Seriously though, it seems like every form of infrastructure we rely on is held together in such a fragile manner. I hate hate to think of the chaos should there be a major Internet and physical infra failure in close proximity, time-wise.
As far as I can tell this is a truism across all fields: farming, skilled trades, build systems, transportation infrastructure, housing…
As I was writing that, I was just thinking of the recent Surfside collapse, what would would have happened if the regions data networks had gone down simultaneously (by chance). A major event two decades ago, cellular networks were overwhelmed and calls could not be made. I dare say we're more reliant on those networks today, as well as the Internet.
Not that I would expect it to happen, but it was just a thought.
Screwdrivers are more of a consumable than a capital good.
So presumably just another programmer making up an analogy with insufficient background knowledge so that we can nitpick the details of it.
In fact, so much care is put into infrastructure that most people/shops have lots of tools they have designed and built themselves at great expense to streamline their operations.
This is why you can't just drive a car until it breaks, you get it checked out.
Then again, cars are a private good. When it's your property vs our property you have more of an incentive to take care of it.
Getting it out won't be fun.
but in a shop unless you can't take it out using other means (pliers for example or a nut split remover), you can simply weld a bolt on the screw's head and use a wrench to unscrew it.
or drill a hole through it after removing the head and use another screw to take out the moncone from the other side.
Bad screws are more common than bad screwdrivers and even a brand new screwdriver could lead to the same result.
as the original post said "If it breaks all the time, everybody is highly experienced at patching together new workarounds"
All the steps you outlined risk damaging the part you're working on, or wasting time. Let's just say you only value your time as a mechanic at $30 an hour if getting that screw out takes you another 20 or 30 minutes, you would have been better off buying a $5 screw bit
but what the original post said it's not that you shouldn't buy a new screwdriver, but that it you know something will break, you learn how to fix it.
if your brand new screwdriver ends up stripping that screw anyway and you don't know what to do next because you thought that it would never happen using a working screwdriver, well. you're screwed :)
sometimes there are no good solutions, only bad solutions
that's what keep things working.
if everyone believed that spit and bailing wire was a no go, because they are bad solutions and there's a better one - there always is - (i.e. fixing the root cause, after having identified it) there would be no internet as we know it today.
Having ready spares is great but I'm sure the HN crowd knows how much crib-death there is on new, replacement bits of all kinds.
Until it's actually been run-in for a while how do you really know it's going to work when you unbox it to replace a truly dead piece?
The upshot of this is' RAID-6' type designs are the most reliable in the real world since when one fails at least you are leaning on other parts that have been run-in and are past the leading edge of the bathtub curve.
We had the unfortunate experience of installing 4 new 16 bay chasis with brand new drives (10+ years ago now). We designated one of the 16s as hot spare for each chasis, plus had 2 cold spares for each as well. 72 brand new drives in total. All from the same batch of drives from the manufacture. Set them all up on a Friday and configured all for RAID5 (pre-RAID6 availability). Plan was to let them build and have some burn-in time over the weekend for possible Monday availability. Monday provided us with multiple drive failures in each chasis. Drive manufacturer confirmed a batch batch from whichever plant, replaced all and delivered larger sizes for replacements. Luckily, they failed during burn-in rather than 1 week after deploying.
I'd be far more concerned with agricultural logistics, though we've never starved to extinction, either.
Perhaps we've reached a point of positive no return: We can no longer cease to exist!
A lot of starvation events have of course occurred across many different nations, peoples, civilizations. Europe, as one example, was numerous times ravaged by extreme starvation events that collectively killed millions of people across the 19th and 20th centuries. I think your agriculture concerns are well placed.
The various Internets have gone down routinely for all sorts of reasons.
Note that the argument is not dependent on any sort of cause, such as climate change or whatever. It is entirely probabilistic.