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Yeah, it was bad enough when they began putting those metal pipes and fancy porcelain bowls INSIDE the house. It used to strengthen the constitution to go outside in winter and work the pump handle when you wanted to wash, and it built character to have to trudge to the outhouse through the snow. Outhouses used to be safely placed away from the home, kitchen, etc..., which was hygeinic. Now there not only aren't any outhouses, you wash the sh*t away into pipes that go through the walls to who-knows where. Just the thought of that creeps me out. What if one day they spring a leak?
Then they got those fancy squawk-talk things, uh, -- telephones! Like it would hurt your lungs to yell over the back fence when you wanted to talk to your neighbour, or hurt your legs to walk into town when you wanted to find out if the store carried something you needed. At least when they started, you could talk to the sweet-voiced hello girls at the switchboards [Madeline always sounded the sexiest, but Mabel was the kind you'd wish was your Mother. Only Harriet reminded me too much of my old teacher!].
Radio used to be simple: hook up three batteries, dial in three knobs, and you could hear the station. Then it got more and more complicated, and sometimes sounded a little better, but for years now it has all been going to hell. The music has, too. The noise they put out now isn't really music. Doesn't matter much, though, since kids today don't really dance: they just sort of sit there and bounce like bobble-head figurines. Now they've made music controls simple again with iPods - just one round thing like putting the old knobs together -- but the sound is awful, even compared to the old horn speakers we used to listen through.
Okay, I'll stop there...shift gears:
We live in the future. Okay, so we aren't flying around in Jetsons-style hovercars yet, but GPRS is pretty amazing and would have fit right in there. Our mobile phones aren't strapped on our wrists like Dick Tracey's radio-wristwatch, but they serve very much the same function of keeping us connected everywhere. And we still have the choice of leaving them at home or turning them off (even if some people resent it when we do). We live in yesterday's future. Unfortunately, we kept some of the "cartoon joke" aspects in the transition, as regards some measures of quality. iPods are much more portable than 22XX or SX-series receivers or even boomboxes. But they are more fragile, have poorer sound and won't last as long. One step forward, one or two steps back.
There are many and complex reasons why the world is going the way it is -- some of them inevitable, but some quite lamentable nonetheless. Hundreds of millions of increasingly affluent consumers in India and China are driving up the price of basic raw materials, metals, etc... to unprecedented levels, and that process will continue for years to come. Imagine if all those people were buying SX-1050ss instead of little iPods or plastic-cased radios. The wooden cases for those receivers alone would destroy most remaining forests within a decade. If all their cars were made from heavy sheet steel like 1950s cars were, imagine what steel would cost today, trying to keep up with demand.
If everyone is going to have a television, stereo system, appliances and entertainment, most of the goods HAVE TO BE mostly made from cheap plastic, and engineered-to-the-minimum-cost standards. Yes, it would be nice if we each bought one TOTL last-your-entire-life radio and that was the end of it -- that might even work in terms of demands on resources-- but it would be boring and would make it hard for many companies to stay in business, would tend to stifle innovation and put a limit on potential lifestyle improvement (even if much of what results is NOT an improvement) and consumers would go without many things for longer periods of their lives. These days, most people will not defer satisfaction that way. Long-term, the world will inevitably continue to change, sometimes in ways we do not like, because there are "too many" people in the world for it not to!
Hopefully we will (individually and collectively) find ways to achieve a good balance. For many of us on this board, that includes retaining, repairing and preserving some of the higher-quality older gear. My steam iron is an old industrial-grade unit from a garment factory. FAR out-performs the best of the new ones in the department stores (I know, I had one of those too). But it isn't realistic nor practical for us to expect or demand that most of the population follow that path and that manufacturers continue to turn out that quality. Perhaps it is better in many ways if most of them don't. I'm sad, too, to see these changes in society. But I accept that they may be inevitable. I don't participate "fully" in the modern economy, but find my own "balance point", consuming some new products but mostly recycling the older versions that I perceive to be better in absolute quality, and much better value-for-money. I'm glad there are others here who follow a similar path, but don't expect nor hope that the whole world does so.
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