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Life Improvements Since the 1990s

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Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#271

Post by quacked »

njharman wrote: post #237
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yep. 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).

I agree with you, but in a different way. Our supply chains that we need to stay alive (medical, shipping, farming, manufacturing) run on extreme conditions and extreme working hours, paid for by extreme money, designed by extreme intellect. We could all stop working, but the workers in those industries (from the CEO down to the laborer) would have to keep their extreme conditions and extreme hours.

If, somehow, we all started working for the supply chain, I think we could rebalance those hours so that they weren't as extreme. As it stands, solutions like UBI still require sweatshops, global shipping, global finance, etc. while simply letting people who aren't on the hook to provide a vital service to sit around and gaze at navels.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#272

Post by ghaff »

Clewza313 wrote: post #229
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…

One other big change since the 1990s, though, is that Creative Commons is now a real thing. Many publications/sites including Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and open-access journals release everything as CC by default, and Wikimedia Commons has become a treasure trove of materials that can be freely remixed.

>can be freely remixed

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.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#273

Post by matthewmorgan »

ghaff wrote: post #17

>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…

Chinese geneticists didn't have the ability to do it back then.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#274

Post by acituan »

JackPoach wrote: post #127
rthomas6 wrote: post #68

But are people happier and more fulfilled? Are they more able to have a meaning-filled life surrounded by people with whom they have close and lasting relationships? What should we be measuring when we measure improvement?

Should we be measuring at all? Claiming that people have to be more happy over time is a weird proposition for a biologist like me. Not only happiness does not exist (see reification), the idea that it can be 'measured and improved' is silly. Should the next generation of birds be more happy and fulfilled than the previous one? Should the next generation of chimps have stronger lasting relationships? Does it even mak…

> Should the next generation of birds be more happy and fulfilled than the previous one? Should the next generation of chimps have stronger lasting relationships? Does it even makes sense?

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.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#275

Post by ghaff »

dougmwne wrote: post #163
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…

I had a moment like this recently with, of all things, a snorkeling mask. It was one of those full face masks with a big snorkel sticking out the top like a unicorn's horn that popped on the market a few years ago. It is a marvel. It took all the downsides of the old masks and ingeniously fixed them. Full mouth and nose breathing so you can breathe naturally and comfortably, an airflow pattern that pulls dry air over…

Those types of masks actually existed in the 1960s though I'm sure the newer ones are more sophisticated. My mother had one of those.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#276

Post by Jeff_Brown »

marricks wrote: post #240
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…

I think the tragedy of 9/11 is distinctly different from this one. That one was covered non stop by media networks and lead to titanic shifts in the US and to US foreign policy. Comparing emotional states between now and then seems pretty useless. And sure every new crisis can seem bleak but just considering climate change when the field of people studying it have observable depression I imagine things are a bit gloo…

* One of the worst in the developed world.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#277

Post by alasdair_ »

“ the Internet/Human Genetics/AI/VR are now actually things Imagine dealing with the 2019–20 coronavirus pandemic in 1989 instead.”

Am I the only one hat thinks without Facebook and other social media, our vaccination and mask wearing rates would likely be much higher?

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#278

Post by nostrademons »

jasode wrote: post #67
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.

>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. 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 generat…

I'm old enough to remember 1991, even if I wasn't in the workforce then, and IIRC the mood then was kinda depressed. We were in the midst of a recession. We'd just come off the hangover of the first Gulf War. Nobody really knew what the fall of the Soviet Union would mean for America, and there were real fears about nukes falling into the wrong hands. Grunge was the hot new music, and pop culture was all about Gen-X alienation.

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.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#279

Post by Jeff_Brown »

xyzelement wrote: post #189
minikites wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 ve…

In general I think low expectations for the (near) future of humanity and depression are correlated, but intriguingly to me, it's not an extremely tight correlation. Some people think the ship's going down and manage to party and have a good time. Others aren't particularly extreme in either emotional direction even as they evince extreme pessimism. And I imagine the reverse is true too, although I don't recall seeing it.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#280

Post by minikites »

xyzelement wrote: post #239
minikites wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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. I think it only seems overly negative -because- so many people are blindly optimistic and assume things just get better naturally w…

You're talking about human nature. You're seeing the problems only. But humans were "like this" forever. EG: you're dismal about covid because some people won't get the shot. But in the 80s/90s you'd be dismal because people weren't practicing safe sex despite AIDS, and you'd draw that line to a depressing conclusion. And yet in reality, somehow the world moved towards a much better place despite those things. Same w…

>And yet in reality, somehow the world moved towards a much better place despite those things.

It's not "somehow", you're glossing over the very real losses and very avoidable tragedies (fed by bigotry and fear) that happened during the AIDS crisis, which is my whole point. Progress isn't free and by ignoring the real losses and avoidable tragedies we repeat the same mistakes. That's why we have to confront the uncomfortable parts of the past and present. If we only focus on the superficial elements of success and progress, we make problems more difficult to actually confront.

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