Comment by seem_2211 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by seem_2211 | Hacker News Reader

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I think you've got a really underrated point about the farm population.

We've generated enormous wealth and an amazing quality of life by specializing our skills and the global economy to a massive degree. But we've also got a system that leaves skilled workers vulnerable if they are "no longer required."

Reading books before say 1950 and it's incredible to see the diversity of skills that individuals had. Now we're in a hyper-optimized economy where we get a handyman to do basic home maintenance tasks, or we get our oil changed by the dealership, rather than doing it by ourselves. And from an economic perspective, it makes sense - especially if you are able to earn a lot of $$ per hour. But it also makes us a lot more fragile.

We've ruined our waistlines with our diets, we're wrecking our mental health and concentration skills with our social media / internet usage, and the average person has disastrous finances.

I don't know how we fix this, but I often think about how I can protect myself and my standard of living if things get worse. I think we all should do this, and we should proactively do things to ensure that we've got some level of individual buffer for when things go bad.

Compared to the 1950s it's also far easier for the average individual to learn how to do basic home maintenance, change their own oil or cut their own hair. It's not all doom-and-gloom.

>Compared to the 1950s it's also far easier for the average individual to learn how to do basic home maintenance, change their own oil or cut their own hair.

With apologies for flipping back around to the doom and gloom, the picture for all three examples there is more complex. I get that your core point was the availability of information via the Internet, but in opposition to that the subjects at hand have generally become more complicated in themselves.

This was illustrated to me recently when I picked up an old binder publication 'home car repair and customization' from a garage sale. It was from the sixties, and what was most interesting about the content was just how much more aspects of a car's maintenance and customization could be performed by a home handiman. Drastically more than is possible on modern cars.

Paint jobs, upholstering repair/replacement, trim fabrication, structural repairs. All of them were in there and could be tackled with a relatively low density of information. About 75% of the whole publication was useless, at a fundamental level, if applied to modern vehicles.

Now, the reasons for that are varied and some of them are not net negatives. The reason most can't work on structural components of their cars today is at least in part due to safety improvements, for example.

I think the car issue is caused by rise of emissions controls. Efficiency and emissions control have been improved by computerizing the car - thats what puts car maintenance out of reach. Its hard for the average person to understand/fix things that we cannot see or touch.

I strongly suspect it's due to more than a single dimension. To name a few:

Emission controls, increased features (e.g. GPS, Seat warmers, lane assist), reduced fuel consumption, increased power, increased safety features, miniaturisation/lightening of components, reduced tolerances, materials specialization.

There are also more contentious but likely contributors, such as vendor lock-in (if you have to come to my dealer network form maintenance, I'm gonna make more money) or planned obsolescence (if you need a new car every X years, I'm gonna make more money).

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