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Comment by sigstoat | Hacker News Reader

> Where's the predicted society where automation allows us all to work for two hours a day, and spend the rest at leisure?

if you'd like the standard of living of a few centuries ago, you can probably fund that by programming for a couple hours a week. instead you want entertainments, medicines and foods that take correspondingly more effort to produce.

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Funnily enough. People without a leg up in the system can't get a property to save their life (and have that standard of living) and the quality of goods decreases while surveillance and authortiarianism increases.

A lot has improved but in the last 20/25 years, the inequality and increasing centralisation has worsened.

And if you don't realize this it probably means your safety net was too cozy for you to notice.

With that said, my comments don't relate to GPT4 which i find interesting and hope that people can be instructed how to make the most of these LLMs for themselves and not just as a tool for a company.

Eggs are still eggs no?

No. I remember eggs 50 years ago, they tasted better, as did many other foods. Extrapolating, centuries ago, eggs were like divine ambrosia.

Human taste degrades as we age. Everybody will remember food being better when they were younger.

but produce really has gotten blander. I've never been a fan of regular Roma tomatoes, and even grocery store heirloom tomatoes mostly just taste sour. but I recently had the opportunity to eat a pizza with heirloom tomatoes from a friend's garden, and it tasted like the second coming of Jesus Christ in my mouth. like, not exaggerating, I was briefly moved to tears by how flavorful it was.

You might want to reword that sentence unless you’re like that nun in Sweden who had some very detailed visions of feast of the circumcision, let’s leave it at that.

Anecdotally I think food tastes way better in general today than it did in the 80s or 90s. Avocados used to be hard and almost flavorless, strawberries were watery and less sweet, restaurants are making much more interesting and complex dishes than I remember ever seeing as a kid, and food in general even just looks better. Go back and watch some old movies with some "fancy" dinners, everything just looks disgusting, like it was all cooked in a microwave or something. The situation looks like it was even worse in the 60s and 70s.

I think the mass shipping of produce has actually gotten better, probably in no small part from logistics software. Is there a chance though that you buy groceries somewhere relatively more expensive than where you (or your parents) bought groceries in the 80s/90s? It’s still very possible to find bland strawberries, it just depends on how much you are (or aren’t) willing to pay.

Genetic engineering has actually changed the taste of produce, so it's not just seasonality: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UaxzEztQcyg

Not even anecdotal, this is legitimately what occurred. Genetic engineering created better food today than even 30 years ago: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UaxzEztQcyg

Presumably they are referring to the reduction in average quality that came with scale and cost related changes in food production. If you buy (expensive) eggs from a small farm, they objectively taste better than eggs from a cheap or even average grocery store. My impression is that whatever “innovations” produce this difference had not yet been put in place 50 years ago.

HN user discovers aging.

I'm sure there wasn't any backpain 50 years ago either.

Eggs from healthy chickens with good diets have more nutritional value and taste better than inbred, locked-in-a-tiny-cage, fed-only-corn, factory-farmed eggs. Visit a rural area and try some eggs from a chicken that's allowed to run around and scratch and eat bugs and seeds, it's not even comparable to thin-shelled pale-yellow-yolked garbage in the grocery store.

I'm not sure... I get the sense that eggs of the 1800s were likely a byproduct of having chickens, or barter with someone who had chickens. Yes, some effort went into them, where now it's more likely that the effort goes into work which turns into money which turns into eggs.

But, I've made a choice: I'll pay for eggs at the market rather than have chickens, because I don't want to have to deal with chickensitters when we got on a trip. This is the sort of choice that the person you're replying to is talking about.

A chicken Bot AI that keeps your chickens and house safe is the solution you need you didn't knew

If you have enough land, by all means..

You could replace 100% of your diet with eggs by programming half an hour each week. Most other foods are cheaper per calorie.

now they come in nice little disposable cardboard boxes, and they're available within a mile or two of your home, 365 days a year, probably about 24/7, regardless of season, or any diseases sweeping through the chicken population. it's possible you've never had to smell chicken shit in your entire life. they're sorted by size, graded by the USDA, run through certified facilities with quality control experts doing I don't even know what, but i'd wager a cookie you vote for people who pass food safety laws, so i'm assuming you approve of those QC folks.

if we round up and say a dozen eggs costs $5 right now, and then use CPI to go backwards to 1913, what we're getting would've cost $0.16 then. the first website i found says that a dozen eggs cost $0.37 in 1913. i realize there's some circularity in there with eggs being part of the CPI calculation, sorry.

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