Davis Aurini - Planned Fallibility

Dec. 2, 2012 - Davis Aurini

14:11

Planned Fallibility

www.staresattheworld.com http://captaincapitalism.blogspot.com/ https://twitter.com/Aurini My Novel: http://www.amazon.com/Walk-These-Broken-Roads-ebook/dp/B009RZYO2O/

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	Planned fallibility is one of those urban myths and conspiracy theories that's almost true.
	It's in the realms of things like NLP and hypnosis, where it's real, but it's not as interesting as it's made out to be.
	It's not quite so magical.
	And yet the rumors about planned fallibility do speak to a very real ugliness in the modern era.
	First, let's start with planned fallibility itself.
	Planned fallibility is the idea, the conspiracy, that manufacturers intentionally make defective goods so that you have to come back to the store and buy a replacement.
	Now, on the one hand, they certainly have the ability to figure out when their products are going to fail with some statistical relevance.
	Anytime you buy a computer, for instance, you can buy warranty insurance on it for $300 that in the next three years, if it breaks, they'll replace it for you.
	And yet, they offer that insurance, don't they?
	So you can certainly approach it as a company trying to scam you and nickel and dime you and so on and so forth.
	What you're getting down to here is, it's not a conspiracy, it's not, it's just a failure of the marketplace.
	And the best example of planned fallibility is the light bulb.
	Now, up until the invention of modern halogen light bulbs, your standard light bulb, a filament light bulb, would last about six months to a year.
	And you pay about, let's say, $2 for one of those.
	Now, the thing is that we've had technology to make light bulbs that never burn out for over a century.
	The thing is that those light bulbs cost about $5.
	And so even though this light bulb never burns out, and the $2 light bulb burns out every single year, people just don't seem to be willing to pay $5 for a light bulb.
	And if you think about the way we use light bulbs, we tend to move from apartment to apartment.
	Light bulbs are known to break if the lamp gets knocked over or something like that.
	So you can understand why consumers are going to go cheap and buy the $2 light bulb.
	It's an unexpected expense at the end of the month when a light bulb burns out.
	You don't want to invest in something high quality.
	But a consequence of that is that we actually spend far more money on light bulbs than is necessary because it's just not profitable to manufacture the good quality ones.
	And so there you have planned fallibility in a nutshell and why it's just an inevitable market failure that's going to happen in any capitalist system.
	And as for the state-run systems, the market failures in those are far, far worse.
	Now that said, let me tell you a story about coffee makers.
	Over a two-year period, I went through three coffee makers.
	One of them broke because the water inlet on the back water reservoir didn't have a filter.
	And so eventually, through normal use, a coffee ground fell into the back, fell down, and the way it prevents water from going back up towards the back is a simple ball valve.
	Basically, you've got this tiny little ball that, you know, when it goes up, it blocks the line.
	When it's going down, the water flows normally.
	And that got screwed up by a coffee ground.
	So I disassembled it, ripped it all apart, and it wasn't designed to be ripped apart, of course.
	It was all glued together, not screwed together.
	And I fixed it, and then a few months later, it broke again, and it broke again, and then something else was going wrong with it, and so I got another coffee maker.
	This one, on the plug to hold the coffee in when you pull the pot out, and then, you know, there's a little plug there, stops it from dripping, then you put the pot back in, it pops up.
	There's a tiny little rubber gasket on that, which broke.
	And so now there's nothing to retain the pressure spring.
	And so that part didn't work anymore.
	Once again, a component that costs a tenth of a cent, that if you'd spent two-tenths of a cent, it would not have broken.
	And there's some other problems.
	I'm currently using one of the broken coffee makers, and I just deal with it because I'm sick of buying new ones.
	But it's crap like this that has us all talking about planned fallibility.
	Why is it that we can't go to the store and buy a good quality product anymore?
	50 years ago, if you could find a 50-year-old coffee maker, that thing will still work.
	Buy anything at the store, it's going to break within six months.
	And so planned fallibility is what we jump to.
	And to a certain extent, certainly a part of the problem is the consumer base.
	Now, it's not like the light bulb, where the light bulb is just an accident.
	The way we buy light bulbs, the way we think, our long-time preference over short-time preference.
	And plus the fact that if a light bulb breaks, you probably need a new one.
	Otherwise, you're sitting around in the dark.
	So you're desperate to buy one ASAP, regardless of how much money you have.
	That's just an accident.
	That's just one of those things that doesn't work very efficiently, unfortunately.
	And there's not really anything you can do about it.
	Coffee makers are another story.
	And this is where we get to the ethics of our society.
	It all boils down to the difference between a society of producers and a society of consumers.
	You see, the producer invests in themselves.
	They invest in life.
	They are trying to build something, to produce something out of reality.
	So when they buy a coffee maker, they want a good, solid, rugged, trustworthy coffee maker that will do the bloody job.
	With the consumer, it's a different paradigm.
	The consumer is about consuming.
	This unending black hole of consumption that they constantly need more material goods to fill it.
	The producer buys a coffee maker so he can make coffee in the morning so we can go to work.
	It's there to serve a function.
	The producer buys a painting because it's an excellent painting that says something, that means something to him, and he wants that painting in his life.
	He wants it there for the rest of his life.
	The consumer, on the other hand, buys a brand new painting every week.
	They want to get a brand new phone every single year.
	They want to either, A, buy a brand new coffee maker every year as they change the decor of their kitchen, or they want to get a pretentious high-end coffee maker that they only ever use for making coffee, but in theory you can make lattes and frappuccinos and whatever else people drink at Starbucks to impress other people.
	They want to consume.
	When they pay good money for something, it's not because it's a good quality product.
	They pay good money for something because it is fashionable.
	And as a consequence, finding a basic coffee maker that is durable and rugged is going to be almost impossible nowadays.
	Because anybody that's going to buy something for the long term is going to buy something pretentious and fancy and useless.
	So that's the first reality of the planned fallibility myth.
	Is that it's not that corporations are secretly making low-quality products so we have to buy new ones all the time.
	It's that we have a morally callow populace that wants to buy garbage.
	They want brand new shiny garbage as opposed to something rugged and reliable that lasts.
	But there's also a deeper thing going on with all of this.
	This is something Captain Capitalism and myself have been writing about recently.
	I'm not going to link to anything specific, but trust you read our blog so you've read something along those lines.
	It's about the excessive education, excessive credentialism, combined with a lack of actual education.
	The captain really spearheaded this with his book, Worthless.
	An excellent Christmas present, by the way, for any of you with friends in university right now who are taking a woman studies, English studies, history studies, transgender turtle studies course.
	Highly recommend the book.
	It'll maybe set them straight so they don't waste more money at that worthless institution.
	And I was writing about it myself recently, about how these people with useless degrees don't just disappear onto the dole.
	Some of them enter the workforce.
	Of course, these people with their credentials and their education, they're not going to become a mere grunt, a mere technician working with their hands and getting dirty.
	Oh Lord, no.
	These people will never do something like that.
	No, they're going to get into management.
	More and more companies nowadays have utterly incompetent management cadres.
	People with useless degrees.
	And you know what?
	This is more than just having a useless degree.
	You can have an English degree and be extremely accomplished.
	My old Sergeant Major had an English degree.
	He owned every copy of Beowulf, and he was the scariest man I've ever known.
	Never once heard him swear, but good lord, could he tear you apart.
	He used his English degree in that capacity.
	And he was an excellent, excellent Sergeant Major.
	But again, he's old school.
	He's coming from that world where men changed their own oil, where men were real men and knew how to live and had examples to follow.
	And where the university system wasn't quite as broken as it is today, though it was certainly going down the route.
	See, nowadays, when you see somebody with an English degree or a gendered turtle studies degree, they have never worked a day in their life.
	They have never built a machine or repaired an engine.
	They have never even argued something that's true.
	Their entire life is based upon lies and pretension and bullshit.
	And these are the people we have running most companies nowadays.
	So you have utter incompetence in the management.
	Then, in the worker pool, we have more and more affirmative action, shoving people into the jobs they're not qualified to do the jobs, turning the jobs into a game of politically correct chess, where saying the right things and getting the right people to like you is more cogent to doing your job than your actual job.
	We have a very obedient workforce, but not a very skilled one.
	And the management is even worse.
	So it's not planned fallibility, folks.
	It's a zombie economy.
	It's the blind leading the blind, selling garbage to the immoral with low time preference.
	What wonderful things we're doing with all this technology.
	Imagine if we didn't have computers.
	We'd be living in mud huts right now.

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