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Life Improvements Since the 1990s

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Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#311

Post by bob1029 »

0xffff2 wrote: post #177
nemo44x wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Get better pans, then heating up isn't an issue. I think it's nice to have an induction burner but I prefer gas for many reasons. One is the visual feedback from the flame. Another is that a flame is a 3D surface to cook on so I can tilt the pan to get certain sides hot when needed. Induction is good at boiling water though.

As a general rule, the better the pan, the thicker it is and the longer it would take to heat up.

Precisely. This is why I started moving towards induction after I became obsessed with the capabilities of cast iron cookware.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#312

Post by unnouinceput »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #74
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'll take 91. I get to experience all the exciting personal computing technology again before it all becomes web appliances and dark patterns. Back when the internet, if you could get it, was a place of wonder instead of terror.

Do you have kids? Sounds like you don't. All people would go back in time until they become parents. After that, faced with the harsh reality that going back in time would alter your decisions hence not getting the same kids, they, admittedly begrudgingly, back off.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#313

Post by njarboe »

quacked wrote: post #271
njharman wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Maybe a system where people work in the extreme system from 20-30, get paid highly, and save enough to not need to work again in their early 30's. Seems like a much better system than UBI.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#314

Post by trynumber9 »

d_burfoot wrote: post #304

>having Fansubs available for all anime (no longer do anime clubs watch raw anime and have to debate afterwards what the plot was! Yes, that’s actually how they’d watch anime back in the 1970s–1990s This actually sounds really fun and makes me feel nostalgic for the 90s

If you know a bunch of people who do not understand Japanese you could still do that. Could be fun, I'd try it once at least.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#316

Post by api »

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…

I would bet that today's public domain open web is larger than it was in 1999. It's just harder to find because search engines prioritize large closed silo sites and outside those sites search has been largely destroyed by spam.

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.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#317

Post by z77dj3kl »

wazoox wrote: post #291
jasode wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 was 20 in 1991 in Europe. I was flying regularly without any flygskam. The USSR was just falling and we were all sure it was an unmitigated good (we still didn't know that the Russians will die by scores and see their life expectancy drop like a rock); Germany was just reunited and we thought the EU was a great project, not a bureaucratic monster working for the oligarchy; Hell, I even believed there were nice guys…

I'm extremely interest the general feeling and views societies had in the past: how they perceived the present and the future, as a whole.

Objectively life has become better and more comfortable for the vast majority of humans since then (Hans Rosling does a beautiful job of exploring this).

But I do think that perceptions and feelings matter, and even though material wellbeing is a prerequisite to that, so is also the general feeling and view that those around you hold, and in many ways I feel we've gone backwards in that.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#318

Post by thegrimmest »

minikites wrote: post #280
xyzelement wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 uncom…

But isn't the point that despite the very real and avoidable tragedies along the way, things have continued to improve quite quickly? So as we continue, we can expect more preventable tragedies (whatever "preventable" actually means), but also more progress to benefit the vast majority of us who do make it?

I don't think we need to get bent out of shape about the aspects of human nature that cause horror and tragedy, since they seem so greatly overshadowed by aspects of the same nature which are driven to continuously improve. The good guys are winning, by a lot.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#319

Post by thegrimmest »

denton-scratch wrote: post #199

To 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…

> 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.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#320

Post by asdff »

SavantIdiot wrote: post #296
notdang wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So this means that people with less disposable income can afford to fly now. 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?

Trains are nice too. Cheaper, and you get to move around and mingle at lot easier. Maybe try one of those? Busses are cheap as well, but you can't walk around as much. But I know some people think trains and busses are gross and "lower class", which is why they have so much trouble getting funding. It's a catch-22: people won't use them, so lines don't get funded, so people don't use them. I'm quite fond of Amtrak's…

No one wants to sit in a train for 10 hours on what would have been a two hour flight
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