Why is the Intertubes so slow?

Well, of course it is all those others using it.

The other answer is crappy programming on the server side. And on the client side.

Apparently you need an Advanced Degree(™) to do better.

Here's what I mean:

Yes, I'm a Mac User. No, that's not the cause. Except that it is, slightly.

The above image is "Activity Monitor". You can see that the top two *busiest* users of CPU cycles are Safari and Firefox. Everything else is essentially zero, or idle. When a process is ~100%, that means it is saturating a cpu core, and can't do any more.

But those two are busy doing something, and that something makes them fairly unresponsive to what I want them to be doing. (I acknowledge that some of the problem is that while I'm typing this blog, Blogger is busy trying to help me by doing on-the-fly spelling check, which means there's a background process that is sending/receiving content to/from somewhere far away, and that ties things up a little. That help is nice, but I'd rather throttle it back--remember that I am on satellite internet now…)

What are those two up to?

Bad programming. Well, bad websites, and then bad web-broswer. Those numbers are while the browsers are "idle", too. So what are they doing?

Unfortunately, it's hard to find out because the cpu-usage reporting does not go down to the individual-lightweight-thread level, so I can't know which specific open window (URL) is causing the problem. 

But it's a near-certainty that EBAY and AMAZON are the two likeliest culprits, because they are the pages that have the never-ending-animation content. There are probably other URLs that are worse, but ones I don't visit.

Also, look at the real-mem size. Safari is 15GB?  a pig. This is the same problem that Firefox has, too, about lightweight threads that haven't been terminated and not closing file resources.

Which means that we have web-pages that aren't really 100% closed, even if I closed the window/tab. Files aren't close, and the resources that were loaded (images) are still using memory.

Some of the problem is that on this machine I'm on an old OS, Mountain Lion (10.8). Going to bump it up to Capitan (10.10) in ~3 weeks. I don't expect that is going to fix the issue.

But the problem starts with website creation work that insists on putting animation all over. I personally prefer much simpler pages that have no such thing. These animations that force me to see them are offenses of their own. 

You can dodge some of this via things like FlashBlock (Flash use to be THE WORST about this). But that only solves Flash, what about the animated GIFs? No solution I know of.

I agree that newer OS should have some better-behaving Safari in it. And newer machine would help, except that this machine is already ridiculous fast:

So there are problems in browsers: unclosed resources that are dangling, AND mediocre javascript engine. 

Apple is not guilty of these problems in Firefox, but it IS guilty of them in Safari.

All this animation needs to be halted. At least with FlashBlock I could then choose to play something or not.

What I end up doing now is watching URLs that are these criminals, and adding them to etc hosts.

THIS IS NOT TO HARD TO SOLVE, PROGRAMMERS!

[Next day: "Safari Web Content" seg-faulted and killed Safari completely. Geez this is dumb.]

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If I quit and restart Safari or Firefox, that cpu number goes down to 10% or something like that, then is slowly creeps up again. At 100% the browser is unresponsive, so I'll be ok until I hit that again. But this is ridiculous.

Garbage on the server side causes this, and bad programming on the client/browser side makes it worse.

It's my understanding that javascript is now compiled on the fly, which didn't used to be the case, so it's at least not running slow by being interpreted still. That was never good, just easy.

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Another issue about why Blogger is problematic: it wants to do this auto-save for you, and as I am on satellite, that fails a bit too often…and then it is stuck in a different way. It might recover in a few minutes, but it is at the same time trying to do the spelling check, so who knows?

Almost enough to make you want to go back to Lynx.

Economics lesson part 4

Product creation and pricing this time.

X coconuts per year sales - Y cost of raw materials - Z cost of labor - Q other costs = profit.

Let's reset with Herbert, Suzy and Tom.

Each has two coconuts.

We'll stick with Tom this time.

Tom knits hats. The raw material (yarn) costs one coconut for enough to make five hats.

Each hat takes one week to make, and he can sell a hat for one coconut, continuing to mean that his labor is worth one coconut/week.

At the end of five weeks Tom has made and sold five hats, and his materials cost one coconut, for a profit of four coconuts. That's X - Y = profit.

But what of his food needs? If that is one coconut per week, he's losing ground, because his expenses over five weeks were actually six coconuts (one yarn and five foods), and his income was five, meaning he's losing money.

Tom needs to work faster and make six hats, and hope that there's a sixth buyer.

OK, let's say there are LOTS of buyers. Tom can actually sell as many hats as he can make.

So can Tom make six hats in five weeks? Yes, but not because he becomes more efficient, he decides he has to work longer hours, about two more hours, but this gets it done, and now his income equals his needs.

This can continue indefinitely, as long as the cost of raw materials does not go up, and his customer demand does not go down.

In fact, if those two conditions are true, Tom can hire Suzy to make hats too,  but that is only going to work out if she makes hats at the same rate he does, otherwise HER hats aren't worth as much, and then his aren't either.

Wait, how is that true?

Tom makes six hats in five weeks, worth one coconut each.

Suzy makes FOUR hats in five weeks, but they are priced the same. So now two people are making ten hats in five weeks, and selling them to the tune of two coconuts per week. But Tom's previous sales rate was actually 20% higher. The hats are now worth less, because total production rate is down (where production rate is actually quantity divided by workers).

Suzy needs to improve or Tom has to fire her. Or achieve some other kind of efficiency or economy of scale. If he raises his sales price, that will reduce sales volume just slightly, but really not much changes.

Tom needs a knitting machine, but he lacks coconuts to buy one with. OK, let's skip that aspect, too complex. Tom's mother gives him fifty coconuts and he buys the machine. The machine can make one hat per day. Production volume is huge. Tom lets Suzy run the machine, he doesn't even MAKE hats any more. He handles the increased sales by himself. Instead of making 60 hats by himself per year, or 100 with Suzy, they now make 365 hats, and sell for 365 coconuts. This is WAY better.

The material cost of the hat hasn't changed, it's still 1/5 a unit of yarn = one hat, which means 73 coconuts per year material cost. (Actually that probably wouldn't be true, the machine probably wants a slightly different yarn, etc, but we'll skip that.) Suzy's labor cost is still one coconut per week, for a total of 125 coconuts per year operating cost (52+73), leaving 240 coconuts for Tom.  And Tom repays his mother after six months, for a net profit for the year of 190. Next year Suzy gets a raise of one coconut per month, aka 64/year. Sales are again 365, operating cost is 137, for a profit of 228. Tom is happy with this, because his final profit for the year is 176 after his own personal expenses. He was barely getting by before, but the machine ("automation") has made him rich, almost overnight.

After a couple of years the local market starts to saturate, and sales volume goes down. He has to expand his market. This will actually cost money, but it is a good investment to do so, and again his market rises to meet his manufacturing capability.

Then he discovers that he is receiving orders faster than he can fill them. What to do?

Two possibilities: (1) buy another machine. That doubles his production capacity, but could lead to market saturation sooner, again reducing sales. Or, (2), he could raise prices so that the demand drops off enough that sales orders = production capacity.

As always, the situation is more complex, because what happens when Suzy wants to get paid more? After a couple of years, Suzy decides she can buy the same machine and go into business for herself as a competitor.

At this point Suzy has to decide where to locate, else there is a local race-to-the-bottom on pricing, and Suzy is going to lose because Tom has enough coconuts reserve to ride out the price war, and she actually has debt from having to borrow to buy the machine.

So Suzy goes into business far far away, and all is good. Or she doesn't go far away, and figures out how to make a different kind of hat. That changes the competition.

But the pricing strategy is still pretty basic:

X coconuts per year sales - Y cost of raw materials - Z cost of labor - Q other costs = profit.

Pricing on a lot of things you buy is arbitrary--lots of businesses don't have too careful a price-determining method. "Charge what the market will bear" is the phrase. If there are enough customers at 100 coconuts per sales unit and you make an interesting profit, then 100 coconuts doesn't really have to reflect an actual cost.

Economics lesson part 3

How do you measure the size of the economy?

Let's start over with Herbert, Suzy, and Tom.

Each of them make something the others needs. Once a year. Let's also say they all already have two coconuts.

The only need product A/B/C once per year.

Herbert make "A", and needs a "C".

Suzy makes "B", and needs an "A".

Tom makes "C", and needs a "B".

A, B, and C each cost one coconut. Beyond that, Herbert, Suzy and Tom are completely self-sufficient.

Sales each year are one each of A, B, and C, for one coconut each, per the above list, effectively in a circle.

Three sales transactions at one coconut each, per year, means the economy is three coconuts large.

Each of the A/B/C are consumed during the year, so each person needs one again the next year. So next year's economy will also be three coconuts.

After three years Herbert decides he also needs a "B", and he has one extra coconut. Suzy makes another "B" and Herbert buys it. Now the economy has FOUR sales transactions, and the size for the year is four coconuts, a 33.3% growth. Hooray! Next year Suzy has an extra coconut, and decides she wants a "C", so she buys that from Tom. Tom now has an extra coconut, so HE buys an "A". Sales for the year are now six coconuts.

But the same number of coconuts exist, no new coconuts were created, and yet the economy has doubled in two years. Each person has the same amount of coconuts at the end of the year: two. But they each bought two things during the year, so yes, the economy doubled.

This too is a weak example, because you could then increase it so that each of the three people buy 100 million A/B/C if they could actually execute the transactions that fast, and the economy would be 100 million coconuts. And you can do this without actually even CREATING the A/B/C, just rotate around what is being sold.

Creating and then selling A/B/C is what is called "real wealth", whereas just reselling the same things over and over is just "paper wealth". (Remember that regardless of how many transactions occur, at the end of the year there are still only six coconuts…even if the economy was 100 million.)

Turning raw materials into finished goods creates real wealth.

Continuing in a given product-creation business means that you need to have enough customers to buy all you can/wish to produce per year. This includes handling the wearout/return-rate. If the potential customer population is large enough, you can grow continuously. All of which contributes to the size of the economy.

But remember that "the size of the economy" does not equal the money supply, nor the "real wealth".

Economics lesson part 2

The US economy, the world economy…really complex. No one really understands it well, except in small pieces. Anyone who says they do is lying to you, and probably has a hidden agenda.

Does it take an Advanced Degree(™) to get your head around it? Well, yeah, probably. And a bunch of separate lessons. Here's #2.

This is a tiny-scale lesson. It's going to involve analogies. They're not going to work very well, because it's hard to invent an example that works and is small enough to understand.

Let us think back to an imaginary social situation 10 thousand years ago (why? because there's essentially zero technology).

There are three actors in this scenario. We'll call them Tom, Suzy, and Herbert. Each actor has a thing they can do to participate in the economy. They are completely different things.

Tom makes furniture.

Suzy makes clothing.

Herbert cooks meals.

Remember that this is 10 thousand years ago. Tom doesn't even have a knife, maybe a bit of stone he can scrape tree branches with. But he is able to make a table, of sorts, chairs of sorts, and bed frames that are above ground to avoid there being too many bugs. Furniture consists of tree branches that are tied together using vines. It's all very Tarzan.

Suzy makes clothing from animal skins. They're not high fashion, but provide some insulation.

Herbert grills meat over a fire. No knives, no skillet or pots. Primitive.

How much furniture do they need? Well, three beds, three chairs, one table. Let's say it takes Tom one week to make a chair, two weeks to make a bed, and three weeks to make a table. Once made, the items last one year before falling apart (because the vines don't last).

Suzy's clothing takes one week per person.

Herbert cooks every day.

Where do the raw materials come from? Tom's come from the forest. Suzy's come from the animals the Herbert uses for food. Herbert has to go hunting once a week to acquire a week's worth of food.

This started out sounding trivial, but as we try to make it more accurate, it gets more complex.

So the economy goes like this: Herbert cooks, Suzy makes clothing, Tom makes furniture. For All. There's no "money", there's no "barter". It's too small.

On day one, there's no food, no clothing, no furniture. Tom goes to the forest for sticks, Herbert goes hunting. At the end of the day, Tom has enough sticks to make everything, and Herbert has a week's worth of food. Tomorrow Suzy will have animal skin for one person's clothing.

After three weeks, Suzy has made clothing for everyone. Tom has made three chairs. Herbert is still doing the cooking.

How things are working so far. Well, they sleep on the ground still, but they do have chairs. They have clothes, and food.

But now, animal skins will start to pile up because they have enough clothing for the first year. We'll ignore this for now.

Herbert's work is a just-in-time process. He hunts for deer, he cooks them. 

But Suzy runs out of work after three weeks. Tom keeps chugging and after 12 weeks there are three beds, three chairs, and one table. That's probably not enough tables, so Tom makes another table just for Herbert's cooking usage, and a table for Suzy to use while making clothing. But after three weeks Suzy already has nothing to do. She is not longer contributing to the economy. What does she do? After several months, Tom is in the same situation. 

After six months, Herbert gets tired of being the only worker. Plus, deer are getting scarce, because they run away when Herbert appears. 

So they capture some deer, Tom makes a "pen" and the deer go in there and can't get out. (Ok, analogy is breaking down now, deer can jump decently, and aren't docile enough to have gotten caught in the first place.) Deer take management, but they are a self-renewing resource. As long as they only need to eat 52 deer per year, and they have at least that many in captivity, food is a self-sustaining activity, and now Herbert doesn't have to go hunting for meat. He can go pick fruit instead. Tom and Suzy have to manage the deer, which means making sure they have enough food, water, etc. AND, captive prey animals means predators discover them. Tom has to provide security.

This is a collectivist operation. Now everyone is busy enough.

Until Maria shows up. What can Maria do to join in? Maria needs a chair, a bed, and a table. What is Maria going to create in the economy? Maria is going to make grass huts. No one had shelter before.

It takes 3 months to make a grass hut, so it will take her a year to make one hut each for four people. Beds go in the huts. Each hut needs another chair, and another table. Tom is busy with furniture again, but he's also providing security for the deer, so it takes him a lot longer to get more chairs made.

All these primitive creations have a short lifetime, because the materials and craftsmanship are crude. So let's say that one hut out of four is destroyed every six months. Maria will be busy half the time make huts. During the winter they discover that the animal-skin "clothing" they've worn isn't sufficient, so Suzy makes new heavier stuff. OK, now everyone has twice as much clothing. 

There's no money here yet, because the economy isn't complex enough, but it's headed there. There aren't any "managers" yet either.

And everyone in the economy needs everyone else's services, albeit not all the time. And they are dependent on the wear-out rate.

OK, this example is already getting complex.

Let's change one aspect. Suppose it takes Maria four months to build a hut. Now there's trouble, because she can't build four in a year, but one out of four collapses every year. So at the end of her first year there's a good chance that instead of 3 huts there are two. In year two she has to build two huts to fill original demand plus first-year wearout, in addition to the next one that is going to collapse. She's losing ground.

So next Roger shows up. He makes jewelry, at one week per item. Well, he wants all the same things everyone else has, which mostly works, except that Maria is only just barely keeping up. And Roger doesn't want to wait a year for his hut.

The wearout problem is getting difficult. In addition, Herbert is starting to have trouble feeding everyone enough.

Yeah, the economy, and the society are going to start to break down at this point.

Roger wants his hut NOW. We'll ignore the possibility of violence in here, and argue that Roger offers Maria something extra to build his hut first. OK, now the money question approaches. How do we value peoples' work properly, in order for demand to cause a change in construction priority because Roger is "willing to pay more"?

What happens when Maria figures out to how to make a fancier hut, but it takes longer? What if Maria runs out of customers (i.e., no population growth one year) and makes no new ones? Or does she just keep on making them anyway, figuring that "if she builds it they will come"? If she makes more, that means that Roger can just arrive and walk into a hut. OK, Tom was bored and made extra furniture too, the hut already has a bed, table, and chair. What is Roger going to contribute to the economy?

Problems arise. Alternatively, Tom doesn't furnish the hut in advance, but he has some extra inventory. Roger can have a table, but Tom doesn't want jewelry, so he can't barter with Tom for it. But Maria wants a jewelry but can't barter with Roger for a jewelry because he only needs a little bit to get a bed, and her sales quantum is four months work of work whereas his is one week.

So let's say that the get together and conclude they need a bartering abstraction, using coconuts. One coconut equals one week of work. To initialize, they gather one coconut each. (We'll assume for the moment that no one cheats and goes out in the dark to collet more coconuts down by the beach.)

One coconut won't buy a bed, but Roger can, after two weeks, trade two jewelrys for two coconuts, and can then trade three coconuts for a bed. He makes one more jewelry, and trades with Suzy for clothing. At this point, Roger has no more customers wanting another jewelry.

But everyone needs to eat, and Herbert now has to get paid for the food he makes. One coconut per week is good, he says, and he can cook for six. So at the end of week one, they all pay a coconut, and that means Herbert earns five coconuts. But he has a hut, and furniture, and clothing, what does he need to spend coconuts on? At the end of the second week people are starving, and have to figure out how to prepare their own food, because they have no coconuts to pay Herbert with. Maybe at this point Herbert has to drop his price, or the others have to raise theirs. 

And here we are at the supply and demand balance. Herbert's product has a constant demand ("inelastic" if you prefer). Furniture is an occasional demand. Clothing likewise. Food, though…you need it every day.

Edward comes along and he can do the food thing too. And he's willing to charge less than Herbert. Herbert's price has to come down, at least to the point that there's balance, because once Edward is maximum busy, Herbert takes the overflow. But Edward has customers getting angry he can't do more, and he raises his price a little, because this will drive off enough marginal business that there's balance. Herbert still takes the slack.

And one day Herbert discovers black pepper. Suddenly everyone wants it, and wants to buy from Herbert again. HE can't keep up with demand, and raises HIS prices to drive off marginal business, and those customers are back to Edward.

But at this point Edward and Herbert are not competing on price. Not completely. Herbert has a better product, and it costs more. Herbert has all the business he wants. In fact, more than he wants, so he decides to raise his price further, and then only work six days. He still cooks for himself on Sunday. Some folks have to save a little bit out of each meal and eat leftovers on Sunday, because altho Edward can pick up some slack, he can't feed everyone even one day during the week.

This is all about balance. Supply, demand, pricing. All about balance.

Until Walter shows up, and he can cook more food than Herbert AND Edward, because he's got a Dutch Oven, and his cost is therefore less. Herbert and Edward are out of business, caused by automation. Well, OK, maybe Herbert is not, because he has black pepper. But the folks who bought from Edward now buy from Walter. So Edward is guaranteed out of business. Herbert probably loses some, maybe he has to lower his price, or go back to working all seven days…

Complex, no? And we don't even have babies in the mix yet. That's automated low-speed creation of new customers.

The economy is always in flux, because there are new people created, and old ones die out (the wearout factor applies to humans as well). Technological changes = automation improvements, and that causes job loss. Edward is going to have to figure out something else to do. Or maybe he goes to work for Walter.

Edward invents doors for huts. He can make one door per week, one coconut's worth of work. But he thinks a door is worth TWO coconuts. A door means that your hut can be closed off to critters wandering in, so it's really useful, and now Edward is earning twice as much as other folks. But there's a limit to demand--huts only need one door. Maria is still building huts, and she contracts with Edward to make a door for her every time she makes a hut.

Then Edward invents the window. Whoa! Whole new product. Same customers, but a window is priced at one coconut. Everyone wants a window, so some other prices start to go up, in order that people make enough profit to buy a window.

Everyone's needs can be meet by earning the equivalent of 52 coconuts/year for food, and about ten more coconuts/year for the other stuff. Herbert is earning around 100 coconuts, so they start to pile up, because he has nothing he can spend them on. With a fixed money supply, very rapidly Herbert has all the coconuts, and the economy collapses. So Herbert has to spend them, else his customers either come and steal all his coconuts, or worse. Herbert has to find something else to buy. A fixed money supply is not good (this is part of why the "gold standard" is a disaster at some point dependent on the overall size of the economy--economy big enough and the gold supply is constant means the gold price-equivalent goes up, and the inevitable "bubble-burst" will cause a bank run and collapse).

(A lousy alternative: people can go down to the beach and collect more coconuts, and thus enrich themselves, but if it's too easy, that is going to devalue the coconuts--if they're too easy to get then prices will go up, causing an inflation spiral and economic collapse. ("I went down tot he beach this morning and gathered five coconuts; I'll pay TWO for that clothing now" -- Suzy likes this, but now there's a bidding war for her product, thus the inflationary spiral.)

Aaaauuuggghhh! It's complex. I guess you DO need an Advanced Degree(™). 

TV/Electronics tech advances

15 years ago or thereabouts I had simple cell phone, then I had a phone and a Palm Pilot, then a phone, a pilot and an iPod.

I remember saying to someone at work that what I *really* wanted was the unification of all three, so that I was only carrying one gadget. Three was too many.

That did eventually happen, with the IPhone. For reasons, I didn't get into that level of smart phone right away, not until 2010, and I started with an Android, because I thought I was going to do a programming project for it (that never happened, and eventually I hated the device--Android at that time was stinky). But I did love the success of only having one device.

The problem with this is that the Pilot was better at one particular thing I needed to do, and adequate at the remainder, and I STILL cannot do that one thing equally well since having to give it up. This really bites, and I could damn sure solve it if I could program the iPhone in my preferred language (Java, which Apple doesn't allow). I'm not going back to android.

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Where is this going?

Why hasn't the television world unified all those devices along with the obvious expansions that should happen?

What is it I want? I want a single unit, so I don't have cables all over. I want that unit to do the cable/satellite interface (i.e., channel tuning, DVR, channel guide, etc), I want it to play a DVD/blu-ray, I'd like it to do all the online things that Apple TV does.

And I want to use voice control.

I don't want to spend a pile of time flipping through a hard-to-read channel guide. I'd like the screen to be touch-sensitive. I want to be able to say "play channel 24", "what's on TCM now?", "record this movie", "open the dvd tray"

Why isn't this the default of new TVs already? There's nothing new there that involves R&D, just a coordinated integration spec. You can imagine it being just slightly configurable, inasmuch as I need to be able to replace the "cable" interface sub-unit with a satellite equivalent. And I need to upgrade from DVD to blu-ray at some point. (OK, I can play a blu-ray through the xbox, but that's outside the voice-control, and many people don't have xboxes. And no reason the xbox couldn't have an external-peripheral interface that let me still have voice-control (which wouldn't have to be extra-complex), although as I think on it, that might only really have to be "power on xbox", "power off", and a couple other things. I wouldn't really want to use the voice to replace the xbox controller handheld.

What do you think? Have I missed something else that should be included?

You'd think this was already done, but it's not. ChromeCast uses your phone as the primary device, but I sure don't want that. I'm ok with it as the "remote", but not as the streaming source. The TV still has to do the heavy lifting, regardless of whether your phone is the remote or not. (and if it is, I should be able to talk to Siri, which accomplishes the voice control?)

Why couldn't my XBox be the unit with all the smarts? Well, it'd need a 2T hard disk, or allow an external one somehow, or a local-network storage (

What about Alexa? and FireTV? OK, apparently you can now get an Alexa TV. That sounds good, but it doesn't work with my satellite box.

Years ago you could get a PCI card that was a tv tuner, and then software that would use it. I had one, that was really nice, until the channels I wanted most to record (TCM) went digital and encrypted.

At the moment, it looks like the Alexa-TV/Echo-Dot combo is the closest. And available as a 65-inch 4K. But no cable/satellite. These devices are also, of course, intended to be used by folks with real broadband internet, not folks with satellite.

It shouldn't take an Advanced Degree(™) to figure this out.

Economics lessons, part 1

It shouldn't take an Advanced Degree(™) in Economics to figure out how the economy works, but it sure seems like it does.

"We're going to bring back coal" -- what a ludicrous thing to say. Does anyone think this is going to happen ? Why? It's not. Coal is nearly dead. And you don't want it to come back. Those are nasty dangerous jobs, with illness and reduced life expectancy for everyone involved or nearby. Mine collapse, black lung disease, polluted drinking water. Where coal is burned, polluted air. No good.

Why is coal going away?

Basic lesson: old business models are replaced by new ones that are more efficient in some way. Old tools are replaced by new ones. You could call this economic Darwinism if you're aren't afraid of evolution. If you are, well, you're going to get rolled under by those who aren't, and no amount of stupid from the current federal government/administration will stop it.


Cases in point:

1) Horses. up to 1900, personal transportation was either on foot or on horse. Neither goes very far or very fast, so your travel is very limited. Well, okay, since 1840 there WERE places you could go on a train. But not to the grocery store.

A horse is more efficient that walking, if for no other reason than something besides YOU is doing the work, and the cargo load is greater.

But what's worse is the pollution aspect of horses. Imagine that you are in 1890 New York City. Four million people live there. There are a LOT of horses. Horses poop everywhere. It's probably less bad in the winter than the summer, but it's still bad. And you can't turn it off. (Imagine if the car you drove in the 1950s, 5mpg and high-pollution, could never have the engine turned off…not then an improvement over a horse.) Horses drop dead in the streets; then they rot: flies and disease. You can't hook a horse on the back of a tow-truck and take it to the dealer for repair.

So the revolution here is when an automobile becomes possible, and priced right, it eliminates horses as transportation almost overnight.

(Remember a good Henry Ford quote here: "If I'd asked people what they wanted, they'd have said 'better horses'" because most people's vision extends only just beyond their front door. Well, he gave us a better horse, and a better business model along the way. (Yes, I know Ford didn't really say that.))


2) Shopping. about the time I was born, your standard shopping experience was to go to a department store, let's call it "Sears", and you could talk to someone who actually had expertise/knowledge about how to do something and what tools to use, and they could sell you those tools.

Now, well, Sears is slowly going out of business. With the increased competition that Sears faced, and the willingness of stores to compete on price, the American consumer reached a point where purchase price was the critical aspect. That resulted in a need to cut costs at Sears (and everywhere else), and one of the costs that got cut was labor. Reduced pay because of cheaper workers means reduced purchase prices which means customers don't go elsewhere. It also means that workers are less knowledgeable. Turning those workers into part-timers to avoid paying benefits also keeps costs low, but you still only get the lesser workers. And those workers are the ones that interact with customers. Retail customers don't like trying to deal with dumb employees, but it's not like that's not true everywhere else too. And because aggregately we have decide that cost beats all, this was inevitable.

When you are forced to compete on price, rather than product or service quality, you get a race to the bottom. That always results in a shakeout where some close, some are bought, and a couple limp along getting slowly worse and worse.

As Sears has gone downhill, so have others, putting people out of work.

What's the business model that accelerates this? Well, Sears itself started it back in the 1800s. Remember the "wish book" ? Yeah, that was it, combined with Wells Fargo wagons (remember the song from The Music Man?). The model: send a catalog to a customer, let the customer place a written order with a paper check, box items and put them onto a Wells Fargo Wagon, wagon delivers to customer. Customer doesn't have to visit a store, in fact CAN'T because it's too far away. The process isn't fast, but it means you have access to thousands, millions of customers who don't live in town, or live on the other SIDE of town. Remember that transportation back then was horseback.

Back in the day, you could even buy a house, as a kit, from Sears.

So what was that? It was a new and more efficient business model. Enabled because of reasonably efficient postal service, banking service, and transportation service. Those things were, of course, still fairly limited, but still a giant leap over 100 years before.


3) Amazon. Now the equivalent model is Amazon.com + Paypal + FedEx/UPS. Instead of a turnaround time of weeks, it's now days, and perhaps only hours if you live near an Amazon distribution center. So those Sears jobs are turning into Amazon jobs. At least you don't have to interact with dumb employees or customers.


A theoretically perfect market is like this: you as customer have access to the advertising service, which has access to the payment service, and the delivery service, and all of that can turn around with minutes to hours. That sounds like today, with one exception: in a perfect market ALL possible goods and services are available for purchase at all times. I want to buy an "X" and the advertising service shows me who has that for sale. Our current market is imperfect in that some things are not for sale when you want to buy and go looking, but it's awfully damn close.

The old business model of "brick-and-mortar" stores is just about dead. Yes, there are still a lot of stores around. But that's going away. an old business model that is no longer efficient enough. One of the other reasons why the newer model is more efficient is that if you buy pants that don't fit you can just send them back and order a different size. Soon as you know you wear 34x32 pants, that's the only size you order. No need to try them on at at store.


4) 3D printing. This is going to replace a bunch of manufacturing flavors, over time. You will do it yourself at home. It will be more efficient to own a printer, and order a design, which it then makes for you. There is ZERO shipping cost, beyond raw-material refills. Eventually this is the Star Trek synthesizer. Make-on-demand. No need for a store, because there's no need for inventory.


5) Delivery via drones. Amazon is working this. It will have limited range, but be more efficient for small things, and nearly fully automated: this will reduce vehicle traffic at ground level. Just wait until the air is full of these things, tho.


Back to why coal can't come back…it's an old business model. It worked at the time because it was very low-tech, and because of that there weren't any competitors. You could dig it out of the ground with a pickaxe and haul it home with a horse-cart. But it was still nasty. At large scale, it was also dangerous. Oil is high-tech, but there aren't any mine collapses or explosions. (well, you get oil spills, those are nasty too.)

The coal competitors involve a bit more advanced technology, in varying amounts. Oil/etc require special transportation, special processing, special handling at your house. Natural gas is similar. Electricity puts the most dangerous parts far from your house, and you can do a lot more with it. Solar can bring power generation right back to your house again, and the fuel source is free, but the tech to create solar panels isn't trivial.

Here, too, tho, coal itself displaced a predecessor: trees. Much higher energy density, same transportation methods. Problem: non-renewable. You can grow trees in your yard.

Coal is nasty from the get-go. Oils is too. NatGas not so much. Solar is nasty only at manufacturing time (I imagine that disposal time will be too, but I haven't heard about much of that going on, the wear out age of solar panels is still probably well into the future).

But very little of that involves human work any more. And that is why coal is going away.

Automation.

All of these advances are the result of automation. Improved tech is a kind of automation. Both are better business models.

Which all result in job losers. Job winners, too, but the jobs are different, and the people are too. 50 years ago cars were still largely hand-made. Assembly lines, yes, but human workers. Now they are almost fully automated. Competition and therefore cost pressures forced this to be true. You want to buy a human-made car? Who still does that? Rolls Royce. Bentley. Morgan. Ferrari. Lamborghini. What's the sales price? Yeah: quarter-mil+

(look here: http://www.madehow.com/Volume-1/Automobile.html for a fascinating explanation)

Coal production, such as it still is here in the US, is not guys in mines with pickaxes. It's giant earth-moving trucks scraping a mountain flat out west. The mining jobs are gone. Automation has killed them. Not coming back. Waiting for them to come back because some knucklehead presidential candidate says they will is foolish in the extreme.

Automation has already killed a lot of jobs here in the US. Cost pressures moved a lot of jobs outside the US, and automation will kill them too.

Winners and losers. Economic Darwinism. Survival of the adaptable.

Inevitable. And scary.

----

An afterthought or two:

1) the coming "AI" revolution is already changing things, and that will accelerate. I don't know how or where. I used to work in that area, when it was still primitive. It was great fun, but inevitably came the pullback of "this is still too hard".

2) electric cars. If I live another 30 years I will see the end of the internal-combustion-engine-driven car. Gasoline will go away. What is currently a gas station hasn't been solely a gas station for years. It's a convenience store where one product is gasoline. Don't plan on keeping your current car forever. Or your antique.

3) self-driving cars and the Uber/Lyft equivalents will eliminate private ownership of vehicles for the most part. Self-driving trucks are in the near future (test vehicles are already in use). This will be one disruptive use of AI. Taxis are doomed; well, the ones driven by humans are. Uber service with self-driving cars will be the new thing--you won't even own a car.

4) There are plenty of historical occasions where the upheaval of new tech replacing old tech causes social unrest and rioting/vandalism.

Solar Power at the home

Hyde University campus has two buildings. One of them was designed and built by me, aka "the barn", and the other is the house.

Where HU is located it's readily possible to have a 30 inch snowfall. I think two years ago we have one that was ~24. Fortunately, it's rare, and doesn't last long (the 24 was only a few days long before melting). The barn has a poured concrete floor on cinderblock supports (because the ground is sloped there). While the foundation isn't precisely flat, it's close. There's about a half-inch variation from the corners to the side-centers. (I didn't know that at pour time, only discovered it as I was installing wall framing sections and not getting the precise alignment I wanted.)

So when I designed the barn, I requested roof trusses capable of handling that 30 inches of snow. The roof is corrugated sheet metal sections on one-inch purlins every 24 inches.

Part of the reason for that was to handle the snow, but another part is that I would like to put about 5KW of solar on the roof. Solar has some weight, but not like the snow. But it's permanent weight, so the trusses are "storage trusses", which means I can also shove boards up there on the inside, and I have done that; mostly it's 2x4 and 2x6, altho my 50/60-year-old cherry one-by is up there too.

So this is all fine. I have a price quote on installing solar, but it's higher than I want, so I haven't done it yet. The quote has, in my opinion, too much battery and not enough panel. I want to be able to start my table saw (Delta Unisaw, 1HP motor, this looks about the same vintage as mine)

while a sawdust collector runs. There's a power-drain-surge while an electric motor starts up, so I want to only start them one at a time, but that's easy enough, and you want to do the collector first. (That said, my "collector" might just be a squirrel-cage blower to vent sawdust out the side wall; I have one, but it's sitting on the floor right now.)

This is a typical two-bag collector.

If you look at Google Images for "sawdust collector" you can see a lot of home-brew variations involving a shop-vac. Shop-vac is usually fairly low-power.

A Squirrel-cage is like this (except that mine is WAY bigger):

I'd just bolt that square opening to a hole I'd cut in the exterior wall, mount a water-blocking cover/shield over it and blow dust out. That'd work fine. It's not like I'm going to be cutting so much sawdust that there'd be a mound of it, it'd just be a dusting, and there's often enough breeze to dissipate that anyway.


So where is this all leading?

The HU house doesn't have the same kind of roof trusses. They are simple triangles with a center-post, no diagonal struts. That makes it easy to climb in around them, but I now have the feeling that I can't do solar on the house, which I *especially* wanted to do, with the barn as a test-drive.

This is a bummer. The house has A LOT of roof, because it's a single-floor ranch, and solar would be great.

I don't know if this has a solution. The trusses over the garage are 2x6, so they are stronger than 2x4 trusses, where the barn has 2x4 trusses with mid-supports.

It might be going to take an Advanced Degree I don't have to figure this one out.