I've recently discovered how large the price of getting rid of something can be. Usually these costs are hidden because you just throw something into the trash and it's gone. But not always the case.
A few years ago we bought a generator. A few months after the warranty expired, it broke. There are no small-engine repair shops in my area, and it's too big to fit in my car anyway. Having someone come to our house to repair it would cost more than buying a new one. But... how do you get rid of a broken generator? It weighs 45 kg and it has four gallons of gasoline in the tank. You can't just chuck it in the trash.
(FYI, I decided to take it apart and was actually able to get it running again. It turned out to be an easy fix -- broken fuel valve. But success was far from guaranteed, and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge?)
I still think it was the right call to give it a shot. Save my uncle and myself, nobody I know will try to repair anything themselves.
Solution: find a very thin pin and ream out the buildup in the carburetor, and all the steps leading up to being able to do that. The sense of personal (horse)power I felt after reviving that engine was palpable.
It's funny cause now, just based on that experience, I'm not saying I'm an expert, but I am saying if I encounter any small engine that won't start I will eagerly start trying to figure it out. It looks fun now. The brain is weird.
Funny thing, the replacement batteries are much larger in capacity now, but the price of a single replacement battery is the same cost of a new powered tool. So, I wound up getting a new tool that I didn't have with a new battery. I have a few LiPo batteries for my cinema camera gear that have died as well. I'm going to try to find someone that can just replace the batteries packs inside the custom housing.
Very few exceptions to this rule for me, and I generally avoid anything with a Micro-USB charger like the plague if I can, as I can't help but see it becoming e-Waste in 3-5 years.
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/proximity-consequential-opt...
We really shouldn’t discourage people from trying to fix thins because of fear.
If you need to try a repair again checkout YouTube, the small engine guys on there are really, really good. They've got tricks even I'd never heard of before.
I refuse to believe someone who is attempting to repair an internal combustion engine does not know that gasoline is flammable and the working area should be ventilated (or outside), particularly if they’re working on the fuel system.
Sure. But people do occasionally ignite gasoline by accident. It's uncommon, but the consequences can be very severe.
That way you can be 100% sure it’s fine if you’re concerned.
But I kept telling her that she doesn't want these complex mechanical things hanging around. I tried to impress on her (pace Technology Connections) how abysmal that air conditioner is going to be. I also tried to explain to her that if she gets a generator, she'll have to maintain it and fire it up once in a while, and that will not be easy. I explained that I have at least one other friend who decided that owning a truck and an inverter was way easier, because the truck has wheels that you can use to drive it around, the truck is easily maintained by the auto shop on the corner, and the truck will provide plenty of power just the same as the generator.
She really has a prepper streak, though, and I couldn't talk her out of it, especially after the sales lady got talking to her. She doesn't have a car and her roommate doesn't drive either, so I don't know how they'll transport/maintain these machines, but oh well.
Cars are an immensely inefficient platform.
My comment was more in line with using cars as energy storage infrastructure. I think most car owners don’t want to use their car batteries as grid infrastructure.
Furthermore, only expensive late model trucks even have high capacity inverters built in that are capable of running a separate air conditioner. The little portable inverters that plug into a 12V vehicle outlet can only do about 150W.
So for me, I'll always spend time on this sort of stuff if it's within my reach to do a decent job.
As far as disposal goes... yeah, most stuff I sell on Marketplace or Gumtree would be a net loss after wasting time dealing with people (and scammers, who belong in their own category). But I hate to have things I used and enjoyed just die alone in landfill.
I started rebelling against the idea of "I might as well buy a new one". The way I see it, if (say) my phone screen breaks I have two choices: I spend $150 fixing it, or I spend $150 buying a new phone. In either case I end up with a working phone, but the second case has generated one phone worth of electronic garbage.
You don’t, constantly comparing time to money is a bad way to live.
If you learned something, tried something new, and maybe even enjoyed it? That’s good enough.
I do a lot of repairs and maintenance at my own house. Last year I built a terrace and an extra room, and only had to pay someone to help me, and this week I painted the all house exterior with the help of my dad. Total costs of painting and entire house: 240€. It would cost north of 2000€ if I had to pay someone to do it.
Yes, my "hourly rate" for that kind of work is sometimes much less than my "regular" work. But I can fix many things, don't need to go find "credible" people to do things for me, I fell an immense pleasure to be self-sustainable (for that kind of things), learn a lot; and my house, cars, electronics, are mostly in top shape.
In Denmark the tax system is such that if you subcontract out of personal money they need to be 5 times fast than you.
If we say that you can make your deck in half the time a professional would have don it, the factor is still 2.5x.
Ig. assuming a contractor would do it for 50 USD/h, this would translate to "making" 125 USD on hour by doing it yourself, 250 USD/h if you know what you are doing.
Obviously these things change with tax regimes.
(Also discussed recently on HN.)
If we assume I'm a contractor charging $100 per hour and take the cash as salary:
(100/1.3142) * 0.5 = $38 left after payroll tax and the top income tax rate (50%).
So if I'm just as fast and good as a professional, the professional needs to charge $38 per hour or less for it to be worth it. But in reality, a professional is probably at least 2x as fast as me, making it $76. That's probably less than they charge, so it's worth paying for a professional.
Then you also need to add some cost of doing business.
Said in another way: The 100SEK you earn becomes 25SEK the contract can use (assuming 50% tax rate) – that's the first factor of 4. The last factor can be found in the details.
After all, if the contractor had some strange anomaly where he pays 100% of his income in tax, why would that matter to you?
Do it yourself: Miss out on that hours worth of salary
Subcontract: 2 times tax is paid.
Obviously this has implications on negotiation. This is exactly the reason why services are considered very expensive in the Nordics (as in 80USD to get your hair cut).
Note that this needs to be compared with a company getting their stuff fixed. Their contractor costs are fully deducted from their income.
In my example, a contractor who's twice as fast needs to cost $76 or less per hour . Thrice as fast is $114 or less.
You're right in principle though, just not on that calculation. In Sweden we have tax deductions for private citizens exactly to combat this issue: up to a certain amount per year can be deducted from your income, just like a company can, for certain services (such as cleaning or house repairs).
Said in another way: you don't pay income tax when you paint your own house.
I once wasted my whole holiday on painting the house. And it wasn't well done, because it was my first time. I'll probably not do it again, unless I don't have other work.
If you would have to do it again, would you do the same errors, and the paint job would turn out equal? Or would you do better second time?
That is why I never painted an entire house before having painted a bedroom at least one time. And I've never painted a bedroom before I painted a small piece of furniture at least one time. One needs to learn gradually, hopefully with someone who knows how to do things. Last year I built a terrace and room with the (paid) help of a contractor. I started just carrying the trash, then breaking things, then putting cement of the walls, etc. etc. Now I can quite complex things by myself..
The key is to do things gradually..
I wouldn't work saturday afternoon anyway because my head is already useless for programming. So I do need to change line-of-work somehow. I can either go for a walk and learn something about nature. Or I can self-repair something and learn something about construction.
Of course spending all free time on self-repairs would be exhausting. But I don't feel like lying on a couch entire weekend either.
This is the key! I do these kind of things on my spare time!
On my spare time I could (1) do nothing; (2) try to cram more screen time into my life, and give the money earned to someone to do my repairs for me or; (3) do some things by myself, learn while doing it, and feel like a super-human that can control is own life (well, some of it). I prefer number 3!
So it is more comparable with the work rates, since I do not have a lot time time to tinker
Yes, using power tools while kid is napping is no-go. But after few months kid is not napping that much. And there’re many relatively silent jobs. It’s easy to silicon a window sill while kid is sleeping in another room. Or assemble a drawer with an old good screwdriver instead of a drill. And after a couple years there’re endless learning possibilities. Sure, it goes slowly, but it does happen eventually.
Full disclosure - I did hire handymen for a good portion of jobs for various reasons. Mostly because we were burning a lot of money in rent or some jobs require too many special tools and knowledge to be done right (electricity, drywalls, etc).
Firstly, in most cases we are just DIY'ing the final "craftsman" step of the work, we still depend on the materials being available.
Second, if more and more people that actually care about work quality go DIY it leaves people who can't or won't be as involved. Over time unscrupulous tradespeople will take over the market.
Labour in the west is much more expensive than energy, so it's only natural that your time was worth more than a new unit.
But that's an accident of geography and politics. Someone in a poor country, in the same line of work that you're in, might actually break even on this.
I believe there's value in this sort of self-sufficiency. Especially considering that, as recent years have shown, we're one global supply chain breakdown or war away from plain unavailability of some goods.
Improve my HN karma.
;-)
Not necessarily. It depends on the job and other factors. How much time does it take to find a competent person to hire? And what if you fail, and they do a bad job; how much time does it take you to deal with the situation and fix it (or do you end up paying twice, once for the bad job and again for someone else to redo it)? Do you need to be on-site to supervise them (so they don't steal stuff)? That's more of your time. If it's something portable or that needs to be transported to the professional, how much time and money does that cost?
Don't forget the value of the satisfaction from having fixed something yourself and how good fixing stuff helps with recovering after spending hours in front of a computer
My wife doesn’t understand how I spend my whole day complaining about fixing things (sys admin) for work then seem genuinely happy to work on a car, bike, random electronic thing, etc.
Completely different.
On the selfish side, I might actually get to enjoy what I fix at home.
On the brains are funny side, anything physical hits different. Turning a wrench, busting knuckles, burning myself triggers a satisfaction a screen does not.
I’m not a masochist either. Why is a soldering iron so hard to hold? Probably a me problem.
All those skills transfer around too.
For example if you are an employee and establish your rate that way, you probably can't work more to get more anyway.
So repairing things for yourself is just cream on top in that case.
Don't forget to also factor in the hidden cost of depriving the CS field of many great works during said hours which is incalculable imo.
Also, if you have kids who learn along with you the value is multiplied.
Well in an emergency scenario (what generators are for generally) the troubleshooting/repair knowledge you gained will be invaluable
You need to decide for yourself what is more valuable to you.
I'd add a 4th: storage price. Having lived in the city, space is at a premium. We have found ourselves unable to go into specific (smaller) apartments in the past just because we had too much stuff. This goes especially for kitchen items.
Case in point, Adobe Creative Cloud. Never have I encountered more anti-consumer behavior. For yearly subscriptions they only allow you to "not continue subscribing for another year" during a brief window of time right before your renewal date.
Mind you, I'm not talking about cancelling the service and backing out of obligations that you've agreed to, I'm talking about Adobe engineering a situation in which they implicitly assume that you want to continue being a customer, while removing the ability for you to tell them that you no longer wish to be a customer.
Or four times: Acquisition price, usage price, storage price, and disposal price
Hong Konger who rents here:
Or five times: Acquisition price, usage price, storage price, moving price and disposal price
repairing >> replacing > buying ...
I'm not sure where maintenance fits, I guess that's what "painting" is.
Maybe even a fifth: storage price.
Funny enough, I actually have noticed this with my books. More books require more bookshelves. More bookshelves require more real estate. It's a straight-line arrow of causation from picking up a copy of Moby Dick to house-shopping for a place large enough where I can have my own private library.
I'd offer another that has to be paid before the price in money:
Research cost.
Increasingly I don't need "things." I need the best/right "thing" for the job. And for hobbies or high cost/risk purchases (think car, house, big dollar contracts) I find I need to invest substantial time into researching my problem and then my options for solutions, which takes lots of my time. Because the cost of getting it wrong often means even more time, money, and headaches that I don't want to deal with, I sometimes find myself over indexing on the up front part to avoid the pain of getting it wrong.
In many cases the cost of time invested eclipses the cost of the object because the cost of the time to remedy it is more than the cost of replacing it.
The same argument can be made with regard to finite space. Say you are a collector of diecast model cars, but have limited space in your house to store them. Acquiring a new model limits you from acquiring a potentially more desirable model in the future.
If I have the option to choose between two gadgets, the acquiring prince of one may be far less (assuming lower quality and everything else equal) and even usage is kinda the same, modulo a bit of frustration if the lower-quality thing is not as smooth to use, but if it breaks, then cheap stuff tends to be harder if not impossible to repair, and if you can't fix it then you need to dispose of it and possibly get a replacement.
Too much hassle. If I have the money, I optimize for quality above everything else.
(Sadly, since manufacturers know this, the premium quality version usually costs disproportionally more cause market -- I'm ok with paying more. Not just a bit more, but much more.)
> companies producing electronics and appliances should somehow participate in disposal
The curent approach is fraudulent offloading of responsibility.
The only solution is to charge manufacturers and importers complete cost of disposal / recycling for a given item. They can be asked to provide evidence of recycleability, they can be fined for lying. Manufacturers have incentive then, to improve recycleavility - costs willvbe lower. This issue should be solved between manufacturers and government.
Three reasons why current approach will never work:
1 - A consumer cannot evaluate suitability of a given item for recycling or disposability, that information is only avaliable to the manufacturer. A consumer cannot evaluate government's ability to recycle - UK has over 100 different local authorities and each has different rules for which kind of plastic goes where.
2 - Manufacturers routinely commit fraud - and there is no way for consumer to get compensation if they were told something is recycleable but 5 years later it turns out it's not. Recyclers themselves regularly commits fraud - people are told their item was recycled but actually it gets dumped in africa. There is currently a system in UK where recyclers get paid by government for recycling plastic, they claim they recycle 2x as much plastic as exists / gets produced/ is imported into UK. A significant portion ends up illegally exported to philipines, not recycled.
3 - Individual disposal is unpoliceable - you can't police millions of idividual people. You have to move to policeable entities - manufacturers.
Seems very wrong, but my current plan of action is to hack it up with an axe and slowly feed it out through the bin each week.
But there is a deeper topic behind these: what value foundations do we use to estimate what comes to our awareness. Without valuation judgment, there is no cost and no gain.
For someone putting above all immediate serotonin peaks, an endless disposal of affordable first price might be enough.
For someone that is striving to realize some daunting task that will catch most of other people in awe, it’s obviously mostly the second price that will matter: the more expensive the better.
For someone driven by a sense of sustainable community of life forms, the emphasis will be all on recycling through virtuous loops.
Of course I do have my own tropes that one might be guess from the way this points where formulated, but I recognize there is no absolute true accessible to human beings that will prescribe some categorical imperative between them.
How easy is exporting the data you care about if you want or have to change platform? Not seldom it's so labor intensive you'll never migrate to something better.
This is how I ended up discovering Obsidian and I have not looked back since.
So for the sake of simplicity, and to invoke thought, I think the two prices are good enough.
If money saves transaction costs, then it can't be neutral. The introduction of money becomes an essential part of the economy. It's not like there are good alternatives to money.
Don't think this further and wonder if interest is just a monetization of the transaction cost savings. Then it would turn out that interest payments negate the benefits of the division of labor entirely.
I think you're right! I wish our society did recycling better. In Japan, to get rid of a computer (for example), you don't throw it in trash - you must pay a recycler to handle it correctly.
Got a broken doodad? Throw it in the recycler and print a new one. 99% of the necessary feedstock ought to come from the broken one, so the only costs should be energy and the part that failed its tests and had to be replaced. Hopefully it's something small like a single capacitor.
There's probably some fundamental limit on how good such a system can get. Like, even if you recover 100% of the solder, you're going to need new flux every time. Or maybe you fill the chamber with argon so you don't need flux, but then how much of that can you recover. Or maybe you just leave it full of argon, but then how lossy is your doodad-in-out mechanism...
If your recycling scheme involves condensed matter physics, it might as well be magic. But if it's just known-robotics and reusable parts and good design taken to the n'th degree... that's the kind of thing that could feasibly inspire action in a reader--which is the kind of sci-fi I want to read.
Besides, there's something inelegant about breaking something all the way down just to build it all the way back up. A system that understands that the shortest path from here to there means something other than a full molecular disassembly is far more impressive than one that's just a decomposer.
It'd also be a nice springboard for an AI's first go at manufacturing and going out of spec lol