This entry continues my list of the top five worst
inventions/ideas that are still very much in use today. In my previous entry on this topic, I covered
numbers 3-5. Now it is time for the top
two on my list. But first, I’ll mention
a few things that didn’t make it in the top five, but were close. The QWERTY keyboard has to be one – that fact
that the inefficient keyboard layout persists to today is a bad idea. Loosely related is the persistence of
worthless letters of the alphabet, namely X, Q, and C, which can be replaced by
other letters. I also find that words
spelled oddly…or should I say weirdly…make no sense either. Can’t we just hold to some basic spelling
rules? Another thing that probably
should be in my top five is the "rule" that people get to vote on
taxes for public schools but almost nothing else. Why does that make sense?
As I mentioned before, I think you should try making your
own list and writing it up. Let me know
and I will add links. But remember, the
inventions still have to be in use today.
Without further ado, here are my top
two worst inventions that are still in use today.
Worst Idea #2:
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act...aka "HIPAA"
HIPAA is a law passed by the US Congress in 1996. Otherwise referred to as the "Privacy
Act" because that is the most visible outcome of the law. Actually there continue to be additions to
the original law. Some of you probably
have never heard of it and so it doesn't make sense that it would be the #2
Worst Idea on my list. And, honestly, to
a certain extent, I am using it here as an example of a law that started with a
good idea, got expanded upon in the process of being put together, and then,
when passed, had many unintended
consequences. Such laws are, in
general, very bad ideas. Also,
unfortunately, such laws are very difficult to undo once they have been
enacted. In my experience, HIPAA is a
perfect example of such a situation, it is very bad, and makes it to #2 on my
list of the worst ideas that are still part of our daily lives.
You may not think of HIPAA as part of your daily life,
but if you have ever been to the hospital or doctor's office, you had to fill
out at least one form that was solely related to the HIPAA law and its
subsequent derivatives. You probably
didn't read the HIPAA form because you had 50 other forms to fill out and that
one seemed pretty irrelevant. If you
don't work in the healthcare industry in some way, then it probably has little
consequence to you. It wouldn't make
your list or even cross your mind.
I work in medical research and I deal with the
consequences, both intended and unintended, every
day, whether at work or at home! And, for the most part, those consequences
are entirely a waste of time. Yes, there
are some good things about the general concepts that were part of the original
law, but the whole concept of "patient privacy" took on a life of its
own. One annoying thing is that often,
even if everyone, including the patient, agree that some of the law's
requirements are a waste of time, it is not allowable to bypass the
requirements. It's like creating a 25
mile per hour zone on a freeway so that a family can cross from one side to the
other, and then that family says, no, we'll take the bridge five miles down the
road, yet the 25 mile per hour zone is left in place. There's no logic there. Red tape for the sake of red tape.
The unintended consequences have to do with the “privacy”
part of the law, which, as I understand, wasn’t even the original intent of the
law (and the word “privacy” doesn’t even appear in the title). The original intent was to make sure that
health information could “stay with the patient” – meaning it was “portable”
(that is in the title) when the
patient is treated at different hospitals and clinics. The privacy part came in under the
“accountability” portion of the law.
This also was a good idea, but this is where the really bad (and
probably unintended) concepts arise.
The HIPAA law and related laws have spawned a whole industry.
Check it out for yourself (for example:
https://www.hipaatraining.com/).
There are companies that sell entire training programs on how to
navigate the HIPAA laws. Every
institution doing research had to create an entire process to meet the
requirements of HIPAA that rivals the process for obtaining informed consent
for research. All such institutions now
have a "Privacy Officer" and a staff of people whose entire job is to
make sure that everyone in the institution is following the HIPAA laws so that
the institution doesn't get fined. That
is a bad unintended outcome - at least I sure hope it was an untended outcome!!
I don't know anything about Congressman Bill Archer, but
he gets my thumbs down for introducing this bill to Congress. This was a Pandora's Box. There are some good things in this law, but
there are also some really poorly thought-out aspects that, at this point, are
nearly impossible to undo. It is more
red tape that slows progress and created a whole industry that creates nothing
productive. It's like creating a new tax
that just goes to pay the salaries of the people collecting the new tax.
Laws with unintended consequences, baggage and red tape
are #2 on my list. But, in my opinion,
there is one clear winner...
Worst Idea #1:
Hand Blow Dryers
Yes, I'm talking about those stupid hand dryers that you
find in public bathrooms. It seems like
they have been around for about 30 years or so.
Someone decided it was a way to save trees by reducing the use of paper
towels. They did a good job of marketing
them to cities and counties and states, and so they are everywhere now. I hate them.
If they were a good idea, people would install them in their homes. They don't.
Maybe they don't bother you. They bother me because of a number of factors
that come together: 1) I end up in lots
of places where the bathrooms have hand dryers (like rest stops and so on), 2)
unlike most men (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4504379/), I always wash my hands after using the
bathroom, 3) I like my hands to be dry, 4) I don't want to spend any more time
in a public restroom than I have to, so I want to get in and get out.
The thing is, paper towels work great. They are fast, efficient, and they just
work. It's hard to improve on something
that is so simple: a wimpy piece of
paper. With a paper towel, you can dry
your hands in 5 seconds. You can even
dry your hands as you're walking out the door if you really are in a
hurry. You can take a paper towel with
you to clean something up. Hand blow
dryers take what seems like forever to work and they cement you to one specific
spot. If you really want your hands
fully dry, you've got to stand right there until they are dry. I've timed them - they take maybe 30-60
seconds typically. But that is a five-
to ten-fold increase in the time it takes to dry your hands. That's a poor trade-off. In my observation, men are much more likely not to wash their hands at all, or to
leave with completely wet hands, when the only option for drying their hands is
one of those ridiculous hand blow dryers.
Further, recently I've noticed some bathrooms have both paper towels and
a hand dryer. In those cases, I have
never ever observed anyone opting for using the hand dryer. Does anyone think they are better at drying
your hands???
Part of the problem with hand blow dryers is not the
dryer itself but the way they are implemented in public restrooms. First, there is often just one, which then
becomes the main bottleneck in a busy bathroom.
Again, what happens? People don't
wash their hands because they don't want to stand in a line waiting for the one
precious dryer. This is especially great
if it is an old wimpy dryer that takes forever to work. Also, I've sometimes observed them to be
placed up high, which means that when you use it, it blows water all over
you. If you're in a wheelchair, then
you're really stuck, not to mention that the dryers are against the wall which
makes them hard to get to in a wheelchair.
Paper towels you just grab and go and dry your hands anywhere. There is never a line for people waiting to
get paper towels!
Of course, the big supposed draw of hand dryers is that
you are doing your part to save trees by making hand drying much more
inconvenient. If that was really the
goal, then they should be crank operated (or put a pedal down below and operate
the fan with your foot). To install a
device that sucks up electricity to drive a heater and high-powered fan in
exchange for a paper towel dispenser that uses no energy at all seems like a
very questionable trade-off for claiming that it is "good for the
environment." It also takes energy
and resources to build the hand dryers.
Of course the same can be said for the process of making paper
towels. At home we use cloth towels,
which have to be washed and require energy and water. It's not simple to figure out which option is
the most energy efficient. My guess is
that they are all pretty similar and that the impact on the environment is not
drastically different among the different options. If I were to rate things on a scale of 1 to
5, where 1 = no impact on the environment and 5 = huge impact on the environment,
I'd say they would all be given a "2". Therefore, the decision regarding what option
for hand drying should be made on other factors...like efficiency of hand
drying! I'm pretty sure that you could
do a lot more to help the environment by riding a bicycle instead of driving a
car.
Somewhere along the line, the marketers of hand dryers
needed an additional sales gimmick beyond the idea that they were good for the
environment, so they came up with the idea that they spread less germs. I assume the point was that there was less
touching of things with a blow dryer? I
don't know - it's not like you're grabbing the same paper towel that someone
else used. I think the idea was that
with a manual paper towel dispenser, you sometimes had to pull some kind of
lever to get the next towel out. But
there are plenty of other ways to design a paper towel dispenser so that you
don't have to touch anything other than the towel. Further, a lot of hand dryers have a button
you have to push, so that totally defeats the "no-touch"
concept. Maybe the argument was that air
had less germs than paper??? Well, as
you probably know, that concept was totally debunked. As it turns out, hand dryers are really good
at blowing germs onto your hands, as described in this study: https://aem.asm.org/content/84/8/e00044-18.abstract
One thing I found while traveling across the country one
time when I was on crutches for a bad knee:
hand dryers are as inconvenient as you can get. I don't think anyone thought this
through. After you hobble to the sink to
wash your hands, you now have to find where the hand dryer is, because it is
never right next to the sink (probably because that would be an even bigger
bottleneck - or maybe someone doesn't want to mix water and high current hand
dryers!). If you need your crutches to walk
over to where the dryer is, you have to grab the crutches with your wet hands. Also, there's no place to rest your crutches
near the hand dryer. Paper towels just
work better - assuming they are placed next to the sink, where they should be.
Another limitation is if you want to dry some other part
of your body other than your hands. For
example, when you drive across the country, it is not uncommon that you want to
wash your face or your mouth. Hand
dryers are not designed to dry your face.
Paper towels just work better.
It's obvious.
So, in summary hand dryers are slow, they are
inconvenient, they spread germs, and they probably use up just as much energy
and have just as much impact on the environment as paper towels. For those reasons, hand air dryers are the #1
worst invention that we currently still use.
That's an invention I'd like to see disappear!
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