Technology versus mechanics.

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guitarbuddha

Posts: 2970
Joined: Jan. 4 2007

Technology versus mechanics.

In the last few decades electronics have really developed. The inexpensive hard drive of today looks the same as it's counterpart of five years ago but stores up to one hundred times as much information.

This phenomena is entirely limited to electronics. Yet mechanical technology is marketed as if that were not the case.

I always get a good laugh at men in their fifties in bicycle shops credulously lapping up the sales jargon which tells them about the incredible performance of their bike. Which is really within two or three percent of a bike from the thirties. And that bike could be expected to last about twenty careful years whereas the new one is designed to be fragile. And off they go with their high performance road bike on the pavement puffing and panting in lycra in the wrong gear ratio and buckling their hand built wheels as they bump up and down at every curb. Cheaper than a Porsche I guess but every bit as ridiculous.
Men who could cheerfully lose three stone shaving grams from a gear lever at ridiculous expense.

Training shoes too. I run a lot and training shoes are like toothbrushes. They are fit for purpose or they are not. Yet people actually believe in technological advancement delivering incredible results and throw their money away. And the pure nonsense they talk. As if getting a magazine designed to make you want expensive equipment taught you anything more than how to want the stuff. If your feet hurt then you are running badly, trainers are a tiny part of the equation. Yet as the only thing which can be readily sold shoes are where people place their focus.

So few people are rational it seems. So much misinformation and salesmanship and the constant invitation to confuse the orders of magnitude possible with developments in electronics with what is possible with mechanical technology.

I guess I just don't have the gadget gene. Or a TV, I think a lot of stuff seems acceptable when you embrace the worst excesses of unrestrained misinformation every twelve minutes of your life.

D.

REPORT THIS POST AS INAPPROPRIATE | Date Mar. 28 2014 12:42:09