How Can China Do It?

I recently bought a electric wheelbarrow kit which consisted of a hub motor with tire and inner tube installed, motor controller, and some human interface gizmos. The whole thing was about $250 delivered.  On Alibaba there are numerous similar devices for roughly the same price. If you want to make some PEV of basically any configuration you could dream up, you can buy some pre-fab motors, differentials, etc... It's hard to imagine how each component could be machined, assembled, tested, packaged and shipped for $250.

It took an afternoon to install on a wheelbarrow. I did some minor metal fabrication and welding. The thing works reasonably well so far. It's far from perfect, but that's fine, in fact, for my needs "good enough" is perfect. I could build three or four versions of it in a couple of months if I really wanted to.

The low cost of useful stuff from China is perplexing from a US citizen point of view. I wonder "how can China do it?" Although I think the reality of the scenario is "How long will the US system last in its current form?" Probably not long.

Chinese companies seem to have no overhead costs, or minimal overhead costs, and that must ripple through their whole economy. I think their economy must be like the US economy of a prior era where there was just less parasitic costs.

There's enormous costs associated with parasitism in the US economy. The entire insurance industry is a parasitic cost as is the financial system in general and the corporate system is really just an extension of the financial system.

I have relatives and friends who went out of the US to get medical or dental care. The costs are a tiny fraction of equivalent procedures in the US. In the US you often can't even get a quote to do various medical procedures because the cost is totally opaque. If you go to Latin America, though, you can get various tests and procedures at a a la carte rate, and can get a quote in advance, just like you would if you took a dog to the vet's office.

Within the US, there are high cost jurisdictions, like California, or Illinois or New York. Chicago recently imposed a 15% tax on "cloud services", for example. That's a burden for the user of such services, plus the operators of those services. A user in Chicago needs to be charged a special rate and Chicago's taxing authority needs a special payment system. How long will that last? You'd have to be a retard to live in that city and state.

Anyway, I think the days of the "overhead" heavy economies like the US's current model are numbered. The EU countries are toast; they're basically an all overhead economy. It's why lefty oriented people cream their jeans about Europe. It's a fantasy land for a would be bureaucrat.

The Amish approach to reducing overhead and regulatory burden seems to be to mostly ignore it. That generally works for them, however, the state often intrudes in their affairs and wrecks their businesses from time to time.

Critter Food Cost!

 For the past few years, I've been splurging on food for birds, which turns into food for squirrels, deer, etc... I go through literal hundreds of pounds of the stuff per month in the summer months. In the winter it's not nearly as much since so many birds migrate away. Just this week, shrinkflation hit hard. The prices have been going up and up for years, especially since COVID insanity hit, but this week the cost of this stuff jumped significantly. Maybe 20% altogether as a combination of increased prices and decreased package size. The packages went from 50 pounds to 40 pounds.

I'll keep feeding the birds since I have a very low cost of living and make a good income, but still, it's pretty wild how the costs seem to keep climbing with no end in sight, but wages are stagnant. I've been buying the same mix of groceries for several years now, going back into the very early 2000s. Back then my shopping trips were maybe $35. Now, it's close to $100 for not a whole lot of stuff. A tiny bag of coffee, now is over $10.

I'm not sure how long out of control food inflation can continue in the US.

Man Types

The primitive jobs are activities that arise from basic human needs: water, food, clothing, shelter. These needs are associated with just a few categories of activities: hunting and fishing, gathering and farming, making things, and knowing things. 

The idea from the previous post was I could map the present day "man types" to the primitive jobs. I think, though, it's probably more useful to decompose the primitive jobs to a collection of skills. Then the current day man types map to some collection of skills. The combinations of the skills is the basis of the player character "classes" of D&D as well.

I think the "collection of skills" concept also shows how there are underlying physical or genetic attributes involved in shaping the man types. For example in real life, the "strength" skill, so called gross motor control, doesn't mix well with fine motor control skills or manual dexterity and balance skills. Those body systems are different. The type of nervous system activity associated with weightlifting, or recruiting large volumes of muscle is different than fine motor control associated with something like painting, or picking a lock, or balancing on a narrow beam. 

If you picture a tightrope walker, for example, it's not a dude with bodybuilder or offensive lineman physique. I think there's two reasons--to be elite in a skill excludes other skills since there's not enough hours in a day. There's probably genetic variations in the underlying physical systems that lead to the choice to train one thing or another.

For example, within the category of "aerobic athletes", there's often stark subdivision among disciplines like cycling, running, or swimming, then there's strong affinity among seemingly unrelated disciplines, like cross country skiing and cycling. Many athletes, even rando amateurs, strongly favor one or two of those disciplines over the others. Why? There's probably a nexus of skills associated with each one that meshes up with an individual's genetic gifts.

Anyway, it seems like it would actually be kind of useful to align the skills with "real life" man types.

Classes of Men

When I was a senior in high school back in the late 80's, one of my friends and I were filling up my car at the local gas station and we observed a man with a hunter green Ford Ranger filling up his truck. He was a solid representative of a type that's common in my county. I don't have any real memory of that incident from almost 40 years ago. Instead, the image I can conjure of that scene is of an archetypal character. Skinny, average build and height, work boots, jeans, flannel shirt, work jacket, trucker cap, mustache probably in his mid to late 40's.

We joked about him for a while after we drove off because a guy who drove a Ford Ranger back then was a specific type--no nonsense working man. The guy at the gas station was essentially an embodiment of a Ranger. Those 1980's through early 2000's Rangers are shockingly basic compared to any new car or truck today. They often had crank windows, a manual transmission, maybe no A/C. You bought one if you needed a truck for specific chores, but didn't have sufficient money, or the desire to go into debt on an F-150.

Mulling over that memory brings to mind the concept of "classes" from Dungeons and Dragons, or Biology. The D&D concept is a player character is a profession. There's even a ranger class modeled on the Aragorn character from The Lord of The Rings. So the character wakes up in the morning as a Ranger and is one all day long. In fact, there's penalties for deviating from type in the form of loss of experience points.

Is real life like that? I'd say not today. In fact, our system is setup so most people are artificially maintained in an undifferentiated state for decades and are dogged by the question of "what am I?" Often that leads to the "mid-life crisis" scenario.

I don't think the man-type maps well to a profession in most cases. There are some D&D class-like professions today, like a farmer, cop, fireman, where the man is his profession 24/7. However, I think most "professional jobs" like engineer, or lawyer or even a doctor really don't map directly to the man-type. The "professional" is just a "worker"--a cog in the pyramid machine.

I think that's one of the problems of life, since the professional types are indistinct and separate from a person's true calling, they are basically a distraction and a thing to be endured, as is school. It's like being in a prison for 40 years. It's a byproduct of the pyramid system. Anyway, I'll get back to that in a future post.

The true "man-type" is obscured by that problem. I think the vast majority of people only arrive at their "man-type" when they're fully established. For many men, that doesn't really happen until the age of 40 years. It's effectively arrived at via a sorting process, so while a 14 year old might "want to be" a thing as an adult, they don't really know all that entails, and probably only get there through trial and error. A 14 year old boy, in most cases, is just in a broad category, then over decades might end up in a more D&D class-like scenario.

Most of the males in my school days fell into two broad categories; basically urban people (or professional class parent families) and country people (working class, or farming families). 

There were only a handful of boys in my school that were conscious of the type they wanted to be and emulated it. One kid I knew named Eugene was a farmer's son and clearly wanted to be a farmer so he acted like a farmer as a kid. There were a handful of "rich kids" who were also a specific type at a young age. 

Most, though, like me and social circle, were only a type in potentia. Then we went through a process of differentiation by trial and error over subsequent decades. This dividing-in-categories process would winnow down the whole population of men into several classes. By the time a man is in his 40's or 50's, his type is reflected in his neighborhood and home and stuff he owns. I think many, probably most, remain an indistinct type, though.

My neighborhood is a freakish example of sorting into types, and in our case, types-by-location. The people who live here are like animals with specific habitat requirements that ended up in an ideal ecological niche. For example, one of my neighbors was a pro mountain biker in the 1990s. Back then I was road racing bicycles and mulling over the concept of pursuing it "full time" or being a road-cycling bum. His job title is basically the same as mine. The list goes on.

What are "the classes" to begin with, that is, the real world equivalents of the D&D classes? I think the starting point would be the subset of primitive jobs, which derive from the needs of life back in the earliest human settlements, or tribal life thousands of years ago. I'll try to break that down in the next post.

Electric Wheelbarrow

I've been building a mountain bike trail on my property for the past few months but it's been kind of slow going because late fall/early winter is the "mud season" here in Northeast Ohio. I won't take my tractor out into the yard or woods this time of year unless the ground is hard frozen because it will turn the ground into a mud pit. Heavy machinery like a tractor does the work of dozens of people, so without it, everything is much slower.

For the trail project, I frequently need to carry heavy or bulky stuff into the woods. Just a few 12"x18" sandstone pavers that can be used to get over a muddy spot, for example, weigh over 100 pounds. Since some parts of the trail are about 1000 feet from the driveway, it's not convenient or practical to make several trips back and forth to move a pile of rocks or whatever. I used a wheelbarrow as an intermediate solution between carting everything out by hand or by tractor. When the ground is very muddy, though, even the wheelbarrow makes a mess because the tire is too narrow and high pressure.

I thought a low pressure ATV type wheel with a hub motor could make a wheelbarrow into a very versatile tool--basically a poor man's Sherp. (see the sherp) It seems many people had the same idea since there are numerous electric wheelbarrows and kits available. The kits consist of a built up hub-motor wheel, a motor controller, and some simple hand controls. It's easy to use large power tool batteries to supply energy to these devices.

The electric wheelbarrow is an interesting category of device and tech development for me because the "typical" approach for projects is to adapt the landscape to the needs of machines, which devolves to a generic solution that meets the needs of the corporate and financial system. For example, since a tractor or skidsteer is useful for so many applications, they are mass produced. To move one to a remote job site requires a road, though. "Building roads" means cutting down trees, leveling grades, and the like, which of course is the opposite thing I'm trying to do with a mountain bike path.

The system generates so much stuff though that an individual can DIY a specific solution to their specific problem from bits and pieces that the system casts off. The niche is too small for the corporate system to bother with, like the electric wheelbarrow.

This scenario is sort of paradoxical. The capable individual needs the system less and less and can exploit weird niches, which generally means "lower cost" environments.

 

Corporate Executives "Believe" The Bullshit Their Fellow Scammers Sling

Over the past several years, there have been a sequence of PR driven hype bubbles. The gist of the narrative is X is the next big thing that will replace everything else. It will be the most important thing in the world and will "disrupt" everything else.

Some of the hype is industry specific and mom and pop people don't really hear about it in detail. Other hype bubbles, like the AI bubble are hyped to the max and everyone is involved in the bullshit storm.

For example, the MRNA based "vaccines" like the COVID shots were supposed to be able to cure cancer, and blah blah. It was hyped to the max. People were forced to take it, or they might lose their job or whatever. Then it didn't really work that well. In short order, everyone knew it wasn't that great and the hype was all forgotten in less than a year.

EVs were the panacea fix for everything. There would be a battery powered motor in every machine, big or small. It would solve all the world's problems. blah blah blah. It didn't really work out like that obviously. Tesla became quite successful in its niche. Lots of other forms of EVs also grew. There's EV dirtbikes, unicycles, skateboards, and on and on. Rather than a "disruptive" thing that would wipe out all other types of transportation, it's a new category of consumer products.

AI is the prime example though. It's been hyped to the moon, but it's sort of already fizzling, even before some of the AI startups manage to milk the gullible public with IPOs.

The interesting thing about these hype bubbles is many of the supposed insider, in the know people go along with it. Ford, for example, went all in on EVs, but that flopped for them. Companies like Honda and Toyota could see EVs weren't really ready.

So why did the Ford executives get suckered by the very typical hype of EVs so they'd effectively panic and waste billions of dollars?

Criminal Probe into Fed Chair

Lately, I've been paying attention to gold and silver spot prices. In recent days they've been moving higher really quickly. There's an element of FOMO price chasing going on, but there's also legitimate concern about the USD. This morning, gold and silver prices lurched upward. I wondered why. Usually a big move like 5-6% is associated with some news. In this case it's apparently driven by Donald Trump's administration launching a "criminal probe" into the Fed Chairman Jerome Powell. The narrative is that Trump wants an uber dovish (low interest rate loving) Fed Chair so this is some type of political maneuver to oust Powell.

I think it's pretty obvious the USD is going to get heavily devalued over the next handful of years. That's one reason why the "AI bubble" probably won't pop. Instead working people are going to get crushed... all through the spectrum of poor, middle class, and upper middle class people. It'll get pretty ugly.

Gold and Silver are easy ways to get money out of the USD system, but they're also easy to heavily tax and control. It's also expensive to buy and sell precious metals. Gold is probably a reasonable insurance policy against US dollar devaluation, though. Other precious metals are wildly volatile because of their odd supply constraints and industrial uses, for example Platinum prices shoot up and drop like a rock from time to time. Platinum is probably harder to liquidate as well.

It's anyone's guess what crazy shit is going to happen... who, for example, would have guessed 10 years ago that the US would seriously consider annexing Greenland?

The USD is the Achilles's heel of the "US" empire.