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Life Improvements Since the 1990s

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Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#431

Post by savingsPossible »

hansvm wrote: post #428
andrepd wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> public domain is being enriched by that stuff from the early 20th century. Well this is trivially true, but it really doesn't mean anything. If copyright length was 500 years this would still be a true statement. It's ridiculous that there are 100 years old works of art created by people who have been dead for three quarters of a century which are still under copyright. You cannot spin this as a positive thing, I'm…

> It's ridiculous that there are 100 years old works of art created by people who have been dead for three quarters of a century which are still under copyright. You cannot spin this as a positive thing, I'm sorry. One counter-argument I've seen when I've taken your side is that some works are higher quality for society (in some fuzzy, aggregate sense) because they have gatekeeping that maintains the image of a given…

If we are talking about cultural consumption as a status symbol (or maybe: that a thing having status makes consuming it more enjoyable or more likely)

Well, then there are still the thing that have copyright today!

If you are talking about some cultural space being exausted because of remixing (say, overuse of the mona lisa makes people less interested in it) -- well, this seems not to be the case, but anyway, we could have specific legislation to avoid this effect and still have copies for people to enjoy (not that I support that, I bet its not a big problem when compared to the massive boon of accessibility)

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#432

Post by 1123581321 »

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…

The most charitable option is that it’s simply a great pleasure to imagine retreading familiar years. Due to human limitations, those years are the ones we grew up in.

That explanation has the benefit that it doesn’t need to counter-assert against daydreamers that things are getting better, worse, or staying the same.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#433

Post by egypturnash »

wolverine876 wrote: post #178
dntrkv wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And not only that, a lot of the improvements in these tools, services, and supply chains means you can design, prototype, and mass manufacture a product without buy-in from a major corp. So many of the new products I buy are designed by small teams, or in some cases, one-man operations. It's funny how we went from a single craftsman making the whole product, to massive corporations making all the products, and now th…

> And not only that, a lot of the improvements in these tools, services, and supply chains means you can design, prototype, and mass manufacture a product without buy-in from a major corp. A great point. While I'm well aware of it, is there a book or guide to how that is done? 'Global supply chain manufacturing for noobs'? I'm looking for something with real expertise and research behind it, not someone's blog post.…

https://www.bunniestudios.com/ should have a lot of blog posts with real expertise and research behind them, he’s been blogging about doing this for ages.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#434

Post by thegrimmest »

Robotbeat wrote: post #397
thegrimmest wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't the fact of rapidly climbing, market-driven compensation for typically-minimum-wage jobs such as food service, hospitality and labour sufficient to dispense with minimum wages all together? Yes perhaps the market takes X years to adjust, but it does in fact adjust. Why not just wait the years and save all the bureaucracy. > they can just hire cheap workers and fire them as needed But doesn't increasing the mini…

No, because usually we aren’t in such an extremely tight labor market driven by high federal spending. If you want to argue for indefinite high federal spending to guarantee a tight labor market for decades, then sure, a higher minimum wage might not be necessary. Is that what you’re arguing? Because if a tight labor market is transitory (and minimum wage keeps dropping due to inflation), then businesses won’t be giv…

I'm not arguing for indefinitely high federal spending, but I would make the case that spending money on infrastructure is a much better use of money compared to pretty much anything else the federal government can do with it.

I'm arguing that labour shouldn't be specially exempt from markets fluctuating between tight and loose. I'm also arguing that raising the minimum wage hurts the very poorest of us the most, by making them unable to complete in the only way they can: lifestyle compromise. Indeed, they end up worse off when they are priced out of the labour market and forced into joblessness.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#435

Post by savingsPossible »

only_as_i_fall wrote: post #264
JackPoach wrote: post #169

Earlier 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.

That's a silly strawman. Nobody is claiming that happiness exists literally. And it's intangible nature does nothing to prevent us from measuring or maximizing aggregate happiness.

Well, not any more than chairs :P

I'd say happiness exists exactly as much as chairs, in both cases we are classifying what is, in reality, just a collection of atoms, either as a chair or as a happy person, based on some external measurments

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#437

Post by bcantrill »

thundergolfer wrote: post #426
bcantrill wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's great to get this extra perspective from you Bryan, because you're probably the person whose talks have most made me interested in seeing 1990s Sun Microsystems et al. Point taken about 1991's struggles. I was vaguely aware that it was a troubled time, but took the premise as is. Which particular part of the 90s was best seems an awkward question. Were things generally getting better through the 90s until dot-co…

It's hard to know -- but something that definitely struck me was that we at Sun did much better technical work in the bust (2001-2005) than the boom (1997-2001). (It's hard to say anything definitive about this as there is so much there that's specific to Sun and the group of technologists I was working with, but it certainly didn't make me long for the boom!)

As for the progression of software development, this may be trite to say, but in my opinion the single most important revolution in software is the rise of open source. I don't think that there was a single event here per se but rather a multi-decade long progression across many different domains that has changed just about every single aspect of software development. (Cloud computing too, certainly -- but I don't think that cloud computing is economically viable without open source.) So software development from the 1990s is unrecognizable in large part because it is just so damned proprietary -- which, as it turns out, was in fact a relatively short blip in the fullness of history.[0]

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zpnncakrelk, in which I expand a bit on the history of open source, among other things

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#438

Post by HaloZero »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #337
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If 1991 why not 1919? You'd want the world transition from the horse age to the space age. It might be a good while yet beforw we see any new changes as profound as that one. Okay I guess I'd rank crispr as highly. But the list of changes that profound is short.

1919 for any non-white person (or woman) would be a terrible idea. 1991 at least you don't have to worry about segregation.

Assuming you're talking about staying in an industrialized nation.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#439

Post by thundergolfer »

bcantrill wrote: post #437
thundergolfer wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's great to get this extra perspective from you Bryan, because you're probably the person whose talks have most made me interested in seeing 1990s Sun Microsystems et al. Point taken about 1991's struggles. I was vaguely aware that it was a troubled time, but took the premise as is. Which particular part of the 90s was best seems an awkward question. Were things generally getting better through the 90s until dot-co…

It's hard to know -- but something that definitely struck me was that we at Sun did much better technical work in the bust (2001-2005) than the boom (1997-2001). (It's hard to say anything definitive about this as there is so much there that's specific to Sun and the group of technologists I was working with, but it certainly didn't make me long for the boom!) As for the progression of software development, this may…

I'm early enough my career to not at all find it trite. Open-source has certainly been the most exciting and fulfilling aspect of my software work so far. If I was thrown back to the 90s with knowledge of 2020s open-source culture, I'd be frustrated as hell.

I didn't fully appreciate how important open-source is as a 21st century movement until I read The Cathedral and the Bazaar this year. Hearing the open-source development story of SQLite also blew my mind a little.

I can see why you're so energized by open-source firmware.

Re: Life Improvements Since the 1990s

#440

Post by unnouinceput »

denton-scratch wrote: post #419
unnouinceput wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You seem to forget that Vietnam war was a side effect of the Cold War. USSR and US fought through proxies in Cold War, Vietnam being just one instance. Another one before was Korean War which resulted in splitting that peninsula. I'd say your 20k is a bit low, might want to reconsider it with at least one order of magnitude. Oh, and since we are splitting hair here about numbers, US started a 20 years war as result o…

I think you maybe have misread me! I wasn't "splitting hairs" about numbers; I don't know where you get that from. I thought my estimates for Cold War casualties were pretty generous - I didn't want low estimates to get in the way of my case. But I think my case stands even if 100,000 died in the Cold War. If you're going to argue that every mid-20thC "hot" war was just a campaign in the Cold War, well I'm sure the c…

"The first phase of the Cold War began shortly after the end of the Second World War in 1945. The United States created the NATO military alliance in 1949 in the apprehension of a Soviet attack and termed their global policy against Soviet influence containment. The Soviet Union formed the Warsaw Pact in 1955 in response to NATO. Major crises of this phase included the 1948–49 Berlin Blockade, the 1927–1949 Chinese Civil War, the 1950–1953 Korean War, the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, the 1956 Suez Crisis, the Berlin Crisis of 1961 and the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The USA and the USSR competed for influence in Latin America, the Middle East, and the decolonizing states of Africa and Asia. "

Source is wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War

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