Don't get me started on modern cars. They're built like utter shit, the parts don't last, aftermarket replacements are worse, but you can't get OEM anything anymore, since COVID somehow killed their entire manufacturing ability (it didn't, that's just another in a long series of lies that OEM's use to purposely not supply any replacement parts for anything), and even if you could get it, you can't install it without paying the OEM even more money to "program" the part to work with your car.
Radio go to hell in your 2019 Chevy Whatever? That's too bad. No radio sucks, but it also controls literally everything else in the interior of the car, so no heat, no AC, no rearview, no seat adjustments, and maybe no instrument cluster either. If it fails in just the right way, it'll take down the whole CAN bus and your car won't even run anymore. Nothing will work inside or out. Because the radio broke.
You can't get one from GM, because they are on infinite backorder, and you can't get one from the junkyard either, because they are locked to the specific VIN of the car they were first installed in (to "prevent crime", but also helpfully, to prevent used parts from even being a thing anymore).
So, your only options are:
1) Just not have anything work in your car ever again.
2) Buy one from a junkyard and send it to someone who can put a new EPROM (or whatever is used now) on the board so you can get it "programed" at great expense to be registered to your cars VIN. Expect to spend many hundreds or thousands of dollars and a couple of weeks on doing this, with zero assurance as to the remaining lifespan of the used part.
3) Buy a whole new car (this is what the OEM wants you to do).
I will never own a vehicle made after 1995 for the rest of my life. I don't care how much I have to work on it. I'll build the damned thing from scratch before I participate in this level of bullshit manipulation and thievery.
Jokes on them. I'm a machinist and I drive a 1993 GMC 1ton pickup with a 6.5 detroit diesel. That motor don't even need electricity to run, and I can make damned near anything that cares to fall off the thing myself if I have to. But, I don't have to, because you can still buy parts for the thing just about anywhere.
Don't drive a lot now, since I moved my shop closer to home, my commute is about a hundred yards, but before I got that done I put near 200k on the thing. All it does is leak oil (detroit diesel, remember) and live forever.
They don't salt the roads in my state, so that helps immensely. Folks that live in NY or northern IL are kinda SOL because their roads very helpfully make their cars dissolve in less than ten years. Yet another thing that OEM's don't even attempt to mitigate.
But then, why would they? If your car rots and then breaks in half five years after you buy it, you've got no choice but to buy a new one.
Nothing like a car that costs what a house used to, but only lasts five to ten years and is then totally useless and worth nothing at all.
An experience I had recently almost triggered a Kaczynski-like rage in me.
I went to visit a friend in an urban area with paid parking. In order to pay, one can either download an app, or try to navigate the labyrinthine maze of an interface on the mainframe terminal posing as a parking meter in the corner of the parking deck. Needless to say, neither option worked, and I ended up spending close to thirty minutes trying to figure out how to give some privatized contractor a couple of dollars just so that they wouldn't boot my car.
These days, I try to avoid the city as much as I can.
I hate that! In some places Uber is prohibited, which I don’t have a problem with if I can get a bus to my destination, but sometimes they hobble the driver and then they ding YOU for canceling the ride! Had to fight with them on this. In Thailand, for all its problems, it was a cinch to use Grab to get a ride from the airport to a Bangkok hotel.
I had an appliance repair business for 10 years and it's happening in that market too. You'd be amazed at how much of it is driven by government fiat. That backup camera and all those airbags in your car are there because the .gov says they have to be. We are sold huge SUVs and trucks because CAFE standards have made it illegal to make efficient and afforfable small vehicles. You can still buy a simple and reliable NEW truck for $12k in other countries, those vehicles don't meet "standards" here. I can go on and on and on, but the essential point is that simple, reliable and affordable tech is illegal according to the US government.
There’s a video doing the rounds on social media showing a guy running his old fridge with the door off, outside, in the summer. Cost like 3 bucks worth of energy per month.
Same thing has happened here in Britain. Aside from the money printing, safety regulations have pushed the cost of vehicles up. The Ford Fiesta was one of the best selling cars in Britain for many years, but has been discontinued because they can’t make a vehicle that small and affordable.
The “cheapest” new vehicle you can get, is a Vauxhall Corsa which will set you back £26k($31k). Staggering for how tiny they are and considering a few years ago, you were looking at somewhere between 12-14k for a new one.
The Hewlett-Packard, early-Apple era, I'd say no. The current mess of VC-funded zombie startups producing largely useless shit? Yeah, definitely seeing diminishing returns there.
The consumer has more incentive to fix the product than the producer, whilst the producers’ engineers are stuck trying to figure out how to do “everything”.
Your car key, has to be secure, zero-trust, block-chain enabled, containerized, accessible, server-less, heat & cold resistant, a Swiss Army knife, etc… and then may it open your car.
I, an engineer, build “everything”. You, a consumer figure out “something”. The business has no clue about “anything”.
I agree 1,000%. The whole business model is to displace time and effort into the consumer, and to charge more for the privilege. I hate electronic keys; in part because they can fail. Out on a long hike and the battery goes dead? Fail. I would happily pay $300 to get a plain metal analog key for my Toyota. Same thing with digital checkouts, app based parking (My small town has three separate apps for three different zones as the county, city, and port couldn’t agree to the same parking app!!- in a town of 10,000 people this is insane.
It is getting even more difficult to opt out. And the “cashless” trend is crazy to. I went to a National Park that refused to take cash; cards only. This is the Federal government refusing to take the currency of the Federal Government. Crazy.
Yet we’re told constantly we’re in some kind of technological golden age. If we stripped all this crap out, life hasn’t moved on that much since the 70s or 80s. If anything, innovation has gone backwards. In the 80s, I could fly from London to New York in a couple of hours on a supersonic plane. Instead, we have glorified to-do list SaaS products, dickpick apps and rented server farms,
I dropped my husband off at a train station. He had driven there, as I don’t feel confident driving his too-big car. He left the engine running and I got into the driver’s seat and off he went. Half way home I realised he had taken the car’s keys with him, along with the house keys so I wouldn’t be able to get in the house….oh the panic…I was terrified I would stall the car and wouldn’t be able to start it again….lucky for me, my son lives close to us and I managed to drive to his house and rang him from his drive, afraid to get out because I would have to turn the engine off…he didn’t answer his phone, but I guessed he was home because his car was there….so, I took a chance, turned off the engine and knocked on his door. He has keys to our house and he drove me home, I got the spare keys, he drove me back and I drove the car home. What a horrible waste of time for him and me (he also had to sit and have a coffee with me because I was so upset). I can’t tell you how much I hate this idea of not putting a proper key in the ignition - I still have nightmares about that horrible journey home, worried I would have to spend the whole day and late into the evening locked out of my house - even if I did get safely home. Anyways…the evil ones don’t want us to drive, that’s the bottom line, and will make driving as expensive and time consuming as possible until many of us give up our cars in despair.
I would also love to hear your take on the added security burden. All of the connectivity seems to introduce weak points in the security chain. A digital car key can have its signal intercepted and cloned.
Thieves are putting up fake QR codes over those parking app stations so that they can steal your credit card info…
This is insightful. I think it is an example of a broader trend, that trains people to opt-in on all sorts of things. Like the early self-pay gas pumps *seemed* like a convenience.
It is really not only saving money (the ostensible excuse) but it also trains habitual compliance and submission to intrusive tech, such as biometrics, etc.
In some areas, you get glared at trying to get human service (certain airports).
As a fellow software developer by trade, I refuse to use deliberately convoluted modern "web stacks" for this very reason. No, Facebook, I'm not going to use React, help you fix bugs for free, and inculcate myself into the design patterns of your closed-loop ecosystem.
No, Big JS, I'm not going to use Webpack and Babel and Linters and a strongly-typed variant of a weakly-typed language just to shovel some JSON around.
I remember the first time I saw a buddy's old 70s AMC with the hood popped. He was cleaning the carb and I was shocked that most of the front of the vehicle was empty space! An incredibly simple machine - even with my rudimentary knowledge of engines I could identify almost all its components.
The sad thing about the functionaries of the technocratic class is that, unlike automotive, they're not forced by regulatory bodies like EPA to behave this way. They mostly do it to themselves.
I'm about to read a book on my Kindle I saw recommended on SS,it's The Sleeper Awakes by H.G Wells. Yes,the shape of things to come H.G Wells. It was written in about 1909 but so the recomendation said,it portrays a world where "work" is a couple of hours a couple of days a week and is what we would now call 'digital' (and working from home). Sounds good but that's for the people who are what I'll name The Elite. Everyone else is,well it's not nice. In fact it's surprisingly like our world now. But I'll find out for sure when I read it. But the recommender of this book points out that internet,online,digital,high tech has not resulted in less and lighter work. Seems that tech workers spend more hours,more days etc just being 'at work' and to be honest if it's the sort of job where the 'work' bit can be accomplished in two hours but you have to be present right to twelve hours to justify being paid then stringing out 'work' to make you look busy is more stressful and tiring than actual work. I bet even Elon Musk doesn't pay his people to bunk off after 2 hours and go to the park and the beach -even if they have actually achieved the neccesary jobs of the day!
I had the electronic mechanism of my driver's side door break a few years ago. Instead of a $1500 repair, I paid $5 to make a big version of the tiny key inside my electronic fob. One of my favorite purchases. Tickled that you used that example.
This also is death of a thousand cuts to economic productivity, really the only metric besides raw resource availability that makes Country A more wealthy than Country B.
Don't get me started on modern cars. They're built like utter shit, the parts don't last, aftermarket replacements are worse, but you can't get OEM anything anymore, since COVID somehow killed their entire manufacturing ability (it didn't, that's just another in a long series of lies that OEM's use to purposely not supply any replacement parts for anything), and even if you could get it, you can't install it without paying the OEM even more money to "program" the part to work with your car.
Radio go to hell in your 2019 Chevy Whatever? That's too bad. No radio sucks, but it also controls literally everything else in the interior of the car, so no heat, no AC, no rearview, no seat adjustments, and maybe no instrument cluster either. If it fails in just the right way, it'll take down the whole CAN bus and your car won't even run anymore. Nothing will work inside or out. Because the radio broke.
You can't get one from GM, because they are on infinite backorder, and you can't get one from the junkyard either, because they are locked to the specific VIN of the car they were first installed in (to "prevent crime", but also helpfully, to prevent used parts from even being a thing anymore).
So, your only options are:
1) Just not have anything work in your car ever again.
2) Buy one from a junkyard and send it to someone who can put a new EPROM (or whatever is used now) on the board so you can get it "programed" at great expense to be registered to your cars VIN. Expect to spend many hundreds or thousands of dollars and a couple of weeks on doing this, with zero assurance as to the remaining lifespan of the used part.
3) Buy a whole new car (this is what the OEM wants you to do).
I will never own a vehicle made after 1995 for the rest of my life. I don't care how much I have to work on it. I'll build the damned thing from scratch before I participate in this level of bullshit manipulation and thievery.
yeah the idea is to make them shitty enough that you're dependent on constant maintenance
Jokes on them. I'm a machinist and I drive a 1993 GMC 1ton pickup with a 6.5 detroit diesel. That motor don't even need electricity to run, and I can make damned near anything that cares to fall off the thing myself if I have to. But, I don't have to, because you can still buy parts for the thing just about anywhere.
Don't drive a lot now, since I moved my shop closer to home, my commute is about a hundred yards, but before I got that done I put near 200k on the thing. All it does is leak oil (detroit diesel, remember) and live forever.
They don't salt the roads in my state, so that helps immensely. Folks that live in NY or northern IL are kinda SOL because their roads very helpfully make their cars dissolve in less than ten years. Yet another thing that OEM's don't even attempt to mitigate.
But then, why would they? If your car rots and then breaks in half five years after you buy it, you've got no choice but to buy a new one.
Nothing like a car that costs what a house used to, but only lasts five to ten years and is then totally useless and worth nothing at all.
An experience I had recently almost triggered a Kaczynski-like rage in me.
I went to visit a friend in an urban area with paid parking. In order to pay, one can either download an app, or try to navigate the labyrinthine maze of an interface on the mainframe terminal posing as a parking meter in the corner of the parking deck. Needless to say, neither option worked, and I ended up spending close to thirty minutes trying to figure out how to give some privatized contractor a couple of dollars just so that they wouldn't boot my car.
These days, I try to avoid the city as much as I can.
wait til you try to get a taxi at an airport. no longer possible in most airports without a lot of BS
I hate that! In some places Uber is prohibited, which I don’t have a problem with if I can get a bus to my destination, but sometimes they hobble the driver and then they ding YOU for canceling the ride! Had to fight with them on this. In Thailand, for all its problems, it was a cinch to use Grab to get a ride from the airport to a Bangkok hotel.
I had an appliance repair business for 10 years and it's happening in that market too. You'd be amazed at how much of it is driven by government fiat. That backup camera and all those airbags in your car are there because the .gov says they have to be. We are sold huge SUVs and trucks because CAFE standards have made it illegal to make efficient and afforfable small vehicles. You can still buy a simple and reliable NEW truck for $12k in other countries, those vehicles don't meet "standards" here. I can go on and on and on, but the essential point is that simple, reliable and affordable tech is illegal according to the US government.
What about energy star ratings?
There’s a video doing the rounds on social media showing a guy running his old fridge with the door off, outside, in the summer. Cost like 3 bucks worth of energy per month.
Appliances aren’t actually getting better. It’s crap.
Also Cash for Clunkers absolutely destroyed the used car market in the US.
Same thing has happened here in Britain. Aside from the money printing, safety regulations have pushed the cost of vehicles up. The Ford Fiesta was one of the best selling cars in Britain for many years, but has been discontinued because they can’t make a vehicle that small and affordable.
The “cheapest” new vehicle you can get, is a Vauxhall Corsa which will set you back £26k($31k). Staggering for how tiny they are and considering a few years ago, you were looking at somewhere between 12-14k for a new one.
Silicon Valley was a mistake
The Hewlett-Packard, early-Apple era, I'd say no. The current mess of VC-funded zombie startups producing largely useless shit? Yeah, definitely seeing diminishing returns there.
The consumer has more incentive to fix the product than the producer, whilst the producers’ engineers are stuck trying to figure out how to do “everything”.
Your car key, has to be secure, zero-trust, block-chain enabled, containerized, accessible, server-less, heat & cold resistant, a Swiss Army knife, etc… and then may it open your car.
I, an engineer, build “everything”. You, a consumer figure out “something”. The business has no clue about “anything”.
well said
I agree 1,000%. The whole business model is to displace time and effort into the consumer, and to charge more for the privilege. I hate electronic keys; in part because they can fail. Out on a long hike and the battery goes dead? Fail. I would happily pay $300 to get a plain metal analog key for my Toyota. Same thing with digital checkouts, app based parking (My small town has three separate apps for three different zones as the county, city, and port couldn’t agree to the same parking app!!- in a town of 10,000 people this is insane.
It is getting even more difficult to opt out. And the “cashless” trend is crazy to. I went to a National Park that refused to take cash; cards only. This is the Federal government refusing to take the currency of the Federal Government. Crazy.
Yet we’re told constantly we’re in some kind of technological golden age. If we stripped all this crap out, life hasn’t moved on that much since the 70s or 80s. If anything, innovation has gone backwards. In the 80s, I could fly from London to New York in a couple of hours on a supersonic plane. Instead, we have glorified to-do list SaaS products, dickpick apps and rented server farms,
Bill Burr on self-checkout: "I didn't know I WORKED HERE NOW."
I dropped my husband off at a train station. He had driven there, as I don’t feel confident driving his too-big car. He left the engine running and I got into the driver’s seat and off he went. Half way home I realised he had taken the car’s keys with him, along with the house keys so I wouldn’t be able to get in the house….oh the panic…I was terrified I would stall the car and wouldn’t be able to start it again….lucky for me, my son lives close to us and I managed to drive to his house and rang him from his drive, afraid to get out because I would have to turn the engine off…he didn’t answer his phone, but I guessed he was home because his car was there….so, I took a chance, turned off the engine and knocked on his door. He has keys to our house and he drove me home, I got the spare keys, he drove me back and I drove the car home. What a horrible waste of time for him and me (he also had to sit and have a coffee with me because I was so upset). I can’t tell you how much I hate this idea of not putting a proper key in the ignition - I still have nightmares about that horrible journey home, worried I would have to spend the whole day and late into the evening locked out of my house - even if I did get safely home. Anyways…the evil ones don’t want us to drive, that’s the bottom line, and will make driving as expensive and time consuming as possible until many of us give up our cars in despair.
Great points.
I would also love to hear your take on the added security burden. All of the connectivity seems to introduce weak points in the security chain. A digital car key can have its signal intercepted and cloned.
Thieves are putting up fake QR codes over those parking app stations so that they can steal your credit card info…
The list goes on
This is insightful. I think it is an example of a broader trend, that trains people to opt-in on all sorts of things. Like the early self-pay gas pumps *seemed* like a convenience.
It is really not only saving money (the ostensible excuse) but it also trains habitual compliance and submission to intrusive tech, such as biometrics, etc.
In some areas, you get glared at trying to get human service (certain airports).
As a fellow software developer by trade, I refuse to use deliberately convoluted modern "web stacks" for this very reason. No, Facebook, I'm not going to use React, help you fix bugs for free, and inculcate myself into the design patterns of your closed-loop ecosystem.
No, Big JS, I'm not going to use Webpack and Babel and Linters and a strongly-typed variant of a weakly-typed language just to shovel some JSON around.
I remember the first time I saw a buddy's old 70s AMC with the hood popped. He was cleaning the carb and I was shocked that most of the front of the vehicle was empty space! An incredibly simple machine - even with my rudimentary knowledge of engines I could identify almost all its components.
The sad thing about the functionaries of the technocratic class is that, unlike automotive, they're not forced by regulatory bodies like EPA to behave this way. They mostly do it to themselves.
I'm about to read a book on my Kindle I saw recommended on SS,it's The Sleeper Awakes by H.G Wells. Yes,the shape of things to come H.G Wells. It was written in about 1909 but so the recomendation said,it portrays a world where "work" is a couple of hours a couple of days a week and is what we would now call 'digital' (and working from home). Sounds good but that's for the people who are what I'll name The Elite. Everyone else is,well it's not nice. In fact it's surprisingly like our world now. But I'll find out for sure when I read it. But the recommender of this book points out that internet,online,digital,high tech has not resulted in less and lighter work. Seems that tech workers spend more hours,more days etc just being 'at work' and to be honest if it's the sort of job where the 'work' bit can be accomplished in two hours but you have to be present right to twelve hours to justify being paid then stringing out 'work' to make you look busy is more stressful and tiring than actual work. I bet even Elon Musk doesn't pay his people to bunk off after 2 hours and go to the park and the beach -even if they have actually achieved the neccesary jobs of the day!
I had the electronic mechanism of my driver's side door break a few years ago. Instead of a $1500 repair, I paid $5 to make a big version of the tiny key inside my electronic fob. One of my favorite purchases. Tickled that you used that example.
I'm looking to buy a used car and this is the reason I'd like to get an old one.
This also is death of a thousand cuts to economic productivity, really the only metric besides raw resource availability that makes Country A more wealthy than Country B.