The Clusterfuck Nation Chronicle

Commentary on the Flux of Events

The diminishing returns of technological solutions to the problems of life continue to impress me. I was on a radio talk show by phone last night out of Sante Fe. The host -- a friend of mine -- is a forward-looking fellow who likes to remain optimistic about the gathering clusterfuck and how we Americans might handle it. But he surprised me by whooping it up for the new hybrid cars that are beginning to come on the market.

Hybrid cars -- that is, cars that run partly on gas and partly on electricity (or any other kind of new-and-improved engine) -- carry with them the huge diminishing return of allowing Americans to believe that we can continue our current suburban living arrangements. Since I believe that events will compel us to live in more compact, mixed-use, walkable towns, the hybrid car strikes me as a terribly unfortunate distraction from the larger task of downscaling our activities to fit the realities of the 21st century.

I had another brush with the diminishing returns of technology yesterday when I brought in a computer jock (at $80-an-hour) to wipe out my hard drive in order to replace Windows-98 (the Mother-of-all-Hairballs) with Windows-XP. The transition went all right, and most of my programs are running again, but my Minolta slide scanner will not run with this operating system. A call to Minolta's tech support line confirmed this in unambiguous terms. I paid over $700 for the scanner back around 1997. So, now I have a (supposedly) stable operating system, but I no longer have an operating slide scanner and sooner or later will have to replace it.

Anybody want a Minolta Dimage Dual slide scanner?? Works fine with Windows-95 or 98. Requires scssi card with a db25 interface connector. Email: kunstler@aol.com