Motorized Ox Carts

> My boarding school headmaster, for instance, possessed an Edwardian bathtub of some magnificence, with great brass wheels and levers which could rapidly fill it four feet deep with hot water or subject the user to a bracing shower from above, behind and on either side.

So there's a real world version of the bathtub described in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series, where the head of the Unseen University has something like that. There must be pictures of such things.

Oh wow, the Lamp on HN? And Peter Hitchens no less. I don't even know how I found myself reading this the other day, but my take away then was it felt like ramblings of an old man wishing the world had technologized "better." Though because Hitchens is a pretty skilled writer, the better part is subtle and it mostly ends up couched as "different". But all in all I was left unimpressed.

Though I did learn about slip coaches, which sounded neat, though pretty clearly fundamentally flawed.

I think this essay is partly a simple longing for the past, which is understandable (if a bit boring), and partly a quite imprecise rant against shitty incentives worsening our experience with technology.

Theres much to be said (and has already been said) about bad technology, but Hitchens is so wide ranging in his targets that the essay doesn’t hang together. I’m sorry that his fancy hotel Jacuzzis arent of an acceptable quality, but that has very little to do with the reasons that our transportation infrastructure is car dependent. Or maybe there’s some fundamental reason connecting both at the core of liberal capitalism, but telling me about your drawer full of obsolete cable adapters isn’t going to get me there.

The only consistent theme is that Hitchens misses the old days and his old stuff, but so does everyone, we know this.

What's your example of most recently obsoleted technology?