Those thin transparent screens you see in sci fi movies.
I thought we’d have affordable 8TB SSD’s.
Realistically?
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Housing that doesn’t cost a fortune
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Healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt you
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Food that’s both affordable and worth eating
None of it is futuristic. All of it feels further away than ever.
That’s not tech, that’s policy. Technologically there are no holdups to this, capitalism just needs it to not be so
Your answer is something you want to force into the conversation, not what OP asked.
You’re not wrong, but that’s not the conversation man.
As it is written in the Śūraṅgama Sūtra:
It is like when someone points his finger at the moon to show it to someone else. Guided by the finger, that person should see the moon. If he looks at the finger instead and mistakes it for the moon, he loses not only the moon but the finger also. Why? It is because he mistakes the pointing finger for the bright moon.
Recently quoted by Bruce Lee, than in the movie Le Fabuleux Destin d’Amélie Poulain
Yeah, the reason we don’t have those isn’t technological. We could have it today if we collectively decided that we wanted it.
That’s not really how it works, or we’d already have them. People in China have those things because they beat the fascist KMT back to Formosa, and by force subordinated the bourgeoisie and the remnants of feudalism.
Well, that plus militant organizing
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Actual hoverboards, as promised.
Standardized connector for everything with backwards compatibility
Recycling that actually works.
Brit on a train; A phone network that would offer a reasonable level of connectivity no matter where you are in the country.
Ours definitely took a few steps back early 2023.
Self driving cars. Ten years ago I said, “we’ll have this worked out in 10 years”. What a fool I was.
Elmo has claimed to have it for over 10 years now
You weren’t a fool, you simply were lied to
Elmo always lies, every second word put of his mouth is a lie. Every project he boasts about has been a lie.
I thought that by now we would’ve commercialized at scale alternative battery technologies. We’re still using lithium ion even for grid storage and EV’s.
Also, I expected we would have put a man on the moon by now.
We wouldn’t such a battery development if we had simply invested in a standardised electrified wiring network for the motor roads. we would have lighter cars that charge their ~100 km battery while driving on the motor road so they can easily reach their destination
Maybe give cars a second pair of axles, to keep them aligned with the overhead power on the highway and to reduce the tire wear. Maybe join them together too so each individual car doesn’t have to worry about braking and the driver can basically just sleep.
This isn’t me sarcastically reinventing trains. I see why people would rather spend their commute in a private car than in a public train carriage. These features just seem genuinely useful.
What I have sarcastically reinvented is basically just self-driving cars.
Guillotines and a lineup of billionaires in straight jackets
Really fancy guillotines, with Internet Access, Bluetooth, and AI, of course.
“I’m Alan, your Virtual Execution Assistant. I can offer you a choice of a Last Cigarette, or Last Words, which would you like to choose?”
Good music. Why does music in the 21st century have to suck so bad? It’s not that much different than what we had in the 20th century, the quality just steadily decreased instead of increased. It’s all divas screaming, really boring rap, or just dull, art-less rock.
Today, even young people are discovering that the Classic Rock era had very cool music. It would have been like my generation discovering the music of the pre-war 30s.
If you’re talking about modern pop, I completely agree. But there’s so much amazing music coming out every year, way better than anything before it imo. My guess is if you really do want to find great new music, then you’re not exploring enough. Or maybe you’re happy with what you already know.
I am talking about Modern Pop, and Rock.
A lot of the problem is that most men grow up listening to rap, and women grow up listening to divas, and if they don’t listen to those genres, then they listen to country. So many young musicians are growing up listening to mediocre quality music, and they tend to slip into genres that are somewhat less competitive, artistically, like Rap or Country.
That leaves fewer musicians to carry on the Classic Rock tradition. Besides, what’s the point? The fact is, the Classic Rock era turned out the best popular music of all time. That sound like a wild statement on its face, but it really is true. What band emerging now seems like it could be the next Beatles, or Rolling Stones, or Led Zeppelin, or Pink Floyd? I can’t think of a band that threatened to have that kind of influence since Nirvana.
There have been a few worthy artists, like Adele, and a few truly great singers, like Ariana Grande, but there are no other superstar Rock artists whose talents are undeniable, like Michael Jackson, or Prince.
Taylor Swift, Bruno Mars, Adele, and Ariana Grande are about all I can think of, and that is over about 30 years. Compare that with the 60s or 70s, or even the 80s, when artists were establishing MASSIVE careers that would last decades, on a monthly basis. At the end of the year, you were listening to a dozen classic albums by bands you hadn’t heard of a year ago, and another dozen classic albums by your favorite bands. GREAT music was just pouring out, and it became popular not because of an enormous marketing campaign, but because the music was great, and the word spread. Hardly any of Pink Floyd’s music was ever on the radio, and yet they established a career and a catalogue that sells to this day. Taylor Swift seems huge, but back in the day, she would have been outsold by a dozen other artists.
So why even bother re-inventing the wheel? There is already about 50 years of AMAZING music that young people today have never heard. I always get downvoted when I say this, but they are from people who don’t know what they are missing, and think today’s music is perfectly acceptable.
The music of the 60s and 70s inspired my to pursue a life and career in music. Today’s music would not have inspired me at all.
I like music from the decade before my birth and swing became big at one point and many folk discover there is a lot of classical music they like. I get what your saying but like there is a lot of historical crap pop to which is kinda always around.
Cool, I have a degree in Music History, and you are 100% correct, there is a LOT of bad historical music. Luckily, we don’t have to deal with it much, because most of it has been filtered out over time.
There’s a loose rule in all Art, that 95% of art is mostly mediocre. Only about 5% is worthy, and only about 1% is truly good, or great. When youre in the midst of it, most of what you are hearing is junk, and you have to be the filter, and it can be exhausting.
But if you go back to the old stuff, it’s basically been curated by critics and fans over the decades, and mostly the best stuff has survived, so it’s easier to find great, satisfying music.
And if you’re ambitious, you can sort through the debris, and find the odd forgotten classic rock gem, like Shoes:
Or Yaz:
Or Bread:
I wonder about that in the modern age though. I mean there has to be a factor of how easy it is to copy and store. So likely a lot was lost before performance recording capability. In the car I mostly listen to npr but when I don’t care for whats on I will just sorta jump between stations and there is a thing now for stations to kinda take a time period but they don’t seem to be very discriminatory about it. On the other hand now that we can call up any song we want likely you will see the cream come up to the top on what gets asked for a lot. I have one particular gripe though because my fav band tull had this album crafting they did where the position of songs, especially the first and last, were real important. They have these special editions they kinda just tacked songs on them and it ruins the flow. Its impossible, at least with amazon, to get the device to do the original vs the special edition that it defaults to.
Ability to live in balance with the earth
Only after the nuclear winter
I was hoping that by now technology and education would have helped all the humans to realize how to take care of each other and work together for a better tomorrow.
Instead we got this fucking mess that’s going on right now all around the world.
It’s really that. All that technology and we still didn’t solve the most primitive and basic problems in this world’s community.
More of a pet peeve, but I thought IT would be way more stable by now. Everything has so many bugs and it’s just accepted. I’ve grown pessimistic about new tech and I would prefer to wait a couple years before getting it. It’s not novel if it’s broken.
Side thought, I thought we would have hologram phone calls by now.
Phones that can be opened up and have internals replaced, like desktop computers
So like the Fairphone?
That one is still exclusive to a few select countries and won’t ship to mine :/










