The Nazis.
OH WAIT.
Damn, came to make this joke myself.
Smoking everywhere. For anyone who wasn’t around for the 70s/80s/90s, everything was tinged yellow and smelled of smoke. Car/plane/train seats had built-in ashtrays. Restaurants had smoking sections separated from the non-smoking sections by waist-high walls.
I have asthma and it sucked. Not sure if I grew out of it as I got older or if there’s just not a miasma of smoke around everywhere, but it rarely bothers me anymore.
Not 100% gone yet, but gas powered yard tools are dying. Battery powered tools are just better in 99% of use cases.
Two stroke engines do seem dead though which is awesome, because mixed gas was a massive pain in the ass.
Oh god I want to gift ALL OF MY NEIGHBOURS BATTERY LEAF BLOWERS. I bought one, it’s amazing, and we’re about to go into autumn 🤢
The fumes and noise of those little engines makes me excited that the battery versions are taking over.
I had a 11kW two-stroke motorbike and while it was very important for my rural youth, I do not want it back. Fuck the constant oil refueling, fuck the fumes, fuck the noise. If I ever get a motorbike again, it’d be electric.
I remember fighting with gas weed whackers endlessly as a teen trying to do chores… having to dick with the choke for a cold start, having to pump prime them (and it being possible to over prime and lock them out), then you had to carry them around and use them with the exhaust at steak searing temperature… and if you didn’t know how to tune an idle they’d just die in your hands if you didn’t goose the throttle occasionally
This is a great one - don’t miss small gas engines even a little bit lol
Ngl I always thought starting 2-stroke engines was pretty fun. But I certainly don’t miss the noise or the horrible pollution.
Really? Some appliances are a great fit for battery but others less so.
An electric mower just doesn’t feel right to me.
The mower is in that 1% unless you have a really small lot. It gets cost prohibitive if you need multiple sets of batteries to finish your lawn.
I use one on a cord. I put it on my shoulder so I don’t ride over it. Never had any problems.
Even better: tools on a wire
It’s getting legit difficult to find corded tools, corded mowers are fine for the size of yard I have, but choice in those was extremely limited. Yeah battery ones exist, they’re twice the price for the cheapest ones and only go up from there, I can live with an extension cord.
I haven’t had much trouble after ditching google and bing. Except for headphones that take aaa batteries
Love my electric chainsaw except for in winter. Battery life is horrible.
Do you keep the battery inside or on a shed? Much better for the battery to be kept indoors if that’s an option.
I’m perfectly content with my little electric chainsaw. Basically I only ever use it if a tree dies or falls in a storm, it actually starts unlike the gas ones I’ve had…It wouldn’t be up to the task of chopping enough wood to heat my house through the winter but for occasional use it’s better than gas.
I do use a chainsaw for cutting wood to heat. (Although this winter is unpleasantly warm. Thanks, climate change…) There is definitely no way that any electric saw would be able to keep up, esp. since you can’t readily drag 500y of extension cord behind you. Chainsaws could absolutely be made cleaner though. Unfortunately, I think that 2-stroke engines have a much higher power:weight ratio than 4-stroke, so we’re stuck using gas mixed with oil, which pumps out smog.
I kinda wonder if it would be possible to make a 2 stroke engine that doesn’t burn its own oil. Like, essentially supercharge it. Use an impeller on the flywheel to pump air into the cylinder so that the crankcase could be full of heavy oil. Though that might not work with a chainsaw since it has to be held at various angles.
Since you don’t have a timing chain on a two stroke, you’d need something else to run a fuel pump.
If engine design interests you, there’s a lot of neat stuff in this channel.
That throws a “this video isn’t available anymore” page.
If that doesn’t work, the channel on YouTuber is “Driving 4 Answers”, and the title of the video is, “The Only Video You’ll Ever Need to Watch to Know how 4 Stroke and 2 Stroke Engines Work and Differ”.
smoking everywhere
Women having to get husband’s permission to open a bank account (speaking of the US).
Aiso used to be true in France, along with any operations on it. Hence why my mom preciously my grand-ma’s old “Liret A” with the mension “mon assisted of her husband”. (My grand-dad himself found the situatin ridiculous, and had made the necesary to ensure she could oprate their bank acounts without him.)
Smoking sections
As long as the law is properly enforced. It’s worse to have smokers just all over the place
I’m so fucking glad we’ve stopped calling women “hysterical” whenever we don’t believe them. That word is so blatantly misogynistic and it seems to be dying out now.
At the risk of becoming too anti-casual, anti-gay slurs were so common in the US up until the mid/late 90s, if you weren’t there for it you just have no idea. One of the Bill and Ted movies (I think the first one?) just randomly dropping it in there as a joke, where the slur is the joke, is a good example of just how it was then. There’s still bigotry but it’s not as casual and pervasive.
It’s weird watching average sitcoms from then because of this. The more popular ones are sometimes better but even Seinfeld wasn’t great with it.
a lot of media used the F slur well into the 2000s. it’s pretty shocking to watch nowdays
Eminem has a song where he casually drops an F bomb.
He dropped like a thousand of them. He was using it regularly until sometime in the 2010s.
Eminem is weird cause he leans left but will use any word— save for n word and now f— as long as it rhymes or fits the scheme, then does nearly nothing else offensive. It’s like words are exempt from his morality.
As does Tyler, The Creator, a decade later.
Can gay men not use that word?
In context, it’s an insult.
Policing a gay man on this is odd
George W. Bush’s presidency. I don’t know what the kids are smoking when they say current republicans make him look “classy” or that Trump’s first term was worse than his. He bred a constant state of paranoia and xenophobia and used it to justify killing countless people in the middle east. The damage done to that part of the world is staggering and everyone just treats it like background noise.
Also that decade post-SpongeBob where every kid’s cartoon was about a loud, annoying, dumb guy.
GWB definitely had a scarier presidency than Trumps first term for sure. but this second term is unlike anything I’ve ever seen
Absolutely, that’s why I specified the first term! Even during Biden I kept seeing people say GWB was better than Trump, when they didn’t have this current nightmare fresh affecting their judgment. The kids just really want to redeem Bush for some reason.
Imagine being 6 years old and your mother hugging you while crying. You have no electricity. It’s night time. Artillery shell explosions followed by the crumbling buildings and injured crying in pain are the only break you get from your mother’s sounds of sobbing. They’re destroying your entire block, but what you feel is terror. You can look out a window and see flashes. You don’t even know what politics or weapons of mass destruction. You’re just there scared until you die. You wonder what you did for this to happen. Now imagine hundreds of that same experience per night.
That never makes it into the news. I would love to see people’s responses. Show the child and mother live. Then, people are randomly asked, “Push button to kill this person immediately or you will be put in jail and shamed for life.” Let’s see how they react to that guilt for eternity.
There’s a quote from Game of Thrones that I think of often. The setting is that 3 brutal high-class leaders have to decide which one of them will die as punishment. They start getting nervous, so Tyrion says:
It always seems a bit abstract, doesn’t it, other people dying?
I find it validating.
white dog poop
This is probably completely uninteresting to everyone else, but this has re-surfaced an old memory for me. I had a really dull data entry job one summer, and the crowd I worked with included a few odd figures. One particular guy was always making jokes that were just a bit too edgy for the workplace, especially amongst a bunch of people that didn’t know him well enough to know how much he meant any of it. For some reason, completely unprompted, he brought up that “you never see white dog turds any more”. Everyone heard this as “white doctors” and immediately winced in anticipation of some incoming racism, and everyone still heard it that way when he tried to clarify several times. Turns out no, it was 100% innocent, just weird.
He was fired for unrelated reasons a few weeks later; he had gone to the nearby pub on his lunch break and had several pints
goals, honestly
For anyone that doesn’t know, dog food used to contain a lot of bone meal; as dog poop degraded (?), the bone meal would remain. Hence white dog poop. I think that this changed due to tighter regulations on pet food.
The Ozone hole.
Also acid rain. Two massive environmental Ws that aren’t celebrated enough.
Objectively, dial-up.
Otoh, what I would really badly like to become a thing again is actual media ownership, ie. not having streaming services randomly yank your stuff away from you.
Also, I would nominate the fact that the ‘It’s obsolete as soon as you get it in the door’ meme hasn’t been valid for decades now, but hardware manufacturers, Windows itself, and the game industry are trying really hard to make that a thing again seemingly.
Leaded gas.
Dial-up internet. I would open a website and go do something else for a minute until it loads, then fight with my parents when they pick up the phone when I’ve been downloading something for 3 hours.
We had very late internet infrastructure upgrade, so at the end we had a bluetooth dial-up internet router in the early 2010s…
Internet over bluetooth is a crime against humanity
@simple@lemm.ee Minitel was even worse. But then, Minitel was a French exclusivity.
@Servais@discuss.tchncs.de
obligatory quick Sylvqin video (in french though)
I haven’t known the minitel but I guess that the novelty of BBSes compensated the loading time
@Taewyth@jlai.lu @Servais@discuss.tchncs.de @simple@lemm.ee When I was still in school, the Minitel was still used to register us to pass our diplomas. One of the schools I was in even still used an actual Minitel terminal to do so. (Most used a compatibility option integrated in dial-ups modems sold in the country. As did my father a couple of times for other unrelated tasks that couldn’t yet be done via internet, when we first got it at home.)
Henry Kissinger
May he rot into nothing and be forgotten
