https://www.gatesnotes.com/Development/Max-Roser-three-facts...
https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
It's an amazing read as well, much like Pinker's other works.
We have made great strides, but in the U.S. social mobility is lower now, life expectancy is down, so if you have to be born to a poor family, being born earlier might be better.
How about "the percentage of millionaires who were born in a poor family"? I bet this is where US shines. Rich people in most other countries are mostly from old money.
Regarding social mobility -- well, you can live a good life in Denmark, but living great life is different. Janteloven is still very much a thing.
What great strides do you think America/the developed world have left to make?
Sociology, economics and politics are difficult, valuable and all too often completely overlooked by people who have the luxury of being able to solve for x in their day job.
In many ways we've already tried that, for example in urban planning, and it failed miserably.
For a counter point, as applied to urban planning, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_and_Life_of_Great_Am...
Social problems are best solved from a grassroots perspective, and they require negotiation, compromise, and HN hates this one, wait for it... politics (both official politics, and everyday interpersonal politics.)
Some observations are quite surprising, for example using coal and then oil for energy replaced huge amounts of manual labor and might have eliminated slavery, deforestation and hunting whales for whale oil.
Poverty: It is now known that there is a rising gulf between subjective and objective well being. A majority of millionaires do not think they are rich. I think this psychology will make it impossible to solve poverty.
Cancer: Entropy/cosmic rays scrambling DNA... I think thermodynamics will make it impossible to solve cancer (as in, all cancer) for everyone (very rich with DNA repair therapy in the medium/near future).
War: Actually living now in the most peaceful time in human history as a % of humans in conflict. I think the human desire for power/wealth (again, back to poverty) will make it impossible to solve the zero war scenario. At least nukes scared everyone from the big wars so far :)
This may be philosophically true, and probably even technically true in practice, but I suspect the vast majority of homeless would prefer better shelter than they currently enjoy. For whatever reason, these people have failed to attain better shelter within our societal system. Some people blame the system for letting these people down, other people blame the individual for not having what it takes to "make it", but I don't think you can call this a choice unless you call failure a choice.
Given that, there probably are things we can do to "solve" the vast majority of homelessness, so don't give up just yet. The few people that then legitimately choose to be homeless will probably be so scant as to be barely noticed by the rest of us.
War, meanwhile is a scalar concept of the platonic idea of conflict in general, between two individuals, but scaled up and beyond the scope of individuals to transcend to rival collectives.
So, cancer. Unsolvable for absolutely everyone, although it can be solved for some, but then dancing around the issue of wealth again.
Here’s where I’d like to stop for a moment, and dispense with the conceptual curveballs being tossed around, because now with wealth as a requirement for diamond sure shots against cancer being accessible only to the wealthy, we’re right back onto the homelessness/poverty concept.
I’m going to cut to the chase: the words “illegal to force someone to take care of themselves” is an extremely misguided framing of what homelessness is. Almost to the point of willful deception. That ain’t what homelessness is.
Okay, sure. You’ve got psychiatric, fractured people walking around in circles, and lead a horse to water, do no harm, you’re idea of compelled assistance is my idea of a cage, and what about all the sociopaths who might game the system like blood sucking parasites. Healthy people need not be beset by the lampreys of willful destruction and self destruction.
But.
The U.S. Marshalls and/or the town sheriff’s department will trot on up to my door with cuffs in hand, and guns drawn, within 45 days of my bank telling someone that I haven’t scored enough paper points to pay tribute to the monarch of my roof. So, under threat of violence, not only is the degree of luxury stripped from my permission to simply exist comfortably, but perhaps I land in a cage. A real cage, not a conceptual economic cage of taxes and regulation. A cage shared with some of the fractured psych cases that might fracture me to match their proclivities and better suit their surroundings.
So, poverty. Back to wealth, yes? Points scored on paper, retained by banks that publish scores to highly available, networked computer databases for live transactions and batch processing.
We’re rapidly approaching a situation where electronic systems, computer software, and related hardware applications will obviate human effort in a wide array of scenarios. Transportation, anything involving sorting, organizing and distribution, rote fabrication and assembly; much of that can be automated, with or without magic decision making buzzwords for the edge cases that are currently mechanical turked with brute force data entry by humans in the loop.
This reorganization, centralized around advanced electronic systems of record and authority will drastically improve efficiency, to simultaneously create surplus and idle humans in one stroke, or many, many concurrent strokes, struck within a very fast, short span of time.
Now, broken humans, stupid humans, evil humans, and even just plain old humans, mediocre, unfuckable, and aged out; such a chore to be around and listen to. Why do anything for anyone that can’t charm your pants off? And then, there’s the biosphere to think about. Do we use automation to unleash a surplus of pollution, garbage, waste and toxicity upon our already fragile planet, but for the want of maximizing a bottomless pit of human activity? Indeed, when we play god, and cure cancer, feed the poor and house the homeless, do we even fix the ugly, mean freaks that no one finds adorable or even mildly interesting?
I think we can draw a bounding box around an extrapolation of all living humans in their current state of affairs, and what it would take to raise the standard of living, and provide a comfortable pasture for all the broken shambles of misfortune that creates poverty and all the mental illness that creates homelessness. We’ll probably even have enough surplus to snip out all those pesky tumors, and mend the festering sores that sprout more. We’ll probably be able to figure this stuff out, granted that biology is merely piles of chemistry, which of course is merely piles of physics, and that highly efficient resource sharing will produce idle humans bathed in surplus, many of whom will be pretty smart, healthy and motivated. My, that’s optimistic, isn’t it?
So, I dunno. I don’t see things your way, but then again, I have to spend eight or more exhausting hours a day, on this treadmill of income chasing to pay rent, eat food, run fool’s errands, commute, idle in front of a cathode ray tube, psychically recovering from the trauma of the stupidity inflicted upon me by this shitty mess of a groundhog’s day rat race, and then sleep for eight hours, so I’m actively prevented from helping you solve the problems you attempt to frame as so bloody insurmountable.
C’est la vie...
I was being a bit flippant in my comment because I take issue with the phrasing of these problems in the context of 'solutionism.'
We can, and have, eased poverty. Families aren’t having to eat their children as happened in 1920's Russia. We must strive to ease it our entire lives to add meaning, even if we know we will never reach the asymptote for the reasons I mentioned,
We must strive to ease war. Does that mean having a strong police-like presence in the Middle East, or just getting the fuck out? Our own society arose like a Phoenix from extreme violence, at we harming less developed countries by constant intervention in their sectarian violence?
We must strive to ease cancer, because we have to solve this before the heat death of the sun if we wish for humanity to survive afterwards.
Peace be with you
I'd argue (and I'm not a millionaire) that being worth less than 10M isn't really that rich. A long-term pet peeve of me is that most people don't realise how poor they are, if you treat everything as being relative.
For most civilians, access to wealth and being able to access debt (and leverage) is tied to house prices, and a lot of house prices in high-paid areas are beyond the reach of most people. Thus, by extension, access to wealth is not easy for most people.
Trying to have access to wealth AND having at least one stay at home full-time parent? Even harder to achieve in this day and age. People born between the 50s and 80s basically were able to both get on the wealth ladder AND afford for one parent to dedicate themselves full-time to parenting their children.
Oh and I don't know, about $250K worth of professional experience and skills but yeah.. we have.
The 3D printer might have been the biggest offender, to be fair, but many libraries have some (as do many maker spaces that are hourly). Additionally, you can order a number of 3D printed parts online as well, for relatively low cost.
Soldering was done in a reflow oven, commercial units start at around $200 or you can use a modified toaster oven. This board doesn't look too terrible to do with an iron or hot air gun either. You can get a decent combo hot air/iron station for about $60.
You'll want some test equipment, cheap multimeters start at free from harbor freight but you'll probably at least want to step up to a ~$15 model. Logic analyzers are handy and until fairly recently were quite expensive but now you can get them for $10. An oscilloscope might be handy for debugging the power circuitry here, you can get a cheap one for $20 or a nice one for a few hundred or an old nice one for about a hundred.
An adjustable bench power supply isn't really necessary but nice to have, those start around $50.
A professional EE's workbench will probably have many thousands of dollars worth of equipment on it but most hobbyists have much more modest budgets.
The 3D printer OP uses is a Monoprice; it looks like the delta mini (https://www.monoprice.com/product?p_id=21666). It costs $160.
The circuit boards and the solder paste mask are made by another company and delivered by mail. It's been a while since I looked up costs, but it's quite cheap these days, and the watch's circuit board is small, so I can comfortably say it cost under $100 to get the mask and a few copies of the board.
The soldering could be done with a $200 chinese reflow oven, like the T962 (https://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_nkw=t962), or with a $20 toaster oven, an oven thermometer, and some careful timing. (Some people do their surface-mount soldering with just a frying pan and their kitchen stove!)
The rest is just basic hand tools -- screwdriver, file, sandpaper, tweezers, maybe a magnifier. Maybe a $5 Arduino clone to help with debugging and programming, and a $35 T12 soldering tip+controller for doing soldering test stuff and "I messed up" wires.
If the first try doesn't work, and it's not obvious why, you'll to spend more money.
If fixing the problem requires changing the board board then you need to order new ones, and the mask to solder them.
DC voltage levels, current consumption, and electrical continuity can be checked with a $20 multimeter. The presence, frequency, and integrity of signals can be checked with a good used analog oscilloscope costing $100-$200. Some things are easier to check with a new, basic digital oscilloscope costing $300-$400.
If the electronics are good but there's something wrong with the software, you'll need something to read the signals the chips are exchanging with each other. Basic, low-speed (less than 1 MHz or so) signals can be read and generated with the Arduino board, or a $30 Bus Pirate. If your project uses higher-speed signals, you'll need a logic analyzer. A good USB model is the Saleae Logic 8, which costs $400.
(There is overlap in the capabilities of digital multimeters and logic analyzers, so you can sometimes just buy one and use it for both purposes.)
That is the level of technology that we are at today. We are living in the future. And it is a future that Asimov would like.
This technology can very well, and was to a large extent made to, be used for something else. I don't think researchers or EEs are stepping over homeless people more than anyone else. When it comes to doing good things with electronics I would be more worried about patents, or just finding the time.
It's more than just that though. Centuries of incremental knowledge passing from one generation to the next. A global economy that allows chips manufactured in China to be shipped to American for peanuts. All the collaborative effort that went into writing an OS that's available for anyone to use free of charge. That someone is able to be so specialized, they can do this in their leisure time.
It is an incredible amount of human cooperation and achievement over thousands of years. I suppose you could say that about many things today, but for whatever reason, this watch put me in a bit of a philosophical mood.
I guess: humans collaborating achieve great things; we should do more of that.
(You know what else reliably gets me marveling about humanity? Attending a symphony orchestra performance.)
Assuming perfect reliability, reasonably low sound levels, super high efficiency engines, and flying pigs.
And those 1000 KG bullets would be, on average, piloted by someone with the skill of the average driver today.
No thank you.
I'll give two: reduce traffic jams, and less need to build/maintain roads. The average commute time* is about an hour a day. Giving people back that time to spend with their family, to work, to play would be an amazing boon to society. The real issue is that the technology to make practical (cheap, fast, quiet, safe) flying cars doesn't exist. A practical flying car would also solve the housing price crisis in cities as people could fly in from the exurbs.
* https://www.npr.org/2018/09/20/650061560/stuck-in-traffic-yo...
Doesn't this just reinvent the problem? You're currently spending a long time commuting due to congestion; you'll now spend a long time commuting due to sheer distance.
All the traffic collisions that currently happen in 2 dimensions (changing lanes without looking, failure to yield, rear-end collisions) would happen with flying cars but now in three dimensions. And when a collision happens that completely disables the car, it won't just crash in two dimensions, it will plummet to the ground.
To prevent that, we'd need dedicated air lanes that cars would have to merge in and out of, and on-ramps where they're only allowed to move up or down at dedicated spots to help with merging. Which we have on the ground already.
Yes planes fly fast. They're also piloted by professionals who dedicate their lives to piloting them, controlled by a central ATC tower, and heavily regulated by a governing body. And we still have air disasters.
There is zero reason to move cars into a third dimension of travel. If you want "cars but faster", we have a solution for that: cars. But faster.
Ships, also driven by professionals, collide more frequently than airplanes for the same reason.
Another important reason to go 3D is that you can go much faster with less fuel at high altitude.
I have an acquaintance who was evicted (due to property damage caused by her ex boyfriend). She was given a 3 day notice to vacate, and now she has an eviction on her record. The eviction basically means that she cannot rent a property in her own name for the next 7 years, even though she's gainfully employed and can pay rent. After over a month living in a hotel, she finally found an off-lease sublet. But that's only temporary.