We Lost Our Ability to Mend
dieworkwear.com
dieworkwear.com
He looked at me like I had 3 heads to even consider a fridge repair and a week or so later sent me a pic of his new, $2000 fridge in place. I tried.
There might even be more mass of just polystyrene insulation in the fridge he's just trashed than the mass of plastics he keeps out of the landfill. There is certainly more overall plastic in there.
https://www.titlemax.com/discovery-center/lifestyle/trash-on...
To my mind, that is a significant amount of waste, and definitely worth chasing.
* Durable Plastics: 72.9 lbs
* Nodurable Plastics: 28 lbs
* Plastic Bottles and Jars: 17.7
There is more, but this gives a sense of the statistics they quote on their site. These do not seem unreasonable to me, and they suggest that recycling plastics would save a refrigerator or two in weight per household per year, depending a bit on the size of the household.
It is best if we both recycle and fix the refrigerator. But doing either is better than doing nothing. In other words, arguing that one good is more effective than another good doesn't mean that it isn't admirable to do only the smaller good.
Many of us up here on Hacker News are good at fixing things. But some of us might be less skilled in other areas, such as organizing political campaigns or working in the medical field. It's easy to criticize someone for not doing something we find easy, but it is harder to see how they might be skilled in areas where we struggle.
It might just be marginally better.
If "fixing the refrigerator" (and other such items in our lives, cars, etc) yields 100 e (e = a made-up token measure of environmental benefit) and not using plastic bags for a decade yields 1 e, then it's almost irrelevant.
I'd like to see a "CO2/water/etc cost" sticker
YouTube and specialized forums are very helpful in pinning the issue and parts.
Even, some years years back (10 or so?) when buying a woolen pullover you’d get a bit of mending yarn wrapped around cardboard bobbins with the exact same color as your sweater.
Nowadays they’re not included, at least where I buy.
I was quoted 600 for a whole system part of a car (dubcomponent wasn’t sold separately), the actual necessary used sub-part was 50 on eBay.
Even in cars, you gotta figure, is the part critical? (brakes, steering) or non critical (wipers, seats, heating/ac, etc).
Those aren't the only failure modes to consider for washers, dryers, and toasters. Flooding (for the first) and fire (for the other two) are concerns.
Yes be careful, you could get an electric shock photograph before you take things apart and read instructions before putting things back together.
Two notes on ice makers specifically: 1. There is a much smaller number of models of ice makers than refrigerators. (One model of ice maker crosses over to many fridges, though you may need to unplug and move the fridge-specific wiring harness over to the new ice maker.) Many times it's an extra half hour of googling to find the generic ice maker part number and then chase that down. 2. Some ice makers that are not OEM are painted to look non-stick and that paint will start flaking off into your ice in about 2-3 years of use (disgusting). This is a case where I'd rather take a used OE part over a new part of unknown provenance, even though they are a high failure part.
It's almost my story as well.
My microwave I had for 8 years (and I got it second hand) stopped working. A quick inspection + watching a couple of YouTube videos revealed that a plastic latch inside the door got broken.
It would have been very easy to replace it if only it was still being sold. Extensive search on the internet showed it was not :( :( :(
If only I had some time (well a LOT of time) to reverse engineer the existing latch and 3D-print a new one... But I did not.
So, I had to put the microwave outside on my curb. I attached a note to it saying it works well if the latch is fixed and also attached the broken latch.
I was happy to see it was gone in a few hours. I live in a city (Montreal, Canada) so I guess it helped my microwave to not be wasted.
I wish 3D-printing technologies - or more precisely, a technology that helps to create 3D specs out of an existing object - would be more advanced. Well, I did not do an extensive search about it so I may be well mistaken :)
The latch for my vacuum clean bin broke. I fished it out (10m), modelled a replacement in FreeCAD (2hr, I had to learn how to use FreeCAD since I’d never used it before), and printed a replacement (40m print time) - and now I don’t have to buy a new vacuum cleaner.
But that’s happened once in the three years I’ve owned a 3D printer. Simple mechanical part failures just don’t seem to happen that often.
I’ve actually fixed this vacuum cleaner numerous times! Not always with 3D printer parts though.
I guess my point is "don't discount traditional processes". Someone good with a razor and file could make a new plastic latch from an old cutting board faster than someone with a 3D printer could print the part, much less design, print, and verify.
Or let you keep yours there where more people can get use out of it and it isn't taking up space in your garage.
You can try sculpy or similar things next time too to make plastic parts. There are several materials that are basically play-dough that hard set to plastic like materials.
Don't buy a fridge with an ice maker.
The ice maker is by far the least reliable portion of a refrigerator.
Ice cube trays don't break down and need repair.
I'm not picking on your friend specifically, just pointing out one factor that can reduce the immediate friction of people buying new stuff, instead of trying to fix the old.
People look at me funny when I say "corporate propaganda", but in case you needed evidence that corporate propaganada is a real thing, here it is.
Also, a lot of people complain to generate conversation, not for the 2nd opinion they get.
Doesn't make his friend look any better...
A few of my mechanically inclined but lacking confidence friends and a few of my other broke as a joke friends have taken me up on it over the years. Most can't believe how cheap, fast, and easy to do/hard to screw up it is. Very few repeat "customers" though. :(
In the fridge case, it turns out he had already ordered one for delivery in a few days and had already mentally parted with the money, so didn't want to fix his and call to cancel the order...
I found that I had to chip ice out the base back panel of the fridge, where it had significant ice accumulation. No way in hell I'm treating something we paid 1.5k$ for and 'throwing it away'.
I still maintain there's 4 R's: Repair, Reduce, Reuse, and eventually Recycle.
For the Samsung fridge getting ice buildup, there are relatively few causes and likely the simplest is the same defrost timer mine had issues with. I like https://repairclinic.com for appliance parts, though they don't have any of the 3 models of Samsung defrost timers in stock right now.
I would only recommend people stay away from microwaves.
Just remember to set a timer and turn that back off after 20 minutes or so, because the same nonfunctional timer that starts it turns it off as well.
Seems people were moving out and it was too much trouble to take it with them. Nevertheless, it was there for some weeks before someone collected it (I don't have room or I would have taken it pronto).
Seems many have too much money these days.
Even professional house cleaners could do some checks as add on sales.
I thought it was crazy but he swore by them so I tried it. They were thick, stiff and uncomfortable at first, but after a couple months had transformed themselves into my favorite thing ever as they "wore in".
After a year of everyday wear they start developing holes. But they're far too expensive to throw away, so first I took them to the local "denim surgeon", but then realized I could learn to darn them myself.
I bought myself the cheapest Singer sewing machine, a darning attachment, and specialty denim thread, and in the past 4 years have probably darned 30 holes across 3 pair, also reinforcing button holes and pocket edges. They look great and unique and are completely "me". I have no doubt the jeans will last me for another 10 years at least, and will turn out to have saved me money in the long run (crazy!).
It's very satisfying to have things you care for, that aren't disposable, and are worth the effort of maintaining. But really, the only clothing items for men that seem to be constructed with enough quality in the first place to be worth maintaining are things like raw denim jeans, leather boots (e.g. Red Wings) and quality leather jackets.
I also repaired or had repaired outdoor gear of various types. That's mostly about functionality so the repairs don't need to look great.
Some of the best and affordable machines out there are the Singer 301s, which were made back in the 50s. They're bullet proof and repairable. You can do a lot with a straight stitch machine, and a single use machine like that will outperform any multi-stitch machine by a long way.
It's a shame that a lot of people come across these and think they're junk because they're not computerized.
Singer hobbymatic machines from the late 70s and later also have plastic gears, but for some reason these last no problem. They also mostly use bushings for bearings (I mean obviously it would make the mechanism much larger if you had to fit roller bearings everywhere), and they also last, provided you oil it every couple years.
The second is a Toyota Jigline. It’s from the 70s and is mostly stainless steel. It has multiple stitch patterns but the pattern selector has the only plastic gear in the entire machine and it’s cracked. It still works fine but I’ll have to replace it at some point. At least I can see and understand the entire mechanism.
The Toyota was cheap but the Singer was around market price. The Toyota was marked as not worked but with a liberal application of machine oil it came free. There are plenty of guides online for fixing up machines.
That goes for much earlier models too. Recently, during a factory clean-up, I came across a Singer that predates yours by some 50 years—it was made in the early 1870s—1874 to be precise—and it too was built out of cast iron and made to last seemingly for ever (it was still quite functional).
Incidentally, you can tell the date of your Singer easily by by checking the many Singer serial number databases on the Web. Here's a couple to start with:
http://www.sewingshop.com/dateyourmachine.aspx
https://sewalot.com/dating_singer_sewing_machine_by_serial_n...
I got it because the plastic gears in my wife's singer self destructed when I was using it to sew camping gear. About the same size, 2x the price, just insanely better.
If you're not going to do anything heavy than then the parent's recommendation is fine. And it won't have a motor short like some of the old singers where the insulation is wearing out, but that's an easy fix.
I think it's because my black jeans and dark indigo jeans are dark enough that stains won't show, and my first pair that have turned lighter indigo have so much variation in color and texture across them that yeah, anything you can't wash out just kind of blends in? They basically wind up looking like this (which also shows what they look like after a bunch of darning):
https://cdn.shopify.com/s/files/1/0028/6132/files/3sixteen-S...
But ultimately, it's been a complete non-issue.
See Heddels Fade of the Day for how denim-heads love and mistreat their pants. Example: https://www.heddels.com/2018/02/fade-day-naked-famous-elepha...
Highly recommend, wasting clothes is a serious problem.
PS: For those worried about Costco membership costs, just buying a couple of these jeans every year (compared to Levi's) is kind of breaking even on a Costco membership ;-)
/confused
But the reason I find it worth it to repair my raw denim jeans is that they're so much thicker than regular jeans (e.g. Levi's), which means:
- It takes a lot longer to develop holes
- Once you finish darning a hole, the darned part is the same thickness as the rest of the jean (on "thin" normal jeans it would stand out as much thicker)
- A separate issue is entire sections "wearing out", particularly crotch and knees, just a 4x4 inch area getting so thin it essentially disappears, and you can't really darn that. That doesn't really happen with raw denim because it's so thick to begin with
(I'm pretty sure you can also buy raw denim that is thin, I've seen $100 raw denim jeans like that, but for me that defeats the whole purpose.)
The nice fabric ones that I've had from tommy bahama, levis, etc that were "soft" wear out quickly. The rough ones I have like dickies and some levis are fine. My dickies last longer.
I think the distressed denim really weakens it.
I've had a variety of jeans under 100€, none ever got any hole. The buttons or the pockets break though.
If you wear looser-fitting jeans that aren't subject to stretching forces, or only wear a given pair once every week or two, then of course you won't develop holes for a long time.
I went to a place that repairs jeans and they quoted me the purchase price of the jeans to fix it.
I've got several sets of dickies I re-sewed with stronger thread, kevlar, and soaked with beeswax as works pants. They're running strong.
I've 4x-7x'd the life of a lot of clothes with this tactic.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”
― Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms: The Play
I’ve bought APC jeans (French, raw denim) for the last 10 years. I wear them for 1-2 years nearly everyday, getting them patched at my local tailor shop as needed for $5-10 while I wait. After 6 months or so they take on an amazing patina and fit like a glove.
Not only do I get compliments on them constantly (they are an authentic version of the faux fade and wear pattern many companies sell) APC will actually purchase them back from you for 50% of original price and sell your worn versions in the store for $400.
Even more mindblowing is you can get $250+ selling them yourself on eBay (search APC Butler) effectively getting paid for wearing your pants.
I've seen this many times.
Sometimes the right answer is: get an expert to look at it. You don't need a $2000 fridge, but you may need a $200 repair job to get it done fast and right.
You can learn so much by reading repair manuals & books, watching youtube videos, and being able to recognize patterns in other things you have repaired.
Doing this will save you tens of thousands of dollars over the years. Furnace, A/C, House appliances, Home repairs, Furnitures, Cars, computers, even clothes & shoes...
Often a tool can cost less than getting it repaired, paying for itself in one go. And there's many things that are straightforward to fix (bikes for example).
It also takes time to arrange a repair, go there, drop it off, pick it up, realize they didn't fix the problem, do it again, etc. I often find doing this stuff myself can actually save time, and if things break on a weekend/holiday you can still salvage your plans.
A 20min job is 20mins often because it took hundreds - or in the case of professionals, thousands - of hours of learning, practicing, and experimenting.
Of course everyone’s utility function is different, but my free time is at a heavy heavy premium. I’m happy to spend money where it gets me time in return.
My growth today in IT has very little to do with IT, I'm taking much lessons from other industries. Want to learn to build reliable systems, serious study the airline industry, how do they build such reliable systems? Want to learn how to troubleshoot and solve problems fast? How does your typical ER work?
There's much to learn from cross pollinating ideas from other fields. Most of us in IT are not just lovers of computers, but just builders. We are lucky to be born in this time in history, 100 yrs ago, we might be building cars or other sort of mechanical devices.
I truly do not care about repairing fridges. Not even a little bit. Yes I’m an engineer. Still don’t care. Don’t care about repairing my car either.
Some people feel so righteous about repair for some reason and it just doesn’t make sense to me. Why would someone want to impose how they spend their time on other people? If you enjoy it, that’s great keep doing it! Doesn’t mean I have to spend my time that way.
I’m just going to get the thing fixed (even if it costs more money) and just move on with my life.
To you point though, if I was really into something then I might be up for it! But fridges? Low on my list.
And then people wonder why they are miserable.
People are not owning cars, they're Ubering. People are not buying movies, they're using Netflix. People are not owning homes, they're renting and using Airbnb. People are not cleaning their spaces, they're using Task Rabbit. etc etc.. The uptick in nomad lifestyle also means not being able to carry all the tools around. People are becoming mobile and specialists; being really good at something that pays decently well but knowing less of how to do a little bit of everything because it doesn't further their career. Jack of all trades are the minority and generally curious people that love learning new things which isn't for everyone.
For me I've found once I accumulated the skill, just doing it myself was often faster and easier.
I understand the value of free time and all that, but I bet even in your day job you gradually cultivate side skills that are not your core work function, you just use them every now and again in the process of your work.
It is harder to teach kids this attitude now. So many things that interest them are seam-welded or potted or otherwise inaccessible. It's still possible though. My daughter and I disassembled old DVD drives and made laser pointers from the diodes that still worked. She was excited to take things apart after school.
If you can't borrow a tool or need it semi-regularly, I'd recommend checking out Harbor Freight if there's one nearby instead of going to the local hardware or big box store. Their tools are not the highest quality, but unless you're a contractor or serious craftsperson, they'll probably work just fine at a much lower price point.
Its simple self-centred greed really.
They will sell complete new systems, when you just need a new compressor, or even a capacitor.
The best bet, IMO, is to get advice from someone who doesn't directly benefit from a bad product, but is still an expert. For example, don't take the advice of a salesman, but instead a repair guy friend.
So a fridge I may expect to need to repair once a decade is perhaps best for the professionals, but I have e stated fixing my own washing machine and tumble dryers because they cost maybe £200 new and a fix can be in the region of £60-£120. So 2 or 3 repairs and I may as well have bought a new one, fixing it myself usually means a quicker job and always means a cheaper job. Plus now I am pretty certain that if I could call someone to fix it then I could do it myself.
In the last year I’ve done maintenance work on the dishwasher (twice), ice maker, furnace (fuse), duct work (baffle), two clogged drains (love those air-pump drain cleaners!), sliding door (leveling adjustment), vacuum (broken plastic part), doorbell (new button), several light switches (new dimmers), stopping drafts (new weatherstripping), sump pump (burned out wiring cap), painting and spackling, 2 toilet flappers, dryer thermostat and humidistat, and hanging a new flat screen.
That’s just top of my head. And there was plenty of bigger stuff I outsourced but could have potentially taken on like installing a new front door, and seal coating the driveway.
If I hired an “expert” for all of that it would have been nearly $10,000. And next year it’ll just be another list the same length of all different stuff.
As a house owner it is far easier to build a list of trades people you won't use again, than the one to hang on to.
Full disclosure: I'm the freesewing maintainer
You might want to redirect http:// to https:// right now if I type "freesewing.org" into my browser it heads to a "Apache2 Debian Default Page".
All of the Patreon links so far just seem to be hugely overboard "sign up" ones, with nothing linking to the actual account.
Guessing I didn't spot something obvious? :)
The reason why you need an account is explained in the FAQ on our new beta site: https://beta.freesewing.org/en/docs/faq
It boils down to the fact that all are patterns are made-to-measure. So we need your measurements, thus we need a way to store them. That's why a (free) account is needed.
There's no catch.
A trick I picked up at my last job was to use Rubber Renue[0] (one bottle will last virtually forever since you need so little) on the pickup rollers on laser printers when they started having paper pickup problems. Works like a charm, but that stuff is nasty. I also learned the delicate art of using a screwdriver to scrape toner deposits off of the fuser. In both cases, these are parts that are easily replaceable because the printers were designed to be maintained, but tight budgets made repairing the parts necessary. Ironically, the deposits on the fuser were due to budgets that necessitated buying cheap knockoff toner.
I still use the Rubber Renue on my 12-year-old printer at home. My girlfriend's reaction to my printer jamming was "It's time to buy a new printer!", which horrified me because the problem is so minor and so easy to fix. We do want a colour printer though, so I've been researching to find one that's maintainable instead of disposable. So far the laser printers from the usual suspects (Brother, HP) look like they haven't been affected by the same disposable mentality that inkjet printers have.
[0] https://www.mgchemicals.com/products/cleaning-products-for-e...
My girlfriend, on the other hand, prints a lot more (still, probably under 20 pages per month). Most of it is things that actually need to be printed, like paper-piecing quilting[0] patterns where you need to cut pieces out in order to use them as a guide for sewing. Colour is helpful for these too.
The nice thing about a laser printer is it can go months without printing and when I click print it just wakes up and does its job and goes back to sleep after a bit.
[0] https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/learn-how-to-paper-piece-a-q...
The real issue seems to be that people are helpless without the Internet - and that our consumerism has brought a throwaway mentality with it.
My mother made our Halloween costumes by hand. We didn't (and don't) really mend clothes, but the skill set is the same. And when I had a shirt fail by coming apart at a seam, rather than having a hole worn through the fabric, my reaction was that I should sew it back together.
Mending a seam is invisible. Mending a hole will give you a visible patch; I think there are good reasons people don't do that. And far and away the most common failure in my clothes is wearing a hole in the knee of a pair of pants.
Which might be considered stylish and left alone as it is.
What's bizarre is when you see two people wearing the same brand/pair of pants with the same manufactured holes. All the holes/rips/tears in the pants are identical, a marvel of mass-production.
The real problem is that today's technology is generally much more complicated than it used to be. Also manufacturers don't expect things to be repaired (because it isn't cost effective unless you do it yourself) so they don't make things easy to disassemble.
I broadly disagree - the proportion of people who can fix a TV is probably no lower now than it was in the 1970s; a modern TV might be more complex, but the accessibility of information, tools and parts is far better.
The wider issue is the broadly positive fact that automation has drastically reduced the cost of goods relative to labour. The range of products and failure modes that are economically repairable is much narrower, because repair is relatively more expensive and replacement is relatively cheaper. Generally speaking, the most expensive part of repairing a TV is simply the labour cost of dismantling and reassembling it. As mentioned in the article, paying a seamstress to patch a jacket or darn a sweater is often more expensive than just buying a new one. There are worse problems in the world than "we've got so good at making stuff cheaply that it isn't worth the effort to fix it".
But also, a set of tools was once a necessity, because things were built to be repaired. Now it's a luxury item for most people. Simple things like changing oil are, in most cars, way more complicated and difficult than they used to be, because the market has spoken. Easy DIY maintenance is not the priority.
Only because the huge negative external costs of a new appliance aren't priced in - pollution created in manufacture, environment disposal of the old one, long-term exhaustion of raw materials.
[1] http://lowendmac.com/2007/the-truth-about-crts-and-shock-dan...
If a TV breaks now, it's some component that's either glued in or soldered in, so good luck replacing that. Modern TVs are not designed to have replaceable parts.
I'm not sure reseating a broken component would help, I think you might mean "new" :)
Additionally, availability of replacement parts is excellent. Whatever you need is only a $2 package with free shipping from amazon or aliexpress.
I don't see being helpless without the internet as a problem. I know how to find the information i need, and barring some apocalypse knocking out the internet that's probably just as good as actually knowing it.
We collected up suitcases off the curb that in theory need minor mending (no smells, certain problems left behind), and over time the backlog has built up. Time is also an ingredient, here; in the best case it takes fifteen minutes to prep a curb suitcase, in the worst (cleaning stains, etc.) the suitcase might need to sit around in a ventilated area for days over the course of treatment.
As for the Hall field sensor yeah I know I probably could have found an equivalent on Digikey and saved $15 or so when you factor in the shipping, but the convenience factor and knowing that I just fixed an otherwise fine $1700 commercial shredder for $25 is fine.
http://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/interesting-youtube-repa...
Today it is not about knowing, it is about time. I can't spend 30 minutes fixing my clothes because my 30 minutes is more valuable than a tshirt's cost. Or I don't want to deal with ordering glue for my shoe and work on fixing it, I take it to a shoe repair and get it fixed for $10.
Things got more convenient than war times. We don't need to turn potato sack burlap into clothing anymore. Although, I also believe a man should know how to stitch a button if they need to. I want people to repair electronics rather than clothing.
I think it's a mistake that we value our own time like this. There's satisfaction that can be derived from spending time mending some of your own clothing, and that contributes to wellbeing. That wellbeing is not something that you can put a dollar value on.
I'm not sure such a blanket statement is helpful. This isn't just about money, it's about opportunity cost. The time that he sinks into mending that Tshirt is time he could have put into any other potentially more worthy endeavor.
* Time spent with the family / kids? That contributes far more to my wellbeing (and theirs). Sure I could mend my clothes with the kids but that isn't something they'd enjoy (nor me to be quite honest) and there are already enough chores I make them do as a family.
* How about time spent cooking and cleaning? But unfortunately I already pay different people to wash the windows, clean the house, mow the lawn... there isn't much less responsibility I can hand off there.
* I guess I could spend less time tinkering with my own hobby projects - but that amounts to very few hours a week and given it's my own personal time, I think I should do what I find more rewarding and relaxing and that isn't mending old clothes.
I barely get time in the week to do fun things as it is. I mean stuff like going on bike rides with my eldest son (who's 5) and I certainly don't get any time to look after my own personal health (I used to run 5k several times a week - it's not much but it made a difference. These days I'm lucky if I get one 5k run in a week). So if I can outsource stuff I don't enjoy to someone else for a reasonable fee then my time is most certainly worth it.
This is also true for most adults I'm friends with - in that a couple might occasionally go on Facebook but most of them aren't heavy users of social media.
For context: on average we're late 30s and most of us have young kids. We didn't grow up with social media and we've have better things to fill our adult time with since social media become a "thing". So it's not something we spend a great amount of time on.
I'm sure yours (and a many other peoples) experience will differ but my point is you shouldn't generalise that adults spend a lot of time on social media because that isn't always true.
Speaking of the milage, I took the liberty to glance at your HN account stats. You appear to be a more prolific poster than I am, even though my account is couple years older.
Not judging mind you. I have my hobbies too, including a nice metalworking shop. But the proportion of time I stand at the lathe to me watching YouTube videos of people machining is tiny.
People in 21st century first world have a lot of disposable time. They also complain most about lack of it.
I wasn't playing an "age card" - I was adding context to why I don't use social media. Also I think you missed the part where I said:
I'm sure yours (and a many other peoples) experience will differ but my point is you shouldn't generalise that adults spend a lot of time on social media because that isn't always true.
> Speaking of the milage, I took the liberty to glance at your HN account stats. You appear to be a more prolific poster than I am, even though my account is couple years older.
I'd already addressed that point in my post: Yes I do spend a lot of time on HN. But only 5 minutes here and there during the week when I need a proverbial cigarette break. I don't generally use HN during the weekend. The fact I post a lot is really more a symptom of how opinionated I am rather than how much time I spend on HN.
> People in 21st century first world have a lot of disposable time. They also complain most about lack of it.
You cannot generalise like that. Some people need to work multiple jobs just to keep their family fed and housed. Others - like me - have long commutes and busy homes to manage. You want to know my weekly schedule?
06:00 get up and showered for work
06:45 drive to train station
07:00 catch train
08:15 arrive in office
16:15 leave for the evening
18:45 get home, bath kids, read them a story then put them to bed
20:00 do house work
20:30 cook dinner
21:00 eat while chatting to wife or watching some crap on TV
21:30 down time
22:00 bed
I wouldn't say I'm unique either nor that I don't have a lucky life (I have a family who love me, a good job, nice house in a good area and enough disposable income to afford a few luxuries). However I don't take kindly to people who assume that I have lots of disposable time. My kids or catching up on sleep is my disposable time and I get very little left after that.
So I suggest you don't make assumptions about other peoples lifestyles based off your own. It's a diverse world out there ;)
The problem is that would mean we'd either end up in a less desirable area (less greenery, higher crime rates, etc) or have much less disposable income. The closer you move towards London the sharper the rise in house prices - and it's quite significant too. Plus as I'm just 10 minutes drive from a direct fast line into central London so moving closer wouldn't actually save myself that much in commute time (maybe half an hour each way if I'm lucky). So there just isn't the intensive to do so.
In fact my wife and I actually did the maths and the money we'd save on my season ticket (which is very expensive) wouldn't even come remotely close to the increased cost in housing. So spending that extra hour mending things wouldn't even scratch the surface. And to be honest, I quite like having that hour of relaxation time on the train ride home as it's uninterrupted me time - which means by the time I get home I've recharged my own proverbial batteries a little so are more energized with the kids. So the time with them is of a better quality.
I'm not suggesting this would work for everyone but there's a few other guys in my office that have the same routine and find it works for them too. In fact it's quite common for people who work in London to live a county or two away from the city and thus have long commutes.
Maybe when the kids are older and want to live in more urban areas, my wife and I might reconsider living this far out from the city. But personally I quite like the contrast of quiet village life after spending the day in the noisy capital.
I’m not an outdoors person for a lot of reasons, but I do have a bedroom set aside in our house for a home gym. My wife and I will spend time together talking, watching TV, etc while we are working out together. Also having a gym at home means I can be at home with my wife until she goes to sleep and then work out.
What I really need to do is set myself personal goals. At one point I used to train for running longer distances or to get my 5k personal best down to a certain time. But I'd reached those goals around the same time my daughter was born and never really got motivated to do any proper training again since.
So I just need to set myself motivated with some personal goals again.
However, if I think about when I won’t be earning like that anymore, it shifts a bit. That “when” is hopefully 20 years from now (when I’d like to retire), but could be next year and for awhile if the economy goes south. It also helps that I enjoy those things enough to consider them hobbbies.
We also remodeled our own kitchen, doing everything but electricals ourselves (including knocking through a new entrance and closing the old one). From an immediate cost perspective, I should have hired someone to lay the tiles instead of doing it myself. That experience, though, means that I can now easily do my own tile repairs and can better assess the quality of work I might pay others to do. It ended up being fun enough that I’m looking for another tiling project!
1) that it takes 30 minutes to mend, which is high in my experience.
2) That a t-shirt costs less than a half-hour's income. Less than a half-hour's after-tax income, even. Some t-shirts do: The t-shirts I got for free at conferences cost less. But my favourites, the ones I might wear out, aren't the cheap ones.
3) That purchasing new clothes takes no time.
Valuing our own time is okay, but it has to be done correctly. Not bent to produce a particular outcome.
(Yes, I mend. Not t-shirts, because I hardly ever wear those. But I mend shirts.)
Perhaps for some people. I've tried mending my own clothes, but it always ends up looking kind of crap and so I don't end up wearing it anyway.
So it's not about counting pennies but about justifying outsourcing jobs you don't enjoy so you can spend more time on the stuff that really matters.
This point of view is particularly important to those of us who have really busy lives and thus are often juggling our time between different responsibilities (family, work, household chores, etc).
Doing chores and fixing stuff can be an interesting activity for a kid, depending on the age. Granted, I'm not good at mending either.
To be honest I shouldn't have to defend what chores I choose to spend time doing with the kids. I'd be interested to know how many on here have kids, do all of the aforementioned chores and still find time to teach 5 year olds to mend socks, shirts and jumpers? There seems to be an inordinate amount of "high-roading" happening today.
Each of them doesn't realize what they aren't doing. Only that they're very busy and somehow manage to fit in this one thing. So why can't you?
Don't take advice on parenting from HN. It's the essential oil mommy blog of the programmer community.
...and that is the 'secret' to raising self-reliant children: involve them in common tasks when those tasks are performed anyway. This does not take any "high-roading" as you imply, it just takes a little bit of forethought and might make things go a bit slower than they normally would.
Good for you. However not all kids are the same so what activities worked well for you might not work well for other families - despite their best efforts.
Like I said - we have tried doing needlework with my son with a kit that was specifically designed for kids. So my comments are not without precedence.
> ...and that is the 'secret' to raising self-reliant children: involve them in common tasks when those tasks are performed anyway. This does not take any "high-roading" as you imply, it just takes a little bit of forethought and might make things go a bit slower than they normally would.
Geez, I wish I thought of that. So all those years I've spent playing number and word games with them; teaching them to cook, handle scissors, knives, gas cookers and even open fires responsibly; how to do a great many DIY projects with power tools safely and engage in their curiosity for the natural world was all just a waste of time because I didn't happen to do that one thing you do. /s
Of course you shouldn't, but you presented a false dichotomy with "if I spend an hour fixing this; this is an hour less I spend with my kids."
There is nothing a parent can take apart or put together without any curious child immediately having a deeply rooted interest in- and a thousand questions about the matter.
It's okay not to be able or want to fix something, but don't blame it on your kids.
As an aside, I believe it's the best way to parent. It teaches kids that no matter what happens in life, they always have themselves to rely on.
Given you know precisely zero about me, my family, nor our routines; you are in no position to assume what is a "false dichotomy".
> It's okay not to be able or want to fix something, but don't blame it on your kids.
If you're takeaway was that I'm blaming it on the kids then you've clearly not been reading my posts properly. My stance from the very start was that I don't want to do it.
> As an aside, I believe it's the best way to parent. It teaches kids that no matter what happens in life, they always have themselves to rely on.
Thank you for that titbit of advice. I'd never considered teaching my kids basic life skills. /s
> I don't want to do it.
which is different from "if I spend an hour fixing this; this is an hour less I spend with my kids". "I don't want to do it" or "I can't do it" is a perfectly fine reason by itself.
> Thank you for that titbit of advice.
You're welcome.
Specifics do matter when they're critical to the conclusion being made. In this case my daughter it too young to do needlework and my son isn't interested in it either (as I've said before, we have tried). So ultimately I would end up -- and previously have ended up -- doing it by myself despite any best efforts to incorporate the kids.
I do get at some point he'll have to learn that not all chores are fun but he's only 5 and there are a lot of chores he does love doing (including stuff "normal" people hate) so I'm willing to let him stick to the ones he finds enjoyable while he's still young enough to get away with it. After all, he has a whole lifetime of work ahead of him.
> I have no idea why you're defensive about this.
Wouldn't you get a little defensive if I started telling you how I think you should raise your family when I've never met you? I see it time and time again where HN posters pretend to be experts on the weirdest of subjects and this is no exception. I swear this place was never like that when I first joined...
In any case, comments about ones family are a deeply personal topic so you should expect one might take those comments personally. ;)
I see, and I agree. My apologies.
The point is, you shouldn't be alarmed. You can afford your free time. Just know how pointless it is to suffer through some of your time to save a bit of money that is much less than the value of the time you spent suffering.
I'm still fixing things, but not because I want to save anything. I just like to tinker and figure stuff out so I'm geeting my money's worth out of every attempted repair.
Also I hate shoping so shopping time saved is often worth for me more then time used for repairs.
I've got a dollar that says you watch TV while looking at a social network or something on your phone. You could fix a shirt instead.
Of course, I know what you mean. But consider, at least for a moment, that the cost of that t-shirt to you includes the wages paid to the cotton pickers, thread makers, cloth makers, cutters, stitchers, packers, transport and warehouse workers, and the amazon delivery driver, who will contribute to making that t-shirt and getting it to your door. So in a way, you're saying your 30 minutes is more valuable than however many minutes of all those people's lives that would have to be spent to get you a new t-shirt.
There's some profound insight into how economics works to be had when you truly consider what it means to trade off your time and the value of your labor output, against the time and labor of countless people, all put into supplying you with stuff.
I randomly came across a backpack in a used gear store in the mountains in Colorado, being sold on consignment — it was ancient, clearly a bag that had seen a lot of use with several patches. It’s a huge u-zip backpack with quality padding, good hip/chest straps, three (useful!) fully exterior zip pockets — two clearly well suited for water/coffee, and nothing dangly. Intrigued by this packs design, so different from all the clone backpacking bags on the market now - I bought it used for 20 dollars. This is the best backpack I’ve ever owned! I use it as a rock climbing day pack and for longer trips with air travel - I can fit everything I need in it for multi month climbing trips to Europe.
But it’s clearly very old. I packed too much weight into it and accidentally tried to pick it up once while accidentally standing on the hip strap — putting an enormous strain on the shoulder strap — which broke. This made for an unpleasant train journey in Wales until I arrived at my destination but fortunately I wasn’t too far off. And also fortunately would be staying there for several months so didn’t really need the bag for awhile.
During that time I went on a long fruitless search across the internet and brick and mortar stores to find a replacement. I searched everywhere and could not find a backpack that offered even a quarter of the joy I get from this old packs design ...
Fortunately — it turns out that mending expertise still exists in some part of the world and smallish town Wales is one such place. A friend suggested I check out a tailor to see if they could fix my broken backpack strap. Long story short — 13 pounds later — they did it!! I also asked them to reinforce the other strap.
Result: I couldn’t be happier. The love and admiration I now have for this tailor is substantial. Fixing things is still possible — and fixing that are worth fixing is enormously valuable. Honestly I feel guilty to only have paid 13 pounds for the work of that expert seamstress - in the future I would pay 300 dollars to keep this bag going if I could rather than buying a new bag that is not fit for purpose from day one ...
Perhaps as they say, It doesn’t have to be pretty to be beautiful ...
And one Fully Loaded for checking before a flight - https://twitter.com/ibreathetweets/status/109746414128192307...
There are also specialty places that do outdoor equipment repair. Rainy Pass in Seattle was a name given to me for a backpack zipper repair but a friend ended up doing it for me.
It can't do the fancy embroidery stitches, but with some chalk, a seam ripper, and some thread you can repair almost anything. I had an old jacket where the outer shell was more empty space than fabric, and I was able to disassemble the coat, trace the pieces that needed to be assembled onto new fabric, and reassemble it again.
The argument that "it isn't worth my time to repair stuff" always grates on me. It makes sense to a certain extent, but there is a lot more to life than pure economic efficiency.
I've generally had poor experiences when dealing with clothing/equipment manufacturer warranties. Some claim lifetime warranties, then don't stock parts for repairs. Others will just say they can't help after a year or two. A lot of modern products aren't designed to last.
Well... it turned out that the teeth of the zipper are just a plastic string wrapped around a cord (and both still perfectly fine) and that stitching the cord back onto the tape material required not much more than some dexterity and accuracy. It took maybe half an hour from diagnose to the finished fixed zipper.
Bonus: feels empowering to do things that someone else considered impossible.
I think with outdoor gear, there's actually a certain cachet to gear that's obviously well-used and battle-scarred :-)
Also I used to have DIY books which would have diagrams to help you fix things. Today all of those diagrams are worthless. Nobody has a rotary telephone anymore. No one has washing machines without circuit boards anymore. Even toilets have different flushing mechanisms, and if you don't know which one you have, you get worried you can't replace the original. Repairing VCR -- give me a break -- or a TV? I think the mending culture needs to start teaching people how electronics work, and then people will start to see the errors of their ways.
When I was a kid, my Dad and I rebuilt a 1945 Ford 9N tractor from the ground up, including a complete engine teardown. Pistons, rings, valves, carburetor, distributor, points, plugs, the whole shebang. He'd undertaken a similar project in the 70s with his father, and it had served him well, allowing him to do his own maintenance on his used cars, keeping his TCO extremely low. They never had to worry about a car payment, and considered a lease to be for suckers.
Now, though, my car is somewhat more reliable but also hugely more complex. When something goes wrong, I don't need to remove a casting and clean some passage, I need my oscilloscope and some eBay spelunking for the dealer's computer manual.
It used to be reasonable for a home mechanic to be able to keep up with trends in auto manufacturing and be competent at every task they needed to do. Now I'm not sure a professional can keep up, without specializing.
Likewise, I'm an EE, and could probably repair a VCR -certainly done a few stereo recievers in my day. But when my dad (as mentioned above, of the repair mindset) sent me a picture of the PCB from a $30 kitchen appliance, showing an epoxied flip-chip controller and LCD zebra connector, I walked him through checking the batteries and that was reasonably all we could do to fix it. Knowing how to do electronics manufacturing profitably at scale is at cross paths with repairing those electronics.
Professionals get maintenance manuals from manufacturers. They tell them how to unmount the broken part, and then say "OK, now buy a new one." No oscilloscopes involved.
Now a day it's even easier cause Youtube.
There's an opportunity in there somewhere.
What if clothing were made to order locally?
I've been pitching the idea to any one who will listen. Many makerspaces already have stuff for textiles. Kids these are really into cosplay, crafts, homemade. Outside of a few STEM hubs, there's excess warehouse space AND untapped labor.
Etc.
The pendulum swings back.
Restoring this grill required a few hours of labor and lots of patience. The grill retails for a few thousand dollars. I bought it for less than 10% retail, used and requiring repair. The parts cost less than 100.
Many of us value our personal time in a way that rationalizes avoiding a project such as this. However, the cost savings and value created by this project were sufficient to justify the effort.
I like to consider this strategic mending..
Replacing the grills, heat spreader, and burners however makes a lot of sense and can make an old BBQ virtually new again.
I don't know, maybe I just came from a different background. Hacker by nature, grew up poor enough that fixing things was how it was done, have a genetic predisposition against waste, whatever.
One other thing that strikes me as odd is that most people aren't curious to learn how their everyday devices work. As long as it works it's fine by them. I from the other hand need to know even how the toilette flush works because I find the learning process fascinating.
I guess it all boils down to how curious one is.
I get this, but I also think that if you're willing to spend $2000 to replace a refrigerator, per the example, it's not like you can make the situation much worst.
I suppose they might think that they can harm themselves in the process, that's possible. Personally, I might only be okay with futzing around with a refrigerator because I've done it with other (smaller, seemingly less harmful) things in the past.
People can be curious about different things. I have little interest in understanding mechanical/electrical stuff, but I love reading about and visiting other cultures, I enjoy learning new games (board and video), and learning new physical/athletic skills.
It's unthinkable anyone would come to work in mended clothes. They would be concerned everyone thinks they're poor and can't afford buying new clothes. As long as there is this social stigma, and clothing brands interest in people buying new pieces of clothing continuously, we can forget about mending.
It's like casual friday. The CEO can wear shorts and the junior engineer can probably wear shorts. However, you probably won't see the upwardly mobile managers ever wearing shorts without a direct order.
Social signalling matters and clothes are part of social signalling.
You'd be surprised.
https://www.nowtolove.co.nz/celebrity/royals/prince-charles-...
People define themselves by those they could plausibly be mistaken for, not the full range of possible social roles.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
> Everyone wants to look like they are a member of a higher class than they actually are. But everyone also wants to avoid getting mistaken for a member of a poorer class. So for example, the middle-class wants to look upper-class, but also wants to make sure no one accidentally mistakes them for lower-class.
> But there is a limit both to people’s ambition and to their fear. No one has any hopes of getting mistaken for a class two levels higher than their own: a lower-class person may hope to appear middle-class, but their mannerisms, accent, appearance, peer group, and whatever make it permanently impossible for them to appear upper-class. Likewise, a member of the upper-class may worry about being mistaken for middle-class, but there is no way they will ever get mistaken for lower-class, let alone underclass.
Nailed it. The same is true in many social situations as well (although by no means all - repaired or damaged clothing is absolutely acceptable at gigs for many genres, for example).
The problem is not that we can't mend, but that we can't mend seamlessly. We can repair clothes but can't do so in a way that makes them good as new again, which sends an undesirable social signal in many situations.
I might have been sniffy about it in my 20s. Couldn't care less nowadays as it bears no relation to my poverty or not.
Of course there is a difference between mending otherwise fine clothing and having to go on wearing worn or threadbare clothes, as you rightly point out.
I guess because of the cheap car I was driving (It is about $15K brand new and I bought it used four years ago) and I showed up in just casual clothes, they thought I was struggling.
When they heard I was contemplating buying myself a car instead and I was looking at some of the higher end cars, they kept steering me to the lower cost cars. Not that I would have bought anything from there anyway. I don’t buy new cars.
We're talking about at work, where I've never seen any hint it matters beyond be clean, be presentable, be personable etc. 30 years ago, usually wear a suit. In other words, fit in. Choose carefully when making first impression - be that interview or date. :)
At work being junior programmer or CTO reveals status. These days both rich and poor alike will buy £10 jeans, or £2 T shirts. I think no less of them or any higher of someone with a label addiction, if I even noticed. I would think a lot less of someone who acted on perceived social status at work. We're not there for a first date.
Personal anecdata:
* I notice a more relaxed attitude to mended clothes in my native western European country than in my eastern European second home country.
* I also noticed a pattern in secondary school. In the economically privileged environment I went to school, kids cared less about clothing brands than at the less afluent schools in the vicinity.
* I carry mended clothes to work every now and then.
It's straightforward countersignalling - some people are sufficiently wealthy that the cost of their clothes carry negligible economic signalling value, so they can signify the fact that they're above that level of status game or use their clothes to convey different kinds of status. Nobody would believe that the Prince of Wales can't afford a new suit, so patching a tear in his jacket signals thrift and tradition. The patch in his jacket signals that he is old money, that his status is higher than someone who needs to signal their status through clothing. Distressed jeans are the obvious example of retail-level countersignalling; when you can buy a new pair of jeans for $8 at Walmart, the fact that your jeans aren't ripped at the knee carries very limited signalling value, making the countersignal more accessible.
We see the same thing with cycling. The very poor cycle, because they can't afford a car. The very wealthy cycle, because nobody would believe that they can't afford a car and choosing to cycle signals that they could obviously afford to drive but they're conscious of their health or the environment. People in the middle wouldn't be seen dead on a bicycle, because they're not confident of their ability to convey the high-status countersignal rather than the low-status signal. In this example, social capital often substitutes for economic capital; if you're young, bohemian and cosmopolitan, you can more easily convey the countersignal. There's a fairly nuanced meta-signal that says "I have the education and the opportunity needed to be a wealthy professional, but I have made the conscious choice to be an impoverished artist instead".
I'd argue that the strong social safety net in western Europe drives more people into countersignalling and meta-signalling behaviour, because base-level signalling of economic security is less necessary. You don't need to signal the fact that you're not desperately poor in a society where very few people are desperately poor, which opens up a wider range of signalling behaviours.
It has stuck with me every since, and honestly has made me realize how silly this practice of signaling to each other is. It is entirely a phenomenon coming out of the middle class. Even signaling among the upper class is usually due to young or new money.
I often wonder if it was always like this, or of it was created when the consumer middle class was created in the last hundred or so years.
Sumptuary laws are an interesting example - at various times in our history, people of certain social status were forbidden by law to wear certain garments or own certain items. Sometimes this was to prevent runaway consumption due to zero-sum status games, but often it was because the declining cost of luxury goods or the emergence of a nouveau riche undermined the status of the established elite.
I'd argue that the invention of fashion was a necessary response to the falling cost of clothing; when most people of a given social standing can afford equally high-quality clothing, fashion emerges as a kind of planned obsolescence.
The emergence of cultural capital amongst the aristocracy of the 17th century feels remarkably modern. During this period, the role of universities expanded from being practical training colleges for clergymen to a status symbol. The children of landowners could afford to spend their time cultivating "useless" knowledge, while the children of the nouveau riche merchant class needed to learn the family business. Young aristocrats would embark on what we might now describe as a gap year, travelling across Europe to gather knowledge of exotic cultures and collect souvenirs. It could be argued that modern science emerged largely as a byproduct of status signalling - many of the idle rich spent their days showing off expensive scientific apparatus and their access to the latest books and journals, inadvertently inventing modernity in the process.
Maybe it helps that we work in software engineering, so it's quite clear to my colleagues that we could buy a new pair of shorts for each and every day? Or maybe it's because of increase in environmental concerns especially with younger urban people? I can't honestly say, as it never occurred to me that it could convey a negative message.
People call it "knowledge based economy," but one of my previous bosses had that phrase about it "it feels more like it is an ignorance based economy"
And yes, the service economy is there to accommodate living of very one sided people, in regards to both work and life skills.
The amount of money spent in service economy is seemingly directly proportional to at what cost intellectual ineptness comes to money earning classes of society: branding consulting, financial consulting, management consulting, "change management" - really all that stuff is available to any able minded person if he can give 5 minutes of serious thought to that. I do believe that most of HN readers have hard time understanding people buying into that stuff too.
I wonder, if I would've been a multibillionaire, would I be also paying millions to random consultants to do 2+2 things for me?
> This all changed in the 1960s. For good reasons, second-wave feminists fought back against the rigid gender stereotypes of the previous decade and felt that mandatory home economic classes were pushing women into the confinement of housewifery
I understand the idea but no, it is not good. Women used to know how to cook and mend clothes while men knew how to fix cars and furniture. It meant that households could do all that. The man/woman distinction was kind of arbitrary but it resulted in useful complementary skills.
Gender roles are officially a thing of the past now, but the way we did it is by reducing to the least common denominator. Women don't learn how to sew and men don't learn how to woodwork, and no one knows how to budget. Instead of removing these classes, why provide them to both boys and girls instead, maybe in a modernized form?
Gender issues not withstanding, you're absolutely correct, the tragedy is that very few people of either gender know to do these skills today and it's resulted in some very negative consequences.
As I've pointed out in a rather long post below, we desperately need to regain many of them and there's multiple good reasons why we should do so ASAP.
It's a damned disgrace. No wonder there's 'Right to Repair' movements starting up everywhere. They need our full support.
No, it didn't.
One, because while it may have been required for graduation from high school (most of the described material was not, in most places, anyway, though it was traditional and common, and, even where it was required at one point, it remained traditional and common decades beyond the 1960s), graduation rates have always been substantially below 100% (especially before the change in the 1960s), and second because not all households, even in and before the 1960s, consisted of at least one adult of each gender.
The only way to assure that households have a particular combination of skills is to assure that individuals, regardless of gender, have that combination of skills.
> Gender roles are officially a thing of the past now, but the way we did it is by reducing to the least common denominator.
No, we didn't; there is a lot more required in high school today than there was in the 1960s; shop and home ec became less common not because gender roles weakened (that just made both more gender mixed, especially the traditionally male classes), but because they were displaced as academic core requirements got more involved.
> Instead of removing these classes, why provide them to both boys and girls instead, maybe in a modernized form?
The reason is because they are capital intensive, liability intensive, there's less interest in them if offered as electives because the relative economic value of the skills and the relative social status of practitioners of them has declined, and there's no room without displacing something seen as more valuable to fit them in as universal requirements.
We absolutely lose out on these skills in aggregate, by pulling them from the curriculum, and it’s also not obvious at all that there is less overal economic value to providing some hands-on tradecraft skills (which often require critical thinking and creative problem solving) versus another theoretical academic course.
The amount of money an average household can save through doing their own home maintenance and upkeep is substantial, and the opportunity cost is not as high as you might think. These activities often have positive externalities (the additional learning that takes place while doing them, or the opportunity of doing them with the kids), not to mention emotional payback. And the cost of outsourcing these jobs is almost always not tax-deductible, making the true cost of outsourcing nearly double the sticker price.
But in reality most of school is about developing interpersonal skills and having time to do whatever really interests you, and teaching applied rationality is hard, and only occasional in every class, be it DIY, physics, debate club, or free form project.
While it's usually thought of on a national level, Ricardian comparative advantage works at the household level, and as markets have less overhead in the form of financial and other (e.g., delay) costs, outsourcing more tasks where the household doesn't have comparative advantage is expected. If you don't want these tasks outsourced, you either need to make a nation of professional woodworkers and seamstresses somehow or, more plausibly, artificially increase transaction costs of outsourcing, e.g., by targeted taxes.
> And the cost of outsourcing these jobs is almost always not tax-deductible, making the true cost of outsourcing nearly double the sticker price.
That's a bizarre claim. If it's not tax deductible, the cost is exactly the sticker price. If it is tax deductible, it's less than the sticker price by the marginal rate of income tax paid by the purchaser, so even if it weren't unreasonable to treat the tax deductible case as the baseline car, you'd need a 50% marginal income tax rate to make the non-deductible cost the twice the deductible cost.
You can get this in the top bracket in CA, but that's a pretty narrow elite.
Furniture (products of woodwork) and fashion are super cheap nowadays, so the rent of mending is diminished. I can spend 20 minutes on fixing a shirt before it is financially rational to just buy a new one.
Cars and some other things are just very complicated thanks to closed and obscured software.
My girlfriend just recently fixed our LP player (both 25 years old ;) ), I tried to fix a 5 year old CD player .. not a chance.
If it were produced from sustainable materials and labor, and you had to pay the rent for the landfill space it occupies until it biodegrades, and you made an average income, the cost would work out in favor of mending.
Disposable goods are a high rent that we pay almost exclusively to the mega-rich and subsidize for ourselves by externalizing much of the cost onto underrepresented labor groups, like developing markets and future generations that will inherit our landfills.
Disposable goods are disposable because people tend to act rationally about time and costs.
I did take both? At a standard public school in Canada.
I think it depends on jurisdiction, and I'd guess if those classes aren't provided, it's more likely because they're more expensive to teach (sewing machines, cook surfaces, woodworking tools are all very expensive).
I went to middle school in the early 90s.
I was awful at it, but I learnt how to do it and I (badly) sewed a lot of things through my life. Mostly buttons :)
I recently ordered a new kit from them, and learned that they are working on a new project to produce a more mendable fabric: https://madetomend.com/ I can't wait until I can buy a jacket from them and try it out.
Yeesh! Is there really something 'illegitimate' about housework? Such a ridiculous tone. All work is important and should be done well and with pride. A person is not less than or "in a ghetto" if their contribution to a family is taking care of most of the housework.
I'm a guy and I remember taking Home Ec and Shop, and then those being phased out. All students were expected to take both, and I remember learning a lot there. I suppose its much more important to learn about "Catcher in the Rye".
Our whole life is optimized for maximum working. Everything else is flensed away.
Decades later I have lived in China 20 years and Hongkong and I still take the attitude of fix before replace. Clothing, shoes, electrical gear, showers....often to the amusement of partner ("you can do that?!") or "that won't work"(and years later is still working).
What ALL kids need to be taught in school is basic principles and skills for repairing things. Its fun, builds new skills, maybe gives them a hobby, and creates more rounded people for the future with more environmentally friendly attitude to possessions.
Maybe it's something to do with countries that were more recently considered frontiers.
It's my prized possession. It will definitely outlive me.
- We want/need a kitchen island - So instead of going out to buy one we found someone that wanted rid of an old table and are in the process of resizing, adding shelving, wheels, and re-finishing.
- The vacuum broke, so instead of throwing it away I tore it down and fault-found until it worked again.
- The car gets as much maintenance from me as possible before I call the shop.
Today, unlike before, I first considering how much self-help is possible before seeking external assistance/inputs. There's far less anxiety about capability and being able to respond to changing situations. The only down-side is the need to maintain some true down-time, as all the DIY stuff eats into that (it's still, ultimately, work and not relaxation).
https://garbagefinds.com/ https://www.instagram.com/garbagefinds
"But old clothes are beastly," continued the untiring whisper. "We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better …"
"Government's an affair of sitting, not hitting. You rule with the brains and the buttocks, never with the fists. For example, there was the conscription of consumption."
"There, I'm ready," said Lenina, but Fanny remained speechless and averted. "Let's make peace, Fanny darling."
"Every man, woman and child compelled to consume so much a year. In the interests of industry. The sole result …"
"Ending is better than mending. The more stitches, the less riches; the more stitches …"
As a guy, it would be nice if a class in high school had forced me to learn to sow. Teach it to people of all genders.
There are tradeoffs certainly but I've come to believe that high school should have a track that covers, for lack of a better term, "adulting." Cooking, sewing, shop, personal finance, statistics, etc. And most of those can be mixed in with more academic subjects. I've done machine shop stuff at research universities and I've taken a Harvard MOOC on food science.
Fortunately, the generation that was born with YouTube will be a lot better off, because the amount of things you can learn to do from watching YouTube videos by experienced people is astounding.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/news/adulting-classes-teach-millenni...
We are expecting our first child, and the amount of second-hand clothing that found its way to us via family is astounding. Children outgrow clothing fast, so even without mending clothing gets reused as a matter of course.
We bought 6 months of clothes for our son when he was born, and have barely bought anything since, he's 2 and a half now, and has more foot wear than me.
Unless a second child happens, we'll likely give away all stuff in decent conditions too. Pay-it-forward & all.
Speaking of those groups, she also managed to pick up an old Łucznik sewing machine that's older than our parents. It's repairable, indestructible, and has already created a bunch of stuff, including hand-made gifts.
If that's a hallmark of a "poor" country, then I don't want to live in a "rich" one.
It was actually children that caused us to rediscover mending. Case of having to really. We were not going to throw away the week old jacket because they inconveniently put a rip down half the front, or buy new school pants because they put a hole in the knee playing football at break.
Jeans, no matter how cheap, go first in one of two places. The main button hole or knees. 5 mins patching will get another year out of them. More expensive jeans can be patched for much longer though. Which is where the whole fashion for ripped or patched jeans came from in the first place. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Textile_industry_in_Bangladesh...
Poorer parts of the world are poor by default, not because of trade.
Through to disposal where discarded products will either go to poor countries to be resold, or thrown into landfill.
I still feel my life was much more interesting back then. We were poor but, paradoxically, we ate better than I eat now. The tasks had much more variety to them, there was a lot of interesting stuff happening every day and requiring your attention. There was new thing to be done/fixed all the time and I would never get bored. We would be doing everything for ourselves no matter how unskilled we were in the task, you had to figure it out while you were doing it. There was plenty of variety between seasons and there was plenty of free time to spend with the family.
I like my current job and it pays very well but I feel my daytime consists of only work and entertainment. There is almost no variety to it and during 3-4 weeks of vacation I have annually I feel like I have no idea what to do with the time to truly recharge my batteries.
> Two old men are talking. "Ah, life was so much better during Stalin's rule!". "Are you mad? We barely had anything to eat, and they were randomly killing people, we lived in constant fear!". "Yes, but we were young...."
I feel this is the same - your nostalgia is saying more about you than about the times/the society. I also grew up in a communist country, and I don't feel there's much that we lost by getting rid of them - you could easily choose to live that very same lifestyle now, but (I speculate) you don't because you know deep inside that you and your family would hate it.
This was when I was unemployed and the time/money ratio was worth it...
I fix stuff because its fun and frugal, and currently have an ongoing classic car project which is fun but not so frugal. These things serve as a nice mental break from coding all day, everyday.
I've repaired the washing machine twice -- once for an open-circuit dryer thermistor (bad batch apparently) and again for bad wiring on the door interlock latch/switch.
The sensor cost £5, the interlock cost about half an hour of cleaning the old switch with Q-tips and fifteen of crimping new Faston spade terminals onto the wiring harness. The IDC connectors Indesit use on their wiring harnesses are truly awful things.
I've seen similar in an AT&T 3B1 (aka UNIX PC), with the same failure mode: the connector gets warm, the IDC contacts loosen, contact resistance increases, the connector gets warmer and eventually it either burns up or shorts out.
Can't say I'm a fan!
I've also lost count of the number of things I've fixed with the 3D printer... I'd rather spend a few hours modelling something in OpenSCAD to fix something else than throw the broken-thing away. It's nice practice for when I'm making new things.
We can boast all day long about how good our tech skills are but out in the real world it's far from "much more useful and valuable to civilization" than a lot of things. It seems like a very narcissistic and simple point of view.
timbuk2 fixed my backpack 2+years into the deal. It was a close to zero paper overhead engagement. If I'd known what their intended fix was, I would have done it myself (it was some simple stitching mainly) but the point is they did repair, not replace. and I'm content.
No we haven't. If you need to sew on a button and you can't figure out how to do it from looking at a piece of thread, a needle, and the other buttons, then go spend fifteen minutes on a Youtube tutorial. It's easy.
If the task is more complicated any you really like the piece, consider the fact that in terms of opportunity cost, it's almost certainly cheaper for you to send the piece across the country (or the globe) and back than having it fixed by yourself.
My Dad made our furniture and fixed many things, but sewing? He hadn't the faintest idea.
FWIW, neither of them fixes anything any more.
There are some intricate bits the trickery required to get the timing just right is at the edge of my patience but when they run it is like music.
As opposed to a non-mechanical sewing machine? What does this mean? Guessing you mean one with metal gears unlike the plastic-geared junk sold new in most stores now?
From what I know there is just less logic and software inside. Whenever I change the style of stitching, I can hear some mechanical clicking inside of it. So I assume there is no fancy logic inside. Just pure mechanical switches and an engine.
"ending is better than mending" and "the more stitches the less riches"
As with many things (like clothing in the article) we’ve also lost our ability to mentally heal from the damage that repeated exposure to modern workplace cultures inflicts on us.
The seam is an emergency repair and looks awful.
Button work is OK. My mom gave me the idea to put something, like a toothpick, between button and garment, so the button has some flexibility when you put it in button hole.
Love it.
I’ve not seen one in a long time. That tells you a lot.
Recently, this has come to the fore with movements such as those pushing the Right to Repair hi-tech proprietary items such as iPhones and John Deere tractor electronics, etc. I wholeheartedly support these movements, for as a society I reckon we need to relearn how to get our hands 'dirty' by doing physical tradie-like things from time to time.
No pun intended but there are many threads to this topic so it's hard to know where to begin or how to paraphrase/limit my comments to a reasonable size. Let's start with life skills and a quote from the article: 'There was once a time when every American child was formally taught the basics of living'. Whilst I understand and agree with the reasons given in the article why most of us seem to have lost many basic life skills, I cannot quite fathom how we let the situation degenerate to such an extent.
Surely basic life skills are more than important, they are in fact very important. Why? Well there are many reasons why one should become reasonably proficient at acquiring them and do so at an early age as is possible. Essentially it boils down to one's need to be resourceful, especially so when our modern-day 'crutches' either fail or are otherwise not available and we have to improvise—or just generally (as one can do things much more quickly and efficiently after having acquired them). Secondly, the need to acquire basic skills at an early age is important for learning more advanced skills acquired later on in life, as these build on earlier learning (even when the new skills are quite different from the older ones). The fact is that learning new skills as an adult is considerably easier if one already has the basics fully conquered. For me, this truism is borne out of experience.
Years ago, I came up with the quip: 'Question: can one become a good practical engineer if one cannot sew one's buttons back on?' Answer: probably not!'. It arose after seeing how impractical and inept some qualified engineers were at doing certain normal day-to-day manual tasks that one would have expected them to already know how to do (as well as have an intrinsic feeling for doing it well). For example, I've seen too many who've little or no feeling for tightening up a screw or nut to the right tension without either stripping the thread or having it too loose. As adults, they had not yet developed a feeling for say the strength of everyday materials or how to work them (clearly this puts them at a disadvantage to those who already have (assuming all else being equal that is). The question is why, as for the most part, they were bright people.
When I delved into the matter a little deeper I often found that as kids they had done very little exploration of the mechanical world around them, they had not done things such as building Meccano models, or pulling the lawnmower engine apart, or attempt to fix broken clocks, etc. Seeing how and why things break is an essential skill to learn at a very early age, especially so for engineers, as it fine tunes one's understanding about how things work. As well, one also develops a practical feeling for the strength of various materials and other relevant properties that are not easily learned by simple observation or from just reading textbooks.
It's my experience that really good techies are almost invariably good at most of these simple skills and that they acquired the essence of them at a very young age. It seems manual dexterity and concomitant mental agility (one's overall perception of what needed to achieve the task successfully) continually improved throughout their lives—skills they learned whilst young transferred later on to a newer understanding of how to tackle work that is much more complex. (In his book 'Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman', physicist Richard Feynman beautifully illustrates how skills learned early on are useful in later life. Feynman was not only a theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner of the first order but also he was extremely adept with mechanical things—skills he'd well honed as a kid (for instance, his exploits at safecracking are well known, so also is his analysis of why Challenger's rocket seals failed).
The general loss of craft, trades and various skills in fixing things has had a large negative impact on the population as a whole. It has meant that essentially the workforce has become deskilled in many areas (and consequently so has the whole population). Combine this with the fact that nowadays corporations are making much more use of proprietary (and increasingly secret) technologies and we have the makings of a large social problem. For starters, there is 'new' unemployment amongst once-skilled workers, and given the fact that many workers, especially males, often are much happier when working or creating things with their hands and who now have been deprived from making their living in this way, has meant considerable distress for many of them.
Whilst this may seem contradictory (given what I've already said), it, nevertheless, is all the more reason that we must re-evaluate and upgrade the importance of developing life skills at a very early age (as today workers need to be both nimble and flexible and to do so they need to acquire such capabilities very early on in their lives).
This brings me full circle, as a kid my mother taught me to sew on buttons and do basic repairs to clothes (which I did even though I didn’t much care for it). She strongly insisted that boys also needed to know these skills (and I suspect it was also to save her some work). If I had not learned those skills when very young then the army would have insisted I do so under its instruction not to mention learning all those other irksome dress-code-related tasks upon which armies insist in drilling into poor unfortunate recruits such as ironing, shining boots, putting creases in pants in exactly the right places, etc., etc. (As part of ones larger kit was little repair kit that contained some cloth patches, needles and spare buttons, and we were drilled in the use thereof.)
My mother also taught me the basics of knitting, as I was forever getting holes in my sweaters and she expected me to fix them (which I did pretty well because when completed my fixes blended in and weren't very obvious). The important point here is that it doesn't take much skill just to do a reasonable repair. I never got past knitting squares and scarfs but even that meant that I'd acquired sufficient skills to do a decent repair job. Moreover, it's not essential that one has to like leaning such skills nor that of actually doing them. As a male, knitting certainly wasn’t my scene but I'm now glad that I've learned the basics (as it's actually turned out to be quite a useful skill).
What my mother didn't teach me was how to use a sewing machine. Nevertheless, I learned the basics anyway on her machine much to her chagrin. It was not long before I was forbidden to use it, as I used it to stitch together cardboard and other strange materials for various projects and models I was working on. (Incidentally, it didn't stop me using it in secret but she had a sixth sense and she always knew and caught me out after me having used it—it seems I could never reset the tension knob exactly to her 'default' settings!) ;-)
Was learning the basics of using a sewing machine a useful skill for a nine/ten year old boy to acquire? In the end it certainly was, as I later learned the hard way, which was by that time the next generation of women had arrived they had become sufficiently emancipated to have essentially given up sewing machines altogether; so whenever I asked women in my life to repair my clothes they simply told me to go take a running jump. 'Do it yourself or get new ones' was the new mantra, so I had no choice but to comply.
Whilst I can say that using a sewing machine is a task that I certainly don't relish, it nonetheless remains a fact that nowadays it's dead easy for me to do simple repairs to torn clothes, or to use the button-hole attachment to replace or renew buttonholes, or for me to take up jeans by a few inches.
Same thing with a fancy looking scale- the wires internal where glued together with a sort of ducttape. Two solder points later - meet the eternal scale.
I sometimes wonder, why this is not a buisness model. There must be money in making cheap items ever lasting.
Manufacturing is cheap. Labor is expensive.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol%27s_cost_disease
It is, and it's wide out in the open. I bet the high end water heater with a solid reputation for quality would have proper hinges and insulation. It's just that most people are wary of paying a premium for what they perceive to be the same item.
Well I, for one, am extremely glad they don't. I remember cars from the 1960s and 1970s, and they were ####ing terrible: unreliable, unsafe, slow, poor handling. Cars today are vastly better, although I think the accelerating trend for packing them full of complex electronics and gizmos may bite us in the arse. There is simply a lot more to go wrong in a car from 2019 than a car from 1979, even if individual parts and subsystems are much more reliable.
My uncle and my step-dad both have more realistic views. My uncle used to ride motorcycles back in the 60s and 70s and looked at me askance when I'd complained that the problem with doing long distances on a bike with chain rather than shaft drive is that you always needed to carry chain lube with you to oil the chain every 200 - 300 miles. His comment, about an old Norton he'd had, was that he needed to strip down and rebuild the engine every time he'd done 100 miles (he didn't keep it long; even back then this was considered awful).
Likewise, about 15 years ago I'd mentioned some relatively minor part needing replacement after 50,000 miles on my first car, and my step-dad pointed out that with a lot of the cars he'd driven in the 60s, after 50,000 miles you'd need a replacement engine, never mind the odd part.
50K miles was about how long my parents' cars lasted. 100K miles was considered exceptional at the time and the owner probably babied the car and didn't drive it in places or seasons where it would be exposed to salt.
Now durability as a term exists only for things like jeans and trucks where it’s not supposed to indicate that you can use the thing for long, but rather, to indicate a macho DIY culture.
I believe marketing has played a large role in moving consumers away from even considering how long a product will last.