Not 100% gone yet, but gas powered yard tools are dying. Battery powered tools are just better in 99% of use cases.
Two stroke engines do seem dead though which is awesome, because mixed gas was a massive pain in the ass.
I had a 11kW two-stroke motorbike and while it was very important for my rural youth, I do not want it back. Fuck the constant oil refueling, fuck the fumes, fuck the noise. If I ever get a motorbike again, it’d be electric.
The fumes and noise of those little engines makes me excited that the battery versions are taking over.
I remember fighting with gas weed whackers endlessly as a teen trying to do chores… having to dick with the choke for a cold start, having to pump prime them (and it being possible to over prime and lock them out), then you had to carry them around and use them with the exhaust at steak searing temperature… and if you didn’t know how to tune an idle they’d just die in your hands if you didn’t goose the throttle occasionally
This is a great one - don’t miss small gas engines even a little bit lol
Ngl I always thought starting 2-stroke engines was pretty fun. But I certainly don’t miss the noise or the horrible pollution.
Oh god I want to gift ALL OF MY NEIGHBOURS BATTERY LEAF BLOWERS. I bought one, it’s amazing, and we’re about to go into autumn 🤢
Love my electric chainsaw except for in winter. Battery life is horrible.
I’m perfectly content with my little electric chainsaw. Basically I only ever use it if a tree dies or falls in a storm, it actually starts unlike the gas ones I’ve had…It wouldn’t be up to the task of chopping enough wood to heat my house through the winter but for occasional use it’s better than gas.
I do use a chainsaw for cutting wood to heat. (Although this winter is unpleasantly warm. Thanks, climate change…) There is definitely no way that any electric saw would be able to keep up, esp. since you can’t readily drag 500y of extension cord behind you. Chainsaws could absolutely be made cleaner though. Unfortunately, I think that 2-stroke engines have a much higher power:weight ratio than 4-stroke, so we’re stuck using gas mixed with oil, which pumps out smog.
I kinda wonder if it would be possible to make a 2 stroke engine that doesn’t burn its own oil. Like, essentially supercharge it. Use an impeller on the flywheel to pump air into the cylinder so that the crankcase could be full of heavy oil. Though that might not work with a chainsaw since it has to be held at various angles.
Since you don’t have a timing chain on a two stroke, you’d need something else to run a fuel pump.
If engine design interests you, there’s a lot of neat stuff in this channel.
That throws a “this video isn’t available anymore” page.
If that doesn’t work, the channel on YouTuber is “Driving 4 Answers”, and the title of the video is, “The Only Video You’ll Ever Need to Watch to Know how 4 Stroke and 2 Stroke Engines Work and Differ”.
The electric chainsaw is the only one I still don’t like being battery powered. Indeed the battery life is too short for most jobs.
But the noise is also part of the experience, it just doesn’t feel as Powerfull without it.
Lawnmower and snowblower have been the only things I haven’t been happy with being electric. Climate change might help me not need the snowblower at all.
Do you keep the battery inside or on a shed? Much better for the battery to be kept indoors if that’s an option.
Yeah stored in a shed. It’s not an option to keep it indoors as there’s no heated indoors.
Just gotta have backup batteries that you keep charged.
Even better: tools on a wire
It’s getting legit difficult to find corded tools, corded mowers are fine for the size of yard I have, but choice in those was extremely limited. Yeah battery ones exist, they’re twice the price for the cheapest ones and only go up from there, I can live with an extension cord.
I haven’t had much trouble after ditching google and bing. Except for headphones that take aaa batteries
Wired tools are also a pain unless you have a limited scope for movement.
I make sure to have plenty of extension cords, and sockets hanging from most ceilings (with a place to tuck them away).
I don’t know hoe relevant this is, but I am in a 240 volt country. So extension cords don’t really run hot or poorly even with quite a bit of distance and high loads
Really? Some appliances are a great fit for battery but others less so.
An electric mower just doesn’t feel right to me.
The mower is in that 1% unless you have a really small lot. It gets cost prohibitive if you need multiple sets of batteries to finish your lawn.
I use one on a cord. I put it on my shoulder so I don’t ride over it. Never had any problems.
Smoking everywhere. For anyone who wasn’t around for the 70s/80s/90s, everything was tinged yellow and smelled of smoke. Car/plane/train seats had built-in ashtrays. Restaurants had smoking sections separated from the non-smoking sections by waist-high walls.
I have asthma and it sucked. Not sure if I grew out of it as I got older or if there’s just not a miasma of smoke around everywhere, but it rarely bothers me anymore.
At the risk of becoming too anti-casual, anti-gay slurs were so common in the US up until the mid/late 90s, if you weren’t there for it you just have no idea. One of the Bill and Ted movies (I think the first one?) just randomly dropping it in there as a joke, where the slur is the joke, is a good example of just how it was then. There’s still bigotry but it’s not as casual and pervasive.
It’s weird watching average sitcoms from then because of this. The more popular ones are sometimes better but even Seinfeld wasn’t great with it.
Eminem has a song where he casually drops an F bomb.
He dropped like a thousand of them. He was using it regularly until sometime in the 2010s.
Eminem is weird cause he leans left but will use any word— save for n word and now f— as long as it rhymes or fits the scheme, then does nearly nothing else offensive. It’s like words are exempt from his morality.
a lot of media used the F slur well into the 2000s. it’s pretty shocking to watch nowdays
Dial-up internet. I would open a website and go do something else for a minute until it loads, then fight with my parents when they pick up the phone when I’ve been downloading something for 3 hours.
We had very late internet infrastructure upgrade, so at the end we had a bluetooth dial-up internet router in the early 2010s…
Internet over bluetooth is a crime against humanity
@[email protected] Minitel was even worse. But then, Minitel was a French exclusivity.
obligatory quick Sylvqin video (in french though)
I haven’t known the minitel but I guess that the novelty of BBSes compensated the loading time
@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected] When I was still in school, the Minitel was still used to register us to pass our diplomas. One of the schools I was in even still used an actual Minitel terminal to do so. (Most used a compatibility option integrated in dial-ups modems sold in the country. As did my father a couple of times for other unrelated tasks that couldn’t yet be done via internet, when we first got it at home.)
Henry Kissinger
May he rot into nothing and be forgotten
Smoking sections
As long as the law is properly enforced. It’s worse to have smokers just all over the place
Women having to get husband’s permission to open a bank account (speaking of the US).
The Ozone hole.
Also acid rain. Two massive environmental Ws that aren’t celebrated enough.
The lack of privacy, independence, and freedom that generally comes with childhood.
yeah I always wanted to be an adult and now that I am it’s fucking awesome
I’m glad that Furbys, inflatable furniture, and disposable cameras are no longer mainstream. And may they never return.
Disposable cameras are making a return.
Like 35mm point-and-shoots? That’s surprising. I wonder why?
Disposable cameras and Polaroids have been getting popular at weddings in place of guest books or as something for the guests to do during the reception. The couple then gets something physical they can keep.
Interesting. I still wonder why, because this was a trend in the '90s that died out with camera phones and social media. Maybe it’s a retro throwback trend that got popular with younger folks? Still, I thought they stopped manufacturing Polaroid paper, and can you still get film developed at like the grocery store or a pharmacy?
I think it’s that the physical part provides a value that digital doesn’t.
It’s definitely a hipster thing yeah, they aren’t selling them cheap either since it’s a novelty item now. You can still get film developed but same thing, it’s a niche thing now so fewer places to do it and more expensive.
furby was so creepy. esp when he bugs out
The Nazis.
OH WAIT.
Medicine in general has gotten a lot better. I’m also able to buy stuff like silken tofu without having to drive quite far to find a specialty store that sells it.
Smallpox
white dog poop
This is probably completely uninteresting to everyone else, but this has re-surfaced an old memory for me. I had a really dull data entry job one summer, and the crowd I worked with included a few odd figures. One particular guy was always making jokes that were just a bit too edgy for the workplace, especially amongst a bunch of people that didn’t know him well enough to know how much he meant any of it. For some reason, completely unprompted, he brought up that “you never see white dog turds any more”. Everyone heard this as “white doctors” and immediately winced in anticipation of some incoming racism, and everyone still heard it that way when he tried to clarify several times. Turns out no, it was 100% innocent, just weird.
He was fired for unrelated reasons a few weeks later; he had gone to the nearby pub on his lunch break and had several pints
goals, honestly
For anyone that doesn’t know, dog food used to contain a lot of bone meal; as dog poop degraded (?), the bone meal would remain. Hence white dog poop. I think that this changed due to tighter regulations on pet food.
Pagers. Having to find a pay phone. Looking through newspapers for jobs. Absolutely gutless emissions- strangled malaise era cars with horrible brakes and numb steering.
Looking through the paper for a job was in some ways better. Now it’s so hard to even get past the initial filters to an actual human because job postings get spammed with hundreds of applications, many from people who are underqualified and/or straight up lying on their resume. For remote jobs, you’re competing against the whole country whereas with jobs in the paper you were mostly competing against those in your local area.
Is funny how we have all this tech for it and they’ve only managed to enshittify the process. Some sites are going back to the original purpose like indeed but it’s still like tossing your resume into space.
The enshittification is the point of tehse “high tech” replacements for things that worked just fine beforehand.
Capitalism is the point. They’re usually fine tools until they have investors steering the ship.
“Capitalism is the point.”
“Enshittification is the point.”
They’re the same sentence!
Pagers certainly still exist.
Troubleshooting issues with them is a pain too.
That being said, I’ve only seen them in the medical field.
