In Praise of Maintenance (2016)

Maintenance can also help you in creating new things. You see a good basis, from which to extend with new ideas. You see the beauty and craftsmanship of a well-designed device, system, etc. And that inspires you, and sets a floor for the quality of what you want to accomplish.

Maintenance gives you time to "meditate" -- performing needed and useful work while keeping a few neurons open for new thought.

And maintenance saves money, allowing you to invest resources in new projects instead of constantly ad-hoc patching and replacing those you've neglected to the point of failure.

It can also provide some redundancy. If model 2015 breaks down, maybe model 1985 can carry you through the repairs.

Finally, some of the old tools I have are better than the new. Better to maintain them, because I can't replace them with their equal or better for any reasonable price.

It's important to know when to let something go. But, it shouldn't be out of neglect followed by panicked necessity. Panic can generate inspiration, but it's not good as a lifestyle.

Important subject, terrible article. A famous one, by Eric Hoffer, 1958:

As I walked several blocks from the bus stop to the docks, I was impressed by the gardens in front of the houses. The houses, of average size, are fairly old, yet in excellent shape. The people living there are mostly workingmen.

The sight of the gardens and houses turned my mind to the question of maintenance. It is the capacity for maintenance which is the best test for the vigor and stamina of a society.

Any society can be galvanized for a while to build something, but the will and the skill to keep things in good repair day in, day out are fairly rare.

At present, neither in the Communist countries nor in the newly created nations is there a pronounced capacity for maintenance.

I wonder how true it is that after the Second World War the countries with the best maintenance were the first to recover. I am thinking of Holland, Belgium and Western Germany. I don’t know how it is in Japan.

The Incas had an intense awareness of maintenance. They assigned whole villages and tribes to keep roads, bridges and buildings in good repair.

I read somewhere that in ancient Rome a man was disqualified as a candidate for office because his garden showed neglect.

As a very cheap way of restoring a device to an optimal state, maintenance costs are almost like a way to repurchase something without expenses such as fabrication, assembly, transport, etc. The correct molecules are each already in the correct locations, making it much cheaper than modifying other molecules - just restore or replace the most entropic parts.

Described in another HN thread:

> If you do have a particular attachment to the taste of coffee, consider a Keurig ($120-$250) with a reusable filter. Each cup of coffee uses ~1/3 oz of ground coffee, so a 12oz bag ($6-21) gives ~33 cups. With expensive coffee, and an expensive machine, at 10 cups per day, after 100 days (1000 cups), that's $886.36, or $8.86 per day. If you find a cheap machine and good, inexpensive coffee, you're looking at $301.82 or $3.02 per day.

Add in $13/300 paper filters for easy and compostable cleaning, and you're looking at $3.45 - $9.29 per day, depending on your coffee price. And 32oz of vinegar for the descaling ($4) for another 1000 cups, increases to $3.47 - $9.30 per day.[0]

In this way, the $4 of vinegar (and associated labor) is almost like the $120-250 for a new machine, from a certain point of view.

[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17362292