The future is over-rated.
Reason has been replaced by emotion.
Which is why ancient Greek democracy failed in the long run.
I see we’ll STILL be stuck with, ‘She Who Shall Not Be Named!’
If she’s in MY future - I ain’t goin’! ;)
The constitution
Privacy rights
Property rights
America
Western civilization
Families
Too blunt?
Yes. The future will see it as the Wild West.
And you know how we miss the Wild West...:)
This is one of those articles that are fun to read but full of overblown speculations. The Post Office will continue to reinvent itself as it has with package delivery. To mail a DVD or small book by Media Mail is $2.66. Why would I pay UPS and Fed Ex rates?
“The 20th Century was great;) “
So are:
Cellphones with internet and navigation
75” Tv’s with 4k her
600 HP cars with all the goodies getting 20 mpg
WIFI
...
Traffic lights are likely to vanish as self-driving cars establish a safety record superior to humans, leading to a ban on non-self-driving cars.
If/When land lines are gone I will be telephone free. I will not carry a cell phone and I will not pay the exorbitant cost of one compared to my landline or go through the constant hassle of recharging for the ones that do sort of compare with the cost of the landline. The land line also stays functional in power outages and through hurricanes that take out all the nearby cell towers. That is a considerable advantage here in Florida. When cables are all underground I might go to an internet phone but it will be attached to my desktop and will not go with me to be constantly pestering me through my day.
You forgot the Democrat Party.
It’s demise can’t come soon enough.
1) I don’t think so. It will change somewhat but My P.O. Box will be filled with orders, checks and invoices thirty years from now.
2) We’re not Britain. We use a check for proof of payment on occasion.
3) Agree.
4) Disagree. Vinyl records are still being sold, so will special books.
5) We have EIGHT phone lines - ditched our last landline three years ago when our DSL speed could not exceed 325KB - paid for 1.5 MB. VIOP phone lines are very reasonably priced.
6) I can’t say, but I do believe live music is alive and well.
7) Seems like the author is bitchin’ about cable companies here.
8) When I purchase a movie online I download it and make a copy of it as a backup. Has come in handy more than once when a movie ‘disappears’ from my movie collection.
9) I gave up cursive in the 70’s
10) Sure. But I’m still private.
The dirty little secret about UPS and FedEx is they charge you extra to give it to the Post Office to deliver. They make money off of you when you don’t use USPS.
#2: it costs even more to process the card transactions than it does to process checks, at least, judging by atm and credit card fees.
#4: electronic gadgets can never offer the ability to quickly thumb through a book to read bits and pieces here and there. When I read a book, it is rare for me to read it from front to back. Instead, I thumb through it, looking for the fate of a particular character or finding out how a particular plot element develops, or rereading a part to get a better idea of the groundwork for a particular thread. Electronically, it is very hard to thumb through the pages. And if I find a part that I want to examine, it is difficult to go back to where I was. Until electronic books have that ease of looking forwards and backwards and accurately returning to the page the reader was last reading, print books have the advantage.
#5: until the sound quality on cell phones is at the quality of land line phones, I am not giving up the land line. I tell people not to call the cell, text me instead. If a call is important, I use the land line.
I put these objections in terms of my experience, but I think they apply to a lot of people. I can’t be the only person who does not read a book in sequential page order, or who finds cell phone sound quality almost impossible to understand.
Other things on the list... well, print news is largely a victim of its own arrogance, so good riddance to it. I hope that it cannot survive in electronic format, either; in a perfect world, fake news would be unsellable in any format. (Pulitzer prize to NYT for blatant fake news, seriously?)
I will fight to keep the “landline” until my cold hands are incinerated (due to lack of burial space, right?). Malthus carries on forward to doom because we humans are so ignorantly unbelieving.
Let me tell you why: Here in the BIG EMPTY as I call this area of PA without any major roads south of I-80, NE of Pittsburgh, W of Harrisburg, and N of Cumberland (excluding the interstate corridors) there is little to NO cell phone service for the poor, including me, who cannot afford the 4 and 5G phones. No Verizon service internet that is reliable...up and download speeds of 0.79 MBPS and 0.22 MBPS, for example, on 4/15/18. .
I am physically impaired and when the day comes I need an ambulance, I must have telephone service to call one. I have a land line and it costs almost $95/mos. Tat is almost 10% of my income. Geez.
Schumpeter's creative destruction (while originally borne out of a review of Marx's writings) has given us so much. Personally I am pretty happy that we have automobiles vs horses, washing machines vs rocks by the river, ATMs vs no cash on the weekends, central air conditioning vs heat stroke, cell phones vs land lines, Breitbart.com and FR vs The New York Times, Navigation systems vs being lost, and NICUs vs preemie funerals.
Furthermore, with every advance in snooping comes advances in cloaking and ways to avoid Big Brother. How many people worry about Google and Facebook yet eschew TOR or DuckDuckGo? Yea it requires a little work and maybe inconvenience but at least you won't be like the whiners on MSNBC.
As for music...well..when was the last time anyone got off their arse and went to a bar or club and caught 5 acts for $10? Sure a few of the bands will suck but you may find that the Death of Music is not here yet. Maybe you'll pay $10 for a CD or shirt and keep things moving. On a larger scale, go to a show of 1000-1500 people and catch some new acts. There is no shortage of new, interesting, music that is very good...there is equally no shortage of boring old people blogging that Rock is Dead while listening to The Stranger and The Last Waltz (yet again) on their iPad.
The future is what you make of it. I choose freewill, a little ingenuity, and to advance via peering through the windshield vs wistfully staring at the rear-view mirror.
The post office does fine on an operational basis. The reason it can’t make money is that it is not allowed to accrue unfunded pension liabilities. If local governments were forced to operate on the same model, most of them would be bankrupt overnight.
Very easy to make that prediction - most of those things are already fading into oblivion.
I hope the book is the very last one to go. I want cursive to go away - it leads to meaningless scribbles that I can’t understand. Privacy is already gone. Dead and buried.
Unless broadband exists throughout the country, the article is BS. None of the coverage maps I’ve seen are accurate. Landlines will continue to be the sole source for rural areas unless a cable supplier exists.
11. John McCain...tick tock
Agree with a lot of this - books for instance. It’s hard to find a brick-and-mortar bookstore these days. But I still prefer ‘real’ books and have not purchased a Kindle or Nook yet. As for the post office, it’s not going away any time soon. Every time I go to mail
A package it’s jammed with customers. And it has always been losing money....