The human paradox that Corbest discusses leads one to the question: "How many Neros are fiddling their fiddles as this planets eco system faces ultimate ruination.?" This is the ultimate cost of the paradox as mentioned in the OP. - head in sand and apathy.
Cars, like most everything man makes do have a “design life.” Whether you call it “planned obsolescence” or not is mainly a matter of choice - a POV. This has been true of cars for more than 80 years as following true story will prove: In 1920s Henry Ford hired a mechanic with no task but to travel all over the US visiting junk yards for more than a year. The mechanic was to disassemble all the Fords he found that had NOT been in any accident to find out why they had been scrapped. The mechanic's finally report was detailed and noted that not one Ford had failed because of a snapped king-pin. (That sort of T-shape piece of steel that allows the front wheels to turn.) Henry called in his engineers after reading his mechanic's report and told them: "Make the king-pins cheaper and lighter." It just makes good sense to design all components of any complex system to have the same expected serviceable lifetime. How long that lifetime should be is also a logical, rational, economic choice, but a complex one with different answer for the customer and the maker of the product. For example, steel car body is relative strong, cheap and quickly formed by presses, compared to aluminum or fiber glass, but will not last as long. (And requires painting to prevent rust). There have been a few all aluminum and many fiber glass car bodies made, but steel is very dominate. What would be the point of a car body that last 50+ years, unless the rest of the car can too? So long as there is competition for car sales among different makers, one can be sure that at least some bias towards a cheaper initial price (lower expected lifetime) will exist and this also tends to make the unit production cost decline (as annual production required for replacement is greater.) Style is unfortunately (IMHO) very important to most customers and this adds considerably to the cost with model changes each year. At least that is what one might assume as it results in a smaller production runs for each model; this however is demonstrably false: My Ph.D. thesis adviser bought a Checker (A large maker of many taxi cabs with 10 or more years between significant model changes.) expecting it to last at least 300,000 miles prior to any major failure. (As it turned out the car lasted longer than he did. - It was part of his estate and sold rather cheaply, I think.) He paid much more for it than a Chevy or Ford as every year (until now at least) Chevy and Ford sold more cars of each model than Checker does, despite their annual model changes. (Had lower unit costs due to volume in part) When the US big three all are bankrupt, and dollar is too weak to import foreign cars, perhaps we will all driver Checker made cars and be done with this style change nonsense, which unfortunately is necessary and economical given the fact that most buyers want it. I.e. few buy the fixed style Checkers even with their longer life expectances and lower life cycle costs. (Assuming you do not die before wearing the durable Checker out, as my adviser did.) Perhaps someone will post the cost of a new Checker and its average life expectancy? Is it still the lowest life cycle cost car?
Up where I live they are still building houses out of stone block. Stone inside and out. These houses will last thousands of years without doubt. The reason a lot of European buildings still stand is because they were built out of stone. Know why? Because those primitive societies that QQ seems to worship as superior had deforested Europe in the wasteful heating of their homes. England was mostly deforested by 1350. Continental Europe had the same problem. This is why most of the structures built before then are long gone, they were built similarly to how most houses here are built, only not as well. Planned obsolescence is conspiracy theory. We live in a disposable culture that throws away perfectly good items in the lust for something newer and shinier. This is a product of the envy and greed present in every hominid. It is not something created by the producers, it is a demand generated by we, the consumers. One of the most enticing features of any product is price, which creates a massive demand for the most stuff as cheap as we can get it. When producers satisfy this demand they should be applauded, not castigated. QQ suffers from the Naturalistic Fallacy. I'm trying to help him with that. I don't want him worshiping cultures that burned witches and cut down every tree in sight and forced people to worship a particular god upon threat of torture. Nor do I want him frowning on modern culture just because we are now wealthy enough to satisfy the delights that humans have harbored since before the pyramids were built. Why should the Pharaohs be the only ones with shiny things to be buried with? Such a philosophy leads to very real evils, my friend.
But...but....but..... we didn't know what we know now years ago Swivel. We were ignorant of what our actions did to our long term survival. We do however know a great deal more now and the ignorance excuse is washing a bit thin IMO..... Most buildings were torn down by rival groups either to utilise their stone for other structures or as revenge or other nasty motive...most artworks destroyed or disfigured as a slight against their creators...humans of the past behaved reprehensibly and in many cases still do. One of the main reasons the pyramids still stand today is because no one could be bothered trying to steal those big blocks of stone....People just being people I guess. The paradox in some ways can be seen in the use of "arbitary intelligence" with out the wisdom to support it. The wisdom is part of the philosophical side of humanity and is far from arbitary.
yes I basically concur. However the point I was attempting to make is that humanity appears to have reduced the extent of it's emotional and financial investment beyond their mortality.... A "general-istic" observation and one I am sure will be supported adequately if one bothered to do the proper surveys and research. And of course this is an aside to the Op topic.
I do appreciate your concerns Swivel. I attempt to take the most realistic approach to the "beast and the beauty" that humanity is. We are such a dynamic race of individuals after all. And as mankind moves and grows from a position of relative insanity and in to a more sane position sometime into the future, it has to struggle with those attributes that could be deemed to be "insane". Religious dogma becoming or maturing into a more pathenistic style or whorship is an example of that trend to wards a better state of mental/emotional health. [IMO] { re - your naturalist fallacy comment} But along the way reality checks are needed to avoid the possibility of not surviving the journey and the eco-catastrophy pending is one such reality check. The need to extend our vision beyond our own graves and plan for a future that we are not going to directly participate in are all part of finding a better way to survival of the species. If every generation invested only for their own life time the human race as a race of volition and sophistication is doomed to exist only for a few generations... When our forfathers in their wisdom planned to build nations and cities they did so with perpetuality in mind... where are those leaders today? any one?
Civilization is our "immortal self." We are all cells in an "organism" that is greater than any of us and has a much longer lifespan. By contributing to the maintenance of civilization, even through such a humble activity as stacking the canned peas in a grocery store, we give our lives meaning that is greater than survival and the satisfaction of our individual needs. Abraham Maslow dealt with this when he mapped out "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs": survival-security-love-esteem-fulfillment. (Those aren't his exact names for the Five Steps of Maslow's Hierarchy but I always condense them into single, more easily remembered words when I teach it in passing. "Sound bites," I suppose.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) The fourth step, esteem, is where we are nurtured by the respect of others for the things we have accomplished that transcend our own individual needs. Fulfillment goes a step beyond that (Maslow's term is "self-actualization"): not just maintaining civilization or even picking up someone else's slack, but doing something to advance it. I don't like your use of the word "supernatural" to describe this ambition. If you were the first one to coin it then of course you'd be correct, because it highlights man's transcendence over nature, by using our uniquely massive forebrain to redirect and even completely override our primitive instincts. But "supernatural" has come to mean something else: a second universe outside the natural universe, whose inhabitants capriciously interfere with the operation of the natural universe for their own amusement. Religion is indeed a codification of the supernatural, the "fantastic" as it were, but it is not a "fantastic ambition" in the sense you're describing. Religion is nothing more than a collection of what Jung calls "archetypes," which are merely instinctive beliefs and thought patterns hard-wired into our synapses by the vagaries of evolution: ancient survival behaviors that have long outlived their usefulness, genetic bottlenecks, etc. Religion therefore can be seen as the very opposite of the ambition you're looking for, because it is atavistic and reinforces our most primitive instinctive behaviors. This can be seen in the headlines of any newspaper, reporting on the way religion reinforces our Stone Age pack-social instinct, pitting tribe against tribe over their conflicting manifestations of their inborn supernatural motifs, and constantly threatening to bring down civilization, rather than advancing or even maintaining it. As you noted, most sharks are killed for their fins, which are considered a delicacy in a part of the world none of us lives in. I don't think the tiny pile of shark steaks that occasionally appears in my supermarket for adventurous eaters requires unsustainable fishing. Many of the artifacts of our "throwaway economy" do indeed represent the squandering of non-renewable resources, with plastic being the most egregious of the lot. But houses and commercial buildings are not. Except for a rather small portion of their mass like plastic plumbing and electrical fittings, a demolished building is pretty much "ashes to ashes and dust to dust." And as other responses to your post have pointed out, those ancient constructions may still be standing, but only in the strictest sense of the word. Most of them are not habitable except as rudimentary campsites, and if they weren't cultural treasures they'd be torn down. I beg to differ. Only a small percentage of any model last that long. I have a 1980 diesel-engine Mercedes-Benz, generally acknowledged as the world's best-built car. It has only 240,000 miles and it's ready for the junk heap. The heater core has failed, a $1,500 repair. Which means I've got no heat, no A/C, and worst of all in the winter months, no defroster. Sure, I could fix it, but that's hardly a reasonable deployment of funds. Even people like my wife and me, who consider a car a member of the family and keep it for decades, cannot dependably expect to get 300,000 miles, even on the models that are regarded as exceptionally well-engineered like Toyota or Volvo. I'm glad someone finally posted that figure; I've been looking for it. Baron Max, who was an architect before he became a full-time curmudgeon on SciForums, said that he'd never heard of the service life being estimated for the buildings he worked on. He seemed to be assuring me that they'd last for thousands of years, like the pyramids, if they were simply kept watertight since water is the greatest threat to their integrity. I am certain that this is a temporary condition, a phenomenon of the Paradigm Shift we have the luck to be living through, from an industry-based economy to an information-based economy. (Some Chinese guy must have cursed us: "May you live during interesting times."Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!) My grandparents' generation (born in the late 19th century) were notorious for planning for the future at the expense of present consumption.
Nice post Fraggle, To me the issue of "supernatural source " could be inevitably relegated to what has been coined in the past as the "God Complex". That somehow we individually wish to exercise God like power over ourselves, those around us and that of the environment. The source is actually our innate sense of individual superiority over everything else and our rise to more power ambitions, but most of all it is our sheer arrogance that prevents us from remembering that every one eles has just the same ambition and thus conflict is inevitable until the "God's" learn to get along and stop fighting each other. The road to co-operation and fair sharing of resources has been a long and hard one and one yet to be accomplished in our evolution towards a more peaceful co-existence. So in a sense this innate God complex leads to things such as religion, and other power struggles. Ironically religion seems to existentialise the inner God and thus grant man a lesser position [humble ] of humility. When God is no longer existentialised and becomes ourselves in the form seen in our individualistic cultures we run into serious ego issues and war ensues but in an inner sense rather than what happend in the past which was existentialised warfare....ww2 ww1 Bonaparte etc etc... So regarding the OP topic the source could be this God Complex IMO
Funnilly enough in this case it is the life expectancy of the welding, riveting and bolts that sets it up for demolision in 60 years. being primarilly a massive steel construction with a veneer of brick, cement, tiles , glass, and plaster over the top of it... quite impressive engineering IMO but strictly designed to a limited life expectancy. And yes humidity, moisture and actual rain/storm water woud be the greatest factor. Although these days they think of ultra violet radiation and other less obvious factors such as oxidisation, and in the case of welding and bolts, crystalisation due to micro flexing [I think ] The lessons from the twin trade tower collapses of 9/11 are still being learned so it seems
I read an article quoting a letter from an engineer who blamed the New York City government. They passed a law against the use of asbestos when the towers were almost exactly half completed. The upper floors had to be fireproofed with another material. He claimed that no other fireproofing material available at the time was as light as asbestos, so in order to avoid overloading the carrying capacity of the floors that were already built, they had to use less fireproofing material than was required to do the job right. He went on to point out that it was estimated that by eliminating half of the asbestos in the WTC, three lives would be saved per century. Instead, it took a toll three orders of magnitude greater. However, when I posted that on SciForums, an architect spoke up and said that the guy was wrong. I haven't seen it discussed further, so I have no idea who's right.
That is another human paradox. Once you leave the realm of math and physics, "truth" is very plastic and easily shaped to serve almost any POV. E.g.Israel committed war crimes -T or F?
I don't get the asbestos-scare. Asbestos is a naturally-occurring substance. There are some areas, I think one part of San Fran is one, where the level of asbestos in the air is far above what was determined to be "un-safe", but there are no ill effects. If I remember correctly, the only type of asbestos which is really dangerous, and can get into your lungs and barb itself in tight is a kind that was never used in civilian applications. It was reserved for military and extremely specialized industrial usage. The kind that went into homes is safe enough to eat, and misguided politics and enviro-scare tactics just led to MASSIVE wastes in money, and likely many lost lives.
the main reason for the shift in attitude to the asbestos issue is purely one of litigation...Hardey's Ltd. here in Australia faced and paid out enourmous amounts of compensation money for "victims" of asbestos related diseases. amongst them Pneumoconiosis [ asbestosis ] But it is not one of philanthropy but one mainly because of potential litigation, the same with smoking tobacco.
Maybe the idea is that future generations will come up with something new and better before the end of time, and as such there is less need to build stuff to last forever. Because we can expect improvement and wish to replace the inferior old with the superior new. But that's just speculation, and you're probably right that we should build things to last longer.
And you are sure there are no ill effects because you've checked? Asbestos is dangerous, and at least the people who worked with it - in the form used in housing and pipe insulation, brake linings in cars, etc - suffered ill effects. Arsenic is a naturally occurring substance, found in drinking water all over the planet. It has ill effects. If there is too much of it - as in the aquifer under a good share of Bangladesh - the ill effects can be strikingly apparent to the experienced eye, even as they are accepted as normal by the people who live in the area. Preventing the wholesale introduction of asbestos into daily life is simply prudent. Whether the complete ban now in force is overkill, can be questioned - but use that results in steadily rising levels of the stuff is not a good idea. OT In general, durability can be: resistant, repairable, replaceable. The "replaceable" form of durability could also be labeled "sustainable" - a grass lawn is a durable ground cover, replacing itself every year. US suburban and rural housing is in general none of those three - which is due to be a problem in a generation or two.
That's not universally true. It depends on the maturity of the technology involved, among many other things. It's pretty easy to keep a 1950s-era American car running and many people do so for nostalgia. No $1000 computer to rattle itself to pieces, no $1500 air bags to decompose over time, etc. But those missing parts are the very things that make those antique cars no longer roadworthy, no matter how well the few parts they actually have work. Not to mention, the fuel consumption of those "classics" was 8-14 miles per gallon (16-28 L/100km). Who would want to drive one of today's cars thirty years from now when fuel is $25 per gallon? But there are other considerations too. Paradigm shifts are, by definition, unpredictable, and no one could have foreseen the Information Revolution. Would it have been worth the enormous expense (and use of resources) to build highways, overpasses, etc., that would last hundreds of years, not knowing that within the lifetime of you younger people the majority of the workforce will be telecommuting and your children may see the day when very little travel takes place for purposes other than recreation and socializing? How about office buildings? They will become obsolete before the end of this century, for the same reason as twelve-lane freeways.
