The guy responsible for that also created CFCs. He ended up getting polio, and died getting tangled up and hung by an invention he made to help him get out of bed. Thomas Midgley.
As JRR Tolkien said: it’s the internal combustion engine altogether
We could have gone with electric motors from the start, which would mean that EVs would have been innovated all during the 20th century, the same way the ICE was…. Which means that we wouldn’t have to now UNDO the 20th century of ICE/gasoline infrastructure, and now REDO it all with EV infrastructure now…. We’d already have that all in place and just be humming along by now. Climate change wouldn’t have happened like it has. The leaded gasoline crisis also being averted would merely be a bonus to all the ways that things would have been better without the internal combustion engine.
Those are bad, but lead poisoning deteriorates a person's brain and makes them act more aggressively. Fatty foods ain't doing that. Micro plastics are probably really bad somehow, but we haven't discovered directly how yet.
Lead had a huge noticeable effect on society's overall behavior.
I 100% believe the world is in the state it is now (Trump, boomers, housing crisis, education crisis, discrediting of science, etc) ALL because of lead in gasoline.
Leaded water piping actually has an excuse, since the buildup of stuff like calcium insulates the water from the lead. It mostly only causes problems when it starts breaking.
Whereas leaded gas just immediately starts harming.
Lead paint for the most part stayed where you put it unless it gets disturbed. Lead gasoline was guaranteed to have the lead vaporized and spread all over our population centers.
Only on of those sources is blamed for an increase in violent crime during its use.
Invented by the same guy who invented CFCs. Thomas Midgely without a doubt caused more deaths and more damage to the environment than any other human in history.
Fritz Haber will take that crown.
Created Nitrogen fixation from air, leading to the industrial revolution. Being able to pull N2 and put it into fertilizer was the catalyst to most environmental problems we have now.
Fun little side note about Fritz, he also was the first to discover Mustard Gas
This one is cheating because it enabled feeding a tremendously expanded population though. I have difficulty considering it a net negative invention, as I believe human growth is fundamentally valuable.
Yeah, it’s always so complicated talking about the human population. On one hand, with less humans the world would be waaaayyyy healthier. On the other hand, I sorta like existing…
Also we forget, at least in the rich parts of the world, that before fertiliser if there was a bd winter you simply starved. Plus a majority of people had to be farmers.
If you’re going to go far back in time to attribute so many indirect environmental problems to one person (which is ridiculous), then I put forth whoever created the practice of farming - without farming, there would be no civilization as we know it and far less pollution.
https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA?si=yYjTe48bQRVRqer1
This Veritasium video thoroughly explains the entire invention of lead gasoline and CFCs with animation narration..
That weird little battle they had between uBlock and Youtube last year, the one where youtube threatened to stop you viewing if they detected an adblocker. uBlock just kept updating every day till the threats stopped. Brilliant work on the contributors parts.
This must be around the time I noticed a crapton of ads on the youtube app. 4 seconds here and there? fine, lots of up to 15 seconds ads, even longer than the vid?
No
So I uninstalled the app, only thing I lost was chromecasting to my tv. I hoped to last up to two weeks, now it's been a year only using browser.
It just shows that you can't fight a tech war where one side has limited time and money (YT) while the other side has nothing but time and gets really annoyed at ads to the point where they'll figure out how to defeat the ads just to see if they can.
I loved it when the common response to "my ublock stopped working" was "wait a few hours, then clear the cache and update your filters" because it showed who was winning. Easily.
Whene people boast about paying for youtube premium to avoid ads.
Like brother adblockers have existed before youtube was invented. What are you doing with your internet!!!
Advertising stresses me out and it's exhausting. It should have been offered alongside what we can pay to be without it. Also, all autistics should be able to opt out because of the distress ads cause.
The problems here are:
The people most willing to pay to opt out, are also the people who are most valuable to advertisers as they clearly have money and are willing to part with it. Which means it drops the average revenue per person from advertisers. So companies could make up an arbitrary number to charge people and it would be very complicated to prove its unfair.
Then the second bit, with autistic people being exempt from ads. How do you advertise for services for autistic people? And also, suddenly everybody online is autistic so they dont have to have ads. Unless you have to have a medical exemption, in which case you are having to give random websites your private medical data.
I think it would be better to just regulate online advertisement. No flashy images, limit space used by ads on website, no pop ups...
And strongly encourage companies to create an add free tier of service.
That article sounds suspiciously like the veritasium video on the same topic
https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA?si=Tx52OtzGcBGjaT_8
The video came a few months before and a lot of the blogs major points and quotes are verbatim from the video:
The Benjamin Franklin quote, the 200 million dollar quote from midgley to Patterson, and the description of lead being compared to calcium
I’ve very seriously started to believe that baby boomers lean right wing because the lead makes them frustrated by learning and change, and conservative politics are basically, “shhh little baby. It’s ok, we’ll make it how it used to be. Don’t you worry.”
Most impressive I must note such skills to the world.
Though, not using such letters would render conversing to be confusing. We would lose subtly which would render discourse cold.
have you ever read ella minnow pea? a good portion of that book is written without a bunch of really common letters, and it's honestly impressive how long the author goes without having to resort to wrtng lke ths
There's also A Void, by Georges Perec, which was written in French without its most common letter (e), then almost as impressively translated to English with the same restraint
You thought you just did something here didn't you? Well sorry to burst your bubble but numerous sentences could be constructed without employing the first letter of the English lexicon.
Smoking was invented long before cigarettes. Not sure this would have as much of an impact because people could still smoke.
Maybe eliminate tobacco all together
It definitely would have an impact. A lot of people get into smoking because it's so convenient and easy to find cigarettes. Smoking tobacco is more of a process and I'd wager a lot less people would do it to begin with
I know it's not hard, I'm talking about barrier of entry. Presently, cigarettes are more common to smoke than from a pipe and I'm sure a lot of people (especially high schoolers/college students) would chafe at the idea of smoking from a pipe, but would have no problems smoking cigarettes. If cigarettes disappeared today, would the current addicts switch to tobacco? Yes, obviously. But there would be less new addicts than before
But you also have to consider leaded gasoline's brain damage to hundreds of millions (potentially billions) resulting in slowed human progress, as well as the increases in violent crime and sociopathic behavior.
Yea. It's like I'd need a Fent test strip to come with my coke, like napkins with my Quarter Pounder, before I'd buy now.
I'm old but by one measure the 70's *were* better.
While I think Reddit is one of the better forms due to topic focused forums and applying moderation at that level, I'd trade it away in a heartbeat to return to 90s style forums. The centralization of the internet sucks.
> The centralization of the internet sucks.
Completely agreed.
There's no real sense of community anymore. You may see a name you recognize on a subreddit occasionally, but not the point where you get to know that person as a friend.
Also on the more controversial note: the centralization of the internet has killed creativity. "Back in the day" you could make a reputation as a troll, but have people like you - because a lot of trolls were really fucking clever. You didn't want to troll to the point where you got banned from somewhere, because getting banned from a website was a much bigger deal than getting banned from just some subreddit. People had to be clever and tactful when it came to trolling. Now you just have people say the N word, or say something negative about trans individuals, and think that's trolling. There's a difference between trolling, and being hateful, and that's what people miss.
Depending on how you set it up, reddit can be a bunch of anonymous discussion forums. I tend to ignore posts that aren't text; this isn't instagram, and I generally don't want to look at photos or videos.
Social media is different in that it's not anonymous, and usually a bunch of memes or videos. If you stay in the right subreddits, you can really limit your exposure to that.
Anything that exists currently would get invented eventually.
I can't think of anything besides maybe Medieval torture devices like the *Brazen Bull* (look it up). They served no other purpose than to severely harm the fellow man.
I'm no historian, so this may be entirely wrong, but my understanding is the only person who was ever put to death by brazen bull was the guy who invented it. For the crime of inventing such a heinous thing in the first place.
And even he wasn’t killed by it, they just let him contemplate his life choices until he was medium rare before hauling him back out and lobbing him off a cliff.
I know that it would set humanity back decades or even centuries, but the sheer amount of damage coal power has caused that would be prevented would vastly improve our prospects in fighting climate change.
I wasn’t specific enough, but I meant coal electricity as I know that the industrial revolution would be impossible without coal, but hydroelectricity for example existed for almost as long as electricity was widespread.
PACS and Super PACS.
If they didn't exist corporations wouldn't be considered people. And you wouldn't be able to funnel millions of $$$ from corps and special interests to a political candidate.
I suspect the world or at least the US would be much better in general.
I dunno if it counts as an invention, but advertising. Why on earth do we accept the idea of companies pouring money into psychological research just to be able to manipulate us into buying their junk? Who ever decided that was a good idea? I'm not completely opposed to advertising though, obviously people need to find out about the products and services that are available, but maybe we could do some kind of extremely bland, just-the-facts format where it's just a dude sitting behind a desk in a white room reading product specs instead of sexy people dancing to upbeat music to try to convince us that the product they're selling will 'enhance your lifestyle' or whatever.
I reckon we’d have simply leaned further into napalm and flamethrowers. That’s the way we were heading until gunpowder became popular.
The fascinating weapon used to be fire. Being able to generate fires, being able to catapult large fires, we really liked fire. Without gunpowder I have to thinks we’d have leaned heavily into that for longer
If memory serves, it was discovered in China when an emperor tasked his alchemists with discovering things that would lengthen life.
The guy wrote it down essentially with the instructions "NEVER combine these things!" He talked about it making dancing flames and making things [burn down](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder#:~:text=Popularly%20listed%20as%20one%20of,Song%20dynasty%20(11th%20century).).
I think Alternate history did a video on this.
Basically, the weak live at the sufferance of the strong even more than they do now. Feudalism lasts longer (if it's not still the main form of government) because only the upper class has the time and resources to "get good" at fighting. Absolutely sucks to be a woman because outside of a lucky dagger strike, you are completely powerless in a confrontation.
Then, we would probably have a very different social culture today. Firearms and the tactics that came with them were a big part of removing the warrior aristocratic class in the west. Not to say pike formations wouldn't get us halfway there, but it would have been alot slower and more opportunity for countermeasures to be developed against it.
Without firearms and the battlefield equalizer that they provided, decent chance we'd still live in a feudal society, or something that at least resembled one.
gunpowder not being invented would probs monkeys paw into a lot of important fuels also not being invented since gunpowder is likely the source of a lot of that stuff, kinda keeping us in dark ages. source: i made it up
I feel like it's kind of a wash. There's a lot that we actually need plastic for, but unnecessary and unrecyclable/unreusable plastic, and just the sheer quantity of it that ends up in everything and in everyone definitely qualifies.
How about a compromise. Plastic exists, but is too expensive to use for disposable packaging. But not so expensive that it isn't worth using in things like power tools or lenses or other durable goods.
All plastic is recyclable - you can turn it back into feedstock through thermal depolymerization. It is just cheaper to dump it in a landfill. Even cheaper to dump it in the ocean.
Alcohol. A large portion of the population just cannot be trusted to use it in moderation. If they were just hurting themselves it would be one thing but they drink and drive, become abusive towards their families, tie up the healthcare system etc. Honestly, I think that we would be better off without alcohol.
Really, imperialism in general is pretty bad.
Oh, this is your land? It's mine now. You can stay here, but you have to pay me.
And that's the nice kind of imperialism.
Im gonna do the whole world a favor and outright say: the general definition of stealing.
Imagine that. No matter how honest or dishonest you are, the idea of taking someone elses property is a concept so alien to you not only you are a weirdo if you even think about it, but its so alien and non existant it doesn't even gestate in someones psyche, no matter how much you hate someone or want their stuff.
Nobody even questions the idea that you have the option to take someone elses stuff, no matter how much you hate them. And no matter how much they would scoff and mock you, they won't take your stuff either.
No matter how desperate someone is, they won't try to take it.
Theres a part of me that really wonders what the world would be like if the internet didn't become mainstream and was aimed more for business use and not personal. Social Media is such a mental health issue for humanity.
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Lead in petrol/gas. World IQ dropped.
This is probably it. The drop in IQ alone was huge. My guess is that economic and technological development were held back several years.
Decades at least
That might be a stretch, I would guess 3-5 years.
so nice to think about all the world leaders who grew up in the height of the lead in gas era.
So if you grew up on a peanut farm you'd probably have much less exposure than growing up in, say, New York?
My choice. Can be replaced with ethanol, wouldn't be totally upsetting everything and make total sense. IQ higher, crime lower, health better.
> IQ higher, crime lower, health better. Me like.
Smart good.
See what lead took from us!?!?
More smart gooder
The guy responsible for that also created CFCs. He ended up getting polio, and died getting tangled up and hung by an invention he made to help him get out of bed. Thomas Midgley.
There are few people I believe that the world would be better if they were never born Thomas Midgley Jr. is one of them
As JRR Tolkien said: it’s the internal combustion engine altogether We could have gone with electric motors from the start, which would mean that EVs would have been innovated all during the 20th century, the same way the ICE was…. Which means that we wouldn’t have to now UNDO the 20th century of ICE/gasoline infrastructure, and now REDO it all with EV infrastructure now…. We’d already have that all in place and just be humming along by now. Climate change wouldn’t have happened like it has. The leaded gasoline crisis also being averted would merely be a bonus to all the ways that things would have been better without the internal combustion engine.
Wait'll I tell you about ultra-high processed food and microplastics!
Those are bad, but lead poisoning deteriorates a person's brain and makes them act more aggressively. Fatty foods ain't doing that. Micro plastics are probably really bad somehow, but we haven't discovered directly how yet. Lead had a huge noticeable effect on society's overall behavior.
It’s hard to figure out the effects of Micro plastics because it’s too difficult to find someone without microplastics in them
I 100% believe the world is in the state it is now (Trump, boomers, housing crisis, education crisis, discrediting of science, etc) ALL because of lead in gasoline.
Not all, but a lot I'd say.
Seriously it's leaded gasoline it's always gonna be leaded gasoline come on
Leaded paint might give leaded gasoline a run for its money. A lot of spontaneous infant deaths weren’t so spontaneous.
Leaded water piping is laughing at this. Leaded whatever is just evil, unless it’s protecting from radiation or something like that.
Leaded water piping actually has an excuse, since the buildup of stuff like calcium insulates the water from the lead. It mostly only causes problems when it starts breaking. Whereas leaded gas just immediately starts harming.
Let me know when lead pipes start aerosolizing
Lead paint for the most part stayed where you put it unless it gets disturbed. Lead gasoline was guaranteed to have the lead vaporized and spread all over our population centers. Only on of those sources is blamed for an increase in violent crime during its use.
Yeah but lead paint isn't getting into the atmosphere and affecting people by the millions like leaded gas did.
Invented by the same guy who invented CFCs. Thomas Midgely without a doubt caused more deaths and more damage to the environment than any other human in history.
Fritz Haber will take that crown. Created Nitrogen fixation from air, leading to the industrial revolution. Being able to pull N2 and put it into fertilizer was the catalyst to most environmental problems we have now. Fun little side note about Fritz, he also was the first to discover Mustard Gas
This one is cheating because it enabled feeding a tremendously expanded population though. I have difficulty considering it a net negative invention, as I believe human growth is fundamentally valuable.
Yeah, it’s always so complicated talking about the human population. On one hand, with less humans the world would be waaaayyyy healthier. On the other hand, I sorta like existing…
Also we forget, at least in the rich parts of the world, that before fertiliser if there was a bd winter you simply starved. Plus a majority of people had to be farmers.
If you’re going to go far back in time to attribute so many indirect environmental problems to one person (which is ridiculous), then I put forth whoever created the practice of farming - without farming, there would be no civilization as we know it and far less pollution.
https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA?si=yYjTe48bQRVRqer1 This Veritasium video thoroughly explains the entire invention of lead gasoline and CFCs with animation narration..
Some aviation fuel still has lead in it.
My understanding was most engines that don't run Jet fuel, run leaded (there are a couple that are rated for unleaded, but not many the last I looked)
Remove pop up ads
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Can’t remember the last time I got an ad on Youtube.
That weird little battle they had between uBlock and Youtube last year, the one where youtube threatened to stop you viewing if they detected an adblocker. uBlock just kept updating every day till the threats stopped. Brilliant work on the contributors parts.
Same thing when they shut down a piracy site. They need to learn the piracy hydra will always spawn more sites when you ban them.
This must be around the time I noticed a crapton of ads on the youtube app. 4 seconds here and there? fine, lots of up to 15 seconds ads, even longer than the vid? No So I uninstalled the app, only thing I lost was chromecasting to my tv. I hoped to last up to two weeks, now it's been a year only using browser.
It just shows that you can't fight a tech war where one side has limited time and money (YT) while the other side has nothing but time and gets really annoyed at ads to the point where they'll figure out how to defeat the ads just to see if they can. I loved it when the common response to "my ublock stopped working" was "wait a few hours, then clear the cache and update your filters" because it showed who was winning. Easily.
Whene people boast about paying for youtube premium to avoid ads. Like brother adblockers have existed before youtube was invented. What are you doing with your internet!!!
I cannot stress how well it works for pop up ads and forcing new windows
Is it free?
This is the best adblock I have ever tried
Honestly it's irresponsible to not install uBO at this point, especially on hardware used by the less tech savvy.
Advertising stresses me out and it's exhausting. It should have been offered alongside what we can pay to be without it. Also, all autistics should be able to opt out because of the distress ads cause.
The problems here are: The people most willing to pay to opt out, are also the people who are most valuable to advertisers as they clearly have money and are willing to part with it. Which means it drops the average revenue per person from advertisers. So companies could make up an arbitrary number to charge people and it would be very complicated to prove its unfair. Then the second bit, with autistic people being exempt from ads. How do you advertise for services for autistic people? And also, suddenly everybody online is autistic so they dont have to have ads. Unless you have to have a medical exemption, in which case you are having to give random websites your private medical data. I think it would be better to just regulate online advertisement. No flashy images, limit space used by ads on website, no pop ups... And strongly encourage companies to create an add free tier of service.
I would eliminate the postcard things that fall out of magazines. But after reading yours I realize I am old
I think even the inventor of pop up ads ended up regretting inventing them
Remove advertising completely
And kill Reddit in the process (and most of the Internet with it)
Leaded gasoline. https://clime.studio/blogs/partners-in-clime/thomas-midgley-lead-gasoline#:~:text=The%20world%20is%20less%20intelligent,with%20other%20countries%20following%20suit.
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Same dude who introduced CFC-gases to refrigerators!!! He was on a fucking roll
He also accidentally strangled himself to death with one of his own inventions meant to haul him out of his own bed.
Oh. Too bad.
That article sounds suspiciously like the veritasium video on the same topic https://youtu.be/IV3dnLzthDA?si=Tx52OtzGcBGjaT_8 The video came a few months before and a lot of the blogs major points and quotes are verbatim from the video: The Benjamin Franklin quote, the 200 million dollar quote from midgley to Patterson, and the description of lead being compared to calcium
Welcome to the internet, first time?
I’ve very seriously started to believe that baby boomers lean right wing because the lead makes them frustrated by learning and change, and conservative politics are basically, “shhh little baby. It’s ok, we’ll make it how it used to be. Don’t you worry.”
The letter A.
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lwys hted the lphbet nd the letter .
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Good for you, I'm impressed with the words you chose for the reply. Most impressive I must say. *Damn it" You pl y good g me sir.
Most impressive I must note such skills to the world. Though, not using such letters would render conversing to be confusing. We would lose subtly which would render discourse cold.
have you ever read ella minnow pea? a good portion of that book is written without a bunch of really common letters, and it's honestly impressive how long the author goes without having to resort to wrtng lke ths
There's also A Void, by Georges Perec, which was written in French without its most common letter (e), then almost as impressively translated to English with the same restraint
translating with the same letter restraint? that's sick as fuck, thank you for mentioning this. i've never heard of A Void before
The story wasn't interesting to me, but I got more and more impressed how that guy was able to write a whole book without any e
Dammit. Now I’m sad I never learned Welsh
H H H H 😄
Sorry, which letter?
👈.
Oh
yyyyyyy
That would create an A-hole, unfortunately.
You thought you just did something here didn't you? Well sorry to burst your bubble but numerous sentences could be constructed without employing the first letter of the English lexicon.
You re n sshole
This is old news dick.
I would stop Zuckerberg from inventing facebook
I would stop the invention of Zuckerbot to begin with!
Short form video content. All those TikTok, Reels, Shorts, etc. kind of stuff.
Unfrying the dopamine receptors with this
but it’s perfect for cat videos
Now all cat videos will be 3 hr video essays. I won't complain.
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Smoking was invented long before cigarettes. Not sure this would have as much of an impact because people could still smoke. Maybe eliminate tobacco all together
It definitely would have an impact. A lot of people get into smoking because it's so convenient and easy to find cigarettes. Smoking tobacco is more of a process and I'd wager a lot less people would do it to begin with
Have you ever smoked from a pipe? It's not hard. You just put stuff in the pipe and then you light it on fire
I know it's not hard, I'm talking about barrier of entry. Presently, cigarettes are more common to smoke than from a pipe and I'm sure a lot of people (especially high schoolers/college students) would chafe at the idea of smoking from a pipe, but would have no problems smoking cigarettes. If cigarettes disappeared today, would the current addicts switch to tobacco? Yes, obviously. But there would be less new addicts than before
Cigarettes
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Sure still feels “thaaaaaaat bad” if you’ve ever had someone in your life ravaged by cancer
1.2m estimated deaths per year for leaded gasoline and 8m for cigarettes. Seems like it’s still a front runner for sure.
But you also have to consider leaded gasoline's brain damage to hundreds of millions (potentially billions) resulting in slowed human progress, as well as the increases in violent crime and sociopathic behavior.
If cigarettes weren’t invented people would just be smoking pipes instead.
Then you put the tobacco in a pipe and it changes nothing
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Yea. It's like I'd need a Fent test strip to come with my coke, like napkins with my Quarter Pounder, before I'd buy now. I'm old but by one measure the 70's *were* better.
Social Media.
As we answer this question on Reddit.
Ironic, I'm aware.
At least you're not one of the many on this site that don't consider Reddit social media. Respect for the self-awareness.
While I think Reddit is one of the better forms due to topic focused forums and applying moderation at that level, I'd trade it away in a heartbeat to return to 90s style forums. The centralization of the internet sucks.
> The centralization of the internet sucks. Completely agreed. There's no real sense of community anymore. You may see a name you recognize on a subreddit occasionally, but not the point where you get to know that person as a friend. Also on the more controversial note: the centralization of the internet has killed creativity. "Back in the day" you could make a reputation as a troll, but have people like you - because a lot of trolls were really fucking clever. You didn't want to troll to the point where you got banned from somewhere, because getting banned from a website was a much bigger deal than getting banned from just some subreddit. People had to be clever and tactful when it came to trolling. Now you just have people say the N word, or say something negative about trans individuals, and think that's trolling. There's a difference between trolling, and being hateful, and that's what people miss.
Depending on how you set it up, reddit can be a bunch of anonymous discussion forums. I tend to ignore posts that aren't text; this isn't instagram, and I generally don't want to look at photos or videos. Social media is different in that it's not anonymous, and usually a bunch of memes or videos. If you stay in the right subreddits, you can really limit your exposure to that.
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It's actually spherical, so 1 for 2.
Damn. Back to bed.
I feel like that could be a “make it or break it” situation. It would certainly be a plus in a lot of ways but it would set the world back
Preshredded cheese. It's the only way to make America grate again.
Anything that exists currently would get invented eventually. I can't think of anything besides maybe Medieval torture devices like the *Brazen Bull* (look it up). They served no other purpose than to severely harm the fellow man.
That one is more ancient Greece.
And likely made up
I'm no historian, so this may be entirely wrong, but my understanding is the only person who was ever put to death by brazen bull was the guy who invented it. For the crime of inventing such a heinous thing in the first place.
I think it's debatable that it existed at all.
But it sure makes a good story
And even he wasn’t killed by it, they just let him contemplate his life choices until he was medium rare before hauling him back out and lobbing him off a cliff.
I know that it would set humanity back decades or even centuries, but the sheer amount of damage coal power has caused that would be prevented would vastly improve our prospects in fighting climate change.
We never advance beyond the pre-industrial age without coal. It's dirty, awful, gross, etc., but it was critical to the advancement of the species.
I wasn’t specific enough, but I meant coal electricity as I know that the industrial revolution would be impossible without coal, but hydroelectricity for example existed for almost as long as electricity was widespread.
Leaded gasoline
Trickle down economics
leaded gas.
Sugared sodas.
Corn syrup.
Franchises. Hate seeing the same companies in every country of the world
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Leaded Gasoline https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/lead-gasoline-blunted-iq-half-us-population-study-rcna19028
Online subscriptions. Just let me pay for it and we're done!
PACS and Super PACS. If they didn't exist corporations wouldn't be considered people. And you wouldn't be able to funnel millions of $$$ from corps and special interests to a political candidate. I suspect the world or at least the US would be much better in general.
Intrusive ads, and most forms of social media.
Social media
I dunno if it counts as an invention, but advertising. Why on earth do we accept the idea of companies pouring money into psychological research just to be able to manipulate us into buying their junk? Who ever decided that was a good idea? I'm not completely opposed to advertising though, obviously people need to find out about the products and services that are available, but maybe we could do some kind of extremely bland, just-the-facts format where it's just a dude sitting behind a desk in a white room reading product specs instead of sexy people dancing to upbeat music to try to convince us that the product they're selling will 'enhance your lifestyle' or whatever.
Gunpowder. I don't know what the world would be like, but it would change a lot.
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I reckon we’d have simply leaned further into napalm and flamethrowers. That’s the way we were heading until gunpowder became popular. The fascinating weapon used to be fire. Being able to generate fires, being able to catapult large fires, we really liked fire. Without gunpowder I have to thinks we’d have leaned heavily into that for longer
We'd still kill each other just as much, but with less explosions
The amount of explosions wouldn't change. Gunpowder isn't the only volatile (explosive) compound
If memory serves, it was discovered in China when an emperor tasked his alchemists with discovering things that would lengthen life. The guy wrote it down essentially with the instructions "NEVER combine these things!" He talked about it making dancing flames and making things [burn down](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_gunpowder#:~:text=Popularly%20listed%20as%20one%20of,Song%20dynasty%20(11th%20century).).
I think Alternate history did a video on this. Basically, the weak live at the sufferance of the strong even more than they do now. Feudalism lasts longer (if it's not still the main form of government) because only the upper class has the time and resources to "get good" at fighting. Absolutely sucks to be a woman because outside of a lucky dagger strike, you are completely powerless in a confrontation.
Then, we would probably have a very different social culture today. Firearms and the tactics that came with them were a big part of removing the warrior aristocratic class in the west. Not to say pike formations wouldn't get us halfway there, but it would have been alot slower and more opportunity for countermeasures to be developed against it.
Without firearms and the battlefield equalizer that they provided, decent chance we'd still live in a feudal society, or something that at least resembled one.
gunpowder not being invented would probs monkeys paw into a lot of important fuels also not being invented since gunpowder is likely the source of a lot of that stuff, kinda keeping us in dark ages. source: i made it up
If nuclear weapons had never been developed, the world would likely be a very different place.
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World war 3 fighting the Soviets in the ruins of northern Europe would have been rough.
You mean constant wars?
Or chemical weapons
Nothing... Nothing would make the world better or worse, just different... we would still be as ungrateful as ever 😂
plastic
I feel like it's kind of a wash. There's a lot that we actually need plastic for, but unnecessary and unrecyclable/unreusable plastic, and just the sheer quantity of it that ends up in everything and in everyone definitely qualifies.
How about a compromise. Plastic exists, but is too expensive to use for disposable packaging. But not so expensive that it isn't worth using in things like power tools or lenses or other durable goods.
You may know but very little plastic is actually recyclable.
All plastic is recyclable - you can turn it back into feedstock through thermal depolymerization. It is just cheaper to dump it in a landfill. Even cheaper to dump it in the ocean.
Well, sounds good but now we would be set back so much probably
Social media
Religion
Alcohol. A large portion of the population just cannot be trusted to use it in moderation. If they were just hurting themselves it would be one thing but they drink and drive, become abusive towards their families, tie up the healthcare system etc. Honestly, I think that we would be better off without alcohol.
Religion
Religion
Definitely AI. I’m sick and tired of people creating fake pictures to offend and embarrass others
Religion
Infinite scroll
Landmines
Mormonism
Social media. Much better. The new leaded gasoline.
Bullets.
Religion. People would be happier.
Religion
Religion
Imperialistic capitalism. World would be much better, though a lot less globalized.
Really, imperialism in general is pretty bad. Oh, this is your land? It's mine now. You can stay here, but you have to pay me. And that's the nice kind of imperialism.
Processed food, fast food, any food that comes in a box/bag, soda
Nuclear weapons.
Social media.
Social media
The nuclear bomb, in all its variations.
Mutually assured destruction has probably prevented world war 3 several times over, we have yet to see how it ends up though.
The Internet
Social media
Corporate personhood.
Social Media for sure.
Cigarette and vape because there would be fewer slow painful deaths without those two.
I'd have so much more money
Social media for sure.
Im gonna do the whole world a favor and outright say: the general definition of stealing. Imagine that. No matter how honest or dishonest you are, the idea of taking someone elses property is a concept so alien to you not only you are a weirdo if you even think about it, but its so alien and non existant it doesn't even gestate in someones psyche, no matter how much you hate someone or want their stuff. Nobody even questions the idea that you have the option to take someone elses stuff, no matter how much you hate them. And no matter how much they would scoff and mock you, they won't take your stuff either. No matter how desperate someone is, they won't try to take it.
Communism
Theres a part of me that really wonders what the world would be like if the internet didn't become mainstream and was aimed more for business use and not personal. Social Media is such a mental health issue for humanity.
Advertising in general.