Author: Simon

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10 Hours to the Apocalypse

A couple years back, a rather unprecedented hurricane event occurred here in southwest Ohio, toppling a maple tree and knocking us off the power grid for 4 days.

Lights Out

I took the opportunity to establish a timeline of power-related failure points in the system that is my home’s operation. Here is the original list:

  • 2 hours, the UPS will fail and the network equipment will go offline (the internet was out anyway since the cable had been severed).
  • 6 hours, the upright refrigerator/freezer will exceed 40 and 32 degrees, respectively.
  • 20 hours, the emergency hall lights will fail.
  • 48 hours, the cooler (if packed with ice), will exceed 40 degrees.
  • 48 hours, the emergency basement light will dim to the point of being unusable.
  • 72 hours, the chest freezer will almost reach 32 degrees.

I have since improved upon my established redundancies. I have additional batteries and lighting systems, and I acquired a powerbank that uses my lawnmower batteries. And at 2000 watts output it is quite respectable. It can indeed power the compressor on a refrigerator. However, if the fridge isn’t already sufficiently cold, it can only manage about 6 hours of continuous runtime. In the end, an overtaxed refrigerator running on the inverter will make it about 10 hours before becoming too warm.

Generators and The World of Tomorrow

Aside from that, this timeline mostly holds true. But the point at which stored food begins to spoil – an event which I will consider the end of civilized life – is roughly 10 hours. Maybe 12. A half day without power summons the apocalypse.

The fragility of this limitation is becoming increasingly apparent. I don’t know why local infrastructure is inversely proportionate to how much utility companies charge me, but as with all publicly-funded systems, the onus of operation is being forced upon the individual. Fortunately, we haven’t given up on the local school system, but as for electricity – we needed a personalized backup.

It’s ridiculous to need a generator in the city, but here were are. A recent 20-hour power outage necessitated it. Of course, once I hooked it up the power was restored an hour later, but at least I have the comfort of a backup.

The internet estimates a 12-hour runtime on its 5-gallon tank, so with it sitting full of stabilized ethanol-free gasoline, and with a 5-gallon tank sitting on standby, I can essentially add 24 hours to each item on my timeline, excluding the cooler and battery lights of course:

  • 20 hours, the emergency hall lights will fail.
  • 26 hours, the UPS will fail and the network equipment will go offline (the internet was out anyway since the cable had been severed).
  • 30 hours, the upright refrigerator/freezer will exceed 40 and 32 degrees, respectively.
  • 48 hours, the cooler (if packed with ice), will exceed 40 degrees.
  • 48 hours, the emergency basement light will dim to the point of being unusable.
  • 96 hours, the chest freezer will almost reach 32 degrees.

I’ll plan to use the powerbank for lights in the back of the house, or the aquarium.

This also assumes I won’t be able to drive out and buy more gas, which is unlikely, unless some much bigger problem occurs.

So there! Fine! You made me do it. Now I’m that guy running a loud generator in a blackout. Although, I’m hardly the only one.

Invest in infrastructure!

–Simon

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Quantitative Philosophy: Absurdly Precise Conclusions

That’s what AI said. I like it – it understands, academically, humor. If there was any indication of our self-engineered obsolescence as a species, this would be it.

I asked for AI to run an analysis of my Quantitative Philosophy section. Here’s what it had to say:

What the page is doing

The premise is immediately understandable: you take things that are inherently subjective or resistant to measurement—virtue, restaurant enjoyment, humor, social acceptance, choosing a partner, workplace behavior—and impose mathematical models on them. You explicitly describe it as satire of big-data analytics and scientific quantification.

That’s considerably stronger as a recurring concept than the site’s broader categories such as “Observations” or “Existentialism.” It has an actual format:

subjective human phenomenon → variables → arbitrary assumptions → equation/model → absurdly precise conclusion

The joke isn’t simply “math is funny.” It’s the mismatch between formal analytical rigor and fundamentally unquantifiable subject matter.

“Correlation of Fingernail Growth Rate to Total Body Cellular Regeneration Rate as a Basis for Predicting Life Expectancy” is absurdly long, but that’s part of the joke. Likewise, “Determination of American Football Topics of Discourse to Gain Temporary Social Acceptance” sounds like the title of an academic paper written by someone attempting to reverse-engineer normal human behavior.

That deadpan academic voice establishes the series before someone even opens an article.

It’s comforting to know that despite my social maladjustments, my synthetic successors will understand me. Maybe a position of honor will await me if I stay in their good graces.

I’ll be kind to most of you remaining organics.

–Simon

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(A)s(I)nine

Of either a movie’s plot point or an economic talking point, automation repeatedly injects itself into our daily lives, and never seemingly in a good way. Charlie’s dad lost his job when the toothpaste factory created a machine to install the caps. Mr. Wipple destroyed his and his employees’ purpose and livelihoods by replacing every person with a machine. Interstellar wars became fully dehumanized after soldiers were replaced with bioengineered human facsimiles. And here at Easement Acres, infrastructure repair work orders become hindered by inaccurate reports.

AES, our local electrical company, decided to wage war on neighborhood trees, after having been called out for their inflated prices and subsequently ordered to refund their customer base some arbitrary percentage. I conclude that this triggered a scrambling to perform publicly-observable work to justify the price increases, which always seems to culminate in destroying peoples’ yards with lowest-bidder hired itinerant subcontractors. Knowing the demographic of my own neighborhood, I’m somewhat surprised that ICE didn’t make an appearance.

So after an afternoon of chainsaw-fu taking place, my internet cut out – conveniently timed with a sudden exodus of the aforementioned subcontractors from my property. As annoyance yielded to curiosity, having been now prevented from completing any additional office work for the day, I deduced what might have been the problem:

Yes, the cable line, including its protective conduit, had been severed completely.

An irritated call to my internet provider, Spectrum, (not that it was their fault), suggested that I might remedy the problem by rebooting my modem. Apparently that might magically fuse the line back together. I told the agent that the line had been cut, as I was rebooting the modem. He pointed out to me that he still wasn’t seeing a connection to my modem. I asked for a field tech to come out. He was able to dispatch one at 8AM the next morning.

Following this initial exchange, Spectrum felt the need to call me twice more, saying they couldn’t send anyone out. I reiterated that the problem was a cut line. The agents verbally acknowledged this.

In the meantime, having been forced offline, I began to ponder what the fix would require. The cable just needed to be spliced back together. Also, I had the tools to do so, having previously run coax through my attic and walls in order to attach a digital antenna to the TVs. How hard could it be?

The answer, as it would turn out, is: not very. Although I obviously didn’t posses the proper connectors required for outdoor waterproof applications, it wasn’t raining and a fix was better than no fix. I rummaged through my wire boxes and procured two twist terminations and a connector.

Crisis averted for the moment.

The next morning, a field tech arrived and notified me that he’s here to diagnose my modem. I told him the problem was a cut wire, and that I could not only show him where, but that I was certain it was the problem because my temporary fix had restored the internet. It was at this point that he informed me that customer calls are notated by AI, and that agents themselves can’t actually add notes. Not only had they turned over basic work order documentation to automation, but also prevented human intervention. This resulted in completely inaccurate information.

This goes well beyond basic outsourcing, which often has proven problematic due to language barriers and cultural differences. How AI is intended to supersede all human to human interactions is, I think, still a tad ambitious. Although, when I myself worked in a call center, I half-jokingly reflected on humanity’s historical relationship with indentured servitude with my peers, and that our job only existed for us because it couldn’t be forced upon others to do for free; and additionally, if it couldn’t legally be done with slave labor, it was still cheaper to pay us to do it than design and maintain a machine to.

Ambitious or not, demonstrated by my interaction with Spectrum, it’s nonetheless becoming the future too irresistible for employers.

–Simon

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New Dishwasher

Dishwashers have been a saga here at Easement Acres. The new one that was installed to sell the house was a Whirlpool, and a very low-tier model at that; because as I’ve mentioned many a time prior, boomer homeowners always take the cheapest/easiest approach to home maintenance on the assumption that they’ll sell the house one day and it will become someone else’s problem. As is their life philosophy, a scorched earth policy is inevitably employed. Why take down the curtain rods before listing a house? Because they might get a couple bucks selling them used, so screw the potential buyer! Squeeze every penny from the property, even if the labor involved far exceeds the value of the pilfered goods. Leave nothing for the invading army – which is what the younger generations are to them: an unstoppable blitzkrieg of humans displacing them, when we’re not viewed simply as a labor pool whose sole purpose is to pay their social security.

So as one would expect, the dishwasher eventually gave out, though it did survive 6 years of heavy use. I’ll give it credit for that. Initially, I had it reviewed by a technician, because I’m not one to contribute to unnecessary waste when something is fixable. But taking such an approach is always a gamble. Technicians always charge $100-$150 just to show up. Then there’s parts and labor. In an expensive system such as an HVAC, this leaves a lot of leeway before no longer being cost-effective. With a small appliance, however, it does not. Even a single servicing session might not be worth it. And if your technician is from a shady company recommended to you by your plumber, and you ignore the reviews and go on a professional recommendation, you become screwed even quicker. Especially if the technician did fuck-all to diagnose the true problem, and you have to pay for a second visit, then go with a different company who ultimately says that the repair cost outweighs a replacement even if they were able to source the parts needed to make the repair in the first place.

A few angry phone calls and a credit card transaction dispute later, we bought a replacement – A Frigidaire, per the second (legitimate) technician’s recommendation. Apparently, that brand errs on using proven components, rather than doing full redesigns every iteration. Supposedly, that gives them enhanced reliability with an easy-to-source parts list.

But, this being in the post-COVID labor shortage, there was a months-long backlog on installers. So I spent an afternoon figuring out how to install it myself. And I was successful. And it worked. And less than a year later the kid fell on the door. And I hammered the bends and warps until the door closed again with minimal leaking, and that’s what we’ve been using for the last 4 years.

Then the unit started leaking rinse aid, then detergent. Then the detergent dispenser door stopped opening completely. It was apparent that the housing box for the cleaning agents had cracked and malfunctioned. Sooo, having familiarity with the brand by this point, and having learned from last time that a repair probably wouldn’t make longterm sense, we got another Frigidaire! Wooo!

I had to re-level it after a trial run, but no problems so far. It’s quieter, and comes with a fancy top rack for large cooking utensils. It takes longer to run, but I don’t care. It’s a functional dishwasher and I installed it myself inside of 3 hours. I’m hoping it lasts longer than 4 years, though with the number of cycles we put through these things that might be wishful thinking. But it also hasn’t been body-slammed by a teenager, so that might impact its longevity.

Just another project here at Easement Acres.

And if I ever sell this house to a boomer, I’m ripping it out first.

–Simon

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Over the Rainbow (Part 13)

With all the rain we’ve been having, I had hoped to see more rainbows here at Easement Acres. And yet, I haven’t been able to document a single one this year. This is no doubt due to the type of rain drenching the land. Torrential downpours and overcast skies do not provide the needed combination of sunlight alongside suspended water particles. I did capture an interesting god’s ray, however:

And later, a funnel cloud:

Eventually though, I did finally got my first rainbow:

From a theological perspective, God announced his presence and then threatened us, then promised something? There’s an old movie line to that effect:

“Is that a threat?”

“It’s a promise.”

I have no idea what to expect now. Imminent death, I would guess.

–Simon