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Everyday life improvements since the 90s (2022)

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

#91

Post by MarkusWandel »

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.

Mine cost CAD$140 on special at Costco. It'll be perfectly fine for my needs for 3+ years.

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

#92

Post by rsynnott »

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.

$1k 1990 dollars is about $2500; approximately no smartphones are that expensive.

Even $1k smartphones would be a small part of the market; you're basically talking about things like the iPhone Pro, which is not the mainstream option.

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

#93

Post by rsynnott »

parpfish wrote: post #18

Other food: - Mangoes went from unknown/exotic in the US to being a standard fruit in your produce aisle. - it’s surprising how cars in the 80s didn’t actually have cup holders. I always thought that was just a joke until I bought an 80s car and learned I’d need to buy the cup holders aftermarket - frozen vegetables overtaking canned vegetables - sugar free sodas

> Mangoes went from unknown/exotic in the US to being a standard fruit in your produce aisle.

Not in the US, but _slightly_ sceptical of this one, because (a) I'm pretty sure that they were available in supermarkets _here_ (Ireland) in the 90s and (b) because there was a Seinfeld episode about them (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mango - 1993, Kramer is banned from his favourite fruit store, is horrified at the suggestion that he buy supermarket mangoes).

> frozen vegetables overtaking canned vegetables

Again, we're talking the 90s, right? I'm pretty sure that had already happened; that'd be more 70s-80s.

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

#94

Post by rsynnott »

medion wrote: post #9

It’s a nice list, but honestly, none of these improvements are really life changing (except the reduction in crime that has been noticeable and good). Things otherwise got a bit nicer and a bit cheaper and a bit faster - but life would have been just fine without these improvements.

> none of these improvements are really life changing

They don't really cover it, but one literally life changing one has been medicine; a lot of things that were a death sentence (and often a very nasty, slow, painful one) in the 90s are now quite treatable. Particularly cancers, but also there've been big improvements in cardiac treatment, and the treatment of certain diseases (particularly HIV).

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

#95

Post by aaronbaugher »

dcminter wrote: post #27
alabastervlog wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The smoking one's huge. It's hard to overstate how incredibly gross most public spaces (and homes...) were before indoor smoking largely vanished.

I went off pubs after the smoking ban in Britain; suddenly it was much more obvious that they all smelled of sweat and stale beer.

After smoking in bars was banned, my brother and I noted how run-down and dreary the places we hung out looked. We just hadn't been able to see it before through the haze.

I always hated the smoke and the way your hair and clothes would still reek of it the next morning. Now, on the rare occasions I catch a whiff of cigarette smoke, it's nostalgic and almost smells good.

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

#96

Post by parpfish »

rsynnott wrote: post #93
parpfish wrote: post #18

Other food: - Mangoes went from unknown/exotic in the US to being a standard fruit in your produce aisle. - it’s surprising how cars in the 80s didn’t actually have cup holders. I always thought that was just a joke until I bought an 80s car and learned I’d need to buy the cup holders aftermarket - frozen vegetables overtaking canned vegetables - sugar free sodas

> Mangoes went from unknown/exotic in the US to being a standard fruit in your produce aisle. Not in the US, but _slightly_ sceptical of this one, because (a) I'm pretty sure that they were available in supermarkets _here_ (Ireland) in the 90s and (b) because there was a Seinfeld episode about them ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mango - 1993, Kramer is banned from his favourite fruit store, is horrified at the s…

re: mangoes

In the 90s, American would've known that mangoes were a fruit and (probably) that they were orange. But they would not be in a standard grocery store. I suspect a big part of this was that for a long time the US banned mango imports from India, and that was lifted in 2007.

NYC is a bit different because it's much more multicultural and not really representative of the typical US experience. Plus, the fact that they had Kramer obsessing over mangoes was a bit of "he's a weird guy, of course he'd into a weird fruit". Living in the midwest, I think the first time I saw a mango for sale in a grocery store was probably ~2010.

re: frozen veg

they definitely existed in the 70s and 80s, but flash freezing technology has made them significantly higher quality in recent years and expanded the number/type of veg that you can find frozen. And on top of that, in the last decade has had the advent of 'steamer pouches' that make microwave cooking super-easy and they've really taken off in popularity.

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

#97

Post by ldng »

michaelt wrote: post #63
ardit33 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

And they used to be obsolete within 3 years, tops.

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

#98

Post by pabs3 »

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,…

All my recently acquired computers are dumpsters and were built over a decade ago.

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

#99

Post by ardit33 »

michaelt wrote: post #63
ardit33 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, thanks for the link! Good laptops were 4-5k minimum. Thats like 7-8k now.

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

#100

Post by gwern »

rdlw wrote: post #74
windowshopping wrote: post #25

I love this article, it really point out a lot of things we take for granted. It's easy to focus on the bad and forget how much things have really improved. The one line about the EU made me laugh though: > EU: the European Union & single Euro currency make the EU easier to understand & travel in it much less tricky and expensive The fact that it just says this in passing from the perspective of a tourist and without…

Well, the page starts with this in the introduction: "So here is a personal list of small ways in which my ordinary everyday daily life has been getting better since the late 1980s/early 1990s" So on the contrary, it seems to me listing "countless improvements for Europeans" as an everyday life improvement would be an extreme overstatement of the American (?) author's empathy, or perhaps a performative indication tha…

As an American, I do indeed have little idea what sorts of improvements people in the EU as a whole - much less any individual country - have had. I can guess at a few, since presumably a lot of my items transfer. (Pascalization for avocado preservation, for example, is presumably a world-wide thing because the laws of physics are the same everywhere.) But I can't write a decent list.

I see that fact as more of an invitation to write your own. Do Europeans feel annoyed at the omissions of XYZ? Go right ahead and make your own! There's no patent on the idea of 'writing down a list of things that have gotten better'. I'm not going to sue you if you write down a list of ordinary things that have gotten nicer in the UK. In fact, I'd be happy to link it in the external links section if anyone makes a decent list for some other country in the same spirit. (I would prefer it not be tech-heavy, though. Things like "did you know PCs and smartphones also got really cheap in the Third World or the EU, and SSDs are pretty sweet compared to HDDs?" are not particularly interesting to anyone and do not need to be pointed out.)

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