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Comment by pjmlp | Hacker News Reader

When I was a 70's kid growing up into the 1980's, repair shops were all over the place, for any kind of electronics.

Then suddenly we got into this throw away garbage culture at the slightest sign something stops working.

The only way back is rebooting the system, or having governments step in.

Appliances got so cheap there was no more value to extract by repair shops so they shut down. Government could step in with 200% tax on new appliances and the repair ecosystem would regrow, but pretty much no one wants that.

The funny thing is that YouTube has ushered in arguably the golden age of DIY. If your appliance fails you can very often fix it fairly easily. Plus, you get the satisfaction of fixing it yourself and you get to strut proudly as you tell your wife that the dishwasher is working again.

Some of them even lasted in the 1990s (in the US). I had a CRT monitor blow a capacitor in the mid 1990s and took it to a repair shop. It cost me something like $100 to have it fixed, but that was still way cheaper than buying a new monitor. But yeah, after that everything became throw-away because 1) the cost of someone spending a half hour or so figuring out what the problem was and then repairing it would be more than the item cost to replace 2) greater and greater miniaturization meant that discrete components that could be repaired were few and instead it was just a "black box".

That's a bit of a myth. Lots of electronics can still be repaired just fine. Check out some electronics repair channels on youtube. I've repaired plenty of electronics myself.

Replacing instead of repairing really is mostly a cultural thing.

Well, maybe. In cases where they don't either reduce the electronics to a single custom IC or cover the electronics with resin it might be possible from a technical perspective. It still isn't probably worth it from an economic perspective, but it might still be worth it if you value the environment over cost.

It's not (only) a cultural thing. It's primarily an economic one! Getting a $THING fixed requires typically:

1) Getting a technician out to identify the fault

2) Order the required replacement part and wait for it to be shipped

3) Getting the technician out again to actually fix the fault

The technician needs to be sufficiently skilled, wants vacations and sick days. We can somewhat trade-off utilisation vs. travel time, but I would be shocked if we can get a single turn out to be reliable below an hour. Even if we are optimistic and calculate with 100 bucks / hour this means the cheapest possible replacement is 200 bucks. That means it's _strictly_ cheaper to immediately throw everything below 200 away. And for everything more expensive we still need to beat opportunity costs and failed-to-actually-fix-the-problem fixes.

If you do these calculations in earnest I'd be shocked if _economically_ it's worth to repair anything below 500 bucks.

Same thing, thankfully to a lesser extent so far, for cars. Everybody's applauding the move to lots of tech and EV batteries for car but meanwhile my german car from 1988 is still running strong.

People shall complain that it's a gas guzzler but 38 years old is easily twice the lifetime any EV shall ever see. I don't see that taken into account much when talking about the lifetime CO2 of cars.

I have nothing against EVs: tried a Porsche Taycan and loved it and someone I know has a little BYD (chinese) SUV and it's very fine car for its price.

But sadly EVs seems to rhyme with "we can (and shall) remotely modify your car's software" and that's very close from "we'll remotely disable your car for good at some point in the future, when we consider it's time to upgrade to a new model".

As for car mechanics: those at official dealerships seems mostly clueless. They read the diagnostic and the diagnostic says: "Replace the entire braking system for the front right wheel". While if you go to a proper, old-school, mechanic, the dude shall happily find what's wrong and replace only what's necessary.

Gearbox noisy? Under warranty? Leave us the car for a few days and we'll replace the entire gearbox. Been there with my daily.

They're not really car mechanics anymore: they just swap complete parts, following procedures written by the car engineers.

Meanwhile you go into a shop taking car of oldtimers and youngtimers and you still get to see the actual proper mechanics, who can troubleshoot and fix only what's necessary.

EVs don't need to be spyware on wheels, just take an ancient ICE car and convert it to an EV, with spare EV parts and some open source electronics.

https://openinverter.org/wiki/ZombieVerter_VCU https://youtube.com/@evbmw https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43898280

>just

Link started with:

“You undertake your project at your own risk. Converting a vehicle to electric drive is likely to be difficult. …”

What reason is there to believe an EV couldn’t last 40 or more years? There’s nothing inherent in the technology that makes that certain.

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