Tech Work for 20+ Years

 I've had a "tech" job since about 1997. That's the year I jumped into full time software development from my first after college job in physics.

I generally enjoy some aspects of work in "tech", like solving problems and learning sometimes interesting and clever things. There are two things about it that I can't stand.

One is, tech is really a giant parasite, as depicted in "The Matrix" movies. That hollywood depiction is a fanciful over the top depiction of how it really functions. I write about this in probably 25% of the blog posts I do, so I won't belabor the point. All the tech stuff requires human time and energy to function and maintain. It's been the same story ever since the very beginning of "tech" when men settled in cities and sought to "free" themselves from the cycles of nature.

The other one is more of a complaint about tech work. It's gotten pretty standardized and formulaic over the years, and there's been a steady growth of overhead in doing any tech work. Now there's essentially "paperwork" (the electronic version) straight out of "Office Space" associated with doing any tech project, except at small companies, or when I do projects myself.

That phenomenon is pretty interesting.

In theory, corporate America is all about "efficiency", but in reality it's always wasting time, money, and people's lives especially on paperwork, or the electronic equivalent. One of the popular revision control systems (where software source code is stored) is "gitlab". It produces many Office Space style "TPS Reports". It's possible to use a minimalist set of the functions of a program like gitlab and avoid the electronic paperwork, but many corporations like to have all the paperwork done.

What's the net result of all that paperwork? It just takes much longer for anything to be finished. The idea is with all the extra paperwork, there's more "control" over what's in the source code repository... but that doesn't even happen. It's possible for the code to be a mess and dysfunctional and broken with all those TPS reports attached.

Why do people do that, then? If it doesn't really work, why do people put time and effort into it?

The short answer is people are docile sheep and just go along with trends and fads. Somebody sold gitlab, people bought it and regurgitate whatever the original sales pitch was.

Debt Mirage

 My 2008 Honda just "died". I could repair it, but there's no point anymore. Everything on it is rusted from winters and road salt. I did the total cost of ownership calculations on it a few months ago and it was pretty shocking. I spent an average of $300 per month since I bought it on gas, insurance, depreciation, etc... It's a "cheap" car too. I paid half the sticker price in cash, then financed the rest for two years, I think. I don't remember exactly since it was such a long time ago, but I haven't had a car payment since maybe 2010 or earlier.

Used car prices are quite high now. I planned to get a truck once the old car gave up the ghost, but a 10 year old truck with ~80k miles is about $15-20k depending on the model. Plus trucks take up a lot of space, and are expensive to operate. I also learned I don't really need one since I bought a farm truck a few years ago. I drive it so infrequently the tires get a flat spot and I need to recharge the battery prior to use. Almost anything I want to buy can be delivered for a modest fee, so there's no point in paying a premium for convenience of ownership.

Anyway, the tempting thing to do is get a car loan instead of paying in cash. It's kind of painful to take $20,000+ out of my savings account, because I know how long it takes to replace that money. Plus that $20k earns around $80 in interest per month in a FDIC insured bank account right now. Also with a car, unlike a productive asset, that $20k just starts burning up with each use of the car.

The loan gives a person the sensation that they still "have" $20,000 in the bank, even though there's typically fees and interest and over the life of the loan, they'll be out more like $25,000 or more. It makes them feel like they'd be able to cover an emergency more easily, etc... If the interest expense on the loan is $0, maybe it does make sense to keep the money in the bank instead, although, that's almost certainly an illusion because the interest will just be charged in the form of fees and markups... You really can't win with a car purchase. It's just a game of limiting losses.

Anyway, that's what I'm going to do now, just keep the expense as low as possible and pay in cash. I hardly drive anymore, now that I work remotely 100% of the time. I can't imagine getting a car loan for $50,000 or more like my peers do to get a Lexus, or a big fancy truck, or a Tesla, or a Bronco. It boggles my mind that so many people are willing to part with ~$1000 a month on car expenses. I don't even really know what the minimum is. Reliable sedans and small cars can be had for $10-15k. The monthly TCO is probably still roughly $200 due to insurance costs and gas and the like. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how cheap I can go and still have a decent reliable vehicle.

The US Federal Government is Retarded

Battery powered semi trucks are one of the dumber ideas being pushed by the clods in charge of the US. The federal government is pushing them heavily as are some state governments like California.

There are two killer problems with battery powered trucks now. The batteries weigh too much, so more trucks have to roll to carry the equivalent goods. They take a long time to recharge, so the duty cycle of the trucks is significantly worse than an equivalent diesel powered truck, which means more trucks are required to carry the same goods. All that just means more resources are required to move goods around. A related problem is the cost to charge the trucks is higher too, because heavy duty infrastructure is required to do that.

If the batteries improve significantly, battery trucks are feasible, but currently they aren't up to the task and there's no reason to believe they will be any time soon.

The feds want to regulate petroleum powered vehicles off the road, but there's no replacement. So what happens when the regulations threaten the basic function of the economy?

Escaping Natural Necessity through Enslaving Others

The previous post was about Cain/Abel, Prometheus/Epimetheus, and the Romulus/Remus characters in mythology. I think the most complete mythology on the topics covered by those characters is in the Prometheus/Epimetheus stories. The Cain/Abel and Romulus/Remus stories are more mangled and omit many key elements found in the Pro/Epimetheus stories.

The stories are about human use of technology and artifice to try to escape natural necessity. In each case, the attempt ends in mixed results or outright failure. For example, Prometheus is punished for giving fire to man, and Cain toils and obtains nothing from his labor. If you ever build anything, even some simple thing like a fence or a woodshed, you will get a taste of the same type of punishment. Your infrastructure eventually falls apart, maybe at an inopportune time, and requires constant repair and vigilance for critical things.

Technology initially looks like a means of escape from the toil and difficulty of life in the natural world, but it isn't.

Inevitably, some men attempted to repair this defect of technology and artifice by enslaving others to do the toil. The masters then imagined they were able to live the life of their "god" characters in myths, while those enslaved were reduced to life beneath that of animals. Of course that's not really what happened at all.

The "masters" are those enslaved to the system of slavery, whatever kind of slavery, be it physical oppression and control of human bodies, or scamming people into working for fake money. Today, the executives and managers of corporations are the people who make the paper corporate egregore function. They serve the corporation and the system itself.

"Technology" Demons; Cain and Prometheus

I was in Los Angeles for work (network tech stuff) last week. Los Angeles and the surrounding areas are a vast almost totally man made area. I've been through LAX before to make connecting flights overseas, but last week was the first time I was on the ground for several days. The vast scope of the artifice of LA is striking when you see it from the air, then see it up close from the ground. It's not hard to imagine that sprawling man-made structure as a disease or fungus. The whole experience got me thinking of the futility of technology from the days of Prometheus and Fire until now.

Even Bronze Age humans knew that cities and "technology" were at best a double edged sword. The basic problem with tech is it's not alive and outside the solar power cycles of earth, and therefore derives its energy from human labor.

That notion shows up in a handful of myths that are passed down to us today. Prometheus from Greek myths and Cain from the Cain and Abel story are certainly based on a nexus of the same archetypal characters and possibly related to the fallen "angels" in the book of Enoch. (Enoch was the Son of Cain) It seems likely to me that the Prometheus character and story is the original, and that the Cain and Romulus and Remus stories are knock-offs.

Many people are familiar with the Cain and Abel story from the Bible. Fewer are aware of Greek mythology because Jewish priests declared it "fiction" and insisted their myths are superlative historical fiction at worst or really are history.

Anyway, as a result of that propaganda, few people are aware Prometheus had a brother Epimetheus. The stories of Cain and Abel and Prometheus and Epimetheus are both about a change in human fortunes. Cain and Abel are linked with Adam and Eve, and that story of course includes the forbidden fruit concept, and the idea that women are somehow problematic to humanity. Many of the same themes pervade the Prometheus/Epimetheus stories. Epimetheus opens Pandora's box, for example, which is another original sin/problem with women story. That same theme is in the epic of Gilgamesh story, too--Enkidu enters the city after having sex with a temple prostitute.

Both of the stories also include a curse/ongoing punishment for the Cain and Prometheus characters. As far as I know, only the Cain and Abel story includes the fratricide angle that is central to the Cain and Abel story, and that's also present in the Romulus and Remus story as well. Enkidu also dies in the Epic of Gilgamesh story.

The Prometheus and Cain stories include the concepts of sacrifice. Cain and Abel's sacrifices are central to the story. Prometheus changes the terms of sacrifice to Zeus by tricking him. The Cain and Abel story is probably a mangled version of the Prometheus story because key elements of it are elided and the overall Cain/Abel sacrifice story makes no sense. The notion that Prometheus tricked Zeus with his sacrifice, and therefore Zeus was enraged is missing from the Cain and Abel story. The Jew Zeus doesn't like Cain's sacrifice for no apparent reason.

The characteristics of the brothers run through the both sets of stories. Prometheus is clever, defied the gods and was punished. Epimetheus was foolish. Abel pleases the gods and is perhaps "simple" and is murdered by his brother.

Prometheus is literally "cast out" of Olympus/Greek heaven and is a Titan rather than one of the Olympian gods. Cain is born from cast out parents and is marked for killing his brother and ultimately founds a city. The same elements of fratricide and founding a city is present in the Romulus and Remus story.

The theme I've interpolated from these stories is the characters of Cain and Prometheus attempt to escape natural necessity. Their brothers personify the natural order of things. The Enkidu character from the epic of Gilgamesh literally goes from being a wild man who's at one with Nature to a city man. The Abel and Epimetheus characters are variations on that theme. Prometheus ends up chained to a rock and punished daily. Cain must toil and his labors bear no fruit. In other words, human endeavor to escape nature is all vanity, and human cleverness is an illusion.

Government Chips: Feds "Invest" in Moribund Tech Company

Back in the late 1800's through the early 1900s the US railroad industry and government basically "merged".  Railroad pensions, for example, are some government hybrid plan like Social Security. The railroads and early era of industrialization was a huge economic growth engine in the US and other developed countries, but it was well into the era of diminishing/negative returns by the turn of the 20th century.

A similar thing is happening in "tech" and the dot com companies that survived the early 2000s. It's just all out of gas. Now the feds are throwing money at Intel to build foundries in the US... Why does Intel need taxpayer money for that? If they had a profitable business model for the new chip plants they could easily get private cash for it. Instead the US and other governments around the world are throwing buckets of tax cash at private businesses.

Eventually Amazon will be getting federal money too... they probably already do.

EV Flop?

I've been following the EV story since the early 2000s. I used to hang out on stock market message boards back then and closely followed the drama of a Canadian company called Zenn Motors who was partnered with a company in Texas called EEStor who claimed to have a revolutionary solid state hyper-mega-capacitor with immense energy density. Zenn Motors entire business was hyping the possibility that the EEStor energy storage system was going to be demonstrated any day now to pump their stock.

Eventually I got bored of that and just moved on. It was an interesting lesson though. There are lots of companies like that which make a living off greed and the good nature of "investors" who hope they've found the next big thing and will get obscenely rich from a $500 "investment". There are oil and gas companies like that, gold and silver miners, and many tech and biotech companies like that as well.

The interesting thing about that story is Zenn and EEStor zeroed in on the main problem with electric cars at the very inception of the EV mass market. The EEStor vaporware addressed the problems with chemical batteries: slow to charge, limited lifespan, low energy density. If the EEStor gizmo existed, EVs would be a no brainer replacement for ICE engines, but it doesn't.

Currently it's possible to build a pretty good car with lithium-ion batteries, but they have limitations and look to be relegated to niche use cases. Lots of engineering time and resources are currently being wasted on things like battery powered busses and trucks and heavy equipment, but that's probably at least partly funded by government funny money and all that effort will go into the trash.

One of the things that's very interesting about EVs is the original sales pitch of their simplicity = low cost and higher reliability did not pan out at all. A well made and maintained gasoline or diesel engine is probably going to outlast multiple $20,000 batteries, motors, and power electronics in a typical EV. Even though it has dozens or hundreds of moving parts, the process of manufacturing and assembling such a complicated mechanical contrivance is far superior to the latest electric tech crapola. 

Anyway, the reason I'm writing on this topic at all is the EV flop story is totally mainstream at this point. Everybody and their 80 year old mom knows it didn't work out as originally sold. The hype and propaganda and PR engine for that industry is out of gas apparently. Governments are still pushing EVs especially in Europe, but the audience for the government sales pitch dwindled to a handful of fanbois at this point.

The EV story has lots of similarities to COVID vaccine sales techniques. EVs were massively over-hyped and the sales pitch and reality were separated by a vast gulf. Eventually people can't help notice they were lied to. The reality of EVs is they're probably about as resource and energy intensive as ICE vehicles--possibly worse, and for typical drivers they're far more expensive and less capable and practical overall.

The EV topic isn't as politically partisan as COVID vaccines, though. For a while the COVID vaccine topic was dominated by shrieking leftist retards. Eventually most people figured out the vaccines didn't really work that well and only the most strident paid lefty oriented shills were left defending and pushing them. With the EV topic though, people seem capable of making an assessment based on observation and calculation instead of environmentalist hype.

People often make car purchases based on a fairly well thought out set of requirements, features offered by different cars, prices, total cost of ownership and the like, so the hype only works on some subset of the population.