Posts Tagged → technology
Where is the Manual Override lever?
A friend of mine has a beautiful home filled up with high technology gadgets. Everything in the house is automated, including opening and closing toilet seats, lights, music, the kitchen wine rack, you name it; if it can be programmed to happen or turn on or off when a person enters or exits the room or uses the potty, he has it set.
First time I encountered this was at a party. It was funny and entertaining. I would experience something newfangled and robotic, comment on it, compliment my friend for his ingenuity, and then retreat to the pool deck or his living room to talk with a human being.
Then a year later he generously hosted me as a guest for a weekend as I ran for state senate, while he and his family were away. Every time I stepped into the kitchen, lights would turn on, the fridge would light up, or automatically open if I approached it, same with the coffee maker, etc. When the shower was turned on, music started.
No matter what I wanted to do, or needed to do, or possibly indicated a desire to do, the automated electronics tried to anticipate me and do it for me. Even the toilet paper dispenser was set to go, maybe not enough, but it tried to provide. Everything but the final act was done by the toilet paper dispenser, but then the guest room toilet also had a bidet feature, which if you are into that, can work wonders if set on “fire hose high.”
After that weekend, I swore I would try to avoid automation as much as possible the rest of my life. It unnerved me, because almost as frequently as the robotics were correct, they were then incorrect, and then annoying. Put another way, the first hour of that is Golly! amusing. The second hour is provocative, as the human mind tries to find ways to work around the now-annoying robots. After that, one becomes tired of the novelty, and a bit alarmed by all of the automated activity that occurs no matter which room one enters into, and what one really wants.
And there is no manual override.
Several years ago I made the mistake of buying a newfangled clothes washing machine. Our old one died, and I had run out of fixes for it. I could not find its two-way electric motor, used, even on eBay, and so it went out into the world of recycling.
Looking for that old machine’s fierce old-fashioned tear-your-arm-off churn of the washing machines we all grew up with, I accepted the salesman’s representation that this new machine could do that, if I programmed it to do it. And Lordy but does it have buttons for programming! It even can link up with your smart phone and be run from that, if you download that manufacturer’s spyware app.
I figured that with all of these sophisticated buttons and options, the machine could probably be programmed to write Shakespeare sonnets, much less really, really clean our family’s clothing.
Nope.
Turns out that the machine has programming for a high efficiency absence of cleaning water set at cold, and shame-on-you low efficiency absence of cleaning water, set at tepid, with the same weak, flaccid, slow, low-energy half-turn of the cleaning rotor as happens with the high-efficiency choice. And the churny-rotor thingy is a superior action to the lift-and-flop motion the machine is set to do from the factory.
Any mistake in trying to run a wash and then stopping it requires the machine to drain out all of the wash water and then start all over again. Which is a waste of water, and whatever electricity it used, and is usually an unnecessary step.
With this new, expensive, high tech clothes washing machine, you are stuck with a set of poor or poorer choices in how to maybe clean your clothes. The machine was designed and programmed by people who care more about energy and water efficiency than actually cleaning clothes.
Note to clothes washer manufacturers: We consumers buy clothes washers because we want our clothes to get clean, however that is done, whatever it takes, at whatever amounts and temperatures of water are needed, and with whatever rotor churn power is needed to knock the caked dirt off of my work clothes. We don’t want high efficiency water and electrictity use for anything other than thoroughly cleaning our clothes. And if the high efficiency settings don’t clean clothes, as they usually do not, then we want a choice in setting the machine to really kick ass and do what clothes washers are supposed to do: Clean. Really, really, super clean. At whatever cost in water and electricity.
And no, there is no manual override for this fancy washing machine. You the consumer are given an incomplete set of choices, and by golly, that is what you will learn to like, whether it is likable or not.
Last but not least among the examples of modern thingies needing a manual override, we have the new car belonging to the Princess of Patience. It is a 2026 Toyota Rav4 hybrid, being number four in a progression of RAV4s the Princess of Patience has owned and relied upon, with great enjoyment.
Heh, well, this latest and greatest iteration of the tried and true and much favored RAV4 inspires our gentle, soft spoken, always well considered Princess of Patience to say things like “I hate this %*$#@! thing. I want to set it on fire and leave it on the side of the road!”
Now, what could inspire such a harsh reaction to something so wonderfully modern and reliable as her new car? In a word: Technological automation.
This damned RAV4 has more technology than a fighter jet, and more automation than the Toyota car factory that built it. The technology is overwhelming, unnecessary, superfluous, and impossible to control, unless one has a degree in computer programming. The little turny knobs we used for the past seventy years for selecting radio stations and interior temperatures worked, ya know. Simple solution, hard to break, easy to tune. Not the new car technology! It is all touch screen, which is hard to see, inelegant, and clumsy.
This RAV4 tries to grab and pull into its computer motherboard every electronic gadget and phone that passes within fifty feet of it, then downloading and storing everything digital on said gadget and phone (to then download to Toyota so the car company can then sell and monetize our most personal information). This car also has every kind of Nanny pseudo-safety feature automatically built in that a weenie sheltered mama’s boy could ever dream up.
The car beeps and chimes and dings if you swerve one inch into the road dividing line. It will also automatically swerve away from any car or dividing line it believes you have mistakenly turned towards, even if you are swerving to avoid a deer standing in the middle of the road, but end up hitting the deer instead, because of the car’s automated correction system.
Ditto for coming anywhere near another vehicle while driving or parking. Last week my left wrist was nearly broken because of the force it hit the steering wheel with, as the car automatically and harshly jammed on the brakes to “save” us from hitting the rear end of a car that was turning into an alley in a congested urban area. We were plenty far enough away from the other car’s bumper, but to the RAV4, we nearly died, and it saved us.
Whoever programmed this car’s automated sensors and driving instructions obviously never drove in Brooklyn, New York, where urban combat driving is the norm and clearances between moving and parked vehicles and with buildings and humans are all measured in tenths of inches. To everyone’s satisfaction. But not to this car!
If I were to try to drive this 2026 RAV4 in a place like Brooklyn, I would leave a trail of destruction and mayhem behind me, on account of the automated driving and “safe reaction” nanny settings programmed into the car. The car would swerve to avoid one perceived obstacle, and then take out two grandmas, a stroller, and a partridge in a pear tree in one full swoop, just to stop me from maybe hitting something. All while the damned thing scans my eyeballs and my brain for what music I might possibly want to listen to at that second.
Folks, there is just too damned much technology and automation and useless gee-whiz gizmos in everything we use. It is all working against us, against our interests, our choices, against our humanity. It is a reflection not of us and our choices, but of the weak and highly risk-averse fairies who program these things before we start using them. And there is no manual override for any of it.
Not everything analog is bad, and hardly everything digital is good. The deeper we go into digital everything, the more we want some of that old analog world back. It was easier, more user friendly, did more with less, easier to maintain, lasted longer and broke a lot lot less than the digital crap.
You want a tamper resistant and theft-proof vehicle, that does what you tell it to do, when you want it? Get a manual stick shift. That is what I want in my next pickup truck, if only to be able to regularly give Third Gear to The Man.
Re NPR & PBS
Looking like far-left wing opposition research and partisan propaganda outlets NPR, PBS, and CPB are finally going to stop having American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars supporting them. Good! I mean, why not give taxpayer money to the National Rifle Association, too? The NRA has been around since 1857, making it America’s oldest civil rights organization. The NRA certainly qualifies for getting lots of American taxpayer money, if NPR and PBS do.
Fact is, the entire world has changed since the 1970s, and public funding of radio and television programs goes back decades before that. By the time of Sesame Street and its band of cute fuzzy monsters talking about racial harmony, correct English spelling, and counting numbers correctly, the tide of technology was already turning in other directions. More TV and radio channels were becoming available every year. By the 1990s, the Internet was born, access to all sorts of programming and information became 24/7, and NPR, PBS, and CPB had gone hard left and become fully an arm of just one political party (not the GOP).
The marketplace of ideas and information had changed as radically as the industrial revolution had changed hand labor and home crafts, demand for government funded programming had greatly diminished, and yet NPR, PBS, and CPB were fully addicted to big wads of free taxpayer money. They insisted they were still relevant, and also wanted to be independent of taxpayers, but still getting our money. Which seems like a strange asymmetry. Usually if you get money from someone, you are accountable to them.
Now, bills are passing in Congress to withdraw all taxpayer money from NPR, PBS, and CPB, and it appears this will actually come to pass. This is a just and good outcome. However, we cannot forget the intellectual property of NPR, PBS, and CPB that was also created with public funding. Things like trademarks, logos, copyrights are all intellectual property that belongs to We, The People American citizens.
It is not as if NPR, PBS and CPB can get scads of private cash and continue on with their far left attacks on American culture and politics. No. They will have to relinquish the use of all of their identifying logos and trademarks. They have no claim on this public property. Oh, NPR can go ahead and do it is whatever they want to do, but they are going to have to come up with new names and new logos. It’s not my problem if they are undistinguished and unidentifiable in the marketplace.
It is almost as if they really did need that public funding after all, despite telling Americans for the past thirty years that our tax money was only a small amount of their overall budget. I think they were most aware that removing the public money also meant removing all of the other public taxpayer investments made there over the years, too.
It is almost as if without all the taxpayer money, NPR and PBS will really in effect cease to exist…Welp, too bad, NPR. So long Screwy, see ya in Saint Louie!
Sorry, that won’t work either, because that’s a Looney Tunes Bugs Bunny line, already taken, and you NPR people are going to have to use something else. Good luck, don’t take a wrong turn at Albequerque!
A simple request of PA hunters
A simple request for our Pennsylvania hunters: Be hunters, not assassins.
Relying on technology to obtain an animal whose senses you cannot defeat within fair chase distances because your hunting skills are stubby is lame. Killing animals from far outside their hearing, smell, eyesight is not hunting, it is just killing, an assassination. This is not fair chase.
If you are strictly subsistence hunting, I understand, but if you are adhering to fair chase and sporting chances, this long distance stuff ain’t sport hunting. It is ultra cheeseball. Yeah I know, this whole obsession with long range sniping and ultra accuracy that came out of our military experience in Iraq and Afghanistan is cool. But it is not hunting.
A person who is sniping wild animals at hundreds of yards has expended zero skill or effort to defeat the animal’s natural defenses. You might as well drop a hellfire on it from a drone. And yeah, there’s probably a lot of “gamers” who will claim that that also takes “skill” and is “hunting.” Stop it. You are debasing yourself with this crap. Pick up an open sighted 30-30 lever action and learn what hunting is again or for the first time. You deserve it, the animals deserve it, the sport deserves it.
Good luck out there this deer season.
How’d that go? PA begins online hunting license & tag sales
Today at 8:00 AM marked the first day of the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s true entry into the modern world of home computers and the Internet. This probably sounds like an unnecessarily harsh or even a commonly outlandish criticism of the venerable PGC, but it is a technological fact that today marks the very first step by the 1895-founded-and-minded wildlife agency into directly integrating with its customer base.
And it has not gone well, although it could have gone a lot worse. Monday end-of-business hours analysis shows the PGC website processing about 7,090 license purchases per hour. That is about 118 per minute, which is a lot faster than the roughly 1,900 licenses per hour purchased in the early time frame I operated in. Given all of the little moving parts involved, especially that carefully measured doe tag purchase, I guess I can see why this is taking longer than the two to three minutes total that each person expected to spend on it. It still frustrated me and others who are not at war with PGC.
The process has been marred by exceptionally long waits, both in-person at brick and mortar retailers and online, with lots of “system crashes” and people standing in line for hours, spawning humorous memes like the old and now former pink doe tag envelope saying “Miss Me Yet?” I like the meme of the skeleton passed out over the desktop computer “Waiting for my 21st century Internet purchase from the PA Game Commission.”
The truth is that this day had to come, sooner or later. The old double-stamped pink envelope US Mail process was increasingly marred by the US Postal Service’s incredibly ever worse performance, to the point where people were photographing piles of time-sensitive pink envelopes sitting in heaps in some post office rooms, waiting for who knows what or who knows who. No one likes to be treated differently than everyone else, and the pink envelope lottery was an idea from 1945 that worked when postal employees did their jobs. These days, the Postal Service is notoriously unreliable. We can’t have a doe tag distribution process that relies on unreliable people and institutions. Even when the applying hunter does everything correctly, his or her pink doe tag envelope might take a wrong turn at Albuquerque and arrive days or weeks after the last doe tag was distributed. Which greatly impacts the hunter’s plans and prospects for that upcoming hunting season.
My own experience today had me first sleeping fitfully all night like it was hunting season, and finally dragging myself out of bed and hunkering down by the laptop well before the 8:00 AM beginning of the online purchase process at www.huntfishpa.gov. Almost like opening day of deer season and sitting down at an ambush site. Except this process revealed itself as having actually started well before the appointed 8:00 AM hour, as I was number 7,023 in line when I signed into my PGC huntfishpa account. With barely any coffee in my veins to buffer this unhappy revelation, an ice cold shock ran through me as I realized I was both early and yet already very late to the process. Thousands of hunters were ahead of me in an online process that was unknown, untested, and sure to have its ups and downs and delays.
The big ticket item for most of us early applicants is getting the doe tag of our first choice Wildlife Management Unit. It is why we stayed in the game til the very end. And the numbers tell the tale: My own first choice, WMU 2G, sold 17,000 doe tags by 5:00 PM today, about twice as many doe tags as any other WMU. There is a strong fear in a lot of guys that if you don’t get in line early either online or at a store, you won’t get your coveted doe tag in your primary hunt region. Fact is, with the ever popular northern “Big Woods” WMU 2G, that fear is well founded. There are many more hunters wanting WMU 2G doe tags than there are WMU 2G doe tags to hand out. The early bird gets this worm, every year.
[UPDATE: At 9:42PM I looked at the doe tag numbers and 23,502 WMU 2G doe tags out of the 35,000 total allocation for that WMU have been sold so far. A sale rate far beyond any other WMU. This means that 2G will be sold out by Tuesday early morning hours. The hunter demand for Big Woods 2G tags has always been high, we knew it, and now we get to see how that demand plays out when the hunters themselves are put in direct control of their tag orders]
Four hours and ten minutes later, having obsessively hovered over my laptop screen the entire time while emailing and bitchfest-texting with friends in both better and worse positions than I, I finally had ordered my general hunting license plus all of the additional license and permits I get, like furtaker (trapping), the annual elk application (I will take anything ya got anywhere ya got it), muzzleloader, archery, spear, atl-atl, sling, blowgun, black bear, fisher, bobcat, armadillo, hog, dog, rat, bat, and zinjanthropus tags. And yes, I got my WMU 2G doe tag, which enables me to hunt the way I enjoy most – solo pack and rifle and maybe an overnight and campfire somewhere way off the beaten path and far from roads and people, and the promise of a long and heavy pack-out of boned-out meat with a single doe’s ear and a completed tag attached. This kind of hunt is the most rewarding among big game hunters everywhere. Guys sitting in warmed box blinds overlooking fields and ravines have no idea.
So yeah, I waited and waited to ensure I got that 2G doe tag. A lot of my Big Woods hunting depends on it.
Anyone old enough to pick up on the Bugs Bunny theme above will understand where I am coming from; it was a loooong and kind of zany morning. In this day and age of Amazon and eBay and Gunbroker one-stop-shop badda bing badda bang badda boom go online and it’s yours two minutes later, Pennsylvania’s entry into the online hunting license world was practically Stone Age. New York has about as many hunters as Pennsylvania, and I have never encountered anything like this when I order my hunting license and tags from NY. It is usually immediate. Even Kentucky’s online hunting license and elk tag application process is faster than ours was today.
I am not picking on Kentucky….but come on, we all know it, Kentucky is not known for being especially technologically advanced. And yet….!
On the one hand, we must must give PGC credit for taking the long step out of 1895 and into the computer and internet age. This step the agency took this morning was one small step for PGC and one giant leap for hunterkind, or maybe the reverse, or whatever….. something like this. It is a big deal and I send you guys three cheers. Three grouchy cheers. Let’s not do this again, OK?
Yes, today’s license purchase has been marred by delays that seem unacceptable, but we all know that the PGC’s public employees have way too much pride to let this situation continue. It is a fact that a lot of employees and contractors will be working all night on this new system, and that by the time 8:00 AM breaks tomorrow, a lot of the glitches and delays we experienced today will be a bad memory for some, and a non-experience for a million others.
Primitive hunting techniques are more important than ever
In this day and age of popular stainless steel and plastic hunting rifles and Hubble telescope-sized rifle scopes, primitive hunting techniques and weapons are more important than ever. Something in the bad age of video games and instant gratification happened to the American character in the past thirty years or so, and so many young Americans have become lazy and even a bit heartless, as a result. Hunting culture has suffered from this, too. Really badly. Today’s focus seems to be predominantly on the kill, and much less on the process of the hunt.
Those curious about the distinction here should look up some neat videos from real hunters in the big woods of Vermont, Pennsylvania, and the Adirondacks.
Hunting should never be just about, or mostly about, killing an animal. Especially if the hunter wants to call it a trophy and put it up on his or her wall as a representation of his skill.
People trying to justify 300, 400 yard long range shots (or farther) on unsuspecting animals are not hunting, they are assassinating. Their wood craft often sucks, their field craft is limited to wearing camouflage, and their knowledge of the game animal is negligible. They are not really hunters, but rather shooters. Their high-tech guns, ammo, and rifle scopes are a crutch diminishing their need for good woodcraft, and it also results in a lack of appreciation for an actual hunt, and a lower value placed on the animal.
Culling oversized wild animal populations for the benefit of the environment is one thing, but hunting wild animals for pleasure and clean meat should be accomplished with skill. Age-old skills that everyone can respect. Hard-won wild animals taken with real skill under fair chase conditions are all trophies.
An unsuspecting big game animal assassinated at long range (or worse, inside a high fence, or over bait) requires very little hunting skill, and can never be said to be a trophy that is reflective of the hunter’s skill set. And yet isn’t this why so many hunters want big antlers and broad hides? They see these big animals as a reflection of their hunting prowess, of their manhood, their chest-thumping status within the outdoors community. As a result, America has developed a hunting culture driven by bigger-is-better trophies, at any cost, all too often achieved through long-range assassinations of unsuspecting wildlife, or over bait. Fair chase, which has always been at the heart of hunting, has been tossed away in favor of quick gratification and unfounded ego bragging rights.
The primary reason why primitive hunting weapons are so important today, is that someone has to keep the culture of hunting alive. What is a primitive hunting weapon? Pretty much any legal implement that requires the hunter to work hard to develop unique field craft/ wood craft skills, including the ability to penetrate within a fairly close range of the prey animal’s eyes, ears, and nose: Any bow (compound bow, stick bow, self bow, longbow, or other hand-held vertically limbed bow), spear, atl-atl, open-sighted black powder or centerfire rifle, any large bore handgun with or without a scope, should qualify. Flintlocks, percussion cap black powder muzzleloaders, and traditional bows are especially challenging to master and to harvest wild game with.
All of these primitive weapons require the hunter to actually hunt, to rely upon his woodcraft to carry him quietly and unseen across the landscape, and into a fair and close range of his prey animal. Animals taken with primitive weapons and techniques are earned in every way, and therefore they are fully appreciated.
Few experiences bother me more than watching some internet video of a fourteen year-old hunter running his hands over the antlers of a recently deceased buck, and listening to this inexperienced mere child discuss the finer aspects of this rack, its inches, its points, its relative size, and its (barf on my feet) trail camera name. Usually the child has shot the deer from an elevated box blind that conceals all of the hunter’s scent, sound, and movement. Whoever has taught these kids to hunt this way exclusively, and to then look at deer harvested this way as so many bragging rights, has done a huge disservice to these kids. These kids are going to grow up into poachers and baiters, always trying to prove how great of a “hunter” they are, and how studly and manly they are, at any cost. They will end up doing anything to score the next “record book” animal. These young kids who are being warped right now with this trophy nonsense are the future of America’s hunting culture, and what a crappy culture it will be if it is dominated by big egos and even bigger mouths armed with sniper rifles and no actual hunting skill.
Moms, dads, grandpas and uncles who are beginning to teach kids to hunt right now can do two simple things that will ensure their little student grows up into an ethical, responsible, high quality, law-abiding hunter: Make them use open sights on single-shot firearms and bows.
The skills that young hunters develop from having to rely on open sights and single shots (primitive weapons) will force them to achieve a high level of field craft, wood craft, and fair chase values. Developing skill requires a person to overcome challenges and adversity, often making mistakes along the way. And that results in better character.
Forcing kids to get close to their prey animal, and to take only carefully aimed shots with just open sights, will result in people who become really excellent hunters. Adults can always opt to add a scope to their rifle as their eyes age, but the lessons learned early on in concealment, controlling movement, playing wind direction, and instinctive shooting will keep the respectable art of hunting alive and well.
This Fall, get your little one started on a flintlock or old Fred Bear recurve bow from the get-go, for squirrels and deer, and watch as a true hunter is born.
Does your kid have autism, ADD, ADHD? Nope. Modern society is what’s off, not your kid
For about 70,000 years (or 5,780 years for literal Bible believers) our species Homo Sapiens Sapiens has been on Planet Earth. In that time we have proven ourselves to be not only the dominant life form capable of killing everything else, but so good at killing that we are capable of killing ourselves, as well.
Over this long period of time, humans evolved as hunter-gatherers. We spent all our time hunting and gathering food, and we spent most of our time sitting around a camp fire eating meat we had hunted and fruits and herbs we had gathered. It is a lifestyle perfected by the American Indians and known to us today because we largely ended it through mass migration into their pristine Eden.
During the European conquering of America, very few Indians became European, most resisted to the death. The few who willingly adopted European clothing and religion can almost be counted on two hands. Indian schools like the one in Carlisle were renowned for runaways and coercive methods to convince little Indian children to adopt European ways.
On the other hand, many, many, really countless numbers of European Americans “went native.” They willingly sought out and joined with Indian tribes across the continent, wore their tribes’ clothing, spoke their language, adopted their habits and customs. This happened because something innately natural about the hunter-gatherer lifestyle powerfully speaks to the hunter-gatherer that is inside every human.
Even when it is covered by the thin veneer of “civilization” like today.
This is why people today still hunt, camp, hike, fish, seek wilderness etc. Our species evolved in these natural environments doing these exact activities, and these are the activities that are most natural to us humans today.
Look at it mathematically: For 65,000 of our 70,000 years on Planet Earth we humans were only hunters and gatherers; subsequently for 4,500 years we learned to farm and grow our food; then for 150 years following we became industrialized; for 125 years after that we have been eating out of a tin can and driving motorized vehicles; then for 100 years we have lived in the Information Age. Only in the past few decades have we lived as we currently do, in a massive consumer society driven by high sedentary living and complete materialism.
So 30 years divided by 70,000 years equals only 0.00042857% of human time on Planet Earth spent as we live today. This is to point out that our technology-heavy western lifestyle today, which we take for granted, is in fact not even a blip on the radar screen of human existence on the planet.
Which is to say, the hunter-gatherer lifestyle is most natural to us, it is hard-wired into us, and the iPhone-heavy digital lifestyle is totally new to our species. Our current lifestyle has a lot of costs that we do not yet understand, and yet we have embraced it in a death grip.
So when your beautiful child is “diagnosed” with autism, ADD, ADHD, etc., be skeptical. It is unlikely that there is anything actually wrong with your kid. What has happened is that our modern industrial, sedentary, virtual, digitized society has developed new standards for living and behavior, and for measuring success, that are completely at odds with how we evolved, how we are hard-wired, how we have lived most of our time on this globe, and how we need to be in order to be our most natural, most happy, most successful.
In a hunter-gatherer society, those young people who notice movement the quickest are not easily distracted. Rather, they are going to be the most successful hunters and warriors on a landscape where movement equals either food or danger, and those who see movement the fastest either live the longest or eat the most food. In that hunter gatherer environment, what we today call ADD is actually an important adaptive skill needed to survive.
So an “autistic” kid today who is obviously bright and technically gifted but socially quirky, was, five thousand years ago, probably the best flint knapping spear head maker in the tribe.
It is today’s Western society that is living at odds with our most human traits, long adapted and refined over tens of thousands of years, and only now considered to be liabilities in a physically weak, feminized, pacific, diabetes-riven technologically-based culture where food is served up by the unhealthy bucket-full with no effort required by the eater.
Got an autistic kid? Put him or her into a more natural setting, away from dominant society where they are mis-judged by unhealthy, unnatural material and behavioral standards, and watch them flourish. Even better, withdraw from it yourself!
