I haven’t encountered anything like that in years. Maybe you just live in a place with ganky infrastructure.
Low energy light bulbs that save a lot on electric bills, and are good for the environment, but don’t work with a dimmer switch.
Modern push-button starters in cars. I’ve complained about this before…
There have been a fair number of accounts of people who inadvertently left cars running, and lots of instances of keys being left behind once a car was started and driven away.
Suppose you were an engineer tasked with solving such problems. You’d probably invent the f#$%ing CAR KEY! The car can’t run without the key physically in it. Perfect fail-safe.
If that’s not backward progress, I don’t know what is.
This is going to be a bit obscure.
While videotapes (think VHS or Beta) did not have outstanding resolution and produced an interlaced image, they did preserve each video frame (two fields=one frame) independently. This meant that we could use techniques like frame averaging to improve quality in a scene. For example, we could often average multiple frames to enhance a license plate and make it legible.
Modern digital compression techniques make this difficult or impossible. The images have already been compared (either to preceding images or bidirectionally) and only the significant differences between frames are encoded and preserved.
One additional advantage to videocassettes is that they could be preserved more easily following an incident. Security cameras in a building might be recorded on a 16-channel VCR. The security officer could eject the tape following an incident and seal it for future use. The officer would then insert a spare (“scratch”) tape and continue recording. With digital systems, most officers aren’t capable of exporting a true video copy or simply aren’t allowed to. When investigators show up, they don’t know how to export the digital video or they don’t have appropriate media available. I see lots of videos where the investigating officer has had to use his/her smartphone to record what was being played back on the security monitor. (You can imagine the quality as the handheld phone is moved all over the place.) A week later, additional investigators/insurance investigators go back to the site and the sequence has been automatically overwritten by the system. Again, happens all the time. I hate it.
There’s also the key-in-pocket/purse start function whose signals are easily recorded by would-be thieves.
Paper straws preceded plastic ones.
Was @TriPolar talking specifically about cassette tapes, or about any kind of tapes, including high-speed reel-to-reel?
I meant cassette tapes as compared to LPs. I don’t know how larger size tapes do in comparison. My point was what ecg did mention, the fragility of vinyl, picking up dust and scratches and wear that affect the sound, and most of the record players they were played on were less than studio quality.
I think that my 2008 car gets worse gas mileage than the car I bought in 1985. You would think they would create better technology over time, not worse.
At least part of the issue around gas mileage, as I understand it, is that, over the past 40 years, cars have had a lot of safety and “quality of life” features added – airbags, crumple zones, ABS systems, entertainment systems, etc. Many of those add a significant amount of weight to a vehicle.
(And, yeah, the 1981 Plymouth Reliant, which I drove when I was in grad school in the late '80s, got 40+ MPG.)
Cassette tapes were objectively lower quality than vinyl LPs played on a decent turntable with a good cartridge. Their sole attraction was portability and, in the opinion of some, convenience. Their main limitation was slow tape speed and a narrow tape, meaning relatively little magnetic surface and hence low information capacity per unit of time.
Whereas reel-to-reel technology had the potential to be significantly better than LPs, depending on the quality of the machine, the tape, and the tape speed. 7½ ips with a good tape recorder and premium tape could typically match or exceed the quality of an LP. A tape machine capable of a tape speed of 15 ips is essentially what studios used to record master tapes and would be far better than any consumer product at the time or even now, excepting maybe SACD or DVD movie soundtracks using a modern codec.
Speaking of older vehicles I would NOT necessary say non-electric car locks and window cranks were better but they were more reliable and less prone to breakage than electric ones.
Since the switch-over from analog to digital TV broadcasts in my area I now receive zero stations in my area.
And I can no longer listen to audio broadcast of TV stations on my FM radio anywhere anymore.
Electric door locks on cars are extremely convenient – it would be intolerable to have manual ones. Electric windows are only a minor convenience, IMO, and can sometimes freeze up in very cold weather.
Power seats, OTOH, are the spawn of Satan. I have an unwanted power driver’s seat which I adjusted once and never used again, but occasionally a mechanic or someone else will re-adjust it, and I always worry it will break when in some awkward position. Then what do you do?
To be clear, my original point was that no recording was as good as live sound. I don’t have the technical details to defend the general concept of tape vs. LP vinyl.
My recollection, from the '70s and early '80s, when I was a young music fan, was that, in that era, a lot of the serious audiophiles preferred reel-to-reel tapes, for this very reason.
I was one of them. 
I had several good reel-to-reel tape decks, and although I did have a very few prerecorded tapes that sounded terrific – professionally recorded from studio masters at 7½ ips – mostly I used them for creating mix tapes and preserving LPs. When I bought a new LP I especially liked, it would go straight to tape on the first or second play, and I’d mostly listen to the tape.
Alas, those carefully preserved LPs got dumped a long time ago. Some of them would be quite valuable today, especially original pressings in mint condition. 
You have a strange definition of “intolerable.” It takes less than 30 seconds to lock or unlock four separate manual locks.
Perhaps you’re related to some superhero I vaguely remember called something like “elastic man” who was also an incredible contortionist. Otherwise I can’t see how one can do this from inside the car, say, when picking up people and the doors are locked. Unless your arms are six feet long.
Of course you can always remember to unlock the doors before you leave. Then you have to remember to lock them all again when you get home. Or perhaps you’re taking friends to a restaurant. Then you get to lock all the doors by hand when you arrive, and unlock them all again by hand when you leave. And lock them all again when you get home.
Or, you can lock or unlock all of them by pressing a button.
Or how about unlocking doors (or the trunk) when burdened with something you’re carrying. One button push on a keyfob versus fumbling with keys in a lock.
Power windows are a nice convenience. I like them. But power locks are necessary.
Ha! This inspired me to go check just now. Sitting in my driver’s seat with my seatbelt on, I was able to reach all four door locks. The rear ones were a little awkward to get to, but not difficult. I do have long arms, but not quite six feet.