Look at the bottle of Elmers glue on the table. Today the glue probably works better (barring regulation that forces compromises to product efficacy) and comes in a bottle that uses half as much plastic. Something like a bottle revision that would have formerly required expensive salaried employees to come up with multiple options, send them to the supplier, supplier has to respond to each with details and quotes, etc, can now be accomplished in a fraction of the man hours thanks to email and CAD being ubiquitous in the entire supply chain from marketing, to engineering, to the vendor's contractor who will actually design the tooling. Sign off might take days instead of weeks. This sort of efficiency improvement allows more engineering, design work, or other optimization to be done to every good and service in our economy allowing it to penetrate into even the most thin margin use cases. From farming to high finance products and services are substantially more influenced and optimized by specialist professionals than they were in 1990. Increase efficiency like this throughout the national and global economy is how lawnmowers and A/C units can be sold on sale for $100 and still make a profit. (yes I know that example isn't perfect but you get the point).
https://blog.daneurope.org/en_US/blog/are-full-face-snorkeli...
If each local region needs its own widget factory, then to become a top widgetsmith you only have to compete with the local widgetsmith talent pool. Just as there can be many high school star athletes across the world, there can be many top widgetsmiths within their local widget factories across the world, even if each is likely mediocre relative to the global pool of widgetsmiths.
Now the widget market has globalized. To become a top widgetsmith, you now need to be the best in the world. There is no room for locally optimal widgetsmiths when the market can globally optimize, just as there’s no room for most star high school athletes at the NBA.
The upside is that the entire world gets much better widgets. The downside is that you can only make a good living as a widgetsmith if you’re the absolute best in the world. Local markets lead to redundancy, which is globally inefficient but locally optimal.
This is extra pronounced for singers, actors etc., but not as much for people such as software engineers. A mediocre programmer that implements functionality that you need is much more valuable for you than a star programmer immersed in his UltraFastXMLParserForHaskell library and does not take side jobs.
Yes, though for most jobs there is far more demand than can be met by the best in the world. When someone needs a lawyer or software developer, they are very unlikely to hire the best in the world.
It definitely applies to software. It's why trades are a much better career option, local will never not matter in that case. The best 'star high school' welders and electricians are always going to be desirable, as no one is flying in the best in the world for every little job.
Most of us, except the best in the world among us, messed up going into software. The script completely flipped on this since I was a child in the 80s and was dreaming of becoming a programmer as I am now.
That is why society is (has to) move into post-employment era. It's no longer required or even beneficial for everyone to be employed and/or employed to the extreme degree they are now (~50% of waking hours).
You can find examples of this, but overall, I dispute the generalization.
I think quality/price improvements have been monumental in some areas, stagnant in others. Computer related products have gone crazy. It's not more for less though, it's "much more for a little more." The market grew a lot and a produces a hell of a lot more. Even that isn't the norm though. More for less, even less for less, are uncommon.
Farming and manufacturing.... None of the capitalisation, gene patents and such of recent generations is anything like basic green revolution tech, in terms of productivity growth. Farming is different. It uses less labour, more capital, but it's not producing much more efficiently. The price of farm produce isn't falling, quality is not rising. Same for most manufacturing, especially basic manufacturing. Most of the last generations' gains were made by employing cheaper employees in cheaper places, not reinventing manufacturing techniques. So, low end, high volume manufactured goods got cheaper, but a car still costs what it costs. Good quality appliances generally do too.
The quality of housing has gone up, but prices are often very high.
Education... we have more and arguably better, but more expensive.
Medicine... same. More and better, but more expensive.
There's a pattern here that's more complex and interesting than the average.
There are many thousands of people on this forum that have gotten a free education and in turn, one of the best careers in history from that free education that would never have been possible until recently.
I'm seeing more and more people (that aren't designers and engineers) are forgoing classical education and making a great living for themselves just by utilizing the freely available information on the internet.
At least in the embedded space, this is definitely not true. The norm is approaching more and more features for less.
I thought we liked Raspberry Pis on HN.
Regulation might do that and there is much more going on:
Regulation also protects health and safety of customers and workers (especially important with chemical products) and prevents fraud, and it corrects market distortions that damage businesses, including instituting changes that the nature of the market prevents any one business from implementing, and opening up competition.
Other things limit technological innovation, including incumbents with market power who profit more from eliminating competition than from improving their products.
Definitely a big deal, but mostly invisible on the demand side. You're talking about improvements to the supply process; the article is about what consumers experience.
Can you really not think of any benefits of regulation to correct for pervasive market failures?
"Intellectual Property Maximalism rollback: copyright terms have not and probably will not be indefinitely extended again to eternity to protect Mickey Mouse, and in 2019, for the first time since 1998, works entered the public domain"
I think the easy indicator may be the wrong one here. Defined more broadly, the public domain is not being enriched. For example, the web was a lot smaller in 1999, but it was a much more public domain. Today's web and post web internet is more centralised, controlled and therefore private property. Google could crawl pages, links, forums, because they were public, and use that access to create a search engine. Content, connections and signal are, today, proprietary. You can't order the world's information if that information is facebook's, only facebook can.
Or patents, more stuff of the last generation is patented than the previous'. Does that mean we invented more or we patented more? What happens to stuff that doesn't get patented? It's public.
Old copyright expiry deadlines might be a symbolic lead indicator, but they're determining the location of a fence post in county scale land dispute. A tiny, legible, part of the whole. In real terms, Disney's copyright portfolio is worth more, not less.
The public domain has gotten larger as has the private domain. But all that private stuff is now on track to expire one day, while in 1999 it was not clear that that would ever happen at all.
Compared to 1999, a lot more of that "private domain" stuff is also being made freely available, price-wise.
I support copyright expiration, but making Disney's copyright portfolio worth less when they continue to create a bunch of stuff was never an explicit part of that goal for me.
Well this is trivially true, but it really doesn't mean anything. If copyright length was 500 years this would still be a true statement.
It's ridiculous that there are 100 years old works of art created by people who have been dead for three quarters of a century which are still under copyright. You cannot spin this as a positive thing, I'm sorry.
Works published two years after the end of World War I will enter public domain in 2047 (Agatha Christie's first book). Star Wars will enter public domain in the 2070s. It's mad.
The type of CC matters.
NC can't be used commercially--whatever that means.
ND, rather ironically, essentially forbids derivatives/remixing therefore prohibiting one of the reasons CC was created in the first place.
Or it's kept as a trade secret.
You can't be secretive about a UI, or the chemical composition of a drug.
It's sort of like the people who say mobile devices are destroying the more open PC market and replacing it with closed mobile "consoles."
There are far more PCs out there today than there were in the 1990s and they are cheaper, faster, easier to use, and more versatile. The reason people think mobile has eaten everything is because growth in mobile has outpaced growth in PCs and there are now far more mobile devices than PCs. The PC market has still grown though, so there are more PCs than ever.
Mobile growth is plateauing too. The mobile explosion was the creation of a new computing niche more than the displacement of an old one, though low-end and narrower PC use cases have been displaced by phones and tablets. PCs have become more like trucks vs. cars, machines for "real work."
We also have a lot more OS and architectural choices in PCs today than in the 1990s. Linux is pretty usable and MacOS no longer sucks, so with Windows there are now three major choices available. Others like FreeBSD and OpenBSD are also viable but not as popular. You can even get an ARM laptop or desktop in the form of Raspberry Pi style boards in laptop form factors, larger ARM64 "server" chip boards that can work as desktops running Linux, or in the form of Apple Silicon Macs (that can also run other OSes on ARM in VMs), so you now have two CPU architectures in the mainstream PC market instead of just one.
Lastly there's a huge market today for cheap single board computers like the Raspberry Pi that did not exist at all back then.
A similar comparison by the way applies to the metal server market vs. cloud. There are far more racked up servers today than there were in the 90s. Cloud has just grown really quickly, so there's even more cloud deployments.
Well, there definitely are more PCs now than in 1991, but pre covid-WFH era, PC sales were at an all-time low, following a multi year downward trend, thanks to people moving to those closed mobile devices and consoles.
Because almost all the industrial production that pollutes water and air moved to third-world countries, where people suffer from pollution. Same for thrash that is taken to China, India, Indonesia for "recycling", but is actually burned in fires or thrown into the ocean. I wouldn't consider it an improvement due to advances in technology.
Rather, pollution is largely something that occurs in the production process in locations where desperation for production is so high that they are not willing to put in any personal effort or social policies to curtail it at the expense of production.
However, once you become richer, air quality and so on moves higher in our collective list of priorities. Production can occur without pollution. It is just more expensive, and requires care.
Some of the "upsides" (e.g. improvements in patent regime) just aren't there. Some aren't as wonderful as they are described.
I'm in my mid-sixties; I'm very much a candidate for the "things were better in the old days" brigade.
But I do think many (most?) things have improved. Housing is better; healthcare is immeasurably better (unless you can't afford it); and mobile telephony has improved the lives of at least a billion people worldwide.
Because I'm not miserable old git, I'm not going to list downsides.
[Edit] OK, I'll list one: permanent war.
Not exactly a new thing though is it? Plus the actual percentage of people worldwide exposed to war or directly affected by it has dropped significantly. The world is more peaceful than it has ever been.
Depending on who you ask, conflict deaths per capita have stayed the same or declined since 1990.[1] 1991 had the first Gulf War, The Troubles, the Yugoslav campaign in Croatia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Guatemala, and many more.
1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/conflict-deaths-per-10000...
But the music was definitely better back then!
We now make bigger, more-accurate bombs and missiles, but we sprinkle them around just as carelessly. We still have to be made to hate people if we are going to support a war; and we don't pay a lot of attention to the casualty-count of people we hate.
Music: If you're referring to the 60's and 70's, I agree - the seventies were my formative years, musically. But we're speaking of 1991, I think. [checks 1991's hits] In among the dross, there are some good tunes - Clash, Should I Stay Or Should I Go; James, Sit Down. And there was some great Acid House, which didn't make the charts (clubbers didn't know the names of the songs or the artists).
Objection!
Before 90's US was in permanent war just as well. It was called the Cold War. So that one downside is actually non-existent - from "before" vs. "today" point of view.
What should we be measuring when we measure improvement?
When I was growing up camcorders were expensive so video is limited to special occasions. Have a good amount of pictures but a lot fewer than we have of kiddo. Cameras were more expensive and each picture cost money in film and development. Long distance calls were short and infrequent because they were expensive.
We’ve also built a highly sophisticated surveillance state and generally reduced our basic freedoms and individual rights post-9/11, and despite bumps in the road for this program thanks to Snowden etc, nothing has fundamentally changed and things continue to get worse on this front.
To me, this list of improvements is really just a list of improvements absent broader context which paints a very different & disturbing picture.
Mobile phones are the pinnacle of tech - and also a superb tool for mass surveillance.
Happiness is a proxy for successful adaptation to reality. So yes, if they are successfully adapting to the changing environment, they should be happy. The very least, failing at it will make them pretty “unhappy”.
> We are biological creatures and each one of us chooses to construct meaning of life (or lack thereof) individually.
A weird level of resolution to stop at. We’re also atomic creatures, maybe we shouldn’t care about death? But we’re also conscious creatures that suffer and maybe at least avoiding that is pretty meaningful? I don’t think any nihilist is nihilistic enough to self-immolate for example.
You could DIY your meaning individually, as is the fashionable belief in this age of post-modern, but it’s liable to crumbling tragically with an inopportune contact with reality. Normativity of reality seeking is a strongly built instinct in any species that knows they have to survive in it, and their meaning emerges from this relationship.
Benjamin Franklin, agreeing that “the happiness of individuals is evidently the ultimate end of political society,” offered his vision of Higher Progress: If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on some- thing useful, that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life, want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and happiness.
Also Epicur: "Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest, sustainable pleasure in the form of a state of ataraxia (tranquility and freedom from fear) and aponia (the absence of bodily pain) through knowledge of the workings of the world and limiting desires. "
I don't mean to suggest that miserable circumstances don't make you miserable; just that circumstances that are twice as awful don't seem to make people twice as miserable. I suspect that most mediaeval peasants were about as cheerful as most ordinary people today.
We seem to be designed to not be content with what we have, because that would eliminate motivation to make things better.
If you're going to broaden person to people, I think it's best to narrow to "happier and more fulfilled" in regards to something. Marriage/personal economics/profession/social life/spiritual life/etc.
An incredible number of people pick ‘91. Some people even ask to go back to the seventies.
This article explains why I would much rather be young now rather than before.
Young adults in 2021 are hopelessly trying to outrun that time they tweeted a slur when they were 12.
Okay I guess I'd rank crispr as highly. But the list of changes that profound is short.
There's a podcast by Jason Feifer (was called Pessimists Archive) where the repeated theme across many episodes is the recurring fallacy of the "good ole days": https://www.jasonfeifer.com/build-for-tomorrow/
E.g. you ask today's generation and they say the "good old days" was 1991; but if you ask those in 1991 what the good old days were, they wouldn't say "right now!" ... they'd say 1970s. And if you ask those in 1970s... they'd say... (you get the point).
So the conclusion is either...
- the true good old days after connecting the survey across centuries was actually the prehistoric cave man days of hunting & gathering
... or ...
- every generation repeats the rose-colored glasses narrative because we bias the past with positive memories and the bias the present with negative current events
My mother was 20 in 1968, and it was the good old days. They believed the revolution was around the corner. Present was somewhat grim, but future was bright; in her years of political activity she saw the pill come, abortion rights, women rights enhanced, the end of dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, the end (in civilised countries) of death penalty, the crumbling of USSR.
My children are in their 20s; my son refuses to learn to drive because cars are evil and he doesn't want to own one, ever, because they're bad; he's hell-bent of enjoying the now because he's pretty sure that there is no future, except climate catastrophe, incessant wars, and electronically-enhanced surveillance; he thinks that democracy is a complete scam and he forgets to vote if I don't nag him weeks in advance. He's just as disillusioned as I am, but 27 years younger.
So I think the picture is more complex. The global direction of evolution is much more important than the objective starting point.
Is this sourced? In Europe, 1991 was when the Soviet union fell. Sure, in many now-ex-USSR countries 1991 wasn't the best of times because the collapse wasn't very well managed. But in West, suddenly the impeding doom of nuclear war near disappeared overnight.
2021 has ... exciting climate events and Covid.
edit. What is the soundtrack of 2021? In 1991 it supposedly was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4RjJKxsamQ . TIL the year ended with band donating bunch of royalties from the single to Gorbachev 10 days before he resigned and the USSR disappeared. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_of_Change_(Scorpions_song...
If you asked then what the good old days were, they'd probably say 1988. There's a reason Bush 1 was the only 1-term president between 1980 and 2020. Things didn't start perking up until around 93-95 with the WWW.
I grew up in the 90s, & maybe I'd do better as a 20 year old in 1991 rather than 2031 (too young to say 20 in 2021; I've succeeded already close enough to there), but I'd rather grow up in the 2000s than grow up in the 80s
There's a kind of arbitrage, where if I could take my technical abilities from 2010 back to 1990, I'd probably do pretty well. I'm not so sure about taking those abilities to 2030. So you need to frame your question more clearly: at what age does the time travel occur? For simplicity I assume the only age you've given: 20. If it's about when we're born, then that's a completely different human being
That explanation has the benefit that it doesn’t need to counter-assert against daydreamers that things are getting better, worse, or staying the same.
Google search and showers that stay hot are pretty nice, but the relative difficulty of accessing quality education, jobs, and housing probably turn out to be much more significant as you exit your 20s in 2031 and think about starting a family.
There's a big difference between 1991 and just a few years later of course, but even when I graduated from college (1996), Microsoft was absolutely suffocating. I had decided that I wanted to work for a computer company and that I had zero interest in working on Windows NT(or Copland). This left one company, Sun Microsystems, which even in 1996 was not really recruiting at universities. I got a job there by cold e-mailing a Sun engineer (Jeff Bonwick) based on a Usenet post in comp.unix.solaris. (Cold e-mailing to get a job was so unusual that a friend of mine who was a reporter for the AP wrote a story about my job search -- and it was broadly picked up nationally![0]) At Sun, I was the youngest person in OS development by a decade, and the industry broadly thought Sun to be foolish for insisting on innovating in the operating system. Conventional wisdom was wrong, of course, and I had a great 14-year run at Sun that I wouldn't trade for anything -- but it would be a mistake to overly romanticize what was honestly a pretty crappy era.
[0] I talked about this briefly in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IznEq2Uf2xk, including an (embarrassing) photo of me ca. 1996 that ran as the front page of many business sections around the US
Also, IME, the culture has become hateful, poisonous, and based on trauma, despair, and survival rather than hope and dreams, freedom and self-actualization.
May be with memory wipe of currently what you know and the way the world is
The past always looks better. People still want to return to the 50's and most of them were not alive then.
However, I believe every generation has had it "better" generally speaking than the previous and that's how it should be. Certain era's had things that were probably better but this era has things that future generations will envy as well while also having it "better" generally speaking.
Today is this best time to be alive and I'm optimistic tomorrow will be even better.
A recent study (2013) suggests that the idea that second hand smoke has a direct link to cancer wasn't entirely accurate.
https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/105/24/1844/2517805
>Even unhealthy foods are less unhealthy due to removing hydrogenated fats from foods
I would say food is far more unhealthy today than in 1991. There is sugar and bastardized sugar in everything. Sugar is addictive and food manufacturers use it to get people addicted to their food. Instead of eating for nutrition, people eat for that sugar hit, and you almost can't escape it. Try finding prepackaged foods in the grocery store without some form of sugar in it.
But the 2020s are going to be a transformational decade too, with a lot to learn and experience, and a ton of opportunities. Far more chaotic than the 1990s, but honestly that suits me personally. I thrive on that.
I would pick the 90s over the 2000s or 2010s though.
Well, I'd go back to the 2010s and buy even more bitcoin than I did, but other than that, I could skip that decade.
"You mean we don't all die in a nuclear war or from AIDS or global warming?"
"No, the future is much better! Riding lawn mowers are cheaper, teddy bears are much more cuddly and silky, board games have been revolutionized and you can get goat cheese at Walmart!"
Those quality of life improvements on that list are in reality pretty sad compared to the loss in social cohesion and quality of life in ways that matter more. You would think we didn't have indoor plumbing or antibiotics. We were in good shape. But the difference in pre and post 9/11 America is stark. This place was basically ruined on a social level, pure fear and panic, and it remains in different forms.
Now if you asked me if I'd rather be born in 1971 or 2021? I would say 2021. Because the last 20 years have been throwaway decades. Someone 20 years old in 2021 missed ALL of the good times, never saw America as it was, and has and will spend most of their life behind the 8 ball.
If you're born today, while there could definitely be more calamity, there's a good chance things turn up from the malaise of 2001-2021 in the next two decades. At least as it pertains to the working class. Which is most of us. Its been a great two decades for those that were running the show. But there's a reason why overall sentiment is and has been negative.
I'll take 20 in 1991, or 20 in 2041. But not 20 in 2021.
GPS on the phone is awesome, but I'd still prefer financial security.
Factory jobs that is probably true in general--though you're still into the period when a lot of traditional union manufacturing jobs were leaving (or had left) the country.
As an engineer/software developer, you're probably going to be paid about $40K for an entry-level position [ADDED: For the US at a "tech" company]. And there is basically no equivalent to routine FAANG SWE salaries.
Housing is cheaper (relatively) in some locations although the Bay Area was still relatively expensive. Manhattan was considered the high-priced place to live at the time.
Not in tech though. Engineering jobs paid middle-class level well, but nothing out of the ordinary for white-collar professionals. Starting salaries were in the 30Ks for top offers in rich companies but many people started in the 20Ks. You had to be Sr.Dir/VP level to start getting close to 100K.
The concept of engineers with a few years of experience making more salary than top-level surgeons was inconceivable. So purely on a financial sense, it's much better to be a new grad in software today than in '91.
Still, I'd rather be paid 35K doing ground-breaking UNIX kernel or networking work than be paid 500K building yet another adware/spyware social app.
Similarly for life at the bottom. In almost any period in history, life at the bottom sucked hard.
On the other hand, since I was in my 20's in the 90's I was a young child in the 70's and 80's when nerds were to be bullied, gay people were to be beaten, and God help you if you were Trans. That's still the case in much of the world, but looking at how my kids grew up, vastly improved since then.
So as a nerd, yes, the 90's were probably better for 20 year old me, but the 10's were definitely better for the 10 year old me.
Not so incredible I guess. I was 20 in '91 so can relate.
Computers and the internet were seriously exciting at the time, uncommercialized and pure hacker culture of exploration. We were building technology because it was exciting. The concept of building adware or spyware didn't exist. Today a startup going to "make the world a better place" is a sitcom joke, back then it was truly the feeling.
When can I be 'improper old' ?? :-D
Edit to add: in many ways, the apparent close of the Cold War just removed that one bilateral threat from center attention. In its place, we gained a new awareness of much more fragmented conflict scattered all over the world...
While you enjoyed your life in 1991, people around me literally died of hunger, because Gorbachev and Yeltsin and their advisors from USA killed almost all the industry on the former USSR territory overnight. People lost jobs, people lost savings, people lost meaning of life overnight.
It's a biggest case of genocide since 1940s, that is silenced and undocumented.
https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/22/world/soviets-foresee-bud...
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
That said, given current inflationary trends, it will be interesting to see if this still holds up in a decade or two.
[0] https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/cpi2020.png?x...
Real people need to pay for tuition/childcare, housing, and healthcare, so what would be the point of excluding those from the calculation of real income?
There's no real reason to have to pay for college when we're already paying for public education.
If you want uneducated children with no healthcare and no affordable place to live I guess things are fine, and that’s pretty much what we see now.
When I was in grade school we learned that average was a generic term for mean, median, or mode. So when I see average conflated with median in discussion (as it often is), I assume it's intentional. But others seem to interpret it as a synonym of mean.
[0] https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/gs-live/uploads%2F1527022...
Quality of life depends far more on the integrity of a person's human relationships than these trivial material gains.
I can remain bright eyed through all kinds of horribleness if I believe my suffering is meaningful and valued.
I used to be very excited about technology and I really believed it could fundamentally improve humanity in some way(s).
Now I'm excited about prosocial things, interconnection, anything which allows humans as a social animal to truly connect, find meaning, and uplift each other. Everything else is likely a distraction.
This is the hard part though. Technology lets you make incremental progress, occasional breakthroughs, and rarely has any major setbacks that aren't purely monetary. Humans having healthy social lives at the micro and macro scale is something we arguably understand and can affect much less than technology at the moment.
> Remember when physically detaching your car radio to avoid leaving it in the car was considered a 100% normal thing to do?
Why is it rarer, I wonder? I do recall having a detachable faceplate on my car radio. I sold that car in ~2010 or so but stopped bothering with the detaching long before then.
> All Day: because you won’t be yelled at for tying up the (only) phone line
... missing phone calls because I was occupying the phone line. My university claimed to have been "wired" but it was always "going to be enabled 'next year'".
There are various ani-theft technologies that can kick in if an infotainment system is removed. Electronics are also just cheaper in general so there's less value in stealing them.
All crime is down significantly, except murder and gun crime in the last year or two.
I imagine the value of a stolen car radio has plummeted since the combo of smartphone + CarPlay/android auto/3.5mm aux jack/Bluetooth is ubiquitous in any car made in the past 10 to 15 years.
I think some Eastern European gang perfected a way to smash windows and grab the valuable parts because at some point arrests were made and after that I haven't heard about it.
- Mapping the human genome has led to many applications of genetic medicine.
- Polio was eradicated in India.
- Cancer death rates declined 27% since 1999...
Click & go stroller & carseat systems are magical. Used to be that if your baby fell asleep in the car, you'd have to wake them up to undo the 5-point harness, transfer them to stroller, buckle another 5-point harness, undo it when you get to your destination, and then deal with the screaming baby. Now the carseat base stays in the car, you unclick the carseat, pop the whole thing into the stroller, get to your night out, pop the carseat on an inverted high-chair, and the kid can sleep the whole way or join you at the table.
Cheap plastic has dramatically reduced the cost and increased the safety of toys. Also, electronic toys & learning aids are super cheap now - my kid's got a Mandarin/English pictionary where you hover the pen over the pictures and it tells you the word for it in either Mandarin or English, and it cost < $20.
High-end preschools are better. There's been a lot of research on how to support children's social & emotional development that's now made its way into the classroom.
Traveling is generally better. There've been large improvements in travel cribs like the Pack'n'Play or Lotus, many hotels have them stocked, and there's the aforementioned improvements to carseats. Also airfare is cheaper. My kid went on more plane trips before he turned 2 than I did in my whole childhood.
There've been vaccines developed for many common childhood illnesses. No more rotavirus, no more chickenpox.
The big bugaboos for parents today are housing and work. You need 2 incomes to buy a house now, which makes everything else much more pressed for time. But if you can ignore that, there've been a lot of conveniences invented to help improve the efficiency of that constrained time.
When I was 7 years old way back in the day, all my toys could fit in a small bin about 24 x 24 inches.
80% of the crap in our house never gets played with, just sits in the bottom of a toy box taking up space.
Then there's the keyboard / mouse combination. The keyboard is an Apple Keyboard II [1] (or a minor variant - there were a few different models, with adjustable height and different switches), which came with the Macintosh Classic and uses the ADB connection. But the mouse is a Macintosh Mouse (M0100) [2], that uses the DE-9 connector, a connector that the Classic / Classic II did not have.
I know this is being pedantic, and in the end it doesn't matter, but it does annoy me that the computer / keyboard / mouse combination presented would not work together. Like the above poster, I expected better of the Harvard Innovation Lab.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_keyboards#Apple_Keyboard...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_mice#Macintosh_Mouse_(M0...
Hmm. Perhaps this is a regionalism, but I remember the phrase as being "batteries not included":
> Car Theft is rarer, and in particular, we no longer have to worry about our car windows being smashed to steal our car radios
Yes, car radios have been made harder to steal, but now our car windows are smashed to steal laptops and other valuables. And catalytic converter theft is also rampant.
Well that sure seems to be true.
https://www.motortrend.com/news/catalytic-converter-thefts-n...
“According to the National Insurance Crime Bureau, the pandemic has seen a rapid rise in catalytic converter theft. In 2019, an average of 282 catalytic converters were stolen every month; in 2020 the average had risen to 1,203—and that's just an average. In December alone, 2,347 catalytic converters were stolen.”
And anecdotally, living in Chicago: I know of so very many people who have had their convertors stolen. The wonders of outdoor parking.
An incredible amount of whistleblower leaks made it possible for citizens to know what horrible things their governments are doing. There is a real check on state power when the press has such a reach now, and you can publish (or dump) materials anywhere online even if you don't trust the press.
Frozen/convenient dietary alternatives to enslaving and killing animals are now easily available and it's no longer conventional wisdom that veganism will kill you or make you a stick figure person. Not likely considered incremental by those living beings!
I can remember in the early 90s going to AAA to get paper maps for upcoming trips, buying a Rand McNally almanac for the car, etc.
First getting mapquest and then later in-car GPS and later Waze has been super convenient.
Although the one part that is unequivocally better is the real-time traffic/incident info to reroute around trouble.
1) Printers still suck. By that I mean, mainly, reliability. I try to print something from my Mac laptop. The printer is connected, has paper, and displays no error messages. Nonetheless, nothing happens. There's no apparent way to figure out why. There wasn't in the 90s and there still isn't.
2) Software quality is, if anything, worse. It's clear that no unusual cases are ever tested for; only the most common browsers and a few of the recent releases of the OS. Error cases are handled no better than they ever were.
3) What else?
Laser printers are a step forward even if they leave a lot to be desired. Also, somewhat anecdotally, the amount of times I need to use a printer has significantly fallen since 2005.
- big tech companies are becoming so powerful that they will interfere in our daily lives through tech (because tech is everywhere) and there is little we can do about it we want it or not.
You cannot escape Google/Microsoft/Facebook/whatever. You just can't (unless you go full offline, but then the tech live improvements since the 90s go away as well).
This is such nonsense.
There are more alternatives now than ever. Name any service provided by FANAMNGS (or whatever acronym we're using today) and there are many alternatives. Shit we even have viable alternatives to iPhones and Androids.
Now if you need AWS level quality of service, you're gonna have to use a service provided by a company that has the means to provide that level of service. The difference is, 20 years ago, that level of service was just not available to your average person/company.
If you're talking about social media, then yeah, social media NETWORKS rely on having everyone on the same platform. It's easier than ever to host your own Geocities equivalent, if that's what you wanna do for some reason.
The way technology today is implemented repulses me. The surveillance, gamification, addition psychology all seem so unrecognized by the public but have made me less interested.
But for me the biggest grievance is the poorly working software. So tired of it. So so tired.
I want to say that IMO: the workday should be lowered. It is possible to produce all necessary things for living in just 2-4 hours/day, including houses, cars and many more. See productivity growth. Free time can be work too, but it should not be seen as necessary work, everyone should be able to make a choice: work necessary time (2-4 hours/day) or longer. If you think something worth your free time, OK, work at your free time. But what happen is that you try to tell me that I have to work each day 8-12 hours/day so you can have an universal cable or a new video game, etc. Not cool.
A funny point considering the absolute unmitigated disaster that is the Eurozone both in concept and implementation x)
> Keurig & other Single-Serve coffee machines
Another unsustainable waste of materials. Just use ground coffee please.
> Clothing has become almost “too cheap to meter”
Yes, it has been outsourced to countries with dirt-cheap labour. I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing.
Europe had ARM, a whole slew of microcomputer companies (and still the Raspberry Pi foundation today), Nokia, Linux, MySQL, etc. - all largely sold off or destroyed. Such a loss of potential.
I have issue with this one in part:
> Not Watching crummy VHS tapes, period
The rewind button actually worked 100% of the time.
I also have an issue with the like for USB. Yes, it’s better than most 90’s tech, but USB-C in its various guises/disguises and it’s horrible relationship with Thunderbolt is a travesty. The cables and ports can’t reliably be distinguished and various things just won’t work, or become unreliable. It’s just so unhelpful to have so many identical specs in in form factor.
One caveat is I only used macbooks for years. I was shocked when I built a Ryzen desktop and one usb-c port was standard, without thunderbolt support. So I had to begrudgingly use a to c cables there.
there are no material life improvements - only more efficient dopamine triggers. but that's not an improvement because before the 90s - guess what - they had their own triggers.
in that spirit you could add how access to more diverse pornography brought happiness to so many lonely men considering how especially a hundred years ago they were so starved they would get aroused at the sight of women's knees. poor bastards.
guess what, your mega-tittie-porn isn't really an improvement over some picture where a woman lifts her skirt you can see her ankles. it's just a fucking going round in circles what you all confuse with "improvement".
life for many people fucking sucks and most of those "improvements" only come at the expense of removing people further from any kind of meaningful spiritual fullfilment.
This goes even more so if we speak of the spectrum of LGBT identities, which in 1991 was in the midst of losing all continuity with the past because so many died from AIDS; many folks then would stay closeted and quiet because coming out was just too threatening. Casual homophobia was everywhere, and the "gay neighborhoods" of larger cities were somewhat exceptional even within that city. Now it's hardly unusual to be out, though generational acceptance remains rocky.
I don't know about you, but having cheap access to climate control and refrigeration is a pretty big deal. Even animals appreciate a warm place to sleep and fresh food.
Your reasoning seems ascetic. If a fellow says he's happier with the mega-titties than the ankles, who are you to tell him otherwise? Every human experience can be categorized into a dopamine or cortisol trigger. Who vested the authority in you to decide which of them constitute "meaningful spiritual fullfilment" and which do not?
>The percentage of the global population living in absolute poverty fell from over 80% in 1800 to under 20% by 2015.
This is astonishing.
In the time frame he's focusing on, from the 90s to now, the decrease in absolute poverty and substantial increases in well-being globally are facts that subsume any single technology or widget or innovation.
24% in 1990 down to around 7% today. More people are living better lives than at any point before in history, and this should be celebrated, but hardly seems to be noticed.
The things he points out, however, are crucial pieces of why things have gotten better. We're able to instantly connect to a global pool of information, alerting each other to the swarm of problems facing the world, and we're able to take action.
Charitable donations, political activism, decentralized media, ubiquitous internet access, and a thousand other small things have enabled and inspired people to use powerful networks of people and computers and resources to effectively target and fix huge problems facing billions of people.
Sure, we have real challenges in the misbehavior of big tech companies and the politics of the panopticon, but maybe we can be hopeful that history has a trend toward a more liberal, purposeful, enabling life for all humans that exceeds the mere struggle for survival.
I think of this article as a reminder to appreciate things that are so incredibly important, even if they tend to go unnoticed day to day. Stop and smell the victory of technology over struggle and disease and discomfort and starvation.
The smoking ban happened in England in 2007, so I didn't have to put up with smoking for that long. But I can definitely remember the time when going out meant your clothes and hair stunk of smoke. It was disgusting. In Germany it is still legal for smaller establishments to have smoking, and smoking is still very popular in Germany, unlike the UK and US. A few of us were looking for a place to have some drinks one night and found it really difficult because going into a smoking place was out of the question.
Growing up in the UK we always had the cheapest food. In the 90s supermarkets started having value brands and we had a lot of "Tesco Value" stuff. Today you just cannot find food at such low quality. If you buy the cheapest today, you are getting what would have been a premium product back then. The bread was like tough foam, the crisps like burnt potato skins, the beans were mostly watery sauce.
"My grandmother casually horrified us a few years ago by going through the list of her dead siblings: 2 died on the farm of ‘summer diarrhea’ (bovine tuberculosis from unpasteurized milk) as infants, an unremarkable fate in the area, and then 3 died in their teens–20s after moving to the city to work in textile factories. The rest died later. For comparison, she lost 1 child out of 5 (stillbirth), and 0% of her >12 grandchildren/great-grandchildren."
Several years ago an older friend of mine recounted to me that his father was one of three siblings to survive the influenza pandemic of 1918-1920, six of his brothers and sisters died from it.
Where do I find this? I tried this spring and summer but couldn't find guacamole that doesn't spoil within a day or two, especially after being opened, which is too soon to be practical.
As far as prices go, seems like Walmart has them at $4.89 for 6 mini cups (12oz total or 340g) or a large single package of 15oz/425g for $4.98. An average avocado weighs 136 grams without the pit or skin according to the USDA. Let's say 1/5th of the total weight of avocado flesh you buy is spoiled in some way (too stringy, too hard, spoiled etc.) At $1.25 per avocado and 20% spoilage, the large single package of Wholly Guacamole and the avocado are nearly the same price. Various sources claim that the average US avocado price is around $2 but when I buy them myself I usually get them around $1; I suppose if you're paying more it's an even better value.
So, looks like a good value in addition to saving on spoilage. My only worry would be the plastic waste, but I can't seem to find what the containers are made out of and if those are recyclable.
Following the link, the "clutter free" desktop from 2014 hides all affordances and labels, and dumps everything into a laptop and smartphone screen. The "clutter" is now digital, more complex, and arguably more intrusive in terms of continuous interruptions that follow you around everywhere.
I think the lines of text are too wide, the font is too large and thick, the line height is too small, and paragraphs really need to be padded vertically, the indentation instead makes it seem like a high school essay and made me want to close the tab immediately.
Housing: Now less affordable than ever. It takes more hours worked to afford any kind of shelter than ever in the last 50 years. According to an interview I once watched: in the 60s, a painter could afford a single family house and six kids and the wife didn't even need to work. today, two painters working together can barely afford shelter, even with no kids.
Cars: MPG has not improved. Look at a corolla from the 70s vs today, it's about the same. Comfort is roughly comporable, at least since the invention of AC. It now costs more to buy a car today than in the 70s, in terms of average number of hours worked in order to afford a car.
Education has seen the greatest amount of inflation. Whereas a high school diploma could give you a great enough salary to afford a house in the 60s. Now, not even a bachelors or masters is enough to afford basic shelter for many people living in the first world.
Yes, we have a gazillion more computers, iphones, smart watches and toys to play with. We can fill our entire house with plastic now. what goood is that if you don't have a house to stay in? where will you plug in all those electronics and your massive 70" tv, when you're out on the street?
> Cars: MPG has not improved. Look at a corolla from the 70s vs today, it's about the same.
This is not true, MPG has meaningfully improved. From the EPA, "[sedan/wagon, car SUV, truck SUV, pickup truck, and minivan/van] are at or near record high fuel economy and record low CO2 emissions in model year 2019" [1]
New Vehicle estimated real-world fuel economy increased from ~14MPG in 1975 to 24.9MPG in 2019[1]
>It now costs more to buy a car today than in the 70s
The price of cars has risen below inflation:
The annual inflation average 1970-2021 is 3.86% [2] From 1970 to 2019, cars had an annual inflation average of 2.04%. [3]
Finally, a car today will last longer than they did in 1970. The typical car in 1970 would last until 100K miles. Today the typical car lasts more like 200K miles. [4]
In summary, cars cost less, last longer, and are cheaper than they were in 1970.
[1] https://www.epa.gov/automotive-trends/highlights-automotive-... [2] https://www.inflationtool.com/us-dollar/1970-to-present-valu... [3] https://www.in2013dollars.com/New-cars/price-inflation/1970-... [4] https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/automobiles/as-cars-are-k...
You'll pry my gas range from my cold, dead hands
Children living in homes with gas stoves are 40% more likely to develop asthma for example, according to some studies. Other studies have it closer to 10%.
Anyway, it's clear that indoor gas combustion isn't advisable from a health perspective. Not to mention the climate, burning methane for energy should be phased out, full stop.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/5/7/21247602...
https://qz.com/1941254/experts-are-sounding-the-alarm-about-...
I have recently swapped gas for induction and it dropped my meal prep time by 20~30% because I'm not standing around waiting for pans to get hot anymore.
If I was big into wok cooking, I'd probably keep the gas range. 99% of the time I just want to get a pan to 500F or boil a pot of water ASAP.
Whenever I cook on gas, I miss the fast-heating of induction for things like pasta or potatoes.
I also don't understand why all induction ranges have to be "high-tech" touchscreen crap. I'd love an induction stove with big, substantial, tactile knobs. Cooking on a Wolf range is such a pleasure for that experience alone.
> ...
> Indefinite: not worrying about running out of AOL hours, liberated from the tyranny of time metering and (mostly) bandwidth metering
Except that some ISPs do have caps and going over results in throttling or extra charges. I thought those days were behind us, but no. It is better than it used to be, but it's still a thing.
My eyes used to itch when I watched a CRT for more than a couple of hours, if better technologies didn't become available I would have probably not chosen a career in IT.
It also threatens to wipe away many of those, especially if societies or ecosystems begin to collapse or conflicts increase.
This actually sounds really fun and makes me feel nostalgic for the 90s
I'd be so happy when I got my hands on something that VIZ reprinted, like Baoh, Grey, or Outlanders. Then, I'd know what was going on.
EZ Pass type devices has made long distance traveling so much easier and more efficient. Anyone travel the Mass Pike in the 90s? It would be stopped for a quarter mile for the privilege to pay 75 cents in a line.
> All-You-Can-Eat Broadband
... in some places, with some providers. My local broadband monopoly imposes metered data usage, with caps and overage charges. You have to pay $30 to have unmetered access.
When I was a kid in the 90's when I think about life back then it sucked, compared to nowadays.
I think we could list a lot more than what is in the article.
I routinely flew in the 80's and 90's: shorter lines, more cabin space, and food every flight (and fewer yokels airing their stinky bare feet). I'd go back to that in a heartbeat.
These times of algorithmic flight loading and canceling/combining 'underbooked' flights really stink.
I once ended up flying a Seattle - Boston redeye on a 747 with a total three other passengers, and the flight crew said that they (Braniff Air, bought by Northwest, etc.) were still making money on the flight because the hold was full of US Mail.
That was a quality experience we'll likely never see again.
(Then again, I also once flew London to NYC one row in front of the smoking section - that's also a quality experience that I won't miss never seeing again)
And the people with more income are feeling that their comfort has to suffer.
So for those with more income, maybe it makes sense to pay for first class or hire a private charter plane?
Go watch some early 90s movies and look at the kinds of apartments and houses normal "not material to the plot" people live in and how they are furnished and compare to today.
Am I the only one hat thinks without Facebook and other social media, our vaccination and mask wearing rates would likely be much higher?
Unlike other things, if you didn't have them, you wouldn't really think twice about them in the first place, except as very minor inconveniences...
The web kicked off in the late 90's, picked up the 2000's but not real fast, and now is really flying and one assumes it will continue to accelerate.
Power tools are amazing. And that's the internet pushing them. I can see reviews with each new advancement anywhere in the world. They can see R&D around the world. Each company has to keep up and so do the counterfeiters. I'll order from overseas if they are not available local. Power tools augment humans, you can see people's home improvements getting more complex which is also pushed by the internet. Everything is in hyper mode.
I've wondered about this. No vaccines presumably. But, also, the sort of work from home, online shopping, remote school, etc. that many people/companies were able to more or less adapt to basically wouldn't have been possible in 1990--and, arguably, much before 2000 if that.
It's true that there was less air travel, including international travel, in 1990 than in 2019 but I'd need to be convinced this would be an important factor.
Comparisons to 1918 are hard, if only because of WWI and associated secrecy, but from what I can tell having read a bit, it doesn't appear as if there were widespread or long-lived closures of schools and other places. I assume, we would have acted likewise in 1990; i.e. we wouldn't have done a lot because there wasn't a lot we could do.
ADDED: This was not intended as a political comment. Merely speculation about how the world may have reacted differently in a world effectively without internet or (likely) a rapidly-developed vaccine.
