What If It Breaks? The landill economy
POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Saturday, April 25, 2026 22:44
VIEWED: 2012
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Very few people ask: what if it breaks? It's a question we can ask of a great many things: touchscreens, motherboards, tools, vehicles, supply chains and entire systems: what if it breaks?
The first thing we notice is the great number of things which can't be repaired, they can only be replaced. Good luck repairing the touchscreen or motherboard in your vehicle. Oops, the puncture in your tire is in the sidewall, no repair possible, buy a new tire.
The entire economic system assumes two things: 1) there will always be replacements for everything that can't be repaired and 2) there will always be substitutes for everything we want. Beef too expensive? Then buy fake-meat. If that's too expensive, substitute chicken. And so on: there will always be a substitute that can scale globally that will get cheaper as it scales.
Unfortunately, both assumptions are false. There are no replacements for oil and fertilizers. What we have are ifs: if we build 1,000 nuclear reactors, then we can convert this electricity into hydrogen which will be the fuel of the future. And so on. If, if, if. Nice, but getting beyond if is non-trivial: oops, we need hydrocarbon energy to build the 1,000 nuclear reactors and all the complex equipment to convert seawater into hydrogen on a scale large enough to matter.
Not only are there no substitutes for many things, there are no replacement parts, either. Too bad about your entire Smart Home system going down. The vendor of the do-hickey that's connected to your hub went out of business and so there's no replacement parts or software upgrades. Looks like you'll have to replace the entire system. But since the software was out of date anyway, it was time to upgrade anyway.
The problem is we can't replace entire systems when they break down. Sewage treatment, delivery of food, manufacture of medical supplies and medications, delivery of feedstock for plastics manufacturing--the entire global economy is now a tightly bound system with few replacements for anything that matters and no substitutions for all the things that matter.
One of the few positive movements of the past few years is right to repair. The idea here is to outlaw corporation's favorite trick to speed your old product's pathway to the Landfill by sealing the device to make it impossible to open and voiding the warranty should anyone attempt to repair what was designed to be unrepairable.
The foundation of the Landfill Economy is to make stuff that can't be repaired and is designed to fail so you have to buy a new one--and soon. But repair is not guaranteed. If you happen to own a vehicle which was manufactured in the millions, there will likely be third-party suppliers for parts. But time and cost both erode the availability of replacement parts. There is no guarantee replacement parts will be available. Yes, some can be extruded in 3D printers, but there are a great many things that can't be fabbed on 3D printers: specialty wires, computer chips, alloys, etc.
Moving on to larger scale systems: where's the replacement parts when democracy breaks? How about the systems that deliver oil and fresh food over thousands of miles?
The dependability of these unrepairable systems has given us a false confidence in their permanence and durability. As more things become sole-source, as supply chains stretch and add additional points of failure, as the dependency chains increase in complexity, all these systems--political, technological, logistics--become more fragile--the opposite of durable.
The "buy a new one" faith in the infinite powers of substitution has stripped the economy of resilience and the ability to fashion workarounds. Since things can no longer be repaired, nobody knows how to repair anything. Since everything is sealed, nobody even knows what's inside the system. Since we're assured everything can be substituted and replaced, we no longer know how anything actually works. The best and the brightest have never seen a green bean growing o
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Quote:Charles Hugh Smith is only thinking of worldwide supply chains and dinky little technology, but bigger, heavier tech, even when the tech is all made locally, is just as fragile and unrepairable as consumer electronics. Or democracy.
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
What if it breaks? What's your Plan B, your workaround, your fix? What if you can't buy a new food delivery system off the shelf, or a new democracy that all you have to do is unwrap and plug it in? Where are the cheap, abundant substitutions for everything that's now chronically scarce because there are no substitutes?
Making your entire economy a Landfill Economy dependent on the fantasy of infinite replacements and substitutions is the height of hubris and folly, right up there with war is a solution that will fix everything that's broken.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/03/what-if-it-breaks.html?m=
1
Signym, I have seen enough explosions and fires in petrochemical plants to know that there is NO PLAN B. The equipment closest to the fire is ruined. There is no repairing it. It will have to be replaced with all new. Meanwhile, your plant is shut down for months because there is NO PLAN B. A nation can survive the loss, but maybe not the company. There are some losses that a nation may not survive and there is NO PLAN B. Here is one:
U.S. Risks National Blackout From Small-Scale Attack
Federal Analysis Says Sabotage of Nine Key Substations Is Sufficient for Broad Outage
https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-risks-national-blackout-from-small-sc
ale-attack-1394664965
There are plenty of details, and NO PLAN B, at
https://www.google.com/search?q=electric+grid+vulnerability+to+transfo
rmer+saboteur
If the power grid fails because saboteurs destroy transformers with explosives, or ordinary rifles, those transformers can't be repaired. New transformers, which take months to build, will have to replace the destroyed ones. Meanwhile, the nation has no operating power grid. Until a nation can build two or even three power grids to back up the main power grid, that's the way it's gonna be -- NO PLAN B. Live without power, except for your portable generator or solar power.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I know that this was more a thread about the breakdown of the global supply chain with no contingency plan in place (Thanks Six Sigma), but I have a few little example to add...
As you know, I make a habit of mending things with duct tape and bubble gum if necessary. A lot of the stuff I own is fairly old though, and pre-dates the blatantly intentional obsolescence we see in tech, cars and modern appliances, so there is a certain level of things that the owner can do themselves.
My $25 coffee maker broke a few years ago. It wasn't sucking the water up properly from the tank, and even though you poured 12 cups in the back, it would take over an hour to make about 3 or 4 cups and the rest evaporated.
So I was going to open it up. I wasn't going to let the fact that the 5 or 6 tiny screws on the bottom being set in tiny holes 6 inches deep stop me. Even if they were Torx or Allen or some even more obscure types I'd have to look up before telling you their names. I've got the tools for that...
Or do I???
If you haven't met before, allow me to introduce you to the permanent one-way screw.
They REALLY wanted me to just buy a new coffee pot when their piece of shit broke. And unfortunately, being the caffeine addict that I am, it wasn't very long before I did just that.
Sure, I have a few drill bit sets that can remove stripped screws that might be capable of getting these things out, but it was a sure thing that none of them were going to reach down 4 to 6" into the tiny little holes where these screws were set. The only way I was going to be able to open this thing to see the insides was by taking a hammer to it and cracking it open like a piggy bank.
So when my step mom was getting rid of a perfectly fine coffee pot because she didn't like the color anymore, I told my old man to bring it over here so I've got another backup shitty coffee maker to replace the new shitty coffee maker when it breaks as it was designed to.
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Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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Quote:This is like complaining that the cobbler at the local shoe hospital can't resole the glued together boots you love. Throw the boots and coffeemaker in the trash, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
They REALLY wanted me to just buy a new coffee pot when their piece of shit broke. And unfortunately, being the caffeine addict that I am, it wasn't very long before I did just that.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:This is like complaining that the cobbler at the local shoe hospital can't resole the glued together boots you love. Throw the boots and coffeemaker in the trash, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
They REALLY wanted me to just buy a new coffee pot when their piece of shit broke. And unfortunately, being the caffeine addict that I am, it wasn't very long before I did just that.
That's exactly what they want you to do.
And the fact that I don't do what they want me to whenever I get a chance is why I won't have to do much working for anybody else for the rest of my life if your party doesn't destroy the value of the dollar before then.
Had I been able to open the coffee maker like I should have been able to, it's possible that all I needed to do was clean out the line. I used to do this thing where I'd brew the coffee twice after an old friend of mine got me to try it and I did like the results. But I figure that was probably gunking up the works so I don't do it after that one broke.
Here's another example. I had to buy a new printer before I could do my taxes last year, so as much as it pained me to do it, I bought the cheapest one I could find that was on sale for $60. It was a Cannon. It also has a scanning bed on it.
I find out a year later from a YouTuber who has been fighting for Right To Repair in courts for years that the line of Cannon products that I have in my home right now has DRM chips on their ink cartridges. So not only can't you use any other type of ink in them, but if you run out of ink it's programmed to disable the scanning bed that has NOTHING to do with printing too.
Where the fuck do they get off telling you that you can't scan documents until you pay for their overpriced ink cartridges?
Using your example, that would be like metal spikes coming up from the bottom of your shoes until you replaced a broken shoe lace that was made by the cobbler. You don't like stepping on painful spikes while you're walking? Buy my $35 pair of replacement laces. The $4 ones on Amazon won't remove the spikes.
Joke is on them though. After the chip shortage happened and people weren't able to buy their overpriced, chippped ink cartridges anymore, they had to come out with a software patch that would remove their DRM so you can use their new non-chipped ink cartridges they were forced to produce. The side effect being that now you can put any ink you want to in there and you can still use the scanner bed even if the printer is out of ink.
Fuck Cannon. Last Cannon printer I will ever own.
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Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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Quote:Obviously, unclear on the concept of this thread. And clueless.
Originally posted:Quote:This is like complaining that the cobbler at the local shoe hospital can't resole the glued together boots you love. Throw the boots and coffeemaker in the trash, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
They REALLY wanted me to just buy a new coffee pot when their piece of shit broke. And unfortunately, being the caffeine addict that I am, it wasn't very long before I did just that.
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Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:Obviously, unclear on the concept of this thread. And clueless.
Originally posted:Quote:This is like complaining that the cobbler at the local shoe hospital can't resole the glued together boots you love. Throw the boots and coffeemaker in the trash, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
They REALLY wanted me to just buy a new coffee pot when their piece of shit broke. And unfortunately, being the caffeine addict that I am, it wasn't very long before I did just that.
Must be a day that ends with "day".
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Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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Quote:The caliber of cluelessness is staggering.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Must be a day that ends with "day".
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:Obviously, unclear on the concept of this thread. And clueless.
Originally posted:Quote:This is like complaining that the cobbler at the local shoe hospital can't resole the glued together boots you love. Throw the boots and coffeemaker in the trash, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
They REALLY wanted me to just buy a new coffee pot when their piece of shit broke. And unfortunately, being the caffeine addict that I am, it wasn't very long before I did just that.
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Quote:
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:The caliber of cluelessness is staggering.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:Quote:Must be a day that ends with "day".
Originally posted by JEWELSTAITEFAN:Quote:Obviously, unclear on the concept of this thread. And clueless.
Originally posted:Quote:This is like complaining that the cobbler at the local shoe hospital can't resole the glued together boots you love. Throw the boots and coffeemaker in the trash, 6ix.
Originally posted by 6IXSTRINGJACK:
They REALLY wanted me to just buy a new coffee pot when their piece of shit broke. And unfortunately, being the caffeine addict that I am, it wasn't very long before I did just that.
A side effect of chronic TDS, no doubt.
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Me: "Remember Covid?"
Useless Idiots: "What's Covid, durr? Russia, Ukraine, Putin, NATO *drool*. DURRRR!!!!"
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Fcksk - just clean the damn thing. You probably use water from your tap (no problem) which is probably hard, and calcium deposits are blocking the flow. Decalcify it.
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