Rent to Own

10:36 Friday, 31 July 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 74.66°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 73% Wind: 4.41mph
Words: 318

I'm going to offer an opinion about something that I probably don't really care about, Apple's new "Apple Upgrade" program.

Riccardo Mori has an opinion, one that I'm inclined to agree with on an emotional level. I've even complained about not "owning" things very recently, especially "intellectual property" products.. We "license" them, and those licenses are apparently revocable on a whim.

But I also believe "ownership" is an illusion. At best, it is an abstraction, an artifact of our economic system, and an unexamined belief in our culture.

I'm beginning to believe that "ownership" should attach to the producer, and that they should retain responsibility for the product throughout its lifetime, including its disposal.

I'm not sure how that would work for property like houses. Perhaps those should be "real" property, with title and responsibility. But consumer goods, like the electronic crap we buy to entertain ourselves, should remain the responsibility of the manufacturer. When you "buy" it, perhaps it should have a term, a defined period of sole possession and use, after which you return it to the manufacturer who is responsible for its ultimate disposition.

This would be horrible for the "retro" community, or perhaps a whole new business model for manufacturers. Sit on a returned product for 20 years, and then offer another term to oldsters pining to relive the days of their youth.

But this open-cycle of manufacture, use and unregulated disposal as "trash" is unsustainable.

I think we need to regulate industry to close the loop on consumer goods, and make every transaction something like this.

Apple's "rent-to-own" program isn't that, but it begins to shape the market.

I'm not confident we have the political will and legislative integrity to enact a genuinely effective system. But the current system is staggering toward collapse because it's unsustainable and to a large degree responsible for many of the challenges we face today.

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After the Rain

09:05 Friday, 31 July 2026

Current Wx: Temp: 69.64°F Pressure: 1016hPa Humidity: 80% Wind: 2.93mph
Words: 197

We've been stymied by wet weather through most of the week. We'd hoped to pour the slab on Thursday, but the rain pushed it to today. The weather today is beautiful.

We got the radiant floor tubing installed this morning. The whole Parallels, Windows 11, LoopCAD exercise was a waste of money. I ended up doing kind of a SWAG on the layout. The great room in the basement has the densest tube placement because it will have the highest heat loss through the French doors and the window. The studio/guest room on the other side has the second-highest density because it's smaller and we've decided to put a small fan coil unit in there for cooling. Any guests should be able to dial-in their comfort pretty closely.

We got three runs into the basement bathroom, which should keep that floor fairly comfortable. The rest of the basement has very low heat loss so spacing is wider. We used three 300-foot rolls of PEX tubing.

Rebar has to go down and we should begin pouring a couple of hours from now.

(Update: No rebar. Mix has fiber in it.)

The beat goes on...

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