Tag security theater

The changing of the calendar to a new year routinely brings so many “Best Of” lists and “year-in-review” articles that the people who write them simply bang out the verbiage in June or July and fill in the blanks the last week of December when the stories are due. A variation on the theme that I’ve seen a lot of recently is the call to do away with this or that bit of outmoded, outdated, or otherwise obsoleted object. (How’s that for alliteration, eh?)

Here are just a few of the ones I’ve encountered recently:

• The TSA — No argument from me here. The Theatrical Security Agency is a gazillion-dollar waste of taxpayer money that does next to nothing in the way of making air travel more secure, inconveniences tens of thousands of travelers every single day, and only serves the political goal of making body searches, inept authoritarian thuggery, and unnecessary panic-mongering palatable to the breadth and width of American society. Americans should be both shamed and outraged that this is the domestic manifestation of fighting “The War Against Terror”.
• Second Life — not one, but two articles that come to basically the same conclusion: stick a fork in it, it’s done. It’s not that people won’t join in on virtual worlds, it’s that they need a reason to do so. MMORPGs draw tens of thousands of users who come first for the game and then secondarily for the fuzzier goal of interaction. When there’s no clear “macguffin” to hang on to, people don’t stick around, and meanwhile idle hands become the devil’s workshop in the form of giant flying penises and other “griefer” tricks. It has soured the marketeers, who are still not sure what to do about virtual communities, and that may be the last hurrah. Try again in 2020, kids.
• Consumer-level Recycling — one of the biggest frauds perpetrated on the general public for the last 30 years is that somehow we could save the world by recycling our newspapers, cans and bottles. My blog-buddy GLS had a pretty decent rant about this not too long ago. Part of his argument, and one that I wholehearted agree with, is that consumer-level recycling would be virtually unnecessary if the upstream producers of the waste — that is, virtually every single manufacturer of consumer goods in the world — didn’t create so much packaging in the first place. But instead of Big Business taking a baby step or two towards responsible packaging, they shoved the burden of disposal down to the end-user, which allowed them to continue their merry capitalistic profiteering with as much cardboard, cellophane and styrofoam as they wanted. The market for “post-consumer” recyclable material is next to worthless. In Britain, three out of four communities now simply dump their collected recyclables in the landfills because there’s nothing else to do with them, and the storage of unwanted recyclable newsprint alone is costing the British government millions of pounds.
• Offshored Technical Support Call Centers — Even Stevie Wonder could have seen this coming from a mile away. Yes, first-level tech support is, was, and always will be grunt work that mainly consists of reading answers out of a support manual and/or passing along the phone call to someone who actually knows what the hell they’re talking about, but giving that grunt work to people with a poor command of spoken English and/or an utterly unintelligible accent was inevitably going to backfire. Giving Indian call center employees fake “American” names or trying to hide their accents by making your support only available through a web chat window wasn’t fooling or helping anybody. The typical person calling tech support is already either a) extremely frustrated or 2) unimaginably stupid or iii) both, and making them wait on hold only to speak with a person who can’t really help them in the first place and can’t make themselves understood to the average American is insulting and hostile.
• Platter-and-Head Hard Disk Drives — this post from a techblogger is one of a number I’ve seen lately that makes the argument that the end is in sight for Ye Olde Fashioned Hardde Drive. The Age Of Solid-State Drives is upon us at last. The number of write/erase cycles that flash memory can sustain has been increased by “two orders of magnitude”, which in turn should make it entirely feasible to put vast quantities of flash-based storage into servers, thus further compacting the size and power requirements of data center server hardware, and also rendering the need for SAN devices and other attached storage unnecessary. At the consumer level, flash memory is already available in laptops, but Toshiba’s announcement of a 256GB SSD laptop drive back in September means that mechanical drives are certain to be gone within 18-24 months.
• Movies on VHS — in truth, the end for widespread availability of movies on VHS in the United States ended when Wal-Mart decided to stop selling them in 2006, but the once-and-for-all end apparently came in October, when the last wholesaler of VHS movies shipped their last truckload. I worked in a video store through college, back when home video and video rental stores were the newest, hottest concept in entertainment, and it was a little bittersweet to learn that a part of that time of my life was a part of history. Of course, a lot of people in this country still have VCRs and collections of videotapes, and then there’s the large chunk of the planet which ends up using our castoff toys long after we’ve moved on to newer, shinier ones, so the total extinction is still probably 10 years away, but that’s truly another nail in the coffin.
• Wind Chill Factors — this Slate article tells us what I’ve suspected all along. The whole “feels like minus twenty” thing is crap shoveled up in big scoops to an audience that can’t seem to get enough panic-thrills out of the 11:00 weather report. The original wind chill factor scale was badly miscalculated and based on several erroneous assumptions, and the revised scale developed in 2001, while less extreme in its assertions, is still deceptive and unreliable as a predictor because of variance in wind speeds, humidity levels, and the effects of solar radiation. But, boy oh boy, don’t the weathermonkeys love it when they can scare the bejeesus out of us by telling us it’s going to “feel like” an Antarctic nightmare, when it’s really just plain cold.
• The Federal Communications Commission — I don’t see this happening, even with the Second Coming…er, I mean Obama’s inauguration…but legal scholar and occasional Internet superstar Larry Lessig wrote this piece for Newsweek which says it’s time to get rid of the FCC as it currently exists because it has outlived its original mission, and more importantly, because it threatens the innovation space for new and developing communications technologies with its obsolescence. In its place, Lessig says, create an “iEPA”, which he says stands for “Innovation Environment Protection Agency” (eeugh!) to work primarily to keep monopolizing media businesses and meddling politicians equally out of the realm of developing technology. Of course, that’s 180 degrees opposite of the way American government works in the first place, so I’d say the chance of this coming to pass is nil.