Hacker News Reader

Comment by mercy_dude | Hacker News Reader

> How much did an internet connection cost in the 1970s? What about a computer? What about a smartphone?

This is the elitist fallacy that somehow having access cheap smartphones and plastics mostly manufactured in China at the back of our working class jobs make your life better while all else indicates life expectancy and quality of life across the board is declining for majority of Americans. Many Americans including my millennial generation feels we are worse off than our parents generation.

How does having cheap access to internet makes the quality of your life better if I may ask? Does it help with the ballooning cost of housing prices throughout the country? Or healthcare? Or education for that matter? These are three basic costs and they all have gone over 100% in most cities in a decade or so. Not to say people are more lonely and isolated than they ever have been.

View on HN

Having access to cheap internet just makes it easier to perform all the additional life administration stuff that people in the 70s didn't have to do but we have to do on top of busting our asses for 40 hours a week to pay off someone else's mortgage.

Comparing utility providers to ensure you're not getting absolutely shafted? Made easier by the internet!

Booking flights? Made easier by the internet!

Having to go through your bank statements to ensure you're not being ripped off by a shady fly-by-night operator? Made easier by the internet!

The causes of decreasing life expectancy are fairly well understood and have little to do with the economy.

We know many young people are dying early deaths of despair. We can make mental health easier to access (there’s a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy just to get pills for well understood mental illnesses).

We can help folks avoid drug overdoses. One piece of low hanging fruit is to make opioids over the counter — that ways people aren’t _accidently_ overdosing on mislabeled fentanyl. And when they do OD, we can make sure they have safe consumption sites and narcan available (this is no different than a bar, where sometimes an ambulance has to rush away someone with severe alcohol poisoning).

We can help folks fight obesity — calorie counts should be included on everything and farm subsidies should be reallocated to healthier foods and low-calorie alcohol sugars instead of HFCS.

And lastly, COVDI-19 has been a big contributor to increased mortality. Anytime the US wants to get serious about the virus we can.

Your point is very strange to me since every single one of the things you listed: deaths of dispair, drug abuse, even obesity are strongly correlated (inversely) with economic health.

The Bay Area is booming, and yet even here this is a problem. There were more drug overdoses than COVID-19 fatalities.

> How does having cheap access to internet makes the quality of your life better

Whoa that's a bit of a reach no? How about the ability to drive around with GPS? Or stay easily in touch with family living far away? Taking photos of your baby and having it stored on the cloud for free? The ability to learn almost anything for free?

I'm not saying it's all great, it isn't, but we can't deny the benefits.

> How about the ability to drive around with GPS?

Maps, and the ability to read them.

> Or stay easily in touch with family living far away?

Phones, you know good old land lines

> Taking photos of your baby and having it stored on the cloud for free?

Why do I need physical photos stored in the cloud?

> The ability to learn almost anything for free?

Have ya heard of libraries?

Does technology make these more convenient? Absolutely. Does it make them materially better? Not in my opinion.

I'm fairly convinced that having to do things as you described was better for mental health as well. The always on, always connected lifestyle has big downsides.

Driving with a map was better than how it is now? We're 10 years from having the damn thing drive itself for us. I suck at directions, I can imagine without the internet I would just avoid drives to places I wasn't familiar with and miss out on a bunch of things.

Yeah, you have to use a map but your kid only has to interact with the school bullies at school and you aren't temped to reach out to your college fling behind your wife's back beacuse you never see her bikini photos.

Things have gotten better, but in lots of ways they have gotten worse.

Have no argument with you there, I'm not saying it was all a win. Mental health problems seem to be increasing and the internet is part (but probably not all) of the problem.

You would discover you are better at directions than you think, if you need to find places without a phone and GPS.

You suck at directions because you rely on GPS. Navigating is a skill like any other.

> Maps, and the ability to read them.

You basically need another passenger with you otherwise you'll have to do a lot of stops. I'd even say its a bit risky to drive like that.

> Phones, you know good old land lines

So you are saying having a high def video call with my brother living across the world, for free, is just like calling him in the 60s? It used to be crazy expensive to call abroad. And you couldn't see!

> Why do I need physical photos stored in the cloud?

Do you physically develop all your photos? If you do you are an exception to the rule, most people develop maybe 1% of their photos.

> Have ya heard of libraries?

Come on now. Try learning C++ in a library, good luck with that. Also, it's only the rich world that has high quality libraries accessible to everyone.

> You basically need another passenger with you otherwise you'll have to do a lot of stops. I'd even say its a bit risky to drive like that.

Oh, FFS. Pre-GPS, I would look up my destination on a map or street atlas and learn the route. If a portion was especially tricky, I might jot down a few reminders, or pull over before that leg and review the map.

Is GPS a wonderful convenience, especially with traffic monitoring & such?

Hell yeah, I love it and wouldn't want to go back to maps without a damn good reason.

But don't pretend it's somehow vital.

> So you are saying having a high def video call with my brother living across the world, for free, is just like calling him in the 60s?

The vast majority don't use video calling.

Still, constantly available communication is, IMO, a huge net positive.

> Do you physically develop all your photos?

That was obviously how it worked before ubiquitous digital cameras.

Photo situation is better today, though I might argue that the low marginal cost of each photo leads to people robbing themselves of vivid memories of what they're seen. There's some research that supports that idea, though I don't have a reference immediately on hand.

> Come on now. Try learning C++ in a library, good luck with that.

That's exactly what I did. Checked the ARM out of the library. Eventually bought my own copy when I decided it was worth it.

As much as I love the wealth of information available on the net, I sometimes miss how good libraries used to be.

So many misunderstandings in here, probably because you're too young to have done any of these things. (Source: I am pushing 50.)

Driving with maps doesn't require another passenger or a lot of stops, generally. You plan your route with the map before starting out, and if necessary write the turns on a piece of note paper. You may need to stop and consult the map if you miss a turn. I'll grant that GPS is more convenient, but maps worked better than you think they did.

Phones vs. video calls, I'll mostly grant you. Long distance calls were expensive, and video gives you facial and body language cues. On the other hand, audio quality was a lot higher when everyone was on land lines, so you didn't need those cues as much to make up for indistinct audio.

Physical photos: before 2000 or so, everyone developed all of their photos. Most cameras were film, then. Even when digital cameras came into widespread use, it was common to print the best pictures. People really only started not developing photos when smartphones became common.

Libraries: I learned C from a couple of textbooks, and C++ (such as it was in 1993) from a book published by the company that sold me the compiler. All of these would have been available in a reasonably sized library, or in a small library via interlibrary loan.

> I learned C from a couple of textbooks, and C++ (such as it was in 1993) from a book published by the company that sold me the compiler.

You ignored that part of my argument about only the rich world having high quality libraries. What if you'r from India or Africa or even rural America? Now even a poor Indian can solve Hackerrank challenges on his phone. It's not as easy or as convenient but it's much better than his prospects 30 years ago.

Unfamiliar cities could certainly be more challenging to drive around prior to GPS, you got lost more often, and yes you often needed to have a paper map. It took me a while before I really developed a decent mental map for driving around the Boston area. But I find people seemingly arguing that travel to unfamiliar places was this daunting task absent GPS availability rather amusing.

For photos I shot B&W (which I printed selectively) and then slides. But most people just took their roll of print film to the pharmacy or whatever and got a stack of 3 1/2" x 5" color prints back.

I’m not trying to be condescending but I’m guessing you’re pretty young?

>> Try learning C++ in a library, good luck with that.

How do you think people learnt to code before the internet? I borrowed large textbooks on Basic/VB, C++, and Turbo Pascal from friends and libraries. And this wasn’t a long time ago. I did this as recently as 2005.

>> Do you physically develop all your photos? If you do you are an exception to the rule, most people develop maybe 1% of their photos.

Why would you take photos and not develop them? When I finish a roll I take it to the local store and they develop the photos. I then put them in an album or store them in another way. People have been doing this for a long time.

>> So you are saying having a high def video call with my brother living across the world, for free, is just like calling him in the 60s?

Most people I know disable video in meetings. The majority don’t do video calls with friends unless they have some friend that calls them that way. I find audio calls much more enjoyable that video calls and I definitely don’t think I’m in the minority there. If you haven’t seen someone in years and they live far away a video call might be nice but in most cases audio is not only enough, but better.

>> You basically need another passenger with you otherwise you'll have to do a lot of stops.

Most journeys people make repeat. You learn the route. The modern obsession with GPS is so we don’t get there a minute early or late. For infrequent, really long drives you can plan your trip in advance, noting down the steps of the journey rather than following the map constantly. It’s also amazing how far you get just following road signs when you know the general towns on your route.

> How do you think people learnt to code before the internet? I borrowed large textbooks on Basic/VB, C++, and Turbo Pascal from friends and libraries. And this wasn’t a long time ago. I did this as recently as 2005.

I'm not denying that, I'm just sating progress was way slower - especially for newcomers before the internet. Imagine trying to solve problems without Google or Stackoverflow when you're a 15 old kid trying to learn programming. You're stuck on some shitty installation of Linux or some missing package and have no idea why the compiler gives this error message. How do you even get Linux? Have no idea how they did stuff back then but it was for sure harder to just to get something up and running. So easy to give up. Programming in that era used to be something 1 in maybe 50 children tried. It was no way near as accessible as it is today.

The flip side of that is that since it's now easier for everyone to learn new skills and solve problems, the requirements and expectations from workers pretty much went up proportionally.

Have you traveled using maps and GPS? They are very different, and not even comparable.

It seems to me like comparing a shovel to a ditch digging machine.

It is possible to navigate using maps. But not practical for the mass audience of GPS who can’t use maps. And impossible for the industries that require GPS (uber types).

Technology is a multiplier that increases the returns on things my removing labor and letting it focus on other, more productive things.

Similarly, arguing that the internet isn’t 1000x easier to learn things because libraries exist is odd to me. Have you ever tried to use a book in a library to find that it’s checked out? Or not available at all. Inter library loans used to take 30 days, if I had access to a good library, and now that information is available to me for free.

This doesn’t mean the world is perfect or that we don’t still have so much work to do. But it’s just an odd perspective that seems unmoored from reality, since these things can be objectively measured.

Am I in some kind of weird HN bubble where no-one has ever used a physical map?

I've travelled extensively pre-turn by turn navigation using physical maps, i spent a year motorcycling across mainland Europe in my early 20's using nothing but physical maps, I did the same but in the US during the early-mid 2000's.

Was it as easy as sticking a zip code into a magic box and having it tell me where to go and when to take a turn? Probably not. But it wasn't much more complicated because I know how to read maps and can remember things for more than 10 seconds.

I was having the same bizzaro-world thoughts.

These guys are screwed if they ever come across a treasure map.

Well as a society we are super screwed if some event wipes out the internet or computers. The dependence is gonna keep increasing. I wonder when we'll hearing stories about Amazon servers shut downs inadvertently killing some people.

I'm not sure it's an HN bubble so much as a people under a certain age bubble. Smartphones in the modern sense have only been mainstream for a bit over 10 years. The internet was only mainstream for about 10 years before that. But a lot of people seem to assume that we were hunting woolly mammoths with flint spears before that time.

Yes today's communications are nice but we really didn't need GPS or cell phones to leave the house however primitive paper maps and, yes, some degree of planning seem.

I used a physical map, but especially inside cities how the hell are you supposed to keep your eyes on the road and navigate at the same time? A 30 minute drive can have idk 50 turns. Do you memorize those 50 turns? What about places where the street signs suck?

Lol... no it's quite the opposite and far less distracting to actually navigate by map. You read the map, interpret the relevant bits, hold (in broad strokes) the entire strategy in your mind, and then just drive. Most of the small decisions don't matter. In fact, this greatly improves situational awareness. I don't need to pay attention to navigating every interesection when I just read the map and realize that every road as long as I'm heading roughly east will dump into the big collector road that I need to get to. I remember whether I'm on one side of the freeway, or the other, and I can find my way onto it without any additional assistance.

Interestingly, it's often MORE efficient than using Waze or some navigation app with ADHD that can't see the forest for the trees. I pity those that never learned to see the forest.

This is not a bubble, and driving using physical maps outside of major highways is a nightmare.

Less pleasant than GPS, sure, but by no means a rare skill or impossible to achieve. Would you get the road wrong more often, and have to stop and re-check? Yeah, definitely. Would you still get from A to B in roughly the same time? Yeah, definitely.

For what it's worth, my experience is the opposite. When I read the map and know the whole path ahead of time I'm far more likely to get it right the first time compared to using an app in the city that tells me to turn right 200 feet from the intersection when I really needed that information 200 yards from the intersection. Or sends me on some weird right then left then right thing instead of realizing I can just go straight.

I don't think anyone is disputing that technology makes things easier.

And I've frequently commented that early career me would be incredibly frustrated by the difficulty of accessing information about just about anything were I to be transported back in time.

But it's also the case that we were actually able to travel, communicate, and learn about things in 1990. Yes, it was generally higher friction and relied more on physical artifacts like maps and printed photos but we were able to manage quite well.

>And impossible for the industries that require GPS (uber types).

By uber types, you mean taxi types? The same taxis which have existed in some form for a hundred years before GPS was invented?

When I was younger and lived in California, people had Thomas Guide maps. These were the best. As a pizza delivery dude in college, it made it pretty simple to find a house/apartment. And it didn't require batteries etc. Now it wasn't as easy as an iPhone with maps built in, but it wasn't like it was impossible.

You believe it's not practical to navigate without a GPS?

Watch an old movie-- like the Graduate, or the funny comedy it's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad world, people had maps and asked for directions at gas stations.

There used to be a whole trope of men (especially) not wanting to stop and ask for directions. I'm sure there are younger people who would watch a movie or a TV show where this happens and go "Huh????"

There are also any number of plot points that revolve around not being able to reach someone that also wouldn't make a lot of sense in general today.

I did a cross country drive back in 2008 without GPS and it was great. In fact I would argue by removing all the components of randomness out of your life, you make yourself fragile and your susceptibility to risks much worse.

As an example, I lived in NY for three years and recently when I went there at my cousins place (who is GenZ) our batteries died and we had to walk our way to subway. Despite living there all his life my cousin was having a hard time finding the subway station in Astoria (because he just uses the Map) whereas I could remember from my vague memories of alleys and shops to find out rather quickly.Or how about driving into that diner you have never been instead of looking at Yelp or Google review and finding the best reviewed store? You deny yourself simple pleasures like that when you rely too much on Google or other technologies. I am not saying they don’t have their places but saying without them our quality of life would decline is a fallacy.

I would also argue writing letters and occasional/less frequent long formed phone calls were much better than frequent short form SMS or DMs which most of the time come off as devoid of same level of care or efforts. Keeping in touch with people we know have become such a low effort thing, try writing a letter or making a phone call next time instead of texting and realize how much more effort it required.

> Or stay easily in touch with family living far away?

The flip side is that technology has made it more likely to not live near friends and family, and the accompanying challenges for mental health.

Quality of life is pretty subjective but US life expectancy rose from about 70 to 79 between 1970 and today.

You clearly haven't looked at life expectancy in other places. Life expectancy in other places rose more than in the US. That's what's being discussed here.

Yeah this is akin to saying our GDP growth is X% or inflation is 2% so everything is fine.

The measures for a quality of life I mentioned are something that every American or anyone in a first world country has to bear no matter what. Housing, healthcare, education. All of them have disproportionately gone up while the wage have stagnated. Average middle class family can’t afford to buy a house in most cities now, same with education without 22yr old kids taking on 150k loans. Or healthcare being the mess it is. But sure, everyone has a cheap smartphone and access to socials where they are busy fighting the culture war so everything is fine and dandy right?

While life expectancy going up is certainly not a bad thing, it can be hard to decipher what the quality of life is like in those later years. The life expectancy is going up because of drug/medical advancement, but obesity levels in the USA are at/near all time highs. Often times people are just moving surgery to surgery or drug to drug just to stay alive...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com