Modern industry targets a specific design life for most consumer products - when that time is out, you are not expected to repair, but replace! Similarly, most parts have become modularized to the point where a "repair" consists of swapping relatively large modules.
The basic philosophy seems to be that labour is a "bad thing" and must be prevented at all costs... freeing it up, to do... what? 
Freed up to not cut into corporate profits, and no other reason.
This current social paradigm is the classic double-bind; they tie your worth entirely to whom you work for, while at the same time actively doing everything they can not to pay people for working.
IME, corporations should be taxed based on the disparity between their profits and how few people they pay a living wage. The more people they employ per dollar, the less they pay in taxes.
mnem
*toddles off to ded*
By the same token, world governments and large corporations need to also wake up to the fact that with people not working, therefore not earning money in order to spend, is also not a sustainable business model. Its of no use to be producing things that can generate large profits if there aren't people with the ability to buy the items. Governments would lose all the tax revenues that people in employment generate as income tax and then by of VAT and other taxes when they spend the money earned. The quickest way into a depression is to have most of the worlds' money in the grip of corporations, who themselves will then begin to suffer through stagnation.
That is a model that needs to be broken as the wheel of life is the logical and ethical way forward, corporations employ people to make things that others wish to buy at realistic prices. The workers and corporations pay their share of taxes in order to provide all the support structures that everybody requires. The workers and corporations then spend their money to buy items for personal use, food etc and raw materials to continue the manufacture of goods, and in turn pay the sales taxes to further support more infrastructure like roads, health care etc.
Repairable items also become part of that wheel of life as newer and more desirable items are introduced, a lot of people will seek to buy them, passing on their old items to those less able to buy new and so the circle of life once again into play with the smaller items required to keep items in repair. Eventually those repairable items reach the end of useful life naturally by either being so old that they are always being repaired and thus become uneconomical or their function becomes so dated that nobody wants them any more, and then they can be recycled into raw materials to be fed back into the production of new products.
So things like metals, rubber, plastics, glass etc can be reused many times, wooden items that clearly is not the case, but the world could have managed forests to supply new wood and digest vast amounts of CO2 that currently is crippling the world.
It is all doable and everyone can have a good way of life, social classes could still be maintained but altered slightly, so the gulf is not as wide as they currently are.
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Topic: Test Equipment Anonymous (TEA) group therapy thread (Read 16703100 times)