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Comment by denysonique | Hacker News Reader

There is no such thing as 'throwaway culture' instead there is economics. In developed countries it simply is cheaper for the consumer to purchase a new LCD monitor than simply pay for a skilled engineer's labour which would arrive at the same price in addition to the uncertainty and time this takes.

In less economically developed countries, it is exactly the other way around, electronics are rarely being thrown away, in this case the repair engineer's time is significantly lower than the price of most western electronic products.

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The economics you are describing create throwaway culture. The problem with this is that economics cannot override ecology.

> economics cannot override ecology

The annoyance is that economics should reflect ecology.

We have an environmental levy on electronics that supposedly covers the cost of recycling the product. However, I have never seen any reports on whether it truly covers the recycling cost or if it has improved landfill diversion.

"Recycling" electronics means shipping them to Africa where they're first dumped and then burned to recover some of the metals. The results are as disastrous as you would imagine, both for the environment and the people. This is what it looks like: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2014/feb/27/...

Yes, perhaps, but there is no reason to expect that they will without heavy intervention to make it so.

empirically, no. people are absolutely not efficient about this. its because they dont know that there are tons of things that are 5 minutes on youtube and a screwdriver away from being fixed. that is the culture that you might call "throwaway culture". if our culture changed and everyone knew about how to fix stuff, and how to go about learning how to fix stuff, they would all do it. to me you sound silly because i have dozens of real life counter examples that undermine your claim. im not exaggerating, there are countless "broken" things that you can repair by googling for 2 minutes, buying the replacement part on amazon or ebay, and then using a screwdriver to install in 1 minute.

Maybe some are like that, but doing work like darning socks is really time-consuming and there is little incentive to do so if you can pay ten dollars for a pack of several pairs of socks.

I don't think it's even about repair, I wouldn't be surprised if most TVs being thrown out in the west are in working order.

This is more about ecology than economy. But anyway, too many people think "meh, might as well buy a new one" and throw away something that could've been easily fixed for a fraction of the cost.

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