Robb Allen in comments to another post said:
DAILY PUNDIT
By Bill Quick
And so I rarely go to the movies any more.
Which brings up another thought I had as I was reading the responses here. All the things I no longer do because either nannies, or statists, or simply technological change, have transformed my habits.
1. San Francisco has plastered the downtown area with traffic cameras that seem rigged, so I no longer drive downtown.
2. I almost never go to theater releases of movies. Most of the product of liberal Hollywood sucks, and of what remains, it's easier and much cheaper to get it through my satellite and look at it on my big flatscreen.
3. I haven't bought or read a dead tree newspaper in years.
4. I do go out to restaurants, but that's only because I quit smoking. If I still smoked, I'd never go out to eat in California, where public smoking is banned. And given that San Francisco's war on the private automobile has made parking nearly impossible in most places, the restaurants that get my business are located in those few places where parking availability is good.
5. I don't fly unless the need is absolutely dire. The thugs of the petty police states that have accreted around flying have driven me away.
6. If something as good as WebVan were to return - and something will, eventually - I would rarely enter the physical confines of a grocery or liquor/wine store.
7. I, who used to live in bookstores, haven't been physically inside one in years. Ditto libraries. amazon.com for me.
8. Amazon also for a lot of hard goods I might otherwise have shopped the department stores for - especially cooking stuff.
9. I'm no longer much of a clothes horse, but what clothes I do buy, I buy online, except for bags of socks and underwear from Costco.
10. I am almost always personally connected to the internet, either at home, or via my EVDO-connected laptop, which is usually in my backpack. My next laptop will be even smaller and lighter (and much more powerful) than my current machine. I get nervous if the net isn't immediately at hand - especially Google.
How about you? What do you do differently these days from what, just twenty or so years ago, was considered the normal, everyday way to live?
dailypundit.com |
