I'm very surprised and pleased at both the number of responses and the actual content of those responses (given it was posted on Hacker News). It tells me several things, first that people are actually concerned by the waste created by our throwaway society especially so when the items being thrown away are otherwise serviceable except for minor faults, and second there's still an interest in craft—people (some at least) still want to work with their hands.

Recently, this has come to the fore with movements such as those pushing the Right to Repair hi-tech proprietary items such as iPhones and John Deere tractor electronics, etc. I wholeheartedly support these movements, for as a society I reckon we need to relearn how to get our hands 'dirty' by doing physical tradie-like things from time to time.

No pun intended but there are many threads to this topic so it's hard to know where to begin or how to paraphrase/limit my comments to a reasonable size. Let's start with life skills and a quote from the article: 'There was once a time when every American child was formally taught the basics of living'. Whilst I understand and agree with the reasons given in the article why most of us seem to have lost many basic life skills, I cannot quite fathom how we let the situation degenerate to such an extent.

Surely basic life skills are more than important, they are in fact very important. Why? Well there are many reasons why one should become reasonably proficient at acquiring them and do so at an early age as is possible. Essentially it boils down to one's need to be resourceful, especially so when our modern-day 'crutches' either fail or are otherwise not available and we have to improvise—or just generally (as one can do things much more quickly and efficiently after having acquired them). Secondly, the need to acquire basic skills at an early age is important for learning more advanced skills acquired later on in life, as these build on earlier learning (even when the new skills are quite different from the older ones). The fact is that learning new skills as an adult is considerably easier if one already has the basics fully conquered. For me, this truism is borne out of experience.

Years ago, I came up with the quip: 'Question: can one become a good practical engineer if one cannot sew one's buttons back on?' Answer: probably not!'. It arose after seeing how impractical and inept some qualified engineers were at doing certain normal day-to-day manual tasks that one would have expected them to already know how to do (as well as have an intrinsic feeling for doing it well). For example, I've seen too many who've little or no feeling for tightening up a screw or nut to the right tension without either stripping the thread or having it too loose. As adults, they had not yet developed a feeling for say the strength of everyday materials or how to work them (clearly this puts them at a disadvantage to those who already have (assuming all else being equal that is). The question is why, as for the most part, they were bright people.

When I delved into the matter a little deeper I often found that as kids they had done very little exploration of the mechanical world around them, they had not done things such as building Meccano models, or pulling the lawnmower engine apart, or attempt to fix broken clocks, etc. Seeing how and why things break is an essential skill to learn at a very early age, especially so for engineers, as it fine tunes one's understanding about how things work. As well, one also develops a practical feeling for the strength of various materials and other relevant properties that are not easily learned by simple observation or from just reading textbooks.

It's my experience that really good techies are almost invariably good at most of these simple skills and that they acquired the essence of them at a very young age. It seems manual dexterity and concomitant mental agility (one's overall perception of what needed to achieve the task successfully) continually improved throughout their lives—skills they learned whilst young transferred later on to a newer understanding of how to tackle work that is much more complex. (In his book 'Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman', physicist Richard Feynman beautifully illustrates how skills learned early on are useful in later life. Feynman was not only a theoretical physicist and Nobel Prize winner of the first order but also he was extremely adept with mechanical things—skills he'd well honed as a kid (for instance, his exploits at safecracking are well known, so also is his analysis of why Challenger's rocket seals failed).

The general loss of craft, trades and various skills in fixing things has had a large negative impact on the population as a whole. It has meant that essentially the workforce has become deskilled in many areas (and consequently so has the whole population). Combine this with the fact that nowadays corporations are making much more use of proprietary (and increasingly secret) technologies and we have the makings of a large social problem. For starters, there is 'new' unemployment amongst once-skilled workers, and given the fact that many workers, especially males, often are much happier when working or creating things with their hands and who now have been deprived from making their living in this way, has meant considerable distress for many of them.

Whilst this may seem contradictory (given what I've already said), it, nevertheless, is all the more reason that we must re-evaluate and upgrade the importance of developing life skills at a very early age (as today workers need to be both nimble and flexible and to do so they need to acquire such capabilities very early on in their lives).

This brings me full circle, as a kid my mother taught me to sew on buttons and do basic repairs to clothes (which I did even though I didn’t much care for it). She strongly insisted that boys also needed to know these skills (and I suspect it was also to save her some work). If I had not learned those skills when very young then the army would have insisted I do so under its instruction not to mention learning all those other irksome dress-code-related tasks upon which armies insist in drilling into poor unfortunate recruits such as ironing, shining boots, putting creases in pants in exactly the right places, etc., etc. (As part of ones larger kit was little repair kit that contained some cloth patches, needles and spare buttons, and we were drilled in the use thereof.)

My mother also taught me the basics of knitting, as I was forever getting holes in my sweaters and she expected me to fix them (which I did pretty well because when completed my fixes blended in and weren't very obvious). The important point here is that it doesn't take much skill just to do a reasonable repair. I never got past knitting squares and scarfs but even that meant that I'd acquired sufficient skills to do a decent repair job. Moreover, it's not essential that one has to like leaning such skills nor that of actually doing them. As a male, knitting certainly wasn’t my scene but I'm now glad that I've learned the basics (as it's actually turned out to be quite a useful skill).

What my mother didn't teach me was how to use a sewing machine. Nevertheless, I learned the basics anyway on her machine much to her chagrin. It was not long before I was forbidden to use it, as I used it to stitch together cardboard and other strange materials for various projects and models I was working on. (Incidentally, it didn't stop me using it in secret but she had a sixth sense and she always knew and caught me out after me having used it—it seems I could never reset the tension knob exactly to her 'default' settings!) ;-)

Was learning the basics of using a sewing machine a useful skill for a nine/ten year old boy to acquire? In the end it certainly was, as I later learned the hard way, which was by that time the next generation of women had arrived they had become sufficiently emancipated to have essentially given up sewing machines altogether; so whenever I asked women in my life to repair my clothes they simply told me to go take a running jump. 'Do it yourself or get new ones' was the new mantra, so I had no choice but to comply.

Whilst I can say that using a sewing machine is a task that I certainly don't relish, it nonetheless remains a fact that nowadays it's dead easy for me to do simple repairs to torn clothes, or to use the button-hole attachment to replace or renew buttonholes, or for me to take up jeans by a few inches.