Technical Difficulties

My old ' puter was pretty much shitting the bed so I had to replace it. This required transferring its contents to the new machine, which ended up taking pretty much all day -- well, 3 1/2 hours plus commuting time with a tech support guy --  and then the rest of the afternoon restoring my logins, downloading cloud applications, and figuring out the new OS and whatnot. That got me thinking about the hassles connected with all the technology that ' s supposed to save us time and effort and amplify our powers. Somebody -- one of those radical environmentalist types like Murray Bookchin or E.F. Schumacher -- oh wait, it was Andre Gorz -- figured out that with the time it takes to earn the money to buy a car, maintain it, insure it etc., plus fight through the city traffic, occasionally get stranded when the car breaks down, and what not, you ' re actually going about 4 miles and hour, and we already know a way to go 4 miles and hour. Well, maybe, and I agree that people who live in cities with decent mass transit are probably better off without a car. My sister lives in Manhattan, and she doesn ' t have one.On the other hand, she needs to rent a car to visit our mother or otherwise get out of the city, and I am in city traffic a small fraction of the time. Without a car I couldn ' t go shopping, go to work, go to the doctor, or pretty much do anything else. Back in the old days, I would have needed at least one horse, and of course they require feeding and breeding and...
Source: Stayin' Alive - Category: American Health Source Type: blogs