"Ten years ago, thousands of Blockbuster Video stores occupied buildings like this all over the country, renting DVDs and selling popcorn. Today, all but a handful are closed. The company’s shares once traded for nearly $30. Now Blockbuster is gone, scooped up (and then erased) by the DISH Network in a bankruptcy auction.
Obsolescence isn’t always so quick or so complete, but emerging technologies and changing practices are sounding the death knell for other familiar items. Check out these 10 that we’ll be saying goodbye to soon." …
Click bait, granted, but interesting – “#6 College Textbooks”? Hmm.
Normally it would be considerate to actually list those 10 things so we could react to them, instead of posting a link and then asking everyone to click through.
My H is trying to convince me that in 3 years the auto industry as we know it will be virtually gone, replaced with Uber-like fleets of self-driving cars that can be summoned from one’s phone. He claims that it will be so extremely expensive to get auto insurance for a private car that only the rich will have them. He claims that the insurance industry is already contemplating the end of auto insurance.
I tell him that while I could see this happening, there is no way it is happening in 3 years from now. There are too many factors, most notably the fact that even if it makes economic sense not to own a car, or at least not to own a huge gas guzzler, people still do it. Many people’s attachment to their cars is largely irrational. Of course there is also the issue of the massive amount of capital necessary to create the fleet, unless it will be composed of individually-owned self driving cars, not to mention the fact that the technology would not appear to be there yet. And of course the impracticality of serving populations in more rural areas. I tell him that if people were rational about this, we would have more public transportation.
I’m not sure whether he actually believes it, or whether he is just enjoying the exercise of arguing a utopian vision. He’s inclined to do that.
I am not sure about power outages going away–we still have them and they are bigger and last longer than before. We only have mail collection boxes in shopping centers and malls now.
I’m not sure about eliminating fast food workers–may have fewer and charge higher prices to go with higher wages but not sure about them going.
Manual transmissions are a rarity at car rentals in the US and I believe auto dealerships as well in HI. Have been offered to drive a manual once at a dealership in 1986 or so and never since.
Don’t see college text books disappearing entirely for the simple reason that it’s hard to compare texts side by side. Not impossible, mind you, but hard to do so.
Of course they have to throw one or two controversial items in there to draw attention to the article. Do you think we would be discussing it if everyone read the article and said, “Yup, sounds right”?
I agree very few folks have dial up internet any more.
What’s privacy? Haven’t we given that up very long ago? All the affiliation cards and using CCards, plus cameras in many public places and ubiquitous “cookies.”
Incandescent bulbs are already increasingly rare to find anywhere.
In order for number 2, blackouts, to end, not only would we have to overhaul our entire electrical grid, but we’d have to render it bulletproof against cyber disablement by any entity, be it terrorists, foreign governments, or even our own government. Can you imagine the political quagmire that would result from any serious attempts to completely overhaul our electrical grid nationwide so as to make blackouts “a thing of the past”? I think the greater possibility is that we’ll begin to see more blackouts in the future that encompass larger areas, and that last for longer periods of time, if for no other reason, the gradual failure of our vulnerable electrical infrastructure. Only when that occurs regularly, and effects enough people who matter will we see the waves part, and a collective will to address this growing vulnerability happen. But it won’t be anytime soon.
Privacy? That’s already long gone, and the thoroughness of degree to which that’s true is probably something most of us haven’t a clue. Whoa–rhymes!
I feel like a dinosaur. I clicked on the article and could read it (no blocked cookies here, I guess). We had an 8 hour blackout a week ago. I had a metal key made for my front door two weeks ago. I mail china pieces every week for my eBay business. I just purchased purchased incandescent “Edison” bulbs for my bathroom light fixtures. I thought they were all “the rage”.
We still have metal keys and like them fine, thanks. We use then for our home and vehicles and I like that metal keys are so much cheaper to duplicate than ones with computer chips embedded.
