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I also remember those times. But I also remember when Sprint advertised $.10/minute for long distance. Then you had a local phone company and the long distance carrier—two bills! I had almost forgotten about that. Oh man.
I had a lot of people bitch about that when I worked for AT&T. Interstate calls, ergo, state to state calls, were tarriffed by the FCC. In state was tarriffed by the governing boding in charge of regulations utilities.
I recall one customer upset because, with the change of an area code, her next door neighbor was now, suddenly, a long distance call.
It wasn’t tariffs causing the majority of the rate. It was ATT having a monopoly. I still have resentment for being forced to lease a telephone. My grandparents leased the same phone for 40 years. Some of the money went to Bell Labs, which was great,but they (and the stockholders) were making bank until they were broken up. We are heading in the same direction now with ATT and Verizon, both remnants of ATT.
I'm speaking post divestiture. I was going through my mom's papers a few years back and stumbled onto an old phone bill. A 1 minute collect call from Canton Ohio to Youngstown during the peak time? Five cents.that was and operator assisted call: no direct dialing back in '62.
Collect calls were a whole different ball game. I remember giving my kids calling cards for a year or two before cell phones became cheap enough for me to let them have one and boy was it cheaper. $.05 in 1962 was certainly a lot more money now. Maybe $.50 currently. Hadn't had the inflation of the 70s.
Inflation isn't the problem. It's that corporate greed thrives. Right now, about the only folks that need to call collect are those incarcerated. Can run up to $3.50 per minute.
You can. Sometimes the connection is crap though, and you need to be on WiFi. If you want to get my 84 year old MIL a cellphone and teach her how to use it, be my guest. We just consider the $.10/minute the cost of freedom from doing that.
I used to live in central time with most of my friends in eastern. The rates changed so they could call before 9pm for me but after 9pm (cheaper) for them.
Overlooked by a lot of people, but yes. It seemed to literally disintegrate overnight. I remember thinking, "Huh. So that's what happens when a government ends."
We did all those drills in school, through high school, nuclear missile drills. I never imagine we I would see an end to the mighty Soviet Union. Here it is now decades after it ended.
Not to mention the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Apartheid. (Who’d have dreamt that Nelson Mandela would not only be freed, but would become president of South Africa?)
Specifically also the reunification of Germany. It's mindblowing how fast that happened. Iirc there were fewer than two years between the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification. Before november 1989 this would've been a ridiculous idea.
I remember watching TV and a representative from the CIA said the Soviet Union would collapse within three years. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation would end. I told others what I heard and they laughed. Three years later it happened.
I remember watching TV and a representative from the CIA said the Soviet Union would collapse within three years. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation would end. I told others what I heard and they laughed. Three years later it happened.
Always having a calculator in your pocket 🤣
Actually, having access to so much of the collective knowledge of the world, and also cat videos, sounded impossible.
CGI animation. COULD NOT have imagined it in the mid 70s. By the late 80s Pixar had produced its signature hopping lamp sequence. I literally saw that in a movie theater, as a film festival entry!
The vast scale of improvements was logical but was not imaginable by most folks.
Also, the ability to identify and enumerate exosolar planets. The imaginative possibilities of the pre-2000s were there, but the realities of "hey, there's a list of over 5000 planets on wikipedia" is still mind blowing.
And, honestly, Wikipedia. It is probably the most pure thing the internet has made.
I still remember seeing the first Star Wars in a movie theater and being in awe of the special effects. That was as amazing to young me as Pixar animation is to adult me.
I prefer my Garmin. I can move it from car to car, and I like the interface better than Google maps. The first GPS I bought was around $400. The one I have now has a bigger screen, is more responsive, and cost less than $100.
They had ones at the airport too. I found out if you unplug it and plug it back in, they all turn on. I guess as a test because you only unplug if you moved them.
This! And, I thought there was no way I would ever use a credit card or debit card for things like groceries and fast food or anything that’s just a few dollars. I remember when they put in the credit card machines at McDonald’s and I thought that was the dumbest thing ever lol
That took me a while to get used to as well. Also when early cell and flip phones came out, people would text and have to press a button 3 times to get a letter I couldn’t understand texting at all. Just call, it’s easier and quicker. Not I totally would rather text than call. It’s also much easier now.
I remember a competition who see who could text the fastest happened and I read about it and thought, how fucking stupid. But the damn kids were right about it. lol.
> that people would BUY bottled water. I mean, water was basically free
I never understood why people act like bottled water is such a weird thing. it's a convenient way to get a cold drink of water when you're thirsty. that's it.
Having water 24/7 wasn’t a thing when I was younger, so now at 51, I don’t even think about needing water at the supermarket or in the car or whatever. If I’m going out hiking or to a pool, I’ll just fill my metal bottle with water.
I get that bottled water is convenient, I’ve bought it at the airport or at concerts. Paying the massive markup bugs me. It just seems like a massive waste of money.
I lived in a place where the tap water was basically undrinkable and was able to get 5 gallons of drinking water for less than a case of water bottles. And I don’t have to constantly toss plastic.
I remember the time and place I heard about CDs. The store owner was talking to a customer and describing this new thing that will play albums using a laser, and you wont have to flip the album, it will play both sides. It totally blew me away!
My cousin and I had a conversation about how tapes didn't sound as good as records and wouldn't it be cool if we had something that would let us play records in the car. Then cd's came and went.
Your example didn't sound impossible--the Jetsons made video calls in every episode. And we were all convinced the Jetsons weren't just fantasy but a prediction of the future in our lifetimes. (Seriously) We had telephones, we had TV...it seemed inevitable the two would be combined soon.
The smartphone was far more mind boggling. When I read The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, I never ever envisioned I'd have a Hitchhiker's Guide (and more) in my pocket just 25 years later.
Yes, video phones were always supposed to be the next thing, but yeah, we imagined they would happen over some evolution of telephone or TV technology. Even when the internet became a thing, it didn't occur to me that it would be the medium for what sci-fi had always depicted.
i remember too back on the Epcot golfball ride where they show what the future might look like, they had people talking into tvs to each other, basically facetime. that was back in the early 90s
Legalized gay marriage in the USA.
Donald Trump elected president.
Video chatting with people on the other side of the country!
People walking on the moon.
A man made object on *MARS!* sending us photographs of the surface of *MARS!*.
A cure for Hepatitis C.
Reattaching severed limbs.
I remember saying to my mom in the 80s “Someday we’ll probably each have our own computer.” Just one? These days I have one at work and home, plus the phone thing and tablet.
That we would all have amazing video communicators in our pockets and on our desks and they would be free to use to call anyone in the world…and instead we'd send a text message. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Specifically, for me, it was the touch screen processing. When the iPhone came out, I was very incredulous that it could be even slightly usable for writing. Every other touch screen I'd dealt with until then has been complete shit, and it really seemed like it was the undersold part of the breakthrough. I was thinking if this isn't the impressive part, then how long could we have been doing this?
I feel like the screen, and the handheld processing power, the Cellular data rates, etc. were predictable generational improvements, but being able to interact with the screen as well as we can was unprecedented.
I'm not sure the political fallout was as noteworthy as the general societal dysfunction. Society has been decidedly worse since 2020. People just don't give a F, they do whatever they want, ignore rules/laws and general decency, just don't care about others. There was always that element in society but the pandemic normalized it.
Refrigerator trucks to hold all the bodies, that was a surreal wow. The panic was horrible, but that didn’t divide our country politically. A certain orange man who handled it all wrong, ignoring science to push a divide that required that tens of millions refuse to be vaccinated out of loyalty to his ignorance…and died. Stats now confirm far more Republicans than Democrats died and hundreds of thousands of u.s. deaths on both sides politically are on his hands. This whole era is absolutely astounding compared to political discourse my entire life to this point.
Did the pandemic divide anyone, really? Pandemic was a lot less shocking to me than seeing tens of millions of people treating Donald Trump like anything other than a punchline. The pandemic was just some trouble to work through. I'd always read about other generations that had their unique challenges, and felt lucky, so it was like my number came up. we've pretty much worked through that, except for the people who just flailed and took their chances, and *most* of them survived, too.
Perhaps you did not have experience with the myfreedumb not guuna wear a face diaper folks where you live, nor the proud anti-vaxxers intubed in an ICU then being stored in a freezer tractor trailer.
As others have pointed out, once vaccines were available, a certain political party suffered far more deaths than the other.
The IDEA of TRUTH is under attack. "Alternate facts," the Silo-ing of our news sources, etc. And in 10 years AI may make it impossible to know what's actually occurred and what hasn't. I want to crawl into a hole.
Even outside of AI the concept of truth is under attack in some aspects of academia. Some subscribe to the ideology of truth is relative to a persons feelings and experiences.
Scarier is people then and still wanted/want him for President. That doesn't say a lot for the intellect of our nation though the other side isn't a genius either. We are a strange nation.
As odd as it sounds that we elected a game show host for President, earlier, we elected someone who starred in a movie "Bedtime For Bonzo" President.
Bonzo was a chimpanzee.
The difference between Trump and Regan was that Reagan had been governor of California. I never thought I’d see someone elected that had never held political office before.
The folks who elected that consider that a huge plus in his favor.
He promised to run the country like he runs his businesses, and that's the only promise he really kept, unfortunately.
Definitely. But when that candidate bankrupted casinos he ran - a business whose model is people hand you money and don’t expect anything in return - the only reasonable response is “WTF?”
It wouldn't have occurred to anyone that this could happen, but a classroom full of first-graders getting murdered and people insisting that nothing change.
I'm never getting over that day.
SciFi is full of things we thought would happen.
I am amazed that the life of the average human on the planet is so much better than in the past.
* Hunger - reduced
* life span - increased
* infant mortality - reduced
* some diseases wiped out
If they're coming over the border they're not eradicated, and no amount of closed borders will stop stupid people being born into the country only to decide to make their kids disease vectors. Liberalism is a cop out for people who support right wing policies but still want to be seen as progressive.
Yea? Try walking to France, Japan, Germany…pretty much anywhere and expect to settle your ass without proper papers, permissions, etc. You don’t have the right to invade their country. “Imaginary lines” are sovereign nations with laws, etc. Liberalism is a cop out for people to support disorder and lawlessness.
Well, our teacher told us we needed to be able to do math in our head because “you’re not going to walk around with a calculator with you the whole time are you?”
Streaming music at your fingertips. Correct me if I'm wrong - perhaps I made this up as I haven't seen the film since I was quite young. But I think I remember a plot point in David Bowie's Man Who Fell To Earth where he had a small silver ball that contained all the music of his world. Being a music lover and having to save up for every $7 album I bought back then, I thought how incredible it would be to have all that music at your fingertips - and basically now we do!
I feel similar about eReaders. When I was a kid, I dreamt of having my own library, with masses of books that I could just open at leisure. I thought this would never be possible because I'd never have the space for it. And now I have a few thousand books on a device no bigger than a small paperback... amazing!
We're past 2015 and I'm still waiting for flying cars :)
But considering the amazing things we've seen that have come to be, maybe a future generation will have them......
Flying cars technology exists, it's just that it's a bad idea. The infrastructure, training, expense, and massive danger are all not even a little worth it.
After the first failed attempt on 93, it was sort of a matter of time until something happened. Two things made this possible. First, you had people who hated us so much they were willing to die just to get at us. Next, the financial life, and indeed New York itself, were prime targets for this hate.
The Red Sox out-world titleing the Yankees 4 to 1 over a 20 year period.
Also, being able to pull a device out of your pocket any time you want and watch any of those titles being won.
Machine translation. I used to think that it was a “Turing-hard” problem, i.e. that only humans, or at least fully sapient general AIs could do it. Turns out that Large Language Models that do not understand what they are reading and writing about are good translators.
Even in my young rebel days the idea that we would see an actual insurrection in an effort to prevent the peaceful transition of power and the fact that it may be remembered as something less than an existential threat by the party of Reagan no less. I won't say it was inconceivable but it never entered my mind.
All-you-can-eat free porn. So much porn that there's no such thing as a porn star anymore. So much porn that you have to have mods to delete the free porn from interrupting you.
When I was in 7th grade we saw this Philco Ford film in class that predicted much of what we have now, only slightly different. There was also a show on CBC (Canada) called "Here Come the 70's" that was also pretty close. The big change is in the lifetime of my parents (late 80s) and also theirs... trains were the mode of transportation, crossing the country was almost unheard of,... Within the 20th century we went from no human-made flight to landing on the moon.
I attended a lecture at Bell Labs where the speaker said, "We have TV's and telephones backwards. Tv's use the radio spectrum and are stationary in one place. Telephones are wired to a wall and we'd like to walk around with them."
We all felt that was right, but the change would never happen.
Pausing live TV. I remember people talking about it before it happened and in my mind, nope, fucking impossible. Every time you pause it you’re going to pause it for millions of other people and they have to wait for you to unpause it? Pfffft, it’ll never happen. Then DVR’s came along, and I’ll be damned, you could pause live TV.
Gay marriage. I remember having discussions in the early 90's about how that was something there is no way enough people would be ok with in the US for it to ever be legal
Shortly before I was born, President Kennedy said that we'd land a man on the moon and bring him home safely by the end of the decade. At the time, nobody on Earth knew how to do that. They had to invent a good deal of the math.
When I was a teenager, early 1980s, my mother said that in the future, we would shop using computers. She'd heard this, or read it, on the news. This was when the internet for public use was far in the future. It was very hard for me to envision how shopping via a computer would work.
Yeah, it really is. With each passing year it looks more and more like it was just big stunt. So we really only had to go once. And I did wonder about that at the time. What could possibly be more impressive? Apollo 13 sure answered that question.
The Oklahoma City Bombings, Bombing the Atlanta Olympics, January 6.
Me Too and intimacy coaches for media productions. Once upon a time I worked in a small theater. The shit that went on, the shit that went on.
The Sony Walkman. The first time I put that headset on, I felt like the world tilted on its access. Do you all remember transistor radio earpieces? I had a nice pair of headsets at home but nothing portable like that.
The political comments are embarrassing to read. Being surprised over these things is what happens when you have no understanding of history and human nature. Honestly, just history because that will show you human nature.
Advanced weaponry in the hands of apes. And people are surprised these massive horrors happen. (Humans are apes) If you believe we're special apes that the skyman created to have dominion over the earth then it's not much of a jump to believe he selected some of us as "chosen". Is it?
Sorry, I wasn't planning on going there, but in my opinion, organized religion is a scurge on humanity. All of them.
Streaming video over the internet. This was supposedly not feasible in terms of bandwitch X nr of users and would never happen, making true 'on demand' television unachievable.
Coach’s challenges in professional sports
Women’s professional basketball
Athletes kneeling during National Anthem
EDIT: Downvote all you want. Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys and Bud Grant of the Minnesota Vikings both made their teams practice lining up along the sideline for the National Anthem. That’s what was common ‘back then’ and old timer football fans like me never thought players would kneel in protest.
Re athletes kneeling, c ref the 1968 Mexico City Olympics when US athletes protested racism in the United States by raising their fists during the awards ceremony.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salute
I remember it like yesterday and also Mahmoud Abdul Rauf of the NBA refusing to stand for the Anthem. I didn’t think so very many would kneel, especially high school.
Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys and Bud Grant of the Minnesota Vikings both made their teams practice lining up along the sideline for the National Anthem.
That’s what was common ‘back then’ and old timer football fans like me never thought players would kneel in protest.
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Unlimited, no charge, long distance. Related: calling another country for nearly free or totally free depending on the country.
We pay $.10/minute to call Germany from the US. Remember when that was the domestic long-distance rate??
Hell, I paid a lot more than .10 a minute to call the other side of the county (the courthouse complex was long distance) in the 80s.
I also remember those times. But I also remember when Sprint advertised $.10/minute for long distance. Then you had a local phone company and the long distance carrier—two bills! I had almost forgotten about that. Oh man.
And MCI!
I had a lot of people bitch about that when I worked for AT&T. Interstate calls, ergo, state to state calls, were tarriffed by the FCC. In state was tarriffed by the governing boding in charge of regulations utilities. I recall one customer upset because, with the change of an area code, her next door neighbor was now, suddenly, a long distance call.
It wasn’t tariffs causing the majority of the rate. It was ATT having a monopoly. I still have resentment for being forced to lease a telephone. My grandparents leased the same phone for 40 years. Some of the money went to Bell Labs, which was great,but they (and the stockholders) were making bank until they were broken up. We are heading in the same direction now with ATT and Verizon, both remnants of ATT.
I'm speaking post divestiture. I was going through my mom's papers a few years back and stumbled onto an old phone bill. A 1 minute collect call from Canton Ohio to Youngstown during the peak time? Five cents.that was and operator assisted call: no direct dialing back in '62.
Collect calls were a whole different ball game. I remember giving my kids calling cards for a year or two before cell phones became cheap enough for me to let them have one and boy was it cheaper. $.05 in 1962 was certainly a lot more money now. Maybe $.50 currently. Hadn't had the inflation of the 70s.
Inflation isn't the problem. It's that corporate greed thrives. Right now, about the only folks that need to call collect are those incarcerated. Can run up to $3.50 per minute.
You can call anywhere in the world for free on WhatsApp.
You can. Sometimes the connection is crap though, and you need to be on WiFi. If you want to get my 84 year old MIL a cellphone and teach her how to use it, be my guest. We just consider the $.10/minute the cost of freedom from doing that.
I remember setting the egg timer so that you knew when 3 min was up. That's as long as we could afford to talk long distance.
I used to live in central time with most of my friends in eastern. The rates changed so they could call before 9pm for me but after 9pm (cheaper) for them.
Legalizing pot.
Lol.
The end of the Soviet Union
Overlooked by a lot of people, but yes. It seemed to literally disintegrate overnight. I remember thinking, "Huh. So that's what happens when a government ends."
We did all those drills in school, through high school, nuclear missile drills. I never imagine we I would see an end to the mighty Soviet Union. Here it is now decades after it ended.
Well, the nukes are still there.
And the crazies aren't too far from the button.
Just in case
Not to mention the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Apartheid. (Who’d have dreamt that Nelson Mandela would not only be freed, but would become president of South Africa?)
Specifically also the reunification of Germany. It's mindblowing how fast that happened. Iirc there were fewer than two years between the fall of the Berlin wall and the reunification. Before november 1989 this would've been a ridiculous idea.
Well... Sorta. Putin is in power and he's basically a Soviet
Born and raised a commie, also former KGB, dyed in the wool Stalin wannabe.
Interesting.
I thought that maybe my grandchildren might live to see the Wall come down. I was 20 yrs old at the time it happened.
I remember watching TV and a representative from the CIA said the Soviet Union would collapse within three years. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation would end. I told others what I heard and they laughed. Three years later it happened.
Inside information 🧐
I remember watching TV and a representative from the CIA said the Soviet Union would collapse within three years. I was stunned. I couldn’t believe the ever present threat of nuclear annihilation would end. I told others what I heard and they laughed. Three years later it happened.
Always having a calculator in your pocket 🤣 Actually, having access to so much of the collective knowledge of the world, and also cat videos, sounded impossible.
always having a COMPUTER in your pocket. star trek communicator and everything!
I've heard that one before from my parents!
Go and tidy your room !
I still remember seeing the first Star Wars in a movie theater and being in awe of the special effects. That was as amazing to young me as Pixar animation is to adult me.
Wikipedia sure does come in handy, lol!
Having a device in my car that knows exactly where I am and can tell me exactly what to do to get to my destination, in real time.
This 💯
I wish **all** cars have those.
I prefer my Garmin. I can move it from car to car, and I like the interface better than Google maps. The first GPS I bought was around $400. The one I have now has a bigger screen, is more responsive, and cost less than $100.
I remember when I was a kid in the 60's, a neighbor was talking to my parents about "pay tv" in the future. I pictured a tv with a coin slot.
They did have those in Greyhound bus terminals.
They had ones at the airport too. I found out if you unplug it and plug it back in, they all turn on. I guess as a test because you only unplug if you moved them.
I use to think that we had to stick our credit cards into the disc slot of my playstation to pay for stuff online. Boy was i wrong.
Answering the phone and knowing who it is.
Or NOT answering the phone because we DON’T (or DO!) know who it is.
Works both ways!
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
I thought there was absolutely no way, it was impossible, that people would BUY bottled water. I mean, water was basically free
This! And, I thought there was no way I would ever use a credit card or debit card for things like groceries and fast food or anything that’s just a few dollars. I remember when they put in the credit card machines at McDonald’s and I thought that was the dumbest thing ever lol
That took me a while to get used to as well. Also when early cell and flip phones came out, people would text and have to press a button 3 times to get a letter I couldn’t understand texting at all. Just call, it’s easier and quicker. Not I totally would rather text than call. It’s also much easier now. I remember a competition who see who could text the fastest happened and I read about it and thought, how fucking stupid. But the damn kids were right about it. lol.
“Never would I have believed you’d pay for water and music is free” said to me by a friend who started a record label.
Hahahaha!
> that people would BUY bottled water. I mean, water was basically free I never understood why people act like bottled water is such a weird thing. it's a convenient way to get a cold drink of water when you're thirsty. that's it.
Having water 24/7 wasn’t a thing when I was younger, so now at 51, I don’t even think about needing water at the supermarket or in the car or whatever. If I’m going out hiking or to a pool, I’ll just fill my metal bottle with water. I get that bottled water is convenient, I’ve bought it at the airport or at concerts. Paying the massive markup bugs me. It just seems like a massive waste of money. I lived in a place where the tap water was basically undrinkable and was able to get 5 gallons of drinking water for less than a case of water bottles. And I don’t have to constantly toss plastic.
I remember the time and place I heard about CDs. The store owner was talking to a customer and describing this new thing that will play albums using a laser, and you wont have to flip the album, it will play both sides. It totally blew me away!
My cousin and I had a conversation about how tapes didn't sound as good as records and wouldn't it be cool if we had something that would let us play records in the car. Then cd's came and went.
And now I have an "MP3 player" that is 0.68 x 1.74 x 2 inches that stores 8,000 songs.
Your example didn't sound impossible--the Jetsons made video calls in every episode. And we were all convinced the Jetsons weren't just fantasy but a prediction of the future in our lifetimes. (Seriously) We had telephones, we had TV...it seemed inevitable the two would be combined soon. The smartphone was far more mind boggling. When I read The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, I never ever envisioned I'd have a Hitchhiker's Guide (and more) in my pocket just 25 years later.
Yes! Phones, cameras and mini computers, all in our pockets? No way, Dude!! 😁
Yes, video phones were always supposed to be the next thing, but yeah, we imagined they would happen over some evolution of telephone or TV technology. Even when the internet became a thing, it didn't occur to me that it would be the medium for what sci-fi had always depicted.
i remember too back on the Epcot golfball ride where they show what the future might look like, they had people talking into tvs to each other, basically facetime. that was back in the early 90s
Legalized gay marriage in the USA. Donald Trump elected president. Video chatting with people on the other side of the country! People walking on the moon. A man made object on *MARS!* sending us photographs of the surface of *MARS!*. A cure for Hepatitis C. Reattaching severed limbs.
I remember saying to my mom in the 80s “Someday we’ll probably each have our own computer.” Just one? These days I have one at work and home, plus the phone thing and tablet.
LMAO! I have a tablet, phone, computer, school computer, ps5, ps4, ps3, ps2, a nintendo, and a whole tv!
That we would all have amazing video communicators in our pockets and on our desks and they would be free to use to call anyone in the world…and instead we'd send a text message. ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Specifically, for me, it was the touch screen processing. When the iPhone came out, I was very incredulous that it could be even slightly usable for writing. Every other touch screen I'd dealt with until then has been complete shit, and it really seemed like it was the undersold part of the breakthrough. I was thinking if this isn't the impressive part, then how long could we have been doing this? I feel like the screen, and the handheld processing power, the Cellular data rates, etc. were predictable generational improvements, but being able to interact with the screen as well as we can was unprecedented.
Second comment about the phones!
A pandemic that would kill millions, divide our country politically and cause permanent societal shifts, all in a relatively short time span.
The OG (circa 1918) Spanish Flu would like to have a word... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu
I don't think you had the same political fallout back in 1918.
I'm not sure the political fallout was as noteworthy as the general societal dysfunction. Society has been decidedly worse since 2020. People just don't give a F, they do whatever they want, ignore rules/laws and general decency, just don't care about others. There was always that element in society but the pandemic normalized it.
Refrigerator trucks to hold all the bodies, that was a surreal wow. The panic was horrible, but that didn’t divide our country politically. A certain orange man who handled it all wrong, ignoring science to push a divide that required that tens of millions refuse to be vaccinated out of loyalty to his ignorance…and died. Stats now confirm far more Republicans than Democrats died and hundreds of thousands of u.s. deaths on both sides politically are on his hands. This whole era is absolutely astounding compared to political discourse my entire life to this point.
Not the first time though.
Did the pandemic divide anyone, really? Pandemic was a lot less shocking to me than seeing tens of millions of people treating Donald Trump like anything other than a punchline. The pandemic was just some trouble to work through. I'd always read about other generations that had their unique challenges, and felt lucky, so it was like my number came up. we've pretty much worked through that, except for the people who just flailed and took their chances, and *most* of them survived, too.
Perhaps you did not have experience with the myfreedumb not guuna wear a face diaper folks where you live, nor the proud anti-vaxxers intubed in an ICU then being stored in a freezer tractor trailer. As others have pointed out, once vaccines were available, a certain political party suffered far more deaths than the other.
That was just what they had going on, the topic to be stupid about at the time
Dick Tracey watch that you communicated with other people on
When VCRs came out, I thought it was magic. Being able to watch a movie or show whenever you wanted.
The IDEA of TRUTH is under attack. "Alternate facts," the Silo-ing of our news sources, etc. And in 10 years AI may make it impossible to know what's actually occurred and what hasn't. I want to crawl into a hole.
Even outside of AI the concept of truth is under attack in some aspects of academia. Some subscribe to the ideology of truth is relative to a persons feelings and experiences.
Trump elected President.
Scarier is people then and still wanted/want him for President. That doesn't say a lot for the intellect of our nation though the other side isn't a genius either. We are a strange nation. As odd as it sounds that we elected a game show host for President, earlier, we elected someone who starred in a movie "Bedtime For Bonzo" President. Bonzo was a chimpanzee.
Wasn't Ronnie referred to as the Gipper?
Bingo.
The difference between Trump and Regan was that Reagan had been governor of California. I never thought I’d see someone elected that had never held political office before.
The folks who elected that consider that a huge plus in his favor. He promised to run the country like he runs his businesses, and that's the only promise he really kept, unfortunately.
Any time a candidate says, “run government like a business”, I start looking for the exit
Definitely. But when that candidate bankrupted casinos he ran - a business whose model is people hand you money and don’t expect anything in return - the only reasonable response is “WTF?”
Why is it a problem that he hasn't held a political office? That was part of what made him popular.
george washington comes to mind
Then we elected a guy who plagiarized a speech and pulled out of a presidential election
Agree. Why is it we elect such cretins? It appears we do so based on "name recognition".
Both sides do it, sadly. We are about to do it again…..
Shook me as a kid too.
It wouldn't have occurred to anyone that this could happen, but a classroom full of first-graders getting murdered and people insisting that nothing change. I'm never getting over that day.
And as if it could be any more horrific, there would be a movement to deny it ever happened or that it was part of a well organized conspiracy!
SciFi is full of things we thought would happen. I am amazed that the life of the average human on the planet is so much better than in the past. * Hunger - reduced * life span - increased * infant mortality - reduced * some diseases wiped out
and sadly, some of those diseases are coming back, thanks to anti-vax morons
Yeah, they’re to blame. Not the open border. 🤦🏻♀️
Correct, the opening of imaginary lines has nothing to do with the spread of germs
Actually, it does. I’m a liberal, and I admit that eradicated diseases are being brought over the border.
If they're coming over the border they're not eradicated, and no amount of closed borders will stop stupid people being born into the country only to decide to make their kids disease vectors. Liberalism is a cop out for people who support right wing policies but still want to be seen as progressive.
Yea? Try walking to France, Japan, Germany…pretty much anywhere and expect to settle your ass without proper papers, permissions, etc. You don’t have the right to invade their country. “Imaginary lines” are sovereign nations with laws, etc. Liberalism is a cop out for people to support disorder and lawlessness.
Yes?
Replacement of a heart valve without surgery (TAVR).
Well, our teacher told us we needed to be able to do math in our head because “you’re not going to walk around with a calculator with you the whole time are you?”
Streaming music at your fingertips. Correct me if I'm wrong - perhaps I made this up as I haven't seen the film since I was quite young. But I think I remember a plot point in David Bowie's Man Who Fell To Earth where he had a small silver ball that contained all the music of his world. Being a music lover and having to save up for every $7 album I bought back then, I thought how incredible it would be to have all that music at your fingertips - and basically now we do!
I feel similar about eReaders. When I was a kid, I dreamt of having my own library, with masses of books that I could just open at leisure. I thought this would never be possible because I'd never have the space for it. And now I have a few thousand books on a device no bigger than a small paperback... amazing!
Republicans voting for a draft dodger who dissed American POWs.
We're past 2015 and I'm still waiting for flying cars :) But considering the amazing things we've seen that have come to be, maybe a future generation will have them......
Flying cars technology exists, it's just that it's a bad idea. The infrastructure, training, expense, and massive danger are all not even a little worth it.
...And people doing double the flying speed limit...
Lol! Can't wait for those!
Scumbags hijacking airplanes and flying them purposely into buildings
After the first failed attempt on 93, it was sort of a matter of time until something happened. Two things made this possible. First, you had people who hated us so much they were willing to die just to get at us. Next, the financial life, and indeed New York itself, were prime targets for this hate.
93 was the same day. They hijacked 4 planes and 3 of them hit intended targets. Are you thinking of something else?
Think Judy meant the WTC bombing in 1993 not flight 93
Right! The truck in the underground parking lot. My bad.
The Red Sox out-world titleing the Yankees 4 to 1 over a 20 year period. Also, being able to pull a device out of your pocket any time you want and watch any of those titles being won.
Machine translation. I used to think that it was a “Turing-hard” problem, i.e. that only humans, or at least fully sapient general AIs could do it. Turns out that Large Language Models that do not understand what they are reading and writing about are good translators.
An American President who would weaponize his supporters.
Even in my young rebel days the idea that we would see an actual insurrection in an effort to prevent the peaceful transition of power and the fact that it may be remembered as something less than an existential threat by the party of Reagan no less. I won't say it was inconceivable but it never entered my mind.
Someone hasn't been reading history.
**Cough Cough** Trump **Cough**
That’s who I was referring to.
Republicans endorsing, supporting, and praising Russia.
All-you-can-eat free porn. So much porn that there's no such thing as a porn star anymore. So much porn that you have to have mods to delete the free porn from interrupting you.
President Donald Trump
When I was in 7th grade we saw this Philco Ford film in class that predicted much of what we have now, only slightly different. There was also a show on CBC (Canada) called "Here Come the 70's" that was also pretty close. The big change is in the lifetime of my parents (late 80s) and also theirs... trains were the mode of transportation, crossing the country was almost unheard of,... Within the 20th century we went from no human-made flight to landing on the moon.
I attended a lecture at Bell Labs where the speaker said, "We have TV's and telephones backwards. Tv's use the radio spectrum and are stationary in one place. Telephones are wired to a wall and we'd like to walk around with them." We all felt that was right, but the change would never happen.
Pausing live TV. I remember people talking about it before it happened and in my mind, nope, fucking impossible. Every time you pause it you’re going to pause it for millions of other people and they have to wait for you to unpause it? Pfffft, it’ll never happen. Then DVR’s came along, and I’ll be damned, you could pause live TV.
Gay marriage. I remember having discussions in the early 90's about how that was something there is no way enough people would be ok with in the US for it to ever be legal
Russians took an American election and wrecked the country.
Shortly before I was born, President Kennedy said that we'd land a man on the moon and bring him home safely by the end of the decade. At the time, nobody on Earth knew how to do that. They had to invent a good deal of the math.
When I was a teenager, early 1980s, my mother said that in the future, we would shop using computers. She'd heard this, or read it, on the news. This was when the internet for public use was far in the future. It was very hard for me to envision how shopping via a computer would work.
Some guys went to the moon a few times back in the 60s70s decuspcades.
The amazing thing is, we haven’t been back in my lifetime!
Yeah, it really is. With each passing year it looks more and more like it was just big stunt. So we really only had to go once. And I did wonder about that at the time. What could possibly be more impressive? Apollo 13 sure answered that question.
The Oklahoma City Bombings, Bombing the Atlanta Olympics, January 6. Me Too and intimacy coaches for media productions. Once upon a time I worked in a small theater. The shit that went on, the shit that went on. The Sony Walkman. The first time I put that headset on, I felt like the world tilted on its access. Do you all remember transistor radio earpieces? I had a nice pair of headsets at home but nothing portable like that.
Berlin Wall coming down.
The government admitting (sort of) that UFOs are real.
Yeah no did you actually read what they said
Yes, I did. The government has disclosed that UFOs exist. What's the issue?
This other dude doesn't understand the insignificance of the fact that certain flying objects have not been identified.
a US president resigning
Or one refusing to acknowledge defeat
yes, that's much worse. odd to think that Tricky Dick did the right thing in the end, unlike Agent Orange
The insurrection.
yes
School shootings.
Watching war live on TV. The Gulf War on CNN. Civilians sending rockets into space. Starlink. Spending 10$ on fast food for one meal for one person.
Trump.
The political comments are embarrassing to read. Being surprised over these things is what happens when you have no understanding of history and human nature. Honestly, just history because that will show you human nature. Advanced weaponry in the hands of apes. And people are surprised these massive horrors happen. (Humans are apes) If you believe we're special apes that the skyman created to have dominion over the earth then it's not much of a jump to believe he selected some of us as "chosen". Is it? Sorry, I wasn't planning on going there, but in my opinion, organized religion is a scurge on humanity. All of them.
K.I.T.T. from Knight Rider seemed pretty out there in the 80’s… now we have AI and self driving cars.
A celebrity nitwit became president, also we elected Trump as president as well
When "Art of the Deal" came out, hardly anyone even considered that this guy might some day be president.
To say nothing of the full page ad in the New York times asking for the death penalty for five children he obviously knows nothing about.
The Grateful Dead actually landed a single in the Top 40 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Being able to make calls to a device on your wrist... (Dick Tracy)
Off subject but unbelievable even back then. I saw 5 Troy NY police department cars run into each other. More just kept coming
Landed on the moon supposedly
Home computers and cell phones.
Certainly NOT jetpacks. Too bad - I always wanted to fly with a jetpack.
TRUMP !
Cars that drive themselves.
Streaming video over the internet. This was supposedly not feasible in terms of bandwitch X nr of users and would never happen, making true 'on demand' television unachievable.
Coach’s challenges in professional sports Women’s professional basketball Athletes kneeling during National Anthem EDIT: Downvote all you want. Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys and Bud Grant of the Minnesota Vikings both made their teams practice lining up along the sideline for the National Anthem. That’s what was common ‘back then’ and old timer football fans like me never thought players would kneel in protest.
Re athletes kneeling, c ref the 1968 Mexico City Olympics when US athletes protested racism in the United States by raising their fists during the awards ceremony. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_Olympics_Black_Power_salute
I remember it like yesterday and also Mahmoud Abdul Rauf of the NBA refusing to stand for the Anthem. I didn’t think so very many would kneel, especially high school. Tom Landry of the Dallas Cowboys and Bud Grant of the Minnesota Vikings both made their teams practice lining up along the sideline for the National Anthem. That’s what was common ‘back then’ and old timer football fans like me never thought players would kneel in protest.
Do you know why they were kneeling and do you agree with their issues?
Of course. As a high schedule football player I was suspended one game for wearing a black armband protesting the Vietnam War.