Here's some examples of what I have seen in my life
CDs when first introduced were promised to be industructible. Ads showed them bing thrown across a parking lot and then put in a machine and able to play music. Now we know from bitter experience that if you so much as look t it sideways, it will stutter or stick.
DVDs likewise.
But now libraries are having to switch to videos for rental of movies as so many library holdings are inoperative. But meanwhile due to forced switch to new style modem, which only allows one channel. Many have gotten rid of their video players. Doing their recording through complicated recorder on-line somewhere, which may or may not work.
Some have retained their VCR and have connected the modem to the VCR before going on to the TV, But now you cannot record one channel while watching a different show as we used to do.
We saw false advertising and common people paying the price for shake-down of new technology even back in the 1920s.
Edmontonians were heating their houses with wood or coal for many years, then came the switch to natural gas. Promised to be clean and efficient and dependable...
The very first winter, the flow was stopped due to breakdown at Christmas time, and people who had just spent money converting to gas had to scramble to see their homes heated with the old way again.
Then three years later, in 1926 Edmonton was plagued by gas explosions. On several occasions the company shut off the flow and turned it back on without warning. We know what can happen then - the pilot light goes off and when the flow is renewed, a house is flooded with gas, only needing a spark for an explosion.
A nurse, Miss Alberta Foley was burned badly when her house exploded on Oct. 9, 1926.
This is the kind of thing that can happen when corporations are allowed to experiment with our lives. The Edmonton Bulletin (Oct. 12, 1926) reported that city council was instituting an investigation of how the gas company was causing the explosions again and again. without seeming to take any responsibility or change its procedure.
At least the switch to natural gas was voluntary in Edmonton at that time. This is not always the case. Some municipalities are banning the use of wood for household heating except in special clean-burning stoves and fireplaces. Montreal brought in such a law in October 2018. An old farmer pointed out to me that wood, if not burned, rots and deteriorates anyway, producing the same greenhouse gases over time as it would if burned. It all turns to carbon in the end.
Change is often forced on the everyday consumer, against their will and against their desires. People complain of losing their liberties to government - corporations have incredible power over our day-to-day lives with no social limits.
Another involuntary change forced on the common people by a corporation was the need to use the three-number prefix (780 or whatever) even just to make a local call. Instead the company could have kept just one prefix for Edmonton and adopted a different prefix for places outside of Edmonton. Now both types of communities share the 780 and other prefixes that had to be brought in anyway.
Using different prefixes for different area is a simple fix and would not have imposed the burden on all Edmonton people and businesses of switching their phone numbers (by adding the prefix) This is a simple fix because it had been used just a few years before when Alberta was subdivided by prefix. We all used 403 at one time then 780 was brought in for Edmonton north.
Thinking ahead the telephone company could have bought in two or three prefixes at one time and that would have avoided the whole issue just a few years later, when Edmonton's 780 ran out of phone numbers. A simple fix, but one the corporation was unwilling to undertake instead choosing to change people's lives. This was a small change but also just another way a corporation showed that it has power and the common people do not.
Now Canada Post is saying a customer wanting to mail something out of the country must go online and produce a square barcode themself. The barcode could be printed out on paper. How requiring a paper print-out is progress - I have no idea.
And what if you don't have a computer? What if you don't know how to use the corporate program? What if you don't want to learn how to use the corporate program?
I think Canada Post should have an obligation that if a person has a properly marked package and money, they should be able go to a post office and send a package. No complications - no other requirement on part of the customer. Let's have the postal service do the work. This is not so outlandish - it was how things were done for more than a hundred years.
It seems as civilization progresses, things are getting harder on the little guy.
A hundred years ago, voters had tight reins on the politicians. We held a city election every year to elect half the city councillors. The mayor's term was only one year - although if he (no she-mayors back then) did a fair job, he was usually re-elected twice. Nowadays city councils are in for four years - no matter what kind of job it does - and there is nothing voters can do about it.
There was a time even when Edmonton mayors were elected through Alternative Voting, where a candidate had to secure a majority of the votes (even if through vote transfers) to be elected. In 2004 Stephen Mandel was elected mayor with about 40 percent of the vote. Another candidate got 33 percent; another 25 percent. Who is to say that the two together, if Edmonton's election process allowed it, might not have prevented the election of Mandel and saved Edmonton about 600M of public money mis-spent on the downtown arena by making the owner of the team pay for it himself?
At the time when mayors were elected through Alternative Voting, this was in the 1920s, city councillors were elected through Single Transferable Voting. STV produced mixed representation - both business and Labour candidates were elected to council.
But despite how we have so much more wealth now than back then, we have the simplest cheapest possible elections. The candidate with the most votes in a single-member district is elected, whether he or she has the support of a majority of the votes. Where only one can win, all the votes cast for others - perhaps 65 percent of them - elect no one and are totally ignored.
But despite how we have so much more wealth now than back then, we do not have money to hold frequent elections and city councils, unfairly elected to start with, get away from the voters. We have wealth - a high standard of living - but not power.
An interesting development - in Finland, all the government's personal information on an individual citizen is given to the control of the individual. It is fully automated (on computer) and fully put in the hands of the individual. The mantra of Finland is sisu rugged health, resilience and hardiness created by anti-materialist lifestyle and personal discipline - regular exercise, good food, etc.
We could do worse than copying the ways of Finland.
Thanks for reading.
====================================
Comments