Rusty

we believe there's no money in making things. that's why we let china take everything from us. i think we were wrong. one time we waited 9 months for an air conditioning part. the ac was dead until it arrived. on a boat. that's sad. the ac stuff is really sad i think. that one in particular i think we were wrong. there is money in that. all houses have acs. they're an expensive product. we basically said fuck it we'll just let asia build all that shit and import it. there are some american brands but i looked them up and i do not associate them with quality. i think america was wrong on this as an industry. someone could have made a lot of money owning the air conditioning space. air conditioners are a better product in some ways than like. a refrigerator or a microwave or all these other things. you can't charge that much for those but fuck man. could you charge a lot of money for an air conditioner that doesn't break. engineering wise, maybe air conditioner is a hard thing to make not break. i don't know. you start thinking about it and the problem is how houses are made. houses are not designed to repair. it should be easy to open up the walls and get to the things you need to fix. the walls should just open up. right? it should be like invisible panels. it should be trivial. putting something at the top of the wall like those stick on units is fucking hideous. it's superior to repair. i get it. why can't we just cut out a piece of the wall? so that the thing sits in there and blows. you'd have to make the wall a bit wider or thicker or whatever i guess. that seems fine. but we don't care. we build the cheapest things possible. i'm sure it's less profitable to do something like the panels. it's hard. i think everything is hard. the physical world is hard. that's why we do shitty things and the perception is it doesn't matter that much. you just replace them. maybe that's true. i don't know. i don't want to talk to you about enshittification. i want to talk to you about how i started thinking while vacuuming while the robots were running. i talked about the small vacuum and how i once had workers here and they asked for the model number. you asked for the model number and i do not want to tell you. they don't make it anymore. well, they do make it. there's a new model. i just spent a >month at a best friend's house. her new house is in a different new city and i packed the child and checked him into sports camp. her husband's mother offered to spring for a designer, and he told her, it's ok. we have a melissa. i'm not a designer. again. post ai we need a new word for hobby. the first weekend me and the child were there, two things happened. the first is, the friend and her husband peaced out for a wedding. it was just me and the child and their dog. the second is, the child got a virus. i don't really know how this is true, but it is. he's never had a stomach thing before. he's never thrown up before. i did not know how bad it could be. i said i do not want to talk to you about enshittification. but it's not limited to the physical world. the first hour of the first morning there was spent finding a fucking doctor. "pediatrician $city" returned: pediatric dentists, pediatric chiropractors, and pediatric psychiatrists. i possess harsh enough words for this and i will not write them. the ais were no better. whatever. now the child has a prescription and he's taken the god tier medicine and he's parked on the couch with star wars. he watches once and gets sick of watching and moves on to legos next. meanwhile i get to work. the friend was unpacked and things were mostly technically put away but there were no systems. i set about doing all the systems. the friend arrives back at the house and is like: show me everything you've done. i do. she's pleased but not surprised. she knows me too well. her husband, however, is bowled over. he asks me if i'll do his office and garage next. this is all a too-long way of telling you she pointed to the cardboard box in the corner of the entryway and said, what's that? and i said, well. i ordered you the small vacuum. it's 50% more expensive now. and technically, by the specs, it says it's 50% more powerful. i don't know what to say. it's at least 50% weaker. i think i'm being generous. anecdotally, it sounds like a calm quiet gentle summer breeze compared to the gleeful violence of mine. if i'd known the new one was going to be so bad, i'd have gifted the old one to everyone i know. the ais tell me, yes, it's at least 50% more powerful. maybe 65% more powerful. i say, fuck you, don't talk to me about how the companies say the air moves. i only care about the amount of dirt it disappears. it's inferior. the ais say, yeah. the old one had a bit of a cult following. the ais also tell me, then they changed the nozzle design. the new one's wider. more open and rounded. the old one's narrow. flatter and sharply tapered. something something static pressure. something something higher localized pressure differential. the ais continue to lecture me on things i do not know about and cannot call bullshit on. eventually it speculates that it's literally probably just, the quality of plastic is poorer. doesn't matter how strong the suction is if there's perimeter leakage out of poorly sealed molded seams. on the last post, a guy named rusty commented. he said, as someone with a fleet of extremely high-end shopvacs, i need to know the name of this vacuum. i messaged him. i said all this. he said, i get it. they stopped making mine too. so i said now what. he had super fucking interesting input. rusty said we no longer live in a functional mechanical culture. we live in a dysfunctional mechanical culture. he said, when you repair a prototype, it gets better. you've found the weak link. this is what a functional mechanical culture is. he says you can know, because Version Two is better than Version One. i tell him about the fridge we had. it broke. we had guys out and they were like, whatever, that'll be $1000. and we were like hmmm maybe at that price we get a new one. and they were like: whatever you do. do not do that. they were literally like, if you ask us to put in a new one and take this one away, we will sell it for some multiple on what you pay for the new one. me and husband looked at each other. i said, this is the worst fridge i've ever had. husband said same. how bad are new fridges? and now what is there to say? do the anti-capitalists have a point? i'd rather kill myself than side with them. but, well. to show growth you have to have new models that people are going to replace their old models with. and you need to have higher margins so that there's more growth. this leads to building the shittier refrigerator that breaks faster. ultimately that's where you inevitably start gravitating towards just building shitty unreliable things with new features and convincing people every few years they need new features. their fridge needs to be on the fucking blockchain or have wifi so it can tell them what to buy at the store or whatever. in the reality where you're constantly marketing new useless buzz features to people, the reliability of products doesn't matter that much. is there something here? it's hard to monetize reliable products. it seems like we know how to build a fridge that lasts 60 years. we did that 60 years ago. it's expensive? i don't give a shit. i'll pay for it. but how would you build a business? implicit in the thing that lasts 60 years is 60 years of support. do we still need that? we have the ais now. husband often makes fun of me. he says, husband gets money, buys avocados. wife gets money, buys ancient technology. years ago i gave away an old bluetooth speaker thing. last month i started looking into buying a new one. i do some research, i remain unconvinced. i ask the ais and sure enough: it tells me the one i used to have has somewhat of a cult following too. there's like a cottage industry of parts and all these fervent audiophile vids on how to replace the few things on it that wear out and what not. i pay more than the cost of a new one for a shockingly well restored refurbished old one. it looks newer than mine did new. husband is annoyed. until he hears it play. are there ancient technology influencers? i told rusty i don't want to be an influencer. not even for vacuums. when the worker guys said the small vacuum was better than their shopvac, i was like oh. nice. until they finally bashfully asked for the model number. rusty goes: i am bashfully asking you for the hand vacuum model number he tells me all sorts of interesting things. he asks me if i know about restomodding cars and i say i do and he says he thinks that's where everything is headed. hand vacuums, shopvacs, coffee makers, blenders, everything. it makes sense that it started as a car thing. isn't this sort of what happened with lamborghini? he left ferrari because ferrari wasn't making good enough cars. he thought ferrari was too much of a pussy. he was like, i'm going to make the fucking best supercar i can fucking make every year. i look at that and i'm like, ehhh. lamborghini isn't exactly a success story. you know what i mean? i don't really know. it's also not just cars. people are drowning. we're back to people are just drowning in stuff. they are just drowned in stuff for any of this stuff so it's hard to reach people. it's just so much fucking stuff. in the last post i said: broken is not binary. rusty says this is a deep thing. he says he's been trying to write about it too. i ask rusty, are you mech eng or something? he says no. we keep talking and i start to see he's a generalist tinker tailor soldier spy repairman. he grew up as a bicycle mechanic, then got into arborist work. now woodworking. he tells me his school of technology criticism recognizes that golden ages exist. but they also end. he says ebay strikes him as the bargaining stage of grief about these things. he also says i should do it. i should name the original model. maybe someone will reverse engineer it. first i text the friend. the one whose house i was at. she did not return the new model small vacuum. the clearly inferior one. she and her husband both think it's awesome. i signal her. i say, hi. can you do a test with the small vacuum she's a real human. who types with capital letters. she says, Hello! Yes I can i say, ok. turn it on boost mode. try to cover the entire nozzle. because the dumb way it's shaped, a flat surface like a floor like doesn't quite work to cover the whole thing i ask her to try on her arm. or her leg she sends me a picture of her arm. she says, You can't see. But it kinda left a mark i am annoyed it left a mark. that makes it seem like it's good. it's not good. i say, ok but how alarming. like. with the old one, it feels alarming she sends me a vid. of her vacuuming her leg she says: Pretty alarming i am not satisfied. i ask her to run more tests. she says: It's now out of battery so fine. i'm talking about shark wandvacs. hers is the WV410. mine is the WV201. it has 23,942 reviews. but, unfortunately, the one i have is the one from 2018. whatever thing they're selling now, and saying it's the WV201, it's not the same. there's multiple reviews saying, quite literally, the same thing as me. like yes. this is the second time i'm buying this vacuum. this one's not the same as the old one. you keep scrolling. broken in one month. doesn't hold a charge. lemon! on june 27, 2026, a customer named jessica writes: DO NOT BUY OR JUST THROW MONEY IN TRASH. worst vacuum ever DO NOT PURCHASE worst vacuum i've ever purchased. one star is being nice it deserves zero stars that's the last review i can see, actually. i can't scroll back further in time. amazon no longer allows me to do that. i'm not kidding. the fact i can read reviews back two months is an improvement. i was reading reviews during prime week (june 23 through june 26, of our year 2026) and suddenly the option to tap into reviews was no longer there. instead there was an error and it was like: yes. hello. we are only showing you the top 5 reviews. the top 5 positive reviews, actually. if you'd like to see more reviews, or any negative reviews, please push this button. to confirm you want to see more reviews. the fuck????? i hit the fucking button. it says: "your request to see more reviews has been sent. you'll receive an email within 5 business days". MY REQUEST???? did i get shadowbanned for reading too many reviews? is this because the ais? am i the only human left reading reviews at the rate the ais do? i have to read so many. to find the ones that aren't written by the ais. for the fucking ais. i verified it was only me. i sent the screenshot to a friend and i said: what the fuck. open your amazon app. go see if you can still read reviews he did go check for me. but first he said: i think they think you're a bot. it makes sense. it's your general vibe. botlike aura he does the sidequest for me. he confirms. he is still allowed to read reviews. and then he said that i ask him enough such strange things, he does wonder sometimes. he said, did you hook me up to an llm with very specific instructions. like, gas him up, encourage him to write. NEVER use caps fine. if i'm going to be accused of being ai maybe that's what kind of ai i am. the kind that relentlessly badgers you with walls of text until you cave and write your own cleaner, shorter version. because after talking to me rusty wrote up his own tirade too. it's good. he uses caps. but it's still good. i'm quoting it below. i'll leave you with that the ais tell me it appears japan still sells what may or may not be the unmolested 2018 version of mine. because you know of course. japan is apparently a country that seems to still have fucking standards. or, as rusty would say. a functional mechanical culture. i don't know. but i do know i'm telling you. don't fucking do it. do not buy the fucking vacuum

They're putting out a new 2CV? You don't say ...

Never Renovate Some people go crazy renovating their homes. After having done this for a few months, I understand why: 1. It trains you to be hyperaware of errors. Your contractors are inevitably going to try to cut corners, and you want to both get your fair money's worth and have your vision executed, so you have to really pay attention, to things that normally you never would: was that scratch there before? Is this cabinet level? Of course, once you're trained in this way, your hypervigilance extends to everything, even far outside your contractors' work: there's a half-inch gap between the doorframe and the floor? Sacrilege! (Doesn't matter if it's been there for 40 years.) A home is a complex thing with lots of detail, so inevitably, no matter where you look, the flaws will be endless. 2. But the other thing you learn is that whatever problems you see, you can fix them! Don't like it? Tear it out and do it again. If renting, you treat things as fixed -- but a house turns out to be shockingly malleable. Literally everything can be changed. You can move lights, pipes, doors, tear out walls, there are no limits. These are the two core learnings of doing renovations, and combined, they are very dangerous: for people who are not used to saying "good enough, whatever", this becomes an endless perfectionist loop. They'll have you changing stuff forever until you either run out of money or sanity. Worse, you'll find that changing one thing often implies changing another thing. I have a painting that looks like it's not level even though it is. Why? It's not aligned with the doorframe. Why? The doorframe itself isn't level. Why? The floor itself isn't level because it's 100 years old. But you can't live there while you're redoing the floors, of course. This is a scope-creep, yak-shaving classic: all you wanted was to hang your painting straight and now you live in a storage unit. Beware.