Which Was The Worst For Society: Ballpoint Pens, Auto Transmissions, Or Smartphones?

[Sneed S. McSneedensen]

Which of the following and its consequences has been the most disastrous for the human race: the ballpoint pen, the automatic transmission, or the smartphone? Why?

Argument for the ballpoint pen: It completely killed cursive script and the intelligence that came along with it.

The ballpoint pen serves two important purposes. It is cheap, and it works. It excels in these two categories due to the simplicity of the ballpoint pen's design: ball inside a tight socket that rotates in all directions and, thus, transfers ink from above the ball onto the canvas below it. When this ball is not rotating, it operates as an effective cap preventing ink from leaking. It works outside the safe environment of an office, such as a plane in a warzone flying at altitudes in which traditional fountain pens would leak and fail.

However, the ballpoint pen is a terrible tool when effortless, legible, penmanship is desired. The operation of the ball in socket is incompatible with the traditional light pressure commonly utilized with quills and ink as well as fountain pens. The ball can only effectively transfer ink to paper when applying a relatively increased amount of pressure to the pen; any attempts with lesser amounts of force result in effectively writing with an empty pen that transfers no ink to paper. As a result, the ideal amount of force to write with ballpoint pens is not equivocal to the ideal amount of force to write in cursive script. As a result, as the ballpoint pen was adopted more and more, the general population has written in cursive script less and less. But what is the significance of cursive handwriting?

Well, overall health. More specifically, hand-eye coordination and motor skills. Ever wondered why the majority of Zoomers are broccoli-headed tranny gay faggots? Ever wondered why the majority of Zoomers do not know cursive handwriting? Ever wondered if there is any connection between cursive handwriting's impending extinction and the widespread decrease in intelligence? The missing link here is the ballpoint pen.

Argument for the automatic transmission: It reduced the skill demanded of vehicle operation significantly such that you may now share the road with women and minorities.

Ever wondered why the majority of drivers in the United States are always either flooring it or slamming the brakes? Ever wondered why the majority of drivers in the United States eat, drink, text, or smoke while driving? Now ponder what transmission type the majority of drivers in the United States operate. Hint #1: It's not the transmission type that requires continuous focus on throttle input, vehicle speed, and all four limbs for effective use. Hint #2: It's not the manual transmission.

As the years have gone, the American auto industry has witnessed a diminishing market presence of the manual transmission; for example, the most recent iteration of the Chevrolet Corvette came without a manual transmission option. Though modern manual transmissions are inevitably coupled with "nanny technologies" that allow for easier operation (Auto Rev Match Assist), the most nannied manual transmission still demands an increased focus on overall vehicle operation.

By contrast, the automatic is deceitfully simple. There are two pedals: One goes, the other stops. If you want to go faster, press the go pedal harder. If you want to stop quicker, press the stop pedal faster. Congratulations, you just learned how to move a 2,000 - 4,000 pound object as fast as 60 miles per hour within 6-10 seconds within two seconds. So long as you are able to pass a state-administered driving exam, you are now ready to take your masterful skills out onto the road where you endanger countless lives with your overinflated confidence in your abilities. With an automatic transmission in hand, you are now ready to show the world just how reckless you can be.

Argument for the smartphone: It gave the Internet to those that did not deserve it.

You are probably going to select this one, so I will not present my own argument for it.

tl;dr: Choose which of the following was the worst for society: the ballpoint pen, the automatic transmission, or the smartphone.

 

[WTBOnlineFather]

I appreciate your effort to find parallels to the unmitigated disaster to humanity that is the smartphone, but your other examples aren't comparable at all.

Ballpoint pen: it's really not that bad, it's very accessible, convenient and durable, which if anything encourages you to handwrite more, because you can always have a working writing instrument ready (and better than a pencil). Many Europeans are still taught to write script and continue doing so after they switch from school-mandated kiddie pens to ballpoints.

Automatic transmission: in America, having a car is basically a necessity to be able to function so even if autos didn't exist, you'd have dangerous idiots trying to drive a manual transmission being even less capable of controlling it than they are now. Even the worst driver that can pass a driving exam should still know when to press the pedal that makes you go faster and when to press the pedal that makes you stop, even if they're sloppy about it. With a manual, if you misshift or stall, the car will behave differently to your expectations, which in the hands of a retard is truly dangerous. In Europe manuals are still common and I can tell you it absolutely does not eliminate terrible drivers from the pool, and that's even though you can get by perfectly fine without a car here.

Smartphone: total global destruction of society as we knew it.

 

[Night Crawler]

The Germans losing WW2.

 

[seri0us]

Haven't smartphones affected cursive script and driving far more than ballpoint pens and auto trans respectively?

 

[Agamemnon Busmalis]

Print letters were good enough for the Romans, Carolinginas, and medieval and Renaissance scholars so they're good enough for me. I always thought cursive looked dumb, I learned it but other than signing my name I use it for absolutely nothing. Helpful if you want to read historical handwritten things from the past few hundred years but that's about it.

Fountain pens aren't that great either, they're messy and a pain in the ass more often than not. Look cool but there's a reason people stopped using them in favor of ballpoints.

 

[The Evil Midnight Bomber]

I can write much better with a ballpoint pen than a fountain pen strangely enough.

 

[CrashMan2012]

I vote smartphone, I don't really think it's hard to see how awful that invention is for society as a whole. Disinformation, influence peddling, a never ending stream of attention grabbing clickbait outrage inducing headlines. If you can think of a bad influence, it's already at your fingertips, demanding your attention and wiping out your productivity.

I learned to drive manual, and I still know how to drive manual. I don't see automatics as the scourge of the road though, and I think that the reasons why were covered very well by @WTBOnlineFather a few posts back.

On the topic of ball point pens and the end of actual writing, got some good news for you, from the most unlikely of places too.

https://www.npr.org/2023/10/23/1207933434/california-mandates-cursive-handwriting-instruction-in-elementary-schools

Other states in the US have also reintroduced cursive, or are at least talking about it.

 

[Party Hat Wurmple]

Cursive as much as it's fine to learn, makes majority of people's handwriting fucking unintelligible. It might be faster, but it's certainly not clearer. It's perfectly fine for art and marketing, but outside of that, nothing will be lost with it dying a slow painful death. Happy days will be had when I can finally read my doctor's fucking prescription because he can't write in fucking cursive.

 

[Climaxing Sunset]

I vote electric car. Why? Because maintaining a internal combustion engine car requires maintenance, and they aren’t as fast as electric cars.

Electric cars at worst has to have its battery replaced every 7-10 years, but the sheer acceleration they have and the attempts by Globohomo to push for these cars will spell disaster in the future especially given the bad driving record of minorities and women

 

[JoshPlz]

Smartphones have easily done and continue to do the most damage to society.

 

[Father Fornicatio]

Smartphones, the others aren't even competition.

 

[WTBOnlineFather]

I vote electric car. Why? Because maintaining a internal combustion engine car requires maintenance, and they aren’t as fast as electric cars.

Electric cars at worst has to have its battery replaced every 7-10 years, but the sheer acceleration they have and the attempts by Globohomo to push for these cars will spell disaster in the future especially given the bad driving record of minorities and women

No worries goy, modern cars are literally computers on wheels, before long new cars will evaluate your driver profile before you first sit behind the wheel and limit power and other functionality accordingly. I'm not even kidding. This is already sort of a thing with teslas where they will sell you a SW "update" that increases the power, the thing is it costs several thousand dollars so niggers can't afford it and women would rather buy whatever it is women buy when they feel like fucking around.
And lol if you think other shit won't go on electric cars before the battery does, lol twice if you think the fix will be replacing the battery rather than selling you an entire new car (aka the Apple model).

 

[TenMilesWide]

Rollerball pens have been around since like the 60s and they're perfectly suitable for cursive. Schools didn't stop teaching cursive because the pens made it hard to, they stopped because computers in home and in the office rendered handwritten documents obsolete. Why struggle to read some idiot's chickenscratch when I can tell him to type it up and print it out instead?

 

[Baked Al-Aqsa]

What kind of pants on head philosonigger moonlogic reasoning do you need to have come up with your first two arguments? You could have alternatively titled this thread, "what starts with the letter 'A'? Sneed, feed, or apple?"

 

[Saddam Hussain Obama]

smarthphones killed the internet read my threads

 

[Sneed S. McSneedensen]

What kind of pants on head philosonigger moonlogic reasoning do you need to have come up with your first two arguments? You could have alternatively titled this thread, "what starts with the letter 'A'? Sneed, feed, or apple?"

On the off-chance this is not a shitpost but instead a broccoli boy that uses "sus" in his vocabulary, there is plenty of documentation that ballpoint pens are notably more difficult for cursive script and that automatic transmissions allot for less attentive driving.

 

[Heed Not]

Definitely smartphones. There's not really anything stopping society from requiring cursive in its literacy education, as recently as the 90's kids were getting fountain pens for school that lasted from elementary to graduation. If anything I'd argue the decline of cursive is actually because of the increase of ESL students and the general lowering of educational standards to keep youth from being "at large" because they can't cut it in school. Auto transmissions would've always eventually come about with fixed-gear EVs or CVTs.

 

[Rubick]

I bring you another contender. The Beatles, ruined music fashion, and helped put the hippy culture mainstream along with what followed after.

 

[Spud]

If not for the ballpoint pen we never would have been able to get a fantastic first hand account from Anne Frank of how Jews were treated in Nazi Germany. None of the items are the problem but rather it's users.

 

[RollerGator]

It's gay to whine about smart phones.