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In 1994, I didn't own a computer yet, smartphones weren't a thing yet, I was 12 years old and learning to fix and rebuild lawnmowers and go-karts.
Age 13, I got my first computer, and promptly learned how to crash it that evening. Turned out it had a DriveSpace compressed hard drive, 125 whopping megabytes, and I didn't understand any of that yet on that very evening. But I had the manuals and the disks, and gradually learned the basics over the next 2 weeks to reformat and reinstall everything my uncle gave me.
By age 15 they were starting to shut down the local parts shops for small engine parts. Now mind you, that was way before online ordering was the big thing, and I was still running Windows 3.11, which I later upgraded to Windows 95, via floppy disk of course, because who in 1997 got a donor hand-me-down computer with a CD-ROM drive?
So, I started learning more about computers, and gradually learning automotive repair, the whole time building custom bicycles, because I had way too many spare junkyard bicycle parts.
But today, I dunno what the fuck to do. People don't really want things fixed like they used to, and even when they do, affordable parts are getting almost impossible to find for modern vehicles and devices.
I get by fixing older vehicles like from 2005 and before, wondering what the fuck done happened to society over all these years?
I'm sorry, I could go on and on, there's soo many things I can maintain and rebuild even, if only you could get parts and tools for modern stuff.
Right To Repair!
because repair doesn't make economical sense when it is cheaper to replace.
for most people, repair is expensive, time consuming, and difficult. It is not enjoyable or rewarding in any way. Replacement is far more immediate outside of very expensive long lasting items, like cars, homes, etc.
I do a lot of DIY, but the vast majority of people do not have the skills, patience, or time to spend hours figuring things out and then sourcing replacement parts to save a few bucks. They just want something that works asap, and replacement is almost always the faster option.
And that's half of how we ended up in the era of enshittification.
Let's say one of the control knobs on your 15 year old dumb stove fails, shorted out, where as soon as you turn it to low heat the eye is blazing hot at full heat. Do you?...
We went with option B, way cheaper than a new stove, plus none of the headaches of modern digital technology. Like, why do appliances need modern digital technology? A stove heats food, plain and simple, and that's all it needs to do.
And look at these new refrigerators coming out, that fail within weeks to months, maybe at best a couple or few years. When your grandma's old fridge was passed down from her mom and has been kicking strong for 50 years, save for that new door seal installed like 15 years ago..
Sigh, we live in a disposable dystopia anymore ☹️
You aren't painting the full picture. The new stove is probably more efficient, cleaner, etc. Modern digital tech makes them better at these things. I have a 20 year old purely analog stove. It sucks balls. But I'm too cheap to justify buying an new one until it breaks. That's entirely on me though.
You are also grossly exaggerating things. I have a 4 year old washer, it came with a 10 year warranty. it broke twice already but both times it was covered under warranty at no cost to me. It was electronic failures. It's super efficient and I love it. Granted if I bought a cheapo one that was $300, it probably wouldn't have such a good warranty.
There are lots of choices. Nobody is forcing you to buy fridges that break. And plenty of companies do consumer testing for you such that you can buy a reliable model.
What you have is nostalgia. I had computers in the 90s too... they broke all the fucking time. I barely got 1 year old of a HDD back then. So yeah you had to repair them. Modern SSDs last much longer because they have no moving mechanical parts, on time of being blazingly faster.
Shitty stuff was always shitty. Good stuff is will always be good. There were shitty computer brands and appliance brands 20 years ago, maybe you were lucky enough to never encounter them, but the notion that 'things are bad because modern' is complete boomer nonsense. Modern appliances are way more reliable, efficient and superior to decades old appliances. It's just that have different points of failure that your 20 old appliance didn't.
Same with cars. Old luxury cars had electronic gizmos that broke. Modern cheap cars are better than old luxury cars, so now they have the same extra points of failure. Like... if you want a car 80s/90s car that's purely mechanical... cool, go buy a used one. There are plenty of them out there, but they tend to be collectors items at this point because people only really want them for the nostalgia factor. For everyday use a modern car is far superior in reliability and comfort to those cars, esp apple to apple comparison. a 2026 mid range Camry has more luxury than a 2000s Lexus.
God damn do I feel that.
I recently replaced my dryer. It suddenly started making a really alarming banging noise.
I'm a DIY-minded guy, spent maybe an hour taking the damn thing apart.
And I found the issue- a bad drum roller. Theoretically an easy enough fix once you have the whole dryer apart like I did (which wasn't really hard, just time-consuming)
I went online and searched out the part, and it was going to cost me almost $200 (granted I was going to replace all 4 rollers, if one went there's a good chance the others weren't far behind)
For a bit of plastic and rubber that looks a hell of a lot like a scooter wheel.
And while I was in there, there were a couple belts and pulleys and such that I also wanted to replace. Stuff that was bound to wear out eventually, and the dryer was about 15 years old.
So all in I was looking at probably close to $4-500 in parts. Couple hundred more and I could just get a whole new dryer, which seemed like the smart choice because who knows what else might have been about to go- the motor, the heating element, any of the electronics
So that's what I did. And I hated it. There was something I could have fixed, I wanted to fix it, but it just didn't make financial sense to fix it.
This wasn't a dryer from some oddball fly-by-night unheard of AliExpress brand, it's an overall respectable company that makes a pretty reliable product. And this wasn't a particularly specialized part, it was basically just a wheel. It should be the kind of thing that's pretty much standardized, used by every company in countless models of different appliances, and available for cheap off the shelf at any hardware store. I should have been able to walk into Ace hardware and go buy something like a generic "3 inch roller wheel" for like $5, took it home, and slapped it onto my machine.
But instead it was some proprietary bullshit and I couldn't find any readily available off-the-shelf part for a reasonable price that would have fit quite right.
They literally reinvented the wheel so that some years down the line I'd have to shell out money for a new dryer instead of fixing the one I had.
If they use standardized/universal parts and let you buy replacement parts for cheap, then how are they supposed to get you to buy a new dryer every ten years?
Think of the shareholders!
you could probably 3d print a replacement for fraction of the cost, just need to get the dimensions right