OFF ON A TANGENT VII: TECHNOLOGY
We can now put a small, self-propelled vehicle on Mars to photograph and analyze the surface of the planet. This blows my mind. We’re controlling this tinker toy from squillions of miles away and it responds with brain-bending photos of an alien landscape. How cool can you get?
Meanwhile, I can’t find an auto mechanic that can fix the banging noise emanating from my V-8 engine. I can’t buy a cd walkman that lasts for more than eight days without starting to skip like a jump rope, or an electric dildo that doesn’t shock the hell out of my . . . uh, anyway, it’s not a good product.
I guess the problem here is the motivation. Scientists working on space technology are the best in the world, and use the latest, highest quality materials available. Their gadgets are built for durability and precision performance. The manufacturers of consumer electronics, on the other hand, want us to keep buying their products over and over again, so they deliberately use materials designed to last a limited amount of time. This keeps their factory costs down and guarantees a captive market. And don’t even get me started on auto mechanics and their duplicitous, price gouging, fraudulent behavior.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the advances we’ve made in the past twenty years have been astounding, and some of them have actually been useful. It’s just that for every brilliant brainstorm, there’s some schmuck introducing a complete waste of everyone’s time and money.
Like car alarms. I don’t believe a single crime has ever been prevented by this useless device. Does anyone even bother to look out the window when a car alarm goes off? Everyone has the same reaction to these annoying pieces of shit: “Oh, Christ, turn that goddamn thing off already!” The yuppie cocksuckers who buy alarms for their Beamers and Volvos are annoying enough without an ear-splitting shriek proclaiming their economic misbehavior. The only thing a car alarm is good for is scaring the bejeezus out of a dog trying to take a whiz on your tire.
To go along with life saving technology like an artificial heart, we have . . . the Clapper. If you are too lazy to get off your cellulite eroded ass to turn off the lights or the TV, you are going to become so out of shape and Jabba-like that you will end up having a coronary, thus insuring the sale of another artificial heart. Hmm, come to think of it, maybe the same company owns both of these products.
And stop with the cell phone crap, too. I swear, cell phone relay towers are sprouting like weeds everywhere you look. It’s no wonder there is an epidemic of migraine headaches in this country. We’re bombarded by radio waves, microwaves, cosmic rays and every other kind of transmission radiation imaginable. Now we’re going to add TV screens to cell phones. They already have video games, internet access and GPS capability. Why not add a stun/kill setting like the old Star Trek phasers? How about a built in electric razor so you can shave your nuts in the car? And send pictures of it to your girlfriend, who will be so turned on she’ll activate the vibrator function on her cell phone and get off in the grocery store. Gack.
Someday, technology will start telling us what to do, and I’ll sit back and laugh at all you automatons because I never got myself a cell phone.