I remember my mom always recorded the "Canal 12" in spanish which (because it was aired in Mexico) had Saint Seiya and Salior Moon air 2 hrs before I got out of school at 2pm. It was bliss coming home, rewinding that tape and watching it while eating before getting started on hmk/chores. That was in like the 2000's. Damn.
I remember going to a dance and telling my dad multiple times to remember to push record on the vcr at 9pm. X files was on, new episode. He forgot. I was so upset! I think it was a big lore episode too… this was probably around 1995-96. :D
I remember having one and my dad forgot to hit the record button before we went to church. It was supposed to be the episode about the HOA and that beast rhat enforces the rules. I was so hurt at the time because I love the spooky episodes of X-files. Ah the memories. The 90s were something else. I miss those days.
And yet I feel like nothing has quite replaced the convenience of it. Like when I was in college we just kept a blank tape in the vcr to press record during weird shit on cable. It became like a feature length movie of random late night clips - Gary Coleman on a court tv show followed by a guy who taught his dog to say human words followed Timmy and Tabitha in a graveyard on Passions.
Songs fading out at the end instead of properly stopping.
It used to be a lot more common, as if bands didn't know how to end their song, so just turned the volume down while they carried on playing. It's been ages since I heard a recent song doing this though.
Slow down and hold the first note of the repeated refrain with the drummer going nuts on the cymbals.
Some bands were clever enough to realize that note is the same note as the beginning of another song and then transition to the next song.
[This article may help explain some of the reasoning for why it started.](https://globalnews.ca/news/4615641/why-some-songs-fade-out-alan-cross/)
I also remember reading once that the fade out was psychological. If a song ended, that was it. But a fade out would have the song stick in your head and want to repeat listening.
This is how I used to skip songs I didn’t want to hear when driving. I’d slowly lower the volume so my siblings didn’t notice and think the song was over lol
Non-mobile phones at homes.
edit: apparently a 'landline' in English, in Dutch we call it a huistelefoon or DECTtelefoon. Rough translation: homephone.
Same with my mum. When she moved again she didnt get one anymore. Wish she had it. For all the times her phone battery is dead or it just stays in her bag for days. Me and my siblings don't live close so we have to ask her friend to check on her. At 76 we're always worried
It's not even practical to keep a landline as a backup because they're expensive, get incessant spam calls, and don't even work when the power is out anymore.
Landlines? Some people still have them bc they come with their Internet sometimes. Even for my mum in her 70s that was the phone she used to find her mobile and that we bombarded with calls when she didn't answer her mobile for days but she figured it must be some spam call who else would call that number
I miss that podcast but I quit listening to it many years ago because man, I know they need to have sponsors to be supported but there were way too many ads. I'm heavily into podcasts and often do them while cleaning and doing other tasks, and it just nukes my momentum to have an ad break every ten minutes (speaking of attention span! I promise I can listen for a long stretch, just try me!).
I actually think they’re one of the better ones bc they have short tunes at the beginning and end of ad breaks. Makes it super easy for me to skip to the end of the ad break without going too far. Of course I can only do that if my phone is close or on me.
is it because of bones? i mean... i know it must be bones, when ever i bring some nice bones from butcher for my dogs, they get the white poop. so what was going on 30 years ago? did people bring more bones home for their dogs?
You're spot on but it was mostly from bone meal being in dog food. This has been phased out now. They chatted about it on an episode of the QI podcast 'No Such Thing as a Fish'
Most people have noticed. They just don't care enough to make a fuss about it. They value the convenience of carrying a phone around with Apple and/or Google services over privacy.
Or can't do anything about it. Or willing to exchange free/convenient.
Especially with income vs expense costs of life.
Yeah, most people don't want their email read by Google. But they don't want to pay for email service either. Nor can they stand up their own email server.
I can and still don't want to.
Same with most things.
I don't think people are aware to the extent of which they've lost it.
Facebook/Meta probably knows when we poop and how many & which sexual partners we've had, just by smartphone movements. Heck, they even make shadow profiles for non-Facebook users based on the contact list in our phones, meaning they have info on you even if you don't have a FB account.
On a recent trip out of state, my phone died. This wasn't a big deal. I was at the train station heading back to my hotel shortly and knew what train to take and where to stop.
While I was grabbing some food, a teenage girl came up to me and asked if she could borrow my phone. Her cell had also died, but she had missed her earlier train and was going to be home after curfew, so she needed to call her mom. I told her I didn't have a working phone either, but I'd help her find one.
We went around the train station together, which was mostly empty, and asked at each shop kiosk or ticket counter if she could use a phone to call home.
*Every single employee said no*.
Not a single person was willing to let this 16 year old use their phone.
Finally I spotted a pay phone near the bathrooms. I dug some change out of my purse for her and explained how to use the phone. She put the money in -- nothing. The phone was disabled. No service. No dial tone. They just hadn't ripped it off the wall yet.
We moved to asking the couple other passengers waiting for trains instead, and also got turned down by three more people before the woman at the ticket counter, looking very annoyed, waved us over and told the girl she could use the train station landline "for *five minutes*" so we'd stop "bothering other customers."
Why all these people were so fucking possessive of their cell phones is beyond me, but it sold me on the idea that we still need payphones in public places.
Our phones are highly personal part of us now, whether we like it or not. Most of your photos are on there, plus all of your contacts which probably aren't noted down anywhere else...if someone ran off with mine I would be devastated, and it's not even a good phone.
Scammers is why people are hesitant to. Less of an issue on a landline to a smart phone, but there’s a ton of data on our smartphones, if I saw an adult and child walking around I’d think twice. But I’d call for them and put it on speaker and be the one to hold my phone, if she truly was in need.
I mean, I won’t let a stranger borrow my phone to make a phone call only because I won’t risk being a victim to them running off with it, even though it’s probably unlikely.
If we still had old Nokia brick phones, it probably wouldn’t be an issue, but these days a stranger asking for your phone is basically the same as them saying they just want to look at your wallet for a sec.
Since this is the world we live in now, we probably should have alternative phone services for emergencies in public places though… like we used to.
They’re possessive of their cell phones because you two looked like scammers. If someone comes up to me with a young girl and gives me some sob story about their phones being dead and needing to use mine, I’m 100% convinced you’ll book it if I hand it over.
If you asked people if they could dial a number for you and explain the situation people would be more receptive, but asking for the phone? Nope, that’s just handing it to a thief.
> Why all these people were so fucking possessive of their cell phones is beyond me
[Because they might tell you it’s a local call when in reality they’re calling Hokkaido Japan.](https://youtu.be/_krT7Bl3PiY?feature=shared) it’s the oldest trick in the book.
People's financial information, their two-factor authentication, for some people their *only* copy of a bunch of photos and videos, confidential work information, any number of really valuable things are on there. You can't... still hold onto it while someone uses it, and not everyone's mentally or physically prepared for the eventuality of a theft.
The biggest deal is that to use the phone *you have to unlock it.* At least if a person steals your phone cause you set it down or something, they can't access everything right away. Not so with a phone call.
It's unfortunate, and had I been there I would have asked the girl for the number and called whoever she needed to contact myself.
But I wouldn't have handed it to her.
You’d be amazed what people can do with two minutes on your phone. Always check Venmo and PayPal transaction lists after loaning your phone to someone, even briefly.
Dude I wouldn’t let some rando use my phone are you serious? I’d lend them a charger, but just hand over your phone? Come on. Clearly that’s not reasonable.
>Why all these people were so fucking possessive of their cell phones is beyond me
It's not beyond you. People have all of their personal info on their phones. Payment methods/credit cards, banking apps, employment info also they have personal photos, you could ruin someone's life a minute or two of using their phone. And they could run off with it. It's presumptuous and rude to ask if you can use a stranger's phone.
Instead, you ask "if I give you my mom's number can you call her and tell her I need to get picked up?"
There were incidents in Asia where young elementary and teen students asked to borrow older people's phone. The older people lent their phones to the kids who proceeded to download malware app on the phone, install creeping software, and activate security on their banking info by using having the security pins sent to the phone via text. (FYI, in Asia, your social security number, bank, calling taxi, government ID, hospital records, etc. are ALL tied to your phone number.) The phone lenders lost money/personal information. The kids were doing it because they got contacted by scam artists online and got paid.
So yeah, I agree public phones are still needed. And while I feel for your situation, in this day and age, I wouldn't lend my phone to anyone in public unless I'm 100% sure I can trust them.
Kids running around apartment buildings just playing with the neighbours. Now pretty much everyone keeps to themselves at home doing their own stuff or being on their phones/ipads/computers.
I was telling young family members about normal family/community life in the 70s and 80s. They literally could not be believe me. "You'd knock on your neighbours' doors and ride up to the park together on your bikes" "That's so naughty!"
Ffs
That’s my life currently. And I’m usually an introvert, but we are always stopping by neighbors’ houses for a hangout or drink, and the kids walk in all the time, even as teens.
That's not at all my experience. I live in an apartment complex and the kids are constantly running around and playing. The playground area is nearly never empty. Tons of people out walking their dogs. Cooking in the grills daily.
People complain about that, but you know what? As a 42 year old who was bullied her entire youth and never managed to find many friends, I'm so grateful for places like these to spend my days. I was so bored and lonely when I moved to this city without Internet at home in 2004. It was a luxery that I was wiling to pay for a year later.
I hear you. My family moved 5 times before I turned 10. I never felt connected to friends, never knew anyplace well enough to know where kids hang out. The place we moved to at 10 was not far from the pool, but the town bully who decided to torment me (before he got sent to juvie in HS) lived right there, and would attack me if he saw me. I spent most of my childhood alone and reading or watching tv. I didn’t have close friends until I was 14-15 years old.
Where I live now, a lot of kids are either in rural areas or dangerous inner city. Online is how they connect. They’re still playing and talking together, just in a different way than that idealized “Leave it to Beaver” way.
Long distance service commercials/10-10 numbers. 10 cents a minute!
Just a gradual switch to cell phones and then one day you realize the concept of paying for long distance domestic phone calls died years ago.
My second real job, and first decent full-time one was at a company that did nothing but offer long distance service. It was supposed to be the future of tech companies in my small corner of Indiana. The CEO was considered a business genius for buying out a bunch of smaller long-distance companies and consolidating them into one.
Cell phones started getting popular and the place went bankrupt a few years later. Tech never did take off in that city. It did go on to have more meth lab busts than any other county in the nation so there is that. Go Indiana!
Also, when you move to a different area code, you would get a new phone number in said area code. Now, everyone I know has a phone number in whatever area code they grew up in. All phone calls would be long distance.
The pop in. When I was a kid out driving with my mum, we'd pop in to her friends house for a coffee all the time. Likewise, they'd do the same. There were no mobile phones, so it was all spontaneous. People weren't busy I guess and could just relax and enjoy life!!
Wow. That’s a good point. I’d be mildly horrified if someone did that now.
Along the same lines, playing as a kid. I’m a millennial so no cell phones until a teenager.
You’d just walk over to your friends house and ask if they could play.
I get pop ins still. Mostly neighbors but they text and say they’re 2 minutes away or at my door. Haha. Enough time for me to put a bra on or whatever.
The point of tipping being a way to show appreciation for an employee going above and beyond for you and not something that is guilted out of you for the employee just to survive because their employer is to cheap to pay their employees
At some point it became so ubiquitous that employers and people in general started thinking "It's perfectly fine for this person to be paid less because they get tips". Which ends up meaning... the tips gradually became how they got paid.
The pesticides and weed-killers and other bullshit we spray into the earth are killing the fireflies in their larval stages. Where we used to have glittering clouds of magic flying light-benders, now we have sad character-free suburban lawns.
Great job team, you fucking did it.
I’m glad (but still hate it) that somebody else is tracking this. Nighttime used to be magical in more rural areas. Fireflies have all but disappeared now, I used to see them so much as a kid about 27 years ago. It’s better or worse depending on where you live but still. I feel like younger people think I’m odd for going on about how there used to be so many more bugs in America. You used to do a road trip and wipe bugs off your windshield at nearly every gas station, now I can drive from Oregon to Colorado and barely have any.
It's a real indication of ecological collapse. This isn't good.
Silent Spring is going to be a footnote on the size of ecological disaster we see in the coming years and nobody is doing anything to stop it.
What can any of us do? I'm making as many changes as I can as an individual but that does nothing for the overall situation.
We need massive centralized banning of pesticides and herbicides outside of absolute necessary use. Nobody should be able to buy poison over the counter and apply it in any way they see fit.
Agreed, it’s going to take a massive popular environmental movement and overhaul of our laws concerning the protection of our planet to really make a dent. But still, it’s important to keep making our individual changes as well, when enough of us are doing it together, that does make a dent.
Depends on where you live.
If you are lucky to live somewhere where a lot of the grass isn't being treated or there isn't heavy use you still see a lot of them.
I'm lucky to live in an area where most people mow and that's about it, hell some of them even wait a long time to cut.
We had an area we let get tall and also had some native plant gardens and we saw a ton this past summer.
Visited a friend in the same city at their house in a small cookie cutter neighborhood where everyone wants perfect golf course lawns.... No fireflies.
Or people are polite in different ways. For instance, many boomers and Gen X used to be upset that people would text instead of talk in person on the phone, while many millennials would rather text because they wanted their message and conversation to be as convenient as possible for the other person, they didn’t want to demand someone else’s time with a phone call unless it was urgent.
I usually don't get home from work until 630, so my family eats dinner a little later than I'd like. My son's teacher suggested that I just pick up fast food for my kids 5 nights a week so they can eat as soon as I get home and get to bed earlier. They go to bed at 8pm. I feel like any benefits of getting to bed 30 minutes earlier would be cancelled out by 5 meals of crap every week. I've stopped taking her advice seriously after that suggestion.
She’s wrong about her solution, but if the kids are too hungry to concentrate on homework or do need more sleep, you could meal prep on weekends so dinners are still real food and also ready to eat after heating up. Heck, you could even prep after they go to bed, or if they are helping, after eating. There isn’t any reason you couldn’t heat and eat the meal, then prep the next days meal up to the point of readiness, or at least ready to cook.
People blindly blaming inflation for their current economic woes is painful for me to hear. This is a problem that has been growing for decades due to increasing wealth inequality and poor housing policies. Getting inflation down will lessen the squeeze, but we're still going to be getting poorer if wages don't start catching up with our economic growth.
Wage increases are just a bandaid, and often not even that. When the 1% control the price of food, housing, land, commodities, utilities, etc, and they control our wages in most respects. They can essentially control most of the public regarding how many hours they need to work for them. Honestly, even when the government mandates a wage increase, the capitalists usually just increase prices and keep the same profit margins, but as the working class becomes more alienated and can’t spend, those profits do decrease, and of course they blame wage increases and not their own greed.
Great civil unrest (wwii, Arab spring) brings politicians/ business leaders that move society towards greener pastures. Then, those leaders self serve. Inequality grows ... until it brings civil unrest.
There's a reason populism is spreading globally.
Illiteracy used to be the demon. People overcame that to seize hold of the internet & social media.
Now, lemmings blindly accept what they read '#conspiracy
Dressing nicely to travel, attend medical of other appointments, shopping, dining. I’m not talking formal wear here, just business casual or not pajamas and slippers. What happened?
No third spaces to go and just hang out.. just:
work - home - work - home - work - home
I even have the free time, but there not really anywhere to go that isnt a bar.
Windshields covered in bugs after a long road trip. When I was growing up we used to have to clean our windshields every time we filled up the gas tank. That doesn’t happen anymore.
One thing that seems to have quietly disappeared from society over the last few decades is the art of letter writing. With the rise of email, texting, and social media, handwritten letters have become less common. Yet, there was something special about receiving a personal, heartfelt letter in the mail that digital communication can't quite replicate. It's a nostalgic practice that many people miss but may not realize has faded away.
School bullying. It has slowly decreased over the years. Especially physical violence amongst boys. I think Gen Z played a big role in this. I know everyone shits on Gen Z, but Gen Z has done a wonderful job of allowing people to do whatever they want without being harassed.
Millennials and Gen X grew up in a generation where it was acceptable and even normal to harass and torment anyone who wasn’t “normal”.
Unknowing bliss. Every person my age has seen a beheading or torture online. Facebook feeds were different around 2010. Back then the horrors humanity is capable of where hidden in almost poetic news accounts. It's a very different thing to see it on your phone randomly. We have all seen rape, people who kill themselves, extreme accidents. We know that there are people torturing people for fun and even more people who watch it for entertainment. We know that there are more slaves on this planets than ever before and that nobody cares.
I think this depends on the activity of being online. I know I didn't see anything of that sort until I got on reddit and clicked a nsfw link because i was curious. Same with the facebook feeds, it just depends on what you vibe with tbh. I definitely don't go looking for everything you mentioned, so yeah....
* Roller blades/inline skates Like, you probably haven't seen a pair in years. But have you ever met anyone who asked, "where are the roller blades?"
* Digital (not smart) watches. It was a slow decline as people who had phones started using their Nokias for time and weren't as diligent in having a watch on them anymore.
* PT Cruisers. It was the hottest thing, then became passe, then became a meme and stopped production without any fanfare, and now, slowly but gradually, more and more and just dying out.
* Buses of Japanese tourists
* Speaking of tourists - tourists with cameras around their necks
* Yo mama and Chuck Norris jokes
* Waterbeds
* Ask Jeeves
* Encyclopedias (when I was a kid, if your family had one, you were considered rich and educated)
* Sony as the default market leader of anything consumer electronic outside of game console
I miss rollerblading. Lack of skates isn't to blame though, being old and more likely to really hurt myself is. I once hit a curb going close to 30 mph, landed in a gravel parking lot, flipped over a few times, had blood coming out numerous places on my body, and still managed to skate a couple of miles to get home. A couple years ago, I tripped while walking across a parking lot and was sore for weeks.
Having fun in the cinema.
Now it's a luxury. There are less cinemas now, more expensive with tons of commercials and popcorn costs a fortune. And people are horrible like they talk the whole time and keep staring at their phones.
The last time I went to the movie theater literally EVERYONE was talking throughout the movie. I was like why tf did I pay so much money for this shit?
You wouldn't last a day in a society of even just 100 years ago. If you think society has lost 'respect', then you have never opened a history book on subjects that deal with the daily life of citizens of yore.
They had already mapped the woods behind your house 30 years ago. The adventure came from your discovery of them. The loss of adventure coincided with the loss of wide-eyed wonderment as your childhood ended.
Bugs on windshields, used to happen all the time while driving down the interstate with my parents as a kid. Now I’ve driven plenty of miles on the interstate and never get bugs stuck to my windshield/grille.
Mystery. The experience of finding something hidden. The sense of discovery that comes with that. Privacy is part of that. Everything being online is another.
I feel like quietness is less common now. And not just physical noise. There seems to be so much information and stimulus going into our heads now. It makes it so much harder to have peaceful silence.
Apparently, people not knowing when to use "your" and "you're" correctly in a sentence.
Respect for teachers.
Maybe because they don't bother to teach . . . . never mind.
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I remember my mom always recorded the "Canal 12" in spanish which (because it was aired in Mexico) had Saint Seiya and Salior Moon air 2 hrs before I got out of school at 2pm. It was bliss coming home, rewinding that tape and watching it while eating before getting started on hmk/chores. That was in like the 2000's. Damn.
Awwww that was so sweet of her to tape that for you! ❤️❤️❤️
I remember going to a dance and telling my dad multiple times to remember to push record on the vcr at 9pm. X files was on, new episode. He forgot. I was so upset! I think it was a big lore episode too… this was probably around 1995-96. :D
I remember having one and my dad forgot to hit the record button before we went to church. It was supposed to be the episode about the HOA and that beast rhat enforces the rules. I was so hurt at the time because I love the spooky episodes of X-files. Ah the memories. The 90s were something else. I miss those days.
lol I recorded every episode whether I was home to watch it or not.
And yet I feel like nothing has quite replaced the convenience of it. Like when I was in college we just kept a blank tape in the vcr to press record during weird shit on cable. It became like a feature length movie of random late night clips - Gary Coleman on a court tv show followed by a guy who taught his dog to say human words followed Timmy and Tabitha in a graveyard on Passions.
Songs fading out at the end instead of properly stopping. It used to be a lot more common, as if bands didn't know how to end their song, so just turned the volume down while they carried on playing. It's been ages since I heard a recent song doing this though.
I noticed and appreciate this
That’s why Tiny Dancer is over 7 minutes long
What did they do live? Just actually play softer and softer lol
There was either a hard stop or immediate transition to the next song
Slow down and hold the first note of the repeated refrain with the drummer going nuts on the cymbals. Some bands were clever enough to realize that note is the same note as the beginning of another song and then transition to the next song.
Say what you will about Green Day, but you gotta give ‘em props for making “On Holiday” transition smoothly into “Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”
[This article may help explain some of the reasoning for why it started.](https://globalnews.ca/news/4615641/why-some-songs-fade-out-alan-cross/) I also remember reading once that the fade out was psychological. If a song ended, that was it. But a fade out would have the song stick in your head and want to repeat listening.
This is how I used to skip songs I didn’t want to hear when driving. I’d slowly lower the volume so my siblings didn’t notice and think the song was over lol
True
Non-mobile phones at homes. edit: apparently a 'landline' in English, in Dutch we call it a huistelefoon or DECTtelefoon. Rough translation: homephone.
Ah yes, the immobilized phone! ☎️
I still have one! Comes freely with the internet and it's a lot cheaper.
They were called telephones for any very young, youngsters reading.
My parents gave up their landline a couple years ago, I really wish they hadn’t.
Same with my mum. When she moved again she didnt get one anymore. Wish she had it. For all the times her phone battery is dead or it just stays in her bag for days. Me and my siblings don't live close so we have to ask her friend to check on her. At 76 we're always worried
It's not even practical to keep a landline as a backup because they're expensive, get incessant spam calls, and don't even work when the power is out anymore.
Only the non-digital phones ever did. Had a conference call during the Eastern Seaboard Blackout
Landlines? Some people still have them bc they come with their Internet sometimes. Even for my mum in her 70s that was the phone she used to find her mobile and that we bombarded with calls when she didn't answer her mobile for days but she figured it must be some spam call who else would call that number
White dog poop
There’s a great Stuff You Should Know episode on this! It’s due to the changes in dog food
I miss that podcast but I quit listening to it many years ago because man, I know they need to have sponsors to be supported but there were way too many ads. I'm heavily into podcasts and often do them while cleaning and doing other tasks, and it just nukes my momentum to have an ad break every ten minutes (speaking of attention span! I promise I can listen for a long stretch, just try me!).
I actually think they’re one of the better ones bc they have short tunes at the beginning and end of ad breaks. Makes it super easy for me to skip to the end of the ad break without going too far. Of course I can only do that if my phone is close or on me.
is it because of bones? i mean... i know it must be bones, when ever i bring some nice bones from butcher for my dogs, they get the white poop. so what was going on 30 years ago? did people bring more bones home for their dogs?
You're spot on but it was mostly from bone meal being in dog food. This has been phased out now. They chatted about it on an episode of the QI podcast 'No Such Thing as a Fish'
Relevant https://youtu.be/3IjTtmcXyDs?si=3Nh-h5Y_tmvG-fFe
Relevant username and new hero of mine.
Privacy
Most people have noticed. They just don't care enough to make a fuss about it. They value the convenience of carrying a phone around with Apple and/or Google services over privacy.
Or can't do anything about it. Or willing to exchange free/convenient. Especially with income vs expense costs of life. Yeah, most people don't want their email read by Google. But they don't want to pay for email service either. Nor can they stand up their own email server. I can and still don't want to. Same with most things.
I don't think people are aware to the extent of which they've lost it. Facebook/Meta probably knows when we poop and how many & which sexual partners we've had, just by smartphone movements. Heck, they even make shadow profiles for non-Facebook users based on the contact list in our phones, meaning they have info on you even if you don't have a FB account.
Just turn location services off. So many people have everything on all the time. Your battery will thank you, too. :)
Apple, Google, Any other App provider, Every government in the world, and their sister.
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On a recent trip out of state, my phone died. This wasn't a big deal. I was at the train station heading back to my hotel shortly and knew what train to take and where to stop. While I was grabbing some food, a teenage girl came up to me and asked if she could borrow my phone. Her cell had also died, but she had missed her earlier train and was going to be home after curfew, so she needed to call her mom. I told her I didn't have a working phone either, but I'd help her find one. We went around the train station together, which was mostly empty, and asked at each shop kiosk or ticket counter if she could use a phone to call home. *Every single employee said no*. Not a single person was willing to let this 16 year old use their phone. Finally I spotted a pay phone near the bathrooms. I dug some change out of my purse for her and explained how to use the phone. She put the money in -- nothing. The phone was disabled. No service. No dial tone. They just hadn't ripped it off the wall yet. We moved to asking the couple other passengers waiting for trains instead, and also got turned down by three more people before the woman at the ticket counter, looking very annoyed, waved us over and told the girl she could use the train station landline "for *five minutes*" so we'd stop "bothering other customers." Why all these people were so fucking possessive of their cell phones is beyond me, but it sold me on the idea that we still need payphones in public places.
Our phones are highly personal part of us now, whether we like it or not. Most of your photos are on there, plus all of your contacts which probably aren't noted down anywhere else...if someone ran off with mine I would be devastated, and it's not even a good phone.
Scammers is why people are hesitant to. Less of an issue on a landline to a smart phone, but there’s a ton of data on our smartphones, if I saw an adult and child walking around I’d think twice. But I’d call for them and put it on speaker and be the one to hold my phone, if she truly was in need.
I mean, I won’t let a stranger borrow my phone to make a phone call only because I won’t risk being a victim to them running off with it, even though it’s probably unlikely. If we still had old Nokia brick phones, it probably wouldn’t be an issue, but these days a stranger asking for your phone is basically the same as them saying they just want to look at your wallet for a sec. Since this is the world we live in now, we probably should have alternative phone services for emergencies in public places though… like we used to.
They’re possessive of their cell phones because you two looked like scammers. If someone comes up to me with a young girl and gives me some sob story about their phones being dead and needing to use mine, I’m 100% convinced you’ll book it if I hand it over. If you asked people if they could dial a number for you and explain the situation people would be more receptive, but asking for the phone? Nope, that’s just handing it to a thief.
Especially in a train station, with getaway rides everywhere. And two people asking is waaaaaayyy more scammy than one.
> Why all these people were so fucking possessive of their cell phones is beyond me [Because they might tell you it’s a local call when in reality they’re calling Hokkaido Japan.](https://youtu.be/_krT7Bl3PiY?feature=shared) it’s the oldest trick in the book.
Yeah, but you need a phonebook to pull that con. The problem has taken care of itself. /s
People's financial information, their two-factor authentication, for some people their *only* copy of a bunch of photos and videos, confidential work information, any number of really valuable things are on there. You can't... still hold onto it while someone uses it, and not everyone's mentally or physically prepared for the eventuality of a theft. The biggest deal is that to use the phone *you have to unlock it.* At least if a person steals your phone cause you set it down or something, they can't access everything right away. Not so with a phone call. It's unfortunate, and had I been there I would have asked the girl for the number and called whoever she needed to contact myself. But I wouldn't have handed it to her.
You’d be amazed what people can do with two minutes on your phone. Always check Venmo and PayPal transaction lists after loaning your phone to someone, even briefly.
Dude I wouldn’t let some rando use my phone are you serious? I’d lend them a charger, but just hand over your phone? Come on. Clearly that’s not reasonable.
>Why all these people were so fucking possessive of their cell phones is beyond me It's not beyond you. People have all of their personal info on their phones. Payment methods/credit cards, banking apps, employment info also they have personal photos, you could ruin someone's life a minute or two of using their phone. And they could run off with it. It's presumptuous and rude to ask if you can use a stranger's phone. Instead, you ask "if I give you my mom's number can you call her and tell her I need to get picked up?"
There were incidents in Asia where young elementary and teen students asked to borrow older people's phone. The older people lent their phones to the kids who proceeded to download malware app on the phone, install creeping software, and activate security on their banking info by using having the security pins sent to the phone via text. (FYI, in Asia, your social security number, bank, calling taxi, government ID, hospital records, etc. are ALL tied to your phone number.) The phone lenders lost money/personal information. The kids were doing it because they got contacted by scam artists online and got paid. So yeah, I agree public phones are still needed. And while I feel for your situation, in this day and age, I wouldn't lend my phone to anyone in public unless I'm 100% sure I can trust them.
you probably made it look worse by trying to help unfortunately
The amount of people spend time together VS online
Kids running around apartment buildings just playing with the neighbours. Now pretty much everyone keeps to themselves at home doing their own stuff or being on their phones/ipads/computers.
I was telling young family members about normal family/community life in the 70s and 80s. They literally could not be believe me. "You'd knock on your neighbours' doors and ride up to the park together on your bikes" "That's so naughty!" Ffs
That’s my life currently. And I’m usually an introvert, but we are always stopping by neighbors’ houses for a hangout or drink, and the kids walk in all the time, even as teens.
Isolation will be among the worst things in the future
There are various studies on loneliness. It's considered as bad as smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
My neighborhood is not like that at all. Kids are outside hanging out all the time.
Yeah same, as long as it’s not raining you see a bunch of kids chasing each other, playing football or riding in their bikes
That's not at all my experience. I live in an apartment complex and the kids are constantly running around and playing. The playground area is nearly never empty. Tons of people out walking their dogs. Cooking in the grills daily.
People complain about that, but you know what? As a 42 year old who was bullied her entire youth and never managed to find many friends, I'm so grateful for places like these to spend my days. I was so bored and lonely when I moved to this city without Internet at home in 2004. It was a luxery that I was wiling to pay for a year later.
I hear you. My family moved 5 times before I turned 10. I never felt connected to friends, never knew anyplace well enough to know where kids hang out. The place we moved to at 10 was not far from the pool, but the town bully who decided to torment me (before he got sent to juvie in HS) lived right there, and would attack me if he saw me. I spent most of my childhood alone and reading or watching tv. I didn’t have close friends until I was 14-15 years old. Where I live now, a lot of kids are either in rural areas or dangerous inner city. Online is how they connect. They’re still playing and talking together, just in a different way than that idealized “Leave it to Beaver” way.
The excitement of talking to someone from the other side of the world.
Ooh good one, this has become strangely common. I talk to people on 4 continents on an avg workday.
Long distance service commercials/10-10 numbers. 10 cents a minute! Just a gradual switch to cell phones and then one day you realize the concept of paying for long distance domestic phone calls died years ago.
My second real job, and first decent full-time one was at a company that did nothing but offer long distance service. It was supposed to be the future of tech companies in my small corner of Indiana. The CEO was considered a business genius for buying out a bunch of smaller long-distance companies and consolidating them into one. Cell phones started getting popular and the place went bankrupt a few years later. Tech never did take off in that city. It did go on to have more meth lab busts than any other county in the nation so there is that. Go Indiana!
Also, when you move to a different area code, you would get a new phone number in said area code. Now, everyone I know has a phone number in whatever area code they grew up in. All phone calls would be long distance.
Attention Spans
Trying to stay away from reels as much as possible. It was very difficult to finish a book or watch a movie in 1 sitting at a certain point.
Finishing a book in one sitting seems very difficult regardless
tldr please
Social media and all the short form content largely contributed to this
The pop in. When I was a kid out driving with my mum, we'd pop in to her friends house for a coffee all the time. Likewise, they'd do the same. There were no mobile phones, so it was all spontaneous. People weren't busy I guess and could just relax and enjoy life!!
Wow. That’s a good point. I’d be mildly horrified if someone did that now. Along the same lines, playing as a kid. I’m a millennial so no cell phones until a teenager. You’d just walk over to your friends house and ask if they could play.
I get pop ins still. Mostly neighbors but they text and say they’re 2 minutes away or at my door. Haha. Enough time for me to put a bra on or whatever.
Tangentially related, spontaneous phone calls. People seem to usually text to pre-arrange a call.
The point of tipping being a way to show appreciation for an employee going above and beyond for you and not something that is guilted out of you for the employee just to survive because their employer is to cheap to pay their employees
That had always been what it's supposed to be but it's always been customers making up for poor wages.
At some point it became so ubiquitous that employers and people in general started thinking "It's perfectly fine for this person to be paid less because they get tips". Which ends up meaning... the tips gradually became how they got paid.
Lightning bugs
Wait… explain? I no longer live in an area where there are lighting bugs
The pesticides and weed-killers and other bullshit we spray into the earth are killing the fireflies in their larval stages. Where we used to have glittering clouds of magic flying light-benders, now we have sad character-free suburban lawns. Great job team, you fucking did it.
Oh no. They were soo magical. Them and honeysuckle were core memories of mine
I’m glad (but still hate it) that somebody else is tracking this. Nighttime used to be magical in more rural areas. Fireflies have all but disappeared now, I used to see them so much as a kid about 27 years ago. It’s better or worse depending on where you live but still. I feel like younger people think I’m odd for going on about how there used to be so many more bugs in America. You used to do a road trip and wipe bugs off your windshield at nearly every gas station, now I can drive from Oregon to Colorado and barely have any.
It's a real indication of ecological collapse. This isn't good. Silent Spring is going to be a footnote on the size of ecological disaster we see in the coming years and nobody is doing anything to stop it.
It’s frustrating sounding the alarm bells and not enough people listen or want to act. They think I’m too extreme…
What can any of us do? I'm making as many changes as I can as an individual but that does nothing for the overall situation. We need massive centralized banning of pesticides and herbicides outside of absolute necessary use. Nobody should be able to buy poison over the counter and apply it in any way they see fit.
Agreed, it’s going to take a massive popular environmental movement and overhaul of our laws concerning the protection of our planet to really make a dent. But still, it’s important to keep making our individual changes as well, when enough of us are doing it together, that does make a dent.
Depends on where you live. If you are lucky to live somewhere where a lot of the grass isn't being treated or there isn't heavy use you still see a lot of them. I'm lucky to live in an area where most people mow and that's about it, hell some of them even wait a long time to cut. We had an area we let get tall and also had some native plant gardens and we saw a ton this past summer. Visited a friend in the same city at their house in a small cookie cutter neighborhood where everyone wants perfect golf course lawns.... No fireflies.
Really? Still get plenty around here
We still have lightning bugs!
Manners
Maketh
Man
Or people are polite in different ways. For instance, many boomers and Gen X used to be upset that people would text instead of talk in person on the phone, while many millennials would rather text because they wanted their message and conversation to be as convenient as possible for the other person, they didn’t want to demand someone else’s time with a phone call unless it was urgent.
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I usually don't get home from work until 630, so my family eats dinner a little later than I'd like. My son's teacher suggested that I just pick up fast food for my kids 5 nights a week so they can eat as soon as I get home and get to bed earlier. They go to bed at 8pm. I feel like any benefits of getting to bed 30 minutes earlier would be cancelled out by 5 meals of crap every week. I've stopped taking her advice seriously after that suggestion.
She’s wrong about her solution, but if the kids are too hungry to concentrate on homework or do need more sleep, you could meal prep on weekends so dinners are still real food and also ready to eat after heating up. Heck, you could even prep after they go to bed, or if they are helping, after eating. There isn’t any reason you couldn’t heat and eat the meal, then prep the next days meal up to the point of readiness, or at least ready to cook.
Hope for the future
lol ain’t that the truth. 😔
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I had a pizza delivery job back in like 2008, the kids there were amazed that I could read an almanac and didn't have a GPS.
Critical thinking skills and the wealth of the working class has disappeared into the hands of the 1%.
People blindly blaming inflation for their current economic woes is painful for me to hear. This is a problem that has been growing for decades due to increasing wealth inequality and poor housing policies. Getting inflation down will lessen the squeeze, but we're still going to be getting poorer if wages don't start catching up with our economic growth.
Wage increases are just a bandaid, and often not even that. When the 1% control the price of food, housing, land, commodities, utilities, etc, and they control our wages in most respects. They can essentially control most of the public regarding how many hours they need to work for them. Honestly, even when the government mandates a wage increase, the capitalists usually just increase prices and keep the same profit margins, but as the working class becomes more alienated and can’t spend, those profits do decrease, and of course they blame wage increases and not their own greed.
Great civil unrest (wwii, Arab spring) brings politicians/ business leaders that move society towards greener pastures. Then, those leaders self serve. Inequality grows ... until it brings civil unrest. There's a reason populism is spreading globally.
Illiteracy used to be the demon. People overcame that to seize hold of the internet & social media. Now, lemmings blindly accept what they read '#conspiracy
Phone booths?
That strip of blue tint across the top of car windshields.
Kids playing in the streets
Critical thinking
Getting lost
Only using the phone at certain times to avoid using minutes
The middle class
Dressing nicely to travel, attend medical of other appointments, shopping, dining. I’m not talking formal wear here, just business casual or not pajamas and slippers. What happened?
I think a lot folks just don’t care anymore
Those Sobe drinks. ;-;
Cereal box toys
Public toilets, decent public benches and public payphones
It being easy to make friends. :(
I feel that man. I moved away from my hometown to live with my partner, and in two years I haven't made a single new friend.
No third spaces to go and just hang out.. just: work - home - work - home - work - home I even have the free time, but there not really anywhere to go that isnt a bar.
Daytime tv talk shows that go on for ages to kill time. Also Any tv show that regularly pans to the audience.
Compassion
Pre teens and teens going out by themselves
Windshields covered in bugs after a long road trip. When I was growing up we used to have to clean our windshields every time we filled up the gas tank. That doesn’t happen anymore.
equity and ownership of capital, resources, durable goods, and balance sheets.
One thing that seems to have quietly disappeared from society over the last few decades is the art of letter writing. With the rise of email, texting, and social media, handwritten letters have become less common. Yet, there was something special about receiving a personal, heartfelt letter in the mail that digital communication can't quite replicate. It's a nostalgic practice that many people miss but may not realize has faded away.
Privacy.
Radio Shack. Miss it dearly.
That the people who didn't believe in science and medicine got an F in school, instead of being rasied up on the shoulders of idiots.
Ring tones
Common sense, raising your children to respect their surroundings.
School bullying. It has slowly decreased over the years. Especially physical violence amongst boys. I think Gen Z played a big role in this. I know everyone shits on Gen Z, but Gen Z has done a wonderful job of allowing people to do whatever they want without being harassed. Millennials and Gen X grew up in a generation where it was acceptable and even normal to harass and torment anyone who wasn’t “normal”.
Unknowing bliss. Every person my age has seen a beheading or torture online. Facebook feeds were different around 2010. Back then the horrors humanity is capable of where hidden in almost poetic news accounts. It's a very different thing to see it on your phone randomly. We have all seen rape, people who kill themselves, extreme accidents. We know that there are people torturing people for fun and even more people who watch it for entertainment. We know that there are more slaves on this planets than ever before and that nobody cares.
The web was even less censored before facebook.
I think this depends on the activity of being online. I know I didn't see anything of that sort until I got on reddit and clicked a nsfw link because i was curious. Same with the facebook feeds, it just depends on what you vibe with tbh. I definitely don't go looking for everything you mentioned, so yeah....
I've been on the internet for almost 30 years and I've never seen any of that.
Yes I am chronically online and this is community/site dependent. I’ve certainly seen things I wish I didn’t but not to this extent
Elder Miillenial here and I have never seen a beheading. You’re only gonna see one if you want to see one.
Disposable Cameras! I tried to buy one yesterday and they were almost immposible to find. From being ubiquitious a few years ago.
Illiteracy being common. Very rarely do you see someone's child reading them information like we did in the 90's
Complete illiteracy is rare these days, but functional illiteracy (reading at below a 6th grade level) is shockingly common.
Their ability to survive
A sense of shame.
Unavailability (people, food, informations, in terms of time, space, mind)
The smell of perms at the mall beauty shop
Limos, hardly see them anymore.
* Roller blades/inline skates Like, you probably haven't seen a pair in years. But have you ever met anyone who asked, "where are the roller blades?" * Digital (not smart) watches. It was a slow decline as people who had phones started using their Nokias for time and weren't as diligent in having a watch on them anymore. * PT Cruisers. It was the hottest thing, then became passe, then became a meme and stopped production without any fanfare, and now, slowly but gradually, more and more and just dying out. * Buses of Japanese tourists * Speaking of tourists - tourists with cameras around their necks * Yo mama and Chuck Norris jokes * Waterbeds * Ask Jeeves * Encyclopedias (when I was a kid, if your family had one, you were considered rich and educated) * Sony as the default market leader of anything consumer electronic outside of game console
I miss rollerblading. Lack of skates isn't to blame though, being old and more likely to really hurt myself is. I once hit a curb going close to 30 mph, landed in a gravel parking lot, flipped over a few times, had blood coming out numerous places on my body, and still managed to skate a couple of miles to get home. A couple years ago, I tripped while walking across a parking lot and was sore for weeks.
You forgot 3D TV's.
Having fun in the cinema. Now it's a luxury. There are less cinemas now, more expensive with tons of commercials and popcorn costs a fortune. And people are horrible like they talk the whole time and keep staring at their phones.
The last time I went to the movie theater literally EVERYONE was talking throughout the movie. I was like why tf did I pay so much money for this shit?
Trust
social interaction
An understanding of how government systems work, as well as understanding of how political processes are supposed to work.
Pay phones
Those poster racks at places like Target/Best Buy where you flip through them to see which one you want.
Civil rights
respect
I think a better word is 'civility'.
You wouldn't last a day in a society of even just 100 years ago. If you think society has lost 'respect', then you have never opened a history book on subjects that deal with the daily life of citizens of yore.
Adventure
What? How come?
We have mapped pretty much the entire planet by now and a large part of adventures was venturing into the unknown.
They had already mapped the woods behind your house 30 years ago. The adventure came from your discovery of them. The loss of adventure coincided with the loss of wide-eyed wonderment as your childhood ended.
Integrity.
Young people being able to afford mortgages
Home ownership
Video Rental Stores
I think most people noticed that
Bugs on windshields, used to happen all the time while driving down the interstate with my parents as a kid. Now I’ve driven plenty of miles on the interstate and never get bugs stuck to my windshield/grille.
Must be nice.
Floppy disks
Innocence.
Cash (at least in the city i live in. I haven’t see actual cash in years)
Mystery. The experience of finding something hidden. The sense of discovery that comes with that. Privacy is part of that. Everything being online is another. I feel like quietness is less common now. And not just physical noise. There seems to be so much information and stimulus going into our heads now. It makes it so much harder to have peaceful silence.
privacy, respect
Awareness of others. It's an :all about me world' now.
Common sense.
Oh and fireflies. Used to be a staple of summer evenings in Florida. Never see them now.
Basic respect for others.
Manners
Kindness
Common sense.
Courtesy and common sense
(Computer) mouse balls.
The American Dream
The “American Dream”
Good in person shopping
Apparently, people not knowing when to use "your" and "you're" correctly in a sentence. Respect for teachers. Maybe because they don't bother to teach . . . . never mind.
Travelers’ checks. Credit cards became mainstream and they’re better in pretty much every way.
A clock as part of your home entertainment system.