newspeak

Firefighters balk at new digital radios, as failures risk lives | McClatchy.

Standards matter. And the lure of the “digital” is really pretty dangerous, if it is thought of as more or less the same way any product from the Jetson’s would be: with excited awe that the future is finally here.

The issue is of course also one of cronyism and profiteering. We see this in developing regions, which are (or were?) colonized by this or that new and seemingly heroic technology that is, in fact, quite wrong for the market, the environment, the milieu. It only wrecks the good and makes it that much harder to become better, and does little to solve the problem of the bad.