Technological/practical "backward steps" we all just accept now

yeah I've bought several old iPhones for $20 which you can just use as music players. it's pretty neat.

hoping to get one of the 256 GB ones this way in a couple years

was it me? i just did this!

― weird woman in a bar (La Lechera), Wednesday, August 14, 2019 10:45 AM (ten minutes ago)

maybe!

More and more kitchen gadgets (and doubtless other gadgets, but kitchen is what I know) are now only controllable via smartphone. This makes the gadget cheaper to manufacture (no buttons!) and "smart" and horrible. How I love losing that hands-on instant feedback and instead setting up lots of bluetooth pairings with greasy wet fingers, pairings which invariably fail either silently, ruining the food, or with loud alarms.

normal versions of these things still exist. why would you buy these smartphone versions?

in case you need to tweet from your refrigerator

you mean like, if you are stuck inside and need someone to let you out?

the day i have to use my phone to operate a kitchen gadget will be a dark day indeed

xp to sarahell

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/aug/13/teen-smart-fridge-twitter-grounded

I've been tempted to when the gadget is in every other respect significantly better than the competition.

are there actual fridges on twitter? tweeting about fridge things?

you all should just be like me and rent apartments for the rest of your lives. this will ensure that your appliances are always 10-20 years out of date and easy to use

you can stay in the same rental apartment for 10-20 years, even!

You can imagine me looking disdainfully over my cyberpunk shades at a lot of the things on this thread (iPods, landlines, artisanal shaving).

I do remember the first time it took more than a second for the response to a button press on my phone to be more than instantaneous - thought "Well, I guess this is how it is now". This would have been in the pre-smart phone era but on a phone big enough that you could install some sort of 'app' - it was hell.

But modern smartphones are things of absolute wonder, generations of humans would have killed other generations just to have them.

(You swipe right on an iPhone's lock screen to get by-the-hour weather, if you've set that up)

One things I'll particularly go to the mat for is automated airport bag drops - we waited 20 minutes in a barely moving queue last week until the staff started going down the line to find those without a boarding card and summarily execute them guide them to the checkin machines. When we got to the top of the queue, the gentleman checked the stickers on the bag that we'd already put on, checked the boarding passes that we needed to have to get the stickers, checked the passports that we also needed to have to get the stickers, directed us to the baggage handlers that were very visible, and told us where the gates were - all completely pointless. In Dublin you can do the whole thing without talking with anyone, leaving staff free for the check-in desks.

Anyway anyway I have come here to shit on Google - a friend mentioned a few months ago that the predictive search has gotten weirdly worse - it'll show what you're looking for after 2-3 letters, but hide it again after 4-5!

And having spent some time travelling over the last fortnight, the Google Maps on my phone is ridiculously full of things I'm not searching for, and too willing to take any passing brush as "Oh do you want to go focus on this bar / restaurant / general Real Estate-only neighbourhood concept? That is cool, I can show you how to get from here to there, and not to whatever you were asking about just previously"

pic.twitter.com/G6V7aAufec

— claudia (@KiIledByDeath__) August 12, 2019

dear dorothy,

please eat more vegetables

warmest regards,
the fridge

xp what airport was that? Sounds horrendous. I was in T5 the other day & it was just hell, automated to within an inch of its life and full of clueless tourists (and why would they have a clue, should be being helped if necessary).

tangent but my Google Maps top hate is when you're zoomed in and do a search for whatever only for it to zoom way out to show vague or related results miles away instead of just shifting right to the actual nearby match or asking if you want to zoom out for the suggestions

cloud based software that is clunkier/has fewer features than the standalone versions. e.g. my frenemy: quickbooks online

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/23/sunday-review/human-contact-luxury-screens.html

Human Contact Is Now a Luxury Good

Screens used to be for the elite. Now avoiding them is a status symbol.

the automated luggage thing is daft as anything. i was going to the states in the wee hours of the morning from here last summer and it was busy as anything at the gates, then once you'd gone through that rigmarole you're in another big lineup for the baggage drop-off. there's no way this expedites anything and I've still had to interact with two staff members (one who looked at my passport and scanned my ticket at the gate, one who manned the wee conveyor belt to dump your luggage on) if reducing labour costs was the idea.

at the counter rather than the gate i should say.

It's about tomatoes, but it's a great study on how industrial farming makes food taste worse.

https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/513NeKcWwbL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

https://www.npr.org/2011/06/28/137371975/how-industrial-farming-destroyed-the-tasty-tomato

Estabrook says the mass-produced tomatoes in today's supermarkets lack flavor because they were bred for enduring long journeys to the supermarket — and not for taste.

"As one large Florida farmer said, 'I don't get paid a single cent for flavor,' " says Estabrook. "He said, 'I get paid for weight. And I don't know of any supermarket shopper who tastes her tomatoes before she puts them in her shopping cart.' ... It's not worth commercial plant breeders' while to breed for taste because their customers — the large farmers — don't get paid for it."

As a result, customers have become accustomed to the flavorless tomatoes that dot supermarket shelves, says Estabrook.

"I was speaking to a person in their 30s recently and she said she had never recalled tasting anything other than a supermarket tomato," he says. "I think that wanting a tomato in the winter of winter — or wanting a little bit of orange on the plate ... is inherent in a lot of our shopping decisions. We expect an ingredient to be on the supermarket shelves 365 days a year, whether or whether not it's in season or tastes any good."

Though most of our tomatoes come from Florida, the state isn't necessarily the best place to grow the crop, says Estabrook. Most tomatoes are grown in sand, which contains few nutrients and organic materials. In addition, Florida's humidity breeds large populations of insects, which means tomato growers need to apply chemical pesticides on a weekly basis.

"In order to get a successful crop of tomatoes, the official Florida handbook for tomato growers lists 110 different fungicides, pesticides and herbicides that can be applied to a tomato field over the course of the growing season," he says. "And many of those are what the Pesticide Action Network calls 'bad actors' — they're kind of the worst of the worst in the agricultural chemical arsenal."

Florida applies more than eight times the amount of pesticide and herbicides as does California, the next leading tomato grower in the country. Part of this has to do with the fact that California processes tomatoes that are used for canning — and therefore don't have to look as good as their Florida counterparts. But part of this also has to do with consumers.

"It's the price we pay for insisting we have food out of season and not local," he says. "We foodies and people in the sustainable food movement chant these mantras, 'local, seasonable, organic, fair-trade, sustainable,' and they almost become meaningless because they're said so often and you see them in so many places. If you strip all those away, they do mean something, and what they mean is that you end up with something like a Florida tomato in the winter — which is tasteless."

don't even supermarket tomatoes taste better in the actual summertime? in Europe you can buy tomatoes all year round too but they naturally taste like cardboard until at least June. so why bother?

i feel like if you've never left britain you've never tasted a good tomato

cars are overly complicated, you can't DIY repairs much if it all
in US, homes & small biz buildings used to be built using sturdy, durable materials and constructed by very skilled craftsmen. now they're made out of plywood and siding. Uglier, don't last as long, not as energy efficient, won't survive storms as well.

Jim in Vancouver otm though it is actually incredibly easy to grow your own as long as you water them. fuck a supermarket tomato FOREVER

of course the tradeoff is cars are now MUCH more reliable and thus need repairs much less often than back in the day

yeah the tomato one is def endemic at this point. the first "what has happened to our tomatoes?" exposes date from the late 60s and early 70s as question-the-establishment and/or naderite consumer advocate journos started realizing what sort of research the USDA had actually been subsidizing for years, oldsters and produce-trade veterans were able to notice the difference etc.

for even earlier "what has happened to our bread?" concern, check out sigfried giedion's amazing /mechanization takes command/ from the 1940s. fascinating as he was a major cheerleader of modernization and modern life but (likely influenced by the context of WW2) was, like lewis mumford around the same time, increasingly aware of the downsides and hoping for some humanist technological synthesis around the corner. he also has long passages about the decline of bathing, the "mechanization of death" in the slaughterhouses, etc., and a million cockamamie old inventions illustrated courtesy of the US patent office.

i neither need nor want televisions in airports, taxi cabs, subway cars, buses, restrooms etc

and if cvs insists on making me do the labor of scanning my own stuff (probably after waiting extra to use one of the machines that take cash), i'm gonna periodically take a cut

Florida applies more than eight times the amount of pesticide and herbicides as does California, the next leading tomato grower in the country. Part of this has to do with the fact that California processes tomatoes that are used for canning — and therefore don't have to look as good as their Florida counterparts. But part of this also has to do with consumers.

As a Californian, who eats predominantly California tomatoes, I am happy that this is not my problem. ... also the economics of tomato growers is something I've been aware of/complained about since the 90s, so like, late pass to everyone but me.

the automatic baggage dropoff at CDG for Air France is good, you walk up to long row of hand scanners, it takes 20 seconds, don’t have to wait in line or talk to anyone

the automatic supermarket checkouts in the Czech Republic seemed better than what I’m used to. nb I am a former supermarket cashier so I loathe the old way

I was actually thinking about tasteless blueberries when I started this thread! some vague memory of possibly a Twitter thread about how we could all have luscious jammy-tasting berries instead of mushy blue crap

i actually like self-checkout at the grocery store ... sorry.

Automated phone systems where you have to speak your response ... if I wanted to actually speak responses, I would talk to a person, just let me press stupid buttons, ok.

of course the tradeoff is cars are now MUCH more reliable and thus need repairs much less often than back in the day

Also far safer for the occupants

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT%2C_VMT%2C_per_capita%2C_and_total_annual_deaths.png

counterpoints: the trend in supersizing SUVs has made it far worse for pedestrians and fuel efficiency

technological change anthropology, live as it happened: PLEASE PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAG: Supermarket Self-Serve Checkout Poll

in US, homes & small biz buildings used to be built using sturdy, durable materials and constructed by very skilled craftsmen. now they're made out of plywood and siding. Uglier, don't last as long, not as energy efficient, won't survive storms as well.

one could argue this is something that can be improved/enforced by changes to building codes. There are newer energy efficiency standards for buildings that actually a lot of older buildings don't meet, and thus there are arguments regarding the use of the historical building code and lower standards for historic buildings ... obviously there are regional differences for these things, and you probably live somewhere with laxer standards.

in US, homes & small biz buildings used to be built using sturdy, durable materials and constructed by very skilled craftsmen. now they're made out of plywood and siding. Uglier, don't last as long, not as energy efficient, won't survive storms as well.

A contractor succinctly explained this to me as: "the owners are going to flip the place in five to six years and the owners after them are going to tear it all out anyway, so durability is a liability"

you can stay in the same rental apartment for 10-20 years, even!

you'd think, but the trick is for the landlord to keep raising prices every year so you have to keep downgrading to shittier apartments. the plus side is that the shittier apartments feature appliances that are even more outdated than the regularly outdated appliances, ensuring that the tenant will never have to use their phone to open the refrigerator

Peaches, strawberries, blueberries. There are a bunch of fruit I avoid buying other than specific times of the year when the more local versions are available, which are generally still pretty good.

lots of xps

I was under the mistaken impression that I had the skill and wherewithal to learn how to repair iPod classics prior to the inevitable death of my own but I think I've decided I'm going to figure out how to make an iTunes-based music server happen so I can still access all my songs and playlists through my phone when the day of sorrow finally arrives. Hence my 'RIP clickwheel' post way upthread as this is the one innovation which is basically just gone forever at this point and which I will truly miss.

"the owners are going to flip the place in five to six years and the owners after them are going to tear it all out anyway, so durability is a liability"

some things yes, other things no ...

you'd think, but the trick is for the landlord to keep raising prices every year so you have to keep downgrading to shittier apartments

one weird trick!

i am totally fine with my 20+ year old stove and 10+ year old fridge

me too, although i am considering inviting an amazon representative over to my place on a daily basis so they can check the items in my fridge, re-order the low stock items via Amazon Fresh, and then sell all my product preference data to everyone who will pay for it without telling me (except on pg 562 of the revised privacy policy plan)

thinking of replacing my walls with transparent nu-glass, moving my apartment into my workplace and then taking a bunch of soma until i die

no easy way to view a big chunk of the movies made before the 21st century

in US, homes & small biz buildings used to be built using sturdy, durable materials and constructed by very skilled craftsmen. now they're made out of plywood and siding. Uglier, don't last as long, not as energy efficient, won't survive storms as well.

uglier maybe. the rest eh... not really. it depends. and cheaper? yes (this matters a lot in environments where it's already extremely difficult to build housing for various reasons, e.g. the US).

http://planphilly.com/articles/2019/08/09/we-don-t-build-them-like-we-use-to-why-new-houses-aren-t-made-of-brick

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-02-13/why-america-s-new-apartment-buildings-all-look-the-same

To avoid the draconian locks that John Deere puts on the tractors they buy, farmers throughout America's heartland have started hacking their equipment with firmware that's cracked in Eastern Europe and traded on invite-only, paid online forums.

Tractor hacking is growing increasingly popular because John Deere and other manufacturers have made it impossible to perform "unauthorized" repair on farm equipment, which farmers see as an attack on their sovereignty and quite possibly an existential threat to their livelihood if their tractor breaks at an inopportune time.

A license agreement John Deere required farmers to sign in October forbids nearly all repair and modification to farming equipment, and prevents farmers from suing for "crop loss, lost profits, loss of goodwill, loss of use of equipment … arising from the performance or non-performance of any aspect of the software." The agreement applies to anyone who turns the key or otherwise uses a John Deere tractor with embedded software. It means that only John Deere dealerships and "authorized" repair shops can work on newer tractors.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xykkkd/why-american-farmers-are-hacking-their-tractors-with-ukrainian-firmware

House technology in the new century: it will eventually be faster and cheaper to keep adding solar panels to a house than it will be to replace the single-pane inefficient windows that have been on it for 60+ years

xp - oooooh! I should ask my mom about that one!