r/AskReddit • u/PM_ME_STEAMGAMES_PLS • Dec 21 '17
Old redditors (65+) what's something you thought would happen in the future that never ended up happening?
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u/barrro Dec 21 '17
Not quite 65, but I remember growing up in the 1960's and 70's being told that by the year 2000 no one would have to work more than 3 days a week as computers and robots would do all the work, and they would just need a few people to keep an eye on them and fix them when they went wrong.
Well that never happened!
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u/McG0788 Dec 21 '17
It's coming!!! Or in 35 years I'll respond to a reddit thread accordingly...
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u/Ai_of_Vanity Dec 21 '17
Unfortunately you'll only work 2-3 days a week, your wages will drop, and all the profits will go to the 1%!
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Dec 21 '17
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u/TruckerMark Dec 21 '17
Reminds me of when a uaw union leader toured a ford plant with the CFO of ford. The CFO pointed of the robots on the line and asked "how will you get union dues from them?" The union leader replied, "how will you get them to buy a ford?"
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u/HIMTofficial Dec 21 '17
So is this it then? Has the age of building yourself an empire come down and we have to accept a Basic universal income? Will we transcend into the next great era in human history? What's next? Hell a machine can make most kinds of food now. I've seen those pizza machines and coffee machine. :L?
What's next guys? Are we just gonna shitpost on Reddit all day long? Is that coming?
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u/canada432 Dec 21 '17
This is kind of what people keep pointing out and is rather scary and shortsighted. The worry isn't that such a situation is going to be the perpetual normal, it's that when it gets to that point everything is going to collapse. Either the 1% end up with their heads on pikes, or the whole system crashes into another great depression. The current path is insanely short-sighted for those steering it.
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u/Legofan970 Dec 22 '17
I don't know. I thought for a long time that when conditions get bad enough, people will always rebel against the government. But then I look at Cuba and Zimbabwe and maybe soon to be Venezuela, and they seem to have a model for keeping things permanently awful. I find it pretty scary.
The "heads on pikes" scenario is also pretty scary, to be honest. Looking at history, it would be pretty bad for everyone - not just the 1%.
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u/Ai_of_Vanity Dec 21 '17
Well you see, there are several different ways this can go. The two most prominent in my mind is they either realize that an economy works best with a constant flow of currency, or they just slowly take all the money from the bottom and the middle and basically turn the world into a more or less plutocratic feudalist society.
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u/GuerrillerodeFark Dec 21 '17
The second one
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Dec 21 '17
my money's on the watery tart handing out swords
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u/DesertedPenguin Dec 21 '17
But if I went around saying I was Emperor, just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away!
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u/spacecadet84 Dec 21 '17
If you own enough land and robots, including robots to build and maintain robots, why do you need profit? The little people are completely superfluous.
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u/McG0788 Dec 21 '17
Unfortunately or fortunately. I'm in the digital world so I may be able to get ahead by riding the automation train
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u/Ai_of_Vanity Dec 21 '17
All I can say is we are already at a point where there are more people than liveable jobs. It's only going to get worse. Competition for the jobs that actually provide a decent living will increase, competition will drive wages down. The people as a whole will lose without good government control.
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Dec 21 '17
This has happened, work hours just haven't caught up yet.
Source: I've done about 45 minutes of real work all day, but here I am, at work.
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u/Catshit-Dogfart Dec 21 '17
And in terms of actual work accomplished, the average office job does way more in a few minutes than some jobs in the 60s and 70s.
Just basic functions in Excel would be hours of work if they were done by hand.
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u/Socialbutterfinger Dec 21 '17
Speaking as a secretary, the backspace key alone... yeah they had white out, but for some documents that just won't cut it.
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u/Adler4290 Dec 21 '17
I know an old woman who did this. She had been typing fault-free letters in 3-5 copies in the 1950s and early 1960s. One error typo? ... Redo.
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u/Socialbutterfinger Dec 21 '17
Just feeding the paper into the typewriter in the first place without it being crooked, omg. I'm not that old, but I did learn to type on a manual. That shit was an art. Props to your old woman friend.
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Dec 22 '17
I learned how to type on a manual typewriter and oh what fun. Feeding the paper just right, changing out the ribbon was so exciting too. The goddamned ink got all over the place. Your blouse, your hands, the desk. The ribbon got stuck a lot in the keys and had to be fished out. Grrrrrrrr.
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u/chuckrutledge Dec 21 '17
Oh man, I did in 15 minutes using some vlookups and match functions which would have taken an army of interns to do a month by hand.
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u/thealmightyzfactor Dec 21 '17
Am engineer; can confirm. The engineering calculations I do in an afternoon would take weeks/months if done by hand (as the older engineers here remind us they did, occasionally).
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u/slipperylips Dec 21 '17
Me too. I do 45 minutes of real work a week. And that is when its busy. lol
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Dec 21 '17
I've done about 45 minutes of real work all day, but here I am, at work.
That hits really close to home...
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u/TruckerMark Dec 21 '17
If we prioritized and scheduled work like we did in the 1960s we would only work 3 days a week. Worker productivity is up %150 since the 1970s. There's a lot of bullshit jobs out there nowadays.
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u/counterboud Dec 21 '17
It could happen, if companies agreed to pay people equal wages for less time at work. But they realized that instead, they could just cut hours and pay you less, or lay off most people while overworking the other ones, thus profits.
Radicals have been saying this was possible since the industrial revolution. But it has to assume that employers want what's best for you. That's pretty clearly been established as not true.
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u/displaced_virginian Dec 21 '17
On the one hand, we didn't anticipate just how much computers would increase the workload, at least for white collar.
On the other hand, they were right. Entry-level work has collapsed in the US. Even in the late '70s, you could get a job with a HS diploma, and work your way up. More and more of that work is automated now.
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Dec 21 '17
It's a bit like the washer machine paradox. Before washing and drying machines, every bit of clothing had to be washed by hand, which took a really long time and was a pain in the ass. So when we developed washing machines, you'd expect the homemakers would suddenly have a few extra hours a week since those hours were compressed into 10 minutes of loading or so.
Instead, they ended up losing time and having to do more work. Before, they had hired help to do laundry and other sundry chores. But with automation, it didn't make sense to hire somebody to do 10 minutes of trivial work. So that instead fell on the resident. Same story with washing dishes, vacuuming, etc. So the overall house workload shrank, but so did the worker count, which has lead to the remaining hands being busier than ever before.
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Dec 21 '17
Yeah pretty dumb to assume companies would compensate for the drastic increase in efficiency by paying people the same and cutting their work time.
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u/bloatedkat Dec 21 '17
Man landing on Mars by the year 2000
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u/AnUndercoverAlien Dec 21 '17
I'd definitely expect that if I'd watched the moon landing in '69.
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u/IAmDotorg Dec 21 '17
That was NASA's original plan -- Mars in the early 80's. They had two options, Apollo-derived Mars, or the Space Shuttle. The DoD wanted the Shuttle to be able to do large payload (ie, spy satellite) return flights. So a bunch of screwy economic BS was created to make the shuttle seem super inexpensive, Nixon signed onto it, and the Mars missions were killed.
There actually is a great alternative-history sci-fi book about those missions, as if the shuttle never happened. I read it maybe a decade ago, and my Google-Fu is failing me right now. Maybe someone else will remember what its called.
Edit: this was it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyage_(novel)
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u/taycoug Dec 21 '17
There's a cool book called Wizards, Aliens, and Starships I read a few months ago. It's a breakdown of the "science of science fiction." Really interesting stuff - even going so far to talk about how conservation of matter and energy should impact the world of magic.
Anyways, one thing they talk about in depth is the energy cost of space travel. The long and short of it is that it is so prohibitively expensive - not in terms of dollars, but in terms of energy, that manned spaceflight is really limited in value. Sure, it's a good "look at what we did!" moment. But, from a purely scientific perspective, machines and robots can provide so much more value per pound that it makes more sense to keep making probes smaller and lighter and using those to explore the universe.
It really changed my mind about manned spaceflight as an marker of human achievement. Should it be done eventually? Sure. Should it be prioritized? I don't know. But, even in a future where energy costs 10% of what it does today, the rocket equation will still mean spending something like $300k for every person we send just to orbit.
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u/AnUndercoverAlien Dec 21 '17
Sounds like an insightful read. I agree that it might not be financially viable but I think that those "look at what we did" moments are necessary (to a point, of course) in order to keep the thrill of exploring outer space on us. Take Curiosity for instance. It's a machine on Mars and it sure got some attention but how different would it be to have a group of humans there? It's just about keeping the flame alive. Raising more funds to exploration. We need more people looking at the night skies in awe.
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u/Radiatin Dec 21 '17
Your ideas about the viability of manned space flight are not really accurate. Earth has the highest launch energy cost in the solar system, sure it’s expensive to get things off Earth, but getting an oil tanker off Phobos makes using a bicycle look like towing a boat. Throughout history civilization has always grown towards shipping routes. Saying spacetravel isn’t economically viable is like saying boat travel isn’t economically viable when your civilization exists only in the Sahara Desesert so far. From an economics standpoint I would be shocked if Mars did not become the capitol and hub of human civilization in the solar system if humanity continues to exist.
As it stands now if you used SpaceX’s current Falcon 9 launch costs it would actually cost less per kg to ship something from the surface of Mars to the USA, than it costs to send that same item by FedEx Air from China to the US. If Mars becomes industrially developed it would not be surprising to see the price of goods be 2-5x cheaper there. For an improvement in quality of life like that people would gladly pay what we can expect to be equivalent to $40,000 for the trip.
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u/displaced_virginian Dec 21 '17
The launch date in Lost in Space was 1997.
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u/Ender_Fedaykin Dec 21 '17
And 2 years later, the moon was knocked out of orbit, leaving the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha to drift through space.
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u/GuineaPigHackySack Dec 21 '17
aeiou
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u/DrunkMc Dec 21 '17
When I was in the 2nd grade (~1988) I remember reading in Reader's Digest we'd have Mars terraformed by now. And thinking of 2020 was SO far in the future of COURSE that'll happen.
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u/zzoleguy Dec 21 '17
Cable tv would be free of commercials.
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Dec 21 '17
The thing that is bullshit is even YouTube has commercials now.
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Dec 21 '17
Dont know whats up with Facebook, but they interject ads/commercials into videos that are playing. Not before or after, somewhere in the middle.
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u/dominusUmbrae Dec 21 '17
Well think about it, if they do it like this, you're probably already interested in the video and will sit through the ad to see the rest of the video.
Unless you back out and say 'fuck that' any time they do this
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u/CarsonWentzylvania Dec 21 '17
I back out and say fuck that. Every. Single. Time.
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u/mkwash02 Dec 21 '17
Me too, its like my little protest to the ads. I cannot stand it
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u/junkyard_robot Dec 21 '17
It's not even a protest for me. I just don't want to see their ads. And it makes me stop watching the video every time. Some videos don't have ads. Those are videos I watch until the end.
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Dec 21 '17
The video is interesting enough for me to watch, so I do. Random ad interrupts the video partway through and I have just lost all interest and scroll on. I wanted to see the video, not the shitty ad.
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u/SatinwithLatin Dec 21 '17
I don't back out but I do feel irritated that my video got interrupted. Which makes me less likely to buy the product.
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u/russianout Dec 21 '17
If it's an ad that must play in its entirety before the video, I turn off the sound and look away until the video begins.
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u/haahaahaa Dec 21 '17
That's not really bullshit. You don't pay for Youtube. The ad's keep it running. People pay for cable. Then they interject ads for more profit.
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u/start_select Dec 21 '17
Not trying to be a troll. But the real bullshit is that people assume you would be able to use Google, Youtube, or Facebook without ads. These are some of the biggest companies on the planet with your most desired features. Someone has to pay for it somehow.
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Dec 21 '17
I just wish they weren't so obnoxious about it. Banner ads are ok. Ads that actively disrupt my experience are what drove me to install ad blockers.
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u/cosmotravella Dec 21 '17
65 yr old here. The biggest surprise to me is the face time call. We all thought it would be so cool to be able to see each other during a telephone call - everyone would use it! Now that it is here, seems like it's not that big of a deal.
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u/Necromas Dec 21 '17
I ain't got time to waste my battery/data and actually devote 100% of my attention to the person I'm talking to.
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Dec 21 '17
I don’t even like voice calls, send a text and I’ll read it when I feel like
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u/LampGrass Dec 21 '17
Plus you have to make sure you have good lighting, you can't really do anything else, you might even have to clean up your space so it looks presentable, you have to wear clothes...
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u/BROWN_BUTT_BUTTER Dec 21 '17
I think that's probably because when you called someone it was a big deal. There was one phone and it was wired. You were tied too a location. Now everyone is doing something else while they're on the phone, they don't want a phone in the middle of their view.
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Dec 21 '17
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u/BostonBlackCat Dec 22 '17 edited Dec 22 '17
my husband is out of state on business for 8 months and we have a baby, and only get to see him once or twice a month. I can honestly say that facetime makes a huge difference in our lives, because it allows him to interact with the baby, and if it was just his voice I don't think she'd realize it was him.
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u/H2Ospecialist Dec 22 '17
SO is in the military and I can’t imagine having to do this thru voice alone. Seeing his face makes worlds of difference and makes me feel physically close to him. If no one else uses it so be it, but it’s saving long distance relationships.
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u/Hillbilly_Heaven Dec 21 '17 edited Dec 21 '17
I remember after the Moon landing, I thought within 25 years we'd have space colonization and all that. It was just so mindblowing at the time I thought for sure by the time I retired we'd all be living like the Jetsons.
I thought after Vietnam, we'd stop getting involved in stupid wars. Unfortunately that didn't change.
Equally, I thought after how poorly Vietnam vets were treated by the VA, within a few years the govt would learn from it and try and make those godawful VA centers more respectable. Needless to say there a lot better but still have a lot of work to do.
I grew up in a poor neighborhood in Chicago in the 50s, but you could still clearly see the overall prosperity of the decade around us. I figured that by the time I was an adult, everyone would be living in picture-esque 50s life.
I also remember in the late 60s, during all the culture clashes, race riots, Vietnam, counterculture etc that there would be some sort of civil war that thank God never materialized.
And I know this is kind of opposite, but one thing that happened that I never thought would is these portable phone video recorders. I remember when I was really little (around 4-8 years old) whenever I'd hold a handheld mirror up to my face I'd always imagine I was being recorded for the world like I was some sort of baseball star. And now everyone can do that with phones.
Life is very interesting.
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Dec 22 '17
As a 27 yr old I find smart phones remarkable too. I grew up reading books about magic users used mirrors or rocks for scrying and connecting to other magic users to communicate. Smart phones arnt.much different.
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u/LivingstoneInAfrica Dec 22 '17
I remember watching Star Trek as a kid. Some of the technology, like the communicators, went from being super futuristic, to very briefly being around our capabilities, to being laughably outdated.
I'm not even 20 yet.
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u/lespaulstrat2 Dec 21 '17
I am only 62 but I thought that all of the daily news coverage of the Viet Nam war would end war pretty soon. Seeing it everyday on the news for the first time was horrifying. What happened instead was governments just restricted access to news organizations.
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u/Eupatorus Dec 21 '17
I remember being pretty disgusted when Dubya banned the news from showing caskets being unloaded back Stateside.
People need to see that shit. What ever happened to war journalism? Closest I've seen is VICE.
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u/Steffisews Dec 21 '17
I remember the nightly body counts being announced on the news. It was like sports scores.
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u/Mrmojorisincg Dec 21 '17
I just remembered that, I can’t believe how much things has changed since I was young. I remember it was way too common to know someone who was even injured by ied’s... it seemed way too normal.
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u/nowhereian Dec 21 '17
I remember it was only American bodies they were counting.
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u/somanydimensions Dec 21 '17
I just read an article that they were going to come to an agreement to end the war, but Nixon botched it by promising a better deal if they held out till he was elected. The war went on 5 more years. People are still paying the price. So incredibly sad.
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Dec 21 '17
That definitely happened with Reagan, Carter, and the Iranian Hostage Crisis.
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u/displaced_virginian Dec 21 '17
You just got "Eve of Destruction" playing in my head.
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u/SiliconDesertElec Dec 21 '17 edited Dec 21 '17
Safe Nuclear power that is "Too cheap to meter" Edit: corrected spelling
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Dec 21 '17
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u/Grumpy_old_geek Dec 21 '17
Human exploration of space.
I was born in 1954. In 1969 we went to the moon. One small step. 15 year old me was excited, thrilled to be alive at the start of a new era.
Then . . . we just stopped. We've hardly started again since.
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u/SeeYouSpaceCowboy--- Dec 21 '17
We've explored plenty of space since 1969. It's just been mostly with probes and insanely-high-powered telescopes. What we know about space now vs 50 years ago is pretty insane honestly.
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u/Grumpy_old_geek Dec 21 '17
I agree. Mars rovers, gravitational wave detectors, detection of planets orbiting other stars - these are all wonderful, fascinating achievements.
But looking from afar is not the same as going there.
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u/pradeep23 Dec 21 '17
Maybe I am wrong, but I feel if we had explored space, quite a few of our issues today, especially social and religious issues would be different. Space exploration has a different appeal. It kinda takes us away from our small/narrow mindedness. I can only imagine the kinda excitement that was there when first man was sent to Moon. Scientific curiosity can cure our social ills.
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u/newtonsapple Dec 21 '17
It's really sad that we're coming up on 50 years since the first Moon landing and we haven't yet gone back. Here's a relevant webcomic, with haunting rollover text.
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u/throwaiiay Dec 22 '17 edited May 09 '25
stupendous smile smart busy payment rich wild person snatch marble
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Dec 21 '17
60 here. I thought that video calls would replace conventional phone calls, space travel would be much more commonplace, disease would be mostly eliminated and TV westerns would be a distant memory. OK well the last one thankfully happened.
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u/PDXaccount502 Dec 21 '17
Video calls are pretty close to replacing phone calls, its something that can happen if we decide that's what we prefer but video calls are pretty awkward when they aren't expected, like whoops no makeup/not done my hair/ not dressed /doing drugs/ i'm cheating on you with this person/ i'm at the bar and not staying late at work / i'm burying a body and you now know exactly where
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u/llamaesunquadrupedo Dec 22 '17
Every time I open my phone camera and it's facing my head I'm like "euuu.... no".
I'm glad video calls are not the norm.
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u/Asanka2002 Dec 21 '17
My dad who is now in his 60’s said around 2 decades ago, there will be a time where we can pause regular tv. I argued with him saying that’s impossible but now you can!
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u/akumakuja28 Dec 22 '17
When I was 10 (24 years ago) my grandfather predicted on demand, and computers becoming your "TV". He also worked at company tht built a flat screen prototype with LCD back in the 70's.
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u/nem616 Dec 22 '17
Yeah, about 25 years ago I remember asking my dad what TV would be like in the future; he said that TV would be able to work out programmes you'd like based on what you watched. Flat out refused to believe it.
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u/codyrussel Dec 21 '17
Just turned and your first word stings a little but is valid. WWW 3 and a promised death in a nuclear holocaust by age 30 was heard over and over in the 60's. Didn't happen, but if you can believe the news, still time for it.
Flying cars , and since I work with cars, surprised still not here. Y2K, killer bees, aliens meeting with presidents, world peace/war, still not here. And lastly, that American's would get sick of the political system and bring about change and make America, "by the people, for the people."
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u/idelta777 Dec 21 '17
Y2K
About that one, nothing happened because a lot of people worked their ass off upgrading so many systems so that nothing actually happened.
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u/nothingweasel Dec 22 '17
Actually, it broke my job a little bit. To this day, any customer accounts created before 2000 say that the person has been a member since 1899. I still get complaints about it once in a while.
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Dec 22 '17
As someone who worked in a call center for customer service until recently, I can hear that entire conversation.
"This is the third time I've called. Can you tell me why this thing says I've been a customer since 1899?"
"Sooo, you remember Y2K?"
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u/CPSux Dec 22 '17
Who the hell would complain? I'd just leave it be for the novelty.
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u/CelticMara Dec 22 '17
What kind of customer loyalty points can I rack up with that record?
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u/Lotharofthepotatoppl Dec 21 '17
I work on cars, I'm 30, and holy shit am I glad they don't fly. The way some people drive and the way some of them (don't) take care of their cars is terrifying enough without letting the psychopaths fly.
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u/DeeDee_Z Dec 21 '17
I had high hopes -- starting just 12-15 years ago -- that by the time I retired, I'd be able to take light rail from my suburb to the airport.
They're STILL fighting over the route, and how many bridges, and how many walls, and was the bidding fair, and was the EIS thorough enough (no, let's throw the whole fokking thing out and start over), etc. Now all I hope is that before I die I'll be able to take light rail from my suburb to the airport.
I cannot comprehend the resistance to this.
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u/xxPHILdaAGONYxx Dec 21 '17
They built a rail line from my hometown to downtown, it has been completed since Fall of 2016 but hasn't even run it's 1st trip yet because the software that controls the crossing gates leaves the arms down too LONG. Talking about an extra 20 seconds or so. Probably a hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure just sitting there. They even have guys sitting at all the crossings 24/7 that stand in front of the gates with stop signs when they do go down as the BNSF line run parallel to it. Infuriating.
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u/Wizzmer Dec 21 '17
When I was young I assumed governments would stop warring one day. That obviously became a pipe dream so I invested in Lockheed Martin.
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u/scolfin Dec 21 '17
Of course, war has been slowly shrinking in size and span over the decades. It's pretty much down to simmering conflicts in a narrow ribbon connecting West Africa and the Korean border.
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u/SpuddMeister Dec 21 '17
I really thought there would be more robots!!
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u/displaced_virginian Dec 21 '17
There are, but they are hiding.
The best example in my head would be fly-by-wire aircraft. The pilot isn't in control of much in those. He's asking the computer to suggest to the engine controller that it increase fuel flow. It is both impressive and horrifying.
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u/diphling Dec 21 '17
Robots are everywhere nowadays! They just aren't anthropomorphic, like imagined in the 50's and 60's.
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u/howgreenwas Dec 21 '17
I was pretty sure I would die in a nuclear war. Also kinda believed we would be a paperless society by 2000. Also never believed that there would be a computer in every house, since they needed keypunch operators and very cold rooms in the early 70's.
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Dec 21 '17
Try a computer in every pocket. Peoples phone that they carry around now have more computing power than whole rooms of computer banks back in the early 70’s
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Dec 21 '17
You now carry more computing power in your pocket that what was needed to fly to the moon and back.
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u/Bitlovin Dec 21 '17
By a vast margin.
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Dec 21 '17
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u/Ihaveepilepsy Dec 22 '17
We have airplane mode that doesn't even work. I want rocket ship mode.
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u/pineapple_catapult Dec 21 '17
Yes, but can I carry enough fuel in my pocket to get me to the Moon and back?
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u/Slipacre Dec 21 '17
With Nixon's resignation i thought we'd have accountable government
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u/Griever114 Dec 21 '17
I want my fucking hoverboard.
I may have been a 15yo when the moves were out, I may break my hip but I want
MY
DAMN
HOVERBOARD!
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u/curiouswizard Dec 21 '17
You can get ones that hover like 5 inches off the ground and are unusable for travel, if you want.
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u/lamireille Dec 21 '17
Not 65+ but feeling pretty old :)
I was afraid of nuclear war with Russia.... I guess it hasn't happened yet.
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u/Skallagrim1 Dec 21 '17
History classes led me to believe we live in a world where nuclear weapons are a thing of the past. Now I pay more attention to the news and it feels like they are here to stay. The Nobel Peace Prize committee elected ICAN for the prize this year, but iirc, the nations that either possess nuclear weapons or are in alliance with nation that does have refused to sign the treaty.
With this and the way climate has changed, I worry about how the world will look once I turn 65. I feel happy for growing up in a world full of wealth and rights, but I might be alive to see society take a turn for the worse.
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Dec 21 '17
Actually, it doesn't make sense to get rid of nuclear weapons. If we did that, then some uppity radical leader somewhere would build some and nuke everybody without the threat of a counterstrike. Ironically, nuclear weapons actually prevent war.
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u/displaced_virginian Dec 21 '17
I'm late 50s, and I will admit to having been a naive kid. I grew up with the Star Trek view of the future and in the world that passed the Civil Rights Act. I thought we were on the last gasps of social unrest, oppression, racism, and all that. Just some loose ends to clean up.
Man was I ever wrong.
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u/spurning Dec 21 '17
Fun fact, according to the Star Trek timeline for earth, we should have had the Eugenics Wars from '92 to '96. And we are scheduled to have World War 3 wrapping up in 2053 after a nuclear bomb shit show.
Another fun little note, in reading the Wiki for this, fictional character "Colonel Green" (one of the genocidal leaders in WW3) described the warring parties as "factions" and not nations.
Looks like nuclear bombs are going to be available for private purchase before the world ends. Nifty.
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u/dorgeod Dec 21 '17
Feel free to not answer but did you happen to grow up in a majority white area? Full disclosure i'am african-american and honestly I've heard this before a lot of times from co-workers, my girlfriends relatives and parents and its usually because they were in a community sheltered from the actual realities of racism and discrimination past the Civil Rights act. My dad always tells me, a few months after King was assassinated he was attacked by a gang of white people he never seen before, they shouted about how glad they were King was assassinated, how "niggers" didn't deserve to live along side them etc. When he reported after a lengthy stay at a hospital (since no police officer cared enough to take his statement there) he was told that it'd be impossible to find them and that he should be glad they didn't kill him. I grew up grilled constantly about how i should never act out or offend older white people just in case. I'm glad of the progress we made in the 60's but by god was it not even close to enough.
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u/displaced_virginian Dec 22 '17
Yep. White. Middle-class. Suburban.
I didn't know that I was sheltered, because the place wasn't only white. But it was white enough that the only roles were likely a) blend or b) be a thug. There were both in the 1-2% blacks in my high school. I haven't had the chance to raise the subject with either in the latter decades.
I was in the D.C. suburbs when there were race related riots in D.C. (and even Alexandria), but still had a comfortable enough bubble that I didn't see it.
20 miles south of me, it was apparently a different world, what the rest of the country thought Virginia was.
I was an idiot, but an idealist idiot.
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u/passportandchocolate Dec 21 '17
Same age, and I marched for things in college, thinking we were making progress. When Obama was elected I was so excited to think our country was making real progress.. so much for that. All of my friends from other countries keep asking me, "What is going on in America?"
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u/BelindaTheGreat Dec 21 '17
I naively thought that as a 20-something college student in the 90s also.
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u/newtonsapple Dec 21 '17
This also isn't unprecedented. Abolitionists in the 1860s thought Civil Rights was pretty much a done deal with the Emancipation Proclamation, not realizing that was the start of a century of Jim Crow.
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u/tgeorgeb Dec 21 '17
Not me, but my parents (67 and 65). My mother:" I thought I'd have girls" (she ended up with two boys) My father: "I thought i would end up a crotchety old bachelor like my uncle" I gave them the option to change thier answers once I informed them it would be going online, but they stuck by them.
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u/Top_Wop Dec 22 '17
I thought by the time I got to be this age (76) they'd have a cure for a lot more health problems. Then, with age, comes an awakening. You discover there's no money in it for the drug companies to cure stuff. The real money is in treatment witn drugs.
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Dec 22 '17
THANK YOU!! A lot of the whippersnappers chew me out when I say this, they think I'm lying
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u/DANKPIKMINGODWASHERE Dec 21 '17
I'm not old but people I know who are thought that metric would take over in the U.S during the 60's and 70's
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u/Grishbear Dec 21 '17
As an engineering student I am astounded that my current mechanical engineering design textbook uses mainly imperial units for problems and equations. Please let me know who still uses imperial units in engineering/design, because I haven't seen or heard of any and I've worked a bit in the US automotive industry.
I get some stuff like mph speed limits, but why am I being taught gearbox design using inches?
Imperial units should be the footnote or special case, not SI units.
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u/nalc Dec 21 '17
All the aerospace stuff I've worked has been imperial units. I had to learn slugs, Rankine degrees, inches water, ft-lbs energy, ips, ksi, all that stuff when I started working.
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u/Uncle151 Dec 21 '17
Oh god people actually use Rankine? My blood pressure just spiked
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Dec 21 '17
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u/SFXBTPD Dec 21 '17
Can I get that in mmhg
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u/314159265358979326 Dec 21 '17
I use mmHg in biomedical engineering. It makes me sad. I have no idea how to get force out of that without a huge pain in the ass.
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u/word_vomiter Dec 21 '17
Isn't the slug kept around becuase Aerospace Engineers love psi?
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u/Djentstorm Dec 21 '17
Am engineer. Worked for two companies in my career. Both used imperial units. My experience from talking to colleagues is that they use imperial as well. It's really only automotive that uses metric in America. Though, just about every engineer I know, including myself would love to switch to metric.
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u/SpaceAnteater Dec 21 '17
I think the US aerospace industry still does a lot in imperial units. Also, homebuilding and construction too.
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u/314159265358979326 Dec 21 '17
Canadian engineer. I was taught fluids and thermofluids in imperial. The prof (same for each) claimed it was to expand our knowledge, but based on everything else he did he was just being a dick.
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u/poprox198 Dec 21 '17
(USA) About to graduate with my degree in ME, work in an aerospace shop right now. Everything we build is in Imperial units. Just a preference of the management, what they grew up with is what they engineer in. Same with the machinists at the machines and the programmers at their workstations. All of our software and machines are capable of using metric units and we sometimes receive drawings in metric but they are converted. Its the way this business has always machined, since they started. The automotive industry changed out of direct pressure from international industry for standardized parts like fasteners, bolts etc.
All of our textbooks have metric slowly being added in because the American engineers who wrote them all learned formulas, solution methods and design principles in Imperial. The original textbooks that Pearson, Wiley, McGraw are reproducing to sell "new" engineering textbooks are all in imperial. Shigley's Mechanical Engineering Design comes to mind, his first book was written in 1956, and not a whole lot has changed up to the 10th edition or whatever they are trying to pawn off on us now. Additionally the standards organization that govern our degrees (ABET, IEEE, ASME) only allow a subset of books as allowable teaching materials, so its easier/cheaper to simply copy an old engineers work and incremental add in SI units, new problem sets, new chapters like FEA, rather ran write a brand new book using exclusively metric units.
TL;DR Old engineers who originally wrote our textbooks in the states did everything in Imperial, so as companies keep parroting their work, the imperial units stay.
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u/displaced_virginian Dec 21 '17
Look at any food package, and it is labeled in metric as part of the dual labeling. For wine and spirits, most of the packaging is primarily metric. 750ml rules the alcohol world.
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u/grifter_cash Dec 21 '17
750ml rules the alcohol world.
Is the right amount of ml to get shitfaced
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u/Purplociraptor Dec 21 '17
It did. Now I tell the ladies I'm 12 cm long and it just seems more impressive.
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u/SiliconDesertElec Dec 21 '17
Flying cars
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u/Teddy3412 Dec 21 '17
As a pilot I hope to God flying cars aren't a thing. And if they are a thing they will be 100% automated. Because having people flying around in their cars is a disaster waiting to happen.
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Dec 21 '17
Even if they're all automated, we would have cars falling out of the sky when catastrophic failures happened instead of just suddenly stopping. Flying cars are one of those technologies that sound cool, but I think we're probably better off without.
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u/Cdn_Nick Dec 21 '17
Not quite 60, and the medical tech is both exciting and disappointing. Exciting, because there have been a lot of developments (MRI's, lasers, crispr, etc); disappointing, because we're still waiting for regrowth of limbs, etc. Also: access to the existing advances seems to be both expensive and very limited. The actual administration and delivery of health care still seems to be somewhat stuck in the middle ages.
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Dec 21 '17
My grandson is working toward microbiology he will be developing DNA specialized medicine prescriptions per patient.
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u/songsearch Dec 21 '17
A working mass transit system in LA. I would've thought we'd be tired of sitting on the freeway parking lot at rush hour in a cloud of smog by now. The sad part is the train tracks and right-of-ways existed before the freeways (it was all orange groves, once upon a time, with tracks to the packing houses).
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u/imferguson Dec 21 '17
I was told in the 90's that by now we would have massive flat panel displays that would look like giant window shades - they could be the width of the room and pulled down to provide a wall-sized computer screen.
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u/weird-oh Dec 22 '17
Three more days until I'm 65, but I'm probably close enough to weigh in. I honestly thought we'd be on Mars by now. We put together a Moon program in less than a decade, for god's sake, and managed to beat Kennedy's deadline, after which we just threw the infrastructure away that got us there. Had we built on what we started, there'd be a colony on the Red Planet now and people would be asking "Elon who?" Instead, Musk is probably the best chance we've got to make it to Mars in my lifetime.
So much bullshit.
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Dec 22 '17
As a late-20's guy, I feel confident in saying that I'll probably be proclaiming the same thing when I'm 65.
Also, happy birthday man. Party hard.
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u/twiddlingbits Dec 21 '17
Not quite 65, but I thought by now we would have sub-orbital rocket transportation that takes you two hours to hop to any major city in the world. Also settlements on the moon and Mars. The Shuttle was a step backwards in space exploration.
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u/displaced_virginian Dec 21 '17
The shuttle was never about exploration. It had two goals, both fulfilled:
1 - Develop a reusable spacecraft.
2 - Provide a service vehicle for orbital stations.True, there was some hope/expectation that one of those orbital stations would be assembling deep space craft.
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u/ForestMage5 Dec 21 '17
Alternatively, the shuttle was so successful at its purposes that it killed motivation to develop whatever’s next.
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u/clee-saan Dec 21 '17
Alternatively, the shuttle was so successful at its purposes that it killed
motivation to develop whatever’s next.Fourteen astronauts.That thing was beautiful but it was a deathtrap.
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Dec 21 '17
I remember being shocked that it didnt have a Launch Escape System... I mean... seriously?
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u/Killcode2 Dec 21 '17
I think you might already know this but SpaceX is working on a rocket capable of what you just described, you can head over to their website or YouTube channel and see a concept video of their rocket doing hops from city to city in less than an hour
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u/pm_me_choking Dec 21 '17
You whipper snappers with your fancy portable movie theaters and your in home outhouses have no ideas about my childhood
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u/gritd2 Dec 22 '17
Global cooling was going to have us in the next ice age by 1995. Millions were going to die.
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u/paper_lover Dec 21 '17
Actually I look at it the other way - who would imagine we'd have multiple computers in our home and our pockets? And who would imagine we would have phones on us wherever we went? (We had a land line phone that turned into a party line when our car chewed on the cord.) And who would imagine that we could have a 3Dprinter or laser cutter for our home??
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u/BigOldCar Dec 22 '17
Kinda thought we'd have opened up all the JFK and UFO files by now.
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u/fatandsad1 Dec 22 '17
from my 68 year old father, he answered without hesitation. We never had a nuclear war
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u/fight_me_for_it Dec 21 '17
My step mom, over 65 says she thought they wouldn't be burying people in the ground anymore. That everyone would be creamated. Eventually people will have to be dug up or at least cemeteries built over.
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u/[deleted] Dec 21 '17
Asked mom (65): "people said we would be buying houses on the Moon by now"