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Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

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

#61

Post by aaronbaugher »

lucasoshiro wrote: post #57
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...

True. The other day I was wondering whether I should buy a new PC, then realized I was only thinking that way out of old habit. It's 5+ years old, and that used to be when a PC would really start struggling to keep up with the software. Now there's kinda no point. If I did build a new one, it wouldn't be significantly more powerful than my current one, so I'd really just be trading older parts for newer ones from fear of parts wearing out.

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

#62

Post by Aloisius »

mrob wrote: post #6

Some more not mentioned in the article: Filtered milk. Tastes the same as ordinary homogenized milk but double (or better) the shelf life. Very convenient if you only use small quantities at a time, e.g. for adding to tea. Microfiber cloths. Much better cleaning than traditional cloths. In many cases all you need is water, or use them dry for dusting. Reusable too. SSDs. In my opinion, the biggest computer upgrade in…

> Filtered milk. Tastes the same as ordinary homogenized milk but double (or better) the shelf life.

I had to look this one up. I don't think I've ever seen filtered milk in the US, but it looks like the ones sold here are specialty high protein/low lactose milks which I can't imagine tastes the same.

They also appear to expire 9-14 days after opening which doesn't seem all that different from other milk with practice?

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

#63

Post by michaelt »

ardit33 wrote: post #28
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,…

1k was a cheap / barebones computer. (Celeron, or AMD K4 chip, with not much memory, and maybe a floppy disk and slow CD reader). A good one (in the 90s at least) was at least 1.5k-2k, which is 2.8-4k now.

Internet Archive has a bunch of scanned magazines from the period - such as https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-june-1996-image... and as you say, $1000 was on the low end.

It's a real blast from the past. I'd forgotten you used to be able to pay $7000 for a laptop, and $100 for a 10-megabit ethernet card.

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

#64

Post by mrob »

Aloisius wrote: post #62
mrob wrote: post #6

Some more not mentioned in the article: Filtered milk. Tastes the same as ordinary homogenized milk but double (or better) the shelf life. Very convenient if you only use small quantities at a time, e.g. for adding to tea. Microfiber cloths. Much better cleaning than traditional cloths. In many cases all you need is water, or use them dry for dusting. Reusable too. SSDs. In my opinion, the biggest computer upgrade in…

> Filtered milk. Tastes the same as ordinary homogenized milk but double (or better) the shelf life. I had to look this one up. I don't think I've ever seen filtered milk in the US, but it looks like the ones sold here are specialty high protein/low lactose milks which I can't imagine tastes the same. They also appear to expire 9-14 days after opening which doesn't seem all that different from other milk with practic…

All the UK supermarkets sell it. Price is about 50% higher, so it's not worth buying if you get through a lot of milk, but I doubt I'm the only one to use milk mostly as a flavoring for tea.

I wouldn't want to drink ordinary milk after it's been open for 14 days.

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

#65

Post by jonathanlydall »

tharne wrote: post #31
thecrumb wrote: post #14

Eh. I'd argue while some of the objects have improved - I'm not sure my life has improved because of them.

> Eh. I'd argue while some of the objects have improved - I'm not sure my life has improved because of them. This is exactly right. So many "improvements" are cool or interesting, but either provide no meaningful improvement to one's life (e.g. streaming vs. VHS) or actually detract from our lives on balance, e.g. smartphones.

I’m 43 and disagree.

Streaming TV shows means I can watch them at a convenient time for me, pausing at leisure, not having to waste time on adverts. In practice this means my wife and I can work through series 45 minutes a night, perhaps only one or two nights a week at whatever time it happens to be after kids are down.

Smartphones can be used in unhealthy ways for sure, but they are almost unreal when you consider how things have changed in the last few decades (looking at my own time):

90s: Shared house lines were the norm, long distance calls expensive-ish, international definitely.

Early 2000s: Personal cellphones pretty common.

Mid 2000s: Home VoIP becoming accessible through Skype, but not mainstream, generally requires a full PC, inconvenient, either for computer enthusiasts or family wanting to do free overseas calls. You would have to hope or arrange other person to be online with Skype at the same time.

Late 2000s: Smartphones are a thing, voip from your pocket is finally accessible, not everyone has smartphones yet, but you can use Skype credit to call anyone in the world at a reasonable cost.

Mid 2010s: smartphones are pretty much ubiquitous, FaceTime (and later equivalent on WhatsApp) mean that you can now talk to almost anyone with very high quality video anywhere in the world basically for free.

What does this mean for me? I regularly FaceTime my parents completely casually with my young children, sometimes just before sleep or in the afternoon or whenever, no ceremony or hassle.

My wife’s sister moved to New Zealand (we live in South Africa) 7 years ago and they FaceTime more than once a week on average with nieces and nephews.

I lived in Europe from 2006 to 2012, and I wish I had in 2006 what I have now in smartphones, maps for most everywhere always available), translation tools always available.

Having experienced the advent of cellphones in my lifetime, they are almost unbelievable to someone who grew up with the full sized PCs which were a lot less capable than a device which now fits in my hand.

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

#66

Post by relaxing »

mrob wrote: post #34
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.

I'm confident that microfiber cloths are responsible for 0% (rounded to the nearest whole percentage) of oceanic microplastics. But it's possible that all clothing and fabrics combined are responsible for a significant fraction of microplastic pollution. If this is the case, then the government should do its duty in regulating externalities and mandate exhaust filters in washing machines.

[flagged]

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

#67

Post by cadamsdotcom »

levocardia wrote: post #59

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…

I'm not trying to be facetious here, although a surface read might seem so.

But like, if having a car is so terrible - why not migrate to an ebike?

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

#68

Post by andix »

mrob wrote: post #6

Some more not mentioned in the article: Filtered milk. Tastes the same as ordinary homogenized milk but double (or better) the shelf life. Very convenient if you only use small quantities at a time, e.g. for adding to tea. Microfiber cloths. Much better cleaning than traditional cloths. In many cases all you need is water, or use them dry for dusting. Reusable too. SSDs. In my opinion, the biggest computer upgrade in…

The ESL milk with 20 days shelf life? I think it tastes very dull, since it's nearly everywhere and good old milk is hard to get, I just switched mostly to UHT milk, which stays fresh for about a year without cooling. It doesn't taste much worse than the 20 day ESL milk, and the unopened boxes don't take any space in the fridge.

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

#69

Post by andix »

mrob wrote: post #6

Some more not mentioned in the article: Filtered milk. Tastes the same as ordinary homogenized milk but double (or better) the shelf life. Very convenient if you only use small quantities at a time, e.g. for adding to tea. Microfiber cloths. Much better cleaning than traditional cloths. In many cases all you need is water, or use them dry for dusting. Reusable too. SSDs. In my opinion, the biggest computer upgrade in…

Microfiber cloths were a game changer for cleaning. My mum still cleans with cotton clothes. I once helped her cleaning, it was surprisingly hard to get things clean without microfiber cloths.

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

#70

Post by Aloisius »

levocardia wrote: post #59

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…

We must have lived in very different cities since carjacking and car break-in rates were way more common in the 90s in the cities I lived in.

I can't think of any major city in the US, at least, where that isn't true.

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