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Comment by noud | Hacker News Reader

I think you're way off base. It's called rosy retrospection, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosy_retrospection. As you already mentioned in your comments, you're judging the past disproportionately more positive that the present.

If you really want to know if everything is declining, try measure it everyday for the next five years. For example, every day, rate your personal well being, track how (un)happy you are with the current software, how much you pay to your landlords and subscriptions, how many mistakes the police makes, the weather, everything, ... After 5 years you'll have a good idea if things actually got worse than they are now. Sure, some things will get worse, but definitely not everything, and some things will even be better than they are now.

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This is just personal but anytime I feel similar to the OP, I watch something by Hans Rosling [1] or Anna Rosling [2]. Although 10 and 5 years old respectively, I feel the general sentiment is still true - that human progress is slow, in the background and might be ebbing and flowing in your specific sub-population.

And when compared to the present, media narrative driven present its hard to see the improvements happening across the global population.

It helps me put stuff in perspective - of course mileage may var (and maybe it's just helping me delude myself into getting out a funk but it works!).

[1] Hans Rosling's 200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbkSRLYSojo

[2] See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income - Anna Rosling Rönnlund https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4L130DkdOw

Reminds me of this tweet by Derek Thompson (writer at The Atlantic):

In 2022, we:

- Reversed organ death in pigs

- Made the first embryo from stem cells

- Made a pan-influenza vaccine

- Saw the beginning of time

- Got best-ever results from cancer & obesity therapy trials

- Maybe cracked the case of multiple sclerosis

From: https://twitter.com/DKThomp/status/1600864770751860737 (https://archive.is/pi95L)

Yeah and we developed the most efficient graphene nanotube batteries that never degrade!!

Sorry, I'm not buying it anymore. More than likely, none of that is going to help me or anyone I know from struggling just a little more each year.

This makes 0 sense to me.

They are arguing that "the system" changing would be more helpful to them and their friends than "technological advancement".

As the meme goes, ¿Porque no lo dos?

TL;DR

Sure tech progress is cool, but it's hard to care when I feel more isolated from my community than ever, the world feels "angry", and in many important ways my life feels much worse off than just a few years ago.

The meme about "but living standards doubling every X years!" is little comfort when you can't feel any of those impacts - not to mention that the material is scarcely the only thing that matters for human happiness.

I think the challenge is that the doubling of life standards is happening for people at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs (i.e. basic survival to a comfortable life).

Most of the HN audience is likely at self-actualization stage where its going to be hard for society to help double life standards when every one's such standard is decided in such a deeply personal way for each individual. [1] It's also going to be really hard to measure progress on this front at a societal level.

[1] The importance of Maslow's hierarchy of needs

https://www.theschooloflife.com/article/the-importance-of-ma...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0PKWTta7lU

It also very much feels like any advancements in tech for the future will also only be accessible to wealthy people... As living costs are skyrocketing daily at the whim of overpaid and callous executives everywhere worldwide.

I hear what you're saying. Things are improving, but what share do I have in it?

Another angle is if I struggle and work hard, what rewards accrue to others, and what do I get in return? The ROI on effort seems to be dwindling cause fakes are crowding out the real hard workers. And the buyers (ie wealthy investors) cant seem to tell the difference between expertise and bald faced lies. (I blame social media and rise of influencers for this, a bunch of fancy graphics and a iphone and now you know the 1 real secret the life long scientists have been holding back to our fatloss/clear pores/million dollar a month business).. Then again it was the missteps of institutions that even gave influencers their chance (a little lack of integrity ruins it for all)

A mind shift (that might help) is to realize that if you have a 401K or IRA or pension - which if you are on HN you have at likely at least have some modicum amount likely - then you are an indirect beneficiary by these profit seeking moves.

From the distribution chart it seems most of the US stock market is owned via IRAs/401Ks/defined benefits and insurance versus individual accounts. [1]

Those evil corporate landlords that drive up rents? Well, likely they are acting on behalf of former hardworking teachers of Canada. Sure there is skimming involved but a bulk is going toward to teacher's retirement. [2]

Of course mileage may vary whether this helps how one feels.

[1] https://i.insider.com/5746013852bcd044008c527e?width=1200for...

[2] Why Canada’s Teachers Run an Investment Firm in Singapore https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HXcT_xlLB0

That's also a good point. Boomers legislated themselves to a bunch of entitlements at my expense, whilst simultaneously cutting any sort of good for my (and subsequent) generations.

To be clear I'm not suggesting that specific advancements aren't being made. It's more like things that matter are going away and the things we're getting do not affect most of us.

eg: something like 99.95% of the planet (all but 1-2 Million) have 0 or near 0 benefit from most of those findings (save for maybe the vaccine). But important things are going away -- treating people well, having happy lives, justice and being treated fairly. It's not a good tradeoff IMO.

I think the generations that were raised coddled, spoiled, and helicoptered are getting into the workforce and administration, and it shows. Police can do much less nowadays because of red tape. The bad apples can do less damage too, but the rest are less empowered as well and the productivity suffers.

Frankly the boomers were already super coddled. They have never known sacrifice, and raised us milenials in an even more hedonistic fashion. No one has the stomach to make sacrifices anymore, of any scale. Even convenience wins out over necessity.

> eg: something like 99.95% of the planet have 0 or near 0 benefit from most of those findings

This is not the right way to evaluate the benefits of science. This is the year those advancements start having an affect. The same thing was true about microchips the year they were invented, and about radioactivity, and even about the health benefits of washing hands and drinking clean water. All scientific discoveries are an investment in the future, and those four I just mentioned have at this point touched nearly every single person on the planet, just like the above list may well do in the future.

There isn’t strong evidence that the things you mentioned are actually going away, why do you believe it’s true? Women and minorities are getting more justice and fair treatment than they have in the past. People treating each other well is subjective, and it’s arguable how well they ever did in the past. But murder, violent crime, property crime and hate crime rates have all gone down for the past ~40 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States Happiness is also subjective, but take a look at the Human Development Index and note how all 66 countries in the list on this page have a positive year-over-year growth rate. All of them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index

> treating people well, having happy lives, justice and being treated fairly.

I think that depends a lot on where you live and what you look like relative to those around you. I wouldn’t think black citizens in the US in the 1950s would agree with what you’re saying. An Asian coworker of mine said he always thought it would be interesting to go back in time and live for a little bit in the 1940s, but every time he thinks that he has to remind himself what they did to Asians in the 1940s here in the US.[0]

I do think that tech (particularly social media) has amplified a lot of the bad social behavior that people have always had. I don’t think there’s more of it, just that it’s gotten louder. Someone who could only be an asshole to the people around them can now go online and be an asshole to millions of people around the world at once.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...

Without looking deeper at any of these, most of the similar stuff from past years has ultimately been humbug, if technically correct. For example, first headlines I found from ’net-positive fusion energy achieved’ were from 2013 or so.

Researchers want to slightly oversell their discoveries, and the media wants to misunderstand to oversell them even more. Humbug 9 times out of 10.

> ’net-positive fusion energy achieved’ were from 2013 or so.

Yep, and they were clear that this was not ignition.

That one is painful, since I wouldn't even call it technically correct, and even an undergrad should have been able to notice the error :

https://cleantechnica.com/2021/11/09/breaking-news-fusion-re...

So a order of magnitude larger output power promised... except when you count total input power and reasonable heat engine efficiencies (if installing one had been planned), it's unlikely they would even get more power out than in !

But then, the very same month I was also made aware of SP(ARC), which is revolutionary because it can (in theory) afford to be so much smaller than ITER (which is ridiculously large and therefore expensive in a super linear way) :

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/10/smaller-more-efficie...

A bunch of claims that cannot be easily verified and may never pay off even if they are true and viable.

Why can't we do something about the genocide of young black men that is being committed by young black men, for example?

We cant fix that because our economic system is rigged against black people. They are kicked down and are forced to fight each other for scraps. The same rigging benefits you (probably) and thus you cannot think of a solution. This rigging starts very early. It's the looks they get in the supermarket. It's how educators think these kids are less smart and give them less chances. Their parents dont educate them in smartness-indicators like the use of certain words or the non-use of others. The parents dont educate them in these indicators because they feel these indicators are from "white people". They are proud of their own culture because they are rejected by the elites (mostly white/Asian). The elites in turn reject them for their "lower class"(read black) behavior. I bet you even do this. After that the easy way is to blame the black people for their upbringing/culture. That closes the loop and blames them for their own failure. But the cause and effects are the other way around.

Blacks had their families destroyed by slavery and now again by social programs that reward women for being single mothers.

genocide of young black men

Are you talking about a specific country in Africa? If so, what do you propose? Should we send US military to force a regime change? Because that worked so well in Afghanistan, right?

Right here in the USA.

Our crime statistics show the greatest threat to a young black male is another young black male. Look at the Chicago shooting stats every weekend.

Dig deep into gun deaths and you will see that is young men if color shooting andurdering each other in gang and criminal contexts that accounts for most of the deaths.

And yet the media can only rise to care about gun deaths when it is white children being murdered. That shows their real values.

I wouldn’t use the word “genocide” in this context, unless you think what happens to young black men in US is similar to what happened in Rwanda.

What do you call a murder rate of 81.7/100000 for black men aged 15-24?

https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https:/...

To me, a murder rate of 94000/100000 is a genocide, and 81.7/100000 is not.

More black men are murdered in the US than white men. But whites outnumber blacks by at least 4:1.

Call it whatever you like, but acknowledge that this is horrific.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in...

Some young men face a tough choice - work at McDonalds for $8/hr, or work for a local gang selling drugs on the streets. Yes, this choice in US is forced by society upon overwhelmingly black or latino men. But it is still a choice, and not every black man born in a poor neighborhood chooses a violent life of a gang member.

I have zero sympathy for criminals who're killing each other. Have you tried comparing murder rates of innocent non-violent civilians across different races?

> the greatest threat to a young black male is another young black male

And the greatest threat to a young white male is another young white male. Does that mean that there's a genocide of white men by white men?

Yes, but the murder rate of young white men does not approach that of black men.

More black men are murdered than white men as an absolute count, which is horrific considering that whites outnumber blacks by at least 4:1.

Is it more racist to not talk about black on black violence, or to address it directly? Refusing to acknowledge the issue so we can tailor policy to save black lives is white privilege exemplified.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/251877/murder-victims-in...

Black people are people.

Murder is bad.

If black people are murdered out of proportion to all other races, by a wide margin, that's something that needs to be investigated.

Down vote me racists.

To be honest, the regime change in Afghanistan was kind of working, at least that's what it looked to me when I was there in 2010. Then the western world lost interest and withdrew

How long were we supposed to enforce the regime change there?

The right thing is let every country run in their way. Don't interfere. It is wise for U.S. army to withdraw from Afghanistan.

I resent the Taliban for depriving of the right of women to receive eductaion, but that doesn't mean I support meddling in other countries' internal affairs. Believe in Afghanistan will generate an enlightened regime in the future.

We've probably only spent 1/10 on it of what we sent to Ukraine last year since the beginning.

And yet, we only get 15 minutes with our primary care doctors. No one doubts the progress of technology: it is the quality of human interaction that's plummeted.

I’ve often had this thought. It seems that people are forgetting they are interacting with other people, rather than machines. The irony isn’t lost on me, as an engineer.

Yes. It’s a shame that more people than ever can’t afford the medical insurance to appreciate these advances.

Rosling's work is fantastic, and I too occasionally watch 'How Not to be Wrong About the World' to keep my spirits up, too.

But. The past 5+ years have not been kind to the general arc of progress, particularly in already-developed countries in the West, and the US most of all. There has been genuine, real backsliding across the board on a variety of measures. And it's important to acknowledge that, too.

> [2] See how the rest of the world lives, organized by income - Anna Rosling Rönnlund

Here's the link to view the photos by income:

https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street

The photos are CC BY.[1] Chronophoto, a game of guess the years of these photos, is currently on the front page.[2] So how about a similar game of guess the incomes?

Compared with historical photos, the narrower scope of dollar-street photos might be less fun? Or not - it's a richly textured image set. Deep linking the dollar-tree site could give richer follow-up context. Perhaps paired guesses of income and location, might quickly teach their relative salience?

[1] https://www.gapminder.org/dollar-street/about? [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34559867

Just wanted to say I watched them both and the Anna one was really helpful. Thanks.

I’m always a little stunned when this (and many sibling comments) is almost always the first response to something like this. It’s probably generally true, and an appropriate response to the most dire decline narratives or things easily disproven by stats . . . But like also: really? None of this resonates with you on a personal level? If yes are you that distrustful of your own anecdata? If no: I hypothesize that you got significantly wealthier over the last decade and spent accordingly to choose/manage your surroundings, and/or live in a blessed location with a healthy friend/family group and a healthy relationship to social media. I think all of these are outliers to majority experience. It sometimes feels like there’s a Panglossian Gaslighting Society operating in threads like this.

>If yes are you that distrustful of your own anecdata?

Hackernews is approaching the topic in a very characteristic way but depression is an important phenomenon that manifests to the individual as, among other things, worsening negative appraisals of everything. So do the consequences of poor fiscal and monetary policy. Funny how we use the same word for both.

> None of this resonates with you on a personal level?

Not really, no.

Don't get me wrong, 5 years ago I was in the UK, I moved to Berlin towards the end of 2018. Visiting the UK again last December… it felt very broken.

But it was the same kind of broken that I saw in Portsmouth when I was a child. And Berlin still feels as good as it did on my first visit.

Landlords being greedy? Sure. That's one of the things Marx and (from what little I've read of him) Adam Smith agreed on.

People are loud? I'm remembering a neighbour in my mid-terrace place in Sheffield in 2009-10, the husband and wife yelled at each other every night loud enough I could hear the words. I'm remembering a biker housemate in Cambridge who openly discussed the motorcycles with illegal loud exhausts. I'm remembering the stories in my childhood about illegal raves being shut down.

Worker apathy, that's hard to gauge. Could therefore believe it if it came with evidence stronger than an anecdote.

Software development looks like it's much the same combination of fads, technical debt, and Peter Principles as it ever was. But that's anecdotes, the proof is in the pudding, and everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember — while I think that Apple's UI peaked a decade ago, that's mainly because I am deeply nostalgic for skeuomorphic UI.

Subscription models: well, if you don't like them, don't get them. We're getting Netflix for one month of the year because that's enough to watch what we want, and there's plenty of others with different stuff we can watch later.

I'm not going to get a Photoshop subscription, but I did buy Pixelmator, and if that hadn't existed I'd have used GIMP.

The police? BLM started in 2013, the word "woke" originated in 1938 in the lyrics to a song about racial injustice in the legal system.

I have become very cynical about the legal system as a whole, but for very different reasons: if you were fully enforce all the traffic laws the only people who would be allowed to drive would be people like me who don't, if you fully enforced the drug laws you'd bankrupt whichever country you were in, and so on. But none of this is new, as evidenced by Sir Patrick Stewart's stories about his father.

For rich grifters, I suggest Robert Maxwell. He's… mostly forgotten. Fraudsters often are, so the question should be: what's the fraud rate in your country?

Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned).

Do we still have problems? I assume so! But they don't appear to be worse, rather they appear to be milder.

“ Everything is poison? I grew up with acid rain (solved), a hole in the ozone layer (getting better), indoor public smoking (banned in the UK, doesn't seem to be here in Berlin), asbestos (banned), and leaded petrol (banned).”

But now you have to worry about plastics in your food, leaching of chemicals from batteries that power new technology, depression and suicide, resulting from social media (especially amongst young children and teens), loss of privacy due to technological devices, dangerous side effects from new drugs that are pushed and marketed onto the public, dangerous chemicals and metals found in modern vaping devices, reduced quality of life due to income stagnation and exorbitant real estate prices, etc

Grew up vegetarian because my mum was worried about mad cow disease. The batteries were also toxic when I was a kid. So were more of the lightbulbs. Suicide rate is significantly lower in the UK today then when I was born.

Loss of privacy concerns me. Most people seem happy to over-share, presumably because the thing also allows more connections with more niche interests than most people can name.

Dangerous side effects of drugs? I remember seeing thalidomide victims in my local mall. We're a lot more cautious these days because of things like that.

Vaping is an odd thing to have a moral panic about, as the alternative for many people is to set fire to a tube of things known to produce carcinogenic smoke, and stick it in their mouth.

Stagnant quality of life is by definition not getting worse.

Exorbitant real estate prices are the only thing where I agree with you they're a genuine concern for the average Millennial and post-Millennial.

In US, suicide rates increased 36% between 2000-2018 and declined 5% between 2018-2020. Overall, a huge increase and we still have covid years to add to the mix.

https://www.cdc.gov/suicide/suicide-data-statistics.html

“A "vape," or electronic cigarette, is a device that heats up a liquid to create a vapor you inhale.”

https://www.webmd.com/connect-to-care/vaping/what-is-vaping

What liquid? I know what tobacco is, but I don’t know what a “liquid” is. It could be anything and many of them contain dangerous metals, fragrances, and other mysterious chemicals. Hardly an improvement over cigarettes.

Stagnant wages over time, while they may have the same numeric value, result in far less purchasing power due to inflation.

Ridiculous real estate values are a concern for every generation.

Why did you describe what vaping is? This isn't a weird obscure practice, and the point was reduced harm relative to putting a burning cancer stick in your mouth, not a claim that that vaping is completely harmless.

> What liquid? I know what tobacco is, but I don’t know what a “liquid” is. It could be anything and many of them contain dangerous metals, fragrances, and other mysterious chemicals. Hardly an improvement over cigarettes.

Do you really know what tobacco is? Or do you take the mental shortcut that most people necessarily have to take with organic chemistry and mentally categorise "tobacco" as one single monolithic thing?

"""Of the more than 7,000 chemicals in tobacco smoke, at least 250 are known to be harmful, including hydrogen cyanide, carbon monoxide, and ammonia.

Among the 250 known harmful chemicals in tobacco smoke, at least 69 can cause cancer.""" - https://www.cancer.gov/about-cancer/causes-prevention/risk/t...

Combining:

> In US, suicide rates increased 36% between 2000-2018 and declined 5% between 2018-2020

With:

> Stagnant wages over time, while they may have the same numeric value, result in far less purchasing power due to inflation.

Yields some combination of:

There was significant nominal growth in incomes in that group (USA) in those period (both 2000-2018 and -2020, only a brief dip in 2020 and more growth since then but that's beyond the scope of what I'm responding to here), it was only stagnant after compensating for inflation — and then mostly in the poorer half (which I'd say is really bad because I'm European and therefore so left-wing I think the Democrats are dangerously right-wing).

And:

The worldwide suicide rate didn't follow the USA's, and is down by about a third in that period: https://ourworldindata.org/suicide — This graph also doesn't support the CDC percentages you quoted, because it's saying USA +10% over the same period they're saying +36%. (I wonder what the difference is?)

And:

Worldwide income per capita, at purchasing power parity, almost doubled from 7.954 PPP dollars in 2000 to 17.038 PPP dollars in 2020.

And:

The CPI inflation index also account for housing costs.

> everything is more stable and less crashy than I remember

I can't begin to believe you're not trolling here. Seriously. "Everything" is more stable ?

Pick a random every-day operation ("rent an hotel", "book a flight", "pay your taxes", "order a pizza", etc...). We'll go to the first website that will come out of a google search, and try to follow the process from start to finish using a modern browser on a modern OS of a modern computer.

I bet we'll get at least 3 to 5 bugs (either in page loading, some server crashing, some page layout issue, some text display, some translation, some form field validation, some form submission, some confirmation email not being sent, etc...)

The most charitable view I can have is that software is "as bad as it ever was, but there is now new kind of bad software that lets you badly do things that were not possible in the past". But claiming an "improvement", especially in stability, seems like a stretch.

There was a distant time where those operations were done by calling a human being on the phone. Those were awkward conversations to have, and there were "bugs" in those too - but human interactions had had a few thousand years to iron out those bugs.

As a software engineer bringing my own set of (hopefully not too buggy and moderately useful) software into the world - I seriously miss those days.

> ("rent an hotel", "book a flight", "pay your taxes", "order a pizza", etc...).

I have literally never had any of those crash, which is what I was writing about.

> some page layout issue, some text display, some translation

Almost certainly on some of them, but that's not what I was talking about.

I have, 4.5 years ago, had an airline not understand how a + before the @ works in an email address. But it didn't crash.

And Ryanair's app and website sucks, but it didn't crash on me.

Booking hotels is reliable enough I've done a 1000 km cycle ride where I booked each hotel en route 2-3 hours before arriving because I didn't know which village or city I would reach before that point.

Taxes I can no longer do online because the UK won't let me do their bit online now I live abroad and I don't trust my understanding of German tax terminology for the other bit so I have an agent, but that's a legal issue not a website limit, and I can't remember ever having had a problem with HMRC online.

Likewise, the biggest problem I've ever had with buying a travel pass digitally was 5.5 years ago, because BVG didn't support iPad (not a typo, my phone was a Blackberry and I had an iPad).

I grew up with "System Error Type 11 (Restart)" on a weekly basis; nothing like that happens any more.

> I grew up with "System Error Type 11 (Restart)" on a weekly basis; nothing like that happens any more.

This probably explains why we don't understand each other.

I grew up with fairly crashy stuff too, don't get me wrong. I ordered stuff on a Minitel, for heck sake.

However, I suspect the fact we're old timers makes it even harder to sympathize with "normal people" confronted with unstable systems.

Because, a page not displaying properly on your phone, a form not liking your first name because it has a hyphen, a website suddenly switching to Spanish for half its content, a email that says "you'll soon receive " before not receiving anything, the message received in batch of 10 explaining that your subscription will now be "${sub}€", etc... All those things (that I literally encountered _this weekend_, on systems developped by big corporations and / or public service platforms): we hackers call them "annoyances" ; fancy people call them "bugs".

Real people call them "stuff that does not work".

And when your are forced, by law, to use stuff that does not work because the software got all the funding, and people are too expensive, then, some real people call it "barbary".

It's "death by a thousand cuts", for sure, in a world where so many die by actual bullets. So maybe it does not warrant a violent uprising.

But you'd be surprised how much I hear it contributing to the overall anger - being the rich "computer guy" trying to help the real people navigating this.

My experience has been that the more time people spend on social media and/or consuming the "news" (such as FOX/CNN), the more they have these feelings of impending doom.

That being said, some things are far better now and other things have gotten worse. Our social isolation and self-imposed echo chambers are the primary cause from what I can tell.

Social media and mainstream media is pretty much cancer for the mind. I've been unplugged from all the garbage since around 2015, which is around when people seemed to totally start losing their minds. I still get current event updates from friends as they are all still plugged into the hive mind and basically talk about the same things like clockwork.

I've noticed the doomsday type of rhetoric as well. I really just don't see how people can keep eating this stuff up and not get tired of it.

    None of this resonates with you on a personal level?

Honestly? Not really, no. I think the world has gotten a lot better over the past few decades. My gripes are that, mostly due to short sighted and avoidable decisions, things could have been even better. But if you asked me, "Okay quanticle, I can take you back in a time machine and strand you twenty-five years in the past, would you prefer that?" my answer would be an instant, "Are you kidding? Get outta here."

Just personally, when my family and I came over from India, roughly twenty-five years ago, we could only afford to call our relatives in the home country once every other month, for five to ten minutes at a time. And, on half of those phone calls, the line would be too noisy to actually hear or make out anything from the other end. Today, my mom (in the US) and my grandmother (in India) speak for anywhere between ten minutes and two hours, every day, in high resolution video. No, things haven't gotten worse. We might not have gotten flying cars, but we did get videophones, and that's pretty cool.

There are some pretty clear indications that the derivative of civilization is strongly negative at the moment, particularly if you live in Europe.

Actually, the fact that people are supposed to pretend things are OK, while everyone over there is possibly a few steps away from being drafted into war, is another sign that things have headed in the wrong direction in exactly the manner OP is suggesting.

What are these clear indications (beside the potential draft point)?

“Everyone” in Europe is definitely not a few steps from being drafted into war. This is ridiculous polemics.

Also, what a fun draft that would be. What Western Europe country could realistically support and train a large uptick in reluctant new recruits?

You need a backbone of experienced military professional and infrastructure to do that ( eg : France used to have a lot of military center to host / train people. Those have been abandoned in the late 90s )

> everyone over there is possibly a few steps away from being drafted into war

Why do you think so? Might be different in Eastern Europe, but as a Central European I think it’s quite unlikely that a direct conflict is going to happen.

There already is a direct conflict. Wake up and get your head out of the sand.

Uh, no? This is definitely an outside perspective.

There was a huge negative spike around the invasion, but the bigger effect has been the rapid rise in fuel prices. Russia are now clearly losing and Russia is in less of a position to threaten.

Nobody in UK discourse is talking about conscription. Mind you, UK political discourse has gone increasingly off the rails with trying not to deal with corruption and incompetence of Tories.

Is Russia clearly loosing? I hope so. But I'm not so sure. They didn't win immediately like they thought they would. But long term they might have better chance than Ukraine to win a war of attrition. (If murdering 100000s people and conquering ruined cities can be called "winning".)

Read [1] recently and it paints an bleaker picture than some other analyses.

https://www.russiamatters.org/analysis/whats-ahead-war-ukrai...

This might be of interest to you :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=deK98IeTjfY

It's a video essay on ammunition stockpiles on Ukraine and Russia by the youtuber Perun. It doesn't paint a rosy picture per se, but it does directly refute at least a few of the points made by the author of the RM blog you linked.

People are getting less social, probably because of social media.

That's not something you can do away with seeing the past in a more rosy way. Because in the past people had to interact to get through life.

Social media might play a part but I'd argue it's not the biggest one. It's urban sprawl, car dependency and now remote work. People are being isolated in boxes out in the suburbs surrounded by no points of interest or areas to hang around.

The most important thing for socialization is to just have physical proximity to other people in shared spaces, be that a park, office, school, club, etc. If anything, social media is just enabling people to sit in their boxes longer while still getting some form of socialization.

When faced with a sinusoid, humans seem to extrapolate exponentials in both directions. Take the business cycle, where the good times appear to approach a "new paradigm!" just before a large correction, and the bad times seem like they'll never end.

Exactly this, and this is a general pattern.

This is reminiscent of my previous struggles with cyclothymia[1], for example. Furthermore, the perception of impending calamity was contributing to the stress and worsened the symptoms further. (I wonder if there is an analogy to be drawn here as well, but I suspect this part is much less generalizable.)

At the same time, it makes sense for people to have heightened awareness of "the bad times": each cycle represents added stress to the system, and with a heightened probability of calamity (eg. becoming insolvent / suffering a mental health emergency).

[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/17788-cycloth...

The business cycle is not a sinusoid. It’s a fractal. It’s chaotic and oddly correlated. Also, sinusoids are exponentials. ;)

Oh! could you elaborate on this? To me even the name "business cycle" hints towards a cyclical/periodical movement. Sinusoids are not exponentials, sinusoids are periodical. They seem exponential for a short while though. The growthfactor also declines at some point. Could you elaborate on why you think its fractal?

It's a joke, sinusoids are sums of exponentials when you're talking about complex functions [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_formula#Relationship...

There is a danger to assigning this term blindly, as it is almost a form of 'rosy ignorance'. We are certainly in an extreme period of societal volatility, and it is absolutely appropriate to examine the causes.

The world has been very dependent on tech for a long time now. We've had many companies that dominated tech and now they have a stranglehold on pretty much every aspect of life and business.

I think a major component to societal decline can be linked to the effects of social media and ill willed corporate and consumerist influence on everything around us, coupled with the on-going social and economic conflicts (war etc) being driven by egotistical personalities that have also been an enduring problem worldwide.

As the Internet grows, greed and ego are consuming resources that were previously share across many prior... There is only the illusion of success played out by people (many of them are trust-fund-driven nepo-babies), as web sites. social and dating apps. and many other prominent online schemes are now simply lottery games that rarely pay out even after years of careful participation. Our ability to climb economically is under great threat by greed of far more wealthy people than us.

The future looks grim as long as we keep letting the wrong greedy personalities win... We really need to stop giving that a pass.

I agree with the OP over the last 5 years. I think he/she's right and it is not an effect of being depressed or what.

Over the last 5 years, wealth distribution, general wellness, world order, SW reliability have all declined. There are data points for some of those items but no all of course.

For SW reliability, I include: buggy websites, product requiring cloud access making them intrinsically less reliable and less trustworthy, the services needlessly requiring authentication making credential theft wide spread and spam/scam campaigns more likely to succeed, companies pulling the rug under paying customers feet, dark patterns...

This reminds of a classic Late Night with Conan O'Brien episode when Louis C.K. was the guest. He is very right. We adopt to the new normal so fast. We need more people feeling gratitude. It is tough since modernity is focused on consumption.

Here's the link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdFB7q89_3U

The few minutes before the clip starts were great too, but sadly I've never been able to find them since I first watched them.

Just because a thing has a name doesn't mean it's true. In many ways the past was better than the present. For example in 1965 a single average wage earner could afford a 15 year mortgage for a nice house in a nice neighborhood.

And don't even get me started on architecture. There's no rosy colored glasses there. Contemporary five over ones are abominable.

For a very large chunk of the population, life is much better today than it was in 1965. Ask the average person in a 3rd world country which has now lifted out of poverty since then or someone who didn't live the straight white ideal 1965 scenario.

And even for people who did live the best possible situation of 1965, we are no longer poisoning everyone with lead and asbestos in the way we were back then. As well as many things we consider absolute requirements like air conditioning being considered an optional luxury back then.

> Ask the average person in a 3rd world country which has now lifted out of poverty

Who did the lifting?

If by "everyone" you mean white males.

Do you have some data that says this is off base besides some general Wikipedia concept? The OP reported direct observations.

Direct observations? It seemed like anecdotes to me! Crime can certainly increase in some areas but I think overall we are down from decades ago

>Seems like everything is subscription model and you have to pay N times to access something thats only worth 1-3x . Eg: I Netflix for a couple hours a month. At the price for 4k access I can almost go out to a theatre. Video games are all trending to subscription models. I just learned the other day that the PS4 games I got with my subcription to PSN all are locked because I stopped subscribing (nearly 50 games) . So I paid them like $125 for access to these games for 24 months, and now I cannot play any of them? At least I still own NES/SNES/N64 Game cartridges that will never lock me out

This one is wrong. If this were the SNES era to play 50 games the best you could do is rent for $3 to play for a couple nights. That's $150 (more like $300 in today's dollars) which is more than they paid for unlimited access to the games. To match that they'd have not much choice other than retail for $50 a pop, $2,500 for all of them, or $5,000 in today's dollars. Used for maybe half that with effort.

HBO was more expensive when it launched in the 80s and that doesn't count the base cable subscription fee. I pay much less for the 2-3 streaming services that I use than my parents paid for cable when I was growing up. That alone is undeniably better. Plus you can do things like buy any Disney DVD used for $2 pop plus a flat $3 shipping on ebay. No way that happens in the VCR days. Not to mention that used DVD players are practically free vs a couple hundred for a vcr player.

Interesting points. I do remember FF3 selling for nearly $100 Canadian.

I guess I feel shafted paying $5 a month to get b list games for only so long as I keep paying $5 a month in perpetuity. The eventual sum of this is approaching infinity or something like 1500-2000 for my remaining life expectancy.

Versus on steam you can sometimes buy great games for $10-20, albeit your betting steam will exist in the future to distribute the game to you.

There are obvious examples in history where it really is getting worse and then things get better. How do you know that Rosy Retrospection applies in this case?

Pick an actual measure and look at real data vs vague feelings. Or like they pointed out, at least compare feelings recorded at the time vs current feelings vs memories of past feelings.

And how does that help the feeling the poster has now? Of course in hindsight it will be known if things are as bad as the poster thinks. Why state the obvious that in the future it will be known if this present time was as bad as some thought? And the question I asked remains unanswered: How does noud know that rosy retrospection is what the poster is experiencing?

I actually read a religious based book on anxiety once that said (secularized) "look at all the hard situations you've gone through and how you felt about them vs how you actually fared. Perhaps you could temper your current mood about the present in light of the difference between how things felt vs how they turned out."

It's not absolutely most rational point, survivor bias and all, but it does have a point about not being excessively negative/anxious.

Also known as "G.O.D." ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_old_days

Everyone claims stuff like this. Or they say that "kids these days" and quote archimedes or plato or something...

But just seriously watch leave it to beaver and then watch any modern tv show and compare the "disrespect". Even if people have been saying "kids these days" for 1000 years, that does NOT mean things haven't been changing for 1000 years for the worse.

Counter-example: A significant subset of people on HN agree that Google search is deteriorating.

Great idea - I can tell you mine personally is 25% better over the last year because of my migraine medicine. I have one extra day a week to be among the living. Sure I have some days where I’m a little bit off but I still remember just how bad it was. Also I can drink and experience a hangover like a normal person. Hangovers are easy no big deal just kind of off days.

> It's called rosy retrospection

Explain this then: https://www.thelocal.se/20230127/ten-terrifying-stats-about-...

Numbers talk. At least here in sweden rich are richer and everyone else is poorer.

Sure, there are dozens of metrics by which the world is getting objectively worse in ways that have very real human and ecological costs. But OP didn't cite any of those. They did, however, complain that the minimum wage worker who made their burger didn't express remorse for forgetting the ketchup.

Not at all. Many problems pointed out are real in some areas, but the never ending techo-optimism of HN cannot handle that.

Pick up the book "Knockemstiff" for a good perspective on how bad things used to be. Things are better then they have ever been, but we all have a responsibility to continue improvement instead of tearing it down to rebuild it (worse).

* Also people like to argue the validity of other's view for the sake of projecting truth-knowing with cursory wisdome like if there was one truth. Spiced with life path couching on own initiative as an extra.

Stop doom scrolling. Find the things that actually matter to you and take steps you can to improve them. Have the wisdom to accept what you can't change.

probably combined with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_panic

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