The Incredible Robustness of Newspapers

(When I see Rupert Murdoch, I think of The Shining, and I hear a mantra: "chodrum"..."chodrum"..."chodrum"...booming in my mind.)

Rupert Murdoch has delightedly painted a picture of the future with no newspapers: no trees cut down for newsprint, no newspaper unions,  no ink, no union pensions, etc. All of this will happen within 20 years, thanks to the heaven-sent electro-gadgets, like Amazon's Kindle. He also wants Amazon to charge more for electro-books that they sell.

OK. I have nothing invested in thhis newspaper thing, one way or the other. I have never even thought too much about it.

However, by now we should know one thing:  NEWSPAPERS ARE ROBUST !

 - a newspaper does not break down;

- a newspaper does not need batteries;

- if one drops a newspaper, it does not break;

- if the newspaper falls into a puddle of water, it is still readable;

- if a newspaper falls intot he bathtub, while you are reading it and relaxing, it does not electrocute you;

- if you lose your newspaper, you may buy another for $1;

- you may use it to discipline dogs;

- you may use it to use as packaging material for items being shipped;

- you may use it to serve fish and chips;

- it is on all the time, no warm-up, no battery to run down;

And so on. I am not tongue-in-cheeking this. My parents, having been forced by Comcast ( an electro-gadgets company ) to be HD compatible, now have little boxes even on their little TVs, plas some of the new Comcast remotes do not work adequately for these older sets, and this requires TWO remotes now: the old one to turn the set on/off, and the new one to does the other things.

I suppose Comcast could send someone out for $100 per service call to rectify this, but they were supposed to have done it properly in the first place.

Electronic Gadgets are not robust. They break down.

The companies that supply them are not motivated by public service; they only respond to profit.

Toyota- one of the paradigms of the modern corporate world - is experiencing the results of the Toyota-system: reduce the number of suppliers and drive down the costs. Problem is, when the fewer suppliers have a glitch, there is no diversity of suppliers available to fill in. Their accelerator problem seems to be due to one supplier, and there is no other, so the problem spread throughout the system, and "infected" all Toyotas.

If we have learned one thing so far in the 21st century, it is : Big Government and Big Businesses screw up, and the bigger they are, the bigger the screw up.

If no alternatives exist, everything will fall apart; any "infection" becomes a "pandemic", any economic downturn becomes a "too big to fail" scenario.

The insane emphasis on profits, combined with an almost total disregard for human values - both the customers as well as the employees - are going to bury our capitalistic system. People like Murdoch will monetize the Web into a straight-jacket which will kill the Web, just like the schemes of people like him are right now successfully killing everything else around us.

There actually is more to Business than Amassing Money. We have demonstrated over and over again that we are on an extremely dangerous course. The precipice may be near, or it may be far, but we are staggering in its direction.
Complexity and lack of robust diversity and simpler technologies to fall back on,  mixed with our weaknesses is going to be a gunpowder like we've never seen!