Category Archives: Science

All things scientific

Durable goods, maintenance, the maker ethos, and the first inroad to voluntary simplicity

Durable goods:

Real durable goods last and can be repaired and maintained.Then there are consumables, things you use for a while then throw away.The problem is that some things, in order to be competitive in price, look like durables but actually are designed to be consumables.Take air conditioners for example.

The laboratory where I work bought a a consumer-quality air conditioner for ~$500.It was supposed to run in a hot lab to take the thermal stress of some of the equipment.Within a year it had failed.It seems that the fail point was a single motor among 3 or 4 of the motors in there.Now, there might be a cascade failure situation.But in the end, it’s probably one motor replacement and the thing is back in shape.But we can’t get that one motor.The company won’t sell us just a part, and they want $75 plus transportation to have a rep come look at it without any guarantee he will be able to do anything.

So, what we have here is a disturbingly common situation of a consumable product masquerading as a durable product.What that means is that AC units used to be considered something you install, maintain, fix and keep around.It was durable.Maybe it cost $1000, but you expect that with $100 per year maintenance, it will last forever.Well, this AC unit only cost $500! A great deal! Except it wasn’t a durable good.It doesn’t cost $100 per year to maintain, it has to be fully replaced every year.

This is a different business model.How this works: produce the cheapest possible product in order to compete for foolish consumers’ attention.People are going to impulse buy on credit, so they are not investigating what is the best deal.So the lowest sticker price is going to get the sale.And, if the product is cheap and breaks, that’s all the better.Since it had a very limited warranty and no plan for maintenance (this thing doesn’t even have screws – it’s snapped together) it was virtually guaranteed to produce a second sale quite soon after.

Now I’m far from being the first to notice this trend; there is a growing subculture of people who are saying they want to be anti-consumers.They want to conserve and maintain.It’s a service-oriented culture that looks at making things last rather than making more things.I like that mentality for lots of reasons.It means more thought has to go into the product.It means less stress on the environment.It makes people more aware of their purchases and happy with their decisions.It’s a lower stress, higher reward lifestyle for more people. The people involved are contributing directly to the quality of each others’ lives rather than trying to produce as much crap as possible and trick each other into buying it.

-Peter

P.S. Here’s the Rev. Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping to break it down.

The internet and peer review

I went to look at some old Ze Frank videos and see what that guy was up to after my last post. As usual, he’s hard at work organizing a cavalcade of entertainments. One thing that I ran into on a tangent was an article on First Monday about Ze Franks’s experiment. I had forgotten about First Monday. It’s a peer reviewed journal about… well, I was never sure what it was about. I read some articles there at some point and never really caught a theme. So that’s fine, not all journals need a theme, but it does raise issues about what constitutes a peer.

I can’t keep up with all of my professional reading much less some theme-free tangential journal, no matter how interesting one article might be per issue. So I forgot the whole thing. But now I’m reminded, so I’ll tell you about it. The whole peer review system in general is a strange one. If you want to get into a fight after an academic seminar, bring up peer review.

It’s (almost) always anonymous, and there was a court case recently in which a journal was asked to reveal who the reviewers were for a published study and they refused. The idea is that if you’re anonymous, you will be more likely to give your honest, critical opinion. It’s supposed to keep reviewers safe from the repercussions of a bad review.

There’s lots of people saying the whole system is outdated. I would compare it to judging a youtube video by the first 3 comments. In case you’re wondering, the single deepest pit of scum and villainy in the known universe is the youtube comment area. It sucks away my faith in humanity whenever I read it, so I generally do not. This relates to a theory of the internet presented Mike “Gabe” Krahulik (NSFW).

Back to the subject at hand, we’re in an age when continuous peer review in real time is happening constantly all over the internet. The academic community is using a century-old social technology because the consequences of moving to something else are unknown. And, as youtube illustrates, some of those consequences are horrific. So, I sympathize.

-Peter