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De-cluttering
May. 25th, 2014 01:31 pmI've had occasion to think about "clutter" recently.
And it strikes me that the currently populatr definitions are *horribly* biased and flawed.
Yes, there are folks who hold on to everything, and need to quit doing so. But the "suggested" guidelines are utter nonsense.
For xample "get rid of anything you haven't used in the last six months". Right. There go the winter (and summer) clothes depending on when you do it.
That also gets into the elitism aspects. It's assumed that if you get rid of something and then *do* wind up needing it later, that replacing it will be no big deal.
Sorry, but for people on fixed incomes it *is* a big dreal. Heck,.I'd have been offline for *months* many times if I didn't hold onto my older computers. They still work, and are usable, if a bit clumsy. Also, they serve as a source of *free* spare parts.
Now we come to another bias (due to thesuperficiality of the folks pushing these rules). They assume that you *can* replace the item if you ever need it again. Ask anybody who has needed to retreive data from an old 5.25" floppy about how easy it is to find those. Or my current concern,m a "LapLink" parallel cable. For some reason mine didn't get stored with the serial cablres. And this is a problem, because I have a computer I need to do some stuff with and it doesn't have an ethernet port.Windows did support parellel port "networking" (though finding it in the help files was a major chore). Serial port networking could be done too, but is's considerably slower.
And now we come to the *really* stupid part. According to these sorts of idiots, I shouldn't have my huge collection of books. "You can get them from the library".
No, actually I can't. Library collections are throwing away countless books, bnased on them not getting checked out "often enough" (and we are olosing vast amounts of cultural info by doing this. Even popular fiction has info that future scholars to be aghast at our discarding)
And that's assuming they had the books in the first place.
Same sort of thing goes for tapes, CDs and DVDs "you can rent them". Aside from the continuing costs, there is (again) the issue of availibility.
While I've ripped most of my CDs, I haven't gotten around to setting up to do it for thre tpes (splitting out tracks is a bit more invvolved, even with the short cuts Audacity allows). Also there are storage issues, as I want to re-rip them in a lossless format. That's one of the reasons I'll eventually be getting more large, networked drives.
But I'm firmly of the oopinion that the folks putting forh these rules are not "merely" severe "neat freaks" but elitists (see coments above about costs of replacing or renting thoings) and likely aliterate (due to the bias against havimng lots of books. With similar biases against large collections of music or video.
Mind you, I'd be the last to claim that I *hsaven't* kept dsome things that "might be useful" long past when they should have been discarded, but even so the "rules" are really stupid
And it strikes me that the currently populatr definitions are *horribly* biased and flawed.
Yes, there are folks who hold on to everything, and need to quit doing so. But the "suggested" guidelines are utter nonsense.
For xample "get rid of anything you haven't used in the last six months". Right. There go the winter (and summer) clothes depending on when you do it.
That also gets into the elitism aspects. It's assumed that if you get rid of something and then *do* wind up needing it later, that replacing it will be no big deal.
Sorry, but for people on fixed incomes it *is* a big dreal. Heck,.I'd have been offline for *months* many times if I didn't hold onto my older computers. They still work, and are usable, if a bit clumsy. Also, they serve as a source of *free* spare parts.
Now we come to another bias (due to thesuperficiality of the folks pushing these rules). They assume that you *can* replace the item if you ever need it again. Ask anybody who has needed to retreive data from an old 5.25" floppy about how easy it is to find those. Or my current concern,m a "LapLink" parallel cable. For some reason mine didn't get stored with the serial cablres. And this is a problem, because I have a computer I need to do some stuff with and it doesn't have an ethernet port.Windows did support parellel port "networking" (though finding it in the help files was a major chore). Serial port networking could be done too, but is's considerably slower.
And now we come to the *really* stupid part. According to these sorts of idiots, I shouldn't have my huge collection of books. "You can get them from the library".
No, actually I can't. Library collections are throwing away countless books, bnased on them not getting checked out "often enough" (and we are olosing vast amounts of cultural info by doing this. Even popular fiction has info that future scholars to be aghast at our discarding)
And that's assuming they had the books in the first place.
Same sort of thing goes for tapes, CDs and DVDs "you can rent them". Aside from the continuing costs, there is (again) the issue of availibility.
While I've ripped most of my CDs, I haven't gotten around to setting up to do it for thre tpes (splitting out tracks is a bit more invvolved, even with the short cuts Audacity allows). Also there are storage issues, as I want to re-rip them in a lossless format. That's one of the reasons I'll eventually be getting more large, networked drives.
But I'm firmly of the oopinion that the folks putting forh these rules are not "merely" severe "neat freaks" but elitists (see coments above about costs of replacing or renting thoings) and likely aliterate (due to the bias against havimng lots of books. With similar biases against large collections of music or video.
Mind you, I'd be the last to claim that I *hsaven't* kept dsome things that "might be useful" long past when they should have been discarded, but even so the "rules" are really stupid
