I'm a software engineer, and I work with technology all day long, and am mostly thankful for it - it pays the bills, after all. But I dearly love going back home to Hicksville a couple weekends a month. Most of the stuff my parents have and use on a daily basis is older than I am, and it just works, because it is all mechanical and built to a much higher standard than you can get without spending an exorbitant amount of money now, if indeed you can get that kind of quality at all. It's not like it was high-end stuff at the time they bought it, either - I'm talking about a 1930s John Deere farm tractor, a couple 1980s Ford pickups, kitchen appliances from the 1970s, hand tools that could collect Social Security. Stuff that just works, and if it breaks, any idiot with some basic tools can fix.

Even mundane objects that nobody (I hope) is ever going to try to put a WiFi card in are not-so-subtly more terrible than they used to be. My favorite example is the five-gallon gasoline can[1].

[1] http://www.gad.net/Blog/2012/11/22/one-mans-quest-for-gas-ca...