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Termyn8or -> RE: New and Improved (4/16/2010 6:33:11 AM)
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Panda, sometimes you just make my fucking day. That is an excellent point and was literated I believe in the words "less is more". I never read that book but I've heard about it. I have no reason to read it actually. Freedom is slavery and ignorance is bliss. See, if you were ignorant you would simply swoon over the new packaging and be blissful paying more for the same old thing.
I really am too old. I remember "Oh Fab, I'm glad, they put lemon freshened borax in you". Borax is boron ore, does it make anything cleaner ? It was all the fad for a time, what ever happened to it ? There were borax additives for laundry soap sold separately, like bleach.
Speaking of bleach, it may disinfect but it does not clean anything. When was bleach invented ? Surely it made things look cleaner, and killed a bunch of germs, but was it really cleaner ? Now we can make dogshit tasteless, odorless and undetectable, does that mean it is not there ?
That is the root of it. They use manipulation of peoples' perception to make more money.
And other factors are at play, which occlude the issue. I know it would cost thousands of dollars to build a TV set like they did in 1978, despite the relative simplicity. Some say it would cost a fortune to build a car new from the exact design from the 1960s. I am not so sure actually. Cars are one thing that that have really fallen under this new and improved bullshit.
There is one thing and one thing only better about newer cars - fuel injection. Of course it was invented long before it came into common use. It is actually an advantage to be able to just hop in and drive because the mixture is so precisely controlled, it beats waiting for the choke to open and the idle to "kick down" before you can really drive down the road. And in most of the better cars there is an oil pump of a better design that has such volume output that you don't even have to worry about your bearings. You hop in, turn the key and put it in gear.
But then there are furnaces. I have two in this house, one is over fifty years old and the other was new in 1995. Well the old furnace (A) is only 80% efficient. Every ten years I have to go clean the orifice for the pilot so it can heat the thermopile and run without electricity. It is totally silent. Furnace B (1995 Rheem) announces it's initiation many times a day with the sound somewhat like a jet engine because of the induction fan. Then the "afterburners" get going when the gas goes on and is ignited. It is sucked through a tubular heat exchanger and really sounds like a jet engine at that point. Then the blower motor kicks in after the timer says so and the vents whistle and rattle due to the oh so efficient heated air BLASTING through. That is as long as ther is electricity.
But it's improved because the efficiency of furnace A is only 80% while the efficiency of furnace B is a greatly improved 80%.
While we are on the Fs, flourescent tubes. Gotta love them. Those old nasty energy wasting four foot forty watt tubes are so 60s. They only lasted about five years and only put out triple the light of an incandescent. These new ones are so much better. They last about six months and only pull thirty two watts, and put out near double that of an equivalent incandescent. What's more you can get a whole case of them for only like twenty or forty bucks every couple of years. Shit, with the old bulbs they would be so dusty by the time you change them your hands might get dirty, but now you are changing and discarding nice new tubes. Who wants those nasty old five year old germs all over the place ?
Holy shit, now I got an entry for the G category - germs. Think of the advances made. With drugs germs are much more resilient and can kill us more effectively. They adapt to new antibiotics etc. so very quickly. Truly a new breed. Now they fuel a significant protion of our robust and healthy ecomony. (more on that some other time. Sorry I am already past E).
Perhaps someone else can handle the entry for H. I am old and tired, in desparate need of newing and improving.
T
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