Ask Lemmy

I've started l to realize that actual information worth reading is not available. Like I cant access in depth medical course or text book in engineering. Lots of beginner tutorials marketed as 7 minute abs.

Information is valuable and nobody gives it away for free. We have access to a worlds worth of crappy, unvetted trash information. But the vast majority of the good stuff is still locked away as it always was.

"It arguably made us all a lot dumber..."

This does make me think. I remember the days where I would turn up at the library to read books. With my phone, I can read and learn but instead I doom scroll.

This is the 50s, I think it'd be pretty easy to draw a line from casual racism to white supremacists. A key difference this time is that it's not just Germans led by one insane man, it's instead a bunch of redneck prices and conspiracy theorists.

"Bus? No we bulldozed hundreds of neighborhoods to build highways so now everyone has to have a car"

Depends where they appeared

You just explained a large selection of boomers.

Seeing how much overlap they have with the KKK, I don't think it'd be that surprising

"You're telling me there was a black president and he wasn't assassinated? Sure, buddy! Now let me get back to my sharecropping."

Also, the "video telephone" that everyone always so desperately awaited from the future? Yeah, we have that; no, nobody uses it, because we can't be bothered to dress up for a phone call.

Person from 2020 magically appearing in 2090 and being told caffeine/excessive sugar is now regulated and ID checked

I'm using this little gadget for all my banking needs, a significant amount of my shopping, to stay instantly connected with friends/family and strangers with common interests all around the world, to almost instantly find information on almost any topic, to watch any of a hundred thousand movies or TV shows instantly on demand, and it's also a telephone.

I think you're severely underestimating how our daily lives have advanced. We've advanced so far that we don't even regularly use the thing that would blow the mind of someone from the 50s, like calling someone on the phone. Calling someone with your phone would already blow their mind, because the first handheld phone didn't happen until the 70s. But we don't really call people anymore. We send instant messages or if we want "a call" we do video calls, which is guaranteed to blow their mind because a) most people in the 50s had a black and white television, so being able to see colored picture in real time is just next level shit, b) you can see someone else in real time on the other side of the planet and c) it's going to feel like you're there because the image quality from the 50s is like a cave painting compared to what we have today. And that's just calling someone. Imagine what else would blow their mind, modern cars probably.

My parents still do. The person who delivers it also delivers butter and eggs.

I'm not sure where the butter and eggs and stuff come from but he owns the dairy the milk comes from and he's part of a cooperative that pay for the equipment. According to him it's just not worth selling to the big stores as he makes more money with fewer customers doing it himself.

"Ronald Reagan, the actor?!"

In the fifties they were aspiring to that already, engineering seemed unstoppable. May not understand how we could pull it off and then our own kids don't believe us, though.