Planned obsolescence was a charge leveled at automobile manufacturers.
Right on the nose, Uncle Ken, and it started in the 1920s or thereabouts if Wikipedia can be believed. An interesting article; sometimes the obsolescence is planned, sometimes it isn't, and other times it is purely perceptual, like clothing fashions.
But just because a product is obsolete does not mean it is no longer functional or useful. Those old VCRs, with proper repair and maintenance will work just as well as the day they were new but you will probably need a cathode-ray TV to view the tapes. Same thing with a lot of products, it just costs more money because they fall into the niche of collectors and specialists. Offhand, I can't think of any product that is obsolete to the extent that there are no surviving examples.
I still have about 400 vinyl albums, but I have a couple of turntables, too, and will convert them to MP3 files one of these days, maybe. Not many VHS or Beta tapes, but I have players for those, too, but I don't know if I can connect them to my current flat-screen TV without a lot of connector/converter mumbo-jumbo. There are less than 125 music CDs in my collection, but they have all been converted to MP3 for use on my iPod so they are just sitting in a closet. I don't want to think about thousands (maybe) of floppy disks in the basement storeroom from the various operating systems I've owned. They may be truly useless; I've read that magnetic media degrades after time and the disks may be unreadable without very specialized, and very expensive, equipment. I should hook up those old systems, fire them up and see what's what. But not anytime soon.
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A while back I mentioned social credit and didn't get much of a response, but that's okay. But it is gathering steam in China, and it's not impossible that it could happen here, in the land of the free and the home of the brave. This is spooky, and so is this.
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As much as I dislike discussion of some current events, today has yielded a motherlode of goofiness. Trump gave a thirty minute interview on Fox and Friends and just about ran off the rails; he got really revved up and yielded a real gem in that Cohen, his lawyer, represented him in the Stormy Daniels mess. Didn't he already say he had nothing to do with her? Oops!
But he may have gotten a little reprieve from the media with the later announcement of Bill Cosby's guilty verdict. Thus falls America's Dad, an 80 year old man facing 30 years in the graybar hotel. If they can convict Bill Cosby I bet Harvey Weinstein is sweating bullets, and well he should.
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Okay, I'm going nuts in my attempts to get the text the right color and typestyle. This page has a mind of it's own and I could use some help. Any suggestions?
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