Public Comment

You're on a two-lane road in a 40-MPH zone, and the vehicle in front of you is doing twenty five. Another car is tailgating you from behind. You wait until there are no oncoming cars in the opposite lane and you begin to pass the slow car. Of course, the slow car speeds up at that point. Meanwhile, an oncoming car has appeared, and you need to gun the accelerator to avoid a head-on collision. Aborting the two lane pass is not an option--the gap in cars has closed up.  

At that point, the safety feature detects the oncoming vehicle ahead, automatically applies the brakes on your vehicle, you have a head-on collision, and you are killed.  

This example of a car designed to compensate for a bad driver, and many other innovations, are examples of how new technology is sometimes making life worse and not better.  

Technology is being increasingly designed to control the public and to herd masses of people like cattle. Important options in computer operating systems have been obfuscated, eliminated, or made to cost an extra fee. Computers are great at entertaining people, but the ability to get work done has been compromised.  

People are all but being forced to store their data on clouds. This public storage of information takes control away from the individual. We are becoming increasingly reliant upon a distant, giant authority which we are expected to trust. Automatic trust of authority involves a huge amount of naiveté.  

Audio and video recordings are now digitized. This has some good aspects, but also has problems. We, as ordinary individuals, are unable to record television onto a removable storable medium. We are reliant upon digital video recorders. The contents must be periodically erased to make room for new storage. 

I haven't seen any device that allows members of the public to keep the government honest, through storage of news events.  

The following technologies have become less usable over the last five to ten years: Vacuum Cleaners, Light Bulbs, Digital Voice Recorders as a replacement for cassette or microcassette recorders, the advent of the Digital Video Recorder and its replacement of the videocassette recorder…and computers. 

To begin with, the latest Windows computers have become more loaded with ways for Microsoft to make money off you if you want to do anything, and many of the options that once existed have been eliminated or obfuscated.  

Windows has gone the route of oversimplifying everything while making it graphically more appealing. This eliminates a lot of user choices and it is aggravating.  

Windows computers at one time came with complimentary software which included watered-down versions of Word and Excel, versions which, although not as sophisticated, were still usable. Windows XP was the definitive operating system, and since then, computers have become less usable.  

Cloud storage of your valuable data is touted as a great way to back up all of your important files. But clouds are also subject to hackers, and the companies that run them are subject to extinction. This is true only if you are foolish enough in the first place to trust a distant authority to safeguard your data.  

The banning of incandescent light bulbs has resulted in another form of class warfare. The expense of a new light bulb, if you are choosing Halogen, is much higher than their predecessor, and the bulbs burn out a lot faster. If you go the Compact Fluorescent route, there doesn't exist a reliable and convenient system to dispose of them. And with human nature being what it is, CFL's will end up in landfills.  

The argument about the mercury hazard in CFL's, in which it is said that a CFL releases less mercury than the amount you would save, given a coal burning power plant, strikes me as bogus. When a CFL breaks in your living room, you will get exposure to mercury.  

To vacuum your carpeting, a dependable vacuum cleaner that actually cleans the floors is not available at any price. You can spend hundreds of dollars on a Dyson, and you end up with something that doesn't work and which necessitates astronomical repair bills.  

The elimination of videocassette recorders means that you can no longer record and store television. Thus, you are dependent on someone at Youtube to record everything, and hope that these recordings will be preserved and not modified. The digital age has made it easier to rewrite history.  

While technology has put numerous tools into the hands of ordinary people, the industry is trying to back off from some of that. The government and the corporate mega conglomerates would like to spoon feed the information that gets to citizens and control the content.