History AwesomeButImpractical / RealLife

* 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.

* 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''.

** 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.

* [[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.

* 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.

* Cryptocurrencies. Let's be curt and say they provide an excellent, albeit an energy-wasting, way to simulate the gold standard. They do, however, have a market niche - for transactions of illicit contrabands, money laundering and ransoms on extortion.

** 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.
** [=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.

** 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.

*** 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.

** 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.

* 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.

* 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).
** 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.

*** 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]]

** 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.

** Pittsburgh's Civic Arena was the first retractable roof venue. Originally designed for the Pittsburgh Civic Light Opera, the Civic Arena was best known as the home of the NHL's Pittsburgh Peguins. The dome was comprised of six moving sections and two fixed sections supported by a 260 foot tall arch. While the design did work, subsequent expansions to the seating bowl as well as the aging condition of the retractable roof system led to its use being limited by 1995 and left permanently closed by 2001. After the Civic Arena's replacement, PPG Paints Arena, opened in 2010, the Civic Arena was shuttered and demolished two years later, despite efforts to preserve the arena as a historic landmark.

* 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.
* 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.

* 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, and the capital gains taxes you may owe the government from selling short term, which depending on your income and the country you live in, can eat up a good chunk of whatever profits you've earned.