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Comment by lazyjones | Hacker News Reader

I'm old enough to know how to mend, but surely even younger people could just watch one of countless Youtube tutorials if they suddenly decided they'd like to learn this? Knowledge is more accessible than ever before, nowadays we just "know where to look" whereas previous generations knew what they were taught (or, sometimes, learnt from books).

The real issue seems to be that people are helpless without the Internet - and that our consumerism has brought a throwaway mentality with it.

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You're right that YouTube has a lot of helpful videos for repair / disassembly that make it a lot easier than it used to be. I don't know why "being helpless without the internet" would be "the real problem" though, given that we ... have the internet..?

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.

>The real problem is that today's technology is generally much more complicated than it used to be.

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".

It's both. Things are so much cheaper to buy because the marginal cost of a factory assembling parts (on hundreds of widgets a minute) is ridiculously cheap.

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.

The waste and pollution of mass production are kind of a problem,if you believe in anthropogenic climate change, for example.

>broadly positive fact that automation has drastically reduced the cost of goods relative to labour

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.

Modern flat screens are much more likely to be glued together in ways that make it nearly impossible to repair them, too.

Exactly. Had part of the bottom LED backlighting strip go bad on a monitor recently. I'm no stranger to electronics work, but repairing it proved impossible due to the way the monitor was manufactured, even if I had been able to source proper replacements. Compare that to old CRTs I used to repair in high school by swapping out parts you could often find at radio shack and get to with just a screwdriver.

Much higher risk of death with a CRT though.

True, but not too much higher if you're careful to ground out the HV circuitry before you touch anything. It's also not nearly as high a risk as people tend to think [1].

[1] http://lowendmac.com/2007/the-truth-about-crts-and-shock-dan...

Agreed with everything but the last sentence. It is certainly a problem, as it ends up in using up more resources, more energy and creates trash.

The primary failure mode of a TV in the 70s was a tube that went bad. Easy fix: open TV, pop out old tube, pop in old tube, done.

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.

>The primary failure mode of a TV in the 70s was a tube that went bad. Easy fix: open TV, pop out old tube, pop in old tube, done.

I'm not sure reseating a broken component would help, I think you might mean "new" :)

lol yes, thank you.

I grew up in a way that didn’t involve learning traditional skills from my parents. That seems almost antiquated although I’m sure some people my age did have it like that. Divorced parents, not so much time spent with grandparents. Mom didn’t have a lot of need for mending, etc. There was no war, affordable stuff was plentiful enough. Many people my age describe this kind of rupture in the passing down of skills. But we are also quite resourceful and it’s like we are teaching ourselves to be different as we grow up into parental age. We also have a sense that life might be getting more difficult when we project decades ahead, so we want to resurrect some of this lost knowledge.

> Mom didn’t have a lot of need for mending, etc. There was no war, affordable stuff was plentiful enough. Many people my age describe this kind of rupture in the passing down of skills.

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.

> 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.

Some people buy pants with manufactured holes, as I'm sure we all know.

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.

I'm young enough that i'm part of the generation that the article is complaining about, but my first thought was also youtube. The amount of knowledge available there is amazing. Yes, it's full of stupid videos and conspiracies too, but if you ever want to learn how to do anything, it's a simple youtube search away. There must be thousands of excellent, clear tutorial videos for every point the author raises.

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.

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