Thursday, January 09, 2014

a quick thought on modern marine electronics and being on the ass end of the supply chain...

Worse than Enron (but no perp walks), Dix on his Cape to Rio race, and an interesting TED talk...

My battery charger seems to be on steroids of late as it's putting out way more voltage than it should. So, time to get a new one and it got me thinking...

Even with a dodgy economy, multiple ecologic disasters waiting in the wings, and a bunch of useless bought and paid for yahoos in government doing their version of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, it's still pretty easy to live on a boat in paradise.

There was a time when having an electrical item fritz out meant weeks or months you might be without while you waited for it to be repaired or replaced. Today it's a simple matter of getting online, ordering a new one, and hey presto in a week I'll have a new battery charger that works sitting at the post office to be picked up.

Life, as they say, is good.

But... (Damn, there's always a but isn't there?) I sometimes worry that we take the instant gratification culture a little bit for granted. Whether it's getting stuff replaced when needful or the fact that 99% of the products in the local grocery store come from 2000 or more miles away makes me just that little bit nervous.

Anyone living in the Caribbean for any length of time quickly realizes that when things get funky weather wise, it affects the supply chain in a big way. A major hurricane will create shortages for months of some products. It's just the nature of being on the ass end of the supply chain and being dependent for just about everything which is not a happy place for some one on a boat to be.

Maybe that's why I'm less than enthused by a lot of modern marine electronics which are not user repairable...

Listening to KT Tunstall

So it goes...