3 ms·

I can relate. My mother hoards old magazines thinking someday she will need the information in them. She hoards magazines, reader's digest books, you name it.

I can relate. My mother hoards old magazines thinking someday she will need the information in them. She hoards magazines, reader's digest books, you name it. Before my father died, he kept her in check. Throwing piles of old news papers out. Growing up it was a common scene to hear her yell at him that he threw something out she needed. My mother use to write a news letter for a government agency. She is a very good, articulate writer. She is so good that one time I was suffering through a creative writing college course, came home got some help from my mom, and the college professor told me I had a career in journalism if I didn't like engineering. It was a family joke for many years. I have a little bit of this myself. My wife yells at me to get rid of things. History repeats itself... I take broken electronics apart for their parts. Kids toys break, toy gets put on my work bench. I eventually get around to taking it apart to harvest parts like LCD panels, MMC slots, etc... I'm getting better. I realize some when I blow dust off of it, it's time to throw out. I think it's a mental thought process that what you have has some value to you. Not like value as in it is worth something to someone else but a cost saving thing. I would rather use a harvested MMC or LED than go to Digikey and buy a bag of them and wait a day or few for it to arrive. The value is in having instant access to it while on a project. At least that is how it is for me.

pbhjpbhj 11y ago
I've got the instinct to hoard - particularly when it comes to electronics. Most recent example of the condition for me: I had a bag of old wine bottle corks gathered maybe 15 years ago, boxed away. I needed a stopper and one of those corks fitted the bill perfectly. Perhaps that's just reinforcing unhealthy behaviours?? In part for me it's about waste - it pains me to throw away plastic (for example) knowing that it came from a finite resource and had so many different inputs. There's so little effort made to recycle - I swear that within a century or two we're going to be mining old landfill sites. People throw out TVs when the power button fails, throw out whole computer base-stations (aka towers) when a HDD fails, scrap cars that just need new piston rings ... as a society we seem particularly bad at addressing these things; corporations move ever more to accelerate [the appearance of] obsolescence. To encourage the throw-away society. I wonder if there's not a structure that can be used to gather in and warehouse, for example electronics, and make them available without cost - maybe using something like prisoner labour. It definitely doesn't seem to be immediately financially sustainable to (for example) gather in all the working components from household goods. A second-hand washing machine controller might cost £100 for an old machine, commercially; when in reality it's just saved from someone's scrap. Given a new machine can be had for £200, it's not financially valid. But that scrapped controller can give 12 months more service to a complete machine - how can we engineer in a greater value to repair and recycling than the immediate financial saving/cost? Should we?

pbhjpbhj 11y ago

I've got the instinct to hoard - particularly when it comes to electronics. Most recent example of the condition for me: I had a bag of old wine bottle corks gathered maybe 15 years ago, boxed away. I needed a stopper and one of those corks fitted the bill perfectly. Perhaps that's just reinforcing unhealthy behaviours?? In part for me it's about waste - it pains me to throw away plastic (for example) knowing that it came from a finite resource and had so many different inputs. There's so little effort made to recycle - I swear that within a century or two we're going to be mining old landfill sites. People throw out TVs when the power button fails, throw out whole computer base-stations (aka towers) when a HDD fails, scrap cars that just need new piston rings ... as a society we seem particularly bad at addressing these things; corporations move ever more to accelerate [the appearance of] obsolescence. To encourage the throw-away society. I wonder if there's not a structure that can be used to gather in and warehouse, for example electronics, and make them available without cost - maybe using something like prisoner labour. It definitely doesn't seem to be immediately financially sustainable to (for example) gather in all the working components from household goods. A second-hand washing machine controller might cost £100 for an old machine, commercially; when in reality it's just saved from someone's scrap. Given a new machine can be had for £200, it's not financially valid. But that scrapped controller can give 12 months more service to a complete machine - how can we engineer in a greater value to repair and recycling than the immediate financial saving/cost? Should we?