Can they operate a telegraph?

  • KFCDoubleDoink [any]
    ·
    11 months ago

    Oh you don't know how to use a fax? smuglord

    No sorry I've never had to verify out of state child support payments before.

    • ratboy [they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      This is one of the exactly 7 uses of a fax machine, I know, I have to fax shit all the time.

      • kristina [she/her]
        ·
        11 months ago

        I remember when I was younger I thought every fax machine had a tube in it that sucked the paper to its destination

        • ratboy [they/them]
          ·
          11 months ago

          That's so much cooler! All correspondence should be transferred via pneumatic tube. They would obviously make super satisfying shoomp noises you just can't get with a boring ol fax machine

            • ratboy [they/them]
              ·
              11 months ago

              If you know about how they work lay that knowledge on me, I'm actually super curious now. I got to see one in action at the drive thru lane for my bank once and witnessing thay was the most excited I'd been in a long time.

      • KFCDoubleDoink [any]
        ·
        11 months ago

        I know we've had a few comrades talk about their struggles parenting before and I definitely don't mean them but... yeah.

        • ratboy [they/them]
          ·
          11 months ago

          Ah I was just joking. The only known uses of a fax at this point are to send crap to DHS, social security, or to send medical records. That's it. The beaureaucrats won't let it die!!

      • FourteenEyes [he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        I know one of the other 7 is verifying a Volkswagon lease payoff with a non-Volkswagen dealer because they refuse to send them any other way so we just stopped taking VW leases

        • ratboy [they/them]
          ·
          11 months ago

          Yep, sounds just about tedious enough to warrant a faxin'

          what-the-hell

      • Mindfury [he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        number one is just anything to do with medical records or doctors in general

        those motherfuckers love a fax. it's like the first technological advancement came along that would replace literally posting or having someone personally courier documents and they said "yep, this is the one"

    • dreugeworst@lemmy.ml
      ·
      11 months ago

      I'm an older millennial, never used a fax machine in my life, wouldn't know why I'd ever want to learn how either

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      I'm looking at getting a replacement birth certificat and the fuckers at the vital records department want me to send them a check.

      Like fuck, sure I guess I'll also send you a big string of cash and maybe a negotiable bearer bond and some cowries.

  • emizeko [they/them]
    ·
    11 months ago

    it took them fifteen years to learn to program their VCR and they're not going to let go of that

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Apparently there was a massive lawsuit between Sony and TV and Movie producers that basically shaped the 20th century as we know it. Sony's VCRs, maybe the Betamax ones, could be programmed to start recording at a specific time and stop recording at a specific time. The idea was that you could record a show off of TV (They literally worked like recording you screen, just whatever was on the TV was written to a magnetic tape) and then play it back at your leisure.

      The TV and movie companies said this was a copyright violation. They wanted to sue Sony out of existence and either have the process made illegal or charge ruinous fees per use to make recordings for personal use. Fortunately the SCOTUS, in one of it's rare wins, decided that recording media for your own later use wasn't evil piratical piracy and so we got to have an entire couple of decades between the invention of home recording technology and Google and MSFT locking down the entire media landscape with hardware and firmware censorship regimes.

  • FourteenEyes [he/him]
    ·
    11 months ago

    :grillman: "These dumb kids today don't recognize my references to music that was released just shy of 70 years ago. They're so out of touch."

    • Fuckass
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      edit-2
      10 months ago

      deleted by creator

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        Honest pretty weird thinking about WWII and my birth year being as far apart as my birth year and the present. WWII was always something that happened a long, long time ago and now I'm like "Well shit, the 80s now happened a long, long time ago".

      • LaGG_3 [he/him, comrade/them]
        ·
        11 months ago

        In my early-mid 20s I was pretty big into these obscure R&B compilations put out by the Numero Group label and, like, 60s-70s soul and R&B singers that had revived careers (e.g. Sharon Jones, Lee Fields).

        Now I'm just thinking of one of my kid's future gen alpha friends being really into Seapunk or something and that idea is hilarious.

    • SweaterWeather [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      If we were to use the same time frames to define "classic rock" as when I was growing up, Death Cab would be included in that genre lol.

    • Dolores [love/loves]
      ·
      11 months ago

      'classical' music fans be like this, only the music is 300 years old

  • Rom [he/him]
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    edit-2
    11 months ago

    I think the funniest ones are the boomer comics where they draw kids as if they've never seen a book before, and they're holding it sideways all confused saying stuff like "father, how do I click the book." As if books are some arcane technology that no longer exist and they still don't use in schools. Like these:

    https://i.imgur.com/qKcIQke.jpg

    https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fb6wgcstptkj31.jpg

    https://i.pinimg.com/originals/4c/62/96/4c6296504e5e0399ebb05f5f451fb5da.jpg

    • AlicePraxis [any]
      ·
      11 months ago

      boomers were the OG "generation that doesn't read" because they were the first to grow up on TV. pretty sure most of em still don't read

        • arefx@lemmy.ml
          ·
          11 months ago

          Well when they started watcjing them a TV was a giant wooden box with a tiny black and white screen and like 2 channels and TV remotes didn't exist.

          • Frank [he/him, he/him]
            ·
            11 months ago

            I think TV remotes started pretty early. I do remember having TVs that didn't have them in the 80s though. The action economy of having to get up to change every little thing sucked, especially given how shitty the reception of TV antennas was. It's wild that the wifi card in my computer can theoretically suck down gigabytes per second when back in the day my TV couldn't even handle a maybe 240p broadcast without static, screen tearing, inconsistent audio, and generally looking like shit.

        • wtypstanaccount04 [he/him]
          ·
          11 months ago

          To be fair TV remotes are absolutely indecipherable these days- I had to ask my folks what button to turn on the TV.

    • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      The social media urls in the borders unintentionally invoke so much contempt for the audience. “Haha young people dumb no read book (but for real, please visit me on the internet)”

  • rodbiren@midwest.social
    ·
    11 months ago

    Fear, weakness, and the desire to feel important. Having "insider knowledge" makes them feel powerful. They see compitent and sometimes joyful young people and feel the pit in their stomach as the hand of death reaches ever closer. Calling you dumb for not knowing what a floppy disk is dulls the pain of knowing you have lived your happiest days and all you have left is to clutch ever tighter to fading lead addled memories in hopes of feeling the joys they see in the eyes of others.

    Break the cycle. Living is hard.

    • mazdak
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      edit-2
      10 months ago

      deleted by creator

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        I think it might be more than just having things relatively easy. Most of the boomer generation were poor and miserable. Maybe less miserable than modern people, but they had shitty medicine that didn't work, alcoholism like you wouldn't believe, shitty sex, universal smoking, the lead, and a bunch of other stuff.

        And I've noticed a lot of the ones who actually made it in to the 1-3% of the population that could be legitimately called middle class spent their whole lives chasing a "good career" and money and shit, and now they're old and all they have is money. No purpose, no meaningful accomplishments. They never even tried to change anything and a lot of them never even considered changing things. They just did what they were told and now they're at the end of their lives, looking back on decades of work that often made the world actively worse, their kids hate them, the world has changed incomprehensibly. Sure, they've got food and medicine, but those higher tiers of Maslow's pyramid are completely empty.

    • GrouchyGrouse [he/him]
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      edit-2
      11 months ago

      That desire for knowing secret truths is probably why so many boomers got Q pilled. Their main character syndrome really bit them in the ass.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        That's why I focus on esoteric mystery religions now so the secrets of the Apollo cult will shield me from believing that water causes magnetism when I'm 80.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      There's a cool documentary somewhere about the last floppy disk dealer in the world. He collects, repairs, and sells disks to companies that still need them to work with ancient systems that host critical infrastructure. There are barely any left in absolute terms and working ones are very precious.

  • FlakesBongler [they/them]
    ·
    11 months ago

    Because to them, society peaked back in 1975

    It's essentially that thing where someone sees a guy wearing a band shirt and then challenges them to name five of their albums

    Just an attempt to establish a sense of dominance

  • Fuckass
    ·
    edit-2
    10 months ago

    deleted by creator

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      idk I kind of feel like the ruthless demands of fast-fashion have kind of disrupted the trend of wild new fashions emerging. There's just not as much that can be done when everything has been leveraged so much. I've noticed it with goths - The look has gotten much more streamlined over the last couple of decades and my personal supposition is that it's because the fancy, sorta-elaborate old velvet and skirts and vests and stuff we used to get cheap from thrift stores in the 90s and 00s doesn't really exist anymore bc of changes in clothing manufacturing and marketing.

      Like the fashion look for this summer was apparently "White guy with no taste".

      • CloutAtlas [he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        Cue hair product companies trying to bring frosted tips back "ironically" to pad their quarterlies

    • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      It's not that they don't understand it, it's more that it was cool at one point in their lives and became very uncool that now that it's cool again there's still a cringe reaction.

      My older siblings will never accept bucket hats or perms for men being cool. Especially not mullets and mustaches.

      Canada is kinda different because hockey guys always have mullets because it's the only thing that isn't a buzz cut that looks the same after taking off a helmet, but the mullets were of a different form than current trendy mullets

  • Frank [he/him, he/him]
    ·
    11 months ago

    idk they used to do it to the Millenials too, and now it's probably mostly X'ers doing it.

    I've got to say, it's legitimately hard to keep up with how technology is changing in use. Like my phone is five years old, I have absolutely no idea what modern phones are capable of. My car is five years old, I have no idea what kind of shit they shove in to new cars. At some point you hit a point where you aren't really buying new appliances and then someone's like "Yeah this one uses deep learning to burn frozen pizzas 15% faster" and I just have to be like "woah I had no idea".

    Up until like 33 I felt, like I perceived myself as having, a pretty good idea of what was going on with consumer tech and shit. Now I just have no idea. Consumer technology? Manufacturing? Computer Science? Fuck if I lnow, it's currently 2017 and probably will be for the rest of my life. I just don't encounter new and changing stuff often enough to keep up to date and generally don't know what I'm behind on. Tiktok was kind of amazing when it worked because I actually could see young people talking about young people shit in young people language that I otherwise had no access to. But then the algorithms do their paperclip maximizing thing and you lose access even to that.

    • scoutFDT@lemm.ee
      ·
      11 months ago

      Eh phones haven't really changed that much in 5 years, mostly some gimmicky stuff and better cameras.

      • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        11 months ago

        Was gonna comment some thing similar. I think consumer tech change has become very incremental and not exciting over the last decade

    • Shinji_Ikari [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      I was borrowing a family member's lincoln and had it yell at me that i left a child in the back seat. Looked back and the car reminded me i left my bottle of wine and redbull. Totally would have forgotten it there. New tech is weird.

    • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      Everything is basically the same consumer tech wise in cars and phones. New phones are more waterproof and have more cameras, that's about it.

      New cars have android auto and apple car play, which is just a way to easily use apps while driving in a more legal way. At least owning a separate GPS is now pointless because google maps/Waze on android auto, unless you care about Google/NSA knowing everything about you easily.

      In 2016 I heard about self driving cars and we're still basically in the same spot with regards to that in most of the country because getting it 90% functional is easy, but the last few percent is difficult. Idk if it'll ever be useful in a place with snow but maybe there won't be snow in a few years. deeper-sadness

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        11 months ago

        : p

        I still need to tear the cellular transceiver and non-user-facing GPS out of my car. Pffft.

    • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
      ·
      edit-2
      11 months ago

      I was mostly blown away by how newer phones have larger storage space. I just checked, and the model was actually released in 2017. So, I guess that's okay improvement in 6 years.

  • Chapo_is_Red [he/him]
    ·
    edit-2
    11 months ago

    It annoys me more when they take pride in not knowing how something works (how to save to a USB, how uninstall an app, how to use excel formulas etc) that I've explained dozens of times (they just expect me to do it for them)

    • Mindfury [he/him]
      ·
      11 months ago

      born too early to be deathly afraid of a personal computer because it's big, technical and not a phone

      born too late to be deathly afraid of a personal computer because it's not a typewriter and it has that internet thingy that downloads muh spams and e-worms

      born just in time to use computer to post on my friendly communist webforum

  • EnsignRedshirt [he/him]
    ·
    11 months ago

    They don't know that cope is cringe, so they post it freely and without reservation. It is pure cope, though. They're old, they don't know how anything works, they've probably been scammed multiple times by phone, text, email, etc., and new technology is generally a nightmare for them. Making fun of young people for not knowing how a fax machine works is a way for them to signal one another for validation.

  • 0xACAB [she/her]
    ·
    11 months ago

    actually pretty funny because I just start talking about film photography until they are bored lol, probably know more about it than they ever did in the day