Crap Dishwashers

 When I was a kid, my family had the same dishwasher machine for many, many years. The components just kept working. Now, since my wife and I have lived at our current house, we've had three in under 10 years. The drain pump just failed on the current one, too. I think the motor windings burnt out. It was the top-end dishwasher at home depot when we bought it, well the top end one with no nonsense electronic/computerized features. I ordered a new drain pump a couple of days ago. The new pump is about $120 delivered. People generally throw appliances away because those parts cost a significant fraction of the cost of a new machine, especially if they pay a handyman or similar person to install it.

30 years ago, companies made parts that last. Now they make parts that purposely don't last. Eventually even appliance makers will try to charge rent to operate their shitty appliances, just like the god awful auto industry.

Youtube History Professor

This guy is a Canadian-Chinese history professor who's a gen Xer. It's interesting how many observer/commentator people who are as neutral as can be come up with similar conclusions. Here's a video about elite overproduction in the bronze age collapse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwfB-vXXKWU

That's a theory from the historian Peter Turchin. I think that theory explains the current times very well. The US is suffering from it, while places like the UK are choking on it and turning entirely dysfunctional.

Things that Don't Make Sense

I think almost everybody follows a "life script". It's necessary to do that because young people don't have any practical experience. In our time, the script provides a sequence of steps to do what's needed to survive by plugging into the economic system. For example, when I was in high school in the 80s, it was obvious "tech" and "computer stuff" was going to be big, so there were a sequence of broad brush stroke steps laid out to do that.

The generic "professional person" life script for me was go to college, then additional details for specific fields are added. For a tech person back then it was get a math, science, or electrical engineering or computer science degree, then get a job. Then there's a list of accouterments and items a job person "purchases", typically meaning they get a loan, then make payments on things like a house, or a car. 

Most individuals wandering down their life script path are only dimly aware of the bigger picture of thousands of people doing very similar things and nobody can really see or predict the aggregate consequences. The outcome of those scripts is only obvious when they are failing.

In the mid 1800s in the US, for example, a "techie" of the day might have worked on a railroad as an engineer of some kind, either designing and building bridges, switch yards, or whatever. They and their peers poured their life into that system, but by the 1870s no more tracks or bridges or switch yards were really needed. So that life script went stale.

The neoliberal system and its main industry: tech, have the same problem today. The life script for tech dude went stale about 10 years ago IMO. That's about when the tech work was fully systematized and became an institutional rote exercise.

One of the really obvious constraints on tech is electric power consumption. Currently, data centers suck up about 4-5% of electrical power in the US! That's absurd. People are competing with shitty tech applications to run their refrigerator and A/C. I think that's a hard limit on tech expansion. About 40% of that data center power budget goes to cooling the equipment, by the way.

When you zoom out and look at the overall system lots of elements of it are obviously nonsensical. The push to outsource jobs, then manufacturing of everything was nonsensical and self-defeating the whole time. Neoliberal economies are currently organized for the benefit of a small fraction of the population. By reducing the mass of people to poverty, they also eliminated their customers. To compensate for that, they look for customers overseas where they shipped manufacturing. It's absurd.

A parallel absurdity is the workers in such companies "investing" in a 401(k) to monetize the executive compensation (in stock) of the corporations shipping jobs overseas. As an individual it seems to make sense to "win by cheating" basically, but in aggregate it's absurd nonsense.

The segments of the economy where prices outpace inflation significantly don't make sense. College and university education, home prices in many cities, passenger car and light truck prices, Healthcare, Veterinary care--all nonsense. Government is usually nonsensical, but giant growing bureaucracy and nanny state regulation is absurd. Pretending EV battery disposal is free and green is nonsense.

An individual in the western countries can look at their current system and see what's crazy/absurd and invent a new approach to life that actually harmonizes with the natural order of things, or at least do something that's closer to common sense. One example of that is provided by the automotive industry. New cars are too expensive. Many older cars are significantly cheaper and more reliable than new cars. It seems pretty obvious that older cars will be on the road indefinitely and will be repaired indefinitely. Car manufacturers will not support them, though, so a parallel universe industry of replacement parts will spring up in a much larger way.

Zeno's Tech Paradox

I bought a new bicycle recently--a Cervelo Soloist. It's got some "aero" features. I bought it for a couple of practical reasons, but mainly I was curious if it's really any better than a bike from 2008--another Cervelo that was the winning bike in Paris-Roubaix and many other races. I bought the old bike used on e-bay for cheap. I put thousands of miles on it since. It was a real bargain. The new bike was pretty expensive.

The high-end road bicycle industry makes lots of claims they backup with "science", or really proxies in the bike media (there is such a thing) make many such claims about new bicycles.

Am I any faster? No. It's identical to my older bike. If there's some systematic improvement in power or speed, it's minute. I knew that would be the case, but it's interesting to see the numbers. I use the Strava service. It compiles a database of ride segments for all the participants. I can see how I compare against others and against my previous performances.

One of the amazing things about doing a sport like cycling is that I can go out and go absolutely ape-shit full gas over a course of almost any length, and physics and biology conspire to limit my speed to a very narrow range. I used to do a local low key time trial (an individual race against the clock). I trained very hard over the winter one year, so I thought I'd be much faster when the TT season started, but my first outing was about 1 second different than the prior year over a 20 minute ride. (1 second faster out of 1200)

A bike can be "faster" through: reduced rolling resistance, better mechanical efficiency, improved aerodynamics, better fit for more optimal power transfer, and maybe some other factors. The physics says aerodynamics is the most important factor for speed, but the bike's contribution to aerodynamic drag is probably a smallish fraction of the overall system's drag, including the rider. In my case, I'm 6' and over 200 pounds. When I get into my best aero position, I'm still the most significant contributor to drag, probably by far. So if the bike really is say 5% more efficient than the old one, it might only amount to a 0.1% overall improvement. (I don't really know the numbers.) A rider, like a pro Tour de France rider might see a more significant improvement from an aero bike, because they're more aero than a fat ass old guy like me.

When I look at the same strava segments I rode on my old bike and on my new bike, the power outputs required to go a certain speed (using the same power meter on both) are the same... so my times over the same segments are the same. I'd have to write my own software to really compare in detail, but that'd be a waste of my time.

Anyway, is the bike better in any way? Yes. The frame geometry is slightly more "relaxed" and it has a longer wheelbase so it's much easier to ride, especially at high speed. My old bike gets twitchy on downhills where the speed gets into the 35+ mph range. That's scary and induces some stress. I don't want to be stressed when I'm out trying to enjoy a ride.

I think lots of tech "peaked" in the early 2000s. Bikes included. Carbon fiber allowed bike manufacturers to produce nearly optimal frame designs... so there's not much left to improve on. I think all tech suffers from a zeno's paradox like effect. It never achieves perfection.

Cantillon Effect + Elite Overproduction + Tech Saturation

 I was surprised to learn that an Irish/French economist who lived in the 1600s to 1734 named Richard Cantillon observed that fiat money is a wealth transfer machine. This aspect of such monetary systems is named the "Cantillon Effect". In a nutshell, the people who receive such money first benefit most. Over the years, I heard explanations for this phenomenon, but wasn't aware a description of it was formulated in the 18th century.

This aspect of the current financial system is probably its biggest problem. Once a person learns they're playing a rigged game, they stop playing. Inflation, a necessary side effect of fiat money, eventually and inevitably leads to lower productivity. If you didn't get a 10-15% raise over the past couple of years you effectively got a pay cut because the purchasing power of the dollar is tanking so rapidly. Why work harder for something that's worth less and less every year?

This economic system is basically about managers and owners of corporations scamming people into working to add value to financial products, that is, pieces of paper. One great example of that is a "leveraged buyout" of some corporation. The owners of a corporation cash out, and transfer ownership to some new group. The cash for the purchase is created from a loan, then the workers at the company labor to pay it off. Their share of the production is naturally smaller than under the prior ownership because they're paying interest and other fees basically to just transfer a pile of paper representing the ownership of their collective labors to some new party.

Another big problem is "elite overproduction" which is a phenomenon noted by historian Peter Turchin. He realized it's a periodic problem. Sometimes the economic and political system of the day can't handle more "elites". It produces way too many lawyers, PhDs, MBAs, etc... It's just a good sign of underlying systemic stagnation and is a sign the "life scripts" of an era are out of sync with reality. There are lots of youtube videos made by people with an expensive, useless degree. When they can't get an academic job with their PhD in some esoterica, they imagine they'll get a high paying job in "tech" with zero experience or relevant expertise even though the tech industry is mass laying people off now.

IMO, elite overproduction is probably a side effect of overpopulation and real economic stagnation. There are inherent limits to the economic system and no amount of financial activity or money printing can propel indefinite useful "growth" of the economy so every economic system is growing in proportion to the population.

The tech industry grew for years. It seemingly fulfilled a 500+ year old myth of "the new Atlantis". Concepts like "the singularity" were promoted as an inevitable outcome of tech stuff and "science". The reality is tech is pretty stagnant and in fact, lots of tech stuff today is significantly shittier and less reliable than things produced in the early 2000s.

I think the "next big thing" will actually be doing less and wanting less stuff, making products that a are smaller, simpler, cheaper and more reliable, long lasting and easy to maintain. People will realize the system is a giant parasite and all their stuff is endlessly hungry for their time and energy.

Tech is Getting Railroaded

For a few years at least, I saw parallels between the tech industry and the railroads in the USA. Mainly tech is too big and its markets are fully saturated. The same thing happened in the US rail industry even before cars and trucks were a significant competitor. Rail lines were overbuilt even before 1893. The rail industry underwent a period of consolidation then decline. The number of people employed by railroads was once in the millions, now it's about 83,000.

Lots of people imagine that the tech industry is laying people off because of "AI". I think in a way that's true. The "AI" portion of the tech sector is currently absorbing lots of investor cash and turning it into hardware and data centers so there's not as much investor money for other schemes. 

Many of the new areas of tech are speculative and implausible sci-fi stories and are really just schemes to sell stock. Even worse, many new areas in tech are part of the gross technocratic surveillance corporate/government hybrid monstrosity.

Anyway, I'm currently on my final tech job. I'm not sure how much longer it will last. I'm looking forward to moving onto the next thing, whatever it might be.