The Disappearing Art of Maintenance
I work in the tech industry.  I&#x27;m somewhat rare in that I also work on my own vehicles, do my own maintenance, repair things, build my own stuff around the property, etc.  A lot of coworkers at various places I&#x27;ve worked over the years view this as somewhere between &quot;eccentric&quot; and &quot;slightly mad.&quot;  &quot;Why would you do that yourself, just <i>pay someone else</i> to do it!&quot; is the common sentiment.<p>But even with electronics, in an office full of tech workers, I still seemed to be one of very few who was willing to get my hands dirty.  I had a steady side stream of evening projects repairing phones, laptops, etc (or, more usually, buying the broken ones, fixing them or merging them together into working ones, and then selling the working ones).  I was also, far as I could tell, the only one in an office of &gt;1000 willing to do things like take a soldering iron to a laptop to repair a failed power jack, or even just do things like taking a laptop substantially apart to <i>replace</i> a power input board with a new one.<p>It never made any sense to me that I was the only one willing to do this sort of stuff.  It&#x27;s paid off well over the years, but it&#x27;s quite baffling.<p>This, of course, means that a lot of new things seem to be designed by people who&#x27;ve never had to work on things or repair them, with the expected results of &quot;This is more painful to repair than it has any business being, because you never thought about it.&quot;  Some of the best vehicles I&#x27;ve worked on over the years were old gen Subarus - EA82, so late 80s wagons.  Every time I had to do something on them, it felt like the engineers had considered that someone would have to do this, and made it as easy as possible within the design.  Things like the fuel filter were on the firewall, instead of under the vehicle out of the way.  The fuel pump was on a skid plate in front of the tank, instead of in the tank.  There was a storage compartment in the back that would fit a CV axle, should you want to carry your old one.  Etc.  They were simple, and easy to work on - so I drove them for quite a few years.<p>But even today, I still constantly see the sentiment that &quot;Well, it doesn&#x27;t matter if it&#x27;s easy to fix, we&#x27;ll just recycle it and build a new one!&quot;  Usually in fields where recycling is poorly defined, at best - consumer electronics and EVs draw this sort of thing frequently.  I view that as complete madness, because it&#x27;s always going to be cheaper to repair something (at least if it wasn&#x27;t a glued together hell to repair) than to crush it and replace it, but... again, this is an oddly minority view in the tech industry.<p>I&#x27;m not sure how to fix it.  We have a lot of people who are afraid to get their hands dirty, designing the things that are supposed to be the future of our civilization.  That&#x27;s a real problem.<p>&gt; <i>No amount of utopian dreaming can make a battery hold any more energy or a piece of steel bear any more weight than it’s designed for.</i><p>Yeah.  That describes an awful lot of the problems we&#x27;re facing...