20 ms·

I think it's thrice: Acquiring price, usage price, and disposal price. I've recently discovered how large the price of getting rid of something can be. Usually

I think it's thrice: Acquiring price, usage price, and disposal price. I've recently discovered how large the price of getting rid of something can be. Usually these costs are hidden because you just throw something into the trash and it's gone. But not always the case.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
tapland 3y ago
That also goes for software (like notetaking apps or using a certain build system). How easy is exporting the data you care about if you want or have to change platform? Not seldom it's so labor intensive you'll never migrate to something better.
- paradox242 3y ago
  This is why I cannot use things like Evernote, OneNote, or the MacOS Notes app. I have first-hand experience of the latter two encountering corruption which was unrecoverable due to their proprietary data format. All three have pretty poor export choices (PDF? Really? What am I supposed to do with that?). I am at the point where I will never again use something that is not plain text files as they are and will likely remain the most portable format. This is how I ended up discovering Obsidian and I have not looked back since.
lisper 3y ago
Yeah, this. A few years ago we bought a generator. A few months after the warranty expired, it broke. There are no small-engine repair shops in my area, and it's too big to fit in my car anyway. Having someone come to our house to repair it would cost more than buying a new one. But... how do you get rid of a broken generator? It weighs 45 kg and it has four gallons of gasoline in the tank. You can't just chuck it in the trash. (FYI, I decided to take it apart and was actually able to get it running again. It turned out to be an easy fix -- broken fuel valve. But success was far from guaranteed, and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge?)
- ExoticPearTree 3y ago
  > On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge? You need to decide for yourself what is more valuable to you.
- jventura 3y ago
  > (...) and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. I do a lot of repairs and maintenance at my own house. Last year I built a terrace and an extra room, and only had to pay someone to help me, and this week I painted the all house exterior with the help of my dad. Total costs of painting and entire house: 240€. It would cost north of 2000€ if I had to pay someone to do it. Yes, my "hourly rate" for that kind of work is sometimes much less than my "regular" work. But I can fix many things, don't need to go find "credible" people to do things for me, I fell an immense pleasure to be self-sustainable (for that kind of things), learn a lot; and my house, cars, electronics, are mostly in top shape.
  - madsbuch 3y ago
    It is quite interesting to calculate the true cost of doing things itself. In Denmark the tax system is such that if you subcontract out of personal money they need to be 5 times fast than you. If we say that you can make your deck in half the time a professional would have don it, the factor is still 2.5x. Ig. assuming a contractor would do it for 50 USD/h, this would translate to "making" 125 USD on hour by doing it yourself, 250 USD/h if you know what you are doing. Obviously these things change with tax regimes.
    - mithras 3y ago
      I have the same thing, I feel these high income taxes force me to do repairs and home improvement myself because the converted hourly is higher than my own generous contracting rate.
      - imtringued 3y ago
bluetomcat 3y ago
There's also an opportunity cost. The usage of that item takes up finite time which could be utilised in alternative ways. The acquiring/usage/disposal price of a TV or a gaming console, for example, is negligent, compared to the lost opportunities during your time with them. The same argument can be made with regard to finite space. Say you are a collector of diecast model cars, but have limited space in your house to store them. Acquiring a new model limits you from acquiring a potentially more desirable model in the future.
- flushit 3y ago
  Isn't that part of the "usage" cost? The time I spend reading that book I can't spend going surfing. But that's already the cost of "using" the book.
psychoslave 3y ago
Excellent remark, and as you suggest, it’s often a hidden cost. That might be a cost paid at society level, but the trash system does not work without some attention, energy and time. But there is a deeper topic behind these: what value foundations do we use to estimate what comes to our awareness. Without valuation judgment, there is no cost and no gain. For someone putting above all immediate serotonin peaks, an endless disposal of affordable first price might be enough. For someone that is striving to realize some daunting task that will catch most of other people in awe, it’s obviously mostly the second price that will matter: the more expensive the better. For someone driven by a sense of sustainable community of life forms, the emphasis will be all on recycling through virtuous loops. Of course I do have my own tropes that one might be guess from the way this points where formulated, but I recognize there is no absolute true accessible to human beings that will prescribe some categorical imperative between them.
tlb 3y ago
And storage price. Housing in the city is like $40/sqft/year, so that plastic playhouse for your kids occupying a 3'x3' patch of living room floor gets pretty expensive.
- nradov 3y ago
  The worst part is when kindly relatives give your kids huge toys, like a doll house or rocking horse. I know they mean well but the gift ends up being a burden just due to the space it takes up and you can't get rid of it without offending the giver.
  - prawn 3y ago
    I cannot convince my mother that ignoring someone's request to not receive any gifts is selfish behaviour by the giver.
charlysisto 3y ago
And maybe we should mention the elephant in the room : the environmental price
flushit 3y ago
And that's why buying cheap is often really not the best choice. If I have the option to choose between two gadgets, the acquiring prince of one may be far less (assuming lower quality and everything else equal) and even usage is kinda the same, modulo a bit of frustration if the lower-quality thing is not as smooth to use, but if it breaks, then cheap stuff tends to be harder if not impossible to repair, and if you can't fix it then you need to dispose of it and possibly get a replacement. Too much hassle. If I have the money, I optimize for quality above everything else. (Sadly, since manufacturers know this, the premium quality version usually costs disproportionally more cause market -- I'm ok with paying more. Not just a bit more, but much more.)
- SpacePortKnight 3y ago
  Cheap does not always mean lower quality. It's more expensive to repair an iPhone 14 pro than to buy a mid-range android for example.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dsego 3y ago
  Often times the problem is figuring out the price-quality ratio from the signals, eg. brand, design, materials, advertising, price. Sometimes, it's deceptive, and an expensive gadget that feels premium isn't necessarily the one that will best serve its purpose or that is most durable.
larrysalibra 3y ago
Hong Konger here: Or four times: Acquisition price, usage price, storage price, and disposal price Hong Konger who rents here: Or five times: Acquisition price, usage price, storage price, moving price and disposal price
- mbg721 3y ago
  My dad used to tell me a hierarchy of satisfaction in the context of home-ownership: buying > replacing > repairing > painting > cleaning. I think disposal is probably just after buying.
  - pbhjpbhj 3y ago
    For me that would be: repairing >> replacing > buying ... I'm not sure where maintenance fits, I guess that's what "painting" is.
dsego 3y ago
Something that can sadly still been seen widely in ex-yu countries is illegal dumping of old furniture and appliances. It's common to leave smaller appliances next to garbage containers. There are recycling centers being built in cities, but a lot of people are unaware and don't know it's their duty to properly dispose of items. I believe it's the consumerist culture, people are being sold shiny products on shelves, but the whole dirty lifecycle is hidden from them. In addition, companies producing electronics and appliances should somehow participate in disposal, even just by making things easier to disassemble and recycle.
- ClumsyPilot 3y ago
  > people are unaware and don't know it's their duty to properly dispose of items. I believe it's the consumerist culture > companies producing electronics and appliances should somehow participate in disposal The curent approach is fraudulent offloading of responsibility. The only solution is to charge manufacturers and importers complete cost of disposal / recycling for a given item. They can be asked to provide evidence of recycleability, they can be fined for lying. Manufacturers have incentive then, to improve recycleavility - costs willvbe lower. This issue should be solved between manufacturers and government. Three reasons why current approach will never work: 1 - A consumer cannot evaluate suitability of a given item for recycling or disposability, that information is only avaliable to the manufacturer. A consumer cannot evaluate government's ability to recycle - UK has over 100 different local authorities and each has different rules for which kind of plastic goes where. 2 - Manufacturers routinely commit fraud - and there is no way for consumer to get compensation if they were told something is recycleable but 5 years later it turns out it's not. Recyclers themselves regularly commits fraud - people are told their item was recycled but actually it gets dumped in africa. There is currently a system in UK where recyclers get paid by government for recycling plastic, they claim they recycle 2x as much plastic as exists / gets produced/ is imported into UK. A significant portion ends up illegally exported to philipines, not recycled. 3 - Individual disposal is unpoliceable - you can't police millions of idividual people. You have to move to policeable entities - manufacturers.
dumpsterdiver 3y ago
> and disposal price Case in point, Adobe Creative Cloud. Never have I encountered more anti-consumer behavior. For yearly subscriptions they only allow you to "not continue subscribing for another year" during a brief window of time right before your renewal date. Mind you, I'm not talking about cancelling the service and backing out of obligations that you've agreed to, I'm talking about Adobe engineering a situation in which they implicitly assume that you want to continue being a customer, while removing the ability for you to tell them that you no longer wish to be a customer.
q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago
Toss in a fourth: maintenance price. Maybe even a fifth: storage price. Funny enough, I actually have noticed this with my books. More books require more bookshelves. More bookshelves require more real estate. It's a straight-line arrow of causation from picking up a copy of Moby Dick to house-shopping for a place large enough where I can have my own private library.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  In capitalist America, stuff owns you.
npteljes 3y ago
This can be nuanced into infinity though. For example, the "first price" is not the first either. I usually spend good time looking for a good deal, a trusty device, or something to consume, before paying the "first price". So for the sake of simplicity, and to invoke thought, I think the two prices are good enough.
- imtringued 3y ago
  Please don't bring transaction costs into play, you might ruin the beautiful neoclassical models. If money saves transaction costs, then it can't be neutral. The introduction of money becomes an essential part of the economy. It's not like there are good alternatives to money. Don't think this further and wonder if interest is just a monetization of the transaction cost savings. Then it would turn out that interest payments negate the benefits of the division of labor entirely.
ghaff 3y ago
Some items I've had luck just leaving at the end of my driveway with a free sign on. (I'm set back from a busy road.) But, yeah, I have a bunch of stuff around my house that I'm basically holding onto because getting rid of it would be a pain. I actually have a small dumpster which helps some but one of these days I'll probably need to get a junk disposal service.
- prawn 3y ago
  Pianos are a classic. We have a semi antique but untunable upright that no one would even take free. Would cost $200 to have it removed. Seems very wrong, but my current plan of action is to hack it up with an axe and slowly feed it out through the bin each week.
firebirdn99 3y ago
Yes, there is a cost of ownership attached to physical objects. As a person who's moved around a bit in the last year, I can attest to that.
TuringNYC 3y ago
> I think it's thrice: Acquiring price, usage price, and disposal price. I'd add a 4th: storage price. Having lived in the city, space is at a premium. We have found ourselves unable to go into specific (smaller) apartments in the past just because we had too much stuff. This goes especially for kitchen items.
KineticLensman 3y ago
Yes. Enlightened capability lifecycles include 'disposal' at the end. There may be fairly obvious costs such as disposal of e-waste, but other activities such as thinking about how to reuse infrastructure, resources and people who are associated with the thing being disposed of.
shostack 3y ago
Others have added additional prices that must be paid after the fact for maintenance, and storage. I'd offer another that has to be paid before the price in money: Research cost. Increasingly I don't need "things." I need the best/right "thing" for the job. And for hobbies or high cost/risk purchases (think car, house, big dollar contracts) I find I need to invest substantial time into researching my problem and then my options for solutions, which takes lots of my time. Because the cost of getting it wrong often means even more time, money, and headaches that I don't want to deal with, I sometimes find myself over indexing on the up front part to avoid the pain of getting it wrong. In many cases the cost of time invested eclipses the cost of the object because the cost of the time to remedy it is more than the cost of replacing it.
- jimkleiber 3y ago
  This makes me think of how much time it can take me to find clothes that fit the way I really want them to fit. I thought about it when I almost lost my luggage the other day, that yes it would annoy me to lose that much money in the first price of the clothes, but how much time/energy did I put into the finding of those clothes?
yboris 3y ago
re: disposal price I think you're right! I wish our society did recycling better. In Japan, to get rid of a computer (for example), you don't throw it in trash - you must pay a recycler to handle it correctly.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I often think about recycling nirvana (mostly for use in sci-fi scenarios). Got a broken doodad? Throw it in the recycler and print a new one. 99% of the necessary feedstock ought to come from the broken one, so the only costs should be energy and the part that failed its tests and had to be replaced. Hopefully it's something small like a single capacitor. There's probably some fundamental limit on how good such a system can get. Like, even if you recover 100% of the solder, you're going to need new flux every time. Or maybe you fill the chamber with argon so you don't need flux, but then how much of that can you recover. Or maybe you just leave it full of argon, but then how lossy is your doodad-in-out mechanism...
  - parthianshotgun 3y ago
    Why test? You could just print a new one right? Assuming star trek rules where it just gets broken down into raw energy.
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      Star Trek took it a bit too far for my tastes. I prefer Sci-fi with tech that is out of reach--but just barely (e.g. The Expanse) If your recycling scheme involves condensed matter physics, it might as well be magic. But if it's just known-robotics and reusable parts and good design taken to the n'th degree... that's the kind of thing that could feasibly inspire action in a reader--which is the kind of sci-fi I want to read. Besides, there's something inelegant about breaking something all the way down just to build it all the way back up. A system that understands that the shortest path from here to there means something other than a full molecular disassembly is far more impressive than one that's just a decomposer.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

tapland 3y ago

That also goes for software (like notetaking apps or using a certain build system). How easy is exporting the data you care about if you want or have to change platform? Not seldom it's so labor intensive you'll never migrate to something better.

paradox242 3y ago
This is why I cannot use things like Evernote, OneNote, or the MacOS Notes app. I have first-hand experience of the latter two encountering corruption which was unrecoverable due to their proprietary data format. All three have pretty poor export choices (PDF? Really? What am I supposed to do with that?). I am at the point where I will never again use something that is not plain text files as they are and will likely remain the most portable format. This is how I ended up discovering Obsidian and I have not looked back since.

lisper 3y ago

Yeah, this. A few years ago we bought a generator. A few months after the warranty expired, it broke. There are no small-engine repair shops in my area, and it's too big to fit in my car anyway. Having someone come to our house to repair it would cost more than buying a new one. But... how do you get rid of a broken generator? It weighs 45 kg and it has four gallons of gasoline in the tank. You can't just chuck it in the trash. (FYI, I decided to take it apart and was actually able to get it running again. It turned out to be an easy fix -- broken fuel valve. But success was far from guaranteed, and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge?)

ExoticPearTree 3y ago
> On the other hand, I also learned a lot so maybe it was a net win. How do you reckon time vs money vs knowledge? You need to decide for yourself what is more valuable to you.
jventura 3y ago
> (...) and it also took several hours of my time, which probably cost me more than a new generator. I do a lot of repairs and maintenance at my own house. Last year I built a terrace and an extra room, and only had to pay someone to help me, and this week I painted the all house exterior with the help of my dad. Total costs of painting and entire house: 240€. It would cost north of 2000€ if I had to pay someone to do it. Yes, my "hourly rate" for that kind of work is sometimes much less than my "regular" work. But I can fix many things, don't need to go find "credible" people to do things for me, I fell an immense pleasure to be self-sustainable (for that kind of things), learn a lot; and my house, cars, electronics, are mostly in top shape.
- madsbuch 3y ago
  It is quite interesting to calculate the true cost of doing things itself. In Denmark the tax system is such that if you subcontract out of personal money they need to be 5 times fast than you. If we say that you can make your deck in half the time a professional would have don it, the factor is still 2.5x. Ig. assuming a contractor would do it for 50 USD/h, this would translate to "making" 125 USD on hour by doing it yourself, 250 USD/h if you know what you are doing. Obviously these things change with tax regimes.
  - mithras 3y ago
    I have the same thing, I feel these high income taxes force me to do repairs and home improvement myself because the converted hourly is higher than my own generous contracting rate.
    - imtringued 3y ago

bluetomcat 3y ago

There's also an opportunity cost. The usage of that item takes up finite time which could be utilised in alternative ways. The acquiring/usage/disposal price of a TV or a gaming console, for example, is negligent, compared to the lost opportunities during your time with them. The same argument can be made with regard to finite space. Say you are a collector of diecast model cars, but have limited space in your house to store them. Acquiring a new model limits you from acquiring a potentially more desirable model in the future.

flushit 3y ago
Isn't that part of the "usage" cost? The time I spend reading that book I can't spend going surfing. But that's already the cost of "using" the book.

psychoslave 3y ago

Excellent remark, and as you suggest, it’s often a hidden cost. That might be a cost paid at society level, but the trash system does not work without some attention, energy and time. But there is a deeper topic behind these: what value foundations do we use to estimate what comes to our awareness. Without valuation judgment, there is no cost and no gain. For someone putting above all immediate serotonin peaks, an endless disposal of affordable first price might be enough. For someone that is striving to realize some daunting task that will catch most of other people in awe, it’s obviously mostly the second price that will matter: the more expensive the better. For someone driven by a sense of sustainable community of life forms, the emphasis will be all on recycling through virtuous loops. Of course I do have my own tropes that one might be guess from the way this points where formulated, but I recognize there is no absolute true accessible to human beings that will prescribe some categorical imperative between them.

tlb 3y ago

And storage price. Housing in the city is like $40/sqft/year, so that plastic playhouse for your kids occupying a 3'x3' patch of living room floor gets pretty expensive.

nradov 3y ago
The worst part is when kindly relatives give your kids huge toys, like a doll house or rocking horse. I know they mean well but the gift ends up being a burden just due to the space it takes up and you can't get rid of it without offending the giver.
- prawn 3y ago
  I cannot convince my mother that ignoring someone's request to not receive any gifts is selfish behaviour by the giver.

charlysisto 3y ago

And maybe we should mention the elephant in the room : the environmental price

flushit 3y ago

And that's why buying cheap is often really not the best choice. If I have the option to choose between two gadgets, the acquiring prince of one may be far less (assuming lower quality and everything else equal) and even usage is kinda the same, modulo a bit of frustration if the lower-quality thing is not as smooth to use, but if it breaks, then cheap stuff tends to be harder if not impossible to repair, and if you can't fix it then you need to dispose of it and possibly get a replacement. Too much hassle. If I have the money, I optimize for quality above everything else. (Sadly, since manufacturers know this, the premium quality version usually costs disproportionally more cause market -- I'm ok with paying more. Not just a bit more, but much more.)

SpacePortKnight 3y ago
Cheap does not always mean lower quality. It's more expensive to repair an iPhone 14 pro than to buy a mid-range android for example.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dsego 3y ago
Often times the problem is figuring out the price-quality ratio from the signals, eg. brand, design, materials, advertising, price. Sometimes, it's deceptive, and an expensive gadget that feels premium isn't necessarily the one that will best serve its purpose or that is most durable.

larrysalibra 3y ago

Hong Konger here: Or four times: Acquisition price, usage price, storage price, and disposal price Hong Konger who rents here: Or five times: Acquisition price, usage price, storage price, moving price and disposal price

mbg721 3y ago
My dad used to tell me a hierarchy of satisfaction in the context of home-ownership: buying > replacing > repairing > painting > cleaning. I think disposal is probably just after buying.
- pbhjpbhj 3y ago
  For me that would be: repairing >> replacing > buying ... I'm not sure where maintenance fits, I guess that's what "painting" is.

dsego 3y ago

Something that can sadly still been seen widely in ex-yu countries is illegal dumping of old furniture and appliances. It's common to leave smaller appliances next to garbage containers. There are recycling centers being built in cities, but a lot of people are unaware and don't know it's their duty to properly dispose of items. I believe it's the consumerist culture, people are being sold shiny products on shelves, but the whole dirty lifecycle is hidden from them. In addition, companies producing electronics and appliances should somehow participate in disposal, even just by making things easier to disassemble and recycle.

ClumsyPilot 3y ago
> people are unaware and don't know it's their duty to properly dispose of items. I believe it's the consumerist culture > companies producing electronics and appliances should somehow participate in disposal The curent approach is fraudulent offloading of responsibility. The only solution is to charge manufacturers and importers complete cost of disposal / recycling for a given item. They can be asked to provide evidence of recycleability, they can be fined for lying. Manufacturers have incentive then, to improve recycleavility - costs willvbe lower. This issue should be solved between manufacturers and government. Three reasons why current approach will never work: 1 - A consumer cannot evaluate suitability of a given item for recycling or disposability, that information is only avaliable to the manufacturer. A consumer cannot evaluate government's ability to recycle - UK has over 100 different local authorities and each has different rules for which kind of plastic goes where. 2 - Manufacturers routinely commit fraud - and there is no way for consumer to get compensation if they were told something is recycleable but 5 years later it turns out it's not. Recyclers themselves regularly commits fraud - people are told their item was recycled but actually it gets dumped in africa. There is currently a system in UK where recyclers get paid by government for recycling plastic, they claim they recycle 2x as much plastic as exists / gets produced/ is imported into UK. A significant portion ends up illegally exported to philipines, not recycled. 3 - Individual disposal is unpoliceable - you can't police millions of idividual people. You have to move to policeable entities - manufacturers.

dumpsterdiver 3y ago

> and disposal price Case in point, Adobe Creative Cloud. Never have I encountered more anti-consumer behavior. For yearly subscriptions they only allow you to "not continue subscribing for another year" during a brief window of time right before your renewal date. Mind you, I'm not talking about cancelling the service and backing out of obligations that you've agreed to, I'm talking about Adobe engineering a situation in which they implicitly assume that you want to continue being a customer, while removing the ability for you to tell them that you no longer wish to be a customer.

q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y ago

Toss in a fourth: maintenance price. Maybe even a fifth: storage price. Funny enough, I actually have noticed this with my books. More books require more bookshelves. More bookshelves require more real estate. It's a straight-line arrow of causation from picking up a copy of Moby Dick to house-shopping for a place large enough where I can have my own private library.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
In capitalist America, stuff owns you.

npteljes 3y ago

This can be nuanced into infinity though. For example, the "first price" is not the first either. I usually spend good time looking for a good deal, a trusty device, or something to consume, before paying the "first price". So for the sake of simplicity, and to invoke thought, I think the two prices are good enough.

imtringued 3y ago
Please don't bring transaction costs into play, you might ruin the beautiful neoclassical models. If money saves transaction costs, then it can't be neutral. The introduction of money becomes an essential part of the economy. It's not like there are good alternatives to money. Don't think this further and wonder if interest is just a monetization of the transaction cost savings. Then it would turn out that interest payments negate the benefits of the division of labor entirely.

ghaff 3y ago

Some items I've had luck just leaving at the end of my driveway with a free sign on. (I'm set back from a busy road.) But, yeah, I have a bunch of stuff around my house that I'm basically holding onto because getting rid of it would be a pain. I actually have a small dumpster which helps some but one of these days I'll probably need to get a junk disposal service.

prawn 3y ago
Pianos are a classic. We have a semi antique but untunable upright that no one would even take free. Would cost $200 to have it removed. Seems very wrong, but my current plan of action is to hack it up with an axe and slowly feed it out through the bin each week.

firebirdn99 3y ago

Yes, there is a cost of ownership attached to physical objects. As a person who's moved around a bit in the last year, I can attest to that.

TuringNYC 3y ago

> I think it's thrice: Acquiring price, usage price, and disposal price. I'd add a 4th: storage price. Having lived in the city, space is at a premium. We have found ourselves unable to go into specific (smaller) apartments in the past just because we had too much stuff. This goes especially for kitchen items.

KineticLensman 3y ago

Yes. Enlightened capability lifecycles include 'disposal' at the end. There may be fairly obvious costs such as disposal of e-waste, but other activities such as thinking about how to reuse infrastructure, resources and people who are associated with the thing being disposed of.

shostack 3y ago

Others have added additional prices that must be paid after the fact for maintenance, and storage. I'd offer another that has to be paid before the price in money: Research cost. Increasingly I don't need "things." I need the best/right "thing" for the job. And for hobbies or high cost/risk purchases (think car, house, big dollar contracts) I find I need to invest substantial time into researching my problem and then my options for solutions, which takes lots of my time. Because the cost of getting it wrong often means even more time, money, and headaches that I don't want to deal with, I sometimes find myself over indexing on the up front part to avoid the pain of getting it wrong. In many cases the cost of time invested eclipses the cost of the object because the cost of the time to remedy it is more than the cost of replacing it.

jimkleiber 3y ago
This makes me think of how much time it can take me to find clothes that fit the way I really want them to fit. I thought about it when I almost lost my luggage the other day, that yes it would annoy me to lose that much money in the first price of the clothes, but how much time/energy did I put into the finding of those clothes?

yboris 3y ago

re: disposal price I think you're right! I wish our society did recycling better. In Japan, to get rid of a computer (for example), you don't throw it in trash - you must pay a recycler to handle it correctly.

__MatrixMan__ 3y ago
I often think about recycling nirvana (mostly for use in sci-fi scenarios). Got a broken doodad? Throw it in the recycler and print a new one. 99% of the necessary feedstock ought to come from the broken one, so the only costs should be energy and the part that failed its tests and had to be replaced. Hopefully it's something small like a single capacitor. There's probably some fundamental limit on how good such a system can get. Like, even if you recover 100% of the solder, you're going to need new flux every time. Or maybe you fill the chamber with argon so you don't need flux, but then how much of that can you recover. Or maybe you just leave it full of argon, but then how lossy is your doodad-in-out mechanism...
- parthianshotgun 3y ago
  Why test? You could just print a new one right? Assuming star trek rules where it just gets broken down into raw energy.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    Star Trek took it a bit too far for my tastes. I prefer Sci-fi with tech that is out of reach--but just barely (e.g. The Expanse) If your recycling scheme involves condensed matter physics, it might as well be magic. But if it's just known-robotics and reusable parts and good design taken to the n'th degree... that's the kind of thing that could feasibly inspire action in a reader--which is the kind of sci-fi I want to read. Besides, there's something inelegant about breaking something all the way down just to build it all the way back up. A system that understands that the shortest path from here to there means something other than a full molecular disassembly is far more impressive than one that's just a decomposer.