Plastic wrap in packaging that has an edge to tear off the needed amount in a straight edge – and really works – to put an end to struggling to rip off a piece and end up with a crumpled mess folded over on itself.
A communications company – cellular phone, cable television – that will communicate. You could call and speak with an actual person without wasting a half-hour of your life responding with keypad or voice (that is not understood) to computer-generated prompts.
Specialty contractor you can hire to come to your house and remove all no-longer-used cable – telephone, cable TV, satellite TV, Internet, power/transformer cords – that are hiding behind furniture or inside walls
A smartphone app: English-Starbucks dictionary so a neophyte can place an order without embarrassment at one of the ubiquitous coffee stores where “Tall” means small. You could order with confidence a “double-shot grandé frappe no foam with room” and no one would look funny at you.
A portable Transporter like what is used in Star Trek. When you find a Yukon XL S.U.V. parked in a space – likely in a space and a half – labeled “Compact,” you can dematerialize the over-sized beast and beam it to a field of weeds, then park your Prius in the space that is rightfully yours.
Costco shuttle – a vehicle – preferably electric powered – to carry you, and the giant-size items you purchased, from the store to your vehicle, parked far away at the other end of the dangerous parking lot. (Inside the store, traffic signals at aisle intersections and painted lines on the floor, like on highways, with no-passing zones, wouldn’t be a bad idea either.)
Standardized bath fixtures in hotels. This would avoid the danger of breaking the shower control by turning the handle when it must to be pulled to start the water. Or avoiding the perverse trick where the hot is on the right and on the left is cold.
Warnings on beer labels: “This is not locally-produced craft beer. It’s made by a giant multi-national conglomerate but packaged to make you think it’s a small brewery. The money you spend on this will leave the country.”
A No-Children section in restaurants, preferably with a soundproof wall separating it from the other diners. Because the food in bars – where people younger than twenty-one without fake ID are not allowed – typically is not very good.
Smartphone, tablet or computer setting that blocks emojis. Because the emoji is the harbinger of the end of language. Texting has already replaced speaking to each other anymore, or writing in complete sentences. If we don’t stamp them out, in the future we’ll communicate without using language at all. Future historians will be able to do little more than interpret the cryptic symbols.
Lengthy prison terms for bicyclists who come up from behind pedestrians without giving warning. Capital punishment if there is a bike path separate from the walking path.
An app that will delete something you posted on the Internet and now want to remove… Ha! Ha! Ha! Just kidding! Nothing says “Forever” like what you put out on the Internet.
Feeling secure because your new credit and debit cards have the state-of-the art chips? Well, don’t; the crooks are relentless and are working to steal that from you also.
Question: When paying your restaurant tab, why does the server take your card away and then bring it back with your receipt? Outside the U.S. the norm is for the server to carry a handheld device to read your card and print your receipt. Your card is never out of your sight. The U.S. was behind other countries in adopting chip technology; maybe some year we’ll catch up with card-reader technology..
If you are a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon aficionado, expect to pay ever-higher prices for your favored wine. The price of Napa Cabernet grapes from the 2016 harvest was $6,943 per ton, 11% higher than the previous vintage. Over the hill in Sonoma, Cabernet brought $2,954 per ton. Sonoma’s priciest grape is Pinot Noir at $3,669. Overall average price for Napa wine grapes was $4,666 per ton, Sonoma $2,585, Lake County $1,664, Mendocino $1,532. The average for all varieties in these four counties was $2,955, an increase of 5.8% from 2015.
What does the future look like? Marijuana, of course!
The Texas State Board of Education approves the textbooks used by five million students in its public schools. Because of the size of the Texas market, many textbook publishers print the Texas-approved books to sell in other other states. (Advances in technology are making it easier to publish other versions for other markets.) This is particularly problematic with history texts, as the politically-charged Texas board is firmly controlled by right-wing nutcases.
Students are taught that slavery was only an incidental cause of the Civil War, after states’ rights and sectionalism. (The state’s right being the right to own other human beings.) Textbooks make no mention of the Ku Klux Klan.
Texas students learn that slavery was simply part of immigration patterns that “brought millions of workers from Africa to the southern United States to work on agricultural plantations.” As part of the effort to purge liberal bias from curricula, Thomas Jefferson is ignored, but the purported “Christian” foundation of our country’s beginning is emphasized. Textbooks also stress the importance of guns to our freedom. After a heroic battle, the Texas board allowed evolution to be broached as a possibility.
With our new president and a new Secretary of the Department of Education who is no friend of public education, we’ll see how things go. For now, historians in higher education are concerned about the teaching of U.S. history. In the radically changed political climate, revisionists are becoming much more emboldened, eager to flaunt their ignorance.
Remember the year 2000? I do. We expended time and effort to reassure business partners that we had made preparations to prevent all our systems from crashing at one second past midnight on New Year’s Eve 1999. We even had high-tech shorthand: Y2K. (Y2K – get it?) Today, we would expect a logo and theme music as well. All because the tech-wizards in whose genius we relied, didn’t know the year 2000 was coming. Guess what? They’re back. The subsequent tech generation is unleashing the Internet of Things. Be afraid. Be very afraid. Continue reading “The Internet of Wh-a-a-a-t?”
