Seinfeld had an episode about cell phones, though.
I don’t remember the exact plot, but I think it was Elaine called somebody about something serious, like expressing condolences for a death or something, and she called from a cell phone while she was out and about, instead of calling from a land line at home. This was seen as a faux pas.
That sounds vaguely familiar… did she have bad reception or something and her condolences came across as insulting as words got cut
My memory was that she had bad reception, but that the call wasn’t cut, and when she hung up, she thought she had done a good job until corrected by Jerry. But I haven’t seen this episode in over two decades probably, so my memory isn’t going to be exactly right.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JW2Jf29hlXA
From the finale episode
A non 212 phone number also a faux pas.
This was seen as a faux pas.
That’s because cell phone audio quality in the analog era was shit. Knowing that you’d be giving condolences with a hissy, staticky, distorted voice is kinda rude when a landline payphone isn’t that far away.
It was more that the person you were calling meant so little to you that you made the call while you were doing other things. Back then calling someone was almost like meeting them for coffee, often you would pre arrange the rough time you would call, and you were both engaged in the activity because you had to be at home sitting next to the phone. There was a certain effort to it that would seem lacking if you just could pull out a phone while you were walking down the street.
People weren’t still scheduling calls in the '90s. We had answering machines and even voicemail by then.
In the early 2000s I was still arranging landline calls ahead of time with my friends because you couldn’t use the internet at the same time as the phone.
A good portion of houses in my country never received a telephone line. Straight from arranging calls between phone booths to mobile.
Before 1989, the state monopoly had an installation backlog of several years (you could only get a line fast if you were high up in the party or had friends at the telco), high monthly fees and was woefully behind on tech: there was no digital voice equipment on the whole network, while the US’s Bell trunk network had all-digital audio by 1970. Even until like 1980, in regional towns of 30k-50k, they required you to speak to operators for out-of-town calls. After 1990, the company privatized but it was still prohibitively expensive to get a line set up, as so much money needed to be spent to belatedly bring the network into the digital era. The monopoly ended around 2000 and prices went down but by that point, people saw the dawn of mobile and didn’t want to pay for a new phone line anymore.
It was the episode where Elaine gets a cellphone, and I think it was about the importance of when to use the cellphone.
Kramer: Look Jerry, twenty thousand dollars in ethereum.
Jerry: but who’s gonna pay for that?
K: You know my friend Bob Sacamano he just bought three of those bored monkeys for ten thousand last week and they are now fifteen a piece, I tell you Jerry this is a great business.
J: but they are JAY PEE GEES!
I’m not sure I’d put PayPal on the good side.
it is “good tech” in the sense of solving a problem that existed before.
I can already see Kramer running NFT scams… or crypto rug pull xD
Kramer would spend all his money on NFTs and then freak out trying to flip them. He would enlist George as a fictional investor who would try to inflate the value of the NFTs by offering exorbitant amounts for them in front of potential buyers.
Jerry would riff on the copyability of NFTs and try to talk Kramer out of it, but would secretly sell an NFT of himself for a low amount of money.Elaine would secretly purchase the Jerry NFT and hold it over him forever.
In the end, Newman would buy all of Kramer’s NFTs and think he was getting a steal. George, who was promised 50% of the profits would be aghast when he learns Kramer lost a thousand bucks in the transaction, even more so when Kramer requests $500 from George for his share of the negative profits.
Newman would then flip the NFTs for a genuine profit.
I just watched 22 minutes of Seinfeld in a 90 second read.
This is gold, agent641, gold!
Giddy up!
I could see george having FOMO and doing most of this shit. Kramer would fall for the AI chatbot.
*The AI chatbot would fall for Kramer.
[Robot voice] I love that jacket…
America’s screen writers adopted the Seinfeld paradigm years ago:
No hugging, no learning.
Apple Maps, on the other hand, is fully worthy of an episode.
or Waze, proceed right on manaheim parkway… bing bong bong, now it wants me to go the other way, can i even make a u-turn here?
Seinfeld is the single biggest unc show
Wtf does unc mean, I keep seeing it used
Uncle. Old man
I got called unc for being in my 30s.
Six seven
Unc is unc.
,_, im only 22
i liked it tho 🥺
That makes you an unc, which is not a bad thing. Uncs are beloved.
yippeeeeeeeeee :3
Ironically, there are companies that put rubber bladders in shipping vessels to prevent leaks. I got in early at Kramerica, but sold before Darren joined the Nazi party.
As far as I can tell, your entire enterprise is no more than a solitary man with a messy apartment which may or may not contain a chicken.
Something something Seinfeld something something Epstein island lemonade
Kramer would go the Epstein Island literally for the snorkeling.
Oh, it’s got gorgeous water.
And the rich people dont care if you sneak on, they just write it off, Jerry.
Or — just hear me out, I’m going to say something crazy — simply consider: will it draw criticism?
This way, you don’t have to use any of your attention span on Seinfeld or his shitty show.
Literally everything should draw criticism. Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Arizona Iced Tea draw criticism.
But if you’re going to be a lemming about it, you could use basically any sitcom set in the 90’s or 2000’s. I remember reading once that the writers of Buffy The Vampire Slayer deliberately avoided giving the characters cell phones because the characters having reliable, cheap instant communication at a distance eliminates a lot of plots.
Use Saved By The Bell if you have to. Screech, the nerd, is blathering about <newfangled tech> in the first act. The gang gets into a scrape in the second act. Does Screech:
- fail to use <newfangled tech> correctly as you would in the real world, because if he did the plot wouldn’t happen at all? – Great tech.
- Use <newfangled tech> realistically to solve the problem, and Zach has a little moment where he admits Screech was right about it? – Good tech.
- Cause, instigate or worsen the scrape the gang is in with <newfangled tech> which has to be solved by some other means especially deus ex machina by adult characters? – Bad tech.
- Play the main role in this, a Very Special Episode? – Bad Bad Very Bad Epstein Bad tech.
I guess it’s a good thing that I don’t know a couple of the “Bad tech” ideas. I can figure out the metaverse land sales but have no idea what a blind box is.
Loot/Blind boxes are like a random pack of baseball cards that you can only show to other owners of baseball cards, or someone who is baseball-card adjacent.
Some of them are “rare” in the sense that the card printing company refuses to make more, despite it costing them nothing after the initial card is made.
What’s more is that the printing compamy has decades of psycologic practices to use on their card pack purchasers. For Example:
- Casino-esque animations, enticing younger collectors before that aren’t even allowed to gamble legally, in person.
- Rarity manipulation, making things rarer than listed. If they list anything more than ‘trust me bro.’
- Making sure that purchasers are surrounded by pack buyers who have already got the rarer cards, generating card envy.
- Removing entire card sets from purchase wirh the whole purpose of making purchasers feel like they will miss out, right now and forever, if they do not buy more packs of cards.
Finally, there is also the fact that all of these cards are entirely digital, so the existance of the cards depend almost entirely on the whims of the printers.
The only blind boxes I know are those little toy collections you purchase in an opaque wrapper or box. You don’t know which one you got until you’ve paid. Generally some kind of licensed product, so movie/TV characters, or whatever else will get a child to talk their parents into spending money. There are others aimed at adults, too, like mini versions of classic branded products (Kitchenaid stand mixer, Kraft mac and cheese box, etc)
There are others aimed at adults, too, like mini versions of classic branded products (Kitchenaid stand mixer, Kraft mac and cheese box, etc)
Those mini verse often contain UV resin, without thoroughly explaining the safety risks of working with resin. It’s kind of amazing how they are able to get away with selling those kits - children certainly by them too.
Resin releases fumes and can cause you to develop a permanent sensitivity. Some of the kits are designed in such a way that the resin isn’t going to fully cure unless you do it in thin layers.
Me too but those are not really tech, they’re a classic carnival item
Yeah, that’s why I’m less than sure it’s the right thing. All I can say is that they seem to be more popular as a category in stores over the last five to ten years than before.
“Blind box” in the tech context is an algorithm that hides its operations from everyone, even its own creators. You give it an input, and then it produces an output, without showing you how it arrived to that output.
Nah, that’s a black box algorithm. Blind boxes are like loot boxes, but for irl stuff. Like labubus. Basically gachapon machines without the machine. But that’s not exactly tech, so I assume the op means loot boxes.
Do you mean AI?
Hmm. Do we want good tech, or do we want to inspire new Seinfeld episodes? This is a tough one.
Well, the show has been off the air for a long time, but I absolutely could see Kramer having an AI chatbot girlfriend, or George Costanza trying to get people suckered into an NFT grift/cryptocurrency side hustle.
The People Coin. Money for people.
Yeah, George would think he’s spotted some slick NFT grift or crypto rug pull that it turns out he was the one getting rug pulled, by Newman.
