www.PSFmagazine.com | March-April 2020 | 35 34 | March-April 2020 | Powered Sport Flying While Life is on Hold The reliance on technology can be brutal, even if the technology itself is great. Technology allows us to leverage time and effort in ways unimagined by anyone only a few decades ago (other than science fiction fans). In the magazine world, computers and a digital printing system allow just the two of us to do the job that it took literally hundreds to do back in the day. And the software even gives us the tools to produce a better product than magazines of old. Even today, Better Homes and Gardens magazine has around 300 employees. I don’t even know what all of those people are doing. That is about two people per page of the magazine. I couldn’t easily find numbers on how many employees they needed to produce a magazine back in the day when images were film images, stories were mailed across the country, and pages were literally put together on a physical pasteboard. It is simply amazing what technology allows us to do. Until the technology stops working. Unbeknownst to me, my technology was going through a midlife crisis (or worse) beginning last fall. I noticed that my raid system wasn’t working in the middle of putting together the last issue of the year. That system is where I keep my library of images that I use to illustrate the magazine. I managed to get by with some data rescue software and a temporary drive. Then as I began on this issue, my main computer went south and took its data with it. I back up my data (I’m not a complete dummy here!) but somehow the computer corrupted the backup drive and the transition to a new computer was, shall we say, clumsy. With some assistance from the manufacturer, I basically hacked my own backup drive. I don’t think that I’ve lost too much data, but I’m still sorting it out. And I’m still happy for technology; I’m just all the more conscious of how dependent I am on it running smoothly. The technology issue has also touched us on a global basis in a different way. We now have a global world economy that is dependent upon (among other things) the fast and frequent movement of people back and forth between first world and third world nations. It is far cheaper to manufacture things in China because they don’t have the environmental laws that we have in the West. (For example, there are processes critical in the semiconductor industry that are done on a large scale in Asia that the epa would never allow here.) And of course labor is cheaper because… third world. We benefit from that with inexpensive products. In fact, things are made so cheaply in China that we have stopped making a lot of those things in the United States. And like my (relatively inexpensive, Chinese fabricated) computer, everything hums along until it doesn’t. In this case, the technology that failed us was that transportation system that allows us to shuttle back and forth to countries without much concern with what else may be shuttling back and forth with us. In what I consider a bit of irony, some countries quarantine animals moved from country to country. But those same countries don’t quarantine people unless there is already a proven medical emergency. It seems to me that a person is more likely to catch a bug from another person than they are to catch it from a pet or some other random animal. But hey, it’s easier to inconvenience a dog than it is an executive making his quarterly trip to China to check on the corporations’ slave labor force. So the global hack for getting cheap goods to the West has backfired and as of this writing a large portion of the world is in quarantine. Only we call it “self-isolation” and one of the prices is for the world economy to grind to a halt. Yes, I know that this is an emergency. Personally, I’m self-isolating and I recommend that others do the same when possible. I’m just not keen on the idea that poor protocols for the travel of 1% of the people have resulted in nearly 100% of the people panicking over toilet paper supplies and being put in the equivalent of house arrest. After all, this was not ‘unforeseen.’ And it isn’t exactly unprecedented, except in scope. It could have been prevented. Over the years we already saw a series of bugs make the trip from third world nations to first world nations. The prevention would just have been inconvenient to a smaller number of people knowingly taking a risk. Hopefully, the world will learn from this like we learned from 9/11. Hopefully, the Chinese will stop eating interesting things in interesting ways. Hopefully, everyone reading this magazine stays safe and well. Beyond that, take the opportunity to fly your personal aircraft! What better way to self-isolate than to get hundreds or thousands of feet above the ground by yourself or with a close friend or family member.
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