The availability of tools is far from a given as well.

It appalls me how few people will tackle what seem to me to be utterly basic repair tasks. I may be on the extreme end, but I think some people would pay someone to change a lightbulb in their house (and I'm sure a great many DO pay someone to replace a headlamp or tail light bulbs).

I'm trying to do my part, ensuring that my kids are exposed to the DIY/maker/hacker ethic/experience, and even went into to teach my daughter's kindergarten class the (very) basics of electricity and we "built" flashlights together (mostly, the kids did a life-scale real "electricity" game with banana jack cables to make a complete circuit and a light to light from a 12V battery and then they put stickers with their name on it around the batteries of pre-built flashlights with a bare wire to the negative terminal as the "switch".) That was 2 years ago, and the kids still talk about it sometimes when I see them at pickup. My son (3 at the time, 5 now) can explain from that how a switch works and that electricity "has to make a whole circle" in order to work.

This was the prototype version we made at home. The production version was more robust and looked better, but worked the same basic way.

http://static-s3.sokoloff.com/random/kids/flashlights/flashl... http://static-s3.sokoloff.com/random/kids/flashlights/flashl... http://static-s3.sokoloff.com/random/kids/flashlights/flashl...

What really appalls me is that in some parts of the world, it is likely there are people who would seriously be scared upon seeing something like that, with thoughts of "is that a bomb?"

On the other hand, you can still find pockets of the DIY ethic in many places. A while ago I remember watching on YouTube an automatic transmission being rebuilt, and two rather young (around 8-10) kids were helping their father with it. That was cute and inspiring.

Tools? There is a minimal set of tools that will cover a very large number of common household and automobile repairs.

I have had a great track record with nothing but a pair of vice-grips and a 4-bit combination screwdriver (2x flathead, 2x Phillips).

Add to that a claw hammer, pocketknife, roll of duct tape, can of WD-40, toilet plunger, needle-nosed pliers, and a few cheap plastic-coated wire coat hangers, and you should be able to bodge or jury-rig anything long enough to get a real repair done over the weekend.

For instance, did you know that one arm of the tweezers in a Victorinox pocketknife can tighten eyeglasses screws?

I am a small time DIY'er and a small time fix-it-yourself person. I came to realize the importance of such tools rather late in my life. Greatly appreciated.

How to change a light bulb on a Renault Megane: http://www.meganeownersclub.co.uk/changingmeganebulb.php

There are Audis where you need to remove the front bumper to change the headlamp. (Less of a concern with HID and LEDs, but some of them are still halogen.)

I had one of those, at least according to the repair manual. In that case I found that the local garage were able to change the bulb without dismantling anything by putting the car over their inspection pit and reaching up through a narrow gap between the engine and headlight (having small hands helped here). This was only 5 minutes' work for them and so the charge was very low, and it was easier for me to pay that than to attempt to jack the car up on my driveway and crawl under.

I always has been. Even 30 years ago most people didn't know how to fix those machines. People fixing cars or plumbery have been popularized by TV and books, but really they were a minority, for the simple reason learning a skill takes time. And most people invest their time in only a limited set of things.

I think there was a lot of DIY in the post-Depression, wartime, and immediately post-war economy. Could be just my family experience, but both sets of my grandparents had a very strong "use it up, wear it out, make it do" philosophy and that included fixing/bodging when appropriate.

Over half the 70 year old guys I know can repair 1960's era cars. First they where relatively simple, second they broke down often. If you made a lot of money then pay someone else, otherwise you where on the sliding scale.

Basically it was like PC repair before laptops. Even if you did not know how to do it working from a good book you would muddle through it.

Even if you didn't know how to fix that car or washing machine, there was a good chance someone in or close to your family - your uncle, your son's girlfriend, etc. - could do that for you. Many of such people started repair shops that could fix pretty much any device of a given category. This secondary repair market is what's disappearing thanks to stuff being less serviceable and more disposable.

> Even 30 years ago most people didn't know how to fix those machines.

True, people would use washing machine repair shops. Today you can't do that because the machines have been designed to not be repairable. They come with sealed tubs. People can replace the tubs, but that's a lot more expensive than replacing just the bearings.

It's not only a matter of ability, but also of opportunity cost.

For instance, when I was a teenager, I always fixed my bicycle by myself. Nowadays, I guess I could do it if I had too, but I prefer to pay $50 and have somebody else do it for me. Same goes for washing machines or similar appliance, I'm sure many people could manage to fix them by themselves by spending enough time, but is it worth it?

I agree but I think it is worth considering what the opportunity cost of letting those skills atrophy.

Can you still fix your bicycle? Like if you had no money or were stuck somewhere distant could you still do it?

Is it just because you're older now and have income that you pay someone to do it or is it something society in general does? Do children's parents just get someone to fix their bike or throw it away and get a new one?

What does it cost us as a society when a generation loses those skills?

>>What does it cost us as a society when a generation loses those skills?

This. This is a lot to do with today's society. We don't seem to appreciate the problem at all. People just think that they can throw some money at someone and get the things repaired and so they don't need to learn anything.

Society as a whole may have to bear a huge cost, and by the time they realize this they might have already lost their time.

Manufacturers are a lot to blame but today's lifestyle of "it's just a matter of few bucks, so why waster time?" is also to blame.

It depends on your definition of opportunity cost.

Recently my ~20 year old fridge stopped working and I spent the better part of the day diagnosing the issue, getting a replacement part and fixing it. Sure, I could have spent that time doing wage labor, call someone to fix it or even get a new fridge and I would have ended up with a net profit. But to me personally, the bigger opportunity cost would have been missing the chance to tinker, learn about fridge circuits, compressors, thermistors, diagnose and fix the issue and enjoy success.

The flip side is so the math Old units are much less efficient. I think last time I did the math my old fridge is rasing my power bill by $50 a year over a new one. So over 10 years that's $500 burned up in smoke and global warming.

So then it's buy a new fridge for $900 vs fix old one for $100 plus $500 in burned coal over 10 years.

Now if power rates doubled then it would always win to buy the new fridge even if nothing to repair.

Yeah I did some math on that too but it's a bit more complicated than that.

First of all, I don't trust a new fridge these days to last 10 years but I can easily see this one purring for another 20 with minor repairs.

Secondly, this is a combo fridge+freezer unit, with 2 compressors. New ones only seem to have one compressor, which makes them somewhat more efficient but if it dies, both my freezer and fridge die with it.

And lastly, it's not my fault we're still burning coal :/ I'm planning to invest in personal solar...

Perhaps.. but lets say in 10 years efficiency goes up another 30%. So yes even if your current fridge COULD last 20 more years, with efficiency gains the best thing for the environment COULD be to melt it down for scrap and get a newer model.

To me this is the really interesting part in all of this. If there was no efficiency gains generation to generation.. say a piece of clothing.. seems pretty obvious to make slightly better if it can last 100% longer for 20% more material/energy/cost.

Things like cars/ fridges / AC units? The math is complex. Think of all the cars on the road right now where 30 year old cars. The air in LA and SF would be like the air in Beijing or Mexico City. It is in fact both good AND bad for the environment at the same time that things are slowly retired and replaced with newer models.

But for example gas furnaces have slowly improved from 50%??? efficient to 99.9% efficient. Clearly they can't get better. But for example, heat pumps can get > 100% efficient.

The problem is that the insulated cabinet portion of the fridge could easily last 100 years, just by replacing the door seals every now and then. Why would you want to throw that out with the parts that should be upgraded every 10 years for energy efficiency reasons?

Those old cars could be made as efficient as new ones by replacing every part in them other than the chassis. That's prohibitively expensive now, but mostly because there's no standard for engine compartment size and mount point locations. If I could order a "Type 2A" replacement engine instead of a "year T brand X model Y" replacement engine--or even get a 5-years-used-and-refurbished "Type 2A" engine from someone upgrading their "2011 Brand M Model N" commuter sedan, and put it in my "2001 Brand X Model Y" commuter sedan--that would solve a lot of the vehicle obsolescence problems. Moving mechanical parts wear out a lot faster than fixed structural parts. Why throw them all out at the same time?

For arguments like this, it is easier to look backwards than forwards.

So let's take a 20 year old car, and pretend it was future proofed to take more upgrades. Would you want it today?

* The style wouldn't be right at all. So let's pretend that we are globally willing to accept out of style things for the sake of the environment. Which is a big if, but let's go with it.

* The steering wheel may or may not have airbags. The doors and seats would certainly not have side impact airbags. The doors and seats would not be designed to take these advances. You would need to basically replace the doors and seats to upgrade these new safety features. But what if these new safety features made the door 2 inches thicker? Since you aren't replacing the frame, you now lost 2 inches of internal space. Maybe the driver would still fit, maybe it wouldn't.

* Engines were much much less efficient 20 years ago. New engines have all kinds of things that a mechanic can better explain. Things like carburetors are gone, things like computer controller ignition are in. Would the upgradable car have known about all these future changes? Maybe, maybe not.

* Frames have gotten much stronger / more crash proof in the last 20 years. Think of better crumple zones. So if you wanted to upgrade that 20 year old car to be as safe as a modern car, how would you change the crumple zones within the frame itself?

* Metal itself rusts over time. Things can slow it, but there will always be some rust. What do you do if the frame has rusted in ways that can't be fixed?

* Crashes can permanently damage cars. Say your frame is bent in a crash. Insurance companies write this car off as totaled, and declare it no longer safe to drive. Can you always fix this kind of thing? Perhaps sometimes. Would you want to drive a frame that has been welded back together after a crash? I would not.

This is not an exhaustive list but it partially proves a point. In a field where innovation is happening, it is VERY hard to future proof your hardware. If you disagree and are a programmer, show me an active codebase that has never had a refactor. By going down this path, you are basically saying the contents of a given method can be swapped out, but we can never refactor the codebase. So show me a 20 year old C++ project with no refactor ever done, just methods being swapped out like your replaceable car analogy.

A better software analogy would be calling an API method whose signature has never changed over 20 years. It would be like making a call to the Windows API, one that has been available since DirectX 2.0a, to play a sound clip.

Styling and design still have room to work if your engine compartment standard does little more than define a minimum volume of unobstructed interior space and several fixed mount point locations. You can make an ATX computer case look like practically anything, so long as the screw holes are in the right place, the I/O shield is the right size, and you leave enough internal clearance for the CPU cooler and video card.

The mount point locations became standard on outboard motors in the 80s, when Yamaha decided to use the same pattern as BRP (then OMC), who had in turn copied the pattern used by Evinrude in the 60s. So you could possibly buy a 50-year-old boat and mount a new outboard motor onto it without drilling any new holes or replacing the transom. The outboard motor bolt hole pattern standard does not affect the thickness of the seat cushions, or the size of the docking cleats, or anything else. You can have many different standards that are not mutually incompatible.

The idea is that auto manufacturers would add to a list of standards, rarely obsoleting some. Maybe the 20-year-old car only conforms to the engine compartment standard and the front-wheel-drive automatic transmission standard. The 15-year-old car conforms to those and to the steering wheel (with airbag) standard. The 10-year-old car conforms to those, plus a side-impact standard and a rollover safety standard. So you might not be able to upgrade the 20-year-old car to be as safe as the new car, but you could certainly upgrade it to be as fuel-efficient or as powerful, which might be all you really care about until the frame rusts out. If you are lucky, the old car might have been the basis for a newer standard, and you could upgrade some things as though it were conformant to begin with. A new car would certainly conform to all the existing standards, and if its standards-conforming side-impact air bags were recalled 3 years later, any mechanic would be able to replace them, instead of just the dealers for one maker.

Any given standard would only be replaced by an improved standard, and that might still be backwards compatible to the old standard. So I certainly would take that future-proofed 20-year-old car with a brand-new off-the-shelf powertrain in it, especially if it cost only $8k instead of the $24k I might otherwise have to spend on an entirely new vehicle.

I think you skipped all my points on safety advances, that there is no way could have been future proofed for. Using a 20 year old windows api is different in that it doesn't put your life in danger. A 20 year old crumple zone and 20 year old airbag technology DOES increase your risk of death.

It is up to the consumer whether it would be better to spend their limited budget on upgrading an older car where safety retrofitting is not possible, or on migrating to a newer car.

You can't have a standard for a technology that doesn't exist yet. But anything that does have a standard can likely be repaired and upgraded more cheaply in the future. It preserves more of the value in the used cars.

If someone really needs those side-curtain air bags, they would be able to trade in their old vehicle, at a higher price, to someone who doesn't value safety features as highly, and use the proceeds to help pay for a newer vehicle with more of those features.

Some fridges achieve energy efficiency by insulation upgrades and/or by pulling a vacuum against the seal to limit air leakage. Those enhancements might not be easy or possible to retrofit.

On the other hand, clean energy is getting cheaper and more widespread globally so power efficiency probably matters less for electric appliances. At the same time, I'm not sure how efficiently humanity is dealing with waste and if we can expect any significant improvement any time soon.

But yeah, it's definitely an interesting balance to think about.

On the other other other hand, there is no such thing as "clean" power.

Wind power takes up land that could be better used for nature or growing food, and kills birds. The turbines are made out of materials that have the same problems as other things. Clearly reducing demand for power is still a good thing, even if we got to 100% renewable power. (And at current low renewable power levels, 1 extra KW of electricity is directly coming from oil or coal or something nasty)

More efficient? It should be the opposite: two compressors should be more efficient than one. Yes, smaller compressors are a little less efficient than bigger ones, however unless you always open both the fridge and freezer doors, it's more efficient to cool them separately. The big downside to dual compressors is cost and complexity.

Here's the thing - the more disposable and non-serviceable the stuff becomes, the less likely it is you'll find someone to pay that $50 - instead of going to the repair shop down the street, you have to find the Licensed Repair Shop of the vendor, pay $200 and hope it'll be done before next month. And a new bike will cost you $199 anyway.

Yep...who repairs shoes or clothes now a days? Go out and buy a new shirt for less than $10. Furniture repair? With Ikea and other compressed wood furniture, it's not worth it to repair furniture. Consumer printers? Just buy a new one.

Heck, I can buy a brand new photo printer for cheaper than it takes to buy the ink (after rebates, of course).

I'm also surprised by this: The proposed legislation would cut regular tax on repairs of bikes, clothes, and shoes from 25% to 12%.

I can't imagine paying a 25% tax on someone's labor (I live in the U.S)

I think there's some kind of sliding scale that needs to be teased out. eg, for your bicycle example; if I cycle an hour from home, then have a puncture; I'd rather be able to swap a tube out myself, than walk it home. Even if I can call someone out to me, I can probably do it myself in the time it'd take them to arrive.

Once you can admit there's some level you'd rather be able to do yourself, all you need to do is keep stretching that envelope little by little.

It isn't always so simple. Money and lifestyle often plays a role in what folks can and can't do.

>... even with the availability of all the tools needed.

This is often a first problem, actually. I've had a few times in my life where I've been completely without handtools. Upon first moving out, for example, upon moving out again: After splitting with my ex, and moving to to a new country.

So if I would sit here and start looking at a washing machine that is broken, I have to buy parts, hope it is user-serviceable, plus make sure I have the handtools or buy them. Afterwards, I know there is a bit of risk that I've repaired this badly or that the source for the instructions were wrong. In addition, if I had to replace a large part, I also have to deal with disposal (not all places will take large items often).

If I'm limited on money, there are generally other choices. A used washer from a dealer or a new, bottom-of-the-line washer on clearance or something sometimes runs the same money - plus I get some sort of promise it'll work or be replaced. It might be possible to repair it if there is a repairman in the area, but I'm gonna balance that out with the cost of the other options.

In addition, with something like a washing machine, I have to figure out if I can wait 2-3 weeks on a part. Do I have time to go to the laundry place? Can I afford both the part and to pay to do laundry? Can I do it over at a friends house for a few weeks? If this doesn't fix the machine, can I afford to try again with a another part? (this last statement is often a sore point when folks are fixing their own vehicles).

And this is assuming someone is mechanically inclined enough to do it or try it, if they think it is a reasonable risk (don't want the washer catching fire) and other things I'm sure I'm missing.

> If this doesn't fix the machine, can I afford to try again with a another part? (this last statement is often a sore point when folks are fixing their own vehicles).

Spot on! I can't even remember how many times I had to bike or bum a ride to a parts store midway through a repair.