A few days ago, we had a thread about games that released in 2004, and I made a comment that ended with "old shit is better." And then I started thinking about it... old things are better.

Case in point: vehicles. I needed a truck for the family farm, and I went shopping. Quickly I realized that 1) newer 3/4 ton diesels are designed to fail as a revenue stream and 2) buying a $80,000 truck that will probably need at least one, maybe two $5,000 service visits before it hits six digit mileage wasn't in the cards. So I bought a 20 year old truck... that every mechanic who has seen it has tried to buy. Total cost was less than a Tabroma with the same mileage.

This continues on to just about everything. My house was built before I was born, and has the original air conditioner, stove and hot water heater. The original fridge died a few years ago, and the washer and dryer finally shuffled off this mortal coil last year. I doubt, seriously, that any of the replacement appliances lasts a decade, much less two or three.

Printers? Unless it's Japanese, don't buy a new one. HP will remote control your printer, if you opt in to the program (which they don't make clear what it is), and Xerox is a crapshoot if it works out of the box. Meanwhile, I have seen cheap Brother lasers go to half a million pages easily.

Tractors? Buy a new John Deere, and if it breaks, you either have Deere's mechanic fix it, or it stays broken. (Keep making your payments, please.) Meanwhile, you can buy an older Deere or Yanmar tractor and keep it going forever.

The modern world is starting to give me serious 40k vibes. Almost nobody knows how things work, new things are bad knockoffs, and there are mutants everywhere.