Things that were once of value but are now worthless

Optimism.

Beanie Babies

Abs

hummel figurines

Amerikkkans.

Children

Blockbuster Video

BBS..

Dignity in the age of social media

AOL

Aluminum and amethyst used to be considered very valuable. amethyst lost it's "precious" status when huge quantities were found in Brazil and aluminum became a regular metal when they figured out how to extract it economically. In Napoleon's time the upper elite ate of aluminum utensils, while the servants used silver.

Editing articles. Any articles

Cursive writing

Research

My tits.

One penny....except one that was minted wrong, then could be worth $$$. Of course, an accumulation of pennies is different. If I saw one on a sidewalk, I would pass it. We even get rid of the extra penny in a jar at the cashier, when paying for something.

Integrity

Honor and consideration now, and empathy

Not flaunting wealth, decency

Privacy

Kindness of any kind

Real patriotism (as opposed to nationalism)

Blue jeans on men that fit their asses properly (no sag, hugging the glutes)

Mel Gibson and Whinny Depp.

A college degree

Honesty.

An American public school education.

Books , watches and being able to speak intelligently without resorting to the now ubiquitous “fuck” every other sentence to make a point.

Earrings

Caftans!

Our Justice system.

COVID-19 vaccines.

Audio cassettes

Handmade clocks and pocket watches.

R25 what do you have against fucking??

BlackBerry and BlackBerry Messenger.

Nothing r32 but I just find it grating when it’s overused. It’s a lazy way to speak. Like people saying “awesome “ about everything is so played out.

awesome is way more played out, pedestrian, meh, dead than FUCKING

The Transatlantic accent.

Fucking will always FUCKING RULE

The federal government now...

Diamonds

My pooosy.

Janet Jackson and Paula Abdul

Intelligence and knowledge, critical thinking....for too many Americans.

Privacy

Common sense.

An autographed photo of Bill Cosby.

An album signed by Phil Spector.

A football signed by OJ Simpson.

A set of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

your busted bussy

R28, it's a legal system. Nothing just about it.

My penis

Oscars

Academic papers. A research site decided I wrote a paper on Labiaplasty. Now I get tapped to “peer review “ other pussy papers. I have no idea how this happened to me!!!

sundresses & hoop skirts

A high school diploma.

Speaking the truth. To me, it's never lost its value. To others, it's an application you download.

The teenage boys of Los Angeles county.

[quote] your busted bussy

Agree, a blown out hole used to be highly coveted and in demand.

foreskins

Commodore computer

Windows 95

Brother/Panasonic word processor

A radio

The FCC

The SEC

The DoJ

The CDC, ever since it adopted Delta Airlines public health policy

A portable TV, especially attached under kitchen cabinet (so mom can watch Jeopardy and Wheel while she cleaned up after dinner)

Visor Handheld/Palm Pilot

Rolodex

Landline

Answering machine

Handheld Labeler

(I still use my fax machine with landline. You’d be surprised how often)

High end expensive luggage.

Fine crystal and china place settings.

A department store credit card.

A big antenna on your roof.

Governmental "norms". No longer normal after Trump.

The stamp collection you put a lot of time and all your allowance into.

COVID vaccinations

Brown furniture.

Newspapers and real journalists.

Now we have tabloid news aggregators and stupid pundits.

Xerox and Kodak and Polaroid in your retirement portfolio. Sniff.

Depression glass.

Large family gatherings

Going to Taco Bell.

Knowing French as an international language.

My life -at least according to the big boss at work who considers me now nothing more than cannon fodder.

All languages are less important now with Google translate

R18 thinks people had more empathy in the Jim Crow era

Tea cups

Tulips

Antimacassars

Dust ruffles

Sets of encyclopedias

Physical telephone directories

Telephone dialers

[quote]All languages are less important now with Google translate

Except google translate SUCKS, at least in Italian. If you're taking a language class, teachers know when you're using it, its sentence construction is so flawed. I use DeepL Translator.

My Franklin Mint plate collection.

meryl streep

Being able to brag, "My son's a priest, you know."

brown wood furniture

R81 Meet R66. Anyway, when I think of brown wood furniture I think of Larkin. Well-made and sturdy, but never valuable.

I love my beautiful mahogany Victorian 10 seater dining room table with matching balloon back chairs. Feel free to enjoy your ugly modern resin dining furniture.

Almost all the humanities departments

Degrees in humanities

R77: DeepL is pretty impressive, thanks for recommending

DeepL does not translate slang; Google Translate does.

Gay bars

I love my brown wood furniture.

"Things that were once of value but are now worthless"

That Rhed painting I bought last year. Value has plummeted.

Curtains, drapes

Most antiques (the pedestrian stuff found in antique malls) have lost much of their previous value over the last decade.

The British Royal Family

...especially the Duke and Duchess of Sussex

Grammar.

Roman numerals. Fuck them.

Manners. Also: Fine china (dinnerware). .We recently tried to sell off some higher-quality family stuff. The Estate sale people said, basically, "yeah, good luck with that."

A VCR recorder.

Put the china on Ebay, R96; there are people who collect it.

Bar/Bat Mitzvahs

Debutante balls

Quinceaneras

Anything celebrating a transition to adulthood as people stay immature well into their forties.

Miss Kay Lenz

Formal hats on men and women for everyday wear.

At least in the US, there is a total lack of any kind of shame, decency, and integrity. My dad (who I loathe, but had a point) used to always say: "Integrity are the decisions you make when nobody else is looking.

I think America as a country itself is extremely tarnished and does not have the value it once had. It's really sad where we are right now and where we are heading. I don't know where we went wrong and no it did not start with Trump, but there is a loss of moral fabric, decency, a neighborly spirit.

r102, you're absolutely correct. The decline started a long time ago, but I can't seem to put my finger on when.

Manners

I think the decline began in the mid-60s, when people started to authorise themselves to do what they wanted without regard for the rules of society which they considered repressive and outmoded. Lots of good came out of it; formerly oppressed and marginalised groups - POC, women, children, and GAYS were liberated and given rights that had formerly been denied to them. People realised they could flout the law, eg, smoking pot in public places, and there were no reprisals.

But the decline accelerated at a rapid pace with three things: misogynistic, hateful rap music, violent video games which desensitised people to violence, and most importantly, the internet, because every deviant, anti-social isolate suddenly found his community on the net, which normalised and enabled amoral attitudes and selfish, anti-social behaviour.

When they took prayer out of schools.

Democracy.

Polite driving.

Theranos shares

A porn career.

Production deals with the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.

Vacines

SCSI cables. Good god, 10-25 years ago, an internal SCSI cable that was a glorified ribbon cable with added certification could easily cost more than $50. Twist the pairs and add toroids, and you were looking at a hundred bucks. A 3-foot cable for an external drive probably cost more than the interface itself did. And if you needed an external enclosure with power supply... (((shudder))).

A landline answering machine. The best and last one I ever bought was actually one I bought on eBay that was originally meant to be used with an office PBX system. It was all-digital and had a hard drive. It could do everything consumer-oriented ones could, except instead of being limited to a 5-10 second outgoing message and 5-10 minutes total of incoming messages, its capacity was for all intents and purposes unlimited (I mean, it HAD a limit, but in ~15 years, I never once came anywhere close to reaching it, including the time I took a consulting job in another city and left it running at home unattended and forgotten-about for 3 months). It also had other neat capabilities... if I connected it to my computer's serial port, I could enable and administer all kinds of cool features, including an autoattendant I scripted to make callers play "Simon Says" before they were allowed to leave a message. As in, "Simon says... press 5... [5]... Excellent, Simon says, press 3... [3]... Fantastic, now press 8 to leave your message... [8] Oh, I'm sorry, Simon didn't SAY it. Please hang up and try again. [click]"

God, I miss inflicting Simon on telemarketers. I've spent years wishing Google would enable Android apps to auto-answer and interact with incoming calls, but not only has Google historically refused to provide an API to do stuff like that, many present-day Android phones literally bend over backwards to make the phone audio channel completely inaccessible to software running on the phone, even the kernel or root, courtesy of ARM TrustZone :-(

Bitcoin.

Or replacements.com, R96.

Stovetop-heated, 10 lb. metal irons.

Men's razors.

Music cassette players.

Television sets.

LCoS rear-projection TVs. You literally can't GIVE one away now, even if it works flawlessly.

Sanka

Von Dutch trucker caps

Under-oath recorded testimony

"I take full responsibility," Hillary Clinton.

Chivalry

Honor

Truth

Androgyny

Shame

r15 = Elizabeth II

They're not worthless, but American art pottery pieces have been seriously devalued in the last 20 years.

Blockbuster

The service sector in United States. There was the tech bubble, but it burst. Clinton said the service sector would provide new jobs. Catalogs hired thousands of Americans to answer phones and use computers to correct errors. They are friendly, unfailingly polite and always solve the problem. AOL had thousands of Americans on staff to help new users. Stores are franchising - Linens N Things, Lechters, Country Curtains, Pottery Barn, Wicks N Sticks, Barnes and Noble. They’re opening in towns across the US, bringing consumer goods to people who are thrilled at the new choices they have. Jobs are created as each franchise opens.

Online jobs are booming. Web services, hundreds of shoe stores, sundries large and small department stores. It’s thrilling. Someone can decide on a pair of shoes, then compare prices at many online stores, use coupons, look for free shipping specials. More competition in the marketplace.

Then it all died. Shops over expanded & franchises closed. Catalogs became meaningless. A certain website is selling books at a loss. Their price is slightly cheaper than Barnes and Noble and people like that. They like saving a few books. That website expands…..starts selling other things at a loss. Put everyone else out of business. That website now sells cheap knockoffs from China. It allows sellers to delete poor ratings. It allows sellers to bombard site with positive reviews using sock puppets and bots. When the cheap crap with falsified good ratings breaks and buyers want a refund, that website says “Fuck you. We’re not the sellers, we’re just the platform. Contact the third party who sold it.” This website makes it very difficult to contact a human being. Other web sellers decide to do the same. They slash their customer service force, use a call center in India.

This is how America fell apart.

Shares in Falcon Crest Winery.

Waterford crystal and China. My mom has a massive crystal collection for over the years of gifts. My grandma used to buy her pieces every Christmas. And nobody wants China (in any context). I still like drinking out of a heavy crystal tumbler, but it's worthless basically.

NAACP

HRC

Democratic Party

Republican Party

DVDs

Laserdsics

VHS Tapes

Beta Tapes

CDs ( Bank Deposits )

Sears

JC Penny

Macy's

Physical Interaction with people

As pertaining to furniture, fine china, and crystal, nothing is really worthless if you enjoy it. Sure, you couldn't sell it for anything, but so what...when you're dead, you won't care anyway. Enjoy it and don't look back. In fact, it will be easy for you to pick up more/different for cheap if you keep your eyes open on estate sales. I was able to get four more matching Pennsylvania House cherry dining room chairs, to match the six I already had, for a total of $100. I purchased some upholstery fabric I liked and recovered the seats myself and now I love them.

Masks.

journalism

Pashminas

Remember when everyone had to have a pashmina?

natural immunuty

R101, typing in his fascinator.

Men that value and celebrate their birth gender

Boom boxes

St Christopher medals

ID bracelets

(St Christopher medals & ID bracelets used to mean you were “going steady”)

Whitewall tires

A formal dining room

Smoking jacket

Piss elegance

Key West as a gay mecca

Keeping the sex parts you were born with.

Me, myself, and I

Video games on physical media that did not need an internet connection.

Republican

Family

Values

Class rings

Hurricane lamps

Being civil and courteous in public

Wearing clothes appropriate for age and weight

Anything sleeveless.

Prayer never belonged in schools. Fucking religious psychos ruin everything. Lemmings, the lot of them.

class, honesty, sophistication, decency

Being Christian

The word "like"

Does anyone buy a school ring anymore?

[quote]Does anyone buy a school ring anymore?

They were never of any value.

Mood rings

Decent political parties that actually cared for more than just themselves (actually, was that ever a thing?).

Pet rocks

Tamagochis

Cabbage patch kids

Harvest gold fondue sets

Wedding china

Gay marriage

Truth.

r91 I don't think antique stores/malls are dead quite yet. I know eBay/Etsy/online shopping almost killed them but shipping charges will soon kill online shopping. (Thanks DeJoy!) And as soon as the pandemic is over people will need to get out and about.

GOP. Texas/Florida real estate.

A bushy groin.

Memory, maps, intelligence, spatial knowledge

People think they can get that from apps now.

r163, sorry to bust your politically-correct bubble, but Florida and Texas real estate aren't getting cheaper anytime soon. Broward County LITERALLY meets the real estate definition of "built out" (basically, greenfield sites larger than 16 acres no longer exist), Dade County is 95% of the way there (what little true greenfield still exists is almost entirely down around Homestead... most of the large seemingly-open tracts of land north of 836 in the Doral/Medley area are actually quite polluted... prior to ~1950, nobody really gave a shit what businesses and the military did "out there" because it was so far out in BFE, but NOW, if you want to turn it into million-dollar townhomes, you have to basically scrape away the topsoil down to the bedrock and scrub it in an EPA-approved manner prior to dumping more rock on top to raise it and develop the area.

It's mostly the Obama administration's fault. Pre-Obama, the EPA didn't really care about pollution that didn't present an actual risk to anyone... or at least, that wouldn't present an actual risk to anyone after getting buried under 5-15 feet of crushed limestone and fill dirt. Now, developers are required to remediate pretty much ANYTHING that's detectable, "just because". So, if you have a 10 acre site that USED to be way out in the everglades where Jimbob and his friends used to ride dirtbikes and crash cars into each other for fun 40 years ago and detectable amounts of motor oil got spilled on the ground, you're now required to scrub the soil to standards that would cause almost any house where someone changed their own motor oil and washed their hands afterwards with a garden hose in the back yard to fail.

Texas obviously has vast amounts of land... but if you want to build or buy a house somewhere within 5 minutes of a freeway and 30 minutes or less from the area that would be generally considered to be your metro area's "downtown" (or at least, one of them)... well... forget about 'cheap'. Plus, nothing smaller than a 4-6 bedroom McMansion with 3-4 car garage gets built new anywhere in Texas anymore... and that includes townhomes. In cities like Frisco, even TOWNHOMES have 3-4 car garages.

My record collection

Not necessarily true, r167, unless it consists of nothing but old original cast recordings and Herb Alpert records. But your records should be in at least very good condition.

The Ten Commandments

Loyalty

Grammar.

Foreign language requirements for PhD in Philosophy at prestigious universities

ri66 GOP Texas/FL real estate.

r166 GOP. Texas/Florida real estate.