PeakOil is You
And they call it progress.
Re: And they call it progress.
by Tanada » Wed 06 Jul 2016, 08:59:01
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ennui2', 'T')hat being said, my Mazda 3 is well over 100,000 miles and still hasn't had to have any major engine work. It's a 2004 model and has plenty of electronics in it (just not in the dash) but it's been reliable. So it's not true that nothing is durable, in fact they might be more durable than the past, just that when it eventually DOES break, you've got issues.
I have a 2000 Honda Civic with 170,000ish miles on it. Other than regular maintenance I have had to replace both headlights and twice replace the radiator, the first time due to road damage from a semi thrown rock on the expressway and the second time two years later when the junk yard replacement radiator failed. Engine and drive train wise it runs like a champ, but the A/C compressor seized up three years ago and I live without it.
The issue is not that we can not build things to last, the issue is we very frequently choose not to build things to last. A 15-20 year old car is not at all a difficult lifetime to achieve, in terms of engineering. Heavy equipment like power shovels and back hoes and farm tractors frequently operate for 50 years or longer with very few major overhauls in that life span.
In fact industrial tools are so robust that it became frequent in World War II that when a factory was bombed and the workers heavily impacted the machinery was pulled out of the rubble still in working condition.
Our problem is, our culture has been oriented towards consumer disposal goods. In addition to muscle power tools my dad had an electric drill and an electrical circular saw that pretty much took care of the power tool needs of a small farm. He could replace broken boards on the out buildings by cutting a replacement and nailing it together with hammer and nails, which was pretty much all that was required. For big jobs like roofing it was generally either a swarm of family when I was young, or a professional contractor when I was an adult and the family was scattered to the four winds chasing careers. If the push mower or rotor-tiller stopped working he would fix it with hand tools, or took it to my Uncle for repair. Throwing it away and replacing it was the very last resort, and even if it were in bad shape it would be kept for a year or too for replacement parts scavenging purposes. Of course my parents were teens during the Great Depression and it made them both very reluctant to part with anything that might be useful later on.
I guess my real point is, people who are unable to just replace one older items with a newer item for reasons of fashion or convenience buy things built to last and use them until they are beyond reasonable repair. Take the classic example of the iPhone. All those iPhone 1 models out there are still mostly in working condition, as are the 2,3,4,5 era models, and realistically they call and text just as well as they ever did. But many if not most iPhone users who buy on the three year contract plan have upgraded at least once, if not in the extreme cases 5 times now. Why? Because they use their phone as a status symbol, more than as a text/phone call device. I carry a durable 5 year old flip phone and before that I had a slide phone that I carried for years and before that I had an early digital phone with a tiny screen for text messages that I received as a hand me down. I gave that first cell phone up when I couldn't get a replacement battery for it and I gave up my slide phone when it developed a short and died. The only reason I have a cell phone at all is because I gave up my landline when I moved here because the service was totally unreliable. It is handy for people like my spouse to get a hold of me, but it is not a necessity.
Try telling a 16 year old American Teenager that a cell phone is a convenience, not a necessity. Unless they were raised on an Amish farm they are liable to consider you mentally unbalanced for such a thought. But cell phones have only been part of American life for a single generation, the Bag Phone was the rule in the mid 1990's and those were expensive and rare. 20 years to go from a bag phone to an iPhone/Android that gives you access to the World Wide Web, and what do they get used for 90 percent of the time? Taking silly or risque photos, texting unimportant messages to other people or maybe 5 percent of the time actually talking with another human being via voice.
The modern cell phone encompasses your camera, your flashlight, your written communication, your voice communication, and for most people your electronic portable game play. Take away the game play and picture taking features and your sales would collapse through the floor. Take away the texting and your sales would be virtually nil. Modern Americans are losing their verbal face to face or phone to phone conversation skills. This is progress?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Alfred Tennyson', 'W')e are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
- Tanada
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Re: And they call it progress.
by ennui2 » Wed 06 Jul 2016, 09:28:56
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')Modern Americans are losing their verbal face to face or phone to phone conversation skills. This is progress?
')Modern Americans are losing their verbal face to face or phone to phone conversation skills. This is progress?
Losing verbal face to face time is unfortunate, but if that's the worst thing we have to worry about, it's hardly what I'd call doom.
It seems like during slow periods that doomers tend to want to gravitate towards get-off-my-lawn critiques against modernity, and it's this kind of stuff that makes it look like doomers see the end of the world coming more due to a nostalgia for an earlier time than any empirical data.
"If the oil price crosses above the Etp maximum oil price curve within the next month, I will leave the forum." --SumYunGai (9/21/2016)
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Re: And they call it progress.
by Tanada » Wed 06 Jul 2016, 10:31:36
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ennui2', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')Modern Americans are losing their verbal face to face or phone to phone conversation skills. This is progress?
')Modern Americans are losing their verbal face to face or phone to phone conversation skills. This is progress?
Losing verbal face to face time is unfortunate, but if that's the worst thing we have to worry about, it's hardly what I'd call doom.
It seems like during slow periods that doomers tend to want to gravitate towards get-off-my-lawn critiques against modernity, and it's this kind of stuff that makes it look like doomers see the end of the world coming more due to a nostalgia for an earlier time than any empirical data.
This thread isn't about your ability to cast every other member in the roll of doom caster so you can discount or ignore their opinions. This thread is about Progress, and where the point of diminishing returns lays in a world of finite limits.
There is a world of difference between observing a trend and believing that trend is doom Doom DOOM! My point is, once we pass peak the paradigm of how our civilization operates will have to change in ways most people are totally oblivious too, bu we already made an extreme change in just the last generation. Teens of the 1980-1960 era mostly had landline telephones with the capacity for private conversation. Teens before 1960 frequently had party line phones and also generally had a real human operator who could also listen in to the conversation. Before 1940 a lot of Americans did not have phones of any sort in their homes because of the expense involved. Every generation has made a leap of "progress" compared to the one that came right before it. Has that "progress peaked now, or will there be a new step none of us has thought of yet? Or will we take a step backwards because iPhone/Android devices are too complex to be viable in an energy constrained finite world in the 2030 era?
Where does the law of diminishing returns hit communication post peak? We already discussed hand tools vs power tools vs industrial tools, what about communications tools? I doubt we will end up all the way back to snail mail, or even the telegraph. But will we have iPhone X equivalent in 2030? Direct surgical brain implant communication like the Cyborgs in 1970's Sci-Fi? Or will we go back to bag phones? Or something in between?
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Alfred Tennyson', 'W')e are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
