When the very first cars were built, only the rich could afford it, but now a large part of the population (in developed countries) has one or more.
What do you think will be such an evolution in the future?
better to ask, what can the average family afford now, but it won’t be so accessible in the future?
water.
(where i am now, water costs money but is still doable)
The average person will always be able to afford water because if they can’t they will soon cease to be a person. Watch out for statistical effects like that because they might mask the true horror of the situation.
That line, “Cease to be a person,” both applies to the sentiment of, “they won’t live long,” and, “when backed into a corner you see what someone can truly be.”
Wars fought over drinkable water is not some far off fantasy but very well could (and likely will) become reality for many people.
The future for our little mud ball drifting through space suspended on a sun beam is looking pretty damn bleak.
i am concerned that drinkable water could become scarce
Water for drinking isn’t the issue - that’s about 0.01% of all water usage. The issue is irrigation for food crops, which is >50% of water use in many places.
And nestle
Fuck Nestlé
nestle should be shut the fuck down
And Stewart and Lynda Resnick.
are you not concerned about the water for those crops?
I am a little, but compared to carbon emissions it’s not a big issue.
It’s a localised problem, so affected areas can solve it without needing the entire planet to agree. And we already have both political and technical solutions available to us. The only reason we haven’t implemented the fixes, is because big agriculture lobbies government successfully and it costs them no votes. But if the average voter has to stop showering because of water shortages, you can bet politicians will “solve” the water crisis in short order.
Where do you live? Where I am we were used to have drinkable water in abundance, and only now start taking about that maybe in summertime we need to restrict car washing or so… what you say is something else entirely.
I live on the edge of one of the watersheds north of cincinnati. i know of two different rivers who would like you to turn your yard into a rock garden.
Free time.
As more and larger industries become automated we will have all the free time we can handle. What we do as a society today will determine whether that free time is spent pursuing our personal interests, or fighting over the last scraps of a dying planet.
I wish this were true, but frankly I don’t buy it. In the last 50 years, thanks to automation and technology - productivity has nearly doubled, and yet people have to work more than ever to make ends meet or buy a home. Automation just means that the ultra rich can produce more with the same workforce. The global economy is built on the idea that GDP has to be constantly growing, and the more growth the better. Why let perfectly good workers sit idle when they could be making you more money?
Some industries get fully (or mostly) automated, sure and jobs dissapear from those industries, but new ones always pop up so that the folks at the top can continue profiting off the labor of those at the bottom. You think all the folks who used to have job titles like “Calculator” just retired at the age of 30 and enjoyed not having to work anymore? Nah, they were just forced to take new (often shittier, lower paying) jobs.
When an individual company looks to increase profit margins they can either increase the price of their product or reduce the cost it takes to produce it. For the vast majority of companies the primary cost for their product is labor. Employees require a living wage, health care, paid time off, and also create additional costs like payroll taxes and an entire HR department.
With automation you have a high initial cost, but it pays out exponentially over time. Sure you still have software costs, repairs, retrofits, and all that goes into maintaining your typically modern assembly line, but you don’t have to worry about your robots suing you for sexual harassment or wrongful termination. You don’t have to worry about busting unions or hazardous working conditions. You can fire your entire HR and payroll departments, too, which is even better for the bottom line.
Because it’s so financially appealing to so many industries to cut out human labor, I consider it an inevitability. The rich will continue to do what’s best for themselves and they don’t really care if the rest of us all die off from starvation or war.
Now, that’s not to say that it will all happen over night. Over the next half century it will likely be as you say where jobs just get more and more concentrated as they squeeze every dollar they can from each individual employee, but if you look far enough into the future we will all become unemployable. And when horses became unemployable, we didn’t set aside 100 acres for them to live their best lives in. We made glue.
right - but you’re looking at it from a single-company perspective.
Individual companies will absolutely cut their work force wherever they can when automation makes it possible. My point is that new industries spring up to fill the vacuum. Things like instacart, Uber, and Doordash didn’t exist in 2005, neither did a myriad of other industries. Where there is unemployment, there is profit to be made in exploiting their labor (which is often cheap, thanks to the fact that they just got automated out of their niche), and as a capatilist society there will always be someone willing to make that profit.
they don’t really care if the rest of us all die off from starvation or war.
Not from a moral perspective, no - but from a pragmatic perspective they absolutely do. If 90% of the workforce was suddenly laid off and left to starve, what do you actually think would happen? That we’d all just sit at home and quietly die? Ask the french royalty what happens when it’s population realizes that it’s main hope to not starve to death is to dismantle the existing system and start over.
The rich of today absolutely squeeze the shit out of the working class for every penny they can - but not to the point where most are actually immediately concerned with starvation. It’s one thing to not be able to afford a home, need roomates, and to have to budget carefully to make ends meet (as is the case today), it’s another entirely to have significant portions of the population be told that there is no job for them, and likely never will be again.
But all that is mostly besides the point anyways, because until literally every possible human job is completely automated, there will always be profit in exploiting labor. And there’s only profit to be had in any case if there are people with money to buy things. If 99% of jobs are automated - that just means that for any given population of workers, they’ll be able to produce 100x more goods for the same (or less) pay. A Capitalist society is never going to say “that’s ok - we have enough productivity”, they’ll just scale up and make even more money
An interesting note about those new industries you mentioned: they’re all contractors. When people talk about working for Uber or door dash they typically aren’t saying ‘this is what I want to do for the rest of my life’, it’s more of a holdover until something better comes along. As these individual companies begin the process of automation it may be that contract work is what most of end up doing. Once most of us are contractors it will become a supply and demand situation where we all seek to underbid one another in order to feed ourselves and our families. We would still be working, but it would be like fighting over scraps.
If 90% of the workforce was suddenly laid off and left to starve, what do you actually think would happen? That we’d all just sit at home and quietly die? Ask the french royalty what happens when it’s population realizes that it’s main hope to not starve to death is to dismantle the existing system and start over.
You’re right, of course, but I doubt that it would happen suddenly. The process of automating 90% of the work force would likely take decades and be a long, slow process with a lot of half measures a long the way to appease the masses, much like we experience today. I imagine full-time work will be redefined to fewer hours and eventually we will need something like UBI to supplement us and drive the economy. Tax burdens will likely shift to corporations in order to keep the government running as human labor will slowly phase out.
And there’s only profit to be had in any case if there are people with money to buy things.
I think that this is the crux of the argument. As automation becomes cheaper than human labor, human labor becomes intrinsically less valuable. This means that any paid work will simply pay less, which gives the lower classes even less purchasing power. Wealth concentration will continue to worsen and the middle class will evaporate. If capitalism continues, it is at this point industry and economy will revolve primarily around the needs of the rich. The people will still be a consideration, of course, but more of a liability than an exploitable resource. A world war ending in nuclear holocaust would likely solve that particular problem, but I’m hopeful that capitalism will be abandoned before it comes to that.
Both of you may be interested in an anthropologist’s theory on Bullshit Jobs
It seems like a synthesis of everything y’all have said, rather than a refutationvof either of you.
“Virtue through suffering” is an interesting take on modern labor. I agree with most of what is posited in the wiki article you posted, but the book was written pre-pandemic and I think that our perspective on our own labor has changed significantly over the past couple of years. Gen Z in particular doesn’t seem to value pointless labor the way the Boomers do and I know many millennials would rather ‘cram and slack’ than do the 9-5 grind.
With the rise of automation our perspective will likely continue to change. I’m hopeful that we will go through a sort of Renaissance era where humans no longer tie their self worth to their labor and we can begin to view industry in terms of providing need rather than creating profit.
We have been hearing that for 35 years… production has gone up exponentially whilst labor requirements dropped yet we work more and longer than ever.
Everyone I know has to work multiple jobs and have roommates to be able to afford housing. What is this free time you speak of?
To archieve free time we have to reclaim our wealth from the rich. There is enough. We just have to redistribute.
Agreed. I also believe we should all stop showing up for work until we are guaranteed health care, a living wage, and reasonable housing prices. We shouldn’t contribute to system that works against us.
As an industrial automation engineer, I don’t have free time anyway
Jobless poor have plenty of free time.
Solar panels on their homes.
Do you mean the solar panel or the home?
Yes
Grow an organ for you from your own cells. No rejection or drugs; your body accepts it as its own.
Not here in Singapore. Cars went from affordable to being a luxury good. I wonder if its the same elsewhere.
It should be like that in more places. Too much of America is built around the requirement to own and operate an expensive piece of heavy machinery just to participate in society. American cities should all go back to how dense they were prewar, when they were walkable and don’t have interstates bulldozed through their downtowns.
Singapore is definitely special in that regards (in a good way, imo). I can’t think of any other place going quite as hard on reducing cars.
Yes, but the public transport in Singapore is excellent. I wish more cities did it.
If electric cars follow this path and aren’t replaced with something else like enviro-friendly fuels, electric cars.
I don’t have an electric car, I dislike how many artificially limit things like speed, it shouldn’t be a paid upgrade if the hardware is capable, the amount of tracking worries me too, like Tesla staff could see through your cabin cameras.
I’d rather have environment friendly fuels that work with older cars, even if that requires a new ECU+Fuel pump.
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Gonna run my 90s Toyota until it’s physically impossible
Outside of the US and Canada, electric bikes look to be the future instead of mainly electric cars. E-bikes are not just massively more environmentally friendly, they’re also radically reshaping city design to be more livable. I hope the future isn’t just a different kind of car. I hope, for the sake of the environment and society, it’s a world with fewer cars.
But what about rural areas and long term travel? My dad, for example, has to travel about 80 miles in each direction every day to get to and from work. How long would it take him to get there with an E-bike?
This is why I said fewer cars, not no cars. Most people obviously do not drive 160 miles a day. With better infrastructure and public transportation, a 2 car family might go down to 1 car, or replace half of their car trips with other modalities, etc.
Oh nevermind, I guess I didn’t read the full message properly.
It’s already past the point where only rich people have them. It’s currently one of those things where it’s actually more expensive to be poor.
I bought an EV because it’s cheaper over a few years than getting the cheapest gasoline beater car. It’s a bigger cost up front, but the total cost is smaller over few years.
If anything, only rich people will be able to afford keeping the gasoline cars. Similarly to todays vintage lead fueled classics.
I don’t know where you are, but in Europe it’s much cheaper to buy a used Gasoline car. I just got a 1L petrol car for the equivalent of $10k, I can’t find a good electric car for anywhere close to that.
Hello, fellow European. The starting price of electric cars is definitely the biggest issue (and there isn’t a sizable second-hand market yet).
If you want to spend even less find out if you can convert your car to LPG. I have been driving with LPG for about 2 years and I couldn’t be more satisfied.
According to the german Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection, there is not much difference in operating costs between an electric vehicle and a CNG/LPG vehicle. Source: PDF from June 2023
But this does not take into account the price of the vehicle as such. In this case, lpg is much cheaper.
I am in Europe. You have to look past the purchase price.
What I did was to compare the price of buying €3k beater cars throughout the next ten years versus getting an only slightly used EV for €21k that I expect to drive for the same period.
The purchase price is 7 times higher, yes, but the savings on fuel, taxes and financing makes up for it it less than 6 years in my case.
So in short, I had a pretty easy choice in getting an almost new EV instead of continuing buying and repairing scrap cars as I’d previously done for the same reasons.
My car tax (VED) is £20 a year, Vs £0 on electric. Fuel and the extra £20 tax a year doesn’t equate to the cost of an EV just yet.
EVs are definitely still a luxury, poor people aren’t going round with EVs.
Yeah well, I’m absolutely not saying that EVs are always the cheapest option. In my case it was.
There are many variables to account for when making the decision. I’d just advise people to do the calculations whenever they need a new car. Generally, It’s still not that much cheaper that it pays off to get an EV if you already have a functional car, but whenever you need a new one.
I’ve been thinking about making a webpage to compare car purchases with all kinds of variables, but it’s quite a big project to do.
it’s worth noting (not that this makes it better) - that artificially removing features isn’t a new thing with electric cars.
It’s always been cheaper to build only the more expensive version of something, then artificially cripple it for the cheaper version. CPUs are a good example - most CPUs of a given series are basically the same hardware, it’s just that the cheaper versions will be down-clocked, or have some cores deliberately disabled.
Before the tech existed to have heated seats be a subscription service, cars that were sold without that option, would often have the heating hardware still installed in the seats, it just wouldn’t be hooked up. Hell, sometimes literally the only difference between the model with heated seats and without was whether they installed the button to turn them on
This statement about cpus isn’t entirely correct. In the manufacture of precision electronics, there is always a reasonable chance of defects occurring, so what happens is that all the parts are built to the same spec, then they are “binned” according to their level of defects.
You produce a hundred 24 core cpus, then you test them rigorously. You discover that 30 work perfectly and sell them as the 24 core mdoel. 30 have between one and eight defective cores, so you block access to those cores and sell them as the 16 core model. Rinse and repeat until you reach the minimum number of cores for a saleable cpu.
This is almost certainly not the case in car manufacturing, as while you could sell a car with defective seat heaters at a lower price point, what actually occurs is that cars with perfectly functional seat heaters have that feature disabled until you pay extra for it.
You produce a hundred 24 core cpus, then you test them rigorously. You discover that 30 work perfectly and sell them as the 24 core mdoel. 30 have between one and eight defective cores, so you block access to those cores and sell them as the 16 core model. Rinse and repeat until you reach the minimum number of cores for a saleable cpu.
Except the ratios of consumer demand do not always match up neatly with the production ratios. IIRC there have been cases where they’ve overproduced the top model but expected not to be able to sell them all at the price they were asking for that model, and chose to artificially “cripple” some of those and sell them as a more limited model. An alternative sales strategy would have been to lower the price of the top model to increase demand for it, of course, but that may not always be the most profitable thing to do.
Not unless they come up with some new kind of battery tech. There’s simply not enough lithium for a global mass adoption of personal electric cars.
I’d also rather have magic cars, but that won’t stop electric cars from being the next wave. At this point there’s so little advancement in new fuels that it’s effectively impossible to hope for that scenario to occur before ICE fades away.
Afaik there are such fuels, but are much more expensive. From what I read it could shift and rich will be able to ride vehicless with combustion engines using eco fuel, while us plebs will drive electric
Honestly, I don’t even care if that’s the case. Cars are becoming more like living rooms on wheels and less engaging overall (less about driving and more about being driven), so I don’t even care what I drive when the time comes, so long as it isn’t a piece of garbage with a shoddily-built interior. Hell, I’d rather just not have a car at all at that point, but we don’t have the infrastructure here (in the US) for that.
Hopefully healthcare.
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Oh my goodness I would kill for foldables to be mainstream
May I ask why? I would be scared 24/7 to break my phone with my fingernails or something because the screens are so fragile.
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Be super keen for foldable devices overall. I just can’t get past the huge obvious fold in the middle of the screen. It’s gotten better but I’m hoping eventually it evolves to the point where it’s seamless. Being able to pull out a phone and then unfold it to get a tablet UI would be super handy for articles
I have one so maybe I can elaborate on the benefits
For one, they’re really not that fragile. I’ve dropped my Fold a shitload of times now, and it has 0 issues. That’s not to say people don’t have issues with them (ala black bar of doom), but they’re not as prevalent as you might think, for the usual reason that you’re always going to hear more about the fail cases than the people who just buy the phone, and have it work fine.
As for the “why do you want one” - it’s basically like having a phone and tablet in one, and all in a form factor that is basically as compact as your typical smart phone (a bit thicker ofc, but still perfectly reasonable to carry every day). When I’m just doing “basic smartphone stuff” like texting, checking emails, etc - I just use the small screen and it works just like any other phone, but when I’m browsing social media, watching TV/Movies, or playing games - it’s absolutely awesome. I have an MG-X Pro that i use with mine, and streaming games from my PC feels like playing on a steam deck, it’s also an amazing emulation device thanks to the big screen.
I can definitely see why some people wouldn’t want one, but personally, I can’t see myself ever going back to a “flat” phone
Thanks for the thorough reply!
The bigger screen aspect seems very nice indeed. I just would be too scared to use it like a regular phone. Wouldn’t something that scratches a regular glass display absolutely shred the plastic screen on a foldable?
What I still don’t get at is the normal sized phone when open that closes to a thicker square. This seems kinda gimmicky to me. One doesn’t get the benefit of the tablet sized screen and you have a bulky think in your pocket that you can barely use when not opened.
Wouldn’t something that scratches a regular glass display absolutely shred the plastic screen on a foldable?
Not really for a few reasons - Firstly, most scratches on your phone happen by bumping up against stuff in your pocket, or by getting knocked against stuff when you have it set down. In both of those scenarios, your phone will be folded. You only really unfold it when you need the big screen, and then it gets folded back up again when you’re done. So it’s more secure than a typical phone screen most of the time. The biggest danger there is getting a piece of debris (like a piece of gravel) on the big screen then closing it, but while I’ve heard about that, I’ve never actually had it happen (or even have a close call in that regard, since i don’t make a habit of using my phone where gravel is flying around lol).
Also, the folded screen has a “permanent” screen protector on it (I use quotes because it does sometimes come unstuck - but it’s easy to replace), so you’d have to cut really deep to even get at the actual screen. Again, I can only speak to my own experience, but in my current phone and my last foldable, I never once scratched the center screen, despite daily use. The front screen however I absolutely have scratched, but that’s just due to my own carelessness - like I said, i don’t baby this thing.
What I still don’t get at is the normal sized phone when open that closes to a thicker square
I’ll be honest, I’m not 100% sure what this means, but I’m going to guess you mean is “When it’s closed, it’s just a super thick phone with a normal phone screen” - if that’s not right, let me know. But yeah you’re totally right that it’s thicker than a normal phone, but it’s not like carrying around a brick or anything, I also have a wallet case on mine, and the size of the fold with a wallet case is less than the size of a “normal phone” + A wallet FWIW. But yeah if you like your phones paper thin, than you’re not going to like Foldables, maybe if Samsung ever comes out with that scrollable phone they’ve been teasing for years now they can make that one thinner.
that you can barely use when not opened
I guess this varies from person to person, but I use my phone all the time folded, and it works great. The folding screen is too big to operate with one hand comfortably, so when I’m just doing “normal” phone stuff, i generally always stick to the front display, and I’ve never had any issues using it. I actually prefer the “skinny” form of the screen to your typical wide modern smart phone for a lot of stuff. On my wifes iphone I find that i can’t actually reach the whole screen when using it one-handed, while on my phone i can comfortably reach every part of the front screen while one-handing it (part of that ironically is, I think, due to the slightly thicker size.
Now I don’t wanna sound like a shill here, so I’ll throw in a bit about what i don’t like about the phone
Dust: I do a fair bit of woodworking, and I found with my Z Fold 3, that overtime the dust buildup in the hinge caused it to not open all the way. With my Fold 4, I either keep it out of the workshop while I’m working, or put it in a ziplock before going in. So far, I haven’t noticed any buildup on my 4 taking this precaution, so I think it’s only really an issue in the sorts of extremely dusty cases you get in woodworking and things like that, but still something to keep in mind.
Battery: Definitely my biggest complaint by far, under “normal” use - I can make it through the day no problem, but if I’m going to be doing anything that falls under the umbrella of “heavy use” (which means anything that makes the foldable screen worth using) then battery life drops off pretty quick. Not a huge issue for me, as I work from home, so I keep mine topped up at 85% most of the time anyways, but if you need to be away from chargers a lot, then this isn’t going to be a good fit for you.
Ultimately whether it’s invaluable or a “gimmick” depends on the person in question. For me, it’s the perfect compromise between a smart phone and a tablet for someone who has use-cases for both, but can’t justify lugging a tablet around everywhere - sounds like it isn’t for you, and that’s alright
Sorry for wording my comment so weirdly. I just had to look up some phone’s names, since I‘m kinda put of the loop with the new models.
A Samsung Fold like phone I get. It is, like you said, a phone when folded and a tablet when unfolded. I see that being useful.
A phone in the style of a Samsung Flip I don’t get. That’s what I meant with the normal size when unfolded and small, thick square when folded part. It has a tiny screen when folded that barely seems usable. It seems like you get all the faults and none of the benefits with this design.
Excuse my poor wording again.
Ohh, yeah to be honest I’m totally with you on the Flip lol - I guess it makes sense if you don’t use your phone a lot and want something that is very easy to tuck away when not in use.
I’m not even sure they sell a lot of the Flips tbh, I’ve never seen someone irl with one
I could maybe see it if the whole front of the folded phone was it’s one display, so that instead of a phone/tablet hybrid it’s a microphone/phone hybrid sort of thing…
I thought we worked for decades to take moving components out of portable devices as they were the biggest point of failure?
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Same. But there hasn’t been an improvement in technology worth a phone upgrade in like 10 years.
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Well, that’s on the iPhone side, which was lagging significantly behind Android at that time. 2013 was the Galaxy S4, which had LTE (still good today), all the same sensors phones have today, 1080p screen, 4k video recording, 13 megapixel camera, and 802.11ac (5GHz) wifi. It even had a headphone jack, micro SD card reader, and a removable battery, which is better than most phones now.
Drawbacks are that the RAM was low (2GB), the CPU is old, and the version of Android hasn’t been updated in a very long time.
The only thing that has really upgraded in the last 10 years for Android phones is that that the RAM, CPU, and camera get incrementally better each year. There hasn’t been a new technology or feature that I have cared about or wanted since then. And honestly, I feel like the camera was good enough 10 years ago as well. I couldn’t care less if the camera on my current phone was the same as the Galaxy S4 camera.
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We did. Because of that people are using their phones for too long without replacing this. This makes Samsung and Apple sad, so they make new phones fail sooner.
Gotta love planned obsolescence.
Once the crease is gone in the middle…
Once the price drops, I’d love to have a phone that unfolds into a tablet, and can then be docked to a monitor and run a full desktop OS.
All that tech is here with the galaxy flip, but the desktop OS, I’ve read is still lacking.
Yeah I agree they look really cool but the durability and wear-and-tear seem to be pretty subpar. I’m not one of those people who goes and buys smartphones every 1 - 2 years, so if I get a phone I’d quite like for it to last me a while.
If the news about LK-99 has any element of truth to it, then superconductor-based technologies and maglev transport will become much more affordable in the future.
But today supra conductor aren’t something just for the rich. It’s used for some specific application like MRI which benefit to the people needing them rather than the rich.
Good luck finding an MRI machine in countries like burkina farso. If you live in the west, you are rich, dawg.
I live in the west and I have no MRI machine at home, so…
Why on earth would you want an MRI machine at home? They are huge, the noise they make is untollerable, you cant have any metal objects nearby lest they turn into projectiles and you need to be an MD to use it.
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Finally, a monorail!
Full genome sequencing.
The price of sequencing continues to decrease as the technology evolves. I have already seen claims of under $1,000 for a full human genome. I haven’t looked carefully into those claims, but I think we are around there. In some years sequencing full genomes will be so cheap to sequence that it will be routine. I want to buy an Oxford Nanopore sequencer in the future.
Gene editing/therapy could become cheap in the future.
Which is how we get gattaca
I think the full sequencing part would already be Gattaca but I get your point
There is a theoretical future in which full-genome sequencing is performed exclusively by large companies, hospitals, and governments, and the data is stored by them and they can access it.
But the technologies are becoming quite accessible. Unless regulations are introduced to force people to give up their genetic data, which I don’t think is so likely, there will be ways for us to get our sequences without the sequences being stored by a third party. I also think that there will be FOSS tools for us to run our own analyses.
Joe mama
I’m embarrassed to say that this was my gut reaction as well
Ah, I see you’re a man of culture as well
Probably those fancy electric and hybrid cars. In the meantime, I’ll be over here, clinging to my old gas-guzzling relic. Someday we’ll all be cruising in high-tech, earth saving, luxury SUVs.
Ever thought of smol car like bycicles (article leads to a random article i found by searching for bycicles like car)
I reckon velomobiles are a better option if you want to have pedals. Otherwise just make it a mini electric car.
Something like that would be awesome and solve a lot of problems, but it would need it’s own infrastructure, like separate lanes. Don’t want those on the motorway going 40kph, and would definitely not be good on the bike lanes either.
Someday we’ll all be cruising in […] SUVs.
God I hope not. These things are a nuisance in urban spaces and everyone would be worse off in your fantasy world, including the drivers.
A brand new Prius starts at like $25k, which is about as cheap as a new car gets, I don’t think hybrid cars necessarily fall into the category of “rich people things”
Indoor plumbing and electricity
Any type of technology that brings equality.
A perspective from India. 20+ years ago before ATMs were implemented, the bank officials treated each customer differently. A worker with dirty clothes would be treated poorly than a person who wears a tuck-in shirt.
Situation now: ATMs don’t know who is rich and who is poor. All people are equal.
