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But was it?
Because I am old enough to remember engines that couldn't make it to 100k miles because carburetors washed down the cylinders and killed them.
It wasn't all that long ago that the center of every road was pitch black from all the dripping oil from EVERY car.
Even guns from back when were no panacea.
I like how it's not even noteworthy for a gun to go thousands of rounds without cleaning effortlessly and drop-in parts. Higher capacity magazines are also a plus.
Electronics are far better.
My cell phone is the hand computer I was promised when reading science fiction that used Von Braun's spaceship designs in the illustrations. Only it fits in my pocket and not my rucksack.
Fuck be upon tape media for music! Even CD's are better and digital means I can keep my entire library on my handcomp!
The past wasn't always better. It just didn't have the new problems we have today and we've forgotten the problems which vexed us then which no longer exist.
It wasn't even simpler.
Cars didn't mostly have air conditioning. At least they were designed for it, mostly, maybe.
ReplyDeleteAnd tires. I remember when it was a big deal that a tire got 20K miles on it. Then 50K.
We can survive crashes now that would have left us dead then.
Though I do admit, our modern cars and trucks are boring to look at. All the requirements for fuel economy have caused everything to morph into the same shapes.
Some things are better, some things worse. The advantage we have now is in some cases we can still revert some things back to the way they used to be. It is still entirely possible to run a car with a carburetor. It is entirely possible to shoot guns that are 100 years old. That kind of thing has it's own set of issues of course. People in the past just had to wait, if they were lucky enough to survive.
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In the worse category is the intertwining of all the electrical systems into a computer.
DeleteThe domelight shouldn't be a request to the BCM from the door switch, it should just be a switch!
I can't argue with that. There are some things that really do make things more complicated than they need to be.
Delete-swj
Bench front seats on a third date. Just sayin'.
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