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Literally doing nothing (as in, not buying anything) could have an impact if enough people stopped spending discretionary income on physical things. Problem, of

by lhorie 5y ago

Literally doing nothing (as in, not buying anything) could have an impact if enough people stopped spending discretionary income on physical things. Problem, of course, is nobody thinks they're part of the problem.

Syonyk 5y ago
I know plenty of people who recognize they're part of the problem, and they tend to buy rather radically less than the average bear, and to buy things like "repair tools" so they can fix stuff that would otherwise be sent off to the dump. Or, at least, turn it into as many useful things as possible. I spent a rather long chunk of my life extracting the residual value from otherwise broken or nearly-broken things. I spent most of a decade driving cars that were either literally rescued from the junkyard (to the amusement and entertainment of the junkyard counter folks - I thought they were nuts, they thought I was nuts, it was a good arrangement) or intercepted on the way ("Hey, if you're getting rid of that, give me a call first." "Junkyard offered $125, beat it and it's yours." "I'll be up in half an hour with $150."). The same goes for repairing laptops, or obtaining a variety of broken laptops and building serviceable ones out of it (plus selling anything useful - the value of a broken laptop, parted out, is further from $0 than I was willing to let anyone else know at the time). It's just that none of this is popular in the tech industry for reasons I don't understand. I worked at a tech company in the greater Seattle metro region for a while, and I was quite literally the only person in the office who was willing to dive into replacing cell phone batteries, repairing laptops, buying and refurbishing broken phones, etc. I didn't mind it - I made rather good coin doing it - but it was bizarre to me that in an office of several thousand people, I was literally the only person I knew who was willing to take a soldering iron to someone's laptop power jack to repair a failed power connection.

by lhorie 5y ago

Syonyk 5y ago

I know plenty of people who recognize they're part of the problem, and they tend to buy rather radically less than the average bear, and to buy things like "repair tools" so they can fix stuff that would otherwise be sent off to the dump. Or, at least, turn it into as many useful things as possible. I spent a rather long chunk of my life extracting the residual value from otherwise broken or nearly-broken things. I spent most of a decade driving cars that were either literally rescued from the junkyard (to the amusement and entertainment of the junkyard counter folks - I thought they were nuts, they thought I was nuts, it was a good arrangement) or intercepted on the way ("Hey, if you're getting rid of that, give me a call first." "Junkyard offered $125, beat it and it's yours." "I'll be up in half an hour with $150."). The same goes for repairing laptops, or obtaining a variety of broken laptops and building serviceable ones out of it (plus selling anything useful - the value of a broken laptop, parted out, is further from $0 than I was willing to let anyone else know at the time). It's just that none of this is popular in the tech industry for reasons I don't understand. I worked at a tech company in the greater Seattle metro region for a while, and I was quite literally the only person in the office who was willing to dive into replacing cell phone batteries, repairing laptops, buying and refurbishing broken phones, etc. I didn't mind it - I made rather good coin doing it - but it was bizarre to me that in an office of several thousand people, I was literally the only person I knew who was willing to take a soldering iron to someone's laptop power jack to repair a failed power connection.