There are opportunities in these setbacks. At first my digital camera problems brought on the red-faced rage that equipment-failures usually do. But let's play nice, at least at the beginning.

I have always enjoyed bumping into Gandhi/Thoreau wannabees, those idealistic preachers of simplicity. There are plenty of these in full time RVing, especially in the boondocking synod. But redemption through renunciation never appealed to me.

My hostility to the clutter of material possessions has a different origin. I think that it really is true that economic GNP stands for garbage national product. About 95% of it is just troublesome junk, usually plastic junk. These days the only thing built to last a lifetime is congressmen.

There are few business models better than ye olde "Give 'em the razor, sell 'em the blades." And there are few companies who practiced this better than Kodak. Their Brownie camera was perhaps the first, branded, mass-produced, consumer item that most Americans owned. Baby boomers are probably the last generation that can remember ancestors whose Brownie-snapped photos fill albums that we still have.

 I would like to rip one apart and coo over real metal and glass. (Let's hope it was actually made in America.) The brownish cast of the Bakelite would remind me of sepia tones in the photographs themselves. Did people keep them for a lifetime?

It wouldn't have hurt Kodak if the Brownie had lasted a lifetime. They probably sold the Brownie at less than cost, since their whole business model was based on jabbing you for the film. They made using the Brownie so easy that the customer developed a greasy trigger finger. He heard the snap of the shutter; Kodak heard the kuh-ching of the cash register.

Thus did Rochester, NY grow into an affluent company town, with a famous optical engineering school, the Eastman music school, and well deserved civic pride. Its Kodak moment lasted for a century.

By the early 1980's Kodak was running scared. Their zoom was all the way out, and they could seen the digital revolution coming. Their research lab was in an uproar, trying to switch from a culture of chemical engineering to one of electrical engineering and solid state physics.

How could they make money off of cameras that didn't use film?! Perhaps photo-editing software might be the new razor blade. After all, endless software upgrades --even the useless or harmful ones-- worked well enough for Microsoft, et al. Alas, photo-editing software turned out to be a freebie.

The "camera" biz tried to glom onto the ink jet printer industry; they wanted you to disgorge your pixels onto expensive paper. Razor blades reborn. That trick never worked on me. I can't even afford the ink cartridges, the only product that keeps Hewlett-Packard in business.

At one time the industry had its heart set on selling you batteries, especially "for digital cameras." Then some fool came out with rechargeable batteries.

Hmmm, how about an industry-standard, 30 day warranty, and then cleaning up by selling extended plans? That worked until consumer organizations started bad-mouthing these insurance plans. Also, some customers learned what it is like to talk to a jabbering coolie in India, with a three second telephone delay.

But never underestimate the creative mind, especially when it's desperate. The industry learned how to get customers horny about ultra-miniature cameras. Just imagine a full-size man fumbling over teeny buttons on a slippery little camera designed for the fingers of a Japanese schoolgirl.

They need custom lithium batteries. By creating a proliferation of short-lived camera models, each with a different custom battery, and by charging enough (ahem) for the replacement battery (which nobody will inventory anyway), the customer will just scrap the camera when the battery croaks.

A few customers, cynical after their experiences with cellphone batteries, wouldn't bite. They insisted on universal, inexpensive, rechargeable AA batteries. (The jerks.) The industry must get some vengeful satisfaction in putting wise-guys like this at the mercy of cheapo plastic trapdoors and snaps, over the battery compartment.

The solution to the camera industry's problem of having no razor blades to sell was to turn the entire camera into a $200 throwaway, something unimaginable to George Eastman or Edwin Land. With new models every week and with enough plastic in the right places, the camera would have the longevity of a bar of soap in a wet shower dish.

With any luck the average consumer will be more concerned about getting the camera endorsed by a tennis star or designed in Milano, than anything technological. These days you can have any color you want, as long as it's not brown.

Epilogue: a couple days after this post, Kodak announced that it would stop making Kodachrome color film, which has been around since 1935.