Can’t think of anything compelling to write today so, I offer the following:
Today, I fixed my old Emerson Electric desk fan. This monster was built back in the nineteen-forties or the nineteen thirties and it really shows–solid steel everywhere and everything is designed to be taken apart and reassembled. It could probably survive a nuclear weapon detonation at 1000 meters and still work! It weighs a ton and you could probably power the drive-train of a minivan with the torque the electric motor puts out. How come they don’t build consumer goods that way anymore?
As I was repairing the fan, I thought about the disposability of consumer goods. When did this begin? My generation simply throws things away when they break; it’s almost automatic. A button comes off a shirt and you give it to charity. Your shoes wear out and you toss them in the trash. If your chair breaks, you can’t burn it so, into the bin it goes.
When did this start? It seems like there was once a time when they designed things to be repaired. Why did they start building tools so that you couldn’t easily separate materials? They could have kept a lot of things out of landfills if they did.
If a part breaks on my fan, only that part has to be replaced and that part is usually made of one type of material so it’s easily recycled. When I look at modern fans (Or most modern gadgets for that matter.) it’s all plastic molded directly to the metal and everything is held together with glue or easily broken clips and tabs. If something breaks, that’s it: Throw it away. People don’t have the time to fix things anymore but even still, it seems like modern consumer design actively discourages any attempts at repair. I guess it’s just cheaper to manufacture things that way. It’s kind of sad.
I don’t think it’s necessary for everyone to learn how to fix their own possessions, there are paid technicians for that. It’s just that somethings are difficult to impossible for even them to repair, given this merged, composite, build-once-repair-never design of things.
And now we are paying for it. Many plastics can’t be classified for recycling because their composition isn’t standardized. Many landfill items are a monolithic–part glass, part metal, part wood and part plastic with no easy way to separate components into different materials. Of course recycling technology keeps getting better–eventually nanotech will allow us to recycle anything made of ordinary matter–but until then it looks like we are wasting a lot of money that could be avoided.
I hate that jar of pennies I have. I hate having to pack pennies into little rolls to take to the bank. I have a little pocket on my equipment vest just for pennies and other useless change and, I make it a point to always leave my apartment with 4 pennies from my jar in hopes that I can get rid of them but, this isn’t enough. It doesn’t empty my penny jar.
I think a law should be passed: metal change can only come in quarter units. The quarter is only thing that buys anything anymore now that more and mover vending slots, pay phones and parking meters take only quarters–pretty soon dimes and nickles will be as hard to get rid of as pennies.
There is only one good thing that comes out of all this garbage coinage that I get as change, I can donate it to various charities. But only if they provide a jar to throw the stuff in as I leave the till.
I guess I could avoid all this and just use point of sale and credit cards and stuff but I like the accounting of cash. With cash there is no checks floating in hardmail, waiting to cash out. There is no unexpected bills waiting for me at the end of the month. With cash I know the money is mine and it’s gone when I spend it. That’s direct accountability. Cash is much easier in terms of bookkeeping–either I have the money or I don’t. But if I wanna do everything in cash, I have to accept the penny. Grumble. If I were king–
New Scientist details a microgravity construction technique that uses radio waves and interference patterns to shape clouds of small particles into solid objects. I imagine by the time this technique becomes widely used, it will be supplemented with zillions of MEMS and nanobots. A few months back there was a conference here in Jet City about space elevators and, Science News covered it. Unfortunately, unlike the robotics conference I went to way back in August of last year, I didn’t go to this. Oh well.
As you may see, looking over the archive, I am not a very frequent poster to my log. I want to change this. I hereby promise to write at least one entry every weekday from here in. I may even throw a few weekend entries in for extra measure. This will be hard to do and I am sure that most entries will be utter junk but, I think I need to do this. Besides, this is the new century. I can always change my mind later.
Personally I am hoping that the rest of the big companies, in redesigning their own sites, follow Wired’s example as opposed to Microsoft’s.
A senatorial candidate in Montana, after a few years of imbibing colloidal silver, turns his skin blue permanently. Maybe it’s just me but, why isn’t it surprising that his party afiliation is Libertarian?
I’ve still got a ton of things I should be doing for work but a friend of mine introduced a new toy to me–Knoppix. Knoppix is a distro of Linux that runs entirely from a CD so, there is no need to install the system. It just loads the kernal, loads drivers and then loads the remainder of the system, finally starting X and KDE. I am making this entry from Knoppix and Mozilla now.
