I looked at the 1980s desktop picture and I realized nothing has improved since then.
Life Improvements Since the 1990s
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Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#22I often ask people: “if you could be 20-years old in 1991 or 2021, which would you pick?” 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.
Nevermind came out in 91, and it did feel like the beginning of something...
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#23I like how the EU is listed under technology.
Well, they are technocrats after all.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#24Great we're doing better however I notice most of these are benefits experienced by the middle class and up. How about we do better and also give a leg up for the those in poverty? Even if Macdonalds is serving healthier food, I wouldn't pat ourselves on the back quite yet.
The smartphone, value engineered window A/C unit and all manner of other things have given the poor a massively better lifestyle than they did in the 1990s.
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.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#25I often ask people: “if you could be 20-years old in 1991 or 2021, which would you pick?” 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.
There are a lot of things that younger people in particular take for granted today that were basically not available in 1990. I occasionally think that if I had to go back to 1990 and do my job as a product manager, I'd probably quit in frustration over just not having the information I needed to do my job.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#26>Imagine dealing with the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic in 1989 instead. 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…
1796 – Edward Jenner develops and documents first vaccine for smallpox.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#27I often ask people: “if you could be 20-years old in 1991 or 2021, which would you pick?” 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.
'91 would be better though - better salaries in a lot of jobs, and lower house prices.
GPS on the phone is awesome, but I'd still prefer financial security.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#28> stoves You'll pry my gas range from my cold, dead hands
What property of the gas range do you most enjoy?
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.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#29More of a criticism of the Harvard Innovation Lab photo than the article, but the "1980's" desktop computer pictured is a rough facsimile of the Macintosh Classic released October 15, 1990. This machine represented the one of the first products produced by the Apple Industrial Design Group which had replaced the iconic '80s Snow White design from Frog Design.
I don't want to detract from the article, but that picture is a bit odd. You've got a Macintosh Classic (or Classic II, which shares the same case) with the Apple logo and model name covered over (why?).
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...
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#30With the exception of a few (very important) services (e.g. college tuition, healthcare, childcare), increases in income have actually outpaced inflation for most other goods and services over the last 20 years [0]. This is something I almost never see discussed; almost everyone seems to believe that real incomes have totally stagnated. That said, given current inflationary trends, it will be interesting to see if th…
> This is something I almost never see discussed; almost everyone seems to believe that real incomes have totally stagnated. 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?
All of these are fundamentally related to the structure of our society and land use policy, not anything technological.
There's no real reason to have to pay for college when we're already paying for public education.