Planned obsolescence no longer the shiney new idea from Alfie Sloan...

 France is starting to reform the engineering and corporate world...

I hope this idea makes it into legislation around the world!  Don't forget to extend it to make illegal the planned obsolescence of software, firmware and hardware in digital components. 

What a great idea!  I'd suggest that abolishing the much beloved "public - private partnership" that has led to so many government agencie$ being captured would be a great addition to reformed and enlightened public policy as well. 

The planned obsolescence idea poisoned several generations of design engineers and product planners. Society has paid the price - so much time, money, materials and labor have been wasted since this terrible idea was trumpeted by GM and the various Alfie inspired B-Schools.  A large part of the world's landfills can be attributed to this mans big idea, supported by institutions like MIT.  Tons of waste, thanks Alfie and all of the rest who saw profit at the cost of squandering societies treasures.  As a former test engineer in the automotive industry and a design engineer in aerospace - I can attest to the fact that the design philosophy at GM was suffocating.  I remember the day I resigned from  GM... I took off my tie in the parking lot and double knotted it around the top of the antenna on my door-less Jeep CJ-7 and drove up 12 Mile never to return to the "Tech Center."  It was a streamer of freedom! LOL, finally perhaps we are turning the corner.  Thank you France. 

By the way, often times the difference between infinite life and high cycle fatigue is a few cents of material.  Maybe just one more design iteration...  disgusting. 

 This is an incredible example of a bad idea gone wild as the profit incentives blurred everybody's sensibilities.  It happens in governments too.  We all know a bad idea when we see it.  Hopefully the energy crunch can help us find our voices to speak up when we see the bad ideas coming.  Not all manufacturers succumbed to this money making ploy.  Several high quality auto manufacturers would not "get with the times" and eshewed the idea of planned obsolescence as dishonest and wasteful.  They went out of business being truthful to their moral convictions.  Sadly.  Public conscientiousness is too often easily manipulated and spun - thanks to a legion of folks like Bernays.  That is our fault.  Stay vigilant my friends. Our future depends on it.

Bad idea Alfie...

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Collapse happens...

 Wow, a great interview with Joseph Tainter!

The book is very interesting, in these times its more important than ever. 

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This is starting to become a common thread....

 Around the World, geologists and geophysicists are making the same warnings...

You can follow along the slide deck here.

"You have to know the truth..." (53:45 ) I too agree but manipulating perceptions is a time honored attribute of those among us who invent their own agenda driven forms of control.  A sad footnote to the human experience.  Objectivity is easily blurred.  Fear is unfortunately a commonly manufactured ingredient.  Just look at the work of Bernays and many others.  It is often created to destroy rational thought and achieve the desired fidelity of the individual or group in cults.  It is not an answer, it merely manufactures a reality around a false narrative.   Oil, conserving energy, and how to get the masses to capitulate especially in the future is a sociopolitical quandary.  Truth telling and rational discourse leverages the minds and wills of the community of our planet towards a solution.  But alas, there are those who think they have the solution already... 

We can assume the geopolitical implications of energy depletion and the ability to maintain the current World's population and quality of life - let alone look at what is going to be required to adapt in the short time ahead are tough to grapple with. The ivory towers don't seem to be very helpful in applying what they are supposed to be good at - crickets from published anything recent in scholarly research. The recent COVID antics have shown us that debating "science" is now censored - so what good is "tenure" I ask? But I digress. As Bernay's made it clear, it's the behavior you want,  the message just has to achieve that end... to that regard the message could be anything to achieve the desired result. The universities are such a disappointment.

 Don't look to the Politicians and Wall Street types who got us here to lead this time LOL I can't imagine a single individual "winning" a campaign based on delivering these facts without an informed populace... so here we are.  A financial system, political system and global trade apparatus that was warned this day would come repeatedly by a few who were men and women of science.  Their problem of course was... they weren't economists.  They saw the world as bounded by those curmudgeon  laws of physics.  The others... well they saw the world as a giant candy store to be exploited. When one bin emptied, don't worry - our subsidized egg heads in academe and our infinite printing press all tell us great things are only a few dollars away.  Their financial growth model has no analogue in nature, but don't worry we'll just reset it all - with depleting feed stocks of energy no less.  Doubling down on digital tools when famines are forming.  Green solutions that require fossil energy to implement and support with greatly reduced efficiency.  Now if you were writing the energy balance equation, taking into consideration all of the very many inputs, it would sadly be apparent.  This strategy will not be a solution.  Rather it will create a winner-looser game in which geography and geology have more to do with success than financial institutions and talking heads.  The universities so disappoint. 

Do your research, plan thoughtfully.  Discuss the possibilities with friends, colleagues and neighbors.  Perhaps the organic nature of a "grass roots" movement can push us forward in a sane and rational way once these issues are common knowledge. 

There is time to bring about debate and to discuss the real issues.  But not a lot of time to waste.

Challenging the Bernays inspired messages of our global institutions and the PT Barnum laden politics may be a waste of time in the short term, but the voices and intellect of the many need to know the truth - and only then can we be assured that we have the best strategy to cope with these profound changes. When you hear a Barnum statement like "for the good of the many..." it only makes sense when "the many" know what the problems really are and how smart the "decision makers" are.  In itself and without full transparency that phrase is just another Barnum Statement.  

  

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Awakening of a sort...

 Real science does have censorship, bias and gate keepers.  Sadly this is a reality  much of it driven by political dogma that can be simply, agenda driven propaganda spun around weak arguments proffered by "experts" usually with PhD's.  Almost always, a large grant associated profit motive or an institutionalized group think is involved. Most people have blindly accepted the word of the expert and scholar as a sort of rigorously tested gold standard.  LOL... Well not any more, and that's a very good thing.  We just may evolve from this era being a little wiser.  Question everything - Euripides, and Albert Einstein.  When the answer received back is a castigation, censorship or an attack you know you are not in a scientific debate.  You are debating dogma.  A belief system that eschews data driven facts.  Easy to spot!

I'm pleased to see small rays of light appearing within the academic cloister.

Let us not stare incredulously at the recent past, but move forward.  Perhaps the orchestrated methods of so many governments were doomed to result in distrust, ranker and frustration.  Most people do not appreciate being duped, so - a likely outcome. Especially when formerly trusted institutions and professionals were so ea$ily co-opted.  I cannot wait to see what's next, as the real underlying issues will not be going away!

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Return to the Black River

I am always happy to spend some time on the North Country Trail.  Yesterday we hiked in to see some of the falls on the Black River on the Northern shore of Michigan's Western Upper Peninsula.  This river empties out into Lake Superior  whose shoreline was foggy and a brisk 53 F while inland on the trail it was a comfortable sunny 73 F. The temperature gradient is common for this zone because of its proximity to a very large body of water that acts as a thermal sink.  The weather on the shore and near inland is unique and in the winter can develop enormous snow accumulations... hard to imagine unless you have lived here! 

 

This is a map of the trail...

 

Zooming out, this is the North Country Trail section

A mix of broad leaf and conifers, a healthy temperate mixed forest surrounds

Just after a rain, the under story was a beautiful green

Nature's version of fast food for the Pileated Woodpecker

Typical of the flows on the river this summer... beautiful to experience.

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Happy B-Day JRO

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What is precious?

Is gold precious?  How about the feeling of warmth or the satisfaction of knowing that a family is safe and well fed?  

When faced with the stress of basic needs of survival, sustenance and emotional happiness what do you value as precious?

I've written in this blog that you can print all the money you want, but you can't print oil.  The take away is that energy is so fundamental to human health, happiness and security that a hunk of gold has very little intrinsic value as compared to our environmental attributes.  

We should take a step back and contemplate what in our lives have real value, and to understand that potential value and tangible (real) value are elastic concepts that are predicated on the stability of our society.  In the face of energy shortfalls, declines and unstable availability we should contemplate the sustainable nature of such a system.  What makes sense to me is a rapid transition towards localized, diverse and ecologically sound sustainable strategies.  Long commutes to work don't make a lot of sense, millions of people living in densely populated areas, not much sense,  investing in hydrogen infrastructures - make sense.  Peace and tolerance makes sense... a three day work week makes sense too.  But let us not forget that people are precious too. 

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