Now this is unironically what I think of when the tiny, near-dead embers of patriotism in my soul get a whiff of oxygen.
Great Depression 2.0 is here, what did we do back during the first one?
Well, lotta people fuckin’ starved and died, got terrible diseases, died before the age of 2, or in child birth, etc.
But, we also formed co-ops. We took a random sad sack of broke and broken people, and their stuff, people with no proper wage work available to do, got em together and said ‘anything useful you can do, for anybody else, is better than nothing’
We talked to those people. We commiserated. We built solidarity with others, face to face.
We fixed shit, we jerry-rigged shit, we made things that were completely broke into things that were only slightly broken.
We took shotguns to local foreclosure auctions, and not so subtly implied to anyone other than someone who’d promised to just gift the home back to the homeowner, that the shotguns were loaded.
Nowadays… call it recycling, upcycling, right to repair, what the fuck ever… stop wasting your money on stupid shit that won’t last a year or even ever be used by you once.
You don’t know how expensive food or fuel is gonna be in a month, 3 months, etc. Could triple by next year, who knows.
Build your life around trying to plan for that.
You got a storage unit full of shit? A walk in closet full of stuff you ain’t worn in a year?
You don’t need it.
Somebody else probably could use it. Figure out how to find that person, and get it to them, with as few or at least as fair middlemen involved as possible. You get a fair price, or maybe even a haircut or week of babysitting, fuck, a pound of flour… they get some barely used clothes.
Every random plot of possibly usable garden space, make it bloom. Fuck your yard of useless grass that literally is a traditional offshot of nobility having so much land they could show off making some of it not productive.
HOA in the way? Learn their bylaws and just investigate them by way of malicious supercompliance. Chances are high they’re doing some kind of money laundering or fraud.
… We’ve done this kinda shit before, our grandparents at least.
Most people actually get joy and purpose not from accumulating wealth, but from feeling like they’re actually some kind of important, in the service of others, in some kind of real and tangible way.
The system has failed us, in every possible way…, it will eat us alive if we do not build our own.
In the words of Adam Savage:
“I reject your reality, and substitute my own”.
We do not have another choice.
This was very well written. This message resonates with me deeply. Thank you. 👏🏾👏🏾👏🏾
Thank you, but my writing ability, in this sort of way, is nothing in comparison to… Charlie Chaplin.
To those who can hear me, I say - do not despair. The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed - the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish…
https://www.charliechaplin.com/en/articles/29-The-Final-Speech-from-The-Great-Dictator-
I still cannot watch or even just read this without being moved to tears.
We need a new story to believe, now that the ‘American Dream’ is so thoroughly broken.
We need hope, placed in the right direction… in ourselves, and in each other.
That kind of society sounds kinda sweet
We’re quickly moving towards a Warhammer40k world where “old stuff is better”. Just like digital services become increasingly enshittified, late-stage capitalism incentivises companies to produce things ever more cheaply just to squeeze out some more of that precious shareholder value. Plastics, electronics, garments - everything is so thin nowadays that it will crack, break and tear quickly.
Case in point: here’s a picture of two types of copper wiring.
On the left, you can see the original wiring of a defunct LED light. Further examination showed that the wiring had simply broken in parts of the cable. So I went to the scrapyard and scavenged the wires off an old 1960s lamp plug (that’s the wiring on the right-hand side). These wires had 3-4x the amount of copper strands as compared to modern wires and will not snap easily. I soldered them onto the lamp - now the lamp lives to light another day.
I can only encourage everyone to get a simple soldering iron, some screwdrivers, or a bit of sewing equipment and get to work. You have nothing to lose from tinkering with your stuff (almost*) . If something was broken before, chances are you’d have discarded it anyway, so you can’t break it much more. But the dopamine hit you get when something previously defunct suddenly jumps back to life and serves you for several more years - that’s priceless. Also, fixing your shit is an erect middle finger to the capitalist logic of ever-decreasing product life cycles and the ever-increasing amounts of deliberately produced waste - all that at a time where we’re more painfully aware than ever that resources are finite, and the so-called first world is squandering a lot of them at the expense of everyone else.
So do your bit. It’s thrifty. It’s fun. And it’s the right thing to do.
* Unless you’re dealing with batteries or high voltages, in which case you want to be careful and do your research; house fires are no fun.
Just so you know, the larger gauge wires were to carry more current required by the old halogen bulb and are unnecessarily large for an LED light. A better comparison of how shit is crap these days is that a lot of electronics don’t even use copper wire but instead copper clad aluminum that’s subject to corroding withing 5-10 years of use. But I love to see you repairing things and “upgrading” along the way with thicker gauge wire! Just wanted to point out the larger power consumption of older appliances is often why they have larger gauge wires. There is nothing better for the environment than fixing and reusing what we have rather than replacing !
Just so you know, the larger gauge wires were to carry more current required by the old halogen bulb and are unnecessarily large for an LED light.
Thanks for the insight! Yeah, I could’ve thought about that. Yet, thinner wiring also comes with much poorer wear resilience. Looking at you, headphone and charger cables…
Sure, the wires are larger because they needed to be, but they are still functional, which is what matters.
I’d say one of the issues with repairing things these days is that everything is getting smaller and smaller. Where thick gauge wires were required before, now they use much thinner wire. Where thinner wires were used before, printed circuit boards are often used now. New circuit boards are chock full of miniature surface-mount components which are much more difficult to replace compared to the much larger circuit boards of the olden days. Every step of miniaturisation makes repairs require more skill.
Ugh, that description triggered my PTSD acquired during the latest repairs on a Lenovo Yoga. Tons of printed and taped-on PCB in place of once solid construction.
I guess that’s why nowadays, whenever I need to buy new, I first watch a teardown video to see the insides. If things look finicky and hard to access/repair, I’m not buying. Refuse > repair.
Ribbon cables with sub-millimeter slots to insert them into
Mmmmh! And ribbon cables that you need to manually fold so they’ll fit into the slot - what a great chance to break the sub-millimeter copper wiring inside!
I read this as “broken sphincter?” for some reason
This is great and I love repairing things. I wish that repair skills would be taught in schools.
If you went to a school in a poor school district - they did. It was self-taught
This is TERRORISM in the United States!
-Trump’s NSPM-7 which classifies ANTI CAPITALISM as TERRORISM!
At this point, saying
“Release the entire unredacted Epstein files” is probably considered terrorism.
Some of us might not make it, but at least we didn’t ignore or support a real terrorist
Here’s the thing: we can’t even trust them to release the unredacted files at this point. There is no 100% truth with this administration.
If they did release unredacted files, we’d have to ask why. We’d have to ask “why now? What’s missing?”
The sad thing is that this is the alt-right goal: to erode trust in our systems. And they have fucking succeeded in spades.
Fingers & toes. They’ll tell the truth before all the digits are missin’, even live on their beloved Fox news.
I see a lot more ignoring than anything else. I think Americans have failed utterly.
Please don’t call me “American”, I am a citizen of the world
A computer shop once laughed in my mom’s face for asking if they’d repair her printer. The accepted practice is to just throw the whole thing out when you want new ink or it stops working.
Eventually she tracked down a guy in another town who fixed printers, and he fixed the printer (a bottle cap was jammed inside, in case you were wondering. He returned the bottle cap).
That was 20 years ago and things aren’t better.
Man I know it.
I’ve definitely bought a new printer before because it was cheaper than ink. More than once.
Nowadays I’ve got a Samsung B&W laser that gets most of what I need to print, and a brother MFP inkjet for the rest. I’m keeping my eyes out for a color mfp laser when I visit thrift shops…I’d gotten one before and it worked well for a while but it was an HP so it broke and became non-economical to repair (and really, I didn’t need/want a giant corporate LaserJet in my home office).
But I don’t even really print in color…very rare that is even needed. If it is, it’s probably stuff like kids birthday invites and I’m gonna be better off sending it to a print shop like Staples or Kinkos or just order it online, anyway.
In fact I’m fairly sure the heads on the inkjet are a solid glob now.
You might as well. If you’re going to trash it anyway, good odds you’re not going to hurt anything by loosening some screws and seeing what’s what.
Spoiler. On fixable things, it’s usually the on/off switch. I think they deliberately make them out of cheap plastic that will eventually break. Plug in oil heaters. Mixers. Lamps with foot switches. Etc.
I remember being out of work from my helpdesk job a couple decades ago and responding to a post on reddit asking for someone to help fix their PC. I went over and talked to the guy. He’d gone through three motherboards and was at his wits end because he couldn’t get anything to turn on.
I looked over his setup, pulled out my pocket knife, stuck it in, and his PC booted right up. His PC case power button was broken, so I jumped the pins to make sure it was just a mechanical issue. Then I wired his reset button up to it instead. He gave me his old Dreamcast on top of the agreed upon six pack because he was so relieved. It was great for my self-confidence while I was out of work.
TBF, the switch is a mechanical part that goes through a series of stresses, not just from the person actuating it, but also from the electrical forces causing the switch to bounce and arc for several ms before it settles. Putting all that stress into a little package with tiny contact wafers, and it’s bound to fail sooner or later.
some components fail more often than others, like caps or batteries, or are designed to, like fuses. sometimes it’s obvious after looking even without measuring
Microwaves and fuses.
Yeah just be really careful taking apart a microwave, those capacitors are nothing to mess with.
just yesterday i’ve put a wire through a blown smd fuse, these are also a thing (fortunately easy to diagnose)
My family has always liked working on things that are broke - what can go wrong, you were going to throw it anyway and sometimes you can fix it. If you can’t fix it a vacuum in parts fits in the trash better than it put together, and sometimes you get a working vacuum. (the implication here is you don’t put it together unless you think it will work)
“Anticonsumerist”… kinda a shocking/clickbait way to put it. I wouldn’t call myself an “anticonsumerist” just because I’m cheap, I don’t want to pollute the environment with more tech waste, and I expect the stuff I buy to last. I mean, these people bought it in the first place, right? Maybe just anti-disposable tech?
God, I was just enjoying some cyberpunk-adjacent media yesterday and laughed at the satire of an in universe news outlet complaining about “anticonsumerist terrorism”.
Something something torment nexus
No they kick you in the shin and make slurs at you the entire time you are trying to fix your stuff. They really want you to feel bad about being a consumer.
I sewed a patch into my pants today instead of buying new ones!
This is the mindset that keeps the world going!
The hacker mindset exists beyond information technology.
A basic sewing machine & knowing how to sew a seam will save you a lot of clothes. YouTube has this covered. Full lessons from old ladies.
Bernadette Banner also has many videos on doing this with simple hand sewing equipment, if you aren’t inclined to get a new machine!
I am also always willing to share what information I have about Darning and Clothing repair if needed… but I am just some person on the internet…
I would love to do this. I’m great at changing out motorcycle tires and changing out brake pads, but I would love to learn how to solder or even diagnose bad diodes on a board.
It would be a great exchange of knowledge.
Go to Hacklab / maker space to teach and learn while making, fixing or tinkering.
Know anyone that’s into gaming? Modding old consoles is a great way to get into diagnosing board problems and fixing the crap PCBs in small electronics is fantastic for learning to solder. Two weeks ago I didn’t know shit about the eldrich slab of charms and runes inside electronics. Last week I successfully tested two power units for a playstation 4 and correctly diagnosed that mine has died due to APU overheating. Took about 2 hours, two videos, and a $15 continuity tester.
Unfortunately, mine’s dead in the water until I find someone who can reball the APU for less than the cost of a new system. In the mean time, I’m doing a tear down and mod on my Xbox 360.
It seems these repair cafes are very popular these days. Even my village of 7000 has one.
First I’ve ever heard of it.
If I can’t fix something…instead of throwing it away, I save it to bludgeon the people responsible for creating something I can’t fix.
You better make sure I’m gone when you go into the bunker. I’m looking for air vents with company logos on them. I’ll have my deluxe HP ready, hung on a leather strap slung around my back.
…when “Squint” & “Cheesecurd” drag you from the depths of Mt. Florida, it’ll be me, “Ink Cartridge Empty” bringing the full weight of my HP2500XLRS down upon thine head!!!
