What modern invention/innovation do you wish had *never* been developed?

[winterland1]

I don't think people should make generalizations about 'the culture of one hundred years ago' unless they were there. I'm sorry, but I've said this before on the 'decline in general standards today' thread;
Nothing changes.
Nothings getting worse.
There is nothing new under the sun.
Our interest in the past as a hobby should not blind us to realities of the golden era, nor bias our opinions.

About the first thing I agree with here concerning the old days vs now talk. I could be wrong but it seems like many of you are not living for today. Now is all we have. Let's enjoy it and live life to the fullest.
We could all debate what we think is better then versus now. I think in the end it all balances itself out.
Some obvious things better now. Advances in technology that make our lives easier, better medicine, less discrimination.
I don't want to go back to bomb shelters, polio, slavery, child abuse spousal abuse, I could go on and on.
Of course there are things that many of us feel have slipped nowadays, core values, common courtesy, work ethic etc.
We have to make the best of each day the year doesn't matter.

 

[Big J]

About the first thing I agree with here concerning the old days vs now talk. I could be wrong but it seems like many of you are not living for today. Now is all we have. Let's enjoy it and live life to the fullest.
We could all debate what we think is better then versus now. I think in the end it all balances itself out.
Some obvious things better now. Advances in technology that make our lives easier, better medicine, less discrimination.
I don't want to go back to bomb shelters, polio, slavery, child abuse spousal abuse, I could go on and on.
Of course there are things that many of us feel have slipped nowadays, core values, common courtesy, work ethic etc.
We have to make the best of each day the year doesn't matter.

Thank you very much!
I think that these threads do sometimes have a tendency to converge towards 'back in the good old days' territory, and an unnecessary rejection, bordering on blatant hate, for modern culture. A culture, it must be pointed out, that provides members with sufficient affluence to indulge in the luxury (emphasis on 'affluence' and 'luxury') of having an interest in 'the Golden Era' (whether that is expressed by reading about the topic, or watching movies, or driving a vintage automobile, or wearing vintage clothes). An interest, I might say, that seems to lead to a bizarre sort of 'one-up manship' of denial of the modern in an attempt to prove 'authenticity'. This is in itself absurd, since the whole discussion is taking place on the internet.

I'm here by way of the outerwear forum, since I have a love of A-2's, and believe that bombing the Nazis was the best thing my grandfather ever did. I appreciate art deco, and jazz, as well as vintage hats. But I'm not kidding myself that the modern world hasn't made my interest possible.

This IS the world our 'Golden Era' heroes made for us.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Something that I truly wish had never been developed: radio and television commercials that employ the phrases, "....all of your favorite [whatever]" or "...your friends at [business name here]."

They don't know me...they have no clue as to what my favorite anything is, and they most certainly are not my "friends." :mad

With friends like The Boys, who needs enemies?

 

[LizzieMaine]

This IS the world our 'Golden Era' heroes made for us.

Believe it or not, many of us here believe that those heroes were capable of grave errors in judgement. I've often argued that the World War II generation sold out its birthright -- the promise of a *truly* better world -- for a six-room house in Levittown and a new Mercury every year. Not quite a bowl of pottage, but the principle was the same. The communitarian, reformist spirit that had been on the increase in the United States from the Progressive Era thru the New Deal era, the 1930s labor movement, and on into the war era turned into an attitude of disengaged, acquisitive, self-involved passivity during the postwar years, and we've been going down that road ever since. The way in which so many modern folk focus on pointing out the flaws of previous generations while being utterly unable to acknowledge the deep and abiding flaws of their own is simple evidence of this.

Oh, and rock music is the bunk.

 

[ChiTownScion]

With friends like The Boys, who needs enemies?

Damn, I wish I could draw. I have an idea for a cartoon about a precocious kid that could give "Calvin and Hobbes" a run for its money.....

 

[LizzieMaine]

Lulu was a genuine radical, always attacking the petit-bourgeois conventions of her time. But then the people from Kleenex came along and bought her off with an endorsement contract. A great tragedy, really. She could have been the Genora Dollinger of the funnies.

 

[rjb1]

Check around here on the FL. Not too long ago there was short thread going on concerning how Little Lulu was the *best* comic book character of all back in the day. (Pre-Kleenex)

 

[ChiTownScion]

Lulu was a genuine radical, always attacking the petit-bourgeois conventions of her time. But then the people from Kleenex came along and bought her off with an endorsement contract. A great tragedy, really. She could have been the Genora Dollinger of the funnies.

I adore Lulu, in any of her incarnations. She's bright, sassy, and takes no crap from either the adults around her or Tubby and the Fellas.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Believe it or not, many of us here believe that those heroes were capable of grave errors in judgement. I've often argued that the World War II generation sold out its birthright -- the promise of a *truly* better world -- for a six-room house in Levittown and a new Mercury every year. Not quite a bowl of pottage, but the principle was the same. The communitarian, reformist spirit that had been on the increase in the United States from the Progressive Era thru the New Deal era, the 1930s labor movement, and on into the war era turned into an attitude of disengaged, acquisitive, self-involved passivity during the postwar years, and we've been going down that road ever since. The way in which so many modern folk focus on pointing out the flaws of previous generations while being utterly unable to acknowledge the deep and abiding flaws of their own is simple evidence of this.

Oh, and rock music is the bunk.

You have to look at it from their point of view. Their lives had been pretty chaotic. Growing up in the Depression, and then having to fight a horrible war that was as much a life and death struggle against true evil that mankind had ever faced. I tend to chastise my dad for not taking advantage of that GI Bill and getting an engineering degree. He certainly had the smarts to pursue it, and heaven knows that harangued me about going into that field-- although I have minimal math skills compared to him. But men like him had been through a living hell: he's survived North Africa, V-1 bombings in London, Normandy, and the Bulge.. all before his 21st birthday.

Marrying the girl back home, getting a steady job, and settling down in that six room house was part of a normalcy that he'd longed for. He'd lost his mother when he was three years old and was dumped off at an orphanage in the middle of the night by his alcoholic father, so there was turmoil long before the crash of 1929 in his life. That I would have played his cards differently (going to Paris, studying at the Sorbonne, publishing my first Pulitzer Prize winning novel, enjoying the company of sophisticated and enchanting French women, etc., all before my 25th birthday, of course...... or even staying in the Army for another 4 year hitch and occupying Norway, as he was offered) is too damn easy for me to say, because I never had to deal with what he was dealt.

He wasn't much for rock music. He also hated Sinatra. Liked Jim Croce, though (Was he even a rocker?).

 

[LizzieMaine]

Individuals, no doubt, had their reasons for the courses they chose. But as a society, well, those choices all had cumulative consequences -- and the result was the great torpid enuui of the fifties, which in turn, triggered the social rebellions of the sixties, in which, once again, the emphasis seemed more on securing the comforts of the few -- "sex, drugs, rock-n-roll, and don't send my pasty white backside to Vietnam" -- than on securing real justice for the many.

Sure, people will stand up and say "Well, gee, what about the women's movement? What about the civil rights movement?" Yeah, what about them? If you talk to people today who were adults in the sixties, every one of them wept great fat tears when Dr. King was shot, and every one of them Went A Long Way Baby. But the reality of the times tells a different tale. Go back and read the newspapers of the mid-sixties, and see what nice, respectable middle-class white people really felt about that rabble-rousing malcontent Reverend and those crazy Women's Libbers. And see what those Women's Libbers themselves, those followers of Simone de Bourgeois, were really interested in -- which was equality for The Right Kind Of Women, the college-educated suburban kind, never mind all those factory workers and store clerks and cleaning ladies. We'll sort them out later. Except later never really came.

As I say, America stood at a crossroads in 1945. And it took the wrong turn, a decision we're still paying for today.

As for Sinatra, most GIs despised him. He made exactly one USO tour -- after V-E Day -- and came back claiming it was strictly for hacks. "Well," said one critic, "you can hardly expect the European Theatre to be anything like the Paramount."

 

[Stearmen]

You have to look at it from their point of view. Their lives had been pretty chaotic. Growing up in the Depression, and then having to fight a horrible war that was as much a life and death struggle against true evil that mankind had ever faced. I tend to chastise my dad for not taking advantage of that GI Bill and getting an engineering degree. He certainly had the smarts to pursue it, and heaven knows that harangued me about going into that field-- although I have minimal math skills compared to him. But men like him had been through a living hell: he's survived North Africa, V-1 bombings in London, Normandy, and the Bulge.. all before his 21st birthday.

Marrying the girl back home, getting a steady job, and settling down in that six room house was part of a normalcy that he'd longed for. He'd lost his mother when he was three years old and was dumped off at an orphanage in the middle of the night by his alcoholic father, so there was turmoil long before the crash of 1929 in his life. That I would have played his cards differently (going to Paris, studying at the Sorbonne, publishing my first Pulitzer Prize winning novel, enjoying the company of sophisticated and enchanting French women, etc., all before my 25th birthday, of course...... or even staying in the Army for another 4 year hitch and occupying Norway, as he was offered) is too damn easy for me to say, because I never had to deal with what he was dealt.

He wasn't much for rock music. He also hated Sinatra. Liked Jim Croce, though (Was he even a rocker?).

I've said it before, they may not have been the greatest generation, but my Dads generation sure did draw the short straw in life!

 

[Stearmen]

Believe it or not, many of us here believe that those heroes were capable of grave errors in judgement. I've often argued that the World War II generation sold out its birthright -- the promise of a *truly* better world -- for a six-room house in Levittown and a new Mercury every year. Not quite a bowl of pottage, but the principle was the same. The communitarian, reformist spirit that had been on the increase in the United States from the Progressive Era thru the New Deal era, the 1930s labor movement, and on into the war era turned into an attitude of disengaged, acquisitive, self-involved passivity during the postwar years, and we've been going down that road ever since. The way in which so many modern folk focus on pointing out the flaws of previous generations while being utterly unable to acknowledge the deep and abiding flaws of their own is simple evidence of this.

Oh, and rock music is the bunk.

Wasn't saving the world from Adolph Hitler enough for any generation? What have any of us done to equal that?

 

[LizzieMaine]

"Well, gee, we saved the world from Hitler -- with maybe a little help from the Russians, of course -- so give us a break. You people who're worried about racial and economic and social injustice in the good ole U. S. A. will just have to wait. We've got more important things to worry about."

Not everybody in postwar America thought that approach was a good idea -- Henry Wallace had a pretty good movement going for a little while, but he lacked the strength and moral vision of an FDR -- and within just a couple of years after the end of the war, those who dared to speak out about social injustice at home were being condemned and railroaded as pinkos and fellow travelers. Not exactly a badge of honor for the generation, and the pall that attitude cast over the country delayed any sort of meaningful progress on the social-justice front by at least a decade. And that delay, in turn, led to violence and riots in the sixties when people decided they were sick and tired of waiting around for what they were entitled to as Americans.

We often talk about the Sixties as the beginning of the end of civilization as we knew it. But the excesses of the Sixties were the direct result of the actions -- and inaction -- and the complacent materialism of the WWII generation during the postwar era. It didn't have to be that way.

 

[Big J]

Wasn't saving the world from Adolph Hitler enough for any generation? What have any of us done to equal that?

I couldn't agree with you more.

 

[dh66]

Indeed, the treatment of minorities in the U.S., especially the brutal backlash against the civil rights demonstrations of the early 60s, fueled a lot of the fire of Soviet propaganda against the west and capitalism during the cold war. "Our" own treatment of "our" own citizens did more to help spread "their" ideology than we'd like to be given credit for.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Precisely.

It'd be nice if the fight for human rights punched a time clock -- "okey, my shift is over, I can go home now and sit on my patio" -- but it never has, and it never will. Closing the book on Adolf was simply the end of one chapter. There were many more volumes on the shelf.

 

[Big J]

Doesn't anyone keep these threads on topic?

 

[LizzieMaine]

This is the Observation Bar. It's conversation. We ramble. It's always been like this.

 

[Big J]

This is the Observation Bar. It's conversation. We ramble. It's always been like this.

Fair enough. Except that now I'm not really sure which modern invention you wish had never been invented.

 

[vitanola]

Fair enough. Except that now I'm not really sure which modern invention you wish had never been invented.

Well...

Globalization -- and cellphones. The twin horns on the Devil's head.

A few more:

Spandex.
High Fructose Corn Syrup.
The Designated Hitter Rule.
Those new nickels where Jefferson is looking straight at you.
Digital Cinema.
Celebrity chefs.
Synthesizers.
Sport-Utility Vehicles.
Expansion teams.
Those narrow rectangular glasses that make everyone look like they're peeking thru a slot.
Blister packs.
Syndicated talk radio.
Backlit plastic signs.
"Jeggings."
Mechanically-separated meat slurry.
Lip implants.
Monday holidays.
ESPN.
Plastic soda bottles.
Computer animation.
Lawyer ads on TV.
Pharmaceutical ads on TV.
Lawyer-suing-Pharmaceutical-Company ads on TV.
Lawyers endorsing certain Pharmceuticals on TV.
TV.

And more:

"Manpri" pants.
Restaurants with inscrutable one-word names.
Raised crosswalks made of brick that buckle all up and become ridiculous after one winter.
Plastic-board film shipping boxes.
Sideline reporters at baseball games, which don't even have sidelines.
Pop-top soup cans.
Flavored Alka-Seltzer.
Middle-aged white men who say "Yo, 'sup" when you see them on the street.
Fabric stores who won't sell to anyone who isn't a quilter.
People who say O-M-G and L-O-L out loud in conversation.
Robocalls.
Adult sippy-cups.
Those wool hats with crocheted beards attached.
Interleague play.
Untalented twenty-something blondes who insist on Whitneying-up the National Anthem.
People who call the living room the "Great Room."
The phrase "baby bump."

And yet more --

News blogs.
Deep fried turkey.
People Search.
Polyurethane shoes.
Bath salts (the drug, not the stuff you put in the tub)
Christmas music that begins on November 12th.
Black Friday.
Milk cartons with those irritating plastic spouts mounted on the side.
Sponge Bob Square Pants.
Sabermetrics.
Shopping malls.
Corn subsidies.
"Shock" radio.
Low-flow toilets.
Unrestricted speculation in oil futures.
Adware
Spyware
Malware
The suffix "-ware"
Needing a passport to go to Canada.
Brand-line extensions.
Print publications that try to imitate websites in their layout.
Scientific marketing.
The idea of health care as an "Industry."
Rock music being played between batters.
Rock music.
People who don't wear coats in the wintertime.
"Extreme" products or activities.
Fifteen-dollar hamburgers.

Another batch:

Automated toilets.
TV weathermen from Indiana who say "nor'easter."
Siri.
Bleached teeth.
Barry Bonds.
Skin-tight bicycle outfits.
Grocery scanners.
Any item ever sold in the "SkyMall" magazine.
SuperPACs
Fruit-scented cigars.
Novelty-colored ketchup.
Those idiotic little $6 halogen bulbs with the little contact pins that break off when you try to push them in the socket.
Sherpa hats worn by people who are not, in fact, sherpas.
Peeing Calvin.
Peeing Calvin's middle-class equivalent: those smarmy stick-figure families.
Peeing Calvin's upper-middle-class equivalent: those smug oval stickers with "ACK" or "OBX" on them.
The Euro.
Underweight bearded prigs who lecture you about eating at McDonalds while they're rolling a cigarette.
Self-service gas stations.
People who buy a new winter coat and then leave the label on the sleeve.
Commemorative quarters with irredeemably ugly designs.
Vegan pet food.
Vanity sizing.

If one is following the conversation one will find that Miss Maine has made herself quite clear.

Her lists are to the point, (and if you follow the entire thread) wickedly funny.