Amish Technology

I love watching the local farmers work with heavy horses. Around here they seem to go for American creams, which can be off-white to palomino; sometimes Clydesdales, I think.

Trapping people is crazy and bad if it's not something they want. But the Amish have a cohesive community and family structure. They looked at what cars did to that, and they are correct in observing that cars increase mobility at the direct expense of cohesion. They didn't want to make that trade. I don't blame them. I consider cars a necessary evil. I can easily see why people already happy with their community would wish to protect it from that erosion.

Another reason I'm indifferent to most of the marketplace is that ads almost never say anything I care about, so I ignore all of them. It's just blather. But one in a thousand or so will have actual product information, and one of things that does stick in my mind is durability. Consequently two of the commercials that I remember are "Takes a licking and keeps on ticking" and the one with gorillas jumping on suitcases. Okay, your product promotes durability. If I need that kind of product, I might remember to look at yours first to see if its other features meet my needs.

Then people don't use them. The more things you turn into computers -- televisions, clocks, ovens, washers and dryers, cars, books -- the fewer people who can and will use them. The products do more IFF you can master their complexities, but otherwise they are less useful or completely useless.

This is one reason I don't watch TV anymore. My standard for a user-friendly TV is to push one button to turn it on, and twist one dial to see what's playing. I do not like TV enough to invest any more energy than that. So at this point, we watch one DVD episode of something a night, and that's because someone else works the equipment. I don't care enough about it to do it myself.

Further consider that the more complex things become, the easier they break and the harder they are to repair. Since America is rapidly getting poorer, this also undermines the market for and use of fancy gadgets. But it's not something people track; they're only watching the part of the economy that chases the the newest release trying to keep up with the Gateses. And then they wonder why it's so sluggish.

>> I fear in families it'll be there's one person who knows how to operate it and this person gets abused each and every time... <<

Often true.

>> The thing my mind perhaps will consider about this is: First, how much is the cost? And second, can it spy me? <<

I resent spyware. I avoid it as much as possible, no matter how shiny the bait it is attached to. I also resent nagware. Screens that threaten criminal penalties for using the product in unapproved ways just make me want to not use the product. Fuck it, I have books that don't say mean things to me, I have gardens, I have crowdfunding full of people who are actually fun to be around. I don't need this shit.

>> And it's not like only those people afford this to themselves which have an income which easily covers that. <<

It's a price people are charged for participating in society, though. More places are forcing people to be on the grid even if they don't want to be. To have a job -- to survive -- you have to have a home, a phone, usually a car, etc. And there's a very disturbing trend away from things you buy once and own, to things you have to pay for all the time and only borrow because they're really controlled by someone else. That's not only abusive, it also runs up the base budget at a time when people's real spending power is plummeting.

Horsepower is self-replicating. You don't go out to the barn and find a baby tractor one morning. Open-pollinated crops are self-replicating. GMOs and hybrids are either designed not to reproduce, or the company will hunt you down for saving the seeds. They want to force farmers to keep buying their shit. People don't want to buy their shit, so they're working to make alternatives unavailable or outright illegal. It's a problem.

They are a priceless backup copy of civilization. I treasure them for that reason. You could not pay people enough to do what they do by choice.