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.
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
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 🤢
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
Wired tools are also a pain unless you have a limited scope for movement.
I make sure to have plenty of extension cords, and sockets hanging from most ceilings (with a place to tuck them away).
I don’t know hoe relevant this is, but I am in a 240 volt country. So extension cords don’t really run hot or poorly even with quite a bit of distance and high loads
Love my electric chainsaw except for in winter. Battery life is horrible.
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”.
Just gotta have backup batteries that you keep charged.
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.
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.
Eminem has a song where he casually drops an F bomb.
the marshall mathers lp alone has like 4 tracks where he does
And yet his first major song endorses gay marriage.
As does Tyler, The Creator, a decade later.
Can gay men not use that word?
In context, it’s an insult.
deleted by creator
I’m not going to explain to you why that’s different than a slur. Suffice it to say, shut the fuck up.
Policing a gay man on this is odd
a lot of media used the F slur well into the 2000s. it’s pretty shocking to watch nowdays
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.
Henry Kissinger
May he rot into nothing and be forgotten
The lack of privacy, independence, and freedom that generally comes with childhood.
yeah I always wanted to be an adult and now that I am it’s fucking awesome
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.)
The Ozone hole.
The Nazis.
OH WAIT.
Damn, came to make this joke myself.
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.
Smallpox
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.
It’s not “gone”, but the notion of it being “acceptable” is gone:
Using ‘retard’ as a slur, not only for people with intellectual disabilities but also just for people or things you think were stupid.
CDs and DVDs and (video)casettes. Took up so much room, annoying to use while travelling.
Quality was also very low. Nostalgia blurred our memories, watching/listening that stuff today is wild.
CDs still sound better than streaming.
DVD and VHS, absolutely they look like trash now.
Oh definitely.
I was thinking VHS and cassettes
CDs are great though :( I love that I can rip them and back them up, play them wherever I go, no licences or streaming. :)
So you don’t actually love CDs but the fact you can not use them after buying them. You can still buy non DRM music you don’t have to subscribe and you could rip or copy streamed music if it wasn’t easier to pirate it.
CDs by the way also are subject to licenses and DRM has started to appear on them. The reason they did not try as hard as with DVDs and Blurays is that Music is trivial to copy, people have been ok with taping from the radio after all. If video on physical media was still a thing you would have plenty of DRM, they’d probably make you buy a newer player after 5 years or so.
I love that they play in my car, don’t take up a tonne of space, have liner notes, and occupy physical space. I stick them on in the house as much as my LPs, and like picking out what to play.
I’m okay with being in the minority, but the sentimental value of where I was when I picked an album, where I’ve listened to it, and who I was with means a great deal to me. :) I download too, but usually things just sit on my drive and don’t get listened to.
You present a good point about licences, but I’ve not ever experienced this, and my main concern with licencing is things vanishing from my library - it bothers me when an album vanishes from spotify, and that never happens with physical media (same is true of downloaded music to be fair). It’s not that I’m blindly loyal to Phillips or whatever, just that I like this format for my specific use case.
Can’t argue with non licensing/copying/backup reasons for preferring CDs or other physical media.
But a lot of people are under the misconceptions that things like licensing came to existence after the switch away from physical media or that there were not DRM in physical media, therefore switching back to a physical media would solve the current problems with lack of control over our media. It will not.
What we need is DRM-free digital media, which we can use wherever and however we want. Just like a lot of us did with MP3s and CDs.
I’m with you 100% :) I have a record collection too, but heck if I’d want only records! There’s a use case for each, even if mine’s oddly specific.
I feel Steve Albini’s take on CDs hit it correctly, it was basically to the effect of “welcome to the rich man’s eight track tape, the music industry’s newest way to make you re-buy your music and spend more money”.
I will say he couldn’t have forseen CDs lasting like they have and being the last big physical format, but I think it’s very true. You’re right that physical formats don’t negate the greed/capitalism, and there’s a compulsive desire from companies to control how you enjoy the media you paid for and “own”.
In short, I completely agree with you and the media industries are really restrictive/anti-art, but love CDs as a format. :)
smoking everywhere
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.
