Housing Changes
Oct. 14th, 2021 03:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ysabetwordsmithPeople used to build their own houses. Then they hired small local contractors. Now they have to depend on huge corporations, to build a chosen model if lucky, or more often, they get stuck living in whatever someone else felt like building. Only in rural areas can people still build what they please, based on their own skills and budget. So housebuilding, which used to be a common skill, is now quite rare; people can no longer rely on themselves for this survival need.
Consider that growing food is an increasingly rare skill, foraging is all but forgotten, hunting and fishing are losing popularity, and cooking is dwindling at a slower rate. Few people can make their own clothing by sewing purchased fabric, and almost nobody knows how to go from raw fiber to yarn to knitting/weaving to finished garment. Not many know how to obtain potable water outside of a tap, and worse, many traditional sources are no longer feasible.
It's not a good thing when most of a species no longer knows how to meet their own survival needs, but are dependent on others. We've lost so much, in less than a century. Sure, people have picked up some new skills like programming, which are useful in making money to purchase survival needs, but that's not the same as actually having your own skills.
Consider that growing food is an increasingly rare skill, foraging is all but forgotten, hunting and fishing are losing popularity, and cooking is dwindling at a slower rate. Few people can make their own clothing by sewing purchased fabric, and almost nobody knows how to go from raw fiber to yarn to knitting/weaving to finished garment. Not many know how to obtain potable water outside of a tap, and worse, many traditional sources are no longer feasible.
It's not a good thing when most of a species no longer knows how to meet their own survival needs, but are dependent on others. We've lost so much, in less than a century. Sure, people have picked up some new skills like programming, which are useful in making money to purchase survival needs, but that's not the same as actually having your own skills.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-14 08:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-14 10:05 pm (UTC)Fixing and maintaining a lot of the more tech items (cars for example) is also becoming increasingly problematic. Not only do people not know how to, but the designs themselves do not lend themselves to being fixed even by increasingly specialized individuals. Tesla cars, for example, you have to disassemble the entire front wheel assembly, and remove the front quarter wing, just to change the bulb in the headlights.
IOW... if anything happens to the supply lines, a lot of people are not going to survive simply because they won't know how.
Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-14 10:37 pm (UTC)I support the Right to Repair:
https://www.repair.org/stand-up
https://illinoispirg.org/feature/ilp/right-repair
https://www.ifixit.com/Right-to-Repair/Intro
>> Not only do people not know how to, but the designs themselves do not lend themselves to being fixed even by increasingly specialized individuals.<<
That's a huge problem in a world that's rapidly running out of key resources. We need products designed to last a long time and be repaired easily, not things designed to throw away. Modern stuff is so shoddy. The ink started coming off my current keyboard in less than 2 weeks, and that's not the kind of thing appearing in reviews, so there's no way to find one where the ink will stay on.
>> Tesla cars, for example, you have to disassemble the entire front wheel assembly, and remove the front quarter wing, just to change the bulb in the headlights.<<
That is a horrible design flaw. But then, Tesla sells to people with money, so it likely assumes those sheep will tolerate being fleeced.
>> IOW... if anything happens to the supply lines, a lot of people are not going to survive simply because they won't know how. <<
That's true.
Almost all supply lines are now long and fragile. This makes the soldier in me uneasy. They're vulnerable to everything from civil unrest to the weather, let alone enemy action. For stability, everything should be produced as close as possible to the point of use. Food in particular should be grown everywhere. Only things that are difficult to produce, like computer chips, should be shipped long-distance -- and even then, you have to think about how you'll handle disruptions in supply. If things can be repaired, then you're less vulnerable.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-14 10:46 pm (UTC)Chips aren't actually difficult to produce, they are hard to mass produce.. but photographic lithography is actually no harder that developing your own photos used to be, provided you don't mind taking a day or so to make one chip.
I've seen a fully automated chip fabber unit that would fit into half a cubic metre, it just wasn't fast enough or economical enough to be anything more than a hobbyists toy. But you could make anything upto a Z80A CPU as long as you had the digital files for it. [and I think they only stopped at that because that's the physical limit on the size of the blank dies.]
And yeah, I was advocating for the makers manifesto and the right to repair long before they became trendy.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-14 10:57 pm (UTC)Oh, that's really interesting. The information I've seen is all about how difficult it is to have precision machinery, a controlled environment, etc. Perhaps the chip industry just lies to people.
>> I've seen a fully automated chip fabber unit that would fit into half a cubic metre, it just wasn't fast enough or economical enough to be anything more than a hobbyists toy. But you could make anything upto a Z80A CPU as long as you had the digital files for it. [and I think they only stopped at that because that's the physical limit on the size of the blank dies.] <<
So that equipment should be on every town's list of emergency supplies, allowing them to fix critical equipment if it breaks down.
Feel free to prompt for that. I know T-America has a much better tech base than here, and they're enormously fond of repairing and repurposing things.
>>And yeah, I was advocating for the makers manifesto and the right to repair long before they became trendy.<<
Same here. I was raised by hippie parents and Depression-survivor grandparents, so I'm double-stamped and pretty good at making-do, even though my mechanical skills are minimal. *ponder* My ability to create magical artifacts is excellent, and I've managed to create a mini-ecosystem good enough for bald eagles to stop for a perch and a piss in the grass.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-14 11:14 pm (UTC)Yeah, you need precision equipment and controlled environments if you plan on producing them by the thousands and want less than one fail per ten thousand. (actually, I think most modern factories have a failure rate less than that)
However If you plan on making one or two every few weeks at most and you're not too fussed if you get one defect every ten chips, then you can use the equivalent of an EZ-bake oven. (not to diss EZ-bake ovens, they're quite good for small batch prototyping of cookies.)
and yeah.. there should be one of those in every maker space, or shelter. Heck, maybe even it's bigger brother so you can make more complex chips in batches of a hundred. If something EMP's a town, you're gonna need it.
Although, I think I'd stick with having the smaller version as well. It's kinda 'hand cranked' i.e it doesn't need a microcontroller chip itself, (strictly mechanical timer and manual operation) and you know, if all your chip fabbers are down because something fried their chips as well, you'd need something simple and robust to get them up and running.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-14 11:38 pm (UTC)That makes more sense.
>> However If you plan on making one or two every few weeks at most and you're not too fussed if you get one defect every ten chips, then you can use the equivalent of an EZ-bake oven. <<
Well then, you have to do the math for wastage of resources (do you have enough spare that it's not a problem) and cost-benefit (can you afford to throw away 10% of product) as well as whether you can repurpose the miscasts (e.g. give or sell them to artists as raw materials).
>> (not to diss EZ-bake ovens, they're quite good for small batch prototyping of cookies.) <<
:D Excellent use. I have also seen them used for some craft projects.
>> and yeah.. there should be one of those in every maker space, or shelter. Heck, maybe even it's bigger brother so you can make more complex chips in batches of a hundred. If something EMP's a town, you're gonna need it. <<
For a makerspace or business incubator, I would choose the light industrial model because they will see not only frequent use but also people needing to make modest batches of things. For a shelter, the small version would be more logical.
>>Although, I think I'd stick with having the smaller version as well. It's kinda 'hand cranked' i.e it doesn't need a microcontroller chip itself, (strictly mechanical timer and manual operation) and you know, if all your chip fabbers are down because something fried their chips as well, you'd need something simple and robust to get them up and running.<<
In that case, consider putting a small and medium set in a makerspace or business incubator, and scatter around the small ones for casual and emergency use. The city's surge plan for emergencies should document those that are available during a crisis.
This is a question that would logically come up for the Rutledge business incubator, which will include makerspace so people can start small businesses without having to pay for all the equipment. Suppose the business incubator decides they can afford a small chip fabber but not a light industrial one. Meanwhile the city has been broke for a while, so they only have a small one in their emergency response center. The mayor says, "We'll go halfsies on a light industrial chip fabber if you agree to let us take over its use in the event of an emergency." Win-win for everyone. Together they can buy what neither could afford alone; the higher-capacity machine will see plenty of use, but is not critical so changing access in an emergency won't cause a hardship.
This weekend is the Creative Jam with a theme of "maturity" so by all means prompt for it then if this topic interests you. Especially if you can find references for the small and light-industrial models so I can use those details.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-14 11:42 pm (UTC)Sounds like a plan.. I'll see what I can find on the details. Although they're both kinda esoteric subjects in L-space.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-15 12:49 am (UTC)Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-15 01:59 am (UTC)I will set myself a reminder and research this. But IRC, the smallest chip fabber design looked a lot like a large cooler. I think because that's more or less what it was built out of. [it needs stable temps, so insulated walls.] I don't remember the price, but I recall thinking it was pretty reasonable and comparable to most workshop largish power tools. I.e, I thought about buying it.
(the big one was about the size of an oven)
I will see if I can hunt it down.. but it might have been not exactly vapourware, but a failed business with a cool idea that just vanished. Plus, it was about three or four years ago I saw them.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-15 03:09 am (UTC)So it is a cooler, with a fabber built inside.
I could totally see Halley getting annoyed with even T-America's available fabbers.
Halley: "I could build something better in our camping cooler!"
Dr. G: "I'll call the patent lawyer and start the video camera running."
>>I don't remember the price, but I recall thinking it was pretty reasonable and comparable to most workshop largish power tools. I.e, I thought about buying it.<<
Awesome.
>>(the big one was about the size of an oven)
Okay.
>>I will see if I can hunt it down.. but it might have been not exactly vapourware, but a failed business with a cool idea that just vanished. Plus, it was about three or four years ago I saw them.<<
While it would be nice if people could buy it, that's not required. I just need a decent description. A lot of the disability aids I reference are, sadly, prototypes or Kickstarters or someone's home build instead of commercial things I can include a purchase link for.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-15 07:57 am (UTC)Only way to "wear off" those characters is to wear a *hole* in the keycap. Which I have *done* on a couple of keyboards that saw heavy use for years.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-15 12:30 am (UTC)Back in a year beginning 197, I rewired a 1967 car when its electrical system went wonky. It lasted another 5 years, up through my second year of grad school. Now I wouldn't know where to start.
Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-15 12:58 am (UTC)If they can't figure out how to make easily removable headlights then they don't deserve your folding vote. Which is sad, because Tesla has done some good things for electric cars. I am happy that my little corner of cyberspace can assist people in making informed choices. \o/
>> Back in a year beginning 197, I rewired a 1967 car when its electrical system went wonky. It lasted another 5 years, up through my second year of grad school. <<
Go you!
>> Now I wouldn't know where to start. <<
So there's another, less obvious problem with badly designed tech that can't be repaired: infantilization. The more people can do for themselves, the more confident and empowered they tend to feel. Consider how a Montessori schoolroom or bedroom is designed to support "I can do it!" growth. But when people can't do things for themselves, they not only feel helpless and frustrated, they have less sense of investment in their life as a whole. This is bad for society, because people who feel pushed around by unseen forces are prone to make poor decisions. Why wouldn't they? Nothing they do really matters, so they might as well grab what little enjoyment they can get. Plus, they're more vulnerable to mental issues, because the biggest risk factor in PTSD is the feeling helpless part.
Learning to build or repair things is empowering as well as practical. It can help people find meaning after a life calamity. Taking up something like welding, glass blowing, woodworking, small engine repair, upcycling, etc. is a good way to take control and practice creative problem-solving. We need those opportunities not just so we don't lose money, but to be complete human beings.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-15 01:05 am (UTC)Personally, I'd look for a good condition pre-80's car, a non-running classic model of some sort. (an old F150 maybe) Then use tesla parts to upgrade it to electric.
The basic guts of a tesla drive train isn't that hard to work on. It's lot less complicated, smaller and more modular.
The guy over on jerryrigeverything on youtube is doing that to an ex-military Humvee. and lets just say the pile of stuff he took out of the humvee is a LOT bigger and more complicated than what he's putting in.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-15 12:59 am (UTC)They're getting better. I mean, we're looking at what is only the third or fourth iteration of a new technology. Sort of the Model T of electric cars.
Give it a few years, and having got something that works, they concentrate on something that works well.
Well ...
Date: 2021-10-15 01:21 am (UTC)If anything from the perimeter is hard to maintain, however, that's a design flaw. There is no reason why a headlight should not be a module that just pulls out so you can fiddle with its components. I've seen more than one car model with that feature, so I know it's possible. In fact, it's especially crucial for headlights to be readily accessible just because lights burn out and need replacing on a regular basis. For the same reason, tires should come off easily with simple tools. Anything prone to wearing out rapidly needs to be cheap and easy to replace.
Another point: electric cars are typically made as "skates," a flat plane on which the vehicle top sits. In fact some models are designed so you can swap out the tops. If they haven't made both sides of that flat plane easily accessible, that's a design flaw.
Any mechanical concept simple enough for me to understand it should be standard practice for people who are supposed to be experts. This leaves me thinking one of several bad things is happening:
* The geeks got over-excited as they are prone to do, and only thought about the fun aspects like "how do we make it work?" and nobody made them do the less-fun stuff like "what's the fault tolerance?" or "how will this be maintained in the field?" which are vitally important to a usable product.
* The engineers building this stuff are nowhere near as good as they want people to think, and can't actually figure out how to construct cars properly.
* The technology isn't really as feasible as claimed, requiring arcane contortions to make it work at all, leading to many solution-caused problems that make the whole thing a kludge. This was true in the early days of electric vehicles, but we ought to be past the gizmo stage, and the headlight example is barely explainable by this.
* They damn well are capable of building a decent product, but have chosen not to so they can steal more money from their victims.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-10-15 01:38 am (UTC)Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-10-15 01:46 am (UTC)I had to use one of those when helping out a friend. 5 minutes and wanted to beat the design engineer responsible for it to death with his protractor set! After finding out how much it cost, I was thinking of glassifying the entire company.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-10-15 03:03 am (UTC)I reiterate my point that we need disabled engineers.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-10-15 01:52 am (UTC)However, grab bars are simple. Yet these are expensive, ugly, poorly designed for grip, and available only in a few sizes. Compare that to the grab bars everyone uses -- we call them stair railings -- which are available from cheap to exorbitant prices, in thousands of styles from neutral to ornate, with choice of multiple cross-sections like oval or T for better grip, in any length or configuration you want. One of the more astute pieces of advice I've seen to people who need grab bars is to buy stair rails instead, so you can get better function for less money. The clinical grab bars seem to exist largely to make handicapped people feel worthless.
This is why I feel that people with disabilities should start their own businesses. They have vested interest in producing good, usable products at affordable rates. If we had a decent education system, folks could be programming apps, or hell, using the new computer-aided design rigs to fab up the products they invent.
Right now, the 3D-printing fans are going all-out to make affordable DIY prosthetic devices. Many of these offer much better usability at a much lower price compared to medical offerings. And the medical industry is going apeshit, "Noooo, you can't build your own body parts, you have to buy our stupid expensive ones." Dumbass, you have a rejection rate over 80% for upper-body prosthetics while armless kids are clamoring for a prosthetic hand that has 4 different toy-hand options plus the finger-hand at a fraction of the price. STFU. I have zero sympathy for the prosthetic industry.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-10-15 08:08 am (UTC)She asked me to try out the replacement in the hope I'd be willing to take it as it wasn't gonna work for her (I declined, my feet were several inches off the floor among other things). She'd hoped that if they could swap it with mine, they wouldn't be so upset at having the get a *different* replacement for her.
All of this could have been avoided if the management company had simply had her go to the showroom for the supply company and check out the models there to find one that would work.
The very *idea* that they put in a supposed "accomadation" without having the person it was for check it out *before* they bought it beggars belief. Yet I get the impression that this sort of thing is "normal"!!
That's like buying glasses for someone without having their eyes tested first... yeesh.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-10-15 07:33 pm (UTC)A problem I see often is that, while there are now more legal requirements for accommodations, people are even less willing and able to provide accommodations that actually work for the individuals using them. It's not about accommodating the people in need, but the people in power. You get what someone important says you should have. If you happen to need something different, it is often illegal for your need to be accommodated. Even if it's legal, you're not usually dealing with anyone who has the authority to make changes; you're dealing with underlings who live by a script. So many problems that could easily be solved with an obvious solution, like "I need the bar here instead of there" or "I can climb steps but not a ramp" or "This needs to an inch higher/lower for me" don't get solved.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-10-15 09:29 pm (UTC)From "It's more 'en me jobs worth"
It's sort of like bureaucracy, but from the bottom instead of the top.
Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-10-15 09:43 pm (UTC)Re: Well ...
Date: 2021-10-15 01:44 am (UTC)Well.. there have been issues regarding repairing teslas.. i.e they'd really rather prefer it if you didn't and while I disagree with it, I understand their reasoning. A lot of it is proprietary designs and they do NOT want their competitors reverse-engineering their stuff and copying it. Which is becoming less of problem since more companies are selling their own versions, leading to Tesla unclenching.
The headlight issue is just piss-poor design though, because the only way to change the bulb is access from the back. The problem came about because it's actually an off-the-shelf design they buy as a module. It's just tacked on to the design as is. The problem is.. normally in cars there's this big space behind the front bumper called the engine bay.. which teslas don't have. So the only access point is up through the front wheel arch. It's a case of standard design module that doesn't work well in a non-standard design car. But tesla engineers chose to go with something sub-optimal instead of redesign the entire front end, because LED bulbs have a five year life span.
The modular skateboard idea has been around since 87. (I have a big book of concept car designs listed by year) In theory it was a rail & anchor point design, something like tactical rails for scopes, flashlights etc on rifles. You could fit body modules as you needed.
It was never adopted because it just wasn't strong enough to be safe. Snap on also means snap off.. not something you want in a crash. Teslas are literally the safest car ever built. They exceed safety standards across the board by quite some margin. Their body and 'skate' are integrated. I think someone decided that having people die in their cars was bad for business, so they kind of over-engineered it.
But yeah.. there is also an element of 'geeks at play' in tesla designs. I mean.. it has built in virtual whoopie cushions. Their 'sport' mode is called ludicrous mode and it has plaid speed.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-15 04:56 am (UTC)Is having some significant subsection of the major skills necessary for survival really so rare in the general population?
(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-15 05:12 am (UTC)Go you!
Date: 2021-10-15 05:34 am (UTC)Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-15 05:29 am (UTC)Yes, you hang out with weird people.
>> Is having some significant subsection of the major skills necessary for survival really so rare in the general population? <<
Sadly so. These skills were declining when I was young, but I still remember my grandparents' generation all having a build/repair area in the garage or shed, a sewing machine, a garden, and a well-stocked kitchen. My parents' generation had a subset of people, the hippies, who often developed badass skills. My birth generation, not so much, but we still had home ec and shop classes for people interested. After me, almost nothing. Schools stripped out everything but academics, so no more home ec or shop in most places. Most people were in cities by then, so no learning to garden or hunt. I'm usually the only person in the coven who can so much as sew on a button. Sure, I have lots of crafty friends, but most of those are my age or older. I've done my best to teach younger folks when they're around, but few were even up to helping make their coven robes, and only one or two could actually sew. We've lost a LOT.
Thank fuck for the Amish. There I can still get things like herbal medicines, empty spice jars, lamp oil, etc.
There are enclaves of crafters, there are makerspaces, but it is no longer the norm that everyone knows basic car maintenance/repair, basic sewing/clothing repair, gardening or hunting and cooking, basic construction, and so on. We've gone from most people living on farms where you damn well do things yourself or they mostly don't get done to almost everyone living in cities where you have to pay people to do things for you because you spend all day working for someone else. The modern skills that people have added, like computer programming, are useful when everything is fine but will not keep you alive in a blizzard or if your car breaks down, let alone any kind of apocalypse. Case in point: when everyone was freaking out over a lack of toilet paper, I was like, "What's the big deal? I can think of a dozen alternatives." We're losing America's once-great tradition of jerry-rigging too.
I have factored these things into the Daughters of the Apocalypse. The death toll isn't just because the cities got bombed with the Grunge (and hurricanes, wildfires, etc.) but also because the refugees had so few survival skills. A great many died in the first year because they couldn't obtain food, water, clothing, shelter, medicinals, safety, or other survival needs. And the places with higher skills -- the farms, intentional communities, reservations, etc. -- couldn't absorb anywhere near the amount of refugees. Places with good relationships took in as many as they could, mostly children and teens. The Mescalero just shot the few fools who tried their border. Can't say as I blame them.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2021-10-15 12:56 pm (UTC)Yes.
>>I've done my best to teach younger folks when they're around, but few were even up to helping make their coven robes, and only one or two could actually sew.<<
Millennial here. I'm probably not all that great at gardening and definitely can't hunt.
But I do know how to sew, it's actually pretty common to patch old clothes and alter new ones (mostly recurring old shirts to my size or hemming pants). I also do basic repairs, like patches and buttons, on the old ones.
Interestingly a Boomer relative seems to think I should just buy new clothes when they yet that worn...
>>Case in point: when everyone was freaking out over a lack of toilet paper, I was like, "What's the big deal? I can think of a dozen alternatives."<<
I solved it modern-style: Onwards! To Google!
The juryrigging out of by brain was saving plastic bags to use as medical gloves (backup for household needs); fortunately we were fine.
And I used up most of my fabric scraps to make masks. (Also, 1 inch wide tshirt scraps make lovely ties once stretched out.)
>>We're losing America's once-great tradition of jerry-rigging too.<<
Theres a reason my ideal apocalypse team would be mostly refugees and military folk, with a few medical people.
>>...also because the refugees had so few survival skills.<<
There's a kids movie that starts with characters (justifiably!) fleeing into the wilderness. Problem is its implied they wouldn't have the right survival skills, so it is very, very likely that a lot of them still died.
People don't usually think of those sorts of realities until it smacks 'em in the face. And far to many of us are udes to getting anything we want after pitching a fit at the manager.
>>Places with good relationships took in as many as they could, mostly children and teens.<<
Good.
>>The Mescalero just shot the few fools who tried their border. Can't say as I blame them.<<
There's a handful of situations where I can't say I'd blame folk for wanting to shoot me if I showed up wearing their opressor's face.
(no subject)
Date: 2021-10-15 11:20 pm (UTC)Yay!
Date: 2021-10-15 11:28 pm (UTC)Re: Yay!
Date: 2021-10-17 01:27 am (UTC)