perature in the freezer compartment would
reach about 20°F, which is 20° above the recommended maximum freezer temperature, before the refrigerator would resume cooling. I turned the freezer control to Max but that didn't solve the problem. Also, the refrigerator compartment would often drop below freezing.
We got a refrigerator repairman to look at the thing. He and I had
an interesting conversation. I mentioned my expectation, from years gone by, that refrigerators would last for many years. Without hesitation or apology, he said, "Those days are gone." I asked him how long it
would be before my new refrigerator would fail, and need to be repaired. He said, again without hesitation or apology, that it would be about three or four years. He also stated that the necessary repair parts will cost
about three to four times as much as their analog predecessors, as he put
it, would have cost, if the parts are available at all. He also predicted
that things are going to get worse. He said that a transition is under
way to use butane as a refrigerant. He said that the Grenfell Tower
fire, in London, was caused by a butane refrigerator that exploded.
Freon and tetrafluoroethane don't explode. I don't know if he was correct
about the transition to butane, but I've started to think more about refrigerators.
That repairman didn't know how to fix my Whirlpool refrigerator. We
got Lowe's to replace it. The replacement worked as poorly as did the first one. In addition, it had a misaligned freezer door and a bent leveling foot. We returned it and bought a Frigidaire. That was
in the middle of July. As of this writing, the Frigidaire is working
better than the Whirlpools did. I can hope.
The installer who delivered the Frigidaire refrigerator warned me that refrigerators don't last as long as they used to, in the old days. So far as I can
recall, I didn't encounter a refrigerator that failed at any time during the
first 65 years of my life. In the last five or so years, I've encountered
about seven or eight (I've lost count) instances of refrigerators that failed
in one way or another. Such deterioration in quality and life expectancy
isn't limited to refrigerators. It's symptomatic of the forced obsolescence
that exists with regard to most of the products that we use. There
are various examples. Lawn mowers come to mind. When I was young,
we never gave a second thought to leaving the gasoline in the lawn mower,
or in a gas can, over the winter. We just used the old gasoline and
the lawn mower worked. Nowadays, they've changed something in the engines,
in the gasoline, or in both, so that I'm forced to buy a new supply of gasoline
at the beginning of each mowing season. Otherwise, the carburetor will
get so fouled that the engine won't start. Of course, forced obsolescence
is notorious as a finely honed tool for increasing the sales of such things
as computers and home electronics.
How does the Crazy Eddie idea fit into this? Unless I've been deceived by alarmist propaganda, the resources on this planet are being depleted, waste
is accumulating everywhere, energy is getting more expensive, environmental degradation is escalating, and the population just keeps growing. It
seems to me that, soon, food and water will be available at a rate that's just barely sufficient. Everybody will be kept busy just trying to supply
the bare necessities. Just when things are at their most expensive, when resources are getting scarce, when waste is a plague on the planet, when
we need to build things to last if we want to have them at all in the future,
then the marketers arrange for things to fail prematurely, so that we have
to keep replacing them over and over again. To me, that sounds a lot
like the Crazy Eddie mentality from The Mote in God's Eye.
I believe that there have been many cycles of high tech human societies on this planet in the past, that each such society has failed, and that the records
have been lost. I'm afraid that we might be facing the end of the present
cycle and that the Crazy Eddies are hastening its demise. I'm not afraid
that my grandchildren will have to buy a new refrigerator every four years.
I'm afraid that there might not be any refrigerators at all.![10x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/10x5_Page_Background.gif) ![Gun](../../Images/Gun.gif)
Additional Suggested Reading
![5x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/5x5_Page_Background.gif) A Long Way Down from the Top, Frontiersman, June
2017, page 2
![5x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/5x5_Page_Background.gif) Born to Rave, Sam Aurelius Milam III, Pharos
![5x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/5x5_Page_Background.gif) The Mote in God's Eye, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, POCKET BOOKS, New York, October, 1975
![5x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/5x5_Page_Background.gif) More Adventures of the Lone Raver, Sam Aurelius
Milam III, Pharos
![5x5 Page Background GIF Image](../../Images/5x5_Page_Background.gif) They Can Fool Too Many of the People Too Much of the Time,
Sam Aurelius Milam III, Pharos
Page 2 | Frontiersman,0c/o 4984 Peach Mountain Drive, Gainesville,
Georgia 30507 http://frontiersman.org.uk/ | August 2017 | |