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| A crack-ho is rented equipment. Your spouse is one you have ownership in. |
The "cool kids" are talking about owning nothing and sharing or renting everything. Uber is held up as an example of the "new economy" and how the younger generations are going to thrive in an era of growing scarcity.
I think they are crazy.
Perverse incentives
Back when I was younger and even more naive than I am now, I was give a job supervising a production group in a large factory with a unionized workforce. Manpower turnover was a constant challenge.
This factory operated on the "team" concept and everybody rotated. The advantage of rotation was that it reduced the rate of repetitive motion injuries like Carpal Tunnel inflammation because it varied the parts of the body that were most challenged. You might have two jobs that kicked your ass, two that were moderate in difficulty and two that were a walk-in-the-park. A typical sequence was to have a moderate-ass kicker-recovery sequence.
In my naivite I suggested that we train "the new guy" on the easiest jobs first because he could pick them up more quickly and engage in a larger percentage of the rotation early in his training cycle.
The team looked at me like I had lost my marbles.
An old grizzled guy named Chuck Bogart took me aside and explained the facts of life to me. "We will get stuck with that yahoo if he learns two jobs (a contractual fact). If he starts on the two easiest jobs he has no incentive to learn any of the harder ones and the people who already earned their way in will have to rotate over their recovery job."
"You gotta start him on he hardest jobs. If he can't learn those, throw him back and get another."
The "metric" my boss had given me was to get the new team member into full rotation as quickly as possible. It had never occurred to me that an adult would stop trying short of that goal.
Like I said, I was naive.
Back to the rental economy
HUD, the Federal Department for Housing and Urban Development projects that carpets in rental units have a life expectancy of 5 years before they need to be replaced.
I asked the lovely and frugal Mrs ERJ how many times we have replaced our living room rug in the past 30 years. She informed me that this is our second rug.
We live on a dirt road and have a gravel driveway. I garden. We walk through the garage to enter the house. We have large dogs. We had four children. In terms of potential, we can really challenge floor-coverings. And ours lasted at least three times as long as HUD says it should have lasted.
Why do you suppose that is?
Maybe it is because that as home-owners, the cost of replacing the floor covering comes directly out of our pockets. If we buy new carpet then we must go without something else we want. We cannot spend the same dollar twice.
Enabling
May I humbly suggest that the shared/loaner/rental economy will not produce the results that the naive planners believe it will? The shared economy dilutes responsibility for upkeep and will enable wastrels to access and destroy resources they would otherwise not be able to access.
And, for lack of a more solid data-point, may I suggest that the average lifespan of a rental anything will be about 1/3 of a piece of equipment that is privately owned. Of course, it will be much shorter in actual calendar time because it will not spend nearly as much time in the garage. Rather, it will get turned around and re-rented when it is in demand (like a rototiller) and then parked outside the shed in the weather during the off-season.
That is not a robust way to extend resources in times of scarcity.
There will be exceptions. Some rental managers will be drill sergeants on maintenance and docking damage deposits of bad renters. But those people will be the exceptions.
ERJ, the reality is - and has always been - that someone that does not have a direct ownership value in an item - be it the item or a relationship to the person owning the item - will almost always treat it more carelessly than the owned item. Example one: Rental cars. The reason ride share cars are generally in good shape is because someone owns them. The public transit world would be a fine example of what a "rental" economy looks like.
ReplyDeleteAnd perhaps somewhat remarkably, people will be far less willing or likely to "give" money to support and maintain those shared items. Tragedy of the commons and all.
"Tragedy of the commons" you beat me to it.
DeleteIsn't that in a nutshell why any utopian community dream is destined for failure?
You have a chance at the utopia if everyone in it is on the same page and also everyone is at least committed to some baseline. "Diversity is our strength" of course is 180 degrees flat out wrong in this sense, you need homogeneity of opinion and shared experiences. Everyone needs at least some skin in the game or has paid-in to get there. For a community thing, everyone in the community owning their own property for instance. In some military units, you have to prove yourself and perhaps pass a selection to get in. Whatever the buy-in is, it has to be there for the community to work. Unequally-hitched people will sow resentment and discord.
Tom from East Tennessee
Rental agencies use shuttle drivers to get excess cars from Point A back to the depot. I did that for a summer and we were paid by the trip, so we all FLOGGED those cars to get back to base and on the road for another cycle. Now factor in how the actual renters treat the cars.....
ReplyDeleteAbout all you can say is they might have gotten oil changes on time.
Hopefully my eyes will heal by morning.
ReplyDeleteWorked as a carpet installer for several years. Some people are clean and some are not.
Agree with your premise and conclusion. Its scary in fact, to hear that younger co-horts actually talk and think that way (my teenage kids do not). The indoctrination is going as planned.
ReplyDeleteOne sentence in particular reminded me of a phenomenon that has gone too far - rental high life. Kids (literally) can rent a couple hours inside a private jet or a yatch to take selfies and pretend they are millionaires for an afternoon. Why work hard to actually get ahead when I can just rent the lifestyle and pretend? It reminds me of patterns of drug abuse?
The underlying theme in all this jumps out at me, as it has become pervasive in our world: fake.
Its all fake. Fake life (no REAL meaning), fake money (USD, credit, not savings and wealth), fake friends (online companions), fake lifestyle, fake car (chopped up ricer with rims and a spoiler = red porsche boxer to this generation)... fake fake fake fake. They cannot tell real from fake. Societies value metrics have been warped, and its not by accident. This crowd (ERJ readers at large unite!!!) is the breakwall against this surge. We are everywhere, but we are losing this fight. I think this summer and fall will be telling for our kind.
Learned the hard way, "nothing parties like a rental".
ReplyDeleteWay back in the day, when I first started as a carpenter, was helping a friend take of some rental apartments in a bad part of town, IYKWIM. It was Section 8 housing.
DeleteWe would go in after the previous tenant was evicted, usually for rampant drug use/selling drugs. Naturally, the evicted party wasn't happy and they would destroy these apartments. Thankfully, they were concrete block construction so not very much sheetrock damage, but everything else would be broken up...toilets, water heaters, sinks and cabinets and usually graffiti all over the walls. If course the carpet and vinyl floors were ruined.
So we'd go in and basically strip the apartment, bring a paint sprayer and paint over everything, lay down new, cheap vinyl and carpet and replace all the other stuff that was damaged, ready for the new tenant.
It was good for sometimes as long as six months before we had to do it all over again, but several times, we were back fixing the same apartment in three months.
There were a few times when we went to work and some apartment dweller came out and basically told us...y'all don't want to be here today. So we would turn around, stop at the package store and then head off to the golf course.
Way, way back in high school (mid '70's) I remember learning about some of our original settlers (the pilgrims?) holding everything in common as in the New Testament. Many of the women were "too sick or weak" to work each day. After the colony nearly starved to death they decided that every family kept the fruits of their own labor. The recovery of the ill was miraculous. And this was in a "Christian" setting. Imagine not even having those social mores. Oh, wait...no imagination necessary.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to the lack of care problem, the most evil aspect of "own nothing economy" is that it makes one dependent on the "lessor" for everything. Assuming that the lessor is the .gov or a .gov agent (as we have seen the banks act in Canada and Operation Chokepoint), this ties into the "social credit" system to make every one a slave in deed and thought - or they will take everything away from you.
ReplyDeleteIt's the life of Winston Smith.
I hear talk of driverless cars being the low cost taxis of our ever Greener future.
ReplyDeleteBut who hoses the cars out between hires?
As mentioned above, there are many examples of failed examples of communal/ shared living and precious few of them work for any length of time.
ReplyDeleteThe only reason the Soviet Union lasted as long as it did was the (small) amount of private enterprise they allowed, particularly in agriculture.
As mentioned other places, companies such as Black Rock are buying houses over market price, charging high rents, then not doing maintenance... A very short sighted practice.
I'm surprised at carpet only lasting 5 years, but that is HUD data and I suspect cheap carpet to begin with... I've used/ lived on 20 year old carpet numerous times. Yes, it's not as nice, but it worked fine for me.