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Musings Report 2018-6 2-10-18 What Is Our Fancy Engineering Optimizing?
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For those who are new to the Musings reports: they are basically a glimpse into my notebook, the unfiltered swamp where I organize future themes, sort through the dozens of stories and links submitted by readers, refine my own research and start connecting dots which appear later in the blog or in my books. As always, I hope the Musings spark new appraisals and insights. Thank you for supporting the site and for inviting me into your circle of correspondents.
What Is Our Fancy Engineering Optimizing?
It comes as no surprise that many consumer products are poorly designed, engineered and manufactured. Indeed, it seems clear that many if not most products are intentionally engineered to fail after a short period of use so the consumer will be forced to replace the defective/broken product (at a nice profit to everyone in the supply chain).
This reality is a major driver of what correspondent Bart D. has termed the Landfill Economy: much of the economic activity that generates "growth" in GDP results from the transfer of goods from manufacturers to consumers and thence to the landfill.
If you've attempted to repair an appliance, power tool, computer, etc., then you've probably found (as I have) that the product was not designed for ease of repair.
In the case of appliances (which once routinely lasted for decades and now tend to fail after a few years of service), you may have found (as I have) that the cheap replacement parts are priced so outrageously ($100 for a service-rep provided part that you can buy online for $10 is not uncommon) that the obvious incentive is to junk the appliance and buy a new one rather than "invest" $100 for the part and $150 for the labor.
More recently, I've found that autos have been engineered to be increasingly difficult for consumers to service or repair. In other words, the products have been expressly designed to be difficult enough to service/repair that the consumer is forced to take the vehicle to the expensive dealer or equivalent professional service.
I recently had to jump-start a 2012 Toyota Prius, a car known for its complex engineering.
Like everyone else, I start by looking at YouTube videos others have helpfully posted on the issue. Several videos explained that if the conventional 12V lead-acid battery in the Prius (as opposed to the main nickel-lithium power pack) runs down, the car won't start. Hmm.
So there's hundreds of pounds/kilos of high-voltage batteries on board that may be fully charged, but if the little 12V battery is drained, the car is dead?
Now maybe there is some reason the main battery pack couldn't charge the little 12V battery to start the car, but I can't imagine why the larger battery couldn't be used to recharge the 12V battery in an emergency.
The videos also explained that the terminals to the 12V battery (unhelpfully located beneath the rear seat) could be found in the fuse box beneath the hood. This makes sense, as it's much easier to attach the jumper cables from the other vehicle to terminals that are easily accessible.
But no, Toyota engineers eliminated these easily accessible charge terminals in 2012, so now the owner trying to jump-start the Prius must pry off a plastic panel beneath the rear seat and squeeze themselves into the confines of the back seat area to attach the jumper cables to the nearly-inaccessible 12V battery.
What possible engineering advantage did Toyota provide the consumer by eliminating the easily accessible charge terminals? And why doesn't Toyota enable an emergency recharge of the 12V battery by the main battery?
How costly would it be to embed a cheap wifi chip in the car's horrendously expensive electronics to notify the owner that the 12V battery was low and they needed to drive the car to recharge it?
It was very difficult to acheive a good contact on the 12V battery terminals due to the insanely tight space beneath the rear seat.
Either Toyota instructed its engineers to completely ignore the consumer's access to the 12V battery, or Corporate HQ instructed the engineers to optimize something that required making the 12V battery extremely difficult to recharge, while guaranteeing that relatively minor power bleeds (door ajar, interior light on, etc.) would quickly drain the 12V battery.
What that something might be is unclear. It seems that the idea that consumers should be encouraged to undertake simple repairs such as recharging a dead 12V battery doesn't carry any weight at Toyota.
I should also mention the 500+ page Prius manual, which has hundreds of pages of complicated instructions on how to use the onboard sound system but precious little on things such as jump-starting the vehicle. Buried deep on page 476, the manual helpfully noted that the 12V battery would discharge with time, even if there was no door ajar, interior light on, etc.
Disclosure: I don't own this Prius, nor will I ever own a Prius.
Next, I was changing the engine oil in a 2016 Honda Civic. In days gone by, changing the oil in a Civic was straightforward: loosen the drain plug, drain the oil, remove the oil filter, tighten the plug and put in a new filter and fresh oil.
But Honda engineers have greatly increased the difficulty of this basic maintenance task for consumers, with no visible payoff in other optimization.
First, the front jack point--the strong point where a jack can safely lift the vehicle--has been moved from the front of the car beneath the front of the engine, where it was in 2015 models, to a point nearly in the middle of the car.
Since modern cars have very little clearance, it's impossible to use this jack point with conventional home-mechanic jacks.
What possible advantage did consumers gain by the elimination of an accessible jack point? Note that the tow hook is still located in the front, and since this is attached to the frame, why not leave the jack point in front?
Once again, it seems this change deliberately pushes consumers to take their car to the dealer for a costly oil change rather than do the job themselves.
(The solution is to use wheel ramps to get the car high enough off the ground to do the oil change. But you need to have jack stands and wheel chocks to make sure the car can't roll off the ramps.)
But that isn't the end of the difficulties created for consumers who want to service their own Civics. Now the Honda engineers have placed light-weight (i.e. flimsy) plastic and aluminum shielding beneath the engine, complicating the oil change.
Honda engineers didn't simply specify conventional threaded screws to hold all this flimsy stuff together; they specified three different connectors, including an Ikea-furniture type screw that seems destined to rattle loose and fall off (it closes with a mere half-turn).
To the user, there is no advantage to all this extra shielding, and given the convoluted holes and surfaces in these shields, they hardly seemed designed to minimize air resistance.
And if air resistance was being optimized, why not have one shield with one type of connector?
I'm again left with the nagging suspicion that these changes don't optimize any measurable advantage to the consumer while they create entirely avoidable complexities and difficulties for any owner who wants to service their own vehicle.
Put another way: the populace is losing the ability to do anything functionally useful for themselves in the real world, and this trend seems to be encouraged by manufacturers and engineering that de-optimizes the ease and cost of consumer maintenance and repair.
Any auto manufacturer that designed a simple to maintain and repair basic low-cost vehicle would have a ready market in all those who are sick and tired of poorly engineered, super-costly to maintain/repair vehicles.
Summary of the Blog This Past Week
Three Crazy Things We Now Accept as "Normal" 2/9/18
Before You "Buy the Dip," Look at This One Chart 2/7/18
Is the 9-Year Long Dead Cat Bounce Finally Ending? 2/6/18
Is Congress Finally Pushing Back Against Security Agencies' Over-Reach? 2/5/18
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
Homemade blueberry cream pie and lemon meringue pie (from home-grown lemons). Could have eaten half of each but would regret it later; better to share the bounty....
Market Musings: Put-Call Ratio and the Expected Stock Market Bounce
As I discussed in this week's blog (see link above), the weekly charts of the Dow and SP-500 (SPX) have just started a decline phase, and history suggests it will take a few weeks at a minimum to work through the technical damage wrought by the recent "correction" (mini-crash).
But the prospect of future weakness doesn't preclude a sharp recovery-rally next week.
The put-call rato ($CPC and $CPCE on stockcharts.com) has spiked to levels that reliably indicate tradeable lows. Various other indicators ($NYMO, the McClellan Oscillator, etc.) have also hit extremes that typically mark a near-term low.
Another factor that experienced traders consider is the options expiration week (i.e. next week) tends to be bullish after a downturn the previous week, as market-makers hate to reward Bears who are short/hold puts.
On the SPX chart: spikes way below the lower Bollinger Band also correlate with panic-selling that typically marks a tradeable low.
As a general rule, participants who "buy the dip" have been richly rewarded for the past 9 years, so this behavior is well-ingrained (and programmed into trading bots/quant programs).
Once the decline appears to be ending, the trading bots/quant programs will buy the dip aggressively, as all the signals I've discussed are well-known to every technical trader (which means all the computers that execute 75%+ of all stock market trades).
From Left Field
Global Wealth Report 2015 -- worth a look (Credit Suisse)
Janesville: A Story About the Rest of America -- the plight of communities that considered good-paying factory jobs entitlements....
PayPal Demonstrates What Happens to Former Tech Unicorns Which Get Lame (via Cheryl A.) -- complying with regulations and demanding users is costly....
China’s latest move in the graveyard of empires (via LaserLefty) -- Western China is vulnerable to Muslim terrorism...
Energy, Money and Technology - From the Lens of the Superorganism (1:20) (Nate Hagens presentation) -- highly recommended...
Could Self-Driving Trucks Be Good for Truckers?
Infinite Scroll: The Web’s Slot Machine
Laser Scans Reveal Maya "Megalopolis" Below Guatemalan Jungle
Navy Presses Mattis to Delay 'Shock Testing' Costliest Carrier (via Joel M.) -- so it first gets tested in combat? Bad idea...
This Tiny Hedge Fund Just Made 8,600% On a Vix Bet (via Maoxian)
Blockchain will fix many problems you never knew you had-- referring to organizational sclerosis and other limitations...
What I Learned from Working for Both Bill Gates and Steve Jobs -- interesting account by an engineer with 35 years experience in computing...
"When goods do not cross borders, soldiers will." Frédéric Bastiat
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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