[DAD] It used to be that if a client wanted something in a week, it was considered a rush job, and he was lucky to get it. Now, with modems, faxes, and car phones, everybody wants everything instantly! Improved technology just increases expectations. These machines don't make life easier -- they make like more harassed. If we wanted more leisure, we'd invent machines that do things less efficiently.
[CALVIN] Six minutes to microwave this?? Who's got that kind of time?!
Good trend: Computers allow us to work 100% faster
Unexpected bad thing: Computers generate 300 percent more work
This is from a courthouse, they have a web application to register and edit formal requests from lawyers. Decent computers, ok network and printers.
From:
- listening to the lawyer,
- (potentially reloging due to session timeouts),
- accessing the right case through a long ID,
- re asking the lawyer about the case ID because half the time they confuse with another ID system,
- retrying to fetch the case,
- selecting a bunch of options (most are direct mapping from ID to value, ID is actually concatenation of these values)
- clicking a few more times,
- reinputing some the already redundant values and waiting for the system to generate the .odt.
- If that does not fail, you get an activex embed view of the document,
- which is 10-15% of the time incorrect in a few places, so manual edit here we go.
- You can now print it x2
One day, network failed so no more web app. Girls told me they have a stash of old printed templates to fill manually. So I took the piece of paper, and while talking to the lawyer I could write things on the fly. It took 30 seconds, no wait, no uncertainty, no redundancy, no last minute error correction.
Middle age monks > 2000s technology (when implemented in absurdia)
I tried googling this - summer is butter on your chin site:https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/
found it instantly.
This is actually why I still use a French press for my coffee every morning. I don't need to be hyper efficient all the time. That 15-20 minutes of my morning is relaxing, leisurely.
Garfield: These microwaves take forever.
Relevant XKCD? https://xkcd.com/303/
We are exploring more leisurely pursuits, though instead pursuing hobbies and building relationships, we're consuming media. The average American adult spends over half their day doing so. A lot of it is probably passive background noise, but it's a lot nonetheless.
https://www.nielsen.com/us/en/insights/report/2020/the-niels...
the fact people rack up 100s of 1000s of karma points or followers on one social network or another.
We're all living in some weird F451/BraveNewWorld where we're all attached to screens, endlessly. But it's our only escape from an endlessly anxious world where we do and keep up with more and more and more b/c modern conveniences have made us able to do so - without asking if it was ever good for us to cram so much business into our daily lives to begin with
While I also would enjoy more leisure time, I agree with the parent that most of it would go to consuming media. What specific interesting things do you think would happen if the typical working week dropped to say 30 hours a week instead of ~40?
I can't speak for others, but I'd be less stressed, and I'd be more easily able to savor the moments when work isn't coming. I'd have more motivation to program rather than play video games, just as I used to do before I got my job. To say "we have more time off" when the comparison is the generation that came before me, never mind the standard from 150 years ago - to me means pretty much nothing. It's very similar to how people sometimes say "what are you complaining about? Compared to the standard of living in medieval times, you're living like a queen!". Who's that really going to convince?
The second point is that there's a tension. Many of the same people who subscribe to some variant of utilitarianism still want to moralize about how people use their time, by dividing things into higher or lower pleasures, without being able to justify it. For example, they say a high pleasure is programming or (maybe) chess. A lower pleasure is, as J.S. Mill described it, something for pigs revelling in their own filth (today, people will say this amounts to video games or 'media consumption').
When people say "things are better than they've ever been", I'm inclined to agree, on most fronts. When people use that as an argument to tell me to shut up and deal with my lot in life, it's profoundly sad.
moreover with the coming automation of many jobs, working on improving our lives is pretty much the only thing that's going to be left to do. (and any kind of exploration of the universe)
it's one thing to not just complain and sulk about how bad our life is right now, as if earlier generations had it any better. but it is quite another to actually work on making life better.
as long as there is a single living being that is not well for whatever reason, we have an opportunity to make the life of that being better.
While you could certainly make the case that the hours were fewer(because it was still agrarian) the state of labor relations suggests a huge demand for cheap workers, not efficient workers. Productivity needs inputs: with no canals or railroads, you couldn't get resources to factories in quantity, so you couldn't get the gains of automation. So the idle hours reflect a general impoverishment of possibility: nothing better to do with the idle bodies. Making them cheap, rather than good, reflects the drive to accumulate within the zero-sum dynamic of merchantalism. Or rather, you wanted to define good as "loyal to me and skilled at attending to my needs", which is different from "good at the job". So there was a lot of emphasis on preserving the body but minimizing resistance.
The labor exploitation in early industrialization reflects the combination of productivity dynamic and merchantalistic norms: now, in a competitive marketplace where you have a lot of opportunities to make products and quickly build wealth, there is a reason to overwork bodies and then dispose of them. That's never gone away, we've just engaged in some collective pushback from time to time, as Marx outlined.
But it could be that we're on the verge of another shift in the norms of labor relations. I suspect that's what is going on now. There are a lot of "pieces of the puzzle" that are ready to nibble away at existing norms.
I won't speak for people in aggregate, nor cohorts. But for myself personally, if my work week dropped to 30 hours with the same compensation package, I'd pick up the pace learning other maker skills so I can build solutions to scratch my own itches, learning a couple other natural languages and cultures faster than I'm learning them currently, and in general do what I currently enjoy when I take time off from my gigs.
The great part of this era is the endless array of autodidactic opportunities easier to access than ever before. It was already endless in previous eras, but the pace was slower, and the scope of what individuals can accomplish themselves was more limited. If I had the money and time for example, I could build my own personal MDx lab that was just impossible in the 1970's; it wouldn't be CLIA certified, but I could test to my heart's content. People talking about the "curse of immortality" speak an alien tongue to me.
[1] http://groups.csail.mit.edu/mac/users/rauch/worktime/hours_w...
That might be the case today, but at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, it was less so. What drove people who might have been subsistence farmers in the past to work in factories were deliberate policies to privatize the land common people needed to work in order to survive, along with laws that made previously landed people landless and criminalizing their abilities to sustain themselves. Early factories were known to maim and kill, the hours were long, cities were full of deadly disease and the quality of life upgrade you might see today didn't exist as wages were so low. People needed to be incentivized to work in factories, and it wasn't fair compensation that was the incentive. The incentive was being driven from the lands that had sustained workers and their ways of life for generations, and systems of laws that forced them into workhouses.
I wish I remembered the quote from around that time, but from memory it went something like, "It might take a commoner a weekend to make himself shoes that will last him years for free, but for that same person working a factory, it would take a month's wages just to buy a pair of shoes that fall apart in the rain."
Enclosure laws certainly were a massive factor into workers moving to factories. However, I reject the Marxist historian's implication that some aristocrats we're inspired by capitalist ideals to become greedy, which allowed them to take lands from the poor farmers. Rather, they were always this greedy, and market conditions simply let them actualize that greed.
The Black Plague decimated the population of Europe, which allowed the peasants to gain more leverage and gave them common land. However, by the early 1600s (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demography_of_England#Histor...), the population had grown back to its height, and the aristocrats had the leverage to claw back these privileges. Indeed, that was when the first formal enclosure acts were introduced (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enclosure).
Moreover, my point about preindustrial/early industrial workers not placing much importance in free time still stands. They could have worked for the enclosure and had more free time but still chose factory work.
Covid lockdowns taught me the general public is superb at wasting time and being inefficient. Their mind turned to Netflixing all day, making Tiktok dance numbers, etc.
I am bullish on machines & software improving because people are incentivized through salaries to improve them. I am bearish / pessimistic on the average humans productive use of time outside of amusement or relaxation. Humanity has taught me that Pareto's principle applies to humans.
Humans consume energy (animals, resources) and create detriment (greenhouse gases, etc) - and must offset all of those to positively benefit the Earth or else that (and each) particular human is a net negative to the Earth. If a human is a net negative, at a higher level why should that person exist?
Humans must each therefore cause a positive net of energy to the Earth through creating useful, productive, additions to the universe to push it forward. Otherwise, as in the matrix, said human is a parasite.
> Television data are derived from Nielsen’s National TV Panel that is based on a sample of over 40,000 homes that are selected based on area probability sampling.
The report does not go into any details on how these 40,000 homes were selected, or any demographic breakdowns beyond saying that the data is "inclusive of multicultural audiences." It's difficult to say how representative these 40,000 homes are of the "average" American.
It's also not entirely clear how they derive their measurements. There's little that discusses how they handle potential over or under-reporting, and there's nothing that says how they differentiate between different people in the same household.
While this report certainly isn't useless, there's enough grey area here that I would be hesitant to draw any conclusions from the data presented. We'd need a much more comprehensive breakdown of their methodology before we can be confident that their data is accurate and representative.
The second link does give some more detail on methodologies used by Nielsen. However, the details are mostly higher-level, and doesn't specify what methods were used on the previously mentioned report. In addition, when 1/3 of the "Measuring Ratings" section is devoted to "Criticism of ratings systems", that doesn't inspire a lot of confidence.
As for the dead link, I found it on Internet Archive; it redirects to this, which does work.
https://global.nielsen.com/global/en/solutions/audience-meas...
One drag on this is property prices. A huge amount of people's incomes go into property, but that's largely something we do to ourselves and each other. There's a very inflexible housing market here in the UK, so we're all in competition for the best houses, and bid up their value against each other.
It is, if we measure it against the average (or even worst) of the past (and go quite far back), and also include things like slavery, etc. as if they are non-separable parts of the past, and not something we could have skipped even in the past (and many places did).
>My kids are 17/18 now, while I was the same age back in the early 80s. There's no comparison. The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
Is it? I'd take the 60's or 80's any day - less rat racy, easier employment, more value for your money, more optimism, less wage inequality, better off middle class, less surveillance, less bureucracy, more relaxed life, and so on. Also a better top-10 and nicer looking cars. And I (and perhaps others) would also gladly take fewer modern technology items over a simpler, more sustainable lifestyle.
I don't consider things like some improved smart fridge, or smart bulbs, or a car GPS and mobile phone much of a quality of life improvement. If anything, some of those are net negatives.
And things that have been worse, e.g. seggregation, they were not "1960s didn't have advance technology to avoid that", they're just cultural choices. We often mix these two ups, like we couldn't have, say, 1980 living, technology, etc. AND gay rights.
Unemployment ranged from 5.40% to 10.4% in the 80s and is 4.2% now. Only the last few yeas of the 60s had lower unemployment than 2021. In 1960 people spend 24% of their income on food, vs 8.6% today. And for most Americans the food was FAR worse in 1960s, cold chain and logistics improvements mean that average Americans have access regularly to foods that were luxuries in 1980.
> nicer looking cars
Those cars were death traps. There were twice as many fatalities per 100k Americans in 1960 vs today with fewer people driving fewer miles per capita.
> more sustainable lifestyle
The US of the 60s and 70s was so choked by smog and industrial pollution that Nixon created the EPA. Cars now get 2x the mpg vs 1960. Forrest coverage was lower, and numerous species that have now recovered were going extinct, like the bald eagle.
> better off middle class
The middle class wasn't better off, it was larger. The poverty rate in 2017 was half of what it was in 1960. And since 1960 many families have moved from the middle income quintile to one of the top quintiles. The middle class in the US didn't disappear into poverty, most of it just became more wealthy.
The 1960s sucked, there was political upheaval, the Cold War, the Cuban Missile crisis, global spanning totalitarianism, frequent political assassinations, Jim Crow, and on and on.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Its-Better-Than-Looks-Optimism/dp/161...
That's because of an increasing number of magic tricks the neoliberal governments (which includes both Rep and Dem, and any major party in Europe on the last 30+ years) have agreed on to make it appear so. Makes them appear as having done their job (no pun intended).
Things like not counting people giving up on job hunting, and especially avoiding any qualitative comparison, and counting any kind of shitty precarious non-job as a job. Hell, if it isn't the case already, I'm pretty sure "Uber Driver" and "Amazon Mechanical Turk signee" will also sure count towards reduced unemployment.
>The US of the 60s and 70s was so choked by smog and industrial pollution
Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production, less plastic waste, and more sustainable lifestyle.
You're taking a by-product of 1970s car exhausts as if it's a permanent given.
We could go back to 1960 levels CO2 production, less consumption (e.g. no fast fashion, less fast food) and so on. And we could do it without giving up modern exhausts, hybrids, and electric cars.
>Forrest coverage was lower, and numerous species that have now recovered were going extinct, like the bald eagle.
2022 really doesn't want to start an argument about extinguished species with the 1960s.
>The 1960s sucked
Not the experience of most who lived through them and herald them as a great age, or even many who didn't live them, and still consider them so.
>there was political upheaval
Far better, more progressive, and forward looking political upheaval than in the last 10 years...
>the Cold War, the Cuban Missile crisis, global spanning totalitarianism, frequent political assassinations
So, business as usual. Though I'm not sure what bearing exactly the have in this conversation. We can have the positive things I've mentioned about the 60s (which were about levels of employment, consumption, sustainability, etc.) without the "cuban missile crisis" and "frequent political assassination" and so on. Those are historical incidents. The things I pointed at are things we can adopt or not.
>Jim Crow, and on and on.
The 60s was the era that got rid of the last of Jim Crow laws.
This is frankly, an absurdly ridiculous comparison. Pittsburgh and Lorain, Ohio, where I had relatives working in the steel mills were completely choked out by smog/industrial pollution. The sky routinely glowed orange as in a volcanic eruption or the Great Day of Orange during the wild fires in the Bay Area! Everything and everyone was covered in soot. Buildings turned black. My old landlord's personal entertainment as a kid was watching dump trucks pour slag onto heaps - watching the molten embers cascade. People heated their houses with coal, which was dumped directly into their basements. Houses in Pittsburgh from that era have a lone, unenclosed toilet and often shower in their unfinished basements (Pittsburgh potty), so the workers could hose down without ruining their house. Rivers were treated as interstate highways at best - the Cuyahoga caught on fire for the Nth time in Cleveland (the EPA is created in the 1970s). Loads of kids routinely died from now treatable diseases! It was just a routine part of life. Cities were violent. Police just shot fleeing suspects in the back! 1973 saw multiple bombings daily. Police stations being bombed was so quotidian, it didn't even make the front page!
[1] http://www.nyc.gov/html/nypd/downloads/pdf/pr/2010_fdr_preli...
Not really relevant to the claim, is it? 1880 England cities were also filled with coal smoke, but still had less CO2 production...
Locally? Probably not. As a nation, sure. More importantly though, their quality of life was terrible.
The BLS has been measuring the unemployment rate the same way since 1940.
> Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production, less plastic waste, and more sustainable lifestyle.
You're taking a by-product of 1970s car exhausts as if it's a permanent given.
The was more of almost every type of type of non C02 industrial pollutant. There was acid rain, and we were punching a hole in the ozone with refrigerants. Pesticides in use then were far more toxic to people and wildlife. Asbestos was everywhere, and lead was in everything.
We could certainly consume fewer disposable things, but the tradeoff is that being poor today affords people a far higher material standard of living than in 1960 by literally any metric.
> Yes. And still the US had less CO2 production
This is almost entirely solvable over the next few decades.
> 2022 really doesn't want to start an argument about extinguished species with the 1960s.
You could and you'd find that numerous large charismatic species on the verge of extinction by the mid 70s have recovered in much of the world. The US has become so rich that we're re-wilding and re-introducing displaced species. The rest of the world could follow.
> Far better, more progressive, and forward looking political upheaval than in the last 10 years...
We started a drug war and the expansion of the carceral state in the late 60s[1]. MLK, JFK, RFK, and Malcom X were all assassinated so I wouldn't call that progressive upheaval. And the progressive upheaval caused by the likes of The Weather Underground or the SLA is hardly impressive.
> Those are historical incidents
Everyone living under the constant threat of nuclear holocaust was kind of a wer blanket.
> The 60s was the era that got rid of the last of Jim Crow laws.
By the end, and replaced it with a drug war.
In the 60s crime was higher, material wealth was less plentiful, more people lived in poverty, life expectancy was shorter, and most people in society had few options. Localized environmental pollution was worse. Cars were far less safe, and mortality by all causes was higher.
> Not the experience of most who lived through them and herald them as a great age
Nostalgia does that to people, but basically all objective measures of life quality were worse.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Rise-Warrior-Cop-Militarization-Ameri...
Men in their 30s and 40s commonly having debilitating heart attacks with few options? No thanks.
Also the 1960s was full of smoky offices and literal poison leaded gas fumes in everyone's blood stream. Gross
I really don't think this is the case. In the US, the cost of many fundamental necessities like healthcare and housing are becoming further out of reach for more and more people. In addition, the suicide rate has been increasing among youth, which shouldn't be happening in a world where modern life is incomparably better. If a "modest salary" is equivalent to the minimum wage in the US, then you're automatically spending above the generally accepted 30% rule for housing spending if you choose to live in a city, which is where the jobs are.
I think certain aspects of life have improved: entertainment has become cheaper, consumer technology is becoming more accessible (although the pandemic has really strained families that don't have access to a good internet connection, which is not a given in this country.)
I really don't think life has demonstrably improved in the US from the 80's to today, it was much easier to have a comfortable life on a lower salary back then than it is today.
For example, in the 1990s only the richest people would have a flatscreen TV, or a phone capable of browsing the web, or an internet connection faster than dial-up. Today, even a person working a minimum wage job can have all of those.
But if healthcare, college education and rent have got more expensive over the same period, is that a net improvement in quality of life?
Do you really seriously consider any of those a measure for quality of life? When I think of quality of life I want the basics: secure housing, healthy food, free time. Perhaps meaningful employment. And pretty much everything else comes down to the people around me.
In 1990, a worker who wanted a TV had to save up two weeks' pay. Today, someone doing the same job could get a better TV for a day's pay. That gives them nine days of free time to spend with their family - or the chance to buy nine more TVs, if they prefer.
Where in 1990 I would have had to go to a library to look something up in an encyclopedia, today I can access a much more detailed encyclopedia, completely free, from a device in my pocket.
In 1990, if you wanted to talk to a loved one on the other side of the world, it was a very expensive phone call. Today it's a video call, in high definition, and it doesn't cost a cent.
In 1990 if you wanted to learn from professors at top universities, you had to get accepted, move house and pay a bunch of money. Today I can get more lectures than I could ever watch, and more than enough education to land a six-figure programming job, all for free.
In 1990, web browsers don't exist.
Obviously no single number can fully represent the incredible richness of human existence. But I think ignoring 30 years of technological process because you can't eat it is a bit short sighted.
I think this is a perfect microcosm of the discussion. The whole point is that you don't get nine days of free time to spend with your family just because TVs are cheaper, and if you did we wouldn't be having this conversation. And what is the use of 9 TVs?
Well, they double as monitors, so you can combine them with your work laptop for that 10-display setup your boss likes...
Most people aren't having children[0], largely because they can't afford them. This is probably selection bias. My kid has a better life than I did, but that's mainly because I have avoided the addictions my parents had.
[0]https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/12/us-population...
Number of children inversely correlates to income [1], with the poorest families having the most children and the richest families having the fewest. You're right that birth rates are falling, but I don't think you're right about largely why.
1: https://www.statista.com/statistics/241530/birth-rate-by-fam...
You seem to be implying that rising incomes are causing people to choose to have fewer children. However, it could just as easily be that having children is a drag on people's incomes.
Edit: or even just access to entertainment that isn't "having sex." I remember a conversation with a (very) old woman who'd had many, many children; she said that... well, there wasn't much else to do back then...
Nowadays, you can have sex with zero risk of pregnancy.
The context of the conversation, however, was that people had children as a non intentional byproduct of having sex, which presumably people had more of due to lack of other entertainment options.
To which I thought it was noteworthy to point out that children are effectively no longer a byproduct of just having sex, especially for the demographics in which birthrates are declining. Hence, regardless of the amount of sex people are having, I would expect the birthrate to still decline.
Is it more economical to share a 2-bedroom apartment when you're starting out? Of course, and many new grads share apartments both for money and, just as importantly, social benefits in a place where you might not know anyone else.
It's a thing, look it up.
It seems there's less freedom, and less exploration by kids today. Everything is recorded and documented. It's too expensive or too dangerous for kids to go do stuff. If you make a mistake today, it will follow you forever - little chance to apologize and fix whatever broke (seems more people want to use full force of law to press charges or sue over minor issues even when the person wants to make it right).
I wasn't in the early 80s and didn't have complete free run, but the independence and responsibilities that came with it seem far better than the digital nightmare kids are living in these days. Just my opinion.
I see a lot of kids out on balance bikes. My kid was playing with his stomp rocket in the local elementary school playground, and a little girl (about 5) - unattended, on a bike, I assume her mom was a couple hundred yards behind - came up to him and said "I've got a stomp rocket at home too, but my house is being renovated so we're living in a hotel." Playgrounds today are made to be much more about sensory experiences - there's a lot more water play, and places for free play like castle theaters, and plain logs or rocks or other obstacles to climb on. It's more typical for parents to go sit on a bench 50 feet away rather than hovering right over the kid.
Much of this is a very deliberate rejection of post-9/11 parenting standards, and may be generational as well. I think it started to change around 2015-2017; I remember there were articles on HN about a free-range parenting movement in Salt Lake City, or new playgrounds specifically designed to be dangerous in NYC. Also the people having kids now are early/mid-Millenials, while the parents of Zoomers are generally Gen-Xers, who were themselves termed the latchkey/TV-dinner generation. There may also be some survivorship bias where all the kids whose parents never let them do anything themselves failed to launch and have kids of their own, while those who did have kids often had fond memories of independent free play.
I don't see how this can be true. By the time I started high school a decade ago I realized that 90% of human knowledge was freely available to me on the internet. And I explored every crevice of it. The world is at our fingertips in a way it never was before.
It also can't teach how to be independent, interact with friends, or what to do if you get lost (without having your cell phone solve it for you).
My friends and I would ride our bikes around the neighborhood and on trails, go fishing, build lean-tos or whatever in the woods, shoot model rockets, play sports, etc. Sure, some TV and video games too. We even had dial-up later on. But we were out in the world, being active, and thinking for ourselves. Those experiences are much more formative than consuming content created by someone else.
I can't deny that the experiences youth have today are different than those that were had pre-internet, but I will absolutely push back against the notion that they are worse. Building stuff with your hands is undoubtedly a cherished childhood experience for many, but just because kids are interacting over the internet doesn't mean they're not thinking for themselves. In fact, I would say they're thinking for themselves even more since the options are so much vaster. Is building an elaborate world in minecraft or roblox really that different from building lean-tos or model rockets?
Kids used to be way less of a time investment. There were more around, and they very easily latched on to playing with other neighborhood kids all day which acted like free daycare. You could send them out and tell them to be back before dark, feed them food, have family dinners, fix their boo boos and not much else. Now in today's limited age, kids can only play with their literal line of sight neighbors unsupervised and are mostly stuck inside, dependent on a parent to become a playmate because they eventually get bored of the video games. Or they get obsessed to an unhealthy degree.
The independence you talk about is another kind, but still a dependent kind on the parents. I think a cell phone coordinated childhood with the permissiveness of the 70s is the ideal + all the info of the internet, but it's not something you can do in english countries.
There is also a curse-of-knowledge aspect to today's age. The average teen does not seem to deal well with instagram and cell phones, especially girls. It's unique. I think society will eventually create an immune system to universal cellphones and social media, much like we did with TV, but until then we are dealing with it downside more than we should.
Is building software that much different from construction? I think so.
"If I wanted to find something all I needed was to look for it."
True, but most of the content is just someone else's. If you wanted to find something out when I was a kid, you formed a hypothesis and tested it - not just taking the word of someone on the internet. The internet can be useful for information, but not as much for knowledge and possibly even less for wisdom.
"Instant messaging made it easier to interact with friends, not harder."
Maybe sort of. I don't think it's quite the same as in-person. I think we are seeing this on a mass scale with pandemic restrictions too - that virtual presence isn't the same as physical presence. How does one learn to handle emotions in person rather than just shut if the computer when an argument arises?
Really I think this comes down to what you think makes experiences valuable. Obviously virtual and physical construction aren't the same, but do they provide the same benefits? It seems to me that building things is a valuable experience because it teaches kids about hard work, grit, teamwork, perhaps curiosity, and makes all those things fun. Building things virtually seems to me to provide all those same things. Maybe you think getting your hands dirty had some value, in which case yea kids are missing out, but I generally think they're able to get many of the same things with the added benefit of increased use of imagination since they can literally build anything.
Now obviously the internet is what you make of it. Like anything the the internet can be a crutch or a tool. Kids can sit in front of youtube for 10 hours a day and learn nothing from it, but I'm not sure that wasn't also the case in the past. Keeping children on track probably requires more parental oversight than in the past, but I'm not exactly sure that's a bad thing either. Exploring the internet together with your child can easily be a way to bond with them while also creating a lifelong love of building and curiosity.
[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/fert...
> The quality of life available on even a modest salary nowadays is far, far better.
Material comforts and the bare necessities are ONE THING, but if you buy into the idea of "Maslow's hierarchy of needs", we have a huge and growing problem with those higher-level needs (and perhaps even the most base one, psychological) in recent times.
Where do you live? I don't think my kids' day-to-day lives are any better than mine was at their age in Ireland in the 80s.
edit: ah sorry, you're in the UK, I hadn't noticed. What about your kids' lives is better than your life was?
I was very lucky to have access to a computer running CP/M and MBasic on my dad's computer back home, but even as a computer science student in the late 80s I had no computer. All my programming was done on minicomputer terminals or lab PCs you had to book in advance, so I only had access for a few hours a week.
For women, oppressive gender bias and overt harassment and abuse was endemic in many spheres of life, I saw people get away with it. Being homosexual was still a career ender for many people. Open and accessible communications technology, and rising living standards has I think been crucial to connecting people and fighting these prejudices. I still remember the gleeful way US politicians and religious figures spoke about the impact AIDS was having, 'punishing' gay people. They thought it was funny. It fundamentally changed my attitudes to a lot of things, socially and politically. I'm still a fiscal conservative and believer in liberal capitalist economic freedoms; but I have no trust whatever of conservative social instincts anymore, that died 35 years ago.
If you took an average modern teenager and had them live in the 80s for a while they'd be horrified.
Ah yes indeed - there has been some genuine progress here
> If you took an average modern teenager and had them live in the 80s for a while they'd be horrified
... but this would really be just an aversion to change, right? Does the average modern teenager have any more fun? Have more joy and less sorrow in their lives? I'm not convinced (unless they're gay)
That must have been pretty rough - I was a CS student from 84 to 88 (Scotland so 4 years first degrees) and we had pretty much unlimited access to kit (HLH Unix minis, BBC micros, Atari STs) and we all got keys so we had 24 hour access.
If there were any issues with access to stuff, being based in the Grassmarket in Edinburgh, we'd just go to one of the many excellent pubs in the vicinity.
I agree there are some things about today's society that are terrible, but a lot of those problems, we bring down on ourselves.
Nowadays, every worker is subsidizing corporations; subsidizing their own slavery within the corporate system - Sometimes unwittingly, sometimes against their will because in many countries, retirement contributions are compulsory and deducted from incomes; this money is 'invested' into corporate stocks and straight into the pockets of big executives who get huge bonuses thanks to the rising stock prices; driven by all the big pension funds propping up stock prices using workers' money which was taken out of their salaries without their explicit consent.
Your parents probably lives through a transition from extreme scarcity to abundance. As scarce as things were for them in the 80s, they were probably at lot more scarce in the 50s and 40s. Maybe your parents didn’t experience that directly but their parents did for sure.
From our grandparents generation and before, a much higher proportion of them were directly affected by things like war.
If you’re lacking hope because you’re afraid of something like war, I would consider that a luxury compared to actually being in a war.
If you had the skills to produce something useful, the market was less competitive so it was possible for essentially anyone to improve their standard of living through education and hard work. Also, employees had stronger bonds with employers and it wasn't uncommon for the business owner to sell or handover management of the business to their top employees (and the pool of employees was far smaller/less competitive). Nowadays, it's not possible for certain people to climb out of poverty because their competitors are big corporations who have access to easy money from banks and governments. Also within corporations, the level of competition is extreme, often counter-productive and the environment is toxic, suppressed and censored. Also, there is constant gaslighting in the media telling everyone how good things are when it doesn't match observable reality at all.
That said, there is certainly plenty of truth to the house building/land use issues. I don't think anywhere has fully handled the new technology of the automobile well as the handling of automobiles has been a major driver of the issues in housing. Unchecked automobile use allows much more land to be used, but conversely encourages dumb land use rules that encourage sprawl and add miserable amounts of noise, pollution, and render most public space (roads) uninhabitable by people. I think the next century will have society figuring out a better balance or some new solutions.
You obviously haven’t eaten British food from the seventies. It was dire.
I lived in a country near the equator with year-round good weather so we didn't have this problem. Many people had land and small vegetable gardens. Fruits tasted amazing. I remember bananas used to be my favorite fruit; that was before the Cavendish variety took over. Nowadays, bananas mostly just taste very sweet with a not much other flavor. Nothing like it used to be. I don't even like bananas anymore. Mangoes also tasted amazing. Now it's hard to find good ones (though still possible but hard). Same with most vegetables; Tomatoes often taste bland nowadays; they're optimized for color, not flavor and they're picked when green/unripe to avoid damage. In many countries in the EU, meat is terrible nowadays. A lot of meat products are heavily processed; sometimes a hamburger patty tastes more like a tough sausage and chicken tastes fatty and rubbery.
The cost to construct brand new housing is considerably under US$100k per person where I live (US smaller coastal city, considering a smallish walk-up building), if you exclude land costs. At current interest rates, that could be financed at around $200/month, around $1/hour of full-time work.
In reality, a unit that costs $200/month in construction financing might cost ten times that to actually rent. Most of that reflects the cost of acquiring the land.
In principle, there is no reason that land needs to be particularly expensive in a lot of the places where it is. My guess is that a lot of the current price reflects land's status as an investment vehicle, which is largely an intentional policy choice (albeit one that might be politically infeasible to substantially change).
Either land keeps its value, in which case income and capital gains tax are no longer needed as government income would be enourmous
Or land loses its investment appeal, and is instead just the competition between different people in how well they can use it
It seems crazy to me that there are acres of land in Manhatten than are used for street level parking
At the same time, it's hard to fault buyers for this. Commuting sucks (what price do you put on 2 hours out of your day?), and the difference between a "good job" and an "okay job" can be an order of magnitude in income these days.
It highly depends. I'm in my early 40s now, still not owning a property, me and my SO are finally one step away from getting into (quite considerable, for our standards) debt so that we can take that out of the way. 30-40 years ago property was a lot more easier to get hold of, even for the less financially fortunate. Forgot to mention that we do not have kids, partially because of the stress of not owning a property just yet.
Because the prices will only go up, judging by what happens further West (I live in Eastern Europe). Five, six years ago I used to believe that wouldn't have hold true going forward, reality contradicted me.
I do not want to "chase better" jobs into my 50s or, God-forbid, into my 60s, I'm content with what I have on that front. No, we do not have (more than emergency) savings, no, we do not have a strong family-support network, no, I don't believe we're the only ones in our age cohort that are in that situation.
Kids need stability, and renting does not provide that.
Well yes, prices rise to the maximum amount that people can afford because the alternative is not living at all. Quite simply there aren't enough houses in the place where the jobs are. The only way to change that is to build more houses or move jobs.
40 years ago the average 18 year old could look forward to owning a modest 3 bed semi with a nice garden with a couple of kids and an annual holiday, all from a single wage
Today they can look forward to hopefully being able to afford somewhere if they get 2 incomes, both in the top 80%ile range. Kids are unaffordable as both parents have to work to pay the mortgage, and there's no extra for a holiday, let alone childcare costs.
But you can veg out in front of netflix after your 2 hour commute instead of watching Neighbours at half five.
And that's why building highways does not reduce average commute time—people just move further from the downtown where they work. If you build a new highway that cuts commute time in half, on the population level, the sprawl increases until average population is twice as far and their commute remains the same.
Cars and the highway enabled that increase in happiness, even if commute times are unchanged.
This is why all the modern conviences that people adore, including myself, just makes our lives more cluttered and anxiety ridden.
Nothing is freeing up our time so that we can focus on self care, relaxation, valuable time with family. It just makes us more able to cram more stuff in. And the "to do list" is never ending. There's always yard work, house work, more constructive things your kids could be doing to get them ahead in life, maybe you could now afford some extra education to further your career, there's always just.. SOMETHING to fill in the new holes we now have.
It's not just businesses and profit motives.
and one day you look back at it all and often you find that 2 hour walk, was probably mentally and physically healthier for you. How many things in life are like this - where we've scarified our mental health, physical/nutritional health, our privacy, ownership rights, and other rights all in the name of a convenient technology that "simplifies" one problem for us while creating 10 more in it's wake? Then we're all convinced that this new, convenient thing is super valuable and can't be done without.
In general people seem to be fairly bad at getting things that are important but not urgent (hat tip to the Eisenhower Matrix) done unless they establish a habit for it. Holidays are valuable in that they at least reduce the need for coordination between multiple parties somewhat, at least for "valuable time with family", but they don't really help with the "self care and relaxation" bucket. Quite the contrary, for many.
I'm not against capitalism outright, so don't mistake this as a leftist snipe, but consumerism and the lifestyle of it has really separated us from each other. Not just in the stuff we buy but in the constant cultural and sub-cultural fracturing going on.
We're obsessed with identity (not just politically) as a society and consumerism drives it as much, if not more, than identity politics.
People want to belong. And identity is a way to do so.
But we've lost roots with religion, community and family. And the further we get away from it, the more stressful dealing with community and family become.
I could go on more about religion.. I'm atheist but have grown to see the evolutionsiry advntage of it and the socio/psychological problems it solved and how the trade off of its rejections and what we get out of that rejection... Isn't a good deal.
Until we confront all of this... Anxiety, depression, suicide, all of this will increase.
Call it hippy dippy. But being connected to nature and family and community has value that's hard to quantify and hard for a headline or a brand or a political slogan to sell you.
And we're losing it. Teenagers and 20 somethings don't see it. It's only when life is hard at 30-40+, does it begin to dawn on most.
And wages didn't follow the increase in productivity: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
As long as people want more stuff. Company profits have a dependent relationship on consumption. It wouldn't matter if the company produced twice as much if people didn't consume the increased output. You hint at that in your last statement, I just wanted to spell it out.
For example, demand for some goods is fairly predictable, e.g. certain commodity foodstuff. A profit driven company selling these kinds of goods is focused on increasing their market share, but no matter what, the demand is there.
Compare this to something else like SUV sales, where demand exists that probably shouldn’t.
Yes, consumer sentiment drives/enables these companies, but the nature of that demand and the behavior it drives is certainly not all equal.
To make the point more salient, if people were willing to live to the standards of the 1800s, a significant amount of the workforce slaving away could retire right now. People choose increased consumption over leisure time, not corporations, corporations only provide demanded goods.
I think the reality is more depressing. It’s not companies deciding this, it’s each other. “Now I can do 2x the work I did before.”
As a system there’s a feedback loop involved. You only need very few people to decide to undercut each other, but for each person who does, that’s more pressure for the next person to keep up, causing even more pressure on the next people, etc.
This is why the 40 hour work week had to come from the top. I doubt we’ll see real leisure time improvements until we see overtime pay starting at 32hr/week or something else top down like that.
Far from putting Hollywood professionals out of business, it’s enabled humans to take many parts of mass media for granted, while pros move on to creating ever more dazzling content.
If you could spec out a house to have only unscratchable concrete floors, rounded corners, all furniture must have adequate clearance, a Roomba would be way more effective.
I'd buy a house with a spartan bathroom if that meant I never had to houseclean.
The Revolving Toilet by Sanitronics https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DjHbj3qon0
But if your idea of leisurely activity is laying in a hammock and watch the clouds go by, it's still as expensive as ever. Time is as expensive as ever; for instance, look at your effective hourly rate.
Yeah, the "free to explore more leisurely pursuits" part is contrived in most cases, but there is a real argument for automating work that's "dirty, dangerous, or dull" -- freeing humans to do the parts of the work that's more interesting, meaningful, safer, cleaner, etc.
Easier said than done, of course, but imagine reaching a technological point where instead of having self-driving cars, we have self-sustaining food/clothing/shelter.
The reason I bring that up is that it distracts from solutions that we can actually implement.
In the US at least, our roads are a public service. You don't have to pay to be on a road (outside of a few exceptions). I think a good long term vision for scientists is to reduce the cost of our basic needs to the point that all our essential needs could be a public service. I don't see why that's a distraction.
Anyway, it can, by a complex process that makes an entire society poorer once people gets thrown out of the economy. That includes the absurdly rich too. It's just that if this is the only point where it bothers you, honestly I don't even care about your opinion.
Your ability to capture leisure time for yourself is largely related to how well you can judge the minimum amount of work needed to not get fired and then execute on that while saving the rest for yourself; or, alternatively, how much value you can create when you do work so that you can bank the rest in financial assets and live without any further transactions. Hint: the former amount is usually more generous than you think it is, particularly if the latter is very high and you let your employer capture that value.
Technologies that result in new transaction types result in large amounts of value being captured by their customers, as well as by the company delivering them. Think of YouTube: millions of people have been able to step into the market previously reserved for entertainers, broadcasters, news anchors, and other TV personalities, and in the process they've made billions for Google, millions for themselves, and cannibalized the whole industries of advertising, journalism, and entertainment. The Internet as a whole has created the top 5 most valuable companies on earth, worth a combined $10T+, as well as millions of other small businesses.
Technologies that increase the efficiency of existing transaction types typically only enrich the companies that buy them, at least until they penetrate the market entirely, at which point they only enrich the company that sells them and are just table stakes for the companies that buy them. Think of say the high-availability mainframe market of the early 80s (Stratus and Tandem). When banks started using these to process transactions, bank tellers didn't capture any of this value, because it's not like a bank teller can go open their own bank using these machines. Contrast this to say the Apple II and Visicalc, where people could open up their own business because the technology let them cut expensive secretaries and accountants out of the loop.
There's a deep connection between this idea and that of Disruptive vs. Sustaining innovations in The Innovator's Dilemma. Disruptive innovations are those that create new customers and new transactions, thus opening up new markets. Sustaining innovations are those that improve the efficiency of existing transactions and customer relationships. Sustaining innovations can widen your moat and increase the amount you can charge for your product, but they aren't going to form new businesses or unlock large market that you don't already have a foothold in.
This is also why certain VCs get extremely excited about innovations like PCs, the Internet, cryptocurrency, and wearable/ambient computing. Communication, finance, markets, and proximity are the key building blocks that enable transactions; anything that fundamentally changes these systems is likely to be significantly disruptive. Meanwhile your SaaS that improves the efficiency of a niche industry by 5x is much less exciting, even though it has a higher probability of success, because you know exactly who your customers are and are unlikely to be able to create more of them.
Automated X replacing manual Y is usually good, IMO, even if the idea that it'll result in more leisure time is pretty much bunk.
Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. I go check more things off my todo list.
Isn't that good? You certainly could give yourself more leisure time — there's no capitalist overlord forcing you to do your own personal todo list — but since you have more time, you've decided to do more things to help yourself.
And I thought you were pleased to see me.
Slightly more seriously, and delightfully pedantically, you don't. A supercomputer isn't a supercomputer because it does a lot of computations every second. It's the utility of the machine that makes it a supercomputer. Your phone can model entire weather systems or the intricacies of millisecond-by-millisecond fluid dynamics inside a nuclear explosion, but you choose to play Angry Birds on it, so it isn't a supercomputer. It's just a very, very fast, and immensely wasteful PC. You could do everything you do on your phone with a much less well-specced device. We all could.
Nah, I mostly read HN and take photos with it.
But — that in itself has been pretty society-changing (well, maybe not the part about reading HN). Literally every person, just about, has a reasonably good camera in their pocket capable of shooting video, that connects to the internet — and by the way, the quality of those images does actually relate to the thing being a supercomputer (thanks, computational photography). Would the George Floyd related protests have happened without someone's cameraphone taping cops killing him in cold blood? Definitely not: only cable news companies decided what to shoot and — equally critically — what to broadcast.
And on a more mundane note: ubiquitous internet-connected cameras certainly revolutionized how I pick restaurants for dinner.
Capital really doesn't drive innovation at all except in very specific situations where there are sufficient regulations and guardrails to coax companies in the direction of progress (and you certainly won't see innovation happening under completely unregulated capitalism). It's almost always independent and/or individual people -- researchers, open source contributors, scientists, etc -- who come up with society-changing technologies and ideas. In the mid 1900s, the large tech corporations ran enormous corporate laboratories, like the famous Bell Labs that would churn out things like this (Unix, almost the internet, etc). Rampant de-regulation of capital in the 70s and 80s led to an industry shift that removed these guardrails and incentives and made it easier to simply monopolize, price fix, and acquire your way to the top, as the oil and rail tycoons had in the early 1900s, and that is where we find ourselves now. FANG companies are not innovators -- they have become machines that swallow up the innovations of others and either neutralize or begrudgingly copy them in such a way that still manages to crush competition via economies of scale.
Google, the "great innovator" of search hasn't innovated on the topic of search engines in over a decade, and instead relies on multi-billion dollar deals to ensure Google is the default search engine on every mobile device in the world. When a competitor emerges, they acquire and shutter it, or sit pretty knowing economies of scale will ensure new competitors won't get sufficient traction.
For the last decade, Apple has simply watched the tech industry very closely, cultivated their image as a glorified fashion company (everything driven by design and status-symbol imagery), exerted monopolistic control over an entire industry via their app store fees and tight restrictions, and used their unlimited resources to copy or buy their way into the features and ideas actual innovators have proven will play well in the coming years.
Amazon uses its size and its control over a global marketplace (that they completely control) to continuously enter new markets and shutter competition with economies of scale, and is taking the same approach with AWS. Notably they won't be innovating on anything outside the realm of "just run it in our network of data centers", and everything they do with AWS is designed to pull you into the walled garden of AWS products.
Netflix has simply acquired their way into controlling a large portion of the good movie studios, their only "innovation" being on perpetuating a toxic and cutthroat company culture where everyone is constantly under review and DRM and compression technology to limit who can watch what based on expensive regional licensing deals.
All of these companies are threatened by, and afraid of innovation, and they will stop it from happening if they can. They compete and innovate, only if they have to, and would much rather just pay you to not innovate. Capital isn't going to create innovation -- regulation of capital, done correctly, will. Capital has to be dragged into innovating, kicking and screaming.
Would UBI be a good way to do that? I do not know much about it but it seems that it could potentially lead to a whole generations being able to try new things, tinker with technology, make mistakes, see what works what does not work. A lot of human thoughts could be shifted from "how to make sure me and my family are fed, clothed and sheltered" to more creative ones.
1. $500 campaign donation limit, per person, per candidate, per year.
2. Corporations not allowed to donate to politics in any way, shape, or form. Subject to a fine of 20% of the corporation's deductions or taxable revenue for the current tax year, whichever is greater (catches the "break even" monsters like Amazon), per infraction.
3. Large financial and jail-time penalties for materially incentivizing a politician for the purpose of manipulating their stance on an issue, for both the manipulator and the politician (if they are proven complicit). All that needs to be demonstrated is a quid pro quo.
4. Corporate death penalty and/or jail time for a variety of corporate issues that currently result in a mere slap-on-the-wrist fine
5. Abolish the electoral college, so we are not living under a tyranny of the few.
Collectively this would end lobbying and make it impractical to entwine money with politics, resulting with, as you say, a number of policies like UBI, high quality public housing, and a social safety net that are provably more conducive to technological and societal progress.
And I say this as a YC CTO who used to be a DoD research scientist.
You can do "more work for the man", or you can do a hobby of some sort. Either way though you are up and doing something.
Way to miss the point completely. Clearly “relaxing” in this context meant “leisure” or “free time”.
Note if you don't have a background in philosophy you probably can't answer this. If you do the answer will take many pages
For some people, reading is relaxing.
For some, writing is relaxing.
For others, playing video games is relaxing.
For yet others, making video games is relaxing.
The point is being able to decide and structure your own time, rather than being beholden to someone else's demands just in order to have enough money to keep existing on this planet.
https://opentextbc.ca/principlesofeconomics/chapter/6-3-labo...
As long as companies are driven by profits, and that profit can be increased by higher enployee productivity in the same number of legal working hours, we will continue to do so.
Even on a personal level, say a car lets me do a trip in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours walking. I don't relax for an hour and a half. I go check more things off my todo list.