Given the heat lately, air conditioning. Sure, AC has been around for a long time but it’s becoming ubiquitous (at least in the us). Mine is controllable over Alexa, outputs data graphs, makes intelligent decisions to save money, etc.

Now that we daily experience the results of global warming, we all hide our heads in the sand AC

Modern ice trays.

My appliances.

The only “smart” appliance I own is a TV, and the ability to just press a few buttons instead of swapping inputs/cords to watch basically anything on it feels pretty futuristic. Even my dumb appliances have features now I never saw even in the rich kids’ houses as a kid in 90s. My toilet has a lid that is engineered to close slowly on its own with gravity instead of slamming. I can use the internet anywhere in my home from a handheld rectangle, man.

I’m dating myself hard with this comment, I know, but as a guy in his mid 30s I’m pretty routinely struck by the thought of how sci-fi some of my commonplace stuff really is compared to what I thought shit would look like as a kid/teenager.

Watching the movie Idiocracy.

When the wildfire smoke turns the air orange.

There’s an app for everything.
And everything requires an app.
It’s not a good future.

Everything’s connected, there’s a vast collection of human knowledge available at a few clicks, smart homes, and the future is looking very hopeful!

We pay for things with plastic.

When I was a kid, I had to reference several manuals and carefully assemble a double handful of parts in specific order to connect two computers to eachother. I’d have to fiddle with protocols and speeds and obscure features and traits to make the stars align. Transferring 200mb would be an overnight task. If I wanted to show pictures from my vacation on a big screen, I would have to have them printed on cellulose and insert them in tiny frames to project on a thick screen with a huge machine.

Yesterday, I went to a friend, pointed my phone at a magic symbolqr code and sent a full movie to their PC in a few minutes. Then I pushed a button to make the photographs on my phone appear on their TV.

Rode in a self driving taxi the other day. While it was very cool, it was much more cool to see the fellow passengers freak out and record the entire ride

Some of the job titles of people I know would sound insane to people in the 80s.

The dystopian novel vibes.

USBC-PD and the rise of energy efficient dc appliances. the ability to to toss out ac power bricks and power most of my DC appliances with an electrical grid I wired together with solar panels and batteries. The sun powers most of my convinence and luxuries without burning fossil fuels.

24" TV, desktop vaporizer, video game console, laptop, and led lamp are all run from my offgrid dc electrical system and can use under 50 watts when all are on at once. I can process a load of laundry with a travel sized washer and spin dryer combo. I can brew a cup of coffee, I can get running water with a usb pump/shower head, I can run a small fridge, run a fan, I have a usb electric blanket/ heated jacket poncho that will sip on 10 watts of power and keep me warm on cold nights. If thats not enough I can get a jacket or blanket that runs on dewalt power tool batteries. Even charge a small electric bike.

I can do all of this with a cheap power station and 200w of solar. Just about the only modern convinences that are still hard to do on a 200w dc system is air conditioning(sadly seeming to be more a survival requirement in the coming years during summer) and cooking appliances. In those cases a tank of propane and dual fuel generator are great backup options especially if you can’t afford more solar and batteries to run a 1000+ watt appliance. Fortunately most 5000btu window units only consume 400-600 watts after startup surge or with soft starter so you dont need that much solar and batteries if you have a small space to be conditioned.

All of these things either weren’t possible or gave our ancestors a laborious manual workload 100 years ago. Most of these things required an industrial sized machine and or massive amounts of wattage 50 years ago. Now this is all possible with cheap affordable technological magic that sips power. Solar panels are getting cheaper and more efficent, and so is most consumer technology that power our lives. Its a shame that our generation and future generations will have to pay for the sins of our fossil fuel burning fathers but I am confident that more and more people will be moving towards more sustainable options especially as their homes/enviroments burn down from the ever increasing dry droughts and they are forced into being nomadic vandwellers.

Being addicted to the internet

Zoom meetings