"Pamela" wrote in message
...
On 23:00 2 Mar 2020, Theo wrote:

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

Some repair work is much less skilled than it used to be. The cost of
labour
compared to the cost of components has seen to that.

Back in the old days, a man would repair your telly or washing machine by
laboriously tracking down the fault and replacing the exact component
which
failed.

Nowadays, repairmen (if they take on the job at all) replace whole chunks
without the same level of understanding into what's gone wrong within the
unit they replace.

Mate of mine's #1 son used to repair TVs with a mate of his. They
shut up shop maybe a decade ago now and he drives big trucks now.