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.
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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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
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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 🤢
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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.
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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.
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Henry Kissinger
May he rot into nothing and be forgotten
The lack of privacy, independence, and freedom that generally comes with childhood.
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The Ozone hole.
Also acid rain. Two massive environmental Ws that aren't celebrated enough.
Women having to get husband’s permission to open a bank account (speaking of the US).
I'm glad that Furbys, inflatable furniture, and disposable cameras are no longer mainstream. And may they never return.
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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
George W. Bush's presidency. I don't know what the kids are smoking when they say current republicans make him look "classy" or that Trump's first term was worse than his. He bred a constant state of paranoia and xenophobia and used it to justify killing countless people in the middle east. The damage done to that part of the world is staggering and everyone just treats it like background noise.
Also that decade post-SpongeBob where every kid's cartoon was about a loud, annoying, dumb guy.
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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.
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It's not "gone", but the notion of it being "acceptable" is gone:
Using 'retard' as a slur, not only for people with intellectual disabilities but also just for people or things you think were stupid.
Using ‘retard’ as a slur, not only for people with intellectual disabilities
That's actually the one group of people I've never seen anyone call that, lol.
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smoking everywhere
I’m so fucking glad we’ve stopped calling women “hysterical” whenever we don’t believe them. That word is so blatantly misogynistic and it seems to be dying out now.
CDs and DVDs and (video)casettes. Took up so much room, annoying to use while travelling.
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Leaded gas.
Objectively, dial-up.
Otoh, what I would really badly like to become a thing again is actual media ownership, ie. not having streaming services randomly yank your stuff away from you.
Also, I would nominate the fact that the 'It's obsolete as soon as you get it in the door' meme hasn't been valid for decades now, but hardware manufacturers, Windows itself, and the game industry are trying really hard to make that a thing again seemingly.
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Orkut, Flogão (kind of a precursor to instagram, it was mostly used by high schoolers around 2004-6), Skype, Internet Explorer and ActiveX
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