Ebay. In the old days it mostly individuals selling stuff from their basement. Then, two other groups became prominent. First, you have resellers. They’ll sell someone’s used electronics for instance, but the difference is the seller doesn’t know anything about the piece and makes no guarantees. I got burned on a cellphone sold by one of tose outfits. The other group is gray-market retailers. I don’t buy from them because I’m afraid of counterfeits and such, and just getting ripped off. To be fair though, I did get ripped off by an individual seller once and I wasn’t refunded on shipping.
There have been big problems with various counterfeit products from China. It got so bad that guitar-maker Ibanez put a warning about Chinese copies right on their homepage.
There are still some regular people, and some other good sources though. Harman International sells refurbished audio equipment directly on Ebay.
I agree about cars. One thing is they’re a lot more enclosed. They have the wider pillars and in recent years they’ve been giving them very high beltlines. Some of them almost look like tanks to me.
As far as sweeeteners go, there’s a new one calle sucralose or Splenda. I would never drink something with aspartame but these new diet sodas are pretty good.
[QUOTE=Zabali_Clawbane]
Movie theater popcorn tasted so much better once upon a time. Furniture was better made, it was built to last decades and was a reasonable price. Now you have to spend a fortune for the chance that your furniture will be good quality wood, and well made. Apples were better, now they’ve been bred to be large, and red, with no flavor, and an icky texture. They don’t know if they can ever bring back the good “old fashioned” apples on a large scale. The same goes for pears and peaches. 
[/QUOTE]
Movie theaters used to use coconut oil for popping. Now they use an oil that’s heart healthier, but not as flavorful. I say, bring back the bad old stuff. Who goes to the movies so frequently that it’s a real health risk? I suspect, too, that part of the health risk is the practice of selling popcorn in bushel baskets. While this is a good size for a group of half a dozen people or more, I don’t think that many people go to movies in large groups.
I have banned all Delicious apples in this household. My husband and daughter like Granny Smiths, and I love Gala apples. We try to eat seasonal fruits and veggies, both for taste and economy.
I miss independent bookstores. I love the modern huge bookstores which are more likely to have what I want, when I want it, but it breaks my heart to see great stacks of books, which I know will be stripped and dumped. I miss remainder tables. I also miss copyediting. While older books might have a typo or two, it seems that many modern books and modern reprints have typos galore, sometimes not misspellings as much as missed words, or the right spelling of the wrong word.
I miss fountains in malls. I know it’s a cliche, but I loved the fountains, they were very relaxing to watch.
Streamline, & Googie-Style Architecture. The furniture & interior decorating of the 50’s & Early 60’s.
I want a house straight outta the Dick Van Dyke Show, dammit!
[QUOTE=Lynn Bodoni]
I have banned all Delicious apples in this household. My husband and daughter like Granny Smiths, and I love Gala apples.
[/QUOTE]
Amen to this. Have you tried Braeburn apples? Worth the extra price.
[QUOTE=Fear Itself]
Car bumpers. They were made out of chrome-plated steel like this and you could run into each other at full speed without totalling your car.
[/QUOTE]
People say this fairly often but it is pretty ignorant. The self-destruct mechanism is to protect the occupants in the event of a crash and to hell with the car. Today’s cars are built to absorb as much energy as possible and prevent it from being passed to the occupants. That is why they fold like a Frenchman being confronted by a water pistol. Cars today are vastly more safe because of it than the ones you are heralding.
[QUOTE=Shagnasty]
Cars today are vastly more safe because of it than the ones you are heralding.
[/QUOTE]
They are safer, but at low speed, they fall apart for no good reason, at great expense. At best, cars look like crap after even parking lot scrapes.
Travel. Time was, flying internationally involved simply fronting up at the airport with a passport sometime before the flight left. Security consisted simply of a metal detector and maybe X-raying your carry-on luggage, if they felt like it. Nowadays… well, 'nuff said, really.
Computers. Technologically, computers nowadays are miles better than they’ve ever been (one might even say they “pwn” t3h 0|d C0|/|pv+3r5, as it were 
), but the thing is, now anyone can go out and buy a pimped-out system- the sort of system that would have been capable of handling the requirements for both NASA and the Soviet space programme in their entirety in the '80s- without a bloody clue what to do with it. The number of people I talk to who have Core Duo processor PCs with 2Gb of RAM, a 300Gb HDD, and a 256Mb Nvidia 7600GS 3D card, yet only use their system for sending E-mails and typing up documents in Word is just astounding. It’s good that more people are getting into computers, but there was, I think, something better about the days when anyone with a computer could reasonably expected to know rather a lot about them- certainly, there was more of a “community” feel back in the days when PCs were expensive and required a lot of technical knowledge to do much more than turn on.
The Future. As has already been said, the Future used to be an exciting place where we’d all have hovercars and robots a la The Jetsons, could take holidays to The Moon and Mars, and generally live like a futuristic version of Pleasantville. Once again, it would appear, we’ve been had.
Lollies. They always tasted much nicer as a kid. Sure, chocolate is nice, but it always tasted even nicer when it was a treat, rather than something that can be purchased by the kilo with spare change, IMHO.
Strawberries used to be small and sweet. Now they are the size of melons, and they taste like rind.
[QUOTE=Lynn Bodoni]
I have banned all Delicious apples in this household. My husband and daughter like Granny Smiths, and I love Gala apples. We try to eat seasonal fruits and veggies, both for taste and economy.
[/QUOTE]
Geh. Gala apples? Maybe if you’re baking. With a lot of curry. An ordinary Braeburn or Cortland should be just fine. I agree about the Delicious varieties. Anytime you eat an apple that has perfectly uniform color and picturebook shape, it’s going to taste like hell.
[QUOTE=Zabali_Clawbane]
Movie theater popcorn tasted so much better once upon a time.
[/QUOTE]
And you could get real butter on it!
[QUOTE=Equipoise]
I used to drink the old Tab too, and it wasn’t so bad. The last time I tasted one it was nasty.
I remember cyclamates, and how good Mom’s Kool-Aid was when made with cyclamates. Then, just because lab rats fed the equal of 800 soda pops a day (or something like that) got cancer, the sugar industry got cyclamates banned. Almost all artificial sweeteners taste like ass or, like aspertame (which is in so many of the diet drinks now) really ARE bad for you.
I say, bring back cyclamates and/or decriminalize stevia.
[/QUOTE]
And for non-diet sodas, criminalize corn syrup! Cane sugar or nothing!
[QUOTE=Argent Towers]
- I think that cars during the 70s and 80s still looked better than the ones now, since the ones now all have homogeneous rounded “aero” styling that clashes, dreadfully clashes, with all the architecture around them. (When I bring up this point about cars clashing with architecture [what are the two things that you’re going to see the most when you walk outside? Cars and buildings] most people act like I’m speaking an alien language. Not a foreign language, a literally extra-terrestrial one. But since you’re a fellow vintage-car-guy, I take it you’ll understand.)
[/QUOTE]
So what? In any city more than 20 years old, the architecture clashes with the architecture!
Funny how things have ALWAYS been better “back then.” Even when “back then” was the Great Depression or World War II, or even the turn of the 20th century, when every family could count on at least a couple of members dying needlessly from some disease or condition that can easily be cured today.
No sir, make mine the present. I enjoy a stroll down memory lane as much as the next fellow, but to me, it’s just gotten better overall.
[QUOTE=Siam Sam]
I enjoy a stroll down memory lane as much as the next fellow, but to me, it’s just gotten better overall.
[/QUOTE]
But not everything. And that’s what this thread is about.
[QUOTE=Siam Sam]
No sir, make mine the present. I enjoy a stroll down memory lane as much as the next fellow, but to me, it’s just gotten better overall.
[/QUOTE]
I have to admit I agree. President Bush. The Scandal of the Week. The War in Iraq. Aids in Africa. Slavery in the Sudan. The melting of Antarctica. The human garbage dump at Guantanamo. Radical Islamic terrorism. The destruction of America’s reputation. Darfur. Rwanda. 9/11. Virginia Tech.
Yessir, happy days are here again!
[QUOTE=saoirse]
Anytime you eat an apple that has perfectly uniform color and picturebook shape, it’s going to taste like hell.
[/QUOTE]
Let’s just say all produce that has been bred solely for its appearance without any regard to taste. Big and colorful = eye-catching and more likely to sell, but think about it: that just means those fruits and vegetables have been bred to be sold and not to be eaten.
The crime of Red Delicious apples (one out of two is true) is, in my view, matched by the offense of those giant swollen tomatoes that look like heaven and taste like particle board. I live for the couple of months in summer when the local heirlooms, unmolested by industrial technique, hit the shelves. You can eat them like apples, the sweet juice running down your chin. I firmly believe that most people who say they don’t like tomatoes simply haven’t had a good one.
Same goes for strawberries, as mentioned above; most kinds of oranges; many melons; many onions; and on and on. I’m the annoying guy in the produce section who roots through everything touching and smelling, looking for the stuff with actual character and flavor. I fear the day the same impulses destroy Meyer lemons, asparagus, butternut squash, and the other fruits and vegetables that are not, as yet, produced to appear uniformly glossy and tumescent.
Ha! Vietnam. Watts. Race riots. Khmer Rouge. Cold War. Biafra. Charles Manson. Death fom innumerable diseases. Richard Nixon and destruction of America’s reputation. Been there, done that.
If you honestly think that you are worse off than people who had to endure the Irish Potato Famine or the 1930s Dust Bowl or some gas chamber in a German concentration camp or the ethnic-Chinese purges in Suharto’s Indonesia or Mao’s Great Leap Forward, then Wow! You must be going through hell. I say overall, the world has progressed. But then that’s just me.
[QUOTE=Siam Sam]
If you honestly think that you are worse off …
[/QUOTE]
No one has stated that. All we are doing is identifying the things which have not improved. Nobody has stated that everything is worse now.
Are saying that everything, without exception, is better now than it used to be? If not, I don’t see where there is any inconsistency between your position and ours.
No, of course I don’t think every single thing is better. I can be nostalgic, too. My purpose was actually just to point out that looking back on the “good ol’ days” is nothing new, that things have always been better “back then” no matter the time period. Just didn’t know someone was going to jump in with the usual litany du jour of all the world’s headline woes.
