No, that won’t help.
What took place–unbeknownst to most people apparently–is that our esteemed POTUS raised the tariff on Scotch & Irish Whiskeys by 25%, on October 18th.
Because I was aware of this massive tariff increase, I bought a case of Johnny Walker Black Label (at Costco) a few days prior to the increase.
Remember…
“Trade wars are good, and easy to win!”
I have a 70 year old Frigidaire refrigerator in my shop that keeps running without complaint. I did successfully remove and clean the thermostat contacts a few years ago. If that hadn’t worked I would have had to junk it I guess. But obviously the hermetically sealed compressor was a technological plus.
I’d agree with the first part… the “rich” do get richer. The poor seem to be running in place. I’ve thought about this recently, not say the conclusion is correct, just something to ponder.
Consider that the lowest 20% are working the most basic of jobs. Ditch digger, dish washer, McDonald’s worker. The skills they use are almost exactly the same as they were in 1967 and pretty much anyone can do these jobs. The value to their employer is the same in 2019 as in 1967 - adjusted for inflation. If they want more money, this group needs to learn more skills so they provide more value to their employer. Why do they deserve a yearly increase if their output is exactly what it was the year before?
If we consider good solid middle class jobs, say, a automotive mechanic. Clearly cars are more complicated. Clearly mechanics require a greater amount of education and training to work on modern cars. More skills, more value. The greater experience allows them to beat the book hour by wider and wider margins each year. More value to themselves and their employer.
Look at the 40% line and the top 20% lines. Current income $100K and $225K per year respectively. A software engineer makes between $63K, an average of $118K to a high of 163K per year across the US. Starting solidly in the 60% bracket and progressing to well above the 20% line. A pretty wide range for a single career choice. All in a career with exploding demand and increasing complexity requiring greater skills. But bad software folks don’t reach $163k because they don’t add enough value to their employer.
These 3 examples are just folks who stay working in their career choice. Ditch diggers become crew chiefs, mechanics become shop owners, software engineers become managers and all take a step to the next income line and all gained skills in an increasingly complex world.
Unfortunately, we will always have people with few skills, or possibly no skills.
The number of jobs available for them over the years have decreased to the point where positions for the unskilled are almost non-existent in many areas.
Think about how few of these jobs still actually exist:
Parking lot attendant
Elevator operator
Parking meter “emptier”
Street sweeper
These are the ones that come to mind at the moment, but I’m sure that other forum members can come-up with many more examples of unskilled jobs that no longer exist, or that exist in very tiny numbers.
When I was a school counselor, I sometimes joked with kids that if they didn’t opt for more training/education after high school, the only job available to them would be “changing the water in the goldfish bowls at Woolworth’s”. Now, those jobs are gone, along with the company.
Because we will always have some people who opt to avoid enough education/training to get more sophisticated jobs, what will we do about the low-skilled/unskilled folks?
I don’t have an answer, unfortunately…
Wow, that is a great line even for today!
The first response likely would be… What’s a Woolworths?
this has something to do with soy based car wiring that they use nowadays and the mice like the taste apparently. Have heard of other people with this problem on newer cars . It was cheaper to use this soy based derivitive so they went with it . I’m sure the people who had troubles are real happy about this .
Morning, I deleted some comments that were made last night in the hope that this conversation would get back to cars. I guess whiskey makes people extra loose. Can we please get back on topic? Thanks.
Why do “we” have to do anything for people who have chosen this path? It’s one thing if they weren’t afforded opportunity but if they squander it, tough cookies. We shouldn’t reward laziness…
You can still get a basic refrigerator at Menards for like $500-600. It is just the basic top freezer model with a black or white finish. They have a stainless model of the same unit for a tad more. I agree it is getting harder and harder to find basic models like this. I have talked to appliance repair guys and they basically say these have less to go wrong so break less often. They also say the super high end brands are a good option.
New cars are a computerized dash that includes the radio controls, climate control, navigation, and such. It seems the days of aftermarket radios are over. Can you still replace or upgrade stereo systems in this type of vehicle? It seems like you can’t. And when one little thing goes wrong, you end up spending $5000 to have the dash pulled out and the problem fixed. I knew of a guy who had the entire dash die in his car. It was around 10 years old and everything else was fine but it wouldn’t pass inspection without a working speedometer and some other instruments. It was traded in or sold as a “parts or repair” vehicle.
I have had to deal with rodent damage as well. Outdoor kitty cats can help with that though.
It seems that the trend here is stuff is being made harder to service, no matter what the product is. It could be cars or refrigerators. I have grown up in the days of hermetic compressors with the motor bathed in oil that run for 20+ years without anything other than the coils being cleaned. This is like the engine mentioned above with several hundred thousand miles that was still running but using quite a lot of oil, all with nothing more than plug and oil changes. There are no distributor caps/rotors or points, etc. these days.
I am wondering if the overall cost of ownership might be less on newer stuff than older items that require more maintenance and don’t last as long overall. 100,000 miles on a car is not a big deal these days but I guess that was quite the milestone back in the day.
I am not so sure about electronics. While some things such has SSDs and other flash memory have increased reliability, it seems that the lack of serviceability has definitely become an issue. External batteries are a thing of the past on laptops. This is probably because people want lighter thinner units. The same is true for phones. Usually you get maybe 3 years before the battery life starts to really degrade. Apple products are the worst. They don’t break often but when they do, it is a BIG DEAL to fix them. Cheap TVs die in a year or so and you can’t find parts or it is cheaper to buy a new one.
Modern electronics use less power and the components are exponentially smaller. They are very unforgiving to power fluctuations such as surges or brownouts. A lot of the damage I see is from this. a 30 year old CRT wouldn’t think twice about something that smokes a new flat panel TV. It always gets me when I see a $5000 TV plugged into a $5 surge protector if you can even call it that.
My feeling is that failures of modern vehicles, appliances, etc. are rarer in general but are more costly or non-repairable when they due occur.
Back to the OP’s statement that new cars are to complicated . I think that might apply from the start of automobiles . Sure they have been complicated to owners who lack the ability , knowledge or tools to work on them . As for dealers , sometimes the dealer is the best place for those diagnostic tools and corporate support to fix a baffling problem that independents can’t justify buying limited use equipment for.
And if the OP thinks they are too complicated why does he have two AWD vehicles with the same problem .
Yes, I see that a lot of posts were censored, and that’s a real shame.
[quote="cwatkin. External batteries are a thing of the past on laptops
That is something I was curious about I had a Dell for quite a few year’s it died the end of may due to drowning ( seem’s it did not like coffee ) it did not have a external battery I replaced it with a HP with no external battery I might be wrong but I thought with all the tech that go’s into them they should out last the battery which could be replaced rather than buy a new computer as I did
. After reading all tthe comment’s you have made about the cheap computer’s I was going to have the computer shop here in town build one for me but he moved & I couldn’t find another one in my area.
I remember people in the 1950s complaining about how complicated the new cars of the 1950s had become. For example, there was that troublesome automatic choke. Automatic transmissions were to be avoided due to.repair costs. Power steering and power brakes were options that could cause problems later on. Air conditioning was a high maintenance option. Overhead valves operated by hydraulic tappets should be avoided. These hydraulic tappets required detergent oil, an added expense over non-detergent oil.
In household equipment, a self defrosting refrigerator might lead to.problems down the road-- best to stick with a manual defrost refrigerator. In fact, one would be even better off with a Coolerator ice box with know moving parts. The Coolerator was self defrosting. The only problem was if the ice man failed to show up. Back in 1963, I rented a room in a house owned by an older couple in their 60s. Their old wringer washing machine gave out. They were afraid of an automatic washing machine, so they bought a new square tub Maytag wringer washing machine.
Most people are willing to sacrifice simplicity for convenience. Many people seemingly don’t want to do their own repairs. The Setchell-Carlson made a television back in the 1950s where the chassis was split into several several interconnected sub-chasses. If a problem arose in the television set, the dealer would advise the customer as to which sub-chassis to bring in a based on the symptoms. Setchell-Carlson didn’t have many buyers. Most consumers today don’t care about how easily serviced an appliance or a vehicle is when they make a purchase. Technology moves so quickly we have become a throwaway society.
In the '50s I can recall reading a warning from somebody (probably not a person with medical credentials) that, “if we start driving cars with automatic transmissions, our left legs will deteriorate and atrophy”.
Also in the '50s–when power windows were still relatively rare–I can recall people saying… Don’t get power windows because when they fail it will cost $40 to repair them!
In retrospect, those early power windows probably were somewhat problematic, and $40 was a lot of money in those days, but…
A friend of mine–who is the biggest skinflint/Luddite I have ever known–refused to buy a new kitchen stove to replace his filthy old (impossible to clean) stove because he “doesn’t know how to repair” the electronic ignition that is part of every modern range. I asked him if he knows how to repair the electronic ignition in his car, and while he had to admit that my logic was correct, he still rationalized that he should retain his 30 year old “builder’s special” stove that was so filthy that its top could no longer be cleaned.
So, he went to Home Depot, bought some “grill paint”, and slathered it on the stovetop, over the mounds of accumulated grime. It looks like hell, but he thinks that it is just wonderful, so I guess that your friends with the wringer washer were spendthrifts compared to him.
@VDCdriver. My Aunt had a 1948 Buick convertible with power windows. While she was visiting my family in 1958, the driver’s side window would not stay up, but would gradually lower itself. I was a teenager at the time and she asked me to take it to the Buick dealer. I obliged and the service manager told me that the window was raised and lowered with a hydraulic cylinder. He did round up the parts and the hydraulic cylinder was repaired. I thought back then that I wouldn’t want a vehicle with power windows.
This Buick also.had a power seat. However, it would only move forward and backward, but would not adjust up and down. I didn’t see any advantage to this feature.
Now that I am an old geezer, I like many of the features on my Sienna. The power sliding doors are handy when I am transporting older passengers. It makes it easy to open the doors and load a basket of groceries. The Bluetooth connection with my smartphone allows me to answer telephone calls. The automatic temperature control I find to be a nice feature.
I recently had to replace a 29 year old dishwasher. The new machine has an electronic control panel. I don’t know if it will last 29 years, but I like the fact that it is so quiet and it gets the dishes cleaner than the machine it replaced.
I don’t know if I will😯
Yes, the early power windows on GM products and on Packards were hydraulically-powered, and I think that the very early power seats may also have hydraulically-powered. In addition to the other problems, leaks in the hydraulic lines running into the doors frequently ruined the fabric upholstery on the inner door panels. Of course, this was all necessitated by the absolutely anemic electrical systems in those days.
My recollection of the warnings about power windows that were expensive to repair dates to the late '50s, and I believe that they were all electrically-powered by that time.
My 61 olds dynamic 88 had an issue with the manual window falling into the door if you slammed it too hard. I probably could have figured out a fix if there had been an internet at the time, just got good at not slamming the door or putting it back on track if needed.
I trust you’re willing to admit that those prices aren’t at all typical.
… Or if you’re not so-willing, tell me where you’re buying because I want in! I’m paying a whole lot more for internet and cell bill than you are, and I’m not on the “expensive” plans. '_
That bottom quintile line on your chart looks awfully flat. Given that there’s barely any discernable uptick in that line, which is on the bottom half of a section that goes from 0-50k, from the appearances of that chart if the bottom quintile gained $1000 between 1965 and 2017 I’d be surprised.
I think the top two lines tell the real story, though. Those two groups have a whole lot more money to spend, especially the top 5%. Prices tend to rise when such things happen. After all, if I know I can sell my widget for $100 because there’s a group of rich guys who will buy it, I will. And that will price the people who can only afford $75 out of my widget.
Here’s the top-end Samsung 65":
Which at $4995.98 is within the range I said.
And since when I said $5-7k I didn’t specify a size, here’s the actual top end Samsung (but still in a size that might actually fit on your wall)
So yes, I was wrong. I should have said $9,000. 
Maybe not typical but available nationwide. Many folks don’t shop around or want to finance their phones or insist in bundling all this stuff for bigger bucks than you can get seperately.
Ok, Ooma internet phone for telephone. Free after buying $99 box except you still need to pay state taxes on it. A bit more than $5 in Florida.
Cell phone is Cricket Wireless for $35 a month, prepaid, (saves $5) and uses ATT’s network. There are similar plans available for Verizon and T mobile. I own an unlocked smartphone compatible with GSM. I think they slow my internet if I exceed 2.5 Gigs but that never happens with me.
DSL internet is $45 a month for 20 Mbps speed, plenty for phone and streaming TV.
Streaming live TV from Hulu for $50 a month eliminated my $140 a month satellite bill.
Hope that helps you save a few bucks you can spend on nice cars!