My Ordinary Life: Improvements Since the 1990s
Funny; I always thought Gwern was around my age, but it seems like he either wasn&#x27;t fully conscious in the 90s or lived some peculiar life out in the weeds.<p>Shit he missed:<p>1) Video conferencing is a big deal. Makes remote work possible and routine.<p>2) Bittorrent, libGen and SciHub have actually realized the dream of making information de facto free, even if it is illegal.<p>Agree on:<p>1) Logistics has improved immensely (in part due to ubiquitous computing and part to exporting manufacturing to all corners of the globe).<p>2) You can get more &quot;weird&quot; foods at walley world and Trader Joes (on the other hand, staples are more disgusting and obviously unhealthy -just look at people)<p>3) Spaced rep applications are useful. Not world changing, but useful. Ed Thorp did know about this in the 50s though (as I did in the 90s).<p>4) Electronics are much cheaper (and I make a lot more money to buy more of them). Linux works about as well as it did in mid-90s anyway. Laptop batteries MUCH better.<p>5) Cars are better: antilock brakes, crumple zones, airbags have made things much safer on the roads<p>6) Crime was much higher in the 90s than in the 21st century. Trend is reversing in the US at least.<p>Disagree&#x2F;aesthetics<p>1) Clothing is vastly worse than in the 90s in every way; aesthetics, durability, materials<p>2) Muh weed isn&#x27;t better than public smoking; I miss being able to smoke in public after a drink<p>3) Induction stoves are bloody awful and a huge regression from gas, even electric coil<p>4) Microbrews were much better in the 90s; everything is a disgusting IPA now, mostly to cover up the fact you&#x27;re drinking toilet water. I&#x27;d rather drink coors light than an IPA.<p>5) Most coffee is actually worse; Peets and Starbucks burning their beans is an aesthetic atrocity.<p>6) Apples are still groace and covered in alar.<p>7) Average flights are cheaper, but travel is VASTLY more unpleasant. You used to be able to buy a paper ticket, then trade it on usenet for someone else&#x27;s ticket. No ID required; just the ticket. Imagine that. No CNN blaring at you on the infoscreen making thought impossible (looking at you Atlanta). No anal probe at the boarding area. Your family could wave at you when you get on the plane, or hug you as soon as you get off. Total regression: I&#x27;ll happily pay more for the old experience.<p>Just wrong:<p>1) Travel in the EU is vastly more expensive to an American than it used to be, and hordes of travelers from everywhere on the globe make it less pleasant as well. It&#x27;s also worse from a visa perspective; you used to be able to do visa runs and stay on the continent basically forever instead of vacating Shengen every 90 days.<p>2) Most houses are actually NOT heated&#x2F;cooled&#x2F;insulated as efficiently as he thinks; presumably he just moved up a few socioeconomic brackets or moved some place warmer.<p>3) Coats? C&#x27;mon; if your coat is thinner, it&#x27;s because you live in the Bay Area or something. High end winter coats are still goose-down.<p>4) AI&#x2F;VR aren&#x27;t really things except as LARP<p>5) Trichinosis wasn&#x27;t a problem in the US in the 90s any more than it is now. Personally I can no longer eat US pork (it was fine in the 90s, just as it is in europe). See next point for why, perhaps<p>Shit that got worse and he didn&#x27;t notice:<p>1) Everyone&#x27;s fat; an aesthetic and libidinal apocalypse. Obviously something enormous and negative has happened in public health (cue 10 people responding to this, all with different &quot;answers&quot;), and nobody can identify what it is.<p>2) Everything as a service: back in the day you had to pay for utilities and maybe cable TV. Now you pay 10x what you used to for phone service (in the US; elsewhere else it&#x27;s fine) due to oligopolistic pricing, and you have a bunch of dumb &quot;apps&quot; on your phone charging you, 3 different movie services, even your damn radio betrays you. Managing more such things is unpleasant and the whole world is basically a giant ripoff<p>3) Social atomization in the US is at all time high, mostly due to technology<p>4) Search engines, homeless people and Elsevier have destroyed physical libraries, and that&#x27;s a real loss.<p>5) The internet is dumber and more corporate, and opinion makers now think that Usenet arguments on twitter are meaningful and real: something the rest of us got over around 1991<p>6) Cheap LED lights means designers put them everywhere, and you have to work hard to sleep in a dark room<p>7) Movies are shittier; big deal that I can watch a capeshit movie in 4k. I&#x27;m an adult and do not enjoy watching adults prance around playing make-believe in their underthingees. Supposedly we live in a &quot;golden age of TV&quot; but I don&#x27;t see that either: they just rediscovered the 1930s serial format. You can watch any of 1000 things, but most of them are awful.<p>8) There are tent cities in the US, rapidly turning into Favelas<p>9) The ubiquity of internet telephony (a general good) has made telephone scams and spam calls much more annoying than playing phone tag<p>10) Cheap flights and transport has caused &quot;barbarian invasions of Rome&quot; level immigration problems, and will be a huge social problem in the next economic downturn, in part because the internet means ethnic enclaves don&#x27;t have to assimilate to local culture. Globalization has generally destroyed the lower middle classes in most first world countries.