The report of the Amazon outage led me to reflect on the Internet and other things.

The Internet was devised to be resilient, hence its decentralised design, and its multi-path topology. DARPA (the Pentagon’s research & development branch) paid for it. Then (of course) the private sector took it. Now we have Amazon, Google, Microsoft etc violating the principle of decentralisation. That clearly makes the internet less resilient. The outage occurred in one of Amazon’s server centres, but if affected all of its network, and caused problems to millions of its customers.

The outage demonstrates the weakness or flaw of centralised control. Yet humans repeatedly strive to achieve just that. The ultimate centralised control in politics is totalitarianism, usually realised in a dictatorship. But oligarchy serves the purpose well enough that it’s the most common form of polity. Democracy touted as a system of voting for the leaders hides that unpleasant fact.

I think that democracy is better defined as a system of reaching consensus. Such systems have existed on the tribal and village level. At the tribal level, centralised control is reserved for war, when reaching consensus would take too long, and so the efficiency of a war chief as leader is worth the sacrifice.

Control is about information. Democracy as the method of consensus attempts to gather and disseminate information from everyone. When everyone listens to everyone else, there is an automatic error-correction. The best available information will usually determine the consensus. Usually, because values and desires also play a role, and we are willing to put up with less than the best in order to preserve our values or satisfy some desire.

Totalitarianism strives to concentrate all information in one person or small group. Since that means constant cognitive dissonance for most people, I wonder why it’s accepted. It seems we can tolerate a certain amount of cognitive discomfort. When too many people reach an uncomfortable level, there will be agitation for political change. So the aim of totalitarians is to keep cognitive dissonance within tolerable levels, and to deflect the inevitable anger onto some easily identifiable target. Orwell showed how that works in 1984. It seems the people behind Trump have understood his explanation, and are trying to install a self-perpetuating system.

Footnote: More on the development of the internet here: Arpanet Etc

AI: A Conceptual Problem

AI is really a conceptual problem.

What is "human intelligence"? I think for most people it's a fuzzy concept combining self-awareness, reasoning, information processing, problem solving, symbol manipulation, insight, etc. In other words, not clear enough to make good sense when thinking about machine intelligence.

What is "thinking"? ChatGPT seems to think, but all it does it string together words and phrases and sentences, based on some probabilities that were calculated during its training. I've tried it several times, and what I notice about it is that it uses vast amounts of cliche. Which is not at all surprising, since cliches by definition are more likely to occur in text than original tropes. Its output makes sense, but it's yawn-inducing boring.

On the other hand, I think all those processes, plus processes not yet understood or recognised, are necessary for sentience and self awareness. Will machines get there? Maybe. The real danger is that we will confuse their making sense with wisdom, and rely on them to do things only humans should do. Such a judge guilt and innocence.

Footnote: The most common imagery of robots shows them as humanoid. But all robots currently at work are machines that look nothing like human beings. They're basically arms.

The City (Lapham's Quarterly 03-1, 2011)

 LQ 03-4: The City (2010) The city is, I think, one of humankind’s great inventions. Through

most of our existence on Earth, there were no towns and cities. They became possible when agriculture improved enough to support a fairly large proportion of non-agricultural workers. Nowadays, in technologically advanced countries, about 5% of the population works directly in agriculture. It’s likely that building towns began when agriculture enabled supporting about 5% of the population as non-agricultural workers. But even so, pretty well every household raised all or most of their food well into the 18th or 19th century. Cities in the modern sense required not only more efficient agriculture but more efficient and cheaper transport. This may be why the first large cities were all on navigable rivers and/or next to good harbours.
     But from the beginning, towns and cities were disliked. Most of the excerpts in this collection attack the moral laxity and material excess of cities. The tension between the city and the country has varied, but it’s always existed. Cities have been targets of robbery, a.k.a. wars of conquest. They concentrate cultural and intellectual resources. That in turn fosters innovation, which raises suspicion and worse in the surrounding rural communities. In the relation between city and hinterland, exploitation and mutual dependence are often hard to distinguish, another reason for rural suspicion of the city. The first states, hierarchically organised societies with large power and economic differences, were cities. Larger States resulted from wars between cities.
     I like cities. I also like the small town in which I live. I doubt I would like it so much if I couldn’t get most of the advantages of city life as easily as I do. Communications technology provides more choice than we can manage; we’ve learned to limit our sources to make choice easier. Materially, pretty well everything I would want from the city is available by mail or special order when not available locally. Still, cities are increasing in size and number. Almost half of humankind now lives in cities. It’s will be more than half within a decade.
     Many comments in this collection indicate express praise not for human cities, but for the City of God. That golden city is not only the expected destination of the faithful, it is a counter example to the human cities that failed to live up to the expectations of their detractors.
     Recommended. ****

Econ 101: The supply web.

Consider the ball point pen. It’s cheap, it’s everywhere, it’s still useful despite the increased digitisation of our everyday lives. Millions are sold every day. Millions are discarded every day, too.

The earliest versions of the ballpoint pen date from the 1800s. They were unreliable. The ink usually blobbed and smeared, or dried out. The ball didn’t transport the ink reliably, so the pen skipped, and the writing felt rough. Its modern version was invented by Laszlo Biro, with the help of his brother Gyorgy and friend Juan Meyne. It’s a triumph of technology. Without modern applied chemistry and physics, the pen would be neither reliable nor cheap. Only pencils are cheaper. The vast majority of ballpoint pens are disposable. Even refillable ones are usually thrown out.

The simplest ball point pen is the Bic Cristal™. It has seven components:

1. Barrel: plastic. 2. Cap: plastic. 3. Plug: plastic. 4. Ink reservoir: plastic. 5. Ink: dyes, alcohols, fatty acids. 6. Ball: metal. 7. Ball socket: metal

All parts begin as ores and oil, raw materials which are refined to make feedstock (plastics, metals, ink) with which to make the parts of the pen. The pen is made by the thousands on machines that began as raw materials that were processed into parts for assembly. The pens are packaged, warehoused, and eventually shipped to the retail store. The packaging, warehousing, and transportation also began as raw materials.

The sequence from raw material to final product is called the supply chain. But it’s really a supply web. I have two observations about the supply web.

One, it’s fragile, because every member of it tries to reduce costs. A failure by any member to deliver what’s asked will ripple through the web, sometimes causing shortages of apparently unrelated products. Resilience requires excess capacity, but excess capacity is unused most of the time. That looks like unproductive cost to the accountant, so it’s reduced and even eliminated.

Two, we rely on people to do their work well at every step. The ballpoint pen has involved hundreds of people, from the producers of the ores and oil to the truckers that delivered the product to your local store,. Of these hundreds of people, the only one you deal with in person is the store clerk.

Edited for clarity 2023-10-25

Kaleidscopes in the 1980s

 

  Cozy Baker. Through the Kaleidoscope... and Beyond (1987) Second, expanded edition of a catalogue of US kaleidoscope makers and vendors in the 1980s. Some history of the toy, including a copy of the inventor’s patent application. Some colour plates, a handful of nicely done black and white drawings, and photos of most of the artisans. The book seems to be a vanity project by Ms Baker. No doubt useful for kaleidoscope fans at the time, and possibly useful for anyone wanting to write a history. Printed on heavy paper in a well-made cloth case. The colour plates are well printed, but do not add as much information as I would like. Not a keeper. **

Homo Faber: Technology (Lapham's Quarterly XIV/1)

 

 Lapham’s Quarterly XIV/1 Technology (2021) Simon Winchester in his introduction to this collection adduces three phases of “technology proper”: the mechanical, the electronic, and the atomic, and argues that despite the Greek aptitude for mechanical devices, the mechanical age did not begin until an arrangement of mechanisms powered by steam was invented by Watt and his contemporaries. I think this view of technology is limited both conceptually and historically, even though it’s wider than the current most widely used meaning of the word. “Technology” these days usually means electronics, and often (more narrowly) electronic digital devices. More seriously, Winchester ignores spinning and weaving: I wonder who had the wit to put an image of a spinning wheel on the cover.

     I think that technology evolves out of tool making. Homo sapiens and its relatives became the dominant hominids because they went beyond the shaping of natural objects into tools, a process they refined over several hundred thousand years. But then they figured out how to combine shaped pieces of hide, wood, bone, and stone into more complex objects, and how to combine pieces of animal hide into clothing. They discovered a method of invention. Invention is an exponential process. We now have such rapid development that our habits, customs, ethics, and laws all fail to keep up with it.

     I recently came across the thesis that technology as such begins with the invention of spinning and weaving, a far more complex process, which depends on more than the recognition that reshaping a natural object may make it more useful. There is simply no natural analogue to textiles. They may have been inspired by spider webs, but they are a wholly new human invention. Through most of human history textiles were a more precious material than any others. Since the invention of the power loom, textiles have become so cheap that we think nothing of throwing them away. In fact, we make too much of the stuff, and even the poorer countries of the world no longer want our cast-offs.

     The next major phase of technology was the production of new materials, ceramics and metals. Both require exquisite control of fire and raw materials. Both put a premium on the human ability to imagine consequences, to observe and infer effects from causes, to imagine possibilities and find ways of testing them. The industrial revolution that Winchester adumbrates as the beginning of technology began when some European “natural philosophers”, inspired by Arabian examples of extensions of ancient knowledge, devised methods of systematic investigation of the world around them. By so doing, they accelerated that process of the mutual interplay of inquiry and technology that Winchester describes in his introduction. We live with the effects, in a system of constant invention and (occasional) improvement. This collection shows us how we have become more aware of both the process and our inability to escape from it.
     Another well done overview. ****

Unintended consequences: Noninterference (Harry Turtledove)

 

Harry Turtledove. Noninterference (19881). The Federation Survey Service is surveying Bilbeis IV. The local ruler, a woman of remarkable character, is dying of cancer. The Terrans decide to give her “immune system amplifiers”. The Bilbeis biology is close enough to human for the drug to work, but different enough to have unforeseen consequences. Those consequences and their effects provide the bones of the plot. Turtledove adds convincing characters and sociological insights to make a well-constructed entertainment that also asks serious questions about governance, polity, bureaucracy, historical hinge points, and of course the effects of individual quirks on other people’s plans.
     Turtledove is also known for alternate histories and historical fiction. His Wiki bibliography lists an enormous number of books. This one I  rate well above average for the genre: ***

Neanderthals are humans

More evidence  that Neanderthals were people like us. Doesn't look like  much, eh? It's a piece of string.

It takes a lot of insight to make string. You have to understand that twisting fibres together makes a stronger product. You have to see that string is useful for tying stuff. You have to have stuff that needs tying. And so on. Quite an achievement!

Now I know why I save string.

Need to tweet? No phone? No problem: Use the fridge.

The Guardian reports that a teen's tweets from her smart fridge went viral.

If the fridge can be used to send tweets, you can bet that it's being used to monitor the family's refrigeration habits. That data is valuable to advertisers, which can use it to "suggest" that some supplies need to be replenished....

Because you see, tweeting requires a link that works in both directions. So if the frdige can be used to send data out, it can also be used to send data in. And that, my friends, is the real purpose of smart devices.

Say Hello to Alexa..

Update: This news item has been  outed as fake. As you can see above, I was fooled, too. The effect of too much confidence in my expertise,

Incentives and Disincentives; Superfreakonomics (2009)

Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner.  Superfreakonomics (2009) Another excursion into the obvious but oddly unappreciated fact that humans, like other animals, respond to incentives. But it’s not aways obvious what the incentives are, in part because a policy proposer by definition doesn’t think like most people, and when most people propose or back a policy, they usually misunderstand both the problem and the solution. The former is shown in campaigns to eliminate prostitution (most prostitutes are in the business because it’s the best-paying work they can get); and the latter in the design of child safety seats for cars (for 3-year-olds an up, the adult seatbelt does as good a job as the safety seat).

     Nevertheless, the implicit thesis is worth placing front of mind: If you want to know whether a proposed policy will work, ask both what the incentives and disincentives are. Thus, Ford installed seatbelts as a safety feature, but buyers balked: they didn’t want to be reminded that driving a car is dangerous. But after several decades of ubiquitous seatbelts, buckling up has become second nature. The incentive is conformity to a social norm.
     The last chapter deals with global warming, which 10 years ago could still be considered not well enough understood for making sound policy. The doomsayers of the time have turned out to be correct: it’s real, and we should have begun mitigation and adaptation decades ago.
     A fun read, which gently teaches you to check the numbers and think hard about what people actually want. We humans rarely have simple wants: we generally want to have it all, which is impossible. So we need to compromise. Understanding the problem comes first, and that almost always requires knowing the numbers and doing the math. ***

World War II fighters: a picture book.

    D. Avery, ed. The Concise Illustrated Book of Fighters of World War II. (1989) Beautiful art work, and a photo of each plane. Lots of technical data, inadequate discussions of the planes’ deployment and performance. Originally British, it’s for the war and airplane geek. I enjoyed looking through it, but did not read all the data. Useful for reference, despite its limitations. **

A subway by any other name....

Here's one of the stories about Elon Musk's proposal for underground roads for autonomous electric vehicles: Musk's Hole. Looks an awful lot like a subway to me.

This whole autonomous car thing is an attempt to combine the indvidual convenience of the car with the safety of rail. From a rail passenger's point of view, a subway car is an autonomous vehicle. "Leave the driving to us", Greyhound used to say. Well, when you ride in a train, someone or something else is driving. Properly controlled and isolated from cross traffic, a railroad is a horizontal elevator (as George Kneiling said many decades ago). The first elevators were controlled by human operators. Now they are automated. There's no reason not to automate passenger rail, except our weird notion that we should all be able to come and go as we please, and damn the expense.

Turn of the Screw: Rybczynski's history of the screwdriver

   Witold Rybczynski. One Good Turn (2000) Rybczynski was asked to write an article about the most important tool of the millennium. Some research showed that pretty well all the tools expected in a good toolbox had been invented much more 1,000 years ago. Eventually, he settled on the screwdriver, and wrote the essay. But the research was incomplete. This book recounts the research.
The screw is quite old: the Greeks and Romans had it. But the screwdriver dates from some time in the 1300s. That discovery prompts Rybczynski to meditate on the nature of invention, and the effects of the machine tool. For the screw enabled the creation of the device that made it possible to mass-produce screws: the machine tool. There were lathes earlier than the screw-cutting lathe, but the quality of the work depended on the skills of their operators: they were basically devices for holding and turning the workpiece, but the operator had to control the cutting tool.
     Modern lathes simplify control of the cutting tool, but still require operator skill. The machine tool does it all. Mount the workpiece, apply power, and the tool shapes the pieces as desired. Above all, the machine tool allows us to make identical parts to almost any degree of precision. Without that, steam engines and other modern machines would be impossible to make.
     A book worth reading and rereading. Rybczynski writes with grace and economy. The book is short, but contains a lot of information and insight. ****

Everything Connects: The Knowledge Web (James Burke)

     James Burke. The Knowledge Web (1999) Many years ago, when students complained that the stuff they had to learn was useless, I pontificated: “There’s no such thing as useless knowledge. At the very least, some fact will connect two other facts. You just don’t know which ones, until you do it.”
     James Burke’s books and TV programs inspired this insight, and this one demonstrates another fact about knowledge: it’s all connected, somehow. It could be two people who know each other. It could be a problem to which someone else’s published insight provides a clue. It could be an idle question about some oddity. It could be deliberate speculation about possible answers. It could be knowledge brought into an apparently unrelated field. It could be – well, you get the idea.
     The book also attempts to use a kind of hyperlink. Every now and then, numbers in the margin direct you to another reference to the same person or fact. You don’t have to read the book one page after another. The links lead through the web by another path.
     Nowadays, we can click our way from one link to another. And with all such links, you depend on some other person recognising the connection and inserting the links. Most such links these days are designed to lead you to another product to buy.
     Burke’s TV series Connections of 1976 predates the world wide web. This book builds on the insights and methods presented in that series and the book based on it, The Day the Universe Changed. Worth reading just for the fun of recognising how the bits and pieces of history link up. Good index and bibliography make this a reference book as well. ***

Artificial Intelligence (AI): A series of notes

2005-06-20
“If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it’s a duck” (Ancient wisdom)

Unless it’s a model of a duck.

Artificial Intelligence is model building – we want autonomous machines, but the best we can do is build models of autonomous machines.

Eg, an artificial ant could be made to behave like an ant in many ways, but not as an ant in an anthill, or capable of making more ants.

2015-10-21
It’s probably possible to make an artificial ant that behaves like an ant in anthill. We may even be able to make an artificial ant that can reproduce in some way.

However, “behave like an ant” is not well defined. There are too many behaviours, and some are obviously easier to mimic than others. Nevertheless, it will soon be possible to make an ant-size robot that can navigate like an ant, climb vertical surfaces like an ant, etc.

But it will always be a model of ant, and therefore its behaviour will in some respect will not be antlike, and in other respects will be a bad imitation of ant behaviour. That’s simply the nature of models. Models are mixtures of emulation and imitation.

2016-05-15
Intelligence is even less well-defined than “ant behaviour”. We can mimic some intelligent behaviours, eg, sorting, learning correlations, recognising patterns, and so on, which are useful to augment human tasks such as diagnosis of a fault or illness, or finding the data we want. If a task is well enough defined, we can build a machine to do it.

But that’s the problem: “Intelligence” is simply not well enough defined. My notion of it is the ability to apply and adapt existing knowledge and insight to unanticipated problems. Every term in that definition is fuzzy and vague. Anyhow, some people (including me) would argue it’s more of a definition of creativity than intelligence.

Is consciousness part of  “intelligence”? Many people would say it is. A machine that merely solves problems isn’t intelligent, it’s just an algorithm. It’s not enough to know how to do long division, you have to be able to recognise when and why you should do it. An intelligent entity then would be able to apply the rules of the algorithm to another problem. This claim entails that intelligence can abstract rules and patterns, and recognise them in different contexts.

“Understanding” is another component of intelligence. Isn’t it? Well, it does have something to do with learning: an intelligent person is one who can make sense of new explanations. “I don’t get it” at one extreme means “I haven’t figured it out yet”, at the other it means “I can’t figure it out”. The latter is a measure of intelligence.

And that’s just three attempts to make sense of “intelligence”. We’re long way from knowing exactly what we mean by “artificial intelligence”. Far enough that we may not even recognise it when we see it.

The recent development of “deep learning” artificially intelligent neural nets crystallises the problem. It’s already clear that we can evaluate the results of their operations, but we can’t figure out how they do it. What’s more, they have come up with solutions that humans have not only not produced, but have trouble recognising as viable solutions. For example, some AIs are better then humans at recognising cancerous tissue.

2018-07-03
If we accept “intelligence” as a label for problem-solving abilities, then consciousness is not required. That makes the neural-net AIs more than a little spooky.

Railways in Edmonton, Alberta.

     Alan Vanterpool. The Railways of Edmonton (1997) A well-done overview of the development of railways in Edmonton, Alberta. Published by the British Railway Modellers of North America (BRMNA), it consist of photographs with extended captions, a style that compresses a lot of information into a small space. Twenty years ago there were still many lines in place that have since been lifted, so a follow-up book would be in order.
     Vanterpool begins with water and land transport before the railroads, then offers pictures of earliest roads to arrive in Edmonton, and goes on from there. As far as I know, his history is accurate. About the only flaw in this book is that it presents two photos per page, which makes them too small. I suppose the BRMNA’s usual format of one photo per page would have required a second volume. I for one would have been happy to pay the extra cost. Well done, especially considering there are few photos beyond the news and publicity categories. Out of print, but woirth the search for your own copy. ***

Humankind's Most Dangerous Invention: A Short History of Progress (Wright)

   

Pithy quote

 Ronald Wright. A Short Illustrated History of Progress (2006) A paperback version of Wright’s 2004 book, with pictures, and coloured pages with pithy quotes displayed in large type. The book doesn’t need these gimmicks, it’s compulsively readable. Wright’s thesis is that civilisation is a trap. He’s an archeologist/anthropologist. He uses “civilisation” to mean a large complex culture based on the domestication of plants, animals, and human beings. A civilisation is marked by hierarchies, administrative complexity, specialisation of work, politics, etc.
     Almost every civilisation we know of has ended destroying itself. The type example of this process is Easter Island, which hosted a simple civilisation which at its peak fed around 10,000 people, but which collapsed when the people focussed on making gigantic statues. The statues which were supposed to prevent what we would now call ecological collapse. It didn’t work, and when Europeans made contact with Easter Island, there were about 1,000 nearly-starving people and a couple of hundred statues left on a treeless, rapidly eroding hunk of rock. To counter the argument that Easter Island culture wasn’t really a civilisation and so cannot stand as a warning, Wright looks at the first city-based civilisation, Sumer, which did the same damage to its ecology as the Easter Islanders did. It just took them longer. The successors to Sumer pretty well all made the same mistakes: Assyria, Babylon, etc, now exist only in clay tablets and stone statuary.
     Jared Diamond wrote a longer (and gloomier) meditation on the same themes as Wright (whose book began as a series of Ideas programs on CBC). Wright’s book is a much better read,  Diamond’s book provides more data. They both come to the same conclusion: “Civilisation” is humankind’s greatest and most dangerous invention. If we don’t learn from past experiments, we’ll destroy our civilisation, too. Because it’s a world-wide one, the collapse will entangle a larger swath of the ecosystems on which we depend, and which we persist in either ignoring, or see as an obstacle to further progress.
     Recommended. ****

The Polaroid SX-70

An ad in the May 1975 Esquire says "Polaroid's SX-70. It won't let you stop." Right. If you could afford it. In today's money, each print cost $2 to $3. Way beyond the average person's disposable income bracket. But when digital photography became cheaper and better than film, that promise was fulfilled.

A lot of analogue tech of the 60s, 70s and 80s prefigured digital tech. Or: Digital tech to a very large extent fulfills the yearnings and promises that anlaogue couldn't.

Human Computers and the Space Race

     Hidden Figures (2016) [D: Theodore Melfi. Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer, Janelle Monáe, Kevin Costner, et al.] Three black women, Katherine Johnson (Taraji P. Henson), Dorothy Vaughan (Octavia Spencer), and Mary Jackson (Janelle Monáe) working at the Langley Research Centre  as computers (human calculating machines) figure prominently in the calculation of the  numbers needed to plan and fly the first US manned flights into space. This history was until recently known to very few people.
     The movie does a good job of telling their story. Sensibly, I think, it focuses on the work they did, with enough backstory about their families, and references to the racial tensions that a few years later erupted into the civil rights movement, to give some sense of them as real people.
     The movie shows us what it’s like to do a good job. Like Sully, it’s about people doing their best, managing to achieve their goals despite the social and psychological constraints that burden us all, and some more than others. The movie makers knew how to convey the tension of actual and incipient failure, and the relief and joy of success. The human interactions are touched on lightly. One thing that comes across very well is the awareness that small errors could kill, and small errors are inevitable when calculating results based on numbers with built-in measurement uncertainty. We also see that professional pride and competitiveness may endanger the people who rely on those calculations to keep them safe. A rocket is a slow-burning bomb. Riding one into near-Earth orbit is always dangerous.
     I liked the movie. It’s depiction of Katherine, Dorothy, and Mary is perhaps a tad too self-congratulating (I think the sheer grind of being black in a segregated State was glossed over, not to mention the fear of random harassment or worse), but on the whole the movie had the ring of truth. Above all, it's a movie about work. The "hidden figures" faced obstacles that many, perhaps most of us, would not have even tried to overcome, but they did. They did so because they wanted to do the job right. Their greatness lies in their refusal to let anything get in the way. The greatness of the white characters, especially Al Harrison (Kevin Costner) the team leader, is that they shared that passion for getting it right.
     It’s a feel-good movie for sure. It takes us back to the days when America tried to be the best it could be, and when we formed the memories that make us pine for the days of greatness. ***½

2020 02 24: Katherine Johnson died today.

The arithmetic of repairing a car

Should you trade in an old car or repair it? The accountants tell you that when the cost of a major repair comes in at about the value of the car, it’s time to buy a new one. “It’s costing you more than it’s worth”, they say.

I think that depends on how you look at it. At current prices, replacing an old car with a newer one will cost $200-$400 a month, whether you borrow the money or save for a future purchase in cash. Insurance and licensing will cost the same whether you drive the car or not. Regular maintenance and fuel costs depend on how much you drive. So $200 to $400 over and above those costs buys a month’s worth of car life.

Let’s define a major repair as one that costs at least $400. That’s about the cost of a brake job. So if the brake job lasts longer than a month, you’re money ahead. Buy a rebuilt transmission for, say, $2000. In less than half a year, you’ll be money ahead. And so it goes. Even body work, such as patching holes or a new paint job, can buy you more additional life than the same money spent on a newer car.

I think that repairing (and maintaining) cars to a nearly new level makes huge economic sense. But as a car ages, owners are less and less willing to do that. There are many reasons for that, but to discuss those would make this post far too long.

 

Update 2023: Cost of repair have risen, but so has cost of purchase. So the argument is still valid. FWIW, my current car is 10 years old and drives like new. Repair/maintenance costs have amounted to about two or three months worth of  financing/purchase cost per year.