66F and saturated.\u00a0 Sunny though.\u00a0 Nice day so far.<\/p>\n
As I look at my gutted dishwasher, I’m contemplating an idea that may be more important than I first thought.\u00a0 The idea is that we’ve been trading resilience for convenience.<\/p>\n
As far as I can determine, a power surge\/overvoltage\/etc damaged the control board in my dishwasher during the storm of a few days ago.\u00a0 A dishwashing robot is an incredible convenience.\u00a0 Load it up, press start, and an hour later you have clean and sanitary dishes.\u00a0 The price for that is a microchip that can be damaged easily and will stop the whole machine from working.\u00a0 A few cents for the part, but without it, nothing.\u00a0 The design engineer went with a micro because he could put logic in software, rather than discrete hardware.\u00a0 They potted the board because it reduces failures but it also reduces resiliency in that it can’t easily be fixed.<\/p>\n
I see the same sorts of decisions everywhere in the modern world.\u00a0 New heat pump water heaters have a computer on them.\u00a0 Old ones used a simple thermocouple which was cheap and robust, easy to stock a spare, and easy to replace.\u00a0\u00a0 Furnaces have gone the same way.<\/p>\n
Cars have a huge number of convenience features that can all break.\u00a0 I wonder if the ‘lane assist’ will let you operate the vehicle if the system is broken (not off, but actually broken.)<\/p>\n
Society is falling into the same trap.\u00a0 No cash because you can always use cards fails completely when the comm links are down.\u00a0 Then you get no food.\u00a0 Just in time inventory is also convenient for the stores, but absolutely not resilient.<\/p>\n
We’ve been cutting “slack” and “excess capacity” out of systems for 40 years and there is little left to cut.\u00a0 We are always running on the very edge of every use case, one small failure away from a big one.<\/p>\n
Think about adding resilience BACK into the systems and devices you use daily.\u00a0 That is sort of the essence of prepping anyway…<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
66F and saturated.\u00a0 Sunny though.\u00a0 Nice day so far.<\/p>\n
As I look at my gutted dishwasher, I’m contemplating an idea that may be more important than I first thought.\u00a0 The idea is that we’ve been trading resilience for convenience.<\/p>\n
As far as I can determine, a power surge\/overvoltage\/etc damaged the control board in my dishwasher during the storm of a few days ago.\u00a0 A dishwashing robot is an incredible convenience.\u00a0 Load it up,<\/p>\n