Road networks in most cities in my country are like someone just dropped a pot of spaghetti. The oldest urban areas here are at most 150 years old too, so it's not like we can blame the Romans.

You should become a cabbie in London. They all have to memorise 320 routes, 25,000 streets and 20,000 places of interest, e.g. hotels, stations, tourist attractions and so on. It's called The Knowledge. There's some evidence that mastering The Knowledge actually alters the structure of the brain!

I used to do this when I delivered pizza.bMy phone wasn't playing well with the GPS because I had put a custom ROM on it that happened to be too much for the thing, plus aging, but the ROM was too good in every other aspect. So I just studied the map on the same computer we clicked through orders on, remembered my route, and in a couple of weeks I didn't even need to look at the map before going around our zone.

Still helps me navigate cities to this day, even now that I don't drive at all.

Although living in a post-Soviet country helps with city/road design, making it rather predictable in ways lol

I was so confused by this comment until I remembered that US-american streets are planned and numbered. Because while I grew up in a village in the 90s, I wouldn't be able to tell you where the "Primrosestreet" or the "Blackbird street" is unless I had friends who lived there.

This only works in cities with naming schema that work that way. For my city, if I wanted to go to my old college, I'd drive to Columbia Parkway and have to take Martin Luther King Jr Boulevard all the way in, or divert through downtown to Victory Parkway otherwise. Some places in the city are named logically or you know where they are, but outside of downtown, you abandon the 5th/6th/7th sort of scheme in many cities in America that weren't initially Planned Cities.

Now, you can do this in a handful of American cities (Indianapolis, for instance), but not most of them.

I wonder if it took quite a bit longer for people to reach their destination. Because not everyone would be as good at reading maps (compared to simply following gps instructions) Maybe that made it more common for people to arrive at different times. or plan longer trips because the driving would take up a bigger part of it.

Oh it absolutely did. You would regularly have to stop (often after a turn or if you felt like you missed one) and reconsult the map. You just accounted for that additional time. Longer trips are often less of an issue, because its usually, you get to a big main highway and its cruise most of the rest of the way.

And plenty of times, you might get lost/ not be able to find yourself on the map. You'd have to pull over and ask for help/ directions. You might write the directions down on a piece of paper, but that doesn't do you much good if you missed a turn and didn't know it.

Depends on the area and how familiar it is and how hostile it is to navigation. I can beat the Google maps time 9 out if 10 times in Seattle because Google sends you through some seriously dumb intersections.

As someone who travelled for work before and after smartphones, absolutely. You couldn't just open Google Maps, search a business and go there, the problem wasn't going city to city, but finding a specific place in or outside a city. If you got a request to go to X business either you already knew how to get there, or it would take some planning.

Nowadays my company can receive a request from a customer in another country, and in 1 hour they can plan the trip, reserve the rental car, book a plane, book an hotel for the night. That just wasn't possible in the past.

The main maps I used for driving (back in the day, UK, 1986) were 'books' rather than large fold out maps. At local level, an A to Z. At national level, an AA road map, this has the format of a small newspaper, however in thicker paper.

Swede here, how would using a street directory help you navigate without a map?

Sure, I know that at least here in Stockholm and it's suburbs that when a new area is being developed, they name the streets after a similar theme.

But knowing that Sommarvägen in Täby is located within the district of Hägernäs doesn't get you very far.

"You wanna go down Three Oak lane, I forget what its 'proper' name is, but there used to be a farm there called Three Oak Farm, so that's what we all call the lane round here. 'Course the farm's gone. And so have the oaks. Anyway, go along there until you get to the field where the unexploded bomb was found back in '68, and turn right. Then left past the field where the cows got sick last year. If you reach shagger's hill, you've gone too far. Now there's a ford down that way, so you can't miss it. Except, I suppose, in this weather since it hasn't rained in a month and the ford's probably dried up. Most important thing though, you don't want to start from here."

Actually a much better way was to use a street directory if you know your way around the town even a bit.

You generally only had a street directory of your OWN town, outside of specific professional settings.

That reminds me that I never moved the map from old car to the new current one.

Mmmm, interesting, can you list off that data along with your mother's maiden name? It's uh for a friend...

Same here. I even still remember my phone number from 40 years ago, living as a child in Tehran, Iran. Numbers just stick in my brain.

That's memorization in action

Quite common as in, I've only met one person here in my life who can only drive automatic. Electric cars being more mainstream means many more people are driving automatic, but if you do your licence in an automatic you are not allowed to drive a manual car. So I'd wager over 99% of people can drive a manual. This is in Belgium btw.

Yes, true here in Denmark for example, but it is slowly changing on account of the rising number of EVs.

You likely already know this but if anybody else reading is interested, this is because if you test for your commercial license in an automatic then you're restricted to only automatics. The schools are still teaching manual, so it doesn't make any sense to learn that then test in an automatic and get that restriction.

Is it really?

How scary is it to drive down a big hill?

Did u ever use a different kind of motor with one?

I have to add that you're 99.9% correct, there are rare people who only learned automatic and may only drive those. I know exactly one person, so it might well be 0.1% 😁

Do you mean that you can't read it at all? It's really close to lettering, it's just got swoopies attached to most letters. There are only around 4 that you have to know how they're different, but the rest are super similar.

At this point it's actually kind of useful as a mild coded writing that excludes idiots.

Basically, those people were not going with you. I wouldn't consider them your friends. Friends would at least tell you they are bailing so you don't go

Sometimes I'll be getting myself ready to do the thing, but if someone reaches out and gives me an out... Yeah I might just take them up on it. I'm big on canceling plans

It was a fairly regular part of our public school education

I've got a log table in the back of one of my reference manuals. The results go up to 6 digits. You aren't going to get appreciable material savings after 2 digits.

And in some cases like structural steel, the built up members were far more optimized 100 years ago compared to today because the labor required to build the optimized structure was that much cheaper.

I use a graphical tablet (wacom) to write my notes. If i write my notes, i remember them much better.

They stopped teaching it here in the US, which makes me wonder what people will use for a signature.

Ah ha, that one I did not know. I guess slavery is also Americana, though a whole lot less quaint than the thought of industrious households making their own nails

Before adhesive pads were invented to stick to your underwear, you had to wear a climbing harness and use safety pins to keep your pad in place.

Good for you.

DIY filter change? $25 give or take depending on the filter. Service company doing it? $100 for the luxury of them arriving, $30 filter, $150 min labor rate to maybe do a service check, then whatever $ for issues they find.

FWIW think it’s good to have pros check stuff once in a while, they’ll see things I won’t know to check.

Not OP, but I believe there is a big difference between reading a book or longform article vs 3 paragraphs in a Fediverse thread. I certainly feel it when I sit down to read longform (but i still often read longform).

But what are they reading? Being a better reader or writer is only as good as the information exchanged. Is it memes? Clips? How about per capita?

Most shoes aren't really built to be resoled these days, they're out there and if they can be they usually make it a selling point of that shoe, they're usually a good bit pricier than other comparable shoes as well, probably gonna be about $250usd at the low end

Coincidentally I actually just sent my hiking boots out to be resoled. I have a pair of Danners, they cost probably around $450 new, and I'm getting their full recrafting service, so new heel counter, shank, resole, goretex lining, and if my shoe had any broken hardware that'd get replaced too, cost I think $260. Just a simple resole would be cheaper of course, and if you have a decent local cobbler they could probably beat that price.

I've had them about 4 years, and at this point the sole is pretty well-worn-out but the uppers are still in pretty good shape. They've been worn pretty close to daily, and have some hard miles on them.

I definitely feel that I've gotten my money's worth, before these I probably got new boots every 2 years or so and usually spent about $200 on a pair, so if these last me another 4 years (and I don't have any reason to think they won't, but there's no guarantee what misadventures my boots might go through in the next 4 years) I'll have even come out a bit ahead on them vs buying cheaper boots.

These are hiking boots, so I'm not exactly keeping them mirror-polished or anything, so care is pretty minimal, clean them with saddle soap once in a while, wipe them down with mink oil or whatever your preferred leather conditioner/waterproofing stuff is a couple times a year (I generally try to do at least twice a year, maybe a bit more frequently if they're getting a lot of hard use- getting really dirty, worn in the winter or near the ocean where they may be getting salty, etc.)

Also not shilling specifically for Danners, I've been very happy with them so far, but there's plenty of other brands out there that are as good or better, and of course everyone has their personal preference. My next pair may or may not be danners, I do have my eye on some boots from higher-end manufacturers if my budget allows.

What was this in response to?

Having grown up on the cusp of smoke free legislation in my country I remember what it's like first hand.

It is sooOooOOoo much better now without smoking everywhere.

Glad about that. I can’t imagine living in that kind of environment for long

It wasn't bad. One of the skills lost since then was how not to be a fussy Felix Unger bloodhound. You didn't notice it. People are much more sensitive to smells today. Between the body spray and the air fresheners, the modern world still stinks, it just stinks pretty. The other nice thing was that there was a clear distinction between places that were uptight and relaxed. Today the smell of a church and the smell of a bar are almost the same.

Edit:

Also, one of the skills lost today is handling fire. Back then everybody lit a match or flicked their Bic 20+ times a day. Casually, effortlessly and elegantly handling flame was a skill almost every sophisticated adult had. Today seeing a 26 year old strike a match is like watching a 6 year old strike a match in the 80s. It's very apparent in films that are period pieces when the actor is kind of terrified of the match they just clumsily struck.

Automotive cigarette lighters eventually developed a secondary use as an auxiliary power port. The modern ones don't actually function as a cigarette lighter though. They don't have the clips needed to hold the lighter coil in the socket.

I've been in 3 different people's cars that didn't even have the cigarette lighter hole, and I believe they stopped including the actual lighter in cars before they switched to just having USB outlets in cars

EDIT: The cars were 2015, 2020, and 2021 models. My old 2004 had the cigarette outlet

Ah, yes, the emergency services!

867-5309!

Its a great skill to have, if you fix something a bit janky, no one is going to notice.

Getting a basic sewing machine, while absolutely not required, opens the door to more efficient repairs or modifications. Like shortening sleeves or pants that are too long. (You also don't have to learn to do different stitches, you select one on the machine and let it do the hard part)

People talk a lot about the internet causing social corrosion various ways, but this might be the most real. Back in time, and still to some degree in rural areas, in-person organisations (churches, unions, clubs) had tons of political power. Getting a endorsement from them often meant more than your platform or soundbites or political brand.

The new way isn't bad per se, but it's not time-tested, and it's not looking very stable so far when imposed on 20th century institutions.

They don't/cant learn that in today's world. They have abandoned learning and switched it out with answers to everything.

It sounds like you are better at it than most kids these days. I look up solutions all the time. No sense reinventing the wheel. I've also spent days on some problem without looking elsewhere for a solution. The dopamine from solving a problem myself is excellent.

When I was very young around 50 years ago I built a small flashlight using a plastic tick tack box, paper clips,a flashlight bulb and two AAA batteries. No one showed me how I just figured it out. So just because you couldn't see the problem solvers among you doesn't mean they were not there.

I used to know a guy at church who said he didn't know how to cook and went to the convenience store for every meal.

From looking at history this seems confined to one generation - in 1950 the "ideal family" was a man going to work 9-5, and the women staying home to cook/clean. For a while it even worked out that way for a lot of people, but over the 1960s there was a culture revolution and women started working, while men learned to help. This process is continuing on.

Look longer over history though you see that in almost all cultures men would regularly get into situations where there were no women around to cook. Hunting, or working in the field all day often meant men and women were separated and so men had to cook for themselves if they were to eat. (women between 15 and 40 were regularly pregnant or nursing a baby - men cannot do these things, and they limit what a woman can do so some activities become men's work.) Not to mention war which typically was mostly men, though "camp followers" did cook for the army in some cases.

Which is to say, maybe your Grandpa didn't cook. However that men in his generation didn't cook was an outlier. Over history men and women both cooked.

This is the origin of "phreaking". Tapping out the pulses (on the 'hang up button') on a rotary public payphone to make free calls.

If we're going to gatekeep.

Then only those of us hand cranking the engine to start it model-T style can actually drive.

That might be fast, but it doesn't look very secure... the surgeon's knot seems better for actually staying up.

Here's how to tie another one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUHgGK-tImY

I don't know why I spent a good minute looking at that, studying exactly how to do it. My shoes don't have shoelaces....

Haha! You make a good point!

But I still don't feel old, yet.

No judgment if somebody can't.

Absolutely. Most of these that I know are down to either dumb luck or being blessed with too much free time when I was younger. And I guess being blessed with many hand-me-downs.

And who knows, if things get more expensive and uncomfortable for a while, you will know how to deal with it easily.

Yes. I'm really thankful for that.

I feel that I had it pretty easy, as a child; but sometimes I recognize that parts of the way I was raised are because of hard times seen by people who raised me.