I went skiing for the first time in a while, and was surprised by how the lift pass had changed. They just give you a card that you put in your breast pocket, and NFC readers on all the lifts just open automatically as you approach. It was a complete sea change from the paper stickers that some attendant would check when I was a kid. It's a clearly superior solution, and one using now-common technology, but I hadn't thought about that change being made until I saw it. Focus: What advances in technology or knowledge have completely supplanted the way things were done/known when you grew up? Especially things that didn't really occur to you until you suddenly realized "oh, it's completely different now."
Funny, I experienced the ski pass thing at Loon a few weeks ago and was pleasantly surprised. Focus: Arcades exist purely for nostalgia reasons. Why would I want to go to an arcade when I can just play any game I want at home?
I mentioned this before in the covid thread, but watches. Jesus christ. Growing up, I thought I was fancy because my watch was water proof. Now there's more computing power on my wrist than in the first spaceship to land a man on the moon. I have the Garmin Forerunner 955 solar. Just looking at the watch face, in addition to the remaining battery life, time, date, sunrise, sunset, phase of the moon, current temperature at my location and weather forecast, it also tells me my current heart rate as well as my HR over the last 30 seconds in graph form. That's just glancing at it. When I pull up the app on my phone, I'm immediately greeted with a custom workout for the day which is determined by an algorithm utilizing the available data, my current training status (based upon HR, exertion levels, sleep, etc) current and historical HR data, "body battery," stress levels, "intensity minutes," steps, floors climbed, approximated current calories burned, my sleep nightly sleep pattern broken down into deep/light/REM/awake, a sleep score, heart rate variability status, current pulse ox. and acclimation, and respiration as measured in breaths per minute. All of these can be clicked on in order to see further graphs and an historical analysis. The watch also measures workouts, because, obvs. I haven't fully tested the battery life, but with all this going on, and solar charging turned off (the watch face itself is a solar charger), at exactly one week of wearing it 24/7, I was down to 30% battery remaining. Seriously, wtf?
The other two I had in mind: Went to see John Williams in concert a few months ago. Forget mailing you paper ticket, forget will-call, forget all that bullshit, they just send you an email with a link and say "add this to your Google Wallet/Apple Pay" and your ticket shows up on your phone with a scannable barcode, calendar alerts, directions in maps app, etc. When I was a kid it was a big question "what killed the dinosaurs?" These days it's like "it was an asteroid, you can visit the impact site in Mexico if you want."
I wasn’t sure what to mention until I read this part of your post. We were watching the last Jurassic Park movie the other day. I was telling our son that if you showed 5 year old Walt those high def images of dinosaurs on the TV, my brain would have exploded. Walking With Dinosaurs would have been playing on a continuous loop. All I had was episodes of Land of the Lost. And, knowing now that they weren’t these slow, lumbering, monochromatic things as TV and movies portrayed them? That they were colorful, fast moving and some had feathers?!? It’s still pretty amazing to going on 49 Walt.
and your post reminded me of the Jaws ride at Universal Studios. That fucking mechanical shark gave me nightmares for years when it predictably and slowly came out of the water at the trolley. today? My boys would think that’s hilariously fake and would probably get pissed we wasted their time on that ride. Think of it this way: we are literally living in a time in which special effects have gotten so good, that it’s now a thing to intentionally make them worse in order to make the movie more popular. See, Sharknado franchise.
I could talk for hours about all of the automotive stuff that has changed since I started working on carbureted cars/ trucks in the '90s, but most of it is going to be angry ranting, as I see a lot of the electronic "innovations" on cars/ power equipment as unnecessary at best, and maliciously predatory on the part of the manufacturers at worst. I like electronically controlled engines and transmissions; beats the shit out of a carburetor and a mechanically controlled automatic transmission. I DO NOT like the idea of a bad power steering sensor shutting down the whole vehicle (I have personally seen this, and I've heard about even worse. CAN-BUS systems can suck ALL the dicks.). I DO NOT like the idea of manufacturers locking you out of things your vehicle is already capable of, just because you didn't pay enough (I'm looking at you, Tesla. FUCK TESLA.). I DO NOT like the idea of manufacturers locking you out of repairing your own vehicle (too many manufacturers to mention, but John Deere and Mopar/ FCI instantly come to mind). EDIT: I don't see any of this getting better, since there is this moronic push to EVs (I'm really curious about which lawmakers have investments in EV technology...). I support green energy, but I have said for year that cars/ trucks should remain fuel powered; they are actually a very small portion of carbon emissions. How about giving us higher octane gasoline?! Higher octane allows for higher compression ratios. Higher compression ratios allow for greater efficiency. 94 octane is the highest you can get in the US, and has been all of my life. What the fuck is up with that? Let's get some 100 octane going, and bring on the 14:1 engines, or higher boost pressures!
They're working on some artificial stuff that is pretty amazing. Porsche has some R&D that is putting out very high power synthetic fuel with none of the emission shit, that you can safely run in high octane settings like high boost dual turbo setups. Of they can figure out how to manufacture that so it's affordable, it's like the best of both worlds.
I would be curious as to your gripes against Tesla. In sustainability school, we talked about a virtuous cycle that Tesla sort of used, and the initial lift was "better mousetrap, no guilt for going green and making something environmentally friendly sexier than it's less green counterparts". I think the EV thing is inevitable, and here in the next few years it gets fun where you can really start to mod the vehicles. I say inevitable, because...well, there's way more ways to produce electricity than gasoline/diesel. And GOD what I would do with that kind of fuel in a motorcycle tuned and geared for it. For me, aside from the shock and awe of buying shit on the internet getting so much easier....stuff like Tinder being the default for dating is kind of wild. Like...apps and algorithms are breeding humans. Also, I love the Aziz Ansari bit about Grindr: "yeah, the phone part of it doesn't really work all that great, but if you want a guy to suck your dick, there's apparently 4 or 5 of them in this restaurant right now." I'm in NM, and I'm still blown away at the idea you can buy weed like...in what looks like an Apple store from a teeny white girl in dreadlocks in several states. Every time I smell it, I'm like "OH SHIT SOMEBODY FIXIN TO GET...oh, yeah, right." My working theory is they won't legalize it down South until they get a handle on the diabetes/obesity shit, because having the munchies near a soul food place where I can motorboat some cobbler is a whole other level of getting fat. I still lose my shit with every launch from Space X, and while I do not think we are going to Mars, I do think investing in the technology to allow us to do so is going to be pretty important. If we had the "terra-forming" starter pack, there's a zillion acres of desert that now becomes somewhat viable for agriculture or human usage. Australia, the ME, Africa would all suddenly be players on a more tremendous scale in terms of agriculture. Also, on the medical front: I remember having to lug this massive nebulizer kit around as a kid. It was a nighmare. Now, I have one that looks like a shitty vape pen. They won't cure asthma, but they have made being wheezy more breezy. Counter-point on the watch thing: I have a smart watch, and any text image gets displayed automatically. This weekend, I get a text from an unknown number saying "Hey, it's Michael." I think it's my buddy Mike who recently lost his mom. We exchanged emails and made loose plans to talk, but Mike's not much of a phone person. So, I responded with a "hey, man, how's it going" etc. and the convo dies off. Yesterday I got a "good morning" which...weird, maybe not for me. A few hours later, I get a shirtless pic and a dick pic...that just happened to coincide with a large, in-person meeting in a packed board room. NOPE, WRONG MIKE. This dude and his thunder thimble showed up on my watch, and one of my staff was like "Hey, um...you got a pic." So....technology is still blindsided by dude's with 4" thumb-shaped dicks from WV.
counter point to your counter point: porn on watches. Win. I used to have to turn the tv to channel 99 to try to make out maybe a quarter of a scrambled titty amongst the visual noise. When the internet took off, it still took minutes — MINUTES — for a single picture to upload. And we LOVED IT!
I fondly remember cleaning out someone's house, finding old porn and quickly divvying it up between the boys. Hustler might as well have been called "fuzzy axe wound" back in those days. I'm still fucking mad I can't get pornhub on my roku.
Interested to hear your rationale on this as someone who actually works on cars. Personally, I always saw EVs as ideal - there are tons of ways to generate electricity, and it can be done centrally (i.e. the power grid) or distributed (i.e. local solar). This means that upgrades to the power supply automatically improve the vehicle - you can literally get an "MPG" increase, or cleaner power, without touching your vehicle. Not to mention the relative simplicity of electrical motors at the wheels vs. harnessing the power of tiny explosions and needing to direct that energy elsewhere. This isn't at all to say EVs are perfect. I don't own one because charging takes way too long for road trips, charging stations aren't widely available enough, and it's hard to bring an emergency supply of electricity with you. Plus, the current rare earth elements like lithium have their own problems. But those are things that improvements to the technology are fixing. Focus: while the Internet is an obvious one, it wasn't that long ago where questions or problems were impossible to resolve without sinking hours of time into it - going to a library, finding books, poring over books looking for solutions. Is the book accurate? Is it even possible to vet? Depending on how niche the question was, it might be literally impossible to answer in some kind of reasonable timeline. If the book(s) weren't available, what do you do? It's just become normalized that any question you have is solvable. Focus x2: everyone carrying a digital camera with them at all times. Going over old photos from when I was a kid, or even older ones, it strikes me how few "moments" got captured. Sure, there were posed group shots, and smiling faces during holidays, but how many times did you see a snapshot of a friend laughing at a joke? Film cost money, developing cost money, cameras weren't automated and tuned for casual use... It seems so normal now to have those little moments from all of your loved ones. I have a few precious film photos of those kind of moments, and they're so sparse compared to today.
Let me elaborate on what I said. I think that given the current state of technology EVs are good for small cars used for short distances; think urban commuting. However, I don't think they are viable for many drivers, and definitely not for any kind of heavy duty use. The batteries for that would be huge, and the bigger the batteries, the less the truck can carry. The most realistic outcome for trucks would be a locomotive type setup: An engine that just runs a generator, and that powers the motors at the wheels. With that said, I agree with downndirty that electric motorcycles would be pretty cool.
I had a similar conversation with a regional/semi local delivery driver. He struck up a conversation over the e bike. I explained how it was a good solution for us due to our small town in generally stable weather, giving us the ability to run local errands and get a little exercise without $pending ga$. He says that EVs and bikes are perfect for how I'm using them but he is not on board for cargo hauling long distances because the infrastructure is just not there yet. The infrastructure is lagging behind the batteries and it's just going to be awhile til it can truly be adopted nationwide. Trains haul a huge bulk of goods, but at some point they have to be distributed into a region and in some sparse places, it might be a long trip.
The trouble kid in my neighborhood would steal porn from his grandpa and share with us down at the community lake when we were 12 or so. He would also brag about how much pussy he got on the regular. We knew he was full of shit, but never called him out in it lest we be denied our only access to porn given the alternative was watching the scrambled footage of the Spice channel.
Kids won’t ever have to rewind the pornos to the spot their dad last nutted at! Speaking of entertainment streaming will probably take down the whole movie theater industry as another scalp. I think the fragmentation will eventually doom even the streaming companies. Obviously won’t all be Blockbuster but too many options and so much content will lead to burnout. I think Netflix might be the biggest to go under if trends continue. Their content is not what it used to be and they are going to feel the sting of changing more for multiple person accounts. QR codes really amaze me. Coupon wise makes everything so seamless and convenient loading everything onto a digital customer card. Also a lot of companies that are good at getting content connected to the your product. Cordless power tools are another thing that has been revolutionary.
Focus: I have a TV with Roku built in. I have the Roku app on my phone. I can use it as a remote control and it works better than the remote that came with the TV. I can connect my earbuds to my phone and listen to programming on my TV without disturbing anyone else. There is no latency on the sound, and it amazes me how that works so well.