Incredible, Indeed

No, not the cabin. It’s fine, don’t get me wrong. I’m using the word “incredible” to refer to the builder, Bjorn Brenton, who was 21 when he produced this video. It’s hard to nail him down (sorry), but he’s apparently a Swede, although it appears he’s building stuff in the Ukraine. I’ll have to assume the western part.

I’ve seen lots of videos of people making stuff, including proto-semi-kinda houses like this one. They all use clickbait headlines that are attractive to the modern internaut. Young people don’t respond to anything but dream house baloney. They’re say they’re not only willing, but eager, to live in the forest in a log cabin with no electricity, or a tiny house, or a hobbit hole, or anything other than a regular single family home, because they’d have to mow the lawn and clean out the gutters in the fall. For most of these alternative housing people, it’s an offer to expend all sorts of effort in the quest for a free lunch. They’re willing to watch videos of people doing it, anyway, while eating microwaved hot pockets in their apartments.

At any rate, this video is well worth the two hours it takes to see it done. This fellow’s cabin project is borrowed or stolen or re-purposed on at least one other YouTube channel that I saw, titled: Man Builds Incredible DIY Wood Cabin in the Woods Start to Finish. “Incredible” is one of those words that’s been bowdlerized, if not outright bastardized, by misuse, and then plain overuse. Words like amazing, or at least unusual seem more to the point. Commendable comes to mind.

But I really can’t believe (the true meaning of incredible) what I’m looking at in the video. I don’t mean it’s a fraud. I have no doubt the kid built this by himself. The construction techniques are mundane to someone who’s built houses. Not incredible. I’m talking about the young man in the video. He’s incredible. He wasn’t old enough to buy beer when he built this. Here’s what I noticed about him:

He is dressed properly for construction. He is wearing long pants, a shirt with sleeves, and substantial boots. He is wearing a hat, and it’s not on backwards. He has no visible tattoos. He wears gloves to protect his hands when it’s appropriate. He has a proper toolbelt with small assortment of good hand tools, not loaded down with labor-saving gewgaws that are a drag to carry around all day. He knows better than to risk injury while lifting, and rigs a come-along for timbers that more foolhardy workers would try to muscle into place. He has a broom, and knows how to use it. He finishes off the exterior with a flourish (the antlers). He saves interior work for bad weather. He works carefully, but doesn’t waste his time with superfluous safety devices. He uses insulation, but he doesn’t worship it. He knows the value of wood preservative. He has a cute dog, instead of the usual vicious beast.

A cabin in the woods is nothing. That young man there, however, is a rare thing indeed. I used to know lots of guys like him. I was sorta one myself. And we’ve been hunted to extinction. Well, almost, apparently.

The Thing That Is

This video is ten years old. At the time, Fred Harriss was billed as “Britain’s longest-serving blacksmith.” He’s been banging away since 1938, when he was ten years old. Well, let’s face facts. There was really only one man who was likely to break Fred Harriss’ record, and that was Fred. According to the comments on the video, he’s still going strong at 94 years old. He doesn’t seem to take any days off, either. How many people can claim to break a record at work every single day for years on end? 

Human beings like Fred are getting pretty scarce. I’m not talking about his age, or his work ethic, which are nonpareil, of course. I mean that he’s a person that is a Thing, and always has been. Commerce is currently atomized. People do little bits of this or that, but not enough of anything to become The Thing That Is. Heidegger had a lot to say about the idea. It mostly makes my eyes glaze over. Sartre came closer: What you choose to do is who you are. You define yourself. Even refusing to do anything is a choice, which defines you whether you want to or not. A policeman will explain that very concept to you with a taser and handcuffs if you refuse to identify yourself during a traffic stop. A man becomes the thing he is doing at the very moment he acts.

I guess Sartre means that a guy sleeping behind a dumpster all the livelong day is as much a Thing as Fred. I don’t think so. So I guess I’m not buying anything on the card tables at Sartre’s Bazaar, either. I’m going to be required to retreat to the Stoics. Fred has an unwavering devotion to his craft, and a total mastery of himself. Daily repetition, regardless of external circumstances, makes him a model of virtue through discipline. A sunny Sisyphus. It’s how you roll the rock that matters. Sleeping at the bottom of the hill in the shade of the rock doesn’t cut any ice with yours truly. And Sartre should look me in the eye when he’s talking to me.

Fred is a smithy. That’s a Thing, in addition to being a person. He avers that he’s never been anything else, and never wanted to be anything else, including retired. To retire would mean that he would cease to be the Thing that he is. That means he would cease to exist, in the only way that matters to him.

If you study ancient Greek and Roman gods, you notice that they’re not omnipotent, and some are at least partially human. They dabble in human affairs, and do mundane stuff like grabbing chicks and dragging them back to their Olympian lairs, or the underworld, and having trailer park kids with them and whatnot. The line between human and divine was kinda blurry. In Rome, especially, extraordinary humans were declared gods. Many other cultures did the same sort of thing. When people did superhuman things, they were granted apotheosis.

noun: Exaltation to divine rank or stature; deification.
noun: Elevation to a preeminent or transcendent position; glorification.
noun: An exalted or glorified example.

I’ve decided to revive the practice. I’m expanding the pantheon. In doing so, I’ll be able to consider myself pretty exalted in my own right. For example, the President of the United States can pardon people, but if I can declare them gods, I’d say I have a leg up. And I’m international, baby. So I give you, ladies and gentlemen, Hephaestus, Vulcan, Goibniu, Gobannus, Völundr, Svarog, Tvaṣṭṛ, Viśvakarma, Ogun, Amatsumara, Kanayago-no-Kami, and Kajiya-hime.

And, you know, Fred.

Chiba Harbor Freight

I’m not exactly sure what this video demonstrates. There’s work ethic, of course. It’s an excellent example of the reduce, re-use, recycle ethos. It’s a testament to curiosity. The clerk studies about tools constantly because it’s interesting, and important for his job. There’s customer service. The battery tester from around the 12:00 minute mark, used to measure how many cycles of recharging batteries had already endured in order to price the tools fairly, is a primer on honesty and fairness.  Networking enters into it. There’s a bootstrap lesson at around 13:00 minutes. The owner of this shop explains it started as a different kind of business, and they tried used tools as a sideline, and eventually it became so popular that it superseded the original theme of the shop.

Ultimately, it’s just a slice of life from somewhere I’ve never been, and know little about. I’m always grateful for stuff like that. Way to go, Paolo from Tokyo. Regular news outlets and broadcast media never have any useful information, never mind interesting stuff to look at. ZooTube has become a fetid swamp of robot-generated slop. Finding something like this is getting pretty difficult these days.

The closest similar business in the US I can think of is the tool rental house, the kind of place I’m pretty familiar with. A jolly clerk is pretty rare in one of those, though. They tend to be fairly snooty in my experience, and for no reason. They care for their tools about as well as you see in the video, and at least know how to turn them on. They generally rent more robust tools than you see in the Japanese video. It’s doesn’t look like Harbor Fraught exploded in a good rental house.

No, truth be told, for the last couple of decades, in the US it was Craigslist that performed the same service you see in the video, without any semblance of service, of course. The market has now almost entirely been purloined by FriendFace Marketplace. If you’re in the market for a broken tool, sold to you in a parking lot in a sketchy section of town, Zuckerberg is your man. Stolen, broken tools, in many cases.

The United States is trying to make everything as impersonal as possible. We went from shopping in stores to supermarkets to warehouses to mouse clicks. Even the delivery drivers run away so they don’t have to talk to you. Your only chance at human interaction is interrupting porch pirates while they’re stealing your packages, and they’re famously introverted.

I don’t know if there’s anything that can be gained from watching that video. But I certainly noticed things that have been lost.

If You Fix Things, You Are My Brother: The 240Z

The 240z was an interesting car. Nissans were still called Datsuns back then, and along with Toyotas and Hondas, the badges were making inroads into the American market. American cars had gotten elephantine. Little Japanese cars got good gas mileage, were more fun to drive (a floor shift beats three on the tree anyday), and were cheap to buy. But it took a lot for American buyers to get over their aversion to Japanese cars. Some of it was patriotism. But mostly, it was simply inertia. People need a big nudge to change their long-held opinions.

The 240z was just that kind of nudge. It came out in 1969, and it changed American attitudes towards Japanese cars overall. Lots of people started driving pokey B210s and Honda Civics because the 240z made Japanese cars finally seem cool. The car looked like an Asian Jag, or any number of other European long-hood roadsters.

It’s not surprising to see someone restoring a 240z. It’s basically always been the kind of car worth a makeover. Fifty years on, it still seems as cool as it ever was, or even moreso. What is surprising to me is to see how good this panel beater is at his job. He lives in a land beyond meticulous.

More or less the first job I ever had was doing the needful in a body shop. We did quick and dirty repairs, using much more bondo than ingenuity. We sprayed paint like vandals. The fellow that ran it, whose lungs are probably long since an exhibit in some Don’t Do That Museum, made most of his money by pinstriping cars. He left work to me he probably shouldn’t have. If you’re currently driving a Vista Cruiser and the rear fixed windows fall into the rotted fenders when you go over a speed bump, I apologize unreservedly.  So I know bad well enough to know good when I see it.

I watched a bunch of related videos for this restoration. They’re delightfully free of sleeve tattoos and thrash metal soundtracks. There are lots of people banging on old cars on YouTube. This fellow stands out.

The Future of Software

Here’s how cars were made in 1960:

Here’s how they’re made now:

The only real work for humans in the modern factory involves judgment. They inspect what the machines have done to make sure it’s correct. Later on in the process, some people crawl around in the passenger compartment to install the electronics and the trouble lights I’ll be looking at when I buy the car second hand in fifteen years or so. It’s not automated, but it sure is mechanized to a fare-thee-well. Again, they are relying more on judgment and experience than a strong back.

It’s 1960 in software. People who push a little javascript around on a virtual desktop, in a fit of self-importance, call themselves engineers, and they think they’re immune to the same forces that made all those thousands of blue-collar workers superfluous in the space of a single lifetime. Open AI or LLMs, or whatever you want to call almost-thinking-bots are going to perform all the IT drudge work going forward. This is not conjecture on my part. This website uses seven plugins I installed that I coded using AI. They all work better than the human-coded plugins they replaced.

The only thing that will be really valuable for computer coding is going to be judgment. And if you’re wearing wool socks and sandals, a man bun, and a neckbeard, I’m afraid you’ve already demonstrated exactly how valuable your judgment is going to be going forward.