Yes, when you have low regard for human life and the environment you can move quite quickly.

> The insane amount of progress in a short period does seem to have slowed.

The phone I carry has more computing capability than all of the computers used in the Apollo program combined.

I’m able to reliably establish video calls with people on the other side of the planet while walking my dog.

My photos are grouped by person using facial recognition.

Shooting 120 FPS 4K video is built into my 200 gram phone (20 years ago you rented a camcorder from blockbuster the size of a briefcase to record effectively 320x240 onto a VHS tape).

The text contents of the library of congress can fit onto a micro sd card the size of a fingernail that costs less than $100.

The pace of technology innovation is astounding. It’s moved so quickly that we’re disappointed when the exponential growth of transistors slowed down.

We're entering the age of fully dynamic production lines. 3d printing's true strength here is not printing the object, but the molds.

Medical science, genetics specifically. We've come a long way, but this field is still like computing was in the 1940s.

We barely understand genetic expression as a whole process, eg how the entire genome is effected by modifications, and changes.

Yet when we do, the changes will be astounding. The end of most disease, the ability to use organisms to do our bidding, nanotech isn't going to be metal, but instead, bio.

We're about to set boots on Mars, in a decade we'll likely have permanent residency there. Our first new planet.

With that comes the potential to move industry to space, mining asteroids, power generation, and more.

There are endless, massive changes coming, we're merely in a period where they are all coming together.

The next 50 years will make the last 50 look glacial...

Batteries, man. I am constantly astounded at how much power you can get out of a battery today. The fastest production car (0-60) ever made runs on one.

To drive that point home, the metal in a new car did not exist a decade ago. To someone not intimately involved with materials, that was mind-blowing

Let me counter a bit of the heyday argumner.

During this so-called “heyday” destroyed many inner cities, their street cars and created incredible pollution.

The EPA was founded in 1971 and environmental regulations came into place then.

This is incredible. To this day, no country has better air than the US. And that includss Europe. Maybe the US did do something incredible in the last few decades—it just happens to be a repair of nature.

In the meantime because of oh-so-useful infrastructure built during the time of Mad Men, Robert Moses and suburbs US is still unable to implement mass transit as they once had and maybe now we will have global warming due to the infrastructure created when the US was “building fast and breaking things.”

I don’t disagree with you—but I wouldn’t embrace the heyday as the pinnacle of achievement either.

Not to detract from your wider point, but this just isn't true. Here's at least one link that counters with data: https://www.iqair.com/world-most-polluted-countries -- the USA is 84th "most polluted" in terms of Air Quality Index on that list of 106 countries.

Also just anecdotally, nobody that's been to both, say, Norway, and the USA can possibly think that the air quality in the two countries is even close!

Pakistan is #2 and the "second most polluted" -- so extending that, USA is 84th on that list and hence the "84th most polluted", with country #106 being Puerto Rico, which is the "106th most polluted", and therefore the least polluted as per that list. So if you must reframe it as "least polluted", then USA is the 23rd least polluted on that list.

First, there are ~200 countries, not 106. Second, Puerto Rico IS the USA. Third, "84th most polluted" out of a list of 106, is just a weird way to talk. It's like saying the valedictorian of a class of 100 is the 100th most underachieving student.

The US, mind you, is not helped by the forest fires of the last few years in this ranking. They really skew things in California and the US as a whole. These forest fires though can be attributed somehow to the building of the interstate system and therefore sort of does add to the wider point.

Europe is pretty bad because of the diesel engine cars. If you change that, air quality will improve dramatically.

Tragic sure, but what’s the point? Think of all the lives saved by not having to ferry people.

The point is that those people died due to labor practices of the time, not some tragic fluke accident.

> Building the Golden Gate Bridge just took a few years and was very affordable when adjusting for inflation.

11 workers were killed building it. They estimated 35. [0] Can you imagine putting into a project proposal knowingly estimating X number of dead construction workers?

[0] https://www.ciconstructors.com/the-evolution-of-construction...

I don't know enough about the rest, but a cheap bridge isn't necessarily a great thing.

And I don't know that progress has necessarily slowed. A computer in your pocket happened in my lifetime, and indeed, within my memory.

There are a lot more things considered now.

And also in all these we may be forgetting one thing. Maybe handcuffing the government is not a good thing? Grover Norquist style drown the government in a bathtub honestly has been a disaster for us, and it's time we wake up to that.