40 Things And Secrets People Saw In Their Professions That They Avoid Now

As scary as contracts can be, the various pieces of advice here are correct, if it’s not in writing and signed, it is effectively worthless. This isn’t just some modern concept, even in the ancient world people needed ways to ensure that there was evidence of an agreement between two parties. In other words, before we even had paper, we had legally binding contracts.

How was this done, one might ask, well, simply put, the agreement would be literally carved in stone. Examples of these can be found in Ancient Greece, where some are still visible today, and Sumeria, among others. 

These agreements would evolve in a number of ways, for example, in the Indian subcontinent, a hundi would be a type of contract that could be transferred. This allowed for people to have significantly more liquidity, as they could sell off a contract to raise money quickly. In other places, similar ideas would develop for debt and obligations, as well as the somewhat detested ability to transfer the debt to another party upon death. 

On a more accessible scale, some people recommended avoiding “smart” devices that need to be constantly connected to the internet. At first glance, it may seem cool, your smart fridge can play a jingle when you open it on your birthday. This is all fun and games until it needs to update in the middle of the night and reboots, melting all your ice cream. Or even worse, a minor wifi issue now means you risk all your meat spoiling. 

There have been cases where smart lights fail to switch off when Google servers have been down, a somewhat comical issue until you need to sleep. On a more serious note, there are legitimate security concerns if someone can hack everything from a car to a door. These devices, at the very least, will store some of your data that can be stolen, while at worst, your household appliances can be controlled remotely by malicious actors. 

Of course, this is a bleak scenario, as not all smart devices are constantly connected to the net. But you probably have noticed that increasingly advanced devices become more and more complicated to use and understand. A coffee machine now might have a whole tablet menu to navigate. While this may be great in the long run, touch screens can be a pain, and as Michael Littman, a computer scientist at Brown University put it “If users need to learn different interfaces for their vacuums, their locks, their sprinklers, their lights, and their coffeemakers, it's tough to say that their lives have been made any easier."