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> we have to make everyone materially poorer first. that's false. We can also make repairs materially faster (more productive). Just to illustrate the point w

> we have to make everyone materially poorer first. that's false. We can also make repairs materially faster (more productive). Just to illustrate the point with something extreme. If a worker could fix 100 fridges a day, they'd only have to charge like $5 labor.

yamtaddle 4y ago
This is a good point, and might actually be viable in some cases. Though I think most of those end up looking less like what we'd think of as repair and more like, I dunno, replacing the batteries in a remote control, or lightbulbs in a lamp. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's also probably not easy to engineer into a lot of products, especially without driving up the price significantly.
iggldiggl 4y ago
Countering with an adapted proverb: All working applicances are all alike, each broken applicance is broken in its own way. This might be exaggerating a little bit, but I do think that repairing stuff is inherently more difficult to automate than production, and increased automation is the major way we've seen productivity gains in manufacturing other than offshoring to cheaper countries and shipping things over slowly but cheaply in bulk.
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  The proverb doesnt really address the point. Is your claim is that repairs cannot ever be sufficiently productive to be worth it?
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    I wouldn't claim "cannot ever" (and after all, to some extent repairs are worth it even under today's conditions), but I do believe repairwork is simply inherently more complex and difficult to automate. Unlike in assembly, there's not just one happy assembly path that you need to handle – first you always need to diagnose the problem, and then depending on the problem take a variety of actions in order to fix/replace whatever you've identified as the faulty component. Plus subsequently, even in the ideal case of a widget that's as easy to disassemble/repair as it was to originally assemble (which comes with its own set of trade-offs), any productivity gains in manufacturing that were based on parallelisation are difficult replicate when repairing just a single one-off component. E.g. reflow soldering allows you to efficiently solder large circuit boards with hundreds or more components in one go, but conversely subsequently replacing just a single one of those components therefore doesn't take one hundredth of the original assembly time.

yamtaddle 4y ago

This is a good point, and might actually be viable in some cases. Though I think most of those end up looking less like what we'd think of as repair and more like, I dunno, replacing the batteries in a remote control, or lightbulbs in a lamp. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's also probably not easy to engineer into a lot of products, especially without driving up the price significantly.

iggldiggl 4y ago

Countering with an adapted proverb: All working applicances are all alike, each broken applicance is broken in its own way. This might be exaggerating a little bit, but I do think that repairing stuff is inherently more difficult to automate than production, and increased automation is the major way we've seen productivity gains in manufacturing other than offshoring to cheaper countries and shipping things over slowly but cheaply in bulk.

maerF0x0 4y ago
The proverb doesnt really address the point. Is your claim is that repairs cannot ever be sufficiently productive to be worth it?
- iggldiggl 4y ago
  I wouldn't claim "cannot ever" (and after all, to some extent repairs are worth it even under today's conditions), but I do believe repairwork is simply inherently more complex and difficult to automate. Unlike in assembly, there's not just one happy assembly path that you need to handle – first you always need to diagnose the problem, and then depending on the problem take a variety of actions in order to fix/replace whatever you've identified as the faulty component. Plus subsequently, even in the ideal case of a widget that's as easy to disassemble/repair as it was to originally assemble (which comes with its own set of trade-offs), any productivity gains in manufacturing that were based on parallelisation are difficult replicate when repairing just a single one-off component. E.g. reflow soldering allows you to efficiently solder large circuit boards with hundreds or more components in one go, but conversely subsequently replacing just a single one of those components therefore doesn't take one hundredth of the original assembly time.