Self-esteem or self-respect?
Sunday, 17th December 2006
Third Sunday of Advent

Dear friends,

At present I seem to be fighting a new kind of technological war. In my carport at the moment my old Hi-Ace van is sitting with the engine half out of it waiting for me to fit a band new engine I was able to pick up on e-bay for $1,750 including $100 freight to have it shipped up to the Blue Mountains from North Geelong. I've never replaced an entire engine before and it's a challenge I'm looking forward to over the next week or so. Apart from rebuilding the existing engine, which is old anyway, this turned out to be the cheapest option when I found out the old engine had blown a hole in one of the pistons.

Yesterday though I spent a large part of the day trying to resurrect, for the second time, my old iMac computer. The power supply board is blown but these circuits are so complex these days, and the components that cause them to blow are so small, that there is actually no brute evidence — like a blown piston and smoke and oil billowing everywhere — to be able to easily tell which component has malfunctioned. It is actually cheaper to replace an entire complex circuit board than to spend days hunting around trying to find which particular component has blown. In this case I am sure it is a capacitor or small transistor or integrated circuit worth less than a few dollars but finding precisely which component of the thousands is a nightmare. There was a guy on the internet up until a few months ago who was able to provide the circuit diagrams and manufacturers handbooks but he has since been put out of business by Apple's lawyers.

	My iMac in a couple of hundred bits

To ask Apple to repair their computer incurs a fee of three or four hundred dollars — far more than the $53 which one of these computers sold for on e-bay last night. (Apple simply replace the power supply board because it is too expensive, even for them, to repair the boards at component level.) I learned a lot yesterday though, through the internet, of how these power supplies work. They are a far cry from the power supplies I learned to construct and service thirty years ago. The engineering and thinking that has gone into making these machines is simply brilliant and I can well understand why we use this sophisticated engineering today even though, when individual components do fail, as they do, it leads to so much redundancy. In the overall scheme of things the efficiency of these machines far outweighs the cost of disposal if we leave out the bigger ecological considerations. There are questions of ethics and sustainability that are raised by all of this — just look at the landfill dumps being created around the world for all sorts of household appliciances that are trashed because some $2 component has malfunctioned and it is too expensive to find which particular $2 component has failed.

I'm in the process of bidding on another computer on e-bay which hopefully I can pick up even cheaper than the $53 one went for last night. That should enable me to get a little more life out of my existing machine. (I still use it for a few programs that are not available on a pc and, besides, I still need to access my archives which extend back to 1986 from time to time for a particular article or image.)

Working on this sort of stuff does cause me to reflect on those questions of social ethics and sustainability as to how we use the human and material resources of our fragile planet. Compared to many in Western society I think I have a relatively small "ecological footprint" I leave on our planet. This has occurred, I must admit, more through circumstances rather than altruistic effort on my part. I am always conscious though that even then it is gargantuan compared to the ecological footprint that the vast majority of people on our planet are able to leave. Will there be some kind of global or cosmological accountability for all of this one day?

For further reflection today on something completely different, here's something I've been thinking about based on Hugh Mackay's commentary in the Sydney Morning Herald yesterday.

Have a great day wherever you happen to be ... in life, and in our world.

Self-esteem or self-respect? Hugh Mackay's opinion piece in this weekend's Sydney Morning Herald has caused Tom Scott to re-think one of the homilies he's been preaching for a long, long time. What value should we promote more: self-esteem or self-respect? [more]

Brian Coyne
Editor and Publisher
Catholica Australia