“Practical, Captain? Perhaps. But not desirable. Computers make excellent and efficient servants; but I have no wish to serve under them. Captain, a starship also runs on loyalty to one man, and nothing can replace it, or him.” – Star Trek (TOS)
I’d tell you a German knock-knock joke but they already have AI-enabled sensing that lets them know who it is.
Let’s pretend that you had to break a big rock. A really big one, say the size of your mother-in-law’s butt.
Okay, that’s a big ask. The last time I had to break a big rock that big was . . . never. That’s a big rock.
Big rocks, mothers-in-law? You’re thinking, have you had too much ale, John Wilder? Bear with me, this will make as much sense as Joe Biden’s economic policies.
So, we’re back to breaking a stupid rock in our mind because John Wilder asked us to. What’s the most direct way to do it?
What does a member of the Southern Buddhist Church say when they die? “What in the reintarnation is going on here?”
You might think you could use a sledgehammer, but not so fast, Thor. That’s not the most direct way, and Disney® will probably sue me for mentioning Thor because they now have the intellectual property rights on all things Norse. Ignore Disney®, since they don’t have (yet) a copyright on hammers. But I don’t want to give them ideas, because soon enough they’ll have a copyright on interstellar space.
To have a steel hammer, you’d have to make one. That would involve having a mine for iron ore. Then the ore would have to be processed into steel. After you figured out how to do that, you’d have to forge the head of the hammer (it has to be strong, right?).
Even then you’re not done. You have to find a tree, get some wood suitable for a handle, invent an entire industry to just get the knife to carve the handle, and finally mate the handle to the hammer head.
Nope. A hammer isn’t that direct. To have a hammer, you have to have a functioning civilization.
Thor’s enemies never get drunk: they just get hammered.
For the most direct way, you’d have to grab a stone or something hard nearby and just start thwacking the rock.
That’s not very efficient.
A hammer is more efficient. But how about you build a piece of high-strength steel to use as a drill? That’s faster. But the drill requires advances in metallurgy even greater than the hammer head.
Okay, what’s the most efficient way to break rock?
How about you blow it up?
Note to the ATF, this is economics, not a suggestion.
That’s a really good way to make a big rock a bunch of tiny rocks, quickly. But in addition to making your hammer and drill, you have to also create an entire industry dedicated to making explosives.
This points out a lesson from the (dead) Austrian economics dude, Ludwig Von Mises: the most efficient way to do something is the most indirect.
To break a rock more efficiently, you have to look for increasingly more indirect methods. That requires time. It requires effort. And, it requires resources that might be hundreds of miles (around 7 kilometers) away.
We have a really efficient society. We can have fresh strawberries delivered to us (cheaply) in January because they grow them in Peru or some other country that rarely visits here. We can have fresh roses for Valentine’s Day® because we have airplanes that deliver them directly from the cocaine fields. Or something like that. I’m not a botanist.
Efficient is better, right?
Well, no. I’d like to put forward as Wilder’s Exhibit A the human body. Nobody needs two kidneys, at least that’s what the girl in the motel in Vegas told me before I woke up in the bathtub. Yet we have (on average) two. We have two lungs. Everywhere that having a spare part might make it easier for you to pass along your genetic information, the parts are paired. I’ll leave the other locations of other paired organs as an exercise for the reader. I mean, everyone has six toes on their left foot, right?
Wow. Looks like Chee-toes® instead of actual toes.
Not everything is paired. We each have (on average) one brain, though I think my ex-wife had six or so brains, one for each personality and species of venomous snake that she would normally impersonate.
But that single brain is armored as well as it could be. Likewise, physics says that having two hearts works as well as having a man living with two women living under the same roof. Thankfully, we have a solution that’s the next best thing – death.
Two eyes. Two ears. I could go on and on. It appears that humans are designed based on the philosophy that “two is one, and one is none.” Huh.
Efficient designs are vulnerable.
From experience, I can say that any business that has any spare capacity will do anything to use that capacity. Wall Street doesn’t want 90% utilization – Wall Street wants 99%. They want . . . efficiency. They don’t want profits for the next decade, they want profits this year.
Just like I have two lungs, I’ll say this again: Efficient designs are vulnerable.
How many of the semiconductor chips in your life came from Taiwan?
A lot. Here’s what the Financial Times noted:
“Yes, the industry is incredibly dependent on TSMC, especially as you get to the bleeding edge, and it is quite risky,” says Peter Hanbury, a partner at Bain & Company in San Francisco. “Twenty years ago there were 20 foundries, and now the most cutting-edge stuff is sitting on a single campus in Taiwan.”
So, most of the best information and knowledge in making computer chips that define the very essence of your life are built at one factory in a country that the Chinese now know that Joe Biden will defend with all of the force of . . . a strongly worded speech.
The Chinese word for Asia is the same as their word for Taiwan: China.
It’s efficient.
I can’t help wondering how many of the current shortages of “stuff” that we’re seeing is just China messing with us. “Hey, if we turn this lever, what happens to the United States? Oh, man, that was funny. Did you expect to see used car prices go up? And those pickles and baking soda? That was a hoot.”
Outsourcing and internationalizing is efficient. Having no surplus production stored in warehouses is efficient. Having no redundant capacity is efficient.
When efficiency works, it means everyone has more stuff. The factories are working at 100%. The people are consoooming apps and video games and pantyhose and PEZ®.
Did I mention that efficiency is vulnerable?
What happens when an efficient process gets disrupted?
Shortages. Price increases. Business failures. Revolutions.
Maybe the question that we should ask is what can we do to make life less efficient?
I guess I have stock-home syndrome.
More efficiency means empty warehouses. Do you have food storage? Do you have ammo storage? What happens if you lose the grid for an hour? A week? A month?
What happens if you lose the efficiency of modern life for a day? For a week? For a month?
What happens if you lose it for the rest of your life?
What happens if you have to live a life that’s less efficient?
I guess there are always more rocks, right?
Efficiency and longevity are inimical.
Fruit flies are about the most efficient species on the planet.
They live for 24 hours.
If humans were that efficient, they’d be extinct.
Thus endeth the lesson.
Um, actually, I think you mean the mayfly, not the fruit fly, as living only for 24 hours. Mayflies are born without mouths and so cannot eat, living only long enough to lay eggs. These eggs turn into larvae that live just below the surface of water for around a year before maturing into the short-lived adult.
https://www.nwf.org/-/media/NEW-WEBSITE/Shared-Folder/Wildlife/Invertebrates/invertebrate_mayflies_600x300.ashx
In contrast, fruit flies lay eggs that grow into sexually mature adults that lay more eggs within two-four weeks (depending on the temperature), and those adults continue to live for up to another six weeks before their natural death.
https://www.yourgenome.org/sites/default/files/images/photos/Fruit%20fly.jpg
This rapid reproductive cycle, plus the fact that adults have been bred to exhibit hundreds of distinct characteristics, has made fruit flies a long-time model organism for genetic research.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d7/b1/b4/d7b1b433b76f15f2f87e3eb3dcb816c7.jpg
But your (and John’s) main point about humans needing inefficiency for their survival is absolutely correct. Females of all other ape species are only sexually receptive when they are actually fertile, which is of course a very efficient sexual strategy. Human females, in contrast, have evolved to be sexually receptive at all times, including the 26 days of their reproductive cycle where there is no human egg available in their uterus to fertilize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_female_sexuality
All hail human inefficiency!
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
What is the opposite of “efficiency” ??
Government, of course !!
Yeouch – but heavens, you’re right. Except they just waste it. Imagine if Elon had the budget of NASA. We’d be on Mars this week.
Fire.
The answer to the BFR is fire, with some water thrown on top when hot.
The answer to the efficient system is also fire, as it burns to the ground, taking all those that depend completely upon it into the inferno as well.
A good back-burn is needed to keep the conflagration from consuming the better prepared.
That seems to happen periodically. Civilization does better because of the pruning.
It hasn’t happened in nearly 100 years. Watch out.
If you have ever seen the warehouse of a local big box store, like a Wal-Mart or a Meijer here in the midwest, it is startling how little storage space they have, especially for food. They rely on those trucks rolling in every day and this is important, those trucks rely on fuel so we have to keep gas cheap otherwise we can’t get fresh produce 12 months of the year. Our entire economic system is based on consumption and that consumption requires above all else cheap fuel to move goods. If people had to wait a week for something from Amazon instead of 24 hours, they would freak out but it takes a lot of gas to get those trucks, planes and delivery vans to keep running. I am sure that gutting our domestic oil productions won’t blow up in our faces and soon.
Funny, my local Meijer is remodeling (they’ve been open for close to 20 years now) and one of the things they’re doing is replacing a door for the “back room”.
Compared to the store its tiny, and over the weekend when I went with my boy (he’s 12) he also “noticed” this fact.
Sure, there’s floor to ceiling shelves (some…) and racks.
But “he “noticed” something else, “what are those garage doors over there?”
That’s where the semi trucks get unloaded. They back right up, park, and…look at the open door, that’s a trailer.
“They’re not very far away…”
Because they’re probably filling almost empty shelves.
Because they’re redoing a door, they do have it blocked with merchandise so a non employee can’t just “walk in the back to get crushed by a forklift or pallet of goods”, at least not easily.
But I did point out “there’s not a lot of extra stuff back there, which explains the shortages of Toilet Paper last year, as well as other things. They probably order stuff months in advance and know “exactly how much they need to buy to get through a cycle before reordering”. This got knocked off kilter by somebody deciding to buy a year worth in one day and thus setting off a panic the next dozen people tried to duplicate”.
Just In Time needs a lot of work to happen, and all it takes is “something” for it to quit working.
Old figures were that the grocery had 3 days worth of food. I don’t think it’s nearly that today.
I’m old enough to remember the National Grain Reserve, where we would store grain for use in a future situation when we needed it.
Dimitri Orlov has written about how the inefficiency in the USSR economy helped many people survive the collapse. Words to the wise, those.
Very much in mind as I wrote this. He’s had some great observations.
Back in the 80s and 90s, the trendy mantra was “Just In Time” or JIT. Businesses fawned slavishly over fragile Japanese models as quintessentially efficient. My own employer, a defense contractor, insisted with squinty eyes that we embrace the philosophy with all due dispatch.
What a disaster.
I recall numerous instances where delivery of a multi-million dollar radar system was delayed because a 1/4-20 hex bolt or a mil-spec cotter pin was unavailable, with none in reserve. There was no one-day shipping from Amazon in those days, which just bricked four tons of high tech gear until that tiny cog arrived. Our stockroom was repurposed as a video conference center, and it was there that we all gathered on the regular to discuss the day’s current shortages.
I haven’t heard of JIT in ages, but the elusive Quest For Efficiency has not gone away. It has merely morphed into Kanban, Agile, Scrum and myriad other silly impact terms, all of which distill down to schedule Hara Kiri when the SHTF.
Modern business models, all searching for ways to circle the drain more efficiently.
It’s a great way to lower inventory! (Laughs in prepper.)
John
This is likely your best post of this year. Relevant. Timely. To make it the perfect post, you would have talked about redundancy as hedge against price inflation, illness, injury, unemployment. And also add something about momma, trucks, trains, prison, and getting drunk. Then it would have been the perfect Modern Mayberry post.
Effective is often better than efficient. I was a soldier for a long time. Effective ruled in that context, as did just in case logistics. Carry extra water and a way to filter it, just in case. Same for ammo and hand grenades.
The same applied when i was a contractor. It’s better to have a little extra material delivered to the job site than have an expensive crew sitting on their hands waiting for a couple hundred dollars worth of parts.
So that’s how we run our household. Keep the important things on hand in sufficient quantity to last through minor supply chain disruption. Have a plan to use substitute goods when appropriate. Have a kitchen garden and put up food for winter. That’s effective, but not efficient. It’s also resilient to exogenous shocks over which we have no control.
Thank you!
On a summer job one year I saw a paver and 20 trucks and a hot plant sit idle while they looked for a comealong to fix the paver.
Mighty expensive.
re: Taiwan: “…the Chinese now know that Joe Biden will defend with all of the force of . . . a strongly worded speech.”
1) I always appreciate your optimism, JW. I expect the BidenReich to defend it with incoherent rambling and an early lid.
2) Most of the Great Toilet Paper Shortage of Spring, 2020 was caused by panicked people who do not know how much they use of anything combined with a huge number of scammers who thought they could resell at $20 a roll on Ebay. Calling it a ‘side hustle’ makes it seem more legit.
3) JIT (mostly) works for stable, first-world countries. It’s completely insane for the second and third world (which the USA now belongs to).
Great points, all. I agree with number 1). I’m not sure he can last the year.
We can have terrorists delivered right to the homeland so that we have to fight them here courtesy of the Weather Underground Government and globalist traitors.
No weapon is ever truly obsolete, just ask the guy that got hit in the face with a hammer.
Come out of the city? But I like a target rich environment.
Keep your enemies closer…so they catch full ballistics.
Ha! I’ll leave the city to you. I prefer a slower, less efficient way of life.
Speaking of growing inefficiency…
https://www.freightwaves.com/news/global-demand-isnt-booming-so-why-are-shipping-rates-this-high?utm_source=sfmc&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=as_daily_8_9_21&utm_term=Global+demand+isn%e2%80%99t+booming.+So+why+are+shipping+rates+this+high%3f&utm_id=47936&sfmc_id=198030
That’s an interesting one. Something is driving that.
Inflation???
I have several hammers. I think I will follow Henry Ford’s lead and put the rock on a production line loop and just have several people pound it continually
Hahahaha! Great visual. Also: several government departments.
Compounding the desire for economic efficiency is the difficulty that is American Capitalism: The consumer reigns above all, and thus the best product at the lowest price always wins. It does not matter where the product comes from – say, chips from China – only that it is the best one at the lowest cost (because production costs in the US are much higher).
Economic and national security, you say? Pish posh. The overwhelming evidence of the power of American Capitalism by happy consumers will ensure that no-one ever need start a war.
(Pretty much the US has backed itself into a corner. If I am any one of our enemies, it is pretty evident we cannot fight a one front war, let alone a two front war. Start something over here, move something over there, and magically China controls the bulk of the world’s chip supply. Were I them in that position, I would simply starve the US of chips. 5 years, maybe 10, we will be back to “non-labor saving devices” as things break down. Thanks, Planned Obsolescence.
Yup. Free trade might make us (in the end) all poorer.
“I mean, everyone has six toes on their left foot, right?”
Wow, I didn’t know you were a polydactyl. By coincidence, that is also my favorite dinosaur. Know any T-rexs? I think a few in DC could solve a lot of problems.
Ohhhh, now that’s a Jurrassic Park we can all believe in! (imagines the “Hope” poster with a T-rex on it)