Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

Comment by paulpauper | Hacker News Reader

The major downside of the 90s was fewer treatment for serious diseases, like cancer, and fewer ways to make good money. Nowadays you got people making mid 6 figures with tech, or with youtube, streaming, tiktok, Onlyfans, instagram, Substack (The author himself makes over $200kyear with Substack), podcasts, option trading, etc. None of those things existed in the 90s, and even adjusted for inflation and stock options, tech pay was worse. Homes were cheaper, but harder to get good rates, and less appreciation. Yes, the 90s tech boom was quite lucrative for some, but it ended so abruptly too. The post-2006 app/sas/cloud boom has continued for 16+ years unstopped. College was cheaper, obviously, but salaries considerably lower too.

For people with talent and ambition, now is the best time in terms of pay and finding a huge audience online or recognition in fields such as AI, computer science, or physics. In the 90s if you were a bodybuilder or enjoyed working out, maybe your income options were limited to hustling steroids at the gym or selling workout videos, but guys on YouTube easily make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year or even millions through ads, selling program, supplements, etc. to a worldwide audiences of millions. Same for video games, thanks to Twitch. People are even getting rich making videos of binge eating. Pretty much any niche you can think of can be turned into a lucrative income stream.

Every time someone says the 90s were better than today I remind them that, back then, HIV was a death sentence. You got it, you were dead--that simple. The fact that we made it into a manageable chronic condition is an astonishing triumph of modern medicine.

By the 90's, though, everybody knew how it was spread, and it was pretty simple to choose to use condoms or abstain from sex, and not use IV drugs. Did everybody do so? No. But we had HIV-based sex ed in school and you knew what was up.

Compare that to now, where Covid can destroy your life and you can get it just going to the grocery store...it's much worse.

> Compare that to now, where Covid can destroy your life and you can get it just going to the grocery store...it's much worse.

The chance of dying from COVID is 4/100,000 if you're 80 years old and fully vaccinated [1]. HIV, by contrast, was a death sentence regardless of age. Before COVID vaccines were available, sure, you could compare the pandemics; nowadays, the two situations are not comparable.

[1]: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/science/data-revie...

You don't need to die for covid to destroy your life https://www.cpr.org/2023/02/03/colorado-long-covid-report/

Do we know yet how much of long covid cases are psychosomatic? Only women seem to get it...

At the beginning of the 90's it was, and at the end of the 90's you could expect to live a normal lifespan with treatment. Magic Johnson comes to mind - just looked it up and he announced he had it in 1991 and is still among us today.

> guys on YouTube easily make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year

...for some values of "easily"

Seriously, there have always been barriers to entry and always will be. They constantly shift. Yes, more competition is happening, which is good, but none of this is something the average person can realistically expect to do without a lot of difficulty (almost by definition).

Anything that's working well today is likely not to be a year from now. Most people aren't cut out for constantly chasing the fickle winds of change to optimize their latest hustle.

Anything that's working well today is likely not to be a year from now.

Really? Mr. Beast and others have been making money for years. Rogan has been at the top of the podcasting game for close to a decade.

Seriously, there have always been barriers to entry and always will be

The barriers to entry were huge in the 90s too, like Hollywood or the music industry. Nowadays at least there are more opportunities to get rich.

Your examples are unicorns. A huge part of their success is legacy network effects built over time, and oh yeah, luck.

There are more opportunities, yes. But the accessibility of those opportunities hasn't increased all that much. It still takes capital, networking, marketing, hard work and some temporary statistical anomalies which work in your favor at a time when you're equipped to make the most of them.

Things are supposed to be hard, not easy. And there are plenty of people making a living wage that you don’t hear about. Ever hear of the riches are in the niches?

> Nowadays you got people making mid 6 figures …, or with youtube, streaming, tiktok, Onlyfans, instagram, Substack (The author himself makes over $200kyear with Substack), podcasts, option trading, etc

99% of the money goes to 1% or even 0.1% of people doing things like TikTok/onlyfans/substack/twitch/YT/etc, it’s not an actual choice for the vast majority of people.

> Homes were cheaper, but harder to get good rates, and less appreciation.

so you're saying homes were cheaper, but unfortunately they weren't getting less-cheaper fast enough?

Housing expenditure as a percent of income hasn't really changed in 50 years. Prices however vary inversely with interest rates. That also means no more gains. Raising rates recently has frozen the market.

Always the incredible disconnect between housing as an investment class vs housing as basic shelter. People turn their brains off and seem to believe that those two goals aren’t at odds, somehow.

People want to have their cake and eat it too.

Food in the 90's really sucked. At least in the US, food exchange and markets have significantly more and better food - especially produce. Beer in the US markets sucked back then too.

1990s music also sucked. Despite all that it was a fairly decent decade for much of the West. Let's hope the 2090s will be at least as good.

  > 1990s music also sucked.

Quite the opposite. The 90's saw the grunge era end that shitty hairband decade of the 80's and the first half of the decade caught the tail end of the Golden era of rap as well. Even the pop music of the 90's was better than what we have now.

homes were cheaper. and smaller. and worse quality. and a constant fire/lead hazard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com