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Musings Report 2024-30 7-27-24 The Termites Eating Our Time and Money
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The Termites Eating Our Time and Money
Termites do their work out of sight and out of mind. We might notice some tiny holes or granular droppings, but we might not realize the damage they've done until our house falls down. That's our collective situation today: the economic termites eating our time and money are consuming our lives.
Here's our situation stated bluntly: corporations' time and money is valuable, government's time and money is valuable, but our time and money are not valuable, and can be consumed by corporate-state termites without limit.
Let's start with two correspondents' accounts of the way economic termites consume our lives a bit at a time.
David E.:
"Here’s another example of the economic termites at work.
I have several DeWalt battery 18V powered tools (a small circular saw, a drill, and a Sawzall), that I have had for 25 years. At times they get extensive use. At others, very little. It all depends. I have replaced the batteries a couple of times, but otherwise, they are solid, reliable tools.
I have recently started more extensive use of these tools after some time off, and have discovered that the batteries may need to be replaced again. However, it turns out that DeWalt no longer makes the 18V batteries. Instead, I can buy the 20V batteries, which require an adapter (sold separately, of course), and to no one’s surprise, the 20V batteries cannot be used in my 18V chargers, so I would have to buy another charger or two as well.
Plus, the adapter doesn’t really fit in the carrying case I have now.
I see this a lot with tech. Companies basically “bricking” thousands/millions of perfectly good tools or devices, and forcing an upgrade cycle that actually makes things worse (and don’t get me started on the forced conversion to another unwanted system – Windows 11). Or Intuit, which did away with the stand alone version of QuickBooks and force companies to spend $35/month for access to their own data."
Keith:
"Your recent post about your negativity had me laughing, although in a depressing way. I had just got off the phone with GE about my broken washing machine, so it was very timely. We bought our machine brand new in December 2021 and it has already failed so spectacularly that we must decide between a $400 part and buying a new machine. After some basic Google searching this is a widespread problem, so not a one-off failure. Fortunately I can do the repair myself, but it feels like a waste if the same thing is going to happen again in less than 3 years. It's insulting to have to listen to our leaders explain how prosperous we are using fancy charts, when our lived reality is so different. I'm only 40, but I helped my dad repair our family washing machine many times growing up. Always easy to repair, parts were cheap, and consequently my parents owned the thing for 20+ years. Now I get "features" like an app to control my washing machine via WiFi, but the thing can't last 3 years. That ain't prosperity".
I've recounted my own experiences with the termites of abysmally low quality--Cory Doctorow's "ensh**ttification" of goods and services--and also my experiences with the time-termites of government agencies making me trudge the endless halls of Kafka's nightmarish bureaucratic Castle to get my address changed (a two-year process) or change the registration of a car.
(The California DMV demanded proof that I hadn't secretly shipped the car to Hawaii to avoid paying the California registration fee. Yes, true. How fiendishly clever the citizenry have become, spending over $1,000 to ship an old car out of state to avoid paying us our rightful registration fee!)
Then there's our name-brand dryer that failed, and the replacement motherboard cost half the price of a new dryer, for $20 of simple circuit boards and cheap commodity chips encased in a plastic casing with a few wires. The digital codes that were supposed to diagnose the problem (helpfully listed on the instructions buried inside the washer after you disassemble the top) were a worthless time-sink, too.
If you think this is an American-only problem, think again. The very expensive Zojirushi rice cookers made in Japan have a predictable point of failure that forces consumers to replace their otherwise perfectly good rice cooker: the rice cooker's battery is buried deep inside the device, and soldered in so it can't be replaced without a stupidly arduous effort. The rice cooker doesn't work with a dead battery, of course.
Note that some of these termites are the result of soaring complexity with little payoff (the WiFi connection to your water heater--really?), while others are designed in (the rice cooker battery) and others are intentionally "bricked" by software upgrades, changing the configuration of batteries, and countless other termite-tricks, and still others are the result of poor quality control / low-quality components that are so bad one wonders if they're intentionally unreliable and prone to failure.
Nothing beats third-party termites for squandering time and money. To cite one recent example from a reader, the process of qualifying as a professional healthcare provider for payment from Medicare was once a relatively straightforward submission of documents. Now it has been offloaded to a third-party provider--keepers of the inner circle of Digital Hell--which charges $3,000 for providing a truly Kafkaesque labyrinth of frustrating incompetence.
Then there's the immense amount of unpaid Shadow Work we have to perform to keep our digital world from falling apart. Here's an account of my experiences with chatbots and other time-sinks: Digital Service Dumpster Fires and Shadow Work.
Here's my account of "the illusion of choice" in our digital servitude: Is Anyone Else's Life as Stupidly Complicated by Digital "Shadow Work" as Mine Is?
It's not a choice when you're informed you must "update business information" (though nothing has changed) or you get a one-way ticket to the Demonetization Gulag.
All of this can be summarized as The Decay of Everyday Life, or less politely, as The Ghetto-ization of American Life.
These are only the most visible termites. Deep inside the posts and beams of the economy are swarming multitudes: surveillance pricing, junk fees, price-gouging, price-fixing, rapacious bank fees--the list is virtually endless: https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/24/gouging-the-all-seeing-eye/#i-spy
FTC vs surveillance pricing
In summary: corporations and the state get to feast off our time and money, with no visible limits or pushback. Where does this go, and where does it end?
One could argue that this is systemic decay of competence. There is a strong case to be made for this, even more so if it is linked to the diminishing returns on complexity and compliance.
But look at corporate profits--they've never been higher, far outpacing inflation.
The crapification, immiseration and ensh**ttification of our lives is simply darned good business. As Matt Stoller, Cory Doctorow and others have highlighted, much of this profiteering is the result of monopoly and cartels creating an "illusion of choice" while actual competition has been smothered. We literally have no choice left (and please don't tell me to buy a commercial grade appliance that costs mega-thousands if I want the quality and durability that everyday appliances once gave us for a modest price).
Government agencies also suffer no downside from immiserating us.
In systems terms, there are no negative feedback loops between consumers / citizens and corporations / agencies: there are only positive feedback loops reinforcing the crapification, immiseration and ensh**ttification of our lives: corporations reap higher profits--positive feedback. Agency budgets rise--positive feedback.
How do we push back against the quasi-monopolies that dominate our daily lives with an "illusion of choice": two equally wretched health insurance corporations, two Internet providers, etc.? There is no market mechanism for negative feedback in a cartel economy.
There is a political mechanism--antitrust, anti-monopoly regulations--but corporations have endless resources to contest and delay such regulatory pushback, and citizens are too busy keeping their lives from falling apart to support years-long litigation.
Centralization is a core dynamic: once power is consolidated into enormous corporations and state agencies, they become unaccountable to mere consumers and citizens.
The structure of our centralized economy is also a factor. In the name of efficiency to maximize profit, our economy has become a network of tightly bound dependency chains that are inherently fragile, a topic I discussed last week in Optimized for Fragility (Musings 29).
As for the costs forced on us by monopolistic state agencies, there are no negative feedback loops in this system, either. Citizen complaints have zero impact. Consider federal taxation: the system is set up to accept feedback from a corporation or super-wealthy family who donates $5 million to senior politicians who then add a tax break to congressional legislation. Citizens complaining about needlessly complicated shadow-work to file taxes--no impact whatsoever.
How do we add market and political feedback loops to a system that considers our time valueless and our money as low-hanging fruit just waiting to be picked clean?
Unaccountable systems with no feedback loops to consumers and citizens are impervious to reform.
That leaves system collapse as the only viable opportunity to reset the system to optimize accountability, competition, real choice and negative feedback (pushback) loops rather than optimizing monopoly, unaccountability and profits reaped at the expense of the powerless.
Highlights of the Blog
The Downside of Complacency: Illiquidity Evaporates Stocks and Real Estate 7/26/24
How Those Using "Useful Idiots" Become "Useful Idiots" 7/24/24
Two Tidbits of Timeless Political Wisdom from Machiavelli 7/22/24
Best Thing That Happened To Me This Week
The pineapple patch is ripening.
Longtime readers may recall I lived on the "Pineapple Island" of Lanai as a teen, when the island was a Dole pineapple plantation. (Now it is owned by billionaire Larry Ellison). I picked pineapple in the summer before my senior year, hard, hot work that made any other work after that seem easy (carrying 2X10s uphill in the blazing sun and similar construction work excepted).
Pineapple plants are very hardy and forgiving of thin soils and partial sun. We planted pineapple crowns in a shaded area where nothing else would grow, and they've thrived despite the less than ideal conditions.
What's on the Book Shelf
Complex Organizations by Charles Perrow
From Left Field
NOTE TO NEW READERS: This list is not comprised of articles I agree with or that I judge to be correct or of the highest quality. It is representative of the content I find interesting as reflections of the current zeitgeist. The list is intended to be perused with an open, critical, occasionally amused mind.
Many links are behind paywalls. Most paywalled sites allow a few free articles per month if you register. It's the New Normal.
World’s rarest whale may have washed up on New Zealand beach, possibly shedding clues on species.
Advanced Economies Are Headed For A Downfall--energy....
China's economy falters, raises pressure for more stimulus.
Analysis-China tries to hit more birds with one stone in property rescue push.
The Ultimate Guide to Global Reading Habits (Infographic) -- Don Quixote tops the list--interesting...
U.S. Talent Migration: The Stories Behind the Story--not sure what qualifies as "talent" nowadays...
How Disney Is Trying to Be as Addictive as Netflix--just what we need: more addictive addictions...
The Rise of Stealth Shopping: How Americans Are Hiding Big Purchases From Their Partners.
Moving in Childhood Contributes to Depression, Study Finds: A study of more than a million Danes found that frequent moves in childhood had a bigger effect than poverty on adult mental health risk.
A Glimpse Into the Chinese 'Garbage Time of History': Deals like the "Poor Guy's Package" and "Blind Box of Leftovers" point to significant changes in the Chinese economy affecting the lives of ordinary people.
‘Garbage time of history’: Chinese state media pushes back on claims country has entered a new epoch.
Gen Z Men Are Currently Experiencing a Dating Apocalypse, Here’s Why.
"If anyone tells you that a certain person speaks ill of you, do not make excuses about what is said of you, but answer: 'He was ignorant of my other faults else he would not have mentioned these alone.'" Epictetus
Thanks for reading--
charles |
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