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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2529 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for September 15, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Has anything noteworthy improved in the world in the past 10-15 years?

I've wondered if it's just a natural product of depression or aging, but I was thinking recently about how absolutely everything feels as if it were so much better a few short years ago. Housing/food/necessities more affordable, political discourse less toxic, the internet was both more wild west but also more self-regulating, TV was in its golden age (Breaking Bad, The Wire, Mad Men, etc.), sports felt more like an escape than circus, technology still held promise of a brighter future rather than potential enslavement of humanity, people still talked to one another without being addicted to smartphones, the media was still somewhat believable, medicine was still a respected profession by a wide margin, college was the smart choice for many/most young people... I could go on but you get the idea.

What has actually improved in the time since? Uber? Starlink? That's all I can think of, and I don't use either one.

From a British perspective, things that were not widely available in 2009 but now are include:

  • Smartphones
  • Keyhole surgery
  • Cars with powerful driver-assist features like parking assist and adaptive cruise control
  • Induction hobs
  • Affordable next-day delivery of online shopping
  • Ocado and similar grocery-delivery services

Interestingly, "Uber" is not on the list because London had a healthy ecosystem of minicab apps before Uber came in and crushed them all by pricing below cost.

Also, we had mass unemployment in 2009 (remember Subprime!) and now don't.

Smartphones are much better. Video streaming is much faster. It's much easier to navigate in a car by hooking it up to your phone and using the built-in display. Half decent laptops are much more affordable. Good quality large televisions are much more affordable.

More on the technology point: cheap storage. It feels like every time I go into town the flash drives and SSDs in the tech aisle are twice as large and half as expensive as the last time I went.

Solar and battery technology have rapidly expanded, greatly reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

I live in a bubble and I don't know what other people do, but to me Substack has brought a real renaissance in self-published long-form articles; the discoverability and follow-ability, and ease of doing these things, is greatly improved from anything else I knew of before.

To give kind of a corny answer to your broader question: I more or less agree that most things have gotten worse, including several things which were really important to me. (The landscape of fiction publishing is a big one.) But it's not entirely a bad thing; to some extent it forces us to define what is important to us and actively fight for it, instead of assuming that a gentle and friendly world will keep providing it without our doing anything. For example the smartphone problem: if you respond to this by intentionally selecting for "people who have fought this off and remained unaddicted" as your friend group, you may end up with a cooler and more resilient friend group than you would have if it had never happened.

TL;DR I agree with you, but let's make the best of it.

I'm getting the same impression overall.

A long time ago, normies were sold a lie: "modern capitalism is so great that even average people with modest means will have access to affordable loans". This lie went out the window after 2008. Then they were sold another lie: "globalization will mean that producers will compete in the free market for your money, so goods will become ever more affordable". This lie also went out the window after the catastrophic economic consequences of COVID lockdowns started to have an effect on average people. Now the system is done with lies because they're no longer needed, and it rules through intimidation, threats, blackpilling and gaslighting.

Has anything improved in your life?

There's a bias Steven Pinker talks about in Enlightnement Now. In surveys, respondents will predict that the average person in their country will get poorer in the next few years, while simultaneously predicting that they themselves will get richer.

Do you earn more money now? Live in a bigger house or have more savings? Multiply that by most people on the planet.

I was a student, so I had no income, but make less now that I thought I would make as a starting salary, live in a much much smaller house. I have a little bit more savings, but I'm also considerably closer to retirement.

I thought you were actually going to say something different. Most people's lives just get worse and worse as they get older, but each generation is better off than the last.

Really depends a lot on the person. I loved being a kid, hated being a teen, I liked being a young adult but hated college life and now love being a parent & working ( though I'd prefer a different job at this point). And I'm barely past 30! I don't think I'll become less happy for quite a while. Probably peak happiness is still in the future, since I'm already looking forward to my kids being a bit older so that we can do stuff we currently can't.

I don't think any time of my life after about 5 was happy, but I do enjoy the freedom of adulthood, so I'm probably happier now than I was. But problems just seem to compound throughout life for the most part, and your health and looks get worse over time.

Most people's lives just get worse and worse as they get older...

That's definitely not true. It's more that you exchange one set of pleasures for another as you get older. Whether that is as fulfilling as before is more up to the individual than anything else. For example, I'm just about 40 now. Compared to when I was 20, I:

  • Make almost 5x as much money (not inflation adjusted to be fair but still significant)
  • Own a house
  • Got a girlfriend, married her
  • Have nephews who are an incredible bright spot in my life
  • Finished my degree (note that I don't mean I graduated at 22, I mean I flunked out of college and finished later)
  • Am in worse shape physically
  • Don't have as much free time as I used to (but still have a fair bit cause I don't have kids)
  • No longer can enjoy my friends' company as easily as I could when we were all in school together

There are both good and bad things in my life since then. But I think they balance each other out. My life may not be better than it was 20 years ago, but it isn't worse either.

80 year old East German: “Things were better under Communism.”

“Why’s that?”

“Sex was better then.”

Answering the question as stated, though perhaps not as intended, the vast majority of the people in the world have seen substantial improvements in their material standard of living over the past two decades. In some places that might just mean going from being desperately poor, sick, and starving, to being desperately poor, malnourished, and overworked, but China went from being a source of cheap plastic knockoffs to a maker of electric cars and smartphones on par with anything Western companies can produce, there's now high-speed rail in Indonesia, Morocco, and Uzbekistan, and countries like Malaysia and Poland have more or less converged with the developed economies.

Limiting ourselves to the US, Gwern has a good writeup on the subject, though it's pre-pandemic and so misses things like anti-obesity drugs. Obviously nothing on the scale of first getting access to cars or the internet, but that's a pretty high bar to expect to clear every generation, and even then there's a decent chance AI has you covered in that department. In the end though, whether we're born into a time of progress or decline (or material progress coupled with moral decline, or any combination thereof) is never under our control to begin with, so it's just something we have to learn how to accept and live with, whichever way the dice roll.

As to not duplicate from the other comment:

  • Compact utility vehicles, the turbocharged 2-litre 4 cylinder engine, and plug-in hybrids having more performance than non-V8 muscle cars of 15 years ago
  • All new cars are ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago (performance models now have 600-1000 HP)
  • Small trucks made a [limited] comeback
  • All new construction is ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago
  • Grocery pre-compilation for later pickup is cheaper than the cart rentals; delivery not much more expensive than that
  • Food delivery at very reasonable rates; ride-sharing limits what taxis can charge
  • Board games have gone through a renaissance; RP (D&D, etc.) is much more popular and approachable
  • Credit card skimming was 100% solved via NFC (UX of terminals notwithstanding)
  • Android phones more likely to be supported for the physical lifetime of the device
  • Holosun and Primary Arms drove the price of a good rifle or pistol optic down dramatically
  • Optic sights on handguns now widespread, and the variety and capabilities of compact and subcompact pistols in particular has increased dramatically
  • The collapse in price of good AR-15s, Kel-Tec in general, Palmetto State Armory in general, (US only but has knock-on effects worldwide) NFA being completely trivialized means innovation can continue (shoulder braces mean short rifles mean cartridges designed around short barrels, forced reset triggers mean full-auto is functionally no longer banned, e-Form 1 filing for silencers mean you get them in 2 weeks, not 2 months or 2 years)
  • 3D printing, and the accessibility thereof
  • Anti-piracy law is well and truly a dead letter (people were still worried about BitTorrent lawsuits 10 years ago, VPNs weren't yet a thing, Internet Archive didn't exist [for now])
  • Indie games (Minecraft most importantly), mature online distribution for games and music (Steam, Bandcamp, Spotify to a point) and books, backwards compatibility for consoles, subscription services for games
  • Distributed funding platforms (specifically Kickstarter and Patreon)
  • Effectively unlimited cellular data plans, and cell plans having fallen in price by 50% (especially considering inflation)
  • Dramatically cheaper plane travel (except for the last year or so)
  • People work from home more often
  • Computers are faster and consume 10x less power (netbooks finally reached maturity as tablets and hyper-thin laptops)
  • SSDs made computers dramatically faster (this was later taken away by MS bloat, but was true for the majority of the last 15 years)
  • Functional programming principles make UI development far easier

And that's all I have for now.

Functional programming principles make UI development far easier

Can you explain

Based on what little I know about cars, "muscle cars" as such disappeared after California and other US states enacted all sorts of emission regulations in the name of protecting the environment and so on. I think it's just another example of Western civilization becoming ever more lame-ass, but whatever. Anyway, I find the concept of a "non-V8 muscle car" sort of laughable.

All new construction is ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago

Huh? Like...what?

All new cars are ludicrously luxurious by the standards of 15 years ago (performance models now have 600-1000 HP)

What does more HP have to do with luxury?

"muscle cars" as such disappeared after California and other US states enacted all sorts of emission regulations in the name of protecting the environment and so on

Muscle cars simply became their own segment; they simply stopped putting V8s in everything.

What does more HP have to do with luxury?

Past about 300-400 you don't actually need any more. Stuff you want and don't need is generally 'luxury', like 500 screens, massaging seats, etc.

Anyway, I find the concept of a "non-V8 muscle car" sort of laughable.

Larger turbo-4s have at this point totally eclipsed the V6 (even in trucks). I think the only company that still offers one is Nissan (and that's because they're reusing an old design- the Z is not a new car). Most cars that have V8s are turbos now too (trucks not so much), so instead of 300-400 HP you're getting 600-700.

Basically anything that can be mass produced at scale has dropped greatly in price over the last 15 years or so. Consumer electronics, vehicle parts, musical instruments, firearms and accessories, some building materials, clothing and shoes etc. Electronics also seems to have reached a sort of plateau of capabilities where you don't need a new phone or pc every 2 years to use current software.

Yep. Say what you will about China replacing essentially all domestic manufacturing, but China is damn good at making cheap stuff.

It's kinda mind-boggling how cheap some stuff is today.

Just for one random example, you can buy a blender today for about the same price as it cost in 1970, and it will be delivered to your door cheaply in less than 48 hours.

I've been playing the drums since about 1988. An entry level drum set in 2024 still costs roughly what it did in 1988 in whole dollars, while the quality has gone up significantly. Cymbals have risen in price a bit as there is still a fair amount of unavoidable manual labor involved, but the actual wooden drums shells, metal hardware, and plastic heads have benefited tremendously from improvements in mass production and automation.

Some of your bullet points reminded me that quality home gym stuff is way easier to get and probably cheaper when adjusted for inflation than it was.

Lots of things are better. Off the top of my head:

  • Cancer is much more treatable

  • Many forms of surgery are better

  • GLP-1 agonists will lower obesity rates and improve life spans by multiple years

  • LLMs have made it much easier to get answers to random questions

  • Twitter has enabled free speech to a greater degree than ever before

  • Credit cards and ATMs just work in other countries now, where they didn't before

  • Most people have good navigation systems on their phone. In 2009, they didn't.

  • Electric cars are available now and have many advantages over gas cars in specific circumstances

  • Electric bikes provide a new form of transportation

I'm sure I'm missing lots. Personally I think the western world has gotten worse due to declining social connections. But 2 steps back, 1 step forward! There are many areas where things are better than ever.

Twitter has enabled free speech to a greater degree than ever before

Is this meant to be some joke?

No. Prior to Elon's takeover of Twitter, you were basically at the mercy of media outlets to filter things for you.

Even pre-Elon Twitter vastly increased the amount of information available to an average person, so long as it wasn't in the relatively small subset of things which were censored.

so long as it wasn't in the relatively small subset of things which were censored

So basically cat videos, baby pictures and other content if approved by the Blue Tribe.

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