Posted on 03/10/2022 7:04:32 AM PST by blam
Making your entire economy a Landfill Economy dependent on the fantasy of infinite replacements and substitutions is the height of hubris and folly.
Very few people ask: what if it breaks? It's a question we can ask of a great many things: touchscreens, motherboards, tools, vehicles, supply chains and entire systems: what if it breaks?
The first thing we notice is the great number of things which can't be repaired, they can only be replaced. Good luck repairing the touchscreen or motherboard in your vehicle. Oops, the puncture in your tire is in the sidewall, no repair possible, buy a new tire.
The entire economic system assumes two things: 1) there will always be replacements for everything that can't be repaired and 2) there will always be substitutes for everything we want. Beef too expensive? Then buy fake-meat. If that's too expensive, substitute chicken. And so on: there will always be a substitute that can scale globally that will get cheaper as it scales.
Unfortunately, both assumptions are false. There are no replacements for oil and fertilizers. What we have are ifs: if we build 1,000 nuclear reactors, then we can convert this electricity into hydrogen which will be the fuel of the future. And so on. If, if, if. Nice, but getting beyond if is non-trivial: oops, we need hydrocarbon energy to build the 1,000 nuclear reactors and all the complex equipment to convert seawater into hydrogen on a scale large enough to matter.
Not only are there no substitutes for many things, there are no replacement parts, either. Too bad about your entire Smart Home system going down. The vendor of the do-hickey that's connected to your hub went out of business and so there's no replacement parts or software upgrades. Looks like you'll have to replace the entire system. But since the software was out of date anyway, it was time to upgrade anyway.
The problem is we can't replace entire systems when they break down. Sewage treatment, delivery of food, manufacture of medical supplies and medications, delivery of feedstock for plastics manufacturing--the entire global economy is now a tightly bound system with few replacements for anything that matters and no substitutions for all the things that matter.
One of the few positive movements of the past few years is right to repair. The idea here is to outlaw corporation's favorite trick to speed your old product's pathway to the Landfill by sealing the device to make it impossible to open and voiding the warranty should anyone attempt to repair what was designed to be unrepairable.
The foundation of the Landfill Economy is to make stuff that can't be repaired and is designed to fail so you have to buy a new one--and soon. But repair is not guaranteed. If you happen to own a vehicle which was manufactured in the millions, there will likely be third-party suppliers for parts. But time and cost both erode the availability of replacement parts. There is no guarantee replacement parts will be available. Yes, some can be extruded in 3D printers, but there are a great many things that can't be fabbed on 3D printers: specialty wires, computer chips, alloys, etc.
Moving on to larger scale systems: where's the replacement parts when democracy breaks? How about the systems that deliver oil and fresh food over thousands of miles?
The dependability of these unrepairable systems has given us a false confidence in their permanence and durability. As more things become sole-source, as supply chains stretch and add additional points of failure, as the dependency chains increase in complexity, all these systems--political, technological, logistics--become more fragile--the opposite of durable.
The "buy a new one" faith in the infinite powers of substitution has stripped the economy of resilience and the ability to fashion workarounds. Since things can no longer be repaired, nobody knows how to repair anything. Since everything is sealed, nobody even knows what's inside the system. Since we're assured everything can be substituted and replaced, we no longer know how anything actually works. The best and the brightest have never seen a green bean growing on the plant or considered how all the goodies that make their "money" useful-- as in, there are things available for your "money" to buy--were fabricated or grown, cleaned, packaged, shipped and delivered.
As I explain in my book Global Crisis, National Renewal: A (Revolutionary) Grand Strategy for the United States, tightly bound systems and centralized systems are essentially designed to fail. Load the system with dependency chains choked with points of failure for which there are no fixes or substitutes and then stretch those chains across the globe and you get a system optimized for fragility and failure.
What if it breaks? What's your Plan B, your workaround, your fix? What if you can't buy a new food delivery system off the shelf, or a new democracy that all you have to do is unwrap and plug it in? Where are the cheap, abundant substitutions for everything that's now chronically scarce because there are no substitutes?
Making your entire economy a Landfill Economy dependent on the fantasy of infinite replacements and substitutions is the height of hubris and folly, right up there with war is a solution that will fix everything that's broken.
We have an old dial phone in our garage.
It was installed when the house was built in 1976.
It still works just fine—no batteries required.
My father has one also. We moved into that house in 1976, so the phones are probably the same age.
The phone technically belongs to AT&T. My father asked if they would like to have their old telephone back. I told him maybe for their museum.
Not every newer model has them. Seems to have really taken off with 2021/2022 model years. Check the current version of your 2019. Bet it has them.
“Check the current version of your 2019. Bet it has them.”
Nope.
I see it as a symptom of our abandonment of manufacturing. If you manufacture a piece of equipment, say a computer, in the United States, and manufacture all the parts in the United States, then we (as a country) keep all the profits “in house”. But if we are just reselling computers manufactured elsewhere, then we keep maybe 20% of the profit. So you need to sell a new computer five times as often as you would normally in order to maintain the illusion that productivity is stable.
Neither one of them actually work as advertised. I get maybe 3 months life out of a light bulb nowadays, no matter which kind I buy. Incandescents would have lasted 3 years at least.
Yea but MaBell/WE owned those phones. They were on the hook if they broke down.
“Neither one of them actually work as advertised. I get maybe 3 months life out of a light bulb nowadays, no matter which kind I buy.”
Started replacing with LED’s years ago. Totally LED for over 2 years. NO FAILURES!
“Yea but MaBell/WE owned those phones. They were on the hook if they broke down.”
Paid for by the rental fee.
You might try this small family business in San Rafael CA. Electronics Plus.
https://www.electronicplus.com/
info@electronicplus.com
They have hard to find parts and accessories. If they don’t have what you want they will source it. Good luck.
Bttt.
5.56mm
What brand are you buying? The LEDs I get seem to actually be worse than the CFLs. They may keep going more than 3 months but always by 3 months they dim and put out maybe 30% of the light that they did when I purchased them, so they might as well have failed for all the good they do.
You're lucky. My F-I-L has a 2019 Chevrolet HD 3500 dually. The clearance lights on the rear fenders are integrated LED and the whole thing has to be replaced. No bulb to change. All four are out. It's a circuit issue somewhere. But couldn't find it while he was here. He tried to replace two of the fixtures. $75 a pop. Mine is $0.75 for a bulb.
I HATED the light they exuded...couldn't stand the harshness !
So I went shopping and laid in a store of incandescents which I'm using up now.
However, I was told that there are new LED's on the market now which have a much softer glow than the original. Anyone have any input on this?
Leni
“What brand are you buying? “
FEIT, mostly. Old boxes ConservEnergy. Bought Costco.
“$75 a pop. Mine is $0.75 for a bulb.”
Doesn’t sound like a bulb problem. Bulbs should outlast the vehicle.
$26.98 each online.
All you need is a landline.
“but always by 3 months they dim and put out maybe 30% of the light that they did when I purchased them, “
None of mine have any observable dimming. Maybe after 10 or more years some dimming but never down to 30%.
“All you need is a landline.”
And a dial-up modem.
It wasn't. I should have clarified better. He bought the assemblies (from a local Chevy dealer) before we dug into it. It was a used truck, with a lot of miles that had been driven on a lot of gravel roads. So he though maybe the rough roads had caused the lights (circuitry) to be damaged. We replaced one and no joy. Then started testing the circuit. Cheapest I could find them on line last fall was about $45 each. Thankfully he only bought two from the stealership. He had to head back home before we could trace the issue. I don't think he fixed it yet. Will have another opportunity to help him in a couple of months.
Yeah, the LED should last forever. The circuits driving it? Those are usually the failure point.
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