What's the worst invention of the 21st century?

I skip the app and use one of Safeway's "Please Don't Rape Me" cards that I found in the parking lot.

Was that before or after going to the bank, laughing?

Nespresso has ones that are fully metal, and so can be shredded and separated by mass to get scrap aluminum and prime compost fodder. They accept them back by mail.

It's a small plastic cup full of ground coffee, Kuerig machines use them. They generated a ton of plastic waste, since each k-cup was a single use.

Nah that's a diva cup

Don't give anyone ideas.

A lot of stuff marked as recyclable is technically recyclable but cost prohibitive to do so. I don't know what type of plastic these cups are, but when they claim recyclable, it should specify percent actually being recycled.

I'm liking aldi at the moment. They list all the separate parts of packaging for me and how it can be disposed. I hope its just a step to moving more to biodegradable rather than recyclable.

To be used in most recycling programs you would need to fully remove the foil lid, and rinse out every k-cup before depositing them in recycling.

I think the problem is not in pod-based single-serving coffee machines. Those are common, and well-loved for a reason.

But there are easily available alternatives that do the exact same thing without requiring so much plastic, namely Senseo coffee pads (they're grounds in coffee filter paper) or CoffeeB and its compressed coffee grounds balls (so it's all just coffee ground, both the coffee and the pod). Probably a fair few more I don't know about personally.

Possibly even Nestle with their Nescafe pods. They're aluminium but some countries achieve effectively 100% recycling on that, then the only issue is the filter membrane they place inside and I don't know whether that is easily separated during recycling or not.

It’s a bad enough idea we don’t need anymore for the next few centuries.

According to someone else in here, it was 19th, and that sounds right to me. I'm guessing early 19th.

It's just a neat, tidy legal fiction for some purposes.

it was 2010

well citizens united was 21st and encoded it in law.

It's a 19th century idea that appeared in the published decision of the Supreme Court in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Co.

Only—get this—it wasn't even what the Court decided. Instead, it was the guy in charge of recording the decision for publication who declared "corporate personhood" in the headnote (summary) of the case. And would it surprise you to learn that the guy was the former president of a railroad company? We just sort of went along with this not-precedent until the Citizens United case.

Just remove their stem valve cores lol

You can also just... empty the bags manually. Without buying the super expensive machine.

Nah because my kitchen is full of plastic junk 😅

Old mandolin slicers. The plastic on one's produced recently cracks in a year for the cheap ones, or five years for the expensive ones. My grandmother had one that was solid metal. I'm sure it's serving my cousin as well today as it served my grandmother 50+ years ago.

I'd suggest a stand mixer, but even those have gone down hill, even brands like kitchenaid have gotten worse.

Maybe some old pyrex, if you can find some. The new stuff is bad, can't recommend that.

Ah I was falling asleep and didn’t read well enough apparently thanks

Eh, I couldn't really think of anything that isn't already pointed out by somebody else in the comments, so this is the thing that came to mind.

That first one is actually pretty good. For some reason I have never heard of the other three.

Go ahead. Downvote my comment with pleasure.

My favorite episode of X-Files predicted it at a lesser scale: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Switch_(The_X-Files)

Having an internet connection, a proper AI can easily order contractors around and reproduce, secure and empower itself.

Godbless the hype is about stupid t9 on steroids, but we don't really have any safeguards against what we assume is a proper autonomous AI.

Hmm. What is the definition of robot, anyway? A lot of robots run on hydraulics, which in principle could be pumped and valved with no electricity. On the other hand, nobody calls a conveyor belt a robot regardless of how much stuff it moves or how many parts it has.

But what's the error rate? I could type at 200 words per minute (even on a phone!!) if I didn't care about how many typos I was making. And swiping keyboards get confused incredibly easily. The error rates are especially bad when you're writing words that only use a single row of keys - on QWERTY keyboards for example, try writing something like "type", and you could get that, or you might get something else, like wipe/write/ripe. Other groups could include things like tip/top, pit/pot, wit/wire and the selected word will be wrong almost as frequently as it's right. And autocorrect systems can't really correct for things like when you mean to press enter and hit the backspace key instead. Plus, their suggestions are generally just very stupid. So while buttons take longer to press on physical keyboards, the reduced error rate makes typing speed about the same in my experience.

Plus, with physical buttons, you get tactile feedback, so you can tell when your fingers are slightly off and adjust them, whereas on a flat surface, you have no idea whether you pressed the correct button or not. You have to stare straight at the screen to make sure every press is correct, which is exhausting and bad for your eyesight. I feel a lot more eyestrain from simply typing on phones, whereas with physical buttons, I didn't even have to look at the screen, and I could look at something else around me while typing. And don't get me started on how many calls I've missed because I accidentally hit the hang-up button, or couldn't find the accept call button - not a problem when you have physical buttons!

Regarding screen real estate, all you need is a slide-out keyboard. They work great!

There are a few downsides to physical keyboards, but in my experience, they're far superior to non-keyboard devices. But what can you do - in the 21st century, practicality never matters, it's just all about aesthetics and nothing else....

Good for you. My sausage fingers mean I have to use swipe motions more often than not, and often the word will be wrong, then I have to backspace and type it letter by letter, sometimes getting it right, often getting some letters wrong.

Autocorrect means trying anything akin to programming, or typing commands in a terminal emulator is an exercise in patience. "Just turn it off" - see sausage fingers problem

This

Roblox is what zuckerfuck wish his metaverse could become. Millions of kids playing, another thousands working effectively for free to create content, and the very few that actually find success see that getting any money out of Roblox and into their bank accounts is hard as hell and comes with exorbitant taxes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gXlauRB1EQ -> Video is almost 3 years old, but I doubt Roblox got better for developers in any capacity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6PYj93SGxc -> Essentially the same thing as above, but from September 2023, with some numbers updated, like the CEO saying they made "over 100 million dollars of cash in Q1" (2023), the place having over 50 million games, and more.

It might be funny to hear but I am specialized in vr. Well, I could criticize it in many ways. In the case of this picture, it's comparable to people being excited about GMO, but being against it because of how capitalism manages to fuck it up.

Huh what

OK, you got me there. For me, EMail-SPAM is still a new thing, because I still remember the time before.

need a vehicle that sits high

Why does anybody need a vehicle that "sits high"?

But being high make them incredibly dangerous for other road users. If a normal car hits you, you break your leg, it sucks, but within a month you'd walk on crutches and within 6 month you'd be fine. A SUV hitting a pedestrian or a cyclist will break their pelvis or even their back which has a harder recovery and long lasting consequences.

These stuff should be banned