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Life Improvements Since the 1990s (gwern.net)
424 points by janhenr 6 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 462 comments



I think he kind of missed the elephant that is modern communication technology has reduced the marginal cost of skilled services enabling pretty much every object designed in an office and manufactured in a factory to benefit from a broader array of engineering and design professionals and methodologies. The average product and service that the average actor in the economy interacts with is designed and optimized to a far greater degree today than they were historically.

Look at the bottle of Elmers glue on the table. Today the glue probably works better (barring regulation that forces compromises to product efficacy) and comes in a bottle that uses half as much plastic. Something like a bottle revision that would have formerly required expensive salaried employees to come up with multiple options, send them to the supplier, supplier has to respond to each with details and quotes, etc, can now be accomplished in a fraction of the man hours thanks to email and CAD being ubiquitous in the entire supply chain from marketing, to engineering, to the vendor's contractor who will actually design the tooling. Sign off might take days instead of weeks. This sort of efficiency improvement allows more engineering, design work, or other optimization to be done to every good and service in our economy allowing it to penetrate into even the most thin margin use cases. From farming to high finance products and services are substantially more influenced and optimized by specialist professionals than they were in 1990. Increase efficiency like this throughout the national and global economy is how lawnmowers and A/C units can be sold on sale for $100 and still make a profit. (yes I know that example isn't perfect but you get the point).


I had a moment like this recently with, of all things, a snorkeling mask. It was one of those full face masks with a big snorkel sticking out the top like a unicorn's horn that popped on the market a few years ago. It is a marvel. It took all the downsides of the old masks and ingeniously fixed them. Full mouth and nose breathing so you can breathe naturally and comfortably, an airflow pattern that pulls dry air over the lens and keeps it fog free, a wide-angle lense for a better view and less claustrophobia, and an ingeniously designed system of valves that keeps water from flowing into the snorkel and uses your exhalation to push any leaked water in the mask out the bottom. All together, it eliminated the underwater panic I would usually have to fight through while snorkeling and made me feel like a dolphin. No way a product like this could have been made without the collaboration of a lot of very skilled professionals.


Be careful with those. Diver's Alert Network states that full face snorkeling masks can cause dangerous hypercapnia unless they have tight seals and working one-way valves.

https://blog.daneurope.org/en_US/blog/are-full-face-snorkeli...


Interesting, thanks for sharing.

> So how to know a mask is safe? Check whether the mask has a one-way breathing system, verify that one-way valves are in place both in the snorkel as well as in the orinasal mask section, and last but not least check if the orinasal mask makes a good seal on your face. If these checks are positive, then it is a good indication the mask is safe to use.


Thanks, yes my mask is properly designed with the one way valve system and small sealed breathing pocket around the mouth. I definitely appreciate that this product has a complex design to ensure safety and that a knock-off could be dangerous.


That's got to be some person with a snorkeling hobby and they are just thinking "there's got to be a better way than this".


These are somewhat dangerous as the additional airspace allows CO2 to build up. I haven't seen good studies either way, but there's lots of anecdata out there of people reporting symptoms.


There is a system of valves that keep the air flowing in just a single direction. Also, there are additional seals inside the mask that keep the exhalation dead space to a small area just around the mouth and nose, not the entire inner area of the mask and snorkel.


Is this really dangerous? We are naturally armed against CO2 and there will be a lot of warning signs (headache, short breath, ...) before anything happens.


Anything that compromises respiration while in the water is very concerning to me and I wouldn't use them, though it seems to be resolved in newer models. I prefer a basic but high quality J snorkel with a comfortable mouthpiece but I understand why these types of masks are appealing too.

Your thought that we're naturally armed against CO2 build up is generally true, but what we aren't armed against is a lack of O2 in the presence of a lack of CO2. Our urge to breathe occurs not because we're losing O2, but because we have too much CO2 in our bodies. I think this is critical to understand in the context of snorkelling.

If you're in a room and CO2 is gradually built up, you will likely experience symptoms of the build up occurring in your body, absolutely. When it's more acute though, you often don't experience symptoms in a time frame in which you'll be able to respond properly. In the case with this mask that's probably not a concern at all.

Another concern, far more applicable here, is hypoxia. This kills snorkellers and divers frequently. Typically they deplete CO2 levels in their body via over-exertion and/or hyperventilation (intentionally or not) then go under water for some period waiting for their warning signals to return to the surface to breathe. Unfortunately the signals never occur because CO2 levels haven't reached a level which causes their nervous system to respond by causing an urge to breathe. Instead, oxygen is depleted causing a blackout to occur either under water or near the surface. The person isn't able to protect themselves while unconscious, so they often drown.

I wanted to point this out because in the context of water sports, more people need to be aware of this. Your body won't always let you know you're in danger. It's often why people experience it and/or die from it - they simply didn't know. We expect our bodies to tell us when we need to breathe. This is because our bodies are typically in conditions which allow for this to happen and we're very accustomed to that - we take it for granted. Once you skew the O2 and CO2 levels in your body, things don't occur as you'd expect at all. Much like any other situation where homeostasis is compromised.

Hopefully I'm not coming across as lecturing or anything. I'm genuinely intending to be helpful.

Some key tips when in the water, regardless of what mask you use:

- Breathe normally, don't hyperventilate

- Only dive if your breathing is at a normal rate and you feel relaxed

- Say you dive down for 30 seconds - spend at least 1 minute (2x your dive time) recovering oxygen, preferably 3x

- Always, always try to go with other people - accidents happen, and you'll need each other

- If it's your first time spending time under water, gradually build up your time under there. Feel out your comfort zone before testing yourself.

- Spit out your snorkel when you go under water. If something goes wrong, it becomes an easy entry point for water to get to your lungs.


It's not like they're execution devices. But the symptoms include dizziness and disorientation which isn't ideal in the ocean. Plus it can exacerbate pre-existing conditions where you might skip the mild symptoms and go straight to serious ones.


That doesn't make sense to me, why would a larger space allow for more CO2 buildup, if there is a connection to the outside?


I started to write this out but realized a more polished explanation might be more useful:

"Snorkels constitute respiratory dead space. When the user takes in a fresh breath, some of the previously exhaled air which remains in the snorkel is inhaled again, reducing the amount of fresh air in the inhaled volume, and increasing the risk of a buildup of carbon dioxide in the blood, which can result in hypercapnia. The greater the volume of the tube, and the smaller the tidal volume of breathing, the more this problem is exacerbated. Including the internal volume of the mask in the breathing circuit greatly expands the dead space."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snorkel_(swimming)

(The face mask snorkels are relevant to the "greater the volume of the tube" part.)


Interesting, my comment was based on the assumption that the tidal volume of human breath would be much larger than the tube/mask, but it seems I was wrong, it's just 500ml for an average human breath, opposed to 6 liters of lung volume.


That's the problem with the old ones, where you breathe in and out the same tube. That's fixed in these full-face masks.


As long as they are working properly. The problem is that the valves can fail (or not be properly designed in the first place), and then they become dangerous.

https://www.ktvu.com/news/recent-snorkel-deaths-prompts-inve...


New snorkels have a one way valve on the bottom. That vents the exhalation plus allows the water to drain when you're on the surface.


I don't know if it actually applies to a facemask with unidirectional flow (on at the top, out at the bottom). But the CO2 buildup mechanism is sometimes described as a reason for medical facemasks to be close-fitting. When you exhale into a mask with a big space, and then inhale again, you (very roughly) first inhale everything that was in the mask before inhaling new air.

The extreme example is breathing from a long skinny tube. If the volume of the tube is bigger than that of your lungs, you never inhale new air.


There will be some mixing of fresh air through the snorkel but that's a small opening and a long tube. It will still mostly be the air you exhaled. For a traditional snorkel that's a small volume relative to a breath but not so much for those masks. Plus, if you're diving under the water a traditional snorkel will be completely purged while these masks will retain the air.


The real problem with these masks is that unless you are quite good at equalizing with your jaw, it will be hard to relieve pressure if you dive down more than 6-8 feet or so.


Those types of masks actually existed in the 1960s though I'm sure the newer ones are more sophisticated. My mother had one of those.


Alright, you have me sold - link me to the mask?


In France you can find them for instance here: https://www.decathlon.fr/browse/c0-tous-les-sports/c1-snorke...

(Decathlon is a very prominent sports shop in France, I believe that others now sell the mask as well)

EDIT: I noticed that we apparently have the anti-unicorn version (with the tube pointing to the back) :)


These all are essentially the same design:

https://www.amazon.com/full-face-snorkeling-mask/s?k=full-fa...


The downside to broadening the talent pool for design/manufacturing is that it means workers now have to be among the best in the world to get business and thus earn a good living. It no longer suffices to be the best in a local region.

If each local region needs its own widget factory, then to become a top widgetsmith you only have to compete with the local widgetsmith talent pool. Just as there can be many high school star athletes across the world, there can be many top widgetsmiths within their local widget factories across the world, even if each is likely mediocre relative to the global pool of widgetsmiths.

Now the widget market has globalized. To become a top widgetsmith, you now need to be the best in the world. There is no room for locally optimal widgetsmiths when the market can globally optimize, just as there’s no room for most star high school athletes at the NBA.

The upside is that the entire world gets much better widgets. The downside is that you can only make a good living as a widgetsmith if you’re the absolute best in the world. Local markets lead to redundancy, which is globally inefficient but locally optimal.


"workers now have to be the best in the world to get business and thus earn a good living"

This is extra pronounced for singers, actors etc., but not as much for people such as software engineers. A mediocre programmer that implements functionality that you need is much more valuable for you than a star programmer immersed in his UltraFastXMLParserForHaskell library and does not take side jobs.


> that it means workers now have to be the best in the world to get business and thus earn a good living. It no longer suffices to be the best in a local region.

Yes, though for most jobs there is far more demand than can be met by the best in the world. When someone needs a lawyer or software developer, they are very unlikely to hire the best in the world.


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 the internet, with the access it has given us to information and the global supply chain, has allowed us to go back to that world where we can leverage the talents of an individual and mass production at the same time.

I think the Framework laptop is a prime example of this. The fact that a small team like that can "produce" a product of such quality is mind blowing.

It seems to me that the general quality of items has been on a steady rate of improvement again, rather than the race-to-the-bottom that seemingly every industry experienced during the 90s and early 00s.


> 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.

- Another consequence is that everyone can publish, anything, no matter how good it is. Come to think of it, in that example, crap rises to the top much more than the cream.


Global supply chain manufacturing for noobs in two parts:

Part 1; make a compelling mockup, post to kickstarter etc and other social media

Part 2: bide your time with product update mockups until knock offs appear on Alibaba. Make a show about complaining about the knock offs and then return the kickstarter deposits.


This is what's happening with open source hardware. For example, VESC and ODrive both quickly had knockoffs in all the usual places. The maintainers were somewhat understandably irked by this, but if you ask me it's exactly what should be happening. Maybe the issue was the knockoffs not complying with the license or not giving credit, but if that's all good and proper, and we should check as the end buyer, it's a net benefit to the consumer.


> This is what's happening with open source hardware. For example, VESC and ODrive both quickly had knockoffs in all the usual places. The maintainers were somewhat understandably irked by this, but if you ask me it's exactly what should be happening.

That is fantastic (at least as far as I understand it). What a fantasy of open source that not only do people download your code and compile it, but they download your hardware design and manufacture it!

Who doesn't it benefit? The designers and other developers now have prototypes, etc. without having to pay for manufacturing.


Agreed. I'm working on some hardware that I intend to open source and prepare a ZIP with all the files necessary to order your own boards from some place like JLCPCB that also does assembly. For the user it's a matter of dragging the ZIP to the manufacturers site and filling in some details. But that also means that they can easily swap out parts and customize it any way they want. Together with a 3D printer to make a case, you could make OSS/HW replacements to a lot of the crapware products that we have to use.


I find there is an amazing amount of stupid/marketing-segmentation designed stuff.

It started(and continuing) with 3D printing and now looking into KiCAD...

I would absolutely be interested in projects with your approach.


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.


> When someone needs a lawyer or software developer, they are very unlikely to hire the best in the world.

Certainly not the absolute best in the world, but they are still unlikely to hire a thoroughly mediocre worker who in a past world devoid of easy global communication and travel would have only been hired into a high-paying role by virtue of the fact that they were the only available worker with the necessary skills, since sourcing better talent from a global pool was much harder.


Agreed; it is more competitive, and therefore work should become more specialized. I wonder if it drives unemployment; I expect that it drives people to tasks they are more productive in (and perhaps more interested in, given greater options).

But let's also remember that much of the world doesn't use the Internet. In the US, large segments of the population lack computers (beyond phones) and high speed internet access. I know that during the pandemic, schools in poor districts had the problem that many of their students lacked those tools for remote learning.

And for FWIW, there are exceptions where the absolute best in the world dominate the market, such as in entertainment where the top musical performers, athletes, etc. collect almost all the revenue.


The upside I think of is that this enables more specialization and "division of labor", which is one of the basic drivers of prosperity.


* was one of the basic drivers, when labour was scarce and specialization rare.

We're now headed to a situation where labour is abundant (demographic trends being what they are, globally) and specialization trivially achieved (hello youtube). I'm not so sure it will continue to be an advantageous trait.


True, but a downside is that there may be a correlation between specialization/division of labor and depression/ennui.

I don't have any data handy, but I think we often feel greater satisfaction working through all of the aspects to creating something versus being a "cog in the machine" and specializing in one role. E.g. I'd rather build a boat - have a hand in the design, source the materials, and actually physically build it rather than work in a factory and operate a machine that spits out rudders all day, every day.

Of course, the boats created via mass production are probably going to be cheaper and in many ways better than what a novice manages to put together.


Even someone who does "the whole job" is still generally a cog in the machine, as few jobs are in themselves extremely important in the global scheme of things. Indeed t here have been plenty of forgettable prime ministers and presidents. The question is just how much diversity of tasks it takes to feel engaged, and how much scope of responsibility it takes to feel like what you're doing matters.

The exception would be someone like a subsistence farmer. But hell I'd rather work in a factory.


Your boat comparision is nonsensical.

To build a boat on your own the way you described is crazy resource intensive. You need land to store the boat, you need materials, you need tools, you need free time to work on it. This is basically a wealthy persons pet project. Depending on the size of the boat and your abilities you will be pumping a crazy amount of resources into this for years.

The second type is a job. You need a car to get to the factory, and an able body. Within a week to a month you would be expecting your first paycheck.

You are basically asking if a wealthy person can feel higher amount of satisfaction than a worker class. It’s cliche that money doesn’t bring happyness, but if you are investing that much resources into a project it better be making you happy or what are you doing with your life?

The other problem with the comparision is that people who have a boat project are a self-selected bunch for those who would enjoy building a boat. If i would have the resources to build a boat I wouldn’t. It is a risky, hard, and back breaking work. The reward at the end is that you have a boat, which I don’t want. If you give me resources and force me to build my own boat I will be misserable.

Is it a surprise then that this wealthy self-selected bunch has a higher statisfaction with their pet project than a factory worker? How could this ever be a fair comparision?


Very well put. Excellently stated. That's one of the concepts that many have thought about, because we all feel the effects, but aren't exactly sure how to articulate. I'm going to be thinking about that comment!

It definitely applies to software. It's why trades are a much better career option, local will never not matter in that case. The best 'star high school' welders and electricians are always going to be desirable, as no one is flying in the best in the world for every little job.

Most of us, except the best in the world among us, messed up going into software. The script completely flipped on this since I was a child in the 80s and was dreaming of becoming a programmer as I am now.


Software dev wages are through the roof as a counterargument.


Most aren't - most are quite comfortable but 100k is still above the median for developers.


according to BLS, the median is more like $110k: https://www.bls.gov/ooh/computer-and-information-technology/...

anyway, the median figure doesn't tell you a whole lot by itself. the median rent in the US for is ~$950 for a 1BR or ~$1250 for a 3BR (suitable for a family with 2-3 children). if you make the median salary, you are probably taking home $6000-6500 a month depending on tax situation. having ~$5000 left over after paying rent sounds more than just "comfortable" to me.

of course, we don't know exactly how well local rents are correlated with dev pay. maybe to be more than "comfortable" you need to pay for private school or pay rent in the best school district. but it would be much more useful to calculate the ratio of rent or home price to pay for each dev and then take the median of that.


That's what I see. As the OP I can say that my wages aren't through the roof, and I don't think they ever will be. I'm a developer and under 100K. I'm not sure anyone I know in this industry has a "through the roof" salary. I don't know anyone at Google. Given how hard I work for the money I do make, I'm expecting to unionize or go solo with my own thing, before my salary somehow goes through the roof. Either of those are more likely.


I dunno. I've never worked a FAANG, but wage increases have been great for every new job. Maybe my US perspective is showing? Maybe move to a hotter market?


I'm in the US, but I won't be moving to a hotter market during the pandemic for sure. If your personal wages are "through the roof", good job, as I'm always for general upward pressure on wages. But the original statement was that dev wages were through the roof. Moving to get them is a new, originally unspecified condition that the statistics don't bear out.

To revise your original statement, "dev wages can be through the roof, if you live in one of a few hot markets that exist globally at least". To me that's like saying, "need more money? Just become the CEO". :)


Do some interviews. You'll see. The remote market is everywhere. Good luck.


You may be right about that. I don't interview often. I despise switching jobs because of the gamut of exams and tests they put you through. I've had 2-3 hour exams before. Sometimes coding, sometimes pure psych exams. It completely pushes me away from seeking new jobs. Thanks for mentioning it because sometimes people, including myself, lose the script.


It's noteworthy that you're talking about the market for products, not services. Services generally don't scale like products do. We need more plumbers than toilet manufacturers.


A big question to be is if https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox applies to this type of labor.


Yep.

That is why society is (has to) move into post-employment era. It's no longer required or even beneficial for everyone to be employed and/or employed to the extreme degree they are now (~50% of waking hours).


I agree with you, but in a different way. Our supply chains that we need to stay alive (medical, shipping, farming, manufacturing) run on extreme conditions and extreme working hours, paid for by extreme money, designed by extreme intellect. We could all stop working, but the workers in those industries (from the CEO down to the laborer) would have to keep their extreme conditions and extreme hours.

If, somehow, we all started working for the supply chain, I think we could rebalance those hours so that they weren't as extreme. As it stands, solutions like UBI still require sweatshops, global shipping, global finance, etc. while simply letting people who aren't on the hook to provide a vital service to sit around and gaze at navels.


Maybe a system where people work in the extreme system from 20-30, get paid highly, and save enough to not need to work again in their early 30's. Seems like a much better system than UBI.


"From farming to high finance products and services are substantially more influenced and optimized by specialist professionals than they were in 1990. Increase efficiency like this throughout the national and global economy is how lawnmowers and A/C units can be sold on sale for $100 and still make a profit. "

You can find examples of this, but overall, I dispute the generalization.

I think quality/price improvements have been monumental in some areas, stagnant in others. Computer related products have gone crazy. It's not more for less though, it's "much more for a little more." The market grew a lot and a produces a hell of a lot more. Even that isn't the norm though. More for less, even less for less, are uncommon.

Farming and manufacturing.... None of the capitalisation, gene patents and such of recent generations is anything like basic green revolution tech, in terms of productivity growth. Farming is different. It uses less labour, more capital, but it's not producing much more efficiently. The price of farm produce isn't falling, quality is not rising. Same for most manufacturing, especially basic manufacturing. Most of the last generations' gains were made by employing cheaper employees in cheaper places, not reinventing manufacturing techniques. So, low end, high volume manufactured goods got cheaper, but a car still costs what it costs. Good quality appliances generally do too.

The quality of housing has gone up, but prices are often very high.

Education... we have more and arguably better, but more expensive.

Medicine... same. More and better, but more expensive.

There's a pattern here that's more complex and interesting than the average.


> Education... we have more and arguably better, but more expensive.

There are many thousands of people on this forum that have gotten a free education and in turn, one of the best careers in history from that free education that would never have been possible until recently.

I'm seeing more and more people (that aren't designers and engineers) are forgoing classical education and making a great living for themselves just by utilizing the freely available information on the internet.


True. Some of that "more" is even free, quite a lot of it. Still, if you do the sums, the education industry is larger.


> Even that isn't the norm though. More for less, even less for less, are uncommon.

At least in the embedded space, this is definitely not true. The norm is approaching more and more features for less.


My point was that as price drops & quality rises, there's an increase in consumption.


> Computer related products have gone crazy. It's not more for less though, it's "much more for a little more."

I thought we liked Raspberry Pis on HN.


I’m assuming you are referring to the US.


> Today the glue probably works better (barring regulation that forces compromises to product efficacy)

Regulation might do that and there is much more going on:

Regulation also protects health and safety of customers and workers (especially important with chemical products) and prevents fraud, and it corrects market distortions that damage businesses, including instituting changes that the nature of the market prevents any one business from implementing, and opening up competition.

Other things limit technological innovation, including incumbents with market power who profit more from eliminating competition than from improving their products.


> missed the elephant that is ...

Definitely a big deal, but mostly invisible on the demand side. You're talking about improvements to the supply process; the article is about what consumers experience.


I think he missed a lot bigger elephants. Things like the massive reduction in global poverty levels or eradication of polio. The global decrease in crime. We reversed ozone depletion and massively decreased the mortality rate for HIV. This post is more like a list of cool products we have now when we have monumental human development achievements no one is talking about.


Polio is not eradicated and with Taliban taking over Afghanistan, likely won't be anytime soon.


>(barring regulation that forces compromises to product efficacy)

Can you really not think of any benefits of regulation to correct for pervasive market failures?


Of course there are benefits. It’s still true that it compromises the main goal of the glue—compromise is the point.


> It’s still true that it compromises the main goal of the glue—compromise is the point.

That may happen, but it's not generally true. Regulation can, for example, increase competition which increases innovation. It can standardize safety rules, which reduces the risk for manufacturers clearly defining what they do and don't have to do. Etc.


That's not the typical framing I see, it's usually "government regulations strangling private sector innovation" with the implication that there are no benefits.


I'd say the costs outweigh the benefits, and the benefits often go to the politically connected who can influence the regulations.


> the benefits often go to the politically connected who can influence the regulations

The benefits go to a lot of people, or you could say that voting makes you politically connected. Politicians must balance many interests, including those of the politically connected and of the voting public. You don't want to be the politician who failed to protect your constituents.


This reminds me of a golden age blog post, when lists turned out to be an understudied literary device. I'm a fan of "dumps." Some interestingly debatable ones here:

"Intellectual Property Maximalism rollback: copyright terms have not and probably will not be indefinitely extended again to eternity to protect Mickey Mouse, and in 2019, for the first time since 1998, works entered the public domain"

I think the easy indicator may be the wrong one here. Defined more broadly, the public domain is not being enriched. For example, the web was a lot smaller in 1999, but it was a much more public domain. Today's web and post web internet is more centralised, controlled and therefore private property. Google could crawl pages, links, forums, because they were public, and use that access to create a search engine. Content, connections and signal are, today, proprietary. You can't order the world's information if that information is facebook's, only facebook can.

Or patents, more stuff of the last generation is patented than the previous'. Does that mean we invented more or we patented more? What happens to stuff that doesn't get patented? It's public.

Old copyright expiry deadlines might be a symbolic lead indicator, but they're determining the location of a fence post in county scale land dispute. A tiny, legible, part of the whole. In real terms, Disney's copyright portfolio is worth more, not less.


You're only arguing against the claim about copyright terms by equating two separate definitions of "public domain." public domain is being enriched by that stuff from the early 20th century. The "public feeling" stuff of the 1999 internet wasn't actually in the public domain then either.

The public domain has gotten larger as has the private domain. But all that private stuff is now on track to expire one day, while in 1999 it was not clear that that would ever happen at all.

Compared to 1999, a lot more of that "private domain" stuff is also being made freely available, price-wise.

I support copyright expiration, but making Disney's copyright portfolio worth less when they continue to create a bunch of stuff was never an explicit part of that goal for me.


> 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 sorry.

Works published two years after the end of World War I will enter public domain in 2047 (Agatha Christie's first book). Star Wars will enter public domain in the 2070s. It's mad.


> 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 copyrightable work.


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)


> Well this is trivially true

Not really!

If there was any fixed copyright length, then true. But the lawmakers were changing it, maintaining the "last thing to enter the public domain" constant


New public domain on the internet probably peaked with flickr's height.


As I said, "defined more broadly," which I'm also arguing is the pertinent way to define public and private domain.


I don't think that's a fair extension. The two concepts are really different, and neither is a more broad version of the other.


One other big change since the 1990s, though, is that Creative Commons is now a real thing. Many publications/sites including Wikipedia, Stack Overflow and open-access journals release everything as CC by default, and Wikimedia Commons has become a treasure trove of materials that can be freely remixed.


>can be freely remixed

The type of CC matters.

NC can't be used commercially--whatever that means.

ND, rather ironically, essentially forbids derivatives/remixing therefore prohibiting one of the reasons CC was created in the first place.


Note the full quote was:

> Wikimedia Commons has become a treasure trove of materials that can be freely remixed.

And wikimedia commons does not allow ND or NC licenses.


>What happens to stuff that doesn't get patented? It's public.

Or it's kept as a trade secret.


True. I considered clarifying, but didn't to be concise. I think publication as a reasoning for granting patents is superseded. It's mostly relevant to the history of patents, not the present.

You can't be secretive about a UI, or the chemical composition of a drug.


WD40 formula is famously still secret.


Take GC/mass spec/NMR to it and find out. The tools are available.

Do it to Coke/Pepsi while you're at it.



I guess that's an example in both directions. WD40 formula is secret despite the existence of patents.


There are competitors with less name recognition, but arguably a better product (WD40 is great for water displacement, but it isn't very good for most of the things people use it for).


is it? Though it was kerosene, paraffin and a drop of anise oil to cover the smell of the kerosene.

Maybe I should to revisit what I thought I knew


I would bet that today's public domain open web is larger than it was in 1999. It's just harder to find because search engines prioritize large closed silo sites and outside those sites search has been largely destroyed by spam.

It's sort of like the people who say mobile devices are destroying the more open PC market and replacing it with closed mobile "consoles."

There are far more PCs out there today than there were in the 1990s and they are cheaper, faster, easier to use, and more versatile. The reason people think mobile has eaten everything is because growth in mobile has outpaced growth in PCs and there are now far more mobile devices than PCs. The PC market has still grown though, so there are more PCs than ever.

Mobile growth is plateauing too. The mobile explosion was the creation of a new computing niche more than the displacement of an old one, though low-end and narrower PC use cases have been displaced by phones and tablets. PCs have become more like trucks vs. cars, machines for "real work."

We also have a lot more OS and architectural choices in PCs today than in the 1990s. Linux is pretty usable and MacOS no longer sucks, so with Windows there are now three major choices available. Others like FreeBSD and OpenBSD are also viable but not as popular. You can even get an ARM laptop or desktop in the form of Raspberry Pi style boards in laptop form factors, larger ARM64 "server" chip boards that can work as desktops running Linux, or in the form of Apple Silicon Macs (that can also run other OSes on ARM in VMs), so you now have two CPU architectures in the mainstream PC market instead of just one.

Lastly there's a huge market today for cheap single board computers like the Raspberry Pi that did not exist at all back then.

A similar comparison by the way applies to the metal server market vs. cloud. There are far more racked up servers today than there were in the 90s. Cloud has just grown really quickly, so there's even more cloud deployments.


>It's sort of like the people who say mobile devices are destroying the more open PC market and replacing it with closed mobile "consoles." There are far more PCs out there today than there were in the 1990s and they are cheaper, faster, easier to use, and more versatile.

Well, there definitely are more PCs now than in 1991, but pre covid-WFH era, PC sales were at an all-time low, following a multi year downward trend, thanks to people moving to those closed mobile devices and consoles.


Slowing sales were also due to PCs lasting longer and remaining useful longer. Mobile sales are slowing for the same reason. A five year old phone is fine.


Environment: air quality in most places has continued to improve (and considering the growing evidence on the harms of air pollution, this may well be the single most important item on this whole page), forest area has increased , and more rivers are safe to fish in

Because almost all the industrial production that pollutes water and air moved to third-world countries, where people suffer from pollution. Same for thrash that is taken to China, India, Indonesia for "recycling", but is actually burned in fires or thrown into the ocean. I wouldn't consider it an improvement due to advances in technology.


He referenced the Environmental Kuznets Curve. This provides a mechanistic understanding of what is happening. It isn't that modern industrial civilization requires a certain amount of pollution per unit of production which can be offloaded.

Rather, pollution is largely something that occurs in the production process in locations where desperation for production is so high that they are not willing to put in any personal effort or social policies to curtail it at the expense of production.

However, once you become richer, air quality and so on moves higher in our collective list of priorities. Production can occur without pollution. It is just more expensive, and requires care.


The Environmental Kuznets Curve is problematic though, see for instance: https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2020/10/9/response-to-mcafe...


Massive amounts of resource extraction still occurs in places like the US, Canada, and Australia. The US is the world's largest oil producer now. Canada and the US have huge logging operations, and are huge agricultural exporters. Australia has enormous mining operations. And indeed all three still use and extract coal, and most people rely on internal combustion engines for transportation.

Despite all of this, air quality is relatively high. Water quality is relatively high. Ecological preservation efforts have restored all sorts of habitats and saved species from extinction.

Gina Rinehart has become a billionaire in Australia by owning a massive coal mining operation. A lot of the coal is burned locally, but most is exported to Asia. Asia isn't forced to buy Australian coal. Asian countries could instead put a tax on dirty energy, and encourage cleaner energy. But some combination of reasons keeps that low in their list of priorities.

And even if they unfortunately wish to continue to burn coal, it would be possible to force the use of air scrubbers and purchasing purer grades of coal. But that isn't pursued for the same reasons.


Yes, and as pointed out in the link I shared, air pollution is part of the limited impacts it is applicable to, but points out "it does not apply to impacts like resource use and energy use".


To me, the article seems panglossian (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candide).

Some of the "upsides" (e.g. improvements in patent regime) just aren't there. Some aren't as wonderful as they are described.

I'm in my mid-sixties; I'm very much a candidate for the "things were better in the old days" brigade.

But I do think many (most?) things have improved. Housing is better; healthcare is immeasurably better (unless you can't afford it); and mobile telephony has improved the lives of at least a billion people worldwide.

Because I'm not miserable old git, I'm not going to list downsides.

[Edit] OK, I'll list one: permanent war.


> permanent war

Not exactly a new thing though is it? Plus the actual percentage of people worldwide exposed to war or directly affected by it has dropped significantly. The world is more peaceful than it has ever been.


> [Edit] OK, I'll list one: permanent war.

Depending on who you ask, conflict deaths per capita have stayed the same or declined since 1990.[1] 1991 had the first Gulf War, The Troubles, the Yugoslav campaign in Croatia, Mozambique, Ethiopia, Guatemala, and many more.

1. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/conflict-deaths-per-10000...


I wonder if permanent war was around in the 60's it was just easier to keep things under wraps because of smart phones. From what I have heard the CIA has been involved in some unsavory activities since before the 60s. I also believe that life lost by war and violence have decreased dramatically since then. It might be an ignorance is bliss thing.

But the music was definitely better back then!


Permawar: I don't think lives lost by war and violence have diminished. If our leaders want us to support wars, they need enemies, and we're encouraged to hate them. The number of civilians killed in just Iraq is comparable with the number of combatants+civilians killed in Vietnam. But the Vietnam war lasted about 12 years, then it ended. It was confined to Indochina. The "War On Terror" has killed huge numbers of people in Afghanistan, Iran (if you include the effects of sanctions), Libya and Pakistan.

We now make bigger, more-accurate bombs and missiles, but we sprinkle them around just as carelessly. We still have to be made to hate people if we are going to support a war; and we don't pay a lot of attention to the casualty-count of people we hate.

Music: If you're referring to the 60's and 70's, I agree - the seventies were my formative years, musically. But we're speaking of 1991, I think. [checks 1991's hits] In among the dross, there are some good tunes - Clash, Should I Stay Or Should I Go; James, Sit Down. And there was some great Acid House, which didn't make the charts (clubbers didn't know the names of the songs or the artists).


Actually lives lost by war and violence have diminished.

https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-natu...


> 1991 > Clash, Should I Stay Or Should I Go

?


There was a very prominent "permanent" war in the 1960's and 1970's.


> But the music was definitely better back then!

Objection!


>[Edit] OK, I'll list one: permanent war.

Before 90's US was in permanent war just as well. It was called the Cold War. So that one downside is actually non-existent - from "before" vs. "today" point of view.


"Non-existent" is a bit hyperbolic. I have no idea how many casualties resulted from the Cold War, I'd guess a few thousand. Even if 20,000 died, which I doubt, that's pretty good going for a war that lasted 30 years.


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 of just 3k deaths during 9/11. You and US government have another order of magnitude disagreement about what constitutes a "good" number of deaths as war causalities.


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 consensus is that the Cold War didn't include open conflicts like Vietnam.


"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


What do you think the cold war was?

What do you think Vietnam was about?


But are people happier and more fulfilled? Are they more able to have a meaning-filled life surrounded by people with whom they have close and lasting relationships?

What should we be measuring when we measure improvement?


I can't speak for "people" at broad, but improvements have certainly made a difference for my household. Gwern mentions hearing aids. They haven't just gotten smaller, but more capable. My wife couldn't have conversations with people at all in 1991. She can now. Universal subtitling opens up the full catalog of film and television that she couldn't experience. Spinal interbody fusion existed before 1991, but it wasn't very reliable. Procedure quality has improved rapidly, and that is the only reason my life right now isn't hopelessly miserable or possibly over, as the amount of pain I used to be in made death pretty tempting.


This. I think innovation real-value is spikey. A low band of timesavers bumps along the bottom but is punctuated by occasional leaps in particular domains. From what I've seen the cochlear implant can offer an amazing difference to quality of life for those that choose it. I can only imagine the difference the implant, or the improved aids, would have made to my hearing-impaired college roommate in the early 90s.


On that latter note, my friend has an electronic device implanted in his spine to reduce pain. Non-opioid, effective pain relief!


What is it?


Yeah ditto, I need that.


I sure am! We have family and friends spread across 2 continents. We can travel freely to spend time near them, take our jobs with us wherever we go, rent a well appointed home with a tap, and when not physically present, have a video chat at a moment's notice and hop into a round of VR golf. In the old world we would have had to choose career or having relationships with our parents and extended families. No more.


This is definitely a marked difference. Grandma/pa get a near daily stream of pictures & video of kiddo growing up. They get video calls on a (relatively) big screen to interact on a weekly or so basis.

When I was growing up camcorders were expensive so video is limited to special occasions. Have a good amount of pictures but a lot fewer than we have of kiddo. Cameras were more expensive and each picture cost money in film and development. Long distance calls were short and infrequent because they were expensive.


Most HN users are going to say “yes” because we are generally much higher income earners. Have things gotten better for everyone? Definitely not. Looking at continued increase in “deaths of despair” it seems like some of the changes that have made some of us richer have also made a larger % of the population more miserable than ever.

We’ve also built a highly sophisticated surveillance state and generally reduced our basic freedoms and individual rights post-9/11, and despite bumps in the road for this program thanks to Snowden etc, nothing has fundamentally changed and things continue to get worse on this front.

To me, this list of improvements is really just a list of improvements absent broader context which paints a very different & disturbing picture.


Indeed. We've traded cheaper better widgets for political and economic regression.

Mobile phones are the pinnacle of tech - and also a superb tool for mass surveillance.


Should we be measuring at all? Claiming that people have to be more happy over time is a weird proposition for a biologist like me. Not only happiness does not exist (see reification), the idea that it can be 'measured and improved' is silly. Should the next generation of birds be more happy and fulfilled than the previous one? Should the next generation of chimps have stronger lasting relationships? Does it even makes sense? To me it doesn't. We are biological creatures and each one of us chooses to construct meaning of life (or lack thereof) individually.


> Should the next generation of birds be more happy and fulfilled than the previous one? Should the next generation of chimps have stronger lasting relationships? Does it even makes sense?

Happiness is a proxy for successful adaptation to reality. So yes, if they are successfully adapting to the changing environment, they should be happy. The very least, failing at it will make them pretty “unhappy”.

> We are biological creatures and each one of us chooses to construct meaning of life (or lack thereof) individually.

A weird level of resolution to stop at. We’re also atomic creatures, maybe we shouldn’t care about death? But we’re also conscious creatures that suffer and maybe at least avoiding that is pretty meaningful? I don’t think any nihilist is nihilistic enough to self-immolate for example.

You could DIY your meaning individually, as is the fashionable belief in this age of post-modern, but it’s liable to crumbling tragically with an inopportune contact with reality. Normativity of reality seeking is a strongly built instinct in any species that knows they have to survive in it, and their meaning emerges from this relationship.


As I understand, happiness is free time from necessary work. Quote from book Hunnicutt, Free time:

Benjamin Franklin, agreeing that “the happiness of individuals is evidently the ultimate end of political society,” offered his vision of Higher Progress: If every man and woman would work for four hours each day on some- thing useful, that labor would produce sufficient to procure all the necessaries and comforts of life, want and misery would be banished out of the world, and the rest of the twenty-four hours might be leisure and happiness.

Also Epicur: "Epicurus believed that the greatest good was to seek modest, sustainable pleasure in the form of a state of ataraxia (tranquility and freedom from fear) and aponia (the absence of bodily pain) through knowledge of the workings of the world and limiting desires. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicureanism


Wouldn't it then be easier and more logical to set the goal as 'reduction of work hours from ... to...'?

Personally, I don't believe that working less (or more) makes people happy (unhappy), but my whole point is that defining your future goals in terms of happiness and attempting to measure it is futile by definition.


On the whole, I think people's happiness depends on those people, rather than their material circumstances. After all, there's only so miserable you can get (or so cheerful). Most people are wealthier; but even very wealthy people evidently think they don't have enough money.

I don't mean to suggest that miserable circumstances don't make you miserable; just that circumstances that are twice as awful don't seem to make people twice as miserable. I suspect that most mediaeval peasants were about as cheerful as most ordinary people today.


I can tell whether I am happy or not. What do you mean when you say happiness doesn't exist?


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.


Reification is usually a fallacy when we take the abstraction too far. The canonical example being "the map is not the territory" where someone confuses every mark on a map with actual features of the terrain.

One could argue that abstractions "actually exist literally" without being physical. Gravitational fields don't exist physically but do exist and they're a valid abstraction that's useful to measure. Maybe happiness is a phenomenon that could be useful too (though I would say to a lesser extent.)

A little tangential but... even things that we would say exist physically are not on closer inspection. Does a chair actually exist or is it a platonic ideal that we apply to a collection of atoms assembled to form four legs, seat and a back?


You are absolutely correct. Moreover, reifications can be useful or harmful - purely based on how they are being used. That's why maps are actually useful, except for several individuals that died in Australia and other places by trusting their navigators more than their own eyes and actual surroundings. I've been in situations where GPS malfunctioned and when I quickly realized it I understood that I should not follow the map.


If you grant that is possible to "feel happy" (for whatever definition of "happy" you choose), then happiness can be defined the state (or the "emotion") of feeling happy. Sure, happiness is not a concrete entity (though it does have concrete/physical underpinnings in people's brains), so in this sense it doesn't "exist literally", but I don't know where you're going with that. You can still measure it and devise strategies to have people experience more of it.


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


So by your logic, everything that doesn't literally exist (laws, businesses, emotions, software, governments, money, etc.) are all things that can't be measured or improved?


No, it's not my logic and your conclusion is incorrect. Measurement units don't actually exist (meters, seconds, inches, pounds, liters) - yet that's how we measure things and very successfully.

Abstractions are critical to human thinking in science. But not only reification is very different, you can't measure happiness even if you want to. You'll always have to go 'happiness as defined ...' or resort to people self reporting their feelings. Which is fine - I always ask my kids how they feel. I just understand that not only kids and adults may change how they feel next hour but that those feelings are unreliable. If you have kids of your own, you know how many 'tragedies' they lived through by the age of 6.


> You'll always have to go 'happiness as defined ...'

How is one meter defined?

You claim that happiness cannot be measured, yet in the next sentence you talk about measuring it by self reporting. One unreliable way of measuring doesn't equal to “cannot be measured”.


My argument is as follows - happiness can not AND should not be measured.

Now, that doesn't mean that you can't define happiness as you want it and pursue it on an individual level. For instance - walking in the park makes you 'happy' (as self reported feeling). Yoga makes you happy. Meditation makes you happy. Great - go for it.

BUT it's pointless to even attempt to measure 'group happiness' and try to increase it. People make pointless statements and point fingers in on the wrong directions. The article is about technology and I am sick and tired listening to how technology makes people unhappy or happy. Governments are often blamed for policies that make people unhappy. Society is probably blamed the most for people not being happy. It's too materialistic, the goals are wrong, bla-bla-bla.

BTW Here's the exact meter definition - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metre


Thanks for the pointer. It seems that there is no such thing as a meter except the “meter as defined”. And when people discovered that measuring length is not as reliable as they wanted, they didn't say it “can not AND should not be measured”. Instead, they found better ways of measuring it.

If happiness is not as well defined or well-behaved as we would like it to be, perhaps we can make it better rather than dismissing the problem.


Doesn't happiness exist in the sense that there is a complex set of chemical combinations happening in your brain emitting the feeling of happiness?


Maybe, maybe not - you'd have to define which complex set of chemical combination is happiness and which isn't. But why? We know a lot about neurochemistry. We know a lot about receptors, neuromodulators and their interactions (serotonin, addiction). As a biologist I don't understand - why would you want even study something that doesn't exist (happiness), when you can study specific parts of neurochemistry that are more practical and may have actual benefits (like reduction of addiction or help with schizophrenia)


At the most basic level, life expectancy has increased everywhere [0] and so quality of life has increased for a large number of people who would otherwise be dead.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_expectancy


Life expectancy has already lowered quite a bit from the pandemic we can't put a lid on, and when (if) that settles down cataclysmic climate change will continue its work. Sorry but the future seems quite bleak.


At any point of human history, one could convince themselves that the future is bleak. There had been pandemics and plagues, cold and hot wars, revolutions and dangerous technologies and -isms.

And yet in retrospect humanity's trend has been of greater ingenuity, connectives, safety and well-being. Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clock - if you think every thing will kill you, you will eventually be right.

But I see no reason to think like that. For example, sure the pandemic sucks but relative to what it could have been, especially in such a connected world, humanity is handling it pretty well. There seems to be resilience in our economies, supply chains, and people - that when they are tested they have bent and strained but not broken. Like a ship that gets rocked but doesn't sink in a storm that's actually a GREAT sign.

I can related to your emotional state though. I remember walking in NYC a few days after 9/11, and seeing a half-completed building on 42nd street and thinking: this will never get finished. Nobody will ever dare come or invest or live in NYC - we're doomed and dead.

That building is worth a billion dollars now and that neighborhood is thriving. It's important to remember that feeling of gloom and realizing that it doesn't always (in fact, most of the time) pan out as we feared the worst.


>Sure, it's possible that THIS is the high point and it'll all go down-hill from here, but that's like being a broken clock - if you think every thing will kill you, you will eventually be right.

It's not about present society being a global maximum, it's about present society being a local maximum. The lessons from history are often that things can and do get worse, sometimes for generations, before improving again later. It is absolutely possible (and I would argue probable) that life will get worse for a long while before improving.


> (and I would argue probable) that life will get worse for a long while before improving.

Sure. Like I said, you can do this at any point in time and if enough people do that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy so it's better not.

Out of curiosity, I took a look at your submission history (which is vast!) and it's 90% doom and gloom across a vast array of topics. I do think living with such a negativity bias is very disempowering - and not to mention not fun. I don't mean to be stupid and blindly optimistic (I manage risk for a living among other things) but like I said, living with certainty that everything will be terrible will ruin your life.

Like I said, since dawn of man, people had reason to believe what you believe. And those who really believed it would have no reason to build anything, learn anything, invest in anything, have children etc - why do any of that if the world is ending.

But the world is inherited by those who DO do those things - everything we have, everything we are, everything we're investing in - is there because someone in the past believed that the future is worth the work. So just be careful how much of this your let into your psyche because it will lead to you to a dead end


In general I think low expectations for the (near) future of humanity and depression are correlated, but intriguingly to me, it's not an extremely tight correlation. Some people think the ship's going down and manage to party and have a good time. Others aren't particularly extreme in either emotional direction even as they evince extreme pessimism. And I imagine the reverse is true too, although I don't recall seeing it.


>I do think living with such a negativity bias is very disempowering - and not to mention not fun. I don't mean to be stupid and blindly optimistic (I manage risk for a living among other things) but like I said, living with certainty that everything will be terrible will ruin your life.

I think it only seems overly negative -because- so many people are blindly optimistic and assume things just get better naturally with no action required on our part. That's why I have such a negative outlook, I can envision the immense work we need to do to address climate change (and many other issues) and I'm seeing such a small amount of work being done that it's basically a rounding error. Watching people reject even the small amount of work required to personally address COVID (a free shot) does not fill me with hope that we can make big changes.

>But the world is inherited by those who DO do those things - everything we have, everything we are, everything we're investing in - is there because someone in the past believed that the future is worth the work

I think this is the disconnect between us. The future is worth the work, but we refuse to work on the future. We instead work harder to prop up the unsustainable present.


You're talking about human nature. You're seeing the problems only. But humans were "like this" forever.

EG: you're dismal about covid because some people won't get the shot. But in the 80s/90s you'd be dismal because people weren't practicing safe sex despite AIDS, and you'd draw that line to a depressing conclusion. And yet in reality, somehow the world moved towards a much better place despite those things.

Same with COVID - you are obsessing on a small number of people not getting vax and getting depressed, but you are ignoring for example super-fast vax development, global awareness, willingness of governments to move in and out of different disease control regimes, etc. Those are wildly optimistic things, but you don't let those things encourage you, instead you seem to seek out the bad stuff no matter how small and and form your view on that.


I'm generally an optimist but do think this time might be different. Never before have so many people had such access to information that they could become convinced they understand anything after a little research, and never before have producers of fake news had such reach. Yesterday's predominance of political apathy seems to have been much more stable than today's predominance of vehement polarization.

Conspiracy theorists used to be everywhere, but in small numbers and not very homogeneous; now they are plentiful and coordinated enough to lead to outcomes like the Jan 6 insurrection or the vaccine denialism gripping something like 30% of Americans.


>And yet in reality, somehow the world moved towards a much better place despite those things.

It's not "somehow", you're glossing over the very real losses and very avoidable tragedies (fed by bigotry and fear) that happened during the AIDS crisis, which is my whole point. Progress isn't free and by ignoring the real losses and avoidable tragedies we repeat the same mistakes. That's why we have to confront the uncomfortable parts of the past and present. If we only focus on the superficial elements of success and progress, we make problems more difficult to actually confront.


But isn't the point that despite the very real and avoidable tragedies along the way, things have continued to improve quite quickly? So as we continue, we can expect more preventable tragedies (whatever "preventable" actually means), but also more progress to benefit the vast majority of us who do make it?

I don't think we need to get bent out of shape about the aspects of human nature that cause horror and tragedy, since they seem so greatly overshadowed by aspects of the same nature which are driven to continuously improve. The good guys are winning, by a lot.


Thank you for explaining my post in different words - I agree with your summary of it.

I don't think you're living up to your name though!


>progress to benefit the vast majority of us who do make it

So what level of sacrifice should be required of those that don't make it? Going back to the AIDS example, government involvement was delayed because of bigotry, because it only affected people who didn't make it. Our economy is currently propped up by low wage workers both locally and globally who aren't making it. We don't do a good job at taking care of the sick and the poor. We're doing a terrible job at taking care of the environment. As you both have said, none of this is new, but it doesn't have to be this way. We know how to solve many of society's problems and we choose not to do so. If the core reason for these things is "human nature" and we shouldn't try to change, I don't think I have the defeatist attitude in that case. My attitude comes from seeing solutions that we aren't even trying to do, not that we -shouldn't- try.

>The good guys are winning, by a lot.

I don't see the good guys winning. The good guys currently have the high score, but the bad guys are on the upswing and scoring points on the good guys, who are just standing around.


> So what level of sacrifice should be required of those that don't make it

The same as it has always been for all living things: pain, suffering, and death.

> low wage workers both locally and globally who aren't making it

Pretty sure quality of life is up by pretty much every measure for "low wage workers" both locally and globally.

> none of this is new, but it doesn't have to be this way.

> We know how to solve many of society's problems and we choose not to do so.

You could have made this statement at any point in history, and people might agree with you. If this is the only way it ever has been, why do you think it doesn't have to be this way?

We know in theory. There is a vast, uncrossable gulf between theory and practice, as various communist experiments have shown. There is no known solution to ingroup/outgroup tendency, sociopathy or naked self-interest.

> If the core reason for these things is "human nature" and we shouldn't try to change

We should totally try to change! But we shouldn't expect to succeed, and we shouldn't be surprised or disappointed when awful things happen. We should instead realize that, looking at the past few centuries of history, this is an amazing time to be alive, by every metric. Better to accept humanity the way that it is, space rockets and genocides and all, and realize that it's still a net-positive, than despair that humanity doesn't hold up to some sort of fictional ideal.


>Pretty sure quality of life is up by pretty much every measure for "low wage workers" both locally and globally.

Wages are stagnant and certainly haven't kept pace with productivity. They can buy more TVs because electronics are cheaper, but costs for basics are going up. Metrics don't capture "having to pee in a bottle" because of work demands.

>You could have made this statement at any point in history, and people might agree with you. If this is the only way it ever has been, why do you think it doesn't have to be this way?

Was it true in 2500 BC that they had the resources to feed everyone on the planet consistently? 1500 AD? We can feed everyone now, yet people go hungry in the wealthiest nation in the world. Has it been true at any point in history since the industrial revolution where we could provide healthcare and advanced education for everyone in an industrialized nation? It works for many of them, but not the wealthiest one. Are we doing everything we can to solve these problems? I understand life is about prioritizing and understanding tradeoffs, but food and healthcare are among the most basic needs for a healthy individual and education is one of the basic needs for a healthy society.

>There is no known solution to ingroup/outgroup tendency, sociopathy or naked self-interest.

So why do we structure society to encourage and reward these behaviors instead of trying to mitigate their effects?


> Wages are stagnant and certainly haven't kept pace with productivity

Wages have never been tied to productivity. They're derived from supply and demand for labour. Gold miners are very productive fiscally speaking, but they don't make any more than coal miners.

> Metrics don't capture "having to pee in a bottle" because of work demands.

Why do you think people shouldn't have to pee in bottles? Or be exposed to dangerous conditions? You seem to be operating from a moral ideal that gives a very clear idea of how things ought to be. Where do you derive it from?

> Was it true in 2500 BC that they had the resources to feed everyone on the planet consistently? 1500 AD?

You'd be surprised how much grain was hoarded by ancient Pharaohs and Medieval Lords. It was likely enough to prevent much of the starvation their populations experienced. We could always feed more people than we do, and people with wealth and power have always preferred expensive trinkets and shows of status to feeding the hungry.

The US is fundamentally build on individual liberty. This idea is in opposition to involuntary social obligation. If a person doesn't want to use their wealth/time/energy to the benefit of others, do they have to? Should you force them? To what degree? Are people entitled to be helped or should they have to ask? People disagree axiomatically on these things.

In absence of an oracle to tell us who is right and who is wrong, and given that we are all morally equal, it seems to follow that no one has a strong case to impose their answers to these questions on anyone else. Why are you so sure that helping people is "right"? Why do you think everyone has to work towards your idea of a "healthy society"?

> So why do we structure society to encourage and reward these behaviors instead of trying to mitigate their effects?

I'd say our current social structure is the best we've got for mitigating these effects. Entrepreneurship allows people to harness their self-interest to the benefit of others. Democracy limits the effects of corruption. This is why our society is able to innovate as much as it does, and therefore prevail in the ongoing competition with other societies and other ideas.


>The lessons from history are often that things can and do get worse, sometimes for generations, before improving again later.

The example I like to think about for this is imagine being born in the eastern European bloodlands - Eastern Germany, the Baltics, Poland, Byelorussia or Ukraine around 1895-1900. Things are pretty good up until the Great War starts, which back then you would be old enough to be considered an adult for, and then it is wars, famines, repressions and totalitarianism for the rest of your life as you likely die just short of the Iron Curtain falling. That's a pretty bleak life. Yet many people lived it, and found love and purpose and had families under it and those civilizations as a whole eventually recovered.


That love and purpose can be found in the bleakest of circumstances is indeed true and amazing.

That Belarus recovered is not obvious.


Yeah good point. Although I think it is pretty safe to say they are better then they were in the 1930's and 1940's. Are they better then they were in the 1960's 70's? Not as clear.


Or, most of Afghanistan in the period 1979-99


I think the tragedy of 9/11 is distinctly different from this one. That one was covered non stop by media networks and lead to titanic shifts in the US and to US foreign policy. Comparing emotional states between now and then seems pretty useless. And sure every new crisis can seem bleak but just considering climate change when the field of people studying it have observable depression I imagine things are a bit gloomier than the average person may imagine.

The pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of deaths just in the US hasn't had the same sort of coverage. Nor the fact that we haven't had hurricanes in the Gulf but massive flooding everywhere... my response doesn't come from emotion but from the lack of emotion I see in our leaders to the catastrophes.

We haven't even begin to cut emissions enough to slow down the climate catastrophe and I doubt we ever will. While I imagine the US will start protecting its own supply chains I imagine it will act as it always has, protect the wealthiest and best off and leave middle and lower classes to fight for scraps. Just look at our healthcare system, best in the world for the richest, and one of the worst in the western world for lower classes.


> The pandemic, with hundreds of thousands of deaths just in the US hasn't had the same sort of coverage.

Sorry, but where are you living/getting news from because I am jealous and I want to be that isolated.

Literally every new story, list of headlines, broadcast, tweet, and conversation today includes COVID. CNN used to have daily death counts and totals. Every single person's life, from the way we study, work, shop etc has changed because of COVID.

If your thesis is that somehow this big crisis hasn't been sufficiently publicized and people aren't aware, I just have a really hard time connecting to your perspective on the world.


* One of the worst in the developed world.


One human constant through history is that the future always seems bleak to most of it.

This seems like an understudied thing to me.


No matter the improvement, including social improvements like you're suggesting, people just adjust their expectations to the new normal.

We seem to be designed to not be content with what we have, because that would eliminate motivation to make things better.


"Happier and more fulfilled" is a good question to ask about a person, but I think it gets too squishy in regards to people. Too abstract.

If you're going to broaden person to people, I think it's best to narrow to "happier and more fulfilled" in regards to something. Marriage/personal economics/profession/social life/spiritual life/etc.


I think a set of metrics would be if people's stressors have been reduced. Like Do people spend less time worrying about paying bills, job security, etc. I agree that a "happiness" metric is not great.


I wonder if happiness is influenced more by some absolute level of joy or is it more influenced by the rate of improvements.


Our society is not structured in a way to value or measure this, our society is optimized for wealth generation and extraction. If a human activity can't be bought or sold, we don't value or measure it. For example, stay-at-home parents aren't accounted for in GDP calculations, but outside daycare providers are, so we structure society to encourage parents to work and pay for daycare instead of staying home.


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'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.


In '91 nothing followed you around. You could go to prison in Tennessee and Arkansas wouldn't be able to find out without a cop or two putting in a days work and making phone calls. People would get arrested, give a fake name, plead and do time, and be released without their identity ever being verified.

Young adults in 2021 are hopelessly trying to outrun that time they tweeted a slur when they were 12.


If you are going back Marty, there are a few timelines I’d like altered.


Fun fact is that the alternate 1985 in Back to the Future II where Biff ran Hill Valley was actually based on what it would be like with Donald Trump (as the sleazy casino developer) in charge.


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.


1991 still feels modern enough to have a decent chance at participating in that transition I suppose.


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.


Do you have kids? Sounds like you don't. All people would go back in time until they become parents. After that, faced with the harsh reality that going back in time would alter your decisions hence not getting the same kids, they, admittedly begrudgingly, back off.


>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 generation and they say the "good old days" was 1991; but if you ask those in 1991 what the good old days were, they wouldn't say "right now!" ... they'd say 1970s. And if you ask those in 1970s... they'd say... (you get the point).

So the conclusion is either...

- the true good old days after connecting the survey across centuries was actually the prehistoric cave man days of hunting & gathering

... or ...

- every generation repeats the rose-colored glasses narrative because we bias the past with positive memories and the bias the present with negative current events


I was 20 in 1991 in Europe. I was flying regularly without any flygskam. The USSR was just falling and we were all sure it was an unmitigated good (we still didn't know that the Russians will die by scores and see their life expectancy drop like a rock); Germany was just reunited and we thought the EU was a great project, not a bureaucratic monster working for the oligarchy; Hell, I even believed there were nice guys and bad guys in the Yugoslavian wars. I probably even believed that voting counted. Future was bright, and open. Year 2000 was still ahead, with its wonders.

My mother was 20 in 1968, and it was the good old days. They believed the revolution was around the corner. Present was somewhat grim, but future was bright; in her years of political activity she saw the pill come, abortion rights, women rights enhanced, the end of dictatorships in Spain and Portugal, the end (in civilised countries) of death penalty, the crumbling of USSR.

My children are in their 20s; my son refuses to learn to drive because cars are evil and he doesn't want to own one, ever, because they're bad; he's hell-bent of enjoying the now because he's pretty sure that there is no future, except climate catastrophe, incessant wars, and electronically-enhanced surveillance; he thinks that democracy is a complete scam and he forgets to vote if I don't nag him weeks in advance. He's just as disillusioned as I am, but 27 years younger.

So I think the picture is more complex. The global direction of evolution is much more important than the objective starting point.


I'm extremely interest the general feeling and views societies had in the past: how they perceived the present and the future, as a whole.

Objectively life has become better and more comfortable for the vast majority of humans since then (Hans Rosling does a beautiful job of exploring this).

But I do think that perceptions and feelings matter, and even though material wellbeing is a prerequisite to that, so is also the general feeling and view that those around you hold, and in many ways I feel we've gone backwards in that.


> but if you ask those in 1991 what the good old days were, they wouldn't say "right now!"

Is this sourced? In Europe, 1991 was when the Soviet union fell. Sure, in many now-ex-USSR countries 1991 wasn't the best of times because the collapse wasn't very well managed. But in West, suddenly the impeding doom of nuclear war near disappeared overnight.

2021 has ... exciting climate events and Covid.

edit. What is the soundtrack of 2021? In 1991 it supposedly was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4RjJKxsamQ . TIL the year ended with band donating bunch of royalties from the single to Gorbachev 10 days before he resigned and the USSR disappeared. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_of_Change_(Scorpions_song...


I'm old enough to remember 1991, even if I wasn't in the workforce then, and IIRC the mood then was kinda depressed. We were in the midst of a recession. We'd just come off the hangover of the first Gulf War. Nobody really knew what the fall of the Soviet Union would mean for America, and there were real fears about nukes falling into the wrong hands. Grunge was the hot new music, and pop culture was all about Gen-X alienation.

If you asked then what the good old days were, they'd probably say 1988. There's a reason Bush 1 was the only 1-term president between 1980 and 2020. Things didn't start perking up until around 93-95 with the WWW.


A 3rd option is society (or parts of society) can go through rough patches where 30 years before year X was better than year X + 30. Trajectories for different populations within the society can differ themselves and so individuals will have varying answers.


Alternatively, it's a bit of Future Shock

I grew up in the 90s, & maybe I'd do better as a 20 year old in 1991 rather than 2031 (too young to say 20 in 2021; I've succeeded already close enough to there), but I'd rather grow up in the 2000s than grow up in the 80s

There's a kind of arbitrage, where if I could take my technical abilities from 2010 back to 1990, I'd probably do pretty well. I'm not so sure about taking those abilities to 2030. So you need to frame your question more clearly: at what age does the time travel occur? For simplicity I assume the only age you've given: 20. If it's about when we're born, then that's a completely different human being


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.


That's one of the themes in the film Midnight in Paris. (Yes, it's a Woody Allen film.)


Going to be another person commenting that they'd seriously consider 1991 (as long as I had the smarts to still go into software). Jump back to 1991 as a 20yr old and head to the recruitment fair stalls of Sun Microsystems / DEC / Apple / Adobe / Microsoft.

Google search and showers that stay hot are pretty nice, but the relative difficulty of accessing quality education, jobs, and housing probably turn out to be much more significant as you exit your 20s in 2031 and think about starting a family.


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 DOS era as well -- so not only is the company smarmy, its products are buggy, demoralizing piles of death-marched junk. Read the (excellent) Showstopper! for a hint of what awaits you at Microsoft.

There's a big difference between 1991 and just a few years later of course, but even when I graduated from college (1996), Microsoft was absolutely suffocating. I had decided that I wanted to work for a computer company and that I had zero interest in working on Windows NT(or Copland). This left one company, Sun Microsystems, which even in 1996 was not really recruiting at universities. I got a job there by cold e-mailing a Sun engineer (Jeff Bonwick) based on a Usenet post in comp.unix.solaris. (Cold e-mailing to get a job was so unusual that a friend of mine who was a reporter for the AP wrote a story about my job search -- and it was broadly picked up nationally![0]) At Sun, I was the youngest person in OS development by a decade, and the industry broadly thought Sun to be foolish for insisting on innovating in the operating system. Conventional wisdom was wrong, of course, and I had a great 14-year run at Sun that I wouldn't trade for anything -- but it would be a mistake to overly romanticize what was honestly a pretty crappy era.

[0] I talked about this briefly in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IznEq2Uf2xk, including an (embarrassing) photo of me ca. 1996 that ran as the front page of many business sections around the US


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-com bust turned everything to shit?

Thanks for the book recommendation. I've added it to my Goodreads list. I'll checkout the talk too. I haven't seen that one of yours, because I saw the title and figured it was heavy on memory-management and pretty out of my wheelhouse.


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


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.


Yes! The final two frontiers (or, among the final two frontiers, anyway) of proprietary software are firmware and EDA software. I am (as you noted!) very bullish about both, and I think that open firmware + open EDA will lead to a new golden age of HW/SW co-design -- it's a great time to be a software engineer, and it's only going to get better!


> So you wouldn't be "heading to the recruitment stalls" for any of those companies except potentially Microsoft.

Late '91 I was graduating soon and I did go to the university recruiting stalls of Sun and IBM and Motorola. DEC was a presence but I loved SunOS and didn't like VMS so didn't talk to them. Never considered Microsoft since I hated them so much already back then.

Ended going in a different direction due to a graduate degree scholarship but thinking back maybe should've joined Sun directly back then. I did later end up at Sun a few years later, roughly same timeframe as you.


Now I could understand this as a blue collar worker, but you’re saying you’d prefer to be a software engineer in 91 than 2021? Come on, of pretty much all the professions were the ones who have reaped the most benefits of the past 30 years


Arguably in 1991, you're getting in on the ground floor but it's a mixed bag. Your new grad salary is probably going to be around $40K or so in the US. And dot-bomb is 10 years in the future.

And that list of companies is sort of a mixed bag.

Adobe has mostly done pretty well through the years.

Sun Microsystems did have a very good decade through the dot-com years but then didn't.

Apple was really struggling at that time.

DEC was on the way down and would be bought by HP a few years later.

Microsoft was about to launch Windows NT so that was a pretty good place to hop on but obviously went on to have a long period of stagnation.


Indeed it predates my entrance to the industry by a half-decade but one thing that's notable about this period is the technology stacks being built during it would in large part be heavily de-emphasized later when the web exploded.

If you were at Apple, you'd be working on a platform (Mac OS classic, or Copland, or Newton) that would be thrown away by the end of the decade.

If you were working at DEC, likewise. (VMS, VAX, even Alpha)

Sun is more complicated, as they pivoted better and took longer to die. That would be a good place to be maybe.

1991 is an awkward year since it's about 2-3 years before the HTTP/browser revolution.

One thing though is that to my eye when I look at what these companies were working on then, it all seems more interesting to me now. The actual employment of a programmer (who wasn't stuck in finance or insurance etc. doing COBOL) had the potential to do some stuff that we at least thought Was going to be groundbreaking back then. NewtonOS and Alpha and Copland, CORBA, PowerPC/PREP, OS/2, research projects like Sun's "Self", etc. it was all exciting stuff. Just very little of it went on to be used later.


For me, Sun definitely looks like the most attractive company on that list. (Though Microsoft might well have been a perfectly good job.)

For one thing, you'd have been much more plugged into the coming internet revolution broadly than any of the others. You'd also have been at least connected to the open source world although Sun resisted aspects of it in many ways.

They were also primarily in Silicon Valley unlike the others.


The 90's had all kinds of tech companies starting. Many of them didn't last, but there was a lot of exciting stuff going on.

Early cell phones. PDA's like Palm. Printer market was hot. Businesses were networking their computers like crazy. The PC accessory market was hot. Video games like the Playstation were about to come out. Dial up online services and then ISP's. The web appeared.


I guess if you had hindsight it would be great, just live very frugally, choose the right company and above all buy as much real estate as possible in SV :)


> Your new grad salary is probably going to be around $40K or so in the US.

Of course $40K then is $80K now, and you were working at 9-5 at BigCo, with a pension plan. Interest rates were 3-4x what they are now, the value of the house that you spent a couple of years salary on is probably going to quintuple, and the stock market runup over the next 30 years is going to be unreal.


>the stock market runup over the next 30 years is going to be unreal

Not counting the stock market plunge especially in tech in the dot-bomb era when there's a good change you'll also lose your tech job and very possibly be very underemployed for a few years. Of course if you hold on through that (and 2008), you'll come out well on the other side.

And if you were 20 in 91, you probably don't have a house in ten years in pricey (just not eye-watteringly so) SV 9 years later when the bottom falls out of the market.


You might also be describing 2021-2051.

Well, except pension, which were largely gutted in the private sector by 1991 (it was the plot of the 1987 movie Wall Street).


I moved from Wall St. to the West coast in the 90s. Both paid above average programmer salaries for the time, but S.V. was the place to be for tech. So much going on, so much demand.


I'm sure the day-to-day experience of building software is generally much better in 2021, but as others have noted there are other reasons to start in 1991.

- Particularly interesting point in history for software (pre-Netscape!) - Build lots of experience before Google, Netflix, and FB are even born. - Incredible compounded returns in software stocks (and great returns in housing)

2021 is a great time to be a 20yr old software dev, but it's also a great time to be a 50yr old software dev who has 30 yrs of experience, stock market returns, and housing investment.


The political dangers are orders of magnitude worse now, plus there is climate change (a product of the same political problems). I'll take 1991, but without this future.

Also, IME, the culture has become hateful, poisonous, and based on trauma, despair, and survival rather than hope and dreams, freedom and self-actualization.


> I'll take 1991, but without this future.

May be with memory wipe of currently what you know and the way the world is


2021 if only for the health improvements without trying: - You grew up in an era of not inhaling cancerous smoke everywhere you go - Even unhealthy foods are less unhealthy due to removing hydrogenated fats from foods (god were they tasty though) - Cars are safer than ever - The environment is cleaner than it has been in decades

The past always looks better. People still want to return to the 50's and most of them were not alive then.

However, I believe every generation has had it "better" generally speaking than the previous and that's how it should be. Certain era's had things that were probably better but this era has things that future generations will envy as well while also having it "better" generally speaking.

Today is this best time to be alive and I'm optimistic tomorrow will be even better.


>You grew up in an era of not inhaling cancerous smoke everywhere you go

A recent study (2013) suggests that the idea that second hand smoke has a direct link to cancer wasn't entirely accurate.

https://academic.oup.com/jnci/article/105/24/1844/2517805

>Even unhealthy foods are less unhealthy due to removing hydrogenated fats from foods

I would say food is far more unhealthy today than in 1991. There is sugar and bastardized sugar in everything. Sugar is addictive and food manufacturers use it to get people addicted to their food. Instead of eating for nutrition, people eat for that sugar hit, and you almost can't escape it. Try finding prepackaged foods in the grocery store without some form of sugar in it.

https://www.addictioncenter.com/drugs/sugar-addiction/


I was in my early 20s in 1991, and I'd easily pick 2021. The 1990s were a great time to have as my formative period, and it was fun to ride the web from gopher to mobile.

But the 2020s are going to be a transformational decade too, with a lot to learn and experience, and a ton of opportunities. Far more chaotic than the 1990s, but honestly that suits me personally. I thrive on that.

I would pick the 90s over the 2000s or 2010s though.

Well, I'd go back to the 2010s and buy even more bitcoin than I did, but other than that, I could skip that decade.


I'm trying to imagine being back in the late 80's living in the squat or in the animal house I lived in during the early 90's and having this guy time travel back to tell us about the future.

"You mean we don't all die in a nuclear war or from AIDS or global warming?"

"No, the future is much better! Riding lawn mowers are cheaper, teddy bears are much more cuddly and silky, board games have been revolutionized and you can get goat cheese at Walmart!"


It might go a little something like this: https://sfdebris.com/videos/special/timewalker2020.php


For a sexually active 20 y.o., 1971 was probably better than 1991. The threat of HIV had an enormous chilling effect on the casual dating scene.


I'm going 91. I was there. I wasn't 20, but I was closer to 10. And 10 years old in decades past is about equal to 20 years old today, we experienced more. We had more freedom, we made more mistakes. More of us were likely beaten/raped/killed or otherwise died.. but we simply were less childlike, the generations that had analog childhoods. Less coddling. That was more true the further back you go, but there was a steep decline for children born around 1990 or after due to many factors. At least that's what I've observed.

Those quality of life improvements on that list are in reality pretty sad compared to the loss in social cohesion and quality of life in ways that matter more. You would think we didn't have indoor plumbing or antibiotics. We were in good shape. But the difference in pre and post 9/11 America is stark. This place was basically ruined on a social level, pure fear and panic, and it remains in different forms.

Now if you asked me if I'd rather be born in 1971 or 2021? I would say 2021. Because the last 20 years have been throwaway decades. Someone 20 years old in 2021 missed ALL of the good times, never saw America as it was, and has and will spend most of their life behind the 8 ball.

If you're born today, while there could definitely be more calamity, there's a good chance things turn up from the malaise of 2001-2021 in the next two decades. At least as it pertains to the working class. Which is most of us. Its been a great two decades for those that were running the show. But there's a reason why overall sentiment is and has been negative.

I'll take 20 in 1991, or 20 in 2041. But not 20 in 2021.


I honestly feel this same way about the past 20 years. You captured it so well.


'91 would be better though - better salaries in a lot of jobs, and lower house prices.

GPS on the phone is awesome, but I'd still prefer financial security.


>better salaries in a lot of jobs

Factory jobs that is probably true in general--though you're still into the period when a lot of traditional union manufacturing jobs were leaving (or had left) the country.

As an engineer/software developer, you're probably going to be paid about $40K for an entry-level position [ADDED: For the US at a "tech" company]. And there is basically no equivalent to routine FAANG SWE salaries.

Housing is cheaper (relatively) in some locations although the Bay Area was still relatively expensive. Manhattan was considered the high-priced place to live at the time.


I was making $50K/year as a developer on Wall St. with 2-3 years professional experience...and it was awesome. And yes, the HFT guys got 'FAANG' salaries. HFT was in its infancy, and those guys were making bank!

While the absolute numbers may seem small by today's standards, it was more then enough for a single 20something to have the time of their lives. Even paying Manhattan rents, we were out 5-6 nights a week clubbing and partying


There are many factory jobs today and companies have a difficult time filling them. They are not the monotonous, repetitive jobs of assembly line work (that has been outsourced) but rather involve some skill that you'll be taught. But it's hard to find people to fill these roles as qualified candidates in many cases think the jobs are below them (college educated but can't find work in their field) or they simply don't want to show up every day and work.

Many people today choose lifestyle centered work (gig economy, part time roles for short term, etc) rather than work that lets them build a life. I have multiple friends that have gone this route out of high school with no college and started at the bottom and have over the years acquired more skills and knowledge and some have moved into supervisory and management roles after their companies financed some additional skills like using spreadsheets, basic management, etc.

The endless stories of people that start, work a week and get a check, don't show for 2 weeks and then come back thinking they are still employed is amazing. The jobs exist and they pay well, but not enough people want them.


If people don't want them, then they don't pay enough (or have other issues - work safety, etc.). That's how the market works...


It could be, but really I think it's more than that. These jobs pay really well and they offer a career ladder. You will be able to buy a home, have children, take vacations. But you need to show up every day and work. A lot of people who would be qualified for these types of jobs don't want to do that. They'd rather pick and choose and float around at places for less money and less financial security.

This isn't like fast food restaurants having trouble hiring people at minimum wage because stimmy checks pay more than working. People come in and they want the job and they work a week or 2 and then disappear after they get paid and then come back when they need money again. That type of work ethic just isn't compatible with this kind of career so they end up at an Amazon warehouse, driving Ubers, and delivering food instead since that does support their lifestyle choice.


> These jobs pay really well and they offer a career ladder. You will be able to buy a home, have children, take vacations. But you need to show up every day and work.

They obviously do not pay commensurate to the risks of job loss, lack of quality of life at a job, and/or to make up for the undesirability for the location they are in.

The proof is the data showing wages for factory type work stagnating for many decades now (until the recent few years). People incorporate that knowledge, and let their kids know that those jobs are not worth investing in. How many factory towns are there where the factory closes or downsizes and the whole town goes into economic decline? You need to pay a lot to offset that kind of risk.

The other proof is also that I bet they can get lots of qualified applicants that will “show up everyday and work”. Just offer $200k per year. Or $500k per year. Obviously the purchasers of that type of labor are not offering enough money.


> They obviously do not pay commensurate to the risks of job loss, lack of quality of life at a job, and/or to make up for the undesirability for the location they are in.

I mean, there's a lot of alcoholism problems and drug issues too.

>People incorporate that knowledge, and let their kids know that those jobs are not worth investing in.

I'm not sure the wisdom of the crowds is a great example here. How many kids are in many thousands of debt and working at dead end jobs or as a barista, etc. because they got a useless degree from a third rate university?

> How many factory towns are there where the factory closes or downsizes and the whole town goes into economic decline? You need to pay a lot to offset that kind of risk.

I don't think I'm describing factory town style jobs of yesteryear. There are many solid jobs in tool and die, machining, etc that are mainly run by small to mid-sized shops. Literally thousands of these around the country.

There are a lot of people making a great living in these places, it's just that there's a shortage of qualified labor. Similar to software companies - there's a shortage of labor and it isn't because they aren't paying enough. Additionally, a lot of people think this kind of work is below them because they went to a university to study a field that they can't make it in.

> The other proof is also that I bet they can get lots of qualified applicants that will “show up everyday and work”. Just offer $200k per year. Or $500k per year. Obviously the purchasers of that type of labor are not offering enough money.

Yeah probably but I'm not sure that's economic. Also, the starting pay won't be the best but you rise fairly quickly through the ranks where the money improves. But like I said before, there are a lot of people making a good life for themselves with a home, a family, vacations, and a solid American life in these places. This life exists for people. But you would think it isn't even available - but it is.

Kids complain that they are 50k in debt from school, can't find a job that pays well and will never be able to afford a home or have kids. But that's not true. There's a career out there in modern manufacturing if they are willing to humble themselves.


> Additionally, a lot of people think this kind of work is below them because they went to a university to study a field that they can't make it in.

People think it is "below them" because they saw the people who went into white collar professions in their parents' generation come out ahead. Pay enough (and advertise the pay) and people's perception will change.

>But you would think it isn't even available - but it is.

Where are the job postings showing the pay and benefits? Why do the stats indicate the wages not increasing much?

>There's a career out there in modern manufacturing if they are willing to humble themselves.

The situation might have changed recently, but those jobs have definitely not paid sufficiently for the past few decades to make it a worthwhile investment. This is shown by definition, since they are complaining about lack of candidates for the job positions. If they paid appropriately and competitively, by definition people would have opted to work those jobs.


I’m not sure and maybe the type of work I’m describing isn’t traditional manufacturing. Machining and welding for instance are skilled trades but a big part of modern manufacturing. Tool and dye press setup is another and one of many entry paths.

We hear the same things in other non-manufacturing trades though like plumbing and carpentry and HVAC, etc. companies struggle to find reliable people when the money is good and prospects are stable.

One contractor I had was a Ukrainian man with a math degree but went into tile work when he moved here because he found he could make more money doing it. Smart man in our conversations and humble but is massively in-demand in the general area because he’s so good at it and he’s paid like it.


My entry level software job was $35k in 2015 in London! Outside the US, jobs across the board paid a lot more before 2008.


> '91 would be better though - better salaries in a lot of jobs

Not in tech though. Engineering jobs paid middle-class level well, but nothing out of the ordinary for white-collar professionals. Starting salaries were in the 30Ks for top offers in rich companies but many people started in the 20Ks. You had to be Sr.Dir/VP level to start getting close to 100K.

The concept of engineers with a few years of experience making more salary than top-level surgeons was inconceivable. So purely on a financial sense, it's much better to be a new grad in software today than in '91.

Still, I'd rather be paid 35K doing ground-breaking UNIX kernel or networking work than be paid 500K building yet another adware/spyware social app.


I was 20-years old in 1991. It was good.


yeah - I enjoyed it...


Nevermind came out in 91, and it did feel like the beginning of something...


This was the first thing that came to mind. Rock & Roll may have died in this decade but the innovation of the 90's made it worth it. I fear for 2031 once the tik tok-ification of music has run its course.


I was 23 in 1991. It was OK, but just yesterday I was talking with a twentysomething guy who was playing for me a song he'd written using GarageBand on his phone. I told him, man, I wish I'd had YouTube and GarageBand when I was his age. It's really hard to say what I'd do. I'd probably not change anything. I've noticed that computer technology isn't really anything special to my kids. I'm not sure I would have taken up an interest in programming as a youth in 2021 as I did in the 80s and 90s.


The more I think about this, the more I realize that you pick almost any time in history and if you were wealthy and powerful, it was freaking awesome. Can you imagine what the life of a Roman Caesar was like? Or a Rockefeller or Windsor?

Similarly for life at the bottom. In almost any period in history, life at the bottom sucked hard.


There are a lot of things that younger people in particular take for granted today that were basically not available in 1990. I occasionally think that if I had to go back to 1990 and do my job as a product manager, I'd probably quit in frustration over just not having the information I needed to do my job.


But you'd only be competing against other similarly hampered project managers. Depending on how well you worked without the modern internet, you'd simply find your same place in the bell curve.


Well, sure. It would just be incredibly frustrating. As would lack of information generally.


I was in my 20's in the 90's. It's tough to say. On the one hand I feel like I was the last generation to take a mid-level software salary and pay off a degree and a "short commute" detached house before I was 40.

On the other hand, since I was in my 20's in the 90's I was a young child in the 70's and 80's when nerds were to be bullied, gay people were to be beaten, and God help you if you were Trans. That's still the case in much of the world, but looking at how my kids grew up, vastly improved since then.

So as a nerd, yes, the 90's were probably better for 20 year old me, but the 10's were definitely better for the 10 year old me.


> An incredible number of people pick ‘91.

Not so incredible I guess. I was 20 in '91 so can relate.

Computers and the internet were seriously exciting at the time, uncommercialized and pure hacker culture of exploration. We were building technology because it was exciting. The concept of building adware or spyware didn't exist. Today a startup going to "make the world a better place" is a sitcom joke, back then it was truly the feeling.


Yes, I feel the same way. I was only 15 back in 1991, but was involved with BBSes, Usenet, early ISPs, etc. The "early commercial Internet" years (1991 - 1996 or so) were so much fun.


I was 7 then, and just getting into computers - playing with BASIC on the CPC464) so being 20 then would have been awesome, although I’d be proper old now ;)


sigh So I'm 'proper old' now ? :-P

When can I be 'improper old' ?? :-D


I’d just like to go just far enough back to not be around for WW2 so I have to spend the least amount of time in the 21st century as possible. So I guess stick me in 1946.


I’d pick 20 in 1991 just to be there for the original rave scene!


That's almost an unfair comparison. I don't know how old you are but 1991 was an incredibly optimistic time in western history with the fall of communism in Europe. Maybe a closer comparison would be 2000 vs 2019, both years right before a big global event.


Overly simplifying my memories as a west coast US teenager in that era, the very late 1980s were a time of cautious optimism with news such as the solidarity movement in Poland and the fall of the Berlin Wall. However, 1989 in many ways felt like the peak. Soon after, such global optimism was soured by the Gulf War, Serbian civil war, etc. We weren't as aware or focused on other positive changes that may have been happening elsewhere.

Edit to add: in many ways, the apparent close of the Cold War just removed that one bilateral threat from center attention. In its place, we gained a new awareness of much more fragmented conflict scattered all over the world...


Destruction of the USSR in 1991 gave a boost to the Western economies by eliminating a strong competitor and opening a new huge market.

While you enjoyed your life in 1991, people around me literally died of hunger, because Gorbachev and Yeltsin and their advisors from USA killed almost all the industry on the former USSR territory overnight. People lost jobs, people lost savings, people lost meaning of life overnight.

It's a biggest case of genocide since 1940s, that is silenced and undocumented.


The USSR destroyed itself. It was bankrupt by 1989:

https://www.nytimes.com/1989/01/22/world/soviets-foresee-bud...


1991. Less Orwellian. Back then, 1984 was a warning, not an instruction manual.


In 1991, distributing encryption software was a violation of US munitions controls.[1] At the time, it was not at all clear whether encryption software would remain legal for individuals to own and use. The US government was considering mandating backdoors in all consumer encryption, culminating in the development of the Clipper chip.[2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clipper_chip


Today, 1984 feels like an Utopia.


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