On Sun, 28 Oct 2007 17:31:05 -0700, Larry Bud
wrote:

On Oct 28, 6:21 pm, "Bob F" wrote:
"terry" wrote in message

s.com...







Member of the 'throw-away' society; eh Tony?
Have to agree that if/when one has to pay North American labour rates
it is often not economic to 'pay' for something to be fixed!
Also to 'pay' for something to be fixed usually means driving
somewhere or having someone come and pick it up, repair it and return
it (or pick it up yourself). With the consequent use of gasoline etc.
However anyone willing to reuse/recycle should be commended.
My quick, back of the envelope, calculations seem to indicate that any
significant project I can tackle personally can often be completed for
one third the cost if one does it oneself, especially if one has
mostly used materials on hand or saved up for it. Repairing an item
such as a battery charge from a few extra bits on hand or purchased
could possibly be done for just a few dollars. I too have couple of
such chargers and another to scrap for parts. A few years ago rebuilt
one of those 'heavy' chargers that can give enough current to start a
vehicle or recharge a battery in 20 minutes. It had been thrown out by
a local auto repair outfit who said "take it". Some $40 later and with
the addition of a missing handle replaced with one from a scrapped
'weed eater' it is good as a new $250-$300 one!
I congratulate the OP for thinking about refurbishing, reuse, repair
or recycle whatever you want to call it. We should all be thinking
that way.

If everyone saved and re-used broken things and scavenged them from others, what
would happen to our economy?

For starters, personal debt would go down.

It was common practice until somewhere in the 1980's for people to
repair things. This disposible society is actually something new.
The economy in the 50s thru the 80's was no worse than it is now, and
selling parts was a business in itself. What we do now is fill dumps
with tons of junk, and deplete our resources, while buying inferior
products. I know that when I was a kid, my parents fixed everything
they could, and in all honesty, life was much better then, and people
in many ways had more money left over at the end of the week or month.
Of course back then, people did not live to own the latest fads. I
still have a TV that I bought around 1970, and it still works great.
But now we are all faced with, and being forced into HiDef tv (which I
could care less about). That's a large part of the problem, we are
forced by greedy corporations to keep buying stuff. When MS comes out
with a new OS, they force out many of the older computers, and now
they are doing the same with our tvs, and who knows what else. I
still use Win98 and have no intention to upgrade, and I dont even like
the picture on a HDTV.

Ya, I am getting off track here, but I have a valid rant. The older I
get, the less I want to change, particularly when that change is in
most cases just to make some company wealthy, and does nothing to
benefit me as the consumer. I find the newer MS OSs just bloated, and
overly complicated with no benefits. And as I said, I like the
picture on a standard tv much better than HDTV. Unfortunately, our
younger people live to kiss the asses of these companies, because
their generation is never satisfied with anything. So, these
companies win, and us older people suffer as a result.

It's a sad state of affairs America has become......

Alvin