IFixit's Self-Repair Manifesto | Hacker News Reader

IFixit's Self-Repair Manifesto

ifixit.com

54 pointszdw13 comments

I've always been peeved at how so many people consider recycling the only way to be 'green'. Remember the old slogan, "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle"? Reducing your consumption and reusing as much as possible are way better than just recycling. Unfortunately they also reduce spending so there's not a lot of incentive to encourage it via marketing dollars. iFixit seems to have found a viable model to push people to "Reuse" rather than "Recycle", but I'm still hoping somebody out there can push us to "Reduce" first.

Amen to that. Instead of taking old hardware to green citizen for recycling, lately I've been donating it on craigslist. In silicon valley, it's surprising how many people will get use out of your old electronics.

Thats a good suggestion, but there is a better alternative:

>use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without

Of course I do neither, but thats just cause I hate the planet.

> we can’t run a linear manufacturing process forever.

If only we were running a linear manufacturing process. The market punishes companies that don't post exponential growth in the form of seemingly linear quarter-over-quarter growth.

This is a great way to present the problem to non-hackers, if you haven't seen it: http://www.storyofstuff.com/

One of the inspirations to the Self-Repair Manifesto is the equally awesome "Maker's Bill of Rights"[1], which is a little more focused on the practicalities of such a concept including gems such as "Screws better than glues"

[1] http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2006/12/the_makers_bill_of_...

This is made even more evident by the fact that iFixit runs Make's http://makeprojects.com/

I spent a good part of my teenage week-ends at a dump in France with my brother and our friends recuperating small engines and moped parts, hacking them back together, creating strange 2 or 3 wheel novel vehicles. Every time we see each other, we have the best time remembering those memories. We all have all in one way or another kept doing the same thing at work with other types of technologies.

All this to say that this manifesto goes for companies too of course!! and that it's not owned by ifixit.com, but should be yours too if you care about waste and overconsumption.

Fixing things can be fun and educational; however, as a matter of routine maintainance there comes a time when it is no longer desirable or economical to repair. It's better to discard and replace.

I look forward to the time when we have sufficiently abundant power and other relevant knowledge to recycle everything by heating waste to a plasma, sorting, and converting the condensed atoms into useful stock compounds.

Thus replacing consumption of material by consumption of fuel?

You can use the waste heat to generate electricity.

But presumably this is only done once energy is very cheap/abundant.

BTW this plasma thing is real: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plasma_arc_waste_disposal

There are enormous amounts of garbage on this planet and since matter is energy, we can convert garbage into useful things, improve the environment and get to a post scarcity future.

"We have the right" should probably be "We want the right" From what I know, in the US at least, a warranty void sticker for example is legally valid.

It is not the case in Russia. The manufacturer (or repair service provider) must prove that it was your intervention that caused the product to break [ЗоПП 18.4].

Unfortunately, a lot of people don't know this, and are mislead by sellers and service providers.

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