How long til my lappie is junk

It pisses me off that when I buy a laptop it has been designed to be obsolete junk in well about 5 years. I have only owned my first laptop for just over two but already desperately want an upgrade, those super thin postable ones are super cool and less of a pain to lug around the world but unfortunately that doesn’t quite justify it quite yet.

While in Guatemala I had a system failure and must have been the only person ever to go into get it fixed that said yes I do have everything backed up. Amazingly I only lost a few, like five photos.

Now I am running a Spanglish system, extra useful for the continuing error messages and other notices popping up around the place because I don’t even need to try understand if it might be important to understand them a task far beyond my bad English and worse Spanish.

Back to it pissing me off, it doesn’t need to be like this and shouldn’t as far as I am concerned this is another criminal act like wasting food. I try to continue with out of date technology for as long as I can examples I was traveling with tapes when the first ipod came out, my film camera was taped shut while my friends showed me photos instantly. I continued to fight for the mysterious joy of developing, paying more than my camera was worth to develop a roll. Ok cell phones I liked my brick so much that even when it switched off upon receiving a call most of the time I resisted for far too long. Still the technological waste I have produced is unacceptable. Already at least three phones, like five tape players, one discman, one mp3 player and now I have two ipods. At least the size of the products designed to be toxic waste is getting smaller and a few people are thinking about making them less toxic. I am going to pick on the chip producers because they an easy target, intentionally redesigning the shape so instead of just changing a few pieces of your computer you have to buy a whole new machine.

Overproduction!!! In the seventies America decided to encourage farmers to grow as much as possible and ended up with a farming industry reliant on government payout. Michael Pollen explains that best and I will rant about that more in another post.

So I would love to hear that the presidential candidates had thoughts on this ludicrous form of production the under regulated free market has created. Surely the economy can grow and we can all get richer without designed waste and overproduction.