Leo D.M.J. Aurini - December 02, 2012


Planned Fallibility


Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

129.57793

Word count

1,841

Sentence count

145

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

15

sentences flagged

Hate speech

4

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Planned fallibility is one of those urban myths and conspiracy theories that's almost true. It's in the realms of things like NLP and hypnosis where it's real, but it's not as interesting as it's made out to be. And yet the rumors about planned fallibility do speak to a very real ugliness in the modern era.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 Planned fallibility is one of those urban myths and conspiracy theories that's almost true. 1.00
00:00:13.780 It's in the realms of things like NLP and hypnosis, where it's real, but it's not as interesting as it's made out to be.
00:00:26.940 It's not quite so magical.
00:00:30.900 And yet the rumors about planned fallibility do speak to a very real ugliness in the modern era.
00:00:39.320 First, let's start with planned fallibility itself.
00:00:43.940 Planned fallibility is the idea, the conspiracy, that manufacturers intentionally make defective goods
00:00:54.260 so that you have to come back to the store and buy a replacement.
00:00:57.840 Now, on the one hand, they certainly have the ability to figure out when their products are going to fail with some statistical relevance.
00:01:08.940 Any time you buy a computer, for instance, you can buy warranty insurance on it for $300 that in the next three years, if it breaks, they'll replace it for you.
00:01:19.340 And yet, they offer that insurance, don't they?
00:01:25.240 So you can certainly approach it as a company trying to scam you and nickel and dime you and so on and so forth.
00:01:35.280 But what you're getting down to here is it's not a conspiracy, it's not, it's just a failure of the marketplace.
00:01:46.180 And the best example of planned fallibility is the light bulb.
00:01:53.080 Now, up until the invention of modern halogen light bulbs, your standard light bulb, a filament light bulb, would last about six months to a year.
00:02:03.900 And you pay about, let's say, $2 for one of those.
00:02:09.700 Now, the thing is that we've had technology to make light bulbs that never burn out for over a century.
00:02:18.200 Thing is that those light bulbs cost about $5.
00:02:21.440 And so even though this light bulb never burns out, and the $2 light bulb burns out every single year,
00:02:32.600 people just don't seem to be willing to pay $5 for a light bulb.
00:02:38.360 And if you think about the way we use light bulbs, we tend to move from apartment to apartment.
00:02:43.800 Light bulbs are known to break if the lamp gets knocked off or something like that.
00:02:48.860 So you can understand why consumers are going to go cheap and buy the $2 light bulb.
00:02:55.420 It's an unexpected expense at the end of the month when a light bulb burns out.
00:03:00.280 You don't want to invest in something high quality.
00:03:03.620 But a consequence of that is that we actually spend far more money on light bulbs than is necessary.
00:03:09.160 Because it's just not profitable to manufacture the good quality ones.
00:03:15.180 And so there you have planned fallibility in a nutshell.
00:03:17.700 And why it's just an inevitable market failure, that's going to happen in any capitalist system.
00:03:24.240 And as for the state-run systems, the market failures in those are far, far worse.
00:03:33.080 Now that said, let me tell you a story about coffee makers.
00:03:36.260 Over a two-year period, I went through three coffee makers.
00:03:44.400 One of them broke because the water inlet on the back water reservoir didn't have a filter.
00:03:52.260 And so eventually, through normal use, a coffee ground fell into the back, fell down.
00:04:01.020 And the way it prevents water from going back up towards the back is a simple ball valve.
00:04:11.680 Basically, you've got this tiny little ball that, you know, when it goes up, it blocks the line.
00:04:17.600 When it's going down, the water flows normally.
00:04:20.580 And that got screwed up by a coffee ground. 0.99
00:04:22.680 So I disassembled it, ripped it all apart.
00:04:26.600 And it wasn't designed to be ripped apart, of course.
00:04:28.580 It was all glued together, not screwed together.
00:04:31.820 And I fixed it.
00:04:32.740 And then a few months later, it broke again.
00:04:34.380 And it broke again.
00:04:35.440 And then something else was going wrong with it.
00:04:38.440 And so I got another coffee maker.
00:04:39.640 Here, this one, on the plug to hold the coffee in when you pull the pot out.
00:04:49.680 And then, you know, there's a little plug there.
00:04:51.600 It stops it from dripping.
00:04:52.380 Then you put the pot in.
00:04:53.700 It pops up.
00:04:55.340 There was a tiny little rubber gasket on that, which broke.
00:05:01.900 And so now there was nothing to retain the pressure spring.
00:05:05.360 And so that part didn't work anymore.
00:05:07.120 Once again, a component that costs a tenth of a cent.
00:05:12.800 That if you'd spent two tenths of a cent, it would not have broken.
00:05:19.020 And there's some other problems.
00:05:21.200 I'm currently using one of the broken coffee makers.
00:05:23.580 And I just deal with it because I'm sick of buying new ones. 0.91
00:05:27.620 But it's crap like this that has us all talking about planned fallibility. 0.91
00:05:32.380 Why is it that we can't go to the store and buy a good quality product anymore? 0.98
00:05:37.780 Fifty years ago, if you could find a fifty-year-old coffee maker, that thing will still work.
00:05:42.700 Buy anything at the store, it's going to break within six months.
00:05:48.080 And so planned fallibility is what we jump to.
00:05:52.520 And to a certain extent, certainly a part of the problem is the consumer base.
00:05:59.780 Now, it's not like the light bulb, where the light bulb's just an accident.
00:06:07.740 The way we buy light bulbs, the way we think, our long-time preference over short-time preference.
00:06:14.840 And plus the fact that if a light bulb breaks, you probably need a new one.
00:06:18.660 Otherwise, you're sitting around in the dark.
00:06:20.520 So you're desperate to buy one ASAP, regardless of how much money you have.
00:06:26.700 That's just an accident.
00:06:29.260 That's just one of those things that doesn't work very efficiently, unfortunately.
00:06:33.720 And there's not really anything you can do about it.
00:06:36.920 Coffee makers are another story. 0.93
00:06:40.000 And this is where we get to the ethics of our society.
00:06:44.240 It all boils down to the difference between a society of producers and a society of consumers.
00:06:55.060 You see, the producer invests in themselves.
00:06:59.100 They invest in life.
00:07:00.560 They are trying to build something, to produce something out of reality.
00:07:05.120 So when they buy a coffee maker, they want a good, solid, rugged, trustworthy coffee maker that will do the bloody job.
00:07:18.200 With the consumer, it's a different paradigm.
00:07:22.740 The consumer is about consuming.
00:07:26.420 This unending black hole of consumption that they constantly need more material goods to fill it.
00:07:32.820 The producer buys a coffee maker so he can make coffee in the morning, so he can go to work.
00:07:39.400 It's there to serve a function.
00:07:42.340 The producer buys a painting because it's an excellent painting that says something, that means something to him.
00:07:50.680 And he wants that painting in his life.
00:07:53.440 He wants it there for the rest of his life.
00:07:55.240 The consumer, on the other hand, buys a brand new painting every week.
00:08:04.160 They want to get a brand new phone every single year.
00:08:07.820 They want to either, A, buy a brand new coffee maker every year as they change the decor of their kitchen.
00:08:13.200 Or, they want to get a pretentious, high-end coffee maker that they only ever use for making coffee.
00:08:21.460 But in theory, you can make lattes and frappuccinos and whatever else people drink at Starbucks to impress other people.
00:08:30.500 They want to consume.
00:08:31.880 When they pay good money for something, it's not because it's a good quality product.
00:08:38.000 They pay good money for something because it is fashionable.
00:08:45.340 And as a consequence, finding a basic coffee maker that is durable and rugged is going to be almost impossible nowadays.
00:08:58.100 Because anybody that's going to buy something for the long term is going to buy something pretentious and fancy and useless.
00:09:08.000 So, that's the first reality of the planned fallibility myth.
00:09:16.560 It's that it's not that corporations are secretly making low-quality products so we have to buy new ones all the time. 0.95
00:09:25.200 It's that we have a morally callow populace that wants to buy garbage. 0.71
00:09:30.780 They want brand new, shiny garbage as opposed to something rugged and reliable that lasts. 0.93
00:09:39.280 But there's also a deeper thing going on with all of this.
00:09:49.100 This is something Captain Capitalism and myself have been writing about recently.
00:09:53.560 I'm not going to link to anything specific, but trust you read our blog so you've read something along those lines.
00:10:00.740 It's about excessive education, excessive credentialism, combined with a lack of actual education.
00:10:12.800 The captain really spearheaded this with his book, Worthless.
00:10:22.360 An excellent Christmas present, by the way, for any of you with friends in university right now
00:10:29.200 who are taking a woman's studies, English studies, history studies, transgender turtle studies course.
00:10:36.500 I highly recommend the book.
00:10:39.020 It'll maybe set them straight so they don't waste more money at that worthless institution. 0.99
00:10:49.280 And I was writing about it myself recently.
00:10:52.720 About how these people with useless degrees don't just disappear onto the dole.
00:11:02.860 Some of them enter the workforce.
00:11:06.500 Of course, these people with their credentials and their education,
00:11:11.040 they're not going to become a mere grunt, a mere technician working with their hands and getting dirty.
00:11:17.180 Oh, Lord, no.
00:11:18.380 These people will never do something like that.
00:11:20.320 No, they're going to get into management.
00:11:25.740 More and more companies nowadays have utterly incompetent management cadres. 1.00
00:11:32.280 People with useless degrees. 0.99
00:11:36.820 And you know what? 0.99
00:11:38.000 This is more than just having a useless degree.
00:11:40.920 You can have an English degree and be extremely accomplished.
00:11:46.180 My old sergeant major had an English degree.
00:11:49.000 He owned every copy of Beowulf, and he was the scariest man I've ever known.
00:11:54.260 Never once heard him swear, but good Lord, could he tear you apart.
00:11:57.920 He used his English degree in that capacity.
00:12:03.460 And he was an excellent, excellent sergeant major.
00:12:06.880 But again, he's old school.
00:12:12.340 He's coming from that world where men changed their own oil, 0.99
00:12:15.140 where men were real men and knew how to live and had examples to follow.
00:12:20.420 And where the university system wasn't quite as broken as it is today,
00:12:25.540 though it was certainly going down the route.
00:12:27.580 See, nowadays, when you see somebody with an English degree
00:12:34.260 or a gendered turtle studies degree,
00:12:37.760 they have never worked a day in their life.
00:12:41.320 They have never built a machine or repaired an engine.
00:12:45.960 They have never even argued something that's true. 1.00
00:12:49.460 Their entire life is based upon lies and pretension and bullshit. 0.99
00:12:57.440 And these are the people we have running most companies nowadays. 0.99
00:13:03.220 So you have utter incompetence in the management.
00:13:09.380 Then, in the worker pool, we have more and more affirmative action.
00:13:15.600 Shoving people into the jobs that are not qualified to do the jobs. 0.51
00:13:18.580 Turning the jobs into a game of politically correct chess.
00:13:23.580 We're saying the right things and getting the right people to like you
00:13:26.980 is more cogent to doing your job than your actual job.
00:13:34.020 We have a very obedient workforce, but not a very skilled one.
00:13:39.580 And the management is even worse.
00:13:45.500 So it's not planned palability, folks.
00:13:48.580 It's a zombie economy.
00:13:50.940 It's the blind leading the blind. 0.99
00:13:54.760 Selling garbage to the immoral with low time preference. 0.81
00:14:04.220 What wonderful things we're doing with all this technology. 0.92
00:14:07.260 Imagine if we didn't have computers.
00:14:09.180 We'd be living in mud huts right now.
00:14:10.800 Irini out.
00:14:12.440 Irini out.