Amazing how beautiful the sky can be. We get a lot of stunning sunsets here in Utah like that one on the right. Not usually this time of year, but we've had more lately since we haven't had a lot of storms, just tons of clouds. I should take more pictures and put them on facebook or something.
Was looking for a picture but I had a bolt for the valve cover on a pickup stretch to about an extra quarter inch while I was trying to get it to torque. One of those times where trusting my gut that things didn’t quite feel right saved my ass.
An old army buddy of mine once said with the purest rage: “It don’t matter which way I fuckin turn it! It ALWAYS COMES BACK TO LEFT!!” after hearing righty-tighty lefty-loosy for probably the thousandth time whilst givin er in the wrong direction once again…
He got out of the army as a heavy tank mechanic and went into concrete. I don’t even think he owns any tools at all these days… That’s been thirty damn years ago and I’m still fuckin with him about it every now and again…
Got something similar on my fire stick the other day. It said it could help me get back to the shows I love watching faster if I turn on the new feature that shares all the data from the different apps directly with Amazon.
The only options were yes and ask later. I had to go to settings to find and turn it off.
Obama overcame the sunset provisions and made the tax cuts permanent for single people earning less than $400,000 per year and couples making less than $450,000 per year, but did not stop the sunset provisions from applying to higher incomes, under the American Taxpayer Relief Act of 2012.
But they don’t though. They are only seen drinking alcohol at the end on Christmas Day. Literally, there’s only a few scenes that even feature the parents, and none of them until the end include alcohol consumption.
Didn’t alcohol use actually go up during temperance? I swear I read some studies on that. Like that was the reason it failed – alcohol use not only increased, but the alcohol that was available became more dangerous, so temperance was reversed and regulations on how it was made and licensing were instated.
If there is one thing I could bring back from that era, it would be the durability of their appliances and materials. Much better than this throwaway culture we have, where everything is made to last a couple years past warranty, then thrown out at the first sign of malfunction. Shit from the 1950’s was built to endure decades of regular use, and repairs were simple and cheap.
so how come they’re so rare nowadays? I mean everyone had one back then, why aren’t the overwhelming majority of these appliances still with us? Survivorship bias, that’s why
but if they were “built to last” then surely we shouldn’t have needed much more produced after market saturation. And yet, they actually are vanishingly rare today. Which means most did break down
Don’t discount how much marketing convinces people they need to just buy new shit every few years either. I’ve seen a lot of perfectly functioning appliances replaced just because someone saw something they thought was nicer “on sale”.
Sure, I’ll agree that they did break down. Everything does at some point or another. Back then it was easier to repair your equipment and you had the right to. That’s why they were “built to last”
Then, as time passed, that changed. It became difficult to find the necessary parts for repairs.
Example: My father is a heavy equipment mechanic. I’d say somewhere in the last ten to twenty years, his suppliers started to refuse selling specific parts he needed because he’s an independent.
He also described to me how some jobs he takes today feel like he’s handling a bomb. If he so much as trips a stray sensor, a representative from the machine’s manufacturer will come sniffing around the yard to catch him.
Then there’s the knowledge required to perform the necessary repairs. The common sentiment I hear from people is that it’s cheaper to replace than to repair. They’re not wrong, however this way of thinking demotivates the need to learn how to repair it.
So yeah. Those built to last machines have broken down. Knowledge and parts for them have become difficult to acquire, however an enthusiast willing to put the time in to repair them will have a machine that hums for the rest of their lives.
Tons were thrown out for fashion or modernization, not because they broke down. Kitchens have trends that last around 7 years and even back then people wanted the latest designs.
I’ve lived in at least 20 residences across 4 continents and only one of those was from the 1920s.
It still had an original stove.
That stove was the fucking best shit ever. It was amazing. I swear to God I have never been able to cook bacon so amazingly as on that stove top.
I don’t disagree that survivorship bias is a thing. And perhaps I had the best possible option of that era. I mean, yes with an induction top I can do great things. With an MSR dragonfly gas stove I can cook the camp a great breakfast anywhere in the world. I’ve cooked on wood fire stoves. I’ve cooked primitive fires in outback Australia and the himiliaya mountains… But there was something special about that 1920s stove that I’ve won’t ever forget.
Side note, MSR dragonflys are the shit. I love everything about them, the literal drink bottle of petrol you have to carry around, the crazy aluminium foil windshield, the pumping, the way they spray fuel everywhere as you light them, then the tower of flame that almost burns down the building as it primes. Cheap to run, indestructible, perfection.
I recently heard an interesting take on a podcast that prior to electronic calculators and especially computers, doing calculations was very tedious, time consuming, and not as precise for complex calculations. This resulted in things being over engineered to compensate.
Once it was easier to make calculations, you could easily figure out the minimum amount of resources needed to make a product last during the warranty period. With spreadsheets, you could have a complex view of all variables and tweak the materials to maximize profit, largely at the expense of durability.
This is I think one of many factors, including survivorship bias, why people feel like they don’t make em like they used to.
I’ve got a better one for you: a certain piece of 11kV switchgear has little M10 steel bolts attaching the cable box cover. If you turn them too quickly with the cover under tension the steel heats up through friction and welds the fucking screw into the thread.
The latest version uses M13 and I think the problem has been mitigated a bit, but I’m sure it can still happen, and there’s a metric shit ton of the old stuff out in the wild.
All full of SF6 as well, which is a very cool (I really want to inhale some and sound like Darth Vader) but also really bad greenhouse gas (20x worse than CO2), and with so much out there inevitably some of it leaks (with a 20 year time delay from a leak to the gas reaching the upper atmosphere), but we can’t be having switchgear taking up more space and commercial enterprise profits diminishing to cover it so we just continue our global exponential growth in use of the stuff.
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