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Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

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Re: Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

#51

Post by lucasoshiro »

I was born in 1996 but I really love the past. 90% percent of the music that I listen to is from before 1990; I have a typewriter and I really find it fun to use it; I have some vinyl records; I have two SNES (one I that we have at home since the 90s and another that I found for sale); half of the movies that I watch were released before the 90s; I have a cuckoo clock working in my living room; I have a street atlas in my car and thanks I'm poor because of course if had money I would have spent it buying an old car.

But know what? Probably I'm happier living in 2020s. Technology allows me to watch more 80s movies that I would do if I lived in the 80s; it allows me to know more 80 bands than most of people who I know that actually lived in the 80s; I'm not restricted to watch only 80s movies or listen to 80s music, I have available everything from the 90s, 70s, 60s, 50s and so on; using a mechanical typewriter is fun but it might be a nightmare needing to use it. And so on.

In fact, I love the past because the present allows me.

Re: Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

#52

Post by Karrot_Kream »

Agreement with the list:

Induction Stoves. We've switched to an induction stove and love it. We cook a lot and I'm fairly sensitive to gas. The air quality in the house is so much better after doing a lot of cooking, but also the second order effects. No more face and arms feeling singed after looking over 3 flame burners. No more sauces getting singed on the side of pots or pots being burned on the sides due to gas. No more concern over draping clothing or hair singing. Fast heating times and a cooktop that doesn't stay hot for too long after you remove the pot.

More stuff I'd like to see on the list:

Digital Photography and Videography. Now a single person or a few people can do what used to take an entire staff to do. Short films and CGI are viable with just a few people. A photographer can take pictures of events that used to take studios with photo lighting to handle.

Disagreements with the list:

Ubiquitous HVAC use is more of a curse than a blessing. Ubiquitous HVAC has led to badly ventilated, badly designed apartments/houses that need constant HVAC usage to even be moderately livable. Central HVACs also often cannot deal with hot/cold areas in the house. Awareness is growing over the need for clean indoor air and that people enjoy air CFMs higher than most guidelines purport. Along with growing use of mini-split HVACs, ERVs and HRVs, this is a great direction. But too many cheap homes throughout the world are designed only around blind central or single unit HVAC use and that is just bad IMO.

Re: Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

#53

Post by Eduard »

dcminter wrote: post #24

With the exception of cellphones, almost everything that needed a battery in the 90s used disposable dry cell batteries. Left unattended they often leaked destroying the device. Now almost everything that needs a battery has a rechargeable one built in. There are a few downsides to that but it's a hell of a lot more convenient! As a kid in the 70s/80s any battery powered toy spent most of it's life unpowered and usel…

And plenty of Lithium rechargeables are a statistical storage box fire liability

Re: Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

#54

Post by emchammer »

eej71 wrote: post #40
nonrandomstring wrote: post #21

As someone who loves to cook I think kitchen advances are somewhat overlooked, from pressure cookers to microwaves to air-fryers, IR ovens and all sorts of amazing combos, hand blenders and whatnot Time to make good home food got much shorter and more energy efficient. Edit: showing my age, cos that's 80s, not 90s. In fact I think pressure cookers got popular in the mid 70s.

I think the popularity of pressure cookers predate the 70s since it gets a comical reference in this old cartoon that you might remember. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_House_of_Tomorrow_(1949_fi...

I think that this cartoon was a play on a booklet from that era which the electric company gave out. It illustrated the grid and all kinds of possibilities around the home and farm for those who were not used to electrification. My dad had kept it around and I remember reading it when I was little. It had all the wiring plotted out like a Richard Scarry book. I have not been able to find it since.

Re: Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

#55

Post by Karrot_Kream »

nonrandomstring wrote: post #21

As someone who loves to cook I think kitchen advances are somewhat overlooked, from pressure cookers to microwaves to air-fryers, IR ovens and all sorts of amazing combos, hand blenders and whatnot Time to make good home food got much shorter and more energy efficient. Edit: showing my age, cos that's 80s, not 90s. In fact I think pressure cookers got popular in the mid 70s.

Even since the '90s a lot has changed. Innovations in MEMS have allowed for much smarter rice cookers and the creation of the sous vide cooker, along with small air fryers with cheap, precise temperature control. Powerful DC motors have allowed us to have hand blenders, spice grinders, and food processors that take up little counter space but do their work admirably. The only reason I have enough time to cook as much as I do from scratch is because so many of my appliances are precise set-and-forget. My mom cooks a lot as well and I watched how advances in appliances changed the amount and precision with which she could cook.

Re: Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

#56

Post by zeroonetwothree »

ryandrake wrote: post #41
varjag wrote: post #5

Some of the improvements on the list are non-issues best described as cultural differences. Consider: …not making a dozen phone calls playing Phone Tag, to set up something as simple as a play date Well this is why hardly anyone was bothering with setting up play dates back in the day† and were letting kids roam. Different culture facilitated by poor connectivity and scarcity of content. † The title says the 90s but…

Additionally, people flake out now more than ever. Back in the 80s, if you managed to win the game of Phone Tag and arrange for your 5 friends to get together at the mall at 2:00PM on Saturday, you could pretty much rest assured they would all make it. Just getting it scheduled was a massive investment in effort and time. Now, someone will plan a birthday party or something, the kid will invite 15 other kids from sch…

That wasn’t my experience, people wouldn’t show up sometimes and then you’d not know what to do

Re: Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

#57

Post by lucasoshiro »

MarkusWandel wrote: post #3

Fact: In the 1990s a reasonable capable computer was a significant expense on the order of $1K, and likely to be obsolete within 5 years. My best present laptop is 5 years old and perfectly capable and was free because its previous owner didn't want it any more because of a minor defect. That's an exception, but the fact is, being somewhat tolerant to less than state-of-the-art computers, I haven't bought a new one,…

> likely to be obsolete within 5 years

Crazy how it's perfectly ok to use a computer from 2015 today. But it wasn't ok to use a computer from 1995 in 2005...

Re: Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

#58

Post by michaelt »

kleiba wrote: post #12
MarkusWandel wrote: post #3

Fact: In the 1990s a reasonable capable computer was a significant expense on the order of $1K, and likely to be obsolete within 5 years. My best present laptop is 5 years old and perfectly capable and was free because its previous owner didn't want it any more because of a minor defect. That's an exception, but the fact is, being somewhat tolerant to less than state-of-the-art computers, I haven't bought a new one,…

Fact: In the 1990s a reasonable capable computer was a significant expense on the order of $1K, and likely to be obsolete within 5 years. Most people's main "computer" these days is a smart phone with a similar price tag and a much shorter shelf live.

IDK, $1000 is brand-new-flagship-phone territory (albeit for the bottom storage tier). I'd wager most people aren't buying flagship models brand new.

Re: Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

#59

Post by levocardia »

Some of these "improvements" seem highly tilted towards the experiences of wealthy people in the suburbs. Here in the lower half of the income distribution in a major city, we still don't have AC, use gas stoves (and often start fires), get our car windows smashed more often (though instead of stealing the stereo, they steal the change in the center console and your extra clothes in the trunk), and instead of the car being stolen while you're gone, it gets stolen while you're in it -- at gunpoint! Car alarms go off all the time as well; still as much a part of the city audioscape as police sirens.

Ordering a mattress online is great, though.

Re: Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

#60

Post by kemaru »

kvdveer wrote: post #35
kemaru wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microfiber cloths are, on the other hand, a major source of microplastic pollution. They are basically just ready-to-snap-off microplastic particles. They shed a substantial % each washing cycle. Something like 80 % of all microplastic pollution sampled in ocean water is from microfibers.

Do you have a source on that? I'd like to understand the definition of "micofibre" in this context to see of I need to change my purchasing habits.

The 85 % figure is from Environ. Sci. Technol. 2011, 45, 21, 9175–9179 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/es201811s

The 200-500 kiloton/year is from https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.3c05955

For a deeper dive you can peruse the works that cite these articles, there's lots of research into microplastic population dynamics. Unfortunately most reach similar conclusions.

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