Comments by "Harry Mills" (@harrymills2770) on "Louis Rossmann"
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All good points. Sadly, they don't want you repairing your petrol vehicle, either!
Planned obsolescence is one of the biggest causes of major pollution, today. Think of the energy and resources and pollution that go into (or come out of) the manufacture of a new vehicle. So to save 100 gallons of gas a year, you're going to expend the energy and resources equivalent to a $200,000 new Tesla? How about taking that money and applying ot towards a home that's closer to work, so you don't have to drive as much?
I'm sort of blurring the practical environmental value of an electric car with planned obsolescence, but they're closely linked in my associative mind.
A more sustainable model for greener world would be a vastly reduced auto industry that builds cars to LAST, and only the young or egotistical older people would ever be buying the "latest model."
If I could - and I'm trying my damnedest - I would drive my '93 Toyota pickup the rest of my life. I remember as a young man in the 1980s helping rebuild a '55 Chevy. There were parts manufacturers in Mexico and the USA that still made "new old stuff" and put out their catalogs for backyard mechanics and professional auto shops. Not so much, any more. I'm not sure, but I think you can still build a complete VW Beetle out of new old parts, if you want. You can certainly restore those old Beetles.
The EPA will tell you those old cars are bad but they never figure in the pollution that comes from junking the old cars and making entirely new cars. That's why I'm convinced that all this environmental alarmism is driven by profits for a few and not for the betterment of the planet or mankind.
Rossman should be able to repair Nokia flip phones to this day. Any smart phone should be built to last forever or be easily repairable for freaking ever.
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For every one story like yours, there are 99 stories of people who dream big, but lack the talent to make it big. I see it all the time. Kids with only bonehead math on their transcript heading to college "determined" to be electrical engineers. I try never to discourage anyone, but if you're 18 and you still don't have algebra and trig out of the way, you're already adding a year or two to your expected graduation date, because engineering programs - 4-year engineering programs - are based on starting with Calculus I.
Rather than try to bring them down, I just lay out their program of study, with a semester of college algebra and college trigonometry taking up the first year. And that's assuming they're even prepared for college algebra, which many are not. They like tinkering with things and they like the idea of being a high-paid engineer, but they have no idea what they're up against in the years to come. The only "discouragement" they get from me is my being realistic about how long it's going to take them, and, given their current level of learning, how EARLY it is for them to be deciding they're cut out for engineering, at least in the traditional sense.
A lot of those kinds of young people would be better served getting into a vocational-technical program for electricians or electronics-repair.men. It may even put them closer to what they actually want, which is to tinker with electronics and build their own cool projects. And if they're STILL determined to be a traditional, college-graduated engineer, they've got a skill to help PAY for it, so they don't have to live like poor college students for 5 or 6 (or more) years, with nothing certain except for a mountain of debt when they're done, assuming they finish.
As a mathematician, I feel that a good engineer is BETTER in some areas of math than I am, because of their immediate applications to their field, and their constant use of those areas. There are also a lot of DIGITAL techniques that serve the same purpose, but without all the theory, other than a general understanding that if they've got enough data, they can build a model, empirically, without really concerning themselves with what classical function it most resembles. A LOT of the math they'll teach in a classical engineering program is built on mathematics that was invented because if they didn't find something clean to represent their model, they were at a loss, because they lacked the computing power to brute-force it.
If we had computers before Newton came along, maybe we wouldn't care one bit about "smoothness and continuity" principles, but just build a digital model of how far the apple has fallen after x number of seconds, build a smooth curve through all the data points and extrapolate from that curve you built off empirical data. You might never have to know the basic falling-body model in order to predict when the apple hits the ground and how fast it's moving when it does.
In real-life engineering, there's a lot more experimentation and testing than theory. They may not know WHY x amount of this metal makes the alloy the strongest, but they tried every percentage and took the one that was best. Maybe in 20 years or 30 years, they'll figure out why.
I remember teaching an applied problem: "How long should your eaves stick out if you want to block the sun in summer and let the sun in in winter?" problem. I used data for the angle of the sunlight at the solstices and equinoxes, and gave a really complicated derivation of the ideal length. A physics prof taught in that room the next hour, saw what I was doing, and said "Why not just use a stick to see where the shadow falls on those days, and use that?"
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Back in the '70s, used bookstores used to have to tear the front cover off used paperbacks.
Back in the '90s, the price of college textbooks was based on existing pre-orders. They set the price to make all their money back from the orders they already had. Everything after that was profit.
What I'm doing, NOW, as a math professor, is purchasing the Learning Management System that accompanies the textbook for around $100. Included in the LMS are homework exercises that are graded automatically, for instant feedback. There's "View an Example," "Help Me Solve This" and "Ask My Instructor." They will give you a pre-test and auto-generate a custom study plan for you (and your deficiencies).
They suck for graphing and can't (yet) automate the partial-credit grading of written work, so I supplement with a handful of "Writing Projects" that are graded by hand by a human, the old-fashioned way. But a LOT of students learn a LOT from what LMS's CAN do.
The price of a new book is $100-plus. IMO, the LMS is WORTH $100 for a semester. The LMS comes with an eBook as part of the service. Students who want a hard-copy textbook may still purchase one, new, but I tell them "ANY EDITION OF THE TEXT IS FINE." So they can rent or buy used on eBay or Amazon or wherever. This way I can build a course based on a particular author and re-use the materials online for YEARS.
I think the new books are a major scam, but the publisher can still get their $100 per pupil AND the pupil gets ALL KINDS of on-demand help. That help isn't always the greatest and some of the "Go to Read About This" just sends them to a chapter without directing the student to the actual part of the book that pertains to their question. That's why I make a video for every question the students might have. MY take on what we're covering.
At my institution, the issue is quality control for remote and online courses. During COVID, the testing center stopped supporting written test proctoring. So I'm testing online with lock-down browser and cameras. But that's not the same as a WRITTEN EXAM under a TIME CONTROL with a PROCTOR overseeing the test-taking, to reduce cheating. You can spoof a lock-down browser and camera pretty easily if you want. Every time I bring this up, nobody cares. Academia is trying to get away from "high stakes testing" so that more students will "succeed." I consider anything less than mastery to be a failure, but I see more students "passing," who wouldn't have 3 or 4 years ago, when we still had the in-person testing under a time control.
Now, Disability Services hands out extra time on tests like candy, and I have to accommodate those diktats. I think that if you give them extra time on everything, you're not really getting a fair measure of their competence. "He can get 100% if you just give him 10 hours!" Taking 10 hours to do what a competent person can do in 1 hour is not mastery. It's welfare, and may God help their employer when they show up and work REALLY REALLY SLOW.
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I was pretty happy with Acrobat Pro V9. Then they took away features I depended on, without warning. Why should I have to drop everything at work and spend HOURS re-training on software I already know, quite intimately?
It's theft, and all these companies "updating" things that don't need updating deserve to go broke. If I were 20 years younger, I would learn everything I could about LINUX OS for my PCs. I'm close to retirement, and it's just easier to go with what my institution provides, and coast to the finish line, but it's infuriating to have someone reach into my tool belt, steal my best hammer, replace with a meat tenderizer, and have the gall to say "You're welcome!"
I hope you young people stand against these "You will own nothing and be happy" criminals. Learn all you can about open source software. Software should be inexpensive and robust. What we have is expensive and unstable.
They know how to do this right. They don't want to, because it's less profitable for them to treat their customers right.
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Fixing the equipment is a big part of why my brother-in-law rents out his land, rather than farming it, himself. He got out before things got too crazy.
I personally think that between the government and the equipment manufacturers, we've strayed away from cars, trucks and tractors that last a long time and are straightforward to repair. It takes more and more specialized training (and re-training) to be certified to work on vehicles these days. All we think about is the fuel efficiency and always reducing the emissions, with no thought for the emissions created building entirely new vehicles, because the previous vehicles are designed to break down in 10 years or less. I'd be perfectly happy with my '93 pickup for life, if I could keep finding parts for it. Even a super-expensive repair is cheaper than buying one brand-new, and think of all the mining, refining and sheer energy that goes into building a new one.
Same for phones and other electronic devices. I get that things keep getting faster, but if you're happy with the functionality of your Galaxy S3, you should be able to fix it and use it essentially forever. But that's not what these people - who all insist I'm polluting too much - want. They want to sell me a new one after a year. 3 years at most.
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I've been using Amazon as a catalog to find better companies with better independent reviews. Then I go direct to the manufacturer with the best reputation. Almost all of them will ship direct to the customer. I did it because years ago, with their treatment of their own workers and politicization (Denying AW$ services to a platform they deemed politically incorrect). I also had my own mini-boycott against Chinese goods, because of how they treat their people and their predatory trade practices. I think countries like that should face steep tariffs, to offset their underhandedness and oppression at home. No embargoes. Just a middle path that increases the cost of being authoritarian cheats.
As time has gone on, it's gotten harder and harder to tell just from the Amazon site where something is made, and the more they hide it, the more sure I am that it's from China, where, on top of everything else, I have no confidence as to the materials used or the quality of construction, expecting it to fall apart or wear out really fast.
Amazon was a great idea and revolutionized commerce, but when it could be generous and open, it chose to be tight-fisted and opaque. It won't be going any where any time soon, but it'll do without most of my business.
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Their problem is they support the Democrat establishment, which is causing inflation, which has resulted in the prime rate jumping from near 0% to 8.25%. I'm not sure what the Fed rate is... checking... 5% to 5.25%. That's what they're charging banks. The banks are charging 8.25% to their biggest corporate customers.
That's why Google's looking for pennies in the sofa. Their early success and continued operation depended on almost-free credit, to keep the ball rolling and hoping that the money eventually starts rolling in. I know my institution uses Google, much the same way my and other institutions used Microsoft. They basically undercut everyone with virtually cost-free software suites, to dominate the market, which they now do, but their margins are tiny, and they really aren't improving their product. Microsoft eventually had to give way to open-source operating systems in the commercial and big-institution sector, because the open source kept evolving and had more capability with fewer security holes. LINUX is more stable than Windows NT, which I think reached its peak in the late '90s and early 2000s, but nobody's running NT that I know of.
Something similar will probably happen to Google, although ed. institutions will be slow to respond, at first. Right now, it's all the rage, though. I just think that when the venture capital dries up, Google/Alphabet is going to hit a wall, economically, and eventually fall behind, technologically, partly because it weeds out all the non-woke in its ranks.
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The latest (and last) Mac I bought has never been updated. Never had problems, other than that it asks me to update every single fuckin' day. It's worked better, with fewer issues than the previous one that I dutifully updated.
About 4 or 5 years ago, I noticed that software "updates" usually meant the software worked less well, deprived me of more and more keyboard shortcuts, and generally made me less efficient at work. They're building this stuff, now, for people who use smartphones, not for professionals who use computers. Adobe is the absolute worst in this regard. Acrobat Pro was a real mainstay for me, until the mandatory upgrade to Pro DC, which is almost useless.
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Yes. It's adorable. You see it all the time. If you don't understand the scale, a "$5,000 drop" seems like a huge amount, especially if they just show that part of the graph in isolation. But when you take a step back and see the entire graph, it just looks like a little wiggle. They do the same thing in climate "science," to exaggerate short-term up-ticks. They did the same thing with radiation when that was the thing The Eye was focused on.
You couldn't even use granite to build a nuclear power plant because granite's more radioactive than the level some technocrat, with the advice of an activist, decided the standard would be, but they didn't put up any warning signs when you went fishing in the pristine waters of the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness, which is smack dab on top of the Idaho Batholith, which is basically granite (quartz diorite, potayto-potahto).
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