Latest / Words & Numbers / Episode 414: Robovacs to Riches

Transcript

Episode 414: Robovacs to Riches · Words & Numbers

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Hi, I'm James and I'm Anthony. And this is words and Numbers
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brought to you by the fine people at Khaki, the Center for
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American Culture and Ideas and. I've got a Christmas gift for
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you. Ask me what's new and exciting
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in my world. Oh, here we go.
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What? This is gonna suck so hard.
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What's new and exciting in your world this weekend?
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Absolutely nothing. I have nothing to talk about
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this week. Oh Saints be praised.
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Oh God bless us everyone. On that note.
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On that happy note. On that joyous, the most joyous
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of all notes, I don't have a quick hit either.
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But I have two perfectly serviceable foolishnesses of the
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week. Oh, a double hit of foolishness,
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all right. Not one, but two.
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And I'm gonna start with Nancy Mace, whose behavior becomes
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more idiotic each and every. Day.
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I don't know who Nancy Mace is. She is a congresswoman who has
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decided that her big issue is going to be to make sure that no
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one who is born a man can use the ladies room at the Capitol
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building. OK.
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And look, you would say, that's probably not that big a deal.
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How often is that likely to happen?
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And until the new Congress is seated, your answer would be
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probably almost never. But as luck would have it,
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there's a transgender person in the new Congress who's going to
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sooner or later, have to go to the bathroom.
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So Nancy, bless her heart, as they would say in the South, a
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phrase I usually set aside for Michelle Taylor Green.
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But Nancy knows that this is a dyed in the wool winner for her
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on certain constituencies. Sure.
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She is going to milk this for all it's worth.
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I usually say, well politics is politics.
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You can do these idiotic things if it whips up your base.
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That's demagoguery at its finest.
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Look, you and I are going to probably have something to say
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about transgenders sooner rather than later.
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This has gone on for too long as an issue in the electorate for
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us to just let it go. We've long said that we're not
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going to talk about gender and we're not going to talk about
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abortion, and it's probably time to set those two rules aside.
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Why are we not talking about those things?
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If those things matter, we should talk about them.
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We're not talking about them today.
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All right, say what you got to say.
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No, I wasn't going to raise either issue, but rather point
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out, and I've made this argument to you over the years that we've
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tried to carve out a niche in which we go to the data and we
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take a rational look at what's going on.
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And those are two topics that are sorely lacking in those
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things. However, you can take a sober
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look at them and be rational. Yes you can.
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Few people do, and we're going to do that.
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And just to give you a little hint where I'm going to be going
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with this, if your pronouns are a bunch of letters that I can't
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pronounce, that no human being has ever seen before, you're the
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problem. So I'm going to throw that out
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there. Go ahead.
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You've got enough Tinder to start the fire upon which you
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will throw me later. But for today, I want to stick
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with Nancy Mace on the hard right of American politics, who
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declared that somebody we dealt with Once Upon a time, you might
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recall, you and I had a meeting with a bunch of congressional
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staffers. Do you remember that when we
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told them about the debt and the deficit and how they could
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arrive at rational calculations without having an entire staff
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of economists working for them? Do you remember whose office
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spearheaded that? No, I don't.
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It was Trey Gowdy, a representative.
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I haven't heard that name in a while, yeah.
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That's right. And I have to say that when I
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think of people in the House of Representatives, I rarely think
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of people have any respect for at all.
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And yet, when I think of Trey Gowdy, I think back to a man
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that I had quite a lot of respect for.
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Yeah, but he's no longer a congressman.
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He had something better to do than put up with that all day
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long. But he was an eminently
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respectable human being. Does that mean I think he was
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right about everything? No, it means he was respectable.
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And you might be wondering how I'm going to get from Nancy Mace
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to Trey Gowdy. Well, Nancy suggested that
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perhaps Trey Gowdy is a transgender.
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What? Well, he gave her some lip about
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her bathroom thing and her result was to just keep right on
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swinging. And maybe even Trey is
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transgender. And Nancy has gotten herself to
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the point where everybody who she doesn't like is the one
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thing that she hates the most, and this is just ridiculous.
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Oh my God, it's like McCarthyism but with transgender replacing
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communist. Yeah, the story is going to be
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in the link in the show notes, and you can have a look at it
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all you want. I can't wait to see who she Tees
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up next. But Aunt, you might be asking,
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how is that not the runaway foolishness of the week?
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How on earth? Can there be anything?
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Else that sits next to that as a foolishness of the week.
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Well, we're at the end of the year.
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People are trying to get in under the wire, yeah.
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And here we have our newly minted president, the
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president-elect Donald Trump, who opines on Twitter faith is
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coming back to America and fast. Exclamation point.
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The perfect gift for this Christmas is the God Bless
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America or God Bless the USA Bible.
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Also available are signed copies.
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Signed by God. Well, that's always the
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question. And I immediately remembered
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back when some moron was selling Plato's Republic on Craigslist
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and he was selling an autographed cop.
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And here we have the grifter in chief selling autographed
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Bibles. Congratulations Donald Trump,
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you are yet again the foolishness of the week.
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For One Stop shopping for all things James and Aunt, visit our
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website wordsandnumbers.org. We give a special shout out to
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our Patreon sponsors who help us keep the lights on.
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If you'd like to contribute, go to patreon.com/wordsandnumbers
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this week. I've got a kind of personal
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story, and the story begins with your as you know, we've moved,
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and actually we moved a year ago, almost a year ago today.
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God, has it been that long? Yeah, Can you believe that?
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And I'm still, as I look at my office, I've still got boxes
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that need to be unpacked and all.
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And my pipes that need to be sent back to me.
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Your pipes are sitting right here.
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James left his packet of pipes last time he was here.
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I'm holding them hostages, so you come back and visit again.
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That tobacco is going to get too dry to smoke.
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You best send that back. But here's the thing, As you
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know, we're slowly unpacking as we do, and you've gotten to the
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point now where things are kind of set up, although not
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entirely. And my wife wanted me to do some
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vacuuming. The place where we're at has
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what I consider pretty high tech.
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It's this central vacuuming where you just bring the hose
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and you stick it into an outlet in the wall and the hose sucks.
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You've done. That was high tech in the 1960s.
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Well, it's the first time I've ever had anything like that up
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until this point. I have this thing, the machine
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you push around. In any event, I'm doing the
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vacuum. I say, OK, which room do you
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want vacuumed? Oh, no, no, no, it's not which
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room. I want the whole house vacuumed.
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All right, so I'm going to do this thing.
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And I've been to your house to vacuum that whole house would
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take a day and 1/2. It took me over an hour to do
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the whole thing. An hour?
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No. If it took you an hour to vacuum
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that whole house, you did not do a particularly solid.
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Well, let me say this, I stopped at the end of an hour.
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OK. OK.
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That sounds a lot more like it. So I'm done with this and I
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thought this is just ridiculous. You know, they're better things
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to do with an hour of your time. Of course you do want the lace
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vacuumed. And I thought maybe it's time to
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look into getting one of those robo vacuums.
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I looked at them some years ago, haven't looked at them since.
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So I got online. I'm poking around and the prices
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are kind of reasonable. I'm reading reviews and a friend
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of mine has one. I looked up his and there's now
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a couple generations later and I saw one that I liked.
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The one that I liked was beyond my budget, but I found a
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refurbished 1. Once in a while I'll do that.
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I'll buy refurbished stuff and I find that actually the quality
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is possibly better because they brought it in, they figured out
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and made sure that thing worked right.
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I'll just throw this out there. There are all manner of products
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for which this would not be the case, right?
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But for anything electronic, you're probably better off
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buying the refurb because things that come off an assembly line
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don't get checked, they get thrown in a box and.
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Shipped. That's right.
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Yep. When they go back, they get
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taken apart. The problem that they had and
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got fixed, any other problems there might be have been
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identified. You have much higher quality
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control on a refurb. Yeah, you might not get the
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warranty, so you've got to weigh those things off each other.
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But if I find something that has the same warranty on a refurb as
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the new product, I always buy the refurb.
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Yeah. So we did that, or I did that
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and got it for about half the retail price.
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And it's got Lidar, you know, this radar thing, the laser
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radar that can see objects. I am wholly unfamiliar with that
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term. So it's got a bumper like many
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of these things do, so it bumps into furniture, but it can
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actually see if I put something in front of it, it'll stop
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before it gets to the thing in turn and go around.
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It that is fascinating. It's astounding.
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In any event, I set the thing up and first thing you do, you
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know, you download the app and very first thing is it says, OK,
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it needs to make a map of your house.
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So hit go. I hit go, and the thing trundles
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out and starts wandering around the house.
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And it's doing this for, I don't know, half an hour or so.
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And then I get a ping on my phone.
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OK, we're done. Take a look at this map.
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Is this accurate? Oh, my God.
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It was a highly accurate map of the house and it had clearly
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identified furniture versus walls and the whole thing.
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So I said, all right, fine, I've set this thing up and 2:00 in
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the morning, every morning, it goes out and vacuums.
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I come downstairs, the place is clear.
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It looks vacuumed right, noticeably better.
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In any event, I start thinking about this and I'm just
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particularly having just a few days ago before done the
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vacuuming myself. I'm just blown out of the water
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at how much time and energy this thing has saved for me and all I
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have to do now is push a button, it goes and it does this thing.
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I'm astounded. And then I think about all of
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the appliances that the modern home has that do things like
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this for us every day, and we aren't astounded by it.
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I'm not astounded by it. I've got a dishwasher, and you
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put the dishes in, you push the button.
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The next day, you know, they're clean.
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Everybody does this sort of thing.
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You know how it works. But that visceral sense of, Oh
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my God, how much labor this just saved me, we tend not to have
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with our appliances because we're so used to them.
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It takes something like this of getting this new thing that I've
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never experienced before and seeing what it does to get that
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incredible gut reaction to it. Oh, oh, and so I said this to my
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wife is I'm recounting to her the story I'm recounting to you
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now and my feelings about this. And she said, yeah, her
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grandmother had hired people to come and help whatever it was,
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draw water from the well or clean the house or whatever it
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is. And there her grandmothers
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family was not rich, their regular middle class even a
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little bit less. And it was the case that, you
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know, 100 years ago or more, even middle class families would
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have servants who would do things right.
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And we don't have servants today, but we've got appliances.
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The appliances do that plus more that the servants used to do.
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Yeah. I'm loathe to let any stranger,
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hell, man, I'm loathe to let any human being into my house.
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You know, it's just a private space and I don't like that.
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But I have servants in every room.
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Yeah, the dishwasher is really a great example because that's
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luxury right now. You can go to the washer dryer
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set and make very strongly, I think, the case that that did
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more to liberate women than any political thing ever did or
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could have done. Yeah, and that's not an
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exaggeration. No, no.
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I mean this in the most literal sense possible, because people
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have no sense of this. In order to wash clothes, Once
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Upon a time, you had to bundle them up in a basket or a tub and
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drag them to a running river. Yeah.
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And in the winter time, you either couldn't find one or it
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became extraordinarily difficult.
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But it was never an easy, pleasant task.
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It was always difficult. And once you get it to the
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river, you then have to manually scrub the things, and then you
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hold them sodden back where you put them through a ringer.
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Then you put them on the line and oh, and then you've got to
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iron them because permanent press didn't exist.
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That's right. And I could tell you, Aunt, I'm
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well into my 50s at this point, and in my entire life, I've
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never ironed a thing. So in a dishwasher, on the other
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hand, that's more of a luxury, right?
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Because washing dishes is not nearly as difficult as washing
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clothes would. Be that's right.
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You can make a pretty strong case that, all right, we're
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going to call a washer dryer as close to a necessity as you can
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get without going over the line. You could go to a laundromat if
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you had to. I've done this right.
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As an adult, I have gone to a laundromat and done my laundry,
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and I hate it. But the other option was either
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not doing it or, you know, finding a river.
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Neither of those things is acceptable, given that you can
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go someplace with a stack of quarters and get it taken care
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of. But when you think about a
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dishwasher in the kitchen, that's truly a luxury item.
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You could do your own dishes. We have sinks now.
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At one point it would have been science fiction, but at this
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point, it's just a luxury. And yet we don't think of it as
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a luxury. We just think of it as one of
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those things that we absolutely have to have, right?
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What's a luxury? A trip to Europe, that's a
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luxury. What else?
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Well, all kinds of things that you can't afford.
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Because we think of luxuries in terms of price, not in terms of
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what they do right now. A dishwasher.
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I mean, you could buy a dishwasher for two 300 bucks.
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That's astonishing given the labor it saves you over the
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space of a year. If your labor is worth a dollar
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an hour, it still makes sense to buy a dishwasher.
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Right. Imagine if you paid somebody to
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come and do your dishes, what that would cost you right it?
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Would cost you a fortune. So too with so many mundane
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tasks that we have eclipsed through these little tiny
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luxuries like your robot vacuum. Look, your having talked about
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it just now makes me think I need to go get one.
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Yeah, they're really cool. That's about what it took for me
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to go from thinking once every six months I should look into
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robot vacuums to now thinking, why don't I have a robot vacuum,
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right? Is it a luxury?
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It's absolutely a luxury. Is it cheap enough that doesn't
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really count as a luxury anymore?
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Probably. But notice something
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interesting. You were talking about how much
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it would cost to hire somebody to do the dishes.
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So you have the dishwasher, you have the washing machine, you
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have all the various things that otherwise, if you didn't have
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these and you wanted not to do the job yourself, you'd have to
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hire someone. And I want to go to the people
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who say to employers, if you can't afford to pay a living
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wage, you shouldn't be in business.
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You shouldn't be in business at all now.
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Apply that same logic here. If you can't afford to pay
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someone to come in and do your dishes, then no, you shouldn't
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have a dishwasher. You should just be doing them
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yourself. In the context of economic
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analysis, and I'm not talking about your feelings or what you
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think might be the case, in the context defined by economic
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analysis, there is literally no difference between those two
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things. That's right.
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Literally no difference whatsoever.
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You know, people say, well, yeah, but that's a business.
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Yeah, well, your household is a business also.
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You're providing a living for you and your family.
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That is what your business does. And not only that, it behaves as
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a business. You hire people to do the things
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you can't do yourself. The grocery store is the perfect
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example. Yes, yes, you can't grow your
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own groceries. You can't get your own meat.
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And until we have Star Trek replicators, you'll never be
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able to. You have to hire that job out.
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Well, if you're old and infirm, you also can't do your laundry.
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You have to hire that job out until you get a washing machine,
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Then you can. These things are all over the
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place. We talked about appliances, but
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a big thing, and I notice it here, is the heat.
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If you want heat, you turn a switch on the wall.
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A magical switch. Now all throughout our married
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lives we've had wood stoves and thankfully they've never been
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the thing we had to rely on. That's more of an ambiance
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thing, but nonetheless we have the wood stove.
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Can confirm, and what this means is that when I went over to
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aunt's house, one room was 385° and the rest of them were, let's
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just say, significantly colder than that one.
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But let me tell you what's involved here.
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You go out and let's suppose the tree is already on the ground.
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Forget about cutting it down, right?
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The trees already on the ground. You got to cut it up.
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You've got to haul it. You've got to split it, you've
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got to stack it. And I'm assuming here that you
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you're already using machinery, a chainsaw, you're not going to
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use an axe and you got a tractor to haul the stuff.
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You're not going to drag it by hand.
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And you've got a splitter that's going to split the thing.
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You're not going to use, you know, the mall to do all of
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this. So already there's a tremendous
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amount of mechanization going on.
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And I could tell you from years of experience, it will take a
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full day of work to put away what will turn out to be maybe a
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week's worth of heating wood. A full day to get heat for one
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week. What do you do today?
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You walk to the wall and you flick a switch.
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And the best part of that switch is when it gets really hot
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outside, it also makes the house cold.
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Right. It goes the other direction,
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right? It's a magical switch that does
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everything I need not only to stay alive, but to stay
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comfortable. You and I have said these words
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before multiple times that people really need to be
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thankful for what they have. And so it's very much on my mind
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anyway. And Despite that, I was taken
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aback by my reaction to this robot vacuum.
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And I realized that my understanding of of, you know,
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being thankful for the the machines that we have and the
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standard of living we have is way in my head.
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Even I, knowing all of this, don't feel it at a gut level.
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I didn't feel the gut level till that little hockey puck start
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running back and forth at 2:00 in the morning cleaning my
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house. But how?
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Can you feel it at a gut level? Our lives are generally quite
19:25
comfortable. Yes.
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This isn't a matter, not really, of having this income versus
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that income. If you're able to have a job,
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chances are your life is more comfortable right now than the
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vast majority of everybody who has ever lived ever.
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And we make this case in other contexts.
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But if you're alive right now, you probably live, in many
19:48
respects, more comfortably than any of the great monarchs of
19:53
18th century Europe could ever have dreamed of living, let
19:56
alone lived. How do I know you have indoor
20:00
plumbing? I mean, really think about what
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indoor plumbing brings into and more importantly, takes out of
20:06
your life. It's really quite an astonishing
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difference from what came before.
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OK, heat and cold, that's nice. But Oh my God, I have a toilet
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and sinks. You know, if you're out looking
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for an apartment and you're thinking, oh God, I got to pay,
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you know, $1800 a month in rent to live in this ridiculous city,
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feeling whatever city you want, and you walk in, there's no
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question in your mind that there's going to be a toilet
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there. Right in hot water.
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It's not like you say, let me see the sinks.
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I want to make sure it has sinks.
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Nobody thinks this way. And that's how you know things
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have gotten better. You have to always ask yourself,
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what do I take for granted? This is, incidentally, how you
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know what kind of political environment you're living in.
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What do I take for granted? Who am I allowed to make fun of
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here? I make fun of whoever's the
20:59
president almost every day. Do you think N Koreans are
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behaving in that manner? Do you think Russians are
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behaving in that manner? And the answer is no, No, they
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are not. So it's always about what you
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take for granted and the things that we take for granted.
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That's an astonishing list. I was thinking about your vacuum
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story before we decided to talk about it here.
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What are the things I'm taking for granted?
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Well, I take for granted that no matter what I'm doing, I can
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whip out my phone and get an answer to any question or avail
21:30
myself of almost every service. Yeah, from anywhere to anywhere
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I can get a ride. If I need a place to stay, I can
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do that without getting out of my chair.
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If I'm in a country and I don't speak their language, I can get
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restaurant reviews literally as I walk past the restaurants
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automatically. Every restaurant I walk by, I
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can just get an automatic review in my language.
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If I need to have a conversation with somebody in a foreign
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country, I could put a device in between US and we can converse,
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even though there's no way in hell we could ever do that.
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I've done that and it is the weirdest experience.
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These are things that we now take for granted.
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By any estimation, we are insanely wealthy.
22:14
Insanely wealthy? Ask yourself the people I used
22:17
to pay to do things that indicated I was incredibly
22:20
wealthy. Travel agents, for example, they
22:23
no longer exist because I got even wealthier.
22:26
There's this middle phase where you're incredibly wealthy and
22:29
people exist that will satisfy your every need, and then you
22:32
don't even need them. And then people moan about how
22:37
hard life is. No, pumpkin, it's not.
22:40
It's not hard at all. You're not going to freeze to
22:42
death no matter where you are in the country right now.
22:45
You may be really cold. You might be uncomfortable.
22:47
You may think, oh, my God, I got to pay the gas bill.
22:50
But you're not going to freeze to death and you're not going to
22:52
spend a day stacking an hour's worth of wood.
22:55
Yeah, it's kind of astonishing when you think about it.
22:58
I'm always amazed, and I mean this quite literally as I live.
23:02
I'm amazed every day by something that I had here to
23:06
four not paid any attention to. That's, I think, when you start
23:09
to realize how good you've got it.
23:11
I live in what, when I was a young person, I would have
23:15
thought I live in the sci-fi future.
23:17
Oh yes, not in the Blade Runner future where everything is dark
23:21
and grim and nobody's got enough food to eat.
23:25
I live in the science fiction future where, you know, with a
23:28
few really glaring exceptions, we're all doing way better than
23:31
we once did. And those glaring exceptions
23:34
need not exist but for our pig headedness in the 1st place,
23:38
which means we'll figure it out at some point.
23:41
I don't know. When you look around, the
23:42
comforts of life are kind of overwhelming.
23:44
And we've said this before, we're so comfortable now that we
23:47
have to go out and exercise at the end of the day instead of
23:51
breaking our all day long to do our jobs.
23:54
So, you know, as long as that's the case, I guess I got nothing
23:58
to complain about. Not really.
23:59
You, James, nothing to complain. About I'll find something, yeah,
24:02
I'll work on it, but we've all got it pretty soft, me included.
24:07
And that's all the time we've got this week on words and
24:09
numbers. Until next time.
24:11
Send us e-mail wordsandnumberspodcast@gmail.com.
24:15
Try to be nice to one person who doesn't deserve it till next
24:18
week. Can't take it easy.
24:19
See you next week, James.