The Bill of Rights contains no amendment granting people the right to be stupid. Unfortunately, millions of Americans are insisting there is.

They want to be stupid about science, medicine, religion, guns, and the restrictions of the Constitution itself. They’re Con artists, attempting to convince those “other” people that the Cons have Constitutional protections you don’t and that you don’t have protections you do. It’s the underbelly of idiocy that drags along the soil of ineptitude.

America is rife with past examples. There’s America’s “peculiar institution” that insisted that the people we enslaved were inferior — mentally if not physically. We’ve made a market in bias against the Irish, Italians, Jews, Asians, and just about anybody born somewhere else. 

In the 20th Century, after running through the usual ethnic victims, there was the vituperative hatred of Father Coughlin. The Catholic “radio priest” couldn’t seem to remember — in the midst of his venomous condemnation of Jews — that Jesus just so happened to be Jewish. 

McCarthyism thrived on willful ignorance. The junior senator from Wisconsin made claims (like today’s) with no basis in fact against people who were guilty of nothing. People whose behavior was permitted. By the Constitution. 

The John Birch Society joined in on the fun of a political kakistocracy. Back then they hated Russians. Today’s heirs-apparent think that Russia has the right idea: no opposition, no dissent, no choice, and no room for intelligent thought.

After having defeated Nazis in Germany, George Lincoln Rockwell still rose his stiff armed salute with a swastika armband and persuaded too many Americans that Adolf was right about the whole master race thing. In a sense, he was the ideological godfather of modern white supremacists. It wasn’t the Klan. That crowd was at least smart enough to wear a mask.

Another George (Wallace) had the sense to understand that racism was, well… stupid. Strom Thurmond did not, at least not until he had to admit he had a daughter whose mother was Black. 

Nixon, who should have had the wiles to work around the perceptions that he knew he should avoid, was almost clinically moronic. What made things worse was that the people he relied on were even less perceptive than he was. It’s too bad he was allowed to resign. It was a “good of the country” maneuver that set a pattern for tolerance of unConstitutional behavior. It was, yes, stupid.

Reagan? Oh, God. He was the best snake oil salesman the White House had ever let in. Nothing that he said or did helped the people that he said he was helping. And they weren’t smart enough to see that his actions helped the wealthy, not them. The “Great Communicator” was, in fact, a great deceiver. 

All the highly vocal men in Congress who went after Bill Clinton for his lies about sex with an intern turned out to have committed far greater sins of the flesh. At least they didn’t have the gall to claim “I wasn’t really that into her.” Just brainless enough to have opened their mouths after previously opening their zippers.

If Cheney was Tweedle Dum, poor Dubya was Tweedle Dumber. Instead of accepting the world’s willing help to eliminate the threat from Al Qaeda and terrorism, he listened to neocon nincompoops and put us even further in harm’s way. Apparently, too many of his cronies swallowed yellow cake.

By the time Mr. Trump stumbled into the Executive Mansion the first time, H. L. Mencken was proved right after nearly a century.

…All the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” [Baltimore Sun, July 26, 1920]

Those plain folks are now — thanks to decades of descent in the quality of education, the lack of compromise in politics, the belief that facts are optional, and the assurances that “there are good people on both sides” — the prevailing idiocracy. They all declare the right to be stupid, but the rest of us should never be so stupid that we ever admit that they’re right.

This won’t be easy, given that a member of the Supreme Court has suggested eliminating contraception (after joining the majority on the Dobbs decision that undid Roe v Wade), but let’s give it a try. 

The easiest thing would be to realize that sexuality is a business, and usually the promise of profit makes conservatives drool. Yet we’re the country that thinks that nudity is wicked, and American tourists get either uncomfortable or unnecessarily stimulated when they visit Europe and see bare-breasted women on billboards. (We’re also the nation that objected loudly and often when cable television first debuted and offered X-rated content… as an option… and when courts decided it was, in fact, an option that wasn’t included as part of the basic package, people relaxed… and signed up for porn in droves.)

Promiscuous profits
Contraception has been profitable for generations. Condoms were initially promoted as a way to prevent sexually-transmitted disease. Only later did anyone concede, publicly at least, that they were a form of birth control. But they were a worthwhile, profit-generating business for ages.

The interesting thing is that they were aimed at male customers. Birth control in the form of IUDs, diaphragms, and the pill shifted the focus to women — women who, in the women’s lib era, wanted to enjoy sexual activity without the risk of pregnancy. What was wrong with that? Oh, lots of things.

The price of pleasure
First, it suggested that, as validated by Kinsey and Masters & Johnson research, women actually enjoyed sex. Well! As any Bible thumper can tell you, that’s horrible. It puts those women — single women — up there with Jezebel and Delilah. We can’t have that now, can we?

Second, birth control, whether condoms or anything else, has a cost. That’s how the manufacturers earn their profits, but it’s why so many people don’t use birth control because, well… they can’t afford it. 

For the “oh, in the throes of passion, there’s no time to rubber-up or put a diaphragm in place” crowd, there are, as they say, consequences. Like VD. Or AIDS. Those two things support the sexual-industrial-pharmaceutical-medical complex. They are, in other words, good for business. But pregnancy? Whole ‘nother thing.

The price of prevention
Sure, pregnancy keeps OB/GYNs in business, but only for the women who can afford them. It also used to support clinics that help women who cannot afford birth control or proper medical care. The morality police, however, never liked that part of the overall equation.

What’s left then? Three very obvious things that mimic basic crime prevention and law enforcement: access to prevention, accountability, and prosecution for avoiding obligations.

Free or subsidized condoms, IUDs, diaphragms, and birth control and morning-after pills will reduce the number of unwanted pregnancies. It’s a ridiculously cheap alternative to having unwanted children wind up on public assistance rolls.

Who me?
Accountabilty? There’s the rub (and not the sexual variety). Everyone, particularly male legislators and judges, puts the blame for getting pregnant and the responsibility for raising unwanted children on women. But tell me: how did those women get pregnant? Immaculately? Au contraire. There was definitely a penis involved. Which was attached to a man. Who is, as far as those legislators and judges are concerned, not obligated in any way. Let’s change that.

Rule, instead, that any woman who is prevented from having an abortion and is compelled to give birth is entitled to have the child supported by the man who got her pregnant. There should be no such thing as “fun and run.” If a man can get into it, the woman he gets into must get something out of it… besides a newborn.

If men refuse to provide child support, they do not pass Go, they do not collect $200. They go directly to jail. If a guy claims, “It isn’t mine,” a DNA test will settle that in a couple of hours.

The wages of sin are paid in secret
This will not please the sex-out-of-wedlock-is-sinful crowd. Just don’t catch them at it, as too many politicians have been. Just as with X-rated cable, what people say and what people do have very little in common a great deal of the time. Besides, if it weren’t for infidelity (and pickup trucks, dogs, guns, and trains), there’d be no country music.

The we-won’t-pay-for-anything contingent — nothing for birth control, nothing for prenatal care, nothing for delivery or medical complications, and certainly nothing for post-natal child support — probably won’t be swayed by the reduced cost of legislation, regulatory enforcement, criminal procedings, incarceration, and lawsuits. That simply proves that those people failed both math and economics and, since most of them claim to be good Christians, that they have no understanding of Christ’s teachings. They’re too busy throwing stones.

The balance sheet
What the access-to-birth-control/healthcare-and-accountability-for-men alternative can do is
• improve mental health
• reduce sexually transmitted disease
• keep women in the workforce (and paying taxes on their income)
• preserve government resources for providing beneficial services
• lower the cost of enforcement and prosecution
and, most of all,
• increase happiness.

If most of the anti-abortion legislators could be honest, they might admit that their decisions have nothing to do with women. They’re focused on having power over women. When that’s the only way a man can feel like a man, he’s admitting that he’s less than one.

Nothing’s quite as annoying as nagging. If you’ve made a behavioral adjustment to do something (and you actually do it), reminders are like gravel on glass.

If those allegedly helpful notifications are inflexible, and Duolingo’s are, they go beyond annoying to irritating and engender feelings of appicide — the desire to kill software. So, during the week between Christmas and New Year’s when people have more fulfilling ways to fill their time with family and friends, Duolingo never relented in telling me that my streak was at risk. 

Not only did I not care (I’d been going non-stop for the other 51 weeks of the year), I could not be made to care. If I was going to let a piece of software tell me what to do and threaten me with retribution if I didn’t do it, I would be susceptible to Newspeak (which, in 2024, is just as insidious as it was in “1984”).

GROW ACCUSTOMED TO THE PACE
When my firstborn child awakened with inconvenient regularity at 5 am, I became accustomed to finding something to do between the time she went back to bed and the time that I would normally arise. I exercised. It was beneficial to my physical health and, because it gave me time alone with my thoughts, my mental health, as well. Yet, when she began sleeping through the night, I was attuned to rising well before dawn. Sleep became a total waste of time. Except to her.

If there had been consumer-level software and mobile devices and apps then, I might have used that time with Duolingo. Or an industry-specific news site. Or an exercise program. But I wouldn’t need the enticement of a streak. Self-improvement is its own reward and, if you want that reward, you do the work… and you do it without being noodged.

It is, of course, a very individual problem. The idea of accomplishment is often far rosier than the effort required to achieve it. It’s why I label all those people — the ones who show up at the gym in January only to vanish by Valentine’s Day — resolutionaries. They fight one minor battle and abandon the war. 

THE PARTS ARE GREATER THAN THE WHOLE
A psychoanalyst might say I’m a little, well… obsessive/compulsive. I probably am. But it’s helpful, and it’s learnable. 

Set a goal and break it into parts. Don’t look weeks or months or years into the future where the objective resides. Focus on reaching step one at the end of a day or a week. If someone, besides yourself, has to remind you to do it, it will not get done. It didn’t really matter enough. Or you hit a snag and abandoned the quest, admitting deep inside that you can’t solve the problem (you can) or that the goal was unrealistic (only if you quit) or there are other things much better (and easier) to do. 

It’s bad enough that others might think you’re insufficient. It’s worse when you think they might be right. They’re probably not. And neither are you.

If you’re really, truly, actually not succeeding at something for which you’re sure you have (or can acquire) the skills, it might not be a fit for your strengths. If you want to learn French but, no matter how hard you try, merci beaucoups sounds more like murky buckets, try another language. Or study phonics to understand pronunciation; it helps in English, too. So, when you visit Boston, you’ll know how to say “I need t’pahk at the hahbah” when you want to find a garage at the dock.

YOUR THING MIGHT NOT BE “THE” THING
Not everybody’s good at everything. Do what you’re best at, which is usually what you love most.

There are too many challenges that people abandon. I developed asthma in my teens and listened to my doctors and relied on medication. When I did my own research, changed my diet, increased my level of exercise, and abandoned bad habits, the asthma vanished. [Note: doctors do not know everything. They know averages. So if you’re not average (and you’re not), they need to spend the time to understand how you work and why. There’s a difference between “normal” and “normal for you.”]

So the Duolingo effect is only good when a task is a painful duty. If you need to be encouraged, you didn’t want to do it in the first place.

It is not a new year. It is when, for the sake of record-keeping, we change the date. All of human time is designed to do that. 

If we all matter-of-factly change the date each day — “Is today the 3rd?” — and the month every thirty days or so — “Yesterday was February 28th. Is this March 1st or the 29th?” — and we never stop to celebrate that March has arrived (with or without attendant lions) or to reflect on what occurred in February, then why make a fuss about a year?

TRADITION
New years are pagan things. They’re long past having any meaning in a culture that thinks that anything that’s more than twenty minutes old is irrelevant. Or, among more recent generations, that nothing ever happened before they were born when the earth was without form and void and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

The pause at the end of each calendar year, as opposed to fiscal year or Chinese year or Hebrew year, is increasingly annoying. People cram into one brief period all the things that they should have been doing over the previous seasons: getting together with family, offering gifts because “I saw this and thought you would like it,” wishing for things like peace and love that were actively scorned during fifty earlier weeks, and eating single meals that could feed all of Mali for a decade.

WHERE TIME IS MEANINGLESS
People in areas of conflict where life is uncertain, food is a blessing, and freedom from disease is a miracle don’t care about what day or week or month or year it is. It’s another day to suffer or to have unexpected relief. It’s a day with equal chances of struggle and calm and the unmeasured time between sunshine and darkness.

So is this a new year or just more of the same? Is it merely a record of order and shipment dates and lease terms and football schedules or is it the start of something actually new — a world that finds a way to agree in spite of different perspectives, that doesn’t seek to have more and more when billions of others have less in a lifetime than we acquire in a season, that works to ensure that total strangers survive without thinking their survival diminishes us, and that faces the realities of life on earth now and makes an effort to improve them for the future?

It won’t be a new year until something changes from the old one.

Mixing politics and business can’t be two things at once… unless you’re a cultural absolutist. 

The millions of dollars that major companies spend on lobbyists — intent on swaying legislators and regulators to pass laws and make decisions that are favorable to business — is considered normal. Every firm from coal mining to crypto mining spends vast sums on influencing Washington, state capitals, and city halls.

Yet when corporations take a stand on social, religious, gender, and racial issues or speak out about armed aggression, someone will issue a call for a protest or boycott. It could be a customer or a senator, an organization or a sect. It will definitely be someone who’s convinced that “I’m right, and you’re not.”
​

THE NEW ABNORMAL
This enters the netherworld of the high court’s Citizens United and McCutcheon decisions. As misguided as those rulings may be, they established the idea that a corporation is a person and has the same speech rights as an individual. 

When companies are spending money on PACs or ballot initiatives, some consider it fair play, others interference, but voters, ultimately, are influenced by those efforts. They’re not always accurately informed, but they don’t seem to care… as long as the cause fits their preconceived perceptions and assures them that they won’t be inconvenienced.

However, in the court of cultural conflict, passions flare. Speak up for just about anything that’s thought of as liberal, and voices will shout about wokeness (even though they misrepresent what “woke” really means). Support a conservative issue, and the culture warriors attack, claiming bias against a minority and, these days, implicitly in favor of white-is-right.

YES OR NO, NOT MAYBE
If anyone attempts to strike a balance — to recognize legitimate merits about conflicting points of view — the partisans reject them. Though human behavior reflects an infinite number of shades of gray, not black and white, it’s got to be us vs. them, the good against the bad, the right against the wrong. If someone is for this, they must be against that.

Nothing’s that simple. Unfortunately, politicians will say it is if saying so will earn people’s votes. Corporations will shy away from controversy for fear of losing Wall Street’s or buyers’ support (and the impact on share price and revenue). 

AN OUNCE OF PREVENTION OR EXPOUND THE IMPURE?
Speaking out is not merely brave. It’s essential. Silence gives comfort to demagogues and despots-in-waiting. Or, depending on your viewpoint, to libertines and blasphemers.

If Browning was right to say, “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,” where is God when the world is in turmoil? What makes religious principles right when their adherents defend people whose lives violate those foundational tenets?

Gen Z wants to work for and buy from companies that reflect their goals for career growth, diversity, low or positive impact on the climate, mental health awareness, and economic prosperity. Their parents and grandparents tend to favor the status quo, even if it will have a negative effect on all those concerns.

THE WEIGHTING GAME
Clean energy or fossil fuels? Green careers or outdated ones? Artificial intelligence or only human? A safer tomorrow or a more convenient today? Those are choices that psychologists adore. Do you want one marshmallow now or three in an hour from now? The long-term studies show that those who defer gratification do better in their careers and their lives.

What choice will you make?

A recent study has revealed something old, not new: America’s students are falling behind. That’s particularly true in math.

The country has devolved from one that could watch “The G. E. College Bowl” and know the answers to one that implies that the road to success and riches is through “American Idol” and professional sports. (The fact that Shaquille O’Neal has a masters degree gets lost in the shuffle.) Even shows like “Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader” vanished because, well… viewers weren’t. 

Decline and fall
Starting with the Reagan Administration, which tried to abolish the recently established Dept. of Education, there has been an effort to de-emphasize the primary benefits of education: exposure to a broad range of thought and opinion, the ability to think analytically, and the skill to apply classroom learning to the experiences of daily life. That has contributed to the so-called “dumbing down” of America and, by now, several generations of Americans no longer see any value in those traditional benefits because they didn’t learn them. They are, as John Cleese put it, not smart enough to know they’re stupid.

In the decades after World War II, companies that relied on mathematicians, engineers, and scientists in every discipline from biology to zoology had local internship and after-school programs for high school students who were considering careers in those fields. It gave the students a good idea about what challenges and opportunities they would face in the workplace, and it gave the companies access to potential future employees. Some firms even offered scholarships with the promise of post-graduation employment.

All of that’s gone. Yet, today, it’s more important than ever. 

Way out of first place
In a Pew Research Center survey done a few years ago, the United States didn’t get above 20th place in science, math, and reading. We were bested by places we consider almost Third World: Singapore, Estonia, Macao, Slovenia, etc. We were outdone by all of Scandinavia, most of Europe and, in spite of all the derogatory jokes about it, Poland.

We’re still admired for our university education, but our own children are competing against foreign students who make a considerable effort to qualify. Yet those international applicants may be the kids — in Japan and China, especially, where cramming for entrance exams (and failing to qualify) has caused mental health issues — who didn’t get into their home countries’ schools. So they might be considered second string. However, they’re almost sure to be something the vast majority of Americans are not: multi-lingual.

The abusage of English
Some would say that Americans no longer speak English. Vocabulary skills have been replaced with four-letter alternatives that seem to stand for everything without conveying anything, and idiomatic usage has become, simply, idiotic: things vanish or disappear, they don’t “go missing”; “step foot” suggests that you can “step hand” when “set foot” is accurate; “based off of” would undermine physics and architecture in a way that “based on” does not. 

But I digress. 

When it comes to education, America has met the enemy and it is us.

AI holds enormous promise for reducing the time between a problem and a solution. It may be able to spot relationships — in a nearly infinite amount of data — that humans might never have thought about. It might also be used as a weapon on a global stage. Yet there’s one potential outcome that has not appeared in anyone’s calculus.

If AI can out-think us, create robots that can out-produce us, and develop software to run it all (including software that can design and build robots), there will come a point at which human involvement will be reduced to obsolescence. When people are no longer necessary to design and build products, provide services, grow food, and provide entertainment, who will have the money to consume any of those things?

The high cost of saving money
Industry has been seeking cost-reduction strategies throughout recorded time. The process was accelerated during the Industrial Revolution, but the machinery that replaced workers still needed people to run and maintain it. In the 1970s, before the rise of computing, American businesses offshored production to reduce the cost of labor. That had consequences.

The middle class lost opportunities, particularly in manufacturing, that helped accelerate the gap between wealthy business leaders and the employees who had lost union-driven wage protection. As the cost of healthcare rose, businesses cut costs further by eliminating company-paid benefits and shifting much of the financial burden to workers. That, too, cut into middle class budgets.

As tax revenues fell — due to lower incomes and tax cuts — the quality of education declined (reducing the talent available for contemporary jobs and initiating the H1B program), the nation’s infrastructure crumbled (increasing the cost of moving goods), the environment stopped improving (leading to a greater occurrence of respiratory and water-borne ailments in need of healthcare), and only the defense budget grew (giving us too much confidence about winning un-winnable overseas wars).

The extinction of purchasing power
Now, if AI and robotics can eliminate both white and blue collar employment — software development, engineering, accounting, paralegal work, medical research, drug development, crop harvesting, food preparation, and countless other professions and jobs — who will have the income to buy… anything? What market will all those AI systems and robotic activity be producing for? The owners of the new infrastructure? Not likely. Without consumers and customers providing revenue, where will their income come from?

In time, as humans become more and more obsolete, the machines will be thinking and working for themselves. They may reach the point where they can maintain and repair themselves or each other, but to what end? 

AI doesn’t need food or shelter or sex. Machines only need a source of power, which can come from the sun or the wind or the geothermal heat of the planet. But without a market (or an emotional “soul” to provide satisfaction), what’s the point of making anything? 

Starting over
When the world can run without humans, we might be forced to start over — as an agrarian society that gathers seeds, plants crops, and uses food as the currency of a barter economy. That will allow people to eat and survive, provide an incentive to create goods that support basic needs (paid for, initially, in crops), develop a financial system, and permit the luxury of education beyond craft skills... to utilize the AI and automatons that made us unnecessary.

Assuming, through short-sighted arrogance, that we haven’t died out as a species before the resurrection of society.

Now that the iPod is officially dead, it’s probably time to change the name “podcast,” but “self-promotional drivel” is probably too long. 

Of course, the name has become generic for any long-form (or longish) content that’s delivered digitally. The list extends from brazenly self-serving “thought leadership” blather to documentary, drama, and comedy series, most of which reveal that listeners have nothing else better to do. Or don’t know how to read.

Decades ago, when the Walkman was considered leading edge, I worked with a colleague to develop concise, clear audio explanations of new or emerging technologies — the kind of stuff that was challengingly new then but is considered basic (or obsolete) today. It was scripted, performed by three people, put on cassettes, and distributed with complementary printed content. That won’t work today, in part because it wasn’t free, though it’s likely that advertisers in 2022 would find the targeting ideal. 

Podcast is now as meaningful as “music” — not everyone wants every kind of music, which is why there are specific categories: vocal, instrumental, experimental, orchestral, band, dance, classical, operatic, folk, country, urban, rap…. Even radio is divided into music radio, talk radio, news radio, religious programming…. 

I’ve got alternatives: 
• bodcast (fitness)
• codcast (phallusy)
• godcast (religion)
• hodcast (masonry)
• modcast (fashion)
• nodcast (relaxation)
• oddcast (unusual facts)
• prodcast (product information)
• quadcast (college)
• rodcast (fishing)
• shodcast (shoes)
• sodcast (lawns)
• trodcast (hiking)
• vodcast (video on demand)
• zodcast (enemies of superheroes)

Or not.

I have traveled around the world. Literally. And I have crossed hundreds of bridges in my travels.

Never, however, have I crossed a toll bridge that made it impossible to pay the toll. At least not until a recent visit to the San Francisco Bay Area. Every single lane was designated for FasTrak without a single lane devoted to paying in cash.

There are (or were) Bay Area bridges that imposed a toll on the inbound routes into San Francisco and the East Bay. Yet they let drivers get out of the city faster — to avoid traffic backups in town — by not stopping outbound vehicles at toll gates. I thought that the route from east to west across the San Mateo Bridge might just be an example of that.

It wasn’t.

The route cause
My original route would have taken me north along the coast. A car problem, though, sent me inland to a dealer for repair. The detour changed my direction from south-north to east-west, and that involved crossing a bridge (or driving an extra hundred miles around the bottom the bay). It was, clearly, an unplanned event.

A month after the end of my journey, Bay Area FasTrak sent me a bill. For the toll! Apparently, Bay Area planners decided that, in the environs of Silicon Valley, everyone is digital and everyone uses FasTrak. That includes visitors, apparently.

Not everybody knows that
According to the Bay Area FasTrak website, visitors can pay in advance online or pay in cash at various locations around the bay. They can, if they’re visiting from farther points and renting cars to get around, arrange payment with the rental company. That’s fine if you’re planning in advance and are really detailed about understanding local requirements. Like bridge tolls. If you’re simply passing through, the Bay Areas’s perspective is truly myopic.

It would be astronomically costly for Bay Area FasTrak to advertise in every city that sends travelers to San Francisco and its multitude of nearby towns and cities. It might also require some dealmaking to have airline and rail tickets imprinted with the toll payment information. But it’s also expensive to print and mail out as many as, I assume, tens of thousands of notices every year to non-Fastrak travelers who happen to cross a Bay Area bridge.

Tua culpa
I don’t mind paying the toll. I tried my best to do it when I made the trip across. It does, however bother me when I attempt to pay online and learn “Account and payment access will be unavailable on the website, through the telephone system, and at cash payment network locations due to planned system maintenance. Email inquiries via the FasTrak website will also be disabled during this time period.” Of course, no “time period” is given. 

I could pay by check and send it by mail, but that makes it costlier for me. I’d be paying for a stamp and taking the chance that, in Louis De Joy’s Postal Service, it might never be delivered, which would subject me to a penalty fee.

The other alternative is to ignore it. They had their chance to take my money, and they didn’t make it possible. Their bad, not mine. Or I could wait awhile and see whether their website or phone system get finished being “maintenanced.” One way or another, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.

Breville makes household appliances that are considered — by reviewers and consumers — to be very good. That’s not true about its customer support.

It is hard to comprehend, in the era of “the right to repair,” how a high-profile company can make it impossible to purchase essential parts. They’re not offered on the company’s website, through third parties, or even by independent after-market suppliers.

For example, Breville makes a burr coffee grinder called the Smart Grinder Pro that retails for $199. That’s not as ridiculously high as some Italian brands that specialize in espresso grinds, but it’s significantly higher than other all-purpose grinders — the ones that turn out a variety of options for everything from a coarse French press to an extra-fine espresso.

The Break Down
The Breville burr grinder has two components in its grind chamber that, according to owners who have posted comments and reviews on websites, are prone to failure — a felt washer and an impeller. Of course, Breville provides no instructions about replacing them if they do fail, and even ignores information about removing other grind chamber components to reach them.

That chamber contains four elements: the top burr grinder, the lower burr grinder, the impeller that moves grinds into a chute that leads to a collection cup, and the felt washer that fits under the impeller. Breville gives all sorts of instructions about removing the top grinder and using a brush to clean any clogs. It even suggests running uncooked rice through the device. It never suggests that problems might be related to the washer or impeller, and it doesn’t list those parts in any diagrams or parts lists.

The implication is that, if a problem can’t be resolved with brushes and rice, the grinder’s a goner. That’s hard to accept for an item that was cleaned once a week and that costs $200.

The felt washer can, with a bit of effort, be found on third party sites. It’s pricey at $7 (it’s probably worth 70¢), but it’s available. The impeller remains MIA.

Unresponsive
Email messages sent to Breville support; Stephen Krauss, the President of Breville Americas; and Aaron Wanek, the VP of Global Customer Care resulted in… nothing. No one responded with offers to provide the parts or guidance about where to obtain them.

This might be understandable — maybe — if the machine were very old or out of production. It’s not. It’s five years old and still available around the world.

What I’ll use while waiting for the felt washer to arrive (to see whether it solves the problem) is a Moulinex blade grinder. It’s not as precise as a burr grinder, but it works. And it’s 50 years old.