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1''A "cool" tool with severe drawbacks, at least for the time being.''
2
3!!Examples
4* AwesomeButImpractical/{{Military}}
5* AwesomeButImpractical/{{Vehicles}}
6
7[[foldercontrol]]
8----
9[[folder:Architecture]]
10* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Style_(architecture) International Style]] in general. Flat roofs with no eaves, ribbon windows, supporting pillars and white surfaces and omission of any decorative elements made a revolution in architecture, but they are leaky, are difficult to overhaul and repair, are prone to [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_building_syndrome sick building syndrome]] and mildew and mold problems, especially in humid and cold climates, weather uglily, have horrible heating bills and are dependent on mechanical air conditioning, and are prone to collapse in a case of fire. They are, however, cheap to build and therefore have become the paradigm, as they usually are demolished after a 15 to 60 years of lifespan.
11* Retractable roof stadiums:
12** Such stadiums have the appeal of choosing either having protection from the elements or playing in the open air when the weather cooperates; however, such stadiums are often more expensive to build and maintain than their open-air or fixed-roof contemporaries. Retractable roofs are prone to leaks in their first years of operation and have problems with the wind. While some retractable roof stadiums can keep their roof open under light precipitation, others are like a convertible car, which can only really be opened when the sun is shining. In some cases, such as NRG Stadium in Houston, grass playing fields have to be replaced with synthetic turf, as the roof would block out the sunlight.
13** Some retractable or fixed-roof stadiums, such as State Farm Stadium in Arizona and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, alleviate the "growing grass indoors" issue by using a retractable ''field'', allowing the grass to grow outside while leaving the stadium available for other events that may otherwise damage the field.[[note]]For example, the grass surface at Allegiant Stadium is used only by the [[UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeague Las Vegas Raiders]]. The stadium's other main tenant, [[UsefulNotes/CollegiateAmericanFootball college football's]] UNLV Rebels, uses artificial turf.[[/note]] However, such a solution adds more costs to an already high stadium price tag, since such a solution requires more land to accommodate the field tray and the additional maintenance costs of the systems to move the field in and out of the stadium.
14** UsefulNotes/{{Montreal}}'s Olympic Stadium. Designed to be the world's first retractable roof stadium and the showpiece of the 1976 Summer Olympics, the stadium wasn't fully completed in time for the Games, due to a construction workers' strike. When the roof was finally installed over a decade later, it was intended to work like a giant umbrella, with the roof going up into an inclined tower. However, despite being made of Kevlar, the roof was prone to tearing in high winds and would often leak water. After ten years, the retractable roof was replaced with a fixed roof. However, problems persisted after the new roof collapsed in its first winter of use after heavy snowfall, rendering the stadium unusable if there is a threat of more than an inch (2.5 cm) of snow, and the roof is ''still'' prone to tearing in high winds, costing thousands of dollars to fix annually. After construction delays, mounting interest payments, and failed attempts to fix its design flaws, the Olympic Stadium cost Montreal and the Quebec government over C$1.5 billion[[note]]about US$1.32 billion in 2006[[/note]], a debt that wasn't fully paid off until three decades after the 1976 Summer Olympics. (To add insult to injury the first actual ''working'' retractable roof stadium in the world opened in Toronto in 1989.) The stadium is nicknamed "The Big O" for its shape and roof; however, because of how much debt the stadium had accumulated over its nearly half century of existence, it is often derisively called "The Big Owe". It still suffers from structural problems and acoustics so bad that most people cannot hear the loudspeakers. Also, the Pie-IX Metro station is located directly beneath the stadium, so demolishing the stadium would be too expensive.
15** Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta has an eight-panel retractable roof, which opens like a camera aperture, as one of its signature features. However, the roof's complexity delayed the stadium's opening several times, and the roof wasn't fully finished until about a year after the stadium officially opened.
16* Montreal was the home of [[https://www.stadiumjourney.com/news/autostade-accidental-football-stadium the Autostade]], sporting one of the most revolutionary stadium designs of all time: a bowl consisting of 19 modular sections with a little over 1,000 seats each, which could be moved and reconfigured as needed. The sheer strangeness of the stadium, coupled with a bad location (near the St. Lawrence River, which made the area cold and windy), decreased its popularity over the years, and once Olympic Stadium was finished, the Autostade's main tenant, the [[UsefulNotes/CanadianFootballLeague Montreal Alouettes]], moved out. It was dismantled in 1978, with several of the sections getting moved to the small town of Thetford Mines (a three-hour drive from Montreal), where they were rebuilt into a baseball stadium.
17* UsefulNotes/{{Atlanta}}'s Omni Coliseum. At the time it was built, it was considered an architectural marvel with its distinctive space-frame roof and weathering steel façade. However, the weathering steel, which is designed to surface rust to seal itself, was ill-suited for Atlanta's humid climate and rusted more than intended; this was a huge problem since it was part of the load-bearing structure itself. The rusting got so bad that arena officials had to put in chain-link fences around the perimeter of the Omni to keep gatecrashers out. Greater-than-anticipated settling caused further damage to the structure; the roof, in particular, would often leak water. While the arena was often praised for its sight lines, the Omni was among the last NBA/NHL arenas built without luxury suites and club seating, putting the Hawks at an economic disadvantage. The Omni was demolished in 1997 and replaced by the venue now known as State Farm Arena.
18* UsefulNotes/{{Dubai}} seems to be the epitome of the high-tech, ultra-modern city with its numerous flashy skyscrapers and ambitious building projects. However, the city itself lacks a centralized sewer system. Though the city has adequate treatment facilities to process all of the waste it generates, said lack of sewers means that most of the city's waste has to be carried by tanker truck, which can lead to long queues that can force a driver to wait at least 24 hours. It isn't rare for tanker truck drivers to simply dump their waste wherever they can rather than wait.
19* Various skyscrapers, such as the Burj Khalifa and the Abraj Al-Bait, were built in the Middle East between 2002-2008 without considering cost and practicality. The result was a property bubble that helped puncture the world economy, depressed growth rates in those countries, and may have indirectly sparked the Arab Spring. This hasn't stopped attempts to build the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeddah_Tower Jeddah Tower]], a planned [[StarScraper kilometer-tall tower]] in Jeddah, UsefulNotes/SaudiArabia that has had its construction set back by various ecopolitical issues.
20* The Ryugyong hotel in North Korea, also known as the "Hotel [[DoomyDoomsOfDoom of Doom]]", was to be the tallest hotel in the world, had it actually been completed before another hotel had snatched that title. It suffered numerous halts in construction and was later deemed unfit for use due to structural problems like concrete spontaneously breaking apart and crooked lift shafts. North Korea ran out of money before completing it, with some sources reporting the hotel costing the country 2% of its GDP during the years it was being built.
21* The most fabulous of the Ancient Wonders were built to satisfy the egos of the local rulers or city authorities. They were unrivaled architectural achievements that attracted the envy of all, but were also incredibly expensive and of very little practical use. In AncientEgypt, it was not uncommon for a Pharaoh's monument building to leave the nation bankrupt.
22* In the United States, several cities in the mid-20th century had mixed-use stadiums for their major league UsefulNotes/{{baseball}} and [[UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeague football]] teams to share. While it seemed like a good way to conserve space at the time, the two sports' functional needs proved way too different to coexist. Because baseball uses such an oddly-shaped playing field compared to football, the stadium seating during football games would be far from the action due to the extra space taken up by the baseball diamond; the since-demolished [[https://www.stadiumsofprofootball.com/stadiums/cleveland-municipal-stadium/ Cleveland Municipal Stadium]] is a good example of how problematic this could be. With the baseball and football regular seasons overlapping by about a month, with another month or so possible if the baseball had a good year and made the playoffs, the field had to be kept in both "modes" at once and football players could get injured from being tackled on dirt. Not to mention that the field would be subject to damage from heavy use during the overlap. Lastly, these stadiums were usually owned by the local government rather than the teams themselves, which meant that the teams received less revenue from ticket sales and concessions. By TheNineties and the TurnOfTheMillennium, most mixed-use stadiums were demolished in favor of separate, specialized arenas for baseball and football. As of 2022, the only one remaining in active use is the Oakland Coliseum, which was home to both the NFL's Raiders and MLB's Athletics, but with the Raiders having moved to Las Vegas and only the Athletics remaining in Oakland, the Coliseum effectively functions as just a baseball stadium now.[[note]]In most countries outside North America, the two most popular outdoor sports are soccer and rugby, which can easily use the same field to the point that distinct stadiums are completely unnecessary.[[/note]]
23** Even UsefulNotes/MajorLeagueSoccer, which can (and originally did) use stadiums built for American football, began building its own in the late '90s to get more revenue and provide an experience specifically suited for soccer: smaller dimensions to better accommodate the smaller crowds (since soccer [[SoccerHatingAmericans doesn't draw the same numbers in the US that its does elsewhere]]), but wider fields to meet FIFA regulations.[[note]]A regulation American football field, including the end zones, is actually longer than a standard FIFA field, but is about 20 meters narrower.[[/note]]
24** Teams at lower levels of US soccer often opted for baseball parks, which almost always have the room to house a FIFA-size soccer field and, in the case of minor-league ballparks, have capacities that are more in line with what minor-league soccer teams tend to draw. However, joint soccer/baseball use has the same sight line issues as with football/baseball. Also, the dirt parts of the baseball field need to be covered over for soccer, ''and'' a removable pitcher's mound is needed because of the need for soccer to have a level field. An even bigger problem is that the US soccer season almost completely overlaps that of baseball, making it anywhere from very difficult to impossible to maintain a field to the standard required for professional play in both sports. This has led to pretty much all soccer teams at those levels moving into dedicated stadiums or planning to do so. A couple former MLB parks (Turner Field in Atlanta and Globe Life Field in Texas) have have been permanently converted to football/soccer use. Maybe not the most ideal solution, but probably the most cost effective.
25* Australia has its own problems with mixed-use stadiums. The most popular outdoor sports there are, in alphabetic order, UsefulNotes/{{Australian rules football}}, UsefulNotes/{{cricket}}, UsefulNotes/{{rugby league}}, UsefulNotes/{{rugby union}}, and soccer. As noted above, there's no problem with the rugby codes and soccer, since they use the same field dimensions. The same holds true vis-a-vis Aussie rules and cricket, as Aussie rules was designed to be played on cricket ovals, which are ''much'' larger than fields of other football codes. (Also, Aussie rules is played mostly in winter, with cricket in summer.) The problem is trying to put oval- and rectangular-field sports in the same venue. A rugby/soccer pitch can entirely fit in a cricket oval, but end-zone spectators in the rectangular sports will be at least 30 meters from the end of the playing field, and even sideline spectators are considerably farther from the field than in a dedicated rectangular venue. On top of that, the sight lines differ significantly between the two field types (though not as much as in the baseball/gridiron football situation). Stadium Australia in Sydney, originally built for the 2000 Olympics, was later retrofitted into a dual-use rectangular/oval venue. At the dawn of the 2020s, plans were in place to convert it to purely rectangular, but those were canceled due to financial impacts of COVID-19. Melbourne's two largest venues, the Melbourne Cricket Ground and Docklands Stadium, are ovals. These days, the MCG is almost exclusively used for oval sports; Docklands is still occasionally used for rectangular sports thanks to movable seating, but the city's teams in rectangular sports (which are much less popular there than Aussie rules) have since moved to a newer dedicated rectangular stadium that's noticeably smaller than Docklands. Perth (where Aussie rules is more popular than any rectangular sport) built Perth Stadium to replace the Subiaco Oval; for rectangular sports, that city converted the smaller Perth Oval into a rectangular venue.
26* [[https://www.homedit.com/11-amazing-old-barns-turned-into-beautiful-homes/ Converting a barn into a house]] sounds like a renovator's dream, and the end result is a beautiful open-plan home, but it is also highly impractical since barns are only meant to hold livestock and/or farming equipment, not humans. Not only do you have to build all the requisite rooms--kitchen, bathroom, living room, bedroom(s), etc.--but you'd also have to connect plumbing and gas, and most barns have thin outer walls not designed to hold in heat or AC, as well as a large open interior, meaning you're paying to heat or cool space not being used for anything. The costs can be mitigated by adding insulation and/or constructing a second floor, but by that point, you're spending way more than if you just bought a house already built for human use. Converting a barn can easily cost six figures and sell for half a million or more; these are often vanity projects where money is no object.
27* The World Trade Center Transportation Hub looks breathtaking, being an extremely ambitious project intended to replace the destroyed original PATH station and designed to rival Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal. The main station house, the Oculus, is a structure made from white ribs that interlock high above the ground, and then spear out like wings above either side to evoke a bird taking flight. Light enters between the ribs and through a huge skylight into a vast underground concourse, whose cathedral-like vaulted chambers and corridors contain the PATH train terminal, subway platforms, and the Westfield World Trade Center Mall. Once a year, on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks that destroyed the original World Trade Center, the skylight of the Oculus opens to the outside air from 8:46 am, when Flight 11 struck the North Tower, to 10:28, when the North Tower collapsed. The problem is that the project went through long construction delays--opening almost 10 years later than originally projected--and cost overruns that doubled the price tag to $4 billion. The exotic design turned some people off, and detractors noted that it was overkill to build one of the most expensive train stations in the world when it only gets 46,000 daily passengers compared to the 250,000 that pass through Grand Central. The skylight, with its complicated opening mechanism and damage-prone rubber seal, has been plagued with leaks for years, and the "wings" that overhang the plaza on either side create a falling ice hazard in winter, sometimes requiring the plaza to be closed off to pedestrians.
28* Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, the designer of the aforementioned WTC hub, has a track record of creating incredibly ambitious, beautiful, and fantastical, yet severely over-budget and poorly-functioning buildings. In 2014 his home city of Valencia [[https://www.designboom.com/architecture/santiago-calatrava-sued-by-valencia-for-crumbling-opera-house-12-30-2013/ sued him]] for the crumbling roof of the Opera House at the ''Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia'' exhibition complex, and in 2019 the city of Venice [[https://news.artnet.com/art-world/santiago-calatrava-venice-bridge-1629082 fined him]] for "macroscopic negligence" in designing a glass and steel bridge over the Grand Canal which has proved high-maintenance and unable to withstand the wear and tear from the number of tourists who use it every day.
29* The concept of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transporter_bridge transporter bridges]]. Using a gondola suspended from a bridge to cross a river solves many unique problems with building bridges across waterways in densely built-up areas; you can carry a large number of people across on a frequent basis while simultaneously keeping the waterway clear at all times, and you don't need to build long approach ramps on either side. Practicality aside, it's also just an impressive feat of engineering. The problem with transporter bridges was that they were introduced just as the ascendance of the automobile had made them obsolete; the 200 passenger capacity suddenly became 9 cars, and they were now too slow to be of any use when even a long detour would be faster. Only 25 have ever been built, of which just 9 are currently in use.
30* The city of UsefulNotes/{{Venice}} is romantic, but also incredibly fragile. All the structures in the city are built on top of piles driven into the mud of a lagoon and serviced by canals instead of streets, meaning that all transport has to be based on boats and bridges. Most of the buildings are centuries old, rendering them inaccessible to anyone with mobility issues. It's impossible to expand the city any further, so crowds become overwhelming, especially during the high tourist season. There is no sewer system, with wastewater dumped directly into the canals; the freshwater was originally provided by artesian wells, which were banned in the mid-20th century after authorities realized they were causing the islands to subside. That, combined with rising sea levels, mean that the ''acqua alta'', or frequent low-level flood, is now a fact of life for Venetians, with mitigation efforts plagued by delays, cost overruns, and corruption. Additionally, the water in the city is seawater, which quickly erodes the bricks and stone that make up the buildings, causing structural collapses and requiring regular and expensive maintenance.
31* Vertical sliding doors, the sort that is [[DilatingDoor a staple of sci-fi]]. They are intended to look like the water-tight doors used in ships for a time. However, this style of door, unlike normal sliding doors, requires a compartment either below or above it to slide into, which is a nightmare from a floor planning standpoint. Also, they're a significant safety issue, in that if a normal sliding door shuts on you then you might end up with a bruise on your arm, while if a vertical sliding door shuts on you a large heavy object smacks you in the head. Even in ''Franchise/StarTrek'', horizontal sliding doors are much more frequent, and only need horizontal space to retract while retaining a sense of being futuristic. The main place with vertical sliding doors is a warp core, where they're used to seal the room if the reactor is ruptured.
32** The BoringButPractical equivalent are vertical rolling shutters. They're not as flashy as rigid sliding doors but are much easier to implement, being common at malls for sealing a shop when it's closed temporarily.
33* The [[UsefulNotes/LosAngeles Los Angeles Metropolitan Area]], while famous in media, had many drawbacks that came to haunt it. The suburban sprawl has an agreeable climate well suited to gardening and a lot of homes at least have a small yard, plus it has Hollywood and numerous landmarks featured in the movies. However, unlike UsefulNotes/NewYorkCity, skyscraper space wasn't nearly as prolific due to the risk of earthquakes, which didn't help when it came to the housing shortages the region suffered. While working in Los Angeles was seen as attractive, traffic congestion created problems such as the infamous smog that required legislation to eliminate. In the end, the limited space encouraged expansion in places such as Orange and San Diego County. The [[UsefulNotes/{{California}} Inland Empire]] (Riverside and San Bernardino Counties) meanwhile saw significant economic growth, and while it may not have the glamour of Los Angeles County, it became one of the [[BoringButPractical more practical]] regions to move to for many families.
34* The California Speedway (AKA the [[ProductPlacementName Auto Club]] Speedway) in Fontana started becoming this due to declining attendance numbers making it more difficult to fill the grand stands and make such a huge venue worth the upkeep as huge swathes of empty grandstands are just empty space largely doing nothing. As a result, plans were made to [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4TfIn8Wh68 redesign the track into a 0.5 mile oval]] akin to a hybrid of Bristol and Martinsville by combining the most popular features of both in response to the demand for more short tracks in UsefulNotes/{{NASCAR}}. While there is disappointment over the 2.0 mile superspeedway being retired, it is much easier to fill the seats for a [[BoringButPractical 0.5 mile track]] and the new configuration offers spectators a better view of the race thanks to the stadium-like configuration, potentially increasing spectator satisfaction. There is also the trouble of Fontana being located in the Inland Empire within San Bernardino County, creating an obstacle for attendance from Los Angeles and Orange Counties due to factors like distance as well as the infamous freeway congestion of [=SoCal=], encouraging the redesign to a half-mile oval. The plans however, [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto_Club_Speedway#Planned_reconstruction hit a snag in 2022]] with NASCAR races being held in Los Angeles at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and NASCAR being noncommittal. The popularity of this short track event left the Auto Club Speedway's redesign plans in limbo. Even still, one common problem is how unbearably hot the region gets for spectators during the summer, further discouraging attendance during this time.
35* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcpZ9Z5EBNY&t=210s Kentucky Speedway]] is another venue that was a product of its era, as an attempt to put a track in a large market (in this case Cincinnati, with Louisville about an hour's drive away in normal non-NASCAR traffic). On paper, it was a good way to add a track to the region to satisfy NASCAR fans in the vicinity, and hosted NASCAR events like the Camping World Truck Series, Xfinity Series, as well as [=IndyCar=] races. However, the inaugural 2011 Cup Series opening was haunted by infrastructure issues, such as major highway congestion preventing as many as 20,000 from even ''reaching the track''. The track also got infamy for producing boring cookie-cutter races that turned out to not even be awesome to watch due to a bland track design that offered little race variety. In 2015, another design flaw surfaced during severe rain, with poor drainage resulting in the track remaining too wet to safely race on, even after the rain passed. Redesigns to the track were not enough to improve spectator satisfaction (in fact, they made the boring races even worse) and the track was dropped from the UsefulNotes/{{NASCAR}} calendar for the 2021 season, much to everyone’s relief. Its main use since then has been a massive parking lot—during the post-COVID semiconductor shortage in the auto industry in the early 2020s, Ford, which has a huge pickup truck plant in Louisville, rented it out to park trucks that were awaiting the chips that would allow them to be sold.
36* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palace_of_the_Parliament Palace of the Parliament]] of UsefulNotes/{{Romania}} is the heaviest building in the world and one of the largest administrative buildings, whose building was ordered by Nicolae Ceaușescu as part of his "Systematization" program, on the North Korean model. Large enough to house both chambers of the Parliament, along with three museums and an international conference center, 70% of this building stays empty and heating it costs more than US$6 million a year to heat and light it, enough to fuel an entire city.
37* Berlin Tegel Airport is perhaps the most BrokenBase airport to have served travelers in the [=21st=] century. On the one hand its main terminal, designed by Meinhard von Gerkan (a German starchitect then barely out of college who [[LongRunner remained active in architecture until his death in 2022]]), was designed with "short distances" prioritized above ''all'' else. If you had a flight leaving out of the main terminal, you could roll up in a taxi to the terminal, go through security and board your flight all in the span of five to ten minutes. But woe be unto you if you had a flight that ''didn't'' leave from the main terminal. Or if you had the crazy idea of ''connecting'' in the (then) second-biggest city in the EU and a major European capital through (at the time) Germany's second Airline - Air [[MeaningfulName Berlin]]. ''Every'' gate in the main terminal building had to have its own security control and the waiting areas at those gates were not big enough to offer seating for a fully booked Boeing 737-800 (189 passengers and actually towards the ''smaller'' size of modern aviation). Of course there was no possibility of offering sterile transit through the main terminal[[note]] For Americans: Sterile transit (which the U.S. does not allow) is the possibility to connect at an airport without passing through immigration thus bypassing the need for a visa or complicated and lengthy immigration procedures. It's standard in most of the world (except the US) to enable this, but it requires some form of separating those passengers who have just arrived from abroad from those who are headed for a domestic flight[[/note]] and the attempts to find solutions for this were awkward at best. High-profile flights to Israel were even moved to the even more lackluster Schönefeld Airport outside Berlin proper after 1990 because there was just no way to accommodate the extra security needs at Tegel. There was also very limited shopping and dining due to the obvious space constraints and ''obviously'' nothing post-security, so if waiting for your flight you got peckish, good luck queuing back up for security after you got your 15€ sandwich... Oh and due to having been built and designed in the 1960s and 1970s there was no provision made for a UsefulNotes/BerlinUAndSBahn connection[[labelnote:background]]well, they left room for a ''station'' and had even built connecting stations on other lines, but unfortunately today's [=U5=] terminated in the East at the time and it was that line that was intended to be extended towards the airport, which never happened due to the airport being slated for shutdown after reunification[[/labelnote]] and thus everyone had to either arrive by car (good luck finding parking close enough to the terminal for the "short distances" to actually apply to you), taxi (Berlin cabbies will happily take your money - so much for "cheap flights") or bus (due to the access roads the iconic Berlin doubledeckers were not able to get to the airport and the BVG refused to buy any buses with additional luggage capacity for airport service, so good luck fitting your luggage on the crowded bus) with of course all those option subject to traffic congestion. During one particularly bad strike, the ''airport itself'' actually told passengers not to attempt arriving via the (blocked by the strikers) access roads but to instead take the U-Bahn to a station some 2 km away and ''walk''. While many old West Berliners blinded by NostalgiaFilter had tears in their eyes when the last flight out of Tegel left in 2020, a lot of people who had suffered through Tegel Airport in one of the usage cases it ''wasn't'' optimized for were not weeping or if they were only tears of joy to be finally able to say good riddance to this ambitious if misguided attempt to optimize an airport for a single trait at the expense of all others.
38* Making homes out of discarded shipping containers became trendy in the 2010s. On paper, the idea is to make an environmentally-friendly home out of something on its way to the junkyard, but in practice, making a shipping container (or several adjoining containers) livable for humans requires numerous modifications that completely negate any environmental or financial benefit over buying or building a normal house. This is especially true if the person lives inland and has to pay to have the containers shipped to their plot of land; the whole process is far more expensive and leaves a larger carbon footprint than simply building a house with local materials just like everyone else.
39* The Tel Aviv central bus station. It was built to be the biggest in the world (a title it didn't lose until 2010, when the New Delhi station was opened). However:
40** Construction was started in 1967, when Israel was drunk on the triumph of the Six-Day War. Of course, after the sobering of 1973, matter changed a bit.
41** It was TroubledProduction which was passed between several builders. Each one solved funding problems by planning a few more shops in and selling them to potential owners.
42** It was six floors of pure {{Bizarrchitecture}}. A deliberate design, to make people spend more time shopping.
43** Bridges outside were passing close to private residences, leading to lawsuits from the inhabitants well before the building was even completed.
44** Ultimately, the building wasn't inaugurated until 1993 due to TroubledProduction, by which time it was rather obsolete already. Tellingly, during the opening ceremony, a [[LampshadeHanging white elephant balloon]] was released.
45** Not only was the building obsolete, but they couldn't predict in 1967 how common private cars will be, which defeated the very purpose of such a large station.
46** Much of the space was never used, and in fact had to be walled off to stop unauthorized use by drug dealers and pimps.
47** The space sealed off included the two bottom floors, which were underground, so exhaust gasses tended to accumulate there - there used to be a cinema there, which naturally was shut down as well.
48** The bus terminals from the bottom floors were transferred to ''yet another'' floor. Since the whole plan for profits relied on people going between floor 6 (intercity lines) and floor 1 (internal lines) through four floors of mall, this was yet another huge nail in the coffin's lid.
49** The owners have filed for bankruptcy in 2012; as of 2022, it is scheduled to stop functioning by 2027, and in the meantime, in all seven floors, you'll be hard pressed to find a single properly working toilet with a seat.
50* The handful of domed stadiums used by lower level UsefulNotes/CollegiateAmericanFootball teams tend to shoehorn the playing field inside the building in odd ways, with the main issue being that, since the stadiums are small, there's no real need for seats behind the end zone, but the peak of the ceiling still needs to be high to allow enough room for punts and kickoffs to go in the air unimpeded (the only on-campus domed stadium at the FBS level, Syracuse's JMA Wireless Dome[[note]]historically Carrier Dome[[/note]] has a 50,000-seat double-decker bowl arrangement and avoids this problem). The first such dome, Idaho State's ICCU Dome (originally called the Minidome and later Holt Arena), was built as a giant Quonset hut, but the arched ceiling spans from end zone to end zone. The roofline at the back of the end zones is very low and steep; there's barely enough room for the goal posts. Idaho's Kibbie Dome uses the same shape, but the ceiling spans the sidelines. This leads to the opposite effect of the top of the ceiling towering over the whole length of the field and dwarfing the bleachers. Idaho dropped down from the FBS level back to the FCS level in part because they couldn't come up with a practical plan to expand the dome's capacity above 16,000 seats; there was no place to put extra seats. Low roofline cramping the end zones (North Dakota's Alerus Center, Northern Arizona's Walkup Skydome, Northern Michigan's Superior Dome) versus huge roof that makes the dome seem cavernous and empty (Northern Iowa's UNI-Dome, South Dakota's [=DakotaDome=]) remained problems for future small domes. North Dakota State's Fargodome has end zone seats and avoids a lot of these problems, but to do so it basically has to not be a dome; it has a flat roof.
51* On the college basketball side, Vanderbilt University's Memorial Gymnasium has a unique imaginative design, intended to allow the building to be used for other purposes besides sports. The court is raised a couple of feet above the floor, making it feel more like a theatre than a sports arena, but, because of this, the team benches are placed on the baseline instead of the sideline, an arrangement that wasn't uncommon in 1952 when it was built, but today Vanderbilt is the only college or pro gym to do this, which has led to complaints of an unfair advantage for Vanderbilt since opponents have to adjust to this oddity. In particular, visiting coaches complained about having a limited view of the court from the baseline, so the university decided to fix this by adding coaching boxes on the sidelines. Yes, that means the coaches stand alone on the sideline while their team sits around the corner behind the basket.
52* Solar-Paneled roads. The appeal is obvious: roads and solar panels take a lot of space that otherwise go unused, so why not combine them to maximize their value and some even suggest they could use some of their energy to melt snow away. What’s not to love? Well…short answer is that they are very subpar at functioning as either. As solar panels, they are horrendously inefficient as they can’t cool easily, the fact that they’re laid flat where cars are driving is incredibly sub-optimal for capturing sunlight, and dirt and debris inevitably cripples their ability even more. And as roads, they’re far more fragile than a normal asphalt road especially when factoring in their vulnerability to theft. For the money, it’s far more practical to just build a standard solar farm or a solar farm canopy over a parking lot.
53* As its big public project for the UsefulNotes/{{Canad|a}}ian centennial in 1967, the city of Ottawa decided to build a unique sports complex (now called TD Place) in which an outdoor stadium and an indoor arena were integrated into the same structure. To accomplish this, however, the arena was placed underneath one of the grandstands. Because of the slope of the grandstand, one side of the arena has a much lower ceiling than the other side, which also limits the amount of seating on that side: there are only 10 rows of seats on the grandstand side, which makes [[https://cdn.ontariohockeyleague.com/uploads/ottawa_67s/2023/02/07125758/ruorwcdhj-1024x576.jpg it look lopsided and asymmetrical when viewed from the baseline]].
54* Kezar Stadium, original home of [[UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeague the San Francisco 49ers]], had oodles of tradition (built in 1924) and was in one of the most colorful settings in a [[UsefulNotes/SanFrancisco picturesque city]], since it was located in Golden Gate Park. But the playing turf was famously awful (prone to mud, and also used for dozens of college and high school games every year). And the field space was huge, with the actual gridiron only taking up part of it; the stands were almost 40 yards away from the field lines, and only about 16,000 of the stadium's 60,000 seats were located between the goal lines. Plus it was a favorite haunt for seagulls, looking for scraps of food. In 1971 the 49ers moved to Candlestick Park,[[note]]Kezar Stadium still got a fair amount of use after that, particularly as a venue for live music, but was damaged in the 1989 earthquake, and afterwards was demolished and rebuilt as a 10,000-seat stadium mainly used for high school sports[[/note]] which had an even more dramatic setting on the San Francisco Bay, but since it was built for the [[UsefulNotes/MajorLeagueBaseball Giants]], it was never a completely comfortable fit for football. Breezes from the bay often made the stadium cold, and, since the field sat below sea level, it was prone to flooding based on tides. The Giants got fed up with Candlestick and moved to what's now called Oracle Park closer to downtown in 2000. The Niners stuck it out to 2013, before moving to a comfortable, state-of-the-art football-only stadium, but to do so they had to travel an hour's drive down the Peninsula to Santa Clara for a good location (which happened to be next door to their HQ).
55* [[TheAlcatraz Building prisons with extreme geographical surroundings]]. Yes, they look imposing and are much more difficult to escape, but on the other side of the coin you should keep in mind that prisons are not self-contained, and need supplies delivered to them and a simple way for staff to go home at the end of their shift. Alcatraz was open as a prison for just 29 years, and closed for the mundane reason of it just being too expensive to run.
56* [[https://www.buriedsecretspodcast.com/the-curse-of-the-luxor-hotel-part-6/ The Luxor Las Vegas]] was designed with the novelty of being able to stay in a hotel shaped like a pyramid. The construction project was one of the most treacherous construction projects in the history of the Los Vegas Strip, it was rushed to the hotel's detriment and not long after opening, the owners learned that the hotel was [[DidntThinkThisThrough sinking into the sand]] and adjustments needed to be made to compensate. The Clark County building division also had to order the Luxor to vacate a section of the basement level when it was discovered that there were two unfinished support columns. Luxor has been subject to thousands of correction notices in total ranging from structural faults to maintainence issues.
57** The hotel has types of elevators called "inclinators" that moves at 39-degrees to conform to the shape of the pyramid structure in the main attraction, however, they have been reported as being very slow.
58[[/folder]]
59
60[[folder:Culinary]]
61* Food from any luxury restaurants can be this if, despite excellent taste and aesthetics, they leave you still hungry and even undernourished due to a lack of quantity. It doesn’t help that they are typically expensive.
62* Any sweet or junk food definitely tastes good, especially after a long day or to celebrate an occasion, but at the same time, they are full of processed substances, their taste is unnatural due to even more processed substances, and in some cases, [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking they can even get stuck to your teeth]]. Additionally, what happens if you eat a sweet so often that it doesn't taste good anymore?
63* There are many single-use kitchen appliances, often (but not always) sold in infomercials, marketed on the idea of "How '''awesome''' would it be to easily make (insert popular food or drink item) in your '''own home'''?!" [[note]]Some of the biggest offenders are bread machines, margarita makers, deep fryers and a plethora of double-sided electric grills for everything from quesadillas to cupcakes.[[/note]] These appliances often do a good job making the specific food or drink item they were intended to make, but are rather useless for any other task. Five months later, you will have used it only once or twice, promise to use it again at a party, and forget about it being there until the next time you clean out your kitchen cabinets. The impractical part is that most home kitchens have rather limited counter and cabinet space, and these appliances often end up in donation bins after home cooks need to make room and realize their more frequently used cookware can do the same job almost as well, or it's just easier and less time-consuming to buy the same food or beverage pre-made. The only households where these sorts of devices get regular use tend to be those where someone has a food allergy and the only way they can be sure to avoid cross-contamination is to prepare food themselves. Of course, there are some crafty lifehackers and absolute madlads who would use these single-use appliances [[NotTheIntendedUse beyond their intended purpose]].
64* The Slicer-Dicer. For every good review you'll find online there'll be several that complain about the device breaking under the strain and several more that complain of bad design, with the thing failing to do what it's supposed to in anything like the efficient manner shown in infomercials.
65* The Magic Bullet blender, and other similar single-portion blenders. While in principle a decent idea -- they turn the blender container upside down so the user can blend directly into a sealable cup, which overcomes a limitation of full-sized blenders, particularly those with wider bases, that often don't blend very well when making a single smoothie or other small batches below their recommended minimum capacity. The impractical part is the cups themselves are fairly small, limiting users if they ever want to produce larger batches, and because containers aren't vented hot ingredients aren't an option. More importantly, the motor is liable to overheat and break, and cups are prone to breaking or [[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/nutribullet-blenders-can-explode-new-lawsuit-claims/ even exploding]] due to the non-vented containers.
66** On the other hand, if you need to prepare only small amounts of food, such as hot chocolate, whipped cream, various sauces, smoothies, milkshakes, or dips, or if you live in a small household, the Magic Bullet is a true win. Usually, ten swift less-than-second pushes are enough to prepare the food.
67* The Miracle Blade knives. Billed as super-sharp and all-but-undullable, anyone with any knowledge of metalworking at all will tell you that's impossible. The sharper you make a blade the quicker it'll get dull; the Miracle Blades get around this by having a serrated edge that'll make them cut with ''some'' usability even when the actual sharpness has long gone to hell, but the quality of the cut will still plummet as they are used because you're essentially sawing rather than slicing at that point. While such serrated knives can be re-sharpened using the right tools and techniques, it requires more skill and labor than sharpening a straight edge, and can't be done by a countertop sharpening machine.
68* Speaking of knives: ceramic ones aren't quite the revolutionary product they're advertised as. Yes, it NeverNeedsSharpening. Yes, ceramic inserts are used in machine shops to cut steel. And yes, a machine shop with a diamond-dust grinding wheel is the ''only'' place that can actually sharpen one. While it's generally true that a ceramic knife will hold a scarily sharp edge way after a comparable metal one will be so dull as to be useless, a few passes over a sharpening tool or stone every now and then will keep the latter sharp for a long time (almost indefinitely if you also hone them regularly, greatly reducing the need for sharpening). Ceramic knives, on the other hand, are expensive disposables: their blades are far more delicate, so instead of getting dull they chip and crack (losing efficacy as they go) until enough structural integrity is lost that the blade snaps. This is a rarely seen failure mode, though, because most users will shatter the blade by accidentally dropping them long before then.
69* The [[http://www.bialettishop.com/MukkaMain.htm Bialetti Mukka]], intended to make a nice foamy cappuccino without the expense and complication of an electric espresso machine equipped with a milk frother. Instead, it makes an excessively foamy white coffee that tastes rather differently than a true cappuccino. Which might not actually be unpleasant, depending on your tastes, but the Mukka is also fiddly to prepare, harder to clean than an ordinary moka pot, and rather temperamental as the valve design is imperfect: occasionally it provides insufficient pressure for no apparent reason, resulting in an unsatisfactory brew.
70* Any gadget ever invented to quicken the process of peeling vegetables is either inefficient (leaving bits of skin that you have to inspect for and manually remove with a normal peeler anyway) or incredibly messy (save time in peeling, waste it again in washing the gadget), as [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=APCv5FRoqmo&t this video by Techmoan shows]]. A good peeler and a fast hand are still the fastest way to get rid of the skin on potatoes, carrots, and what have you.
71* The Rollie Eggmaster vertical grill, a compact travel appliance to make small portions of food for a rapid lunch break on the go - in theory. In practice, compare the yummy, colourful food it makes [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XILbEZlS0U in the infomercial]] to the [[http://www.thepizzle.net/the-rollie-eggmaster-is-the-best-dumbest-cooking-device-ever-invented/ actual food it, uh, "shits out"]] (that's not gratuitously added vulgarity, by the way - that's from ''the review text''), just in case you thought that this was a one-off here is [[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/15/kitchen-gadgets-review-egg-master-horrifying-unholy-affair the review]] from the [[UsefulNotes/BritishNewspapers Guardian]]. Anyone who needs a quick meal and isn't too picky about quality will likely just eat some frozen microwave meal or fast food.
72* Shopping at high-end kitchen gadget shops can be this, due to the severe markup in prices that can occur. Often, you can find the same or similar tools and appliances at discount department stores and internet retailers for greatly reduced cost, and the build quality need not be worse.
73* You can turn a can of sweetened condensed milk into ''dulce de leche'', a form of caramel, by [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag0NtfZRTvg boiling an unopened can in water for 3 hours]]. This ''does'' work, it's very simple to do, and it's easier than making it in the traditional manner. However, this trick has its downsides: it takes much ''longer'' than the traditional method, and if you don't make sure the can is completely submerged for the entire time it's boiling, it will explode. As ''dulce de leche'' and similar products are increasingly available commercially now, this little trick doesn't have quite the same impact as it did years go.
74* Lots of gourmet cooking techniques and dishes qualify, at least for most amateur home cooks.
75** Special mention goes to ''gold foil'', which is exactly what it sounds like - a very thin sheet of reasonably pure gold that you put onto food and then ''eat''. While it is, somewhat surprisingly, safe to eat, the body will simply pass it through, and it has no discernible taste - basically it's a way for the excessively rich to garnish their food with bling while giving the finger to anyone for whom hunger is a daily problem.
76** Similarly to gold foil, but far more common are cheap silver dots. Like the foil, these are meant to be decorations but at a much more reasonable cost (generally only a few dollars a pound) and look pretty good on homemade confectionery. However, they taste absolutely meh; they're basically condensed sugar dots with a coat of edible silver paint over them. Not to mention if you present this to people who are not familiar with them at all, they might think your food is inedible to boot.
77* Opening a champagne bottle with a sword. This technique is known as ''sabrage''. Sure, that sounds cool, but most likely you'll just end up with a broken bottle as many "fail compilation" videos on Website/YouTube can attest. Even worse, you could end up [[{{Fingore}} slicing something off your body]] instead of the neck of the champagne bottle.
78** Moreover, when properly done, this technique breaks off the thick part of the bottleneck, making it impossible to recycle or reuse the bottle anymore - it becomes glass trash. It also becomes [[DidntThinkThisThrough impossible to close again]] - or drink off the bottle mouth.
79** The shock on the neck by the sword blade also creates a champagne geyser, often expunging a good ''one-third'' off the good stuff for the magpies to enjoy.
80* The tomahawk steak. Getting a [[WesternAnimation/TheFlintstones Fred Flintstone-esque]] cut of meat and swinging it around like the namesake weapon might look cool for an Instagram photo-op, but tomahawk ribeyes are ''[[https://www.foodbeast.com/news/tomahawk-steak-scam/ insanely overpriced]]'', costing nearly twice as much as their boneless counterpart in most steakhouses; essentially, patrons are paying for an additional 12 inches (30 cm) or so of inedible bone that would be typically discarded by butcher shops.
81* {{Dagwood Sandwich}}es such as over-stacked burgers make for a showy presentation at the table, but the purpose of the sandwich is lost since the average mouth won't be able to bite into it conveniently without disassembling and using cutlery.
82* Instant noodles may be cheap (often at less than a dollar per cup) and easy to prepare (just put in boiling water and let it sit for 3 minutes), however they are sorely lacking in nutritional content and have scary high amounts of sodium. It's not uncommon to hear tales of convention-goers getting sick because they decided to skimp on the food budget and eat only instant noodles for every day of the con, often getting dehydrated especially if they neglect to drink enough water to balance out the salt levels. Like all junk food, instant noodles are fine in moderation, but they should not be relied upon as a primary source of sustenance.
83* Colonel Sanders' original recipe for his gravy was so complex that it couldn't be produced on a mass scale. One KFC executive said [[https://gunaxin.com/colonel-sanders-wasnt-big-fan-kfc "The Colonel’s gravy was fantastic but you had to be a Rhodes Scholar to cook it."]] Therefore, they simplified the recipe, much to the Colonel's displeasure.
84* French macarons are a delicious, but ''insanely'' expensive treat, especially compared to other sweets. A single macaron can cost over US$3 while being the same size or smaller than an average chocolate chip cookie, with high-end bakeries charging even more. The macaron's high premium stems from its ingredients, namely almond flour and aged egg whites, and the level of expertise required to make them properly as well as the time needed to prepare them; one wrong move during ''any'' step of the process, and it results in imperfect macarons.
85* Cube-shaped watermelons have a neat, [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin cubic]] appearance. The growing methods to create them involve a lot of attentiveness and most fruit fail to attain a square shape, so they're prohibitively expensive at a price point of around 10,000 yen (about 100 US dollars). And, if you ever want to eat them... well, you're straight out of luck, as the melons are sold as decorative plants because harvesting them in their desired cube shapes involves doing so before they ripen.
86* For a lot of startup eateries, the use of full table service tends to be this. The idea of a wait staff to tend tables and bring food and drinks is certainly very convenient for diners, but executing it well can be difficult. As shows like ''Series/BarRescue'', ''Series/KitchenNightmares'', ''Series/RestaurantImpossible'', and so forth demonstrate, many people get into full service restaurant ownership without realizing how difficult it can be to execute and maintain properly.
87** The restaurant needs sufficient space for the expected dine-in guests, due diligence with identifying guests of legal age for drinking alcohol, well-trained wait staff who can also wow the diners with their enthusiasm, and sufficient parking to ensure a convenient place near the restaurant (while the ''actual'' need for parking at restaurants tends to be much smaller, business owners chronically overestimate the share of their customers who drive to their business). All of this adds to the cost of the meals. In food service operations, keeping a tight grip on expenses is ''crucial''.
88** Even more elegant is Service à la française, or "Service in the French Style". It can make for a very stunning table display having all the requested foods presented at once and gives the dining session a very family-oriented feeling, but in practice, the difficulty of executing it well, number of staff required, and the difficulty of having to navigate larger tables limited this style of service to more high-end events and restaurants. The food is also more likely to become cold, and some guests may become puzzled over what to choose to eat. An alteration of this format is the "buffet style" which is much easier to execute as guests leave the table to plate up food from serving stations and there is much less food waste this way.
89** This is why a lot of food service restaurants choose the BoringButPractical quick-service model where guests bus their own table or -- more often than not -- order their food for take-out and seating capacity becomes a lower priority. Many wildly successful eateries chose the quick service model and the lower property size requirements make expansion easier. Also, on weekends, it's not uncommon for full-service diners to get fully booked and need advance reservation, but a quick-service eatery will normally not have this problem to nearly the same extent and walk-ins (as well as mobile orders) are the norm.
90* Edible food wrappers seem like a good idea. There's no waste with packaging that ends up in a landfill in theory. In reality, sanitary considerations preclude edible wrappers because you don't want food actually touching other surfaces. That means that it's still necessary to use paper, plastic, or foam takeout wrappers and containers, negating the idea of an edible wrapper in the first place.
91* The Codd-neck bottle, which uses a marble and the drink's carbonated contents to seal itself closed, has a cool, distinctive appearance and is best known for being the shape of Ramune bottles. They have less control over when they close, ie. when right-side up, they don't have a cap to seal in the carbonation again, and when tilting it to drink the marble can roll back to the top of the bottle and re-seal it. Furthermore, they're also harder to open; they require a tool provided with each bottle with which the drinker has to push down on the marble with some force, a problem not shared by twist-open caps nor aluminum soda can tabs.
92* Hyper-realistic cakes. It would be cool to make a cake that looks like something else, but they require crazy amounts of time to prepare, and most likely several different vessels and molds, and different colored fondants to put on the outside. And the spongy layers will likely have to be cut into different shapes, leading to crumbs that can only be thrown away. Plus, if the TV shows where these cakes are made are anything to go by, they are more difficult to cut due to being wrapped in fondant, rather than frosted. And to top it all off, they don't taste as good. So, if you want cake, it would be quicker, easier, and tastier to just buy, or bake, a sensible, regular cake.
93* Induction stoves, depending on what you cook. They heat the cookware directly and thus not only cook faster, but are safer because the heat transfer process prevents the surface itself from getting too hot, as opposed to hot-coil stoves (the other kind of electric stove), and they don't use gas so they're less likely to create a fire hazard (up to and including a deadly hard-to-extingush explosion) if something goes wrong with them. However, they also require flat-bottomed cookware that is designed specifically for induction cooking, so you may have to replace a lot of your pots and pans, and some types of cookware will just not work with induction stoves at all, most notably woks that are commonly used in Asian cuisine since many of them are round-bottomed.
94* Flat-bottomed hard taco shells. They're easier to fill and serve and make for a neat presentation, but a traditional taco shell holds together much better when you bite into it, where the angular shape of flat-bottoms causes them to shatter almost completely on the first bite, creating a bigger mess while eating (and wasting most of the filling if you don't have a plate to eat them over).
95* Fridge-sized mini "kegs". They're fairly cheap (usually around $20 for a 5 liter) and it's certainly cool to have draft beer at home with no high-dollar bar setup, but they also waste ''entirely'' too much carbonation, usually leaving you with 5 to 6 inches of foamy head on top of 2 inches of now-flat beer, which you'll get regardless of how well it's chilled or how carefully your pour against the inside of your glass. You're better off just investing that $20 towards a 24 pack of cans; there's less novelty value, but you'll get almost twice as much beer out of it and can control how you pour it to keep the head from overgrowing.
96[[/folder]]
97
98[[folder:Economics]]
99* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_standard The Gold Standard]] and Hard Money in general, if you're willing to look into history. While the idea of having money tied to something with a concrete value sounds like it should make things more stable, in reality it causes a lot more problems than it solves. People complain about inflation, and while hyperinflation is obviously bad, hyperdeflation, the inevitable result of the gold standard, is far worse. Inflation drives spending, which drives a consumer economy, and it makes debt easier to pay off, as the money you pay it with is worth less than when you took on the debt. Deflation does the exact opposite, and for most people their debts would magnify and their wages collapse faster than the cost of living would fall. There's a very good reason for most of history, economic populism was movements like [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_silver Free Silver]], farmers and workers backing a more inflationary money standard as the deflationary gold standard left their position precarious at best. At times, deflation got so bad that UsefulNotes/WilliamJenningsBryan compared maintaining the gold standard to [[http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5354/ crucifying mankind]]. What’s more, the core logic of the Gold Standard--that gold is inherently valuable and gold has intrinsic value--is questionable. Until very recently with the invention of electronic computers, there was no practical use for gold, and even now the amount of gold needed for computers is fairly small compared to the demand for decorative purposes. In the kind of scenarios that Goldbugs present, [[WorthlessYellowRocks are you going to trade your food, ammunition, gas, spare parts, or whatever for a soft, shiny, heavy metal ingot?]]
100** There is far more money in circulation than there is physical element Au extant for its worth. Moreover, gold standard makes treatment of some diseases, such as arthritis or ancylosis, impossible, as they are treated by injecting Au compounds, such as gold cyanide or aurothiomalate, to the joint.
101* The act of keeping up with the Joneses, comparing your stuff with your neighbors, and trying to outdo them in outward-looking wealth, can easily be this, especially if you're otherwise poor. They say wealth whispers, meaning a lot of truly wealthy people tend to live well below their means so they can use their money to grow their wealth. It's not worth trying to look rich if you can barely make a rent or mortgage payment, are swimming in debt, and all that debt are liabilities that just drain your finances, as opposed to building enough wealth, and spending as little as possible while still having a fulfilling life, to be able to live comfortably, and possibly never have to work ever again (or, if you do still work, use that cash as extra for the occasional comfort, or to further build your wealth).
102* Gambling for money can be perceived as this because it is possible to [[WealthyEverAfter win a lot of money]], but hardly practical considering all commercial gambling is [[SchmuckBait designed with something else in mind]] or requires a big capital to start with anyway. Besides, the house will always keep games with the lowest margin of winnings for the player.
103* The lottery. You just go to your local convenience store or gas station to buy a ticket and you will get massive gains if you have the winning numbers... ''if''. Given the astronomically low odds of winning, every ticket you purchase with a 0.01% or ''less'' chance to win big could instead be spent on a 100% chance of getting basic necessities like food and paying the bills.
104* In the realm of the stock market, day trading can be this easily. The rush of snatching a good profit by selling almost immediately after buying can be enjoyable, but it's no better than gambling, it defeats one of the purposes of investing (developing an income without wage labor), and it is more profitable to buy that investment low, and waiting several months to let it appreciate in value. That's on top of the risk of getting a free-ride penalty, which forces you to buy only with settled cash, which typically takes a few days after a sale to fully settle.
105* Buying on credit can be this, especially when carrying a balance on a credit card. Sure, you can buy expensive items that you would have to pass up if you don't have the cash on hand, but you can end up soaked by interest charges if you only make the minimum payment. That's why it's better to live within your means and buy things outright. There are still things that most people wouldn't pay cash for even if they wanted to, like houses or cars. That's why they generally arrange installment loans with much lower interest rates to pay these things off rather than use revolving credit.
106* Cryptocurrencies. Let's be curt and say they provide an excellent albeit an energy-wasting method to simulate the gold standard. They do, however, have a market niche - for transactions of illicit contrabands, money laundering and ransoms on extortion.
107** Additionally, cryptocurrencies are known to be incredibly volatile. Many find this enticing since it can lead to large profits in short periods, but it's essentially gambling and carries a major risk of their money being lost just as quickly.
108[[/folder]]
109
110[[folder:Electronics & Programming]]
111* Programming on assembly language. It is basically the "mother tongue" of the computer, and it is the way to make computers to run the fastest way possible, but it is ''so incredibly tedious and user-hostile'' that it had fallen out of vogue already in the 1990s. Today's compilers, especially C and C++ compilers, are so good and produce so optimized code there is no point on programming on assembler any more - unless you are doing it on a vintage CPU architecture, such as the MOS 6502 (e.g., Platform/Commodore64, Platform/AppleII, Platform/Atari8BitComputers) or Zilog Z80 (e.g., Platform/ZXSpectrum, Platform/TRS80, Platform/AmstradCPC).
112* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esoteric_programming_language Esoteric programming languages]]. For example, brainfuck has only 8 commands yet is Turing-complete, and compilers for it are ridiculously small. There is also LOLCODE, where many commands are replaced with internet memes. However, these languages are really not practical for any serious programming.
113** Some of them are designed for hypercomputers, which means that it's physically impossible to build a computer that can run them in this universe.
114** While we are at this, it takes actually exactly ''one'' instruction to make a Turing-complete universal computer. Of course, such computers are no more practical than the aforementioned esoteric programming languages and are their thought experiment counterparts. They are notoriously tricky to program for (and that's with the most straightforward subtract-and-jump-if-(not)-equal instruction), and their efficiency is atrocious.
115* For a long time, computer programmers considered interpreted programming languages to be this. These languages are easy to code for, but until fast computers with lots of memory became commonplace, they were resource hogs. Now that machines can run interpreters without a huge performance hit, and with the Web's acceptance of [=JavaScript=] as the de-facto programming language on the client's side, they're seen in a better light. Some examples are [=JavaScript=] itself, Ruby (for a time the most common replacement of PHP), Python (a great way to introduce programming to beginners), and Lua (a small language that really shines as a scripting language).
116** Many traditionally interpreted languages have gone the route of compiling the source code when needed. This is the secret sauce that makes them run fast in many use cases.
117** New languages like Go and Rust can be seen as this, too. Being the hottest things available right now gives them a lot of publicity, but the relative immaturity of both (especially Rust), the lack of tested, stable libraries, and Go's refusal to implement any programming innovation from the 70s on (like generics, for example) make them for now rather unsuitable for serious systems development. This is the reason older, more mature languages like C++, Java, and C# still lead the most used languages' charts.
118* Transparent displays. A staple of sci-fi movies and TV series. They've been in existence since the early 2000s but never caught on due to a shifting background being distracting (they're still shown in media a lot because they "look cool", as well as the (actually rather practical, from a storytelling perspective) ability to allow the audience to simultaneously look directly at the actor's face, as well as what they're looking at on the screen).
119* Most novelty mice:
120** Car-shaped mice might look good if you're using them in a showroom or something, but they're all an ergonomic disaster.
121** 8-bit [[Franchise/SuperMarioBros Mario]] [[http://craphound.com/images/mariogoombamice.jpg computer mice]]. They're nifty and look nice, but they're also large, clunky, and uncomfortable.
122** Specialised gaming mice can have up to 20 buttons on one side, including the standard mouse buttons, to control with your thumb. For comparison, an X-box controller has 15 buttons for both hands. That being said, there are niche uses where extra buttons can be helpful such as when managing control groups in RealTimeStrategy games where your unit groups can easily be selected with a finger (like with a numeric keypad on the side).
123** Apple ended up making this mistake with the Apple USB Mouse M4848, commonly referred to as the "hockey puck" due to its circular design, proving to be incredibly uncomfortable after prolonged use and quickly becoming hated by users. Third-party accessories were available to mitigate this. Apple discontinued the mouse after two years.
124** Chrome-plated computer mice. They look all cool and shiny-- until you touch them. And you ''have'' to touch them in order to use them. Chrome plating kind of defeats the purpose of a mouse.
125* Dream [=PCs=], often with thousands of dollars' of processors, graphics cards, and liquid cooling system, and have the specs that could conquer any game currently on the market.
126** The practical problem with expensive hardware is that you get next-gen performance on current-gen hardware. Your rig will become ''outdated'' long before it becomes underpowered. Anyone who bought a top-end single core CPU or [=DX9=] video card probably ended up replacing it quickly, not because it was too slow but because it was not a multicore CPU or [=DX10=] card. This has become less of an issue in more recent years; five-year-old computers can still regularly play games, whereas back in the 1990s and early 2000s that was unthinkable, and many companies have backported newer features to older hardware (such as [=DirectX=] 12, which could run on many existing [=GPUs=] when it launched). The biggest problem tends to be that you end up overpaying for the extra performance beyond a certain point.
127** [=3dFX=] was a graphics company popular in TheNineties. Their magnum opus was [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voodoo_5 The Voodoo 5 6000]]. A card with four separate processors and ''an external power supply''. The card drew too much power for the motherboard to provide by itself - far from an uncommon problem in the years to come, but now we just run a wire from the main power supply, while back then it was feared that they wouldn't be powerful and reliable enough.\
128\
129Despite that, the Voodoo 5 did not support hardware transform and lighting (depending on the main CPU to do it). The Radeon and Geforce were released BEFORE the Voodoo 5 was finished, did support those, and pretty much hammered the Voodoo 5 into the ground in performance, at a fraction of the cost. 3dfx ended up going out of business and being bought by Nvidia.
130** Enthusiast video cards often fall into this, offering high-end video rendering for the current generation, but easily exceeding $800. It is quite feasible to get by in gaming with a [[BoringButPractical mid-range video card]] for the current generation, with most games on the market, or you can [[BoringButPractical dial-down the visuals]] in many games to make up the difference. Also, when the next generation of video cards roll around, the enhancements on the previous high-end models may be applied to the newer, less costly models.\
131\
132Exemplified with the [[https://pcpartpicker.com/product/PG848d/evga-geforce-rtx-3090-24-gb-ftw3-ultra-gaming-video-card-24g-p5-3987-kr EVGA GeForce RTX 3090 FTW3 Ultra]] which launched at around $1900 USD back in July 2021, and with enough power to have VideoGame/{{Crysis}} for lunch & return for seconds; yet this price is even more than the price of many powerful gaming computers on the market. It also requires three expansion slots to fit in a [=PC=] so internal expansion space really takes a hit. The kicker? It barely outperforms the RTX 3080 unless you're cranking up the resolution to 8K.
133** Even more expensive was the practice of running up to four video cards at once with either Nvidia SLI & AMD Crossfire. Sure, you could harness immense graphical processing power, but they came with a host of other problems:
134*** When the video cards could no longer handle the latest games, you then had to replace 2-4 video cards if you wanted to continue reaping the benefits.
135*** Multi-GPU setups weren't free lunches, often requiring profiles that were tuned for the setup. For, say, a two-card setup, you may not have seen the potential 2x increase at all.
136*** VRAM didn't combine. So two 4GB cards didn't equal an 8GB card of the future. Therefore, while you could theoretically crank up the resolution way higher with a multi-card setup, you would often get bottlenecked by the VRAM and get terrible performance anyway.
137*** Compatability problems were a constant bugbear, with many games either running terribly, running into constant microstuttering, or just flat-out crashing out. As a result, you would often get ''better'' performance by removing all but one of the cards in your system.
138*** Then there was needing a motherboard that supported it, the need for a more expensive power supply, better cooling...
139*** It's for these reasons that multi-card gaming essentially died off by the late 2010's [[note]]the GTX 1060, by far and away the most popular GPU of the decade, didn't support it at all[[/note]] with the last Nvidia gaming GPU to "support" it being the aforementioned 3090. Even then, Nvidia never bothered making driver profiles for it - the only games you could utilize it with were games that went through the trouble to natively support it in [=DirectX=] 12 or Vulkan, of which there were exactly 14. So unless you really wanted to crank the resolution in ''VideoGame/HaloWars2'' to obscene levels, it was rendered effectively useless.
140** Cutting-edge gaming laptops allow desktop performance for the games of that laptop's era, but the price of one can easily exceed $2,000 USD, a high price to pay if theft or damage occurs. Laptops also suffer from inflexibility for upgrades, and usually can not have the video upgraded, leaving an insurmountable bottle-neck that can obsolete the machine for gaming, prematurely. Plus, while laptops are portable, if a game you want to play requires a constant Internet connection (often the case for {{MMORPG}}s, {{MOBA}}s, and multiplayer-focused {{FPS}}es), public networks are often spotty in terms of reliable connection. In addition to all this, gaming laptops tend to function poorly as laptops, since the powerful hardware makes them thicker and heavier than most laptops and results in poor battery life. If you're willing to sacrifice gaming on the go (which as mentioned above isn't the greatest of experiences on a gaming laptop), you can get a more powerful (and upgradable) desktop and a cheap but functional laptop for working on the go for less than one of these gaming laptops.
141*** A specific example that best personifies the trope is the limited-run [[https://www.acer.com/ac/en/US/content/predator-model/NH.Q1RAA.001 Acer Predator 21X]]. Among its features are a Cherry MX Brown mechanical keyboard with a swappable trackpad and numpad on the right side, a curved 21-inch (533 mm) ultrawide 120Hz display, an overclockable Seventh-generation Intel Core i7 CPU, dual 8 GB GTX 1080s in SLI, and 64 GB of RAM. When plugging in the "laptop" [[note]]more accurately, the Predator 21x is considered a desktop replacement computer[[/note]], it requires ''two'' AC adapters, each at 330 watts. The computer weighs a whopping ''19 pounds'' (8.6 kg) and comes with a large wheeled case to transport it. Its insane specs command an equally insane price tag at $9,000; one could get a desktop of similar specification for a fraction of the cost.
142*** It used to be that laptop graphics, despite carrying current generation monikers, were often as powerful as the previous generation due to power consumption and heat constraints. But today, both NVIDIA and AMD have designed laptop [=GPUs=] that are effectively the same as their desktop counterparts. Meaning, for example, a GTX 1080 in a laptop is the same as one on a desktop (albeit, both at stock). This helps lessen the impracticality of going all out with a gaming laptop.
143*** Cheaper gaming laptops have also hit the market, some of them floating around $1,000-$1,200 USD. And most of them are in sizes that are more reasonable. A famous one that hit the market in 2020 was the ASUS Zepyhrus G14, something of a unicorn laptop. It not only had the gaming chops that it could sustain, but did it in a 14" laptop size that was just under 0.75"/18mm thick, and when you weren't gaming had leading class battery life. It wouldn't look out of place if you placed it next to a Macbook Pro or Dell XPS, two laptops considered to be the benchmarks of lightweight, small laptops.
144** Overclocking a CPU or GPU can provide better performance than stock speeds, particularly to squeeze out extra performance from aging components. However, overclocking requires more power to maintain a stable clock speed and substantial cooling to offset the extra heat generated, and it is possible to permanently damage components if substandard parts are used, ''especially'' the power supply. While modern overclocking has gotten easier, with most [=OCs=] being done in software and reputable components having thermal overload protection, overclocking older platforms was a far more daunting task, which can involve physically modifying the motherboard.
145** Custom liquid cooling loops can provide better cooling for overclocking compared to an air cooler; however, a custom loop has several points of failure due to its many components (e.g., reservoir, pump, water blocks, o-rings, etc.). If part of the loop fails or if the user wants to add or remove components, the loop has to be drained and disassembled. Depending on the system complexity and quality of materials, a custom loop can be very expensive. A custom loop is also impractical for a LAN party system since the loop has to be drained before transport and refilled before using it.
146** An extreme version of liquid cooling is using liquid nitrogen (LN[[subscript:2]]). LN[[subscript:2]] cooling can achieve ''insane'' overclocks; however, LN[[subscript:2]] is ''very dangerous'' if mishandled, potentially causing frostbite and permanently damaging components. PC components are typically not designed to operate at sub-freezing temperatures, meaning that components surrounding the CPU cooler block have to be insulated to avoid condensation. Because of LN[[subscript:2]]'s sub-zero boiling point, the reservoir has to be refilled constantly, making it only useful for short-term CPU benchmarking. [[DoNotTryThisAtHome Only experts should attempt this method]].
147** Mineral oil cooling. While having your PC submerged entirely in liquid is awesome, and it doesn't risk damage from coolant leaks, extreme care has to be taken to avoid contaminating the mineral oil and risk causing a short. Furthermore, this approach makes it almost impossible to upgrade hardware and/or resell used parts, meaning that any mineral oil build has to be designed to last. Lastly, it doesn't provide much benefit over air cooling or piped liquid cooling, making the expense and effort largely for the sake of aesthetics and bragging rights.
148** While tempered glass side panels may look nice and allow you to show off your build (like a custom water loop), they're also fragile and expensive fingerprint magnets. Tempered glass cases are also ''dangerous'' for those with young children and/or pets, which increases the likelihood of a broken glass panel, which results in hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny glass pieces to [[NauseaFuel wound people with cuts and blood]].
149** Desktop Gaming [=PCs=] in general are this to many people. While having a powerful computer is nice, laptops can address most people's non-gaming computing needs nowadays while being portable, making gaming the only reason to have a desktop. Many people prefer or even need the portability of a laptop, making a desktop PC an expensive secondary computer with gaming being the only justification for having one. The steady improvement of integrated [=GPUs=] may eventually eliminate even this justification. Integrated graphics are already more than adequate for many older and indie titles.
150* The iPhone 4's antenna, which is that stainless steel banding built into the casing of the device, was described as "really cool engineering" by Steve Jobs. However, the iPhone doesn't work very well as a ''phone'' when you hold it, [[http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8761240.stm leading to dropped calls]].
151* Buying arcade boards and machines, especially when a home port of the game in question exists.
152** The main problems with owning original hardware is their size and weight. Even small profile units such as the cocktail table form factor can take up considerable space. Also, owning arcade cabinets means that you or somebody you know should be knowledgeable on how to repair them ''when'' they inevitably break down.
153** Practically every arcade cabinet made before the mid to late 2000s relied on CRT displays, which are becoming increasingly hard to find each year since they're no longer mass-produced. While some games can be retrofitted with an LCD display and would be unnoticeable to practically anyone other than arcade purists, certain genres rely on a CRT for various reasons. {{Light Gun Game}}s rely on the way a CRT refreshes its screen in order to function, and [=CRTs=] are preferred for vintage {{Fighting Game}}s, especially in competitive settings for their extremely low latency. [[VectorGame Arcade machines which use a vector monitor]] rather than a raster monitor are more difficult to service.
154** However, with the availability of single board computers, small enough to fit on your palm such as the Platform/RaspberryPi, you can have the best of both worlds. Wire one up to the controllers of an old arcade cabinet and a replacement screen, install an emulator, and you can play practically ''every'' arcade game via that single cabinet. There are a number of companies marketing such setups, ranging from kits you assemble yourself to fully-assembled cabinets.
155** There's also the matter of expense; in addition to the price of owning a classic arcade machine, ''running'' the machine takes up plenty of electricity, and it only gets worse if you decide to buy multiple machines. Retrofitting machines with LCD monitors and replacing the attract lighting with [=LEDs=] whenever possible can help make the machines more energy efficient.
156* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z86V_ICUCD4 The Most Useless Machine Ever]], a device whose sole purpose, once turned on, is to turn itself off.
157** Needless to say, it spawned a race to design machines that are even more awesome while retaining the utter uselessness of the original. Cue the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Djc8FPHs45o advanced edition]]…
158* There are lots of cool website designs that look awesome, but load slowly and are hard to navigate. Similarly, many interfaces on [=TVs=], video game consoles, websites, etc. tend to fall more towards this trope with each update. The result is a design that looks more sleek and modern than the previous version but is less accessible and harder to navigate. This trope is why many of these updates are mentioned on TheyChangedItNowItSucks.
159* Wi-Fi connected "smart" light bulbs have apps that can imitate a thunderstorm or fireworks, by simply flashing the light bulb. It is very cool to get the "effect" of a thunderstorm or fireworks in your own home, but consider the fact you turn on a light to see in the dark, and these apps flash the bulbs intermittently.
160* The Dvorak keyboard layout. It's supposed to be more efficient than the standard QWERTY keyboard and cut down on repetitive motion strain (unproven). Also every major operating system supports it in software. Unfortunately the typical Dvorak keyboard runs well over $100 and no IT department will appreciate you gluing new letters onto your keyboard.
161** Many keyboards have pop-off/pop-on keycaps, so you could move them around, reversibly. Or learn to touch-type in Dvorak and don't even look at the keys. These both require going under the hood and remapping the keyboard, of course. (Some people's skin gradually wears the lettering off computer keys, so they can touch-type, replace keyboards regularly, or glue on new labels.)
162** Additionally, note that the Dvorak keyboard is based on a myth; its creators believed that the QWERTY keyboard was created to slow down typists. This, at least, is well-documented as being untrue. (The arrangement has to do with the exact mechanics of the inside of a typewriter and the way certain bars tended to jam when struck together, not with any deliberate attempt to slow down typists.)
163** [[DamnYouMuscleMemory The major problem is that you have to completely re-learn touch typing]]. While switching may lead to faster typing in the long run (as mentioned, there's no hard evidence either way), it will definitely slow you down in the short term. It also makes it incredibly inconvenient to use anyone else's computer (or a public computer) and, conversely, inconvenient for anyone else to use yours.
164** Also, good luck letting a customer service agent remotely control your PC. The Dvorak layout is going to extend through the remote software, and unless you happen upon a service rep who is also using Dvorak, they will be unable to work on your PC.
165* TV sets with [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4K_resolution 4k resolution]]. 4k is basically twice the horizontal ''and'' vertical resolution of HDTV, and is regularly used in digital cinema. So it's a TV with the resolution of a movie theater! The first such models are 84" diagonal and start at about $20k. While there already are a handful of 4k videos posted on [=YouTube=], nothing is currently broadcast at this resolution, and won't be without another major upgrade to TV equipment. It is doubtful that such an expense would ever be justified, as most people don't seem to really notice a difference between the 1080p resolution of Blu-ray and upconverted DVD.
166** But if that's not enough for you, try the format-after-next [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UHDV 8k UHDTV]] (ultra-high-definition television) resolution. Yes, that doubles the x and y resolution of 4k. At 7680x4320, that approaches the resolution of friggin' IMAX film! And don't even get started with the associated audio format of [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/22.2_surround_sound 22.2 surround sound]] ({{exactly what it says on the tin}} -- 22 speakers and 2 subwoofers.) Just a little overkill for watching the news, no?[[note]]For what it's worth, 8K resolution is basically equal to the resolution of the human eyeball. Anything higher than that would be utterly pointless, as humans literally couldn't see any difference; 4K is already so close that only very sharp-eyed viewers who are deliberately looking for the difference can spot it[[/note]].
167** And, as of 2013, games are starting to be developed with 4k resolution. While it gives PC elitists bragging rights over the [=PS4=] and X-Box One not supporting it, the market saturation needed for it to be anything more than a talking point does not yet exist for the above reasons. You'll also need an extremely powerful PC to be able to run a game at 4K unless you like your framerates measured in seconds per frame.
168*** A bit less so in 2014, with [[http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00I0H9T5C/ 4K monitors going for as low as 600]].
169*** As of 2017, large (43") 4K monitors are a great solution over multiple smaller monitors. A single 43" 4k screen is equivalent to 4 21" screens. This is very practical for both work and play, providing a large, seamless work area and a better gaming experience than multiple small screens.
170*** As of 2021, [[MediaNotes/TheNinthGenerationOfConsoleVideoGames 9th generation consoles]] such as the Platform/PlayStation5 and [[Platform/XboxSeriesXAndS Xbox Series X|S]] provide native 4k rendering. Some passive entertainment is also released and broadcast in 4k, especially if you consider TheRuleOfFirstAdopters. It is also nearly impossible to buy new 40"+ [=TVs=] below 4k resolution. And in 2022, it's not uncommon to find 4K monitors on sale for less than US$300. TechnologyMarchesOn, indeed.
171** The fundamental problem is that the primary component of "quality" of a picture is pixel ''density'', not ''number''. An 84" 4k monitor has about the same number of pixels per inch as a 42" HD monitor. And it turns out that the human eye has a severe law of diminishing returns for moving picture quality. While a human can easily tell the difference between a picture printed on a 300dpi printer and one on a 1200dpi printer, it can't when comparing a 300dpi monitor vs a 600dpi monitor. 4k resolution on a 20" monitor is about the best a human eye can distinguish.
172** Even better, 4k displays for ''smartphones'' are in the works. Nice, you have the resolution of a next-generation TV in your pocket... but given that the individual pixels on a 1080p smartphone are already barely discernable, having four times the pixel density on a phone is overkill.
173* IMAX film itself. It produces some of the highest-definition film in existence, but the heavy-duty 15/70 cameras are massive, expensive, noisy, and rare. It's very difficult to shoot more than a few minutes of a film on that kind of camera. Infamously, Creator/ChristopherNolan, one of the few directors to make heavy use of IMAX, has accidentally damaged or broken multiple such cameras during filming - which wouldn't be so abnormal if said cameras weren't so expensive and rare that Nolan has literally destroyed a significant fraction of all IMAX cameras in the world.
174* Digital Projectors in comparison to [=TVs=]. For around 500 USD you can get a projector able to display a 1080p image at 120'', but the room has to be long enough, there can't be too much light seeping in, the light from the projector can't be blocked (can be solved by attaching the projector into the wall/roof), you need a screen attached to the wall for decent colors and occasionally you need to replace the bulb. In other words, you need to practically build your living room around the projector to get the best results out of it. [=TVs=] just need to be plugged in.
175** On the plus side, mass-production models became available at relatively affordable rates, and thanks to streaming video on mobile phones and screen mirroring, positioning the projector became much more simple. Portability greatly improved as well, and a projector has easier portability than an LCD anyway so it's nice if you like mobility and can spare the expense of replacing the unit when it wears out.
176* When buying a 3D [=TV=] you have to ask yourself which compromise you dislike least for proper 3D display. Active Shutter glasses display the content in full resolution (by displaying the left and right images intermittently) but require bulky electronic glasses (blacking out the relevant eye) that are expensive, uncomfortable (both due to the weight of the glasses and the eye strain that some people experience with them) and need to be synced with the TV. Passive 3D doesn't require electric glasses but is displayed by showing the left and right images on different lines of pixels, effectively halving the resolution. Both also compromise color contrast for the 3D effect, as the glasses darken the image.
177* Curved-screen televisions. They take up more depth than regular flatscreens, they don't provide any real benefit for viewing, and unless you're right in front of the middle of it, they slightly cut down how much of the screen you can see.
178* High Dynamic Range, or HDR, was the latest hot trend in [=TVs=] around 2017-2018. The basic problem HDR is trying to solve: prevent color banding and loss of detail in high contrast scenery by expanding the color range from 8-bits per color channel to 10-bits. Which is great and all, but now you need a display capable of showing 10-bit color (most displays were either 6-bits or 8-bits), software that's built for 10-bit color (most software assumed 8-bits), and a much higher display contrast ratio to really make the difference matter (most standards recommend having at least 10,000:1 when most displays have 1,000:1).
179* [[WhatAreRecords Vinyl records]], at least in modern times. They subjectively have better sound quality than digital files, and there's just something [[RuleOfCool inherently cool]] about them, but they're large, inconvenient, and ripping them to play on your [=MP3=] player or game console requires somehow hooking up the turntable output to your computer's analog input, or having a [[http://www.amazon.com/ION-Profile-LP-Vinyl-to-MP3-Turntable/dp/B0029QRA1U/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1333314049&sr=8-1 special vinyl-to-mp3 turntables]] and recording it as it plays. Record companies seem to recognize this, with many of them offering digital download coupons with new vinyl releases.
180** Except the ''better sound'' of vinyl records is caused by the one particular technique which is regrettably abused in the modern ''CD'' mastering: a dynamic range equalization. [[LoudnessWar It artificially pulls up the volume of the quieter sounds and muffles the louder ones]], often across the entire spectrum, so that the overall record might be more even in intensity.[[note]]and, as the producers often hope, perceived as a louder one, as this is commonly thought to be more attractive for the listener[[/note]] Unfortunately, the overindulgence may (and, sadly, too often, does) lead to the record becoming an unlistenable mess, with every detail drowning in an impenetrable wall of sound. Vinyl records have much lower dynamic range than [=CDs=], and don't lend itself to this technique: in a too-loud sound the needle will be simply thrown out of the groove. That's why the records usually aren't equalized for the vinyl medium, which leads to the crisper, more detailed sound.
181** However, the other thing about [=CDs=] is that they are pre-equalized - they come with a defined bass and treble level whatever you play them on. On a vinyl record, you are amplifying an un-equalized signal yourself, so you can adjust the bass and treble settings before it reaches the speakers. The warmth of a vinyl record is usually caused by a low-level hum that is endemic to the analog medium; that's why digital recordings often sound 'cold' by comparison.
182*** The whole 'needle jumping out of the groove' thing is somewhat of a myth, as modern vinyl uses 180-gram records which have deeper grooves and can take higher volumes. Many recent examples have used almost exactly the same mastering as the CD, sometimes taken directly from the [=CDs=] (in the case of bootlegs).
183*** Of course one further thing is that when pre-equalizing [=CDs=], the mastering engineers often make questionable choices, such as cutting out the bass to make the music sound 'brighter'. Many audiophiles like vinyl precisely because they have more control over how it sounds.
184* "DVD quality" audio, which is spec'd at 24-bits per sample at a rate of 192KHz. Compared to the CD which is 16-bits per sample at a rate of 44.1KHz. If you compared the audio signal of DVD quality vs. CD-quality audio, DVD quality would look very much like [[https://archive.is/sFScl/74532afaa26866fcd49bd95e0e3b053133cadb3e.gif a perfect sine wave]] in digital form. Unfortunately, due to the limitations of the human ear, most people can't tell the difference, and the few that do probably have to seriously focus. Not to mention DVD audio takes up roughly ''6.5 times the space'' compared to uncompressed CD audio.
185* More to that point, high-end audio cables. There are people who insist on spending hundreds or [[https://silversonic.com/products/speaker-cables/deity/ even thousands]] of dollars on the best cables so they can hear the best sound from their music or video. But an informal experiment showed that professed audiophiles couldn't tell the difference between great cables and ''[[https://gizmodo.com/363154/audiophile-deathmatch-monster-cables-vs-a-coat-hanger wire coat hangers]]''.
186* Certain vintage electromechanical keyboard instruments, such as the Hammond organ and the Mellotron. They sound great, but their intricate mechanisms make them a nightmare to take on tour, as many ProgressiveRock bands found out the hard way. This is why many keyboardists wanting retro sounds use sampled versions on modern digital synths or software synthesizers, which stand up to the rigors of touring much better, with physical instruments largely relegated to studio work. The original analog synths, such as the Minimoog, are also temperamental, often going out of tune easily. Lots of musicians prefer digital recreations for the same reason.
187* Electronic musical instruments, anyone?
188** Modular synthesizers. They are what synths started out as, and in [[TheNineties the mid-'90s]], they had their big comeback that still lasts. They give you vastly greater possibilities than non-modular ones, and let's face it, they look way cool. But they tend to be big and cumbersome, not to mention expensive. There is no way that patch memory with total recall can be implemented on them, and recreating a patch takes a great deal longer on one of these beasts than, say, on a Minimoog, so they aren't really for gigging with pre-defined music. Also, ever since the introduction and opening of the Eurorack standard, [[ICantBelieveItsNotHeroin they've grown highly addictive]].
189** [=ARP's=] take on a fully modular synthesizer was the 2500. It packs quite some synthesis power, especially with wing cabinets, it's more stable tuning-wise than contemporary Moogs (which ARP advertised), and most notably, the ARP 2500 does away with patch cord curtains by using a patch slider matrix instead. This matrix, however, is quite prone to contact problems due to corrosion, not to mention leakage.
190** EMS used a pin matrix instead, even with pins with different electric resistances in different colors. What works well enough in the compact [=VCS3=] and Synthi A became a literal pain in the back in the huge Synthi 100: In order to work one of its two sizable matrices, you have to bend over it, also because the columns are labeled at the far end from the musician and in a quite small font, so you can't read the labels while standing up.
191** Eµ offered keyboards with digital internals for their modular system that could theoretically control up to ten voices. The catch: The modules themselves were still monophonic. If you wanted ten voices, you needed all the modules in your patch ten times.
192** The ARP Centaur VI was an utterly overengineered synthesizer prototype. First of all, it included various tone generator sections with up to six voices. That alone made it so complicated that even serial production devices would have cost $20,000 in [[TheSeventies the mid-70s]], and hardly anyone was willing to spend that much on a synth, no matter how sophisticated, in a time when Japanese manufacturers dictated the prices. But wait, there's more: The second prototype was closer to what its creator really had in mind: a polyphonic guitar synthesizer. This actually made things worse because the designers never got the special pick-up to track six strings properly.
193** The Yamaha CS-80 is widely regarded as a 'holy grail' of synthesizers. Eight voices, pure analogue, and a history that includes half of the big-name bands of the '70s... in a package that weighs 86kg. And is infamous for tuning stability issues. And is such a pain to service that most techs won't touch it with a ten-foot bargepole, being loaded with custom-made, highly fragile parts and requiring minor demolition to get into. Also, it cost over $6000. In 1976. It now goes for... considerably more. See also, for a less severe case, the Memorymoog.
194** The early Sequential Circuits Prophet-10, another prototype. When it was introduced, it outshone the Yamaha CS-80, the father of all modern polysynths, in many regards: It was smaller, it weighed a lot less, it had patch memory, and it had a whopping ten voices. However, it was so crammed with circuitry that it tended to fail due to overheating. This problem could only be solved by reducing the number of voices to five, thus creating the legendary Prophet-5.
195** The Oberheim Polyphonic line of synths were some of the first mass-produced polyphonic synths to hit the market. However, unlike later efforts like the Prophet 5 and CS-80, which used a microprocessor to attach multiple oscillators to a singule control panel, the Oberheim instead consisted of multiple SEM monophonic synths attached to the same keyboard. This of course, meant that every module had to be programmed seperately, with its own oscillator, filter and enveloppe running independently from all the others. On the two-voice model, this was manageable. On the four-voice, it became complicated. On the eight-voice model? It was downright impossible. That's not even getting into the monstrous size of the latter, with an equally monstrous price ($20,000 in 1976, with $2000 extra necessary for rudimentary patch memory). Of course, this huge amount of variables meant that incredible patches could be designed, but one had to be a synth wizard to actually reach that point.
196*** Its successor, the Oberheim OB-X, was better, but not by much. It actually added one common user interface and all-encompassing patch memory for all voices. Better yet, it was still available with four, six or eight voices, depending on how much you were willing to pay for it. Its downside was that its largely discrete analog circuitry was quite sensitive to outward influences. This thing was extremely prone to going out of tune, you had eight to sixteen [=VCOs=] to keep in tune, and you had to open the machine up to do that which wasn't good for the tuning either. It was a nightmare in the studio already, but gigging with it was out of question. It wouldn't be until the OB-Xa that Oberheim would finally produce a polysynth that was (somewhat) affordable, user-friendly and gig-ready.
197** The Fairlight CMI was one of the first commercially available digital samplers and thereby offered all-new possibilities to the musician. But unless you were a big name such as Music/PeterGabriel or Music/JeanMichelJarre, and you could get your hands on a special codec, the measly amounts of RAM in the machine didn't allow for a decent quality for your own samples. Many just used it as an oversized sample player, and it certainly was way too expensive for that. Also, it was a usability nightmare: Much of its operation involved typing commands on a computer keyboard. When the simpler and cheaper E-mu Emulator came out, many artist jumped bandwagons, also because pretty much the whole Fairlight factory sample library had been re-sampled for the Emulator.
198** The Juno-6 was Roland's answer to the Korg Polysix, the first affordable polysynth, and it was likewise affordable for the masses. Granted, it had to be reduced from what the battleship that was the Jupiter-8 had to offer. Each voice had only one VCO and one envelope. You could work with that, and the built-in chorus was wonderful to fatten up the sound again. But please, Roland, why did you have to cut the patch memory?! This essentially rendered the Juno-6 useless for gigging musicians.[[note]] Half a year later, Roland introduced the Juno-60, essentially the same synth, but with patch memory.[[/note]]
199** The Yamaha [=EX7=], [=EX5=] and [=EX5R=] music workstations are romplers, virtual-analog synthesizers and physical modeling synthesizers rolled into one which was quite remarkable in their day. That said, they don't pack enough processing power to do much of this at once. Since you probably needed multiple synths anyway, you could just as well have gotten yourself these kinds of synths separately instead.
200** Physical modeling synths in general. The initial idea was to skip sampling and simulate how acoustic instruments work physically. Machines like the Yamaha [=VL1=] allow for some very expressive playing beyond anything you could ever do with a rompler, but as far as realism goes, they're straight out of UncannyValley.
201** The Roland V-Synth is a second-to-none sample-bending synth. The V-Synth XT introduced two additional modes: It can become a vocal synth and vocoder or a Roland D-50 clone. But it can't become all this even halfway at once: In order to switch modes, you have to power the whole unit down and boot it up again. This feature is clearly not for gigging.
202** Alesis Micron and Akai Miniak are downright parameter graves. They're based on the Alesis Ion, but although they're way smaller (most of them is keyboard), they outshine the Ion in several ways. Their size comes at a price, though: There's only one knob for editing ''everything''. Whereas the Miniak has a sturdier build, this very knob is usually the first thing that breaks on a Micron. And no, there has never been an official software editor.
203* Platform/LaserDisc. Sure, it had better quality than [[Platform/{{VCR}} VHS]] but the discs were expensive and most rental stores didn't stock them, while they had shelves and shelves of VHS tapes. Plus, the discs were huge, the size of an LP. Watching a full-length movie required flipping discs. The format was limited to deep-pocketed film buffs and industrial uses, though [[GermansLoveDavidHasselhoff it was popular in Japan]]. Platform/{{DVD}}s came along in the late '90s and offered all of the advantages of [=LaserDisc=], including advanced picture and sound while being much cheaper and the size of a Platform/CompactDisc; needless to say, [=LaserDisc=] barely survived into the 2000s, the last film released on the format in the United States being ''Film/BringingOutTheDead'' on October 8, 2000.
204** Same goes double for Platform/{{CED}}, AKA RCA [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capacitance_Electronic_Disc SelectaVision]]. Never heard of it? It was actually an ''analog'' video disc similar to an LP, only using a capacitive pickup instead of a vibrating needle. The disks were permanently encased in sheaths reminiscent of a 3.5-inch floppy the size of an LP jacket, only leaving their protective plastic cage when they were inside the player itself, and tended to wear out quickly... like after the second viewing. Compare that to [=LaserDisc=], which didn't suffer any appreciable wear during playback due to the laser pickup. And wear wasn't handled very well at all; when disks wore out, they began [[RepetitiveAudioGlitch skipping]] in a fashion that has been compared to, and some even believe may have inspired, ''Series/MaxHeadroom'''s {{Blipvert}}s. In addition, ''if'' a disk played properly, the video quality was barely an improvement over tape-based formats, giving [=LaserDisc=] another edge. Not a big success.
205* As with collecting arcade boards mentioned above, collecting classic computers and game consoles can fall into this, with the need for storage space, power, TV/monitor connections, and aging/failing hardware with few options for repair for someone who isn't a GadgeteerGenius. That's why emulation is so popular in modern systems.
206* Running emulators and ports on improbable devices, such as ''VideoGame/{{Doom}}'' [[https://youtu.be/XLHx3vO7KJM on a printer]] and ''VideoGame/{{Tetris}}'' [[https://youtu.be/0atY4mboD4w on a hi-rise building]]. Though they're demonstrations of clever programming and hacking skills, they're obviously not ways that you want to regularly play your games.
207* Listening to music at extremely high volumes. Yeah, it might give your music that extra oomph, but if you listen at maximum or near-maximum volume all the time it'll be only a matter of a few years or even months before you can't enjoy music at all anymore. Plus, depending on what kind of headphones you're using, the sound may leak and annoy people around you, and if you're using speakers and other people live with you, good luck justifying why your music deserves to be blatantly audible throughout the entire house. Even barring hearing loss and making people want to break whatever you use for listening, a lot of audio gear can only get so loud before the sound turns into a muddled mess.
208* High-quality cassette formulations, such as chromium dioxide and cobalt, offered superb audio quality rivaling reel-to-reel tape, but since most people only had cassette players that could only handle Type I or "Normal bias" tapes, it was almost impossible to exchange recordings made on the high-end tapes with anybody else. Prerecorded tapes with these formulations were only offered by small boutique labels catering to audiophiles.
209* Open-source software zigs-zags with this problem. Although there are many free or cheap alternatives to a lot of commercial software (such as Linux, Filezilla, [=LibreOffice=], among others), there are also many open-source programs that are often completely useless or too complicated to use for everyday use and whose that is usually intended for users with more advanced knowledge and not for the general public.
210** Similarly, one of the most important disadvantages of an open source program is that, if the original creator decides to remove a feature from the program either because it is not to his liking or because it is illegal or has illegal uses, there is nothing to prevent another person from using the original source code and fork that program, causing the original creator to lose control of the authorship of that program in case some legal problem arises. Perhaps the most particular case is the famous KODI media player, which is open source. While the application is legal and has legitimate uses, due to the use of some features of the program, such as add-ons that allow pirating content, the program has been the target of the law in recent years, to the disgrace of its creators. To make matters worse, due to being open source, it is not possible to remove those features without users deciding in retaliation to fork KODI to include features that could have been removed to prevent pirating, which creates a chicken and egg situation for its original authors. Obviously and for the same reason, closing the source code is not a solution either.
211* The interface protocols the USB Type C connector supports is a great idea. Not only does it support USB, but it supports various other interfaces like HDMI, [=DisplayPort=], and Thunderbolt. The problem? They're all optional and it's not obvious at all whether or not a given Type C connector supports those interfaces. To top it off, a given Type C connector isn't even guaranteed to support USB 3.1 Gen 2 and at best, you're only guaranteed USB 2.0 support. So you're stuck with a connector that's trying to do everything, but in reality it may not and it creates confusion among people who wonder why their USB Type C to HDMI cable doesn't work on one device when it worked fine on another. An infamous example of this is with the Platform/NintendoSwitch, which uses a very specific interface that, while also present on some non-Nintendo cables, is fairly uncommon; this led to a number of nasty incidents where people fried their Switch by trying to charge it with an out-of-spec Type C cable, leading to the still-persistent misconception that the Switch's charging cable is a proprietary one that just looks like a normal Type C cable. The interface issue in general is a real shame, since Type C solves a couple of issues with past USB connectors, which can only be inserted in one orientation, and on [=microUSB=] in particular the pins bending over time due to the way the locking mechanism works; in short, Apple's Lightning connector but for non-proprietary devices.
212* The [[https://youtu.be/50kOJRfVCQ4 Teac O'Casse Open Cassette]] swappable cassette reel system has subjective charm as it's a cassette reel holder that looks like a classic reel-to-reel system when loaded and the swappable reels looks like they could let you carry more music on the go. However, when it's time to swap out reels, the learning curve to load the caddy at an acceptable speed means you lose the convenience of simply popping in another tape in seconds, a major selling point of cassette tapes to begin with.\
213\
214Fortunately, the concept was improved upon in the [[https://youtu.be/RtYmaKsWwrU Audio Craft Cassette Cartridge]]. The loading process was much easier with this system. Still, the capacity of the reels are about half that of traditional cassette tapes.
215* As of early 2019, foldable smartphones seem to be viewed as such. A combination smartphone/tablet, which in reality is neither, and is for the price of both combined. People keep wondering whether the software is ready, how durable it is, whether the crease on the screen can be made invisible (an issue plainly visible with the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Fold)...
216* The earlier Galaxy Edge models can be viewed as such, given that edged screen may make it look a bit futuristic, but if an important display elements is in the edge of the screen there is a possibility to be folded along...
217** Some Samsung models, including Galaxy Edge as mentioned, has an "always on" configuration that displays the bare essentials even when the device is asleep (such as the clock). Since some early AMOLED screens are more susceptible to burn in through static pixels, this could not be a good idea...
218* The Galaxy Edge models is topped by Xiaomi's "Mi Mix Alpha" which has screens in the front, side, and the back. One can imagine the increased power consumption...
219* As with interpreted programming languages, graphical user interfaces made computers easier to use but were huge memory hogs when they were first introduced in the 1970s and 1980s. The original Platform/AppleMacintosh could only hold a few word processor pages in its memory, such was the resource usage of early [=GUIs=]. The only machines that could support graphics and doing actual work through the 1980s were expensive workstations, while [=PCs=] stuck with slim character-based interfaces. Steady improvements in hardware allowed for cheaper and more powerful computers with graphical interfaces toward the end of the '80s, paving the way for Windows 3.0 in 1990, which finally popularized [=GUIs=] in the PC world.
220* Flexplay was a short-lived DVD rental service where the customer could rent a DVD without the inconvenience of returning to the store or mailing the disc back, while also allowing non-rental stores to get into the rental business. The [=DVDs=] contained a chemical that would make the disc unreadable after about two days when exposed to oxygen. This concept came with multiple problems. First it made every DVD have an expiration date as oxygen would eventually seep into the container and destroy the disc. Second, it would result in a large amount of waste since the DVD would go straight to the garbage (which caused negative PR with environmental groups). To resolve the second issue, Flexplay introduce recycling bins in rental locations and a mailing label to send the disc to a recycling center. However, these solutions undid most of the advantages of disposable discs as the customer would either have to return to the store or mail the discs back. Flexplay also had the problem of launching around the same time that Redbox and Netflix were really taking off, each of which provided most of the same advantages with standard [=DVDs=], while streaming would do away with discs altogether.
221* The Kingston [=HyperX=] Fury RGB SSD looks impressive with its array of 75 [=LEDs=]. Unfortunately, the heat those 75 [=LEDs=] produce individually adds up and can accumulate to the point of causing [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vnST5rA64Oc catastrophic thermal throttling]]. Yeah... not the best idea to mix a performance-critical component and a large number of light sources, to say the least.
222* Clicky switches for mechanical keyboards (often known as "blue" switches, as such switches are conventionally blue) sound great, feel great, and can let you know when you've pressed hard enough to register a keypress so that you don't have to overexert to type. However, they fall into this trope when used in an environment shared with other people, offices in particular, due to the loud sounds easily getting on the nerves of others; offices have been known to ban clicky-switch keyboards as a result, limiting their appeal to the solitude of your own private room.
223* Apple's "butterfly switch" keyboard mechanism. Introduced in 2015, the butterfly switches made Apple's ''already thin'' laptops even thinner than what would be possible with traditional scissor switch mechanisms, and Apple claims that the butterfly switch keyboards are more robust and responsive. However, the butterfly switch design is flawed, as it is easier to for the mechanisms to malfunction due to dust and other debris, causing the keyboard to become unreliable. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4KuVvb9DTaU Also, the keyboard is integrated to the upper casing]], making it a costly repair if the computer is out of warranty. By 2020, Apple ditched the butterfly switch keyboard and reverted back to the more tried and true scissor switch keyboard.
224* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microkernel Microkernel]]-based operating systems have advantages from a security standpoint over [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monolithic_kernel monolithic kernels.]] In layman's terms, an operating system set up in this manner gives maximum privileges to fewer components than a monolithic kernel, such as excluding device drivers from the core of the operating system, which can make it much more difficult to exploit security holes in programs and seize full control of the entire system or parts of it. It also makes the system more robust as it's almost impossible to crash the machine. The drawback is that this tends to limit fast access to system resources as user-level programs are not usually allowed to just directly access the necessary resources on the system. This is one reason some operating systems such as the [[Platform/MicrosoftWindows Microsoft Windows NT]] and Apple's [=macOS=] family use a [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_kernel hybrid kernel]] to [[TakeAThirdOption strike a balance between the quicker monolithic and more secure microkernel paradigm]]. Similarly, the Linux kernel can load and unload modules during runtime to make things more manageable. Device drivers are usually implemented as modules because there are so many components on the market that it would be impossible for kernel developers to include them all in one binary. As with [=GUIs=] and interpreted programming languages, performance improvements have led to a reassessment of microkernels. With processor power increasing along with the urgency for higher data security, the microkernel became more attractive for its potentially stronger security, and skilled programming helped reduce the performance hit anticipated with the paradigm.
225* RDRAM was billed by Intel and Rambus was high-performance RAM for the Pentium III era. It was supposed to be higher performance than single-data-rate SDRAM and gained some fame for being good for video playback, but it had many drawbacks:
226** RDRAM was very expensive, causing developers to shy away from it in favor of the more economical DDR-SDRAM, not to mention, there were royalties that had to be paid for using the former and Rambus was infamous for their lawsuits to enforce them.
227** RDRAM also had such very high latency and a small buffer that its advantages were negated, infamously making it a performance bottleneck on the Platform/Nintendo64 and the Platform/Playstation2.
228* Gaming cyber cafes suffered from this on the ownership end. They had appeal as a place you go to play on a computer without owning one, had a contemporary library of games to play, and you could even have [=LAN=] parties with friends. However, the cost of replacing aging hardware on such a large scale proved to be very costly, and with the introduction of portable desktop machines and improvements to the cost efficiency of gaming laptops, cyber cafes started losing their appeal as a place where you didn’t need to bring your own hardware. While the power efficiency of computers improved over time, running numerous high-performance gaming machines could still be taxing on the power bill, and thus rent expense for the business space.
229* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Row_hammer Row Hammer exploit]] uses a quirk in the design of DRAM to manipulate data in one memory sector by inputting the right data in a physically adjacent sector. Used right it allows you to bypass any layers of security that aren't built into the hardware. However, the principle underlying the exploit is rapidly putting data into one sector repeatedly, and hoping that charge leakage turns the data in adjacent sectors into something vaguely useful. Actually using the exploit is the CS equivalent of starting and driving a car by lying in the trunk and tapping the side with a hammer.
230* Gaming smartphones, at least top of the line devices as the [[https://www.gsmarena.com/asus_rog_phone_6_pro-11648.php ROG Phone 6 Pro]]. You'll get state-of-the-art hardware and software designed for gaming (ie, cooling systems to deal with {{Overheating}}), which works nicely with heavy non-gaming apps too, beefy fast-charging batteries, and everything wrapped in an aggressive-looking design, but price is according to their capacities, ergonomics may leave to be desired, they're a niche product harder to get by, cameras are poorer than their non-gaming counterparts, overkill for basic usage, support is worse than for standard phones, and of course as TechnologyMarchesOn they will not be as good. Unless you're a hardcore/pro gamer you're likely better off with a regular and more versatile flagship phone if so much horsepower is needed or a dedicated video game console.
231* The [=3M=] [=LX451=] Keypad Mouse. As its name suggests, it combines an optical mouse with a numeric keypad in one device. However, as retro tech {{YouTuber|s}} [=VWestlife=] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=og4L7aELZDg demostrates]], it fails at both tasks, being both too large to serve as a mouse and too small to use as a numpad. As a mouse, it doesn't have the ergonomic shape to use it comfortably for long periods, and as a numpad, the keys are smaller than normal, and because of its dual use, it tends to slide around when attempting to use the numpad. Also, the [=LX451=] was expensive at US$89.99 in the mid-2000s, making it far more practical to carry a discrete mouse and numpad, although most non-Apple laptops made since the late 2000s and early 2010s have an integrated numpad.
232* On March 23, 1974, Music/TheGratefulDead debuted the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_of_Sound_(Grateful_Dead) Wall of Sound]] PA system, a 60-foot, 75-ton speaker stack designed by the band's longtime sound engineer Owsley Stanley. The setup consisted of over 500 total speakers and was designed to support the larger crowds the band was drawing in at the time, with each instrument having its own channel and with a particular focus on high quality sound. Unfortunately, the Wall had several issues from the start:
233** The massive size meant that it was a nightmare to set up, take down, rig, and haul from show to show. They had to hire people to set up the scaffolding and make sure the venues' flooring could support such a heavy speaker setup, then have people set up the speakers and wire them the same way each time, have people maintain the care of the speakers, then have the speakers be taken down each time, and that's not mentioning the huge road crew and all the trucks needed to carry the setup from show to show. What's more, there were either two or three sets of scaffolding in order to accommodate the time needed to set up the rig for the next show while the band was playing their current show.
234** Having the speakers behind the band meant that the microphones were at risk of picking up the speakers and causing a feedback loop. To fix this, the band had a special microphone system: Each singer had matched pairs of condenser microphones spaced 60 milimeters apart and wired in reverse polarity from each other; the singer would sing into the top microphone, and the lower microphone picked up the ambient sound to cancel it out in the mix. While it succeeded in eliminating feedback, this did frequently result in the vocals having a tinny sound.
235** Ultimately, due to being a nightmare to haul from show to show, the Wall of Sound was retired on October 20, 1974, less than a year after its introduction. When the band resumed touring they replaced it with a smaller scale sound setup. Nevertheless, despite its impracticality, the Wall of Sound was highly influential on modern day sound setups, including monitor system and feedback cancellation, and it has become iconic of the band for its influence as well as its sheer size.
236* Both wired and wireless [=LANs=] can be this depending on context. While wired Ethernet is reliable and immune to interference, which is why wired Ethernet connections are considered practically mandatory for multiplayer gaming, any device using them is tethered to the Ethernet cable. It's also necessary to run cable for new connections, which may not be possible or desirable in residential settings, especially in rented accommodation. This is why wired Ethernet is mainly used with desktop computers, servers, and other networking equipment like routers and switches. Wi-Fi allows mobile devices to move around, but can be susceptible to interference, though newer Wi-Fi standards mitigate this.
237* Roaming data allows your cellphone to use cellular data from another network, particularly if you're traveling abroad, meaning you can take phone calls and use Internet data while out of the country. However, roaming data often costs a hefty premium. Depending on your phone's relationship with your carrier and the availability of public Wi-Fi at your destination, it might be more economical to invest in a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, a separate basic mobile phone (which can also double as a hotspot through tethering), or a SIM card at your destination if your phone and your destination country's laws and regulations permit or just use ordinary public Wi-Fi hotspots.
238* Handheld computing took decades before the widespread adoption of smartphones because multiple building blocks weren't ready yet for the mainstream public.
239** Text-based palmtop can sleep between keypresses and generally can work for hours before the battery runs out. The exorbitant price and limited use case of a greyscale, text-only app when GUI is starting to take hold means even enthusiasts are more likely to talk about it instead of actually buying one. Some industries do love them, the price is more justifiable for continuous work that saves employees from bringing a full-fledged PC to the field or large warehouse. Some terminals were still produced in the mid-2000s since there were no competing products that could run for a complete workday without any recharge while surviving harsh environments.
240** Windows [=CE=] handhelds can mimic a PC if you squint your eyes, but their high price tag, limited battery life, sluggish performance, and the small number of available applications mean they're also limited to enthusiasts and niche industries. Ironically, while they survived long enough until the smartphone era, they never really solved the lack of available applications, not helped by Windows Phone lacking compatibility with the large library of previous Windows Mobile apps (to be fair, those apps were designed for stylus and would be hard/impossible to use with fingers), squarely defeated by the newcomer.
241** [=PalmOS=] devices embrace the limitation of the small screen, slow [=CPU=], and minuscule battery. They succeed in gaining hold, but can't really expand much. Without ubiquitous & affordable wireless connections to get apps on the go, people were content to use their [=PCs=] for computing and phones for communicating. Like Windows [=CE=], [=PalmOS=] also survived long enough to see the dawn of the smartphone era, and die pretty much due to the lack of app ecosystem.
242** Platform/{{Symbian}} devices were phones and by definition don't have connectivity problems, but vendors have different implementations so app developers can't just write for one and have it run elsewhere without changes. There was no single marketplace to publish because operators insisted on treating apps like yet another mobile service such as ringtones. Users were then reluctant to buy apps without any reviews in a highly fragmented market.
243** [=iPhones=] were nearly doomed to the same fate, with Steve Jobs trying to have native apps only developed by Apple and tell everyone else to use web apps. Had this decision stuck, other mobile [=OS=] would easily outnumber the available apps since standard-compliant web apps should run on any browser. Instead, Apple backtracks and frequently boasts how its app library can fulfill everyone's niche.
244
245[[/folder]]
246
247[[folder:Evolution]]
248* In the animal kingdom, being bigger. True, having more body mass and thus being stronger, tougher, and more imposing will leave very few predators able to take you on, but even they will be an afterthought when your main enemy is the SquareCubeLaw. Moving around a huge body (or heck, even just pumping your blood around it while standing still) will require enormous amounts of energy, forcing you to constantly be on the lookout for food and consequently all but forcing you to be a herbivore, since hunting would burn more calories than you'd gain from eating prey. And even if you do find your niche in the food chain, even a slight alteration of the ecosystem can have a dramatic impact on your ability to sustain yourself, meaning you will have a far lower chance of surviving than smaller but more adaptable species.
249** And for a good example of this applied to humans, gigantism, usually as a result of acromegaly. Based on an excess of growth hormones, it's produced some of the largest and strongest humans in history. Wrestling/AndreTheGiant is probably the most famous one; there are stories of him being able to flip cars, drink enough beer to kill an ox, or scare off cops just by standing up. But the SquareCubeLaw is a harsh mistress, and there's a very good reason it's seen as a disability - growing that size places immense strain on a body that simply doesn't have the right adaptations to deal with it. Many sufferers of acromegaly require surgery, and they rarely make it to their 40s[[note]][[Wrestling/PaulWight Paul "Big Show" Wight]], who was at first billed as Andre's son by Wrestling/{{WCW}}, had surgery to correct his acromegaly very early in his career and as of 2023 is still alive and well at 51, or at least as well as can be expected for someone who wrestled for 20 years[[/note]]. Sultan Kosen, the world's current tallest man, has had surgery multiple times and requires crutches to walk.
250* Some animals end up getting stuck with this as part of their evolutionary adaptation, with the best example being the extinct saber-toothed cat. A muscular big cat with elongated banana-sized teeth jutting out of its front jaw must have been the ultimate badass right? Well...evidence has shown that those impressive felines were less fearsome than they appear. While it did help in killing large animals, said animals had to be held still by the cat's prodigious strength to prevent their delicate teeth from breaking from the strain of struggling prey, unlike the teeth of today's big cats which are more durable.
251** Cheetahs can run faster than any other animal, but being built for such speed has left them unable to defend themselves effectively. They are built lightly, and after a full-blown run they must rest without doing much of anything or they might ''die'' from overheating, they can't even eat immediately. Considering that they live on the continent with the highest density of predators, they often must watch the kills they ran so hard and fast for get stolen. This problem, along with human-caused issues and bad luck (they went through a population bottleneck at some point in prehistoric times), has left them in danger of extinction.
252** Speaking of fast animals: The Giant House Spider is not only probably the most common cause of arachnophobia in the western world, it's also the world's fastest true spider, reaching speeds of up to 1.1 mph. But it can only hold this speed for eight seconds, and then it'll stop immediately, otherwise it'd overheat and die. Worse yet, if startled while trying to cool down from running, it'll start running again which makes it possible to [[CruelAndUnusualDeath kill a Giant House Spider by overheating it]]. Not only that, its sheer size which makes its tremendous speeds possible in the first place also makes it easy prey for the smaller Giant Cellar Spider which it can barely see in return due to its bad vision, and it's big enough to be regarded as prey by predators which it can't outrun: cats.
253** In a certain way, human anatomy can be seen as this. Sure, our upright stance and larger brains have proved to be our greatest asset, but with a massive cost: we have easily the most difficult (and potentially lethal to the mother) birth of any placental mammal since we evolved to have such big heads and such narrow pelvises. At the very least, with that big brain also came the development of healthcare, reducing death by childbirth significantly than when our ancestors were living in the wild.
254* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_selection Sexual display characteristics]] were an attempt by nature to reconstruct this trope. Large peacocks are poor fliers and maned lions are poor hunters, just to name a few, but females find them desirable regardless because the only way to grow your flashy display is to be one of the healthiest, most genetically stable bachelors around.
255** This also applies to humans, of course. Most of the sexually desirable attributes of both men and women offer us no actual advantages in survival, and in many cases are actively detrimental -- for instance, broad shoulders in males and wide hips in females are ungainly, and biologists have been unable to distinguish any functional purpose for the fat stores in a woman's breasts other than sex appeal (ostensibly to simulate being engorged with milk and therefore a more suitable mate). As most women know, [[DCupDistress large breasts are uncomfortable on the lower back, don't hold their appealing shape forever, and get in the way of lots of recreational activities]] (even the... obvious one).
256*** In the centuries before decent [=OB/GYN=] care, wide hips on a woman were believed to be a sign that she could survive childbirth -- the Caesarian section was normally only performed on a dead or dying mother in the hopes that at least the kid would live. Unfortunately, while a larger pelvic opening does make vaginal childbirth easier, wide hips don't always equal a large pelvic opening. In addition, the male pelvis is better adapted to walking than the female.
257** The ahem... SpearCounterpart to this, [[BiggerIsBetterInBed a very large penis]], doesn't fare much better since an extremely long and/or thick penis could potentially injure the receptive partner, or at least make the sex more painful than pleasurable. It's also possible that the owner will think his endowment alone will satisfy his partner and not perform any other acts that would make the encounter more enjoyable for them.
258** For either sex, getting shredded or "stage lean". Movie stars, models, fitness influencers, and bodybuilders in prep mode probably give you the idea that having a super-low fat body with abs separated like an ice cube tray would make you a dude- or chick-magnet. Well, it may be true that a lot of people would start to look really good at the beach if they followed a practical, sustainable plan to get to to the upper or mid-teens of body fat percentage while developing a good muscle tone through exercise. But when you start talking about going down to below 10 percent for men, or 17 percent for women, that’s beyond what most people could do sustainably and is more trouble than it’s worth if you just want to look—and feel—good. The sustained caloric deficit required to lose that much fat involves really strict dieting for several months, which gives you constant cravings for foods you’re not allowed to have and makes you feel lethargic. The latter is a problem because whatever muscle you built beforehand is going to melt away in response to the deficit unless you keep grinding it out at the gym. Continuing to train while your body just wants to rest all the time turns what might otherwise be a fun activity into a terrible chore, and it’s extremely difficult to retain one’s motivation. Once you attain the target body composition, it should be easier to maintain it than it was to get it in the first place. Regardless, it will be difficult to not fall off the wagon if the natural body fat percentage your body wants to revert to is significantly higher. The ironic thing is that despite a person who’s that shredded looking strong and sexy to the lay observer, that level of leanness actually reduces strength, as well as sex drive. So even if you succeed in attracting people, your ability to enjoy it will be sadly reduced. All that to say, unless your actual job requires you to be this shredded, the only reason to do it is as an exercise in art for art's sake.
259* Flight. Despite being a long-held dream of humans for aeons, many animals such as ants and various flightless birds have actually lost that ability in the course of evolution. Why? Because it takes up a disproportionate amount of the body's energy, which only gets amplified by the aforementioned SquareCubeLaw. If one already lives in a suitable environment where they don't need to migrate much, losing flight frees up the body to hone other skills, such as increased muscle strength for worker ants (mating ants still have wings), or swimming and diving skills for penguins. As an example, hummingbirds have very precise flight capability, able to hover in place gracefully -- unlike regular bird flight -- but this mode of flight requires a disproportionate amount of food and without a regular source of nutrients, hummingbirds won't last longer than 3 - 5 hours.
260[[/folder]]
261
262[[folder:Fashion]]
263* Basically, the ''whole point of fashion''. The clothing and makeup of the wealthy and noble (or, in slave societies, simply of free people) are often designed specifically to say "Look, I can afford wasting hours preparing or being prepared by servants. Look, I don't need to work, which would be impossible like that. Look, I don't need to indulge in any activity which may dirty up and ruin all this work spent."
264* "Cutting-edge-of-fashion", ''haute couture'', designer outfits that might look "fabulous" at the exclusive show in Milan, but would be extremely impractical (if not awkward or dangerous) to wear anywhere else. A morning talk show host once did a short on this, where she wore a runway piece to the supermarket to gauge people's reactions, which mostly ranged from "WTF?" to "The jacket is ''kinda'' cute but..."
265** Just as important, they can't be mass-produced due to reliance on sewing techniques that machines can't replicate and fabrics that are just as experimental and unlikely to ever be woven or knitted in real quantity.
266* For that matter, a lot of fancy clothes in general. Try wearing a gown and stiletto heels to do...well, anything productive. To say nothing of corsets, hoop skirts, and the like from the past.
267** Open trench coats don't agree with car doors. Neither do capes and cloaks, [[CapeSnag which also tend to get snagged on just about anything]], as is demonstrated to lethal effect in ''WesternAnimation/TheIncredibles1''. Loosely-fastened scarves are generally a bad idea in dense forests.
268* Corsets, especially for tightlacing and body training. You can get an absolutely ''gorgeous'' waist and body by wearing a corset ([[OfCorsetsSexy and the corset will look sexy itself]]), but it can be tedious, uncomfortable, or [[OfCorsetHurts even painful]] if you overdo it. Good luck attempting strenuous activities whilst wearing a corset.
269* Traditional female clothing in Norway, [[http://www.nb.no/cgi-bin/galnor/gn_sok.sh?id=69110&skjema=2&fm=4 like what this Hallingdal woman is wearing]], dressed up for church. The headgear had to be put on with special care, and the whole set took an hour to finish. The last generation to use this regularly died out sometime around 1980, and younger girls in this particular area switched to a more practical bonnet when dressing up. Nonetheless, this particular way of stashing was common in this area for ''300 years''.
270* Cosplays with elaborate armor, props, wings, and the like are no doubt the result of hundreds of hours of dedication and hard work and look excellent for photoshoots and for simply showing off. However, many of these cosplays can be uncomfortable to walk around a convention center in--just ask anyone who has tried to walk around in a 10-foot-tall cosplay of [[Franchise/NeonGenesisEvangelion EVA-01]] or the complete outfit and armaments of one of the ''VideoGame/KanColle'' ship girls and they will tell you that strolling around the convention grounds without accidentally hitting people with their cosplay or wearing themselves out (depending on the weight of the materials and how warm the outfit is) is no easy task. Usually, people who output these kinds of grandiose cosplays will put them on for a photoshoot and then either remove the parts that inhibit mobility or change into something else to wear entirely when they want to walk around the event venue afterward.
271* Cashmere sweaters. Very warm, soft, and comfortable, but you can't put them in the washing machine; if you don't take them to a dry-cleaner they'll be ruined. They're also rather itchy.
272* There are a lot of truly beautiful clothes out there for children and babies. A surprisingly large percentage of them are not machine-washable.
273** Same goes for the dresses and gowns many starlets wear on the Red Carpet. They ''tend'' to be beautiful, but they cost an inordinate amount of money for something ''she's only going to wear once''. Notable pop star Music/LadyGaga seems to be [[StealthInsult parodying]] this, as some of her outfits are ''really'' out there [[MemeticMutation (the meat dress, anyone?)]] but, as her first performance on ''Series/SaturdayNightLive'' shows, she has some difficulty ''sitting'' in them to play the piano.
274** To a larger extent the [[PimpedOutDress magnificent dresses]] used by both nobility and royalty in the past. Undoubtedly cool, but heavy, stiff, and being needed up to hours to ''be dressed'' in one -and that with the help of several servants or maids.
275* The Roman Toga; the definite status symbol in Ancient Rome and made you look like a refined Patrician, like today's elegant three-piece suits. But they were heavy, inconvenient, a hassle to walk around in, extremely uncomfortable in the hot Roman summer, and more or less completely disabled the use of the wearer's left arm (which, besides the business about the left arm, is rather like today's three-piece suits). They had to impose a law forcing senators to wear them in meetings because they were so widely hated (just as today, certain official arenas like courts and legislatures maintain regulations requiring people to wear suits...).
276** It isn't really surprising: the toga was basically an oval or rectangular woolen sheet about a meter wide and 6 meters long, wrapped around the body several times. Imagine yourself wrapped head to toes in a blanket--in sunny, warm Italy, no less. ''Of course'' it was heavy and stifling: the classical toga was a thing that differentiated a ''quiritus'', or a free Roman citizen, who was expected to devote himself to politics, from a slave, whose purpose in life was to work, and who therefore wore a light tunic.
277* Lots of clothing would come under this, such as extremely high heels that in many situations are crippling, but still popular for aesthetic reasons. Also exceptionally tight and restricting clothing, and clothes that are worn for fetish reasons can be impossible to move in.
278* A classic Japanese kimono is clothing of idle nobility, plain and simple, and this is most evident in the formal women's fashion with its straight and narrow silhouette, which looks stunning, but forces its wearer into a painfully straight posture and barely allows walking. Men's formal wear when in presence of a Shogun or Emperor also included extremely long pleated trousers, called ''naga-bakama'', which were often 2-3 meters long and were ''specifically'' designed to restrict movement for increased safety of a visited dignitary, as they make a sudden attack impossible. Serving or working men and women wore shorter, knee-length or mid-thigh kimonos, often with narrow pantaloons called ''zubon'' for commoners, or wide, pleated ''hakama'' for upper classes and certain trades, and in hotter weather simply a ''fundoshi'' loincloth, all of which allowed for a much better freedom of movement.
279** Not really the kimono versus the obi - the belt that ties it together. The formal women's obi is called a ''maru''. It is a piece of cloth over two feet wide and around fifteen feet long (and costing several hundred dollars for a genuine "made in Japan" one). It is nearly impossible to tie alone, as the large knot is in the back, and certain knots have upwards of 40 steps for tying.
280* Brand-name clothing makes you look cool, but you'll be spending hundreds of dollars when you can wear a similar-looking Brand X for relative chump change.
281* Neckties are popular in many professional fields for men, because, well, they look really classy. However, they can be a hindrance or even a danger to individuals in certain occupations. Police officers, for example, tend to wear [[BoringButPractical clip-on ties]], allowing the tie to detach if it were grabbed by a suspect, whereas a standard necktie could be highly dangerous in close combat[[note]]A 90's sitcom, possibly ''Series/{{Martin}}'' even had the main character ridicule a security guard for wearing a clip-on tie, even though it made perfect sense for his safety[[/note]]. Ties can also be a danger for those who work with heavy machinery, by becoming entangled in the machines and endangering the life of the employee. Neckties may also increase disease transmission in hospitals as well, as many doctors wear them while on the job. Even for those whose occupation does not preclude wearing neckties on a health or safety basis, neckties can be cumbersome to many daily activities. Some studies even suggest that wearing a necktie with the collar buttoned to the top can increase intraocular pressure, leading to a heightened risk of glaucoma and other conditions.
282* Swimwear designed for RuleOfSexy instead of practicality:
283** In the 1990 ''Magazine/SportsIllustrated'' Swimsuit Issue, Creator/{{Elle MacPherson}} wore a one-piece black swimsuit that had a strap over her right breast but [[HandOrObjectUnderwear nothing covering her left breast]]. The magazine lampshaded this by writing that the suit might give her "an unusual tan."
284** Along similar lines, in the 2014 issue, Creator/IrinaShayk was shown wearing a one-piece yellow suit that covered her completely in the front but had netting in the back, exposing her butt. This accomplished the goal of having her wear a full swimsuit and showing what she would look like without it at the same time.
285* Speaking of RuleOfSexy, many forms of lingerie. Looks amazing on the person? Maybe. Tight, clingy, and uncomfortable, especially on someone who doesn't have a particularly exact-matching body type? Almost certainly. Cotton undies, on the other hand, might not exactly send one's mind immediately to ''amore'', but they're perfect if you just want something to wear that's comfortable.
286* Mechanical watches fit this trope to a T. They are amazing, intricate pieces of technology, and they're preferred by watch enthusiasts both as marvels of engineering and as a continuance of hundreds of years of traditional watchmaking. They're also less accurate and less durable than any cheap quartz watch and cost much, much more. Just about the only practical advantage mechanical watches have is not having a battery to need replacing, but they lose that advantage when you consider they need fairly expensive servicing every 5-10 years. (Servicing starts at about $100 for a basic watch with nothing wrong with it and goes up from there.) A multi-thousand-dollar Rolex is in every way less practical than a $10 Casio.
287** Dive watches were once a practical, necessary tool for scuba diving. Nowadays, dive computers have superseded dive watches for just about all diving, and while having a dive watch can be a useful backup for diving, most dive watch owners will never take their watch deeper than perhaps their local pool. Despite this, there is demand for dive watches rated to 1000, 2000, or even 3000 meters of depth, despite the fact that the deepest scuba dive on record was only 332 meters. A helium release valve is also not an uncommon feature on dive watches, despite having no practical use for anyone but deep-sea divers that spend prolonged periods in diving bells. That's to say nothing of mechanical diving watches, which are both quite common among high-end brands (e.g., the Rolex Submariner) and have all the downsides of other mechanical watches.
288** Quartz watches aren't immune from this trope, either. High Accuracy Quartz watches can be incredibly accurate, some to ~5 seconds per ''year'' (as opposed to a normal quartz's ~30 seconds per month). Unfortunately, they're much more expensive than normal quartz watches, and any application that really ''needs'' that level of precision probably isn't being done with wristwatches.
289* Acrylic nails. Sure they may give your hands that extra feminine touch, but they have to be cleaned constantly to minimize the risk of infection and are prone to breaking. Oh, and good luck trying to peel off a sticker or pick up things off the ground.
290* Most of the so-called 'fashionable' haircuts. As [[https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/fa/32/51/fa3251a296c467961fc0f5676a836fdd.jpg amazing]] as [[http://www.verstylehouse.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/New-Modish-Party-Hairstyle-Collection-2014-15-For-Women%E2%80%99s-4.jpg some]] of them may look, the majority of them are absolutely impractical. They generally take a large amount of time to get just right, with the payoff not being as great as the effort, since most people are not up and about long enough to hold this hairstyle for more than 12 hours, tops. And most include touch-ups over the course of the day. There's also the fact that they are just plain impeding in everyday life, particularly those that involve limiting one's vision by a large percentage.
291* Afro-style hairstyles: Especially the supercool ones from TheSixties and TheSeventies as well as the ones Music/{{Prince}} had. Those afros were cut in a way that the surface appeared very smooth and even, like a topiary. Also, a hot comb was used to loosen the hair strands. But that's only immediately after you get off the barber chair. Hair strands grow at different rates depending on where they are on your head, so it will not look perfectly smooth after a few days and especially not after washing it, after which you will have to apply the hot comb again. Like all freshly cut hairstyles, temperatures and humidity changes will open or close your pores and the hair strands will tighten or loosen accordingly. Accumulation of scalp oils and other buildup from holding sprays like Afro Sheen will also clog the pores causing hair to revert to a thicker, more natural style. This style has to be retouched and shaped up every few days, but while black media figures may have the money for that sort of maintenance, it can be a bit of a hassle for many others.
292* There's a reason the beehive hairstyle went out by the end of the '60s. Sure it may have looked cute in magazines and on tv, but it had no practicality for everyday life. The setup was so complicated, the hair couldn't be washed without taking it all down, so women often went weeks without washing their hair, which was every bit as unhygienic as it sounds.
293* Body piercings beyond the earlobes. Sure they might look cool and/or [[RuleOfSexy fetishy]], but they are also subject to much longer and more painful healing times, which also means a longer period than they're prone to infection. Even after they heal, they can cause complications depending on where they're located: piercings on the head of the penis will affect urination, oral piercings can damage the teeth and gums, nipple rings snag on absolutely everything, etc. They can also be difficult to remove, or even impossible without a professional, so you can't switch them out on a whim like you can with earrings. Lastly, if the piercing is someplace highly visible like the eyebrows, lips, or tongue, it might go against school/workplace dress codes.
294** One exception to earlobe piercings being exempt from this trope is extremely large gauges. The process of stretching out your earlobes is permanent, so if you ever decide you're no longer into the look, you're now stuck with unsightly, drooping lobes with massive holes that require ''surgery'' to correct.
295* Having flesh tunnels on your face, namely on your cheeks and nostrils, definitely qualifies (see [[https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/2015/10/record-holder-profile-video-joel-miggler-and-his-11-facial-flesh-tunnels-399674 Joel Miggler]]). While it may seem cool to have holes in your face, the cons are going to HEAVILY outweigh the pros, as having them can make you have difficulty or unable to eat or drink certain foods and beverages, limit your facial expressions, cause the inside of your mouth to be air-dried and suffer from dehydration, have difficulty pronouncing spoken words correctly, get water (especially salt water!) in your mouth and sinuses when you go for a swim, and [[ArsonMurderAndJaywalking end up ruining your table manners]], [[{{Squick}} as seeing inside of your mouth may be disgusting to some]].
296* Solid gold (24K) jewelry (or anything else) sounds awesome, right? There's a reason most gold jewelry is actually 14-18K, and it's not the cost. Solid gold is actually one of the softer metals, making it very prone to denting, scratching, and literally getting bent out of shape. In other words, not what you would want to have made into a ring (or other accessory) that you plan on wearing for decades, let alone a family heirloom.
297* Rompers and jumpsuits. Sure they might be cute and fashionable these days, but the only way to use the bathroom in one is to ''take it all the way off''. At least with men's rompers, the front zipper/buttons extend to the crotch, letting them pee without having to strip. But for women, or men going #2, you gotta take it ''all'' off.
298* High heel shoes, particularly stilettos. While they may be fashionable, heels over 2 inches (5 cm) in height are not very practical in most settings. For those not accustomed to high heels, it often results in HighHeelHurt, and in the worst cases, a TwistedAnkle. Wearing high heels long-term can actually damage your feet. For events that require ladies to dress up such as pageants, weddings, and prom, it is common for ladies to ditch heels as soon as practical and slip on more comfortable shoes, like sneakers, flats, or flip-flops.
299* In a similar vein to high heels, platform shoes. While they may help a short person appear taller, platforms are often clunky to walk in, and novice wearers might stumble at best to twist their ankle at worst.
300* Wedge heels may seem like a more practical substitute for high or stiletto heels because they have a larger sole for more stability. However, the fact that the front and rear portions of the foot are connected to a single, rigid wedge of material means the foot has no ability to flex while walking, which is a problem that even many stiletto-heeled shoes don’t have and which makes them potentially at least as impractical for athletic movement.
301* Body hair removal, especially leg hair. While the smoothness can feel great, and it's conventionally seen as more attractive (at least on women and sufficiently feminine-looking men), it's a ''very'' tedious process and often comes with risks of harm: shaving is perhaps the least risky but can still cause cuts, painful ingrown hairs, and takes a lot of time, waxing can cause skin inflammation and irritation, hair removal cream (like Nair) can cause ''burns'', and sugaring, while less potentially harmful, still involves sticky substances that are not pleasant to peel off the skin. Pubic hair removal can be ''[[GroinAttack especially]]'' problematic. And getting rid of it permanently involves expensive electrolysis/laser procedures. While removing body hair does have a few practical advantages, they are often niche advantages (like in competitive swimming) that aren't really relevant to the average person.
302* A surprisingly large number of Black men in fiction nowadays have the "Killmonger" hairstyle, best exhibited by its namesake, the BigBad from ''Film/BlackPanther2018'': short dreadlocks (or some other type of braid) with faded sides, and maybe colored tips. The idea is to showcase a hairstyle that's both fashionable and uniquely Black, but the problem is that this style would be ''very'' high-maintenance in real life, requiring expensive biweekly visits to the barber to keep looking fresh. It can also seem uncharacteristic if the character doesn't come across as someone who would be fussy about their hair and would likely prefer a BoringButPractical buzzcut or fade in real life, but that's just not as fun to design.
303* In the early days of commercial aviation, people would wear their Sunday best to fly due to it being an upper-class experience at the time (middle- and working-class folks still travelled primarily by train or bus). But, as the rest of this section points out, ''formal wear is not made for comfort''. As air travel became more affordable to the public at large, people began dressing to be comfortable for hours-long flights, and this quickly caught on. Nowadays even the wealthiest of first-class travelers will wear pajama pants or sweats when flying, especially long-haul flights, fashion be damned.
304* Rimless eyeglasses are meant to look sleek and modern, and they have some advantages like being lightweight and not overcrowding the wearer's face, especially if the person isn't happy about needing glasses in the first place. But their popularity took a nosedive once people realized how delicate they are: the bridge and arms have to be drilled directly into the lenses themselves, a specialized process that makes the glasses more expensive ''and'' less durable due to the lenses having to take on all the stress of daily wear. And you can forget about doing any kind of physical activity in them. Some see half-rim glasses as an acceptable middle-ground by giving the bridge and arms something to attach to, or the worst of both worlds since the rim is visible but doesn't provide the durability of a ''full'' rim.
305[[/folder]]
306
307[[folder:Gizmos & Gadgets]]
308* 'Lightscribe' (and its rival [=LabelFlash=]) is a technology that allows you to 'print' high-quality labels onto optical disks such as [=CDs=], [=DVDs=] and Blu-Rays. The process doesn't require paper, ink, or anything else beyond a special type of drive that costs only a couple of bucks more than a regular drive and special disks that cost only a tiny bit more than regular disks. After you've burned your data, you flip the disk over in your drive and 'burn' the label that you've designed in an easy-to-use labeling program; after a few minutes, a high-quality, high DPI label is embedded into the 'label side' of the disk surface. Unfortunately, it takes about 15 minutes to 'burn' a Lightscribe label, and it takes multiple repeated 'burns' to get an image of satisfactory contrast. You might have a Lightscribe capable drive and not even know it, because simple permanent markers are just ''faster''.
309** Similarly, they also make "printable" (matte white upper side) [=CDs=] and [=DVDs=] for use in certain printers. Just don't put them in a high-speed drive, as the rotation speed can sling the ink off of the disk, gumming up the drive.
310*** That being said, [=LightScribe=] and [=LabelFlash=] are genuinely useful for people who have bad handwriting.
311** 'Lightscribe' and similar technology had a predecessor in the form of the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1pehz1hNtk Yamaha DiscT@2]] (tattoo). The idea was that you could tattoo a label on the ''data-side'' of a CD-R and didn't require any specialized media. However, any "tattooing" on the data size can NOT be used to store data, the actual result were barely visible even if you were trying to see it, and again, a boring old permanent marker can be used to quickly label anyway on the intended label side of the disc. The technology also wasn't compatible with DVD+-R which greatly limited the tech's already limited appeal.
312* Early portable [=MP3=] players all had several features that put them firmly in this category.
313** [=CD/MP3=] players were cheap and had significant storage capacity, but they were often difficult to use on the go (anti-skip technology mitigated, but never entirely eliminated, the problem) and preparing their media was a massive hassle. Want to change one track on your 700MB, 160-track CD? Gotta buy a new one. Ah, but you foresaw this and burned it on a rewritable! Nope, gotta buy a new one anyway, because the wear-and-tear of portable use scratched the CD-RW to hell and now your burner doesn't want to know about it. And burners of the time were painfully slow, too -- writing 700MB at 4x speed was a half-hour affair.
314** Hard-disk players had rapid interfaces, no skipping problems and you could effortlessly change their content as you saw fit -- and for the time they held a ''massive'' amount of music. Unfortunately, they were eye-wateringly expensive, often had questionable battery life, and were frightfully delicate -- if you dropped one even a short distance while the disk was spinning you were almost guaranteed to end up with a brick. Often the drive would die after some use even in players that weren't dropped because no hard disk likes being jostled around in a pocket.
315** Flash-based players could be used while taped to a jackhammer and they'd keep working, they could have their content modified at will, they were very lightweight and had great battery life -- but flash memory technology was in its infancy at the time, and you could either have laughably small capacities (like, two hours of music, down to ''half an hour'' for the very first models) or ''absurd'' price tags. They eventually matured to their current state and eliminated all competition, but it took a good few years.
316** Rob Malda of Slashdot was famously [[ItWillNeverCatchOn unimpressed]] with the [=iPod=] for the reasons mentioned above. "No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame."
317** Nowadays, there are hi-res audio players that use one or multiple [=MicroSSDs=] as memory. In a sense, they ''are'' practical because they can hold entire music libraries of tens of thousands of songs in a small and thus very portable frame. They're both smaller and better-sounding than any smartphone out there. Now, navigating such huge libraries on a tiny touchscreen of sometimes less than three inches is tedious to say the least.
318*** Which is why even people who still prefer to listen to offline music no longer bother with carrying one, and instead use their phones which can have hundreds of gigabytes of storage, Bluetooth for wireless earbuds or headphones, and a large touchscreen with input methods refined over a decade and a half. Oh, and also access to numerous music streaming services providing the listener with a near-infinite library (contingent on internet access, of course).
319* dbx emerged as a competitor to Dolby noise reduction for consumer audio tapes but was hampered by the fact that while Dolby recordings were perfectly listenable without decoding equipment, dbx recordings were unlistenable despite higher sound quality than Dolby with properly-equipped recorders.
320* The Sony D-88 Discman. It's a portable CD player that's ''smaller than a CD''. This has obvious appeal to the "smaller is better" crowd, and it can play [=CDs=] just fine, they just stick out of the device -- very cool-looking, but obviously a bit fragile! It does fully contain the smaller discs once commonly used for singles, but this has, of course, become less useful as record labels now either just put singles on full-sized [=CDs=] or stick to digital distribution. And, of course, it's vulnerable to all the same foibles of any other portable CD player. [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AowJGns66_4 Here's a video about it.]]
321* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Ara Project Ara]] was an effort by Google to develop a modular smartphone. You know how with [=PCs=], you, the user, can swap parts like the RAM, CPU, hard drive, and graphics card rather than having to buy a whole new PC? Picture that, but with smartphones. No more having to buy a brand new phone every couple of years, just swap parts in for gradual improvements! And replacing defective parts sounds equally convenient, as opposed to having to buy a replacement phone or take your phone into a repair shop or make extremely risky fixed involving solders and other delicate tools. Unfortunately, various issues with this concept, such as poor performance, high cost of all the combined components, bulking up of the phone due to each component needing to be safely contained, and power inefficiency led Google to cancel this project.
322* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_turntable ELP laser turntable]] is a turntable that plays records with, well, a laser, eliminating wear and tear on the grooves. However, they never caught on due to how unwieldy they were. Not only is the price quintuple-digit for the ''basic'' model, but the laser is highly sensitive, picking up dirt and dust more readily than a stylus (since it doesn't push debris out of the way) and being unable to read vinyl that isn't the standard opaque black. Consequently, owning one requires keeping a limited record collection and constantly cleaning the discs like they're covered in nuclear fallout every time you want to play them. To rub one final handful of salt in the wound, the device was in DevelopmentHell for ages and didn't hit the market until 1997, by which point vinyl had already been displaced by the Platform/CompactDisc, which offered all the same benefits and was more reliable. Tellingly, when Optora attempted to revive the laser turntable in 2018 following renewed sales of vinyl records, the device sat in limbo and was ultimately canned.
323* From time to time vendors floated the idea of phones docking & having their internals powering an otherwise empty shell in the form factor of a tablet, laptop, or even desktop. No need to worry about syncing when it's literally the same device, right?
324** The display and battery in the tablet shell themselves already cost similar to a standalone product, indeed, the lack of production scale meant the Asus [=Padfone=] (a standalone phone that can power a tablet shell) was launched for more than the combined unlocked price of an iPad and an iPhone.
325** Early laptop shell suffers from the phone's relatively underpowered internal and Android's lack of multitasking features. If all you can get is an acceptable performance for web apps, might as well just buy a proper tablet with a keyboard case, which, again, due to production scale can be cheaper than a laptop shell.
326** A dedicated desktop-sized shell is doomed once people can just wireless cast and connect a bluetooth keyboard & mouse. This means travelers can just carry their mouse & keyboard (or even just buy one at a nearby store), and for places that expect customers/employees to require such a setup, the cost of a proper PC is negligible compared to the profit.
327[[/folder]]
328
329[[folder:High Technology]]
330* Carbon fiber, ultimately. It's very lightweight and several times stronger than steel, but it's also brittle, and it corrodes metal in contact, making it a very situational or poor choice for reinforcing armor and equipment. Not helping matters are production difficulties.
331* Theoretically, antimatter would be an incredible fuel, with every gram allowing for prodigious amounts of energy -- making possible things such as far-space travel, or tiny power plants that could energize entire countries. The only problem is, antimatter is astronomically expensive (62 ''trillion'' dollars per gram) and slow to produce (to the point we've only ever managed to make a few hundred atoms), very complex to contain (a momentary containment failure of a significant quantity could result in explosions such as the human race has never yet seen) and has a bad shelf life (varying from a few seconds to a few minutes).
332* Any modern technology when it was in its early stages. The ENIAC, arguably the first digital computer, took up a room. The first cell phone weighed 80 pounds (36 kg). The first modern cars from around a century ago were not only unreliable, but there weren't that many decent roads to drive them on, or very many stations to refuel them at. And before that, the first trains were just as bad (cinders from the steam engines starting fires, later on the wood-burning stove in a wooden framed car being a fire hazard (and wooden framed cars are no protection in a crash), the rails (which were metal straps on top of wood) impaling people through the floor of the carriages, horribly slow by modern standards, etc...). This is why the AndYouThoughtItWouldFail page for [[AndYouThoughtItWouldFail/RealLife real life]] is so long: it’s because most people at the time of the technology's release couldn’t reasonably count them as anything useful, no matter how revolutionary, and as such, considers them as a fad or a novelty, at most, before their full potential had become more apparent.
333* The Manned Space Program. There is very little for scientific pursuits that a manned mission can do that can't be accomplished by an unmanned vehicle for a fraction of the cost (other than things like measuring human performance in space, where a human is part of the question). [[RuleOfCool But it's too cool to resist.]]
334** In particular, colonies on the Moon or Mars. Getting people and some buildings over there, hard as it is, is only a one-time effort. Then there's the ongoing resupply of food, medicine, and anything else they can not produce, without which the colonists will die. A lot of the R&D toward space colonies goes toward making them able to produce their own necessities and something else that can't be had more cheaply on Earth to pay for what still needs to be imported (such as computer chips), as well as for more colonists. (This is one reason why [[AsteroidMiners space stations mining asteroids moved into Earth orbit]] has been proposed before colonizing either the Moon or Mars.)
335* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propulsion%29 Project Orion]]: Using nuclear explosions to propel a spacecraft. (Un)fortunately, the project was shelved after various test ban treaties. However, there were plans to build a freaking ''[[http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/realdesigns.php#id--Project_Orion--Orion_Battleship battleship]]'' with enough firepower to blast the Soviet Union into the Stone Age and have China for dessert. Thankfully it was shelved when the planners realized that it's essentially a game for two.
336** To be fair, the only things that made the spacecraft impractical were legal issues. From an engineering perspective, it was perfectly reasonable, even if it did sound a little over the top. Well... that and its inability to land anywhere with an atmosphere.
337* The concept of a SpaceElevator sounds cool: Bringing materials and people up to orbital altitudes without needing fuel-burning rockets. However, many issues prevent the concept from working in practice, the threat of meteors and satellites colliding with the elevator cable being an obvious concern. As mentioned above though, most new technologies start out impractical and require ''a lot'' of work to bring into the realm of feasibility, space tethers are far from even the prototype stage. There are proposed alternatives like the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure) skyhook]] and the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop launch loop]], which would still involve building structures that are impossibly massive.
338* Back during the Cold War and the Space Race the USA got the Saturn V rocket working, and the USSR wanted something better. Enter the N1, a massive five-stage rocket intended for launching space stations and other large cargo. It was properly huge and employed the novel concept of a cluster of smaller engines instead of the traditional four or five big ones. This gave it a significantly higher thrust than its American counterpart... in theory. In practice, the higher thrust didn't actually give it a better lifting capacity, and the engine cluster required complicated plumbing that was never able to withstand the forces and vibration of launch without exploding the whole damn thing to bits. The second launch crashed back on the pad and caused one of the most powerful non-nuclear explosions ''ever'' recorded; though that probably qualifies as awesome in the traditional sense of the word, it wasn't exactly what the Soviet engineers had in mind.
339** The choice of clustered (relatively) small engines was not due to such cluster being better, but due to the political infighting. Those who were able to produce big engines were intensely disliked by Korolev, and those he was on speaking terms with had no such experience...
340** The first stage rocket engines used by the Saturn V had a different problem. They were actually a bit too powerful for 1960s technology to completely handle. (Let's put a human-sized handle on this: Sure the engines each delivered around 1.5 million pounds of thrust, but who can grasp that? Instead, try this: Each had a rocket-fuel-driven turbopump to pump fuel and oxidizer to the main engine. Those turbopumps produced roughly 55,000 horsepower. Each. Just to pump the gas.) NASA had a large enough budget to work around this problem and completely redesign the Apollo spacecraft after the Apollo 1 fire that killed 3 astronauts. The center engine of a Saturn V was programmed to automatically shut down before the end of the 1st stage burn when the acceleration rate passed a certain point or when pogo oscillations were detected. Both of those could destroy a Saturn V during launch. The Saturn V was designed so that it could lose a first-stage engine partway through the climb to orbit (which did happen twice) and still make it to the moon and back.
341* The [[SpacePlane Space Shuttle]]. The idea was to build a spacecraft that could handle any mission the US government needed to fly, then land on a runway and be reused. Sounds awesome, but it turned out to be impractical. They designed in all sorts of reconnaissance satellite launch features that [[TechnologyMarchesOn became obsolete by the time it flew]]; they had to risk the lives of astronauts on missions that could have been launched fully automated and [[WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong couldn't design a way for the astronauts to escape during a launch malfunction]]; and "reusable" ended up meaning "[[PyrrhicVictory reusable after a refurbishment that cost almost as much as building a non-reusable rocket]]". NASA went from suborbital flights to three-day stays on the Moon with a Moon Jeep without ever losing an astronaut in flight to losing two crews of seven to the Shuttle's impractical design; the government, therefore, switched back to expendable rockets for military satellites, and industry didn't use it very much either. The Shuttle wasn't a total waste - it ''did'' fly every manned NASA mission for thirty years and it accomplished many important missions, including two jobs (repairing the Hubble Space Telescope and building the International Space Station) that no other vehicle could have done as well - but it's hard to believe we wouldn't have been better off dropping used rockets in the ocean for another twenty or thirty years.
342* During the gas crisis of the late 2000s, there was interest in crop-based biofuels as an alternative energy source to oil. The appeal to environmentalists was obvious on the surface — biofuels are made from plant oils rather than petroleum, and as such, they're renewable, generate less pollution, and has a lower carbon footprint. Furthermore, as many biofuels can be extracted from homegrown agricultural crops, there was an additional appeal for energy independence. However, while the actual biofuel product itself is inexpensive and environmentally friendly, the process of mass-producing it isn't. These fuels require more land, leading to further deforestation that only released trapped carbon and thus increasing global warming. It didn't help that growing biofuels siphoned resources like water away from growing food crops, leading to food and water shortages, and caused ripple effects on food prices, i.e. allocating huge amounts of land to grow corn for biofuel drives up the price of corn, which in turn makes every foodstuff that uses corn (of which there are a ''hell'' of a lot more than you might think) more expensive. Subsequently, most businesses and governments have shelved the notion of immediate replacing petroleum with biofuels, though this idea of sustainable biofuels may become viable again provided that they can be successfully extracted from non-edible and sustainable sources like algae.
343* Speaking of alternative energy, there have been a lot of proposed and prototyped devices that harvest both wind and solar energy at the same time. These all reveal the same basic flaws though, the ideal orientation to collect the wind power and the ideal orientation to collect the solar power are usually different. Most damning of all though, there usually isn't a real reason to build one hybrid device and not separate solar and wind harvesters.
344* Solar and wind power sound really cool on paper: there's free, clean energy all around us, all we have to do is tap into it. But large-scale production requires huge amounts of land that might otherwise be used for food farms or [=CO2=]-scrubbing forests, not every location is suitable for a solar or wind farm (and even those that are are inconsistent and subject to the whims of nature), and building the panels, turbines, and batteries requires rare and expensive materials that tend to be mined in countries that don't have stellar environmental (or humanitarian) track records. Thus, without a significant advancement in technology, such alternative energy sources are limited to a supplemental role at best and we're still stuck with fossil and nuclear fuels for the forseeable future.
345* Project Gnome was the first technologically possible design of a fusion power plant. Notice we didn't say fusion reactor. Gnome worked by exploding hydrogen bombs in large underground spaces (created appropriately enough by also exploding hydrogen bombs) and then using the gasses from the explosion to power a turbine. As a side business, the process contains almost all the nuclear fallout in an easy to harvest form, which can then be sold to satisfy the demands for exotic isotopes while un-reacted fissile isotopes can be made into more hydrogen bombs. As crazy as the concept sounds the most impracticable thing wasn't that it needed H-bombs for fuel and actually didn't have a significant environmental impact. Instead, the impracticality came from the fact that it generated enormous amounts of power in seconds and it's economically unfeasible to store power on an industrial scale and set up enough of these things so that one would constantly go off every few seconds was just not logistically possible.
346* Geothermal heat pumps are a very energy-efficient way to heat and cool a building and can work in very cold climates where air source heat pumps are inefficient, but the excavation required to install the coils means that they are only practical for new construction. That's why air source heat pumps employing a conventional refrigeration cycle similar to refrigerators or air conditioners are more popular in temperate climates. Even though air source heat pumps don't work well in very cold temperatures, they have the advantage of taking up relatively little physical space, the same as a conventional air conditioner, and they are much easier to retrofit in existing buildings. An air source heat pump is essentially an air conditioner that has a reversing valve to change the direction of the flow of refrigerant so that it pulls in heat from outside air and moves it inside in heating mode, while it works like a conventional air conditioner in summer. Heat pumps also have electrical heating coils anyway as a backup for really cold temperatures or for a malfunction of the outdoor unit in a split system.
347* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energia Energia]] rocket, developed in the late 1970s-1980s in the Soviet Union, was the most powerful launch system ever built, and was intended to be entirely reusable in its second incarnation -- but it was ''too'' powerful: the projects it was envisioned for, chief among them ''Buran'', the Soviet space shuttle, and eventually a lunar expedition, got axed by the end of the UsefulNotes/ColdWar that happened just as the system was reaching its full capacity, and UsefulNotes/TheNewRussia didn't have the funds to run it. As it later turned out, the project was so ambitious that even the US would have had a hard time finding funding. Naturally, the project was canceled.
348* Hydraulic launches allow roller coasters to reach speeds over 200km/h and generate a forceful launch that can clear a hill of over 400 feet. They are also highly unreliable, which has led to these launch systems being phased out.
349* Particle accelerators can fulfill alchemists' dreams of converting metals such as lead into gold. However, the amount of energy needed to get even a tiny amount of gold is far more expensive than even the price of the gold produced. There are a few other elements which could be produced via neutron irradiation, proton bombardment or other nuclear reactions, but none of them are anywhere close to cost-effective as of 2022. The only exception are nuclear reactions that produce more usable energy than they consume - notably nuclear fission. However, a select few radioactive substances (whose radioactivity is not something to be avoided, but the ''point'' of using them) are indeed only commercially produced via one of those routes (fission, neutron bombardment, proton bombardment etc.) and consequently ''insanely'' expensive. There are - in some cases - proposals to instead extract them from "nuclear waste" (i.e. the "spent fuel" left over by commercial power reactors), but there are major technological, political and commercial hurdles to that, chief among them that it would require "hot reprocessing"[[note]]Reprocessing spent fuel with no or only very short cooling period after discharge from the reactor - usually commcerical "spent fuel" is not reprocessed (if at all) before years have passed from the time it left the reactor[[/note]] - a technology that is currently not used at large scale anywhere in the world as it has large requirements of radiation protection, cooling and puts strains on materials that are not necessarily found in any other current application.
350[[/folder]]
351
352[[folder:Inefficiency]]
353* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKL6elkbFy0 Sharpening a pencil with a CNC Lathe.]] As a commenter pointed out, it's 90 euros for an hour with the machine, but 10 cents to buy a new pencil.
354* Cooking with lava. Not lava rocks, ''[[Film/AustinPowersInternationalManOfMystery liquid hot magma]]''. A favorite demonstration of Syracuse University's Department of Earth Sciences' "[[http://lavaproject.syr.edu/ Lava Project]]" is to [[http://www.businessinsider.com/steak-cooked-lava-grill-meant-bbq-syracuse-university-2015-5 grill steaks with a stream of lava]]. Since the lava furnace takes at least 72 hours to prepare lava, and unless you like your steaks cooked ''very well done'', it's obviously not a practical way to cook anything. Not only that but coming into contact with the lava would lead to some excruciating injuries, provided it didn't outright kill you. Even breathing too close to the stuff is exceedingly dangerous; ConvectionSchmonvection ain't a thing in real life, folks.
355** [[{{Pun}} Of course, we lava good barbecue]].
356* Wireless Charging tends to be this. Sure, it is indeed a neat little method of powering your device - no cables to get in the way. So why is it that, despite this method being around for decades, electronic devices such as smartphones still rely mostly on cords? Because those cords are not only faster but more efficient. A significant amount of energy is released as heat rather than going on to charge the device, with that extra heat not being very good for batteries. Combine the fact that cords are just more convenient (you can still move around your smartphone when charging with a cord as opposed to it having to be on a special charging pad), and wired charging still remains the default way to power your device. Perhaps the biggest problem is that wireless charging is only available for phones made out of non-metal materials, and can also be negated by having a metal phone case or a magnetic pad on your phone (if you use a magnetic phone mount in your car), hence why [=iPhones=] starting with the iPhone 8 started using less durable glass cases.
357** That being said, while there are multiple drawbacks withstanding if you are concerned with the lifespan of your charging port, wireless charging does have the advantage of keeping down wear and tear on that component, plus if you're setting your phone down in the short term, you can give your phone a booster before you head out.
358* Extreme couponing. Getting a lot of groceries and spending very little money sounds enticing, but it can be more trouble than it's worth. Between doing research, collecting coupons, and purchasing products, it can be a massive time sink. Moreover, the practice involves buying groceries in such quantities that would be either impractical or extremely unhealthy for most people to use in a timely manner.
359* Paid Surveys. While they are an easy way to make money, they don't pay a lot and many of them will reject you.
360[[/folder]]
361
362[[folder:Personal Weaponry]]
363* Throwing knives are cool because of the dexterity required to use them, which is why they're used in circus acts and as a hobby. But compared to bows or firearms, they have very short range and comparatively limited accuracy. You can't use them to silently pick off enemy sentries from a distance like in fiction because they lack the power to reliably kill someone at long distances, and InstantDeathStab is not TruthInTelevision: unless you just happen to sever the trachea, the sentry will definitely get the chance to at least scream in pain, alerting their crew, before succumbing. Plus, you're basically throwing away your weapon and giving it to your opponent if you miss and it lands near them.
364** ''Shuriken'', thrown blades resembling stars or darts, are an example of how throwing knives can actually be used: mainly as a concealed weapon that can surprise and distract your opponent, either to open them up for an attack with a different weapon or to slow down their pursuit. Most real shuriken were cheaply made, seeing as they were disposable. Unfortunately for some people who want to play ninja today, shuriken have been banned in several countries on the grounds that they are inherently scary.
365* [[StockNinjaWeaponry Nunchucks]]. They're certainly a flashy weapon to show off within martial arts demonstrations, and being able to master one's use requires a very high level of discipline and finesse. Unfortunately, they're very difficult to train with, pose almost as much of a risk to you as to your opponent even when used properly, and simpler weapons do their job better[[note]]Historically, nunchaku were adapted from grain flails, and they were used the same way a Western flail is: [[BoringButPractical by simply swinging it upside an opponent's head]][[/note]]. Their main use is for honing coordination and visuospatial awareness since effectively training with them requires intimate knowledge of where you are in space and where you need to be. But if you want something to actually hit people with, you'd be better off with a staff or [[BatterUp baseball bat]], which can deliver more force more easily.
366* Six-foot longbows were devastating weapons in the hands of the English from roughly 1250-1500, combining a high rate of shooting with considerable range and power, but the English went through a lot of trouble to keep adequate numbers of bowmen available.
367** It took a whole boyhood and adolescence to grow into using progressively bigger bows with heavier draw weights, while also learning to hit distant targets using only instinctive aiming, so kings of England needed to do things like make weekly archery practice mandatory and ban the playing of football to prevent youths from skipping archery. The English system of recruiting longbowmen required a class of free, usually land-owning commoners who had enough time to devote to archery, came from regions where archery was practical and valued, and were attracted to paid, short-term service in the king's wars as semi-professional soldiers. Most other European countries that tried to create their own longbow forces after the English fashion became disillusioned with the difficulty of changing their institutions and the amount of time it would take to produce results, while also being suspicious of giving their commoners the tools they needed to revolt. They ultimately preferred to use militias or mercenaries armed with crossbows, and later with guns.
368** Making the bows required high-quality wood, preferably from yew trees, which the English over-harvested until they needed to import bow wood from Spain or Italy; the arrows, meanwhile, were sophisticated hand-crafted items and therefore pretty expensive to stockpile. Crossbows were a bit more complicated to make but didn't require such rare materials--especially after the invention of steel crossbows in the 14th century--and bolts didn't require the same delicate fletching as arrows. Later came the handgonnes, where the powder involved some chemistry, but the manufacturing just required iron and ordinary wood, while the ammunition was cheap lead balls.
369** By the 16th century, although various English leaders and military experts tried to keep archery alive, the system was on its way out. An arquebus was a weapon that could punch through a breastplate at close range regardless of the user's strength, and even a man who hadn't trained in shooting since childhood could learn to be accurate at normal combat ranges in a more reasonable amount of time. The longbow still shot faster, but that didn't really matter if you couldn't field as many bowmen as the enemy had arquebusiers. Thus, the military bowman passed into legend.
370* Among civilian firearm enthusiasts, this trope is often known as "tacticool", describing a gun that's been [[GunAccessories dressed up]] with scopes, laser sights, flashlights, bayonets, bipods, and other "tactical" attachments that don't actually improve the function of the gun, and may, in fact, detract from it. Related is the stereotype of the "mall ninja", an inexperienced/ignorant gun enthusiast (typically a young man who's played too much ''VideoGame/CallOfDuty'') who obsesses over these sorts of guns. There are, of course, gun owners who embrace this to the point of deliberate parody, going out of their way to make the most ridiculous guns they can imagine, up to and including tactical ''[[SchizoTech muskets]]''.
371* Fully-automatic machine pistols, such as the Glock 18, MAC-11, and Tec-9, when it comes to anything other than suppressive fire. They burn through ammo, rapidly overheat, jam easily, and are very inaccurate if not equipped with shoulder stocks. Although there have been some exceptions, like the Škorpion, Mauser M712, Micro-Uzi, and Steyr TMP, most machine pistols can be easily replaced by more reliable, controllable, and accurate submachine guns.
372** In particular, the Ingram MAC-10 and MAC-11 machine pistols were good examples of this trope. Being more compact than submachine guns and being robust and extremely easy to manufacture, they possessed an ''awesome'' firing rate - almost double that of similar-looking Israeli Uzi machine pistol. However, the extremely rapid firing rate and flimsy wire stock also meant they were ''horribly'' inaccurate at any ranges beyond 20 m or so, earning a reputation of "bullet sprayers". International Association of Police Chiefs weapons researcher David Steele stated that the MAC-11 was "fit only for combat in a phone booth." It was also all too easy to shoot the whole magazine empty with just one squeeze of the trigger. While some special forces got interested in the MAC-10, MAC did not get contracts and went bust in 1975. As well as that, the .45 ACP/9x19mm MAC-10 had its strengths, but the MAC-11 was a complete disaster. It was tinier than the MAC-10 but chambered in .380 ACP, which gave it extremely heavy recoil. The MAC-11 also had a faster rate of fire, which emptied the magazine even quicker than before and with the heavy recoil, making it practically inaccurate unless at close range.
373*** Ingram machine pistols have ''[[MoreDakka such a horribly great firing rate]]'' - 1600 rounds per minute - that they empty the magazine on one squeeze of the trigger. But those who have actually shot them describe them as [[RuleOfFun "incredibly funny"]].
374** The original [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8d-AQsHY1_c Trejo Pistol]] takes the impracticality up to eleven, being a miniaturized 1911-style .22 pistol with full auto capability and an 8-round magazine, which it burps out in less than a second. The only real purpose it can be said to have is that it's got plenty of [[RuleOfFun "giggle factor"]], as evidenced in the video by Ian of ''Forgotten Weapons'' chuckling like a kindergartner after each magazine he puts through it.
375* Even with automatic fire off the table, the MAC series' semi-auto successors like the Cobray M-11 also have problems of their own, being comically oversized for a handgun and having very poor ergonomics. They're decently accurate and incredibly hard to jam, but the bulky grip, top-heavy overhead bolt, and sharp edges from the stamped sheet-metal construction make it a gun that's both fun to shoot and ''not'' fun to shoot at the same time.
376* The Thompson submachine gun, also infamously known as the Tommy Gun, is partially famous for the drum magazines available for its earliest variants that can hold either 50 or 100 bullets. Sounds impressive for an early SMG, yeah? Well, feedback from military users had some genuine criticism of the drums - they were ''noisy'', slow to load, and not as reliable. Eventually, they issued 30-bullet box mags (that replaced the old 20-bullet mags) and discontinued use of the drums in professional circles. This doesn't stop collectors from keeping and using the old drums, because it's such an iconic part of the weapon's heritage.
377* It's generally agreed among gun enthusiasts that, for self-defense and law enforcement purposes, anything more powerful than a .357 Magnum is essentially [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill overkill]] if you're not built like an ActionHero, unless you expect [[BearsAreBadNews to be attacked by bears]]. If that's the case, then [[HandCannon .44 Magnum]] is the ''minimum'' recommended cartridge. However, these handguns are still outclassed in every regard by the high-caliber rifles that hunters have been using for decades, so their only value might be as an emergency backup weapon.
378* Aftermarket hi-cap magazines that can hold up to 100 rounds ''or more'' are often ridiculous, especially in the civilian sector (where they are the most popular; armed forces are normally fine with sticking to whatever magazines their weapons' manufacturer built to work with it). In exchange for not having to reload as often, the shooter has to contend with having several pounds of weight added to the gun, sometimes more than the gun itself when fully loaded. Hell, some even weigh more when empty than a standard magazine does when it's full. Add to this that these mags are often ridiculously unreliable, meaning you'll spend much more time clearing jams than you would have saved not swapping magazines.
379* DualWielding:
380** The GunsAkimbo style. Sure, [[RuleOfCool you look badass pulling it off]], but having a gun in each hand makes aiming and reloading impossible. Carrying two pistols in a hypothetical action movie scene, it is better to fire them one at a time, switching to the second pistol when the first one is empty to delay the need to reload one.
381** It's possible in real life if you're a trained expert with years of experience. It's easier to learn to shoot one gun well than two guns with varying success.
382** Dual-wielding swords may look awesome, but they're hard to use and aren't as useful as a single sword with a shield. No military culture ever used two swords in serious combat. A dagger or short sword in the off-hand (a "main gauche") was used to parry in dueling and/or fencing, but in real warfare, a shield could parry ''and'' better protect you from being skewered.
383*** Though some historical armies (such as the medieval Portuguese) used a sword and a knife, it's still not much better. When it did pay off, [[RefugeInAudacity it was often because of its novelty]].
384*** However [[UsefulNotes/{{Miyamoto Musashi}} Miyamoto Musashi]] taught the "Niten Ichi" two-sword technique, using a Katana and a Wakizashi (short sword) and used it quite effectively. He also recommended training with two long swords, one in each hand, in order to learn to not use two hands with your long sword. Once you learn that, you switch to the long sword and companion sword. Musashi actually discouraged the use of just one sword. (But then, Musashi was just THAT good.)
385** SwordAndGun was practical at one time since a flintlock pistol could only hold one shot and even a cap-and-ball revolver held only 6 or so shots and took too long to reload in the middle of a melee; you'd need the sword in order to defend yourself against anyone who rushed you while your gun was empty. It was also unnecessary to grip the pistol with both hands, since you'd be using this technique in a situation where the enemy was really close to you, and such early guns didn't have the best accuracy even under ideal conditions. However, the arrival of metallic cartridges and clips or magazines made reloading in combat a lot easier. You might as well use the gun for both short and long range if reloading it is easy, and you can't reload quickly or use a two-handed grip if your sword's in the other hand. Besides, a scabbard is cumbersome to wear if you don't really need a sword.
386* The Mateba Model 6 Unica, known to most people as the "Autorevolver". It's a revolver that cycles like a semi-auto, removing the need for a heavy trigger pull. It looks super cool, but it combines the drawbacks of both semiautos (less durable and more prone to malfunction) and revolvers (smaller magazine capacity and difficult to reload) into one rare and extremely expensive package.
387** Cocking the gun semiauto-style is possible (for show, as otherwise you'd prepare the first shot by simply arming the hammer), but as the carriage lacks grippy surfaces you can only do it by... pushing on the barrel.
388** The Model 6 Unica was also available as the Grifone, with a lengthened barrel, hand rest, and stock, effectively turning it into a carbine. The Grifone was available in .454 Casull too, which is a ridiculously powerful round that's overkill in pretty much any conceivably practical scenario. And in those scenarios where it's not overkill (ie big game hunting), there are still plenty of better and/or less expensive options.
389* Nearly all "collectible" "fantasy" type knives and swords are this. Lots of wicked-looking pointy bits, but you're at least as likely to injure yourself if you try to use them in combat, either from the excess pointy bits on the weapons or from the brittleness of the cheap steel used to make them. That's to say nothing of the fact that a barbed blade could easily get snagged in your opponent's body or armor, which could be very bad if the thrust didn't kill them, or they have friends.
390* The Desert Eagle handgun, especially in .50AE chambering. Awesome looks, awesome power, awesome boom, loved and used by every action hero ever, kills bad guys like nothing else. The concept doesn't translate well in reality though: excessively heavy and bulky, unmanageable recoil (to the point where fractured wrists are a very real possibility), expensive ammunition [[note]].50 Action Express rounds go for over 2 USD ''each'' in 2022... if you can ''find'' them, which has been difficult since COVID-19. If that doesn't sound like much, you've never been to a range during practice shooting[[/note]], small magazine size and ''too much power'' ensure its status as a toy for rich people, but not a practical weapon. Deagles chambered in smaller calibers like .357 are marginally more practical, offering less recoil and a slightly bigger magazine capacity, but are still oversized, more finicky, and heavier than almost any revolver with the same chambering (and such revolvers with a 7 or even 8-shot capacity aren't as rare as you'd think).
391** It also sports two design choices that make it impractical for anything other than range use and occasionally hunting regardless of which caliber it's chambered in - it operates off of what is basically a rifle-style gas relay system (meaning that unjacketed rounds, such as those commonly used in .357 and .44 magnum revolvers, will quickly clog the gas valve, so the cheapest options for its already expensive ammo are a no-go) and uses a "free-float" magazine that will jam if there is any upward pressure placed on the magazine during cycling-- not that you should be using the (also cool-looking but impractical) [[http://www.everydaynodaysoff.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Teacup-Handgun-Grip-1.jpg Hollywood "teacup" grip]] on such a massive pistol to begin with.
392** All types of handguns, even Olympic target pistols, are woefully inaccurate at long range. A rifleman can be trained in a few weeks (and hundreds of rounds fired) to hit an apple beyond 100 yards. To get the same performance from a handgun at 25 yards, it takes years of training. So the gigantic .50 caliber round of the Desert Eagle may be awesome at a few yards if the bear charges you, but nothing else.
393** Nearly all decently-powered pistol rounds actually have a much, much longer effective range than one might expect -- up to several hundred yards in some particularly stellar examples. Submachine guns like the 9mm caliber [=MP5=] and the .45 ACP caliber Thompson are effective out to about 150-200 yards, while there also exist rifles and carbines chambered to fire pistol rounds that have similar ranges and are often used for home defense. The problem is that, while rifles have stocks that significantly dampen the natural motion of a shooter's arms, handguns are subject to every tiny tremble and muscle motion of the wrist, resulting in the angle of the barrel changing much more unpredictably.
394** Expanding on the mention of the "teacup" grip above, the stance is popular in movies and on TV because it allows for a better view of the handgun, but actors are firing blank cartridges and they don't have to deal with the recoil that comes with live ammunition. In real life, cupping your non-dominant hand beneath the grip makes the weapon considerably harder to control because that hand is doing nothing to help brace the gun, resulting in a heavy, bucking muzzle flip that severely hurts your follow-up accuracy. Speaking of severe hurting, try using that grip on an especially powerful handgun and then have fun explaining how you got that nice, shiny new lump on your forehead (read: ''[[DontTryThisAtHome Do not try it]]'').
395* Pistol swords. Sure, the idea of a sword and gun together sounds more efficient than just going SwordAndGun, as [[BayonetYa bayonet-fitted rifles]] have shown, but in practice, all one got was an overly heavy, poorly-balanced sword and a pistol that was difficult to aim properly.
396
397* The long, proud history of trying to make [[MixAndMatchWeapon swords, knives, or hatchets that are also guns]] or [[SwissArmyWeapon swords, knives, or hatchets that turn into guns]] mostly belongs here, but the trend hit its zenith (or nadir, depending on your perspective), with the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_revolver Apache revolver]], an attempt at making a gun that's also a knife that's also a knuckle-duster. In practice, the revolver is horribly inaccurate outside of extreme close range, since it lacks both sights and a meaningful barrel, and unreliable, since the trigger has no guard or safety and the barrel actually points back to the user while folded into knuckle-duster configuration. The knife is a fold-over that's pretty short and just as imbalanced as most such [[MixAndMatchWeapon melee weapons that're also guns]]. Also, changing configurations was a pretty involved process in the heat of combat, negating most of the advantages of having a gun that's also a knife that's also a knuckle-duster.
398* Large-capacity cylindrical magazines, such as the notorious 50-round drum on the Thompson SMG or the helical magazine on the futuristic-looking Calico M690. They allow a user to fire more shots between reloading, and look cool besides, but they're notoriously unwieldy, prone to malfunction, and take an age and a half to restock. Military forces, by and large, have decided to just continue using the BoringButPractical stick or box magazines instead; a soldier might only have 30 rounds in the magazine, but at least they won't need dozens of extra-large pockets to carry the spares.
399* Civilian legal semi-auto versions of submachine guns might seem handy as a general idea but are often impracticable due to other gun laws. Nearly every country that allows semi-auto guns also bans short-barreled rifles and almost all submachine guns fall under this category. You either have to buy the sub gun as a ridiculously oversized pistol or have it with a comically oversized unsupported barrel. They ''can'' be legally owned in most U.S. states, but doing so requires registration with the Federal ATF Bureau, which requires multiple forms, months of waiting, a $200 fee, and the knowledge that Uncle Sam is well aware of your cool new toy (if this doesn't sound like much of a deal-breaker, you don't know many {{Gun Nut}}s).
400** The reason submachine guns have such long receivers in the first place is to reduce the rate of fire and recoil stress during full auto bursts. When converted to semi-auto, this space is useless as the action time of a semi-auto can be as fast as the magazine can load. There are several commercially sold carbines that account for this and move the magazine into the pistol grip rather than in front of it. These also tend to support the barrel more since they are designed with a sixteen-inch barrel in mind.
401* The 10mm Auto pistol cartridge was designed by Jeff Cooper to get the best of the flat trajectory of the 9mm with stopping power on the level of the .45 ACP and was further scaled up in production. What resulted was a semiautomatic pistol cartridge that delivered more energy than a .357 Magnum. It proved to be overkill, with cartridge cases too long and with too much recoil for comfortable and effective handling and shooting by many shooters, as well as being overpowered for defensive use (where overpenetration is an issue), and so was redesigned into the .40 S&W. It still exists in the 21st century for those who insist on having that level of performance (despite the relative scarcity of ammunition options), or for people who need a semiautomatic for potential defense against bears in the wilderness. It's also gained modest popularity for handgun hunting.
402* Due to a GrandfatherClause, [[http://www.cracked.com/article_17016_7-items-you-wont-believe-are-actually-legal.html there exist]] eleven [[GatlingGood miniguns]] that are legal in the United States for people with a decent gun permit. The guns cost 400,000 dollars, plus the price for a decent gun mount, plus another sixty dollars for firing the gun for a single second. In this case, just forget practicality, hunting, or personal defense, unless you consider another nation's entire armed forces to be a likely home invasion scenario and cloned dinosaurs to be a likely hunting target.
403* In the United States, there is nothing but a lot of paperwork and some minor fees keeping you from buying a cannon, whether it be one of the old-timey black powder muzzleloaders or one of the more modern artillery pieces. Explosive shells are out of the question (except very special occasions) as each one of those will require the exact same amount of paperwork and fees. But unless your property suddenly has a tank infestation or you have a need to lob t-shirts at extremely high velocities, there isn't a need. Even if you are up to something nefarious, it's hard to imagine you wouldn't achieve whatever your goal is with many other guns that aren't nearly as much of a pain in the butt to acquire, transport, store, maintain and feed.
404* Owning full-auto firearms, for the private civilian owner. MoreDakka will never ''not'' be cool, but obtaining one legally is an outright impossibility in most countries, and in the few where you can it's absurdly expensive and difficult to acquire one. Without a Federal Firearms License [[note]] which is this in and of itself, because the only practical use for an FFL is for people who trade in firearms as a living such as gun importers, manufacturers, and dealers, as it entails an expensive ($500 for sub-$500k annual receipts) annual tax, a mountain of paperwork, and very stringent legal requirements [[/note]], the only legally purchasable automatic guns in the United States were all made prior to 1986, with an ever-dwindling supply of older guns that may or may not have been maintained very well; prices on these generally ''start'' at the $10,000 mark and go up from there. Add on the previously-mentioned federal registration and $200 tax stamp, and you have a weapon that is difficult to control and hard to practice with, by way of being prohibited at the vast majority of gun ranges. Even in a self-defense scenario, full-auto is likely overkill for a single shooter (as in, not part of an armed squadron that might need to lay down a large volley of suppressing fire) as you might have to worry about collateral damage. Furthermore, BottomlessMagazines don't exist in real life, and you can only "spray bullets" for about 2-3 seconds before your average assault rifle or submachine gun goes ''*click!*''. If you wish to handle full-auto guns, it is more practical to do so under supervision with range-provided guns.
405** In a similar vein to the above, we have bump-fire stocks. It's an attachment to your rifle that makes the recoil of the gun help increase your fire rate. Essentially, it gives you near full auto capabilities without the hassle of a tax stamp, paperwork, and incredibly limited supply [[note]] at least until the 2017 Las Vegas shooting (the deadliest mass shooting in US history), which results in a complete ban of bump-fire stocks [[/note]], at the cost of a sporadic fire rate, and making you unable to hit whatever you were aiming at, because it essentially requires you to slam the entire upper assembly of the rifle against your shoulder, completely wrecking accuracy and precision.
406* [[http://www.backyardartillery.com/82500 The rubber-band Gatling gun.]] The ''ultimate'' in rubber band small arms technology, it can fire over a hundred bands in a matter of seconds. Unfortunately it costs $500.00 (not including shipping), takes around half an hour to load, has a tendency to jam if not loaded very carefully, and is horribly inaccurate.
407* The [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franchi_SPAS-12 Franchi SPAS-12]] shotgun is another weapon that became famous through action movies and video games but the weapon's handling makes it unwieldy to use. The pump action is difficult to operate for a shotgun and the weapon weighs in at 10 lb (4.53 kg) fully loaded. Another problem was a notoriously unreliable safety that required a manufacturers' recall to address. In short, it may be cool-looking in movies and video games, but you're better off with another shotgun for regular use. The final nail in the coffin at least for the [[UsefulNotes/AmericanGunPolitics United States]] was a ban on its importing in 1986[[note]]Along with pretty much every other long gun made by a foreign company with a couple exceptions. Guns made by a foreign company but ''manufactured'' in the U.S. are exempt from this. Contrary to popular belief the SPAS-12 is NOT banned in the U.S. (at least on a federal level, state or local laws may say otherwise), it's considered no different than any other semi-automatic shotgun and no special tax stamps or permits are required to buy one that was in the U.S. before the 1986 ban went into effect. Bringing one in from anywhere ''outside'' the U.S. is a felony, regardless of when the gun was made.[[/note]], making it both very hard to find and an impractical shotgun that may possess an unreliable safety.
408* Every single gun created by Cobray Company falls to this with varying degrees of awesome, although also universally impractical.
409** They produced some of the above-mentioned MAC-10/MAC-11. Accuracy and reliability are surprisingly adequate, but the huge size, bulky, angular grip, top-heavy bolt, and sharp edges from the gun's sheet-metal construction make them range toys that are both fun to shoot and ''not'' fun to shoot at the same time.
410** The Pocket Pal was a dual-barreled revolver that could fire both .22 long and .380 special rounds. The problem was that it could only either hold one type of cartridge at a time, requiring that the entire cylinder be replaced to change bullets, or even just to reload. The gun was also entirely cast steel, so it was quite heavy for its tiny size.
411** The Terminator's only awesome feature is its name. The gun is a single-shot slam fire shotgun. The Terminator is infamously unreliable. ''WebVideo/ForgottenWeapons'' took one to a range and it misfired far more often than it actually shot anything. However, since it is a slam fire, I.E. the heavy barrel launches backwards to make the bullet hit a static pin (and against your shoulder), it has uncomfortable "recoil" even when it doesn't fire. Despite its questionable ability to even act as a single-shot weapon, the Terminator got legal attention over the possibility that it could be easily converted into a machine gun (although doing such an act would require an expert gunsmith, lots of steel, and lots of money, making the prospect of an easy machine gun completely impossible).
412** Their most infamous design is the Street Sweeper. A copy of the Armsel Striker, this shotgun has a large cylinder that can hold up to 12 rounds and gives the weapon a fearsome appearance. However, reloading the gun is a long procedure as the spent casing has to be manually removed and the cylinder has to be cranked by hand between each bullet insertion. The weapon suffered from Cobray's patented reliability issues, and its steel buttstock made it incredibly uncomfortable to shoot. Even though the weapon's combat effectiveness is highly questionable, the gun's name and fearsome appearance gained unwanted attention from the ATF, who declared both the Street Sweeper and the original Striker "destructive devices" without sporting purpose, requiring a tax stamp (and a mountain of paperwork) to buy or transfer them.
413*** Cobray retooled the Street Sweep into the "Ladies Home Companion". It was a Street Sweeper in pistol form and was marketed for women to use as a personal defense weapon at home. This made the gun effectively a high-capacity revolver with a "cool" appearance. However, the "pistol" was 8 pounds (for comparison, the M16 rifle is only 7.5 pounds when fully loaded), with a huge amount of weight in front of the shooter's firing hands so keeping the weapon pointed at a target is exhausting, the recoil is insane thanks to be being chambered in a .45-70 caliber ''rifle round'', on top of all the existing issues with the Street Sweeper.[[note]]Hilariously though, the ATF just considers this a revolver, and so it's perfectly legal to own anywhere that pistols are legal to possess. Theoretically you could place one in a holster and open carry it where permissible by law.[[/note]]
414* Firing red-hot rebars from a [[https://youtu.be/0nLT_bEaLlY battery-powered crossbow]] may seem awesome, but the concept doesn't translate well from the ''VideoGame/HalfLife2'' source material to real life. Red-hot rebars don't make the ideal projectiles because they're so soft from being heated and there's no fins to stabilize the bolt so accuracy will suffer. Not to mention, you need a supply of batteries to heat up the rebars and not simply arrows for your ammo.
415* 3D-printed firearms have been the bane of gun-control advocates (to the point that distributing blueprints for such guns online is now practically a felony), owing to the fact that 3D printers are becoming more and more widespread. However, politicians and gun-control advocates have ignored several problems with 3D-printed guns. The feed polymer used in most 3D printers is the same kind used for making LEGO bricks and does not put up with the stress of actual gunfire very well (most 3D-printed guns are single-shot guns or revolvers which can't shoot many live rounds before their barrels rupture from heat stress). 3D-printed firearms also do not work without ammunition, which must be purchased from a store or a second-hand supplier (and nobody has ever 3D-printed ammunition). Next, 3D printers are expensive and require a lot of technical expertise in the interfacing software. And last, but not least, it is hard to imagine any practical (let alone criminal) shooting use for a gun made entirely out of polymer. So as far as we're concerned, 3D-printed guns are hardly going to be the best friends of any violent criminal, as conventional guns will always have the upper hand in many ways. A far better makeshift firearm can be made by using a [[BoringButPractical bench press and milling machine]], costing ''less'' than a 3D printer.
416* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputter_Gun Sputter guns]]. They are basically submachine guns or machine pistols which shoot the whole magazine empty when the bolt is released, thus overriding the need of trigger. They were invented due to a loophole on automatic weapons law in the USA. Needless to say, they were quickly prohibited in almost all countries in the world.
417* The Taser 10, developed by Axon Enterprise, improves upon older models by being able to be loaded with up to ten cartridges at a time, as opposed to older tasers only being capable of loading two cartridges at most. This sounds fantastic until you dissect how tasers work. They create neuromuscular incapacitation (NMI) by striking the target with two wired probes (basically tiny harpoons) fired by the taser which then sends an electrical current to the target and painfully prevents muscle use between where the probes hit. The bigger the probe spread, the fewer muscles the target can use. Older models such as the Taser X2 and the Taser 7 utilize cartridges that fire two probes at once at different angles, ensuring probe spread. The individual cartridges for the Taser 10 are loaded into a large magazine and are synonymous with individual probes, meaning that a police or probation officer would need to fire their taser at least twice to have a chance of incapacitating their target. In a life or death situation, an officer may not be fast enough to aim and fire a Taser 10 a second time, and not in an incapacitating area, while an older taser model would be able to create NMI with a single shot.
418[[/folder]]
419
420[[folder:Pets]]
421* Exotic pets, or just numbers of ordinary ones, were used to show off the owner's wealth and easy life. The most common ones were [[PantheraAwesome big cats]], monkeys, {{bears|AreBadNews}}, [[GoingToSeeTheElephant elephants]], and non-native birds, but anything that took their fancy was fair game. Royalty and nobility were also known for ''herds'' of horses when even one horse was a sign that the owner was well above everyone else.
422** Dangerous exotic pets, such as lions, tigers, chimps, wolves, and wolfdogs, are seemly cool and awesome to have...but come at the high cost of ''high chance of eventual mauling or death.'' They also are often illegal and expensive as hell to keep - a single tiger, for example, will cost upwards of ten thousand dollars a year to feed and take care of - and it's a good way to make sure your loved ones never visit you again for fear of your pet.
423** Domesticated servals. They embody the best character features of the cat and the dog, they're fast and agile and in general great fun to have around. They're also extremely expensive to buy, require rather more food and open spaces than your average cat, and need very caring and committed owners.
424** This is the origin of the term "white elephant". The legend goes that the kings of [[UsefulNotes/{{Thailand}} Siam]] would gift white elephants to people they found troublesome or obnoxious, so as to ruin them financially with the costs of their upkeep. Since white elephants are held to be sacred in both UsefulNotes/{{Hinduism}} and UsefulNotes/{{Buddhism}}, there were laws protecting them from being killed or used for labor, meaning that the recipient of this gift now had to care for a large, hungry beast that he couldn't get rid of or put to good use (and it's not like you could turn it down, either, since refusing a gift from the king, much less a gift of a sacred animal, would be a grave offense).
425** For Asian households, Arowanas are considered to be a good omen on your house (the legend goes that they're juvenile forms of Chinese Dragons). However, a single silver Arowana can cost upwards of 1000 USD young, and several thousand when matured (rarer colored ones go for double or even triple the price of the silver ones). And they're not easy to keep either; they are carnivores and must be fed a specific diet (usually live), and when matured can grow to a length of two feet and become strong enough to ''break the tank they're in''. Wealthy Asian businessmen are known to not only buy the most high-end tanks for them but also specifically hire people to keep these things alive (which is pretty much a 'round the clock job). It becomes somewhat HilariousInHindsight that the original legend said that the dragon born of an Arowana would come back to either punish a bad owner or shower the owner with riches (anyone actually rich enough to take care of one would probably be better off just spending the money!).
426** Even the basic octopus is very expensive and has specific needs that require extensive planning to keep as a pet, made worse by the surprising frequency people try to buy them for their home aquariums. First, their extreme sensitivity to changes in their water combined with their messy eating habits means that their water needs to be changed ''very'' frequently. But most prominently, the fact that they are so intelligent means that they are prone to boredom and escape attempts, meaning they need tanks with locks and toys just to keep them entertained. And what does even the most dedicated octopus owner get under the best conditions once all of these needs are checked? A pet that requires a lot of work to keep healthy and entertained and whose natural lifespan almost guarantees they won't live more than a year or two anyway.
427* Dog breeds that are extreme distortions of the original model, such as bulldogs with such big heads and narrow pelvises that they can't give birth naturally; their puppies always have to be delivered by Caesarean.
428** Or pugs, which will self-destruct (that is, grow infections and illness, quite possibly leading to death) if not cared for very scrupulously.
429** Big debates have sprung up over slope-backed or straight-backed German Shepherds.
430** Cat breeders are doing the same genetic damage to several breeds. Purebred Persians have breathing problems, eye problems, and are more likely to have stillbirths. The original breed type is still around (usually called Traditional Persian or Doll-Face Persian), but cat shows won't let them compete because they don't have the malformed skull that has become breed-standard.
431** On the other side of things, a few bulldog breeders have realized that the current breed standard for bulldogs is unhealthy to the well-being of the bulldog so they're setting a new standard to make it more robust (and even looking like how the breed was in the 1800s).
432** Genetic disorders are one of the pitfalls of so-called "certified breeds". One popular breed, the golden retriever, can suffer from disorders such as hip dysplasia due to the lack of genetic diversity in the family tree, a problem not found in "mutt dogs". Mutts don't have the "awesomeness" of purebred dogs and may not command the same high prices, but tend to have fewer recessive traits that can plague pure breeds and can still make great companions. Often overlooked because of the priceless nature of a family pet, but still a major consideration before adoption.
433* Cloning your pet. Imagine bringing your beloved and amazing animal companion back from the dead! Only cloning doesn't work that way in real life. The clone may be genetically identical, but it'll be a unique and new individual with its own temperament and personality. Not to mention that cloning would cost a ton of money to essentially get a pet you could buy from a breeder or shelter for much less.
434* Many reptile owners decide that they're bored of "common" reptiles found in the pet trade today--bearded dragons, box turtles, ball pythons, etc.--and go for something far more unusual and exotic: monitor lizards, emerald tree boas, large tortoises, something along those lines. Maybe even a venomous aka "hot" reptile. However, even if legality isn't an issue (and sometimes it is), these pets can cost thousands of dollars to purchase, with equally-expensive care requirements due to their size, natural habitat, and diet. They might also have a defensive nature and be more prone to hiding from and/or attacking their owner. And this is assuming the pet doesn't die from inadequate care. Indeed, the reason the more common reptile species are so popular in the first place is because they do well in captivity: docile temperament, manageable size, and relatively-simple needs.
435** Some large snakes, such as anaconda (''Eunectes murinus'') are known as aggressive and having vicious temperament, and can be dangerous to the owner or family members.
436* Parrots, especially larger ones like the huge Hyacinth Macaw and smart ones like the African Grey, are very difficult to care for properly, and as they can be capable of living for decades even require posthumous arrangements for their care. They are great companions, but it is exactly that capacity of sociality which makes their care so difficult. They are social animals who require interaction with others and isolation makes them dangerous to themselves and others. If one is a professional working with animals then they are an excellent choice, but casual pet owners would be far better off simply getting a dog or some fish.
437[[/folder]]
438
439[[folder:Sports and Martial Arts]]
440* In the [[UsefulNotes/{{tennis}} tennis world]] in 2007, an exhibition match between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal called [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Surfaces Battle Of The Surfaces]] was held. Federer vs. Nadal on a half-grass, half-clay court. So awesome. So impractical.
441** In 2011, Federer vs. Nadal on a tennis court [[http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/tennis/article-1343739/Rafael-Nadal-Roger-Federer-really-walking-water-Qatar.html floating on the ocean]]. Jesus, that's cool.
442* Speaking of sports being played on things floating in the ocean we also had the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrier_Classic Carrier Classic]], a series of [[UsefulNotes/{{NCAA}} college]] UsefulNotes/{{Basketball}} games on American aircraft carriers in 2011 and 2012. There's two problems with this idea, one that's pretty obvious and one less so. The obvious one is that aircraft carriers are ''very'' expensive pieces of high tech military hardware that can be put to much better use other than hosting basketball games, the less obvious one is that depending on the ambient air temperature too much condensation can form on the court and make it unsafe to play on. Of the five games scheduled to be played in 2012 two had to be cancelled (one outright and one deemed null and void after the first half), the games two days later were completed as scheduled and since then basketball on aircraft carriers has been limited to actual soldiers on rec time.
443* Most martial art styles you see in the movies is this trope. You see all those cool backflips, dodging moves that Creator/JackieChan and Creator/BruceLee know? They're real, though choreographed for movies. The most effective techniques are the simple ones you learn early. Some less-than-practical examples from Shaolin Kenpo:
444** Defensive Maneuver Eleven. During the course of that, you redirect a punch, knock them down, break your attacker's legs ''three times'', knee them in the spine, and leave them face-down on the floor after kidney-shotting them. Good luck doing ''that'' one in real life.
445** Another offensive technique merely involves grabbing the top of a person's arm while they punch, slapping their ears, and then kneeing them in the face. You'll notice the technique begins with what is effectively ''catching a punch''.
446** Creator/BruceLee once commented that a person who has trained for a year in boxing and a year in wrestling could beat any eastern martial artist in a no-holds-barred fight. This is why he created Jeet Kune Do, which wound up quite influential on UsefulNotes/MixedMartialArts: he felt that other Eastern martial arts forms had grown too rigid to the point of being useless in a real fight, referring to them as "organized despair".
447** Any flying kick or other technique that causes the attacker to leave the ground in various martial arts. The purpose of these techniques is to teach control and balance and pulled off well they definitely look cool. But they are often highly telegraphed and leave the attacker without any sure footing until they land. A sufficiently savvy defender can simply sidestep these or even knock the kicker right out of the air.
448* No matter how cool it looks, a roundhouse kick is easily telegraphed and can be countered in many ways even with proper training.
449* UsefulNotes/{{Aikido}} in general tends to earn this accusation, to the point that even many of its defenders will usually admit that it's pretty useless in any kind of actual fight (or even spars, or sport fights like MMA), if not outright claiming it's not meant for fighting at all. Aikido prioritizes flashy, impressive-looking throws and grabs that, when executed successfully, allow the user to flip someone over their shoulder like a ragdoll while barely moving themselves. However, many of said techniques are also based on countering an opponent who does nothing but walk at you in a straight line throwing clumsy punches. Aikido training also places almost no emphasis on conditioning and fitness, and features no real sparring; in fact, a significant part of the art is in the person being thrown or forced into a hold actually ''assisting'' the other person in doing so. As Creator/{{Seanbaby}} once put it:
450-->''Combat in aikido is centered around using your opponent's own force against him. When you watch high-level demonstrations, it's one grand master in the center of 50 aikido lunatics. They take turns sprinting at him and when each of them gets close, something subtle causes them to front flip. Suspiciously, this front flip-causing ability only seems to work against people who are voluntarily practicing aikido with you. Against regular people, it only seems to be very unpleasant on your joints.''
451* Ironically, UsefulNotes/KravMaga, despite it's pragmatic, modern military reputation also falls into this trope in the eyes of many martial artists. As a style focused entirely on military and self-defense situations, Krav Maga provides a massive repertoire of brutal incapacitating moves meant to ''end'' a fight, aimed at vital points of the target such as their throat, eyes, and most infamously, [[GroinAttack groin]]. However, in practice, it's become a victim of it's own excessive brutality and emphasis on potentially lethal takedowns... there simply isn't much ''room'' to actually spar instead of rely on rehearsed motions when you're learning how to gouge people's eyes out, and this lack of combat experience can often cause it to fall apart even in a relatively simple situation.
452* It's difficult to say whether or not basketball (mostly the NBA) subverts or plays this trope straight with slam dunks. Many NBA players will not hesitate to perform a flashy dunk if they have the chance, mostly on fast breaks. The 360s, reverse dunks, and windmills look a hell of a lot cooler than standard dunks, but they're still worth the same number of points... and the fancy dunks have a higher chance of missing. However, some people are of the belief that performing flashy dunks can spark a home crowd (or deflate an opposing crowd), thus giving the team more momentum than a normal dunk would.[[note]]You could make a case that this does have a practical value, players that are known for this flashy but not particularly fundamentally sound plays do draw in TV ratings, especially in the coveted [[Main/{{Demographics}} "Key Demo"]]. Players salaries are a fixed percentage of total league revenue (currently 50% per the agreement between the owners and player's union), and most of that revenue comes in the form of TV rights fees, you can do the math from here. These showboat players also tend to do better in terms of endorsements than a more low-key guy with similar stats. No player will ever admit this out loud, but while it might not help your team win it could be a big help to your personal finances.[[/note]]
453** The defensive equivalent of a flashy dunk in this regard is blocking the shot so hard that you hit it out of bounds. Sure, you look like a badass in the process of stopping the team from scoring, but in most cases, having touched the ball last, you let the other side retain possession of the ball. A more practical technique would be to try to tip the ball softly toward a teammate and gain possession (that's not gonna make ''Series/SportsCenter'', though). Bill Russell, one of the greatest defenders and shot-blockers (if not THE greatest) in NBA history, has gone on record many times as saying that blocking shots out of bounds, unless absolutely necessary, is a basketball sin.
454** This trope also applies to passing in basketball. Some players are simply incapable of making a routine chest pass (Jason Williams, formerly of the Sacramento Kings, was benched during fourth quarters because of this - after retiring from the NBA, he now plays a lot of exhibition matches, which give him a lot more room to try fancy passes) at all, and would rather risk a turnover by doing a flashy behind-the-back pass.
455** Related to fancy passes and dunks, we have street basketball, an entire style based on flashy movements. Yes, it looks awesome, fancy and it's a good way to throw off one's opponent in an amateur match. In a standard match, however? Chances are the player would be exhausted very quickly because of all the useless movements, not to mention that a trained player with good reflexes can easily steal the ball.
456* Most ProfessionalWrestling moves qualify. Sure, they look cool and can be deadly if done incorrectly, but they would be completely useless in a real fight. Most of the throws usually require the opponent to assist, or at least allow it to happen, meaning they can be easily countered by a resisting opponent.
457** These days you could almost say there's an in-universe example of this during many matches, where guys (and girls) do moves that are not only useless in a real fight but useless even in the context of ''a professional wrestling match''. Examples being contrived complicated spots involving international objects instead of.. you know, just hitting someone with it, flipping piledrivers when a regular piledriver is not only safer but actually looks ''more'' dangerous, and just a general willingness to do legitimately dangerous stunts that really make no sense in context to diminishing crowd reactions.
458* The "ripped look" [[UsefulNotes/{{Bodybuilding}} bodybuilders]] have while on-stage during competitions looks awesome, but the bodybuilder is actually very low on body fat and is usually dehydrated, enough that it's not uncommon for bodybuilders to pass out at competitions. By comparison, if you look at world-class competitors for weightlifting and other competitions of strength, notice how few care about their overall body image (and some are even fat, making it StoutStrength) despite being the strongest men alive. Looking like you could bench 150 kilograms is not the same as actually being able to.
459* Free-running, which is a descendant of the much more BoringButPractical [[LeParkour Parkour]]. Sure, it's cool to make all those backflips and land on your feet just to keep running, but the training, agility, and stamina required are prohibitive for most people.
460* In the UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeague, many teams are tempted to draft a Quarterback first overall, given half a chance. However, there are only two ways to acquire the first overall draft pick: Either being the worst team in the league in the previous season or trading for it, which in effect means giving up either top tier players or several draft picks, which translates to less room for growing the roster and filling weak spots with better young talent. Sure signing the exciting new gunslinger who just won the Heisman Trophy and led his team to the national championship is ''tempting'', but even if he does not prove to be a bust (surprisingly common) he will most likely be surrounded by a team that ''earned'' their spot as the worst team in the league, and a relatively inexperienced new quarterback can sometimes be a ''detriment''. If the first draft pick was acquired in a trade, you might get a good team in the first year (when the new QB is still learning the ropes), but having given up all those picks to trade up to number one ''will'' hurt you in the years afterward. BoringButPractical solutions like trading away first overall and/or building defense and the offensive line instead can be much more rewarding in the medium or even long term. However, this is kind of a LuckBasedMission, because in some cases the first overall pick really does live up to the hype, like the Manning brothers, both of whom enjoyed long NFL careers and won two [[UsefulNotes/SuperBowl Vince Lombardi Trophies]]. And because of the NFL's rookie salary scale a QB on a 4 year rookie contract is making a pittance compared to what a star veteran quarterback is making (around $50 million a year these days), so you'll have some extra cap room to fill those holes left by the picks you traded away. At least for the first 4 years...
461** Oh, and if your first round QB turns out to be good? Like, really, really, ''really'' good? This trope gets invoked again once his rookie deal is up and you're either losing him to free agency or giving him a contract that eats up roughly a quarter (or more) of your cap space[[note]]Or franchise tagging him, which means you're giving him a quarter of your cap space, but for only one season[[/note]]. Good luck being able to afford anyone decent for him to throw the ball to, or any high-caliber player that can prevent the opposing team from scoring. Case in point: Patrick Mahomes. Drafted 10th overall in 2017, was NFL Most Valuble Player in 2018, won (and was MVP of) Super Bowl LIV following the 2019 season, signed a 10 year ''$503 million'' contract extension in 2020.
462*** Averted in this particular example, as with the sheer inflation on salaries at the quarterback position, in just three seasons, Mahomes has fallen out of the top five earners at his his position, and nearly out of the top ten, in favor primarily of players he outperforms, while he is tied into a contract that provides immense long-term security at the cost of the year-to-year increased salaries he could have commanded with contracts of a more standard length.
463* In soccer flashy offenses like the Dutch Totaalvoetbal of the 1970s have many admirers and are admittedly a delight to watch, but they have netted the Dutch team a grand total of zero World Cup wins. Meanwhile, Italy, which is well known for the more defensively oriented Catenaccio, which has been described as "stirring concrete" has won the World Cup four times. Sadly the flashy awesome offensive powerhouse of world soccer has nothing against the incredibly boring (but practical) style of just keeping the opponent from scoring until they make a mistake or are too exhausted. With very few exceptions, the best defense will win against the best offense when measured in goals scored/permitted per game. This is part of the reason why the number of goals scored per game at the highest level has trended down ever since the 1954 World Cup set a record at 5.38 goals per game. Today it is below three and trending downwards still.
464* Butterfly stroke in swimming. It is considered as the most difficult to learn and the most energy-consuming swimming style, whilst it isn't the fastest (the front crawl, universally used in freestyle events, is).[[note]]"Freestyle" is not a stroke; it's actually a race condition. Freestyle events allow competitors to use any stroke that's ''not'' the backstroke, breaststroke, or butterfly. In the olden days (say, well over 100 years ago), the sidestroke was most common in freestyle, but the front crawl proved much faster.[[/note]] It has little use aside from swimming competitions - breaststroke is the most energy-efficient overall and backstroke is the easiest to teach to a non-swimmer. The one selling point butterfly has is that it has the highest top speed when performing the motion, but this is offset by the long recovery afterwards that makes front crawl more consistent.
465* Martial arts aimed against a single set of opponents, such as jodo. Jodo was originally developed by Gonnosuke Musō [[CoolVersusAwesome after his defeat to Miyamoto Musashi]] and it is aimed against a katana-armed unarmoured opponent to defeat him. It is next to useless against anyone who a) has any body armor or b) is armed with a different weapon.
466* The UsefulNotes/NationalFootballLeague tries its damnedest to avert this trope. Over time the NFL has turned into ''more'' of a passing league and (arguably) BoringButPractical "three yards and a cloud of dust" offenses are becoming rarer and rarer in favor of high-risk high-reward gunslinger offenses and trick plays are usually encouraged rather than looked down upon. There was one area in which the NFL did play this trope straight for a long time, namely extra points. Teams that just scored a touchdown would get the ball at the two-and-a-half-yard line and get one extra point for a field goal from that position and two extra points for a touchdown. Statistics show that a field goal from so short a distance has a success rate well north of 99% and there is only a roughly 45% chance of the two-point conversion being made, making the two-pointer Awesome, But Impractical in all situations but games where one point is useless but two points make it a tie game[[note]][[https://www.theredzone.org/Features/TwoPointConversionChart This chart]] shows when simple math dictates going for two, though it mostly gets ignored if the lead is more than 10 points[[/note]]. The NFL, however, decided to move the line of scrimmage for kicked conversions back to the 15-yard line (while leaving two-point attempts at the same point), which has proven to make teams a little more inclined to go for two.
467** Specialty football offensive schemes like the run-and-shoot (four wide receivers and a single running back, with an emphasis on passing) and the option family (wishbone, flexbone, veer--three running backs with the quarterback able to shift between handoffs, pitches, and scrambles, with lots of fake plays and deception) are a lot of fun to watch when they're executed properly, utterly slicing up the defense and lighting up scoreboards, with the seeming ability to score from any point on the field. Problem is, they're one-dimensional and so specialized that the players are largely drilled only on how to run that particular offense. If a defense can figure out how to stop it, the offense sputters. On the college level, only a handful of teams still run the pure versions of these offenses. Notably, the rise of the spread offense addressed this issue by combining elements of the single-back and option offenses to allow more flexible play calling.
468** Blitzing. Sending lots of guys after the quarterback looks cool, and can get spectacular results, but if the rush doesn't get home the defense is highly vulnerable to a deep pass. Worse, NFL offenses these days have a ton of tools to handle blitzes and a preponderance of veteran quarterbacks who have seen every blitz in the book and will see them coming a mile away. The increasing focus on quarterback mobility in particular hurts blitzes badly. Teams are increasingly giving up blitzing the game's top quarterbacks, because it's simply counterproductive.
469* Submarine (better known as underhand) windups in baseball. A truly skilled submarine pitcher can generate groundball outs and prevent batters from hitting fly balls at a 70% ground ball/fly ball ratio or better (the MLB average is around 48%), and the unusual arm slot and motion enables them to throw pitches that no one else can, like literal rising fastballs (otherwise impossible due to air resistance), or changeups that seem to break upwards before they fade. The catch? It's ridiculously difficult to master. As of the 2016 season, there were no true submarine pitchers in the MLB, with only Brad Ziegler, Joe Smith, and Darren O'Day fitting the criteria of partial submarine pitchers (guys who throw from an extremely low sidearm slot, but not a purely vertical one). They are somewhat more common in the NPB and KBO Leagues of Japan and Korea, respectively, however.
470* Kicksaves by pitchers also fall under this umbrella in baseball. They're amazing, and can be hilarious depending on the situation ([[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaZANJsO4Ss here's a great example]] of Cleveland's Zach [=McAllister=] ''kicking a line drive out of the air''), but they're amazingly impractical. There's no way to control where the ricochet goes, meaning that sometimes you save your team an out and sometimes you cost them an out. It's essentially luck as to whether it works or not. On top of that, there's a huge risk of injury trying to intercept a line drive (liners can reach up to 120 mph) with your body, especially from as close as the pitcher's mound. Pitchers are often told to let a hit go through rather than risk a kicksave.
471* In Handball the "Kempa-Trick" (throwing the ball to a teammate while already in the goal circle who catches it in the air and throws on goal) may look flashy and has a high success rate when properly done, but it is hard to master, increases the risk of injury and if it isn't timed to fractions of a second, someone steps into the circle before the goal is scored. A "normal" goal is usually much easier to achieve than this showboating.
472* Banked-track UsefulNotes/RollerDerby is a lot of fun. It's faster-paced than flat-track roller derby, lends itself to a more wide-open play style, and has tighter scores. The problem is the track itself, which is large, heavy, expensive to maintain, and costly to store. There is a reason why flat-track derby, which can be played on any smooth flat surface that can take tape, is the dominant style of the sport.
473* In golf, there are two types of swings that would belong here:
474** The overswing, which is where someone winds up their club almost to the point of touching their back. It provides more strength to the swing on paper and carried John Daly to being the PGA Tour's first player to average 300+ yard drives and 2 major wins. But for most golfers, it increases the difficulty of stabilizing a swing, leading to more erratic and inconsistent drives. With few exceptions, you generally only see it used by players new to the sport.
475** The Film/HappyGilmore swing. Yes, the famed run-up and swing that Happy uses in the movie is indeed technically usable in real golf, and while it's unlikely to make you start hitting 400-yard drives[[note]]For those wondering, that kind of distance is generally only seen consistently from the types of people who compete at long drive competitions, even after 2 decades since that movie with updated golf technology.[[/note]], most tests find that it consistently adds 10% distance to a golf shot if done well. The problem is that it makes major sacrifices of accuracy and consistency in the process, which are already problems enough for even the best of professionals. This is why no real-life pro actually uses it in a serious setting.
476* Hosting international sporting events like the UsefulNotes/OlympicGames or UsefulNotes/TheWorldCup can be this.
477** While hosting the Olympics or the World Cup is often presented as a prestigious honor, the events often play merry hell the host city. Besides just building the stadiums, host cities also have to build additional infrastructure like housing for athletes, media centers, ceremonial spaces and transportation networks, which only drives up costs and saddles the host city with massive amounts of debt. At the same time, clearing out sites for Olympic venues can result in thousands, if not millions, of residents becoming displaced either by state-ordered evictions or inflated living costs associated with the sporting events[[note]]The number of displaced residents can range from a minimum of 30,000 people with the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta to as many as ''1.5 million'' with the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.[[/note]]. It also doesn't help that international sporting associations [=IOC=] and [=FIFA=] refuse to help cover costs while pocketing the lion's share of TV ad and merchandise revenue, making the games very unprofitable. Once the games are over, the stadiums are left to decay as the indebted host city doesn't have the funds or manpower leftover for maintenance, rendering them useless for future sporting events or any other activities. While international sporting events can lead to infrastructure projects that wouldn't otherwise happen, most of the roads and housing are too specialized to be used by ordinary citizens. Given the diminishing returns, fewer cities are making bids to host upcoming Olympics and World Cup games.
478** The Olympics in the "spend gargantuan sums" era that are widely seen as successes (albeit limited successes) all went a BoringButPractical route. Los Angeles in 1984 used several pre-existing stadiums and "solved" the traffic problem by simply telling the locals so often [[ThisIsGonnaSuck that traffic would be horrible]] so that they would avoid the freeways. Traffic was among the calmest it had ever been during the Olympics. Atlanta in 1996 would rely on Coca-Cola, whose world headquarters is in the city, to spend huge amounts in sponsorship and advertising and like Los Angeles, had several pre-existing stadiums used by its professional and college teams as well as a large state-owned convention center. London in 2012 likewise relied on both pre-existing structures and temporary buildings for sports that aren't popular enough in the UK for an Olympic-sized venue to make much sense. Apparently, the IOC has learned from some of its mistakes and now prefers cities with more pre-existing venues as well as regional cooperations to apply in order to cut down on costs. However, LA was more or less openly bribed to let Paris have the 2024 Olympics and was instead awarded the 2028 games and a handsome sum of money. The Munich Olympics, while overshadowed by the events surrounding the Israeli Olympic team were another relative success, especially when it comes to long-term use of facilities (Olympiastadion was the home of FC Bayern for decades and is still used for concerts) and other infrastructure like the [[UsefulNotes/MunichUAndSBahn Munich S-Bahn and U-Bahn]]. The Olympic village was converted to housing, which is in chronic short supply in Munich.
479** The 2014 Sochi Olympics, widely criticized for the "enormous waste" the investment in preparation to them allegedly was, actually were a clever ploy of the Keynesian faction within the Russian Government to outmaneuver the monetarist faction that is opposed to all infrastructure investments on the matter of principle, insisting that it will only lead into inflation. The Olympics were the useful pretext to develop the area's infrastructure, building new roads, hotels, power stations, railways, etc., which turned the pretty forgotten corner of the Caucasus, only vaguely popular among the budget skiers beforehand, into the bustling whole-year resort which also regularly hosts new sports events ever since, including a Formula 1 race and several matches of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. The stadiums were built from scratch, true, but the event brought enough attention to the city that they didn't stay empty afterward — it helps that Russia actually still ''lacks'' modern state-of-the-art venues, which were needed to be built anyway.
480* Lifters who skip leg day, and focus on sculpting their upper body, may look powerful waist-up, but one look below the belt shows embarrassing-looking twig legs that would get them laughed at anyways. More importantly, though, the legs are a person's foundation, and the lower body ones are some of the most powerful muscles in the human body (to the point where a 300-400 pound couch potato can still walk despite their legs being thin as sticks muscle-wise), and you'll achieve more strength with Leg Drive (one of the foundations behind Kinetic Linking) than without it. Plus, a lot of people find a sculpted butt attractive, so there's also aesthetic reasons for it. There’s a reason that [[https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/skipping-leg-day skipping leg day]] became a [[MemeticMutation meme]].
481* Kipping is this when doing pull-ups and muscle-ups. Yes, it adds a style factor and makes it easier, but it takes less strength, and it's difficult to transfer to the traditional variant. All things considered, doing the regular versions is the best way to go.
482[[/folder]]
483
484[[folder:Toys]]
485* NERF and NERF knock-offs:
486** NERF shotguns. On the one hand, shotguns are awesome. On the other hand, they shoot two standard shots, when most guns can hold 3-12 times that many, before reloading. And the kinds that use shells, like the Buzz Bee Double Shot, look really cool but take forever to reset the shells. This doesn't include other blasters that are primed in shotgun fashion such as the Alpha Trooper and Rampage, ShotgunsAreJustBetter in that case.
487** The NERF Sledgefire, a new addition in the [=ZombieStrike=] line, uses three-dart shells that eject when the breech is opened. Cool, but it can only hold up to 4 at a time, and only comes with 3 since a fourth one makes reloading even more cumbersome. Refilling the shells take about as much time each as swapping out a clip from an N-Strike blaster.
488** In terms of cost, the NERF Cam ECS-12, a neat integration of a camera and blaster in one but at somewhere around $80 with a camera around 0.3 MP and 20 FPS, it's cheaper just to strap a [=GoPro=] to a Stryfe or use your iPhone attached to a blaster by an official holder. Not to mention, the Cam ECS-12's microphone is essentially right on top of the flywheel motor, so the only thing you will hear in a recording from it when it's ready to shoot is '''"WHIRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR"'''.
489* Die-cast metal. Between the weight and the durability, it has enough of a high reputation amongst collectors that some lines flat-out name themselves after the fact that their toys have metal in them, such as Soul of Chogokin or Titaniums. But it also has a fair number of downsides, especially in action figures - that heavy metal can also overpower any joints, the more pliable plastic tends to handle mechanisms or tolerances more easily, and since the metal's base colors can't change, it's reliant entirely on paint that can chip off. Making a figure mostly or entirely out of die-cast metal is reserved for model vehicles, which don't have to worry as much about these downsides.
490* Water guns:
491** The CPS 2000 was the first "CPS" Super Soaker and was in a completely different league to anything before it. As of 2020 it remains the most powerful toy water gun ever, capable of expelling a litre of water in a second at anything within a 15 metre (50 foot) radius. But after that 1 second of firing, it needs loads of pumps to re-pressurize, and after 4 such shots, you'll need to refill. It was succeeded by the CPS 2500; same size, a bit less power, but selectable smaller nozzles for longer shot time.
492** The Monster XL. As of 2020 still the ''largest'' water gun. This double-barreled monster has 6 nozzle options on each of its twin barrels and even comes with a bipod. But it weighs 9 kilos (20 pounds) fully loaded. And despite its size, it's not as powerful as some smaller guns.
493** Additionally, both the CPS 2000 and the Monster XL are now somewhat valuable collector's items, often selling for over $100 second-hand, so owners may not want to risk them in an actual water fight.
494* Gunpla (''Franchise/{{Gundam}}'' plastic models)
495** High Grade-level models of battle platforms such as the [[Anime/MobileSuitGundamSEED METEOR System]], [[Anime/MobileSuitGundam0083StardustMemory GP-03 "Dendrobium Orchis"]] and [[Anime/MobileSuitGundamUnicorn Neo Zeong]]. They are an amazing test of skill, usually composed of both the platform and the Mobile Suit that controls it and comes with numerous moving parts. However, the models are gargantuan (two to three feet in length, meaning you would need a dedicated spot to display the model. They're also stupidly expensive, between $100-300 USD depending on the unit.
496** The ''Advance of Zeta'' line of Gunpla has a gimmick that is carried over from the manga series it came from that allows builders to create new variations of certain machines. While the original retail releases never had this, the more recent P-Bandai lines do. While making a new machine is pretty awesome, as [[{{Macgyvering}} kitbashing]] is always beloved with modelists, the sheer amount of leftover parts is staggering. For instance, to build the Gundam Hazel Owsla, parts are needed from the original Gundam Hazel, the Advanced Hazel, the Hazel II, the Hrududu and the Primrose. By the time you build the Hazel Owsla, you have a scattering of Hazel, Advanced Hazel and Primrose parts left over, a Hazel II without its backpack and the Hrududu without its main gun.
497* ''Toys/LegoVidiyo'' was an ambitious {{Franchise/Lego}} theme focused on AugmentedReality multimedia, with the pitch being that sets consisted of wacky, music-themed stages and compact [="BeatBoxes"=], containing [[Toys/LEGOMinifigures Minifigures]] and elaborate tile sets that could be scanned by an app that could create LEGO-themed AR music videos, a novelty akin to those seen in Platform/TikTok. Unfortunately, it sank dramatically due to two factors: the ''price'' (most [=BeatBoxes=] cost $20 for around 70 pieces, one of the most lopsided price-per-piece ratios in the history of LEGO, and most of the pieces are just [=2x2=] printed tiles), as well as the fact the AR gimmick was only available on a dedicated app that was not only notoriously buggy, but by design didn't allow anyone to export video recordings to share on more widespread platforms like [=TikTok=] or Instagram, limiting its audience and quickly drying up in novelty. The theme launched in 2021, and despite praise for the aesthetic designs and LEGO's plans to continue the line in years to come, it was discontinued in January 2022 due to being a commercial disaster.
498[[/folder]]
499
500[[folder:Unsorted or Misc.]]
501* Watching Youtube videos. It is great, enjoying memes, fails, or just learning about something irrelevant, but can take up a lot of time, it can be depressing even, especially with how much time you realized you spent, and then, you just feel so down because of all the screen time. Entertainment is great, but perhaps a book, or a few (remember, [[TVTropesWillRuinYourLife A FEW!]]) tropes on this website will give you the fulfillment you seek. Exercise some discipline and seek out [[BoringButPractical educational and informative]] videos, and you can make this venture more productive and perhaps even still be entertained.
502* Hydrocarbons such as petroleum and natural gas provide incredible amounts of energy, but they are easily hoarded by a few countries/organizations and produce greenhouse gases and other pollutants. Also, they are effectively non-renewable -- once the current supply runs out, it will take millions of years for new deposits to form.
503* {{Rube Goldberg Device}}s are unnecessarily complicated contraptions that are nonetheless fun to watch.
504* [[MouthfulOfPi Memorizing pi to a large number of decimal places]]. Just 42 digits are accurate enough to calculate the circumference of the sun given its diameter to within the width of ''a proton''.
505* [[http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-10-year-olds-guide-to-fighting/ This]] Cracked article lays it down in the first entry; ask a kid about fighting sometimes, and he'll tell you that 90% of a fight is being able to generate enough raw hell-yeah to make your opponent shit his pants with the force of a cannon.
506* This is what the Japanese "art" of [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chindogu chindogu]] is all about. Essentially, chindogu are makeshift inventions that seem ideal for solving common problems but are so impractical, create so many new problems, or are just plain embarrassing to use that they're almost entirely useless. One such example is the Butterstick, which is butter in a glue stick form. It allows you to put butter on food without dirtying a knife, but it doesn't work well with soft food such as bread, or small items such as peas. It is practical when serving corn on the cob, though.
507* Certain synthesizer patches, specifically ones that provide very un-musical effects like engine noises. They're fun to play around with, but no musician would seriously consider using them in their work.
508* The AlcubierreDrive is a physically viable idea for FasterThanLightTravel. It's only insanely expensive, requires an absurd amount of fuel, is nearly impossible to steer or turn off, and has the added effect of creating a large [[UsefulNotes/BlackHoles black hole]] each time it's used. Also, the volume it moves through reaches preposterously high temperatures in transit.
509* [[http://www.necomimi.com/ Necomimi]] ears are cat ears that move in response to your forehead muscles, and while they look cute, they'll run you at least 100 USD. They can also, as a promotional video shows, completely ruin a poker face should you wear one while playing cards.
510* Fountain pens. They look cool and require less pressure to write with, but also need to be held at a very specific and uncomfortable angle, or else the result is a mess of missing ink. It gets worse depending on your writing hand; left-handed people can't write in left-to-right languages as their pinkie will smudge the ink everywhere, and for the same reason right-handed people cannot write comfortably in right-to-left languages. Additionally, they are rather expensive. The far more convenient ballpoint pen has replaced the fountain pen in modern ages. It takes some particular skill and need (e.g. professional-level writing) to make fountain pens more useful than, say, a high-end gel pen.
511* Creator/AntarcticPress released a series of books on how to draw manga in the early 2000s. One installment focused on swords and pointed out that ridiculously-designed fantasy swords with wild blades, skulls, and encrusted jewels are only good for mantelpiece displays. They would work well only as a weapon of last resort, and would probably hurt the wielder more than the target.
512* Giant flags have the challenge of making sure to treat the flag with respect at all times. The act of setting a flag on the ground or tying it around the body can be seen as disrespectful, even if it's easier to carry around. In fact, there are sometimes rules against doing such things.
513* Siberia. It's got a lot of untapped natural resources and lots of space to do things, but it's cold and lacks a lot of the resources needed for people to survive. Every Russian regime seems to try though, to point that Russians say that you can tell when a leader is weak by how much they invest into Siberia.
514* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit Personal rapid transit]] might sound nice, combining the advantages of cars (spacious individual cabins that can get you anywhere) with those of rapid transit (lower costs, better utilization of infrastructure), but they instead combine their disadvantages. They can be as dirty and limited in network size as the [[SubwaysSuck suckiest subways]] and as inefficient as cars in handling peak demand in big cities. There is a reason why there are only four such systems in existence.
515* Most commercially viable forms of nuclear energy utilize only uranium-235 (about 0.7% of naturally-occurring uranium), with the unusable uranium-238 producing large volumes of waste, so technologies that do something useful with the [[superscript:238]]U sound rather tempting. However, due to the myriad political and economic factors, none of the known processes have found widespread adoption.
516* Most forms of pornography tend to fall here, as the depictions of sex within tend to focus more on heightening the sexual arousal and fantasy of the viewer over the practical mechanics of sex. As many performers have discussed, "porn sex" is shot to look exotic and exciting, but actually tends to be rather awkward, uncomfortable, and even painful for the people involved. Furthermore, particularly exotic shoots may require lengthy preparation to be safe and hygienic for those involved. Consequently, it tends to be less useful for the purposes of enjoyable lovemaking than straightforward "vanilla" sex would be.
517* Entirely hand-drawn animation has since become this, though is more of a [[DownplayedTrope downplayed]] example as some smaller studios still use it for the love of the medium. While it can capture the fluid motion that cel-shaded and 2D computer animation cannot, it is extremely time-consuming and as such has become obsolete. This is why, since [[MediaNotes/TheMillenniumAgeOfAnimation the 2000s]], and for some as early as [[MediaNotes/TheRenaissanceAgeOfAnimation the late '90s]], many studios had since abandoned this technique and instead rely on digital ink and paint, CGI, [=ToonBoom=] and/or Flash, with digital ink and paint being the closest comparison to cel animation, as while some of these options may not be as fluid as traditional cel animation, they’re not only cheaper, but they’re also less time consuming and can help production much faster.
518* Large drum setups may look flashy and cool, but unless you have a road crew to handle the transportation, setup and breakdown, tuning, and sound checking of your setup, they are more trouble than they're worth on the road. For one, some components (namely kick drums, floor toms, and mounting racks) are very large and heavy. Setting them up also takes a great deal of time, and that's ''before'' the soundchecks on each component.
519* Polyphasic sleeping. The idea is that instead of sleeping for 8 hours a night to get well-rested, you instead take a 20-minute nap every four hours to the same effect while needing to sleep less every day. First, you need to be able to do the scheduled naps on command, and it's likely that you'll end up trying to sleep and [[CentipedesDilemma be unable to as a result]]. Second, there's the matter of having enough control over your daily schedule to have time for these naps, with things like school and work making it very difficult to take the necessary time off. Even if you follow the schedule perfectly, you will be unable to sleep deeply, let alone fulfill your proper sleep cycles.
520* While having your own swimming pool might seem the height of luxury, the expense of building one and the upkeep are very expensive for something you can only use a few months out of the year in most climates.
521* Elaborate Christmas light displays at one's house, particularly those synced to music. While they may look awesome at night, such an elaborate display can take days to set up and subsequently take down. Also, neighbors and homeowners' associations may not be tolerant of the light pollution as well as strangers regularly driving by to see the light display. The more lights used, the more energy is needed for the display, driving up the electricity bill during November and December. There is also the possibility of a fire if a strand of lights is defective or the circuit is overloaded.
522* Large telescopes if you're into amateur astronomy. With larger telescopes, it is possible to see fainter objects and more details of objects. The bad news is that larger telescopes suffer more from the effects of air turbulence and light pollution. They are also harder to transport, set up, and take down.
523* Vertical loops work well on rollercoasters, but they fall into this trope when they are put on waterslides. Because waterslides rely solely on gravity, there is no way to accelerate a guest's speed when they are going up the loop, meaning guests who otherwise fit in the slide's tube get stuck at the top if they get that far. The one at Ride/ActionPark had so many guests get stuck that they eventually added an escape hatch at the top of the loop. When the park returned to the idea, they solved this problem by putting guests in aluminum capsules that ran along runners.
524* Asbestos is a lightweight, fireproof insulator that could be woven into cloth, mixed seamlessly with other materials, and was a plentiful natural resource. There's just one problem: it's an extremely toxic carcinogen that sends microscopic {{Flechette Storm}}s into the lungs if inhaled.
525* [[WackyWaterbed Waterbeds]] are originally made for therapeutic purposes given that they conform to the sleeper's body. However, waterbeds are [[{{MurphysBed}} known to rupture]] and are high maintenance. Waterbeds quickly become forgotten after their peak in popularity during the 1980s.
526* All-in-one art supply sets (crayons, markers, colored pencils, etc.) might seem like a nice, inexpensive gift for the young artist in your life, but the items tend to be cheap and poor-quality that the kid won't use if they have access to anything better. For what you're paying, you'd be much better off finding out what their favorite medium is and just buying that. For instance, if they like colored pencils, you could buy them a lovely 100-count set that they're ''much'' more likely to use.
527* Four ''Walt Disney Treasures'' collections from the early 2000s had animated shorts hidden as EasterEggs on their discs: ''Mickey Mouse in Living Color'' ("Mickey's Surprise Party"), ''Silly Symphonies'' ("Water Babies", "Who Killed Cock Robin?", "The Practical Pig", and "Farmyard Symphony"), ''Mickey Mouse in Black and White'' ("Minnie's Yoo Hoo"), and ''The Chronological Donald'' ("The Volunteer Worker"). While fun to search for, they were pretty inconvenient for people who just wanted to watch the shorts without having to remember where to look for them each time. Future collections did away with the Easter eggs and one short, "The Volunteer Worker", would show up on ''The Chronological Donald, Volume 2'' as a bonus feature.
528* In the 1994, Creator/DCComics had two specialized comics (''Superman: The Man of Steel'' #30 and ''ComicBook/WorldsCollide1994'' one-shot) with a unique cover. The covers would be a background scene and come with stickers that readers can use to customize the covers with replaceable stickers of the characters and special effects. Looks neat, but the stickers would ultimately lose their adhesivity, meaning a lot of lost stickers.
529* Lo, and behold, [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3XQuF21fto Jetpack Samurai]], undoubtedly impractical (as they can be shot out of the air), but cool as hell nonetheless.
530* Sure, building a second Nile valley is cool but those responsible for the [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Valley_Project New Valley Project]] soon learnt the Western Desert has high saline levels and aquifers, meaning that any irrigations would meant that it could result in saline, non-potable water.
531* In a similar vein, the various "[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Vision_2030 giga-projects]]" of UsefulNotes/SaudiArabia. While intended to diversify the Saudi economy away from oil, the projects seem more like vanity projects rather than anything practical, such as [[https://thursd.com/articles/mukaab-saudi-arabia the Mukaab]] in the Saudi capital city of Riyadh, which is a city-within-a-city enclosed within a ''massive'' cube-shaped building 400 meters (1,300 feet) tall as it is wide. Even ''if'' any of the projects come to fruition, the Kingdom still has to overcome its massive abysmal human rights record, particularly its long history of state-sanctioned misgyony, xenophobia, and homophobia, in order to become a tourist hub.
532* In the perspective of anti-natalists, raising a family is considered this trope. Sure, the idea of passing the torch to the next generation seems splendid. Unless you consider the fact that there are 7.9 ''billion'' people in the world right now with resources only having so much until it becomes completely depleted as well as the adverse effect it has on the environment. And don't forget the instability brought upon by civic and political unrests as well as the chances that the offspring might as well inherit severe diseases such as cancer or mental disorders. To them, it's not worth the price.
533* [[https://www.google.fi/search?q=world%27s+tallest+bike World's tallest bike]]. Unsurprisingly.
534* The One-Time Pad. Used correctly, it's a completely unbreakable encryption method, as even brute force (trying out every possible key) will not work on it. However, it has drawbacks that make using it awkward at best. The biggest drawback is that the key must have the same length as the message - to put it simple, to encrypt 1 gigabyte of data, the key would also have to be 1 gigabyte in length. Second, the key may never be reused for encryption again. And third, the key must be kept secret, though that is a requirement for reliable encryption in general.
535* Disney's "Galactic Starcruiser" hotel was a ''Franchise/StarWars''-themed hotel at the [[Ride/StarWarsGalaxysEdge Galaxy's Edge]] side of the [[Ride/DisneyThemeParks Walt Disney World]]. The hotel is a theme park marvel that offers an immersive, beautifully designed blend of DinnerTheatre and {{LARP}}-style activities. For its innovation and quality alone, it was highly praised by critics and guests. It was also an expensive, low-capacity hotel (probably better described as a very long dinner theater show) that resulted in extremely high ticket prices while appealing only to the most hardcore Star Wars fans who were willing to spend $5,000 and two nights of their Disney vacation doing {{LARP}}-style activities. The hotel closed after just over a year.
536* [[BigFancyHouse Mega-mansions]], particularly those owned by celebrities. Having a huge sprawling mansion with dozens of rooms, sprawling green spaces, multiple pools and other extravagant features may seem awesome, but it's not all it's cracked up to be. To put this into perspective, a mega-mansion is around the size of the [[TheWhiteHouse United States White House]], if not larger. Aside from the high upfront cost of actually building or buying the mansion, there are also the recurring costs, such as utilities[[note]](power bills for a massive home can get out of control: one Los Angeles mansion costs [[https://fortune.com/2022/10/03/bel-air-mega-mansion-the-one-electric-bill/ $50,000]] a month to cool in the summer)[[/note]], mortgage payments, and property taxes as well as the costs of maintaining the property such as lawn and garden care, housekeeping, and repairs, all of which could end up being more than the purchase price of the home after only a few years. These homes are sometimes dubbed "real estate white elephants" and it's not uncommon for them to bankrupt their [[RichesToRags once wealthy owners]]. One [[https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2015/07/14/the-long-messy-history-of-50-cents-connecticut-home/ Connecticut mega-mansion]] managed to bankrupt four of its owners, including rapper Music/FiftyCent. If the owner decides to downsize, the small pool of potential buyers means the mega-mansion could potentially spend ''years'' on the housing market before it's sold again, during which time the owner is on the hook for all the ownership costs, and if they can't afford them the property can fall into severe disrepair, possibly even becoming ''uninhabitable'' due to toxic mold and/or structural integrity issues, resulting in it selling at a massive loss. Even with all those expenses comfortably covered, just navigating across such a place can be inconvenient, and wear out the novelty, rendering a lot of the space rarely used.
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