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Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

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Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#681

Post by onetimeusename »

lucb1e wrote: post #649
onetimeusename wrote: post #642

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's plausible people might not notice traffic deaths but this assumes there is absolutely no correlation with general driving experience and road safety which is unlikely. Also, this is thousands of extra deaths and on a year over year basis that happened since 2020 when it had been trending down previously so I think it's quite plausible that people notice and it happened rapidly. But that is just one particular st…

> Basically road rage murders increased a lot in 2021 and 2020 and all over the country it seems. These incidents are a tiny tiny fraction of all non-accidental injuries or unnatural deaths occurring. Yes it went up, yes you should pay attention and fix it if reasonably possible. But again: keep it in perspective. Singling out a metric that went up while, say, the total burden of disease (on the scale of comparing to…

ah ok not sure about going to shit, I probably wouldn't say that, so I don't agree with OP that things have gone to shit. I don't feel that way. I do think road safety worsened slightly but it's not Mad Max bad and I think eventually it will revert to the mean hopefully.

Yes, it's a small increase in a long term decline of road deaths and I haven't seen second half of 2022 data yet but my last understanding was that traffic fatality may have peaked in 2022, idk. It's too early to tell and people might not care a year from now if things improve. I should have been more clear about what my position was because yes a lot of things worsened and are much higher concerns than road safety and it's definitely not a major issue but I just happen to be following it. It's just a temporary thing I imagine. But I do want to warn people just to be slightly more careful.

But I am fascinated by some of the data because there has never been a lockdown before and I am curious if it affected driving. It could have implications for traffic safety, road design, and traffic shaping. I should've avoided any other implication.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#682

Post by LAC-Tech »

simonh wrote: post #616
LAC-Tech wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some day soon I’ll be the parent their boyfriends will come home to meet. I hope they feel they have the freedom to wear what they’re comfortable in and that represents their genuine identity. Really? My hope is that I don't raise my daughter so poorly she ends up with a slob who wears pyjama in public.

Sure. Nothing I said implies I want them to have slobs for boyfriends, or would be happy if they did. I raised my girls to confidently exercise critical thinking and have decent values, but at this point they’re out in the world making their own decisions. It’s up to them now.

I raised my girls to confidently exercise critical thinking and have decent values, but at this point they’re out in the world making their own decisions.

Congratulations. I mean that.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#683

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

meheleventyone wrote: post #333
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we ought to distinguish between the case where the person has thought through their decision to wear pajamas in public and is doing it as an attempt to challenge existing norms, versus the case where they didn't even give it a thought. Because if that's what they're doing, then I'm 100% with you. Hanging onto existing norms is just opting out of the conversation about what the norms should be. I suspect, thou…

But norms change because it becomes normal to do it which requires people do it without thinking about it. By definition. If people only do subversive things intentionally nothing changes. That’s in fact what the conservative view wants, safe “change” that doesn’t actually matter. Which is why for example Iran is cracking down so hard on the recent protests because they desperately need for the norm not to change.

I feel like there's more middle ground than you're acknowledging.

Yes, people eventually start doing a thing because it's the new normal--but it doesn't happen spontaneously. Some emergent leader decides to wear pajamas to the office (or whatever) and then the barrier is lowered and others follow suit because the leader had a point and then eventually being comfortable in public is the new normal. But that emergent leader is required, no?

Somebody has to do it first.

I've been witnessing this in my neighborhood. Some apartment complex put up a fence and now the route to the grocery is long and circuitous because we can no longer cut through the apartment complex's parking lot. Some hero dismantled the fence to make a hole and now the whole neighborhood is reopening the hole when the complex repairs it. I'm happy to participate in the maintaining the new normal, but I wasn't the hero that set it up in the first place. I'm in that guy's debt.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#684

Post by mr-debil »

Gigachad wrote: post #607
mach1ne wrote: post #510

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Innovation in narrow fields is not representive of the greater whole. Sure, generative AI is booming, but mobile phones and computers haven’t evolved practically at all in the last 5 years. The general rate of innovation can be somewhat gauged in the increase of living standards, and to my understanding there has been little the past 10 years (in the West in general).

>but mobile phones and computers haven’t evolved practically at all in the last 5 years. Lets do a fact check on this, that time span is the iphone X to iphone 14 Pro. Taking one metric, the geekbench score has gone from 2156 to 5383. So in that time phones have become more twice as fast. It released with ios 11, I wont even bother to list all the major improvements between 11 and 16 because it's a huge list. There i…

Some people will argue that's simply incrementation and not innovation, even though there's serious innovation needed to jump from 10nm to 5nm architecture.

Even at that, if you want to simply do 'novel innovation' in things that are truly new or change your process...you can get phones with folding screens these days, that's pretty cool and wild to think about.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#685

Post by Izkata »

zeroonetwothree wrote: post #274

I don't know your age but I'm going to guess 30+. This is just happens when you get old. When you were younger you probably noticed that all the older people you knew pined for some earlier time (say the 1970s or 1950s). And you probably thought they were being silly. Well, now you've become one of those people. The fact is the world always seems better when you are younger, not because the world necessarily better,…

> This is just happens when you get old. When you were younger you probably noticed that all the older people you knew pined for some earlier time (say the 1970s or 1950s).

Not really. What I picked up from them is the 90s were some sort of high period.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#686

Post by [deleted] »

curiousllama wrote: post #132

Everything isn’t declining. Things were never great, by any modern definition. We just have an expectation that things are supposed to be easy breezy nowadays, and it turns out people are still people. Like, are you telling me that NYC landlords in the 90s weren’t trying to scam their tenants? That Philly police in the 80s were clean, efficient, trustworthy public servants? That there was less fraud in the .com boom,…

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#687

Post by Izkata »

lucb1e wrote: post #637
cedws wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm 21 and I think everything's going to shit as well... is it doomerism or reality? Politicians appear increasingly corrupt and selfish. Geopolitics are becoming less stable. Innovation is coming to a standstill. The average person just wants a decent job, a nice place to live, and maybe a family. All of these are becoming more and more difficult to achieve. Is it any wonder kids are checking out of life en masse?

Others already said this is wrong on basically every point, but I haven't seen this one commented yet: > Is it any wonder kids are checking out of life en masse? It's the smallest, easiest, most concrete thing. Dictionary, en masse, "as a whole". Sure, hyperbole, so let's say... how about a bit more than half, 51%? But you're talking about suicide (presumably), we all know that isn't 50% of the population, but I don'…

That phrase doesn't necessarily mean suicide. It generally means "giving up" - for example, burying themselves in things like video games or social media instead of school or friends.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#688

Post by Sevii »

lucb1e wrote: post #641
Tiktaalik wrote: post #204

A lot of this is related to inequality, value of labour detaching from wealth, and the increasing unaffordability of life. The material conditions of regular people are continuously getting worse as more and more of their income is stripped away by rent seeking oligopolies, mainly increasing housing costs but depending on your jurisdiction all sorts of other costs (eg. cable and mobile phone costs an issue in some pl…

> the increasing unaffordability of life Define: life What life exactly can people not afford anymore? The kind people had in 1900? 1950? 2000? What kind of trend are you indicating here, the last two years only or something broader? Because I don't know of a country not actively at war whose chance on a good life didn't improve over the last generation. Things are ever getting better. Very few people would be willin…

People conflate affordability of a certain lifestyle and affordability of a certain level of social status but they are separate things and people really care about both of them.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#689

Post by Izkata »

ok_dad wrote: post #121
keiferski wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A society is made up of people. The way people act, dress, talk, or do anything else has a pretty direct impact on other people in that society. Unless your definition of society is an extremely disconnected one, comprised of alienated individuals that have no interaction with each other, yes, it does affect other people.

It only affects people who care about what other people wear, and those people shouldn’t have any sort of societal influence because that’s stupid. Name literally one reason that wearing pajamas in public will cause another person actual harm and I’ll take back this statement.

There was a post a while ago about counter-signaling: When a CEO rides their bike to work, it's a "good" signal - they're being green, getting exercise, etc. When a teenager rides their bike to work, not so much - it probably means they can't afford a car. Basically that the same action can mean different things depending on context.

Pajamas in public is another of these, but has meaning for the community rather than the individual: It can mean either not caring, or it can mean that it's a safe, friendly community (like we had in the suburbs I grew up in). It depends on the larger context, and people are concerned it more likely than not has the first meaning. And plenty more bad stuff comes alongside not caring.

Re: Ask HN: Why Is Everything Declining?

#690

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

Might not be one of the most important things but some of thr best videogames I played have been released in the last 5 years, so things haven't necessarily gotten worse.

Keep in mind that covid has been here for the last 3,affecting everything (yes, 3 damn years!)

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