Some news that would be completely mundane today but scary or shocking in the past.
There are still no flying cars.
A dozen 9/11s after every homecoming!
And a billionaire inadvertently continues to do everything in his power to show why they would be a bad idea.
Benzos? Musk?
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Helicopters exist, and there are some octocopter drones that can lift a person. We also got a working jetpack recently, and we’ve had water-jetpacks for ages.
Still, no flying cars 🤷.
You can have a heart transplant.
1923 people expected mechanical heart transplants to be available today
Just an advertisement with a smiling black guy would do.
feels a bit like cheating given that the man in the picture is clearly being presented as a server, not a consumer
Fair. I didn’t understand what OP was getting at, so I took them literally. It seemed strange to ignore that white people in the early 20th loved depictions of smiling black people in servant roles.
As for ads targeted at black consumers… now I’m curious. I know there were newspapers targeted at black readers. I wonder if they had ads.
Yeah I think a better answer would’ve been “an ad with a black man smiling at his white wife”
For bonus points, make it clear in the ad that the man is a house husband and the wife is a working professional lol
Give them a gay son marrying his partner, really blow some heads.
A photo of Obama in the oval office
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We’ve come so far.
humanity generates 16km³ of piss daily.
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I believe that is very very far from true. Do you have any source on that?
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All sources I could find point to 15% to 20% of the population being neurodiverse with only a small fraction of this being people in the autism spectrum (around 1% of the total population). So even accounting for under diagnosing there’s no way that’s true.
Categories only make sense if they are useful, and if you make them so imprecise that they include everyone then they are useless.
By expanding the criteria for the autism spectrum to include everyone that displays even a single trait associated with autism we would be doing a disservice to the people that display a larger amount of those traits (i.e. the ones that are on the spectrum with the current consensus), since they would be invisible in the midst of everyone else.
and even if it were true, it isn’t accepted as a mundane fact now. Maybe jmcs is from 2123 and your reaction is what they were talking about tho
I would guess pretty much everything about our current world would freak out people from a century ago
Probably all the climate change shit
Also if you told a guy from 1923 that the world’s most industrialized nation was China they’d probably accuse you of lying
And even nowadays they’d be right to do so…
Least ignorant liberal
What does it say on all your consumer goods again?
Taiwan, Germany, Canada, EU…
I take quality over slave labor and shit falling apart after a year…
I’m sure you don’t own anything made in China then. Canada, famous producer of consumer goods
Whatever little is actually made in Western countries anymore is shit quality designed to fall apart to make more profit just like everything else.
winnie pooh is pleased with your doing
Nothing never happened day:
have you even seen the video of the thing that never happened?
China is such an excellent test for how gullible someone is. So many people will believe any bad thing they read on the internet about it, no matter how absurd, and no matter how easy it is to disprove.
https://www.shanghaidisneyresort.com/en/entertainment/theme-park/characters-meet-pooh/
So there’s a whole fucking Hundred Acre Wood exhibit, Pooh and all, but I guess if you text someone about it Xi appears from under your bed and black bags you?
WINNIE THE POOH TAIANAMMENNMEN 1989 CHINESE CAN ONLY DO BOOTLEGS
(totes not racist to show an Asian man with yellow skin btw)Can you do
SOCIAL CREDIT so we can do all the greatest hits?
Well I do have one, but only this one item from Germany which I would say is pretty good. A Lamy Safari.
But that is seriously my only thing at home from Germany which I would consider high quality, hell all my Thinkpads are from China after all. Lmao
So they excel at trinkets maybe? Lol
Are you really trying to deny reality here? I understand you hate China and am even willing to belive it’s ideological and not entirely racist but pretending they’re not a global manufacturing powerhouse is next level nuts.
You guys sure love your emoticons
Quite a few people would be probably surprised that colonial empires are no more
as for headlines: British PM Rishi Sunak negotiates Scottish independence with First Minister of Scotland Humza Yousaf
Neocolonialism is alive and well though. Today we have more slaves making more products, than ever before !
The only known sentence that is fatal to white british men circa 1900.
also anything involving european union
in 1923 that idea was not really that shocking and already talked about.
Yeah, like in that Doctor Who special where they tell the WW1 soldier “Now let’s get you back to your first world war” and he goes “FIRST world war?!”.
Wasn’t it known as the Great War until after WW2?
And yes, I am fun at parties.
Especially if they have boys aged below 10 in the family
future telling is kind of a lame answer
Few people would be surprised by it happening. They hoped it wouldn’t be for many decades but it was just known as the way future wars would go.
You might be able to streamline the process by saying “fears of World War III” and letting them fill in the gaps themselves.
Not really. Global Scale Wars were a unique thing back then. The Great War, the war to end all wars, was thought (hoped!) to be the only one of its kind. They had a lot of conflicts between major powers, but at least for the west, 17 million deaths excluding the spanish flu epidemic was a massive outlier.
Even the Mexican Revolution, listed on Wikipedia with an upper estimate of 3.5 million, wasn’t a quarter of that, and it wasn’t global. The last thing in the west that came (somewhat) close was the Napoleonic Wars with an upper estimate of 7 million, a hundred years earlier. China has had several massive death counts in various wars and rebellions, but that won’t have been very present to the average western civilian.
WW1 brought with it a slew of new developments in military technology and capability for destruction. For the world to have not just one, but potentially two conflicts considered at least on par with The Great War would be very concerning.
We should start talking about World War IV then
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. ~ Albert Einstein
I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones. World War V will be fought with crossbows, World War VI will be lasers, and World War VII will be blowguns. I don’t know about World Wars VIII through XI. World War XII will use the same weapons as III, but will be fought entirely within underground tunnels. World War XIV will—Hey, come back! I have a whole list!
The Titanic sinking kills five more
Lol, brilliant answer. I never would have thought of that.
Oh, snap!
Crackle, and pop.
8 billion people and growing.
OpenAI accepts files/documents now.
In 1923 this would be gibberish.
The idea of a thinking machine/mechanical brain would be more than enough to wow them
I miss the niche community “sentences that would have made no sense fifteen years ago.”
Like “Homestuck stans dox Twitter influencer @dril.”
Climate change, same sex marriage (though, perhaps not as shocking as some might expect, ditto anything trans related), potential mars colonization, coming off the heels of the Spanish flu, COVID news would probably freak em out. Ooh, the USSR being gone, and China being a world super power. The USSR would have been new to them, and it collapsing less than a century later would probably feel quite odd, especially if you could make them understand just how incredibly advanced the USSR got in such a short amount of time. Tons of stuff.
potential mars colonization
Yeah because we’re real close to doing that in 2023
Yeah because we’re real close to doing that in 2023
has been hyping Martian adventures only 20 years from now for… over 20 years now.
potential mars colonization
That isn’t a new thing to hype and there was even an actually-competent grifter of his time as the basis of it.
1923, virtually every capitalist country in the world had just invaded the USSR 5 years ago, Japan only pulled out in 1922.
The USSR being gone only becomes shocking post WWII when they went from an agrarian nation wracked by civil war and famine, with zero tractor factories to sending 100,000 tanks into Germany 20 years later to putting a man in space 20 years after that.
In the 1920s a state fresh off a recent regime change disappearing would have been extremely par for the course. You telling that to someone from the 1960s would probably have more of an effect.
I mean, if you showed them a map it’d look nothing like their current political divide. I’m not sure they’d be more shocked by the state of what then was Soviet Russia than by Czechoslovakia being broken up or the other half a dozen changes in Europe alone.
I’m Czech, and exactly 105 years ago (October 30, 1918) the approximately dozen nationally aware Slovaks met in an inn and wrote a letter to Prague that they agree to be part of Czechoslovakia as the “Czechoslovak nation” because they knew they couldn’t form a state on their own, and split off the hated Hungary. The 4 people who signed our “Declaration of Independence” 2 days prior needed someone to represent Slovakia so they went in the streets searching for a Slovak. Vavro Šrobár, a nationally Slovak lawyer who incidentally just arrived to Prague, came forth and signes the document, and became Minister of Slovakia a few weeks later.
The Republic helped Slovakia reach its industrial potential and gave its people democratic values (except for WWII, we don’t talk about Slovakia in WWII). Eventually, Slovak politicians wanted power so they broke off after true democracy was restored in 1989. The Velvet Divorce was so uneventful compared to the end of Communism that people did not really care at all.
So I agree that to informed people in 1923, Slovakia being separate a century later would be no surprise. However, the formation of USSR (which I know much less about) was pretty controversial and involved a civil war so they might be actually be surprised it did last 80 years.
On the other hand, the other changes you glossed over are quite significant, especially with Germany and Poland.
Show them a time lapse animation of the countries borders as they changed in real time such that a second equals one month. Two minutes of “what the fuck just happened‽‽”
I don’t think Mars colonies would surprise them. If anything they’d expect us to have family resorts or Jupiter
ditto anything trans related
In fact, German medical science was on the forefront of chemical and surgical gender therapies, riiight up until Hitler. Quite a lot of seminal research was burned by the doctors responsible - to protect the identities of anyone involved.
– “You can freely marry a Black person in most of the civilized world.”
– “Why would you?”
Most?
