[lbo-talk] demotorization

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Thu Oct 8 17:31:55 PDT 2009


``..Part of the reason could be economic, the firm said. During the worst recession since the 1930s, the cost of owning and maintaining a car likely makes less sense than it did when gas was 30 cents a gallon and every red-blooded American teenager yearned for a Chevy Camaro or a Pontiac GTO.''

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This passage opens up a whole iceberg of thoughts.

I think economic is almost the whole of it. The combination of mandatory insurance, the cost of buying a car, and the fact that almost nobody can fix them except expensive professional mechanics pretty much covers it. You can toss in smog laws too.

I kept my 83 Honda going for years to avoid buying another car. It was cheap enough to operate, and the registration fees stayed relative low. I still couldn't fix the engine, because I didn't have the time and lacked the more up-date skills. I paid a machine shop to rebuild the engine the first time it died. It died for good in June. So I had to replace it. I bought a used small truck.

In the distant past I rebuild or help rebuilt about half a dozen engines as a kid. We hung out at each other's parents garage. It was a great social and learning scene. Two of our fathers were engineers

The other interesting thing about kids and cars, is you can get a concrete insight into exactly how capital expropriation works. Part of that is containing the spread of skills and knowledge to within the capital sphere of domination and control, i.e. fewer and fewer backyard mechanics. With the design phase, the meticulous use of increasingly modular systems.

This modularization process does a couple of capital friendly things. Operations that used to use (x) number of skilled workers, now requires (x-n) workers. The unrepairable module requires a full replacement.

It was fascinating to watch de-skilling, speedup, and expropriation process repeat itself in the durable medical equipment industry. It was also a kind of fascination to watch my own demise as a case study of the destruction of the US middle class.

CG



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