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Science

Video: Cuba's repair-first culture is an extreme, but remarkable, example of sustainability

The unintended consequences of being cut off from the world.

cuba, right to repair, high jeffreys

A woman stands by a vintage car in Cuba.

The growing worldwide “right to repair” movement seeks to make it easier for consumers to fix their products by pressuring manufacturers to share repair information, provide diagnostic tools and supply service parts.

The movement believes that by creating a repair-friendly culture, we’ll be on a path to greater sustainability in a world of finite resources and a changing climate.

Hugh Jeffreys, a right-to-repair advocate and YouTuber with over 849,000 subscribers, took a trip to Cuba to see first-hand how the country’s people have created a culture of repair out of necessity that may provide a lesson for the rest of the world.

Unfortunately for Cuba’s population, they’ve been forced to develop this repair-oriented culture due to 7 decades of communist oppression and a 61-year U.S. trade embargo. An unintended consequence of this political climate has turned Cuba into one of the world's most "repair-friendly countries.” Cubans repair their watches, cell phones, cars and television sets instead of throwing them out like in most counties.

"What is it like in a country with no other option than repair?” Jeffreys asks in a video that shows a country where most cars are from the ‘50s and people still watch television on old Soviet sets from the ‘70s.

Cuba’s political climate has put its people in the unenviable position of improvising and making the best use of what they have. But their ability to be resourceful and repair things instead of having the knee-jerk reaction to throw them out shows how far a repair-first mindset can go when you don’t have the luxury of being wasteful.

it makes one wonder: What would the environmental impact be if everyone in America first considered repairing their damaged goods instead of throwing them out?


Humor

Woman shares wedding album her mom made that’s making people crack up

The photos were beautiful, but there was something hilariously wrong with the captions.

Woman's wedding gift from her mom is making people laugh.

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One mother of the bride decided to take her daughter's beautiful wedding photos and create a special personalized photo album. But upon further inspection of the gift, the bride noticed that something was amiss. Niki Hunt, told Good Morning America that when her mom, Sherry Noblett, gave her the wedding album at brunch, she admitted she may have messed up.

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True

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This confusion on the European continent has played out in countless ways.

Swedish people who move to the United States often complain of being introduced as Swiss. The New York Stock Exchange has fallen victim to the confusion, and a French hockey team once greeted their Swiss opponents, SC Bern, by playing the Swedish National Anthem and raising the Swedish flag.

Skämtar du med mig? (“Are you kidding me?” in Swedish)

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An offhand suggestion from her boyfriend of two years coupled with her own lifelong love of comic strips like "Calvin and Hobbes" and "Get Fuzzy" gave 22-year-old Catana Chetwynd the push she needed to start drawing an illustrated series about long-term relationships.

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