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Joined 2 年前
Cake day: 2023年10月4日
  • tal@lemmy.todaytoAsk Lemmy@lemmy.world•Why is it often cheaper to buy new than repair old and how can repairing be encouraged on different levels of society?English
    101·
    7 小时前

    Making new

    • Making something new requires simpler processes that are easy to automate.

    • Making something new may involve the same series of steps done many times, so one can take advantage of economies of scale. You obtain raw materials or parts, and they’re all handled in the same way, many times over.

    • You only need to deal with assembly, not disassembly.

    Repair

    • Devices don’t fail in the same way, so repairs tend to be unique and not amenable to taking advantage of economies of scale.

    • Unless you repair a device in the same way multiple times, the scale is necessarily going to be less than manufacturing new, since if you manufacture N devices, you can’t be repairing more than N devices; again, not friendly to economies of scale. Even with things like automobiles that are designed with the intention of being easy to repair, older cars become increasingly less-practical to repair as the pool of cars of a particular year and model shrink over time as some become unrepairable and head to junkyards.

    • If repair requires components, those components may need to be manufactured and then warehoused until repair is required, so the storage cost also adds to the cost of repair.

    • Repairing is a complex process that likely differs from device to device that is hard to automate.

    • Repair involves not just reassembly, but also disassembly.

    • Especially if a device was not specifically designed to be simple to repair and especially if scale is not high, repair may involve (expensive) skilled labor from someone who has to be able to craft a specific repair process for this particular device being repaired.

    • Repair involves diagnosis of the problem. Diagnosis may be an extraordinarily difficult process — e.g. trying to diagnose a failure inside of a chip without destroying it is something that we may not be able to do today, and the skillset or automated system required to do it may be very complex. Intel spent ages just trying to understand why there were failures in the last two generations of their chips, a situation where they didn’t care at all about destroying chips that they’d use for diagnosis, and they weren’t trying to repair a single chip, but to fix a process that involved huge numbers of chips. Maybe an electrical engineer could diagnose a problem on a device, but his work will repair only a single device. The time of that same electrical engineer could be used to improve a manufacturing process that could produce many more new devices.

    Other

    • When you repair a device, you get a device which may have other worn components. At some point, something else will fail. If you manufacture a new device, you get all new parts; you “reset the clock” on everything.

    • When you repair a device, you get an older device. In many cases, due to the advance of technology, a newer device is preferable. That may not always be true — consider, say, an antique made by a specific artist centuries ago, where the value is in part that that particular person made the thing. But for most functional purposes, something made using present-day technology beats stuff made in the past. And that’s a more-important factor the greater the rate of advance in the field of whatever good it is that you’re trying to repair.

    • Repair may compete with recycling.

    We live in a world that, due to global trade and large population and probably access to interchange languages, has far more potential for scale than ever before in the past, so economies of scale can be pretty important — design a device once, make a very efficient process for making it, and you can sell to many, many people. Billions of people, even. You couldn’t do that a few hundred years ago, because the world was simply too disconnected. That’s a lot of potential for economy of scale. And economies of scale are, I think, generally more-friendly to manufacturing new.

    I can’t think of many factors that would cause repair to become more-efficient versus manufacturing new relative to where they are today. I think that when we get AGI, we may be able to reduce the cost of skilled labor and complex automation, both used in repair, so far that repairing could see a bit of a renaissance. Maybe if we become a multiplanetary species in the future, travel into space and live elsewhere, then we’ll have small populations that are mostly cut off from the rest of the population, and economies of scale will greatly decrease, and repair will become more worthwhile — you fix something on Mars because there aren’t enough people on Mars for building new to make sense, and sending a new item from Earth costs too much. Maybe we’ll crash into fundamental physical limits and the rate of technological advance in many fields will slow way down, so a newer device won’t have many more benefits over an older device. Maybe some sort of new types of goods that are fantastically-expensive and only required in small scale will become increasingly important, and for them repair will be more important than for goods that are produced at large scale. But outside of that, I think that most of the factors will favor manufacturing new, and if anything, probably continue to do so even more than they do today.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWorld News@lemmy.world•Cash Tracking: You’ve Got a Surveillance Tool in Your Wallet [DE; EN below]English
    7·
    1 天前

    Hansen believes it is important that people have a truly anonymous payment option available to them.

    It’s at least going to be better than a credit card, say, because not every hop in a chain of transactions is going to be visible. And there’s always coins, though there are some physical bulk issues there.

    https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/coins/html/index.en.html

    The euro coin series comprises eight different denominations: 1, 2, 5, 10, 20 and 50 cent, €1 and €2.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coins_of_the_United_States_dollar

    Coins of the United States dollar – aside from those of the earlier Continental currency – were first minted in 1792. New coins have been produced annually and they comprise a significant aspect of the United States currency system. Circulating coins exist in denominations of 1¢ (i.e. 1 cent or $0.01), 5¢, 10¢, 25¢, 50¢, and $1.00.

    Coins don’t have serial numbers.

    considers

    They do have defects from wear. I imagine that you could photograph each at high resolution when they pass through cash processors, generate some sort of fuzzy-hashed fingerprint, and then use that to track coin movement. But I doubt that this is being done, and certainly it’d be harder than tracking banknote serial numbers in a world of ATMs.

  • tal@lemmy.todaytoWikipedia@lemmy.world•LennaEnglish
    2·
    3 天前

    I don’t have a problem with the usage of the image on moral or social grounds, but I don’t think that it’s the best choice to use.

    • In the past, Playboy has been fine with its use. I see no reason to believe that that will change. However, the image is not in the public domain: Playboy just decided to ignore infringement on goodwill grounds. I think that it’d probably be better to use an image that avoids the whole issue.

    • Lenna asked that it stop being used recently. I don’t believe that she has legal ownership of the image, but point is that use of the thing basically existed on goodwill grounds, and I don’t think that changing that is a good idea. No reason to hurt someone’s feelings when there are plenty of other options.

    • While it may have good characteristics as photographs go, I seriously doubt that it’s the best option out there; it wasn’t as if it was selected after some extensive search.

    • The test image is not terribly high resolution, at 512x512. While maybe that was fine for computers in the 1970s when it was chosen, it’s not a whole lot of data.

    • The image is a scan, has artifacts from the printing and scanning process. While arguably it could be useful to measure how scanned images work, I think that most images today are not scanned, but are direct-to-digital, and are probably more-useful.

    • While I don’t think that it’s generally an issue in the West, some countries — think the theocracy in Iran — do take issue with bare shoulders, and it’s just liable to create unnecessary problems for any people working on image compression there. Unless there’s a good reason not to do so, might as well take a least-common denominator image.

    I think that the story is cute, and it’s nice that Playboy decided to let people use it, but it’s not as if the people who chose it were trying to choose a test image for the world.

    I think that the only case where it really makes sense to use the thing today would be to compare compression against some compression algorithm for which access to the algorithm no longer exists, but Lena compression test results exist, which seems unlikely to be much more than a niche case.