Creator of "Dirty Jobs" Mike Rowe testifies to Congress
This is something I've thought about in the last year or two as well. We have a culture of "buy", not "fix". In part, this is because we've had a very rich 60 years. In part, this is because things are cheap. In part, because factories design things that are not designed for repair by customers.<p>The reality is, we can't fix a busted capacitor, a scratched CD, or a damaged microchip.  Nor do we have the equipment and spare materials ready to hand to weld cracked plastic. Super Glue is it, and not a very good it.<p>Whereas, we can fix wood, and with some work, manage metal. Earth can be munged around.<p>Cars are designed to be maintained, unlike computer hardware (especially our Macs :-( ).<p>So in a culture where by the nature of the things we use, we can not trivially repair them - we leave off the ideas of repair, and prefer the idea of replace.<p>This is a problem, because we are more than consumers, more than robots being pipe-fed from the wells of other people's industry.<p>H.G. Wells' conception of the time traveller always hangs around in my head when this sort of discussion arises.<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine</a>