this city while its so hot that I feel like I'm going to die... literally. And I see this big cathedral and I figure... might as well go in there.
Well, it was about 75 degrees inside that building. No air conditioning. Just stone going down to bed rock with thick columns and thick walls of stone.
Result? The doors were wide open... giant doors... wide open to the plus 98 degree temps outside. And it was 75 degrees inside with no active energy expenditure. Just the temperature of the earth cooling the inside of the building.
Guess who wins... the temperature of the planet earth or a summer day? Earth wins every time. Its not a contest. Its one force of nature coming up against a bigger force of nature and suppressing it.
We could do the same thing. We see geo thermal cooling and heating systems proposed all the time. They run pipes into the ground, they build thicker walls, they do all sorts of stuff. And it all works.
The point I'm making is that we can keep our modern standard of living. We just need to not do things stupidly.
And that includes our environmentalism which is just as stupid, shallow, and ignorant as everything else.
Wrong.
The cost of labor is influenced by the design of the machines. They're not designed to be repaired or maintained.
They don't use modular parts that can be easily swapped out or upgraded. Everything is intentionally made to be difficult to maintain.
How many machines have you taken apart? Imagine for a moment you were a designer of such machines. How would you design the machine if you wanted it to be easy to fix, maintain, examine for problems, etc?
Completely differently.
If the machines were built properly they'd be cheap to fix. What is more, most people could just do it themselves. Like replacing a lightbulb in most cases.
Do you buy a new house when a light bulb burns out in your home?
That is precisely what most people are doing when they buy a machine because the last one "broke"... it didn't break. Some little part in it wore out. That's it.
I have some older laser printer that have been in continual operation for 20 years.
TWENTY YEARS. Do you know how I've kept those going? I bought the replacement parts. They were 3D printed by a guy in Idaho.
Cost me 40 dollars to buy the bits. They're tiny little bits of plastic with little bits of rubber stop grabbing the paper properly after about 10 years.
What was cheaper? Replacing 20 laser printers or buying replacement parts?
And now you might say "oh but those printers aren't as fast or have as many features as the new ones or the drivers are hard to get working."... True on all counts.
The poor performance of those printers isn't really a problem since everyone pretty much just has their own printer and they're more then sufficient for that task.
And assuming you wanted to get better performance could be upgraded by swapping out some old parts with some new ones. Most of the printer has nothing wrong with it. Some electronics and motors might need to be swapped at most. A tiny fraction of the mass of the whole printer.
The drivers is a pain in the ass but that's just a question of poor support rather then something inherent.
Long story short, you like having disposable machines? Fine... never complain about the environment or the damage you're doing to it then. Because that attitude is what is causing the problem. If more people like you saw the light this whole issue would just go away.
Nonsense.
Spare parts take fewer resources to produce then building a whole new thing.
As to distributing massive amount of spare parts... why so massive? If the spare parts are built to last then you shouldn't have to replace things that often. You should get competition between companies to produce better longer lasting spare parts.
Buy our product, it lasts twice as long. etc.
There is no comparison between spare parts and replacing the whole thing. Spare parts will always have a lower debt on the environment then replacing the whole thing every time some little part wears out.
How can you possibly think that replacing a whole machine has a lower environmental debt then replacing a tiny piece of that machine?
What you're almost literally saying is that 1 can be a larger number then 1000.
No it can't.
1 is less then 1000. What you said is actually just making me angry with how wrong it is... I have a strong urge to rage and flame you because its so frustrating to hear an argument that is so obviously wrong.
Please think.
Can it be cheaper to replace a whole thing rather then a spare part? Yes. But that is because the machines are built poorly to accept maintenance. The parts are often welded or sodered together rather then fitted modularly. Furthermore, even accessing the interior of most machines is difficult because they're not built to be taken apart.
Change that as well as standardizing internal parts and labeling each and every little bit so that you can buy JUST that bit if you need it. And then you can take the machine apart easily, find the broken bit, buy just that, and fix it.
Or if you're not the handy sort, there will be a lot of local shops that will do it for you. Drop off your broken machine and pick it up in an hour good as new.
Modular upgrades.
Most things aren't completely new but rather simply have a new PART. Replace that part and you almost always have something equal in capability to the "new thing" that new part is often very small and relatively inexpensive to produce when compared to the whole.
They'd do something about planned obsolescence.
We literally build things to fall apart. The waste from that alone is staggering.
Imagine if practically everything where build to last, be easily repaired, easily upgraded, etc.
When your washing machine breaks did the whole thing break or did a 2 cent nut break? Exactly. But it isn't practical to repair it because its so difficult that its cheaper to just buy a new one.
This is by design. What is more, the parts are intentionally designed to all wear out. They use plastic for parts of machines that should be in metal... parts that experience heat that over time melt and deform. This causes big parts of the machine to fail.
Then you have parts that really must wear out like light bulbs but they aren't modular.
If we did this the amount of things we needed to get made on a regular basis would fall dramatically.
This would have a bigger influence on climate change then any other idea proposed... EVER.
But no one wants to do it because it would effect our industrial supply chain that change the whole way everything is made.
Well, until we do this... all climate change talk is a waste of time largely propagated my the incurious and the stupid.
I have no patience for those discussions... they're a waste of time.
We don't need carbon caps. All that does is give governments an excuse to raise taxes which is the only reason the politicians are even interested in this discussion.
What we need is to change our industrial model. And the sick thing is that if we do this we won't even suffer for it. We'll maintain our existing standard of living. All of it. The gains in efficiency will so outstrip everything that it won't matter. The amount of STUFF that has to be made on a yearly basis could fall to less then a tenth of what we currently produce. Which means the carbon debt of our industry without any effort to make it use less carbon per unit production would fall to a tenth.
This would also mean we wouldn't need to import all this shit from china because if you're buying a lot less you can afford to pay more. US manufacturing costs are at most 20 percent higher then china. If you're purchases fall to 10 percent then paying 20 percent more then 10 percent is easily justified.
This is the solution. It has always been the solution. Until this happens... nothing in the discussion of climate change is relevant. Its just hot air.