I sometimes find myself watching similar content for a bit like a kind of engineering "reality" show. no real goal in mind and absolutely no intention of doing any of the things though. Knowing now that they put out videos suggesting people mess with live transformers... i think im over it.
So drop it off at a salvage location. OP was complaining about salvaging it, like it was necessary. If you want to do is as a fun personal project, go for it, but it is wasteful of human time to salvage something that cheap rather than add it to a scrap pile for a professional salvage company to process in bulk.
As a bonus, the kid learns that if you arent careful with your items they may break and be gone. you dont waste hours of your time on something that should cost about 1 hour of your time at work max.
Edit: Agree to disagree, but my post is still a valid position to hold and im open to conversation. but sure use downvote as a dislike button - we are all familiar with where that gets us.
okay guess im an asshole. go use a salvaged toaster in your kitchen. for $20, id rather not risk burning my house down or teaching my kids to put their hands inside the toaster but to each their own
Replacing it teaches the kid that if you break something, it magically comes back like a respawn in a video game.
I'd be very tempted to work with him to help clean it; let him do much of the grunt work whilst I helped and supervised (though to be honest I wouldn't be that hard on my kid for doing this unless he had been told don't do it beforehand. I've done enough boneheaded things in my day!).
>The salvaging actually helped the learning experience immensely - shows the kid that carelessness can have lasting consequences.
If the kid was present for it. Otherwise, its very much just another "oopsie" they did that mom and dad clean up behind the scenes and they have no idea what the difference is between ruining a toaster and spilling a glass of milk.
So what would the learning experience consist of then?
> If the kid was present for it.
OP mentioned several hours of work + dry runs in the garden. Pretty hard to miss that, unless they're perpetually glued to their screens (which would be the bigger concern). PS: Also, unless you take your kid to a physical store, the new toaster will pop up even more magically than the cleaned one.
the learning experience is that the toaster they were familiar with is gone because of what they did. very simple. I guess I am the only one here that doesnt want to fuck with toaster repair. they arent worth it. they can cause fires and give electrical shocks.
honestly, the last thing i want my kid to think in that situation is that it is okay for them to put their hands in the toaster. Which they might do if they see me do it while cleaning
which is why you unplug it before working on it and make a BIG point to the kid of both hazards, and how essential it is to remove power before working on something, AND to do test runs in a safer area like outside, etc.
>>the last thing i want my kid to think in that situation is that it is okay for them to put their hands in the toaster
I'd say that you don't want them putting their hands in WHILE IT IS POWERED or HOT. Important distinction, and best started early and often. They'll see it sometime, better to have them have a context so they can tell the difference between doing the same thing when it is smart (powered down and repairing), vs Darwin Award candidate level stupid (when powered); then they can evaluate other's actions and draw the right conclusions.
If you are confident enough in your ability to convey the entire full safety message to your kid and take full responsibility for anything they do as a result of that information, then go for it. I'm just saying for $20 it isnt really worth it. I dont want my kid fucking with electronics outside the designated use-cases it was built for, period. Cheese in the toaster? item needs to be cleared by a professional again. I dont care if I feel personally competent enough to clear it myself. I have very easy and safe alternatives.
Odds are the toaster company doesnt want you mess with it either. This isnt the old days where you can just use some elbow grease and fix everything on your property. Liabilities need to be managed. Electrical items need certifications. Doing it yourself takes hours. It's just a lot of things that are unnecessary to deal with over a toaster.
If I am going to teach my kid anything about fixing electrical items it's that if it isnt working then he (or she) should unplug them and then he shouldnt touch them until certified to do so. It'll encourage them to look at the bigger picture of the problem.
Sure, as an adult we can see through red tape and feel cool about it and want to teach the same to our kid.. but it's really not worth it. Kids that are smart enough to learn the will likely experiment with new things they learn. Just because they safely unplug the item before working on it doesnt mean it's safe to plug back in afterwards.
It's totally reasonable for an individual to say "it's not worth my time and effort to fix this, I'll just replace it." Taking a moral stand against repair-and-reuse in general is weird. Some people are on a budget where replacing even a $25 toaster is not a painless expense. Some people don't like producing unnecessary waste.
And throwing it away without replacing it punishes everyone in the house for the kid's mistake.
>Taking a moral stand against repair-and-reuse in general is weird
Nowhere did I do this, and the claim is confusing because I am a supporter of repair-and-reuse in general. People are extrapolating from me saying specifically that a toaster is not worth it. Toasters cause house fires. I would always sooner replace it for $25 than salvage one.
>And throwing it away without replacing it punishes everyone in the house for the kid's mistake.
A lack of a toaster for a day or two hardly punishes anyone, and the child sees that other people can be impacted by their recklessness.
> Some people are on a budget where replacing even a $25 toaster is not a painless expense
Yeah, I am one of those people actually. I have an emergency fund that I would happily use for this 1-off incident.
What better way to teach that than have them understand if they dont respect the way something is supposed to be used, they might break it?
Could be fun to sit with them and take apart the toaster and assess it together and see if its worth cleaning or replacing and explaining why. But I wouldnt spend 2+ hours cleaning it by myself and then complaining about it
there's a lot of relevant things i could get into on it. in short though, disposable items are cheaper and despite what a lot people think - most of us are broke.
after you adjust to dealing with disposable items a lot.. you kind of grow out of the feeling that every item is special and needs to be repaired to max extent and kept for as long as it can. It feels anthropomorphic / overly sentimental to do that. the moral argument gets the curtain pulled back and there's very little substantiating it. imo, at least. Curious if you can shed better light on your moral stance here tbh. im not die-hard on this subject and would happily update my views if convinced otherwise
I respect that you have a productive hobby interest in repairing items, and for the most part I share that. But I dont see anything wrong with throwing something away that could be salvageable. Once it stops working, it is just parts and material and I now become part of the demand for toasters. What's wrong with letting toaster specialists handle toaster demand? In the time it takes me to repair a toaster, the specialists can produce 100 of them. and thanks to people like me buying from them rather than doing it myself, they remain productive members of society and get to feed themselves. And I get a couple hours back to do something else to potentially improve society or my personal life.
All that said, I do think there is a lot more we can do with waste management to better deal with disposed parts and materials, though. A lot of how we handle disposed goods is definitely wrong. we mix materials with food waste and it makes everything gross and expensive to work with. food waste really should be a hard split from everything else but maybe one day
except it isnt functional. it is covered in burnt cheese that will take hours to fix. it's a huge waste of time to clean off burnt cheese from such a tiny piece of material.
collect a bunch of similar materials from the dump and bulk clean them all into workable materials again with a pressure washer in the same amount of time.
Work an extra 2 hours, use the money to buy a new toaster, and spend the rest on food for the homeless.
the moral argument is bullshit. it's a waste of your time, and the only reason you dont think so is because you get personal enjoyment out of fixing things (i do too)
back then you could file your taxes with 6 or 7 kids and no one would check
that is not the same as claiming you have 6 or 7 kids that will be filed on your taxes and then just never filing it. Once filed he would need SSN for those kids, or he would owe taxes
Moron or not, I dont want people to starve simply because they dont help a company perform optimally.
If we were to implement some form of a universal basic income there would be no obligation to become a self-serving asshole at whatever company you can get yourself into. The people doing the work would be able to stand up for themselves and tell management to fuck off if they do become moronic or overly self-serving
OK, OK. I am a supporter of of UBI, but let's not make it sound like ICs are the victims that are tolerating the abuse, working for peanuts, or otherwise they will starve.
Lots of ICs are also self-serving morons. It's not like the managers designed crap solutions, wrote the crap code, and are the cause of barely anything working, at least not directly.
My point was mostly that the whole point of hiring managers (and often paying them more than ICs) was to get some people work on optimizing the productivity, making sure best ICs stay and can be effective, and help in various ways ones that are not as solid (possibly yet). By reliably failing to do so, what's the point of having them in the first place, and even more so - holding them in such a high esteem, paying them more, and having so many of them around.
>what's the point of having them in the first place,
to increase company size and keep more people in the world fed. without them, that money just goes into the CEO's pocket anyway.
>paying them more,
this i disagree with as well. Money should be way better allocated to the people keeping the company alive since everyones dinner depends on them.
But overall a company should hire as many people as it can afford. have them work from home and do almost nothing most of the time. pay them the least in the company.
Usually these discussions leave out what happens when people dont have jobs at all, which would happen to a lot of people if companies were run optimally and morons were fired. Do we let them die so that we can buy yachts? I dont think we should all die together if we cant save everyone, but I do think we should be working to maximize the number of "free loaders" our country can support and viewing that as a signal of strength.
I also believe if we remove all these people who are better off as free loaders from the workforce, that companies would become more productive overall, not less. There is this belief that everyone would just stop working if they didnt need to and nothing would get done. I dont buy it. Absolute worst case scenario we could have a draft and use the military to fill the gaps in the workforce lol
A bureaucrat has never created a solution, so thinking UBI would solve anything is naive at best. Why not go for something simpler, like make basic life cheap and efficient so people can live with very little work? Bonus point: no need to take (steal?) money from people to implement.
UBI is like printing money - the last stage before a country's hyper-inflationary collapse.
Instead of inflation & printing money, we should instead be thinking of salt - once a valuable commodity, nowadays so cheap people are literally giving it away (restaurants don't charge for it).
With enough technological development, almost every necessity of life can be as cheap (and cheaper) as salt. Except medicine, because people will always want to live longer, but even there technology helps - poor people in first-world countries have access to much better healthcare than even the riches human 100 years ago.
Great elaboration. If the government kept small like the founding fathers envisioned, I am 99% sure an American would be able to live comfortably on one day of work per week today. They were able to raise a family with one salary way back, and with how much productivity has increased (and would have further increased if not for the government) today would be very different.
I'm interested in your take on how we exercise total control over the cost of living without any sort of bureaucratic processes being implemented?
If vendors are required to accept UBI credit for certain goods and services and must then collect payment from the government, the government is able to restrict inflation by refusing to pay inflated prices.
A "UBI-like system" has such broad range and flexibility of design and implementation that to dismiss it entirely while suggesting (im not sure exactly what to call your suggestion) market manipulation? is ludicrous.
There is a finite amount of work that needs to be done to sustain the necessities for everyone. basic life IS cheap and efficient, but we arent allowed to pay for what it is. I cant buy a simple small house for cheap, because someone who already has a house can afford to pay more and then rent it to me instead.
There NEEDS to be a centralized power separating out basic needs purchasing from "extra" purchasing. All of the "extra" economic activity should be more expensive and the basic needs purchasing should be cheaper. You cannot accomplish that without government. you need centralized power to enforce it.
I would suggest reading or listening to Thomas Sowelll's Basic Ecconomics. Even just listening to the first chapter should convince you that a centralized power is a bad idea.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrPxEmOV0YI
Thomas Sowell seems very considerate of the opinions he forms, I'll check it out. I do already agree in general that centralized power is typically a bad idea. We cannot avoid it, however. For example, the Police force exists as a phenomenon. Without them, a group of people will naturally form privately and specialize in protection services under self-serving chaotic interests (a "mafia" for short). And since they are responsible for protection, they will be able to enforce their chaotic will upon anyone. This is because human-to-human interaction can be extremely volatile and we are capable of killing each other quickly. So it might not be ideal for economics, but we still exist as part of nature and need to account for that.
We must rely on social contracts to stabilize human interaction enough for an economic system to even be possible. Buying and Selling is meaningless when Looting and Destruction are nonpunishable. A social contract is meaningless if we do not punish people for breaking them. A government is a collection of such contracts. The US government differentiates these contracts by various types and instills a separation of powers as a public framework for dealing with dangers of centralized power. Mafias have no such considerations
Power still continues to consolidate among "mafia"s. They are less effective directly as a result of public centralized powers. I believe the next evolution in this war is the differentiation between what people need and what people want. They should not operate under the same economic model. If I WANT the food you NEED to eat, I should let you have it and pursue purchasing it from you instead. that should be a social contract.
This should be common sense, but in the world we live in there is no visibility to what is needed vs what is wanted. People would be incentivized to claiming a NEED on as much as possible. "Bad" Public centralized power used to enforce reasonable claims to NEEDs is the only way forward given the nature of our reality. "Only way" sounds limiting, but of course there are a million+ different ways we can go about it.
Lol what a loaded statement. There are plenty of government programs that have produced better lives for people after being implemented. Imagine being this religious and blind about state-market interactions.
A bureaucrat decides whether to add a hurdle or not. Now once in a while they do things that end up positively affecting some of the population, but at what cost?
I don’t think people that want UBI are bad-faith, they are more likely naive. Asking for life to be cheap and efficient so people can live with little work if they want is spreading propaganda, while asking for the biggest monopoly that had killed people for war experiments, to get a lot more power is somehow being good-faith and responsible person? I’ll let others decide this one.
Just to pick one example, do you see something like state-imposed food standards as a 'hurdle' added by bureaucrats? What about housing construction standards?
One person's hurdle can be another person's safety net?
Yes monopolistic regulations are 100percent hurdles. Now free market standards that people can choose (if they want more safety net), or personal standards, well they don't affect everyone so those are fine.
why did you bring your home computer into the mix to begin with? future advice, never do that. For a lot of different reasons.
Why do you think it would look bad on you if a slow computer does computer things slowly? This is an opportunity for you to demonstrate your knowledge of exactly why a slow computer is a bottleneck.
I would say be specific. Do not say "I am slow because my computer is slow".
Have a coworker send you benchmarks from their machine for some processes you use often. Run the same benchmarks on your machine. Talk about it with your manager. Ask him what you need to do to get a better machine.
Buy a smart bulb for your WFH desk. Pick a color (example: bright white) that you only use when you are working. you might not notice anything at first, but after a while it really helps with shifting your mentality into or out of work mode very quickly. Very helpful at the start of a busy day, or the end of a rough day.
Source: I did WFH for about 2 years before the pandemic in a 1 bedroom apartment that I shared with someone
I did this for sleep hygiene reasons because my office is windowless (the light goes from cool, to warm, to red as the night goes on) and as a side effect I stopped working so late because it was easier to notice "hey, it's 6 pm, I should probably stop for the day".
Great idea. I double up my office space for work and for personal projects / hobbies outside of work (same desk and chair, different computers), but didn't consider having a dedicated colored light for it.
I think I'll leave normal lighting for work, but then do a more playful color for hobbies, like purple or blue or red or something. I already have the light even, I just haven't been using it.
Something I never got around to setting up that you might find interest in if going for a few different "modes" is using NFC tags / stickers to trigger the light change. So you can have a couple stickers on the wall or w.e and tap you phone to work or hobby or normal and have things change automatically.
going into the phone isnt really a big deal, but I always felt setting up a physical trigger would be way smoother mentally
Personally, I don't really have an issue with staying late (a little after 5:30 I need to start dinner so it can be ready by 6:30-7:00, I'm kind of a slow cook).
My motivation to try this is more for shifting to hobby mode and being productive when I go back after dinner, as I've been super unproductive after work lately.
not entirely tautological. the probability that something bad happens tomorrow if we do X today for the first time is very different than the probability that something bad happens tomorrow if we do X today GIVEN weve been doing X every day for 50 years.
It is still insufficient to say nothing bad will happen, of course
