Many changes have occurred. I am, de facto and soon de jure, now becoming a homeowner. And here enters the possibility of a new sort of political and moral corruption. The interests of homeowners are generally opposed to the interests of non-homeowners, so you need to curb your own economic interest, which is a hard thing to do in our society, or else become more or less evil. That’s the default, if you prioritize your home value - you want it to which is to say, you start doing to your neighborhood, which consists of the humans around you, what the richest person who deigns to notice would want done to them. What this is, directionally, we can imagine easily - think what the richest person, richer than you, would want done to you if you were in their way. It’s the easiest way, given that we’re selfish and oversensitive to power dynamics over us rather than us over others. Again, these are the defaults, but if you are to resist them, you need to put in some deliberate effort and commit to some material stakes and hardlines, but I don’t think we tend to be great narrators of our own struggles of good vs evil, the discussion is necessary but I don’t trust my solo platform here, so I’m going to talk about something else, tangential to home ownership, construction, and a beloved screw I found.
The interesting tangential thing about home-owning, though it’s by no means particular to it, is that you engage in the process of building things more than you might otherwise, if you didn’t grow up with it. Now, I wouldn’t equate homeownership with building more broadly - with a moment’s thought, you realize that many people engaged with building things, people who build things all day, are tenants, and in fact I first used a Torx screw, the screw I’m about to talk about, not in the home but in a small community workshop, a “skill share” built around constructing garden beds, where most people were not homeowners themselves. But the house has given me a lot more personal exposure to professional and amateur carpentry, plumbing, gardening, painting, landscaping, and all the associated chores, and based on a sliding scale of difficulty I may be doing something myself or with my partner, assisting a more experienced person we hire (or a neighbor who volunteers), or simply hiring a full team of experts and assistant experts, which still is educational in that they talk through the jobs, especially since we tend to gather a lot of different estimates to save money.
I really enjoy learning and often doing this stuff, though the cost in time and energy takes away from my career and ability to stay in touch socially. I can’t do any of that stuff well enough to earn a living at it, and never will - even many really experienced people struggle with it, because of the way our economy is structured. But actually engaging in the mechanical work (when I can compartmentalize away my panic at the opportunity cost of it, the fact that it cuts into my time pursuing the higher-compensated work I need to be doing as a matter of economic necessity and occasionally does so severely) is a pleasure. At my summer job, I work a couple days a week - the most I can afford, given the undercompensation in the field - at a historic museum focused on the maritime trades, and in my rotation I apprentice with various practitioners of trades - cooperage, carving, smithing, etc. - that were essential in the mid-1800s. At times they paid the bills - the house we live in was owned first by a carpenter, who bought the property from a (probably whaling) ship’s captain. It’s a great house, to which we are adding many things built in factories today. (Hopefully it won’t be washed into the nearby estuary by the time the mortgage is paid off, but that’s a problem most of us are going to encounter in some form, I wouldn’t escape it by paying rent either). But to bring it back - it’s interesting learning how those trades work, and seeing the modern innovations.
Some of the innovations are obvious without a second thought - electricity, motors, composites, YouTube instructionals - but I like to notice the small things. For instance, we have great screws nowadays. Not only in variety and material and the drills and drivers that help them along, but even in things as simple as the heads. In the 1800s, most screws were slot screws, with a single line across - you’d use a “flat-head” screwdriver or anything of that shape. Now, there are a huge variety of heads. We’ve all encountered, at least, the Phillips-head screwdriver, and we’ve all found stripped Phillips-head screws, where the driver can no longer bite to turn them. If we’ve assembled Ikea stuff, we’ve encountered hex-head screws (at least machine screws or the screw-adjacent bolts). But the star-head screws (branded Torx) beat them all. Look around you at pieces of wood where a screw head is in pretty deep, maybe too deep. Decent chance it’s got a star head. Maybe hex, maybe square, but the star head is better. Drive one and you’ll see. It locks right in and it’s really easy to get torque to the screw. In the last year, reading about screws, I learned the term “cam out,” which you know by the feel even if you don’t know it by name: it’s when the driver or bit pops out, and if you’re not careful you’ll end up stripping the screw that way. It happens all the time with slot screws, almost as often with Phillips heads, not that often with hex or square, but almost never with star-heads. And they don’t strip. Below is a good geometric diagram of how it works as compared to the hex screw, which has more danger of rounding out if you’re putting a lot of force on it
Now, some of the disadvantages are obvious. One is you gotta have a star-head screwdriver, multiple in fact, because, like hex or square, they’re unforgiving about different sizes. That makes them less accessible, and on top of that the screws themselves are more expensive, either more difficult to manufacture or because of some kind of proprietary situation, I’m not really sure. But they do work well - if I have a job where I really need to trust the screw, I go with one.
One reason I love mechanical stuff is because I really love a technology that works, where the innovation is in it working well, and part of why I love it so much is it feels rare. So much innovation is in things that we don’t want (rent-seeking, monopolization, attention-hijacking, contract bullying, etc.) that I’ve instinctively dissociated business from actual production of utility (probably a good corrective instinct, because the superstition that money measures utility is so pervasive and damaging). But it still is possible to make things that work better, even if the market often drives things the other way. I don’t really know the political and economic solution, nor do I have a conclusion (the market doesn’t reward essay-writing enough for me, an amateur with mid-level skills, to make money on deeply pursuing questions and hammering out the writing this way, and this will only continue to be devalued, so I’m seeking profit elsewhere), but I’ll leave with another evolution, a more typical innovation familiar to me, the fact that, inside an Apple computer, a computer loaded with many very good innovations, but also some others, you can find Torx screws, but they have five lobes instead of six lobes, not because it’s better, not because it has more torque or any other advantage, but because it’s close enough to being as good as a six-lobe and it has the added advantage to Apple of being less accessible, harder to repair, there are many options for six-sided star drives that you can find at any hardware store, but the five is hard to find, and to them it’s a feature, not a bug, and if we look around we will find many more features of this kind.
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