Posts Tagged → logger
Dear Labor Day: Make Appliances Great Again, please
How sad that our national holidays have become more about appliance and mattress sales than about the original purpose of, say, President’s Day, or Labor Day. But if I were to set out to write an essay about labor, and what working and worker’s rights mean to me, I would die of boredom trying to write it long before I finish it, and long before anyone might stumble onto it while cruising the internet at 3AM, and stay on it til the end. No one would read it, and even if someone might, I would never write it.
So appliances it is on this Labor Day’s essay, and we begin by asking Dear Labor Day, please make appliances great again.
If America is going to have this huge orgy of heavily advertised consumerism around this national holiday, can we at least have appliances worthy of their hallowed, legendary names and high advertising costs?
One must ask, because planned obsolescence is no longer a sideways joke among a handful of Americans who got burned once; today, everyone I know hates modern appliances. Because modern appliances are craaaaaap. All of ’em.
Got yourself a fancy, expensive WOLF stovetop, do ya? Guess what? It has the same exact cheap crap under the hood that the BOSCH has, that all the other ranges have. A little blue cartridge, some same wiring, some aluminum tubes to carry the natural gas, and four or five little piezo starters that are interchangeable among all of the gas stovetop ranges for sale today. And when the WOLF components go bad is about the same time as the BOSCH components will go bad, because they are all the same components. Just the names and a little bit of visible construction is different among the various makers.
How do I know this? Because I have been the ubiquitous frustrated husband who vows “Oh no ya don’t!” when the expensive appliance stops working, because some small electronic gadget way in the back in it goes bad, and I am faced with the bad choices of either bringing in the technician to fix it at nearly the price of a new appliance, tossing it and buying a new one, or trying to fix it myself, while our entire home just about shuts down until the problem is solved.
And I have now fixed enough of these various types of appliances to know the deal, the score, the trap that we are all presently in.
Recently, I bought a new clothes washer that has zero bells and whistles, does not connect to an application on a phone, has no lid lock, no digital display, no buttons. Quite the opposite: It has some old fashioned dials, an aggressive agitator that will rip your arm off, and is made in America. Smaller than most, by any measure, it cost much more than the fanciest washers for sale.
But it also has a waiting list, because Americans are sick and tired of crappy washing machines that put more emphasis on “efficiency” than they do on just washing clothes. Real market demand is bringing back ye olde fashioned washer.
I don’t care about efficiency when it comes to washing my clothes. I just want my clothes to be real clean, and not take all afternoon to appear clean. No low-energy impeller, a high-energy-suck powerful motor spins the agitator, and creates real water turbulence. The new Speed Queen starts and finishes in about twenty minutes total, and if the clothes survive the ride, they are real clean. You may also end up with very clean rags. This Speed Queen model is marketed to farmers and loggers. Think about that.
We Americans used to buy appliances by name brand, because name brand once meant something real, something substantive. Different brands offered different quality levels, different warranties, different life expectancies. Not anymore. Those days are long gone, far over, and I believe Americans all know it. Everything is now made by cheap whores for cheap whores, and tarted up with fancy shiny things and bold name plaques that are not worth the oxygen molecules you will breathe heavily around them as they are being initially installed in your home.
All are made somewhere far away from where legendary American brands started, out of the same crap internals. All of it, every name brand, all is cheap junk whose cheap junkiness will become revealed to you moments after the warranty runs out.
The places that once employed labor forces of American men and women to make the original name brand models, back in the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, the 1970s, they are today deserted ghost towns. Elmira, New York, Utica, New York, half of Ohio, Philadelphia, PA, Pittsburgh, PA, these places are overloaded with empty, crumbling brick buildings that once housed the original manufacturers of the famous name brands we so treasure today.
But today, most appliances are made in Won Hung Low, Long Duk Dong, and Chee Ho, China, and they are all crap.
I know that a lot of American husbands think like I do, are probably battle scarred like I am, and they would also happily spend double the price on whatever the appliance is, if they know it was made in America, by American workers, out of sturdy, reliable, long-lived American-made components, and will not require us to make an impossible choice of fix, toss, or replace while our whole home life stalls out in mid-air, waiting.
Can we please make appliances great again?
(Side note: Author-poet-farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry died the other day; he changed a lot of lives for the better. Gil Freedman, whose father built my home address in 1939, and whose bedroom was long inhabited by one of my daughters, died earlier this summer, from Parkinson’s Disease. Gil was an engineer, and also a conservationist and clean streams volunteer; a gentle person. Nicest guy you will ever meet pharmacist and SCUBA SAR volunteer Steve Markowitz died real young last week, of a cancer he only found out about in July. Folks, do not waste your limited days on anything but moving the ball down the field. Because the older I get, that you get, the shorter and shorter the field appears to get, and we are all running out of field to run down, I don’t care how young you think you are. Spread love, be kind, be good, make our shared planet a little bit better. Editor over and out)
Fake News & their fake public surveys
The establishment media – NPR, NYT, MSBNC, CBS, ABC, etc – are out wide and wide open, to borrow a football phrase, and we all see it. No denying it, the mainstream media are aggressively partisan political activists. Not news or information reporters. As political activists, they lie, lie, lie to try to get the political outcomes they want.
In football, when a team is hard pressed and is closely behind and running out of time, a wide receiver will often run down the field and out wide and wide open, usually alone in the field, completely visible to the defenders. Then the quarterback will launch what is usually termed a Hail Mary, aimed at anyone where the receiver could be in the end zone. But often times this throw is unbelievaby accurate and aimed perfectly. If the wide receiver is brilliant, he will catch the long, hanging pass, despite the hands and helmets of the defenders trying to grab or knock the ball away, and he will score the winning touchdown.
This is the condition of our Fake News Media right now. They don’t seem to care that everyone can see them standing out there in the field, wide open. Everyone sees their intentions, and everyone knows what they are up to. There is no hiding it. It must be that these politically partisan Fake News Media employees feel like they are behind in the game, because they lose credibility even with their most devoted fans when they are this blatant. They are setting their credibility on fire.
Yes, I concur with you, I too am mystified that any American watches MSNBC or CBS, or reads the New York Times, or listens to NPR, without some inkling that something is amiss. I mean, a consumer of this toxic crap would have to have some scintilla, a tiny sparkle, in the back of their mind that maybe all the myriad other new information outlets and sources exist for a reason…. that the “alternative” media sources must have something of value, by the mere fact that the market demands their product.
Despite growing up with and surrounded by Liberals and Marxist Democrats, I confess that I have never understood them. Never. And I understand them even less today. These supposed arch intellectuals self adulate because they are in effect drug addicts. They constantly consume information that reinforces what they already believe, or want to believe, or expect to be told. And they assiduously avoid information that is contrary to what they want to hear.
Like Pavlov’s dog, Liberal Democrats salivate at the sound of the NPR theme music, and when they hear what they want to hear, the dopamines just torrentially unleash in their brains. That rush tells Liberals that they were right all along. The emotional flow, that congruence between mental expectation and mental reward, is really like a drug addiction rush. Liberal Democrats are dopamine drug addicts. And it makes them hard to pry away from the establishment media junk they are snorting up.
In truth Liberal Democrats are living inside a tiny bubble, or an echo chamber, as some say. I prefer the image of the bubble world that looks like almost every grey, destroyed, run-down, bombed out Democrat-run jurisdiction in America, where outside of it are believed to be scary monsters and unhappy feelings, but in fact warm sunshine and healthy green fields beckon. And so Liberal Democrats abuse themselves and stay on their closed-loop flow dopamine high in their drug addled state, unaware of the pure crap they are being fed.
While the Democrat Party has openly become the political party for and of America-destroying murderers, rapists, pedophiles, violent criminals, Antifa, Black Bloc, lawless judges, Tesla vandals, open hate, insurrection, and illegal aliens committing untold crimes against American citizens, the Democrat Party is also trying to burn down their pro-America opponents.
That alternative information seems to be driving them crazy and into a frenzy!
One of their methods of destroying their opponents is relying on “anonymous sources” in negative establishment media writings and TV appearances. Another is using fake, made-up polls and public opinion surveys with 100% non-scientific methodologies. Today, the New York Times, and its family of fake information outlets on TV and radio, released one of these ridiculous polls claiming that President Trump is precipitously losing popularity.
What a hilariously ridiculous crock of crap!
Today on the log landing, the logger and I were talking about the negative effects the White House’s tariffs are having on our freshly cut, high value oak logs. Terrible timing for us, as we just started a new logging job that has, or had, great financial promise… when the markets are in smooth operation. We each had also touched base with several sawmills this morning, to hear what they are experiencing from the tariff wars.
You know what everyone involved said to us today? Something along the line of It sucks to work as hard as we work, and to then not get the kind of financial reward we would have received just a few weeks ago. But we understand the tariffs are necessary for America to regain its trade footing. We are not upset with President Trump, and we still 100% support him and his policies.
I have yet to meet one person who voted for President Trump and who has regret or remorse now. Not one. These surveys have to be fake, as the mainstream media’s polls and surveys propping up Kamala Harris’s silly campaign were fake, and done for their value as the power of suggestion, for simple political impact purposes. But I do see that Trump’s policy successes are driving the America haters into a fury. And so they have to try to lure gullible people away from supporting Trump with blatant wide-open lies that everyone can see from a mile away.
Folks, my fellow Americans, step away from MSNBC and NPR and CBS and the New York Times. It is all fake, it is all unhealthy for you to consume. And if you do consume it, at least take the antidote: Read some Breitbart or Gateway Pundit. Factually accurate information is good for you.
