3 ms·

Isn't that a feature not a bug? That means labor, a proxy for quality of life of the laborer, is more expensive than parts. That's abundance. In fact, in "shit

by tgma 5mo ago

Isn't that a feature not a bug? That means labor, a proxy for quality of life of the laborer, is more expensive than parts. That's abundance. In fact, in "shithole countries" where everyone wants to emigrate from, it is exactly the opposite: i.e. you try to fix everything even if it takes sooo long.

drysine 5mo ago
That means that the cost of (not) utilizing garbage is externalized
- gruez 5mo ago
  >the cost of (not) utilizing garbage is externalized No, it's the exact opposite, because the consumer is on the hook for the purchase price as well as any repair costs.
  - kelnos 5mo ago
    But the consumer isn't on the hook for dealing with the garbage.
  - culi 5mo ago
    Handling trash costs money. A lot of money. Right now, most Americans find it hard to even conceptualize the idea of paying to deal with their waste.
    - loeg 5mo ago
      What are you talking about. Trash is inexpensive, but Americans absolutely pay for it (solid waste utility bill). I think people conceptualize that they have utility bills?
    - fragmede 5mo ago
      Where Americans are renters and garbage service is hidden in their monthly rent payment, sure, but for Americans who own a home, they have to pay their local jurisdiction a fee for taking away trash and recycling and compost (and batteries and light bulbs). Also sewage and water.
    - wat10000 5mo ago
      Wat. Almost all Americans either pay someone to deal with their waste or are dependents of someone who pays on their behalf. Do you think we're all burning our trash in barrels or dumping it in the local river or something?
boppo1 5mo ago
Horseshit. It means we're doing less with more and anyone with a brain should be able to figure out that's bad for Quality of Life on a long term. Wasting your resources is not how an economy grows strong.
- gruez 5mo ago
  >It means we're doing less with more Labor is an input too. Fixing something in a way that saves some materials, but requires hours of skilled labor and specialized equipment doesn't straightforwardly mean you're saving overall.
  - hyperbovine 5mo ago
    I'll bet it does once you properly price in externalities.
    - gruez 5mo ago
      There are various localities that add recycling fees to electronics. They're on the order of 1% of the purchase price, so it's unlikely to make a difference in the repair vs replace calculation.
1shooner 5mo ago
In this interpretation, repair requires more labor than recreating the entire product, and 'parts' somehow doesn't represent any labor.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > repair requires more labor than recreating the entire product It requires specialized and local labor. For products you can ship back to the assembly line, this can sometimes work. If you need a local technician, on the other hand, because the assembly line is in China or the product is heavy, yeah, it very well may be that there is no niche where repairs aren’t a material fraction of a new product.
culi 5mo ago
Temu boots don't feel like "abundance" to me compared to some nice tailored $400 boots that you take to the cobbler when there's an issue. I think in abundant society people would be able to have nice things and the time to take care of them.
joe5150 5mo ago
You can value not pumping out disposable garbage even if the (current) economic regime appears to encourage and reward it.
xandrius 5mo ago
Absolutely not when replacing costs 100% and repairing usually costs 0.1%. And the reason people want to leave certain countries is for totally different reasons than not wanting to repair something. In fact, I would say with quite some certainty that emigrees who repaired first before leaving would still do it after emigrating. The real reasons, in my opinion, are: 1) it takes skill and will to repair something yourself, 2) something new generally feels better than repaired/used, 3) logistics make replacing/repairing less cost efficient, 4) with every replace, companies have a new touchpoint to try to upsell their customers, 5) it takes less time to go to a shop and replace than repair, 6) it takes some giving a shit about the environment to prefer the more complicated route. And probably more.
- wat10000 5mo ago
  If repairing usually cost 0.1% then everyone would do it. The reason almost nobody in first-world countries is getting their microwave repaired is because it often costs more than buying a new one. This is because the new unit is manufactured overseas in a place with cheap labor, but the existing unit has to be repaired locally with expensive labor. Of course people aren't emigrating because they don't want to repair things. But they are often emigrating because they want to live in a place with high labor costs (i.e. high salaries), or for other reasons that are very strongly correlated with high labor costs.
  - xandrius 5mo ago
    You're confounding variables here, the cost of repairing a microwave is actually very often 0.1%: the part they broke and the work required to fix it is often nil. Unless, you have businesses fighting for it to be repaired by making the microwave schematics impossible to find, the casing stupidly hard to open, etc. If you then have that a repair part is impossible to be found then of course only the truly motivated will attempt (and sometimes succeed). Example: a friend bought an ebike with a bosch motor. Something happened and it stopped working. Now the only thing that is possible to be done with it, due to how the system has been constructed, it's to have it replaced by warranty and/or insurance. This is because there are locks on the battery that prevents it from being removed to safely analyse the system, the engine is covered by one piece that makes its opening borderline impossible, etc. On the other hand, I have a top of the line ebike motor (Tosheng) that can be fully opened, its firmware modified and schematics and parts can be easily found online. That meant that when another friend had his motor break down, he could open it, see that it was only a gear that failed and replaced it for less than $10, he only needed to unscrew a coupleof screws to see what happened. With the world we are moving towards, the company would make you throw away the WHOLE bike instead of changing a broken gear.
petra 5mo ago
Often it's not even labor. Given the right guidance and difficulty level, I would enjoy fixing things in my washing machine.
xp84 5mo ago
This is actually a thought-provoking perspective! I have to admit you're right in your conclusions, though the issues are: 1. The waste is still a tremendous shame, both in the materials that will realistically never be recovered in 'recycling', and in the toxicity that results from a lot of that trash created. 2. Jobs in repairing lots of things were arguably pretty good jobs, and we've traded these for, best case, more complete drudgery retailing/supply chain jobs as we get a new laptop every year or two instead of 5 years. Arguably a bigger failing of our economic system, which doesn't seem capable of adapting to global trade, or this shift we're discussing here, nor AI, but still a bummer regardless of fault.
igorbark 5mo ago
this logic does not hold up if the reason that labor is more expensive than parts is that the labor involved in creating those parts has been outsourced to a "shithole country"
- tgma 5mo ago
  If anything the causality is exactly the opposite. The labor cost will go up (empirically provable) in such "shithole countries" once work is outsourced to them, improving their livelihood.

by tgma 5mo ago

drysine 5mo ago

That means that the cost of (not) utilizing garbage is externalized

gruez 5mo ago
>the cost of (not) utilizing garbage is externalized No, it's the exact opposite, because the consumer is on the hook for the purchase price as well as any repair costs.
- kelnos 5mo ago
  But the consumer isn't on the hook for dealing with the garbage.
- culi 5mo ago
  Handling trash costs money. A lot of money. Right now, most Americans find it hard to even conceptualize the idea of paying to deal with their waste.
  - loeg 5mo ago
    What are you talking about. Trash is inexpensive, but Americans absolutely pay for it (solid waste utility bill). I think people conceptualize that they have utility bills?
  - fragmede 5mo ago
    Where Americans are renters and garbage service is hidden in their monthly rent payment, sure, but for Americans who own a home, they have to pay their local jurisdiction a fee for taking away trash and recycling and compost (and batteries and light bulbs). Also sewage and water.
  - wat10000 5mo ago
    Wat. Almost all Americans either pay someone to deal with their waste or are dependents of someone who pays on their behalf. Do you think we're all burning our trash in barrels or dumping it in the local river or something?

boppo1 5mo ago

Horseshit. It means we're doing less with more and anyone with a brain should be able to figure out that's bad for Quality of Life on a long term. Wasting your resources is not how an economy grows strong.

gruez 5mo ago
>It means we're doing less with more Labor is an input too. Fixing something in a way that saves some materials, but requires hours of skilled labor and specialized equipment doesn't straightforwardly mean you're saving overall.
- hyperbovine 5mo ago
  I'll bet it does once you properly price in externalities.
  - gruez 5mo ago
    There are various localities that add recycling fees to electronics. They're on the order of 1% of the purchase price, so it's unlikely to make a difference in the repair vs replace calculation.

1shooner 5mo ago

In this interpretation, repair requires more labor than recreating the entire product, and 'parts' somehow doesn't represent any labor.

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> repair requires more labor than recreating the entire product It requires specialized and local labor. For products you can ship back to the assembly line, this can sometimes work. If you need a local technician, on the other hand, because the assembly line is in China or the product is heavy, yeah, it very well may be that there is no niche where repairs aren’t a material fraction of a new product.

culi 5mo ago

Temu boots don't feel like "abundance" to me compared to some nice tailored $400 boots that you take to the cobbler when there's an issue. I think in abundant society people would be able to have nice things and the time to take care of them.

joe5150 5mo ago

You can value not pumping out disposable garbage even if the (current) economic regime appears to encourage and reward it.

xandrius 5mo ago

Absolutely not when replacing costs 100% and repairing usually costs 0.1%. And the reason people want to leave certain countries is for totally different reasons than not wanting to repair something. In fact, I would say with quite some certainty that emigrees who repaired first before leaving would still do it after emigrating. The real reasons, in my opinion, are: 1) it takes skill and will to repair something yourself, 2) something new generally feels better than repaired/used, 3) logistics make replacing/repairing less cost efficient, 4) with every replace, companies have a new touchpoint to try to upsell their customers, 5) it takes less time to go to a shop and replace than repair, 6) it takes some giving a shit about the environment to prefer the more complicated route. And probably more.

wat10000 5mo ago
If repairing usually cost 0.1% then everyone would do it. The reason almost nobody in first-world countries is getting their microwave repaired is because it often costs more than buying a new one. This is because the new unit is manufactured overseas in a place with cheap labor, but the existing unit has to be repaired locally with expensive labor. Of course people aren't emigrating because they don't want to repair things. But they are often emigrating because they want to live in a place with high labor costs (i.e. high salaries), or for other reasons that are very strongly correlated with high labor costs.
- xandrius 5mo ago
  You're confounding variables here, the cost of repairing a microwave is actually very often 0.1%: the part they broke and the work required to fix it is often nil. Unless, you have businesses fighting for it to be repaired by making the microwave schematics impossible to find, the casing stupidly hard to open, etc. If you then have that a repair part is impossible to be found then of course only the truly motivated will attempt (and sometimes succeed). Example: a friend bought an ebike with a bosch motor. Something happened and it stopped working. Now the only thing that is possible to be done with it, due to how the system has been constructed, it's to have it replaced by warranty and/or insurance. This is because there are locks on the battery that prevents it from being removed to safely analyse the system, the engine is covered by one piece that makes its opening borderline impossible, etc. On the other hand, I have a top of the line ebike motor (Tosheng) that can be fully opened, its firmware modified and schematics and parts can be easily found online. That meant that when another friend had his motor break down, he could open it, see that it was only a gear that failed and replaced it for less than $10, he only needed to unscrew a coupleof screws to see what happened. With the world we are moving towards, the company would make you throw away the WHOLE bike instead of changing a broken gear.

petra 5mo ago

Often it's not even labor. Given the right guidance and difficulty level, I would enjoy fixing things in my washing machine.

xp84 5mo ago

This is actually a thought-provoking perspective! I have to admit you're right in your conclusions, though the issues are: 1. The waste is still a tremendous shame, both in the materials that will realistically never be recovered in 'recycling', and in the toxicity that results from a lot of that trash created. 2. Jobs in repairing lots of things were arguably pretty good jobs, and we've traded these for, best case, more complete drudgery retailing/supply chain jobs as we get a new laptop every year or two instead of 5 years. Arguably a bigger failing of our economic system, which doesn't seem capable of adapting to global trade, or this shift we're discussing here, nor AI, but still a bummer regardless of fault.

igorbark 5mo ago

this logic does not hold up if the reason that labor is more expensive than parts is that the labor involved in creating those parts has been outsourced to a "shithole country"

tgma 5mo ago
If anything the causality is exactly the opposite. The labor cost will go up (empirically provable) in such "shithole countries" once work is outsourced to them, improving their livelihood.