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Comment by bonoboTP | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy to see all these interviews from >25 years ago. Everything is calmer, people are more soft-spoken, they think before they speak. They come across as some mix of wholesome, endearingly naive and balanced, genuine etc (it's the tone of voice, the facial expressions, the body language, everything). compared to the media frenzy today, including the shouting grimacing screaming youtubers, the constant crisis mode, everyone putting on an act etc.

I'm not saying the world had no problems, I was alive, I know it wasn't paradise. But the contrast is always noticable whenever I watch old footage, eg asking people's opinions on the street etc. Or there was also a video about some friends having fun at Disneyland and it all seemed much calmer than today.

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"Susan Kare explains Macintosh UI ergonomics on the Computer Chronicles (1984)" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_q50tvbQm4

She's demonstrating something pretty new and significant to a lot of people.

Maybe software job interviews have followed a related arc, to amped-up performance art rituals and shibboleths, from genuine meaningful down-to-earth conversation.

This is very soothing. I feel like I'm being cradled by calm, intuitive, thoughtful UX.

Are you sure it isn’t just that they’re British? I think a lot of the intensity came from the US. When I grew up in the UK, we used to joke about Americans being insane and loud, but now we are copying them…

Context is important: this was a piece for the BBC's 'Working Lunch' business news programme which went out at lunchtime on BBC 2. This is before 24-hour news channels and endless competition for attention. In 1996 there are four terrestrial TV channels in the UK, most people don't have access to satellite or cable TV, and as for video over the internet? QuickTime is at version 2, and downloading videos over my 14.4k modem wouldn't have been viable even if there'd been anything to download.

And despite that competitive market, almost no one is watching Working Lunch. It's daytime TV, so the majority of people are either working or in school, and the remaining unemployed/retired probably aren't interested in a slightly-more-laid-back format business news programme, and are likely just waiting for Neighbours on BBC 1.

(I was 16 when this was broadcast, and I regularly used Working Lunch as a marker for if I'd been up too late or should go to bed, probably more so a couple of years later than in 1996, but the style is very familiar even all these years later!)

Sounds similar to ever-increasing sweetness of soda drinks: if your drink has 3% more sugar than competitor, it just "tastes better". So the market gradually falls into super-sweet.

Today, it is important to act you have 1000% more fun than the person before. Dude, you're just having a few beers with friends and you act like you just got married.

A good argument for sugar tax, even if a lot of people complain about it.

Only if it’s proportional to the concentration of sugar, which doesn’t seem to be how they ever get implemented.

Would it be permitted to purchase a cordial or other flavor concentrate? Would you apply for a tax refund with a signed log documenting your beverage preparation events and dilution ratios were below the requisite limit, or would it be more of a self-reporting system where you could flag instances where where a child's clumsy pour or unexpected weather causing higher than forecast evaporation rates pushed their lemonade-stand concoction over the line?

Raw sugar? Highly controlled? Or permissible in batters for the express purpose of creating cake or cake-like solids? I feel that frosting could create a dangerous loophole here where it would be easy to manufacture under the guise of legitimate bakery desserts but would be just a simple step for a backyard chemist to transform into a dangerous _sugary drink_. A popsicle is even worse! Power goes out on your freezer and all of a sudden IRS agents are kicking down your door. No, that's just too dangerous. Best to tax all sugar, solid and liquid.

People may accuse us of going overboard but really we're perfectly justified in taxing people's choices where they have a societal cost e.g., on the healthcare system. Participation in dangerous sports naturally will be taxed next. Sunbathing certainly, but also getting too little sun. Not eating enough fiber should be taxed right out of existence. Sitting down too much we need to eliminate. Flying or driving anywhere for non-essential or recreational purposes is right out. Not having enough friends can impact mental health, so if you can't provide documented evidence of having at least 10 friends your income tax should be raised by a % for each. Recreational boating and swimming outdoors are statistically quite dangerous, we could just ban those completely, nobody _needs_ to drive a boat or jetski around.

I'm starting to have visions of the utopia...

I think your comment may have finally changed my views on the subject matter at hand. We should eliminate the taxes on cigarettes, and remove the red tape barring the simple pleasure from humans just because they haven't completed enough revolutions around Sol yet.

In fact, a truly meritocratic society would remove any such barriers. What difference does it make to have a 16 year old pilot a 2 ton general-purpose land vehicle vs an 18 year old? Shouldn't we just give them both a test whenever they personally choose to exercise that freedom, or, better yet, allow our citizens to use their personal property freely at any age so long as they are not intentionally harming others? Surely being able to acquire the down payment for a 2010 Toyota Corolla is the only mark of skill that matters to a thrifty and entrepreneurial society?

And it would be wrong of me with all this talk of individuals to not speak of my favorite Citizens United—NGOs! If adding so much sugar to a can of coke that phosphoric acid is required as an additive (to suppress the natural gag reflex) to increase market penetration 3% in the 4th quarter, then wouldn't the board at such a NGO have an obligation to their shareholders to deliver that growth?

Especially given that children and adolescents become lifelong customers, wouldn't such a board in fact have a fiduciary responsibility to target such demographics broadly with ever-sweeter processed foodstuffs and beverages? It's not the board's fault humans under the age of 25 generally don't have a fully developed pre-frontal cortex that could resist extraneous activations of the ventral tegmental area. It's just good business sense—if not us then someone else would clearly profit.

Or maybe we could tax the externalities, dunno. It seems your argument is no government could capture every single externality at any one given point in time and thus the effort is moot. We should just pick up the tab on our strained healthcare systems and add more motorized shopping carts at Walmart, and heck maybe we'll even get those cool floating chairs from Wall-E if Buy N Large can finally circumvent silly legalisms and deliver to the American public a sugar so concentrated you can skin-pop it.

Most of the differences in what you write is the "externalities" affect others.

Yes the "burden on healthcare" is framed as an externality too, but that's after one has accepted the collectivism of health. The problem with that is where does it end? How can you argue for a sugar tax but also argue against a skiing tax to dissuade people from partaking in that dangerous activity? On the other hand I can say why sugar drinks should not be taxed but people should have to get a license to drive on government roads without being inconsistent.

Sugar beverages isn't the only thing that causes food addiction, obesity, or diabetes either mind you. Why not get down to the brass tacks of it and implement calorie cards for people and tax or ban over-eating? And tax people by their body weight too.

Your argument would be more convincing if sugar tax had not already been successfully implemented in my country. We have an obesity problem, not a skiing problem. And a lot of people were unknowingly intaking hundreds of empty calories from soda for basically no reason.

> Your argument would be more convincing if sugar tax had not already been successfully implemented in my country.

What's your definition of success? I never argued a sugar tax could not reduce consumption of sugar if that is what it is. Just like an obesity tax could incentivize people to lose weight.

> We have an obesity problem,

Did your sugar tax fix the obesity problem?

> not a skiing problem.

Skiing is a statistically dangerous recreation and causes costly injury and death, healthcare system would be better off without it, so why not strive to also eliminate it? I didn't say it's the same magnitude as obesity but multiple problems can be addressed at once.

> And a lot of people were unknowingly intaking hundreds of empty calories from soda for basically no reason.

You must tell me what country this is which does not have the most basic food labeling standards yet has made significant progress in their obesity problem!

In 1996 no-one expected to ever be recorded on video or to appear on a screen. I was doing a big game for Eidos at the same time as DMA were doing GTA and we were photographed and interviewed once for a Polish video game magazine.

I'm always struck by the line in Back to the Future where Doc says he understands why the president in 1985 is an actor. Everyone is walking around with a portable TV studio. We've all become much more used to being recorded, or recording ourselves, on an almost daily basis. We also watch other ordinary people in videos all day. And our children grow up constantly on camera. We have changed how we act when a lens is pointed at us. In the DMA video everyone is nervous as fuck as most of them have never been interviewed before.

Maybe the difference is that in 1996 games were still somewhat nerd-niche rather than mass media. If you look at mainstream interviews of the time with, say, pop stars, I think you see the same kind of hype/glaze/insincerity. The person sinks beneath the brand.

Definitely. It often feels a lot more calmer and thoughtful e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SgMPr0UZObY (came up as a recommendation after watching the article video)

Or this Stallone interview (also YT recommendation) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFlybZL1mWE If a movie star went into that contemplative mode today, the interviewer would feel some kind of awkward tension and would immediately crack a joke or somehow lift up the conversation back to the surface level. You only get this stuff now on podcasts.

As for your video, just imagine uttering the words "complex mathematics" today unironically in an entertainment-related interview. The interviewer would have to immediately ironically say something like "oh, you lost me there" or something like "you're such a wizard, I can't even file my taxes" or so. Somehow genuineness and any level of seriousness is seen as kryptonite for the media today.

I agree. People will be quick to say that that’s just your nostalgia talking, but taken to an extreme, that argument would entail that culture and patterns of behavior never change, which is equally implausible.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxSdWhkMB_A You may like this too

And confidence. Nowadays everyone look super-confident.

The word 'con' in 'con game' is short for 'confidence'. People seem to have learned from the con-in-chief (among others, like the personality cult business people), even those who told me they hated him.

(In American media, but also elsewhere) It was calmer than today but it has become pointless to lament the loss of serenity in an age where attention spans are measured in days/few weeks and no voices speak above the loudest (I have tried many times, but got drowned by the social media opinion tsunami). It crushes the soul and it has spread.

Heck, it's like those who are sensitive to this phenomenon have left or got sucked into it (sadly this includes me at times) and those who remain have no idea what has even happened (generally speaking).

Like when we used to say, woah this whole social media thing is a giant experiment, wonder whether that'll go well. Yeah, apparently 90% didn't wonder; they just did.

P.S. my earlier comment is an instance of this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31270985

> it has become pointless

That's certainly a trendy thing to say today, about everything. I'm interested in what we are going to do. People who say it's hopeless are present for every problem in every time.

More correctly I should have said "It feels to me like it has become pointless".

But meh, fortunately I have plenty of other stuff to do and at least I can self-select against these places (and towards better ones).

It's just strenuous to watch the dynamics that be at play with little recourse, 's all.

> It's just strenuous to watch the dynamics that be at play with little recourse, 's all.

I agree it's strenuous, very strenuous. But I think the notion of 'little recourse' is a product of modern social media. SV, the US, the civil rights movement, women's sufferage, etc. etc. weren't built on 'it's pointless and there's nothing we can do'. The modern reactionary movement - the far right tide - certainly doesn't think that and didn't think that when they were far on the fringe. Sometimes you get punched in the mouth, hard; you thought you were safe and now you're on the ground, stunned and traumatized. The question is what do we do then? The number one thing to do is get up, have faith in who you are and what you believe, and get into the fight.

I've just stopped reading that crap; it's amazing how a little distance can remind you of who you are and what you believe.

Honorable attitude.

I guess it really is hopeless to wait for self-regulation, when those who get to gain most have no incentive (or sense?) for it. No (behavioral) rules without (social) enforcement and consensus.

I've understood some time ago, that dismissal, even when appropriate, will not change anything in certain environments, especially where crowd dynamics rule, and that generally speaking not everyone is waiting for the wisest voice to lead, even when it would matter.

It's a starting point to go on from towards a more proactive/affirmative course of action, so thanks for your confirmation.

It will have to implode somehow. The pressure cooker has its limits. People will one way or another have to reduce their social media intake. Obviously all financial interest is firmly on grabbing eyeballs and not letting go of them, so they won't be onboard. Perhaps there will come some big wave of burnout, mental health issues, general health issues etc. Of course it's not all due to the media. It's a back and forth, cause and effect game also with the economic situation, cost of living, uncertainty about the future, ever fiercer competition, people always being scrutinized, etc.

I've worked in Scotland, I think it's just that Scots are pretty reserved and private by nature.

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