Jeff Wisnia wrote:
xrongor wrote:

there was once a time where people actually fixed things. not just
bought a new one and replaced it, but fixed things. if they didnt
make exactly what you wanted, you made it yourself. it was assumed
you knew how to look at a problem and solve it. look at old popular
mechanics magazines for one example. heck, they practically assumed
you had a welder in the garage. and you know what, you probably did.

ah but times have changed. thinking has become a thing of the past.
spending is the new thing.

every time i suggest anything requiring some thought or innovation,
one of you guys comes out of the woodwork and attacks me for being
'unsafe' or just plain crazy. it gets tiring trying to explain myself
to you one track minded idiots that have long since lost the ability
to think. maybe there should be a seperate group called
alt.home.pay.someone.to.fix.it.cause.i.cant.think. for.myself.

i give up. just toss it and buy a new one. if it doent exist, pay
someone to do your thinking for you. i figure at the current rate of
knowledge degredation, its only a few years before everything simply
becomes disposable anyway. we arent that far off now. the plug and
play house and the disposable education.

randy


I'm suprised that no one has yet noted that the technologies we have
grown to depend on have gotten far more complex and expansive that they
were a couple of generations ago.

Jeff, I totally agree with just about everything
you said

When I graduated as an electrical engineer I considered myself pretty
much a "renaissance man" in that dicipline, as there wasn't much around
other than AM, FM and shortwave radios, TV, radar and a little bit of
what they called "industrial electronics" back then, and a competant
engineer could get comfortable with any of those in a short time. Look
at what the world of electronics has become now. A smart person can
still comprehend the purpose and function of most of it, but no one
individual can have usefull detailed knowledge of more than a small
portion of it.

Back then, (I'm talking the 50s.) the "electrics" in homes (and the
appliances in them) were pretty much just collections of fuses,
switches, light bulbs, motors, heating elements and maybe a solenoid or
two. Easy stuff to learn to understand and fix. Not so today, eh?

I could go on about how much more complex vehicles and machinery have
become, but you get my point (I hope.)

Add to that the vast change in the economic dichotomy between the
"haves" who owned stuff and the "have nots" who fixed that stuff for
them, and even a minor hired repair can seem like an economic disaster
to most people. That tilts the "fix or buy new" decision in favor of
tossing stuff out.

Another factor which comes into play is that our insatiable appetite for
aquiring more goods than we really need (by confusing want with need)
keeps many of us working longer hours or even two jobs just to pay for
all the junk our families "absolutely positively" have to have. That
doesn't leave us with as much time as our forbearers had to fix stuff,
or even learn how to fix it.

Even if you don't have an insatiable appetite for
stuff, you still get screwed. All sorts of
interests push one toward efficient stuff that you
simply cannot fix, e.g. "improved" gas furnaces
that require all sorts of electronics and a failed
board can only be replaced, not fix, even if one
bought all the tools to figure out what went
wrong. Or new cars completely controlled by
electronics.


Like a few others on this thread have pointed out, there are those of us
(and I most definitely include myself here) who just enjoy fixin' stuff
for a hobby, without making any pretense of that having any serious
economic practicality. Hey, lots of guys like to walk around for half a
day swinging a club at a little white ball on the golf course, and some
guys collect stamps. To each his own.

Or play computer games. I find that it's not so
much the fixing as the finding out that is most
enjoyable.

With regard to the totally technologically challenged who really
shouldn't be messing with stuff which can kill them or someone else, I
can only remark that the expression "Fools rush in where angels dare to
tread" was around long before Edison developed a practical light bulb,
and will probably still be valid a few generations from now if we don't
blow up the planet by then.

I wouldn't worry to much about giving them advice
that may be dangerous if not carefully followed.
They are driving auto and may kill you and they
are also likely to be the ones that are into a
variety of highly dangerous activities which
hopefully will end their gene line.


Just my .02,

Jeff