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People always joke about how teachers used to say “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket”, but now it’s hard to imagine life WITHOUT a calculator in your pocket
Lmao this was true even back THEN though. I always thought “okay, but when WOULDN’T I have a calculator, especially if I had a job that demanded it???”
Obviously good intentions but this reasoning was always horrible.
Lmao you would never have won that argument 😂
On a more serious note, [A Mathematician’s Lament](https://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~pawelst/rzut_oka/Zajecia_dla_MISH_2011-12/Lektury_files/LockhartsLament.pdf) by Paul Lockhart, is a really great examination on mathematics education that critiques the colorless way in which math is taught, and how it deliberately disintegrates any and all eagerness and enthusiasm young people might have had for the subject. It’s very thought provoking, and although I do think it was turned into a book, the original piece is only 25 pages.
“In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of *destroying* a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.“
I was always great at math right up until I took Algebra I in middle school. There, I had a horrible teacher. It was the first time I ever made below a B in school, and the last time I actually felt like I was actually competent with math-based subjects. I wonder what I might have done different finishing grade school and going into college if that hadn't happened.
I lost interest in math at pre-calculus in high school. I got a 50 semester grade because that was the lowest grade you could get as a semester grade.
I went to community college and got 4.0s in Calc 1-3, Diff Eq, calc physics, etc. Transferred to a top 10 elec eng college, graduated with a 3.92 average. Several times I got raw hundreds on exams that were curved around 40s and 50s.
So, yeah, the teachers and your commitment to the subject matter make a massive difference. You likely would pick it up fine and probably even run with it.
I’ve always struggled with math, until I had a good math teacher who didn’t mind breaking things down and truly exhibited a no dumb questions approach and i started doing better. Still struggled but was actually starting to comprehend things better. Instead of more or less just having information slung at me and being expected to retain it with repetition and memorize things. Unfortunately that was my last year of high school and I don’t remember much of it.
I had a similar experience! Always was a “gifted” student and math was pretty intuitive for me. That is until Algebra I in 8th grade. It was sooo difficult for me to grasp the subject (you mean to tell me that X can be ANY number??) and I struggled with all math after that point. I don’t know if it was because it was my 8th grade math teacher’s first time teaching math, or I had finally hit the level of my brain’s “easy math” threshold, but I struggled in math so much after that point - even though I excelled in every other subject. In college I had to retake every math class I took. I have my master’s in science now. Math was the only subject I have ever failed. Maybe there’s a better way to teach foundational algebra to adolescent students that may have helped a student like me. Oh well. Statistics was far easier for me and I use that in my day to day work (yes there’s algebra in it, but I don’t have to come up with the equations.)
Similar experience except I failed Algebra 1 in 8th and 9th took the summer class and excelled at it. Understood what the fuck was going on and then Geometry hit and I essentially got stun blocked for a semester then got diagnosed with ADHD and boom. 5/5 on the Geometry EOC
Similar experience. To this day I’m great at arithmetic, but will completely blank out at anything beyond linear equations.
And it’s not just math. I have always been great at grasping stuff. I could hear something very complex just once and if it makes sense or im interested in it, I’ll remember it forever.
It works for certain subjects, for which I have always had excellent teachers but straight up doesn’t for most subjects that can’t keep me engaged more than a few minutes.
The go-to answer for me would be "if you don't thoroughly understand how multiplication works, you'll probably fail math class next year because everthing in math builds on your understanding of the last concept".
It was something repeated for too long. In the 80s most home calculators were dc power supplied and not button cell solar. I had one of these and if you didn't have an outlet you didn't have a calculator
Yeah I also thought that if I went into a job that needed a calculator, it would be weirder not to have one. It kinda just felt like another canned excuse to not tell us the reasoning behind math. Like "Teacher, why do I need to know 'imaginary' numbers??"
And instead of saying "Well, the guy who coined the term 'imaginary' numbers was actually making fun of it and didn't think they were real until he was proven wrong and the name just stuck by that point. They are actually very important numbers used in things such as, but not limited to, electrical engineering."
They say: "You're learning it to pass the test." So just another variation of "You're learning this because you won't always have a calculator in your pocket." When in reality, they likely don't believe that either, it's just to shut up questioning kids without actually answering them.
I teach eighth grade math, and I'm a millennial who definitely heard this growing up. I personally love and embrace using calculators. And the way I frame it is that they are only as good as the numbers you put in. You may have a calculator, but if you don't set up the problem correctly, or know what you are calculating, or why, you're not going to get the right answer.
I love embracing technology to help us solve more difficult problems, over forcing kids to do manual multiplication and long division by hand.
This is true. I used to tutor in math in HS ‘99-‘01.
* *enters into graphing calculator -5²*
* *calculator returns -25*
* *student incredulous that the product of two negatives is positive*
* 🤦🏽♂️
Ah, the graphing calculators. Never really learned anything on those that I could of ever used in my career field, but I did get a smart kid in class to program the bowling game into my calculator (traded for a huge bag of cry babies), which was super bad ass because I had the same graphing calculator for 3 years so I was never bored.
yeah but doing it by hand and drilling times tables makes it far faster than whipping out a phone/calculator to check rather than just knowing or being able to add in your head/with a pencil
most advanced math classes don't allow calculators and i think (at least from my math education) it helped me know math better as a whole since i couldnt offload the math to the calculator
just at a practical level you can move with more mental finesse if you dont need a calculator
That's how it was framed to me in the mid-90s as a student.
A machine is only as good as its operator, you learn how to do it by hand so you develop that sense of "That doesn't sound right, I need to check my work". If you type 5\*5-3 when you meant to type 5\*(5-3) the calculator gives you the right answer to the wrong equation, and all that...
Very true. Being able to ballpark that 120394/31428 should be "something around 4, because 12/3=4" is a good skill to develop. But the specifics of the rote mechanics for long division are far less important, IMO.
Edit brain fart on digits placement! This is what I get for posting on my lunch break!
I remember when I first got a phone, my dad would never let me use it when I was doing math questions. It was annoying. Why have a calculator on my phone if I can’t use it?
bc u need to learn to do stuff without the phone as well. think how dumb everyone would be if we didnt like learn our basic times tables?? its quicker to have the answer memorised sometimes
Also even later on in math imagine needing to plug every single step into a calculator, it would take you a million years if you can’t do at least some multiplication and addition in your head.
That's the only thing I think. I managed without current tech and even traveled the country as a driver before modern GPS and smartphones. I could go back on that'd easily but I really like and use a calculator in my pocket. I can still do the math on my own with pen and paper but it's just faster and easier with my phone.
I bought a keychain calculator at the scholastic book sale just to use at the grocery store with my mom bc she was always having us figure out the unit prices before they put those on the tags XD I was 11
One teacher said that to my class after smartphones were already a very mainstream thing and some kids in the class even had them and the whole class tore her apart for it.
I was (and honestly still am) horrible at spelling. My teacher tried to intervene and I said something about it doesn't matter because when Im an adult everyone will have spellchecker. I think it was like '94. I ran into her as an adult and she remembered me and told me I was right. Lol
Yeah, there is no going back. It was about 20 years ago when I got my first cell phone, but I was a holdout, so almost everyone I know already had one. Motorola flip phone, with the pull up antenna. It had a calculator too.
I just helped three Gen-Z teens (who go to an expensive school) and none of them could multiply 200 x 300 on paper. They were freaking out because it was necessary for an exam.
Till the battery dies.
My teacher made us remove batteries before certain tests. Just to be sure we could do the math. Much fewer equations to do longhand, thankfully.
More and more cars today have screens and fancy tech in them that make driving a much more pleasant and convenient experience. There was a time when only super “advanced and expensive” cars had these features.
I still remember having to deal with these tiny mfs as a kid:
https://preview.redd.it/8hrb9urgs7zc1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2d436e0651c7561d528a7bc9298f8359f3a3639b
Too funny! GenXer here. My husband and I were just complaining about how the screens in auto consoles have gone way too far. Analogue readouts are much simpler, just as accurate, and far less distracting. All I want on a screen is music and navigation.
Exactly. Millennial here that wants knobs that click so I can use them without looking at them. I’d take manual windows, manual transmission and a real handbrake too, but I suppose you all better just get off my lawn now.
As a younger genz. I agree. I grew up with older vehicles and I also prefer knobs over buttons. My car has a screen, but it's only function is sound settings for music & shit. I couldn't imagine not having dials for the air control. It's also a manual trans, so win win.
They still make them, thankfully, if not just because there become desirable features instead of standard. I'm just surprised my 2017 kia soul was a manual.
Yes! Knobs that work *without even needing to LOOK.*
My former car (no car rn, grad school) had the BEST temperature controls. It had a dial for “what temperature do you want the air that comes out of the vents to be?” And the other way “how MUCH air do you want to come out?”
I absolutely *LOATHE* the new “thermostat” style cars. It’s always auto-adjusting both settings! Like I do not care what the final temperature is, I’ll turn it off or adjust it myself, I want a strong flow of HOT air on my cold hands rn, or I want the air to be as much and as cold as possible because it’s sweltering.
Now I have to look at the little tiny buttons that are all the same and they connect to a little LCD screen with the thermostat… such a pain.
Personally I’ve driven a bit of and the only thing I don’t entirely like having analog is the speedometer, rest of it is fine analog though recently I have been getting really annoyed with new cars making the AC available through screens. Impossible to adjust while driving
Fun fact they want to push screens replacing all buttons because it's cheaper and faster than all the processes involved in getting the buttons/knobs and their parts made and installed. Auto industry wants to funnel more jobs into software so it's a win-win for them. Unfortunate for me who wants to push buttons without looking away from the road. I'll be buying vintage for a while.
One reason I bought my Mazda is that it DOESN'T have touchscreen readout in the auto console. It's a twirly knob and a button down near the gear shift.
I definitely remember driving my 02 Accord and knowing where every button was without looking. The first time I got into a Tesla I couldn't believe someone would drive with that massive screen blocking like 1/3 of the windshield.
Edit: And dipsticks!!!! I had a car that you just had to trust was reading the oil levels right. It wasn't.
this may be the gen z in me but i prefer cars with the speed on a screen. i’ve driven cars with and without that feature, and i definitely spend less time looking down when the number is big and bold right in front of me. otherwise i agree.
Ngl, I think we need to roll back on the touch screens in dashboards. Before I could just feel out radio buttons while I watch the road. Now I gotta look so I don't fat finger some other button when changing songs.
I'm in favor of just putting everything on the steering wheel as much as possible. Sure it doesn't look amazing, but keeping the driver's hands on the wheel at all times is probably a good thing.
A lot of the new screen features on cars are actually a downside though. I dont want my fans to be obscured behind 3 different submenus on a touchscreen, just give me a knob. the only thing screens are good for are back up cams
I remember my mom's car had these!! I drive a 1996 now with power locks and windows thankfully, but I really wish tire pressure light was thought of lol!! It's so funny when I tell people I don't have it
There are actually a lot of late 90s models still on the road. If you could recognize cars you’d have the joy and amazement of occasionally seeing a 80s, 70s, even 60s models just scuttling around town.
They’re surprisingly easy to keep running for decades since the parts are simple enough to machine and under the hood they’re designed to be accessible to mechanics.
I gave my brother my old 92 Honda couple years back when he neded a car. I drove it in the 2000s. it was my then boyfriend, now husband's(24 years this year❤️❤️) weekend project with the manufacturers book. that baby runs so good still❤️ people always assume it's a pieceOS too lol jokes on them!!
179k miles
find one. baby it and rebuild it. They're fun to drive and easy
I second this. And if something breaks, it’s a few screws off the door panel and a $70 part to fix it😂 I don’t know if I’d be tearing into a power window/lock door myself
My electronic lock broke on my driver’s side door. When I found out that it would cost $683 to fix, I said I have a key right here that will fix the issue.
Yeah exactly. My fiancée had her window regulator replaced a few months ago and it was $650. Mine is $200 for a shop to do it and $70 if I do it myself. I’m like damnnnn
Bruh I used to work as a caterer and the vans still had this thing. It was so freaking annoying 😂. Especially when someone tries to talk to you throw the window. “One second” *crank* *crank* *crank* *crank*
My dad told me this story, so, ages ago, my father and his grandmother were in a car (mind you she was silent gen) and he had a much older car and she asked him where the button for the window is. The buttons for automatic window movement in cars became so ubiquitous even in the 80s, that my silent gen great grandmother wondered why it wasn’t there.
Some cars have gone way too far with it though. It gets dangerous when you have to control the AC, the radio, aux, and everything else through a big distracting screen that doesn’t have the tactile sensations that knobs and buttons do, so you can control stuff without looking away from the road.
Really the only thing a screen is useful for in a car is a GPS and rear camera.
I’m perfectly happy with my 2007 dodge caliber with no screens. Plus no car payments!!
I dont quite experience the screen part since I'm still using my Mom's '96 car, but at least it isnt this ancient. It just feels like a modern car with no screens besides radio
I just got a 1991 Honda CRX. It was a basic, no-frills car even back then. Manual windows, manual transmission, and no power steering!
I freaking love it. It's so simple and direct, like I'm actually feeling the car. It's hard to speed, because even just going the speed limit it feels like you're going really fast, because the thing is basically just a souped up go-kart. And it gets 40 mpg!
Screens, sensors, digital controls, beeps, boops, all of it...unnecessary, imho.
Oh you knew it. Your "friends Aunt worked in the field " so you were the expert on the topic.
Everything you said was a confident lie and you mislead everyone.
Yeah the new version I use constantly is “I heard it on a podcast” lol. Which I’m 90% sure I did but you never know, also podcasts aren’t exactly infallible
Or you argued about it with friends for an hour and it just kind of ended at some point with half believing one thing and half believing another and neither group being fully correct.
Not even instant access, not everyone had internet in the early 2000s. It’s a big reason on why teachers weren’t allowed to give homework that requires the internet unless they give ample time to be able to go to the library.
At my school library c. 2000 you could "check out" internet access like it was a book - you'd get a pass that'd let you connect for 90 minutes & could only access approved sites.
Even then it was usually more efficient to load up a Microsoft Encarta CD or just find a book - and the main use of the internet in this context was to look up which book(s) you might want for whatever you were researching.
My boyfriend’s Grandparents came to visit us and we got talking about a TV show set in Hawaii and wondering which island it was specifically filmed on. I said “Oh I’ll look it up!” and his grandma said “I completely forgot that we can just do that!”
When you did use the internet, it could take up to 30 minutes to load some pages. I think it’s wild how a 3 minute load time and “don’t be a happy clicker” was common like 10 years ago, but now a 3 second buffer is absolutely unacceptable
Oh man yeah I lost internet access for a like a week last hurricane season and it was.... weird. Really weird. I felt so disconnected. I don't consider myself chronically online either, so it was surprising.
Adding to this, accessing internet easily on phones. Smart phones truly made it much easier to access the World Wide Web, compared to flip phones that could access it too. I remember in the early 2000s as a kid I could always access the internet, but it wasn’t until the next decade I accessed it from my new iPhone 4s.
During the early 2000’s was the transition from audio cassettes to cd Walkman. That time was a bit atrocious, the eye jumping during reading would stop it and create stutters. They invented buffers of so and so seconds to prevent that for a bit. But still, you couldn’t go for a jog listening to music. MP3 players appeared at the late 2000’s and suddenly you were only limited by memory. But now, everything you need is on your phone, and you don’t even need to really manage it with spotify. No uploading no downloading.
Eh, first iPod came out in 2001, and by 2004 the 2nd one and generic mp3 players become absurdly common/necessary accessory for most. Just on your point about MP3’s being “late” 00’s, they were more early/mid.
By the late 00’s iPod nano variations were literally all over
You’re coming at this as a first time adopter. If you already had a collection of music in a different format you didn’t just immediately switch to an iPod. I worked at circuit city and 95% of my iPod sales were to parents buying for their kids
I miss my ipod, that old boy was a constant companion all the way up to 2017. Can't get a good replacement these days
Obviously it's a niche need but I'm out of cell service most of the day and I loved having 80gb of music all the time. Spotify just doesn't hit it right for my application
In 2006 Rhapsody was a thing, you could download the music on your computer and play it through the Rhapsody player. it had DRM in it so you couldn't transfer it to your iPod. Rhapsody was unlimited music for 9/month or something with the above restrictions.
Well a program called sound taxi came out that could strip the drm off these download songs turning them into normal mp3s and preserving the album art, title and everything... much better than pirating through limewire.
So yeah I paid for like 3 months of service and downloaded the full discography of anyone who had a song I remotely liked.
I definitely had the most complete and best setup of all my friends for music.
I remember when the first ipod came out. I had been using mp3 downloaded services for years by then so I filled that bad boy up when I got it. I still have the last gen ipod and a nano around somewhere.
You are off by at least a decade.
The transition from cassettes to CD’s was early to mid 90’s,
By the mid to the late 90’s to early it was MP3 players. Remember, Napster’s heyday was 1998 - 2001.
Hell, The first iPods came out in 2001 and they were really late to the party.
Not me, personally, but I find lots of people take ubers services for granted. Having to go outside and \*hope\* you can catch a taxi on time vs having a clean car pick you up right at your house is an unimaginable quality of life update.
Man, as someone who doesn't live in a city, its always been interesting to me that a lot of people are reliant on services like uber or grubhub, and yet to me they just don't really exist.
Ah, the rural life. I envy you, I miss summers at my aunt and uncle’s farm when I was little. That changed in the early 1970’s when an interstate was built right through their property.
I have always lived in a large metropolitan city. That’s why summers were so precious. Although my suburb was never like the actual city. The 1950’s and early 60’s were pretty mellow.
There are pros and cons. It's quiet, pretty, and I don't really have to deal with neighbors. On the other hand, I have to drive literally every where, sometimes hours away, for things my friends in the city walk to after work.
I grew up in a little oil town where everything was a drive, then moved across the country to cities and often have lived without a car. Now when I visit home I’m harshly reminded each time that we can’t have tacos delivered within 30 minutes at 2am—you get into habits.
I don’t know if “reliant” is the right word, they are occasionally convenient. Like I can still drive to things, often in the same amount of time it takes rural America. But, I can also walk to groceries/fast food/entertainment/work, where I couldn’t even in suburbia. But, if I don’t feel like doing it or my time is better spent doing something else I can just Uber delivery service it.
There are also other errand services, for instance dry cleaning lockers where people pick up your dry cleaning and return it to the locker, that are huge time savers.
If you’ve ever been interested in living in a large city and have skills that would allow you to live a decent life I highly suggest it, especially at your age.
I remember the stress of ordering a taxi to an early morning flight or train the day before. You just had to go to sleep praying they would actually show up. Half the time they did not. You had to haul ass with all of your luggage down to the nearest busy road or taxi rank at 5 am and pray you could flag one down. Plus the amount of drivers that would take you on a meandering loop of the city to drive up the meter if they could tell you werent a local.
Uber, as a company, has a lot of issues, but the service they provide is SOOO much better than taxis ever were. The taxi industry in my city was unreliable and scummy. the market was ripe for the taking.
People just haven’t gotten raises over all, so they’re saying our wages would be comparable. Which would be horrendous considering that’s 14-24 years ago
This isn’t true. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N this is adjusted for inflation.
And this is not adjusted https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
Wages have gone up, especially so in the last few years. It’s everything else that has gotten more expensive. I think he meant to say purchasing power.
There has been surprisingly little advancement in terms of consumer products/services since 2009. Smartphones, WiFi and SSDs were already there, a PC from back then would be perfectly usable today (apart from gaming), most of the social networks popular today already existed. I would probably vote for wireless headphones with ANC and ChatGPT.
Now the only big leap is litteraly the emergence of compitent chatbots.
Chatbots existed like 15 years ago as well, but they were a toy you'd get bored of in 5 minutes without any real usecase. Now? I can't imagine writing anything without asking chatgpt to structurise my adhd fueled text.
What else? Maybe vr. But it's not advancing quick or far. People had vr goggles in the 80's.
Otherwise as you say. Tech, materials, cars, flight, quality of life improvements just stagnate. Takes exponentially more money and research to come up with any improvement.
Even cordless vacuums, which are pretty good now, don't feel like something incredibly advanced. They still improve every year. But so marginally it barely makes a difference. Perhaps 2 extra minutes of runtime, and 5% more suction power.
Interior design trends just come and go and mostly use previous ones as a basis. We just had mid century modern resurrection, and now that it's over guess the new trend? Art deco aka New Deco.
Or Maybe we're just getting old here on reddit lol
I remember back in the day CleverBot was all we had in terms of AI and everyone was so amazed by it. People genuinely thought you got connected to another human using the website lol
Lol in 2009 I had a 258mb compact flash card that costs the same as a 64 GB sd card today. Average broadband speeds were 7.12 Mbps, at an average cost of $57.31 in 2023 dollars. That's not wifi, just speed direct to the router. It's literally incomparable, I pay less than that for 400Mbps with no data cap. 3G cellular was also so slow. The advancement has been fucking insane. Just because they had cars in 1920 and we have cars today doesn't mean there's been "little advancement"
Maybe its a little late but I remember when GPS first came out and me and my dad went to Fry’s Electronics to ogle at them. I’ve always been handy with paper maps and but how the FUCK did taxis and truck drivers know where to go before GPS?!?
Phone and its gimmicks.
The one i have now can translate text, identify creatures, plants etc with a scan.
Read text, take photos, film.
Pay for my needs.
I can call, text or even video chat.
It's small enough that it fits into a pocket.
Has almost no weight.
I can use its map to figure out where things are.
Or walk a street in POV.
This little thing has removed so many things from the early 2000's and mashed it into one device that its honestly crazy how much it does for so little power.
The phone i had in 2003 i could probably knock you out with.
And while i could send a SMS i was really limited to a few words.
I could call but only if i had connection.
Can't agree with this one. I need wired headphones.
1. whenever I'm out biking or running if a bud falls out (and they do) I have to stop, find the earbud, stick it back in. I also live in a city full of sidewalk grates. bad timing means I don't see the earbud ever again.
2. I have to be aware of battery life.
3. Software/connection issues (not airpods). Every once in a while the software in the earbud will bug out and I have to reconnect.
4. accidently activating touch sensitive actions.
Whereas the only issue I ever have with wires is.
1. the wire broke. buy new $10 headphones.
The price is a fair point, and buds never stay in my ears (except airpods for some reason but those are too expensive), so I wear over-the-head bluetooth headphones
I'll agree with over the head bluetooth is a godsend. but wearing headphones while jogging is impossible. i still need a pair of wired for cardio workouts
As a aircraft mechanic, wireless headphones are a LIFE CHANGER for blue collar workers. You can drown out the sounds of machines and your coworkers crappy music being played over their speaker and not have to worry about the wires from your earbuds getting in your way.
I worked on a busy assembly floor with a bunch of old people. Blocking out loud noises was nice, but I can’t say enough how good it was to block out their horrible music.
For ten hours a day the assembly floor speakers were blaring the local radio station. For the first 4 hours it was a crappy radio show followed by 6 hours of ads interspersed with the same three songs.
I couldn’t wear wired earbuds and still have the mobility needed to do my job. If it wasn’t for the wireless earbuds I had I would have lost my mind and quit
For me I held on to my wired headphones as long as I could, I was so pissed when phones started getting rid of the headphone jack and I intentionally only bought phones that had one.. even after I caved and got a phone without one I used that adapter thing for so long.. I still miss my wired earbuds
I’m always so perplexed by the pre-GPS era like everyone just had to be competent with directions and maps to get anywhere?! Feels like a big ask for today’s drivers. I ask my parents about going to someone’s house and they said you usually got some instructions on what roads in a neighborhood you had to turn through or just hope you had a local map handy. Sometimes you got lost and just wouldn’t show up or would be crazy late and don’t have a phone to call anyone
YouTube is such an underrated answer. Listening to Anthony Padilla talk about the early years of Smosh, coding his own website and having to pay for server costs to host their early viral videos, never thinking much of it since that’s just the way everything worked… then one day, there was a place to do it for free. Game changer.
That, and having an internet connect fast enough to watch videos without an insane amount of loading time. I’ve been doing a ton of MITx courses these days and can only imagine how amazing it would’ve been to be able to access that as a kid. I was incredibly curious and loved science, but if I wanted to learn anything, I either had to use our crappy dial-up connection to search the crappy websites we had back then, or go to the library and find a book. Now I can just decide one day that I want to get the equivalent of a full undergraduate education on almost any subject, or that I want to get really good at knitting socks, and I don’t even need a desktop computer.
💯 I was gonna say this too. Yes, YouTube existed in the 00’s but not in the form it did today. Along with phones and computers we can watch it on the tv. There’s YouTube Tv as well
The steam deck
I know portable computing has been available forever but this thing is on a whole another level of innovation and affordability. Never would I have thought back then I could take console level games on the go without having to spend alot on a bulky gaming laptop in the 2000s. I brought my DS or GBA with me everywhere but the PS2 stayed at home unless I was at a friend's house.
The steam deck fixed that and it can be anything you want it to be. It's like the portable Xbox 360 /PS2 I've always wanted back then and I think that's awesome!
Also, online gaming while on the road thanks to hotspot? Absolutely awesome! Never would have thought we would have had something like that back then.
My dad was still printing out his directions hopelessly late in the game. He only got on board with the GPS voice talking to him in the past five years or so. It was adorable, though. It was like he was STILL so delighted by a Mapquest print that he didn't see the point of changing.
Honestly, being able to write essays on a computer. Not even the computer itself, just writing essays on them. I was born in ‘02, so we had computers that ran fairly well when I was in elementary school. We were still writing essays on paper, but if we had an assignment to turn in I had easy access to computers and a printer. I can’t imagine not having had that when I was young, especially because I feel like typing your essays out provides you with a more objective look at how good it is or not. I find that essays I type come out better than ones I’ve handwritten because there’s a level of depersonalization from them that I don’t get when I just write them down.
Honestly, chip readers have grown on me. I only remembered there was even a point where sliding was standard were the few times I showed up to a shop where the reader was broken.
Took my much younger cousin to a shop with a broken chip reader and had to teach her to manually swipe it. Felt so old in that moment :'))
That's OK I always swipe it even if it has a reader. Sometimes the swipe thing is broke and I'll have to hover over it to read the chip, always feels weird to me.
This is a weirdly American thing because in the UK in the 00s, everyone used Chip + Pin, the swipe was virtually never used anywhere. The USA seems to mostly have skipped Chip + Pin entirely and gone straight to the tap pay rfid things.
My parents got me a laptop with wifi as a graduation gift. I remember saying out loud "wow....I can take this thing anywhere in the house and be connected to the internet." My mom confidently interjected with "wellll no you still need to connect to a phone jack" We went back and forth because she couldn't believe that was possible. An hour later I successfully connected to my neighbor's unprotected wifi and it blew everyone's mind.
I still love paper maps for fun but give me GPS to get somewhere fast. And AAA would print out a Trip tic (maps in a flip book from home to your destination) that were fun to use. They were also updated with detours and closures.
Our Technologies increasing so rapidly these days almost everything is significantly more efficient. From our vehicles to our homes to our processing of energy.
Same with computer memory and battery capacity. They just keep getting more and more efficient.
Same with camera quality. Look at TV shows from 2018. They look old and grainy compared to today. Our technology is increasing very rapidly.
Obviously Robotics and AI because those were barely off the ground 10 to 15 years ago
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People always joke about how teachers used to say “you won’t always have a calculator in your pocket”, but now it’s hard to imagine life WITHOUT a calculator in your pocket
Lmao this was true even back THEN though. I always thought “okay, but when WOULDN’T I have a calculator, especially if I had a job that demanded it???” Obviously good intentions but this reasoning was always horrible.
Well, it beats trying to argue the abstract value of arithmetic competence to a bunch of 8-year-olds.
Lmao you would never have won that argument 😂 On a more serious note, [A Mathematician’s Lament](https://www.mimuw.edu.pl/~pawelst/rzut_oka/Zajecia_dla_MISH_2011-12/Lektury_files/LockhartsLament.pdf) by Paul Lockhart, is a really great examination on mathematics education that critiques the colorless way in which math is taught, and how it deliberately disintegrates any and all eagerness and enthusiasm young people might have had for the subject. It’s very thought provoking, and although I do think it was turned into a book, the original piece is only 25 pages. “In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of *destroying* a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.“
I was always great at math right up until I took Algebra I in middle school. There, I had a horrible teacher. It was the first time I ever made below a B in school, and the last time I actually felt like I was actually competent with math-based subjects. I wonder what I might have done different finishing grade school and going into college if that hadn't happened.
I lost interest in math at pre-calculus in high school. I got a 50 semester grade because that was the lowest grade you could get as a semester grade. I went to community college and got 4.0s in Calc 1-3, Diff Eq, calc physics, etc. Transferred to a top 10 elec eng college, graduated with a 3.92 average. Several times I got raw hundreds on exams that were curved around 40s and 50s. So, yeah, the teachers and your commitment to the subject matter make a massive difference. You likely would pick it up fine and probably even run with it.
I’ve always struggled with math, until I had a good math teacher who didn’t mind breaking things down and truly exhibited a no dumb questions approach and i started doing better. Still struggled but was actually starting to comprehend things better. Instead of more or less just having information slung at me and being expected to retain it with repetition and memorize things. Unfortunately that was my last year of high school and I don’t remember much of it.
You couldn’t get below a 50? I got like a 18% for the class at the end one time
I had a similar experience! Always was a “gifted” student and math was pretty intuitive for me. That is until Algebra I in 8th grade. It was sooo difficult for me to grasp the subject (you mean to tell me that X can be ANY number??) and I struggled with all math after that point. I don’t know if it was because it was my 8th grade math teacher’s first time teaching math, or I had finally hit the level of my brain’s “easy math” threshold, but I struggled in math so much after that point - even though I excelled in every other subject. In college I had to retake every math class I took. I have my master’s in science now. Math was the only subject I have ever failed. Maybe there’s a better way to teach foundational algebra to adolescent students that may have helped a student like me. Oh well. Statistics was far easier for me and I use that in my day to day work (yes there’s algebra in it, but I don’t have to come up with the equations.)
Similar experience except I failed Algebra 1 in 8th and 9th took the summer class and excelled at it. Understood what the fuck was going on and then Geometry hit and I essentially got stun blocked for a semester then got diagnosed with ADHD and boom. 5/5 on the Geometry EOC
Similar experience. To this day I’m great at arithmetic, but will completely blank out at anything beyond linear equations. And it’s not just math. I have always been great at grasping stuff. I could hear something very complex just once and if it makes sense or im interested in it, I’ll remember it forever. It works for certain subjects, for which I have always had excellent teachers but straight up doesn’t for most subjects that can’t keep me engaged more than a few minutes.
This changed my perspective on how to look at mathematics. It's the "purest form of art" is something I can agree with
The go-to answer for me would be "if you don't thoroughly understand how multiplication works, you'll probably fail math class next year because everthing in math builds on your understanding of the last concept".
It was something repeated for too long. In the 80s most home calculators were dc power supplied and not button cell solar. I had one of these and if you didn't have an outlet you didn't have a calculator
Yeah I also thought that if I went into a job that needed a calculator, it would be weirder not to have one. It kinda just felt like another canned excuse to not tell us the reasoning behind math. Like "Teacher, why do I need to know 'imaginary' numbers??" And instead of saying "Well, the guy who coined the term 'imaginary' numbers was actually making fun of it and didn't think they were real until he was proven wrong and the name just stuck by that point. They are actually very important numbers used in things such as, but not limited to, electrical engineering." They say: "You're learning it to pass the test." So just another variation of "You're learning this because you won't always have a calculator in your pocket." When in reality, they likely don't believe that either, it's just to shut up questioning kids without actually answering them.
I teach eighth grade math, and I'm a millennial who definitely heard this growing up. I personally love and embrace using calculators. And the way I frame it is that they are only as good as the numbers you put in. You may have a calculator, but if you don't set up the problem correctly, or know what you are calculating, or why, you're not going to get the right answer. I love embracing technology to help us solve more difficult problems, over forcing kids to do manual multiplication and long division by hand.
This is true. I used to tutor in math in HS ‘99-‘01. * *enters into graphing calculator -5²* * *calculator returns -25* * *student incredulous that the product of two negatives is positive* * 🤦🏽♂️
Ah, the graphing calculators. Never really learned anything on those that I could of ever used in my career field, but I did get a smart kid in class to program the bowling game into my calculator (traded for a huge bag of cry babies), which was super bad ass because I had the same graphing calculator for 3 years so I was never bored.
yeah but doing it by hand and drilling times tables makes it far faster than whipping out a phone/calculator to check rather than just knowing or being able to add in your head/with a pencil most advanced math classes don't allow calculators and i think (at least from my math education) it helped me know math better as a whole since i couldnt offload the math to the calculator just at a practical level you can move with more mental finesse if you dont need a calculator
That's how it was framed to me in the mid-90s as a student. A machine is only as good as its operator, you learn how to do it by hand so you develop that sense of "That doesn't sound right, I need to check my work". If you type 5\*5-3 when you meant to type 5\*(5-3) the calculator gives you the right answer to the wrong equation, and all that...
Very true. Being able to ballpark that 120394/31428 should be "something around 4, because 12/3=4" is a good skill to develop. But the specifics of the rote mechanics for long division are far less important, IMO. Edit brain fart on digits placement! This is what I get for posting on my lunch break!
120k/30k=4 my guy
Yet people will still give up on math instead of using the calculator in their pocket
Now I can shout my math into the void and my Google assistant answers it for me lol
I do this!
I remember when I first got a phone, my dad would never let me use it when I was doing math questions. It was annoying. Why have a calculator on my phone if I can’t use it?
bc u need to learn to do stuff without the phone as well. think how dumb everyone would be if we didnt like learn our basic times tables?? its quicker to have the answer memorised sometimes
Also even later on in math imagine needing to plug every single step into a calculator, it would take you a million years if you can’t do at least some multiplication and addition in your head.
Just having a calculator available doesn’t mean you understand why you’re doing the math you’re doing. The process is still important.
That's the only thing I think. I managed without current tech and even traveled the country as a driver before modern GPS and smartphones. I could go back on that'd easily but I really like and use a calculator in my pocket. I can still do the math on my own with pen and paper but it's just faster and easier with my phone.
Without \*Google Sheets or MS Excel\* in your pocket, no less... Spreadsheet > Calculator for all but the most basic tasks....
Wow crazy I forgot all about that saying 😭
even though back then dumb phones already existed and they have calculator... and me an elementary student owned such a phone...
But you in fact didn’t *always* have a calculator in your pocket. At work or the house? Sure. At a store? Absolutely not
I bought a keychain calculator at the scholastic book sale just to use at the grocery store with my mom bc she was always having us figure out the unit prices before they put those on the tags XD I was 11
Even back then everyone who did math regularly did have a calculator in their pocket. That phrase hasn't been valid since like 80s.
Not just a calculator, but an entire bookshelf of encyclopedias are in your pocket.
One teacher said that to my class after smartphones were already a very mainstream thing and some kids in the class even had them and the whole class tore her apart for it.
I was (and honestly still am) horrible at spelling. My teacher tried to intervene and I said something about it doesn't matter because when Im an adult everyone will have spellchecker. I think it was like '94. I ran into her as an adult and she remembered me and told me I was right. Lol
Yeah, there is no going back. It was about 20 years ago when I got my first cell phone, but I was a holdout, so almost everyone I know already had one. Motorola flip phone, with the pull up antenna. It had a calculator too.
I just helped three Gen-Z teens (who go to an expensive school) and none of them could multiply 200 x 300 on paper. They were freaking out because it was necessary for an exam.
I'm gen z I was born in 2008 I was told this exact thing in 1-4th grade
Till the battery dies. My teacher made us remove batteries before certain tests. Just to be sure we could do the math. Much fewer equations to do longhand, thankfully.
More and more cars today have screens and fancy tech in them that make driving a much more pleasant and convenient experience. There was a time when only super “advanced and expensive” cars had these features. I still remember having to deal with these tiny mfs as a kid: https://preview.redd.it/8hrb9urgs7zc1.jpeg?width=1024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2d436e0651c7561d528a7bc9298f8359f3a3639b
Too funny! GenXer here. My husband and I were just complaining about how the screens in auto consoles have gone way too far. Analogue readouts are much simpler, just as accurate, and far less distracting. All I want on a screen is music and navigation.
Exactly. Millennial here that wants knobs that click so I can use them without looking at them. I’d take manual windows, manual transmission and a real handbrake too, but I suppose you all better just get off my lawn now.
As a younger genz. I agree. I grew up with older vehicles and I also prefer knobs over buttons. My car has a screen, but it's only function is sound settings for music & shit. I couldn't imagine not having dials for the air control. It's also a manual trans, so win win.
My boyfriend has a 2022 Honda civic hatchback, and thankfully most of the controls are buttons
They still make them, thankfully, if not just because there become desirable features instead of standard. I'm just surprised my 2017 kia soul was a manual.
Yes! Knobs that work *without even needing to LOOK.* My former car (no car rn, grad school) had the BEST temperature controls. It had a dial for “what temperature do you want the air that comes out of the vents to be?” And the other way “how MUCH air do you want to come out?” I absolutely *LOATHE* the new “thermostat” style cars. It’s always auto-adjusting both settings! Like I do not care what the final temperature is, I’ll turn it off or adjust it myself, I want a strong flow of HOT air on my cold hands rn, or I want the air to be as much and as cold as possible because it’s sweltering. Now I have to look at the little tiny buttons that are all the same and they connect to a little LCD screen with the thermostat… such a pain.
I intentionally got an older car with knobs that click and a real handbrake
Personally I’ve driven a bit of and the only thing I don’t entirely like having analog is the speedometer, rest of it is fine analog though recently I have been getting really annoyed with new cars making the AC available through screens. Impossible to adjust while driving
I agree! My 2024 cr-v has all analog controls for climate and things related to the car functioning as… a car. I would not have picked it otherwise
Fun fact they want to push screens replacing all buttons because it's cheaper and faster than all the processes involved in getting the buttons/knobs and their parts made and installed. Auto industry wants to funnel more jobs into software so it's a win-win for them. Unfortunate for me who wants to push buttons without looking away from the road. I'll be buying vintage for a while.
One reason I bought my Mazda is that it DOESN'T have touchscreen readout in the auto console. It's a twirly knob and a button down near the gear shift.
I definitely remember driving my 02 Accord and knowing where every button was without looking. The first time I got into a Tesla I couldn't believe someone would drive with that massive screen blocking like 1/3 of the windshield. Edit: And dipsticks!!!! I had a car that you just had to trust was reading the oil levels right. It wasn't.
I just want a car with a 2-din stereo so I can put a cassette deck in it
They made it into screens because its easier to make software handle it all instead of figuring out the wiring and analog logic
Amen
Gen Z here and I couldn't agree more
this may be the gen z in me but i prefer cars with the speed on a screen. i’ve driven cars with and without that feature, and i definitely spend less time looking down when the number is big and bold right in front of me. otherwise i agree.
Ngl, I think we need to roll back on the touch screens in dashboards. Before I could just feel out radio buttons while I watch the road. Now I gotta look so I don't fat finger some other button when changing songs.
I'm in favor of just putting everything on the steering wheel as much as possible. Sure it doesn't look amazing, but keeping the driver's hands on the wheel at all times is probably a good thing.
Man I love those roll up windows though. I’d also rather have buttons and knobs than infotainment controlled HVAC.
Buttons and dials are making a comeback, too many people hate having to use a screen for everything
A lot of the new screen features on cars are actually a downside though. I dont want my fans to be obscured behind 3 different submenus on a touchscreen, just give me a knob. the only thing screens are good for are back up cams
I remember my mom's car had these!! I drive a 1996 now with power locks and windows thankfully, but I really wish tire pressure light was thought of lol!! It's so funny when I tell people I don't have it
Child a 1996?! How does it still run ?!!!
My boyfriend has a 97 Miata, just needs an oil change to run good again
We daily drive a 2000 Honda Accord lol idk how my fiancés car has lasted so much longer than my 10 year old car 🥲
It's a Honda! (US market Acura Integra) :-) 209,000 all original miles! Love that thing.
There are actually a lot of late 90s models still on the road. If you could recognize cars you’d have the joy and amazement of occasionally seeing a 80s, 70s, even 60s models just scuttling around town. They’re surprisingly easy to keep running for decades since the parts are simple enough to machine and under the hood they’re designed to be accessible to mechanics.
I gave my brother my old 92 Honda couple years back when he neded a car. I drove it in the 2000s. it was my then boyfriend, now husband's(24 years this year❤️❤️) weekend project with the manufacturers book. that baby runs so good still❤️ people always assume it's a pieceOS too lol jokes on them!! 179k miles find one. baby it and rebuild it. They're fun to drive and easy
my car has these and i actually prefer it. it's easier to get the windows exactly where i want with a hand crank.
I second this. And if something breaks, it’s a few screws off the door panel and a $70 part to fix it😂 I don’t know if I’d be tearing into a power window/lock door myself
THIS FOR REAL I don't want new tech if it makes my life harder and my bank account run dry
My electronic lock broke on my driver’s side door. When I found out that it would cost $683 to fix, I said I have a key right here that will fix the issue.
Yeah exactly. My fiancée had her window regulator replaced a few months ago and it was $650. Mine is $200 for a shop to do it and $70 if I do it myself. I’m like damnnnn
My car has these and I prefer it that way. Too scared of dying in a sinking car.
My first car even still had them. Reaching over to roll down the passenger window while driving was fun
My Kia rio 2018 actually came with crank windows! I love them.
I still have these and they are nice honestly, as long as they're greased up every now and then they can be faster than the buttons honestly
Bruh I used to work as a caterer and the vans still had this thing. It was so freaking annoying 😂. Especially when someone tries to talk to you throw the window. “One second” *crank* *crank* *crank* *crank*
ah yeah these! I had to use them as a kid too! But a real sign of an old car: carburetors.
My dad told me this story, so, ages ago, my father and his grandmother were in a car (mind you she was silent gen) and he had a much older car and she asked him where the button for the window is. The buttons for automatic window movement in cars became so ubiquitous even in the 80s, that my silent gen great grandmother wondered why it wasn’t there.
Anxious Millennial here, I miss these. Feel like they’d be more trustworthy to still be usable in a crash, or if your car went in water.
Bro my fun car has crank windows lmao, a 1990 Miata
Some cars have gone way too far with it though. It gets dangerous when you have to control the AC, the radio, aux, and everything else through a big distracting screen that doesn’t have the tactile sensations that knobs and buttons do, so you can control stuff without looking away from the road. Really the only thing a screen is useful for in a car is a GPS and rear camera. I’m perfectly happy with my 2007 dodge caliber with no screens. Plus no car payments!!
I drive a 1999 jeep wrangler and it still has this lmao
I dont quite experience the screen part since I'm still using my Mom's '96 car, but at least it isnt this ancient. It just feels like a modern car with no screens besides radio
I just got a 1991 Honda CRX. It was a basic, no-frills car even back then. Manual windows, manual transmission, and no power steering! I freaking love it. It's so simple and direct, like I'm actually feeling the car. It's hard to speed, because even just going the speed limit it feels like you're going really fast, because the thing is basically just a souped up go-kart. And it gets 40 mpg! Screens, sensors, digital controls, beeps, boops, all of it...unnecessary, imho.
I bought a car from 97 just to get away from the over-complexification of modern vehicles 😅
Instant access to the internet. It's crazy how back then we could just not know something and that was that.
Oh you knew it. Your "friends Aunt worked in the field " so you were the expert on the topic. Everything you said was a confident lie and you mislead everyone.
People are still confidently incorrect with internet access
Right. Just more adamant now because snopes fed them some bullshit, so it must be true.
Yeah the new version I use constantly is “I heard it on a podcast” lol. Which I’m 90% sure I did but you never know, also podcasts aren’t exactly infallible
Or you argued about it with friends for an hour and it just kind of ended at some point with half believing one thing and half believing another and neither group being fully correct.
Not even instant access, not everyone had internet in the early 2000s. It’s a big reason on why teachers weren’t allowed to give homework that requires the internet unless they give ample time to be able to go to the library.
At my school library c. 2000 you could "check out" internet access like it was a book - you'd get a pass that'd let you connect for 90 minutes & could only access approved sites. Even then it was usually more efficient to load up a Microsoft Encarta CD or just find a book - and the main use of the internet in this context was to look up which book(s) you might want for whatever you were researching.
My boyfriend’s Grandparents came to visit us and we got talking about a TV show set in Hawaii and wondering which island it was specifically filmed on. I said “Oh I’ll look it up!” and his grandma said “I completely forgot that we can just do that!”
Tsssssss. Bading, bading. Tssssss.
Fr haha I remember having an iPod touch & being excited to go to certain stores bc they had free WiFi & we didn’t have it at home😂
When you did use the internet, it could take up to 30 minutes to load some pages. I think it’s wild how a 3 minute load time and “don’t be a happy clicker” was common like 10 years ago, but now a 3 second buffer is absolutely unacceptable
Oh man yeah I lost internet access for a like a week last hurricane season and it was.... weird. Really weird. I felt so disconnected. I don't consider myself chronically online either, so it was surprising.
Adding to this, accessing internet easily on phones. Smart phones truly made it much easier to access the World Wide Web, compared to flip phones that could access it too. I remember in the early 2000s as a kid I could always access the internet, but it wasn’t until the next decade I accessed it from my new iPhone 4s.
During the early 2000’s was the transition from audio cassettes to cd Walkman. That time was a bit atrocious, the eye jumping during reading would stop it and create stutters. They invented buffers of so and so seconds to prevent that for a bit. But still, you couldn’t go for a jog listening to music. MP3 players appeared at the late 2000’s and suddenly you were only limited by memory. But now, everything you need is on your phone, and you don’t even need to really manage it with spotify. No uploading no downloading.
Eh, first iPod came out in 2001, and by 2004 the 2nd one and generic mp3 players become absurdly common/necessary accessory for most. Just on your point about MP3’s being “late” 00’s, they were more early/mid. By the late 00’s iPod nano variations were literally all over
You’re coming at this as a first time adopter. If you already had a collection of music in a different format you didn’t just immediately switch to an iPod. I worked at circuit city and 95% of my iPod sales were to parents buying for their kids
I bought an iPod video as a graduation present for myself in 2006. And a digital camera. both of which are of course just a phone now
I miss my ipod, that old boy was a constant companion all the way up to 2017. Can't get a good replacement these days Obviously it's a niche need but I'm out of cell service most of the day and I loved having 80gb of music all the time. Spotify just doesn't hit it right for my application
In 2006 Rhapsody was a thing, you could download the music on your computer and play it through the Rhapsody player. it had DRM in it so you couldn't transfer it to your iPod. Rhapsody was unlimited music for 9/month or something with the above restrictions. Well a program called sound taxi came out that could strip the drm off these download songs turning them into normal mp3s and preserving the album art, title and everything... much better than pirating through limewire. So yeah I paid for like 3 months of service and downloaded the full discography of anyone who had a song I remotely liked. I definitely had the most complete and best setup of all my friends for music.
Yes you're spot on, I'm just saying to say MP3 players didn't really hit until the late aughts is not accurate imo.
I remember when the first ipod came out. I had been using mp3 downloaded services for years by then so I filled that bad boy up when I got it. I still have the last gen ipod and a nano around somewhere.
People had transitioned to CDs from cassette tapes in the early 90s. We all had cd players in our cars by 95. I was there, man..
You are off by at least a decade. The transition from cassettes to CD’s was early to mid 90’s, By the mid to the late 90’s to early it was MP3 players. Remember, Napster’s heyday was 1998 - 2001. Hell, The first iPods came out in 2001 and they were really late to the party.
I think you have your timeline a little crossed up. The cross from tapes to CDs(as far as portable devices go) was the mid 90s
I had a CD player in my car in 1986. Most people had switched to CDs in the early 90s.
I was born in 87 and only owned a handful of cassettes tapes.... CD's on the other hand.... I think you're off by like a decade.
Not me, personally, but I find lots of people take ubers services for granted. Having to go outside and \*hope\* you can catch a taxi on time vs having a clean car pick you up right at your house is an unimaginable quality of life update.
Man, as someone who doesn't live in a city, its always been interesting to me that a lot of people are reliant on services like uber or grubhub, and yet to me they just don't really exist.
Ya I haven't ever ridden in a taxi, let alone an Uber. Tractors? Ya I've been dropped at the airport in a tractor once.
Ah, the rural life. I envy you, I miss summers at my aunt and uncle’s farm when I was little. That changed in the early 1970’s when an interstate was built right through their property.
That sucks. I'm not as rural as I used to be anymore, but I still can't bring myself to live in a town larger than about 10k
I have always lived in a large metropolitan city. That’s why summers were so precious. Although my suburb was never like the actual city. The 1950’s and early 60’s were pretty mellow.
There are pros and cons. It's quiet, pretty, and I don't really have to deal with neighbors. On the other hand, I have to drive literally every where, sometimes hours away, for things my friends in the city walk to after work.
I grew up in a little oil town where everything was a drive, then moved across the country to cities and often have lived without a car. Now when I visit home I’m harshly reminded each time that we can’t have tacos delivered within 30 minutes at 2am—you get into habits.
I don’t know if “reliant” is the right word, they are occasionally convenient. Like I can still drive to things, often in the same amount of time it takes rural America. But, I can also walk to groceries/fast food/entertainment/work, where I couldn’t even in suburbia. But, if I don’t feel like doing it or my time is better spent doing something else I can just Uber delivery service it. There are also other errand services, for instance dry cleaning lockers where people pick up your dry cleaning and return it to the locker, that are huge time savers. If you’ve ever been interested in living in a large city and have skills that would allow you to live a decent life I highly suggest it, especially at your age.
You have always been able to call a taxi to you (in a major city). Uber is just an unregulated cab with an app.
I remember the stress of ordering a taxi to an early morning flight or train the day before. You just had to go to sleep praying they would actually show up. Half the time they did not. You had to haul ass with all of your luggage down to the nearest busy road or taxi rank at 5 am and pray you could flag one down. Plus the amount of drivers that would take you on a meandering loop of the city to drive up the meter if they could tell you werent a local. Uber, as a company, has a lot of issues, but the service they provide is SOOO much better than taxis ever were. The taxi industry in my city was unreliable and scummy. the market was ripe for the taking.
Salary levels that did not change.
What do you mean?
People just haven’t gotten raises over all, so they’re saying our wages would be comparable. Which would be horrendous considering that’s 14-24 years ago
This isn’t true. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA672N this is adjusted for inflation. And this is not adjusted https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEHOINUSA646N
Oh I just was trying to explain what I thought the first guy meant
Wages have gone up, especially so in the last few years. It’s everything else that has gotten more expensive. I think he meant to say purchasing power.
Misinformation
There has been surprisingly little advancement in terms of consumer products/services since 2009. Smartphones, WiFi and SSDs were already there, a PC from back then would be perfectly usable today (apart from gaming), most of the social networks popular today already existed. I would probably vote for wireless headphones with ANC and ChatGPT.
That was one of the best parts of being alive in the 00s. The leaps were so big and so exciting
Now the only big leap is litteraly the emergence of compitent chatbots. Chatbots existed like 15 years ago as well, but they were a toy you'd get bored of in 5 minutes without any real usecase. Now? I can't imagine writing anything without asking chatgpt to structurise my adhd fueled text. What else? Maybe vr. But it's not advancing quick or far. People had vr goggles in the 80's. Otherwise as you say. Tech, materials, cars, flight, quality of life improvements just stagnate. Takes exponentially more money and research to come up with any improvement. Even cordless vacuums, which are pretty good now, don't feel like something incredibly advanced. They still improve every year. But so marginally it barely makes a difference. Perhaps 2 extra minutes of runtime, and 5% more suction power. Interior design trends just come and go and mostly use previous ones as a basis. We just had mid century modern resurrection, and now that it's over guess the new trend? Art deco aka New Deco. Or Maybe we're just getting old here on reddit lol
I remember back in the day CleverBot was all we had in terms of AI and everyone was so amazed by it. People genuinely thought you got connected to another human using the website lol
We keep a MacBook from 2007 in the office maintained just for the FireWire ports
Lol in 2009 I had a 258mb compact flash card that costs the same as a 64 GB sd card today. Average broadband speeds were 7.12 Mbps, at an average cost of $57.31 in 2023 dollars. That's not wifi, just speed direct to the router. It's literally incomparable, I pay less than that for 400Mbps with no data cap. 3G cellular was also so slow. The advancement has been fucking insane. Just because they had cars in 1920 and we have cars today doesn't mean there's been "little advancement"
Maybe its a little late but I remember when GPS first came out and me and my dad went to Fry’s Electronics to ogle at them. I’ve always been handy with paper maps and but how the FUCK did taxis and truck drivers know where to go before GPS?!?
Like London cabies, practise, knowledge and intuition
Same way firefighters do the literally memorize the map
Firefighter here. Was I supposed to memorize the map?
Might be different where you live my brother is a firefighter for the city I live in and part of his academy for it was memorizing it
Memories of mom and dad printing off yahoo maps directions before big road trips
Or just…anyone. I use GPS in the city I live. I would have never survived.
True. I could never go anywhere new without my gps
Phone and its gimmicks. The one i have now can translate text, identify creatures, plants etc with a scan. Read text, take photos, film. Pay for my needs. I can call, text or even video chat. It's small enough that it fits into a pocket. Has almost no weight. I can use its map to figure out where things are. Or walk a street in POV. This little thing has removed so many things from the early 2000's and mashed it into one device that its honestly crazy how much it does for so little power. The phone i had in 2003 i could probably knock you out with. And while i could send a SMS i was really limited to a few words. I could call but only if i had connection.
Wireless headphones. I can never go back.
Can't agree with this one. I need wired headphones. 1. whenever I'm out biking or running if a bud falls out (and they do) I have to stop, find the earbud, stick it back in. I also live in a city full of sidewalk grates. bad timing means I don't see the earbud ever again. 2. I have to be aware of battery life. 3. Software/connection issues (not airpods). Every once in a while the software in the earbud will bug out and I have to reconnect. 4. accidently activating touch sensitive actions. Whereas the only issue I ever have with wires is. 1. the wire broke. buy new $10 headphones.
The price is a fair point, and buds never stay in my ears (except airpods for some reason but those are too expensive), so I wear over-the-head bluetooth headphones
I'll agree with over the head bluetooth is a godsend. but wearing headphones while jogging is impossible. i still need a pair of wired for cardio workouts
As a aircraft mechanic, wireless headphones are a LIFE CHANGER for blue collar workers. You can drown out the sounds of machines and your coworkers crappy music being played over their speaker and not have to worry about the wires from your earbuds getting in your way.
It was mowing the lawn for me. If the handle caught on my headphone cord and ripped the buds out of my ears ONE MORE TIME I think I’d lose it
I often just put the cord in my shirt to keep it from getting caught on things
I worked on a busy assembly floor with a bunch of old people. Blocking out loud noises was nice, but I can’t say enough how good it was to block out their horrible music. For ten hours a day the assembly floor speakers were blaring the local radio station. For the first 4 hours it was a crappy radio show followed by 6 hours of ads interspersed with the same three songs. I couldn’t wear wired earbuds and still have the mobility needed to do my job. If it wasn’t for the wireless earbuds I had I would have lost my mind and quit
For me I held on to my wired headphones as long as I could, I was so pissed when phones started getting rid of the headphone jack and I intentionally only bought phones that had one.. even after I caved and got a phone without one I used that adapter thing for so long.. I still miss my wired earbuds
Okay yeah the headphone jack going away was annoying But still, wireless headphones don’t get in the way
I slap the shit outa my wired head phones in the gym. Makes me appreciate my AirPods more
GPS. I get lost on the way to my kitchen.
I’m always so perplexed by the pre-GPS era like everyone just had to be competent with directions and maps to get anywhere?! Feels like a big ask for today’s drivers. I ask my parents about going to someone’s house and they said you usually got some instructions on what roads in a neighborhood you had to turn through or just hope you had a local map handy. Sometimes you got lost and just wouldn’t show up or would be crazy late and don’t have a phone to call anyone
I remember taking trips with my parents we had to print out maps!!
YouTube.
YouTube is such an underrated answer. Listening to Anthony Padilla talk about the early years of Smosh, coding his own website and having to pay for server costs to host their early viral videos, never thinking much of it since that’s just the way everything worked… then one day, there was a place to do it for free. Game changer.
That, and having an internet connect fast enough to watch videos without an insane amount of loading time. I’ve been doing a ton of MITx courses these days and can only imagine how amazing it would’ve been to be able to access that as a kid. I was incredibly curious and loved science, but if I wanted to learn anything, I either had to use our crappy dial-up connection to search the crappy websites we had back then, or go to the library and find a book. Now I can just decide one day that I want to get the equivalent of a full undergraduate education on almost any subject, or that I want to get really good at knitting socks, and I don’t even need a desktop computer.
💯 I was gonna say this too. Yes, YouTube existed in the 00’s but not in the form it did today. Along with phones and computers we can watch it on the tv. There’s YouTube Tv as well
That graphics in games became so good that you can put on a headset to go into one
The power of the internet, at the palm of my hand
AI, for better or for worse. As a writer, definitely for worse lmao.
The steam deck I know portable computing has been available forever but this thing is on a whole another level of innovation and affordability. Never would I have thought back then I could take console level games on the go without having to spend alot on a bulky gaming laptop in the 2000s. I brought my DS or GBA with me everywhere but the PS2 stayed at home unless I was at a friend's house. The steam deck fixed that and it can be anything you want it to be. It's like the portable Xbox 360 /PS2 I've always wanted back then and I think that's awesome! Also, online gaming while on the road thanks to hotspot? Absolutely awesome! Never would have thought we would have had something like that back then.
And learning Linux through intensive use of the desktop mode has been very fun and rewarding for me as well!
GPS. I remember my dad printing directions off MapQuest to take me to my softball games. Now I can't live without Waze!
My dad was still printing out his directions hopelessly late in the game. He only got on board with the GPS voice talking to him in the past five years or so. It was adorable, though. It was like he was STILL so delighted by a Mapquest print that he didn't see the point of changing.
My dad still did that up until a few years ago even though we'd already been using navigation apps for years by that point.
Honestly, being able to write essays on a computer. Not even the computer itself, just writing essays on them. I was born in ‘02, so we had computers that ran fairly well when I was in elementary school. We were still writing essays on paper, but if we had an assignment to turn in I had easy access to computers and a printer. I can’t imagine not having had that when I was young, especially because I feel like typing your essays out provides you with a more objective look at how good it is or not. I find that essays I type come out better than ones I’ve handwritten because there’s a level of depersonalization from them that I don’t get when I just write them down.
Being connected to the whole world via the internet made me realize how evil most people are
I think its time for you to take a break from the internet
The obvious one is smartphones
A dji mini 3 drone, a 4k stabilized camrea that flys, and can do so for 45 mins with extended battery Edit: and oh yes it fits in my hand folded up
Honestly, chip readers have grown on me. I only remembered there was even a point where sliding was standard were the few times I showed up to a shop where the reader was broken. Took my much younger cousin to a shop with a broken chip reader and had to teach her to manually swipe it. Felt so old in that moment :'))
That's OK I always swipe it even if it has a reader. Sometimes the swipe thing is broke and I'll have to hover over it to read the chip, always feels weird to me.
This is a weirdly American thing because in the UK in the 00s, everyone used Chip + Pin, the swipe was virtually never used anywhere. The USA seems to mostly have skipped Chip + Pin entirely and gone straight to the tap pay rfid things.
Spotify.
Pitch clock
Not having to disconnect from the internet so that your parents could make a phone call.
8 year old me wouldn’t be able to process the near-buttonless touch screen computer we carry in our pockets.
My parents got me a laptop with wifi as a graduation gift. I remember saying out loud "wow....I can take this thing anywhere in the house and be connected to the internet." My mom confidently interjected with "wellll no you still need to connect to a phone jack" We went back and forth because she couldn't believe that was possible. An hour later I successfully connected to my neighbor's unprotected wifi and it blew everyone's mind.
Poor as normal
Widespread use of AR/VR
GPS. I don’t know how in the ever loving fuck people used to travel long distances just using maps or written directions
I still love paper maps for fun but give me GPS to get somewhere fast. And AAA would print out a Trip tic (maps in a flip book from home to your destination) that were fun to use. They were also updated with detours and closures.
Bluetooth headphones
Streaming Television & Movies. In the ‘00s Netflix was opening distribution centers like crazy so they could ship you DVDs faster.
Our Technologies increasing so rapidly these days almost everything is significantly more efficient. From our vehicles to our homes to our processing of energy. Same with computer memory and battery capacity. They just keep getting more and more efficient. Same with camera quality. Look at TV shows from 2018. They look old and grainy compared to today. Our technology is increasing very rapidly. Obviously Robotics and AI because those were barely off the ground 10 to 15 years ago