I keep seeing things with several regular screws and one a funky type (security torx and such), If they want to make it tamper evident, put a dot of acrylic on the screw,

Then there's clips that will snap together to make a tight fit exactly once. And of course the stupid plastic rivets.

I have no idea what devices you are seeing.

So you're claiming it is somehow cheaper to produce 10,000 desk fans with 3 phillips head screws and one security head crew epoyed in than it is to produce the same run of fans with 4 phillips screws?

You claim the parts are interchangable on the assembly line but somehow not on the repair bench?

Or are you claiming somehow that it's cheaper to have employees assemble random piles of parts in bespoke fashion than it is to have them putting the same parts in the same place every time?

On the other hand, there are plenty of LCD monitors thrown away even though a $25 CFL and 10 minutes could have it up and running if you could get the right CFL.

And don't forget that the time to go get a new whatever isn't free either. Some problems can be fixed in less time than it takes to buy a new one if it's reasonably made to be repaired.

The problem is devices that WOULD be significantly cheaper to repair if parts were more easily (and reasonably) available and if the things weren't designed to be harder to repair.

Often the repair hostile design isn't in any way cheaper to manufacture.

The trick is to grasp that at high RPMs, it's not pressure that drives the work. A light touch will make more progress.

My mid-90s Dremel kicks ass.

A *NEW* use. Not the same old use but online now.

By that time there were millions of slaves in the U.S. and as you pointed out, they reproduced and even resulted in a surplus for the larger plantations. There was a lively internal slave trade at that point.

Actually, the war on poverty was working until the GOP insisted on surrendering.

And yes, businesses that mooch on the taxpayer to supplement their inadequate payroll are evil. They know damned well they are mooching off of people with a lot less than they already have.

We don't claim the car thief is blameless if you leave your keys in your car, do we?

As timeOday said, they cost about 10 years wages for an equivalent free worker, so if the owner didn't keep them alive and well at least that long, it was a losing proposition.

So as despicable as the practice was, the modern practice is in some ways worse.

That's the new innovation of forced labor. In the bad old days, slaves were quite expensive so you had to provide food, clothing, shelter, and at least minimal healthcare.

The new improved forced labor lets them pick up the slaves cheap, provide them minimal food and shelter and just let them die from overwork.

Both upsides were already easily solvable. Most distro's rc scripts already call a function to start a daemon. That could easily have called a helper program to set up the cgroup and register on dbus to act as a controller for the group.

Meanwhile, at least Debian's rc scripts already had dependencies listed in their headers that could be used to compute a start order. It could as easily be used to compute a makefile to start in parallel.

The problem is, now that the init process will be such a hairball of dependencies, it becomes harder to implement such solutions without seemingly unrelated bits breaking. For example, no reasonable person expects the GUI desktop to break if you switch out init. (and no reasonable person creates such a dependency)

Or, you go with signed routes. That is, you use a public key system to prove that you have the right to broadcast a route for a particular subnet.

In practice, it will probably mean some router upgrades. No more router cpus that were considered a bit underpowered for a calculator in the '90s. However, as an interim measure, it could be used to set some BGP filters to limit the potential damage.

The problem is, we're tipped over into corporatism where the net is controlled by a very few very large legal sictions tha tthe courts insist are somehow people.

You worry about the bad old government censoring the net but forget to worry about the ISPs censoring the net.

I can't imagine why you think the overmetered network protects us from the market cornering legislation and the pompous asses. Without proper net neutrality, we get all of the above and nowhere to turn.