DeSantis might be bringing shoulder pads back.
Similar: formicapunk.
Aside from the design, though, what unites most of the vehicle designs in that video seems to be "extra complexity for no clear purpose beyond the visual".
I remember the San Francisco Sony Metreon of about 20 years ago as being a kind of wonderland of new technology. There were cheerful robots doing synchronized dances, robot dogs trotting around being affectionate, arcades where you could play ParaPara and DDR, and showrooms full of round, white appliances that felt really friendly to touch.
Anyway, I think of that period as the last time that I was excited about the future; all future after that has been Garbage Future.
I think what really acquainted us with garbage future was Microsoft. Everyone has a personal computer... and it's the most quotidian thing imaginable!
The techno-optimism of the 90s seemed ridiculous to me at the time. But the idea that there would be dozens or hundreds of new billionaires out of it would have also seemed stupid to me at the time.
Windows XP was itself a step down from Windows 2000. That was when they started trying to make the interface look like it was from Fischer Price.
I never liked 2000. XP was the one that barely crashed.
3.11 was a huge step up from 2.0. And I'm pretty sure that 95 was better than it. I never really used 2000. I got a PowerBook in 2000-2001.
Now they want me to pay money to play Solitaire. Those fucking bastards.
Are they commercials for a deck of cards with a little sun that wears sunglasses and sticks out its tongue every now and then?
No. Commercials for incredibly stupid games for old people, visiting Texas, and adopting right wing political views.
Many of you are too young to remember what work was like before the internet. I would tell you about it, but it turns out, that now that I'm too old to remember.
My first boss still kept a daybook and stuff like that. I would write letters on a word processor but below the signature have "MH:hs" as if it were 1978.
16: I recently obtained a letter recounting a surgery I received as an infant, typewritten from a surgeon to a family doctor, with initials in that style at the bottom.
I learned it in school when they taught me how to type on a typewriter.
No, no. I mean a filing cabinet with copies of all correspondence sent and received. Filed by date but also indexed somehow.
I remember taking a class in the 2010s where the instructor printed out all the slides that were also shared online, amounting to hundreds of pages of slides for every student in class over the full semester. That seemed like a carry over from when you couldn't expect everyone to have access to a computer, plus the instructor came from a corporate background where it's likely a lot of executives associated being on a computer in a meeting with administrative work.
When I was in school, we had to buy course packets with the slides. But, yes, when I worked and gave presentations, everyone got a printout of the slides.
Wait, that's how my secretary does my letters. Under my signature, there's a "JMS:la". What does it mean? I just realized I don't know.
I am still mystified that when everything went online, so many public school teachers chose to create slides which were supposed to function as worksheets, where the student would edit the actual slide and could potentially delete large parts of their copy of it.
It means your secretary has the same initials as Lonnie Anderson.
Under my signature, there's a "JMS:la". What does it mean? I just realized I don't know.
The capital letters are the person who composed the letter and the lowercase letters are the person who typed it.
(I also learned this style in school, I think. Typing class in middle school used both computers and electric typewriters.)
"hs" means "himself" or "herself".
"hs;pl" means you typed your own letter while not wearing pants.
In Congressional offices the capitals are the Member and the lowercase are the staffer who actually wrote the letter. That's a bit of a special case though.
I still have a soft spot for Syd Mead's visions of the future, some overlap in style with the OP.
I think the insane pace of progress has itself dulled the possibility of excitement-- a single-wheel, powered, gyro skateboard, unrealistic to consumer litter in what 10 years? If something's technologically possible, it goes from prototype to abundant really quickly now.
Too bad that better batteries aren't like that yet.
Oh I see. It's not the notation itself that's outdated, it's using the notation when you've typed the letter yourself. But:
1) What if your secretary's name is, say, Henry Smith?
2) I actually do write my letters myself; my secretary prints them out on letterhead and mails them. Any errors are therefore mine, so what function does the notation actually serve? Maybe I should just ask her.
I don't know what happens if someone doesn't write their own emails. I don't run with that kind of a crowd. But, back in the day, people in my kind of position would have.
Actually, I'm sitting on the toilet.
I actually do write my letters myself; my secretary prints them out on letterhead and mails them. Any errors are therefore mine, so what function does the notation actually serve?
I think at this point it's mostly a vestigial thing that doesn't serve any real function.
I don't think there are any attorneys left in my office that have their secretaries print out all their emails. The last one I knew about retired over 10 years ago.
Time was, the discerning correspondent looked for a secretary with the initials "fu".
It's not the notation itself that's outdated, it's using the notation when you've typed the letter yourself.
I actually thought it was outdated as notation! I stand corrected.
Any errors are therefore mine, so what function does the notation actually serve?
I imagine plenty of people with access to secretaries like to have a means of yelling at a particular person if there's a mistake, even if it was their own.
I don't print out my emails, but I do still use WordPerfect. (I also normally write "e-mail," but someone made fun of me for that years ago, so I try to correct it when I remember. You'll pry WordPerfect out of my cold dead hands though.*)
*Not really. My office stopped purchasing updated versions of the software so I've (resentfully) started switching over to Word. Also, my grip strength is shit now because of carpal tunnel, so it's really easy to pry things out of my hands.
I didn't know what that notation usually meant until now but I always thought it functioned as a shorthand filing instruction that would be easier to read than the letter itself.
I didn't know you could purchase WordPerfect anymore.
34: Two ways I've seen.
Subject just says "On Behalf of"
Or, there's a way for someone else to log in, presumably without being able to read all the e-mails and send out the e-mail from Dr. Administrative Bigwig. The people who compose the e-mails don't sign their initials anywhere.
45 written before thoroughly reading 41.
43: If it couldn't be purchased or stolen we could conceive of a word processor that could.
IMHMB that the "startup" which facilitated my career change ten years ago got much of its revenue from us having put together the only iPhone app then capable of reading WordPerfect documents; there were always just enough lawyers and judges who needed that particular thing to keep us in business. For a while we even had an official licensing deal with the corporation, though the terms were pretty bad. Anyway I know a whole lot more than I'd like about that particular file format.
Shift-F7- Exit
F7- save
CTRL-F2 spell check?
That's all I got.
à la les Jetsons
AUX JETSONS.
Under my signature, there's a "JMS:la". What does it mean?
It means your secretary is from Narnia lah.
The real clue is that this was clearly a Japanese video, and Japan ca. 1990 was A. at its peak (although they thought they were continuing upward) in dominating tech and looking like the future, and B. rose on the back of manufacturing excellence. As someone mentioned upthread, Sony in the early '90s embodied techno optimism in a hardware, not software, sense. I remember getting to college and the East Asian students had Walkmen that were 10X better than any I'd ever seen for sale in the US: smaller, better made, beautiful. Some of you may recall that Sony was kind of the benchmark for the original iPod: could Apple make a personal electronic device as appealing and advanced and cool as a Walkman?
The other thing, of course, is that this video is effectively pre-internet (or pre-web anyway). Like, I don't know the exact year it was made, but the idea that the internet/web was the future didn't become embedded in the zeitgeist until post-1995, and I'm certain that video, or at least its conception, predates that. So yeah, a Jetsons future, not a universe-on-a-slab-of-glass future.
Another note on early '90s Japan: AIHMHB, AB lived there '91-93, but she lived in rural Japan, where weekly pay was handed out in cash in envelopes by the office secretary, where the schools were neither heated nor cooled, where the houses were still mostly rice paper. Her stock phrase when I met her was "People think Japan is all Sony, but it's a lot more complicated and sometimes backwards."
I'd be curious to know whether backwaters like her town are still so far behind Tokyo, or if 30 years have brought eg modern construction (almost) everywhere.
PS She brought back a very nice Walkman
||
How the hell is it possible that a major city in the USA does not have access to clean water and has no timeline for when that is going to be fixed?
The father of an acquaintance's (MB) mother was in the foreign service and grew up all over and in Maryland. He's an ophthalmologist. He'd always wanted to go on a medical mission to serve. MB's mother is from Mississippi, so when he settled there, he figured that counted.
|>
I'd be curious to know whether backwaters like her town are still so far behind Tokyo, or if 30 years have brought eg modern construction (almost) everywhere.
I think they are probably substantially improved given how quickly they tend to rebuild, and with updated standards each time. In 2018 Japan, 69% of homes were built during or after 1981, which compares to 47% of homes in 2020 US built during or after 1980.
Taking fireproofing as a poor but starting proxy for more modern construction, in 1978 56% of Japanese homes were wooden and non-fireproofed; in 2018 that was down to 23%. (Wooden homes period went down from 82% to 57% over the same timeframe.)
55.1: Teachers in Columbus, Ohio just went out on strike for a couple of days with one key demand being climate control in all the school buildings. They agreed to a contract with "a guarantee that all student learning areas will be climate controlled no later than the start of the 2025-2026 school year, including installation of heating, ventilation, and air conditioning in buildings currently without HVAC, and in buildings that currently only have partial HVAC".
52 Français?
OUI, ZAT WOULD HAVE BEEN A BONNE IDÉE, MAIS CE MAUDIT KEYBOARD N'A AUCUNE CLE POUR CE PETIT WIGGLY THING* AU DESSOUS DU LETTER "C", SO J'AI EU PERFORCE L'IGNORER.
*JE CROIS QU'IL S'APPELLE LE ZEDILLA.
I'm rather curious when the transition happened that tap water everywhere in the US became safe to drink. It couldn't have been more than a century ago, given how rare this in in currently-developing countries. Was it something in the New Deal or was it a Progressive era thing?
Progressive-era, more or less. It was not so much a single transition as a gradual development as scientific understanding increased and filtration and treatment technology improved, but the early twentieth century was the main period when water supplies first began approximating modern standards for potability. The political impetus came from the recognition of the importance of contaminated water in the frequent epidemics of the nineteenth century, most notoriously cholera but also typhoid.
I think if the standard for "everywhere" is limited to urban areas, it's well over a century. Even now, rural areas have houses with a private well.
There was a huge federal funding push for water and treatment plants in the 1960's. If your city didn't get the feds to buy you a sewer plant back then, there's a good chance that you still don't have one. They're expensive.
55: I spent a few weeks in rural Japan in 2019 and there definitely seemed to be a ton of old construction around, though I'm sure it was some improvement over the nineties. The biggest not-future surprise was how rare it was to find businesses that took credit cards. I think not that many young people stay around in the countryside, one reason the big cities feel so different.
I still use cash for most things. It's easier.
65: I wonder how Eastern Long Island missed that one. They're still mostly unsewered and it's a scandal. There's probably a good story.
64: I'm not sure of it was passed, but my state rep and state Senator were sponsoring a bill to regulate private wells. I'm on town water but some of the towns in the district are not. The next town over has small scale farms too, and I worry during this drought.
I can see the water treatment plant from my house. Except they just shut it down and switched to the regional water system because it was showing levels of PFAS above the regulatory limit.
70: Tim gets C and E news, and I read a blurb that a couple of chemists were able to destroy PFAS. I think they boiled it at low temperatures w/ some solvents. No idea if it can scale, but it would be great to be able to address that.
The biggest not-future surprise was how rare it was to find businesses that took credit cards.
I'm sure I've ranted here before about how infuriating I find it when Americans insist that cash is all but dead in enlightened topless Europe when I know from broad experience over 20 years that card-free restaurants are common, verging on the norm, in non-backwater parts of Germany like the damn Rheinland*. Servers with fat leather wallets are handling €300 meals, but people are telling me everything's card-and-chip and has been for a decade. Feh.
*increasingly a non-water part of Germany
Not only no cards, but some places only take the latest version of currency. I was last in London four years ago and earlier this year I tried to pay with some leftover bills instead of the new plastic Monopoly money and the shop wouldn't take the old stuff.
I still can't figure out how to pay with my phone.
You can barter it for a few hundred dollars of groceries.
But sometimes not for alcohol or gift cards.
Not while I'm still level 43 only.
There's a "Google Wallet" which for reasons unknown to me, is where airplane boarding passes are stored.
72 is surprising because I'm definitely in one of the backwater parts of Knifecrime Island and the only business I've found that wouldn't take cards was the dog treat stall at the county show and that was only because their card machine wasn't working
Yeah, Europe is not a monolith, Germany still likes cash.
Germany is a bit of an exception here in that case because IME France, Spain and Czechia are all at least as card-friendly as the UK... maybe the machines are more expensive in Germany?
In the Kaiser we trust, all others must pay cash.
Youngest son of Otto. "The son possessed all of his father's foibles without his father's greatness" as the NYT said, back in the days when NYT journalists could still write decent English.
I didn't know Bismarck had foibles.
re: 79
The nearest greasy spoon caff to me doesn't take cards, and neither do either of the barbers I tend to go to. I suspect for straightforward tax fraud reasons, but I may be wrong.
But generally, in my experience, you are right. Even the local ice cream vans and temporary stalls at the market, all take cards. I was in Czechia for a couple of weeks earlier in the summer, and that was the same. I think we came across one place, maybe, that didn't take cards, and I think that was a broken machine, rather than a policy.
Germans are known to be among the most price-sensitive consumers in Europe. Retailers doubly so because they are themselves German and have German customers. Many old-line and small-scale retailers don't take cards because they don't want to eat the transaction fees and can't find a way to pass them on to their customers.
Something must be starting to change, though, because in hip-ish parts of Berlin, "card only" signs are increasingly common. I guess the banks are charging more for moving cash around, or some such. Annoying for me, as my bank charges me 30¢ for each card transaction and damn if I'm going to add 10% or more to a small purchase.
88: Careful, please, if you wait long enough Mort works on you.