If you’ve followed Louis Rossmann at all, this is what he’s been up to the last few years. It’s really cool to know that his right to repair focus has continued into these kinds of efforts. I hope I can swing down to Austin sometime in the near future to see this.
I've said for a while now that if I enough money to do something like it, I'd love to buy up the RadioShack name and re-open the business as effectively a bunch of local DIY repair shops like this. Work benches with tool rentals, test equipment rentals, digital microscopes etc, locker rentals and of course component sales (because yeah you can get resistors cheaper and in 1000 counts on Amazon, but being able to walk 20 feet to the counter and get the one you need right now and get back to what you're doing is valuable. Look into hiring some local old salts in the area that are retired and looking for some odd work from time to time and make sure you give them their own bench to work on their hobbies right there in the store / tutor the next gen.
There are a few community group types that do work in these areas. Worth seeing if any are based around where you live:
- Repair Cafes: People bring equipment (not just tech) in for repair, and work with the person repairing it. This gets the equipment repaired and teaches repair skills
- Tool libraries: borrow tools as you would borrow books from a normal library.
- Hackerspaces/makerspaces: if you are willing to repair yourself, but don't know how, hackerspaces might have people willing to give you pointers along that journey so you aren't just googling by yourself.
A repair shop like this makes a ton of sense - but could they also expect to help with the diagnosis? Do repairable problems generally appear obvious under inspection?
We used to have TechShop, but after the bankruptcy and the disclosures that the the concept inherently lost money, the maker shop scene pretty much died.
It’s easy when it’s a Miller and everyone has schematics lol. Mine is an AHP. Someone has some testing points but they don’t want to share them, and AHP won’t even talk to you if you can’t find your receipt.
Their web site describes this as a Real Soon Now thing:
"We eventually plan to have these available every day, once Louis’ staff has completed their full move to Texas. For the time being, check back this page regularly for availability, as the schedule is subject to change!"
No useful stuff like an equipment list, policies, current wait times, stuff you'd need to know to use the place. Do they sell parts, for example? What's their parts stock?
How useful this is tends to depend on little stuff. At TechShop, they had a hot-air rework station. Those need a set of nozzles which fit various part shapes. I had to get my own set of nozzles. At TechShop, to do electronics work you needed your own set of all the small hand tools.
If you're going to repair surface mount electronics, you need to practice first. There are surface mount practice kits, where you solder parts on boards that don't do anything. I did three or four of those before attempting a real board.
None of this stuff is inherently difficult, and there are YouTube videos for technique. But it takes training and practice.
> Hackerspaces are open places for the creative use of technology. They not only provide tools such as 3D printers and electronics labs but also offer a space where hackers, makers, and tinkerers can meet to exchange ideas and work on projects together. Over fifty Hackerspaces will join in and open their doors nationwide and in Switzerland and Luxembourg. The spaces and projects are as diverse as the interests of the CCC activists who meet and get involved in them.
What is your bar for someone being a fascist? For me a fascist is someone who propagates fascist ideology and/or subscribes to a fascist view of the world. Whether they call themselves fascist is irrelevant (famously the word "Nazi" is short for their self-labeling of the "nationalsozialistische" party although there was no socialism involved with the fascism of the nazis).
Now do your research on that guy and his patron Peter Thiel there are enough public statements to make a judgment. Or do you think actual fascists do not exist?
The comintern defined fascism precisely as “the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital”
Regardless of how you cherrypick facts, history as a whole is clear.
National-socialists were socialists. They celebrated the 1st of March worker's day together with other socialists, signed war pacts together with other socialist countries to "free non-socialist societies" and in general did about the same as any other socialist dictatorship, including mass murder/deportation of million humans as something normal.
Then comes the obvious: the founder of socialist ideology called fascism was for several years a die-hard socialist. In fact, was the chief-editor for socialist "news" during several years in a row. Similar to Stalin's career path with Pravda.
A few years down the road in power, socialists understand that socialism doesn't work and change. Same for the soviets, same for the cubans, same for the chinese, same for just about any socialist regime. They were all socialist, they opressed people just like all other socialist ideologies. Neosocialists today still try to disguise previous socialists regimes as "it wasn't real socialism".
It was socialism kind sir. We had enough of it here in Europe.
You are pretending that socialists in power don't mass murder/jail other socialists in each regime. It is the norm for socialist regimes to do so, not an exception.
Can you tell the difference between beer and root beer?
Then perhaps you can tell the difference between socialism and national socialism. Not the least of which is the alliance with fascist Italy. And please don't tell me fascism is socialism in some oblique way.
There is no ground left to make the arguments you are advancing, which ultimately boil down to "the word was in the name". By that measure we really need to start hating on democracy, because everyone known what a disaster North Korea is, and they are a democracy. After all: it's in the name they chose for themselves - the people's democratic republic of korea.
Sorry, but tell this to someone who did not grow up as the grandson of an actual nazi, gew up in Austria and lives in Germany. We know our own history well.
There was no socialism during the nazi era. The people who really profited during that era were (as is a typical trait of facism) certain industrial capitalists that were aligned with the party. Look up a definition of socialism and tick the boxes, then do the same with fascism. Good luck.
Who cares if you are the grandson of a national socialist.
I'm the son of parents who survived socialist invasions. I'm the guy who married to a woman that lived herself under marxist socialist dictatorship, whose mother lived under national socialist dictatorship.
Refrain from babbering your personal feelings and abstract thoughts as if they were historical facts. There is NOTHING of abstract with socialism when it comes to implementation. Either nationalistic or international socialism ends up with the same bloody/corrupt result in the end.
