Farewell to the Old....

[Birdjaguar]

We were the first house in our neighborhood to lock it's doors during the day.

And now there is Ring to keep you updated on who knocking even when you are not at home!

 

[yung.carl.jung]

Since the end of WW2 the rate of change in the things we use and how we do things has been changing at a pretty fast clip. Some changes may have only happened in parts of the world and not in others. In other cases tech has allowed a previous progression to skip steps

Some I've noticed are:

• Fuses have become circuit breakers
• 3D printers now have scaled to use concrete and print houses
• Protons, neutrons and electrons have been replaced by quarks and leptons

What have you seen that is interesting?

you perfectly describe a scary phenomenon, which I have also observed. trying to put it as simple as possible.

1. things change

2. things change at a certain rate: speed of change, SOT
SOT has never been static, it has always been fluent with an upwards tendency

3. the rate at which things change is also speeding up: acceleration of change: AOT
AOT right now is at its all time high. it has never been higher. and it continues to climb. therefore change exponentially grows.

I'm okay with change. life is change, death is static. but there should, need to be limits to change. and I think currently things are changing a little too rapidly. it shouldn't be a possibility to change our planet so drastically that man made climate change occurs. or that microplastic overloads our natural water sources. or that nitrate poisons our earth. those kind of issues only arose because people wanted change, and they wanted it now. we didn't think those changes through enough. I'm not trying to say we need to abandon plastic and electricity, but that maybe some of those standards we've set for modern life (which we do not want to lose) are in- and of themselves unrealistic and destructive. in order to continue the way we are acting right now, we have to destroy the planet. our current lifestyle and the planet being habitable in 1000 years are two events which oppose each other. especially if you consider the fact that human population will only grow, and with that power consumption, carbon footprint, food, clean water, space, air, medicine..

as you can see, I am very optimistic about our future. surely science and capitalism will save us from the problems that science and capitalism brought us! that's always worked, right?

 

[Lohrenswald]

regarding digital media and such, I'm very seriously thinking about starting to burn stuff on DVD's and such
mostly to save space on the computer, and not having to delete stuff all the time

 

[Birdjaguar]

you perfectly describe a scary phenomenon, which I have also observed. trying to put it as simple as possible.

1. things change

2. things change at a certain rate: speed of change, SOT
SOT has never been static, it has always been fluent with an upwards tendency

3. the rate at which things change is also speeding up: acceleration of change: AOT
AOT right now is at its all time high. it has never been higher. and it continues to climb. therefore change exponentially grows.

I'm okay with change. life is change, death is static. but there should, need to be limits to change. and I think currently things are changing a little too rapidly. it shouldn't be a possibility to change our planet so drastically that man made climate change occurs. or that microplastic overloads our natural water sources. or that nitrate poisons our earth. those kind of issues only arose because people wanted change, and they wanted it now. we didn't think those changes through enough. I'm not trying to say we need to abandon plastic and electricity, but that maybe some of those standards we've set for modern life (which we do not want to lose) are in- and of themselves unrealistic and destructive. in order to continue the way we are acting right now, we have to destroy the planet. our current lifestyle and the planet being habitable in 1000 years are two events which oppose each other. especially if you consider the fact that human population will only grow, and with that power consumption, carbon footprint, food, clean water, space, air, medicine..

as you can see, I am very optimistic about our future. surely science and capitalism will save us from the problems that science and capitalism brought us! that's always worked, right?

Thanks. Certain "lanes of progress" are moving faster and faster while others change a slower pace. Digital stuff is moving the fastest and spreading into lots of new places, some of which it probably doesn't belong, but, oh well....

We are still very early in the digital age and transitions often move in fits and starts. The need for people to touch and feel real things will not likely diminish, but everything else is probably fair game for disruption and change.

Now one thing that has not changed much in a couple of centuries are umbrellas. They have gotten smaller and more durable, but are mostly the same. I see an opportunity for an enterprising person to find a way to make a folded umbrella pocket-sized and still large enough for full coverage. The need for them is certainly still there. All you engineers, get busy!

 

[Gori the Grey]

This is just repeating what a lot of the old-timey folks have said, but yes:

The progression in TV: (3 channels to hundreds), no remote to remote, hell, I remember my dad finally caving and buying a color TV.

The progression in computers, which is marked for me by storage media: 5 1/4 floppy disks to 3 1/2 rigid disks that we still called floppies to CDs to thumbdrives to everything onboard/cloud. Prior to 5 1/4 floppy disks, I remember these index cards, like 3 x 6 in size with numbers all over them, and a few numbers one each card got punched and flipping through the cards ran the program. This was from my school's computer in, I want to say, 9th grade.

Also, fanfold paper for printers to just sheets of paper for printers.

Video recording: can't do it all who would imagine you could? to the VHS/Beta/Laserdisk wars, to VHS winning out to DVDs (but now you can't record anymore) to everyone having a video camera in his or her pocket.

What I miss is owning, as a physical object, electronic things: owning your computer game outright, not leasing it from steam. Owning a VHS tape of a movie rather than having it exist on some download status somewhere.

There's some kind of backwards umbrella. I've seen them selling it on QVC. I don't know exactly how it's supposed to be better than the usual umbrella. I didn't stick with the sales pitch that long. My point is just that someone has tried to engineer a better umbrella.

 

[Birdjaguar]

There's some kind of backwards umbrella. I've seen them selling it on QVC. I don't know exactly how it's supposed to be better than the usual umbrella. I didn't stick with the sales pitch that long. My point is just that someone has tried to engineer a better umbrella.

Ok....I'll wait to see one on the street. (Hmmm...that probably won't be Albuquerque though.)

I don't think the shape needs to change, just the size and strength of the struts and thickness of the fabric: smaller and stronger so when collapsed, it takes up much less space.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I liked when phones were phones with a string attached, actual numbers to ring and talking on them were practically free. Like 25 years ago paying for a home phone was as cheap as paying for garbage service - like 10 dollars.

You mean phones with a cord, plugged into a phone jack? That's what I have; it drives other people up the wall when I tell them that I have no answering machine and no caller ID. So if I don't answer, they'll have to try again later.

It's not free, though.

Nowadays you are forced to buy a mobile phone which has a magnetic field, which makes head ache after long talks and which is overly irritating. Glad I can survive without buying a smart phone. I don't plan to. And I hope somehow non-smart mobiles survive. I need to talk and send sms, all other stuff is better done in real life for me.

I've managed to avoid that so far (I have a valid excuse - it's expensive here).

I liked when people had fun strolling around parks. Nowadays young people meet to drink together at a noisy chain caffeteria, back then people were happy to slowly, slowly walk and talk in a beautiful and mostly silent park .

Nowadays it seems like so many people just want a selfie with a nature background but otherwise they don't seem to care much. Or they take stupid chances like some of the people in the photos that @warpus has been posting in his "Hiking Through Norway" thread. Of course it does take quite a bit of effort to get to those places where they take their pictures.

Silence has become a commodity. If I want to live in a silent place, I have to buy a house 5-10 km from city centre. Otherwise than that there are many neighbours in 9-story house which means there is complete silence only like 5-7 hours per day.

One of the best compliments people give tenants here is "You're so quiet, I hardly know uou're there." Nobody wants noisy neighbors, and there are some parents in this building who seem to think that their kids should be allowed to scream in the hallways as loudly as they want, whenever they want. When I ask the parents not to let them do that, I get a rant about how it's normal for kids to scream.

It's also normal for parents to teach their kids when it's okay to be noisy. These parents don't seem to understand that. It's actually in the standard lease everyone has to sign here that people with kids have to make sure the kids aren't noisy or disruptive (ie. running or playing in the hallways).

For me it's music. I'm still listening to stuff that I bought in my teens in the late 80s/early 90s. ... But it's kinda sobering to reflect that these CDs (yes! CDs!) are now older than most of not all of the Beatles' albums already were, at the time when I was buying the 'new' stuff... (if that makes any sense)

I'm still listening to the music I listened to in the '60s and early '70s. My dad succeeded in making an Irish Rovers fan of me, and after Will Millar stopped performing and took up painting, I purchased one of his CDs from the group he formed post-Irish Rovers (he quit the group due to a dispute about royalties). It was nice to get an email back and card showing one of his paintings - too bad my grandmother wasn't here to see that. She would have loved that painting because it's got horses in it.

I still buy music on CD since I never got into this thing about downloading. For CDs, it's easy enough to put it into whatever I'm using to play it on, and listen.

And I have always been quite happy to watch old movies. Though e.g. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction — both of which I saw not long after they were released — would presumably also count as 'old' these days. Hell, even The Matrix will be 20 this year...

My grandmother got me interested in some of the movies from the '50s. It used to be a tradition that every year on Easter Sunday, ABC would show The Ten Commandments (my grandmother was a Charlton Heston fan). She and I would stay up for the whole thing, which was one of the few nights of the year when I was allowed to be up past my usual bedtime. She'd make flatbread, and we would watch the movie and stuff ourselves silly.

I've still got all my LPs and 45s as well as CDs. I did get rid of my cassette tapes a while back. Their annoying habit of getting chewed up in the player mean they are one aspect of the past I'm not sorry to see gone.

I have a couple of cassettes I will never get rid of since there's an awful lot of filk music that isn't available in any other format. I've looked online to see if any of the individual songs from my Dorsai tape have been uploaded, but they haven't. And that's a shame, because Julia Ecklar and Leslie Fish wrote and performed some of the best SF/space songs ever.

Also internet retail hasn't peaked. The growth may have slowed by online grocery shopping is in its infancy and I really think it's going to take a new generation to launch it. I don't think millennials are even totally sold on it, either not comfortable with having someone pick out their groceries or they see the fees as too expensive. It'll be children of millennials who see it as a normal thing I believe.

I've been doing online grocery shopping for years now. Of course there's a lot that isn't available. You can't order pop online yet, or perishables. As for picking out stuff (I assume people are iffy about fruits and veggies and deli items), I do phone orders a couple of times per month and have recently allowed them to pick out bananas, grapes, and tomatoes for me. I just specify how much, and how green or brown I want the bananas (better to be too green than the other way around, since green ones will ripen). Walmart has this service now where you can place an order online and they'll have it ready for pickup in two hours. I haven't used that since they don't have a decent deli or bakery and the fruit they have... yikes, they were selling strawberries awhile back that looked like a pile of mold.

A couple. I posted the beginning of one here a few years ago, not one from my childhood but later. I mostly wrote songs to perform on my guitar.

Camp NaNoWriMo is coming up in April (I will soon post my usual thread about it). Would you like to try that?

Every single person posting on this forum has their entire life story owned by a ton of corporations.

Unless you didn't tell them about it. There are lots of things in my life story that nobody remembers now but me, because everyone else who knew about it is dead.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

I liked when phones were phones with a string attached, actual numbers to ring and talking on them were practically free. Like 25 years ago paying for a home phone was as cheap as paying for garbage service - like 10 dollars.

While this is true and certainly sounds good, there is a flip side. I took a massive blast from my parents when I was in high school for "running up the long distance bill" by calling kids that I went to school with.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

Ok....I'll wait to see one on the street. (Hmmm...that probably won't be Albuquerque though.)

I don't think the shape needs to change, just the size and strength of the struts and thickness of the fabric: smaller and stronger so when collapsed, it takes up much less space.

I looked this up, and if you see one on the street you won't recognize it as anything different. When it is 'deployed' it looks just like any other umbrella. The trick is that when you fold it up it folds the wet side in and away from you so you don't wind up getting dripped on by the thing that kept you from getting rained on.

 

[innonimatu]

I disagree. Our energy model is still not changing fast enough and self driving cars are right around the corner and going to be a huge change.

The energy model will not change fast. And self-driving cars as promised by that industry probably won't happen as a real thing, in public use, before we're all dead of old age.

 

[Lexicus]

regarding digital media and such, I'm very seriously thinking about starting to burn stuff on DVD's and such
mostly to save space on the computer, and not having to delete stuff all the time

I imagine it would be cheaper to get a bigger hard drive, no?

 

[rah]

Or just buy a terabyte thumb drive. I got a couple and it makes things real easy.

 

[Lexicus]

Or just buy a terabyte thumb drive. I got a couple and it makes things real easy.

How much is one of those? I got a 3TB HDD for like $70 at Best Buy, and I'm sure an enterprising millennial could find a better deal.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Also I wouldn't really trust writable CDs/DVDs for long term storage. I have loads from backups I made 10 or so years ago and a large fraction of them are already partially unreadable.

 

[civvver]

I've been doing online grocery shopping for years now. Of course there's a lot that isn't available. You can't order pop online yet, or perishables. As for picking out stuff (I assume people are iffy about fruits and veggies and deli items), I do phone orders a couple of times per month and have recently allowed them to pick out bananas, grapes, and tomatoes for me. I just specify how much, and how green or brown I want the bananas (better to be too green than the other way around, since green ones will ripen). Walmart has this service now where you can place an order online and they'll have it ready for pickup in two hours. I haven't used that since they don't have a decent deli or bakery and the fruit they have... yikes, they were selling strawberries awhile back that looked like a pile of mold.

We use shipt and you can pick out anything in the store. Even if it doesn't come up on their web portal you can type in your own request. Then when the person is shopping they text you. Ours links to meijer, a superstore kind of like walmart but higher quality and prices. Actually I guess it's more like a target but a lot bigger. So I can add a note hey grab me some lightbulbs and a beach towel and they'll get that and my normal groceries. You can get alcohol, milk, fuit, meat, anything. Sometimes they get the wrong stuff or sub weird things cus an item was out or whatever. Mostly it's fine though. The downside is price. It's "free" delivery but they charge 10-20% more for the items and you don't get all the sale items. It adds up a lot. I usually am around $100 when I do the shopping myself and around $140 when they do it.

The energy model will not change fast. And self-driving cars as promised by that industry probably won't happen as a real thing, in public use, before we're all dead of old age.

Maybe in Tim's age, they'll be here in mine. I think 15 years or so but at most it'll be 30-40, when I'm in my 60s-70s. Remember the internet just turned 30. Thing of what's change. We will have automated personal transportation driven by AI.

 

[rah]

How much is one of those? I got a 3TB HDD for like $70 at Best Buy, and I'm sure an enterprising millennial could find a better deal.

Upon further review, never mind, the ones I got were only 128 gig, I'll blame being old.

The samsung metal ones were the best and most reliable were less than 25 bucks.
I got 4 of them and they really make life easy.

 

[Lexicus]

128 GB is plenty to get a lot of utility out of a thumb drive.

 

[rah]

Yeah, I don't really need anything bigger for portable.

I did see an ad for a 1 terabyte one for 20 bucks but it was rated 1 out of 5 stars and the nicest thing anybody said was that it was a waste of money.

 

[El_Machinae]

When I was younger, buying a better lawn mower meant we could spend less time mowing the lawn. But now, when I upgrade my TV, it doesn't create the conditions required such that I 'need' to spend less time watching TV.

 

[Lexicus]

When I was younger, buying a better lawn mower meant we could spend less time mowing the lawn. But now, when I upgrade my TV, it doesn't create the conditions required such that I 'need' to spend less time watching TV.

One is a leisure activity, one is not