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Updated: Aug 26
This is a purely temporary article to pull a ludicrous and beyond pointless conversation out of an internet campfire where people just want to hang around and enjoy their lives a little with no drama. I've maintained relationships with a lot of sites since my initial ARPA and Usenet days and at most only once or twice did I ever observe let alone experience for-the-hell-of-it, gratuitous yet intentionally provocative comments.. to me or anyone else.. about someone's careful work they obviously only partially sampled at most, clearly didn't understand at all, in a voice that gets you put in your place out in the world.. but decent people don't approach others out in the world like that.... so just comfortable with an internet between them. Apparently what I need to burn heartbeats on is correcting the record for the guys who are regulars to this site (to learn) and the side conversations I get from that traffic. I'd absolutely rather be doing something more useful as 99% of what will be written will be 2nd/3rd/etc gen repeats of things written in other articles. Please click the following link if you're in Pursuit of Happiness mode right this moment in your own life (take me with you!)
Here we go again …. pushing the theory that old technology was better and cannot be replicated ….. thus justifying a higher pricer on an older product. There is another group that has seen success pushing and using older technology … the Amish. Might be a good fit ….
Think back to last year’s “tough love” masterpiece you penned.. I recall a careful (i.e. slowly, like you’re 5) and measured reply to you last year.. an effort by me you did nothing to earn to give you a hand understanding how the universe works. No reply to the effort... crickets. Over the past yr, I swore off this habit for good cause, already documented.
In that note, you speculated on why I did not use a “credible broker” (that combination of words will never spontaneously occur to me again). I did try to use a broker, 3 times, and that entire mess was documented to death. In the most recent article you decided to crap on, out of the blue, zero facts, and please get your highlighter out... it said I’m NOT busting my ass to sell CW. Yay if it happens.. I’ll be fine if it doesn’t. And it/the article was to explain an uncommon change in value-vs-time when something in good shape becomes unique and sought, and under those market/inventory conditions, they go looking for you. Not the other way around. Every other thing on the site about business is abandoned. No need to ache over getting those things perfect. There's a price on the landing page but there's no price on the boat... I'll figure my line real time from inventory.
The today-me here now... your tough love thing was idiocy top to bottom, it cherry picked, and got essentially everything it tried to assert wrong and you attempt to build on it in your last comments. It’s not and never was OLDER = BETTER... Here’s the actual sequence....... again, but NOT FOR YOU. If this were for you, the whole thing would be three words. THIS is for anyone your careless and unfriendly ignorance festival/comment confused. But as you can see it too... consider printing it out.
o Mission worthiness and consequently the probability/character of/across the potential failures matter. Like training flight crews on a new model of passenger jet about a mode unpublicized and concealed entirely inside the automation robots.. which want to fight your ass all the way in the ground would matter. 36 years of clients around the planet lead me to suspect they really want their system designs to be reliable.. up to the claimed mission. Just over 130 rescue consults, but there were also a large (larger, I think) number of design rule/design approach “audits”... a “decision/decision-method/belief-system overwatch” to kill problems before they end up in their best customer’s lab. Mostly for rooms full of smart, well-educated, talented engineers with I suspect just a little more experience and more refined habits of the mind than guys with no systems or engineering or reliable-system design training or experience.
o Your hard lockup/misinterpretation of my point that OLD --> GOOD is just pure wrong. So much so it seems suspiciously intentional. Not the only fact you screwed up. You failed to comprehend the point, and I remember reworking it specifically for you. That whole “if it’s not there it can’t break” that I began writing on everything was dedicated to your failure to achieve lock on the formerly sufficient explanation. In my head, it’s The Preston Rule.
o The ACTUAL point... yet again...
§ Mission worthiness is good. Universally good.
§ Going dead in the water, for example, is widely understood to be a mission killer... i.e. bad.
§ Reliability is an essential element/driver of higher mission worthiness.
§ An absolute first tier design factor in eroding engine reliability is system complexity.
§ Complexity across all of the organs of the system that can produce show-stopper failures is first-order predicted by physical parts count crossed with number of system states (if all of them can even be known.. state space is famous for intransparency, like secret robots in the aircraft dashboard programmed to kill you). Super long time back, but I’m nearly 100% the all-day PhD qualifying exam I took in ’85 and studied all day everyday for 2.5 yr included something exactly like that on it in the fault-tolerant/reliable systems design sub-test. Sorry... not some new opinion to, you know, justify a higher price, or otherwise. And WTF kind of people do you hang around with? I've never seen anyone say that in any forum where the whole f'ing plan is to be useful and/or have fun. Nice job.
§ To shoe-horn the character of the failure in... show-stopper electronic parts die RIGHT F’ING NOW. Poof ---> Instant dead in the water, though people who paid for two engines can still probably limp away from the lee shore.. assuming fully independent control systems (no hidden digital interdependencies. Watch Aircraft Disasters, especially for “modern” Airbus cases for that, or hell.. old DC10 hydraulic interdependencies). Read the copious.. pages worth of EVIDENCE summarized in the article with a picture of Dave Bowman looking screwed on it. A few electronics behind his screwing too, eh? Replicated. Trivial. So Wrong Again. Given how you come off on everything else, I do have massive curiosity how often the concept of replicated comes up in your world.
§ OTOH, mechanicals do not do instant death.. they tend to drift in adjustment and then tend be able to be adjusted back to perfect back at the dock with a screwdriver. So, not dead in the water.
§ Hmmm.... look at this... ACTUALLY NOT A MATTER OF MERE OPINION, as someone who thinks they “get it” typed in.
§ Summarizing... again...... complexity, not age.
§ An intelligent person who has enjoyed a life-long engine-centric affair and still remembers the transitive property will tell you product complexity monotonically increases with time (thanks to the hippy drum circles in DC). My “old” truck... 22 yr... 12 computers. The this-year version, looks almost identical but it has >300 computers and more stupid useless yuppie shit to tap into the vastly expanded computer swarm. So age, within certain practical limits, is an inverse second order indicator/predictive factor (i.e. age stochastically can point to good... aka Lindy Effect), rather than a direct causal factor. Obviously within well-selected groups, older design indicates more stochastically reliable design by that transitive property. I apologize.. I’m used to people getting simple relationships like that. But I’m going to commit right goddam now to never stepping back to the big picture view with ANYONE I describe these matters to in the future, in case there’s a second guy like you on the planet. If you want to put words in my mouth, at least put my words in my mouth, or better yet.... consider staying on the sidelines of systems/design matters instead of correcting people who do it for a living. Systems engineering and design are my world... you're barely a tourist in it.
As to your original comments on failure to use a “reputable broker”, initially I attempted to.. I tried.. and that’s written down in 75 places out there too. Three guys, three tries.. three crash and burn failures. Each broke my rule... no any solid businessman's rule re: ethical honest business dealing.. do what you say you’re going to do, or get lost. Zero upside to overlooking that. And BTW, I “get business”.. US and otherwise, and don’t need help understanding it but thanks for thinking of me. Plenty of that documented on the site too.
Regarding how trained professionals engage in technical dialectic.. a couple of things. They don’t parrot bullets from the brochure of their favorite product (e.g. “they are bullet proof” followed by literally no effort to justify the point in any way. Hint for next time... claim the blocks of your engines are treated with Retsin-2.. the updated good stuff, and no engineering competency required! Nor do professionals lead with vague statements as to the kind of gauges in place while ignoring the primary epicenters of non-trivial failure. ONE thing that pissed me off about going out on the water with friends with their glass cockpits was the pointless time and cognitive bandwidth they’d burn head-down for too long hypnotically fixed on some ludicrous detail/nuance of their space shuttle displays. Not working IFR, but just to make the display “just right”. How people out of their element dick around with toys. Do a search on “everglades/light bulb/401”. I’m sure after 35+ yr later half my former design decision-making students still wake up in a sweat chanting like their professional future still depends on knowing... “if you don't kick ass on the small stuff, you can't kick ass on the big stuff”... I sleep better because of that. How one thinks about design/decisions is an enormous operating space and nobody who matters expects civilians, especially at your end, to get all of it, but easy fix... if you don’t design everyday, don’t design on any day. It takes more than driving a Corvette to be an astronaut, as they used to say.
You wouldn’t buy older, despite a lower probability of failure... Fine... free country. On this, I believe you completely, but just so you know, that's not a good thing. Consider remaining flexible in case your ability to evaluate the dynamics of that improves. Read the comments on what’s happening to prices for my truck/made-by-God engine/trans. Prices are soaring and they're often gone in hours. Given everything you booted on this list so far, you really don’t seem to be type who should be carving hard opinions in stone.
CHARACTER AND HONOR.. insinuating the significant technical material, evidence and related perspectives entirely outside of your daily life were fabricated to raise the price of the boat. You check yourself, friend... you be more careful casually experimenting with people’s reputation and motives for your entertainment. A friendly data point for you... the email that alerted me to your message from a friend I’d made from the list included this “That line tells me everything I need to know about him”. I’m semi-open to that not being the full picture but for me, it goes straight to the heart of why I fled boating.. people. I never had to put up with that shit until I owned a boat. EVER.
You need to develop the habit of reading (in appropriate detail) the things you want to lay into as though you're an expert (tourist.. not expert). And then when you don't ACTUALLY understand what something just said, do this innovative thing called asking questions before you embarrass yourself even more. Or really get a damn life and go do something productive. Early in assembling this, I began to come to the opinion the stupid is an act and you feel a need to not just waste my time with your blurted and unselective ignorance, but that of the people who read the technical articles. GREAT off-line discussions and a number of good friendships evolve from those articles, which I can't wait to delete. But go get shit wrong some place else. I want to return to civilized and decent interaction... life's too short.
Guder Daag,
Clock Work
For the people who read the articles on my life-sucking web site to learn... Initially I was going to attach a long sampling from ~ 100pg of case studies as examples of typical junk thinking and the subsequent harm... for the benefit of those who didn't know, my top research interest and professional tool for finding bad design decisions on larger design teams is technical decision making in the face of opaque risk in order to reduce decision-initiated harm. I’ll pick just a few to illustrate and stimulate awareness. Added note as I'm about to press PUBLISH... the errors or really the error mode... that professionals... TFALs.. (Think For A Living) make is typically more constrained... tighter.. which I attribute to more refined "habits of the mind" (e.g. primum non nocere), experience and more awareness of the over the horizon risk. Hobby thinkers... without a professional obligation to build decisions carefully... a few selections:
Why care about junk thinking when making decisions that could affect others? The Lifecycle of Harm is my answer:
· Actions are the offspring of decisions
· Decisions follow from some amount of “thinking”
· There is nearly always some kind of consequence of the outcome and sometimes consequence can be extreme and widespread.
· And for someone... sometimes... an innocent, or many... who didn’t sign up to get screwed by an ignorant, half-assed effort or comment by someone they never met.
To throw just one ultra-common failure mode out there, their decision circuitry decides.. at blinding speed (i.e. the speed of harm).. i.e. just powers past the slightest possible exertion of effortful thinking to blurt out that perfectly crystalized idea RIGHT THERE clear as day in their mind’s eye. Totally accessible to THEM (before speaking). They can SEE it. They can TASTE it... Fricking HAS TO BE RIGHT.. Execute! Go at throttle up, Baby! Forget what the Thiokol guy said! It’ll be fin......... er........wait. Never mind. The hobby thinker again screws the world. Or..
Half-ass installing a handful of rivets... aka your GD JOB... repairing an aft pressure bulkhead rushing to make it to your pot dealer or wherever before they close today, and 7-8 yr later, you send 500+ scared-shitless people who never even knew you even existed into a Japanese mountain.
“See that Baby-on-Board sticker Jimmy?” “Yes, Mommy, it’s just like ours.” “Ours is nicer, but anyway, that’s a very powerful charm that protects the occupants from bad drivers around them” “Look Mommy, another sticker. It looks neat. What’s that?” “I don’t know who Skip Barber is Jimmy.. but it’s just a sticker. Wanna get some ice cream? Oh shit.. my cell fell on the floor. Can you hand it to me please... NO I’m not stopping to call your damn father, we’re already running late! Give me the phone or no ice cream!” “Mommy! Mommy!! LOOKOUT!!!”
Halo/contagion-effect – Halo is one of 3 effects I documented in a dense 25 page 2021 paper.. Three Popular Paths to Bad Deciding. The thrust of Halo: how popular hobby-thinkers and their uncritical followers end up miles off the target. Jim Carrey has super nice hair.. he must totally know his shit about immunology too. You gotta be in the club-house to count and it’s easier to get in with hair than education and experience.. Fitting in because you have nice hair/sound cool, etc is HUGE in social grouping.
For some people, like every guy I know who works high-reliability or life-critical design, everything.. every day... every heartbeat.. is about becoming more useful (cf Phil Connors). For others, it’s about sunsets and LIKES. No wrong answers... until someone in that second group starts expecting the first group to accord fealty to what the second “thinks”, by trying to sound like they're your equals. You’re not an astronaut because you drive a Corvette, and "It is scarcely the same thing to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose." – In Defense of Elitism
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