So many possibilities!
I feel like several of them are in my car:
* Rear-view mirror with light sensors and mirror whose reflectivity is electronically adjusted by computer so it can detect when bright lights behind me might be interfering with the driver, and so adjust the reflectivity. This is supposed to make it so the driver has no need to adjust the mirror the prevent being blinded by bright lights from behind, so the ability to flip the mirror manually for that purpose has been REMOVED. Guess what high-tech doesn’t actually seem to work at all? Result: screwed up rear view mirror.
* Super smart computer-controlled headlights with bulbs that cost hundreds of dollars controlled by a computer which costs hundreds of dollars. Computer has some unknown unfixable malfunction that causes it to flash the high beams randomly. Requires over $600 or disabling the high beams. Result: No usable high beams.
* Car alarm with all sorts of sensors everywhere. Guess what? One of them goes off incorrectly randomly sometimes, meaning car makes bloody awful noise randomly. Result: Disconnect car alarm.
* Little plastic flap window shades that can cover insides of some car windows to help keep sun out. Except they break almost immediately, and become distracting noise-making flapping things that need to be removed at expense.
Other candidates not in my car:
* Electronic voting machines. Solve no actual problem, but create all sorts of opportunities for hacking, vote tampering, failure and lack of trust of voting results.
* The grip pieces on the plastic safety covers on many Trader Joe food products, where they use so much glue that you have to use a knife to cut them off anyway, and trying to use the grip will sooner bend the walls of the container than peel the lid off.
* Starkiller Base.
* The plastic ties on bags of Costco bagels, that usually destroy the bag they tie up before I can get them off.
* Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, or Star Wars, program. Would not have worked and if it had, would have put the Soviet Union in a place where they might consider attacking the US to stop it being deployed. Fortunately, the Soviet Union imploded (not due to Reagan’s cowboy diplomacy nor SDI) before that became an issue. Program thankfully scrapped.
* Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) – destroying the ozone layer for the sake of spray products.
* Lobotomization – let’s stick a pick into someone’s brain through their nose and stir to improve their psychological diagnoses.
* Digital Rights Management (DRM) – instead of realizing that we should shift business models to reward content creators and producers in different ways now that it’s easy to cheaply share data everywhere, let’s try the impossible task of trying to track who has the right to use certain data in any electronic device, and criminalize people to try to protect corporate profits in the old physical media model where it wasn’t actually illegal to share content.
* The man bra .
* DDT – the insecticide that also kills or screws up almost everything else, just more slowly.
* Agent Orange – the tactical defoliant that causes horrible problems for your thousands of own soldiers and even more civilians, causes birth defects, etc.
