Flying cars-------Anti-gravity no but alterbative plane/cars are in progress.
Do you really want the average person to be able to have access to aircraft? I sure don't. Most people are stupid. Really, very stupid.
Not much more to say really, things are slowing down, improvements to products are minimal. Actual, genuine newfangled technology what is there? Everything is an iteration upon an iteration.
We still use the microwave, we still use the freezer, the cooktop, the oven, we mostly use the combustion engine, we still mostly use steam for power plants, computers have gotten faster and we have LCD's now but nothing huge has hapenned, we don't have anti-gravity, we don't have teleportation, we can't change one thing in to another (easily), medically we still aren't growing replacement bodies.
Yes things have gotten better but I haven't seen a huge revoloutionary change to be honest in my lifetime, maybe the mobile phone I guess.
I'm not sure I understand why people complain about things like this. Yes, we still use the microwave. Know why? Because it works well at cooking certain foods. Yes, we still use the knife, an invention that's thousands of years old. We still use the knife because it's good at cutting things and there's no real reason to go back to the drawing board on that particular task. The fact that we are still using inventions that are old doesn't mean progress is slowing down, it means we're smart enough to know when to move on to something else.
In my life time I have seen technical advancements such as:
-Cloning
-Stem cell research (which WILL be a revolution I'm sure)
-The internet
-Cell phone
-Pictures from the surface of another planet
-Pictures of another planet from another solar system
Yeah, some of those might seem incremental, but everything always is. Technology doesn't ever undergo revolution, it undergoes evolution, as Issac Newton said "If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants."
Well that is why AGW became almost a religious issue. I think scientists overreached in trying to claim they can predict the long term climate when they can't accurately predict next week's climate. Having said that your other point is well taken. Every major city in the US has smog levels at some time during the year that are "dangerously unhealthy". Not only that but you can SEE and CHOKE ON smog. You don't need to rely upon a complex computer program full of assumptions to know that smog sucks (same could be said of particulate pollution). I wish all the energy that has been poured into AGW had instead been applied to smog, particulate pollution, mercury in fish, and other things that are far easier to demonstrate as "bad" and as a direct result of man's activities. Who would really complain if the President stood up and said "because our cities are being choked in a shroud of dangerous pollution that kills or impairs X people per year I am introducing new federal standards to etc etc etc". My list would be:
All common sense items that would almost immediately begin to improve human health. Oh and they would also help reduce CO2 emissions dramatically. Reducing the emissions from other sources would be a longer term effort and I think that would need to be baked into legislation that mandates the use of wind, solar, hydro, nuclear, biomass and geothermal. The solutions here aren't all that hard. They are just politically unpopular because, for some reason, Americans think they have a God-given-right to drive 8000 lb cars.
"Well that is why AGW became almost a religious issue. I think scientists overreached in trying to claim they can predict the long term climate when they can't accurately predict next week's climate. " Climate is long term patterns in the earth's atmosphere, so no, they couldn't predict next weeks climate because "next weeks climate" is more along the lines of atmospheric patterns of the short term, which would be more accurately defined as weather. Sorry to burst your bubble.
If it has syntax, it isn't user friendly.
