Current year US military is hilarious

So, the US lit off a Minuteman-3 recently. This system, with origins in the 1950s, is the land-based part of the US nuclear deterrence triad. The test didn’t go well; it blew up right after launch, probably from rotten capacitors. The google machine tells me this isn’t an isolated incident; the last time we tried lighting one off, the same thing happened. We do have a sea based ballistic missile deterrent in the Trident-2. The US hasn’t had any problems with them yet. The British have, and they draw from a shared pool with the US. The other arm of the triad is the B-2 and B-52; the B-2 can’t fly when it’s raining, and the latter dates from 1952. There are plenty of nuclear tipped cruise missiles; fortunately most of those were designed in the 70s and 80s when America still mostly had its shit together.

Unfortunately none of the American cruise missiles are particularly long range or stealthy (there was a stealthy one, retired),  all are subsonic, and they have shorter ranges than the Russian gizmos, which also come in supersonic and hypersonic varieties. Rooskies also have newer generations of ballistic missiles, and are really good at shooting down cruise missiles, so there’s that. Supposedly they also have nuclear tidal wave torpedoes capable of wiping out US coastal areas in radioactive sea water, SLAM hypersonic nuclear  ramjet cruise missiles and who knows what else. Pretty obvious who wins a nuclear war scenario: it won’t be the US. I mean, nobody wins a nuclear war, but the days of US supremacy or even basic competence with maintaining nuclear forces are long over.

Meanwhile in Ukraine, the Russians have figured out they can mass produce cheap drones with parts they scrounge from AliExpress and old washing machines and grind down Ukrainian forces that way.  There are supposedly effective defenses against them. Raytheon has some giant klystron thing you can fry consumer grade electronics with. It’s not clear how well they work, but the US isn’t going to find out because …. well I don’t know why they don’t manufacture and deploy the things. The Russians are a lot better at microwave technology than the US is, so I assume they have something that could also work in the same way, but as far as can be told in the fog of war, they haven’t deployed yet either. Maybe they’d be giant HARM beacons or something. The US government seems to have lost interest in Ukraine in general; like a psychotic toddler who gets bored with a video game he’s losing and flings it away.

Speaking again of submarine nuclear deterrence: the Russians have a decent fleet, with more modern types, some of which have capabilities unmatched by the US. The Chinese have a half dozen each attack and ballistic missile submarines as well, effectively the same as the US Los Angeles class (26 of which are still in service). They also have a really good anti-ship missile. Mostly though, if the Chinese want to destroy the US, they could simply stop shipping us stuff in return for T-bills. I assume they’re for helping get Taiwan back or threatening the Indians. While the US has a dominant Navy, the concept of it is kind of inherently stuck in the early 20th century: it’s to protect US world exports which no longer exist. Protecting US imports doesn’t work if your trading partners are mad at you.

On the bright side, we have a chick as Chief of Naval Operations; so America’s prime directive has been fulfilled. The ability to project power via a powerful navy is useful. The ability to sustain a war with the one we have is questionable though. Since the US shipped most of its manufacturing abroad, including the ability to manufacture things like warships, we’d be kind of screwed in that scenario. Just as the Ukranians are finding out, the ability to mass produce objects used in warfare is still pretty important, and the US is terrible at this. This despite all the futuristic solid printing computard nonsense the MIC and procurement is always babbling about lowering costs and increasing production.

The US Air Force is still the largest and most capable in the world. There are still lots of F-15s, and F-16s, and even though they’re old enough some of them are falling apart, these are pretty important and a source of real physical power. The F-22 is pretty cool, but there are only around 150 of them, and afaik they’re still suffocating pilots. One was recently used to shoot down a Chinese spy balloon.  F-35 also suffocates pilots, and there are considerably more of them, with considerably less utility beyond cost ineffective strafing of cavemen who don’t seem overly troubled by this.  We  have Naval F-18s which are also pretty cool. Of course, like with the Navy, we should think about what all these jets are for. They could probably defeat Russia’s air force. I won’t ask to what end, because nothing done by the foreign policy goons makes sense any more; it’s obvious we can’t defeat them on land. China’s air force would be considerably more difficult, as they’d have to get to China (the F35 wunderwaffe for example has short legs), and China has a lot of aircraft, many of them more advanced than our own.

As for the Army,  77% of military aged kids are ineligible because they’re too fat, too mentally ill or too retarded. And the standards are considerably more lax than in yesteryear when the Army could still fight some semblance of a ground war without full air superiority. People who have their shit together enough to pass the Army’s standards are mostly finding other things to do. Patriotism also isn’t taught in schools much any more, and at this point, I actually agree with this: America is fucked up and whatever there was to be proud of is gone.  The Army are offering special benefits so more people train for the hellish duty of telling family members their soldier relations are dead, presumably because they’re foreseeing lots of casualties in the next few years. People with long family military traditions are advising their sons to not enlist. The Army is considering reinstating the Draft. They’re so desperate for qualified useful personnel they stopped making advertisements featuring lesbian mommies, and they’re starting to make ads so lily white the Waffen SS would approve. There’s talk of making girlbosses register for the draft; it almost got out of committee. Ominous signs for certain. I’d almost enjoy the spectacle of delusional American womanhood being forced to join the Army, except I like my young female relatives.

First female Captained Aircraft Carrier leaves port: this is a metaphor for something.

 

Most of the innovations in weapons systems of the last two decades have been abject failures; from Zumwalt and Littoral Combat Ships, to the F-35. Even more humble projects like the KC-46 tanker (a Boeing 767 to replace the KC-135 which are basically 50s era 707s) have had a hard time. There are no new wunderwaffen in waiting, and the manufacturing capabilities of the US probably aren’t capable of building any if we were to come up with a good idea.

Bringing it back to the Minuteman failures, these failures are representative of the country in general. Our missiles don’t work, but we sure do have fancy over produced websites about our missiles. The current goblins in charge inherited something which was functioning pretty well, looted it, let it rot, and expects it to continue to function because they think technology they see all around them is something that just happens naturally, like sunshine. I bet more people got promoted making this cool website than making the missiles work; Mandarinates are always more concerned with appearances than fact. Simple things like town infrastructure are rotten (outside the beltway which hilariously still has nice roads). Even the biological material of the nation is decaying: the people are ridiculously obese and mentally ill, and life expectancy is declining. Institutions which should be impartial are politicized, and politicians are more interested in controlling what people say on twitter and facebook than they are in fixing the roads or the nuclear missiles. Everyone hates each other and everything is fake, gay and falling apart. But there’s a lot of stuff left for entropy to digest and dipshits tell us the economy is doing great, so nothing changes.

We just spent 20 years dropping expensive bombs on Afghans for wanting to be Afghans and live life their own way. In that period of time, their population doubled. Fertility rate of native born Americans (and allies), by contrast, is about half replacement rate. The people who fought the war with Afghanistan will be halved in population. That’s the optimistic view, assuming the Russians don’t nuke everyone in a fit of pique, and assuming we can convince some of the zoomers to fuck each other in the normal front-hole way. Dying America is still dangerous, like a lunatic who inherited his father’s arsenal, but it sure ain’t what it used to be.

 

I laugh along with Handsome Thursday Afghan chads

 

Edit add: Trident failed again.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68355395

Standards: a ratchet of progress

In my study of the history of scientific and technological progress, there are a few obvious drivers which help push us forward, ones which nobody can argue against. Standardization is one of these. Standardization moves a field from one of creative craftsmanship to one of routine engineering. Engineering can be planned; craftsmanship may run into unexpected problems.

I’ve documented this a little bit; the standardized screws made the industrial revolution possible. Screws had existed since the time of the ancient Greeks, but their contributions to man’s power over nature was supercharged by having standards. If you take a tour of old armories, they’ll likely tell a story of pre-standardization firearms and how standardization made mass production and mass adoption of cheap firearms possible. This changed human history forever: those societies who had mass produced firearms had peasant armies armed with cheap rifles with interchangeable parts: they conquered the world.

Humans have known about this for millennia of course; the Roman Empire had standardized brick sizes which made all manner of architectural innovation possible. There may be more ancient examples, but the concept of having a set standard which enabled planning through interchangeability is a very old idea. It continues to be an important source of innovation and increase in productivity: the shipping container is an obvious modern example which transformed logistics.

Consider the early 19th century physicists; restricting it to E&M, Ampere, Ohm, Faraday. Ampere was fortunate enough to be born in France in time to take advantage of the metric system. He was also fortunate to not be killed by the revolution, though it was a near thing as his father was. Faraday had an even better system of weights and measures: the Imperial system -you know, the measurement system that landed on the moon. Poor Ohm didn’t live in a real country and his weights and measures literally varied by the village.

The Imperial system and the metric system were both standards which helped fuel the scientific and industrial progress of the UK and France. While the Germans made some discoveries and industrial progress before the introduction of the metric system it arguably didn’t really achieve escape velocity until it adopted the metric system in 1872 (admittedly a year after the Empire was founded which I am sure also helped).

There are other smaller scale more or less contemporary examples. The CAMAC crate made the computerization of experimental physics possible. I don’t know what people used before CAMAC (NIM was an earlier related standard for general electronics) but it was ad-hoc and probably each installation used one or more grad student careers worth of brainpower and labor to set up and use. The ConFlat flange similarly made ultra high vacuum chamber construction from a sort of form of creative engineering project to a routine engineering practice any bozo could cobble together. These standards have probably saved tens or hundreds of thousands of wasted careers which would have otherwise been spent reinventing the wheel for a customized computerized experimental interface or vacuum chamber. Similarly I’m pretty sure there were lots of microcontroller systems in cars which didn’t use the CAN bus, but the ubiquity of the latter has made more interesting things possible and spread beyond automotive use. Of course a mature field like steel metallurgy and engineering with steels: there are like 3500 various standardized varieties of steel to build with: unlike the pre-industrial past where you were in the ridiculous situation of needing to be some kind of wizard to make decent steels like wootz out of charcoal, iron and horse piss.

The internet and various programming languages have standards committees which are of towering importance. I think it’s pretty obvious that there is much more work to be done here in computer land. As I have said, the profusion of serialization protocols continues to be an embarrassment for the profession of computard. This happens for sound sociological and business reasons of course; but there is no reason we should put up with it. Similarly for the various forms of shared object spaghetti. Of course, most programming languages are really only distinguishable from one another by what is written in them at this point: otherwise it’s 101 flavors of repl or compiled Algol, along with the mostly irrelevant paradigms of Lisp, Forth and APL. Honestly virtually everything in “software engineering” is non-standard craftsmanship spaghetti bullshit. Where companies succeed they generally have at least internal standards: Amazon most famously turned their internal software standards (which are horrible, but at least are a standard) into their most profitable product line.

I think most of software engineering will remain ad-hoc piles of craftsmanship bullshit, mostly because old software is valuable. There is otherwise absolutely no reason for it. People talk about “AI” replacing programmers; while aliens and immigrants have replaced many, LLMs haven’t, and almost certainly won’t for the foreseeable future. What could replace entire segments of programmers is standardization of more of the pieces which represent “software engineering.”

For a long time, LAMP was a software stack representing about 90% of what net companies do. It was a sort of defacto standard because it represented 4 technologies which were sort of “first and easy to use” -Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python. Now of course this stuff is enormously out of date and replaced by a bewildering bucket of cobbled together brainworms that have various alleged special qualities which supposedly make them better or solve some subset of problems more efficiently.  LAMP type problems, of course, could be made to go away with an efficient standardization, or even a product meant to standardize these sorts of workflows. Labview did something like this back in the 1980s; more or less an extinction event for a certain kind of data acquisition programmer. Of course, people who solve these kinds of LAMPy problems the way they presently do are highly paid and vastly over privileged craftsmen who enjoy licking each other’s butts, so it won’t happen until some founder goes even farther than Bezos did and creates the Labview for LAMP patterns.

Mind you, while I am a happy Linux user, even Linux is a preposterous warthog which is more archaeological dig and hoarder therapy session than operating system. At least it doesn’t spy on me like all the commercial ones do; not if it is working right anyway. I’d like to talk total revolution here, sending most of what exists to the disintegration tubes -even the existing chip architectures. But even a stripped down Linux or Microkernel with network-first (preferably graphical) language and two or three flavors of syntactically identical data store and a secure IPC standard would destroy most Silicon Valley engineering careers. Everyone who has used something like Heroku knows this is possible. I await the future Napoleon who wipe away the vile old world; cleanse it with fire, bring an orderly and beautiful Napoleonic code.

I think you can measure the vitality of a field by its creation of standards. Software standards are pretty weak; even for things which should obviously be standardized, people seem to have a hard time accepting this. So, rather than a form of engineering, software languishes as a sort of ad-hoc craftsmanship. Dorks standing around and ‘mirin your ‘leet code are like woodcarvers, not engineers. The ironic and absurd thing about it is most of them are woodcarvers of things like screws; the screws that ancient Greeks used for wine and olive presses were created by woodcarvers, not engineers.

I figure nuclear annihilation is more likely than fixing software development with more powerful standards, but it’s possible to do, and the future belongs to whoever does this. It’s a shame the Fifth Generation computing project didn’t have ambitions more in this vein, as that would have been a great time to do it, and apparently there was the political will to do so. I suppose most of software was still academic in those days, and so they didn’t really know what to build, but there ought to be enough people around by now with ideas of what needs to be done. It’s funny software dweebs talk about automation and software eating the world, but they never talk about replacing themselves, which is what actually needs doing.

Death of the physical library

One of the unsung disasters of contemporary academic life is the death of the physical library. There are so many disasters in current year academia, I doubt as anyone else grouses much about this, but as a great enthusiast for the KNN algorithm, I will complain about it.

My mid-late physics career had many happy hours spent in the LBNL research library; it is where I expanded my basic knowledge of the principles of physics to broader views.  My early business career had many happy hours spent in the Haas school of business library; most of my good ideas had some origin there, prowling the stacks. At this point, every nerd is familiar with the google/wiki hole where research into one area can lead one. Ventures into a well stocked physical library have a similar effect, though very, very different. The Dewey decimal system of course makes for excellent search results. A book on a general topic may lead to a number of related books on the shelf. Futures trading books lead to options trading books lead to commodities economics and so on. Even better is the inadvertent walk past a shelf on the way to another shelf and have something interesting catch your eye.

Similarly browsing journal articles (after looking them up on INSPEC; a better tool than Google Scholar), you might find something published next to your article of interest which leads you down interesting paths, or broadens your horizons in a surprising way. This can only happen with physical books and journals. Database oriented searches are  useful, but there is much encoded knowledge in the physical organization of the library. There is much encoded knowledge in Dewey Decimal Classification just as there is on the physical layout of the place. Nothing like this exists in database oriented systems; the KNN algorithm in libraries allows one to find new things.

Random sampling is also vastly more powerful in a physical library. I’ll never forget coming across the Chronicles of the House of Lords and reading about various expeditions, naval expenses and early rail systems installed in the United Kingdom. What a treasure that was; vastly better than slumming it through a bunch of wiki articles on the 19th century. Coming across the The London Times Imperial Trade and Engineering Supplement near my favorite seats in Doe library radically changed my views of economic history and the Great Depression. Some of the output of the various “studies” was also both laughable and sobering; do we really need so many shelves of scholarship about latino dudes sticking their pee-pees up each others assholes? Society has apparently decided this is far more valuable than studying Aristotle or the history of the Medes.

Libraries are an ancient and powerful way of discovering the world. So I was horrified upon visiting the Haas library and finding out it had been converted into cubicles and meeting rooms, so business majors can pay $40k a year to pretend they have a dystopian job giving power point to each other in a cube farm. I believe most of the books were moved to “storage” -though it is entirely possible that they sold them all to buy more Herman Miller knock-off furniture -there is no way of knowing. Theoretically books in “storage” can be obtained if you can discover them. Just like books are theoretically available on inter-library loan. Of course you have to discover them, which in my case, happened about 80% of the time by being in proximity to a related book. Otherwise you’re at the mercy of the library database system, which are of extremely variable quality. For example, most of them don’t allow you to query spatially along titles the way you do in the physical library.

Haas library was destroyed by barbarians as surely as the Library at Alexandria was. Perhaps one could make the argument that most business texts are hot garbage (they are), and most business majors are barbarians who aren’t literate enough to make use of a library (almost certainly true). None the less, the Haas library was useful to me, and presumably to someone else, and now it is gone. Vanished under night’s helmet as if it had never existed. 

This creeping barbarism hasn’t limited to business libraries; I used to enjoy browsing in the section of Doe library pertaining to ancient Persian history. One day this section was gone, along with a hell of a lot else of who knows what. It wasn’t even replaced with anything identifiable like Herman Miller  designed cubicles; just a bunch of empty shelves. According to the people who think this is OK, I could tediously look up keyword searches on Persian history and possibly find a couple of them; I couldn’t find the section and all the related sections. This is a towering vandalism the likes of which haven’t been seen since the Mongols sacked Samarkand. Literally the painstaking scholarship of centuries wiped out; the books moved to “storage” where nobody can find them and where they will rot, unread, unbrowsed and possibly unceremoniously sold on ebay or recycled into paper used for latinx queer studies when some bean counter decides they’re not worth anything because nobody ever takes them out of storage.

It’s literally happening everywhere; I assume this sort of demolishing of libraries must be taught as part of “library science” these days. Some insane metric is being optimized for; perhaps if a book isn’t checked out for a few years it’s considered useless. I can see the evidence of it everywhere; my copy of the glorious “Italy and her Invaders” by Thomas Hodgkin is from an extinct bible college, who didn’t think it worth handing on to successor institutions. It’s obvious hundreds of people handled these books before me; while it is available still at many libraries, it isn’t available at the one that purchased it, and since I no longer live in an English speaking country, it will probably only be read by me. Many other books I’ve picked up are purges from active libraries. No doubt after remaining in “storage” for some years, unread. Some  vandalisms have been documented; none have been stopped, and the rot continues unabated.

We have access to great resources like LibGenesis and Sci-Hub which have opened up research in new ways that even very large physical libraries can’t reproduce, but the inverse is also true. Large physical libraries open up research in ways these resources cannot. Getting rid of physical books because we now have databases is like getting rid of sunshine because of the existence of vitamin-D pills and cod liver oil. The horrific thing about all this is it isn’t considered censorship or book burning; it’s considered modernization. These people need to be stopped, and the librarians responsible for these desecrations fired at the very least. People lose their careers over saying a magic word or offending some thin skinned imbecile: these people are literally burning the library of Alexandria -their names should live in infamy forever.

Related:

https://www.palladiummag.com/2023/03/07/our-knowledge-of-history-decays-over-time/

Chesterton’s fence applied to the engineering of physical objects

I like nice things. By nice things I don’t mean the most expensive things, though sometimes the nicest things are the most expensive.  I want all objects within my purview to have good design and durability. Why should I have to buy an object multiple times because it was poorly made? I know planned obsolescence and the cheapest possible product are the rule of the day, but on a long time scale, assuming humans don’t go extinct, disposable and poorly made objects will be viewed with disdain. Assuming “sustainability” isn’t just a stupid virtue word, not making junky objects that fill up the ash heap seems like an important part of it. Even if it is a stupid virtue word, it’s designed to appeal to rich white people like me so I’m going to talk about it.

I first came across the idea of “buy it once” after buying a nice umbrella: one that manages to fit in my pants pockets. Umbrellas are objects generally made badly. They’re also things generally made too large; and when they’re a certain size, they’re small enough to not notice, so it’s easy to leave them behind by accident. Pocket size, you’d have to be an asshole to lose it. It really hasn’t given me any problems in a decade of hard use. Granted it was $50, and I have no idea if they’ll continue to make them, but this is the kind of thing I mean. This one I spotted on the lifetime guarantee: it’s pretty good insurance against it being a piece of crap, but I bet some management consultant MBA weasel with a spreadsheet could come up with an argument that selling cheap shit which will break and bankrupting the company will make someone more money.  I won’t go into too many details of why it works so well; they used good materials and engineering design, and left out useless bullshit like “auto opening” springs. Probably they just copied some old umbrella made 100 years ago.

High quality objects like this umbrella exist, and I like owning such things. My ancient x220 thinkpad is such an item. While I’ve upgraded it with spare parts over the years enough it’s sort of the same thing in a “Ship of Theseus” way, the monitor and chassis are all original equipment, used daily since 2011. I sometimes contemplate upgrading to a new one, but there is little reason to do so. The modern chips have video decoder stuff baked in and it will have 16 threads instead of 4. Modern chips are  …. about 1.4 times faster per thread. A new thinkpad will also have a better screen, and won’t require a bit of scotch tape to hold the battery to the chassis. A new thinkpad will also have a much worse keyboard, and it won’t have the cool-ass thinklight. It will also have NSA spyware I can’t turn off. So fuck getting a new thinkpad. 1.4x on a thread is meaningless; the keyboard is way more important, and I have stockpiled enough parts for my x220 on multiple continents to keep the thing going for the rest of my career. 16 threads can be useful. When I need that, I can run the code on my desktop machine which has 64, all of which are considerably faster than laptop threads. Amusingly x220 I7 thinkpads with IPS screens are now increasing in price, because there are a lot of people like me who realize what’s important in a development machine. They’re still only a third or so of what a new Ryzen-7 one would cost, but my stinkpad might end up an appreciating asset in the long term: heck it’s already appreciated to 2/3 of what I actually paid for it back in 2011.

Cold dead fingers

Another such object  is an Armin Trosser coffee grinder I got from my Stepdad. It uses burrs adjusted for drip coffee, which, as an american, is my preferred wake up rocket fuel. It’s made out of steel and chunks of wood and has been used almost every day since it was bought in 1950s. Apparently it can be adjusted to grind finer; I haven’t bothered to do so. I don’t know what the mean time to failure on something like this would be; it appears to be immortal. The metal parts are thick. The wood parts are beefy hardwoods. I assume when it eventually wears out the wood will dissolve somehow, but it shows no signs of doing so. People copy the form of these things out of nostalgia, but nobody actually makes anything like this any more. In my ideal society, everything would be made like this, rather than making things out of shabby plastic and particleboard.

Which brings me around to Potempkin luxe. I have in the past used Zero-Halliburton aluminum cases to protect musical instruments and keep sensitive electronic equipment. The legend is, Halliburton used to airdrop stuff to its staff at oil wells, and so they designed very rugged aluminum cases capable of withstanding the abuse. I never had one of their briefcases until a few months ago. I do have a case based on the same shell as its contemporary 90s era briefcase which I keep sensitive electronics in. Got a suitcase I keep bagpipes in as well. Mind you it is a very try-hardy briefcase: I ordered it after a few too many glasses of wine and a James Bond marathon. My old ZH cases I bought used; they were absurdly sturdy. The new one is crap. I show you why, and tell you how I think they went wrong.

Here is a comparison of new and old from the front:

 

Here is a comparison of new and old from the back:

Give them a good looking over and tell me where you think they went wrong/right on the new design. I’ll wait.

So the first thing that should occur to you is to wonder where the polished steel clasps went. Those were long the defining characteristic of the brand. When you flipped them bad boys closed, the thing was sealed. ZH cases have this sort of tongue and groove thing that generally has a rubber gasket and in principle make it truly waterproof; including my brand new one. The ones with the clasps closed so tightly that it felt like it could be waterproof without putting a rubber gasket in it; never thought to try, but I’d have believed it if you told me. However because the new case lacks the clasps, this expensive tongue and groove thing around the shells is useless: between the flimsy “no sealing power” fastener and the lack of torque compensating hinges going across the bottom of the thing (two hinges < one big one). You’re lucky if your pencils don’t fall out of your briefcase if you shake it around. It gapes most embarrassingly when you have something substantive inside it, because, like, torque is a thing that applies even to ZH briefcases. This is truly astounding and I can’t believe they sell these things: had I seen it in person rather than having someone send it to my office, I’d have laughed uncontrollably at it.

There are other differences. They make a big deal out of the innovative corner protectors. It is a common blemish on old ZH cases that the corners dent. I never really cared; long before that happens, the thing would be ooogly from scratches anyway. All that means is you had some experience: after all the goddamned things main responsibility is protecting the gold bars or nuclear codes or fine vintage x220 laptops or whatever is inside it. The contemporary one couldn’t even protect my laptop from a garden hose or mild drizzle. I’m certain if I dropped it from a moving airplane it would just explode into two clamshell pieces, because there is practically no physical matter holding it closed. Plastic versus aluminum feet; I assume to not scratch floors; still lame and definitely more fragile than the old aluminum bumps. The new handle is actually cooler than the old one.

If I had to guess how this happened, the clasps were probably made by some outside contractor that died or went into another line of business. They were very well made; high tolerances and fine finish. Sourcing new ones would have been expensive and time consuming. I also guess that some of the more fastiduous customers wondered what the double clasps were for, and thought it pretentious to have to ostentatiously flip them open to a loud clack every time they open their briefcase. Mind you, you’re carrying a fucking $500 briefcase made out of metal that looks like it is out of a James Bond movie, but I guarantee some nitwit with plastic surgery said something about that. Finally there is the ever present urge to “update” things; to prevent them from being “tired.” The old case design really didn’t need any updating. It worked great, and all the design features  combined to a useful and well-made whole. The giant monolithic hinge of the past certainly looked kind of weird and stodgy 50s era, but it served a real purpose. The original ZH functional design had several such Chesterton fences in it. All you needed to do to notice something is wrong with the new design is walk around for a few minutes with something inside it more substantial than a few pieces of paper. I have no idea what to do about it: returning such things by mail is a super annoying process and for all I know won’t get me anywhere. Probably I will rivet some vintage or machined parts to the thing to see if I can approach the old standards.