Smallpox
Pagers. Having to find a pay phone. Looking through newspapers for jobs. Absolutely gutless emissions- strangled malaise era cars with horrible brakes and numb steering.
Pagers certainly still exist.
Troubleshooting issues with them is a pain too.
That being said, I’ve only seen them in the medical field.
Looking through the paper for a job was in some ways better. Now it’s so hard to even get past the initial filters to an actual human because job postings get spammed with hundreds of applications, many from people who are underqualified and/or straight up lying on their resume. For remote jobs, you’re competing against the whole country whereas with jobs in the paper you were mostly competing against those in your local area.
Is funny how we have all this tech for it and they’ve only managed to enshittify the process. Some sites are going back to the original purpose like indeed but it’s still like tossing your resume into space.
The enshittification is the point of tehse “high tech” replacements for things that worked just fine beforehand.
Capitalism is the point. They’re usually fine tools until they have investors steering the ship.
Women having to get husband’s permission to open a bank account (speaking of the US).
Smoking everywhere and anywhere. Younger folks have no idea how ubiquitous it was, not to sound boomerish, but everything smelled so bad, and people would smoke in places that would shock you now, like in hospitals they would smoke in the nurses station, if you walked into a clothing store at the mall they’d be smoking at the counter, etc. Even when they did things like making that glass room for smokers at Tim Hortons, I once saw a woman sitting in there with her toddler in a stroller puffing away. It was actually amazing that anyone put a stop to public smoking because so many people did it.
DEI
Leaded gas.
I’m so fucking glad we’ve stopped calling women “hysterical” whenever we don’t believe them. That word is so blatantly misogynistic and it seems to be dying out now.
The Nazis.
OH WAIT.
CRT displays.
Still using mine daily! Older shows and movies just look better on it.
I like to have one around 😅. I like the look and it’ll probably survive me
Survive you or outlive you?
smoking everywhere
Not 100% gone yet, but gas powered yard tools are dying. Battery powered tools are just better in 99% of use cases.
Two stroke engines do seem dead though which is awesome, because mixed gas was a massive pain in the ass.
Even better: tools on a wire
It’s getting legit difficult to find corded tools, corded mowers are fine for the size of yard I have, but choice in those was extremely limited. Yeah battery ones exist, they’re twice the price for the cheapest ones and only go up from there, I can live with an extension cord.
I haven’t had much trouble after ditching google and bing. Except for headphones that take aaa batteries
Wired tools are also a pain unless you have a limited scope for movement.
I remember fighting with gas weed whackers endlessly as a teen trying to do chores… having to dick with the choke for a cold start, having to pump prime them (and it being possible to over prime and lock them out), then you had to carry them around and use them with the exhaust at steak searing temperature… and if you didn’t know how to tune an idle they’d just die in your hands if you didn’t goose the throttle occasionally
This is a great one - don’t miss small gas engines even a little bit lol
Ngl I always thought starting 2-stroke engines was pretty fun. But I certainly don’t miss the noise or the horrible pollution.
Really? Some appliances are a great fit for battery but others less so.
An electric mower just doesn’t feel right to me.
The mower is in that 1% unless you have a really small lot. It gets cost prohibitive if you need multiple sets of batteries to finish your lawn.
I use one on a cord. I put it on my shoulder so I don’t ride over it. Never had any problems.
Oh god I want to gift ALL OF MY NEIGHBOURS BATTERY LEAF BLOWERS. I bought one, it’s amazing, and we’re about to go into autumn 🤢
The fumes and noise of those little engines makes me excited that the battery versions are taking over.
I had a 11kW two-stroke motorbike and while it was very important for my rural youth, I do not want it back. Fuck the constant oil refueling, fuck the fumes, fuck the noise. If I ever get a motorbike again, it’d be electric.
Love my electric chainsaw except for in winter. Battery life is horrible.
Do you keep the battery inside or on a shed? Much better for the battery to be kept indoors if that’s an option.
The electric chainsaw is the only one I still don’t like being battery powered. Indeed the battery life is too short for most jobs.
But the noise is also part of the experience, it just doesn’t feel as Powerfull without it.
Lawnmower and snowblower have been the only things I haven’t been happy with being electric. Climate change might help me not need the snowblower at all.
I’m perfectly content with my little electric chainsaw. Basically I only ever use it if a tree dies or falls in a storm, it actually starts unlike the gas ones I’ve had…It wouldn’t be up to the task of chopping enough wood to heat my house through the winter but for occasional use it’s better than gas.
I do use a chainsaw for cutting wood to heat. (Although this winter is unpleasantly warm. Thanks, climate change…) There is definitely no way that any electric saw would be able to keep up, esp. since you can’t readily drag 500y of extension cord behind you. Chainsaws could absolutely be made cleaner though. Unfortunately, I think that 2-stroke engines have a much higher power:weight ratio than 4-stroke, so we’re stuck using gas mixed with oil, which pumps out smog.
I kinda wonder if it would be possible to make a 2 stroke engine that doesn’t burn its own oil. Like, essentially supercharge it. Use an impeller on the flywheel to pump air into the cylinder so that the crankcase could be full of heavy oil. Though that might not work with a chainsaw since it has to be held at various angles.
Since you don’t have a timing chain on a two stroke, you’d need something else to run a fuel pump.
If engine design interests you, there’s a lot of neat stuff in this channel.
That throws a “this video isn’t available anymore” page.
The Ozone hole.
Also acid rain. Two massive environmental Ws that aren’t celebrated enough.
Vinyl (for music, not floors).
I don’t care much about the supposed fidelity, but having a group of mates around each pick an album from my stack is a lot of fun.
It stops people from focusing too hard on the music and going “oh wait lemme queue up this track” etc.
CDs would fulfill the exact same use-case while being more convenient, space efficient and cheaper.
Henry Kissinger
May he rot into nothing and be forgotten
Dial-up internet. I would open a website and go do something else for a minute until it loads, then fight with my parents when they pick up the phone when I’ve been downloading something for 3 hours.
We had very late internet infrastructure upgrade, so at the end we had a bluetooth dial-up internet router in the early 2010s…
Internet over bluetooth is a crime against humanity
@simple@lemm.ee Minitel was even worse. But then, Minitel was a French exclusivity.
@Servais@discuss.tchncs.de
obligatory quick Sylvqin video (in french though)
I haven’t known the minitel but I guess that the novelty of BBSes compensated the loading time
@Taewyth@jlai.lu @Servais@discuss.tchncs.de @simple@lemm.ee When I was still in school, the Minitel was still used to register us to pass our diplomas. One of the schools I was in even still used an actual Minitel terminal to do so. (Most used a compatibility option integrated in dial-ups modems sold in the country. As did my father a couple of times for other unrelated tasks that couldn’t yet be done via internet, when we first got it at home.)
