I Miss Microsoft Encarta

Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by kragen on Monday August 19, 2019 @05:06PM (#20741828)

I think this may be a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that people socialize more in the subway than they used to, now that they can send WhatsApp audio messages to their friends instead of reading a novel. But the grocery store half a block away still sells food in much the same way they did in 1994. Bigots still yell at me on the street to go back to my own country. Most of the workforce is still employed rather than gigging, financially independent, consulting, or riding the purple wage. International money transfers still take a significant percentage, unless you use Bitcoin, which most people still don't accept. Elections are still being won by polarizing populists who promise paradise and then pick your pockets; here in Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner even kept the records of her illegal wiretaps in paper form in the secret vault under her house, facilitating access to them against her will by the police. (And that didn't stop her from getting re-elected last week; her opponent also has a history of illegal wiretaps.)

You'd think that universal access to all human knowledge would have remade society, but actually most of the humans don't really seem to care about knowledge. We got the Arab Spring, which turned into Daesh, the Syrian Civil War, and a new military dictatorship in Egypt. (And we got anti-vaxxers, global warming denialists, and "jet fuel can't melt steel beams.") Wikileaks didn't really move the needle on Obama's re-election. If cheap, ubiquitous, networked computing is rewiring the power structures of society, that's more because of Russian trolls and Twitter bots than anything else.

Probably the changes you're talking about will come. But I'm not convinced that it's a revolution that cute girls on the bus give me their Instagram instead of their phone number.

(See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20741592 for my thoughts on other, more positive possibilities of modern informatics.)

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by tern on Monday August 19, 2019 @11:04PM (#20743501)

For the ~95th–99th percentile wealth class, the world has changed considerably. For instance, I can travel anywhere in the world and find a place to stay within an hour, and do so frequently. As a business owner, I can find an international market for my product in a matter of months. I can get anywhere I need to without owning a car. I can maintain a high salary while living in a remote location, of traveling.

For the majority of people, however, things have changed little.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by saagarjha on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @02:42AM (#20744369)

> I can travel anywhere in the world and find a place to stay within an hour, and do so frequently

Could you not do this before? Just book a plane ticket at the airline desk and ask for an empty room once you arrive at a hotel?

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by kragen on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @08:18AM (#20746031)

Yeah, I thought about saying that, but then I realized maybe the dude is talking about rural Tajikistan or something where there were and are no hotels, and I didn't want to be argumentative. (I imagine in rural Tajikistan random people would be delighted to offer you their hospitality, though.) I did travel around Costa Rica in 2003, and I never needed more than an hour to find a place to stay on arriving in a new town, even though internet access was scarce. So I'm not sure what the guy is talking about there.

The other things he said are mostly true. Here in Buenos Aires I've never owned a car, but that has more to do with being a huge megalopolis than anything else.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by DrAwdeOccarim on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @06:32AM (#20745346)

...yea. Weird. But now once you get their you can video conference call with a loved one for cheap, which in a sense takes some of the magic out of traveling as you're never really that much farther away than if you had gone to the grocery store.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by saiya-jin on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @07:23AM (#20745635)

You can always leave the phone at home, or simply turn it off till some emergency comes and then immediately turn it off again.

It might sound pretty awkward these days of pathetic instagram 'celebrities', but actually makes things like backpacking in the middle of nowhere much, much better experience. The magic is still out there

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by vonseel on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @03:02AM (#20744457)

I don’t know, I’d say for the majority of people who aren’t so narrowly focused on conspiracy theories and political power struggles, life looks way different than it did 30 years ago.

Even in poor countries Facebook and cheap instant communication like WhatsApp have rewired the way people socialize and stay in touch.

This is mostly a response to the commenter before you, except your last sentence.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by kragen on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @08:22AM (#20746072)

Well, I did mention people socializing via WhatsApp and Instagram. I think we just differ on what counts as “narrow” versus wide focus.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by simonh on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @10:37AM (#20747466)

Life for ordinary Britons has changed enormously in my lifetime. In my youth it was unusual for someone to holiday abroad, now it's routine.

A budget flight to the continent and a week in an AirBnB in Europe can cost as little as a few hundred quid. Something that was only really available to the rich, or at least the very well off, is now available to almost anyone.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by kragen on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @11:12AM (#20747852)

Ordinary Britons may not be in the 95th to 99th percentile wealth class, but they're in the 90th to 99th percentile. But I don't think that what you're talking about is a question of technology, much less of the internet — it's a matter of deregulation and political alignment, something that is coming to an end with Brexit. Aviation technology advanced in leaps and bounds from the 1890s to the 1960s and has only improved incrementally since 1970. (And of course we no longer have Concorde at any price.)

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by simonh on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @12:46PM (#20749045)

If we're talking outside the western world, things have changed far more dramatically. Across the developing world, hundreds of millions of people have risen out of abject poverty. My wife grew up in China, in a house her father built from a pile of bricks provided by his employer. She helped make their floor tiles, and this was in an industrial city. China's a different world now, and while they are the poster child, this trend isn't isolated to them. The chart linked below is astounding.

https://rwer.wordpress.com/2018/04/22/global-income-distribu...

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by kragen on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @01:58PM (#20749891)

Is this because of the internet?

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by riffraff on Monday August 19, 2019 @06:56PM (#20742521)

> International money transfers still take a significant percentage

Some do, but I can get dollars from the US into most European currencies for less than .5%.

We've come a long way from the '90s.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by kragen on Monday August 19, 2019 @07:11PM (#20742583)

Oh, that's a good point — also it's a lot easier to convert Italian currency to French, German, or Dutch currency now, since they're all the same currency. I think that may be more a question of what the current political alignment is rather than the internet rewiring world society, though.

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by ribalda on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @03:59AM (#20744722)

May I ask what platform do you use?

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by riffraff on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @08:33AM (#20746165)

I use transferwise' borderless account, I believe their fee varies, but I am sure I used TW to transfer less than $10K to EUR for a fee of 0.38%. It now says[0] it's $4.48 to convert 1000$. Changing $1000 to HUF has $4.98 in fees. Both were lower a couple months ago.

Revolut will also allow you to move 5K GBP per month without any fees[1].

[0] https://transferwise.com/gb/borderless/pricing#conversion_fe... [1] https://www.revolut.com/legal/fees/#exchange

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Re:I Miss Microsoft Encarta by Liquid_Fire on Tuesday August 20, 2019 @04:39AM (#20744879)

(Not OP) TransferWise tends to have a pretty good rate (usually sub 1%), though you would have to transfer a considerable amount of money in one go to get it down to 0.5%.

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