Most of those that are considered "rich" have worked for it. Who cares about lazy poor people that won't put the work in necessary to raise themselves out of poorness? The answer is, gullible short-sighted people who are primarily of the liberal persuasion.
That's awfully bitter.
While I agree that there is something to your point, there is another side to it.
The problem is that some of the most miserable, un-creative, un-romantic, bitter and spiritually locked-down people I know are 'successful' in a purely monetary sense.
The trick is finding a path which takes you into the realm of 'success' but which uses a means that does not also enslave. Working 40-50 hours a week in a soul-sucking job is hardly commendable if it prevents spiritual growth and refinement. Commendable is finding a way to power without destroying the self.
I know from my own experiences that until I was able to construct my own means of self-employment, I simply could not make myself work a cruddy job. I couldn't deal with the 'Office Space' reality and simply refused to allow bosses to walk over me or make me perform insane tasks which made no sense. Some would say, "That's life. Suck it up.", but I just couldn't bear to turn off my brain enough to become another miserable worker drone. Nor could I put up with the similar insanities associated with adult education which would lead to higher paying versions of the same nonsense.
Finding a path I loved and building my own company and means of surviving in this world was the only solution for me. Anything else would have led to suicide.
--I think many of the people you indicate as lazy and short-sighted simply recognize the futility of a soul-sucking job and refuse to play. I have a very hard time blaming them. Self-confidence seems to be the thing which stops people stuck in such place from taking the next step toward building a viable system which works for them, (a system other than living on government hand-outs, that is).
How do you define "Really Rich"? Are you suggesting that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet get together to plan famines? Is the Getty family behind the war in Iraq? Does the star chamber really exist? Are corporations really trying to take over the world and enslave people like they're always portrayed in movies? That sounds like a paranoid fantasy world.
Those are entirely valid questions, but not nearly so paranoid as we might wish. Gates isn't even in the running.
I tried to address this in a general post nearer the top of this same slashdot article.
Basically, people seem to have a tendency to severely under-estimate just how huge some personal fortunes actually are and the natural implications which lead from this. The fellow I chose to illustrate this with, aside from being a trillionaire in the 60's, was a hard-core right wing Christian who abhorred atheism and believed strongly in war and who maintained friends high up in the military. --Which neatly puts him in that strange discordant nether-world between, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and weapons manufacture. Essentially, the man was functionally insane, and had both the will and the power to extend his brand of insanity over the rest of the country. And in conjunction with other big power brokers, that's exactly what he did. That's where the Nixon Admin came from, and by extension, the current one.
So it doesn't matter how much this might sound like paranoid fantasy, history unfortunately agrees with its conclusions. But only if you pull back the lense of your viewpoint. As Bill Hicks put it, "Watching TV is like taking black spray paint to your third eye."
People are missing the point here, I think. The problem is that the wealthiest people are a fraction of that top 1%, by comparison to whom, people like Bill Gates, are just low ranking staffers.
The wealthiest few own pretty much everything. Let's take one example. . . Haroldson Lafayette Hunt; arguably one of the richest men on the planet until his death in 1974, is somebody we don't hear much about, if at all. His name did not appear on the list of the 500 largest international corporations, although he was probably among the top five. In the 60's Hunt owned and controled companies the names of which have never even been associated with his. The Hunt assets are staggeringly huge, estimated to be equal to those of such corporate complexes as General Electric.
--As a point of reference, the assets of General Electric, the fourth largest American corporation, equaled $4,851,718,000 in 1966. Yes. That's four trillion. In the 60's! Haroldson Lafayette Hunt had neither stockholders nor board of directors. He owned 85 to 90% of the shares in all of his companies. His family owns the rest.
Now that is wealth. By comparison, Bill Gates with his measly few billion is a bell boy. This Hunt character, and a small handful of people like him, own the world. Hunt had has his own intelligence network, his decisions were carried out by a powerful general staff. His business interests were so extensive that he subsidized (along with other big oilmen) most of the influential men in Congress, men like Lyndon Johnson. Hunt was one of the financial backers of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose deputy Roy Cohn attracted his attention and had since worked for him on several occasions.
Hunt was the most powerful American propagandist of the Far Right in the day. In 1951 he financed "Facts Forum," a series of radio and television programs which was later replaced by "Life Line," a one-sided series of 15-minute radio broadcasts carried daily on 409 stations throughout the country. His propaganda campaign cost him $2 million a year, financed by companies that he owned, or on which he was in a position to exert pressure.
Okay. So what did he do with all that power? What kind of guy was Hunt? Well, you can measure a man by taking stock of his likes and dislikes. He didn't like President Kennedy.
As an interesting aside, Hunt was nearby on the day of the infamous assassination in Dealey Plaza.
At 12:23 on November 22, from his office on the 7th floor of the Mercantile Building, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt watched John Kennedy ride towards Dealey Plaza, where fate awaited him at 12:30. A few minutes later, escorted by six men in two cars, Hunt left the center of Dallas without even stopping by his house.
At that very moment; General Walker was in a plane between New Orleans and Shreveport. He joined Mr. Hunt in one of his secret hideaways across the Mexican border. There they remained for a month, protected by personal guards, under the impassive eyes of the FBI. It was not until Christmas that Hunt, Walker and their party returned to Dallas.
So when people here talk about trickle down economics and the quality of life being measured by the availability of iPods and the number of rooms people have to live in, or the available good food, I am fairly certain the point is being missed. The point of view needs to be pulled waaaay back, because there is a much larger picture. Slaughterhouse chickens have resources and lives of similar relative quality; shelter, heat, food, society of other chickens, and enough room to walk around and pluck about and play 'pecking-order'. (Meat chickens are not individually caged). I'm sure if you gave them some iPods and jobs and general distraction, they wouldn't even realize thta they were owned. But they are, and their lives are severely limited. --Genetically, physically, mentally, spiritually, etc. And they don't realize it.
If the pie keeps growing, we don't need to be as concerned with getting a smaller portion of it. In fact, there's a good argument that concentrations of wealth actually help the pie to grow -- when finding a cure for a disease may cost a billion dollars, you need people who have that sort of money and who are willing to put it at risk.
You're still not talking about the top percentage.
You're talking about the mid-level managerial staff. (Who also, btw, like to ensure that people are fed tainted foods and lifestyles so as to ensure that there is enough sickness around to require their billion dollar cures.) No, the really rich individuals are the ones who plan things like wars and famines so that the human harvest will be just as bloody and terrible as can be managed.
Fear is food for the dark side, and the dark side is in control at the moment.
The reason you don't read CNN is because of 'liberal' news bites?
There far are better reasons than that to avoid the big news sites. --Abandoning the distracting nonsense of the 'Liberal vs Conservative' shell game is one of them.
That whole tactic is designed to divide and conquer the populace. Labeling one group automatically sets yourself into the opposing camp regardless of how poor the rationality happens to be on either side. Both sides are deeply flawed, which means anybody who participates in the game will be unable to advance until they manage to let go.
It's better to engage in honest appraisal of one's internal workings and belief systems without fear, anger and ego getting in the way. It's often painful and humbling, but true power, clarity and freedom are the prizes.
It's an HP Jornada 820. It's from 1999 and it isn't particularly powerful as processing chips go. You can pick one up on eBay for about $300.
But it's possibly the coolest device I own. It's footprint is an inch or so smaller than a sheet of typing paper, but it has a full laptop keyboard, a big-enough screen and no moving parts. All Flashcard memory. The battery runs for twice as long as that of normal laptop. It has enough screen size to make itself useful where a palm-sized device is not. That is, it's comfortable to read and write on where a palm device cannot even get through a single paragraph without the need for a scroll function. This means you can easily do real work on it, and opening it up isn't like deploying a small RTS factory.
Granted, it's no good for games or your.MP3 collection. And it isn't wireless. But as a light weight, highly portable word processor/reader, it's amazing. I use it all the time. Best of all, when I'm working on it, I cannot be distracted by. . . games, an.MP3 collection or the internet. I've had it for almost two years now, and it has become indispensable.
It would be cool if Intel were to put out a better version of the same thing. There is a real market for a dedicated portable word processor/reader, without the bells and whistles and distractions/irritations of a regular lap top. --But very few players have stepped up to the plate to offer such a tool.
Every writer I show it to drools. They know just how dumb a laptop is for writing; it's like owning a car so you can have a decent glove compartment.
"Turn off images, duh!" doesn't work. Nothing works, which is partially why this is news.
Yeah. I've had the same experience. I imagine it will only be a short matter of time before somebody fixes this. It simply cannot be that hard to overcome!
Why even waste your time discussing this topic? Even if millimeter-wave devices were used for domestic crowd control tomorrow almost none of you would get off your fat assess and do anything about it. And hold up just a second before you race to mod me down - you know in your heart that it's true. To the few among us who actually make real effort to protest such things I commend you. To everyone else who has passively sat back and had 'discussions on the Internet' about everything the US administration has done over the recent years, either stfu or do something about it. I'm tired of the hypocrisy in your comments, of which I share the same guilt even in this very post, but it has to be said.
Awareness is vital.
Protest rallies have their place, but they are more a clarion call to others on the planet that the light side is well populated. It's encouraging.
--As is the presence on the web of many voices. --Growing one's awareness and learning the patterns of fascism allows us grow strong. Knowledge protects, and without discussion and networking, knowledge just doesn't grow very quickly.
You shouldn't feel guilty about your meathod of reaching awareness just because you don't attend protest marches. Energy is well spent in any manner used to understand and broadcast the news of why evil happens, how to spot it and what underlying patterns drive and identify it. That way, when it comes down to you, you can understand exactly how to choose against it. The war is being fought through you and me an all of use by the choices we make every day in even the smallest things we do. Being informed allows us to choose with clarity and power.
New military weaponry is a given and avoiding the fascist hammer may indeed be impossible at this point, but certain things do become apparent. . .
The Democrats won the last election by several million votes. However, there were still an estimated 3,000,000 votes which were lost or mis-recorded or switched over to the Republican side through the fixed electronic voting machines. As a voting scam must make the split seem just about down the middle, this suggests that the dark side underestimated just how much the populace is upset with the current state of affairs. This comes about through awareness.
Not that the democratic win is a particularly big deal. The trap for humanity is set regardless and Bush won't likely be impeached. But it does illustrate the power of awareness in a gross sense.
I rigged one of those extending lightsaber toys with a sound effects card and a couple of buttons so you could mime with the thing and have it create appropriate sound effects. It worked really well.
As an aside, I just figured out how to use one of those green lasers to create a cool lightsabler blade effect.
You get a prism from an old SLR camera and rig it so that it spins on a tight axis creating a thin tube of light with an inch or so diameter. You'd need a thin shaft with a knob at the end to stop the beam a meter away.
On a related note,I've been wondering if perhaps one could cancel out a visible laser with another one which is emitting at the same wavelength, but with opposite wave peeks and valleys. Like a wave balancing effect in audio wiring, but I don't know my optics well enough to anwser this. It would be an interesting gadget, though. . .
Cool! I guess you simply weren't a fool enough for the program to be as effective as its name boasted.
I can never figure out why people aren't happy and entertained when people, (especially, in this case, of their own students!) show them the holes in their system as opposed to exploiting them for personal gain.
A tamper is a device designed to make sand nice and flat for placing those cute interlocking blocks people sometimes use instead of tarmac on their driveways.
Anyway, the tamper is basically a big heavy object with a flat bottom and a two stroke gasoline engine mounted to it. When sitting dead, the thing weighs enough to make moving it a hefty undertaking. (I used to work in a machine rental shop, so I know this directly.) But when you set it running, the thing vibrates. When it's vibrating, it's suddenly like pushing an air-hockey puck. Not weightless, but the next best thing, since the tamper is essentially air-bourn by millimeters many times per second. You barely have to apply any pressure to make it drift.
Okay. Next thought. ..
Sympathetic vibration. Every object in the world has a natural frequency to which it is tuned. The 'C' string on a guitar vibrates at 'C'. Your house and car also have their own native frequencies. This is why your car rattles when you hit a certain speed, but stops when you pass that speed. (Actually, I know a music student who told me that one of the more clever auto-company innovations was to make the patterns in car tires irregularly shaped so that they would create dissonant rhythms and thus avoid the creation of big standing waves as their rubber textures repeated struck the pavement while rolling. This cuts down on the noise cars make as they drive. I don't know if this helps make cars shake less, but it's a neat bit of info, eh?) Anyway, Tesla was excited by the fact that all objects had a specific tuning, and demonstrated that if you put energy into an object at its natural frequency, it would start to vibrate, and if you put energy in faster than the energy could dissipate, the object would eventually shake itself apart. Oh, that's so cool!
Now. . , back to Egypt.
If you were to use the right harmonics to put enough energy into a big block of stone and get it vibrating on its natural frequency, and if you could get it vibrating enough so that it was actually leaving the ground in microscopic amounts as it shook, then you could move it in exactly the same manner you can move a sand tamper. There is evidence that ancient cultures understood these principals, though it is the type of evidence which your run of the mill scientist would probably risk losing his funding over if s/he was seen paying too much interest in it. It's a funny old world.
--Interestingly, the same knowledge could also potentially be used to grind blocks to perfect fits with other blocks once they are in place. You just vibrate the stone and move it back and forth upon the stone you've just placed it on top of until the surfaces where the two contact are ground to the kind of perfect fits observed in many monolithic structures, where you cannot even push a playing card between the stones. Nobody has really offered a more elegant explanation, but again, there's that loss of funding issue. So it's chisels, throat-clearing and the-other-way-looking among the orthodox thinkers of our day.
Though, I suppose when you're done you can pour some concrete over the structure and smooth that out so you get a nice triangle-y finish.
Okay. Warning: Tin-Foil Hat stuff coming up. Forbidden thinking generally leads in that direction for a reason, and you may begin to see why. ..
The problem with discussing this stuff openly, and the reason it is not, is that the technology of harmonic resonance is a very powerful concept which leads to all manner of different kinds of thinking. When absolutely everything has a wavelength, you can start to come up with some very powerful technologies and ask some interesting questions. Like, what happens when you find the vibrational wavelength of a given brain wave pattern and broadcast that? Can you inflict emotions or other nervous functions? Well, yes, actually, you can.
Here's a neat little article which mentions casually, (and rather beside the point), that they were using an
When you are around other Zune users, you can instantly detect them and share media. You can move the average song from one Zune to the next in about fifteen seconds.
That's a cool feature in a strictly media sense, (the microwaves are another issue).
That kind of media distribution fascinates me, and I think it could have dramatically revolutionized things. If the Zune fails, I'd be very curious to see if Apple perhaps took that same extra step.
I can't even picture how that would change things. --If you get on a bus with ten other ipods and have access to all those libraries. What an interesting dynamic! What a fascinating way to be exposed to new ideas from areas of the thought-spectrum you'd never normally visit on your own steam. Very, very cool.
Of course, the Zune has a DRM play-limit imposed on any down/uploaded material. That's going to cause problems, but still, it's a very cool idea in terms of media distribution.
It's obvious you only use fuzzy logic as well as don't read too well. The word 'normally' has an impact on meaning in the first sentence. Judging by your attempts at adhom attacks, you seem to be suffereing from a bit of transference as well as a lack of communications ability.
So are you saying that you agree planned obsolescence IS a reality we face in this world? Good. I'm glad we have that sorted out. I wish you'd been a little more clear at the outset. Because, sorry, I am human, and Fuzzy logic is all ANY of us have despite vain attempts to pretend to be machines. That is, if you want your qualifier words to hold any validity, perhaps you ought to use more of them rather than drown one or two of them under an ocean of apologist goop.
BTW, ad hom comments are entirely valid when they accurately describe the 'hom' in question. "Patronizing" is one of the words I was looking for two posts ago to describe your behavior. If giving it a name is an 'ad hom' attack, then I have zero problem with it. Transference? How lame. Take responsibility for your own behavior.
You seem to think that a product life cycle is somehow normally planned to be artificially short and that great effort goes into this in most if not all products. You also think automakers are out to get you with psychology, or perhaps out to get poor dumb lemmings living in red states. [. ..] You also seem to have a 'greed' problem that indicates an apparent lack of knowledge and understanding of economics which is rather pandemic in the US and Europe now. Profit is what companies exist for. Without it, people that work there can't get paid and people that invest in it cannot get any reward for investing there.
Yep. There it is. --It never takes much needling to make a conservative show his colors. Not only do you agree that planned obsolescence exists, you believe that the greed which motivates it is justified. Another boring, 'Greed is Good' clone. Are you a damned Neocon as well? Is Bush a good guy in your book? Because, if balance sheets are your true measure of how reality ought to be run, then the current state of affairs in the middle east ought to make your heart sing. --Hoards of money is being made by greedy people over that blood-bath. But so what, if the ones dying are all "poor dumb lemmings", eh?
As for "profit being what companies exist for", you're incredibly wrong. Companies exist to serve the best interests of humanity, not that they do this particularly well. (Or perhaps they do, if you consider the CEO's at the top to be humanity.)
The fact of the matter is that a company doesn't need to make morally repugnant decisions in order to take care of its employees. Huge profit isn't necessary. All a company really needs to do is pay everybody a reasonable wage and generate enough income to invest in R&D and maintenance. Wasting millions by over-paying CEO's, and generating out-of-balance profits at the cost of morality in order to pay off shareholders, while it certainly is a major part of the current economic paradigm, doesn't make it healthy. Any system when out of balance is unhealthy. There are better ways, but for them to work, greed needs to be removed from the equation. Greed is a disease.
One last story before we part ways. . .
I know a guy who worked at Bic in high management. He was fired for arguing that they should perhaps switch to using a higher grade steel so that their razors would last for far longer than just a few uses. He illustrated how the added material cost would have been negligible, and that the product life-span would have been much longer than it was currently. He was shouted down and sacked, but not after it was explained to him in no uncertain terms that selling fewer razors would mean less income, dropping stock values and instant job insecurity for the top execs who, in failing to keep stocks high, would not be able to find work elsewhere.
Make up your mind. Either defects are normally designed in on purpose or defects are not normally designed in on purpose
Both happen. It's not a binary question. --The problem, however, with genuine design flaws is that they tend to ignore pre-planned product life cycles. How is this hard to understand? Or is anger is making your logic sloppy? (A Type 1 pattern, btw)
New car smell has nothing to do with the engineering design of the vehicle nor the functionality of it. Not even skunk fragrance lasts forever. I've never seen anyone get rid of a car because the smell subsided nor have I seen a vehicle fail because of it. I have seen new car smell available at the local car wash although I usually prefer strawberry or other fragrance.
Do you really not understand that I was using "New Car" scent as an example of the psychology one encounters at an auto manufacturer or are you just being difficult? (Type 1)
I have seen weight as a critical design parameter and the example given of bolt holes versus flimsy screws might have been a requirement to meet the weight or perhaps it could have been a packaging change that failed to incorporate bolt holes with a multi-10s of thousands of dollars injection mold redesign compared to a flimsier alternative. Or, it's possible that a design criteria for ruggedness of that portion wasn't properly estimated.
So, if I understand this, you are suggesting that bad design resulting from managerial stupidity is more likely than bad design resulting from greed. I wouldn't argue that stupidity is uncommon, but I would estimate that greed is no less, if perhaps much more common, especially in positions of power where such decisions are made. And given that I know of several examples of deliberate planned obsolescence, I don't find stupidity a convincing argument against greed. Especially since both can co-exist. Again, it's not a binary question.
In most projects, there is insufficient time and resources to properly complete it on time and in budget while achieving a perfectly designed product. That means there is not enough time to perfectly design the product and then proceed to design in flaws that will result in failures after the warranty period in order to create obsolescence.
This is trite logic which doesn't fit into the real world. And it's more binary logic again. What's with you? --I've seen managers bluster in and demand deleterious changes no matter how little time there is left to complete a project. Humans are quite flexible, both on the managerial and worker sides when it comes to winning an argument over how something ought to be done. We live in a fuzzy logic world, my friend.
As for your auto company creating new car smell molecules that last only a few months, with your assumption being that the smell is supposed to last for less time than it should or easily could, that's rather stupid if it's true. Considering that most people buy cars and keep them longer than 1 or 2 years, and that new car smell lasts only a fraction of a year, any competitor that creates a new car smell which lasts longer than that can create a perception that their products are superior and last longer - a factor which won't affect how long one keeps their car but if such nonsense matters to anyone, it will certainly steer them to the competition for their next car. Hence, unless one can make a car smell new for 1 to 2 years, possibly aggrevating people with sinus problems, the desire would be to design the smell to last for as long as possible.
This complaint is just plain grasping, and it remains totally disconnected from reality. Designer scents and their use as I've described in the automotive world are not just some pet theory of mine. It's the way it's done. I even saw the manipulative psychology proudly described in a damned documentary. So. . , perhaps the automakers have spent a little more time and research than your half-baked type-1 response.
Ad hom insults, indeed. --I just can't stand people who make authoritative, blanket, "This is how it is" statements with absolutely nothing to back themselves up. So you'll have to take the lumps. They wouldn't hurt if there wasn't some truth in it.
While there is always the exception, actually designing in defects on purpose is not really done.
I like how you state that with such an air of authority but don't offer any reason for me to believe you. Actually, I can't stand that. It's conceited and annoying and the kind of people who do it have always, in my experience, fallen into one of two personality types; 1) Ego-driven know-it-alls with gaping blind-spots in their knowledge structures and no ability to overcome their pride in order to fill those holes in with actual data. --Or 2) They are simply very well programmed so that they actually believe the lies they've been sold to such a degree that they can state ridiculous things with impunity. (The second type can be far less annoying, because sometimes they can be open to reason, whereas the first type usually has emotional blocks.)
Now, I don't doubt that you might work for one of the more responsible companies which chooses for whatever reason not to engage in questionable moral practices, but I've simply known far too many engineers and highly placed executives in far too many companies with highly recognizable names who have told me horror stories for me to believe that their cases are the exceptions.
There are plenty of opportunities that exist for unintentional defects to crop in, oftimes, defects that can cost the company dearly in recalls and warranty repairs.
Defects are defects which nobody wants because they are not planned and can indeed bite into profits. However, life-span is something which can and is deliberately calculated. Consider "New Car Smell," which is designed by at least one one major auto manufacturer to last for only a few months. Seriously. The designer odor is even country specific; Japanese consumers like a more leathery/meaty scent in their new cars while the smell for Americans is designed differently, but each is carefully brewed to trigger key emotional centers related to well-being and satisfaction, etc. It's totally artificial, and the smell is designed to be released from the plastics used in the interior and they have a very specific half-life.
An auto company which does this has deliberately taken it upon itself to create a sensory and emotional experience which is designed to create an impression of a product's life-span. It's taking a natural process of wear and aging and manipulating our perception of it. When the artificial perception of, 'New' is gone, then how long does it take for 'Old' to set in? Well, you can bet that if they're going to go to the trouble of creating designer scent molecules that they're not going to stop there. You don't even need to personally know an executive or engineer on the dark side to confirm this; just ask a series of qualified auto-mechanics about the relationship between warranties running out and parts breaking. The pattern becomes obvious to anybody who honestly looks.
Of course, no company would want to get caught with their pants down, so yeah, they're also going to go to the trouble to make wear look like natural and unavoidable aspects of engineering and gloss over the fact that it happens to line up nicely with their sales agenda.
once the critical part has broken, if you have the technical skills to fix it, you can pretty much be assured that your toy/tool/car/whatever will last a good, long time.
A while ago, in my search for a small, dedicated word processor with a long battery life, a big screen and a proper keyboard, I bought an HP Jornada 820. It's a great little machine with no moving parts and a flashcard port rather than a hard drive. Awesome. I use it all the time for writing on the go in ways that make regular lap-top and palm users go, "Wow! I wish I had something which served me as well. How much did you spend? Really? Wow. . . If I gave you some money, could you get one for me also? eBay scares me."
The problem, and I was told to anticipate this, is that the screen on the Jornada 820 likes to break off after a period of use.
So when mine did, I pulled it apart to see why. It's pretty amazing! I discovered inside a set of re-enforced bolt holes in the chassis where some scrupulous engineer figured the screen hinging system ought to be attached. But somebody, somewhere, made the call to ignore those bolt holes and instead use these single, weenie screws in a rather less than strong part of the chassis. A ploy which was clearly designed to have HP's cute little Jorna break with ease. And they do. Thank you so very much, HP!
But since planned obsolescence is a given these days, I was overjoyed!
I simply drilled out the never-used re-enforced bolt holes and employed proper bolts to re-attached the screen. (And because I like to do a really good job, I used some spring-steel and washers to make the whole thing even more rugged. Barring accidents, the screen will never come off again.)
So now I have a computer which by design was supposed to be dead several years ago, but which works just fine for me. And unless the (evil) designers were able to sneak any other time-bomb flaws into the device, my little word processor should last me for a very long time. This makes me happy!
The moral of the story? Learn how to fix things or get used to spending hoards of cash because several somebodys over at HP and similar companies are spineless villains.
Why do Sceptics always seem to stop their much-trumpeted critical thinking whenever it comes to agencies with proven track records of psychotic behavior? I'm guessing it's because they can't tell the difference between a piece of PR department spin and an actual bit of information. Your logical arguments are faulty. Comparing cars from yesteryear to those of today serves no rational point here. The fact of the matter is that the parts in cars and computers are designed to stop working within a specific time frame. Blaming it on material and manufacturing costs as you suggest, is simply a clever side-step which doesn't diminish the actual issue. Clever arguments are for high school debate-clubs. Those in the real world are better served by actually looking at what is really happening.
Case in point. . .
I've known several engineers and managers at several companies who report the use of planned obsolescence. --The simplest version of the same story is this one: I know a guy who was in top-level management at Bic in the Seventies. He lost his job because he argued that they ought to spend a microscopic amount of money more per razor blade rather than continue using quick-to-deteriorate steel in their products. Whoosh. Loud noises and anger erupted, which saw him out the door. --But not after being told in no uncertain terms that making a good razor for almost nothing more would mean their revenue would drop by a huge margin because people would simply end up buying only one or two razors per year instead of many. The fear was simple to understand; stock prices would drop and the executive officers at Bic would lose their huge pay checks, and would probably because of their choices, not be able to get work at any other company.
The effect of Fear on a frightened executive is very, very simple to understand.
And clever arguments which ignore reality don't make that effect go away.
-FL
Re:The conspiracy to create flimsy devices....
on
Why Do Gadgets Break?
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· Score: 1
...is just not there. No proof, no references in TFA.
We don't sit in meetings and say "What should we make breakable?". Ludicrous.
Obviously, you don't buy consumer-level items.
In any case, you must be missing all the real meetings. --I've got friends and family in the corporate world who report exactly the kind of thinking you seem to believe doesn't happen.
You know, "Please" is customary when requesting somebody spend the time and energy to give you something.
But I'll let that go.
--Basically, anybody who has taken the time to actually look into Astrology, (beyond the useless cursory glance most Sceptics give the subject before announcing their conclusions), will know that the patterns both exist and do so very strongly. Why? Well astrology states that people born on different dates respond to the stimulus in their lives according to what the sky was doing when they were born. If we assume that the growth of the human brain is indeed affected by EM influences during its development when in the womb and through early childhood, then this might be a reasonable way to explain the astrological traits observed in people.
But that sadly is all wasted on you. Either you are convinced there must be something bad there, or (more likely on/.) you are just trolling to see who bites. I did:-)
Trolling? No.
Convinced? Well, all I can say to you is that the evidence is both available and reasonable. In return I wonder why somebody who appears to take the sceptical standpoint would automatically bias himself alongside the telecomunications giants when their evidence of safety comes from labs with huge conflicts of interest.
Sceptics confuse me. They claim no bias, but their beliefs always seem to fall in line with the interests of agencies with terrible track records and fickle moral imperatives which are entirely driven by $$$.
Sceptics often claim others are only imagining patterns where none exist, but by the same token, it seems to me that Sceptics could benefit enormously by performing a little pattern recognition of their own rather than base their beliefs entirely on 'official' press releases through big media.
A little more broadly performed research before thinking themselves well-equipped to speak down to others would probably serve them well, too.
Do these people go outside in the daytime ? Do they not realize that they are being bombarded with radiation if they do ? Radiation that, unlike wifi transmissions, has been proven to cause cancer in humans! This has been your irrational minute.
This is a clever argument, but it does suffer from a significant flaw; none of the wavelengths the Earth's atmosphere allows through fall into the gigahertz range. --Although, interestingly, they do fall into the same bandwidth at which the human brain resonates; human brain waves occupy the 1-35 htz range.
There are only two spots on the EM spectrum where solar energy penetrates the Earth's atmosphere; visible light and the low end where the human brain resonates.
I would find it curious if evolution would create an adaptation in creatures to the visible light spectrum but ignore the low htz range. In fact, I strongly suspect the low htz range is linked to the patterns we see in astrology.
Curiously, most cell phones modulate their microwave frequencies down to that range as well.
Given that radio waves obey the inverse square law, the signal strength of a cell phone 1 cm. away from your brain is about a million times that of a wireless network card a meter away.
Given that microwave transmissions are designed to be picked up from far away by devices, perhaps the neurons in the brain are similarly capable of being affected by those transmissions?
Power levels are not the issue. The issue is that the human nervous system is electrochemical in nature and is designed to respond on the cellular level to vanishingly small electrical impulses. Of course, few are aware of this. The telcos are more than happy to keep the debate spinning on about the non-issue of human tissues being heated by microwaves.
The most that particular set of frequencies can do is warm the human body up, and to do that it would need to be far more intense of a signal to have any noticeable effect.
What if the human nervous system is electrochemical in nature, and neurons could be influenced by outside EM stimuli in ways other than simple heating effects?
Also. . , what is the 2.4Ghz signal modulated down to in WiFi devices, and how does that frequency range affect the nervous system?
I think you might be confusing correlation with causation there, buddy. You list a handful of common symptoms of Autism and then blame technological interests for the symptoms. Maybe the symptoms you list and the technological interests have the same root cause, namely Autism?
Gee. I'm your buddy! How nice.
I agree, that it's certainly possible in some of the more severe cases I've seen, but I doubt autism could account for everybody. The simple fact according to my observation is that there is a special kind of zoned out space-case walking around today, and s/he wears white earbuds.
But you might have a point; there may indeed be medical factors more often involved than I'd originally thought. And now that I think of it, the same kind of zoned-out expression I've seen numerous times around here was very similar to that of a room-mate of mine who was taking heavy doses of anti-depressants. --I've heard that the rate of anti-depressant use is very high, estimated by some to be about 10% of the U.S. population, and much of that being questionably prescribed.
Interestingly, my drugged-out room mate was also a pod-person. It seems to me that the common factor is more an inability or lack of desire to interface with the world without some sort of fuzz screen, (either electronic or chemical) in place.
Slashdot Mirror
That's awfully bitter.
While I agree that there is something to your point, there is another side to it.
The problem is that some of the most miserable, un-creative, un-romantic, bitter and spiritually locked-down people I know are 'successful' in a purely monetary sense.
The trick is finding a path which takes you into the realm of 'success' but which uses a means that does not also enslave. Working 40-50 hours a week in a soul-sucking job is hardly commendable if it prevents spiritual growth and refinement. Commendable is finding a way to power without destroying the self.
I know from my own experiences that until I was able to construct my own means of self-employment, I simply could not make myself work a cruddy job. I couldn't deal with the 'Office Space' reality and simply refused to allow bosses to walk over me or make me perform insane tasks which made no sense. Some would say, "That's life. Suck it up.", but I just couldn't bear to turn off my brain enough to become another miserable worker drone. Nor could I put up with the similar insanities associated with adult education which would lead to higher paying versions of the same nonsense.
Finding a path I loved and building my own company and means of surviving in this world was the only solution for me. Anything else would have led to suicide.
--I think many of the people you indicate as lazy and short-sighted simply recognize the futility of a soul-sucking job and refuse to play. I have a very hard time blaming them. Self-confidence seems to be the thing which stops people stuck in such place from taking the next step toward building a viable system which works for them, (a system other than living on government hand-outs, that is).
-FL
Those are entirely valid questions, but not nearly so paranoid as we might wish. Gates isn't even in the running.
I tried to address this in a general post nearer the top of this same slashdot article.
Basically, people seem to have a tendency to severely under-estimate just how huge some personal fortunes actually are and the natural implications which lead from this. The fellow I chose to illustrate this with, aside from being a trillionaire in the 60's, was a hard-core right wing Christian who abhorred atheism and believed strongly in war and who maintained friends high up in the military. --Which neatly puts him in that strange discordant nether-world between, "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and weapons manufacture. Essentially, the man was functionally insane, and had both the will and the power to extend his brand of insanity over the rest of the country. And in conjunction with other big power brokers, that's exactly what he did. That's where the Nixon Admin came from, and by extension, the current one.
So it doesn't matter how much this might sound like paranoid fantasy, history unfortunately agrees with its conclusions. But only if you pull back the lense of your viewpoint. As Bill Hicks put it, "Watching TV is like taking black spray paint to your third eye."
-FL
The wealthiest few own pretty much everything. Let's take one example. . . Haroldson Lafayette Hunt; arguably one of the richest men on the planet until his death in 1974, is somebody we don't hear much about, if at all. His name did not appear on the list of the 500 largest international corporations, although he was probably among the top five. In the 60's Hunt owned and controled companies the names of which have never even been associated with his. The Hunt assets are staggeringly huge, estimated to be equal to those of such corporate complexes as General Electric.
--As a point of reference, the assets of General Electric, the fourth largest American corporation, equaled $4,851,718,000 in 1966. Yes. That's four trillion. In the 60's! Haroldson Lafayette Hunt had neither stockholders nor board of directors. He owned 85 to 90% of the shares in all of his companies. His family owns the rest.
Now that is wealth. By comparison, Bill Gates with his measly few billion is a bell boy. This Hunt character, and a small handful of people like him, own the world. Hunt had has his own intelligence network, his decisions were carried out by a powerful general staff. His business interests were so extensive that he subsidized (along with other big oilmen) most of the influential men in Congress, men like Lyndon Johnson. Hunt was one of the financial backers of Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose deputy Roy Cohn attracted his attention and had since worked for him on several occasions.
Hunt was the most powerful American propagandist of the Far Right in the day. In 1951 he financed "Facts Forum," a series of radio and television programs which was later replaced by "Life Line," a one-sided series of 15-minute radio broadcasts carried daily on 409 stations throughout the country. His propaganda campaign cost him $2 million a year, financed by companies that he owned, or on which he was in a position to exert pressure.
Okay. So what did he do with all that power? What kind of guy was Hunt? Well, you can measure a man by taking stock of his likes and dislikes. He didn't like President Kennedy.
As an interesting aside, Hunt was nearby on the day of the infamous assassination in Dealey Plaza.
So when people here talk about trickle down economics and the quality of life being measured by the availability of iPods and the number of rooms people have to live in, or the available good food, I am fairly certain the point is being missed. The point of view needs to be pulled waaaay back, because there is a much larger picture. Slaughterhouse chickens have resources and lives of similar relative quality; shelter, heat, food, society of other chickens, and enough room to walk around and pluck about and play 'pecking-order'. (Meat chickens are not individually caged). I'm sure if you gave them some iPods and jobs and general distraction, they wouldn't even realize thta they were owned. But they are, and their lives are severely limited. --Genetically, physically, mentally, spiritually, etc. And they don't realize it.
The typical pattern in a free-cho
You're still not talking about the top percentage.
You're talking about the mid-level managerial staff. (Who also, btw, like to ensure that people are fed tainted foods and lifestyles so as to ensure that there is enough sickness around to require their billion dollar cures.) No, the really rich individuals are the ones who plan things like wars and famines so that the human harvest will be just as bloody and terrible as can be managed.
Fear is food for the dark side, and the dark side is in control at the moment.
-FL
There far are better reasons than that to avoid the big news sites. --Abandoning the distracting nonsense of the 'Liberal vs Conservative' shell game is one of them.
That whole tactic is designed to divide and conquer the populace. Labeling one group automatically sets yourself into the opposing camp regardless of how poor the rationality happens to be on either side. Both sides are deeply flawed, which means anybody who participates in the game will be unable to advance until they manage to let go.
It's better to engage in honest appraisal of one's internal workings and belief systems without fear, anger and ego getting in the way. It's often painful and humbling, but true power, clarity and freedom are the prizes.
-FL
But it's possibly the coolest device I own. It's footprint is an inch or so smaller than a sheet of typing paper, but it has a full laptop keyboard, a big-enough screen and no moving parts. All Flashcard memory. The battery runs for twice as long as that of normal laptop. It has enough screen size to make itself useful where a palm-sized device is not. That is, it's comfortable to read and write on where a palm device cannot even get through a single paragraph without the need for a scroll function. This means you can easily do real work on it, and opening it up isn't like deploying a small RTS factory.
Granted, it's no good for games or your
It would be cool if Intel were to put out a better version of the same thing. There is a real market for a dedicated portable word processor/reader, without the bells and whistles and distractions/irritations of a regular lap top. --But very few players have stepped up to the plate to offer such a tool.
Every writer I show it to drools. They know just how dumb a laptop is for writing; it's like owning a car so you can have a decent glove compartment.
-FL
Yeah. I've had the same experience. I imagine it will only be a short matter of time before somebody fixes this. It simply cannot be that hard to overcome!
-FL
Awareness is vital.
Protest rallies have their place, but they are more a clarion call to others on the planet that the light side is well populated. It's encouraging.
--As is the presence on the web of many voices. --Growing one's awareness and learning the patterns of fascism allows us grow strong. Knowledge protects, and without discussion and networking, knowledge just doesn't grow very quickly.
You shouldn't feel guilty about your meathod of reaching awareness just because you don't attend protest marches. Energy is well spent in any manner used to understand and broadcast the news of why evil happens, how to spot it and what underlying patterns drive and identify it. That way, when it comes down to you, you can understand exactly how to choose against it. The war is being fought through you and me an all of use by the choices we make every day in even the smallest things we do. Being informed allows us to choose with clarity and power.
New military weaponry is a given and avoiding the fascist hammer may indeed be impossible at this point, but certain things do become apparent. . .
The Democrats won the last election by several million votes. However, there were still an estimated 3,000,000 votes which were lost or mis-recorded or switched over to the Republican side through the fixed electronic voting machines. As a voting scam must make the split seem just about down the middle, this suggests that the dark side underestimated just how much the populace is upset with the current state of affairs. This comes about through awareness.
Not that the democratic win is a particularly big deal. The trap for humanity is set regardless and Bush won't likely be impeached. But it does illustrate the power of awareness in a gross sense.
-FL
As an aside, I just figured out how to use one of those green lasers to create a cool lightsabler blade effect.
You get a prism from an old SLR camera and rig it so that it spins on a tight axis creating a thin tube of light with an inch or so diameter. You'd need a thin shaft with a knob at the end to stop the beam a meter away.
On a related note,I've been wondering if perhaps one could cancel out a visible laser with another one which is emitting at the same wavelength, but with opposite wave peeks and valleys. Like a wave balancing effect in audio wiring, but I don't know my optics well enough to anwser this. It would be an interesting gadget, though. . .
-FL
I can never figure out why people aren't happy and entertained when people, (especially, in this case, of their own students!) show them the holes in their system as opposed to exploiting them for personal gain.
Funny world.
-FL
A tamper is a device designed to make sand nice and flat for placing those cute interlocking blocks people sometimes use instead of tarmac on their driveways.
.
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Anyway, the tamper is basically a big heavy object with a flat bottom and a two stroke gasoline engine mounted to it. When sitting dead, the thing weighs enough to make moving it a hefty undertaking. (I used to work in a machine rental shop, so I know this directly.) But when you set it running, the thing vibrates. When it's vibrating, it's suddenly like pushing an air-hockey puck. Not weightless, but the next best thing, since the tamper is essentially air-bourn by millimeters many times per second. You barely have to apply any pressure to make it drift.
Okay. Next thought. .
Sympathetic vibration. Every object in the world has a natural frequency to which it is tuned. The 'C' string on a guitar vibrates at 'C'. Your house and car also have their own native frequencies. This is why your car rattles when you hit a certain speed, but stops when you pass that speed. (Actually, I know a music student who told me that one of the more clever auto-company innovations was to make the patterns in car tires irregularly shaped so that they would create dissonant rhythms and thus avoid the creation of big standing waves as their rubber textures repeated struck the pavement while rolling. This cuts down on the noise cars make as they drive. I don't know if this helps make cars shake less, but it's a neat bit of info, eh?) Anyway, Tesla was excited by the fact that all objects had a specific tuning, and demonstrated that if you put energy into an object at its natural frequency, it would start to vibrate, and if you put energy in faster than the energy could dissipate, the object would eventually shake itself apart. Oh, that's so cool!
Now. . , back to Egypt.
If you were to use the right harmonics to put enough energy into a big block of stone and get it vibrating on its natural frequency, and if you could get it vibrating enough so that it was actually leaving the ground in microscopic amounts as it shook, then you could move it in exactly the same manner you can move a sand tamper. There is evidence that ancient cultures understood these principals, though it is the type of evidence which your run of the mill scientist would probably risk losing his funding over if s/he was seen paying too much interest in it. It's a funny old world.
--Interestingly, the same knowledge could also potentially be used to grind blocks to perfect fits with other blocks once they are in place. You just vibrate the stone and move it back and forth upon the stone you've just placed it on top of until the surfaces where the two contact are ground to the kind of perfect fits observed in many monolithic structures, where you cannot even push a playing card between the stones. Nobody has really offered a more elegant explanation, but again, there's that loss of funding issue. So it's chisels, throat-clearing and the-other-way-looking among the orthodox thinkers of our day.
Though, I suppose when you're done you can pour some concrete over the structure and smooth that out so you get a nice triangle-y finish.
Okay. Warning: Tin-Foil Hat stuff coming up. Forbidden thinking generally leads in that direction for a reason, and you may begin to see why. .
The problem with discussing this stuff openly, and the reason it is not, is that the technology of harmonic resonance is a very powerful concept which leads to all manner of different kinds of thinking. When absolutely everything has a wavelength, you can start to come up with some very powerful technologies and ask some interesting questions. Like, what happens when you find the vibrational wavelength of a given brain wave pattern and broadcast that? Can you inflict emotions or other nervous functions? Well, yes, actually, you can.
Here's a neat little article which mentions casually, (and rather beside the point), that they were using an
Good call!
When you are around other Zune users, you can instantly detect them and share media. You can move the average song from one Zune to the next in about fifteen seconds.
That's a cool feature in a strictly media sense, (the microwaves are another issue).
That kind of media distribution fascinates me, and I think it could have dramatically revolutionized things. If the Zune fails, I'd be very curious to see if Apple perhaps took that same extra step.
I can't even picture how that would change things. --If you get on a bus with ten other ipods and have access to all those libraries. What an interesting dynamic! What a fascinating way to be exposed to new ideas from areas of the thought-spectrum you'd never normally visit on your own steam. Very, very cool.
Of course, the Zune has a DRM play-limit imposed on any down/uploaded material. That's going to cause problems, but still, it's a very cool idea in terms of media distribution.
-FL
So are you saying that you agree planned obsolescence IS a reality we face in this world? Good. I'm glad we have that sorted out. I wish you'd been a little more clear at the outset. Because, sorry, I am human, and Fuzzy logic is all ANY of us have despite vain attempts to pretend to be machines. That is, if you want your qualifier words to hold any validity, perhaps you ought to use more of them rather than drown one or two of them under an ocean of apologist goop.
BTW, ad hom comments are entirely valid when they accurately describe the 'hom' in question. "Patronizing" is one of the words I was looking for two posts ago to describe your behavior. If giving it a name is an 'ad hom' attack, then I have zero problem with it. Transference? How lame. Take responsibility for your own behavior.
You seem to think that a product life cycle is somehow normally planned to be artificially short and that great effort goes into this in most if not all products. You also think automakers are out to get you with psychology, or perhaps out to get poor dumb lemmings living in red states. [. .
Yep. There it is. --It never takes much needling to make a conservative show his colors. Not only do you agree that planned obsolescence exists, you believe that the greed which motivates it is justified. Another boring, 'Greed is Good' clone. Are you a damned Neocon as well? Is Bush a good guy in your book? Because, if balance sheets are your true measure of how reality ought to be run, then the current state of affairs in the middle east ought to make your heart sing. --Hoards of money is being made by greedy people over that blood-bath. But so what, if the ones dying are all "poor dumb lemmings", eh?
As for "profit being what companies exist for", you're incredibly wrong. Companies exist to serve the best interests of humanity, not that they do this particularly well. (Or perhaps they do, if you consider the CEO's at the top to be humanity.)
The fact of the matter is that a company doesn't need to make morally repugnant decisions in order to take care of its employees. Huge profit isn't necessary. All a company really needs to do is pay everybody a reasonable wage and generate enough income to invest in R&D and maintenance. Wasting millions by over-paying CEO's, and generating out-of-balance profits at the cost of morality in order to pay off shareholders, while it certainly is a major part of the current economic paradigm, doesn't make it healthy. Any system when out of balance is unhealthy. There are better ways, but for them to work, greed needs to be removed from the equation. Greed is a disease.
One last story before we part ways. . .
I know a guy who worked at Bic in high management. He was fired for arguing that they should perhaps switch to using a higher grade steel so that their razors would last for far longer than just a few uses. He illustrated how the added material cost would have been negligible, and that the product life-span would have been much longer than it was currently. He was shouted down and sacked, but not after it was explained to him in no uncertain terms that selling fewer razors would mean less income, dropping stock values and instant job insecurity for the top execs who, in failing to keep stocks high, would not be able to find work elsewhere.
Greed and Fear go hand in hand.
-FL
Both happen. It's not a binary question. --The problem, however, with genuine design flaws is that they tend to ignore pre-planned product life cycles. How is this hard to understand? Or is anger is making your logic sloppy? (A Type 1 pattern, btw)
New car smell has nothing to do with the engineering design of the vehicle nor the functionality of it. Not even skunk fragrance lasts forever. I've never seen anyone get rid of a car because the smell subsided nor have I seen a vehicle fail because of it. I have seen new car smell available at the local car wash although I usually prefer strawberry or other fragrance.
Do you really not understand that I was using "New Car" scent as an example of the psychology one encounters at an auto manufacturer or are you just being difficult? (Type 1)
I have seen weight as a critical design parameter and the example given of bolt holes versus flimsy screws might have been a requirement to meet the weight or perhaps it could have been a packaging change that failed to incorporate bolt holes with a multi-10s of thousands of dollars injection mold redesign compared to a flimsier alternative. Or, it's possible that a design criteria for ruggedness of that portion wasn't properly estimated.
So, if I understand this, you are suggesting that bad design resulting from managerial stupidity is more likely than bad design resulting from greed. I wouldn't argue that stupidity is uncommon, but I would estimate that greed is no less, if perhaps much more common, especially in positions of power where such decisions are made. And given that I know of several examples of deliberate planned obsolescence, I don't find stupidity a convincing argument against greed. Especially since both can co-exist. Again, it's not a binary question.
In most projects, there is insufficient time and resources to properly complete it on time and in budget while achieving a perfectly designed product. That means there is not enough time to perfectly design the product and then proceed to design in flaws that will result in failures after the warranty period in order to create obsolescence.
This is trite logic which doesn't fit into the real world. And it's more binary logic again. What's with you? --I've seen managers bluster in and demand deleterious changes no matter how little time there is left to complete a project. Humans are quite flexible, both on the managerial and worker sides when it comes to winning an argument over how something ought to be done. We live in a fuzzy logic world, my friend.
As for your auto company creating new car smell molecules that last only a few months, with your assumption being that the smell is supposed to last for less time than it should or easily could, that's rather stupid if it's true. Considering that most people buy cars and keep them longer than 1 or 2 years, and that new car smell lasts only a fraction of a year, any competitor that creates a new car smell which lasts longer than that can create a perception that their products are superior and last longer - a factor which won't affect how long one keeps their car but if such nonsense matters to anyone, it will certainly steer them to the competition for their next car. Hence, unless one can make a car smell new for 1 to 2 years, possibly aggrevating people with sinus problems, the desire would be to design the smell to last for as long as possible.
This complaint is just plain grasping, and it remains totally disconnected from reality. Designer scents and their use as I've described in the automotive world are not just some pet theory of mine. It's the way it's done. I even saw the manipulative psychology proudly described in a damned documentary. So. . , perhaps the automakers have spent a little more time and research than your half-baked type-1 response.
Ad hom insults, indeed. --I just can't stand people who make authoritative, blanket, "This is how it is" statements with absolutely nothing to back themselves up. So you'll have to take the lumps. They wouldn't hurt if there wasn't some truth in it.
-FL
I like how you state that with such an air of authority but don't offer any reason for me to believe you. Actually, I can't stand that. It's conceited and annoying and the kind of people who do it have always, in my experience, fallen into one of two personality types; 1) Ego-driven know-it-alls with gaping blind-spots in their knowledge structures and no ability to overcome their pride in order to fill those holes in with actual data. --Or 2) They are simply very well programmed so that they actually believe the lies they've been sold to such a degree that they can state ridiculous things with impunity. (The second type can be far less annoying, because sometimes they can be open to reason, whereas the first type usually has emotional blocks.)
Now, I don't doubt that you might work for one of the more responsible companies which chooses for whatever reason not to engage in questionable moral practices, but I've simply known far too many engineers and highly placed executives in far too many companies with highly recognizable names who have told me horror stories for me to believe that their cases are the exceptions.
There are plenty of opportunities that exist for unintentional defects to crop in, oftimes, defects that can cost the company dearly in recalls and warranty repairs.
Defects are defects which nobody wants because they are not planned and can indeed bite into profits. However, life-span is something which can and is deliberately calculated. Consider "New Car Smell," which is designed by at least one one major auto manufacturer to last for only a few months. Seriously. The designer odor is even country specific; Japanese consumers like a more leathery/meaty scent in their new cars while the smell for Americans is designed differently, but each is carefully brewed to trigger key emotional centers related to well-being and satisfaction, etc. It's totally artificial, and the smell is designed to be released from the plastics used in the interior and they have a very specific half-life.
An auto company which does this has deliberately taken it upon itself to create a sensory and emotional experience which is designed to create an impression of a product's life-span. It's taking a natural process of wear and aging and manipulating our perception of it. When the artificial perception of, 'New' is gone, then how long does it take for 'Old' to set in? Well, you can bet that if they're going to go to the trouble of creating designer scent molecules that they're not going to stop there. You don't even need to personally know an executive or engineer on the dark side to confirm this; just ask a series of qualified auto-mechanics about the relationship between warranties running out and parts breaking. The pattern becomes obvious to anybody who honestly looks.
Of course, no company would want to get caught with their pants down, so yeah, they're also going to go to the trouble to make wear look like natural and unavoidable aspects of engineering and gloss over the fact that it happens to line up nicely with their sales agenda.
-FL
A while ago, in my search for a small, dedicated word processor with a long battery life, a big screen and a proper keyboard, I bought an HP Jornada 820. It's a great little machine with no moving parts and a flashcard port rather than a hard drive. Awesome. I use it all the time for writing on the go in ways that make regular lap-top and palm users go, "Wow! I wish I had something which served me as well. How much did you spend? Really? Wow. . . If I gave you some money, could you get one for me also? eBay scares me."
The problem, and I was told to anticipate this, is that the screen on the Jornada 820 likes to break off after a period of use.
So when mine did, I pulled it apart to see why. It's pretty amazing! I discovered inside a set of re-enforced bolt holes in the chassis where some scrupulous engineer figured the screen hinging system ought to be attached. But somebody, somewhere, made the call to ignore those bolt holes and instead use these single, weenie screws in a rather less than strong part of the chassis. A ploy which was clearly designed to have HP's cute little Jorna break with ease. And they do. Thank you so very much, HP!
But since planned obsolescence is a given these days, I was overjoyed!
I simply drilled out the never-used re-enforced bolt holes and employed proper bolts to re-attached the screen. (And because I like to do a really good job, I used some spring-steel and washers to make the whole thing even more rugged. Barring accidents, the screen will never come off again.)
So now I have a computer which by design was supposed to be dead several years ago, but which works just fine for me. And unless the (evil) designers were able to sneak any other time-bomb flaws into the device, my little word processor should last me for a very long time. This makes me happy!
The moral of the story? Learn how to fix things or get used to spending hoards of cash because several somebodys over at HP and similar companies are spineless villains.
-FL
Why do Sceptics always seem to stop their much-trumpeted critical thinking whenever it comes to agencies with proven track records of psychotic behavior? I'm guessing it's because they can't tell the difference between a piece of PR department spin and an actual bit of information. Your logical arguments are faulty. Comparing cars from yesteryear to those of today serves no rational point here. The fact of the matter is that the parts in cars and computers are designed to stop working within a specific time frame. Blaming it on material and manufacturing costs as you suggest, is simply a clever side-step which doesn't diminish the actual issue. Clever arguments are for high school debate-clubs. Those in the real world are better served by actually looking at what is really happening.
Case in point. . .
I've known several engineers and managers at several companies who report the use of planned obsolescence. --The simplest version of the same story is this one: I know a guy who was in top-level management at Bic in the Seventies. He lost his job because he argued that they ought to spend a microscopic amount of money more per razor blade rather than continue using quick-to-deteriorate steel in their products. Whoosh. Loud noises and anger erupted, which saw him out the door. --But not after being told in no uncertain terms that making a good razor for almost nothing more would mean their revenue would drop by a huge margin because people would simply end up buying only one or two razors per year instead of many. The fear was simple to understand; stock prices would drop and the executive officers at Bic would lose their huge pay checks, and would probably because of their choices, not be able to get work at any other company.
The effect of Fear on a frightened executive is very, very simple to understand.
And clever arguments which ignore reality don't make that effect go away.
-FL
We don't sit in meetings and say "What should we make breakable?". Ludicrous.
Obviously, you don't buy consumer-level items.
In any case, you must be missing all the real meetings. --I've got friends and family in the corporate world who report exactly the kind of thinking you seem to believe doesn't happen.
-FL
You know, "Please" is customary when requesting somebody spend the time and energy to give you something.
But I'll let that go.
--Basically, anybody who has taken the time to actually look into Astrology, (beyond the useless cursory glance most Sceptics give the subject before announcing their conclusions), will know that the patterns both exist and do so very strongly. Why? Well astrology states that people born on different dates respond to the stimulus in their lives according to what the sky was doing when they were born. If we assume that the growth of the human brain is indeed affected by EM influences during its development when in the womb and through early childhood, then this might be a reasonable way to explain the astrological traits observed in people.
-FL
Trolling? No.
Convinced? Well, all I can say to you is that the evidence is both available and reasonable. In return I wonder why somebody who appears to take the sceptical standpoint would automatically bias himself alongside the telecomunications giants when their evidence of safety comes from labs with huge conflicts of interest.
Sceptics confuse me. They claim no bias, but their beliefs always seem to fall in line with the interests of agencies with terrible track records and fickle moral imperatives which are entirely driven by $$$.
Sceptics often claim others are only imagining patterns where none exist, but by the same token, it seems to me that Sceptics could benefit enormously by performing a little pattern recognition of their own rather than base their beliefs entirely on 'official' press releases through big media.
A little more broadly performed research before thinking themselves well-equipped to speak down to others would probably serve them well, too.
But that's just my opinion.
-FL
This is a clever argument, but it does suffer from a significant flaw; none of the wavelengths the Earth's atmosphere allows through fall into the gigahertz range. --Although, interestingly, they do fall into the same bandwidth at which the human brain resonates; human brain waves occupy the 1-35 htz range.
There are only two spots on the EM spectrum where solar energy penetrates the Earth's atmosphere; visible light and the low end where the human brain resonates.
I would find it curious if evolution would create an adaptation in creatures to the visible light spectrum but ignore the low htz range. In fact, I strongly suspect the low htz range is linked to the patterns we see in astrology.
Curiously, most cell phones modulate their microwave frequencies down to that range as well.
-FL
Given that microwave transmissions are designed to be picked up from far away by devices, perhaps the neurons in the brain are similarly capable of being affected by those transmissions?
Power levels are not the issue. The issue is that the human nervous system is electrochemical in nature and is designed to respond on the cellular level to vanishingly small electrical impulses. Of course, few are aware of this. The telcos are more than happy to keep the debate spinning on about the non-issue of human tissues being heated by microwaves.
-FL
What if the human nervous system is electrochemical in nature, and neurons could be influenced by outside EM stimuli in ways other than simple heating effects?
Also. . , what is the 2.4Ghz signal modulated down to in WiFi devices, and how does that frequency range affect the nervous system?
-FL
Gee. I'm your buddy! How nice.
I agree, that it's certainly possible in some of the more severe cases I've seen, but I doubt autism could account for everybody. The simple fact according to my observation is that there is a special kind of zoned out space-case walking around today, and s/he wears white earbuds.
But you might have a point; there may indeed be medical factors more often involved than I'd originally thought. And now that I think of it, the same kind of zoned-out expression I've seen numerous times around here was very similar to that of a room-mate of mine who was taking heavy doses of anti-depressants. --I've heard that the rate of anti-depressant use is very high, estimated by some to be about 10% of the U.S. population, and much of that being questionably prescribed.
Interestingly, my drugged-out room mate was also a pod-person. It seems to me that the common factor is more an inability or lack of desire to interface with the world without some sort of fuzz screen, (either electronic or chemical) in place.
-FL