Life Improvements Since the 1990s • Hacker News Board

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#181

Post by kristofferR » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:45 PM UTC

nemo44x wrote: post #170

kristofferR wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gas stoves creates high amounts of indoor pollution. The amount of pollution gas stoves creates inside are often illegal outside, the US doesn't have indoor pollution standards. 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 perspectiv…

Those claims have been debunked as being misinterpreted. If you ran a gas stove for 24 hours then yes the amount of NO2 would be illegal outside. But this doesn't consider time-adjusted emissions but rather peak emissions. So you'd have to combine all of that into a single continuous blast, which isn't the case. As for asthma, current U.S. federal agency involvement on the subject does not identify a connection betwe…

Please link some science papers debunking it, something real that isn't just YesToGas lobby talking points. Don't forget US Federal agency recommendations aren't always trustable, especially with lobbying and lots of money involved.

Here's a recent study from Australia for example: https://espace.library.uq.edu.au/view/UQ:727186

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#182

Post by nonameiguess » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:45 PM UTC

telesilla wrote: post #8

Great 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 greatest change to the world from the last X decades is the lifting of billions from extreme poverty in Africa and Asia. Changes to middle class life have been insignificant in comparison.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#183

Post by bcantrill » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:47 PM UTC

thundergolfer wrote: post #64

iambateman wrote: post #14

I 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.

Going to be another person commenting that they'd seriously consider 1991 (as long as I had the smarts to still go into software). Jump back to 1991 as a 20yr old and head to the recruitment fair stalls of Sun Microsystems / DEC / Apple / Adobe / Microsoft. 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 muc…

You may want to reconsider before you step into the time machine. First of all, 1991 in particular is a tough year -- it was a crushing recession in the US, and young people were having a really hard time finding jobs. So you wouldn't be "heading to the recruitment stalls" for any of those companies except potentially Microsoft. And this is absolutely the "why-are-manhole-covers-round" era of Microsoft, and it's the DOS era as well -- so not only is the company smarmy, its products are buggy, demoralizing piles of death-marched junk. Read the (excellent) Showstopper! for a hint of what awaits you at Microsoft.

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

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#184

Post by thaumasiotes » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:48 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #152

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #20

I think he kind of missed the elephant that is modern communication technology has reduced the marginal cost of skilled services enabling pretty much every object designed in an office and manufactured in a factory to benefit from a broader array of engineering and design professionals and methodologies. The average product and service that the average actor in the economy interacts with is designed and optimized to…

"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. " You can find examples of this, but overall, I dispute the generalization. I think quality/price improvement…

> Computer related products have gone crazy. It's not more for less though, it's "much more for a little more."

I thought we liked Raspberry Pis on HN.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#185

Post by barneysversion » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

JackPoach wrote: post #169

laserlight wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell whether I am happy or not. What do you mean when you say happiness doesn't exist?

Do you understand the concept of reification? If not, see https://www.vocabulary.com/dictionary/reification#:~:text=Re... . So if you feel happy (or miserable) it means just that - that you feel happy (or miserable). It doesn't mean that happiness or misery actually exist literally.

Reification is usually a fallacy when we take the abstraction too far. The canonical example being "the map is not the territory" where someone confuses every mark on a map with actual features of the terrain.

One could argue that abstractions "actually exist literally" without being physical. Gravitational fields don't exist physically but do exist and they're a valid abstraction that's useful to measure. Maybe happiness is a phenomenon that could be useful too (though I would say to a lesser extent.)

A little tangential but... even things that we would say exist physically are not on closer inspection. Does a chair actually exist or is it a platonic ideal that we apply to a collection of atoms assembled to form four legs, seat and a back?

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#186

Post by basseq » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

basseq wrote: post #50

dminvs wrote: post #12

> stoves You'll pry my gas range from my cold, dead hands

My ideal range is 2 induction burners + 4 gas. Induction has a lot of the benefits of gas (e.g., instant temperature control), but gas is still superior for sautéing and continuous temperature control. 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…

Apparently I need to look at Gaggenau, which has both knobs on some induction models and a series of models that are designed to be combined together. So I can actually have an integrated workspace with gas and induction options!

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#187

Post by majormajor » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:49 PM UTC

dalbasal wrote: post #81

This reminds me of a golden age blog post, when lists turned out to be an understudied literary device. I'm a fan of "dumps." Some interestingly debatable ones here: " 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…

You're only arguing against the claim about copyright terms by equating two separate definitions of "public domain." public domain is being enriched by that stuff from the early 20th century. The "public feeling" stuff of the 1999 internet wasn't actually in the public domain then either.

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.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#188

Post by LightG » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:50 PM UTC

sodafountan wrote: post #121

hncurious wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're clearly not familiar with hiring in tech. It's 2% because the available pool is tiny. It's not for lack of trying to hire non-white, non-asians in tech. Tech minorities are in fact prioritized in hiring AND there are countless programs to increase the pool. Aimed at girls and tech minorities, not white and asian boys.

It's almost like biology and aptitude play a big part in what you end up doing in life. Here's a definition of aptitude from Google: What is an example of an aptitude? Aptitudes are natural talents, special abilities for doing, or learning to do, certain kinds of things easily and quickly. They have little to do with knowledge or culture, or education, or even interests. They have to do with heredity. Musical talent…

Interesting point, meine Obergruppenführer.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#189

Post by xyzelement » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:52 PM UTC

minikites wrote: post #148

xyzelement wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At any point of human history, one could convince themselves that the future is bleak. There had been pandemics and plagues, cold and hot wars, revolutions and dangerous technologies and -isms. And yet in retrospect humanity's trend has been of greater ingenuity, connectives, safety and well-being. Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clo…

>Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clock - if you think every thing will kill you, you will eventually be right. It's not about present society being a global maximum, it's about present society being a local maximum. The lessons from history are often that things can and do get worse, sometimes for generations, before improving again…

> (and I would argue probable) that life will get worse for a long while before improving.

Sure. Like I said, you can do this at any point in time and if enough people do that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so it's better not.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at your submission history (which is vast!) and it's 90% doom and gloom across a vast array of topics. I do think living with such a negativity bias is very disempowering - and not to mention not fun. I don't mean to be stupid and blindly optimistic (I manage risk for a living among other things) but like I said, living with certainty that everything will be terrible will ruin your life.

Like I said, since dawn of man, people had reason to believe what you believe. And those who really believed it would have no reason to build anything, learn anything, invest in anything, have children etc - why do any of that if the world is ending.

But the world is inherited by those who DO do those things - everything we have, everything we are, everything we're investing in - is there because someone in the past believed that the future is worth the work. So just be careful how much of this your let into your psyche because it will lead to you to a dead end

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#190

Post by dminvs » Thu, Aug 12, 2021, 2:53 PM UTC

bob1029 wrote: post #28

dminvs wrote: post #12

> 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.

The fact that I was able to continue feeding my family hot food in the freezing cold 72-hour blackout in Texas! Big plus.

Electric or induction will never win me over unless I somehow end up in a house with a Powerwall.