While reading the article, the now-less-common business of vacuum and TV repair came to mind. I imagine it's easier than ever to repair vacuums, with improved tools and free internet repositories of schematics. But I only know of one store still doing this within 5 miles of my house. I haven't asked former vacuum repairmen, but my guess as to the reasons:
1) Labor costs go up with inflation
2) Rent goes up
3) New vacuum prices go down
At some point in the past, the downward line of vacuum price crossed over the upward line of repair cost. That's when this profession cratered.
Cars may have a while until that price point hits. But the quoted mechanic's suggestion that engineers optimize for simpler repairs instead of simpler production may be something similar. If simpler production makes the price of a new car $X cheaper, but increases the labor cost of repairs over the car's lifetime by $Y, there could be a time when X > Y.
I remember reading an article about the last TV repair shop in Chicago many years ago in the Chicago Reader.
This would have been in the early 2010s.
The reporter asked the owner why TV repair was dying: were TVs getting too complicated? Help too hard to find or too expensive? Nope, the owner said it was 100% parts availability. The vast majority of business coming through the door he'd have to turn away because manufacturers didn't want him repairing their equipment.
There may sometimes be a tradeoff for manufacturability vs repairability but even when there is not -- holding everything else equal -- manufacturers will choose the less repairable option because they perceive it to be in their interest to do so.
Tv repair made a lot more sense in the days of tubes which wore out quick but were easy to replace. Solid state generally lasts much longer and the parts that fail are not worth repairing.
A quick note to say that at our local repair cafe we do a roaring trade in vacuum repairs for peanuts (not literal peanuts; though some of our repairers do get peckish). If you're in Europe, there's chance you have one nearby. https://repaircafe.org/en
Could you please go in to a bit more detail on how you set that up, how you handle issues, etc? I'm a member of a makerspace, and there's been discussions about doing something similar. There's just not a consensus about how to go about it.
...generally I've seen weekly/monthly "fix-it" workshops as a kindof open-house / membership drive.
Probably best to 1) have people sign safety waivers, especially if they're not members 2) have people sign a "we can offer to help you try, but your widget might end up worse than before" waiver 3) run it as a volunteer outreach event with a focus on getting membership rather than a transactional "fix my ____ for free" outcome
Also, new stuff just isn't designed to be opened up.
I took an old monitor that started failing to a local makerspace (which has a very popular monthly repair cafe), and it took some physical force to crack the case open. Once inside it was relatively easy to get the board out and find the leaking capacitors. Not exactly high-tech parts.
It was fun for me and for the volunteer, but I can't imagine anyone trying to do this for a living -- it would take a lot of time, and charging people for what the labor's worth would probably come close to the price of a new monitor.
TVs and vacuum cleaners are now a lot cheaper AND more reliable then they used to be.
Cars have become more reliable and relatively cheaper then they used to be, but they are a lot more expensive so have a long way to go until that point is reached.
That is because there is not a cost for the disposal of the broken vacuum. Imagine if we paid by the weight of our trash. Some of the right to repair laws are trying to change that by requiring replacement parts be available to purchase. https://www.repair.org/know-your-rights
>How about Israel stop fighting, right now? Right this minute. The magazines come out of the rifles and the fighter jets stay on the ground. As soon as the Gazans decide that this is what they want, they can return the hostages and this will happen.
The Israeli government can stop fighting in a way that's currently killing Gazan civilians and destroying Gazan civil infrastructure.
The Gazan civilians cannot release the hostages. Those hostages are held by Hamas, the Gazan government.
This broad-brush blaming leads to despicable crimes against humanity, and is why so many nations have agreed to rules of war. It is inhumane to intentionally punish civilians for what their government is doing. Collateral damage is inevitable, but there must be an effort to minimize it and to actively preserve the lives of civilians. If that means sending in convoys of food trucks after securing a city, then that's what a humane government should do.
IIRC, the ancient Greek mathematics we learn about today was the university-equivalent mathematics of that era. Common people did not use geometric abstractions to figure out math problems. Before Fibonacci brought algebra to Europe, everyday calculations were done on an abacus. If no abacus was nearby, people emulated one by placing stones in lines on the ground.
Pre-university schools, even today, focus on teaching practical math. Most people can get by just fine without skills in abstract math, theorizing, and proofs (though those skill would make a lot of people much better at whatever they do).
My point was that we should consider how advanced the Greeks were with their understanding of mathematics, especially their desires for proofs. And we should contrast that with how mathematics is taught today.
It's obvious that "practical math" has always been the most important and first skill to teach. But that ends at basic trigonometry.
Students are learning how to do integration in highschool (not exactly a relevant skill), long before they are confronted with the idea of proof in mathematics.
Poor health increasing social isolation isn't even a hard casual path to argue. Common health problems can physically restrict how often and how long one leaves the house: people on oxygen can only travel as far as their supply and weakened lungs can take them, or people with bowel disorders might be reluctant to be do anything without easy and discrete bathroom use, people with visible symptoms might be embarrassed and avoid socializing.
The loneliness-associated protein study linked in TFA doesn't seem to control for health status. So preexisting conditions may have affected the correlations.
Yes, this seems blindingly obvious to me. Maybe because I have chronic health problems myself. Perhaps those blessed with good health are blissfully ignorant.
When you are chronically ill, socializing falls pretty rapidly down your list of priorities.
That said, it seems pretty clear that incentivizing healthy socialization can significantly improve quality of life, reducing perceived suffering and quite possibly improving outcomes through reinforcement of the various social needs we have.
We are fundamentally social primates; there are prior studies demonstrating the overt harms of isolation and ostracization in humans, primates, and other mammals. Our immune systems, metabolism, and cardiovascular health are all tied intimately to things like stress and hormones, with feedback effects that can amplify disorder, or suppress it, depending on the directionality of the inputs.
I see the "just so" element of explanation to this study, but I think that even if the underlying causal factors are more complex, it is so directionally correct that I have no problem with the conclusion of the study, even if it's not correctly justified scientifically.
1. Trump declared a Venezuelan gang as a terrorist organization.
2. Since then, Trump has ordered the military to conduct extrajudicial killings of people suspected of being in that gang who were on boats. He is implicitly asserting that military action is allowed without Congressional approval if the target is a terrorist organization (it probably isn't legal, and he's put out no justification for it).
3. He just declared Antifa a terrorist organization. He has a history of blaming things on Antifa and has mused about declaring other leftist organizations as terrorists.
Between 2015 and 2021, Americans diagnosed with invasive[0] melanoma had a 94.7% net 5-year survival rate[1]. That means, if all other causes of death were impossible, an estimated 5.3% of those patients would have died of melanoma.
That's a pretty good net survival rate [3], but it's not perfect. And it's possible that less care in avoiding excessive sun exposure could lead to any cancers being more aggressive. However, I don't have a reference for that musing, so feel free to ignore it.
[0]: Invasive means the tumor has left the tissue it started in.
[2]: It would be higher if the official method for calculating net survival didn't, in my opinion, needlessly bias itself against cancer patient survival. The last time I reviewed the methodology notes, they compared daily hazards of death between cancer patients and everyone else. But, if the cancer patients had a lower hazard for a day, the difference was treated as zero instead of negative. This is a hill I'll die on, because their method pretends any confounding variables not in the model have no effect. Patients who catch melanoma early are probably less likely to die soon compared to those of similar age, race, sex, and location. An early diagnosis likely means they care enough about their health to visit doctors regularly and make good use of those visits.
>The problem is the citizens, which are chronically disengaged (a fact which has ample evidence behind it), not the legal framework.
That sounds like a problem with the legal framework, if it relies on millions of individuals changing their personalities and priorities. That's not realistic.
> because that's a hard constraint that bounds all democratic systems.
There's no way to have democracy without an engaged citizenship.
And not only is it not a problem with the Constitution because of that fact, but it's a fact that the citizens were engaged in the past, so it absolutely is realistic.
In the US, recommendations come from the United States Preventive Services Task Force. They explicitly do not consider cost in their decisions. They look at harm vs benefit, usually with a focus on mortality reduction. Most insurance companies will base their coverage on the USPSTF.
Decisions as to whether or not to pursue regulatory approval for, example, expanded coverage of the HPV vaccine to men, or older age groups, is very commonly informed by cost-benefit calculations. I've worked on those projects, seen presentations by my colleagues, etc. There was a good two years of my life where this was what I worked on (mostly strain replacement post-vaccination).
It's a level of evidence that's generated (usually) prior to ACIP, and it is presented to them, while there is not necessarily a bright line threshold.
if you suspect that the cdc has been captured by big pharma, "and we don't care about cost of these recommended drugs" should pretty much seal the deal for you :)
There used to be fears of "death panels" controlling access to medical care when Clinton tried to propose universal health care.
The CDC and FDA are about safety, not cost management. And they get significant complaints about how much they regulate pharma and are impediments to pharma for that!
Now the conspiracy theorists of the other side seem to be having their day in the public mind.
This isn't a conspiracy theory - I worked on projects around that during graduate school, and talked to my colleagues who worked on them. Cost-effectiveness thresholds are a consideration that goes into how widely a vaccine will be rolled out, etc.
That was, for example, why boys were originally not part of the recommendation for the HPV vaccine. It would double to cost, while doing very little to prevent cervical cancer via indirect protection. Once the evidence accumulated that it was associated with other cancers, that stopped being true.
Cost considerations would be more from the CDC's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, not the mentioned above United States Preventive Services Task Force. (Oh, and I see that another comment parallel to mine up there now mentions ACIP too...)
In any case, somebody thinking that evaluating safety and efficacy aside from cost considerations means that there's collusion with pharmaceutical companies would be a conspiracy theory.
have you ever wondered if it's a great idea to have former generals populate the defense department, procurement, and revolving door employment with defense contractors? what could go wrong? what could go expensive?
you are one of the generals in this scenario, thinking that evaluating safety and efficacy aside from cost considerations couldn't possibly lead to higher costs because you yourself and everybody in your industry are so darn smart, clever and by god ethical.
what did you do before this? work on creating the covid 19 virus, or just calling people who questioned it "conspiracy theorists"? what's that, you were in caves tracking down the zoonotic transfer, which you'll find any day now, scientific consensus and all, peter daszak assured you you'll find it and he's beyond reproach!
and I resent you saying that I'm a conspiracy theorist because I have not said any of this is happening, I am pointing out the vector where it could happen (go back, look, where did I say any of this was happening?)
it's simply, methinks the lady doth protest too much
>have you ever wondered if it's a great idea to have former generals populate the defense department, procurement, and revolving door employment with defense contractors? what could go wrong? what could go expensive?
The real question is why are people who are capable of identifying the problem when it's generals sitting on the board of Lockheed or a telecom industry insider heading the FCC suddenly unable to do so when it's someone who's made their career engineering stormwater solutions taking a position at the EPA or the pharma industry funding research that the CDC will base its policy on.
The CDC, the DOD, etc, etc, these are all symptoms of the problem and a distracting sideshow.
As usual, the real evil is in the minds of the people who peddle double standards and the fact that we have architected society such that this behavior is mainstream and those who engage in it are not marginalized.
the cdc decides to make recommendations no matter how expensive, and big pharma collects the expensive, and the expert community works for the cdc and big pharma? do you even understand what regulatory capture is? do you understand how framing something as saving lives no matter the cost draws attention away from funneling money to big pharma no matter the deficit?
Since you already replied to my other comment, hopefully you understand now that ACIP takes into account cost as part of its recommendations, but the independent group we were talking about in this thread does not.
Even with CDC its recommendations, it's not the final word.
The reasoning you're highlighting here is highly conspiratorial
1) Labor costs go up with inflation
2) Rent goes up
3) New vacuum prices go down
At some point in the past, the downward line of vacuum price crossed over the upward line of repair cost. That's when this profession cratered.
Cars may have a while until that price point hits. But the quoted mechanic's suggestion that engineers optimize for simpler repairs instead of simpler production may be something similar. If simpler production makes the price of a new car $X cheaper, but increases the labor cost of repairs over the car's lifetime by $Y, there could be a time when X > Y.
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