Complex Numbers

Meet George Jetson

My wife wants a robot.

No, not for that. I haven't been replaced by a machine yet. Or, well, maybe I have; her friends have been holding a lot of schtupperware parties lately. But specifically, she wants a robot she saw that travels around the house, cleaning it.

Now, overlooking for the moment the years of therapy our cats will have to endure if we actually get this little slice of science fiction, glossing over the price (which, really, is probably comparable to an Oreck vacuum cleaner), and even forgetting for the moment how this little gadget confirms my theory that if necessity is the mother of invention, laziness is the milkman... aside from all that, there's something fundamentally wrong here:

There exists a household cleaning robot, and I still don't have my flying car.

I was promised a flying car. It was right there at the 1939 World's Fair: Flying Cars are the Future. Not that I was there, you understand. My mother was, though. Her entire family was shaped by the thing. Then her brother went off to WWII... one of these days I'm going to do a literary comparison between the unbounded optimism of the 1939 World's Fair and my uncle's liberation of Dachau a few short years later... but I digress. Point is, how come she gets a household robot, and I'm still stuck driving a vehicle that never leaves the ground (except maybe when I'm being chased by Roscoe P. Coltrane)?

http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/automotive_news/4215922.html

Oh. That's why.