Most of them are alive and kicking in the first world as well.
Magazines, newspapers, physical currency, DVDs, CDs, desktop computers (!), gas-powered cars (!!!). I will be an old man (I’m 27 right now) before any of those things disappears for good.
Somehow I really doubt that paper and writing utensils are going anywhere at any point near in the future; they’re just too useful. I’m a technophile, and even I grab for the notepad before I open up Notepad on my computer when I get a phone call.
Also, as long as toll booths and vending machines require paper and metal currency (and what the heck is up with toll booths not taking plastic yet? It’s 2009!), I’m sure we’ll continue to have paper and metal currency to spend there.
Actually, toll roads are going cashless. The North Texas Tollway Authority did so last week on the President George Bush Turnpike, as are toll roads in Colorado, Florida and Maryland.
Right. The future is not electric but plug-in hybrid.
Newspapers, the daily kind you subscribe to, may be going out. The free kind you get in a rack will be around for decades.
The ability to repair a piece of electronic equipment down to component level. Now with modern electronics you have to replace the whole circuit board.
These may have limited lifetimes, but I don’t see any of them “coming to a close” any time soon—they’re still around and will be so for awhile.
The cassette era (both audio and video) is, depending on how you define “era,” either already over for a number of years now, or on its way out.
So is the CRT era. Plenty of people still have and use CRT TVs and monitors, but as they become replaced, unless there’s some usage that I’m not aware of, CRTs, which were ubiquitous not long ago, will become extinct.
Yeah… If you question the value of pen and paper, I suggest you try picking them up.
I’m quite a technophile too. For some things, many things, I like to open up wordpad and quickly type some notes. But paper has a free-form quality to it that’s not matched by computers. You can draw, you can format, you can annotate, freely. Now, maybe I don’t use the right progs, but it’s just too cumbersome to do that in software. (At least, in OneNote.) Touch-screen/tablet tech is the “obvious” answer to pen and paper, and I’m sure it’ll eventually have them beat, but right now it really sucks. Horrible fidelity/responsiveness.
The real problem with plastic is that while it’s free to you, it can cost a lot to the merchant. Something like $0.30 per transaction (which I’m sure costs $0.0001 to the processor). As long as this continues, paying for small things with CC’s will either be impossible or really mean to the storeowners (who are forbidden by contracts from charging you extra or insisting on cash or complaining). Only big firms with negotiatory power, like some vending machine operators, can afford to take CC’s for small transactions.
What I found really cool when first learning about this, is that it’s still possible to solder together circuit boards and swap out components by hand, even those that use the most advanced tech. Circuit designers do this all the time. (Mostly you need a tool that blows hot air, versus the traditional soldering iron.) It’s just no repairman bothers with it, because repairmen expect to get ridiculous wages per hour and the stuff they’re repairing is dirt cheap.
Thirty-five millimeter film for theatrical projection of movies will probably be replaced by digital projection in North America in no more than ten years.
I paid cash on the Florida turnpike a month ago. There are some exits where they don’t take cash, it’s all electronic at those. Since Florida is a tourist area I think they will take cash for a while.
I will try it next time I am in NY. I assume that Sheepshead Bay (where my wife is from) would be a good place to start. Last time I was there, everyone was Russian.
Well, I would hope that the freaking state of Oklahoma would be a big enough entity to have some negotiating power, albeit not anywhere near the scale of the Coca Cola Corporation 
The Orlando Expressway Authority says they’re not going cashless in the next ten years, but the Miami-Dade Expressway Authority is converting all their booths to cashless ones by 2011.
I don’t really understand that system - how do they expect to collect unpaid tolls from foreigners?
Perhaps rental cars will come with the electronic toll transponders, and some way for the rental car agency to check usage and charge it back to the renter.
The last car I rented in Boston had just this option. A toll-pass was in a shielding, hinged, metal box on the windshield. Swing it open to use it. They added the fees (and a service charge) to your bill on your car’s return.
Generally, it’s a % fee, with the % decreasing as the average purchase gets higher. It usually runs from 3%- 1%. So, a 3% fee on a $3 toll would be 9 cents.
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Those were gone a long time ago. Keep up.
We have coins here, too.
But with inflation, and our stubborn and asinine refusal to change the demarcation line between coins and bills, they’re increasingly worthless.