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The Planned Obsolescence of America
Submitted By Tom Chatham
Planned obsolescence is the act of designing something to become obsolete or self destruct at a certain point in the future for the purpose of replacing it with something else. We see this with many of the things we use today, especially appliances, home furnishings and technology. We are expected to upgrade at regular intervals to keep up with the times.
It was not always this way. In the past many things were built to last, in some cases for many generations. There are many homes in the world that were built centuries ago and are as functional today as the day they were built. There are appliances built almost a century ago that still do what they were designed to do. There are cars and tools that are decades old that still function as intended.
Many of the items that were built in the past were overbuilt and as a result maintain their function. They were built at a time when society demanded and expected the things they used to last a lifetime. Many items were built to be repaired many times in their functional life extending their usefulness and making them a good value to the owners. At some point, that mantra changed.
As society grew some people realized that they could sell many more items in the future if the products they built only lasted a short while and required replacement. During the 20th century industrialization ran head on into planned obsolescence. Things could be made cheaper and profit margins would expand.
This can be seen in society today in the many things we use. Granted, technology is constantly improving making some things less useful but many of the things we use still work as they always did. Homes used to be built of solid timbers making them last hundreds of years. Today the standard building materials are cheap imitations of that bygone era and modern construction is not expected to last for more than a generation as old buildings are torn down to make way for new and improved designs and tastes.
Society has been conditioned to want and expect change. How many times have you seen mobs outside a store waiting for the release of a new product. They wait to buy a replacement for things that still work fine but are not new enough. They tear down old buildings made of brick and mortar and replace it with one made of tin and particle board. They are on a constant quest to replace the old with the new.
There is a good case to be made for maintaining the old. Once it is built or purchased you do not need to spend money replacing it. The simple act of maintenance and repair will allow you to spend future monies on other necessities. There are some in society that live by the broken window theory. They believe that a broken window is good for society. If a shopkeeper gets a broken window it will force him to spend money to fix it. The window maker makes money. The window seller makes money. The window installer makes money. What they do not understand is that this creative destruction does not allow society to increase its wealth. It is like paying a man to dig holes and another to fill them. You have not created anything new in the end.
When a person buys land and builds a good home on it, if that home is left to the next generation, they can add to it and use their newly earned money to increase their wealth. Over successive generations, the family can increase their wealth because it is the collective wealth of several generations that has amassed. If every generation has to start from scratch, they will only get so far. This is how many of the wealthy families in the world do it. The death taxes that many people are forced to pay when a relative dies is just one of the many ways the system is rigged against the individual. It is a way for the system to force the idea of planned obsolescence on people. It forces people to relinquish the old and start anew.
Planned obsolescence is not restricted to mere products anymore. It now also applies to nation states as well. The U.S. Constitution was made to last for all time. It was designed to adjust to changing culture and needs in society. For many years those in society that have no admiration for the past have sought to change our basic principles of self determination and replace it with planned societies. More and more in the past few years we have heard the chorus of those that profess the constitution is outdated and irrelevant in today’s society. They want us to move into the future. They want us to embrace their vision of what should be.
They want us to demolish the old brick and mortar building that has sheltered us for so long and replace it with a cheap new imitation. Just as our monetary system has evolved into something cheap and disposable, they want to move us away from the overbuilt constitutional structure that can be repaired and reused indefinitely and build a new structure that is cheap and disposable for easy replacement as the whims of society changes.
America is headed for planned obsolescence by a shortsighted, uneducated and careless society that values the enjoyment of cheap trinkets and quick fixes rather than the solid value of time tested products and customs. America is about to be changed forever and just like the older durable products that made their way to the landfills, America may someday find itself covered with dirt to be remembered only in history books.
Just like with our cars, houses, appliances and money, our current form of government that has provided us with prosperity, freedom and liberty for so long is now being engineered for premature destruction. The question is, will the people embrace the new version or will they fight to keep the older model a little longer. Only time will tell.
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I'd say humans are becoming obsolete, the only thing that matters in the world is stawks going up and machines can do that.
It's no different with entrprenuers. Get in, make some decent cash, and sell off. 3 to 5 years. Nobody builds a company to pass down through the generations anymore. That would require delayed gratification, dedication to principles, and an unwavering commitment to quality. So 20th century.
Article make the Rabbi proud of kosher tribesmen. Shows how lost goyim really are. Your gov abandoned you long time ago. Has been in kosher pocket since 1913. Do not read our Protocols of Learned Elders unless you want big picture. Not pretty. We break you down on knees begging kosher masters for crust of bread. America has been copious carrion for kosher buzzards. But not much longer. Oy! Oy! Oy!
Money system predicates outputs. Man is controlled by money power.
“America is headed for planned obsolescence by a shortsighted, uneducated and careless society that values the enjoyment of cheap trinkets and quick fixes rather than the solid value of time tested products and customs.”
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We used to have a large component, about 30% of our money supply that was debt free floating type. It came from many sources, such as loan forgiveness, money dug out of the ground, trade surplus, and most especially from tangible money creation. Tangible money was coins and paper bills printed for and paid at printing by Treasury, and then floated as seigniorage at face value in money supply. Today, money is credit and is mostly intangible numbers on double entry ledgers.
Floating money represents wealth, which in turn can match labor energy and value. Debt/Credit money is privately created by bankers, and matches its debt instrument. Overtime, credit cannot even mirror its debt, as debt instrument grows with usury, or is rolled over and then grows exponentially. It is junk thinking and junk economics. Economists are paid for shills if they cannot understand the basics.
Man uses money and prices in the same way a fish uses water. We swim in money and prices and these things inform our behavior. So, don’t blame uneducated and careless society for a system that purposefully controls their output in a predicated fashion. The press is also paid for, so all inputs that people have are corrupted. Garbage in = Garbage out.
Housing bubble grew because people responded to pricing and money signals, even though those signals were false economics.
Credit as money comes into being usually against housing and land; it then inflates that asset class, and then passes through to be used as our transaction medium. This medium then disappears into ledger and vanishes into nothing upon loan payback. To pay the usury, there is NO non-debt type floating money available in supply, and hence more credit loans must then be created. This means people are put on a treadmill to pay for their credit as money transaction medium, and transactions become high price. (Inefficient credit money is high cost, which makes unnatural high prices.)
To clear out the high prices, industry must make cheap trinkets. Prices in turn are driven even higher due to industry taking out loans, and that usury/cost is then further buried in price.
Credit as money shackles the future; Floating money represents the past flux energy of labor and wealth creation. Hence floating money systems will value high quality items and time value of people; and further will not make excessive demands on futurity.
We need to evolve past debt based systems. Debt type money systems are fraudulent, born in iniquity, and predicates raping of earth, with whole populations of debased people laboring and running unnecessarily on a treadmill.
www.sovereignmoney.eu
America is the land of the fast buck.
Land of the lazy supremacist.
Republicans who scream against amnesty.
But hire them illegally because they are to fat to push a mower.
Camille Paglia in a wide ranging interview on contemporary US society:
http://reason.com/reasontv/2015/03/19/everythings-amazing-and-camille-pa...
The vid is an hour but it's all there in text as well.
"Hillary is a mess. And we're going to reward the presidency to a woman who's enabled the depredations and exploitation of women by that cornpone husband of hers? The way feminists have spoken makes us blind to Hillary's record of trashing [women]. They were going to try to destroy Monica Lewinsky. It's a scandal! Anyone who believe in sexual harassment guidelines should have seen that the disparity of power between Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was one of the most grotesque ever in the history of sex crime. He's a sex criminal! We're going to put that guy back in the White House? Hillary's ridden on his coattails. This is not a woman who has her own career, who's made her own career! The woman who failed the bar exam in Washington! The only reason she went to Arkansas and got a job in the Rose law firm was because her husband was a politician."
I don't see a link for a transcript.
it's below; but if you find the paging annoying, click on "Print" upper mid-right and the whole thing will comeup on a scrollable page.
Thanks for the link Bastiat. I really enjoy reading Paglia, met a few women years ago in NYC who could have rivalled her. In case you missed this one, sorry it's not complete...
http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/magazine/article389697.ece
"For Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference"
Thanks --- a sentence from paglia is worth more than an essay from most others.
Paglia has real opinions and defends them--she refuses to be intimidated by the marxist mainstream of the intellectual left. In the interview I linked above she describes how she was (and still is) pilloried by the Marxo-feminists for wirting some years ago that women should take some responsibility for their own choices and safety. I remember that when she wrote it and printed it out for my 13 year old daughter with my wife's strong support.
@Bastiat, that's marvellous. This is also the thing I see around me, to quote Paglia apropos Gaga: "Generation Gaga doesn’t identify with powerful vocal styles because their own voices have atrophied: they communicate mutely via a constant stream of atomised, telegraphic text messages. Gaga’s flat affect doesn’t bother them because they’re not attuned to facial expressions."
Paglia is brilliant, truly.
Planned destruction causes obsolescence. Even the fundamentals of a normal life have been warped. Getting married, kids, buying a nice house, starting a business, all are busted. Marry a "modern" woman, yea no thanks, they are willing to just date now anyways since their rights to debt are equal, and paying that eventual alimony could go towards my yacht. Kids, send em to gov camp at 3mths - 22 years, and spend all my free time keeping them in check from behaviors/lifestyle that growing up would get me a black welt. No energy to get into the other two points, but the gist is here.
By design.
In order to rebuild you need to tear it down by warz first?
What makes you think the military junta, after having come to power, will want to rebuild anything?
shortsighted, uneducated and careless society???
Try sabotaged society, made to fail, puppet leadership train wreck on purpose.
add to that no self-responsibility, gullibility, laziness, and... and...
Some good points, but it sounds like the author has just started to wake up with the way the constitution is viewed.
Lysander Spooner
“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist.”
Planned obsolescence? I think not. More like the big power struggle between the thousands of various groups. In PC speak it's called 'empowerment'
A nation has to have some basic cultural norms to exist. Any culture in the ussa has been deemed offensive by this or that faction and thus no longer exists.
The whole system has went berserk due to one disease.... Political Correctness. It is now institutional, taught from K-16, in religious groups and even in the military. A Chaplin now has to deny his religion to be a Chaplin. A college has outlawed hoop dresses as anti-woman. In another college a person is forced to avoid a female simply because he resembled her rapist. Mexican food is now offensive. Blacks cry foul on just about everything.Same for LGBT. We have Planet Fitness kicking out a woman because she complained a male was in the Women's lavatory. We have a government allowing illegal immigration in a quest to dilute the used to be dominant group not realizing it will eventually destroy the nation and government.
Each day it's spinning faster and faster. Soon what strands are left holding things together will break. Then all hell will break loose.
"Just as you saw that the feet and toes were partly of baked clay and partly of iron, so this will be a divided kingdom; yet it will have some of the strength of iron in it, even as you saw iron mixed with clay. As the toes were partly iron and partly clay, so this kingdom will be partly strong and partly brittle. And just as you saw the iron mixed with baked clay, so the people will be a mixture and will not remain united, any more than iron mixes with clay." - Daniel 2:41-43
"Chaplin " like in Charlie Chaplain, right. lol
Musk wants to colonize Mars - send 535 + ICiC now
Built-in-obsolescene? Nah....just another two bit Empire of Chaos gone-to-seed and in collapse mode! Entrophy is a part of every system and organism and now the free lunch gig is up coz the shinola that allowed Merca to wing it way past its shelf life is all ...shinolaed out.
Nothing personal.
"The death taxes that many people are forced to pay when a relative dies is just one of the many ways the system is rigged against the individual."
This is such bullshit. Don't try and slip that one past me. I have a wide circle of friends and family over my lifetime. I have never known or heard on one average American paying a death tax. If you are rich enough to pay some form of that tax.
" Most relatively simple estates (cash, publicly traded securities, small amounts of other easily valued assets, and no special deductions or elections, or jointly held property) do not require the filing of an estate tax return. A filing is required for estates with combined gross assets and prior taxable gifts exceeding $1,500,000 in 2004 - 2005; $2,000,000 in 2006 - 2008; $3,500,000 for decedents dying in 2009; and $5,000,000 or more for decedent's dying in 2010 and 2011 (note: there are special rules for decedents dying in 2010); $5,120,000 in 2012, $5,250,000 in 2013, $5,340,000 in 2014 and $5,430,000 in 2015.
$5,430,000 in 2015. $5,430,000 in 2015. $5,430,000 in 2015.
Think of the poor widows thrown out of their homes by the Death Tax!
"Once we squeeze all we can out of the United States, it can dry up and blow away."
- Benjamin Netanyahu
The banksters need to repay us.
"America is headed for planned obsolescence by a shortsighted, uneducated and careless society that values the enjoyment of cheap trinkets and quick fixes rather than the solid value of time tested products and customs "
where ya been dude, it's been going on for decades.
point is, as many posters point out, you've never known it to be any different.
so you think it's not happening.
exceptional amis
tic toc
doomed
Here we ago again? That process of destroying those three pieces of paper that created such a country? A people? A society? A civilization?
Within a piece of my part that question/point was brought up. "These need to be rewritten." To my response, "How can you rewrite such documents when you cannot even honor the originals that brought on such success?" (That conversation ended.)
YES, the next round of trying to destroy such realities are back in play again. To create more diversions? Another piece of a part that has never really gone away?
The only reality is that the same people are still in charge (as they think), and are still trying to apply the same insanity.
Pens,
I don't do planned obsolescence.
My Bertha the Bike is 37 years old and my 'new' car is 17. Both run fine with minimal maintenance that for the most part I do myself. Everything is shiny where it's supposed to be and outside of the Maxima's struts getting a bit thunky, should last a good while longer.
My BIL asks if I get tired of driving that same old thing, so I look at his new car and ask what the payments are because I haven't made one in over 20 years.
The conversation changes.
I haven't had a house payment for 15 years either. Fuck the banks.
I don't make a big deal about how stupid other people are. Why should I? It doesn't matter to me what choices they make because most of them would be mentally incapable of living well below their means anyway.
That's just the way it is.
Pretty vague rant.
America has failed because debt based fiat currency is phoney-balonney.
It's the invisible thread that binds everything, but it's not really there, but that doesn't stop gamers (bankists) from trying to game the system.
There's no sense building a durable house in a disposable neighborhood, and all neighborhoods are disposable since the Civil Rights Movement. Save up all the money you would have spent on home repairs, and when your current neighborhood starts diversifying, use that money as a down payment on a brand new house in a former cornfield. Rent your old house out to Section 8 tenants and profit!
Obsolescence ?
I doubt it - seems like mass-murder will *always* be in style
Retirement is where the chickens come home to roost for all.