Earlier quoted context omitted.
Get the single serve packs then.
Thanks, but that's too much waste for my taste.
I wonder if it’s less waste than spoiling a larger container.
Life Improvements Since the 1990s
191–200 of 480 posts
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#192I 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.
Destruction of the USSR in 1991 gave a boost to the Western economies by eliminating a strong competitor and opening a new huge market.
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.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#193I 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…
The downside to broadening the talent pool for design/manufacturing is that it means workers now have to be among the best in the world to get business and thus earn a good living. It no longer suffices to be the best in a local region. 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 sch…
A big question to be is if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox applies to this type of labor.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#194I 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...
This was the first thing that came to mind. Rock & Roll may have died in this decade but the innovation of the 90's made it worth it. I fear for 2031 once the tik tok-ification of music has run its course.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#195Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 happ…
You are absolutely correct. Moreover, reifications can be useful or harmful - purely based on how they are being used. That's why maps are actually useful, except for several individuals that died in Australia and other places by trusting their navigators more than their own eyes and actual surroundings. I've been in situations where GPS malfunctioned and when I quickly realized it I understood that I should not follow the map.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#196I 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…
> Education... we have more and arguably better, but more expensive.
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.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#197Earlier 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…
>The lessons from history are often that things can and do get worse, sometimes for generations, before improving again later.
The example I like to think about for this is imagine being born in the eastern European bloodlands - Eastern Germany, the Baltics, Poland, Byelorussia or Ukraine around 1895-1900. Things are pretty good up until the Great War starts, which back then you would be old enough to be considered an adult for, and then it is wars, famines, repressions and totalitarianism for the rest of your life as you likely die just short of the Iron Curtain falling. That's a pretty bleak life. Yet many people lived it, and found love and purpose and had families under it and those civilizations as a whole eventually recovered.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#198Environment: air quality in most places has continued to improve (and considering the growing evidence on the harms of air pollution, this may well be the single most important item on this whole page), forest area has increased , and more rivers are safe to fish in
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.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#199To me, the article seems panglossian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide).
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.
Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being a white guy in 2021 is easy sailing.
In the USA, perhaps. Though I doubt it even there, a lot of the rural underperforming regions are mostly white. In Belarus or Moldova, definitely not. People somehow forget that being white is not the same as being white American. There is a lot of dirty poor whites living under dubious regimes elsewhere. Whiteness is not really a thing.
Early 90s Eastern Europe would be a tough environment for a 18 year old. There was a lot of friction moving away from from the old system (not that Belarus living in 2021 is that much easier)