# Inventions we don’t need **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 21, 2022, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313 "2022-11-21T13:30:17Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![Robot\_Arm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/robot_arm/32/18280_2.png) [@Robot\_Arm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robot_Arm)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 12:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/41 "2022-11-22T00:20:35Z")
> [@nearwildheaven](#): > > I sure can. Medical or restaurant use, anybody? I think you’re missing my point. If you touch a soap dispenser, you’re in the process of washing your hands. Even if you do pick up some germ from touching the pump on the dispenser, you’ll wash it off a few seconds later. ---
**Author:** ![Tride](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tride/32/13907_2.png) [@Tride](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tride)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 12:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/42 "2022-11-22T00:24:58Z")
We got a bunch of touchless soap dispensers during the pandemic–encourages hand washing for 1, uses less soap vs liquid, and is just kind of fun… ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 1:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/43 "2022-11-22T01:16:20Z")
> [@purplehorseshoe](#): > > That way, you can set your frozen dinner or what-have-you in the oven, head off to work, then remotely start the oven an hour or so before you leave. Come home to a hot, fresh meal. People have been doing that with ovens since at least the 60s. My working mother had an oven that had a timed start. ---
**Author:** ![purplehorseshoe](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/purplehorseshoe/32/2996_2.png) [@purplehorseshoe](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/purplehorseshoe)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 1:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/44 "2022-11-22T01:50:50Z")
Yeah, but if the Big Boss makes you stay late, you’d come home to a burned dinner instead. (I admit, it’s gilding the lily to some degree. Some people just like gadgets.) ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 2:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/45 "2022-11-22T02:54:15Z")
> [@Ulfreida](#): > > But there isn’t any reason why we couldn’t construct a world where we moved around with much different – or no – technology. Taking away the technology pretty much takes away moving around, period, except maybe the next village over, or a few farms up the road. Another exception would be traveling merchants of the Marco Polo type. But taking away the availability of easy travel obviously eliminates the need for peripherally related technology like timed lamp switches so your house won’t look abandoned while you’re away, automatic pet food dispensers, erc. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 10:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/46 "2022-11-22T10:47:46Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > Taking away the technology pretty much takes away moving around This is not true. Of course, before cars we were mainly an agrarian society punctuated by small towns and, occasionally, dense cities. Farmers don’t travel a lot because their work is at home. Their pleasures are local. And dense cities are perfect for public transport. Idle travel, and living fifty miles from one’s place of work, would obviously be limited. But we are so used to the right to limitlessness no matter what the cost to the environment, and to our emotional and community lives, that we no longer can envision anything else. I believe that has to either change purposefully or it will be changed disastrously. I too live in a place that absolutely requires a car (and a truck). But it isn’t the place, it is the economy that makes it so. For some hundreds of years, the town three miles from my farm was nearly self-sufficient despite being no bigger than it is now, a couple thousand people in the whole township. There were small factories, inns, dry goods stores, churches, banks, bars, repair shops, etc. People grew much of their own food or were supplied by those who did. Now the town, while it has a little grocery store/cafe, and a bar that’s open on weekends, one bank and one church, no longer supports itself. People drive their cars to get to work, shop, etc., and all the real towns are 30 minutes away or more. That change was driven by cars, not the other way around. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 11:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/47 "2022-11-22T11:00:30Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > How can you leave out the Poster Child for useless inventions – the Ronco Inside the Egg Egg Scrambler? Similarly in the egg department, how about “omelet” pans, the kind with a split, hinged cooking surface so you quickly flip the top half of the omelet onto the bottom half? Is it really any easier than just working your spatula under half of the eggs and folding them over? Does anyone seriously interested in cooking omelets use these things? Does any product say "Grocery Store Aisle Of Cheap Kitchenware more emphatically than a hinged omelet pan? Even worse if it’s electric. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 11:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/48 "2022-11-22T11:05:17Z")
> [@K364](#): > > I don’t get the excitement over smart thermostats. A thermostat is so basic, you don’t need any extra logic to control it. If you are cold, turn it up. If you are hot, turn it down. If you are away, turn it off. There are situations that make it useful. For instance if you’re traveling, you can remotely adjust it shortly before you get home, which does help when it’s winter and you’d like to warm up the house a little before you get there. I regret that I didn’t think to ask for a remote controlled thermostat when we had our HVAC system installed. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 11:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/49 "2022-11-22T11:09:02Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > I can’t find it now; but years ago I read an article saying that people tend to spend about the same length of time, on average, getting to work and to shopping, no matter what the transportation available is. Faster transport doesn’t save us time; everything just stretches out in distance to account for it. It’s not only distance, but also the fact that buses and trains have to make a lot of stops. That’s somewhat less true of the latter, but even if the travel time works out to be the same as driving, there are other advantages to using public transport, only some of which have to do with reducing carbon emmisions. ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 2:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/50 "2022-11-22T14:08:07Z")
> [@purplehorseshoe](#): > > Some people like to open the fridge and spend endless time perusing, shuffling, checking to see what’s in this tub or that. It wastes energy AND promotes food spoilage, since the contents all warm up. > This reduces both of those problems. I understand the purpose, but I’m not really convinced that it was a problem that really needed solving, and certainly not in such a technological way. I mean, if it had _really_ been a problem, they’d have figured out how to put peepholes in, or maybe triple-pane glass fronts with external light switches. But no fridge I’ve ever seen has had anything like that, which makes me believe that it’s marketing-driven nonsense. Which is often the prime driver behind inventions that solve problems people didn’t even know they had. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 2:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/51 "2022-11-22T14:39:00Z")
> [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](#): > > It’s not only distance, but also the fact that buses and trains have to make a lot of stops. That’s somewhat less true of the latter, but even if the travel time works out to be the same as driving, there are other advantages to using public transport, only some of which have to do with reducing carbon emmisions I was thinking more of @Ulfreida’s point about the previous self-sufficiency of local communities. When it took multiple hours to get to the nearest city, the small towns had workplaces and shopping. As the entire system became built around the existence of cars, first people had the choice whether to drive to the city or to work and shop locally – and then for many of them the choice disappeared, as the stores and workplaces in the small towns disappeared. So most people still have to travel about the same length of time to get to work; only now in many places they have to have a functioning car in order to do so. ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/52 "2022-11-22T15:38:32Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > So most people still have to travel about the same length of time to get to work; only now in many places they have to have a functioning car in order to do so. Many of us can now work from home. Don’t need to go anywhere for days. I’m driving about 1/3 the miles I used to drive. I’ve wanted to do this for over a decade. But the powers that ‘be’ are not comfortable with that. COVID made that change for me. Many, though, don’t have the option to work from home. ---
**Author:** ![thorny\_locust](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thorny_locust/32/431_2.png) [@thorny\_locust](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/thorny_locust)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 3:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/53 "2022-11-22T15:44:34Z")
> [@enipla](#): > > Many of us can now work from home. Yes. How much of a societal shift that’ll bring on, and what all the societal side effects will be, isn’t yet clear. I’m hoping for significant benefits. ---
**Author:** ![RickJay](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bb73d2/32.png) [@RickJay](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RickJay)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 3:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/54 "2022-11-22T15:49:39Z")
> [@Ulfreida](#): > > Airplanes. Airplanes are a wonderful and extremely useful invention. > [@Dallas\_Jones](#): > > All, and I mean all, of the justifications for commercial private air travel are bullshit. None is needed. Ah yes, the old “I don’t want to use that, so no one should” line. The problem is, of course, that your preferences are not everyone’s preferences. I am wholly confident there are some products and services you use and would never dream of calling bullshit that others would find oddly pointless. Travelling is often necessary and even more often pleasant. If you don’t like it, don’t do it, but air travel is a genuinely wonderful thing that enables people today to do things that just weren’t possible in the past, and vastly increases our aggregate wealth. Airplanes DO burn a lot of fossil fuel. True. So did electricity generation but we’re fixing that. ---
**Author:** ![enipla](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/54ee81/32.png) [@enipla](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/enipla)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/55 "2022-11-22T16:10:54Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > Yes. How much of a societal shift that’ll bring on, and what all the societal side effects will be, isn’t yet clear. I’m hoping for significant benefits. Very true. I’m about half deaf. So interactions with larger groups of people are incredible stressful. I spend the conversation hearing every other word trying to figure out context and form a response. Not fun at all. I am often wrong and get confused looks. I just declined to go to our department Christmas party. I communicate fine with a keyboard and actually know the team I work with _better_ than I did before COVID. I’m just as sarcastic as many of them are. It’s fun. I love this new/different paradigm. We all need to be able to look at things differently. But I realize I’m not even a drop in the bucket. Many lives have changed for the worse. Some, like myself, have changed for the better. ---
**Author:** ![Ulfreida](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ulfreida/32/8014_2.png) [@Ulfreida](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ulfreida)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/56 "2022-11-22T16:48:54Z")
> [@RickJay](#): > > Ah yes, the old “I don’t want to use that, so no one should” line. I’m pretty much the queen of this. My daughter says my motto in life is, “why do they even DO that?” But really, I don’t care what other people do as long as it doesn’t contribution to the destruction of Earth. Of course that cuts a nearly-complete swath across modern human activities. ---
**Author:** ![Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/spectre_of_pithecanthropus/32/12343_2.png) [@Spectre\_of\_Pithecanthropus](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 7:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/57 "2022-11-22T19:06:07Z")
> [@thorny\_locust](#): > > When it took multiple hours to get to the nearest city, the small towns had workplaces and shopping. As the entire system became built around the existence of cars, first people had the choice whether to drive to the city or to work and shop locally – and then for many of them the choice disappeared Very true, this. And it wasn’t just self-contained small towns, but larger cities as well. While mostly residential neighborhoods did exist, strict zoning wasn’t such a thing, so there were more amenities in local neighborhoods. In Los Angeles there is a [Savoy Street](https://www.flickr.com/photos/78538399@N00/albums/72177720303922338), on the northern edge of both downtown and also what used to be the Italian neighborhood. Frank Capra went to the elementary school there. It’s a little byway that seems to be from another time, and still contains several houses from the turn of the last century. It’s so strange to think that the first occupants of those houses could have ridden on horseback, driven a buggy, taken a streetcar, walked, or just maybe driven one of those new-fangled "auto-MO-biles if they were heading down to the main business district. In an early 1950s Dragnet episode, which dealt with the alleged theft of the baby Jesus from a Christmas display at the Old Plaza Church, there’s a scene where this kid, maybe ten years old, comes into City Hall to speak to the detectives, having **walked** from his home. The same episode was rebooted for the 1968 _Dragnet_ series, but they changed the setting to the San Fernando Mission chapel, most likely because DTLA had changed so much. There were few places where a kid could live and walk to City Hall, and probably too many viewers would have been distracted from the story by wondering about that, had they kept the old setting near Olvera Street. I’m not saying residential neighborhoods are completely gone from the vicinity, but most of the amenities that used to exist in the area are gone, as the area has been given over mostly to massive civic buildings, eliminating the historic cityscape in which most buildings had some kind of retail activity on the ground floor. The “walking culture”, if you will, is gone from the area. ---
**Author:** ![gotpasswords](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/c57346/32.png) [@gotpasswords](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gotpasswords)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 8:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/58 "2022-11-22T20:18:20Z")
> [@Gatopescado](#): > > Wait… What??? Washers and Dryers are spying on people??? My LG washer and dryer’s app does keep track of how many and what cycles I use, ostensibly to let me know when I should do maintenance like was the dryer filter or run a tub clean cycle, and more immediately useful, to let me know a cycle is done. Is all of this needed? No. Is it spying? Debatable…I do get monthly emails out of LG saying how much laundry I’ve done. Maybe someone could make some targeted advertising use of knowing if I were to download and use the “Baby Clothes” cycle with the assumption there’s a new baby in the house? Or would they just be bored to know I did 15 “Normal” cycle loads last month? ---
**Author:** ![DrDeth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/b487fb/32.png) [@DrDeth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DrDeth)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 8:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/59 "2022-11-22T20:40:42Z")
> [@Ulfreida](#): > > I can think of thousands. Single use plastics. Fast food. Hydrogenated oil. Private cars. Brachycephalic dogs and cats. Fascism. Nuclear weapons. Airplanes. American football. Cars? Airplanes? American Football is bad, but Rugby and soccer is good? 🙄 Here’s the thing “private cars” and vacation air travel are not “inventions” per se. Long haul trucking and such is absolutely critical, as well as ambulances, fire trucks, police cars, etc. What is being complained about is not the invention per se, but the private use proliferation. That is a sociological issue. In order to stop people from owning and driving cars, we’d have to have a dictatorship… and the cure is far worse than the disease. > [@thorny\_locust](#): > > I was thinking more of @Ulfreida’s point about the previous self-sufficiency of local communities. When it took multiple hours to get to the nearest city, the small towns had workplaces and shopping. But did they grow their own food? Make everything needed? > [@RickJay](#): > > Ah yes, the old “I don’t want to use that, so no one should” line. The problem is, of course, that your preferences are not everyone’s preferences. Exactly. > [@bump](#): > > Tetraethyl lead is about the only one I can think of; it was used as an antiknock compound in gasoline instead of alcohol basically because it was cheaper. Yep. Thomas Midgley Jr. also was responsible for Freon. If he had never been born, the world would have been a much better place. > [@teelabrown](#): > > Is there some add-on thing that makes cars extremely loud and causes them to backfire? Because that seems to be becoming all the rage and it’s horrible. You can hear idiots roaring along major street arteries, punctuated by explosive backfiring, a mile away. It’s getting awful. I have never been exposed to this here in SoCal. > [@Robot\_Arm](#): > > I still can’t figure out why someone invented the touchless hand-soap dispenser. Well, people with germ laden hands will touch the pump, no? ---
**Author:** ![bump](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7c8e57/32.png) [@bump](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bump)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2022, 9:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313/60 "2022-11-22T21:03:30Z")
> [@DrDeth](#): > > Yep. Thomas Midgley Jr. also was responsible for Freon. If he had never been born, the world would have been a much better place. I don’t know that I can fault him for Freon; that was one that took a long time to be aware of the negative effects. Tetraethyl lead was one that everyone involved was aware of the problems with from the beginning. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/inventions-we-don-t-need/975313.md?page=4)