Borrowing the post title from the great Calvin & Hobbes comic, that’s something I’ve been wondering the past day or so. The Economist delved at length on the topic in their end-of-the-year double issue with the theme “Progress and its perils”. It’s a good issue, so pick up a copy or read what you can online if you haven’t yet. While The Economist looked at some big issues, morals and all, I’ll leave those alone for now and focus a minute on some smaller ones where “progress” is actually a four-letter word.
Remember when flying used to be fun?
10 or 15 years ago, flying was a pleasant experience. But now? Now flying is a royal pain with all the added “security” hurdles and restrictions. The latest bombing attempt incident has already – again – caused even further tightened security measures, like the completely braindead approach of demanding passengers sit down for the last hour of the flight. That’s just mind-bogglingly dumb. All this even though everyone should know most of the so-called security procedures are futile. As Bruce Schneier has pointed out:
Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.
The rest, i.e. most of it, is just a nuisance that adds up. In essence, we the passengers have to put up with great inconveniences for the sake of security theater. Not that there’s anything inherently wrong with all security theater, but do we have to pick the most annoying, counter-productive, useless, expensive and abusive theater practices? That sucks. Especially when we could do something useful.
Remember when e-commerce was actually convenient?
“Progress” is also creating problems in another walk of life: credit cards. Even though we all agree they should be more secure (I should know, my card details were compromised two weeks ago), the layers of added security are becoming a painful thing for the user. The Visa/Mastercard 3D-Secure protocol in particular is annoying as hell and has caused many a transaction to fail. It has, in fact, worsened the user experience so much that I have reduced my card usage because of that. Why? Because 3DS adds numerous steps to the payment process, the verifying bank’s systems often don’t work or the transaction just mysteriously fails. Who cares if it’s more secure if it doesn’t work?!
Remember when the Internet was actually global?
Back in the 1990′s the Internet was a rather nice place to hang out in. Of course we didn’t have all the cool services we have now, but the signal-to-noise ratio was vastly better than it is now. IRC was used for intelligent and/or interesting conversations. Usenet was actually useful. And so on.
Now, ironically enough, electronic national barriers seem to be popping up everywhere. You would think the region codes in DVDs were the last geographically limited media thing we’d see, but no. Try watching YouTube videos from anywhere but the United States and you’ll soon enough hit the “We’re sorry, … is not currently available in your country“-message. Ditto for Hulu. And for crying out loud, even the Daily Show’s official site bans visitors from Down Under. What’s more, if an item in Amazon is sold by another merchant, chances are they don’t ship abroad. What kind of globalization is that?
Of course there are ways to get around some of this stuff – like having a VPN tunnel to the USA or buying a redirecting service with a US address – but the point is one shouldn’t have to do that.
The really big picture
All that is, of course, peanuts compared to situations where real progress actually would’ve been needed. Back on the larger scale of things, economically the past 10 years have taken most of the developed world nowhere.
And don’t even get me started on the political ineptitude of dealing with climate change; the worst part is that it is only a political problem as technically and economically dealing with climate change is perfectly feasible, relatively simple and even relatively cheap. Just reminds me of the quote:
The word ‘politics’ is derived from the word ‘poly’ meaning ‘many’, and the word ‘ticks’ meaning ‘blood sucking parasites’.”
Hence, globally, 2010′s better be better than the “naughties” or whatever you want to call this decade.
In the spirit of improving things – or at least not making them any worse – I shall now do the most economical and environmentally responsible thing I can imagine: hit the local beach. It just so happens it’s also one of the most fun things to do.
Lucky coincidence.
Last weekend we went on our first real road trip here in Australia, driving the Great Ocean Road and back via the surrounding countryside. The trip was great and a few photos will follow later, but the topic of this post is some traffic-related thoughts stemming from the trip.
Australian roads unique how?
All cars built locally here in Australia are advertised as being “Developed for Australia’s unique road conditions” or something along similar lines. So it’s only natural to ask what’s so unique about Australian roads?
The answer is not much, at least in Victoria. We drove on roads ranging from as big as they get to as small as they get – and I mean half-a-lane-wide-and-in-the-middle-of-the-forest-according-to-the-GPS-small. As a rule, big highways were in excellent condition and most of the smaller roads were in decent shape also. The smaller the roads were, the worse their condition. If the area was flat, the roads were straight. If it was hilly, the roads were windy. This, by the way, is exactly how roads tend to work in all other parts of the world also.
Maybe the ads are referring to the 100km-stretches of straight roads in the middle of nowhere, the heat in the summer (both of which you can get in, say, Arizona) or something, but as of yet I’m unconvinced that there’s anything particularly unique about the roads here.
Guess the speed limit
See this road here? What do you think the speed limit is here?
The correct answer is 100km/h and the correct reaction to that is: oh come on! I mean the highway (or freeway as they like to call highways here) is in perfect condition with great visibility, plenty of lanes to choose from and very mellow turns. Is there really a case for not having the limit at, say, 120km/h or 130km/h?
For the sake of the argument, let’s say 100km/h is a good speed limit for the road above, which it might very well be safety and all considered. Fine. Then let’s take this road here:
Judging with the same criteria that set the highway speed limit at 100km/h, this road – which is generally in a good shape, but with hairpin curves and shoulders the width of 1cm – should have a speed limit of 40km/h or max 60km/h. But no. It’s 100km/h. What the hell?! You drive this at 100km/h and your car can soon be found at the bottom of some gorge.
That is so weird. On road #1 the speed limit is set to bore you to sleep and unduly lengthen the trip, on road #2 it’s set to kill you. That is, umm, inconsistent at best.
Tiny roads having a relatively high speed limit also has the weird consequence that our TomTom GPS unit, always on the lookout for the quickest route, seems to prefer to direct us through some hay-fields on single-lane country roads (which, to their credit, were in pretty good condition) as opposed to the above-pictured freeway to shave 2mins off our travel time over 200km.
Pun intended
Can somebody please explain to me why the Australian media has such an affinity – an obsession, really – to playing with words? There seems to be an editorial requirement that articles need to appear witty or have some clever (or not) wordplay in the headline. Some examples from this week:
- Desal plant figures don’t hold water.
- A surgeon who draws bad blood
- Sun shines on solar plane’s flight
- A corner in Brighton you can bank on (A property leased by a bank auctioned for loads of money)
- So you think you can prance (A Ferrari review)
- Fear and loathing in Aspen
- Qantas acquisition fails to fly
Ha ha. Seriously, why? Sure some are funny and some even clever, but by no means all. Many are downright forced.
Why pay less when you can pay more?
Perhaps the ad agencies also need to spend more time proofreading the ads instead of coming up with clever quips.
Apple needs a better App Store
I’ve been an iPhone user for a couple of weeks now and am loving the device. It’s great. I’ll save the device comments to another post, but I have some issues with the App Store. As extolled as it is, it’s just not very usable as the number of available applications has passed 100,000. Specifically:
- The fact that all apps aren’t available globally sucks. It’s downright evil having applications limited geographically; reminds me of the DVD region code debacle – Australia at least had the sense to put a stop to that (by mandating that all DVD players sold here must be region-free), so what’s with Apple getting away with doing essentially the same thing?
- The App Store user interface is bad; for one, it doesn’t scale well to the iTunes window. Did someone forget to tell Apple that having a window that needs scrolling both sideways and up-down is lame?
- It’s unclear what the categorization is based on what; who decides what goes into “New and noteworthy”? Are they new, noteworthy or both? With 10,000 new app submissions every week, just having “new” apps area doesn’t help much.
- What are the Top charts based on? Downloads? Ratings? I want a way to clearly find the top-rated applications and I want them categorized; most apps are games and I want to browse the catalog without being bombarded by entertainment apps.
- Why can’t I sort the lists by rating? Why can’t I see Amazon-style “People who bought this, also bought ..” recommendations?
The App Store has been a runaway success by any measuring stick, but I foresee some serious scalability and usability problems as the apps keep on piling. Even currently the best method for application discovery is using external Internet sites that classify, review and list the best apps; then you just search & download what you need from the App Store.
Needing a 3rd party for basic app discovery is a clear sign of some trouble.
