I just had an experience with a auto soap dispenser, sink, towels and dryer set in the same place in a public restroom, didn’t have to walk to a shared dryer
Plus if electric cars become the norm, the streets will be quiet for the first time since the industrial revolution
USBC-PD and the rise of energy efficient dc appliances. the ability to to toss out ac power bricks and power most of my DC appliances with an electrical grid I wired together with solar panels and batteries. The sun powers most of my convinence and luxuries without burning fossil fuels.
24" TV, desktop vaporizer, video game console, laptop, and led lamp are all run from my offgrid dc electrical system and can use under 50 watts when all are on at once. I can process a load of laundry with a travel sized washer and spin dryer combo. I can brew a cup of coffee, I can get running water with a usb pump/shower head, I can run a small fridge, run a fan, I have a usb electric blanket/ heated jacket poncho that will sip on 10 watts of power and keep me warm on cold nights. If thats not enough I can get a jacket or blanket that runs on dewalt power tool batteries. Even charge a small electric bike.
I can do all of this with a cheap power station and 200w of solar. Just about the only modern convinences that are still hard to do on a 200w dc system is air conditioning(sadly seeming to be more a survival requirement in the coming years during summer) and cooking appliances. In those cases a tank of propane and dual fuel generator are great backup options especially if you can’t afford more solar and batteries to run a 1000+ watt appliance. Fortunately most 5000btu window units only consume 400-600 watts after startup surge or with soft starter so you dont need that much solar and batteries if you have a small space to be conditioned.
All of these things either weren’t possible or gave our ancestors a laborious manual workload 100 years ago. Most of these things required an industrial sized machine and or massive amounts of wattage 50 years ago. Now this is all possible with cheap affordable technological magic that sips power. Solar panels are getting cheaper and more efficent, and so is most consumer technology that power our lives. Its a shame that our generation and future generations will have to pay for the sins of our fossil fuel burning fathers but I am confident that more and more people will be moving towards more sustainable options especially as their homes/enviroments burn down from the ever increasing dry droughts and they are forced into being nomadic vandwellers.
There’s an app for everything.
And everything requires an app.
It’s not a good future.Electric cars will certainly be quieter at low speed but they will still be noisy at higher speed due to tire noise dominating. Lower speed limits in cities would help here significantly.
Also, even ICE car can be very quiet in low speed, the insulation and exhaust muffle help a lot. I work with car a lot and often time the noise came from the radiator fan, without it running it’s quite hard to tell if the engine is running or not. The only thing electric car ever gonna solve is the tailpipe emission, which is good, but not quite enough.
Nothing made me feel like the future was now as Orbitz and freeze dried pizza from the Challenger Space Museum.
They don’t make Orbitz anymore tho :(
Orbitz went to heaven so you could have boba.
Arc Search. I’ve learned more this past year.
Relating to electric cars, Aptera – when they hit the streets everything changes.
I second aptera
It looks so cool, I hope it actually launches. They’ve already gone bankrupt once before. I was holding off on a new car for a while to hope to get one, but it doesn’t look like they’re coming out soon, so I got a bolt, which has been great.
Oh, nice, I hear good things about the bolt.
I think that last aptera bankruptcy happened about a decade ago under different leadership, before they had all the manufacturing partners, business plan of today and definitely before this round of pre-orders/investment.
As far as I understand, that was basically a couple guys building an awesome car that they didn’t have the business infrastructure for. It seemed easier to source parts until they had to do it.
Ramping production is still slated for ~'24, which has been delayed before I believe from last year, which isn’t great.
They’ve had mostly finished prototypes driving around for a while now and direct investment/partnerships, so I don’t see them going bust too soon.
They have a lot of pretty regular updates with production status and media updates on their website and YouTube channel to check out.
I’m hopeful. I want the thousand miler.
Solar powered, self-reparable cars are where the future is.
when they hit the streets
I doubt that will be any time soon unless there’s multiple massive breakthroughs. Unless you drive 5 miles a day and park in pure sun there’s just not enough power to keep the batteries charged.
Honestly though I’d really like to see electric golf carts take over as city vehicles. They’re small, fairly light weight, go fast enough for a city, and if you really want you can fit some solar cells on the roof.
I drive like 20 miles a week, so that would be a game changer for me
Some of the job titles of people I know would sound insane to people in the 80s.
Yeah but one of my favourite things is when watching quiz shows, see who can come up with the most fucking pretentious phrase for “I’m a salesperson”
Hi my name’s Lorna and I’m a client communications solutions engineer
Ya hi my name’s Kyle and I’m like a future business outreach manager ya
When I was a kid, I had to reference several manuals and carefully assemble a double handful of parts in specific order to connect two computers to eachother. I’d have to fiddle with protocols and speeds and obscure features and traits to make the stars align. Transferring 200mb would be an overnight task. If I wanted to show pictures from my vacation on a big screen, I would have to have them printed on cellulose and insert them in tiny frames to project on a thick screen with a huge machine.
Yesterday, I went to a friend, pointed my phone at a
magic symbolqr code and sent a full movie to their PC in a few minutes. Then I pushed a button to make the photographs on my phone appear on their TV.Bad news, tires are the biggest source of noise from cars in movement unless you change the exhaust to something barely legal on a gas car.
Rode in a self driving taxi the other day. While it was very cool, it was much more cool to see the fellow passengers freak out and record the entire ride
Home automation. I’ve only just get into relay but man, the ability to turn it on or off based on other devices status is just so futuristic for someone that love and still love simplicity and dumb device.
Also ebike. A motorized bicycle that use electric motor to run, doesn’t smell, quiet, and can assist me so my journey isn’t as exhausting? Where is this thing when i ride my bike 16km round trip to my school every day 20 years ago?
smartphones are pretty damn impressive.
they downright make scifi gizmos like dataslates, or comunicators seem outdated.
gps navigation arround the world,
even without cellula reception if you have offline data.
and automatic navigation / route planninga vast array of communication services be it text sound, or video,
one on one, as a group, or in a public forum.a vast sea of information on every topic immaginable.
ever improving camera & sensor tech.
and smartphones do it all in one device small enough to fit in your pocket.
and didn’t even mention the computing power & storage that oveshadows some room sized supercomputers of the past
Yep! That was my thought as well, especially that we can carry the internet around and talk to pretty much anyone anytime.
Wait people like automatic bathroom fixtures?? Every time I go into a bathroom with them they make my life so much harder than it needs to be. Especially automatic toilets, those things are genuinely one of the most horrible things to ever be invented
Those fancy sinks you can’t fit your hands in and just splash water everywhere. We have peaked as a race, its all downhill now.
honestly just modern medicine and indoor plumbing/water treatment
the amount of not dying from random infections we do these days, no wonder there are so many humans
If it weren’t for modern medicine, I’d have been dead over a decade ago since I have an autoimmune disorder that is treated with a weekly injection. Whenever there are discussions about societal disorder, my first thoughts are wondering how long I would last without the medicine.
:(
no way for you to be prescribed an emergency supply and get self injection training?
Unfortunately, the medication lasts about a year before it expires. However, that’s in the fridge. At room temperature, the medication only last 14 days before it goes bad.
I appreciate your concern so much tho! I’m having a terrible day, so your care made it a bit nicer. Thank you very much 🥹
I hope you have some better days soon. You deserve good days <3
My cellphone. Every day. Every time I’m at my computer and transfer a file to my phone over KDE Connect I kinda just sit there for a second marveling at the fact that the transfer happened and it just feels like magic.
I understand the underlying processes that make it happen, just sometimes I find myself ignoring the details and just appreciating it for a moment.
