Tim Streater wrote:
That's good. A lesson that will have broader implications.

Largely, people don't, I suppose. Stuff's not made to be repaired.
Automated construction gets the cost down but makes it more complex to
fix.

Also worth bearing mind that technology progress trains people up to keep
pace with it. Maybe you started with a classic Land Rover and learnt how to
work on it, then moving through a few decades you learn how new things (eg
fuel injection) work. A modern Range Rover is a complicated beast if you've
never worked on a car before but it's much easier to deal with as 'it's just
like the previous gen but with a few changes'.

The same applies to a lot of tech: if you've followed it through the
generations you can keep on top of the progress. And so give someone a
modern boiler and to them it's really just the same as the 1970s lump they
might be familiar with, only with some condensing stuff added, and then
electronic control instead of a mechnical timer, and a piezo instead of a
pilot light. Whereas if you show that to someone who has never seen a
boiler before it's a big pile of pipes and wires.

Theo