Listening to AH #24 and the spot on recycling brought to mind a recent trip to Leeds (uk) to collect a power supply I had won on ebay.Talking to the guy about the item brought the reply " I picked up a whole bunch of stuff from a TV repair shop that was closing, Nobody fixes things anymore" (only his language was a little more colourful. Turns out that was his occupation until a few years before, now he just goes around buying and selling "Stuff". Buys cheap, repairs and sells on at car boot sales.Test equipment etc goes to Ebay.Makes a living....just.Biggest gripe? spare parts.And its not only consumer goods, I've been a maintenance engineer for nearly forty years, as an apprentice you were expected to fix things and the art of "bodging" was a must have skill.You not only had to know how something worked you also had to be able to fault find and fix it WITH WHAT YOU HAD AT HAND.Now it's mainly swap out boards and send them for repair, most times we do not even have schematics of the boards just block diagrams.Its just as bad on the mechanical side things are thrown away because they are to expensive to repair.One of they most often heard phrases in the workshop is ' If we only had a lathe...' as yet another shaft with a damaged bearing diameter is binned.It gets VERY frustrating.