Ask Slashdot: Which Businesses Will Go Away In the Next 10 Years? (nbcnews.com) 495
AmiMoJo writes: Ten years ago NBC published a list of business types that it predicted would disappear in the following decade. Ten years later and we can see how good their fortune telling was. What businesses do you think will go away by 2027? Who is destined to become the next buggy whip manufacturer, whose demand dried up due to changing technology and a changing world?
For reference, NBC's list was: Record stores; Camera film manufacturing; Crop dusters; Gay bars; Newspapers; Pay phones; Used bookstores; Piggy banks; Telemarketing; Coin-operated arcades.
For reference, NBC's list was: Record stores; Camera film manufacturing; Crop dusters; Gay bars; Newspapers; Pay phones; Used bookstores; Piggy banks; Telemarketing; Coin-operated arcades.
Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
just kidding, lighten up
Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not? The quality of the community and articles is not what it was. It keeps getting passed around from company to company. It is just one corp org away form shutting down. What is left is a very loyal community. But not one that probably earns whoever owns it right now much money.
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Re:Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Slashdot (Score:2, Funny)
Paradoxically, the quality of the comments here would be better if the posting limits were removed. It's stupid that you can only post twice before having to wait long periods of time before being able to comment again. It makes good discussion impossible. Plus it drives away good commenters. The end result is the low quality discussion we now see here so often.
Re: Slashdot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Slashdot (Score:5, Informative)
Logged in you can only post once per minute, and if you are above a certain amount per day, every 5 minutes.
And there is a maximum of posts per day, 25 or 50, don't remember.
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It depends on your karma. If you have excellent karma I don't think there is any limit on maximum posts per day at all.
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Re:Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
I'd say the exact opposite is true. The majority of reasonable people interested in tech news stopped posting or left years ago - e.g. to various subreddits and hacker news, or no forum at all to save time - and the many newcomers from the past five years or so are messing up moderation and the submitters have turned Slashdot in some kind of political opinion and household gadget slashvertisement site. And a large army of AC trolls appeared. I used to come here to learn about things like kernel development, satellite communication, or grey hat hacking, and noways people on /. seriously discuss whether "Alexa" is an operating system.
What you are experiencing seems to be due to changes to the mod point algorithm after the last ownership change. I believe it was designed to keep the trolls at bay and it works to some extent.
(Disclaimer: I've lurked on Slashdot since its beginnings and posted very actively about ten years ago, under various accounts and user names that are long gone.)
Re:Slashdot (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Slashdot (Score:4, Interesting)
Slashdot much like your own body continually dies. You know your are dying as we post, countless dead cells haunting your carcass to be replaced by new cells, you have continually died and reborn since you were first conceived. So as for slashdot, people will move on, newcomers will join, some will hung around till the day they die. The open exchange of ideas around the geek/nerd news of that day. Tearing it apart, putting it back together in new ways just because and injecting new ideas back into the human gestalt in affect programming the AI that is the internet. Slashdot certainly continually changes over time.
Immigration Lawyer (Score:2, Insightful)
After all, once immigration is ended once and for all, who needs a lawyer?
Re:Immigration Lawyer (Score:4, Insightful)
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After all, once immigration is ended once and for all, who needs a lawyer?
Can't help but hear that in this [youtube.com] voice.
Slashdot (Score:2, Insightful)
Poorly maintained forums that get sold from sucker in search of advertising revenue to sucker in search of advertising revenue. Doubly so if they don't support unicode (or if they do).
buggy whips are in an uptick (10 things) (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, admittedly, they may not be used for the same thing as they originally were, but the market is increasing.
I'd tend to say the following:
1. Repair stations (not tire shops) - electric cars and trucks need about half as much maintenance and a lot of it is instrument driven. A good way to diversify is add bike repairs to one of your bays, or a chai/bubble tea store.
2. Single gender bathrooms in retail. Most places can't really afford having separate facilities, so you'll probably see most places just have a room with both fixtures. Exception: bars, restaurants.
3. Fear based local TV news. Unhappy, scared people don't buy stuff. And TV is mostly dead.
4. Food delivery and prepackaged meal delivery services. Those that survive will transition to restaurant delivery. Uber will vaporize as drones replace on demand delivery.
5. Furniture places. 2025-2035 will see most people getting smaller places and getting rid of large furniture. Exception: couches, chairs. Best to diversify into Tiny Home style furniture that incorporates storage into the furniture (dual use furniture).
6. Expensive spicy food places. As Americans age into retirees they will start wanting to go to diner type places. This won't kill ethnic foods, but a lot of current restaurants will suddenly lose foot traffic, as retirees don't eat out that much. Nobody will miss them.
7. Parking garages. The combination of on demand self driving vehicles, more retirees, more cyclists, more pedestrians, and quiet electric transit will kill off a lot of parking garages and the attached malls. Nobody will miss them, except us skateboarders.
8. Single family home lawn supplies. Lawns will be replaced by gardens and more people will live in multi-family towers next to green parks. But plants will be in high demand for the apartments and decks. Tiny greenhouses too.
9. Cell phone stores. The 2025-2035 period will see ubiquitous self-powered wifi devices (like ST comms badges) that run off incidental radiation, and attach to clothes (either as sleeves, belts, broaches, or necklaces. This will save jewelry stores, of course.
10. Wallets. See 9 above. The new devices will mostly replace wallets and purses. People will wear nifty gem sacks at their belts, in which they store their coins (see how Canada does dollars, or Euro coins).
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I seriously doubt your assertion about cell phone stores.
First, the current trend is "more powerful CPU, more fancy screen, more feature-packed, and try to squeeze in a better battery that can run that for a couple hours." This trend doesn't seem to be changing, and so self-powered phones won't happen anytime soon as anything but a gimmick. There's simply no way to keep all these features running off "ambient" power.
And Wifi range is short enough there's no way you'd see these 'self-charging' phones running
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. Single gender bathrooms in retail. Most places can't really afford having separate facilities, so you'll probably see most places just have a room with both fixtures. Exception: bars, restaurants.
Actually, these are going away in bars and restaurants as well, at least here (Western Canada). A number of the local bars/restaurants have moved to a design where you have a genderless restroom, which is surrounded on all sides by full-height stalls. These aren't the stupid stalls like you see in most places, but rather completely enclosed, with a full door/lock on it. They're just marked as to whether they contain a toilet or a urinal+toilet.
I'll admit that the first time I walked in, I backed out thinkin
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Here's a few (Score:2)
Comments here are for the US (mostly...)
Fast food chain burger flipper -- replaced by a robot. There still will be employees at the stores, just a bunch less. Minimum wage laws have made their work too expensive.
More and more agricultural crop picking work will be automated. Especially if Trump continues to clamp down on illegal immigration. Growers either won't be able to find workers, or the workers that remain will want too much money.
And this will apply in a lot of other places as well. More and mo
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As both wireless and wired Internet access become cheaper and more ubiquitous, at some point that becomes the end of satellite/cable TV distribution.
For content distribution, and contribution, satellite will still be around for a long, long time. End user distribution? that's a different beast, but until we have the full demise of the networks, especially the sports networks, satellite will still be around. It's still the single cheapest way to distribute your content to the entire continent in real-time. A typical transponder costs about $1,000,000 a year to lease, and lets you stream out 4 or so HD streams, continuously. You're distributing that to 10
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I enjoy gasoline cars a lot, have a heavy investment in them both financial and emotional, but even I can see the writing is on the wall.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/... [slashdot.org]
I don;t believe the governments are simply posturing, I beleive they're already getting a giant hard-on over the amount of control over us that obliging us to drive so-called "intelligent" cars. Apart from the fact that the government is already facilitating the deployment obviously immature self-driving software out, their intention is cl
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I think electric cars will become another example of how well-off people are able to leverage technology to maintain an economic advantage.
For the foreseeable future, there is no good way to own an electric car and be a renter without parking spot with a charger. Public charging will take too long and the cars won't have enough reserve to not make it a continual bother. So all of the economic benefits of owning an electric car will go to people who can afford the parking/charging setup.
If governments star
Find moderately sized companies w/good credit (Score:2)
Lobbyists (Score:5, Informative)
Just kidding. Lobbying will be a growth industry for the next decade at least.
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Naw, they'll be automated:
Equifax! (Score:2)
(No explanation needed.)
not much about business but ocuppations (Score:2)
Uber! (Score:5, Insightful)
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Youtubers (Score:4, Funny)
Please, for the love of the gods, please let this stop being a profession.
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Please, for the love of the gods, please let this stop being a profession.
Why? There are some very good science and learning channels out there that I would hate to see go.
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I grew up with arcades, so I can appreciate video games. When my kids watch other people play video games, I don't get it either. It's not so much the video gaming part... but the inane, constant, talking. They don't shut up for 2 seconds. Although, I think that may be a reflection of our society, where people feel compelled to spout their opinion the second something comes into their mind, and send it out to the world, all day, every day.
As I heard someone once say though, how is watching someone play
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TV NETWORKS (Score:3)
Equifax (Score:2)
One can only hope it doesn't take 10 years.
Microsoft (Score:2)
Ther will probably still be some business entity around called Microsoft but it will be fully owned by the Chinese and will just be an IP troll.
It will be pretty much irrelevant and insignificant in any real sense, They won't be making or selling any actual products by then.
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Yeah I agree.
I've a gut feeling that Google's turn to become the nominal Evil Empire of the computer world will actually be quite soon.
I also considered Apple, but they don't have enough market share outside of phones to be taken seriously in the general computer space, besides they're pretty much universally hated already.
Coal miners. (Score:3)
I'm not being optimistic about renewable energy use or the will of the government to stop pollution, it's just that natural gas has been gutting the coal industry and despite a recent uptick, automation is replacing most workers. The companies may survive another 7 years but the occupation as we know it will die. With no economic incentive (jobs) to keep the sector alive, politicians that aren't heavily bribed will turn on coal completely most likely by other growing sectors that bribe them better.
Here's the long trend [wp.com] and here's the more recent trend. [statista.com]
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Hookers (Score:5, Interesting)
If the facebook has its way with virtual reality then the worlds oldest business will vanish. Cross physical feed back with AI then things get ... creepy.
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legacy fail (Score:2)
Ten years? We're talking legacy here. How about 100 years?
Here's one that's already dying, and should continue to wither: the monologue-centric academic lecture hall.
Here's another one that will take more than ten years but is already happening: the death of cooking (esp. baking) in U.S. volumetric units.
No-one in the younger generation thinks accurate digital scales are exotic any longer. And what if you want to make 50% more? And the original recipe calls for 1 1/2 tsp? Oh, dear. So what, apart from
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Umm, hopefully we're still teaching basic math in the future. Like fractions. And multiplicatio
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No. (Score:5, Funny)
Dammit, that didn't make any sense.
I guess it's time to close up shop on my Betteridge's law of headlines auto-responder consultancy.
At least business is booming at my Poe's Law-firm.
My predictions for business that will be dead soon (Score:3)
My predictions for business that may well be dead in the not-to-distant-future (if they aren't already):
Video rental stores (I am surprised the ones that still exist have been able to hang on for so long given the rise of both rental kiosks and digital content purchase/rental/streaming/etc)
Landline phones (more and more people will replace home phones completly with mobile like I have or they will get some sort of VoIP service running over cable or fibre or whatever other tech rather than actual proper old-school copper wire phones)
Tobacconists (as less people smoke, taxes on tobacco increase and more and more general retailers like supermarkets and petrol stations are selling cigarettes, less and less people will have a reason to go to a specialty tobacconist for their tobacco products. Laws regulating how retailers can display and sell tobacco products dont help matters either)
Paid FTP software (with free alternatives like FileZilla being as good as the paid alternatives if not better, why would anyone bother to pay for FTP software anymore?)
Classified advertising in newspapers (why would anyone bother with newspapers when buying cars, buying property, looking for a job or buying general crap when things like Gumtree, realestate.com.au, Seek, CarSales and others in other countries are so much better)
Printed TV guides and listings (with digital TV even free-to-air channels give you up-to-date on-screen program guides so you can see what's on and when plus if you do need to look it up without looking on your TV, the Internet has you covered for that)
Printed phone books (I am surprised these aren't completly dead yet)
Toy stores (with the recent bankruptcy of Toys R Us and consumers increasingly buying toys from online or from big box department stores that have lower prices than the toy retailers, could the death of the toy store be far away?)
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There are a lot of peices to the puzzle of completely replacing fuel powered cars with electric ones. Making the cars cheaper and their range longer is certainly part of it but it's far from the only part.
Figuring out where people who don't live in a house with off street parking or people who are travelling for an extended period can charge their cars is one part. Ensuring the electricity grid can deal with the extra load is another.
Having said that I think you are right that largely gas stations won't tur
Re:gas stations (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect that's more on the 30 year timeframe, as I still see cars built in the 1980s and 1990s on the road, and only the rich can afford electric so far.
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I'm not rich and I have an EV. In fact used ones are popular with people who can do the maths required to understand how cheap they are to own, like taxi/uber drivers. My old Leaf is an uber now.
It will be interesting when we get to the tipping point where it's actually a real pain to own an ICE vehicle in some places, due to lack of refuelling stations in the area.
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Other than the one that I own, I've never seen another electric car on the road.
That depends on where you live. In the South Bay, I see dozens every day.
San Jose has the most of any major city in America.
McAllen, TX has the least.
They are even less common in rural areas where the range can be a problem.
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When are we going to see electric semi-trucks?
A small, convenient electric car for a family is something you can happily recharge overnight. A semi. to drive for a day on electricity alone hauling a trailer with steel, and recharge overnight? Not gonna happen in the next 5-8 years at least, and to replace the existing fleets allow two more decades if you look optimistically.
Gas stations may change the profile, but trucks will need oil for a long time yet.
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Re: gas stations (Score:2)
I'd assume plug in hybrids with gas stations pretty much being limited to highways, and cities where people don't own a place to charge. Maybe rural areas, depends the range on battery.
I don't think gas stations will die, but they'll be for the people that can't afford a driveway/nice parking garage or on road trips.
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electric cars still have other limitations: short range and slow charge time.
The range is good enough for 99% of the time. For the other 1%, I can rent a gas car.
The charge time doesn't matter because my car charges at 2 AM while I am sleeping.
In total, I spend a lot less time waiting for my car to charge than you spend at gas stations.
Re: gas stations (Score:2)
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Lectures are only part of the curriculum, and even they are more interactive these days. We've seen no real decline in interest in enrollment where I work, and have not had to reduce our admissions standards in quite some time.
Mozilla will likely disappear before Google. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it'd be far more likely for Mozilla to disappear long before Google does.
Firefox is the only product of Mozilla's that really sees much use, and even it's losing market share. The latest browser stats [caniuse.com] show it has only about 5% of the market now, and essentially no presence in the mobile market (0.04%!).
If I'm not mistaken, their search deal with Yahoo expires in 2019. Given Yahoo's state, and Firefox's almost non-existent market share, I wouldn't be optimistic about it being extended.
After that, the
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But you're right. Mozilla has spent a lot of time not listening to its user base. I definitely understand that the user is not always right, but after the Australis shit and the looming murder of XUL/X
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Wait for it....
**-If the developer completely re-writes from scratch and spends months working with Mozilla to get new WebExtensions functionality added in, so long as that functionality is Mozilla-Approved, and if it's not, the addon can just keep the features that are, as long as some part of the addo
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Except for Thunderbird, which remains in the top few email clients.
Re: Mozilla will likely disappear before Google. (Score:2)
Re: Mozilla will likely disappear before Google. (Score:4, Interesting)
Of course.
Or how would you deal with several email addresses?
Opening each of them in a browser window, each of them with a different GUI?
Oh, shudder ...
And yes, I even use POP, as I want all my mails and mailboxes on my local machine and not somewhere on a server.
How would I search for some mail stuff in an air plane if my mails would be on a server?
Re:Mozilla will likely disappear before Google. (Score:5, Informative)
I doubt it. Remember that Google Chrome literately stole Safari and rebranded it Chrome
Were you born retarded, or were you just kicked in the head by a horse later in life?
The only thing Chrome shares in common with Safari is that older versions of Chrome used the same rendering engine as Safari called Webkit. Webkit itself was a fork of KHTML (of the Konquerer web browser,) which was written by KDE. Google, at one time, made the majority of the contributions to Webkit to support a lot more HTML5/CSS features. Google then forked only the WebCore component of Webkit because they wanted to support sandboxing, deprecate vendor tags, and use a multi-process model. This fork became the Blink rendering engine that other browsers besides Chrome use, such as Opera and Vivaldi.
Ever since Google stopped contributing to Webkit, Apple has been developing it at a snail's pace, just like IE6 back in the day, making Safari the lowest common denominator, which is pissing off a lot of developers. Perhaps because Apple wants users on their app store (read: $$$) rather than on the web? Pretty much the same motivation Microsoft had (Microsoft literally circulated an internal memo describing the web as a threat to its cash cow, Windows.)
Re:Mozilla will likely disappear before Google. (Score:5, Informative)
You got most of that right, but one important correction: Chrome had a multiprocess model years before they ever forked Blink from WebKit, and WebKit already had a multiprocess model by the time Blink was forked.
Backing up a bit, years and years prior to the split, Google baked a multiprocess model into Chromium, rather than WebKit. This gave Chrome a major competitive advantage over Safari and other browsers that relied on WebKit. Apple, of course, wanted to have a multiprocess model as well, so they later baked it directly into WebKit, but it was a significant enough departure that they forked it as WebKit 2. As you’d expect, Google didn’t contribute much (anything?) towards WebKit 2 since it wasn’t compatible with their existing multiprocess model, and, as you’d expect, Apple’s contributions towards WebKit dried up as they focused on WebKit 2. Making things even more interesting, WebKit 2 was a buggy mess for quite awhile, so Apple itself didn’t even adopt it in Safari for Mac or iOS immediately, and Google would have had even less reason to adopt it.
Google’s eventual forking of Blink from WebKit was really the natural conclusion to the choice Apple had made years earlier when they forked WebKit 2, which was itself the natural next step after Google decided to keep its multiprocess model to itself, which was itself the natural next step after Apple left such a glaring hole in WebKit’s architecture, and so on and so in.
Re:Mozilla will likely disappear before Google. (Score:5, Informative)
Google then forked only the WebCore component of Webkit because they wanted to support sandboxing
Except that Google supported sandboxing in a crappy way. Apple implemented sandboxing in WebKit, so every application that uses WebKit gets the benefit. For example, when you view an HTML email in Apple Mail, it's rendered in a separate process that has no network or filesystem access, and the changes to enable this amount to about 4 lines of code (basically, opt into this behaviour and promise that you won't use any of the deprecated APIs that it breaks). In contrast, Chrome puts the sandboxing in the browser, so anyone using Blink has to implement their own sandboxing layer.
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Google's way is actually the same as Apple's way, it's just not immediately obvious.
Apple wanted multiprocess in WebKit because they WebKit as part of their OS and in other apps. Google wanted multiprocess in Chrome because Chrome /is/ their OS.
On Google's OS the apps are just web pages. They even have apps for Chrome that are just .zip files with all the web site resources pre-downloaded for faster opening, plus a few extra local storage features.
Re:Google (Score:5, Interesting)
I hope more for Facebook to go away.
Microsoft has had its peak, but will probably not go away.
Oracle is at larger risk. it's big and bulky with an unclear business strategy.
Several cloud service providers are at risk.
Some ISPs with bad customer treatments.
Analog land lines are already dying in bulk.
Trumps real estate business is probably at risk.
Apple - past Jobs the vision is gone.
Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
The article's headline said that these were businesses "facing extinction in ten years." In reality, very few (if any) of the businesses they identified actually are extinct.
Within the article, they did include weasel language under almost every single item to the effect that "it will be around, but their business will decline." Of course, if they had headlined their article "10 businesses that will decline in the next 10 years," nobody would have given it a second glance.
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No worries, mate. As soon as any given business becomes obsolete, the hipsters will rush to rediscover it, pay 10x the old price for its products, and make it fashionably cool again. It's the circle of life.
Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate (Score:5, Informative)
In fact, some of those are actually on a massive rise due to recent retro trends. Arcades and more specifically Barcades are popping up all over the place now. Film cameras are as of 2017 just starting to make a retro comeback as well. Used book stores seem to be doing just fine, too. Amazon only killed off retailers, not the second hand market. In fact, vinyl records also has a surge going on right now. So like almost half their list is currently being fueled by nostalgia into new market territory.
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I would say that many of those businesses already died, and what we have now is the remaining niche after collapse. Just because we have automobiles and jet planes doesn't mean there isn't still a need for buggy whips.
But telemarketing? I wish they would die. They're like roaches, always hiding except for the times when they run past you.
Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't over-estimate how big those revivals are though. Vinyl only looks like it is selling in significant volume because no-one buys music on physical media any more. CD sales are way, way down in the last decade, as are music sales in general thanks to streaming.
I was surprised to see camera shops trying to make a comeback. There is a chain in the UK called Jessops, which had a pretty terrible reputation for being an over-priced hard-sell rip-off even back in the day. They all closed and a low grade celebrity businessman bought the name, and is trying to bring them back. But everything in there is still twice the price you can get it on online, and with online sales you have more consumer rights.
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They didn't account for the Hipster market. What seems to be taking the biggest hit, are Malls and the Big Box stores.
The small stores with their local charm, have for the most part always had one foot in the grave. But for the most part they are still around, when they are in the right locations.
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Record stores have bounced back, photographic film has bounced back, and telemarketing is (I'm sad to say) still going strong.
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Record stores have bounced back, photographic film has bounced back, and telemarketing is (I'm sad to say) still going strong.
I don't get bothered by any of these much any more, even telemarketing, but when will newspapers have the decency to die off? Someone started one up locally just a couple of months back and started tossing it onto everyone's driveway once a week. They don't even have the thoughtfulness to bring it on the morning of trash day.
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The problem with the demise of newspapers (that people pay for) is not the newspaper, its the loss of journalism and the rise of fake news Nd anyone oublishing any unresearched crap they want.
Poeple will pay for something they can hold in their hands. This is going to be he end of us.
Re:Not prophetic, but very accurate (Score:4, Informative)
Record stores have bounced back
No they haven't! I have in my collection 1000 (!) CDs which I bought over the years. I used to go into record stores a lot and continuously buy more of them. But *all* the record stores I frequented have closed. When I go to shopping malls all over the world, I no longer see record stores, and don't have any opportunity to buy new CDs. The last CD I bought was a year ago, when I visited some old shopping mall and was thrilled to see a CD store, and was so thrilled that I immediately bought 3. But apparently, I'm the only one. People don't even know what to do with physical CDs any more: you can't physically stick it into your music-play phone, and the music and movie industry succeeded too well in demonizing people who "rip" their CDs and DVDs to files.
photographic film has bounced back
Maybe in your alternate universe :-) Nobody I know used photographic film in more than a decade. Maybe some art fans are still using it, but that's 0.01% of the market share it used to have.
telemarketing is (I'm sad to say) still going strong.
That I agree.
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They're currently "in" with the hipsters, that's all.
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Telemarketing: they got this one right by predicting it would still be around in lesser form;
I won't give them this one, because they didn't predict that lesser form would be of the criminal variety, and yet still manage to generate the same or greater volume of calls. They thought do-not-call would kill the industry, not just make it go underground.
Their main failure was they didn't consider the demographics of the targetted consumer base: more senescent people, and more people with complex finances leaving them with frantic levels of concern and thus emotionally vulnerable.
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you're wrong, of course as is your score of only 20%. The vinyl records for example will be for a niche market. so will film for cameras and newspapers. you're comparing gnat farts to a hurricane for most of those
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the prediction was about record stores, which are still going away. that vinyl buying is mostly done in other places.
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Film is as niche as vinyl records or lamp amplifiers. Meaning not really all that niche.
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Yes, the main widespread professional application is diagnostic imaging. Even though most modern diagnostic imaging systems are digital, film is still the preferred print medium for anything big (say, larger than an ultrasound or dental x-ray) because it's cheaper than moving around uncompressed files, easy to archive, and everyone in the medicine business knows how to use it.
My prediction for the next 10 years is that increased bandwidth, storage, and high(er) dynamic-range displays may make film less comm
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How about Microsoft merge with Oracle and then merge with Comcast and Spectrum and AT&T, and then the whole ball of flaming shit burns a painful ugly death live streaming for everybody to see and dance to. Hell, I might even leave the basement to witness it in person.
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Re:Easy one (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm sure this is meant half jokingly, but American football as a whole is in trouble. Schools are starting to shut down their programs due to lack of interest. Parents, worried about their kids' brain health, are pushing them to play other sports. In time, the talent dropoff will be dramatic enough to significantly affect big college and pro football.
The decline for the NFL has accelerated much faster than expected. The league's necessary adjustments for safety has made the game less interesting to watch and the recent anthem "controversies" are not helping. Attendance and viewership is down. The decline has already started and doesn't look like it will abate soon. Think that football is too big to fail? 80 years ago Boxing was the #1 sport in America. Look at the state of boxing today.
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This is a legitimate concern (for the NFL). Fewer children playing will dry up the talent pool in another decade when those children would be at the age for th
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"...made the game less interesting to watch"? Wow - I didn't know that was possible ;-)
More seriously though, if the NFL can fix up some of the more tedious aspects of the game, make a game last the 25 minutes of actual play, versus the 5 hours of ads + inane commentary, then it might have an exportable product. They'd have to rebrand to be the IFL, and they'd need to change the F to be something else, because most of the rest of the world thinks football is a game where you're only allowed to touch the bal
Re: (Score:3)