A friend was recently complaining about having to buy a new $2000 fridge, how his old one only lasted 8 years, and how everything is junk nowadays. He described the symptoms to me [gradual loss of cooling capability, soft ice cream, then melting ice cubes] and I told him I solved the same problem 2 years ago and his was almost surely a broken defrost heater leading to a totally iced up [therefore no airflow] cooling unit, that troubleshooting would take him 15 minutes to confirm, and if that was it, it was a $20 90-minute repair (most of which is waiting for the freezer to defrost).
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.
On the other hand, I had a not-too-old fridge with a broken ice maker, which I tried to repair. The replaceable part was "the whole ice maker", which was out of production and not available anywhere. With some knowledge of electronics and 3d printing, I could probably get it working again, but at the cost of multiple hours of my free time, with no guarantee of success. The best intentions can't always defeat planned obsolescence.
I've had excellent luck with several of the online repair parts vendors. I hesitate to recommend any individual one as I've only ordered about once per year, not enough to generate a meaningful recommendation and I've gotten what I've ordered from every one of the ones I've used.
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.
I'm loving the 2 inch ice cube tray from Tovolo. Liked it so much I bought a second, but sadly amazon sold me a knock off, thin sides and very jiggly. So, get one with thick sides, and I checked amazon, there are way more vendors now for 2 inch ice cube trays with more cube slots.
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 :)
I often find it much faster for me to "widdle" small parts using my "art" skills. Just get a piece of plastic or metal and a dremal and carve it. In 30 min you will have a latch... making a 3d printing model takes forrrrrevvverrr
One advantage of 3D printers is that the part you need might already be designed, you can find all sorts of things on thingiverse. Once the design exists any number of people can use it.
I’m finding Gorilla Glue works wonders for plastic parts broken from bending or shearing forces. I’ve had a few things around the house that have broken and led me to think I should 3D print replacements. I glue them to buy a few days or weeks and the glue ends up bonding so well that I have yet to print replacements yet.
Another good technique for hard plastic is plastic welding, especially for clean snaps. Basically using a soldering iron to melt the plastic back together. Seems to be as strong as before. Plenty of good YouTube videos showing the technique.
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.
Similar story for my ironing board: A nylon runner wheel cracked in half, breaking the folding mechanism. Modeling a replacement in CAD (I used fusion 360), 3D printed it, little drilling to get the axle to fit, and the ironing board was back working same day. It felt great to fix a problem like that - there’s something very techno-utopian about it, like you’re living the dream of a Wired article from 1997 predicting a future where we will all effect household repairs by replicating spare parts.
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.
And it can be fun to fix something. I felt very rewarded after I replaced our kitchen machines worn out gears, by designing and printing out new identical ones.
It takes me about 30 minutes to cad up most parts and I can do it while watching TV. It just takes a bit of practice. You likely didn't used to be able to whip up a simple web scraper in 10 minutes but can do it now.
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.
I recently bought a lathe and a mill, and while that certainly isn't an option for everyone, I've found them to be quite useful for repairing random things around the house. I've got about $2,500 in the equipment and another $500 or so in tooling, but in the three months or so I've been good enough with them to make things I want, I've probably saved $500 in miscellaneous repairs.
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.
For equipment like that which you only use occasionally, they'll often have one at your local hackerspace, along with friendly people who can show you how to use it.
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.
Yeah, Ebay is great for this. I was able to replace the mainboard on an older LCD TV I was gifted years ago. $50 for a used one, exactly matching model#. 15 minute replacement job, 0 wasted televisions.
It does depend on the car part. There are a lot of low quality fakes on ebay, which won't either work, or will break quickly, and finding information with which to sort through which are good and which are not is a task in itself.
The consequences can be even more serious if you're looking for aircraft parts. A few years ago there was a discussion about Chinese made crankshafts for Corvairs on HackerNews, covering this exact issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18788861.
Fixing household white goods where a failure could result in a bad load of laundry or burnt toast is very different from aviation where utmost care must be taken with regard to maintenance, overhauling and repairs.
Even in cars, you gotta figure, is the part critical? (brakes, steering) or non critical (wipers, seats, heating/ac, etc).
For sure. I was pointing it out more for interest's sake than as a serious point of comparison for fixing your washing machine. Still, even there I'd probably be relatively careful, because flooding your kitchen isn't so much fun (bitter experience speaking there, although fortunately the kitchen is at ground level and has a concrete floor under the lino so no serious damage done).
You’re right that there is a possibility of somewhat disastrous results, but in my experience it’s not the motor or high voltage electrical that goes out but a plastic part, an on-off switchbor or a sensor.
Yes be careful, you could get an electric shock photograph before you take things apart and read instructions before putting things back together.
Frustrating for me to hear - I was looking forward to getting a new fridge with an ice maker. Carrying trays of ice in a wheelchair (especially in liquid form from the sink back to the freezer) is an interesting, if damp challenge.
I imagine carrying ice trays on a wheelchair should be easier than on legs. Instead, I just carry water in container and fill the ice tray on the fridge shelf.
Similarly resuscitated a washing machine twice with 10 and $20 dollar parts. Hardest thing was getting sheet metal back in place as it tends to contort and warp.
YouTube and specialized forums are very helpful in pinning the issue and parts.
Even, some years years back (10 or so?) when buying a woolen pullover you’d get a bit of mending yarn wrapped around cardboard bobbins with the exact same color as your sweater.
Nowadays they’re not included, at least where I buy.
Strong agree. YouTube creates so much value around repairs. I can fix all sorts of things with my pool thanks to YouTube. And everyone I know has learned tiny practical skills of one sort or another from there.
I followed a youtube to take out an lcd panel from a laptop to replace. The panel is cracked in the corner and the whole picture if fuzzy. It was easy enough and that then gave me the confidence to order a new one, which is in the mail as I speak. Cost is circa 15% of the new laptop price.
To add to the anecdotes, I wanted to add a chip of ram to my laptop but was very uncomfortable with the amount of pressure that was required to take off one of the bottom edges. Watching a video of someone doing it without damaging the device gave me the confidence to go ahead.
It's possible this problem was an excuse that allowed him to mentally justify the <fancy new fridge> he really wanted. The last thing he wanted to hear is an easy fix.
It's also interesting to note changes in efficiency for things like refrigerators. I suspect at 8 years repair might be more environmentally sound, but any older... refrigerators today aren't indeed built like they were 20 years ago. They use far less energy.
I found that I had to chip ice out the base back panel of the fridge, where it had significant ice accumulation. No way in hell I'm treating something we paid 1.5k$ for and 'throwing it away'.
I still maintain there's 4 R's: Repair, Reduce, Reuse, and eventually Recycle.
For the less hack-inclined, I highly recommend looking at the https://SensorPush.com devices after researching a bunch of wireless remote thermometer options (including a couple marketed for cigar humidors). Bluetooth to (multiple) phones, replaceable battery that should last ~1 year, available Bluetooth-Wifi gateway to let you set up a whole monitoring system, $50.
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.
Even simpler than the defrost heater, in an awful lot of fridges there's a little mechanical timer circuit that turns the heater on and off periodically. Those timers are full of plastic gears and can die, but while you wait for a new one there's likely an opening where you can use a flathead screwdriver to cycle around and manually trigger a defrost cycle.
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.
Did he have to drop $2000 in cash to buy it, or did he finance it (either directly or indirectly)? He may have said "Huh, $65/month; I can afford that!"
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.
I take your point: the trashed refrigerator may be a heavier environmental cost than the plastic bags.
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 is best if we both recycle and fix the refrigerator.
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 think abstractly in these terms too, probably too much so. Whenever my wife or I purchase something or throw it away, I ask myself how much we just debited from the earth. I wonder how one would actually go about defining this measure?
One thing is that companies don't help at all at this -- and they wont unless they are forced to (the same way companies were forced to add calorie and nutrition breakdowns).
In most places I’ve lived in the US it’s takes a lot of work to get an old appliance to a landfill and out of the hands of someone who would repair or recycle it. Somebody buying a $2000 fridge probably had the old one taken away and somebody involved in that process would repair and resell it.
I think the concern is that I might get a significant warm fuzzy feeling from my actions that is disproportionate to the significance of my actual impact on the environment. Presumably (hopefully) my goal is to actually have a positive impact on the environment rather than just feel good by reusing a few plastic bags per month.
The problem with plasic bags isn’t so much that they go to landfills, but rather that they end up going into the wider environment where they pose significant dangers to many kinds of wildlife.
The idea is that one would simultaneously studiously separate and recycle plastic bags (at the cost of hours of their time over a period of a decade) to prevent a few pounds of plastic from entering a landfill while not being willing to use a Phillips screwdriver and a hair dryer for 45-90 minutes to save $1950 and 250 pounds of refrigerator from entering a landfill.
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.
It varies on jurisdiction, but the depth of recycling can be a lot better for electronics and appliances. In Europe an old fridge would typically not go to the landfill but to reprocessing facility first, stripped into metals, plastics and "electronic waste".
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.
They're implying that the friend is "penny-wise and pound-foolish", by making a large effort to recycle small bits of plastic, while making no effort to avoid wasting lots of plastic/steel/coolant/electronics/motors etc.
That his friend does a token BS gesture towards being 'environmentally friendly" while participating in the same needless consumerism attitude that's responsible for 99% of the cost on the environment.
I replaced a broken cooling fan in my girlfriend's fridge. Ordered the new part but the connecter was wrong. So I cut the connectors off and spliced the old to the new and voila! Whole thing cost me $11. Quite empowering.
Recently, on the nature strip outside my place, someone dumped what was essentially a brand new brushed stainless fridge. Why I new it was almost new was that it was lying on its back and I could look into the compressor compartment at the bottom and it was clean—totally pristine! (Just about everyone knows that refrigerators get filthy down there real quick).
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).
I was about to buy a new fridge but held off due to a lot of complaints about pieces of ice falling down the back section of samsung and other refrigerators. I've got a shitty 90s ge fridge, that has a wierd defrost drain. Basically the issue is it freezes down the drain line. A bunch of googling and one dude had a gem, take a piece of 8 ga copper wire, hang it over the defrost coils, and run it down the drain, copper conducts heat amazingly. Hasn't been a issue for 5 years since.
Many people want to buy new stuff just for the sake of it. A breakdown is just the excuse they need to do it. By the time you talked to him his wife had probably already picked out the new one.
My fridge leaks water into the vegetables, freezes where it shouldn't, and gives a loud thuuunk when the cycle ends. I disconnected the water line from the ice maker long time ago, so water must be condensation. I wonder what it might be.
Your fridge also makes water from its auto-defrost cycle (often 15 minutes every 12 or 24 hours). This will typically defrost behind the freezer compartment, drain down to a catch tray that drains to a tray underneath the fridge [where it will then evaporate back into the kitchen]. If that drain line is plugged or frozen, it could leak somewhere else. If the defrost has failed, you can get uneven (and eventually little/no) cooling.
I had this exact problem on mine. I took a panel off from back of inside freezer compartment, and there was a solid block of ice below coils. I didnt own a hairdryer, so used a turkey baster and hot water to melt it. Spray hot water in, wait 30 sec, suck it back out, get fresh hot water, repeat till you get drainage.
Probably the cooling fan not running. The cold air doesn't circulate so the drain line freezes up and overflows into the refrigerator. It's not hard to replace yourself or a repair guy can probably do it for around $200 parts and labor.
I've a standing offer out to friends of mine. They can drive their car over to my place (pre-arranged, of course) and we'll change their brakes together and all they have to pay is the cost of the parts (which is usually much less than they expect).
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'd expect "few repeat customers" to be a good thing - after pairing on DIY repair the one time, they have the confidence to do it on their own the next time.
Five years ago, a friend convinced me to start buying $250+ raw denim jeans instead of $30 regular jeans (which would wear out every 6 months).
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.
“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
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.”
That's the nth time I read that citation here. It's appealing but does not match my experience. I can afford to buy good and expensive stuff, but it is really difficult to tell good and bad stuff apart especially outside ones domain. And you can buy a lot of crap for much money. The main problem is information asymmetry and I'd wish regulation would take this out of the equation (like a mandatory sticker "Must last at least until...", although this doesn't solve all problems).
Speaking of sewing machines, while you can always get an inexpensive Brother, sewing machines today have a lot of plastic gears and other parts that do not last.
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.
I have two old sewing machines, I picked both up at the local refuse transfer station. One is a 1920s Singer. It’s super basic, doesn’t even have a reverse, but it’s bullet proof. It’s cast iron but a portable model, so it’s built in to a carry case and weighs ‘only’ 20ish kg.
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.
> "One is a 1920s Singer. It’s super basic, doesn’t even have a reverse, but it’s bullet proof."
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:
> sewing machines today have a lot of plastic gears and other parts that do not last.
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.
Petroleum oil/grease can make plastics brittle, IIRC they need fully synthetic grease, some manufacturers sell their own but the right type should be ok...
Just troll craigslist till you find a 80s or so bernina. It'll be more than worth the $300 you spend on it. Mine sounds like a new porsche engine running and destroys singers.
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’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'd probably add sweaters to the list. They can develop holes, pulled threads, etc. that can be darned or, for casual use, patched. I've also had dress jackets repaired--usually because the lining has torn or something along those lines.
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.
The Levi’s I’ve bought in the past few years tend to wear out in between the legs. The fabric gets thin and weak and frays/rips near the seam, but the seam itself is fine. Is thst repairable?
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.)
I've had similar experiences with Levi's. I think they're symptomatic of the fit not being great around the thighs. (Or maybe planned obsolescence, who knows?) I've switched to Urban Star jeans from Costco -- they're much more comfortable (2-4% Lycra), arguably look nicer, cost less than $20, and also last me longer than Levi's.
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 ;-)
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.
There seem to be real difference in how Jeans are made. I wish I understood the specifics. Wrangler Jeans tend to be pretty durable. Many other brands struggle to make it 6 months. Does anyone have any idea what the difference is here?
Fashionable jeans tend to be tighter (nothing like skin-tight, just straight cut), and people who wear raw denim tend to wear the same pair every day or every other day. The amount of stretching in the crotch and knees, and the corners of your phone in your pockets, inevitably wear holes starting at about a year in.
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.
It's a good question -- stains are a reason I assume shirts will be disposable in the end, but it's never been an issue with my jeans, at least not yet over 5 years.
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):
Stains add personality to your jeans. These stains may reflect your work, or your passions, or just unfortunate coffee placement. Whatever it is, it's part of life, your life.
I have had issues with stains while wearing jeans while doing greasy work (particularly on engines) or when I got spray foam on my favorite pair. As long as I avoid grease and chemicals though, my jeans have never displayed any staining.
I don’t fully agree, I bought some thick, expensive raw denim jeans too, and although I really appreciate the quality of the material and the comfort of wearing them, I doubt they’ll last long as I tend to break the crotch area which is much harder to fix.
Holes are a consequence of tight clothing. Wear loose pants and you’ll never get holes - even with thin fabric. My last pair of slacks I bought at a thrift store for $5 and they were still good 5 years later.
I once got a pair of stretchy jeans from Uniqlo for $20 that I wore roughly every other day for 2 years until I gained weight and they stopped fitting.
The other side of the coin is seeing someone identify an "easy fix," have to spend hours reading about it, buying tools to accomplish it and having to do it several times and maybe never get it quite right.
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.
Tools have an upfront cost, but they pay for themselves down the line. The first time you start fixing things it might take longer, but as time goes on you get better.
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...
Spending that time on my career will net me more than worrying about or learning about something so infrequent and boring as fridge repair.
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.
Other things outside of your career can teach you much and help you get better in your career.
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.
Sure but I choose my hobbies based on my interests.
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.
I get your point, but have to say I interpreted your previous post as "why would I do something that doesn't maximise profits?" I like messing with electronical/mechanical devices of all kinds, so I'll try to repair most things myself. If you dislike that kind of work, fine, but only caring about money is going to rub many people up the wrong way.
There comes a point where the time and energy I'd have to spend on troubleshooting, tool selection/purchase, part ordering, and temporarily learning the skill become more important to me than saving a few hundred bucks. I just could not care less. I used to be a very avid DIY'er, but eventually I passed a point where most of the time I'd rather pay someone else to solve a problem.
I agree with the points you made. However, the trend society appears to be heading is non-ownership of things and specialization.
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.
Yes definitely not the norm but it's heading in that general direction, particularly with younger generations that are postponing marriage and family until then they'll have a reason to settle down and have the space to acquire tools to fix things like fridges.
Of course on the other hand the time you spent learning will come back to you the next time you have a problem. You only have to learn how to solder pipe once.
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.
One of the most valuable things my dad taught me was that it's hard to break something so badly that it can't be repaired. That's not true of everything any more (I have a decent electronics bench, but I won't even try any but the most basic cell phone repairs), but for your list (Furnace, A/C, House appliances, Home repairs, Furnitures, Cars, computers, even clothes & shoes), I'd rather repair than replace.
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.
I think my comment to the parent post also applies here. I love to learn things and home repair is no exception. A lot of it is a skill that requires practice, though. Even if I don't end up doing the work (and I try to), at least I'll be less likely to get ripped off.
I recently discovered my local tool library -- seems like a really great idea. For a small annual (suggested) donation, you can borrow just about any tool a homeowner could reasonably expect to use (except heavy machinery, of course). I live in a townhouse with no garage and limited storage space, so I simply can't justify keeping a lot of tools around that I might need again someday. The tool library solves that problem and will definitely save me money vs. buying new or renting at Home Depot.
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.
While this is true, it assumes that you not only have enough disposable income to waste on tools, but also that you are free enough from stress and have enough time to be able to do these things.
"waste" seems a bit dismissive. When I was a poor student the only way I could keep my old cheap things working was to fix them myself.
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.
Plus you can resell the tools when you're done. When I finished my basement, I bought a drywall lift that was around $100. Doing any sort of drywall without a lift is not easy, especially if you don't have a helper. When I was done with drywall, I was able to sell it on Craigslist for the original purchase price. I could have rented one, but that would have put time constraints on its use.
The thing is, once you own a house, the number of things that need an hour here or there increases quite dramatically.
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.
My favorite contractor went and retired on me :-/ Last major job I had done (major bathroom redo well beyond what I was ready to tackle) took about a year to find someone and then they did an OK job but just horrible communications, etc. In other words, par for the course.
I'm not sure "priced out" is the right description. If you own a white goods store you can employ more sales people and grab more profit, or employ expensive engineers and reduce your profit (but help save the Earth).
For a scrupulous 'expert', there's more money to be made by selling you a new product. Or if there's likely to be recurring repairs. One way I think, to safeguard against this is to have maintenance contracts. But i know no expert who's williing to take me up on that.
Maintenance contracts are also quite popular since they can charge more for them and amortize the cost over lots of sales. Extended warranties are just one part of this, and often result in the customer paying for something they don't need (how many people have warranties and choose to replace instead of use the warranty?).
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.
I think everyone should stock their start/run capacitor for each of their compressors. That's pretty literally a plug and play blind change-out item before even calling a tech out.
I spent £150 getting a new screen on an iPhone 3g when they were around 6 months old. It was a decent job and I was happy enough with the fix. But then I cracked it again, so I did the fix/replacement myself, it wasn't as good as the £150 job, but then I knew how to do it. I subsequently started repairing other people's phones and most of them were as good as the £150 repair job I had done. So yes a professional fix can be faster but it depends how often you may need to fox something.
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.
It's not every day my worlds collide like this, so I'll plug https://freesewing.org/ for those of you who have an interest in making clothes and are looking for a place to start that is a good match for the hackernews crowd.
We don't use patreon. Patrons can subscribe directly through PayPal.
We don't need the Patreon approach because everything on the site is available for free. Being a patron is completely optional.
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.
The article talks about clothing, but there's so much more that we've lost the ability to fix.
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.
For printers I've learned to look beyond the known brands. OKI seems to be focused on the professional market but has some very great value home printers. Big & clunky but can do a lot and look very solid.
OKI showed up during my research, but I didn't mention them since they're a relative unknown to me. They have some printers that tick all the boxes though, so they're certainly in the running.
I had an OKI printer in the late 80s and that thing was bulletproof. I dropped it down a flight of stairs while moving it once and it just needed some minor alignment adjustment to work again. Glad to hear they still make good stuff.
My solution: don't print. I find very few reasons to print anything. I get kinda irritated when I have to. I donated blood recently and was miffed that the RapidPass required printing out. Why? I have a phone.
I print very little. The half-capacity starter cartridge in my Lexmark lasted a decade (literally - I bought the printer in late-2005 and had to track down a new cartridge in 2016) before I finally needed to replace it. I guess I averaged something like 20-30 pages per year over that time.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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].
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
I have a good paying job, yet I 100% will pick up major appliances or lawn mowers from the garbage if they are somewhat recent with no shame. It is very rare that they have some issue that is worth discarding over. I get tons of junk mail and behind a doctor's office they threw out a $1700 heavy duty paper shredder. It turned out to be a dead hall field sensor to detect when it jams. $25 from fellowes.
That's cool but watch out for hoarding. While I agree with picking up discarded fixable or like new appliances, there are so many of them out there that one may end up hoarding.
My wife learned that youth shelters/foster parenting agencies need suitcases to help the children move their clothing and stuff around. The usual alternative children get: garbage bags.
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.
Have a friend who had a habit of picking up furniture etc from the side of the road, and (perhaps related) got bedbugs. I am very very hesitant to do the same.
Definitely, but I would use a similar amount of caution with used luggage. Luggage is used for visiting many places, left in hotel rooms and overhead bins (high traffic areas), hold clothes, lots of seams and nooks and crannies ... pretty ideal bedbug territory.
There are a few strategies you can use, dependent on the time of year -- they don't like it cold (assuming you don't give them a chance to adapt), nor overly hot, and the suitcases can also be quarantined. I wouldn't drag them into core living areas of your space, right off.
One addition I'll make: locally there is a bulk pickup day twice a year that people hold things for; if it was a suitcase wrapped in plastic or out on a non-bulk pickup day, I likely would steer clear.
Yes this is true. I don't pick up lawnmowers anymore because mine is fine. But I have given some of my old ones to people that just moved into a home and stuff. And yes I am selective about appliances unless I know a friend needs one. Currently everything I own is plugged in and being used, no yard full of junk :).
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.
no he didnt, he managed to destroy the mainboard by doing his _first reflow ever_ without any kind of preparation, and later fixed that TV by replacing all the electronics inside
Unless there's been an update since EEVBlog #1154, he identified that the faulty part was bad solder on a single chip, but he screwed up the reflow. Presuming nothing else was damaged in the process (such as via a hypothetical power pin short), the chip would need to be re-balled and replaced.
When I was studying, I used to turn my round neck shirts into V neck by cutting the middle and stitching. Just for fun and it thought me how to stitch, at least to a point.
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.
Those 30 minutes of your time are only more 'valuable' if the only thing of value which counts is monetary value. This is, of course, not the case. Money is nothing but a means to an end, it should never be the end itself. Assuming the end to be a sense of personal satisfaction over a task well accomplished - whether that task be feeding yourself and possibly your family, raising any children to be a boon instead of a burden to society or just enabling you to be lazing on a beach somewhere - it is not inconceivable for time spent mending something to have more total value than time spent earning money so you can buy a new something.
When people talk about how much their time is worth; they're not talking about it from a strictly financial point of view but from a personal satisfaction point of view. ie if I spend an hour fixing this; this is an hour less I spend with my kids or an hour I miss chatting to my wife.
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).
I discussed this in my other post but to expand on that, we do a lot of household chores together (tidying, cleaning, washing car, gardening, etc). However I wouldn't trust a a toddler and 5 year old with a sewing needle.
A 5yo can certainly be trusted with a blunt sewing needle, the type used to mend holes in socks etc ('stopnaald' in Dutch, darning-needle in English). A toddler can not but might find it interesting to toddle around while you show the 5yo to mend that hole in that sock - or something similar.
He can't. We have actually tried before with a sowing-craft set he got for Christmas (which my wife ended up making with him watching).
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.
I do. We live on a farm where they also get to do other interesting things, e.g. two days ago I was splitting firewood with my 7yo daughter - that is she did the splitting with a hydraulic press, I watched and helped where necessary while showing her where danger lies and how to avoid problems. Both daughters (7yo and 14yo) know how to sew - the 14yo got a sewing machine when she was 11. They can do many other practical things as well since we involve them in many tasks around the house and farm.
...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
Dude. Everyone acts like this. For the guy teaching his kid robotics, you're missing out by not teaching your kid robotics. But he isn't teaching his kid chemistry. And the chem guy isn't teaching his kid carpentry.
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.
> I shouldn't have to defend what chores I choose to spend time doing with the kids.
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.
> 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."
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
"False dichotomy" being a general concept means I don't have to be in any sort of position of knowing any specifics. It's generally applicable. I have no idea why you're defensive about this.
> 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.
> "False dichotomy" being a general concept means I don't have to be in any sort of position of knowing any specifics. It's generally applicable.
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. ;)
If you can have as much work as you want then your free time is worth exactly as much per hour as your hourly work rate.
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 can't spend 30 minutes fixing my clothes because my 30 minutes is more valuable than a tshirt's cost.
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.
Platitudes like that often don't work out in practice. Take my life for example; what do you suggest I substitute in return for time spent mending clothes?
* 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.
Speak for yourself. I'm rarely on Facebook, don't do Twitter / Reddit / Instagram / whatever else. HN is my one social media vice and even that isn't something I generally visit on a weekend (usually just during the week if I need to take a mental break from coding). However today is the exception but my family are out of town and I'm in bed with a head cold so don't feel much up to being productive anyway.
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.
Well I'm 41 and have kids, so your age card is poorly played. Most people of my generation spend their life on social media, I know that for a fact.
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.
> Well I'm 41 and have kids, so your age card is poorly played. Most people of my generation spend their life on social media, I know that for a fact.
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
Granted that 30 minute downtime can be longer and shorter some days depending on how late I go to bed or how much housework we need to do. But I still wouldn't call that "lots of disposable time". The train to work is my disposable time and that's limited by what I can do on the train - which is usually sleeping because my youngest still wakes up multiple times a night (aghhh!)
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 ;)
You could move closer to where you work, so you have a 15 minute bike ride to and from there every day, saving you two and a half hours. Use that time to mend things so that you save money, which you can use to pay for the more expensive house! Problem solved, you can thank me later...
I had decided I wasn't going to entertain this conversation anymore (on scarejunba's advice) but you do raise a good point there and that is something my wife and I have considered.
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.
Understood - I wasn't really serious! However, when I worked in the City back in the late nineties/early two thousands I lived in Islington (20ish minute walk, one stop on the tube) first, and then EC1 (10 minutes or less walking) and although you're right about paying more, as a contractor for a bank, it was still affordable. Plus, I never needed a season ticket, I could pop home for lunch, and it was an interesting area (near Hoxton, Shoreditch, and so on) to live. Admittedly I was much younger and not married, which would definitely change your priorities...
As far as working out, first I realized that taking time out for my own health is worth sacrificing time with my wife and my son. I’m no good to my family if I’m not healthy or dead.
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.
I've got to agree on the personal health side of things but I'm not really a gym kind of person and neither is my wife (we'd both rather go running, cycling, swimming, etc) so any home gym equipment would just gather dust.
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.
Being able to turn 30 minutes into longer-wearing clothes means you don’t have to be able to get paid the way you currently are for those 30 minutes forever. Along with various clothing repair activities and normal cooking, I bake bread and can jam from seasonal fruit surplus. If I just look at my hourly take-home, that is some expensive bread and jam.
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!
What if there are other activities that OP considers more valuable and rewarding? Spending time with friends or family? Starting a new business? Working on that programming project? Learning how to play an instrument? Exercising? Meditating? Cooking?
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.
I rather use my free 30 minutes playing with my 3d printer or laser engraver. As others stated, we only have limited free time and I really don't want to use it to fix my ripped tshirt or shirt and make it look barely okay. I agree with you, but I also think there are more satisfying and educational things than fixing cheap stuff. (Also clothing is not as expensive as 100 years ago, we don't buy tailored anymore so no need fixing as much.)
There's that, and there's mistaking. GP assumes three things:
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.)
How are you planning to fix a ripped t-shirt without making it look terrible? This era, we are wearing very simple clothing which is disposable, also very durable (jeans). I mostly wear shirts/tshirt and jeans. I don't even remember needing to fix any and still have my old jeans for over 15 years.
I don't wear t-shirts often, and don't think any of mine have needed mending. I do wear thin long-sleeved sweaters, so if you don't mind I'll answer for those: The most common problem starts with a small hole somewhere, frequently just next to a seam, and is mended in a minute or two if caught early. Disastrous tears are a different matter, but happily also a rare one.
Still, he paid (in lost profits) for his tv watching and social browsing. He's t-shirt mending would cost the same but he would additionally lost pleasure and gained t-shirt which value is neglible when compared to all other vslues involved.
"my 30 minutes is more valuable than a tshirt's cost"
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 think looking at opportunity costs is important. still, different chores make different demands. the value of my time at, say 10pm after a long day at work is less than at 10am. mrend at night, code during the day.
I recently bought a new backpack — it was a supposedly nice name brand backpack and pricey — 300 dollars or so. I didn’t like it — it’s dofficult to pack for the loads I carry and just very far from my optimal design.
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 ...
I recently invested [1] in a leather backpack, that's hand-made here in Finland. These things are built to last and I expect to get far more lifetime out of it than any of the lightweight crap I've bought from major-brands in the past.
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.
I've had very good luck with cobblers for fixing hiking and camping gear. They have all the heavy needles and so forth needed to do repairs of thick materials. (And I suspect most are not completely overwhelmed with work.)
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.
The nice thing about outdoor gear is that the repairs don't have to be very aesthetic. I repair my own camping gear using my grandmother's old signer sewing machine. It's maybe 100 years old, but unlike modern sewing machines, the frame is cast iron and it can push a thick needle through almost anything.
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.
The teeth of a zipper on my backpack came detached from the tape material on the side of the zipper and a friend said that it looks like I would have to get a new backpack.
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 had a zipper go recently in a way where the whole zipper did need replaced. I was annoyed to learn that at least my local REIs don't do repairs any longer like they did in the past. I'd have sent it out for repair to a company that specializes in outdoor gear repair but a friend of mine was able to do it for me. (I don't have a sewing machine myself and this really needed one.)
FYI in the future there might be a "luggage repair" place in your area that could do this work for you. Had the same thing happen to a backpack I really like and paid $50 to get the zipper replaced and a couple seams reinforced instead of buying a new one.
Never thought of that and I've even had luggage repaired. As I said in another comment, a cobbler could probably have done it as well though I'd probably have had to order the zipper myself in that case.
I think with outdoor gear, there's actually a certain cachet to gear that's obviously well-used and battle-scarred :-)
During undergrad studies I used to wear a jacket with a cross-stitched logo from a game I was playing at the time. It was unbelievable how everyone assumed that it was my mother’s doing. What bothered me was not the thing about the gender stereotype but the fact that putting a string in a needle and using it seems so hard for anyone from teenagers to grown up adult. Sometimes the barriers are just in the mind.
We haven't lost our ability to mend. What has happened is people used to rely on material way back in the past to teach them how to mend. Today our products are constantly being upgraded / changes in real time. Those tutorials are often for specific types of products and those products now have radically different electronics and people when they see different products don't understand that the patterns in designing them are functionally identical. The circuit boards on the other hand might be slightly different. Long story short, if you want your stuff to last longer, stop buying into features, buy simple stuff. Simple works longer because it has less things to break. When the simple stuff does break, it's easier to figure out how to fix it.
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.
> What has happened is people used to rely on material way back in the past to teach them how to mend. Today our products are constantly being upgraded / changes in real time.
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.
>Now I'm not sure a professional can keep up, without specializing.
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.
Right after college I had a motorcycle that I smoked the rings on because the guy who sold it to me lied about it's condition. "I've totally started it every month". When it broke down I was pissed for a bit and then was like "welp now I get to take apart a whole vtwin. Worst case I know how to take apart a vtwin. It cost about $300 and 10 hours but we fixed it, it was a great learning experience esp when you've got time and money like a software dev does.
Today, all things are too cheap. We need include the cost on the environment within the cost of our goods. Altering the price of goods is an extremely important mechanic to move us towards sustainability. It is ok for us to have fast fashion if it can be done in a non damaging way, if it cannot then we will have to learn to mend again.
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.
While a child labor force sweating away over textiles in a rundown warehouse may be a classic business model, it could be a difficult idea to pitch nowadays.
Some people can not afford food. I grew up in a single parent household, 2 boys who ate like horses. My poor mother could not keep up feeding us working her $12/hr job. We ate food from a store where products go before they go to trash (I believe).
I bought a used three-zone Weber Summit-series barbecue for a really good price. It was well-used. Many of the screws keeping it together were corroded and falling apart. There were a couple of holes in the main cooking box. I repaired and restored the entire grill to a very workable condition with the help of Weber, who sells replacement parts and offers great customer support. Unfortunately, I don't weld, so my solution to patching holes involved washers, nuts, screws, and custom cut sheet metal.
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 know someone who picked up a stainless gas BBQ free from the curb in front of someone's house. It was in great condition, the burners and grills looked like it had hardly been used. New, it would have been in the $1000-2000 range. What was wrong with it? All it needed was a new AA battery for the ignitor!
My experience with gas BBQs is that the ignitor is usually the first thing to go. Usually, again in my experience, it happens due to corrosion of the ignitor itself. My solution is usually just to use a match, I find that the ignitor stops working so quickly that it's not worth replacing.
Replacing the grills, heat spreader, and burners however makes a lot of sense and can make an old BBQ virtually new again.
It's weird. We live in an age where many of us carry a device in our pockets capable of searching a vast store of human knowledge and presenting results to us nigh-instantaneously. If I have a problem with anything, even if I have no idea how it works, I can usually acquire enough knowledge about it under an hour to diagnose and repair it or at least determine that that I'm not going to be able to do that.
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.
You have to have a certain mentality to go down this path. Most people don't like messing with things and getting their hands dirty, even it costs them a fortune to replace a device. It's not because they're stupid. They rather think that it's too complicated to try anything and they're afraid they might make things even worse than they already are. Also, quite often they don't have the necessary tools and buying them and learning to use them is a task on its own.
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.
> they're afraid they might make things even worse than they already are
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.
I think they make the correlation between cost and complication, thus assuming that it will be too much of a trouble to fix it. Let's not forget that we live in an era where free time becomes a luxury. Someone may think that spending 20-30 hours to learn a few things about a refrigerator and locating the problem might be a waste of precious time. If you don't have an intrinsic curiosity on how things work then fixing broken devices might seem like too much of a trouble without any clear benefits.
> I guess it all boils down to how curious one is.
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.
Curiousity and confidence play a role, but remember that no one has unlimited time and a half day (or more) spent on learning and completing a new repair is a half day you didn't spend on something else you may have deeper and more enduring curiousity about. Every activity has an opportunity cost.
If you wear belts, you might decide you don't need to repair the button because the belt hides it, and duplicates its function of holding the pants up. This will eventually result in the zipper breaking, which cannot be hidden with a belt, and is much more difficult to repair. The button has the additional non-obvious function of reducing load on the zipper, so you should repair it even if it looks unnecessary.
It's not about not being able to mend at all, these things are fairly easy to do (or to learn).
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.
Affluence and status signaling using clothing: is there an inverse correlation? Any recommended scientific literature on this?
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.
>Affluence and status signaling using clothing: is there an inverse correlation?
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.
When I visited London, UK a couple years ago, I saw the "class system" up close for the first time. A friend pointed out that the lower and upper class actually had a more in common in certain ways than the upper and middle. Neither typically fit in with certain norms. The lower due to necessity, the upper due to immunity - they would simply be labeled eccentric.
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.
>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.
> It's unthinkable anyone would come to work in mended clothes.
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.
Really? I'm probably not going to go into the office or on a trip with clothing that has some obvious quick and dirty repair or is in need of one. But I semi-regularly mend or have mended clothing that's missing a button, has a hem that needs to be tacked back in place, etc. Those aren't visible if they're done even half-competently.
I definitely have been both to the office and on holidays with self-mended clothes. Especially tears in my favourite shorts I repaired perhaps ten times before giving up on the brittle fabric. I never was worried of stigma of clearly mended clothes; I rather was quite proud of my bohemian clothing.
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.
Why is it unthinkable? I do. I wouldn't consider throwing something away I ripped somehow, unless it was also nearing worn out - like all the material was becoming worn or too thin.
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.
Isn't it the other way around? Someone who mends their own clothes looks capable, creative, and economical. Also, elbow patches are trendy.
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.
People who are confident and strong can definitely pull off mended clothes. On the other hand, it's not wise to hand your children obviously mended stuff if you know that they already struggle socially. Bullies sense the weak ones and attacks based on clothing are common, also in later life (although this phenomenon peaks at school).
It’s about signaling social status. If you dress in cheap clothes but you drive a really nice car no one’s going to think you’re poor. If you wear the exact same clothes and don’t have a car people will make a different guess as to your social status.
I just took my son to buy his first car on his own. I told my son that if we couldn’t make the numbers work for him, I would just let him take over payments on my car for the next year ($300/month) and I would by myself another car.
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.
The article includes a picture of Prince Charles wearing a mended jacket. If it’s acceptable for royalty to appear in public in mended clothing I imagine it’s ok for us plebeians.
He has, at times, been derided for it in the media, especially at the lower end. At least he's followed his eco beliefs fairly consistently for decades. It would be much easier for him to not bother whilst he's being sent around the globe on official duties.
Prince Charles doesn't have to care because he is Prince Charles.
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.
Not really. Countless behaviors are seen as "chic" when done by millionaires and thrashy when done by lower class: owning 2nd hand of flashy clothing, drinking alcohol early, owning a strip of land or a horse, keeping a food garden, doing home repairs...
Prince Charles doesn't need to look sharp to prop up his status, which is solidified in the most formal manner. Neither is the Prince best known for his stylishness.
This model is way too simple. People don’t distinguish themselves between those they don’t deal with. No one’s going to confuse a social worker with the genuinely wealthy, but they could pass for a professional like a doctor or lawyer. Equally they could be mistaken for someone of the class of their clients if they dress like them. The social worker will try to dress like the successful professional. The professional is not going to be mistaken for a poor person. If it happens they’d laugh unconcerned and move on. But they are probably socially exposed to genuinely wealthy people or the extremely professionally successful, businessmen, parliamentarians or congresspeople, executives. They could move into these circles themselves or marry into them.
People define themselves by those they could plausibly be mistaken for, not the full range of possible social roles.
> 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.
> The two biggest blows came in the 1990s. The first was the shift in the US economy from manufacturing to knowledge-intensive services (a shift that has been in the making for a long time, but came to a head during the information technology revolution).
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?
> No girl graduated high school without knowing how to bake, budget, and sew, while her male counterpart took classes in autoshop and woodworking
> 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?
> Women used to know cook and mend clothes while men knew how to fix cars and furniture. It meant that households could do all that.
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.
Households on average certainly seem to outsource more and be capable of less of the core “upkeep” tasks than in the past. Whether it’s cooking, cleaning, laundry, plumbing, electrical, auto, etc.
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.
Of course the problem is that at face value those academic classes seem more interesting, seem to have better ROI-for-life, and obviously you are quite right that a lot of people would be better off were they able to do basic upkeep, budgeting, woodwork, plumbing, wiring a socket, or simply knowing how to paint a room, and also you are correct that sometimes these activities lead to insights into problem solving, and some addition to critical thinking skills.
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.
> Households on average certainly seem to outsource more and be capable of less of the core “upkeep” tasks than in the past.
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.
The article also mention how the economic value of woodworking and mending has sharply dropped since the 1960, but I disagree on that when it comes to cooking. The article does not talk about it since it is focused on mending, but food cost are often second highest portion of a individuals monthly budget after rent. In households economics, cooking your own food can easily become one the single biggest savings a person can do. If the article is right that home economics is deincentivized because of politics then that kind of politics are contributing to increased poverty, worse health and harm to the environment. The ability to feed themselves should be an essential skill all individuals should have from basic education, similar to that of knowing how the government work or what basic physical training look like.
>"Women don't learn how to sew and men don't learn how to woodwork, and no one knows how to budget."
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.
Carry that to the extreme and why bother having school at all? I'm all for a lot of classical curriculum components. But I also think that there is a huge amount of value to exposing high schoolers to hands-on activities that are both practical and potentially rather enjoyable. This includes electronics and so forth by the way. But it might also include sewing.
What about social engineering and distractions? Even ancient Rome used this technique—take the Colosseum for instance. The problem is that in recent years our culture has be stuffed up by vested interests (and IT and the internet hasn't helped here either).
You're so, so right. It's an ecological disaster in the making, and by repairing things we essentially deskill the citizenry—we've far fewer repairers and tradespeople nowadays—and we concentrate knowledge in the hands of large multinationals (at expense of information being open to everyone). Take John Deere's proprietary tractors or Apple proprietary iPhone for instance—no one is allowed to repair them except those authorized by these manufacturers.
It's a damned disgrace. No wonder there's 'Right to Repair' movements starting up everywhere. They need our full support.
Gender is not the problem. I think this is a unfortunate mix-up.
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.
> I can spend 20 minutes on fixing a shirt before it is financially rational to just buy a new one.
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.
I think your drastically overestimating the cost of landfill space, and t-shirts. A middle class american's time is worth at least 20$/hr, a t-shirt costs $2 to make from scratch in a factory and the landfill volume of that shirt might round up to a penny.
Disposable goods are disposable because people tend to act rationally about time and costs.
We had cooking, sewing, metalworking, and woodworking classes in middle school, mandatory for all genders. Auto shop was a high school class and it was optional. And I went to a very subpar poor school.
> 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?
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 had sewing lessons in primary school in early 90s in Poland. It was compulsory, on "practical technics" lessons. Other subjects covered were: reading 3d schemas, making some wooden toys, basic electric projects (make engine turn both ways with switches), making pancakes, making christmas tree decorations, such stuff. It lasted for 2 years and was pretty fun. The worst thing was learning "technical script" where every letter had to be perfectly written on a milimeter grid. I never understood the point of it, but the rest was pretty useful.
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 :)
In this context, it seems worth mentioning Woolfiller, a product I love because I always wear out the elbows in my wool sweaters and it lets me mend them: https://www.woolfiller.com/
It's a great example of a company trying to reverse this trend.
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.
"... to legitimize the housework that women were already performing ..."
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".
I don't think the author was implying a value judgment here but stating that the introduction of Home Ec was to help legitimize women's home duties in the eyes of students who may have looked down on them as "not real work".
I grew up in NZ where the attitude is one should at least try to do most everything. Every guy needs to learn how to knit, sew, fix a car, grow veggies, cook a meal, and fix/decorate a house. These are so staple one is almost considered less-manly for not having tried to do all of them. One can fail miserably and turn to professionals but no lose of face for saying so.
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.
I mentioned to a European friend once that I was planning on building a new coffee table over the weekend. He laughed and commented on how American that was.
Maybe it's something to do with countries that were more recently considered frontiers.
I got a late '70s blue Singer 20U recently for parachute rigging. But I've become interested in sewing and repairing other things (like work bags) more recently. It's fun to learn. These old sewing machines are amazingly easy to repair and adjust. The manuals are wonderful, too!
It's my prized possession. It will definitely outlive me.
About 5 years ago I got very anxious about how specialized I had become. Sure, advancing a career for better pay is great, but it was becoming apparent that a lot would be lost paying other people premium rates to do things I couldn't. So, I've had five years of focus on building my personal capabilities. Or another way to look at it is that I've embarked on the standard middle-class mid-life DIY frenzy. Either way, it struck me recently how much my mindset has shifted:
- 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).
I was just talking to my wife about this yesterday. My gloves wore out on the index fingers and I had to mend them with a needle and thread. Literally 5 minutes of work and gloves are good to go. I then commented on how as Americans lost our way with mending old things and she said why I just didn’t buy new ones. I wonder how future generations will fare while having grown up with disposable material things.
Well, it's cliched, but since nobody has mentioned it:
"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 …"
So odd how not even a few hours ago my wife went through my closet and made me throw away old clothes. I had this jacket I’ve worn over 10 years that to me still looked nice, but she insisted it looked worn. The jacket had sentimental value to just from all the places I wore it and the memories I had with it. This wasn’t the first time she made me part with an item dear to me. I had a Hollister t-shirt I wore as a teen - the same one the day we met. Some 18 years later the shirt was still in my closet, ripped and washed out, practically a rag but it had so much sentimental value that I thought about keeping it forever. Nope, she insisted it be gone. This article made me think about my shirt and my jacket. I know they are just items but I’m not sure if I’ll ever get over losing them.
There are opportunities in recycled parts or junkyards for consumer devices. You can pick up a “broken” appliance on the side of the road and test the individual parts and sell them online to people who are looking to repair their own devices.
Just a friendly FYI, "sow" means to plant a seed, or an adult female pig/other animals (pronounced like "now"). "Sew" means to "join, fasten, or repair (something) by making stitches with a needle and thread or a sewing machine."
No that a little bit of gardening would be a bad idea either :-)
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.
I definitely agree. I learned how to sew as a kid for example from my mom, but I sort of dropped it after I realized it wasn't "something that boys do" at the time. All of those functional skills would be so much more useful than a lot of things I was taught in school. There are "adulting" classes now that demonstrate the obvious gap in our education system. [0]
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.
There isn't a need to mend when clothes are as inexpensive as they are. Especially for children's clothes as they outgrow them before they need mending and it's easier to buy new clothes than find what you need second hand.
Children's clothes do need mending. They fall over and play games in their newest jeans or jumper, no matter what you tell them. When they outgrow they can be passed to the younger brother or sister.
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. :)
If we paid more, would the factory owners have built a safer factory? No, they'd pocket the profits. If they didn't have factory jobs, would they be subsisting on coastal fishing and be killed by tsunami?
Poorer parts of the world are poor by default, not because of trade.
This may be the case in the US, but in most of the world, places such as India, China, and even parts of Europe, people still hand down clothing, and have a very real need for mending...
Even parts of Europe? That makes it sound as if this is just something poor Polish country folk do. This is common sense everywhere, including here in the fairly affluent Netherlands!
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.
By parts of Europe, I meant that this may not be very common in the UK or Germany (no idea about Germany), but is definitely common in large parts of EU (Poland, sure, but also Portugal, and I think it's relatively common among the nordics, for example).
Even in the UK. Parents don't want to just throw out clothes, with their associated memories, so they try and pass them on.
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.
Interesting. My experience from London is, people buy clothes that they never even open, and donate them to charity 3-5 years later with tags still on. The consumerism I've seen is utterly ridiculous.
Not so poor Pole here. We're expecting our first child. We could buying clothes & other stuff new, but my frugal wife went on-line, and in two months got us more than enough clothes for the first two years, + a stroller, for free, from local give-away groups. Couple of messages and short car trips is all it took, and in total, we're easily ~$1500 ahead because of that.
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.
There are externalities to mass consumption of clothing though, from the resources needed to grow cotton, dyes, transportation of goods across the planet and sweat shop labour.
Through to disposal where discarded products will either go to poor countries to be resold, or thrown into landfill.
Somewhat ironic this comes in a day after I sewed a hole in the armpit of a tee shirt I like. Doesn't really vibe with the target audience of a site like 'Hacker News'...
Hacking essentially means the exact opposite of buying and throwing away stuff (a cycle known as consumerism i.e. being a sheeple). Fixing and modifying all kind of things to suit your weird imagination is the core idea of hacking. The skill of mending applies to software too, of course.
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 is called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection. I also grew up in a communist country. I also remember good times. I don't miss it, except for the sense of community in the face of adversity. You can still have that now if you look past the consumer culture.
Anyone remember the "bad capacitor epidemic" of the oughts? I've never been Mr. Electronics Guy, but I taught myself how to buy and replace caps and brought back several items from the dead. Got a free computer monitor for the price of bus fare to pick it up from someone offering it on Freecycle, plus whatever, a buck or two for a full set of caps?
This was when I was unemployed and the time/money ratio was worth it...
Sometimes it does a weird horseshoe and becomes a time/ hobby ration that is worth it even with your day job.
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.
Definitely - the challenge and variety were always part of the appeal. Maybe it's partly that (and not just the fact that I'm employed now) that explains why I have yet another "bad caps" project sitting within reach of me right now that's been there for 2-3 years and I haven't even touched it! Thanks to previous efforts, I have all the tools & know-how. I've done it several times. It should be a total breeze, and uneventful. But what fun is that? :) Clearly I am mentally ill.
Nothing wrong with specialization. It's a waste of my time and potentially a waste of money if I ruin the item. There are many shops in town, some excellent at mending and alterations and at very reasonable cost.
For that, I get excellent quality work that will hold up instead of me ruining the garment through inexperience.
I'll stick to my soldering iron, they can keep their thread and needle.
I think make-do-and-mend kinda comes with the maker ethos, at least to me.
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.
I spent my time learning how to mend my computer and the pile of arcane technologies that make it up. Out in the real world, as opposed to here on HN, that is the mending that does not exist. It wasn't even forgotten; it's still simply magic. I can call a repair service and have any mechanical object in my apartment functional in hours. I can call my friends and one of them, or one of their parents, will have a suggestion. But if I walk into a random room, filled with fifty random people off the street, one in four of then will be able to repair a car engine or patch a hole in a shirt, but I will be literally the only person in the room that can get someone's phone back on WiFi after the password changes. That's its own kind of mending, and one that's much more difficult, much more useful, and much more valuable, both directly to an information worker like me and to civilization.
It sure has its own merit, but I think you can remove the last sentence and slow down on the "I'd be the only one in a room of 100 people able to connect a phone to a network".
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.
I cracked the screen on my Samsung tablet. The local repair shops wanted more than 200$to fix which is essentially the same price as that tablet brand new. I bought a kit on Ebay and fixed it myself for 30$ and 30 minutes.
Fixing things is very common in the third world countries, because repair charge is cheaper than its replacement. That's why you see lots of businesses there that cater to these: tailors to TV repairmen..
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.
Mentioned this in another reply but for buttons put something like a toothpick between button and garment when sewing it on, so that there is some flex when buttoning up. Otherwise it's too easy to have button fastened tight against the garment and hard to manipulate.
I was interested in the discussion of home economics. My mother would not have taken that class but growing up in SE Asia through war and peace was used to fixing things. When I was a kid, even though she was a full time physician, she also made my sister's and my clothes (in 1960s and 70s Australia).
My Dad made our furniture and fixed many things, but sewing? He hadn't the faintest idea.
I just finished tuning up a White sewing machine and it blew me away how well built the thing was. Very well used but still works like a charm. 99.9% metal and made in Japan.
Every 6 months I used to go to my mother and use her Bernina sewing machine to fix some clothes. The machine is old already but still works good. Recently she bought me a new mechanical one. I really hope it will last all my life. I don't need it much, but it's a pleasure to fix things or make something small. Plus, the use of a powerful machine makes it way more fun than stitching. Also, it still wastes less time than me searching and buying something new.
I buy up the really old ones and repair them then give them away. They last a lifetime (literally, these are machines from the 30's to the 70's and it is not rare that the previous owner had it as a wedding gift and passed away). I love the Naumann brand, they are really indestructible, light industrial stuff.
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.
I fixed my refrigerator that came with my new house. The fan that blows cold air from bottom freezer to top of refrigerator was broken (and even missing blades?). I found the part on the Internet and also took the time to by myself a soldering iron. https://twitter.com/RussellBal/status/650091457303453696
I had a Maytag washing machine from 1955 that was finally parted with in 2009. It was actually probably entirely functional, but I just could not source a new belt for it after months of trying. Working around the problem finally got tiresome and it was sold to a prop company and replaced with a new machine. The replacement needed multiple service calls for that one year that I owned it.
Interesting: I just did laundry, including six long-sleeve shirts. Four of them had spare buttons at the bottom: made by L.L.Bean, Nordstrom, Kirkland, and an old Eddie Bauer denim picked up at a thrift shop. The two with no spare buttons were both from Arrow. The problem is, I can't remember the last time I owned eiter needle or thread.
From the title I was hoping it would be about self-healing and mental health recovery in the face of dysfunctional modern workplace environments like open plan offices.
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.
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.
This has been one of my favorite things about the 9 months I've spent this last year in western Europe and Asia. Everything is mended and fixed, both in shops and by day-to-day individuals.
We always forget that jeans were designed for workers. Then they turned into a whole culture. It is not clear why some create a real cult of some things?!
I'm very surprised and pleased at both the number of responses and the actual content of those responses (given it was posted on Hacker News). It tells me several things, first that people are actually concerned by the waste created by our throwaway society especially so when the items being thrown away are otherwise serviceable except for minor faults, and second there's still an interest in craft—people (some at least) still want to work with their hands.
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.
I dont know why but it gives you massive pride, to remove planned obsolescence from a very cheap item. Take the water heater of my mum - the toplid did no longer work, because the axis it used was made from cheap plastic, resting on even thinner plastic holders. Solution: Hot screw driven through. Now this cheap item works trouble free since 5 years.
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.
I'd be willing to bet that the failure points you found are far from the only places in the design where they cheaped out. People tend to buy based on price and/or superficial details. It's hard to sell people on substantially hardened designs absent a brand that allows for charging a real premium.
Thanks to the Internet everyone thinks engineering and manufacturing is all about "planned obsolescence". Consumers want to blame the maker for the cheap product they bought instead of blaming themselves for only wanting cheap products.
This has been an issue since before the internet. Growing up in the 80s my parents and grandparents would always be making comments like, "They don't make things like they used to!"
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.
This has been an issue, however, once upon a time durability was actually a marketing term used for regular appliances. Companies sold people on it.
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.
And if the engine didn't need rebuilt, the frame was probably rusting out by 50,000 miles if you lived anywhere that it snowed regularly in the winter.
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.
The consumer is not informed on the quality of a product. How am I meant to know how long a product will last? Price is only a vague estimate of quality. You can spend a lot of money on something that won't last long at all. In fact if it cost a lot of money it was probably built for people who can afford to replace it regularly.
>I sometimes wonder, why this is not a buisness model. There must be money in making cheap items ever lasting.
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.
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.