Shit, man, did you tie an onion to your belt?
And the Japanese don’t own everything else.
Gas is over 5$ a gallon in some places.
Almost everyone has a computer in their home. Most homes have more than one.
Almost everyone carries a computer on their person.
Almost every vehicle has dozens of computers that it can’t run without.
The USSR one probably does seem like crazy talk, though.
And Chrysler’s entire model lineup consists of a single outdated sedan and a minivan sold under two different names. Dodge’s lineup isn’t much better, consisting of an equally dated sedan, a pony car, and an SUV. Plymouth is gone. Actually that last one might not have been too surprising even in 1985; even back then there wasn’t much difference between Plymouth and Dodge.
ETA: Pickup trucks have become more popular than sedans.
ETA2: Actually, telling them that Oldsmobile is gone might be more surprising. The Cutlass Supreme was America’s best selling car for a few years in the early 1980s.
The current price is toward the top of the range, but the gas price has not really varied much over the past 100 years, adjusted for inflation.
People in 1985 will be more surprised that inflation will average only about 3% for the next 4 decades, given what they just went through in the prior decade.
And the next member of the band to die will be Charlie Watts, in 2021 from natural causes.
If you don’t know something, you can Google it on your laptop.
As for gas being over $5 a gallon, that was also true in 2008, and adjusted for inflation, it “was” in 1981, too. When I got my license that year, it was about $1.50 a gallon in my area, and some people were indeed predicting $5 gas, like they had in parts of Europe even then.
OK. Here’s one.
“In the future, they make you take off your shoes and x-ray your whole body to get in the airport. Why? So they know you aren’t a terrorist, duuh.”
“Yeah, we get like 500 channels on TV but I prefer to watch videos on my phone.”
~Max
Speaking of masks, AIDS still won’t have a vaccine or a cure in 2022, but from the late 1990s on, it will be a treatable chronic disease, with treatments that are no longer worse than the disease.
There will also be vaccines for certain types of cancer, and chemotherapy and radiation, while not exactly fun to go through, will be less of a nightmare than they were at the time.
We still haven’t made it back to the moon.
Nearly everyone has a massively powerful computer (compared to 1985 tech) in their homes, and you can watch thousands of movies thru it. You can also order nearly anything thru it and have it delivered to your home, including hot food from nearby restaurants. Oh, and you will have a device smaller than a slice of toast that can also order everything under the sun and have it delivered to you, will allow you to read from hundreds of news and information sources, and takes astonishingly high-quality digital photos - your mobile phoone.
The bad news is your every activity on the computer and your mobile phone is logged, captured, monetized, and shared with thousands of strangers - that’s what makes all the magical conveniences appear to be “free”.
Roads? Where we’re going, we still need roads.
Laserdisc never really caught on.
You can watch movies and listen to music over this thing called the internet, which “beams” the files into your living room. Most of the time, you don’t even need a computer!
We had a Black president.
We have a Black, Asian female vice-president.
Apple is worth more than Microsoft.
And, both are worth more than IBM.
Bruce Springsteen is still a popular recording artist with a number one album in each of the last six decades and still tours with the E Street Band. He also had a one-man show on Broadway.
Apple, no not the Beatles’ record label, is (often) the most valuable company in the world.
A mixed race woman is now the vice president.
The Supreme Court is a failed body.
For that matter, Apple is the largest company in the U.S., based on market capitalization. And, companies #3 through #5 on the list don’t even exist yet in 1985.
“The most streamed show on Netflix is Squid Game.”
We still don’t have jetpacks.
*except for those mystery youtube sightings