subscriptions
I’m not sure how far back you have to go, but those are definitely pre 19th century
Corporations are people?
Trickle down economics?
Nuclear weapons?
The first is 19th century. The rest are definitely 20th century
Ah I was falling asleep and didn’t read well enough apparently thanks
Comment sections
Full scale mass surveillance capitalism. Governments used to have to hire agents, dress them up, and have them bug peoples phones. Now they can just buy it in bulk. No warrent, no black site op, just cashing checks.
Influencers
Back in the day, they were just people of varying fame, whether warranted or not.
Billionaire celebrities with millions of fans enabling their narcissism.
Those are very old. I’d wager that the first monarchs and despots wouldn’t be too different from such celebrities
How can you call that a robot? It doesn’t even run on electricity.
Hmm. What is the definition of robot, anyway? A lot of robots run on hydraulics, which in principle could be pumped and valved with no electricity. On the other hand, nobody calls a conveyor belt a robot regardless of how much stuff it moves or how many parts it has.
I stand corrected.
Do you? I actually don’t know, haha!
It was an honest question.
“We’re glad to see you successfully advanced the state of the art in human tissue culturing. However, instead of renewing your grant, we’ve decided to immediately execute the entire research team. May god have mercy on your soul”
Anything cooking related. It all the same shit you already had but this time it’s plastic, harder to clean and only does 1 specific thing.
Not to mention the shit that’s completely fucking useless, like Juicero - a “juice squeezing machine” that only works with plastic bags you get from their subscription service.
You can also just… empty the bags manually. Without buying the super expensive machine.
Or just buy a glass or box of juice, which is also cheaper than their proprietary bags
Of course
Yes, but you wouldn’t be a cool forward-thinking silicon valley tech fan anymore. Only kind of /s.
Can you give a few examples of older stuff worth getting? I’m looking to update my kitchen soon :)
A cast iron skillet. If you use it regularly the seasoning will be so good that it’s as functional as any PTFE nonstick pan, you can use metal cooking utensils on it instead of having to get plastic/silicon stuff (for PTFE), and it serves many purposes from stove top to oven. If you can find a “vintage” one at a yard sale from when they used to hand polish them smooth instead of pre-seasoning them with a rough texture, even better. When I bought a small Lodge one years ago, I used a grinder and sanding discs to polish off the factory textured seasoning and re-seasoned it myself, which worked a charm! If you go that route, I recommend doing it outside, because the amount of metal dust that it stirs up is impressive (and magnetic, so an absolute mess to clean up).
I’d suggest a stand mixer, but even those have gone down hill, even brands like kitchenaid have gotten worse.
Maybe some old pyrex, if you can find some. The new stuff is bad, can’t recommend that.
Nah because my kitchen is full of plastic junk 😅
Old mandolin slicers. The plastic on one’s produced recently cracks in a year for the cheap ones, or five years for the expensive ones. My grandmother had one that was solid metal. I’m sure it’s serving my cousin as well today as it served my grandmother 50+ years ago.
Microtransactions in video games. Hell, I’d say that modern video games in general are pretty bad, ESPECIALLY modern mobile games.
Have you played many modern games?
Breath of the Wild?
Deep Rock Galactic?
Battlebit Remastered?
Baba is you?
That first one is actually pretty good. For some reason I have never heard of the other three.
Go ahead. Downvote my comment with pleasure.
Look, I agree they suck, but video games being slightly worse isn’t the worst thing about the 21st century.
Eh, I couldn’t really think of anything that isn’t already pointed out by somebody else in the comments, so this is the thing that came to mind.
Although initially good, the internet. From malware to corporate tracking, it’s become a cesspool. And yet, here I am.
Modern social media
SUVs have to be high on the list.
They’re good if you need a vehicle that sits high and has a cargo capacity similar to a truck with a little more efficiency instead of torque.
need a vehicle that sits high
Why does anybody need a vehicle that “sits high”?
Elderly people and people with certain disabilities can have difficulty entering and exiting low vehicle seats.
And loading/unloading a car trunk.
Because you need to handle terrain other than a clear road. When you live somewhere that regularly gets a foot of snow overnight then having a bit of extra ground clearance is a must for navigating that. You also want a bit of extra ground clearance if you need to go off road regularly. The last thing anyone wants is to be out in the boonies and crack their oil pan on a tree stump or something.
Of course, far more people buy SUVs and trucks than actually need them. Also lite trucks would have been the better solution for most people who do actually need them if the EPA hadn’t killed them with poorly written standards. With the current wheelbase based efficiency requirements we’re left with the choice between sedans that drag the undercarriage on residential speedbumps or a Landbarge 9000 toddler slaughter special with worse sight lines than an abrams tank and the (lack of) fuel efficiency to match.
I have a Santa Cruz. It’s my little half-truck and it’s badass.
the EPA hadn’t killed them with poorly written standards
Thank you! I see so many people blaming the manufacturers for greed. No, the EPA killed the small truck. Perfect example of well-meaning laws paving the road to hell.
But being high make them incredibly dangerous for other road users. If a normal car hits you, you break your leg, it sucks, but within a month you’d walk on crutches and within 6 month you’d be fine. A SUV hitting a pedestrian or a cyclist will break their pelvis or even their back which has a harder recovery and long lasting consequences.
These stuff should be banned
20th century for those
Social Media. Cancerous all of it. Psyops and psychological manipulation. If you studied psychology and sociology you would know there is a huge stage 4 cancer in society and it is social media.
Post-WWII put propaganda/advertising to the next level. Social media turned that to 11.
Does Lemmy count as social media?
Yes - by most definitions. It’s powered by user-generated content and is based on interaction between users through engagement with that content, which is voted and scored.
There is a difference which I personally feel makes reddit less harmful than other social media, however, which is the algorithm - or lack of it.
In most social media, the algorithm exists to continually serve people the exact content they engage with in a constant feed, which is IMO the most socially damaging part of social media because it creates endless doomscrolling, toxic echo chambers, promotion of sponsored contebt and a whole raft of psychological problems in users.
The Lemmy homefeed is more organic, and scrolling through ‘all’ you see content genuinely from everywhere, in a less curated way based on upvotes, not individual algorithmic tailoring. And that’s maybe not as “engaging” but it’s far less damaging.
Social Media 100%.
I’d say specifically the predatory algorithms.
I also second social media, but I need to make another suggestion it’d be Keurigs k-cups. So much plastic waste for the barest level of convenience.
Even the creator of the K-cup said he regretted creating it because of the environmental impact.
Was that before or after going to the bank, laughing?
Actually, the inventor of the Keurig coffee pod system, John Sylvan, sold his ownership of the product for $50,000 in 1997. 7 years after founding the company and before single-serve coffee really took off.
Interesting!
What the hell is a K-cup, it sounds like something you shove up your vaj
It’s a small plastic cup full of ground coffee, Kuerig machines use them. They generated a ton of plastic waste, since each k-cup was a single use.
There was great progress in compostable K-Cups from other vendors. And then Keurig did the DRM thing with the UV ink. So they literally made everything worse trying to keep their market reach.
I threw mine out and went back to a french press. Straight into compost, and the coffee tastes better.
And so is every Coke bottle with 5 times the plastic. And so is every store-bought coffee. Yet… silence. 🦗🦗🦗
What about bottles? Far more energy requires to melt and pour glass. No one says a word about single use.
Never found a K-cup on the beach or trail, but I pack plastic bags to haul trash and sometimes load 2 or 3.
Plastic bottles weren’t invented in the 21st century
Yet… silence.
Imagine never reading any news or discussions about environmental impact, but coming in here trying to defend Keurig by doing full whataboutism.
Nah that’s a diva cup
Don’t give anyone ideas.
Too late!
Keurigs are actually pretty convenient when you’re only making one cup. The trick is to get one of the reusable filters and just use whatever coffee you like.
I love my Keurig, but I always use the reusable mesh cups.
K-cups are recyclable. Why are you people not putting them in the recycling.
A lot of stuff marked as recyclable is technically recyclable but cost prohibitive to do so. I don’t know what type of plastic these cups are, but when they claim recyclable, it should specify percent actually being recycled.
I’m liking aldi at the moment. They list all the separate parts of packaging for me and how it can be disposed. I hope its just a step to moving more to biodegradable rather than recyclable.
They’re 100% recyclable. It’s also very cheap.
Again, possible to recycle does not mean they are actually recycled or economic to recycle. Many things are possible to recycle. Most are not. If their form factor or material makes them costly to recycle, they wont be. You say they are cheap. What cost to make new? What cost to collect, sort and recycle?
100% biodegradable would be better. With no plastic.
To be used in most recycling programs you would need to fully remove the foil lid, and rinse out every k-cup before depositing them in recycling.
…okay. And? That’s like 2 seconds of work.
Thank you for beating me to mention this.
K-cups are really amazinlgy bad. And it’s not like there aren’t much better solutions available. Philips has those fully bio-degradable pads, a local store now sells a type of coffee maker that uses just the coffee powder in balls where the outer shell is compressed grounds that is cracked open to get to the powder inside.
But no, Keurig and their fucking oceans of plastic waste.
Nespresso has ones that are fully metal, and so can be shredded and separated by mass to get scrap aluminum and prime compost fodder. They accept them back by mail.
Yes, it’s a waste, but the whole thing was blown way the hell out of proportion.
I hike, kayak, canoe, whatever, all over the place. Every plastic bottle I pick up contains, what, 5 times the plastic? I pick up a LOT. And nobody thinks twice or raises a fuss.
We use a Keurig, but either with plastic refill cups or paper bags my wife brings home from the hotel.
Strong dissagree. I am barely functional pre-caffeine in the early morning. A Keurig is about as much mental energy as I can muster to operate. It is a godsend to me on day I work early.
I think the problem is not in pod-based single-serving coffee machines. Those are common, and well-loved for a reason.
But there are easily available alternatives that do the exact same thing without requiring so much plastic, namely Senseo coffee pads (they’re grounds in coffee filter paper) or CoffeeB and its compressed coffee grounds balls (so it’s all just coffee ground, both the coffee and the pod). Probably a fair few more I don’t know about personally.
Possibly even Nestle with their Nescafe pods. They’re aluminium but some countries achieve effectively 100% recycling on that, then the only issue is the filter membrane they place inside and I don’t know whether that is easily separated during recycling or not.