Posted on 08/03/2017 1:14:19 PM PDT by sodpoodle
Ten Things That Will Disappear In Our Lifetime
This is USA oriented, but Canada and the rest will not be far behind. Whether these changes are good or bad depends in part on how we adapt to them. But, ready or not, here they come.
Maybe not in the seniors of today lifetimes but more likely in our childrens.
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1. The Post Office
Get ready to imagine a world without the post office. They are so deeply in financial trouble that there is probably no way to sustain it long term. Email, Fed Ex, and UPS have just about wiped out the minimum revenue needed to keep the post office alive. Most of your mail every day is junk mail and bills.
2. The Check
Britain is already laying the groundwork to do away with check by 2018. It costs the financial system billions of dollars a year to process checks. Plastic cards and online transactions will lead to the eventual demise of the check. This plays right into the death of the post office. If you never paid your bills by mail and never received them by mail, the post office would absolutely go out of business.
3. The Newspaper
The younger generation simply doesn't read the newspaper.
They certainly don't subscribe to a daily delivered print edition.
That may go the way of the milkman and the laundry man. As for reading the paper online, get ready to pay for it. The rise in mobile Internet devices and e-readers has caused all the newspaper and magazine publishers to form an alliance. They have met with Apple, Amazon, and the major cell phone companies to develop a model for paid subscription services.
4. The Book
You say you will never give up the physical book that you hold in your hand and turn the literal pages I said the same thing about downloading music from iTunes. I wanted my hard copy CD.
But I quickly changed my mind when I discovered that I could get albums for half the price without ever leaving home to get the latest music. The same thing will happen with books. You can browse a bookstore online and even read a preview chapter before you buy. And the price is less than half that of a real book. And think of the convenience! Once you start flicking your fingers on the screen instead of the book, you find that you are lost in the story, can't wait to see what happens next, and you forget that you're holding a gadget instead of a book.
5. The Land Line Telephone
Unless you have a large family and make a lot of local calls, you don't need it anymore. Most people keep it simply because they've always had it. But you are paying double charges for that extra service. All the cell phone companies will let you call customers using the same cell provider for no charge against your minutes.
6. Music
This is one of the saddest parts of the change story. The music industry is dying a slow death. Not just because of illegal downloading. It's the lack of innovative new music being given a chance to get to the people who would like to hear it. Greed and corruption is the problem. The record labels and the radio conglomerates are simply self-destructing. Over 40% of the music purchased today is "catalog items," meaning traditional music that the public is familiar with. Older established artists. This is also true on the live concert circuit.
To explore this fascinating and disturbing topic further, check out the book, "Appetite for Self-Destruction" by Steve Knopper, and the video documentary, "Before the Music Dies."
7. Television Revenues
The networks are down dramatically. Not just because of the economy. People are watching TV and movies streamed from their computers. And they're playing games and doing lots of other things that take up the time that used to be spent watching TV. Prime time shows have degenerated down to lower than the lowest common denominator. Cable rates are skyrocketing and commercials run about every 4 minutes and 30 seconds. I say good riddance to most of it. It's time for the cable companies to be put out of our misery. Let the people choose what they want to watch online and through Netflix.
8. The "Things" That You Own
Many of the very possessions that we used to own are still in our lives, but we may not actually own them in the future. They may simply reside in "the cloud." Today your computer has a hard drive and you store your pictures, music, movies, and documents. Your software is on a CD or DVD, and you can always re-install it if need be. But all of that is changing.
Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all finishing up their latest "cloud services." That means that when you turn on a computer, the Internet will be built into the operating system. So, Windows, Google, and the Mac OS will be tied straight into the Internet. If you click an icon, it will open something in the Internet cloud. If you save something, it will be saved to the cloud. And you may pay a monthly subscription fee to the cloud provider. In this virtual world, you can access your music or your books, or your whatever from any laptop or handheld device. That's the good news. But, will you actually own any of this "stuff" or will it all be able to disappear at any moment in a big "Poof?" Will most of the things in our lives be disposable and whimsical? It makes you want to run to the closet and pull out that photo album, grab a book from the shelf, or open up a CD case and pull out the insert.
9. Joined Handwriting (Cursive Writing)
Already gone in some schools who no longer teach "joined handwriting" because nearly everything is done now on computers or keyboards of some type (pun not intended)
10. Privacy
If there ever was a concept that we can look back on nostalgically, it would be privacy. That's gone. It's been gone for a long time anyway. There are cameras on the street, in most of the buildings, and even built into your computer and cell phone.
But you can be sure that 24/7, "They" know who you are and where you are, right down to the GPS coordinates and the Google Street View. If you buy something, your habit is put into a zillion profiles, and your ads will change to reflect those habits.
"They" will try to get you to buy something else. Again and again and again.
All we will have left of that which can't be changed.......are our "Memories."
And some of us have already lost them!
Everyone at this table
1. The Post Office
Like several printed news magazines that have already failed (Newsweek and U.S. News come to mind), the post office will likely go online and (when it no longer presents sufficient opportunities for political graft and nepotism) greatly reduce its staff; but it'll still be considered the post office.
2. The Check
These days, it's known as the debit card. Just because we won't have to fill out so many paper slips anymore doesn't mean we won't still be drawing money directly from our "checking" accounts to pay for purchases online and in physical stores.
3. The Newspaper
Again, we may throw out the physical fish wrapper, but the online editions will linger as even the author of this article admits. Will people be willing to pay for them? Doubtful. The New York Slimes and Washington Compost Heap and other far-left rags will likely be reduced to the online version of something like those free "style" newspapers available in waiting areas at doctors' and dentists' offices and the like, which is all to the good... but you'll still be able to get them.
4. The Book
Neither the physical nor the electronic form are going anywhere, though electronic sales are already well-set to overtake physical ones. Even our internet-addicted youngsters prefer the physical to the electronic versions these days, as noted. More importantly, physical books aren't as subject to being lost in power outages and civilization's collapse, to totalitarian government censorship, and to being destroyed with the touch of a button as the electronic versions; even the most PC-addled children of our age know if you don't have the hard copy at hand, you don't really own the book.
5. The Land Line Telephone
We won't stop using it altogether, though we might just start running it through our internet lines instead to get better signal reception. Like the desktop computer with an ethernet cable, phones wired into the system are still far more reliable than the wireless ones. When and where the call absolutely has to get through to its recipient (such as at hospitals, for instance), landlines will still be in use.
6. Music
The industry may die, yes; not so much the musicians, though they'll undergo the same "culling of the herd" that indie book authors are undergoing right now. Like the gatekeepers of the print industry, being rid of these (mostly left-wing) meddlers who want to decide what we do and don't get to hear should be a great benefit to both musicians and their listeners. Musicians' celebrity will be measured by the number of downloaders and listeners rather than the number of copies the industries' marketing departments can manipulate people into buying.
7. Television Revenues
The internet is our generation's television. Again, all that has shifted is the form, not the substance. Internet advertising is a bit trickier than old-fashioned television advertising since the view-on-demand setting with ad-blockers and other user controls on the users' browsers keep the advertisers from having so much of a captive audience as they previously did. As the healthy view counts on commercials on YouTube can attest, however, those revenues aren't gone; they've just migrated to the internet along with television itself.
8. The "Things" That You Own
Some of the physical media we've previously been forced to use to store our beloved abstract entertainment (records, tapes, CDs, and DVDs) will indeed likely go the way of the dinosaurs, but the government-and-corporate-controlled internet "cloud" will only be able to take our hard drives and other personal data storage media from us when it pries them from our cold, dead fingers. With the proliferation of miniaturized USB drives capable of holding ever-more-staggering amounts of data, we will always have our ways of keeping our most treasured abstract possessions away from this ill-conceived fascist "cloud" these incestuous governments and corporations in bed with each other are trying to entice us into joining in order to strip us of our liberties and property rights.
9. Joined Handwriting (Cursive Writing)
Like the "dead language" of Latin, cursive will rise again as people continue to flee from the "education" (i.e. brainwashing) of government schools. Being able to dash off a quick message is still a vital skill for survivalists that they'll teach their children, and being able to read these quick messages will continue to be a vital skill for future historians. Joined handwriting fonts (in numerous alphabets such as Cyrillic, no less) are available for computers, and there will always be various sub-cultures of people interested in using cryptographic alphabets and languages.
10. Privacy
How much of this you have has always been decided by how determined you are to keep any given aspect of your life a secret over against how determined others are to look into it. Security cameras are indeed becoming more ubiquitous, and yet unsolved cases of theft and rape and murder and terrorism continue to be concentrated in the very urban centers where these cameras are installed in the densest concentrations. Child pornographers and terrorists and other dregs of society continue to operate online with considerable impunity thanks to ever-more-sophisticated forms of file encryption and link encryption and network encryption.
On a more mundane level, enforcing copyright laws has become all but impossible as anyone who knows where to look can download music, movies, and television shows over secure connections to his heart's content with roughly the same level of impunity as the aforementioned child pornographers and terrorists. More impunity, in fact, since government enforcers all over the world are mostly too busy dealing with far more dangerous criminals to go after all these nonentities for such petty "crimes" as illegally saving copies of copyrighted music and movies from YouTube. Basically, you can get away with doing almost anything as long as you can avoid drawing attention to yourself while doing it.
The secret to privacy, in other words, is to make yourself seem as uninteresting as possible to anyone who might otherwise be inclined to spy on you; and anything interesting you want to do, make sure it's something you can do over the internet through enough layers of encryption to frustrate anyone who might otherwise take an interest in it.
Can you name one song that ruined it for you or a genre in particular? I thought I hit my musical stride in the 80s but when rap came out and my circle of friends were mostly Latino I got tuned in to some amazing music.
Anyway, I’m grateful for what God opened my eyes to. It’s brought me an incredible amount of joy over 30 years.
Arlindo Cruz : O Bem - The Good - music that transcends to prayer
https://youtu.be/Fb_BZg5VKiU
Exaltasamba - Gamei - perhaps one of the most beautiful ballads written
https://youtu.be/ADkVayQrd4o
Carlos Vives - Volvi a Nacer - the marriage song
https://youtu.be/CJ_zRSv3Hr8
Pericles - Erro meu - my bad - music of brilliant depth and complexity
https://youtu.be/WYHc3ac1jBI
Luis Miguel - Como you te ame
https://youtu.be/bRH6kZKjQ3s
Anyway, half my family is Latino so it’s not like there’s much that will change my mind. Hopefully you found something you like with the sampling above.
Survivalists? Sure, if society falls apart. Otherwise it looks like text messaging has replaced jotting down notes. Plus, quick messages short enough, so if you do use physical writing, block letters are as good as cursive.
Joined handwriting fonts (in numerous alphabets such as Cyrillic, no less) are available for computers, and there will always be various sub-cultures of people interested in using cryptographic alphabets and languages.
Not so much. Joined typewriting fonts never caught on. And while decoding a strange cursive script may be an interesting amusement for a rainy day, that doesn't mean people actually use then to communicate.
4 & 6:
If you do not buy the physical (real) media, then you do not own it; you are leasing it.
Also, MP3 is inferior, so many download-only music today does not qualify for the audiophile.
I would rather pay more for ownership and quality!
11. Liberals.
*** “I havent done cursive for at least 50 years” ***
May not have written it but I bet you read it.
*** “Marriage” *** “Normal dating” ***
One cured me of the other.
The Constitution of the United States of America if President Trump doesn’t fill every Federal Judicial Vacancy with Conservative Judges while he is in Office.
It is mandated in the constitution.
We would not have had roads without the post office. Well, long roads.
I know so it will take some time, but let’s get started.
1. Post Office - Cannot remember the last time I licked a stamp to mail something. I sometimes don't check my mailbox on the street I live on for weeks at a time and I find it overflowing - virtually all of it junk mail that I immediately throw away. I have however gone to UPS or FedEx to mail packages.
2. Checks - Once in a while I'll write out a check for something. But I'm on the same book of checks I was using three years ago! I find myself using Apple Pay even more than whipping out my credit cards. That will only accelerate. I hardly ever use cash as well.
3. Newspapers - I finally in the past year cancelled my WSJ subscription. Their anti-Trump editorials were the main reason but I used to consider the WSJ a very major part of my daily life. It was a little heartbreaking but I had to finally let it go.
4. Books - I love books and have a massive personal library at home, much to my wife's chagrin. I have rooms overflowing with books. But I hardly ever buy any new ones. It is so much more convenient reading them on a Kindle and I like having a massive personal library at my fingertips. Lot of free ebooks available that I'm taking advantage of. My library allows me to borrow digital content. This is the way it's going folks.
5. Land Line - Two years ago we disconnected our landline. The wife and I use our cellphones. Way less telemarketers to deal with and it's nice to know who's calling you and not have to answer when you don't know who it is. Readable voice mail (where you can read the text of a voicemail) is a godsend. 90% of those voicemails get deleted forever with no return call. Sorry telemarketers and other people looking for money.
6. Music - With Apple Music ($10/month) you have access to pretty much all the music ever recorded. Why did I waste my money all those decades buying LPs, cassettes and finally CDs? None of them are worth a crap anymore. If I get a sudden urge to listen to "Breakfast In America" by Supertramp or some Bessie Smith from the 1920s, I have it streaming on my speakers in about 10 seconds. Also, if I want to be surprised, I have Sirius/XM that I stream in my car and at home through the app. Over a hundred channels of commercial free music of virtually every possible genre at your fingertips. As a last resort, when I have trouble finding a particular song, there is always YouTube.
7. Television - Other than some FoxNews now and then or some NFL football, I never watch anything on television. It's all Netflix and Amazon Prime streaming through my Roku box or on my laptop or tablet. Then there is always YouTube.
8. Media that you Own - After decades of collecting LPs, cassettes, CDs, Books, VCR tapes, photographs, DVDS, and whatnot, I have all that stuff available in the Cloud. On a recent vacation I took over 500 photos and a few hours of video on my iPhone that got uploaded to the Cloud. One of these days, I'll get around to checking that stuff out.
9. Cursive writing - Other than my signature, I haven't done any cursive writing in years. I think I forgot how to do cursive write a capital Q and Z. I don't think my grown sons can do any cursive writing at all.
10. Privacy - You got that right. There is simply no privacy anymore. I work in NYC and there are cameras on every street corner and in every public space. On the highways, there are cameras everywhere. With your license plate number, law enforcement can quickly determine where you've been. Every electronic transaction and communication is likewise available. I took a right turn on red in Long Island a few months ago when I wasn't supposed to and I received a ticket in the mail - another reason to do away with the Postal Service!
LOL, Thank YOU!!!
It is still my backup plan.
While I may sleep though the gentle murmur of my wake track Baby Bell going off ten minutes later will have my feet hitting the floor and I will be wide awake.
They’ll have to pry my books from my cold dead hands. Don’t like e-readers - they give me a headache. And I have LOTS of books.
“Get ready to imagine a world without the post office.”
not likely. amazon and others are making more and more use of USPS because it’s cheaper than UPS and Fedex for smaller packages. UPS is also using USPS for last mile delivery in some cases. finally, amazon is using USPS for Sunday delivery.
oh, and another thing: USPS is delivering massive numbers of newspaper ad inserts and flyers that USED to be included in newspapers, but no longer are because newspapers no longer are.
Do believe the most important is missing from this list.
THE NATION = U.S.A.
I work with two college students. Their writing resembles the scribbles of a six year old.
After ruining books in a flood and deciding that I had no more space for new ones, I am happy that I can read e-text and hear audio books online. I am in a unique situation where I prefer not having old smelly books and magazines. I see the convenience. Same with music. Lost the record player and I don’t have the store space of a Joel Whitburn to own every CD in the world or at least in Rock N’ Roll in English. So at this moment in time I am happier paying for a service where I can hear Music and listening to online stations. I did keep my CD and Cassette tape collection. Even my old VHS and player.
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